Amazon Should Buy Anthropic, AI Doctors, Metaverse RIP
Also: Helm chart optimization, knowledge graphs before AI actually works, stress as an algorithm, why most Americans did read a book, personal websites as rebellion, and how Home Depot is feeling abou
Original Content
I wasn’t really sure what hardned images were, let alone “distroless,” so Tony and I were lucky to get William on this week’s Tanzu Catsup to sort it out. We also discuss how it fits into platform engineering. If you can’t be bothered, here’s an excerpt on optimizing Helm charts.
After the Dream, Software Defined Talk #555 - This week, we discuss Gemini powering Siri, AWS’s biggest competitor, and AWS strategy choices. Plus, when should your next meeting actually start?
Relevant to your interests
Texas judge throws out second lawsuit over CrowdStrike outage | Computer Weekly - “the plaintiff’s claims were dismissed in their entirety in part because the shareholders had failed to establish any plausible motive of intent to commit securities fraud on CrowdStrike’s part.”
How Daimler Trucks North America built a living knowledge graph of its business - ”Analyze our recent warranty claims, correlate them with all available datasets, and tell me why they’ve increased.” // Also, you need to take care of your silo’ed, neglected data estate before AI will work out for you in a large enterprise.
Taco Bell aims for memorable, not frictionless, experiences - “An approach to CX that is too focused on speed and ease can lead to a lack of brand identity that makes it hard to form relationships with customers.” // This is an odd way of thinking. // Also, is this an example of “executive level” talk?
The squeeze - Enshittification applied to corporate culture.
Stress is the algorithm - Lack of sleep drives stress, stress make it harder to get to sleep - recent surveys on that loop.
40% Of Americans Did Not Read a Single Book in 2025: The Latest Survey of American Reading Habits - “Perhaps that’s worth spinning in a more positive light. Most Americans, 60%, did read a book in 2025.” And: “Those who identified as female read at higher rates than their male counterparts at 63% to 56%.”
🤖 A Website To End All Websites - A critique of the industrialized, platform-dominated web and a call to reclaim the Internet through personal, hand-built websites. Explores historical parallels, technological monopolies, and the philosophy of convivial tools.
RIP the metaverse - It’s fine to use your mountains of spare cash (and voting control) to try out new things. We’re all about innovation and expect it; you have to embrace lots of failure, giant failure. // The actual problem is then discarding all the people you hired to help you. It shucks the “with great valuations comes great responsibility” principle that big tech shits on. (Except, maybe Google and a little bit Microsoft?) // Also, once again, we show that VR/cyberspace is a solution that will never find its problem.
Using generative AI to learn is like Odysseus untying himself from the mast - If you use AI to perform better at something, you have to keep using the AI to perform well. Take it away, and that boost no longer works. This applies to most tools. A hammer boosts your nailing productivity, but stop using the hammer, and that productivity improvement vanishes.
🤖 Scaling Laws for Economic Productivity: Experimental Evidence in LLM-Assisted Consulting, Data Analyst, and Management Tasks - Study finds that LLM scaling reduces task time 8% per year and could boost U.S. productivity by 20% over the next decade.
My Tips For Crushing Your Analyst Briefings And Wowing The Analyst - Good advice. Also, gave a good product. That is deodorant for any stink.
3 + 4 - On the three day work week.
AWS in 2026: The Year of Proving They Still Know How to Operate - “Internal documents reportedly show 69–81% ‘regretted attrition’–meaning the people leaving are the ones Amazon desperately wanted to keep. Where have the senior engineers who’ve been through this dance before gone? They’ve walked out the door with decades of hard-won knowledge about how AWS’s systems actually work when everything’s on fire at 3 AM.”
Joint statement from Google and Apple - Apple to officially use Gemini, though still host it on its own infrastructure (I think). Also, very weird press release. The title is like an after thought, rather, not even a thought. I mean, I’m sure it’s all incredibly thought through, which is what makes it so much the weirder.
My town looks okay, for now (photos) - ‘I wonder why the river is called “Varmá” (literally “Warm River” in Icelandic)?’
These 36 Airlines Offer iPhone Feature That Helps Find Your Lost Bags - A practical, everyday use of computers.
Welcome to the Party: Why Healthcare AI Needs More Than a Chat Box - Advanced product thinking for AI healthcare apps and workflows.
How Home Depot, Wayfair executives are preparing for an agentic AI future - Home Depot’s experiments with AI. At the moment, better search and finding out what projects people are working on. The second leading to more sales and stickyness/loyalty, I guess.
Wastebok
If it’s free today, you’ll pay tomorrow.
Protocols are the new walled gardens.
“elite threat hunting” A CrowdStrike self-thought.
“I suppose it can be said that I’m an absent-minded driver. It’s true that I’ve driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I’ve stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it.” Glenn Gould.
Logoff
The snow is gone from Amsterdam. // As always, if you’d prefer to get all of this more frequently, check my weblog on the World Wide Web.
That productivity scaling paper is intresting but the 8% annual improvement feels almost too conservative given whats happening with model capabilities right now. I ran some tests internally comparing GPT-4 vs Claude 3.5 on analyst tasks, and the diffrence in speed was more like 25-30% depending on context switching overhead. The bigger question is whether those productivity gains actually translate to output quality or just faster mediocrity, which is the thing most studies dunno how to measure yet.