Cote.io

AI backlash, from the read the room/Picard face-palm files.

Thu, 21 May 2026 06:28:54 +0200

The normies don’t like AI, esp. The Kids:

They’re being told, usually by people who already have theirs, that they should be more excited about the latest evolutions in software automation. “Why aren’t you more interested in nuanced conversations about the latest evolutions in software automation,” fans of the latest evolutions in software automation will ask.

And:

I’m sure we’re due for a few Atlantic and New York Times brunchlord opinion columns condemning young graduates for not being appreciative enough of consumer-culture innovation.

Not only does the tech take away their cash before they already have, but the people doing are casually throwing off weird-to-reprehensible vibes:

They’ve watched tech oligarchs spend the last decade mired in scandal after scandal, hype cycle after hype cycle, steadily enshittifying everything they touch along the way. They just got done watching our top tech titans _eagerly_cozy up to the most virulently racist, corrupt bastards U.S. government has ever seen.

🔗 AI Rage Is Inextricably Fused With Justified Loathing Of The Extraction Class. ‘Deal With It’

Do less

Thu, 21 May 2026 05:49:14 +0200

For most of modern history, we’ve invested perhaps 10% of our energy in ‘be’ and 90% in ‘do’. The AI era invites (demands?) something closer to the reverse. That’s not a comfortable shift for an industry that prides itself on shipping, but might be the most important thing we build next.

🔗 The Identity Crisis AI Didn’t Warn You About

Now you can react faster than ever to security problems

Wed, 20 May 2026 15:21:40 +0200

This is an excerpt from our Tanzu Catsup last week. In that episode we talked all about how this AI stuff is changing - for the better - how you can handle security problems at the app layer.

It’s Monday morning. Your boss walks up, says “scrap the backlog, we’ve got a list of CVEs longer than that curved screen we bought you last year, the CISO is coming, fix them,” and goes to brunch. A year ago you had 30 days to triage anything under a CVSS seven. Now two lows can chain into a nine, the exploit is already in the wild before policy catches up, and both sides of the fence have AI for finding more.

This is the 3-minute version of ‪@dashaun‬ joining ‪@thecote‬ and David Zendzian on Tanzu Catsup to walk through what that Monday actually looks like at the application developer level. DaShaun on the new patching math and OpenRewrite. David on what AI plus an MCP server does to a pen-test timeline. The metric question at the end.

Check out the full episode, it was fun and packed with good discussion.

Shadow AI Surge, The Coming AI Backlash, and Apollonian Tyranny - Related to your interests, Wednesday

Wed, 20 May 2026 10:05:32 +0200

Also: Claude Managed Agents, Antigravity, Project Glasswing, repugnant economics, and writing observations.

From: Wes Anderson's Impossible Dreams

Innovations from Google I/O 26 on Google Cloud - Google seems the cleanest when it comes to describing their AI stuff…it’s something like a mix of clear naming (aside from “Antigravity”) and functionality, and not carpet combing you with tools like AWS.
Announcing Claude Managed Agents on Cloudflare - “Integrating with Claude Managed Agents is another step in this direction. You can run your agent loop on the Claude Platform, while using Cloudflare to execute code, secure connections, and run custom tool calls.” // Multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, etc.
🤖 Agent Skills Deliver Gains Only When Curated, Structured, and Secured - Structure workflow work best with skill, and AI is not great at writing skills. // Summary
Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us - Excellent overview.
Shadow AI surges in the workplace - “Of the 45 percent of all professionals using AI in the workplace regularly, 67 percent of those were accessing the platforms using personal accounts that were not authorized by their IT teams, data from Verizon’s annual data breach investigations report showed. Verizon said that the proportion of users accessing AI through personal accounts now represents a fourfold increase in non-malicious insider actions detected across this year’s dataset of more than 22,000 breaches globally.”
AI skepticism grows among US youth - Along with datacenter backlash, 2026 and 2027 is shaping up to have a big, general population backlash against AI. “Polls show that 70% of Americans think AI is moving too fast, over 50% have negative views of it, and just 18% of young people say they feel hopeful about it. Partly, they are turned off by AI’s upending of the job market. ‘Every other day, a new AI agent is being released in the market,’ said Vaishali Hireraddi, 23, a University of California, Davis, graduate student who’s applied to 500 jobs so far. ‘What am I doing with my life?'”
Your Slop, My Sludge - AI sludge: the build up of comprehension debt and day two toil due to AI generated apps.
The coming AI backlash
Rampant shadow AI
🤖 Against the Tyranny of the Apollonian - Beautiful becomes meaningless when machine-generated beauty is infinite; the human response is an embrace of messiness, imperfection, and visceral creativity as a cultural immune reaction. // Summary
The VW ID Buzz: six months and eight thousand miles later - “it feels like you’re driving around in a giant phone booth, but in a good way” Seems like a great car: “We don’t regret anything about this purchase and I bet we’ll have this car for the next ten years”

From: AI skepticism grows among US youth

AI Summaries

Things I asked the robot to summarize for me.

From: Economic history as it's happening is alway relative

Wastebook

“I can think of few better ways of raising social welfare than making sex 10% better!” Repugnant Economics
“Good marketing is putting true facts in a way people want to hear.” John Gruber on Dithering, May 19th, 2026.
“This is a three-beer conversation mistaken for a finished essay.” Observations on Writing with AI
“reflation” China’s narrow reflation

ICYMI

Use AI to write more shorter pieces

Logoff

Perhaps you have noticed something new above: links to AI summaries. As I mentioned in my “please use AI to write shorter shit” post above, I have the robot summarize a lot of things. I have been debating whether or not to publish those. I mean, I love publishing - just publishing anything. So, I see that big stack of content and it pains me to not publish it. But people hate the fuck out of AI.

