There’s a new study out that means it’s time to update all those slides that say AI projects are failing:
[A] new study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School complicates the narrative. The study found that 74% of businesses that measure the ROI from their generative AI efforts are already seeing a positive return, and more expect to see a positive ROI within the next two or three years.
Amazon's culture went the wrong way
Big layoffs at Amazon corporate:
“The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven — not right now, at least,” [the Amazon CEO] said. “Really, it’s culture.”
The culture wasn’t right:
his comments Thursday framed the layoffs as a cultural reset aimed at keeping the company fast-moving amid what he called “the technology transformation happening right now.
I added a colophon for this site, just linked off the main homepage. There is a certain arrogence to explaining yourself, let alone your homepage on the World Wide Web. Who gives a fuck? But, I enjoy reading them. It does not contain much, but like all things homepage on the World Wide Web, not I have a place to dump those random thoughts that I need to pull out of my head.
🤖 Old infrastructure considered not optimal, Forrester study
Legacy systems are creating measurable revenue drag, with 63% of surveyed companies citing efficiency losses. Early adopters of cloud-native infrastructure report 40% faster deployment cycles.
Commissioned by Broadcom, based on June 2025 survey.
🔗 🤖 Forrester: Modernize or Fall Behind – Rethinking IT Infrastructure (October 2025)
Citation: “Modernize Or Fall Behind: Rethinking IT Infrastructure For A Competitive Edge," Forrester, commissioned by Broadcom, n=216 surveys June, 2025, published October, 2025.
🤖 Tanzu Data Intelligence update
VMware announces updates to Tanzu Data Intelligence with performance and resilience improvements across Greenplum (now VCF 9 certified), Data Lake 2.0 (adds Spark support), GemFire 10.2, Postgres (TimescaleDB), Valkey, and RabbitMQ 4.2 (distributed delayed messaging).
🔗 🤖 Tanzu Data Intelligence Gets Smarter with New Updates and Enhancements - Tanzu
New stuff in Apple Shortcuts
Usually I’d say Shortcuts are poorly documented, but at least these release notes are OK. // If you’re a nerd and don’t use Shortcuts, consider it. With the AI stuff in it now, you can make little calls the local, Apple AI model or ChatGPT. That’s very handy for little things.
🔗 What’s new in Shortcuts for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26
Recent AI generated videos, Grok edition - and 4 discoveries/techniques
Grok’s AI video generation is like lazy Sora. All you have to do is upload a picture and it does the rest. You can then refine it through chat. Some of these are the first versions, no input from me. They are mostly pictures from the internet. There are some ones that were still images made in ChatGPT. I think Grok is pretty good at this kind of thing.
There’s a wave of “Back in my day…” nostalgia in the near future as us Gen-X’ers get older. I hope we do it more cool than the boomers did, or just quietly on our own instead of all over Facebook.
🤖 Paris Pedals to the Top: How the City of Light Became Europe’s Best for Young Cyclists - How Paris surpassed Amsterdam and Copenhagen as the most child-friendly city for cycling, thanks to bold infrastructure and speed-control policies.
the heart of Paris’s transformation is its expanding network of protected bike lanes. These lanes are physically separated from cars—a critical feature for safety, especially for children. Paris now has protected cycling routes stretching across nearly half (48%) of its road network.
“data swamp” Here.