I’ve been wondering why the quality and ease of making stuff with AI has not resulting in a creative explosion. In particular with just a hefty dose of prompt-craft, you can get great D&D stuff.
I’m guessing part of the reason is that the incumbent gate-keepers hate AI. They, rightly, see it as a threat to how much they get paid. I could see that they also find it simply offensive, like someone taking a big shit on their desk.
What does Agile Smell Like? I tried to answer that question back in 2006 when I worked at RedMonk in the form of a PDF.
This guide helps you sniff test how Agile an organization is. A “sniff test” is a quick way to establish a gut-feel about something. It helps you determine what to do next.
RedMonk doesn’t really publish “reports” like this, but they were still doing some way back then, especially when a client asked for one. We were so progressive back then and published it under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs License.
🤖 Open Source Maintainers Are Burning Out and Walking Away
Summarized by AI.
Open source software is sustained by overworked, often unpaid volunteers, many of whom face crushing workloads and relentless community pressure. A recent study by Miranda Heath, supported by Sentry’s Open Source Pledge, reveals that burnout among maintainers is not an isolated issue but a systemic failure threatening the stability of the global software ecosystem. Critical infrastructure depends on developers who are exhausted, demotivated, and increasingly ready to quit.
What is a platform and how do you do platform engineering at scale? Find out in this interview on tales from Home Depot and beyond.
Digital Transformation Fatigue, and how to get over it - DOGE case study
This is the story of most large IT transformation/modernization efforts. Once the executives that started it leaves, it stops. Then a new one comes in that does almost the opposite. Put all your apps in the cloud, bring all your apps on-premises.
Tide goes out, tide comes in.
That pattern of course fuels staff “modernization fatigue” where they just ignore all the slides in Q1 and get on with their lives.
Google has many overwhelming advantages. It has vast access to data, access to customers, access to capital and talent. It has TPUs. It has tons of places to take advantage of what it creates. It has the trust of customers, I’ve basically accepted that if Google turns on me my digital life gets rooted. By all rights they should win big.
On the other hand, Google is in many ways a deeply dysfunctional corporation that makes everything inefficient and miserable, and it also has extreme levels of risk aversion on both legal and reputational grounds and a lot of existing business to protect, and lacks the ability to move like a startup. The problems run deep.
This matters politically because it means that in Latter-day Saint theology, coercion is not merely misguided policy or poor governance. It is literally Satanic. The negation of agency, forced conformity, compulsory salvation–these align with the devil’s rebellion against God’s plan.
Slop-reading
If you’re not gonna bother writing it yourself, I ain’t gonna bother reading it myself.
Yes, but…that is often a better way to read. Editorless writing (Substack) has lead to blog posts that way too long, and summarizing them is very nice as a reader.
🔗 If you’re not gonna bother writing it yourself, I ain’t gonna bother reading it myself.
“impervious to the shafts of ridicule and insensible to slights” Notes from “The Story of the Typewriter”