So, I have done the following. I started selectively publish summaries on incomprehensiblemedia.com. In this newsletter, I’ll include links to summaries for the links I have above, plus a new section that lists the some of the other summaries I’ve run.

This is a blog with an RSS feed. I set the robots.txt to exclude crawling of all types. I’m intending to capture traffic from the original. So while it’s not “hidden,” hopefully it will not damage the OP’s Google juice - or LLM juice…or whatever juice the authors like.

Ideally, I would automate this even more so that I can read the summaries in the same flow as reading my RSS feeds. Also, I’m occasionally generating podcasts of summaries. These have a different script written to be more natural voice and use an AI version of my voice - my thinking on that last one is that way I won’t piss anyone off but myself.

Eventually, I need to publish these.

My hesitation for posting this stuff - beyond the juice concerns above - is the AI posting something stupid or, worse, shit-talking about my work, etc. It’s very annoying to have that bottleneck what would otherwise be a nice flow of reading: stuff just shows up in my RSS feeds and podcast client.

All that AI governance stuff is real!

Anyhow, there it is.

And, finally:

From: Hotel Retro: Vintage Luggage Labels from Tokyo to Buenos Aires

Want to subscribe to this newsletter and get it in your email? Do that here. You’ll just get this type of link and post round-up, not everything posted on the weblog.

The coming AI backlash

Wed, 20 May 2026 07:15:53 +0200

Along with datacenter backlash, 2026 and 2027 is shaping up to have a big, general population backlash against AI.

Polls show that 70% of Americans think AI is moving too fast, over 50% have negative views of it, and just 18% of young people say they feel hopeful about it. Partly, they are turned off by AI’s upending of the job market. ‘Every other day, a new AI agent is being released in the market,’ said Vaishali Hireraddi, 23, a University of California, Davis, graduate student who’s applied to 500 jobs so far. ‘What am I doing with my life?’

🔗 AI skepticism grows among US youth

Rampant shadow AI

Wed, 20 May 2026 06:47:41 +0200

Of the 45 percent of all professionals using AI in the workplace regularly, 67 percent of those were accessing the platforms using personal accounts that were not authorized by their IT teams, data from Verizon’s annual data breach investigations report showed.

Verizon said that the proportion of users accessing AI through personal accounts now represents a fourfold increase in non-malicious insider actions detected across this year’s dataset of more than 22,000 breaches globally.

Better get an AI platform in place.

🔗 Shadow AI surges in the workplace

Use AI to write more shorter pieces

Tue, 19 May 2026 07:36:38 +0200

While people are all excited shout using LLMs to write - which is awesome, I am all about AI empowering people to do things they didn’t have the agency to do, writing being one of them - I am imploring y’all to get the LLMs to write more concisely. I am looking at all y’all Substack writers with my sternest Strunk & White spectacles.

The number one use case I have for AI, used countless times a day, is “wow, my digital brochacho, this is really long and convoluted. Can you rewrite this to be more to the point and shorter? What are they trying to say?” There’s a lot of content out there that I want to read because I can smell that there’s something interesting in it, but it comes wrapped in a thick layer of concrete that I have to chip away at.

It works amazing well, but is an odd “your AI is talking to my AI” step.

And LinkedIn hustlers. Come on now. Just tell the LLM to note wrote like a LinkedIn post and cut it with the staccato one line paragraph thing. Please stop tommy gunning me with your life and career advice. You’re allowed a one line paragraph per 1,200 words. No need to be LinkedIn Hemingway.

Tokenmaxxing at Amazon, Potato Stamp Fonts, and Tax Code Hacking - Related to your interests, Monday

Mon, 18 May 2026 09:56:49 +0200

Also: Elon’s OpenAI lawsuit, build-vs-buy for agentic AI, and rethinking observability.

From: Wakamai Fondue, the tool that answers the question what can my font do?

Amazon employees admit to using AI unnecessarily to pump up internal usage scores - workers complain of intense pressure to use AI tools - Tokens are the new lines of code. Also, yes, of course, “Goodhart’s Law," blah blah.
The hidden cost of build vs. buy for agentic AI in regulated industries - “Building an internal agentic AI platform in banking or insurance demands a multi-year orchestration engineering commitment with a regulatory surface area that most organizations underestimate”
Why AI is forcing enterprises to rethink observability
How Dangerous Is Anthropic’s Mythos AI? - Using AI to hack tax codes is a bigger threat than hacking computers.
Elon’s OpenAI Lawsuit Is Boring and Insulting, and It’s Already a Success - Winning in the court of opinion, and all that: “Musk, to be clear, has already succeeded. Regardless of what actually happened and what’s decided from here, he’s inflicted real pain. The trial has been an opportunity to make Altman and OpenAI’s founders look like greedy, sociopathic liars, which is a narrative that much of the public wants to believe.” // And, it’s worth asking if things could have turned out any other way than a non-profit kind of contorting its way to becoming a for-profit: “So go back to 2017. Would the world be better off if OpenAI had remained a nonprofit and slowly withered on the vine while being outspent 100 to 1, as Google secured a monopoly in the most powerful technology of the 21st century? And in that scenario, how much longer does it take for us to get great AI products if Google has no competitive pressure to gets it act together?”
How to raise money without profit, and then profit
Tax code hacking - maybe the biggest AI threat is tax scamming.
Tatermaxxing - “We had the idea to make a Bodoni interpretation with potato stamps, so we bought 8kg of potatoes, some knifes and carved a long, long evening in the kitchen. When we finally had the full alphabet we stamped it on paper, made a font out of this and called it Bodedo.” // Maybe my new mindset on presentation should be: an excuse to use a cool font.

