Enroute to Bangkok. As I write this, I am standing in a galley in the middle of the plane on our flight across the Pacific. Sitting for long periods of time is problematic, especially on seat with, shall we say, limited padding. I need to walk around frequently to avoid sleeping butt cheeks.

The flight is 13+ plus hours and I just watched Rocketman and The Black Panther and rediscovered Backgammon. I would like to write, but the plane is rigged for sleeping so all the lights are off and everyone around me is sleeping. I should be, but, again, the seats are my enemy.

At least my wife insisted on paying a bit extra for more leg room which helps. The dude in front of me is a seat-full-back kind of guy and I appreciate not having the movie screen in my face

The plane takes a great circle route, heading up to Canada (north of Edmonton) and across Alaska before heading down the Russian coast. I gotta admit that I’m a bit relieved that we aren’t taking the Mercator projection straight route which would put us over water for most of the flight.

Heading to a wedding…

Walked into Walgreens to this the other day. Stopped and watched it for a bit as the light and clouds slowly drifted into new shapes and colors.

Remember the Nokia phones? They were indestructible and the best thing next to a Blackberry before smartphones.

They were doomed. Not because their product was inferior. When the iPhone came out, everyone’s product was inferior. It was because they were slow. It would take a developer 24-48 hours to compile and get changes ready for testing. It could take a week or two (!!) to build the complete software.

Anyone who is a developer is cringing right now at that thought.

Interestingly, at some companies, adding AI to their development process isn’t speeding up the pace of delivering software. This isn’t AI’s fault, of course, it is the result of the bottleneck being somewhere else that hasn’t or can’t be sped up by AI. If you have read “The Goal” (Eliyahu M. Goldratt), you know that any improvement outside of the actual bottleneck is probably wasted effort.

This last concept is an important one. Making developers more efficient is not the goal. Delivering more high-quality faster is the goal.

https://howardyu.substack.com/p/what-nokia-teaches-any-company-bolting

to get your attention. Our sunroom looks out onto our yard and the park behind our house. Luna will sit on my lap from time to time and, when she isn’t sleeping, is looking out the window. We often leave the door open so she can go in and out without us having to get up.

But it also means that when she sees squirrels, or even better bunnies, she may decide she wants to go chase them. Then she launches herself from my lap in a hurry. There is often no warning other than a slight lifting of her ears. Launching requires a forceful push against whatever she is sitting on. These are often sensitive areas.

I enjoy watching her chasing bunnies, but I am not a fan of the launching.

Matthew Yglesias is a political writer. I don’t always agree with his opinions, but he is always thoughtful. This article is about data centers and he frames the debate slightly different.

The water problem is generally solved. The energy problem has known solutions to make it a win/win for everything. The AI data centers are different from the cloud computing data centers that we have been building for a decade, primary around location. Cloud data centers need to be built close to people, AI data centers (mostly used for training) can be built remotely.

https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/theres-an-awful-lot-we-dont-know