AI Slop, Blue-Collar Jobs, and Why Platform Adoption Keeps Failing | TSG Ep. 1004

Hey everyone. Happy Friday. Welcome to The Gang Live.

You know, I love doing the Gang live and one of the reasons I really like it is on Friday when I say Happy Friday, it's really Friday. I always felt a little guilty saying Happy Friday, when we were recording Thursday. 'cause I just didn't feel it.

But now I feel it. So happy Friday to you all. We got a great gang here today.

Let me introduce you to them. We've got our friend, Guy Currier, we've got the one and only Kimberly Nights. Happy Friday.

Happy Friday guy. Happy Friday. Kimberly, we've got the guitar man, Mitch Ashley, and the dean, Mike Vizard gang.

Welcome. We've got some good stuff to talk about. Davos is over, so I don't know if we'll talk about that.

Well, we still got some Davos related stuff we could talk about. Um, but let's start off with the YouTube. CEO He kind of reminds me of Louis from Casablanca or Inspector cso.

Shocked. Shocked. Do Say I slop on here.

I do wanna say something about Fridays though, because my Fridays always start out the same. I wake up in the morning and I say, thank God it's Friday, which is followed shortly thereafter by, holy crap, it's Friday. So Yes, that is, that is true on Friday.

What do you say on Thursday? I say So happy. It's Thursday.

Well feels like a Friday. I don't Know. Thursday.

One more day. No, not Friday. I guess so.

But, but guys, what is, you know, is, is Captain obvious over at YouTube? So, so let's work this through a little bit a minute. So YouTube, which is part of Google, is basically saying they're gonna crack down as soon as they figure out how on all this AI slot, which is kinda like pornography, right?

Uh, we don't know exactly how to define it, but I mean, we all know what it is when we see it kind of thing, but it seems to be proliferating everywhere. But, you know, here's the odd thing, right? So Google provides some of the tools.

We're creating this AI slot, and yet if you go look at the best practices for creating content, um, from Google search, it will tell you that you should not use these AI tools. And now they're saying, well, yeah, and by the way, let's not create more AI slop on YouTube with all that video stuff. I look at all this stuff and I'm like, confused.

But guy, what's your take? Well, let, let's, I think start with the obvious point, which is, um, or maybe it's not so obvious, which is, uh, if you are a, um, let's say a, uh, you know, a tricky minded person who may not know anything about content creation in particular, you might look at this and say, Hmm, AI can produce a whole, I'm pretty good at coding, good at, uh, telling computers what to do. And hey, maybe what I could do is I could create a cajillion bits of content video and otherwise using, uh, a kind of a content factory or a set of content factories.

I don't even need people in sweatshops or whatever anymore. And, uh, I can gain the systems of YouTube and tiktoks and Instagram and like, wherever I could just gain these because they're designed to compensate based on human labor. So now I don't even need, it's just like, uh, I don't know, spam all over again, spam factories all over again.

That, that's the first thing to me is, uh, uh, what was originally priced and modeled, um, based on, uh, human labor, um, now can be, uh, produced lots more cheaply at maybe half or one quarter of the quality, and it just has to get past filters. Um, and it's a new arms rates, just like the security arms race. That, that'd be my first take on this.

I got a few thoughts on this. I feel like You might. Yeah.

So shocking. They're shocking. I, I, two, two places I wanna go with here.

First of all, one person's slop is another person's stew, right? When you've got ai, when you've got YouTube itself encouraging us to use AI to make these videos, and then they're gonna hold themselves out as the purveyor of which is slop and which is stew. It don't work.

It just don't work. Because what they may consider slop may not necessarily be slop to Apple or meta or one of these other places or to any of us. So my, my, my issue here is how do we then have an objective standard over what truly is AI slop?

I was trying to, yeah. So when I read the article or read the, the discussion on it, the thing that I'm thinking about is how do you define this? What or not?

How do you define it? Because we can't, as you said, it's, we'll know it when we see it kind of thing, but what's the purpose of what they're trying to do? What, what is the motivation for him making this announcement about monitoring this?

And the one thing that he'd said was deep fakes, and then everything else was kind of jumbled after the deep fake kind of conversation. It was something about knowing that it's AI generated. It's like, so what, you know, knowing that something is computer graphic generated as opposed to a real photograph, um, or altered by computer graphics or your whatever versus the real photograph is, okay, so is that important?

That wasn't important before, but why is it important now? Yeah. That, that's, that's the issue.

