“Pay for the Printer” is a striking short story by Philip K. Dick; see Wikipedia’s summary. At the time I first read it, it naturally seemed like a parable for the decay of Western industry.
Revisiting it in the day of the large language model, it seems to me an equally fitting parable for the decay of Western art and mind.
Many people want to blame AI for significant disruption in the IT job market. I think this is true to a small degree, but it seems to me that it is not sufficient to explain what is going on.
I have personally wanted to blame a growing sort of rapacious value extraction. I think this is true to a moderate degree, and has various contributing factors relating to the watering down of Western Christendom; but I think this is also not sufficient to explain what is going on.
I recently stumbled across this blog post from Sean Goedecke: The good times in tech are over. Taken together with the considerations above, I think this has great explanatory power. Discretionary IT spending is naturally growing far more cautious.
In particular: in the SMB space you already see a pendulum swing away from cloud; consider the notable example of 37signals. Corresponding to this, large enterprises seem to be growing increasingly cautious with IT and cloud expenditure. Famously, for the past two years Hock Tan has insisted that his VMware customer base is largely interested in repatriation of public cloud workloads. This does not mean that cloud has no future whatsoever, but it does mean that some contraction and consolidation lies in the near future for public cloud.
VMware by Broadcom is changing their software download URLs: VCF Authenticated downloads Configuration Update Instructions
I call this authentication theater.
To me this smells like someone had an “unauthenticated API or URI” finding. A junior dev came up with a clever hack, and now here we are with something hasty, kludgy, and insecure. A shared secret?! In the URL?!
[not]
I think of my job often as being a translator between executives, managers, architects, developers, testers, customers, writers, etc. My favorite work projects have been those we conducted war-room style or in an open landscape, yet now it is almost two years since I’ve been in the office. We’ve filled in the gap a little bit with some team outings. Today I went in to the office to collect my belongings, before my vaxx-leper status kicks in and my physical access is deactivated. This is such a stark contrast with my experience at church where we worked hard to find some way to meet, at times even with our fussy government’s disapproval. What a joy and encouragement that fellowship was, and what a missed opportunity these two years have been for camaraderie at so many anxious companies and churches!
I have generally found NoSQL to be a disaster. Like agile processes, it allows you to dispense with certain disciplines, but for use at scale and over time it requires you to engage in substitute disciplines. Too often these are not practiced. From a recent work chat with minor adaptation:
Data hygiene is crucial. I wouldn’t be opposed to broader NoSQL/JSON use if we used JSON schemas wherever appropriate, but at that point it is probably simpler to flatten the data into tables.
A good schema is a species of defensive code; e.g., you can have higher confidence that the value you are reaching for is actually there no matter how old the document.
See also: Complex
I’ve joked for awhile that EDR and similar systems like CrowdStrike or Carbon Black would become Skynet. Or, more likely, a tool of international espionage and cyber–warfare. It doesn’t feel good to be vindicated. (Now imagine someone accomplishing this with a major browser or password manager application.) Complex and highly interconnected systems are difficult to make stable, resilient, or secure; and cannot possibly be made anti-fragile. (This is a lesser reason why I miss my old pickup truck.) I’m not very excited about Kubernetes for the same reason. It’s also partly why I’m not very excited about artificial intelligence; but additionally because analysis of data, whether by machine or by human, does not automatically involve either wisdom or decisiveness (see also Edwin Friedman and Nassim Taleb).
Crossposted on I gotta have my orange juice.
A lot of people are offering advice on how to return to the office safely. Here is my evidence-based approach:
Bring your team back to the office.
You should, of course, continue to give people the freedom to work at home if you are able.
I’ve written much more on my other blog stressing that churches must be open for worship, and should do so as normally as possible. But there is also a tremendous benefit to other spheres of life—business, family, education, politics—for people to be face to face with one another. Beyond that, there is actual harm in exercising authority to constrain any of these spheres of life beyond natural limits.
Here is my evidence: Alex Berenson’s Unreported Truths. In addition to that, Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve offers the appropriate framework for leadership in difficult times: non–anxiety.
For some time now I’ve been a bit skeptical about the promises of blockchain in the business world. I’m a computer scientist and mathematician by training and by instinct, so I have gotten caught up in questions such as the suitability of different forms of blockchain proof, the difficulty of seeking Byzantine fault tolerance, and transaction database [in]efficiency.
However, I have come to realize that the value of blockchain technology does not lie so much in its solving multi-party transaction problems in some provably ideal way, but rather in its solving them in a suitable way—with well-defined interfaces, strong security, and backed by open software and algorithms. This in turn allows it to become a standardized platform. And that standardization is the real value of blockchain: it will both create efficiency and allow for easier innovation on top of it. Of all the solutions we could standardize on, blockchain has the most going for it.
Viva blockchain!
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