The Potato, the Spreadsheet, and the AI That Checks Its Own Work
From Kubernetes theology to AI-using lawyers and spreadsheet-based worldviews, and other ways to automate yourself into absurdity. // Plus, more fun and strange finds from the World Wide Web
Of late, the newsletter has turned into me linking to longer posts on my blog. There’s the usual links and wastebook as well. This makes it more of a digest than a stand-alone item. As you can tell by the volume of blog posts below, I like blogging though and I’m glad I’m doing I do it more!
Original content
Speaking of, several little things on the blog:
The ultimate bike-shedding story, and, always make your own slides.
Reject the rejection of your writing voice especially when you’re writing “enterprise grade” copy.
Java and Spring developers are big deal, probably the #1 way of doing enterprise apps.
And, check out the full discussion I had with Brian here. Lots of good modernization and culture change talk. Plus, what’s up with .Net and cloud native?
Wastebook
“Icecore” 🥶
“Outside sad is better than inside sad.” Trees and sky.
“he ends the memoir discovering instagram and finding purpose in being an asshole on there.” weekly retro #40
“he ends the memoir discovering instagram and finding purpose in being an asshole on there.” weekly retro #40
“Trente Glorieuses” Trente Glorieuses
We should be calling it all “AIaaS,” but I don’t think anyone could pronounce that without going PG-13 in every EBC and MQ.
“Master the potato.”
“I make this soup every week.”
“We guarantee that our placebos will help you regress to any mean, or else!” Taylor.
“AI and Socks – More Alike Than You Think” Here.
“Give me just a second to think about what I need to be thinking about.”
Relative to your interests
Some of the risks of having AIs write codes and AIso check code, “recursive AI security loops.” There’s also some advice about what to do, a post from Camille Crowell-Lee.
Kubernetes and AI Are Shaping the Next Generation of Platforms - Feels a little bit like a platform standard so powerful that you need an AI front-end to make it usable by mere mortals. Yes: ”Kubernetes started as a way to orchestrate containers, but its true innovation lies in its API model. The declarative resource pattern, with its desired state, actual state and continuous reconciliation, has proven to be a universal abstraction. It works for workloads, infrastructure, policies and more. That universality is why Kubernetes has become the foundation for IDPs. It provides a consistent way to define, extend and enforce platform building blocks. Whether you’re provisioning a cloud database, managing a network policy or applying compliance rules, Kubernetes APIs make platforms programmable, predictable and composable. This API-first foundation also makes Kubernetes uniquely ready for the AI era. Agents and large language models (LLMs) don’t navigate dashboards or tribal knowledge; they interact with APIs. And Kubernetes offers a consistent, structured interface designed from Day 1 for machine-to-machine communication.” But: “Instead of memorizing YAML schemas or reading through long docs, they could interact conversationally with an agent that understands both the platform’s APIs and the organization’s rules.”
🤖 Optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in 2 epidemiologic cohorts of men and women - Large cohort study finds that high optimism boosts life span by up to 15% and significantly increases chances of reaching 85+, independent of major health and lifestyle factors.
🤖 Shifting Security Left with AI — Is It Truly AI-Assisted Security, or an Infinite Loop? - Explores the risks of recursive AI security loops and offers strategies to ensure that AI-assisted coding doesn’t undermine enterprise security.
🤖 The Constitution of Innovation: A New European Renaissance – A manifesto arguing the EU must cut regulatory overreach, restore the internal market, and embrace risk-driven innovation to spark a new European renaissance.
Banks turn to AI supervisors as agent use surges - “The most common use case for agentic AI is customer service, according to 75% of banks surveyed by Capgemini. Nearly two-thirds use the technology for fraud detection, while 3 in 5 use it for loan processing and customer onboarding.”
Bank of America runs 270 AI models across operations - ”In software development, we have 18,000 developers at the company that use coding agents today to optimize our development process,” Hari Gopalkrishnan. “We’ve already seen 20% productivity [boosts] coming out of those parts of the lifecycle, which we are now reinvesting next year into new growth programs.”
Vigilante Lawyers Expose the Rising Tide of A.I. Slop in Court Filings - At this point this feels like what it’s showing is that the amount of work needed to do law is crushing and unreasonable. And/or that the potential for profit is so high that taking stupid risks is worth it.
Everything is a Spreadsheet - You can probably do it with a spreadsheet.
How to Stay Sane in a World That Rewards Insanity - “The one who tribalized every issue found a ready-made community that validated every prior. Etc, etc. The incentive gradient was clear: sanity was expensive, and extremism paid dividends.”
Google, Microsoft, and Meta Have Stopped Publishing Workforce Diversity Data - ‘Major employers including Meta and Google suspended minority hiring targets and dropped some references to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from their websites and regulatory filings around the time of Trump’s order. Meta and Google also significantly reduced funding for DEI initiatives, such as events, training, and recruiting drives aimed at improving representation of minority groups, according to company announcements and employees.’
Gartner Raises 2025 IT Spending Forecast, Puts Out 2026 Prediction - IT Jungle - “Gartner is now projecting that datacenter systems spending in 2025 will rise by 46.8 percent to $489.5 billion, which is an incremental $14.6 billion in spending in the datacenter for hardware and base systems software. The core IT spending is now projected to hit $3.45 trillion, an incremental $59.8 billion in spending and representing a 12.5 percent growth over the $3.06 trillion in core IT spending in 2024.”
The Roman Empire’s Entire Road Network Just Got Mapped, and It’s Mind-Blowing
How to Fix Breakdowns in Communication - In a tense situation, take a moment to say out loud your opponents position, feeling, and perspective. This is like setting up context and prompting for an AI. You put that in the context window and it flavors the ongoing conversation. It’d probably do interesting stuff in AI chats. Those chats are so explicit and non-confrontational that these dynamics probably already happen.
The wildest stuff Elon Musk said at Tesla’s shareholder meeting - “I think we might maybe able to give people — if somebody committed crime — a more humane form of containment of future crime. You say, ‘You now get a free Optimus and it’s going to follow you around and stop you from doing crime.’ But other than that, you get to do anything… You don’t have to put people in prisons and stuff.”
Gartner Survey Finds 45% of Martech Leaders Say Existing Vendor-Offered AI Agents Fail to Meet Their Expectations of Promised Business Performance - “The top use cases for AI agent pilots for marketing technology leaders are content or marketing asset production, cited by 52% of leaders piloting these tools. Other top use cases include content and marketing asset enrichment (49%) and campaign management/optimization (43%).”
One-Third of US Families Earn Over $150,000 - “It’s astonishing that the richest country in world history could convince itself that it was plundered by immigrants and trade.”
🤖 Baby Shoggoth Is Listening – A meditation on why writers may increasingly write for AI, seeking influence over superintelligence and a shot at digital immortality.
🤖 Optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in 2 epidemiologic cohorts of men and women - Large cohort study finds that high optimism boosts life span by up to 15% and significantly increases chances of reaching 85+, independent of major health and lifestyle factors.
Logoff
Hopefully I’ll have a new State of Spring talk recorded and posted this week. The idea isn’t to talk about the features and stuff in the framework, but more about the overall community and what I think its focus in large organizations should be.
It's interesting how you touched on the "AIaaS" concept. I've been reflecting on the constant churn of tech acronyms, and the strugle to name new paradigms accurately. Do you feel the difficulty in pronouncing AIaaS points to a deeper cultural issue in how we package and perceive these evolving services? It really makes me wonder about the psychological impact of buzzwords.