Let me hit my other point that I wanted to make. Mitch, I, I, I copied you on this email, reached out to from some security friends of ours. Okay.

You know, a lot of companies are eliminating their bug bounty programs. Did you see the email, Mitch on this? Mm-hmm.

I did. Curl was the latest one curl. They're eliminating their bug bounty programs.

Why not? Because there's more bug, not because there's no bugs, no, there's more bugs. But because people are using security, researchers are using AI to find vulnerabilities in people's code and people's applications.

What's happening is AI is finding these really Low Level bull bull crap kind of vulnerabilities that are not, that's The vulnerabilities like Yeah. Would never actually happen. Mm-hmm.

And, and so it's, it's just overwhelming these bug bounty programs to deal with all of this, let's call it AI slop found bugs, right? In, in, in finding vulnerabilities. They're turning up AI slop.

And so these companies are just washing their hands with it and saying, no, we're looking for, you know, we're like star cast, like star cast. We want tunas that taste good. You don't want ai lop vulnerabilities.

And it's, it's the same thing here with video. I Think there's a lawsuit coming when the first time Google stands up and says, this is AI slough and it happens to have been created using grock because people will be screaming that they're abusing their monopoly physician and all hell will break loose immediately. Right?

Well, it's, it's, you're right, you're right. It's not an easy issue. And, you know, kind of where, where is something that we can all agree on, right?

Is there, because there's so much of, well, yeah, I have a right to use AI to produce whatever content that I want, but it seems like one dimension, maybe we could get some agreement or is quantity versus quality, right? It, it, which all, all goes back to quality is about intent. What am I trying, what am I trying to do with this?

Now there's nefarious intent. That doesn't mean that's quality like misinformation, but, um, when it's qua, when it's quantity, you know, now you're talking about cheap prompts and fast rendering and stuff. Just getting content out there and trying to flood the zone.

Um, which can be an intent for bad, for bad purposes, but that's what a lot of the slop is. It's just, it's just generated. It's not someone really thinking about what they want to create versus intent grade content.

As I'm using AI as an accelerator, um, versus just me as an author of whatever I can get out on the wire. Uh, it seems like that might be one. And of course, I can't say let's put limits on how many posts Mitch can make a day.

'cause I wanna make as many as I want to. But it seems to me that's the quality of what we judge this content by. Is this just slop or is it got something some useful purpose Guy?

Oh, Who judges? Yes. Let me ask you a question here.

Yes. Who judges? Um, Wouldn't it just be easier to identify content that wasn't created using AI than it is to identify content that is created with ai?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And there are, there are, um, I don't remember the details, but there, there has been at least one serious proposal along those lines.

Um, it's, you know, the E-F-T-N-F-T, whatever version of validation that this is real content. But I think, I think to Alan and Kimberly's points, who cares in a certain sense, right? I care very much about where AI is taking us just in general.

And what I think is a, is a potential doom loop of AI generated content being used to train new AI and a DeVol evolutional quality and that sort of thing. But what is quality? This is a really great example for any corner of, of, you know, the world using AI to follow.

Why? Because the money comes from eyeballs. Eyeballs are attracted to what?

The, the mind behind the eyes. I don't wanna push this metaphor too far. It's kind getting gross.

But the point is that if it's like, what, what Alan said, slop is in the eye of the beholder paraphrasing, right? So what is, and what Kimberly said is, what, what's the point of all of this? YouTube paid what?

A billion dollars, according to, uh, the Textron article here, um, paid a billion dollars to content creators since 2021. Wouldn't they like to pay only $500 million for the same thing by saying, oh, is an AI generated? Well, that's beside the point.

Where's the value here? Some of the value is in YouTube getting it in front of people very contextually who are interested in it. But some of the value comes from the content itself.

Who cares if it's AI generated, if people like it and people follow it? Yeah, there's a tag transparency. It says ai, but in a lot of cases they don't care.

So this is a capitalistic system. If a hundred percent of everything we do in, I don't know, a hundred years is a hundred percent AI generated, and we're just sitting there like, you know, uh, consuming all of it, uh, you know, I don't know, like where's the money flow? It's, it's, it's sort of besides the point in that sense, whether it's AI generated or not, It's kind of a recursive doom loop in and of itself, because who here hasn't like improved a paragraph?

Even if they wrote the whole thing, taking some section of it and say, Hey, make this better. I'm kind of clunky. I need some help.

