A small problem

A small problem
8 minutes by Mike Fisher

In 1982, Captain Eric Moody told passengers his 747 had "a small problem" after all four engines failed over the Indian Ocean. That understatement was deliberate: the cabin needed calm, while the cockpit got the full brutal truth. The lesson is that composure is something you broadcast, not just feel, and the message must match who receives it. Tell it to people who cannot act and it steadies them. Tell it to people who must act and it kills them.

AI Bots Are Changing How Enterprises Monitor and Manage Their Infrastructure
sponsored by Hydrolix

AI bots are driving more requests, more telemetry, and new security challenges across enterprise environments. But the biggest challenge isn't detection. It's understanding what bots are doing, which ones can be trusted, and how they affect performance, security, and customer experience. Based on a survey of 300 enterprise IT and security leaders, this report examines why organizations are investing in better visibility and real-time analytics at scale to manage AI-driven traffic.

What does "playing politics" mean for software engineers?
13 minutes by Sean Goedecke

Playing politics at work isn't about scheming. It means knowing who holds real power, avoiding conflict with them, and actively helping them succeed. When you disagree with a powerful person, do it privately, stay polite, and drop it when overruled. Make sure your contributions are visible, and respond quickly when senior people need help.

Zombie companies
44 minutes by Jono Alderson

Large companies can keep growing, renewing contracts, and reporting strong results long after their ability to build a relevant future has gone. Past advantages like brand recognition, contracts, and switching costs keep money flowing, but they say nothing about whether the business could earn its position again today. Meanwhile, challengers need less capital than ever to pick apart the most valuable pieces, and AI is making it cheaper for customers to inspect, compare, and leave. The failure happens years before the numbers show it.

Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
8 minutes by Yennie Jun

Offloading thinking to AI is increasingly common, from trivial daily choices to complex reasoning. While this can free up time and boost productivity, Yennie argues it risks eroding our autonomy and ability to think independently. Using AI to check and extend our own thinking differs from replacing that thinking entirely. The real question is whether we are automating routine work or giving away our own judgment and desires.

Code yellow, code red
13 minutes by James Stanier

James shares his experience of how repeated outages were eroding customer trust, leading to a formal company-wide Code Yellow, targeting eight consecutive weeks of zero downtime. The effort involved auditing the entire stack, fixing rate limiting, adding circuit breakers, resolving memory leaks, and overhauling incident processes. The target was hit. Code Yellows work best with a clear problem statement, measurable exit criteria, full organisational transparency, and genuine authority to reprioritise work across teams.

industry

• Stripe, Advent offer to buy PayPal for more than $53 billion
• Nvidia, CoreWeave, and Nebius: Inside the Circular Financing of the GPU Boom
• Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity
• The Future Worth Building Is Human
• Banning AI in Law School: We've Seen This Before

security

• Soatok’s Informal Guide to Threat Models
• Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak
• The Cheapest Way Into Your Business Isn’t Malware. It’s a Phone Call.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• How successful companies go blind