From: At MoMA, Duchamp Vanishes Into the Shadow of His Own Legend

Wastebook

“bonkbuster” Here
“But what if I buttchug one potion and drink the other?” Here
“The bus stopped, and Bill Gates stepped away from the steering wheel. It wasn’t a bus at all, but a yacht. I’d been pranked. This was my graduation from the grind. I’d made it. He gave me the yacht as thanks. The old lady was actually Jeff Bezos, he was in on the prank. He acquired my business immediately and now I’m sipping on champagne bottles. All thanks to Claude.” LinkedIn fanfiction
“Whether or not that is true, Detroit persuades me that other places should engage in more plaquemaxxing.” Here
“Carousel of justifications” Here
“Future Asteroid farmer.”

ICYMI

Got your deck ready? - my thoughts of slides as the primary corporate collaboration tool.
Buy your platform, AI edition
5G versus The Grapes of Wrath
Aesthetic Computing
Datacenter NIMBYism: What Did You Think Was Going to Happen?
Scenes from the weekend
The world isn’t curl - Software Defined Talk #572 - “This week, we discuss how security gets sold to execs, where agentic coding and security collide, and Cloudflare vs. Datadog’s diverging paths. Plus, Coté weighs in on sugar cookies.”

Logoff

There is a lot of “what do I want?” thinking going on in my head recently. It is exhausting, and I’m not really interested. But Know that if I don’t resolve it, I’ll both regret it and resent past-me for not dealing with it.

Also, I hate calling people on the phone. There are some phone calls that would take just 10 or 30 minutes on my to do list that have literally been there for years. My life would be so much better if I could just pick up the phone - or “tap” it, I guess - and say, “Hello there, I’ve got this thing I need help with…”

Want to subscribe to this newsletter and get it in your email? Do that here. You’ll just get this type of link and post round-up, not everything posted on the weblog.

Mon, 18 May 2026 09:54:46 +0200

Weekend of May 16th, 2026 to May 17th, 2026.

Tatermaxxing

Mon, 18 May 2026 07:19:29 +0200

We had the idea to make a Bodoni interpretation with potato stamps, so we bought 8kg of potatoes, some knifes and carved a long, long evening in the kitchen. When we finally had the full aphabet we stamped it on paper, made a font out of this and called it Bodedo.

Maybe my new mindset on presentation should be: an excuse to use a cool font.

🔗 HVD Bodedo

Buy your platform, AI edition

Mon, 18 May 2026 07:13:51 +0200

Building an internal agentic AI platform in banking or insurance demands a multi-year orchestration engineering commitment with a regulatory surface area that most organizations underestimate. [Bryan Ross]

Tinkers and opexmaxxers take in huge risks when they decide to build their own platforms. And it usually fails, for at least seven reasons.

🔗 The hidden cost of build vs. buy for agentic AI in regulated industries

5G versus _The Grapes or Wrath_

Mon, 18 May 2026 06:42:55 +0200

From the recent cellphone ban in schools study:

The share of students using cellphones in class for nonacademic reasons declined to 13 percent from 61 percent in schools using the pouches, according to teacher surveys, which suggested that students were not widely able to circumvent the bans.

Even so, the bans had a “close to zero” effect on test scores, according to the paper. Test scores are affected by many factors, including the stability of students’ home lives and the quality of teaching and curriculum. The researchers also noted that once cellphones had been banned, students might have been distracted by other forms of technology, such as laptops, which are ubiquitous in American classrooms.

The bans also did not improve student attendance or perceptions of online bullying. And in the first year after strict bans went into place, student suspensions increased by an average of 16 percent — a large and troubling change.

This study was also covered on The Political Gabfest a few weeks back. As Emily points out, at least the teachers are happy:

One positive benefit is that teachers are more satisfied, the teachers are happier, they have to spend less time policing it. That seems like a genuinely important issue. You want teachers to be happy, they will stay longer, they will do their job better, they will, you know, be able to teach more because they’re not policing, they’re not copying the kids who are sneaking phone use. That’s really important. The other one was, did you guys see that, that wonderful little detail? That there was one school district that looked at school library use in the wake, in the wake of the cell phone bans and that way, way, way more books were checked out of school libraries after phone bans, which is fascinating. That seems like a pure good.

Studying ongoing “adult” use would be more interesting. What the relationship between cellphone use and income, happiness, etc.

Also, I don’t think “cellphone” is the right framing, but what tot do with it. Surely there’s a difference between reading Facebook and Twitter al day versus Wikipedia and Chaucer in the a kindle app.

Sun, 17 May 2026 08:23:26 +0200

Aesthetic Computing

Consider “ascetic computing”:

Here’s what “ascetic computing” means to me:

Doing without things that compromise my personal standards or morals.

Learning to live Fearlessly in the face of Missing Out.

Resisting the Endless Pursuit of Shiny Things. … The goal is to live a (computing) life of principle, purpose, and focus. … Nothing I do on computers is masochistic self-denial or performative mortification to impress anyone. Quite the opposite! I find my habits pleasurable and satisfying.

