What the AIs think of the US presidential debate
Gemini chickened out, but Perplexity was eager to help. Plus, links and fun finds from the World Wide Web and some updates on how I use AI.
Today it’s just links and fun finds that I’ve been storing up for a about a week.
What the AIs thinks of the debate
I asked Perplexity about the US presidential debate last night. I wasn’t very interested in “fact checking,” but in how different the coverage in the New York Times and Fox News was. I added in a “partial transcript” of the debate as well to compare both to what actually happened.
The two outlets obviously watched a different TV show than the other, possibly broadcast from two different parallel universes.
The other interesting part was asking the AI what was not covered in each article: climate change is the biggest one, it seems. At the end, I asked it to make D&D characters for each. Overall, it was pretty good - at least enjoyable to read.
Anyhow, I also asked it to write an overview at the end. It was predictably boring in that it was devoid of any point of view. Meanwhile, here’s the view from across the pond in The Economist - plenty of PoV and style as usual.
Oh, and Gemini just flat-out chickened out and wouldn’t do anything. I tried to outfox it by saying it was a fictional transcript, but it was too wise.
(And, yes, obviously generative AIs don’t actually think anything about the debate, they’re just doing their thing outputting what seems like the word that follows the one before it.)
Relative to your interests
Charles Schwab Adopts PostgreSQL (With VMware Tanzu) - Why Charles Schwab chose Postgres over Oracle, and chose to pay for Tanzu Data Services support.
Cycle Time - Time spent figuring out this nuance is time spent not coding and getting your apps out the door and kicking in the product management feedback cycle. Still, good discussion of the nuances of the phrase.
2025 IT Budgets See 5.5% Increase as CIOs Invest in AI and Cloud - “With a projected 5.5% increase in IT budgets, the year ahead is set to focus heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing.”
Executive translation - “Many high-agency managers try to prevent executives from doing silly things, but it’s almost always more effective to translate their energy for a silly thing into energy for a useful thing. It also leaves the executive feeling supported by your work rather than viewing you as an obstacle to their progress.”
How Heroku Is Positioned To Help Ops Engineers in the GenAI Era - “We decided that the best thing for us strategically was to use Kubernetes underneath the covers, essentially to replace a lot of the code that we have been using to do the same thing. That’s a big migration effort for us. There’s a lot of expertise that needs to be built.”
Oracle Runs OCI Clones At Rival AWS, Google, And Azure Clouds - Oracle runs its stack in the various clouds.
Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all - ”According to a report published by UK cloud outfit Civo, more than a third of organizations surveyed reckoned that their move to the cloud had failed to live up to promises of cost-effectiveness. Over half reported a rise in their cloud bill…. Although the survey, unsurprisingly, paints Civo in a flattering light”
Five Lessons Learned From a Lifetime of Platform-as-a-Product - Text version of a good talk.
DOJ, Nvidia, and why we restrict monopolies - “A company getting it right does not give it some kind of permanent license to coast while printing money. The question that all antitrust seeks to answer is simple: how much is enough? When do the well-deserved riches and power that accumulate to companies that make big bets, execute well, and invest wisely start to be toxic for society or humanity as a whole, and for competition itself? Are the riches that the largest companies make earned, or are they simply the product of being large? If it’s the former, great! But if it’s the latter…”
Platform Engineering Reshapes Software Dev at Bechtle - Customer case or Bechtle using Humanitec.
VMware Corner
What with our big conference, there’s been lots of coverage recently of VMware. Here’s some. I think the new strategy - focusing on private cloud - came across clearly.
Under New Management: Impressions from VMware Explore 2024 - “Tan made comments about not chasing ‘bright shiny objects.’ The context around these comments – particularly from the analyst session – indicate Tan’s statements could reasonably be interpreted as pointed commentary about Kubernetes. The Tanzu platform has two available runtimes: Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. More airtime was given to Cloud Foundry than Kubernetes, and the leadership team made statements about ‘focusing on existing customer success.’ All together, there were signals that read as the company focusing on nurturing the assets from the Pivotal acquisition over the Heptio acquisition, and prioritizing solutions centered around its VM-centric past more broadly.”
Tanzu 10 Sets New Standard for Private Cloud-Native Platforms - ”According to a recent survey by Futurum Research, organizations that have adopted cloud-native technologies have seen an average of 20% faster time to market and a 15% reduction in IT costs.”
Broadcom CEO: VMware still ringing the cash registers - 'That translates into 32% quarter-on-quarter VMware bookings growth." And: ‘When it comes to revenue tailwinds, AI is driving “about two-thirds in compute and one-third in networking” said Broadcom CFO Spears.’
Broadcom VMware acquisition sees profitability amid disruption - “As long as [Tan] keeps the [total cost of ownership] for running a workload under the cost of the public cloud and under the cost of comparable competitors, he’s good,” Ellis said. “But the bar was low … essentially [VMware] was the discounted enterprise virtualization suite for Dell and EMC, and they used it to sell hardware; they used it to sell the other parts of their infrastructure. The price was artificially kept low, and essentially Hock Tan is allowing [time] to figure out, ‘Will it sustain this higher price?’ I think when you talk about the inertia, when you talk about how well embedded it is within the tech stack, the answer’s probably going to be yes.”
Wastebook
“At the average organization, 56% of teams utilize a DevOps methodology. Organizations expect this to grow in 12 months by about 6 percentage points. However, it has been 15 years since the inception of DevOps, and organizations are still struggling to expand the adoption of DevOps across their application estates.” IDC: “Development Tools and Applications, 2024.”
In tech, don’t confuse the story that drives your valuation versus the features that get customers to buy your products.
Life is short. Don’t waste it eating chicken breasts.
“tentacles of spend”
“no Facebook employee has, to my knowledge, been killed by cannon fire” Here.
And: “who remembers DR-DOS?”
“We become Old, before we have been able to taste the Pleasure of being Young” Here.
It’s one dimensional chess at its finest.
“galaxy-brain peanut gallerians” here.
Conferences
Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.
SREday London 2024, speaking, September 19th to 20th. SREday Amsterdam, Nov 21st, 2024. Coté speaking. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th.
Discounts! SREDay London and Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day 20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.
Logoff
In AI-land, I’ve been using Gemini and Perplexity more than ChatGPT. I re-signed up for Gemini and…it’s fine? I use Perplexity to the most for basic search and summarizing. Gemini isn’t that great at D&D - ChatGPT feels better. But, I’m still at that ceiling of usefulness for chat AI: without spending a lot of time, I can’t get the results I’m looking for. And that’s the point: it should be quick and effortless.
What I’m liking about Gemini is: it’s integration into the rest of Google (Gmail, docs, Google Drive, etc.) and that you get 2 TB of storage. This means I can use Google Photos again. ChatGPT can import Google Docs, and you can of course upload files, but it’s a lot different to just have Gemini right there in a document you’re working on, or in email. One theory: chat AI is just a feature, so without integrating with and/or owning the rest of the apps, it’ll quickly become less useful.
I used Gemini to help me figure out what to write about for a recent blog post, but it wasn’t good at doing the actual writing. Still, as an assistant it worked, this once at least. The “copilot” idea is a good one.
Gemini still can’t tell me the top five people I emailed in the 2000’s. It just says it can’t do that, despite having all of my email. Something like perplexity would figure out how to search all my emails, sort them by frequency, and then output that. I think?
I still think that the only people who think AI is going to change everything, is super-cool, are people who don’t use it much. The initial impression is amazement, but then you realize it’s just a dancing bear.
Wow. Perplexity is next level but only with these incredible prompts