It's like a writing assistant. Um, but on the other hand, we are at a place where AI is being used to judge quality. We use AI as a tool to say, review this for, I don't say that.

No, it happens. It, it is a real thing. Review this for me.

Give me feedback. Help me make a, how many, how many s make it more compelling. Make it more enticing.

Make it, yeah. Make people want, click on it, whatever, engagement. So it, it's already being used as a quality tool.

And, and next we'll have AI deciding what it's gonna write about. Of course. So I, in a way it's a unsolvable problem, I think.

No, no, I think I'm good, cam. So one of the statements that was stated in the article or whatever, or referred to him, was that they restoring trust in the platform. And the question is, what's eroding here?

What are the people say? What's the feedback that they're getting about their platform? Oh, YouTube kids.

I mean, let's keep in mind yeah, that it's, it's nefarious content. Wait, what were you saying? Cares?

Kids. Kids. YouTube kids.

Oh, YouTube kids. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. So I mean, that makes sense in terms of, you know, if, if he's putting some definition about what slop is in what they're trying to accomplish with this. Um, I think the rest of it is like, I, I think personally, I think he probably agree with some of the conversation that we're having here.

Absolutely. Look, nefarious content is nefarious, whether it was done by AI or a human or an alien, it's nefarious, right? Mm-hmm.

So your normal community standards, your normal kind of processes and rules are at play here. It doesn't, we don't have to put a scarlet letter on it, a big a on it, you know, like, I forgot, was it in Star Trek or somewhere where the holograms had to have the, uh, the h on their forehead or whatever. Um mm-hmm.

You know, we don't need to do that. If it's wrong, it's wrong. If it's bad, it's bad.

Whether it's AI or not, that's an artificial distinction. I think that, I'm not sure the audiences care. I'm not sure that the audiences care.

No, go ahead, Mike. I think, I think the concern that they have though is like, will there be so much quote unquote AI slop that it will just overwhelm all the other content they have and people will stop watching because they're gonna be like, there's just too much crap on this. Turn it off network.

Yep. Yep. So guys, if they don't trust people, you got a question from the, from the field here.

Why does Google create AI tools then? If it's telling people, you know, they're gonna crack down on AI slot? I think that's an easy answer.

Make show me the money, the money. Well, I think it's both sides. I think it's too, like everything else there, there's everything that isn't pretty much in this world.

We can create a negative and something very damaging as well as creating something very positive with it. So I think what he's trying to do here is what you were talking about guy, is the kids nefarious, kind of however you're gonna define nefarious, um, things that are, we consider in our civic, um, line of looking at the world as being something that's damaging. And that's maybe what slop is.

Instead of calling it slop maybe ought to call it something else because it's not really slop. Slop is sloppy business, sloppy writing, sloppy pictures, sloppy whatever. I think, you know, it's more defined than, um, just calling it slop.

And I think this is, is suddenly dawning on the CEO of YouTube to say, wow, this is a problem. This is not new to ai. We had this with, um, hey, what we have, you know, everybody that's now YouTube star is that slop, you know, to someone else, it might be to another audience.

It isn't. Um, you know, what about the content boards that judged? Is this fact check to be correct or not?

Of course, those have been eliminated because everybody has different facts, whether there's facts or not. Um, so AI adding to it maybe adds velocity to it and quantity, but it's still the same problem we had before, and we haven't solved that. We haven't solved the human generated content problem yet, more or less the AI generated.

And one of the things I would like to make sure, I mean, the one area that I think to me that is really important to understand if it's real or ai, um, is music. I mean, it's kind of like listening to, you know, I've never listened to Mitch play his guitar, but I would rather know, you know, that music and that he's, you know, when he's fingering the strings and that kinda stuff. That's really, that's a skill.

That's a tough, tough. It is. But I'm gonna tell you something.

I I, I touched on this song, I think it was the Shimmy says a couple weeks ago, one of the things that AI is gonna set free is creativity around the arts. So you want to call it synthetic music versus human played music. Fine.

But we are going to see a revolution in music and art that we've never seen before. And it's different. It's different than what we've done before where Mitchell's playing the guitar or someone's painting a picture.

We're gonna have AI artists who are using AI to create music, to create art. I mean, uh, Brian, uh, one of our video and sound editors here on our team, he's a Grammy award-winning sound engineer, right? And maybe you and I, Kimberly, as non-professional music people wouldn't be able to do this, but he, he is creating music and AI and then creating music videos with characters, singing the lyrics that AI wrote based upon the prompts Brian gave it.