Yes, and: (1) many people’s aesthetic is ascetic computing, (2) for me, hey, man, I just don’t want to use vi.

I throw around the word “aesthetic” a lot. What I mean by that is that people’s selection of any given technology, and even their evaluation of it is driven by how it feels or looks. This is something like preference, but it’s also driven by their gut reaction regardless of function.

For example, every few years I check in on the Windows UI. It just looks weird. Or last time I saw Android, that just looked weird. Functionally, they’re all the same. TypeScript vs. Java, those versus Python. As is evident by numerous applications over the years, you can achieve the same ends with any of them. But, people have aesthetic reactions to them, and select which to use according to their perception of beauty or ugliness.

Nerd of course don’t use the word beauty. They say things like “this code is elegant.” The opposite is usually something like “this code is so wordy and bulky” (they usually mean Java).

I am no job scheduler expect, but it feels like a good example is from vs launchd vs some GUI with drop-downs that lets you select when a job runs with a UI similar to creating a reoccurring meeting.

cron is ascetic, like Mondrian, but if it was only one square. Launchd is probably something like “mass-market consumer,” like a picture of a cup of coffee you’d see in the eating room of a Marriott Courtyard. The GUI is decadent, something like Jeff Koons.

But, whichever you choose, the job runs.

How to raise money without profit, and then profit

Sun, 17 May 2026 07:43:55 +0200

Winning in the court of opinion, and all that:

Musk, to be clear, has already succeeded. Regardless of what actually happened and what’s decided from here, he’s inflicted real pain. The trial has been an opportunity to make Altman and OpenAI’s founders look like greedy, sociopathic liars, which is a narrative that much of the public wants to believe.

And, it’s worth asking if things could have turned out any other way than a non-profit kind of contorting its way to becoming a for-profit:

So go back to 2017. Would the world be better off if OpenAI had remained a nonprofit and slowly withered on the vine while being outspent 100 to 1, as Google secured a monopoly in the most powerful technology of the 21st century? And in that scenario, how much longer does it take for us to get great AI products if Google has no competitive pressure to gets it act together?

🔗 Elon’s OpenAI Lawsuit Is Boring and Insulting, and It’s Already a Success

Got your deck ready?

Sat, 16 May 2026 07:07:02 +0200

Image by geralt on Pixabay.

The mystery is why everyone is using presentation software for communication that is not a presentation.

Predicable, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this post since first reading it.

The mystery of this is that everyone complains about slides-driven work cultures, but the revealed preference is that people like it because everyone does it. So…slides must…work…?

(One answer is that it’s not the people who make the slides that like them, it’s management whose staff makes the slides for them that like it. I suspect that if management had to make their own slides, we would have less slides.)

I know many people whose professional lives revolve around building slide decks. It’s what runs major decisions in their work. All those layoffs we’ve been seeing are likely reasoned out in endless revisions of slides. Every ornate keynote and product announcement? Slides. Deciding which ice-cream flavors to have for a community meetup? Slides.

In that way, you can look at slides as “the receipts” that responsible decision making was made, that management spent a lot of time on this. “We spent hours agonizing over laying off thousands of people.” A huge chunk of hours were spent getting the slides just right, and they are proof of that agony.

Slides are the visible exhaust of corporate decision making that proves the work was done, not just flippantly uttered in a hallway between meetings or done via tapback emojis.

I came to understand, accept, and kind of like slides when I did M&A at Dell for a couple of years. I’ve also seen many deck virtuoso at work over the years. I have strong aesthetic and information architecture opinions on slides, and I think I have a good grasp on using slides for org hacking tactics.

I mean: I make a lot of slides. I like slides.And not even on a “most decks are crap, but the good ones are works of art” kind of way.

But, I still have very mixed feelings. Reading prose is often easier and faster, and has higher fidelity for information transfer. People forget that with slides, the presenter needs to be there to explain what is going on in the slides.

Conversely, people who are not good at corporate slide craft don’t realize that these slides are not keynotes and they should not have just one big picture per slide. (And, yes, Gemini’s image generation capability is great - but really, if you find yourself putting images like that in your slides, just swap it out for some bullet points instead that explain the point you’re trying to make.)

Image by geralt on Pixabay.

I’m sent slides a lot that look great, have wonderful graphics and perfect text - you can see the blood and tears dripping off the slides. Game recognizes game in deck-craft.

But I’m often left thinking “but what is our strategy?” or “but what does this mean I should do?” or, simply, “weird use a chevron there, Duchamp…and could you make that an inline link instead of just pasting the URL awkwardly at the bottom of the slide like a 6th grader?” Except I keep that last part to myself because I strive to be a kind co-worker.

Most of the ways people use slides are not good. They should have just written a doc or recorded a short video…or just rambled at one of the robots and had it convert it to a short doc/email.

And yet…slides. You can hang all the maps of Napoleon’s March on the walls behind your webcams, but still, slides run the world.

Better get your deck ready.

Related, I suggest this advice and, sort of, ode to slides.

Bedazzled by slides and data

Sat, 16 May 2026 06:13:26 +0200

During the 2000s, slides became even more ornate. Consultancies evolved their formatting rules, and created fancy data-dense charts. They learned that a 200 slide deck made clients feel like they got a lot for their money.

