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I recently watched the talk by Scott Jenson titled "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7AfAcQwLW0&t=445s. He's a great presenter, really articulate and concise. The kind of speaker that you'd
Most people, when asked why they do what they do, lie. This isn’t because they’re malicious but it’s because the honest justification for a career is rarely noble. It’s usually a combination of a decent paycheck, tolerable hours, and whatever neurosis you
For years now one of the most reliable complaints I hear when I try to drag a team off their vendor specific SDK and onto OpenTelemetry is some variation of: "why does it seem like this isn't done yet?" Vendor SDKs for observability are, to put
For roughly the last ten years, a meaningful percentage of my working hours have been spent thinking about observability. If you're not familiar with the term, "observability" is what we call it now that "monitoring" doesn't sound expensive enough. The actual work
I like the Internet. I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet era and despite the younger generations pining for those simpler days, I was there. Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of the
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Welcome back to yet another episode of "security was taken seriously". Being who we are (and constantly being exposed to what we see…), we recognize we have been doomed to eternal damnation as we keep on watching security best practices crumble behind “secure by design”
Fellow Automattician Job Thomas, down in Cape Town, South Africa, has a lovely story about using Claude and the Beeper MCP to wrangle all the group chats for his daughter’s sports.
We keep reading scary reports of swarms of AI agents breaking into computer systems and doing other untoward and perhaps illegal things. To what degree do these agents influence each other? And is there anything we can learn from human behavior that would help mitigate these problems? That’s the heady backstory behind [episode 46](https://www.tractionheroes.com/2439976/episodes/19905275-tribal-psychology) of [_Traction Heroes_](https://www.tractionheroes.com/). Harry brought a short reading from David McRaney’s [_How Minds Change_](https://www.amazon.com/How-Minds-Change-Surprising-Persuasion-ebook/dp/B093R2CP2V/) about the impact of our groups on our thinking and behavior. Here’s the key fragment: > the latest evidence coming out of social science is clear. Humans value being good members of their groups much more than they value being right. So much so that as long as the group satisfies those needs, we will choose to be wrong if it keeps us in good standing with our peers. We never lack evidence for this: just tune in to the news. People do stupid things to remain in good standing with their milieu _all the time_. (I know I have!) And apparently, so do AIs. (Although as I pointed out in the show, we mustn’t anthropomorphize technology.) But more importantly, knowing about the perils of tribal psychology can help us be more effective when working in groups — and therefore, to gain traction. [_Traction Heroes episode 46: Tribal Psychology_](https://www.tractionheroes.com/2439976/episodes/19905275-tribal-psychology)
There's a chance, slim as it might be, that things won't go the way the've gone the last 30 years with digitization the moving to rental models for everyhing.
