How you use customer GPTs - Great looking uses for custom GPTs, and thus AI in general.

United credits tech and staff investments for rising NPS scores - A rare example of an enterprise praising better user experience for helping the business. // “to create an airline that customers choose to fly, we need to deliver a great customer experience."

What Is the Point of Austin’s Fake AI Restaurant? - You usually this to build up follow for an account to sell to someone, then they delete all the content and start new with all those followers. But wouldn’t be it cool if it was some kind of new, surreal performance art?

Medieval Fantasy City Generator 0.11.4: forests - This looks great: I like this map generator but always want more trees.

Let’s start with some YAGV (yet another goofy video):

Relative to your interests

• Spring AI: An AI framework for Java developers - No python? No problem.

• The Great Data Integration Schlep - ‘Every company has something fucked-up and dumb going on somewhere, no matter how admirable they are in other respects, and if they’re facing an existential crisis there’s definitely something going badly wrong that somebody doesn’t want to face. If you ever want to get all your data in one place, you need to figure out some of the shape of the Badness, in an environment where most of the people you meet are presenting as “reasonable and highly competent professionals” and everybody’s got a different story about the Badness and why it’s unavoidable or someone else’s fault.’

• Via: Reflections on Palantir - There’s a lot going on here, from small tactical points (much of the work in enterprise software is just meetings and “politics” to get access to enterprise data and systems) to complete world views (always questing for the most optimized, quickest, and profitable solution that actually works, no matter the cost). Counter arguments: how would one live like this with three kids, even one kid? // There’s also the mystery of why the thought leaders and executives of this world are so weird.

• Warren Buffett’s GEICO repatriates work from the cloud - “Ten years into that [cloud] journey GEICO still hadn’t migrated everything to the cloud, their bills went up 2.5X and their reliability challenges went up quite a lot too – because if you spread your data and your methodology across so many different vendors you are going to spend a lot of time recollecting that data to actually serve customers.” And: “Most engineers I talk to are [also] excited…when ‘Big Tech’ is enforcing less flexible working conditions, coming to a place where we want to build together [without those conditions – she is hiring for jobs that include the option to be fully remote] then that’s very attractive…”

• The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett review – James I’s beloved bedfellow - ‘Buckingham initially consulted Lambe, whom he called “my devil”, about his “mad” – probably bipolar – brother, but retained him as an adviser, perhaps to use his love potion-making skills or his curses, practices for which Lambe had spent time in prison.’

• What Message Queue-Based Architectures Reveal About the Evolution of Distributed Systems - There’s not a lot of buzz and chatter about message-oriented middleware (MOM) anymore (remember the Kafka craze?), but is one of the most common workloads running in containers. One of those “boring” states: when a technology is ubiquitous enough, just works, and therefore is a well oiled wheel that gets no thought.

• Related: Tanzu Postgres for Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry adds new features - Faster, incremental backups using pgBackRest, AI/ML support with Pgvector, and streamlined restore options with adbr

• Relatable, not louder - “More generally, what persuades people is new information – ideally information that is relevant to their lives and that comes with someone who they have something in common with.” // How devrel works. More broadly, of course: marketing.

• A History of Microwave Ovens - As it says.

• I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is - “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

• The XOXO 2024 Talks - People keep raving about these talks.

• Internal Developer Platform: Insights from Conversations with Over 100 Experts - Looks comprehensive!

• The Evolution and Expansion of IT FinOps - Overview of current needs and possibilities in enterprise-y FinOps, I assume.

• Risks vs. Harms: Youth & Social Media - “Do some people experience harms through social media? Absolutely. But it’s important to acknowledge that most of these harms involve people using social media to harm others. It’s reasonable that they should be held accountable. It’s not reasonable to presume that you can design a system that allows people to interact in a manner where harms will never happen. As every school principal knows, you can’t solve bullying through the design of the physical building.”

• Are Kids Screenable? - New screen time app. It sounds like it actually integrates with iOS stuff, which I didn’t even know was possible.

• Why Retail Health Clinics Failed - I wonder if failure is rated by profitability or by the improvement in the amount and quality of care given to people. In medicine, those are probably two different things that don’t often work together.

• The Real Impact Of Return-To-Office Mandates On Productivity At Work - “Not surprisingly, research by Upwork showed that 63% of C-suite leaders whose companies implemented return-to-office mandates say the policy has led a disproportionate number of women to quit. In addition, more than half agree that the loss of female talent resulted in a serious decline in productivity. In addition to women, a Gartner survey revealed that millennials and high performers are the most likely to quit when companies enforce return-to-office mandates. Among high-performing employees, their desire to stay dropped by 16%. And among millennials, the largest generation in the U.S. workforce, the intent to stay declined by 10%.” // RTO is dress-code.

• The Cloud Foundry Renaissance, Julian Fischer, CF Day EU 2024 - This is a good talk, content wise and also structure wise. It has a point of view, a vision, finds a problem, and then launches a product.

Lots of fonts this round-up, so I’ll cluster them:

• Eldritch Art Nouveau: Lovecraft at Ballantine - “This kind of Art Nouveau styling doesn’t really suit Lovecraft either, the design being more a result of Ballantine following prevailing trends than anything else. You could make something like this work for Lovecraft if you were determined, with a border design and font choice more suited to the subject.”

• Typefaces of the occult revival - Back in the 80s, I went to the occult shelves first thing when I’d goto in Half Priced Books. I found a copy of the Necronomicon once! Also, clearly one of the horn-doggest sections of the used bookstore.

• Nick Cooke’s Exentrica - “it seemed as though it were a bridge between Jugendstil and Art Deco — the missing link, so to speak.”

Wastebook

• “Broken steering is a metaphor for that feeling at work where your actions seem to have no impact. Turn the wheel, car still goes straight. This is rare in blue collar work: the car got assembled, now you have car. It is common in knowledge work: you sent some email, so what?” Here.

• “I’ve been married to you long enough. I know you like warm biscuits.”

Conferences

If you’re going to explore, be sure to pre-register for my two sessions. It helps! Check out all the poop at cote.pizza.

VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY.

Logoff

I need a haircut and will be getting one soon.

The Cloud Foundry Renaissance, Julian Fischer, CF Day EU 2024 - This is a good talk, content wise and also structure wise. It has a point of view, a vision, finds a problem, and then launches a product.

Nick Cooke’s Exentrica - ”it seemed as though it were a bridge between Jugendstil and Art Deco — the missing link, so to speak.”

Risks vs. Harms: Youth & Social Media - “Do some people experience harms through social media? Absolutely. But it’s important to acknowledge that most of these harms involve people using social media to harm others. It’s reasonable that they should be held accountable. It’s not reasonable to presume that you can design a system that allows people to interact in a manner where harms will never happen. As every school principal knows, you can’t solve bullying through the design of the physical building."

A History of Microwave Ovens - As it says.

The XOXO 2024 Talks - People keep raving about these.