Coté

Robin Sloan contemplates the _ The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons_: It occurred to me, deep into a really won­derful experience, of reading and thinking and feeling and pondering, that if Wiz­ards of the Coast had pub­lished exactly the same mate­rial online — and you can imagine this easily: you can imagine the web­site, as slick as one of the Google Arts & Culture sites, or the dig­ital book from the Steve Jobs Archive — I would have clicked over; said, “wow, cool”; then moved on to the next thing.

Once you fix the bottleneck of coding, you face the all the other bottlenecks down the line. So, you have to think of how to apply AI, or whatever, to the rest of the SDLC processes. Some real theory of constraints stuff there. 🔗 Development Productivity, Not Developer Productivity

It’s a delight to find weirdly human and overly chatty prompts like this one on how to make PDFs: PDFs - Always use LibreOffice to create the PDF (it must be LibreOffice! If LibreOffice is not installed, you can install it yourself). Other libraries sometimes show weird artifacts on some computers I wonder if the agent actually can install it, or if that’s just nudging it to do a good job by faking it out.

The talk discusses how platform engineers can navigate AI support, emphasizing the need for middleware, customer engagement, and rapid experimentation.

Manton reviews ChatGPT Pulse: it might drive traffic to more websites, going around Google: There’s something else about how this works that is fundamentally different than current chat-based AI where people are looking for answers. Instead of replacing a Google search, it’s adding opportunities to point to other websites and blogs. Because it’s proactively pushing stories to you that you may never think to look for, it should increase referrers to websites instead of subtracting them.

Enterprise AI not legible. If you can’t measure it, you can’t ROI it: “It’s easy for an employee to say, ‘Yes, this will help me,’ but hard to quantify how. And if they can’t quantify how it’ll help them … it’s not going to be a long discussion” over whether the software is worth paying for, Thompson said. // And: it’s a “challenge for businesses is that there’s this leap of faith moment where you try to justify it with the return-on-investment calculation, which is hard to figure out.