New post format: a weekly rollup of links, comments on those links, activity updates and attempts at humor. The intention is quicker hits in addition to the less frequent big posts and more timely hammering on my favorite themes. This is my primary hangout until the contours of the post-Twitter world become clear. Be sure to subscribe below and to the right to receive all my output via email.
Note that my poor, overtaxed server struggles to serve up all the images to email users at the same time, so if you don’t see images, be sure to click through. Server upgrade in the works.
Old MacDonald Had A Search Engine, AI-AI-O
“Google I/O is clearly the “We’re extremely jealous of ChatGPT” show, and the first hour was packed with Google announcing generative AI features for every input box the company has control over.“
Related: A very good synopsis of Google I/O
Towards a Nuclear Powered Cloud
Microsoft signs up to be the first customer for nuclear fusion company Helion (which was once the name of HPE’s fleeting foray as a cloud provider). Nice, but like all the other greenwashing power announcements, this does nothing in the next five years (best case) to provide baseload power for datacenters that need to run 24×7. Nuclear fusion becoming real would be phenomenal, but how about spinning up a few nuclear fission plants while we see if fusion actually works? Waiting for fusion is becoming the latest excuse not to have abundant clean energy.
Previous: Cloud Power Up
The Fate of the European Economy: Automotive Edition
Volkswagen has replaced the head of its sputtering software organization with the former head of manufacturing for Bentley. Given their track record, one assumes they confused their own car brand (Bentley Motors) with a software company (Bentley Systems). I have composed a poem on the matter:
For want of a software leader the auto software was lost.
For want of auto software the leading auto company was lost.
For want of the leading auto company the German auto industry was lost.
For want of German auto industry the German economy was lost.
For want of the German economy the EU was lost.
And all for the want of a software leader.
Previous: Europe: Investing in Slave Labor
Related: Meanwhile at GM
The Fate of the European Economy: Cloud Edition
With their last plan for “cloud autonomy” (GAIA-X) going the way of Quaero, the EU bureaucrats are back with the new plan that borrows from the Chinese playbook.
Previous: Follow the CAPEX: Keeping Up With The Clowns
Stack Overflow, A Private Equity-owned Software Company
“Developers increasingly get advice from AI chatbots and GitHub CoPilot rather than Stack Overflow message boards” Sad! But expected for a PE-owned company.
Previous: Perfidious Private Equity
Non-LLM Hallucinations: Crypto Edition
I have somehow resisted writing about A16Z’s recent “2023 State of Crypto Report“. Putting a positive spin on the state of crypto was, charitably, an uphill battle. But now I don’t have to write about it thanks to Molly White’s exhaustive and entertaining response: “one wonders if they exist in a parallel universe where the recent “crypto winter” never came to pass”. I am, however, eagerly awaiting an A16Z “2023 State of Metaverse Land“.
Previous: Things I Still Don’t Understand: Pricey Metaverse Real Estate
I took a look at the Q1 numbers of the datacenter champions for any signs of cloud repatriation.
Previous: Introducing the Platformonomics Repatriation Index™, Q4 2022 Index
IBM, desperate to hop on the generative AI bandwagon, inexplicably decides that if they rebrand Watson as watsonx, no one will remember that Watson is an industry watchword for “overpromise and underdeliver”. Watson is on par with Osborne in the annals of self-inflicted business errors.
