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.

AWS European Sovereign Cloud Debuts in Germany

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.

🔗 Playing and Writing a Shared World

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.

“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.”

🔗 Walmart: This year, AI tinkering ‘becomes transformation’

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.