The first thing is, the travel industry changes very slowly. What changes most frequently is the interior decorating. The seats in planes, the plugs in hotel rooms, the signs in airports. Even these don’t change structurally, just in aesthetically.
The biggest change in 20 years has been Uber. I started traveling in 20051 which meant taxis. This was stressful. As a boy from Austin, taxis were not part of my life.
About 80% of the time, most made-up percentages of something studies have abandoned “80%” as the default majority number and are now using “70%” about 30% of the time.
“[N]ot everyone needs to like everything, which is the most important thing.” On art, but also life in general.
Relative to your interests on Thursday
Your aging brain stops being a people-please. But: “The same directness that would be called ‘no-nonsense’ in a man gets called ‘abrasive’ in a woman over 40.” “I had to teach a lesson on asparagus, an ingredient I couldn’t care less about but apparently was good for SEO.” Forrester’s highlights from re:Invent, including things that are not AI. “Artists are not using AI to make art. They use it as an ‘Admin Shield’ to handle invoices, emails, and code so they have more time for the actual creative act.
Day 2 AI looms
Achieving enterprise AI ROI still tough:
According to a recent Gartner poll, over half (53%) of participants were exploring Agentic AI, whereas 25% were piloting it and only 6% had reached production mode. The high exploration and pilot percentages suggest strong interest and perceived potential in Agentic AI. However, ==the low production percentage implies barriers to scaling, such as technical complexity, lack of maturity in tools, governance challenges==, or unclear ROI.
Spending less money on IT is always the priority, and how to get around it
The survey of more than 200 CFOs, taken during August 2025, showed that 56% of CFOs rank achieving enterprise-wide cost optimization targets in their top five. Gartner CFO survey.
The easiest way to show the value of IT is to show how it means spending less money. There’s occasional moments where “ROI” is achieved by existential dread - the tech industry is going to Blockbuster you, etc. But those are largely made up, at the least, way overblown.
Relative to your interests on Wednesday
Hasbro thinks AI is fine, so maybe it’s fine, even helpful for the enjoyment of D&D. “Necrobotics is a field of engineering that builds robots out of a mix of synthetic materials and animal body parts.” Do all the self-service platform engineering stuff with your own, thrilling middleware! Surveying the platform engineers and developers about their feelings actually works. Always check your sources when you criticize a best selling author that’s active on the World Wide Web.
Woke fonts. I wasn’t sure what size they used for Courier New.1 How I long for the all business, utilitarian thrill of Courier New… It was a simpler time.
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From the original memo, it looks like 12 point? ↩︎
“snorkeling in the shit-infused shallow end of the Dunning-Kruger pool” But, please, tell us what you really think
If you are only allowed to learn from the internet at age 16, you are probably not ready for marvelous achievements at age 18 or perhaps not even at 20. The country may become more mediocre.