And it's crazy good stuff. It's totally synthetic, but it is an art form unto itself for sure that whether it was synthetic or not, you're gonna enjoy it. And I, I'm, I am curious to see how this plays out in, in the world, didn't you?

I'm getting, I don't, I don't deny that. My husband wrote me a love song on ai and it was, it's Nice. Oh my gosh, it was awesome.

I mean, it had me in tears. Okay, so, so the bar has been risen, guys, Did you clear with him that you're saying this to out in public? Yeah, Because he's a fabulous guy, you know, And he told, he was written with ai, so, right.

Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna get Alan that Liza Minelli AI album for his birthday. That's what's coming up. Alright.

Hey guys, we're way over time though. We gotta move along. Move along here.

Let's go to blue collar ai. Mike, what's this one about? So you were mentioning Davos and Jensen Wong was there talking about the impact AI was gonna have on blue collar jobs.

And he said that, well, it's a boon because there's all these blue collar jobs being created by building data centers, and there's, we need carpenters and electricians and those things, and the kind. Now I found this comment a little rich to be honest, because, um, two other things are also true. One is, well, we don't have enough carpenters and electricians to build the data centers, and this is becoming a yet another thing that is holding back the deployment of ai.

And then secondarily, when we don't have those people, then well, what are we gonna do? Well, NVIDIA's gonna build some robots to become electricians and carpenters and take those jobs and replace that gig. So I'm not quite clear how Nvidia sees itself as the new champion for blue collar jobs, but I found the thing, shall we say, uh, circular in its logic, and I know we talked about this earlier this week, but Alan, I'd love to get your thoughts on this again.

So here's my thoughts on this. This is no more than some syrupy sugary dessert that's going to give you a sugar high and then you're gonna go back to sleep because you gotta a tummy ache, right? Even assuming we had enough electricians and carpenters and all of that, okay?

It, it's like the rat that the snake swallowed, right? So, okay, we got to, we got this big AI data center we're building in West Texas, landman country, right? Country.

And, and Tommy's son is, is is an electrician working on it, and that's great. They're paying him a fortune while we're building that. And then it gets built and then it gets built.

Now what's he gonna do next? Build houses for all the people working at those data centers, all 20 of them right there. There's nothing behind it.

It's, it's a sugar rush. And unless that electrician is then gonna pack up and move to, what was it from yesterday, west Des Moines, Iowa, not East Des Moines, west Des Moines to build the next data center there. And when he's done there, he's going to go on and get his scuba gear and build the next data center at the bottom of the ocean and then get on Blue Origin and build the next data center up in space.

It's pie in the sky. And then as you say, Mike, within, if it gets too good, we're just going to get, and it gets too expensive, it's cheaper to have robots do it. So Jen said, come on, right, come On.

And then, and then, then they come back and their spouse ran off with a data scientist. So, you know, Ouch. A drummer.

Listen, let, let me, let, let, let me, let me summarize for everyone Jenssen's statements at, uh, about this at, uh, at, at the, at Davos. Woo. Look at that.

Look at that. Look at that. Look at that.

Woo. I mean, come on. How dumb.

I mean, look as much as I can like any of these, uh, you know, billionaire, uh, like tech, whoevers Yeah. Well, I don't think of Lisa Sue as a tech bro. She did make the cover of time as well.

Anyway, I, I, you know, I, I like, I like Jensen, um, but he's a salesperson has been from start and he is on, you know, this global PR tour of don't worry, be a happy Nvidia buyer because, you know, it's a wave he's gonna ride as ride as far as he can. I think the the incentives are completely corrupt for this whole class of gajillion errors and what have you. Um, and so the re i i I don't, I'm saying all this because I don't really want to like impugn him by saying that this is just the most ridiculous argument I've ever, I've ever seen.

You know, the, the borough labor statistics did say that, uh, last year on data center related jobs. It's not just you pure construction, right? You out of wild wire pulls and operators and all sort this sort of stuff that grew by 14% from 2024 to 2025.

Um, I don't know Matt, how many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of jobs that are that that represents. But, uh, you know, um, a according to McKinsey, as recently as last year, um, they expect 30% of hours worked to be automated by 2030 in the us. That's, you know, that's 40 million jobs impacted 40 million.

And I say impacted, they're not all gonna be lost. Some of 'em will turn into part-time jobs. Yay.

