Links and strange finds from the World Wide Web for November 4th, 2024

As it says.

Code Neo (Pearl Sijmons), Joana Schneider, 2024.

Relative to your interests

• Priorities CIOs Must Address in 2025, Insights from the 2025 Gartner CIO Survey - “only 48% of digital initiatives meet or exceed their business outcome targets. This statistic highlights a significant challenge for organizations aiming to achieve their digital transformation goals.” // It could also highlight that the expectations were very unrealistic. I’d bet on that more than anything else. // Also, here’s some Gartner charts on the topic.

• Storm Clouds Ahead: Missed Expectations in Cloud Computing - “According to IDC’s Cloud Pulse 4Q 2023 survey, close to half of cloud buyers spent more on cloud than they expected in 2023, with 59% anticipating similar overruns in 2024. The complexities of cloud environments, coupled with unforeseen external influences, make it challenging to forecast costs accurately. Factors such as the increasing cost of third-party services, energy costs, and the financial implications of new technologies like GenAI are contributing to these budget blowouts.” And: “According to IDC’s Server and Storage Workloads Survey, only 8–9% of companies plan full workload repatriation.”

• Embracing Antifragility: Building Resilient Products in an Uncertain World - You can read this as a take on what it means to be a “learning organization.” As ever, the hardest, most mysterious, least airport business book-ized topic is “how do we change from ‘traditional’ to this whiz-bang method?”

• Unleashing Transformation - Yup, this all of the stuff. Arguably, it’s missing #8: actually do it and stop blaming “culture.”

• What Seth Godin Really Thinks About Social Media - ”I do think that social media is largely a trap… for users and for brands. It’s purposely built to create insecurity and false proxies, metrics that get people to work for free to support the business model of the social media companies, as opposed to their own goals. When Wendy’s or Oreo cookies pulls some sort of stunt on a social media platform, it’s not clear to me that they’ve done anything of value. They haven’t sold french fries or cookies, or earned trust. They simply amused a few people. How do we earn permission, trust, the benefit of the doubt or status? If your social media isn’t doing that, what’s it for?”

• If Trump wins, get your tech shopping done fast - “The CTA predicts [PDF] that the increased cost of importation, and retaliatory tariffs from other countries, would raise the cost of a laptop by 46 percent, a gaming console by 40 percent, and smartphone prices would be 26 percent more expensive. As a result, the association expects demand to fall 54, 57, and 44 percent, respectively.”

• Stop Team Topologies - Don’t use an understandable system to avoid asking why you’re doing anything in the first place. // Or: all the value is in the “it depends.”

• Building A Generative AI Platform, Chip Huyen - This is a fantastic overview of what an enterprise AI architecture probably looks like, taking into account not only technical stuff, but also business concerns like cost and risk/accuracy.

• The stoicism secret: how Ryan Holiday became a Silicon Valley guru - “My initial attraction to stoicism is what it can do for you: how it can make you more resilient, more productive, think clearer, be a master of yourself,” he says. “This is a perfectly fine entry point into the philosophy. But if you miss what the philosophy is also asking of you, in terms of ethics and morals and its emphasis on the virtue of justice, how we’re interconnected and interrelated, then really, what you’ve just discovered is a recipe for being a better sociopath. Which is not what stoicism is.”

• Why Jamie Dimon is Sam Altman’s biggest competitor - 🤖 says: JPMorgan Chase, led by Jamie Dimon, is presented as a major competitor to OpenAI due to its vast proprietary data (150 petabytes vs. GPT-4’s 0.5 petabytes).

Wastebook

Thus, Elijah Ruhala, 2022.

• “You can think of prompt injection as social engineering done on AI instead of humans.” Chip.

• “got scolded for drinking coffee in front of god.” Deb JJ Lee.

• “But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’, hoping to escape from the horrors of our present – a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.” Here.

• The used to have blue hair, then a blue streak, and now they have a grey streak.

• “Spruiks.” Originally here.

• “LLMM: Large Language Mobile Marketing!” Tim.

• “And I thought, ‘well, that’s how it goes.’”

• ‘Now that The Ellen Show is off the air, he’s basically the last TV host of the “Gangnam Style era” that’s still on TV.’ Garbage.

• “Bruno Munari disco machine.” Here.

• Conway’s Law applied to M&A.

Conferences

Danielle has a new pitch for why you should join us at Explore. If you’re going to Explore, be sure to pre-register for my two sessions. It helps! Check out all the poop at cote.pizza.

VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. I won’t be at KubeCon US this year, but my work has a 20% off discount code you can use for registration: KCNA24VMWQR20. Also, it’s “invite only,” but why not try to get an invite to our fancy dinner there?

Logoff

I’m in Barcelona at VMware Explore 2024. I did my two main talks today and they were fun to do, especially moderating the panel about enterprise AI. Hopefully the recordings will be up and easy to find soon.