Platform Plumbing, AI Ads That Work (But People Hate), and D&D Characters Drawn by Robots
Plus, more strange and fun finds from the World Wide Web
Original Content
On this week’s Tanzu Catsup, We spend an excruciating amount of time talking about how platform engineers add new services/middleware/whatever to internal developer platforms. It’s great if that’s relative to your interests. My next self-challenge is add a simple service to Cloud Foundry.
An Australian Documentary - Software Defined Talk this week: “This week, we discuss Oracle’s AI vibes, Chainguard’s EmeritOSS, and GitHub’s pricing U-turn. Plus, a robust robot vacuum debate.”
Related to your interests
Vanity Fair photographer defends Trump administration portraits - Always nice to read someone who has thought a lot about their work and is like “I know what I’m doing and it is good.”: ”I don’t know if it says something about the world we live in, the age of Photoshop, the age of AI filters on your Instagram, but the fact that the internet is freaking out because they’re seeing real photos and not retouched ones says something to me.”
Things I want to say to my boss - How NOT to take care of your “most valuable assets.”
Paper: The Impact of Visual Generative AI on Advertising Effectiveness by Hyesoo Lee, Vilma Todri, Panagiotis Adamopoulos, Anindya Ghose - AI generated ads are more effective, but people don’t like them. // Some good old revealed preference. // 🤖: “Ads fully created by visual genAI achieved about a 19% higher click-through rate than human-created ads. However, when ads disclosed that they were generated using AI, click-through rates dropped by about 32% relative to human-created ads.”
“Trump commits to returning Americans to the Moon by 2028.”
“Google is the Company to Beat in the Enterprise Agentic AI Platforms Race Also, roll this new tagline around in your mind-mouth: “Gartner is the World Authority on AI.”
How Vanguard uses behavioral nudges with its customers | CX Dive - ”One of Vanguard’s efforts was to provide information awareness to better serve their outcomes — thus making their next step clearer and narrowing down optimal options…. That could be letting people know if you do this transaction versus waiting, the tax consequences can be pretty different,” Zahm said. “Some of it is helping people understand the implications of upcoming contribution deadlines and saving for retirement.” // Showing potential ROI and downside for “nudges.”
Welcome To Jr. High, GenAI - Excerpt and more on my weblog.
AI’s real superpower: consuming, not creating · Mike San Román - Run Claude Code/Codex over your notes and collected PKM stuff. It works really well, better, quicker personal-ROI than generating content, I’d say. AI is better at reading than writing, w/r/t to helpful tasks. // Also, more for the people are treating AIs like people files.
Specification - Agent Skills - Claude Skills are very under-rated.
How To Win Titular Metagames - Good actionable pondering on coming up titles that people will click on and word-of-mouth spread.
Wastebook
“Betty’s boyfriend-to-be is a dog-chef called Bimbo, who serenades her on a duck that transforms into a guitar, while the restaurant clientele and staff include a fantastical menagerie of animals.” It was a different time.
“It’s a birth scene, not a boss scene.” ChatGPT 5.2 analyzes The Spider-God’s Bride.
Cross silo ROI is not legible.
“We want adult tension. The tension of brains. If anyone sees sex, that’s on them. We’re not responsible for the public’s imagination. We’re responsible for moving units in Woolworths.”
The new mid-life crisis is reading Proust.
“Always be suspicious of a dish that has five shots of vodka lined up so you can brace yourself.” From Ye Olde WWW.
A weird-ass listen, from Russell’s Dig.
“Mad Max, an Australian documentary.” Matt.
Logoff
They haven’t gotten around to publishing it, but I have a secret link to my most recent playing solo D&D with AI talk if you’re interested. // We are off Texas for Christmas. I am looking forward to living the content of our third annual “I used to be from here” observations listical. Past editions: 2024, 2023 (parts one, two, three), 2022.