Executive mandates are racing ahead of reality. Boards and CEOs often expect payback in 6–12 months, but disconnected strategies, messy data, and immature governance stall progress. While two-thirds of AI decision-makers say their organization uses genAI in production, only 15% report a positive impact on earnings, and just a third can link AI spend to profit and loss. Confidence in ROI is dropping, as well: In late 2024, 81% of firms reported 5% or greater ROI; by mid-2025, that fell to 62%!
Making YouTube thumbnails with AI - Nano Banana and OpenAI
Me: “Make this thumbnail better.” [The one above, which I made.]
OpenAI:
Me: “Wow! Can you make it so that the catsup bottle is in good shape? That is my work’s brand, so I want it to be good.”
Gemini:
Me: How about the text is “Adding AI to Internal Developer Platforms” Also, make their faces look happy looking at that catsup.
(1) These are amazing, (2) even the robot knows you have to look like an idiot (me, not Tony) for a YouTube thumbnail.
Adding new services to internal developer platforms, like AI stuff
We spend an excruciating amount of time talking about how platform engineers add new services/middleware/whatever to internal developer platforms. It’s great if that’s relative to your interests.
The ongoing existential quandary of corporate presentations and meetings:
“PowerPoint’s job is simply to help you survive the presentation."
The full thought:
it doesn’t exactly help you communicate something (you do that in Word, or Excel); or coordinate something (you do that in Outlook, or nowadays Slack). PowerPoint’s job is simply to help you survive the presentation. It helps you cope: “You have no real power over this situation, yet you represent it.” And the experience of making slides, one after another, flows from that initial job-to-be-done of divide-and-conquering the presentation into individually survivable sections, slides, and bullet points.
There’s not usually such real-life stuff in VC blog posts.
Also: “getting lost in the sauce.”
Related: people in this study prefer AIs that write like great authors more than the original, human authors.
Related to your interests on Wednesday
Heads down on some stuff yesterday, so no post then. But here is a post now!
Let them eat hard work. “I would sell plasma to pay for Drafts if I had to.” Yay, Capitalism! Looking at the OpenRouter survey data. “Roleplaying”? Games on bookmarks. Illustrating Hyperborea
“We shall endeavor to survive the loss of your opinions.” Westenberg.
There’s a fine line between “charming” and “annoying.”
Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, thrown away properly at the Milieudepot Duivendrecht
Inside The Sandcastle (Het Zandkasteel, Amsterdam)
Platforms, Agents, Anxiety, and Ice Cream
Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam.This week it’s a digest of the flow of stuff. If you want to keep up day-to-day, and even more content not included below, check out my newly reborn Weblog on The World Wide Web.
Original ContentThings I’ve writtenA great platform as a product paper, and a fun platform philosophy thereof.
The Security Gap in AI Applications: Rethinking API Protection for a New Era.
20 years of business travel - you’ll get there, or you won’t.