They squandered the holy grail - “Writing Tools is basically useless for me. It’s just a way to get a slightly worse version of what I already have the ability to make myself better."
Big Tech is pushing ‘AI agents.’ They’ll need intimate access to your data. - (1) The next big bump in AI productivity and change will come when enterprises give it access to all the data, (2) historically, access to data for the people who need it is a huge bottleneck, (3) give the advertising tech (Google, Facebook, etc.) access to all your personal data…what could go wrong?!
How to break free from your “toxic productivity” cycle - “if you’re not able to carve out even 20 minutes for yourself, then something needs to change in your life.” // Tools that find the priorities are hard: “We hear a lot about how to optimize for productivity, but what we don’t have is the emotional awareness and emotional intelligence around why we pursue the things we pursue."
Why are corporations cutting managers? - “a large share of a company’s work force does not produce widgets. Instead, they produce organizational capital.” // Also, what if employee (individual contributor) productivity meant less managers?
Public Domain Day 2025 | Duke University School of Law - “The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf."
I used to be from here
Each year we go back to Texas for the Christmas break. We’ve lived in Amsterdam for six years, so whenyou’re a stranger yourself at home, you notice things. Here’s a selection.
Using the word “awesome.”
Dip Cup.
People starting sentences with “Honestly…”
Adults saying the word “TikTok.”
Ford Ranger truck.
Hotel rooms with three flat screen TVs.
Egg Nog, various sizes, brands, also available in soy and oat.
Can’t buy wine before 10am on Sunday, whether to drink now or later.
Cognitive load is what matters - Legacy software can mean: when changing the code requires too much cognitive load.
Integrating AI Agents into Companies - Changing how organizations work to fit what AI can do. Also, you need context about the organization: as always access to data will be a bottleneck, which is to say, governance and meetings.
OpenAI finally launches screen and live video observation for paying ChatGPT users - CISO’s must be freaking the fuck out about this.
How platform engineering is different than DevOps
How platform engineering is different than DevOps, plus, narwhal teeth and spider digestion, with Viktor FarcicSoftware Defined Interviews #89
This is a good one, Viktor is great, almost an iconoclast on DevOps and platform engineering:
In this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Viktor Farcic, Developer Advocate at Upbound, about platform engineering, the evolution of DevOps, project managing a content creation engine of one, and the virtues of imperfection. Also, the strategic avoidance of asking for directions, or, really, talking with people in general.