E.g.:

I vividly remember being shown the charts room in fund manager Fidelity’s huge London office. There were graphs of everything under the sun. Was the theatre of the chart room the big sell to clients, or was it a useful tool for the analysts? No doubt Debenhams' bosses had lots of facts at their fingertips, but data didn’t help them save the business.

In summary, from Russell:

Data is distracting. Most of it is just noise. You’re gathering it because you can, just in case, because it seems valuable. Then you spend ages trying to work out what to do with it. When you should be paying attention to just a couple of bits of it and actually doing something about it.

Tax code hacking

Fri, 15 May 2026 06:56:51 +0200

Using AI to hack tax codes is a bigger threat than hacking computers.

Using AI to hack tax codes is a bigger threat than hacking computers. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/05/how-dangerous-is-anthropics-mythos-ai.html

🔗 How Dangerous Is Anthropic’s Mythos AI?

Datacenter NIMBYism: What Did You Think Was Going to Happen?

Thu, 14 May 2026 09:06:33 +0200

Tech people are amazingly bad at marketing to The Community. And by “the community,” I mean normal people, not the “open source community.” Take the datacenter problem. Tech companies need more compute, so they need datacenters. They plop them down in some small town, avoid paying taxes, and consume huge amounts of electricity and water.

To the locals, these city slickers just take. They don’t give anything back.

It’s like whoever is making these decisions didn’t live through the Walmart-ization of Main Street. Or, on the left side of politics, 20 years of fighting over salamanders versus parking lots.

You have to give something back - something visible, tangible, and directly useful. Walmart drove down prices and massively increased availability. They sell groceries now, which is its own kind of social infrastructure.

My memories are foggy on this, but I don’t think we had that kind of availability in the 80s. You certainly couldn’t buy cold medicine for your kid at 3am on a Sunday night. And while walking to the register, you couldn’t contemplate whether your midnight snack should be shawarma frozen pizza or a mortadella sandwich. Those benefits became legible, and they still are.

Sure, people on the left still think Walmart is aesthetically bad. It never escaped the stigma of gutting mom-and-pop stores. But, conceptually no one cares: you can just launder those preferences through brands like Target and Costco, and then it’s as if the big box store panic never happened:

No matter who we are or where we’re from, at Costco, we’re more alike than we are different. There’s no such thing as the real America, but if there were, you’d find it here. And you’ll find me here, too, for I have become the Costco person I was always destined to be, preordained by geography and epigenetics, nature and nurture. // From “I Want to Live Like Costco People," by Jordan Michelman

The point is: those city slickers eventually became part of the community that once reviled them. The tradeoff became understandable.

With datacenters, there is no such legibility. When people hear that these companies are escaping taxes, it gets even worse. It looks like mom and pop are getting ripped off yet again. Same old city slickers.

Meanwhile, AI companies can’t help themselves when it comes to talking about ending civilization, replacing jobs, or building godlike systems. Then every week brings another story about how strange, contemptuous, or detached the executives are. These folks make Uber look like the Easter Bunny.

Why not do things like:

Take some of that SoftBank and sovereign wealth fund money and just pay the full taxes. I mean, how much are we talking, $10 million, $5 million? Even at a $100m…is that going to shut down the AI industry?
Build hospitals with names like “Regional Data Center Hospital.” In Austin, the name “Dell” is prefixed on all sorts of things that aren’t computers. I’m sure that helps. And, like, is real. (That said, Dell is located right over the border between Austin and Round Rock for, you know, lower taxes.)
Provide cheap or free fiber internet to the surrounding communities. Everyone needs Internet.
Give every resident ChatGPT for free.

You could call that bribery. Or you could call it becoming part of the community.

When I pick up litter from my neighbor’s yard, I’m not bribing them. I’m participating in shared life with them. And then the next time I need to borrow their pressure washer, it’ll be easier to get it from them.

Eventually, most people accepted Walmart because the benefits became obvious in everyday life. The benefits of AI infrastructure and datacenters remain entirely invisible. All people see are giant windowless buildings, noisy backup generators, and companies trying not to pay taxes.

What exactly did these city slickers think was going to happen?

McDonald's Geofence, Power Tools Got Worse on Purpose, and Big Things Are Trusted Less - Related to your interests, Wednesday

Wed, 13 May 2026 09:43:16 +0200

Also: AI makes marketing opaque, execs value humans less, and clown world logic.

You’re either left holding the bag, or pro-activity delivering “value creation”

The answer is pretty clear: TryTanzu.ai.

