“For the last year or two, we’ve been tinkering with it,” Daniel Danker, executive vice president of AI acceleration, product and design at Walmart, said at the ICR Conference on Tuesday. “This is the year where tinkering becomes transformation. This is the year where we’ve built a level of mastery around that and we’ll start building things that deeply address customer problems.”
Amazon Should Buy Anthropic, AI Doctors, Metaverse RIP
Original ContentAmazon should buy Anthropic.
I wasn’t really sure what hardned images were, let alone “distroless,” so Tony and I were lucky to get William on this week’s Tanzu Catsup to sort it out. We also discuss how it fits into platform engineering. If you can’t be bothered, here’s an excerpt on optimizing Helm charts.
After the Dream, Software Defined Talk #555 - This week, we discuss Gemini powering Siri, AWS’s biggest competitor, and AWS strategy choices.
After the Dream - Software Defined Talk #555
This week’s Software Defined Talk podcast: This week, we discuss Gemini powering Siri, AWS’s biggest competitor, and AWS strategy choices. Plus, when should your next meeting actually start?
Watch the video (above), or if you prefer traditional podcasts, subscribe to it.
Relevant to your interests, Friday
Texas judge throws out second lawsuit over CrowdStrike outage | Computer Weekly - “the plaintiff’s claims were dismissed in their entirety in part because the shareholders had failed to establish any plausible motive of intent to commit securities fraud on CrowdStrike’s part.” How Daimler Trucks North America built a living knowledge graph of its business - ”Analyze our recent warranty claims, correlate them with all available datasets, and tell me why they’ve increased.
Goes over lots of use cases for AI at a grocer. Some internal facing ones:
The platform provides Kroger workers with a single point of access to check their shift schedule, request time off, set shift availability and view their pay stubs from one mobile app, according to a video Kroger played during the panel. And from this, Kroger’s store leaders can get real-time labor data insights as well as view their shift changes, pending punches and time-off approvals
I suppose it can be said that I’m an absent-minded driver. It’s true that I’ve driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I’ve stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it.
60% of you Java people are living dangerously
Check this out from my pal DaShaun: in May of 2025, 60% of Spring Boot downloads were for versions no longer supported by the open-source project. That’s a lot. Too much, really.
I can see how it happens. You get an app into production, it runs fine, and then you moveon to the next thing. Meanwhile, the version drifts into “End of Life” territory. OSS support ends (like way back in mid-2023 for the Spring version DaShaun mentioned).
Here’s a cynical, but good overview of Anthropic’s attempt to use Claude code for generic knowledge work, a tool called Cowork. One part:
Cowork may find fans among knowledge workers who have to create presentations but take no pride in their work.
Come on.
This is an application of that caustic Protestant belief that godliness requires suffering and pain. At the very least a bunch of tedious bullshit. The easy path is the Devil’s work.
Sometimes easy is greatness. This gets more true as you get older. E.g. “this overnight success only took 20 years.” In fact, isn’t making things easier, like, the point of…everything?
See also: “spellcheck and digital publishing, for those who take no pride in their writing and lithography.”
Original: Anthropic floats Claude Cowork for office work automation. See also a coverage round-up of Claude Cowork.
Relevant to your interests, Wednesday
RIP the metaverse - It’s fine to use your mountains of spare cash (and voting control) to try out new things. We’re all about innovation and expect it; you have to embrace lots of failure, giant failure. // The actual problem is then discarding all the people you hired to help you. It shucks the “with great valuations comes great responsibility” principle that big tech shits on. (Except, maybe Google and a little bit Microsoft?
No, no…AI won’t replace you.
A person using AI will replace you and 4,999 other people.