I mean, it's just, it's, it's absurd on its face. The, the statement is absurd. And, and Here's the problem.

And we get it from a question out here, right? It erodes when, when, when Jensen and, and these people make these kinds of circular arguments, it erodes our confidence, our trust, right? We can't, can we trust what the CEOs of AI companies are saying about the impact of ai?

Or do we recognize them for the snake oil salesman? They are. Or is this exactly, Is this just purely a comment aimed at Wall Street and it's just trying to move a stock price and the, and the devil be damned with the rest of it Seem different.

What if, um, argument there Is, hold on Kimberly, go ahead. There Is the group of people that are basically saying, don't worry, AI is wonderful. It's gonna be everybody.

And I think that is completely insensitive and, and it is ignorant. It shows how ignorant they are and how out of touch they are with what is going on in the world. Well, ho ho Hold on, cam, hold on.

I don't think they're ignorant. There are a lot of things, but they're not ignorant. Okay?

They're outta I think they think we're ignorance, maybe, but they're not ignorant. They're, yeah. You know what i's, okay, so it's callous Same time coming out of Dava.

So, so here's Jensen, you know, spouting all this stuff. You know, at the same time you've got others coming out of there basically saying, you know, the, uh, one of the worldwide economists coming out of eu, she was talking about how the iron will sore the most and how it's, and we've talked about this before on this, is how it's that entry level jobs are gonna be hurting and, you know, well, and then the other thing that happened, okay, I think it was today or yesterday, Amazon announced that they're laying off 14 to 17,000 people and they're gonna start by next week, Thursday. So, okay, thank you very much, Jensen.

What about that? And, and in this statement, they are relating it to AI in human resources. People that are going to be laid off as well as AWS.

And then you have, you know, maybe, and this is a good thing that's happening, is you've got, you know, two senators, um, one of them is Democrat, the other one is Republican working through trying to work through a reporting of jobs that are laid off because of AI and having companies have to state At least have some transparency And transparency. So there's, you know, that's okay. You're, you know, you're spitting into the wind Jensen.

So here, I Don't think we gotta look to the tech, I don't think we can look to the tech bros for our philanthropy of what happens to humankind. No. Uh, when it comes to ai, they, they have a very clear agenda.

They're running companies, they have stockholders, and they're, they're about building the, the value of the companies and the value of the stock for their, for their stockholders as well as themselves. No doubt. I mean, that, that's the environment.

It's whether you wanna call 'em robber variants from back in the railroad days, you wanna call 'em tech pros today. That's their, that's their purpose. They're not philanthropists about what happens in society.

What I'm disappointed about Davos is we spend all of our time talking about Greenland and ridiculous things like that. Instead of talking about AI and what that impact is to our economies. 'cause it isn't just stock value, it's, you know, the US' value is its purchasing power, right?

It goes gross domestic product. And, uh, if people don't have incomes, well, guess what? It doesn't matter how fast or quicker or better you can make something with ai, if nobody's out there to buy it, consume it.

So it isn't, uh, their interest to, to work on that part of the problem. And I think that's what we need to challenge them to be. They're not my heroes because they're tech bros.

They're certainly not. That's all goodness for them. But when we look at Davos through the lens of history, there's one quote that is gonna sum this Davos up.

If you don't have a seat at the table, you're on the menu. William Thatcher, God bless Mark Carney. That was a brilliant speech he made.

All right, let's move along, move along, move along. Come on, move along. Is not the droids you're looking for, not the droids you're looking for Mitch, uh, trouble with triples.

Oh, no trouble with platforms. com that we, we would encourage everybody to go check out, but it talks about the challenges it teams have with creating and maintaining platforms and making some advice about how to go about doing that. Kimberly, I'd love to get your thoughts here, because we've been trying to make it platforms for decades, and there seems to be some sort of pressure that always comes around that says, we can keep the platform the way we want it because somebody wants to innovate something or there's some bespoke thing over here, and just what makes it hard to manage it as a platform versus kind of what we see every day.

So I think that that's called, you know, one, one tool to solve them all, which really doesn't exist. We have done that many times. Um, so if what we're saying is I want, you know, one single screen, I still have to go down, you know, to the, the core of the technology, whether it's a server, the network and the storage device and, and kind of get into the technologies thing.

