“in the era of the working class teen, you could get a job at a video store and still afford a car and drive around with your friends and feel free. The sense I had, my friends had, that the world we lived in was temporary, fading fast, was not unique to us, to the working class teens of Buffalo and Rochester and Detroit and Grand Rapids.” // A glimpse of Gen-X nostalgia to come (“Back in my day…"), but a sort of culture plan too. // Big All the Real Girls vibes.
“In software development, we have 18,000 developers at the company that use coding agents today to optimize our development process,” Hari Gopalkrishnan. “We’ve already seen 20% productivity [boosts] coming out of those parts of the lifecycle, which we are now reinvesting next year into new growth programs.”
“For my money, the current multi-billion-dollar question is can AI agents be useful for tasks other than coding?” // Good thinking about productizing AI: what seems to work and not work.
Sounds like a fun game.
🔗 Gamebook Interview with Joseph Fry, Author & Illustrator of Lost in the City
Execs have little knowledge or how things actually work, giving then false hopes on how AI can improve things and replace workers
“In our recent survey of 1,400 U.S.-based employees, 76% of executives reported that their employees feel enthusiastic about AI adoption in their organization. But the view from the bottom up is less sunny: Just 31% of individual contributors expressed enthusiasm about adopting AI. That means leaders are more than two times off the mark.” And: “This disconnect is a symptom of a broader executive blind spot: They’re not especially attuned to what employees think, and they don’t realize it.
An XDG library for Java - xdgj
Each time I write a small utility, either a command line one or for an MCP server, I need to store state and config in the file system. I’ve come up with many ways of doing it. You know, like, you want to store a default LLM prompt in a file. You want to store a D&D play log in a file, or a bunch of markdown files for D&D monsters.
Vibes, Code, Consequences
A selection from my weblog and elsewhere since last time…
Original contentWhitney goes to KubeCon - a cross-over episode from SDT: “This week, Whitney Lee joins us to discuss KubeCon news, Coding Assistants, and conference tips. Plus, vegan food and note-taking recommendations.”
What is a platform? - Tony and I start a new weekly, live-streamed “podcast.”
The AI Apprentice’s Adventures - maybe AI can help create more D&D content and not destroy the world?
Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, the journey to home.
”2022 was a now-unrecognizable time where absurd errors in AI were celebrated.” Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation | Max Woolf’s Blog
“Sometimes you get the sense that McCarthy believes the Twentieth Century actually ended in the 1980s and we just didn’t notice.” THE PASSENGER, Cormac McCarthy