My findings after 3 years on AIs playing games is that they’re just generally bad at it. They’re just good enough to string you along, hoping they’ll get good.
Their lack of new ideas and inability to take action gives you a sort of “it’s just about to be good” feel that keeps you playing. Like that feeling that the next pull of the slot machine will be the jackpot.
Relevant to your interests, Monday
The Revenge of QA: How AI Code Generation Is Exposing Decades of Process Debt - “AI isn’t revealing new problems - it’s exposing decades of process debt we’ve been carrying all along.” / One bottleneck after another… Morally judging famous and semi-famous people - “spending real time and energy morally judging famous and semi-famous people is one of the best and quickest ways to make yourself stupider.” best books, essays, and poems of 2025 - What a list!
More of AWS’s all-in EU public cloud, write-up from Nick Patience:
the ESC represents a total technical decoupling intended to satisfy the most cautious European customers and their regulators. By locating all data – including metadata, billing and identity management – entirely within the EU and staffed exclusively with EU residents (and eventually citizens), AWS is trying to neutralize the legal and geopolitical risks associated with the U.S. Cloud Act, which enables US law enforcement, under certain conditions, to compel US-based cloud providers (such as AWS) to hand over data stored anywhere in the world, even if that data belongs to foreign entities or is stored in a different jurisdiction (e.g. the EU).
And, pricing:
Customers will pay a sovereignty premium for the services compared to a region in Frankfurt. AWS estimated the premium at 10-15%. AWS users pay a similar premium for AWS’s FedRAMP-compliant cloud in the US and for similar services from rival cloud providers. For enterprises, the value proposition rests on whether this isolation provides enough regulatory peace of mind to justify potentially higher costs.
Side-note: I’ve been liking Nick Patience’s stuff. He’s a good analyst, from 451.
After years of playing [solo role-playing], I have developed a personal rule about rolling dice: only roll if the potential outcome _advances _or _enhances _the narrative. If rolling would throw the story off track in a way that doesn’t enhance the narrative or creates an unnecessary or nonsensical detour, I won’t roll.
Also, an interesting idea for solo-roleplaying in a shared world.
“Since we started using Application Advisor, we’ve seen a 70% reduction in engineering time tied to upgrades,” says Roberts. “Now we can focus more of our time and resources on the delivery of new value-added features for our customers.”
🔗 Alight Removes Roadblocks for App Innovation with VMware Tanzu Spring [PDF]
Where there is saxophone, synth is sure to follow.
How to use AI for solo roleplaying with Dungeons & Dragons
Here’s my talk from AI for the Rest of Us:
What the goblins can teach us about enterprise AI. // I’ve learned what agentic AI is by fighting goblins, talking with trolls, and buy custom made boots from gnomes. After a few years of playing solo D&D with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc., playing the role of a DM, I started writing little plugins (Model Context Protocol servers) to give the ChatDM.
Relevant to your interests, Saturday
The rise of ‘micro’ apps: non-developers are writing apps instead of buying them - Another go at LowCode: “It is a new era of app creation that is sometimes called micro apps, personal apps, or fleeting apps because they are intended to be used only by the creator (or the creator plus a select few other people) and only for as long as the creator wants to keep the app.
The Internet and social media platforms are now obviously detrimental to collective goods, cooperative politics and sane public debate.
From here.
I’ve encountered this sentiment a lot recently, even from Ben Thompson. If you take out “the Internet,” it’s probably right. My vibe here is: “human culture can not handle everything, everywhere, all the time.” Some can - they turn it off - but most can’t.
See also “narrative schizophrenia”:
Today’s current events are mediated by platforms that incentivize users to frame the news as sensationally as possible, flattening life’s complexity into good and evil, massaging facts without institutional oversight, and forging an era of American life in which our political differences often look irreconcilable.