And you just can't, we've done this, I don't know, for years and years and years. And each time it's kind of failed because it only can do so much when we have a simple platform. Because the complexity, I mean, I, I was, yeah, this last week for some work that I was doing, like reading up on heavy duty, high-end sand systems.

And, and when you look at how complex those things are, I mean, there's a jbo and then there's these things, you know, that what's the DS 8,000 or the, you know, power Max or whatever, those things are super complex and the options to do things like replication and synchronization or, or whether or not doing, um, you know, service level optimization are huge. And to think that somebody else could build a single platform to manage all those kind of things, then, then let's throw in file systems and object storage all of a sudden, which are, you know, two different completely protocols be crazy. Ain't gonna happen.

Hey, I gotta call timeout. I gotta call timeout. God bless Camberley Bates.

Why don't me just tell you something about this lady right here. She, she quote unquote retired from Futurum group, I guess around the first of the year, December or Thanksgiving a couple months ago. She spends her weekend digging in on, on reports about the latest sand storage platforms and everything.

And whether they're pla what, what's going on with them Probably while she's on the slope. So, may I, let me, lemme think about that platform. You know, Who, who else does that, but Kimberly mates, who else Does that?

Curiosity? Curiosity. The little person that I've got, it's like, just can't stop it.

You Are, well, just when you thought you were out there pulling you back in, you need to get back on on the horse lady. I should show you the sand. My toes were sticking into this last week.

I mean, all right, I was reading Charles Dickens that time. I was reading Charles Dickens. Okay.

I was not reading the other stuff. Alright, See, well what did, what did Dickens have to say about J Botts? Just outta curiosity, But wait, A tale of two cities is an IT story, but that's Another's Topic here.

Thank you. Well, you know, I think I, I'm a big advocate of platforms, but one vendor's platform is another vendor's product suite, right? Mm-hmm.

Like what is it supposed to do for you besides, uh, better packaging, better branding and trying to rationalize siloed individual products. That's obviously not a platform, but I think you have to go back to why do you want a platform one, one of the drivers mm-hmm tends to be better integration, less integration you have to do across functions that happen of the, either the organizations or processes that happen on a particular platform, whether it's security or operational or development. Another aspect is, um, data, data usage and accessibility.

So you're not con constantly trying to integrate different data sources across different vendors tools even from the same vendor. Uh, things like that. And then I think the third thing is, is workflows that can happen across that both multi organizational, uh, and disciplined workflows is tend, they take observability, right?

It isn't just it ops, it isn't just security, it isn't just platform engineering isn't just development, it's all those things. So I think you have to evaluate it based on some principles like that you may have your own of what, what a platform means, that that's some of the core of what I think it is. But everybody, like every other term in our industry, once it's popular, everybody has it, whether they have it or not, you know, it's on the label, it's on the, it's on the billboard.

Um, but it may not be in the product. Yeah. I'm not a big fan of the word platform, but frankly, I can't think of another term that could be used in its place that was more accurately described what we're dealing with Slots already used.

I think it's one of the Mike, so that one, no. Yeah, it's one of the rare cases, uh, uh, I think Mike, where the word platform actually applies because it's sta And, okay, so we've had platforms, if you will, the center would be a platform, the way it's been Des was designed and how you click through it, red Hat OpenShift and how, you know, how they put all that together is a platform because I can manage it. Um, I'll take you way back, something called VCE, If you remember.

Oh Lord, That's A wait app. I worked there. Yeah, well there you go.

Working limited successors. Yeah. The concept of that was to deliver, you know, you rolled in a box, you rolled in a box that was a platform, you know, where Nvidia is trying to create the platform in terms of what they did in the latest boxes that they are delivering, or some of the companies are delivering, you know, the AI in a box and rolling that in.

So you have a platform to, to smooth and ease the process of it. So there is that, I mean, I, I did say you can't do this, you know, it is tough to do, but we have done this in it's, And it gets better. Kubernetes is a platform for building platform, so mm-hmm.

But, but my, my take on this story was I think different from, from, from, um, y you folks, uh, my take on the story, um, was that, um, you know, the best platforms in the world, um, uh, don't address the fundamental issue of, of, you know, op paying attention to and providing what dev needs. I mean to, to Ooh, a little DevOps to requ. Yeah.

To requote to requote. Uh, Alan from earlier, I am shocked, shocked to hear that there is ops people not listening to dev, dev people in this establishment. This is like the oldest stories ever.