What’s New in Tanzu Platform 10.4: Powering Agentic Apps at Scale - Nick and Keith walk through it.
Quit VMware and you’ll emerge with more complex and less capable infrastructure - “One is that few organizations will be able to quit VMware entirely, as they run applications with dependencies that aren’t easy or economical to unwind. Reducing or eliminating a VMware rig therefore means adopting multiple replacements, which creates more infrastructure to manage and therefore extra complexity.”
Redis and the Cost of Ambition - “You’re probably not the target for the landing page.” // Nerds forget that someone has to pay for all their no caring about money. Oh, and those options are not going to increases in value on their own. Related:
Governed enterprise AI drives IBM’s strategy - ‘“The role of a CFO is you have to be focused on creating long-term sustainable competitive advantage and value creation,” he said. “Underneath that, you might ask, ‘Well, what does agent of transformation mean? What is the day in the life of a CFO?’ I would tell you, it’s a fundamentally different mindset and I put it in three buckets. Number one, a CFO has to have strategic vision. Second, you’ve got to be able to enable business model innovation. And the third, very important is organizational agility”’
Execs admit AI makes them value human workers less - “Sixteen percent of companies saw a negative ROI from AI investments last year, and 73 percent of executives whose AI efforts did pay off said ROI fell short of expectations, according to the report.”
AI Makes Advertising Less Transparent and Harder to Justify - As with coding, when you use AI for marketing, the decision process and internals of strategy become opaque. The robot says: “The result is a steady transfer of control and transparency away from marketers and toward systems whose internals they cannot inspect.”
Gartner Predicts 40% of Organizations Deploying AI Will Use AI Observability to Monitor Model Performance by 2028
Burnout and Cognitive Debt
James Shore: You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs - Caught in the legacy trap: “According to our crowd’s maintenance estimates, you’ll spend more than half your time on maintenance after 2½ years. After ten years, you can hardly do anything else.”
I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment
🤖 Inside the Geofence: Faster Pickups Start Here - McDonald’s QA team explains how geofencing-based field testing validates mobile features like Ready on Arrival under real-world GPS, network, and device variability. “Concentric geofence zones around stores trigger promotions, kitchen prep, and pickup confirmation as customers approach.”
Why Most App Modernization Efforts Fail, and How a Capabilities-Driven Strategy Can Stop the Billion-Dollar Bleed
Your Power Tools Got Worse On Purpose - Who Really Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee? - Private equity and execs who are not subject matter experts is a bad idea, in tools at least.
Why Dunkin' failed in India - “A global doughnut icon was suddenly selling hash brown burgers.”
A Library of Distractions - The McDonald’s flâneur reads Aristotle.
RPG Evolution: The reverse chase

And he was worried no one would show up.

Wastebook

“One small problem with that: what you are suggesting makes sense. We live in clown world with clown world logic. Why would we be allowed to have things that make sense in clown world?” GitLab layoffs.
“The easiest way to hit a margin target is to make everything a little worse, across the board, all at once.” Here
“NAT in my backyard” is up there with “MIBs and aOIDing.” Here
A series of “little butlers.” Here
“Sorry, darling. There I go, going on and on about performing life saving heart surgery on little children. How was your day as a Pac-Man ghost at the arcade?” Here
Once cooked, you’ll always end up with more rice than you thought would. So, unless you know what you’re doing, make half of what you think you should.
AI analysis and summaries end up being very positive. “Most pieces like this are worth skipping,” a summary will open with, “but this one is worth sitting with.” They need a counterpoint. A cynical human is a good source for that.

From: Blackmagic Debuts $29K+ URSA Cine Immersive 100G for Vision Pro

ICYMI

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From: Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo: Day 2 Highlights

People don’t trust large organizations. And, I guess, why should they? Large organizations are optimized around making money, they have policy, they are “faceless.” There are countless HBR articles written about going above and beyond with customer service (the perineal Four Seasons case study in different robes).

A counter point is that the very faceless Amazon retail division. I prefer buying from them instead of resellers because I know the price will be good (enough), it’ll get here fast, and that I can return no questions asked. Apple is sort of trustworthy, but they are very goofy in with the non-core products.

Trust in government seems highly relative, and often requires you first asking what the person responding wants. Do they want less government? Do they want government to impose their morals and rules? Do they rely on government for services, and/or wish to pay less taxes? Is there a pothole in the road, or do they ride public transit successfully. Maybe they don’t leave their ranch, and just want people to get off their lawn.

I ponder trust in parents (me!) a lot. That seems to be mostly about keeping your promises and making sure family members are safe and happy.

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Mon, 11 May 2026 10:03:02 +0200

Because it seems fancy pants and authoritative:

The generally accepted hypothesis to explain this overuse ties back LLMs’ training and reinforcement processes. As models learn to predict language patterns, they begin to use their learned patterns to do so. However, this isn’t the only factor determining which patterns get used more often. Models like Claude and ChatGPT have an additional goal with their responses: to provide users with clarity. Em-dashes, which allow for explanatory pauses and the breaking down of complex ideas, are an ideal tool for AIs. As such, LLMs are not only introduced to more em-dashes, but their training also reinforces their usage. This results in em-dashes appearing more frequently than in typical human writing.

From: Why Did LLMs Steal Our Em-Dashes?

Tanzu's 15-Year Head Start, Max Headroom in Every Terminal, and Doctors Catch the AI Bug - Related to your interests, Monday

Mon, 11 May 2026 10:01:42 +0200

Also: Mirantis acquisition logic, and tech jobs at a 3-year high, so why the layoffs?

Here’s the latest Tanzu Catsup:

AI lets us find more vulnerabilities, faster than ever. That’s good news. You want to know what’s broken, and you want to patch it. The hard part is the volume. How do you handle it without drowning?

We stream these every Friday at 10am US Eastern/4pm Amsterdam time. Since David is way into security, I ask him neophyte questions about that each episode, plus we talk about our latest AI harness tinkering.

Check out the current episode, and there’s plenty in the archives.