It probably goes back to eac. You have the, the, the, you know, the dial twiddles and, and you know, propeller head system builders and, and they just wanna create beautiful, in this case, perfect platforms. And, uh, if the dev people don't use it the right way, well that's the dev people's fault.

I mean, can Moses, you know, let my people Yeah, it probably does. It probably does. So, so I asked myself, is it possible for tools or processes or technology ever to defeat culture, cultural issues?

I mean, what you're talking about, um, I, I think it's potential that's mentioned in the, in the article. I mean, they produce, their, their design points are around a lot of the things we talked about, Mitch making it easier to support what dev already does instead of making dev change what they do. Mm-hmm.

Creating workflows that are, that are relatively easy to set up and run across whatever you're calling the platform or not to Kimberly's point, that's all great, but I just, I this, these, this, this cultural divide so to speak, just never seems to go away. Well, when you have your way of doing things, I'm sorry, Alan, go ahead. No, no, no, you go Cam, when you have your specific way you're doing things, especially if you're, you're an old girl like me and you've learned all those things, then you're throwing something else at me to say, we learn how to do this.

And I'm like going, I can do this faster if you just Let me do it my way. Yeah. Which is the right way, by the way, just so everybody knows, that's don't be true.

Not necessarily correct way. Well, lemme, lemme, Lemme jump in here. I got a confession.

I've always sort of considered myself the voice of the every man in the, in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Alan Shimel. There you go. Uh, So, Wow.

Why, why do platforms fail? Because I think not for the C level, not even for the SVP level, but for the, for the single contributor, for the practitioner platforms are usually something imposed from up high. I'm doing my thing my way it works.

I like the tool I use, I like the suite of tools I've cobbled together. 'cause they're best in class. They're what I like.

I'm comfortable and now all of a sudden some guy up in some ivory tower saying, we're going to a platform and we're going to, you know, uh, we're gonna borg you in, in essence, right? You will be absorbed. You will be assimilated.

And you're going to use what I tell you to use and do what I tell you to do when I tell you to do it. And as a worker bee, I, I resent it and I, I use it 'cause I got to use it, but I don't love it and I don't feel as productive as I was. Right?

And I get that we can't have 30 different tools, especially in DevOps. This was a big problem. We can't have 30 different tools for CI/CD.

We can't have, we need standardization. We want one throat to choke. We want it to be more economical, But, and we also want to be able to be innovative and creative and try new things and yeah, go on.

Right? I, that individual level guy, I wanna be innovative and creative and try new things. Exactly.

And as a, as a skilled craftsman, I wanna have, I like to pick my own tools and, you know, I was gonna ask Jack Gt to create the developer experience Kumbaya song, but I'll scrap that now. There you go. There you go.

So that Not selling for the DevOps That's growing in the wind by shimmy for today. Um, But that, that's why I think a lot of platforms or adopting platforms just don't make it. They, they get, they get forced down from up top.

This was a big thing. And is DevOps a bottom up, a top down, middle out a little of all of it to be successful. To be fair though, it, it goes the other way, right?

Because you now, you see developers all building their own perfect custom platforms themselves, and then they don't wanna maintain it. And then all these things start to sprawl all over the place, and we get the other extreme. Yeah, no, you, and that's true too.

Mm-hmm. You know, you can't have infinite variability here. You, you gotta have some standardization.

Anyway, we're about outta time guys. It's Friday. Well, this has been fun.

It has been Kimberly Guy as always, Mitchell, Mike. Thank you. Hey, just a quick shout out.

I've got a double bonus. Shimmy says, I did one yesterday on DevOps, the never ending story. Great.

But I got one today. I got one today on digital sovereignty. Digital sovereignty is national sovereignty.

Digital sovereignty is personal sovereignty. I highly go check it. I like that little batt ching rim shot ching.

But go check it out. I think it plays at two 30 on all your favorite social media channels. This, This, uh, this, this thing you're describing exists in a new country called Shiel Land.

You know what? It's, it's on my next album. It's on my next album.

I think It's currently owned by Denmark and is called DevOps Land or something. Mike, I wanna hear your love song to the DevOps people. Okay, it's Friday.

It's fine. Anyway, hey, we're gonna be back Monday. We've got Techron TV following it.

We've got so much good stuff going on. Do check out a lot of the content even on the, you know, if you like written articles as well. Um, we've got a lot of stuff out there for you to, to uh, to learn on, to chew on.

We're certainly living in interesting times. So for a, for on behalf of us all is Alan Shimel. We're out.