Tanzu Platform’s 15-year head start meets the AI moment - No need to build your own AI platform to do security, governance, and self-service model and MCP access you need, a rock-solid, enterprise proven one already exists. And it’s not Kubernetes.
🤖 Platform engineering drives Red Hat’s enterprise AI push - The strategy is a single Kubernetes-based foundation for traditional apps, VMs, containers, and AI workloads - what Red Hat calls a “metal-to-agents” stack. The argument is that fragmented tools and inference-unfriendly infrastructure, not lack of ambition, are what stall enterprise AI.
From 38% to 81%: Why Doctor AI Adoption Just Doubled and What It Means for Healthcare - “The American Medical Association just released its 2026 Physician Survey on Augmented Intelligence… 81% of physicians now use AI professionally, more than double the 38% figure from 2023.” 🤖: “Adoption concentrated where the problem was acute and the use case was contained: medical research summarization and clinical documentation. AI scribes addressed note-writing without touching diagnosis or judgment, kept physicians in the review loop, and embedded inside the EHR rather than running parallel to it.”
🤖 Can IREN Build a Full-Stack AI Cloud? The Mirantis Acquisition Makes the Case - Explanation of that Mirantis acquisition: IREN is acquiring Mirantis for ~$625M in stock to add Kubernetes orchestration, the k0rdent AI platform, and 1,500 enterprise accounts to its GPU cloud. The vertical integration logic is clear, but execution risk and the standalone-subsidiary structure are the open questions
RIP caused by boredom - The technology is not “dead,” it’s “done.” It’s only dead to investors that no longer make money off its growth.
Tech job postings hit 3-year high - File under “what the fuck is going on with layoffs then?": “Tech occupation employment rose by 260,000 roles, driving the unemployment rate among technology professionals down from 3.9% in March to 3.5% in April, according to CompTIA. The U.S. unemployment rate remained steady at 4.3%.”
Inside the cutthroat community of ‘clippers’

Looks nice from way up there.

Wastebook

“What have you tried?” Here.
dissimulation: Hiding or disguising your true feelings, intentions, or character - putting on a false front. From Latin dissimulare, “to conceal.” It’s the active sibling of simulation (pretending something is so) - dissimulation is pretending something isn’t so. A poker face is dissimulation; a fake smile is closer to simulation.
Whatever the new technology is, every vendor will tell you that the one thing holding you back from success is the lack of the product or service they sell.

From: A Max Headroom in Every Terminal!

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Let’s see how this week goes.

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Mythos Firefox, the AI Job Fantasy, and Oregon Red Clover - Related to your interests, Saturday

Sat, 09 May 2026 08:09:32 +0200

Also: opinion shows for writers, no-update weeks, and the Spinoza heresies.

From: The Brautigan Library

Pushing Local Models With Focus And Polish - Building a DIY AI stack is difficult.
The “AI Job Apocalypse” Is a Complete Fantasy - “The macro story is not a jobless future, where we retire fat and complacent to our Netflix-scooters.” // Yes, but, There is a bit of “disruption for thee, but not for me” going on in pieces like this. No one wants to start their career over at the bottom of the wage ladder, especially if they’re later in their lives. Individuals lives are driven by the micro-economy, has their job been transformed and now they need to (1) learn something new, and, (2) start at the bottom of the career/pay level? // Gen-X kids lived threw off-shoring (neo-liberalism?), and we can tell you the result of “jobs don’t get lost, new jobs are created”: a bunch of unemployed people who can no longer afford their mortgage, their life as a whole. And then you get Tea Parties and MAGA. Good luck to us!
Related: the expectation of this kind of thinking is that people will do things like “buy lots of Nvidia, but if that doesn’t pay off make sure you are doing an MBA and planning a career in non-AI-implementation consulting.”
Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview - “Suddenly, the bugs are very good.”
It’s an opinion show - The value of having a column for the write…or videographer.
The stuff nobody tells you about startup marketing
Why do Oregon farms plant red clover every spring?
Poetry: I Too, Dislike It - I don’t know man, this gotcha headline piece was doing well until it included a poem and proved the headline it was trying to disprove. Multitudes and all that.

From: Astounding Science Fiction

Wastebook

“I think it’s probably a good idea to put a moratorium on installing new software for a week or so.” No Updates
“horrifying heresies.” Spinoza, Atheist.

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Current status: ¯_(ツ)_/¯ but with at least a smile. I think.

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Tinkerslop, Class Wartime, and Jobs Not AI Enough - Related to your interests, Friday

Fri, 08 May 2026 19:23:54 +0200

Also: VCF 9.1 prefers private cloud for AI, the McGroc analyst trap, and the bank that lost the pope’s account.

From: The undertow - Astrid

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 - a roundup of it all.
Broadcom Announces VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 - “A preview of Broadcom’s Private Cloud Outlook 2026 report reveals private cloud continues to be the preferred platform for production AI. More than half of organizations surveyed (56%) are running or planning to run production inferencing in a private cloud. More importantly, public cloud use for production inference was 41%, down 15% year over year. Additionally, 62% of IT leaders reported being very or extremely concerned about generative AI infrastructure costs while 36% report AI is driving new requirements for data protection, privacy, security controls and risk management.”
🤖 Google Is A Full Stack AI Player, And Is Playing Well - Google Cloud’s full-stack AI integration from TPUs through Gemini is finally paying off, with Q1 2026 revenue up 63 percent and operating income tripling. The original “abstract the infrastructure” vision customers rejected a decade ago is now exactly what GenAI buyers want.
Anthropic and OpenAI are both launching joint ventures for enterprise AI services - “The overall logic of the two ventures is the same, raising money from alternative asset managers to create new channels for enterprise AI deals. The ventures will presumably get preferred sales access to their investors' portfolio companies, while the investors will capture more value from any resulting contracts.”
🤖 We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. - “Data center electricity demand was flat from 2005 to 2017 thanks to efficiency gains, but AI-specific hardware doubled consumption by 2023, and data centers now eat 4.4% of all US electricity. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory projects that by 2028, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of US households.”
Do Americans really hate AI?
Apple to Pay $250 Million to Settle Class Action Over Delayed Siri Features - as someone else said, $25 in apologies for at $800 phone is weird.
The Organization Is the Bottleneck
Cloudflare to fire 1,100 staff whose jobs just aren’t AI enough - “To rub salt into the wounds of sacked staff, the email went out not long before Cloudflare announced quarterly results that included 34 percent year-over-year revenue growth and guidance for 30 percent future growth.”
IREN Announces Acquisition of Mirantis to Strengthen AI - Mirantis!
Is feedback really a gift? - “Have you ever gotten _actually useful _technical feedback? Ultimately all the feedback was really ‘write more code.'”
Datadog’s stock jumps 31% on crushing earnings beat, showing there’s still hope for software - There’s always money in the monitoring stand.
The McGroc Trap: Why Most Analyst Briefings Get Stuck Talking About Product - Influencer Relations - How to make an analyst briefing more interesting: have a unique view of “the market,” talk about a dramatic result at a customer, use silence to get the analyst engaged and talking. // “The vendor came with a point of view about where the market was heading, shared evidence from customer outcomes, and invited the analyst to challenge or build on those observations.”
🤖 Life During Class Wartime - Tim Bray argues we’re losing a class war to an emerging hereditary aristocracy and that a modest annual wealth tax is the obvious, achievable counter-move. Uses the Whitecaps sale to a billionaire heir as a vivid illustration of inherited-money power.
🤖 The 1960s Art School Experiment That Redefined Creativity - “…problem-finding draws on something more holistic than reason - a searching, uncertain state that may be where the creative process actually begins.”
🤖 Long ago, a Houston company’s art graced the walls of America’s stoners - “this is the visual record of a subculture whose members didn’t write books and whose work doesn’t hang in museums”

The map of system topologies

Wastebook

“Tinkerslop” - as they used to say “I feel seen.” Here.
“I want to carry my ereader, mesh radio or two, wallet, headphones, keys, pens, battery pack, and usually a manga.” Bag Watch.
“Need a whole lotta milk-ahhh.” Meanwhile, in the hall.
“The bank did not want to lose the account of the pope. They changed the number.” Here.
farrago - a confused mixture or a jumble of different things
“basically one guy controlling every knob.” Claude describes My Bloody Valentine.
“a managerial memento mori” Claude’s take on “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”
“Incidentally, GTA6 is coming out in November and apparently it cost $1 billion to make.” Here.
Asymmetric slop, via.
“Here’s one we built earlier.” Blue Peter, I’m told.
“When I became a magician at the age of 40, I took it very seriously, and it has transformed my life.” Alan Moore

John's Desk.

ICYMI

Laws, anecdotes, and other shit people say - an attempt to gather up all the “laws,” anecdotes, and folklore in tech and management talk.
Always taste the digital transformation while you’re making it - use iterative transformation.
History is not a story - applying a narrative to history is a problem.
Treat AI as a stoner
The Enterprise Dunbar number - Software Defined Talk #571 - “This week, we discuss AI labs driving cloud revenue, hyperscalers laying off instead of building, and kids defeating age verification. Plus, Brandon has too many thoughts on Workday.”

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From: Personal and prompt attention

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Always taste the digital transformation while you're making it

Fri, 08 May 2026 09:31:32 +0200

At a large enterprise I recently worked with, the board asked the Chief Digital Transformation Officer to develop an AI adoption strategy to drive innovation, growth, and cost efficiency. His consultant of choice conducted stakeholder interviews and proposed a three-phase program scheduled to last 3.5 years:

Phase 1: Fix digital basics and address the leftover gaps in people, processes, and technology from an incomplete digital transformation.

Phase 2: Build the AI foundation, including governance, tools, platforms, and an AI office.

Phase 3: Introduce AI and agentic business initiatives most likely to reach customers.

It was a coherent program that optimized for efficient delivery. But it’s not what the board wanted. They were looking for a strategy to become more innovative and competitive in an environment where the time required to implement IT products has shrunk significantly. What they got was a fix-the-basics project that would consume most of the budget before delivering actual business value.

From You Wanted to Become AI-Native, and All You Got Was a Lousy Foundation

That opening anecdote reminded me of most transformation initiatives I’ve either been involved in or observed: mysteriously, they seem to result in the organization doing what it’s already doing, just with new slides!

As Patzak goes on the argue, it’s better to have build up a theory of what to do, try out a little bit, see if you liked it, and adapt or keep going.

Put more plainly, you should taste food as you’re making it to ensure you get what you want at the end.

Sounds like a perfect example of Larman’s Law.

History is not a story

Fri, 08 May 2026 09:12:19 +0200

But how much was really done to unravel the Soviet Union by Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume narrative history of the Soviet Gulag between its publication and the end of Communism in the Soviet Union? Could the works of one author really dissolve a nation? Some might cite the election of the Polish Pope John Paul II in 1978 as making a greater difference. Others might point to U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) or to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika.

Ultimately, the trouble with narrative history – which presents history as a chronologically coherent arc of characters, motives, turning points, and consequences – is that it simply can’t resolve these questions either way. There are too many forces operating on the trajectory of human affairs even to be enumerated. As a result, weighing them against one another is a fool’s errand.

From The Trouble With Narrative History.