Developer templates and secure software supply chains for kubernetes with the Tanzu Application platform. Also: developer tools at AWS re:Invent and using ChatGPT to eliminate needless work.

Episode 249 · Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:15:57 +0100 · 48:56 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

well this week uh well we're catching up a little bit i i think the amazon reinvent was was uh was that last week ed or the week yes they reinvented the world again yeah that's right that's right uh you know i think there's a couple of things that would be fun to highlight there there's all sorts of stuff that came out and uh there's uh you know i wasn't on my own my other podcast last week on software to find talk but they they covered things it's it's back there somewhere that's why i'm pointing uh and so and there's some other good roundups i don't know i don't know if y'all listen to the uh the cloudcast brian graceley over there he did some roundups but i think there's two things you've picked out in particular ed that are that are fun uh to look over and uh we'll just talk about things in general and then hopefully we'll get to uh the exciting adventures with the ai chatbot thing uh terribly called open wait chat gpt i don't i don't know why they didn't come up with a better name but that that'll be fun and we'll see what what else but first now now ben you've been diving into backstage quite a bit i watched one of your uh your your recent videos it's basically a tour of how the tanzu application platform uses backstage uh as as i recall and i think i think you gave a a great demo of what we call accelerators but i'm i'm starting to think the rest of the world calls templates uh which is basically just like here's here's the default setup for your your your project directories uh and here's kind of like a default configuration that you have things like that and i really liked the uh the demo of here here's the part i want you to talk a little bit about we've got this thing called a supply chain in there which which you could also just call uh your build pipeline but that's cool but i think what makes it a supply chain is that it has a lot of the stuff that's kind of interesting it has a lot of the uh tracking and governance and audit stuff in there and that's the part that i think is like so what like if i were to imagine myself not as a programmer but maybe as a i know maybe we don't use this phrase around tanzu labs people but a project manager

or you know someone who's kind of like checking in on stuff or a governance person like like what what are the things i have available for me in the supply chain so i can kind of come in and see what's going on to check in on stuff uh well i think uh probably a headline headline act uh i reckon for the supply chain is this uh this idea of an s bomb or a bill of materials a software bill of materials uh which is a really uh cool thing it allows you to take a piece of source code or or an image you know it depends on how you want to generate your s bombs um but you can you can basically once you've checked those out against some sort of vulnerability scanner of some kind and there are many different uh ones of those available on the market of course then it will basically create a file that that contains all the dependencies inside that particular piece of code and all the um vulnerabilities that would have been checked for as well so you can use that in auditing and in in sort of establishing your security posture at any point in time you know you want to do an audit one day just go do your audit get all your s bombs together go figure out what you've got but in the uh tens of application platform and in the um in the supply chain we we create those s bombs and we store them away in a metadata store and then we expose those through a security analysis dashboard so across all the workloads that you're running on your kubernetes platform you can see okay for this workload has these vulnerabilities we know about them the safe has these ones that are switched off the false positives has these ones that are on and that we should be worried about so you can see instantly you know what's going on across all of the workloads that you've got on that particular platform so it's great and and i get i get does it will it like update like what's in production or is it just what was put into production does that

distinction make sense like can you have it like auto generate like what's currently running yeah so because it's based on dependencies if you run a piece of code through the supply chain and it spots a dependency let's say it's log4j right because there was a big one of those couple of years ago and this should be log4j so let's everyone's favorite let's just say it was log4j and it notices that that's a dependency in that particular piece of code and that there's a new vulnerability against that dependency because the sbomb tracks every piece of code that also shares the same dependency it can then mark all the other items that also contain the same dependency as being potentially vulnerable so that you can do something about it so you don't just get information about the one workload as things change and get updated you get more information about the rest of them as well so it's it's really good and there's there's still tons that we'll be doing with that as well you know it's um it's something that we're adding to all the time so i'm really looking forward to the future as well i think there's a ton of really powerful things we'll be able to do in the future with that and i'm really excited to see what happens there yeah it's it seems like uh there's a lot of effort going on to do that the the the first part of it like like uh templating if you will like here's the defaults of things but then also just i i don't know putting putting a pipeline into your web browser that's that's a silly way of putting it but like giving giving you like a gui that makes it a lot easier to kind of like and of course the command line stuff is always there but just kind of like taking care of a lot of that build stuff like in in the demo you were doing like you know it was nice it it looks simple but you could just log in and be like all right you know go to the next stage of this build and then it would do that which which was uh which was kind of fun like i think i was i was talking with a friend of mine in town last week and oh yeah i remember how he got into this like somehow he got into being a pci compliance person which like whenever someone tells you that being a

like a u.s retail regulation if you want to accept credit card payments that you have to you have to use and uh you know as one would ask i was like how did that happen and of course it was kind of accidental but you know i think maybe in lots of regulations and including like pci stuff there's something like if you wrote the code you can't deploy the code which i guess makes sense but like you know you got all sorts of fun options like that if you just uh if you click on things but it was it was an opportune demo because going to uh a lot of the announcements that amazon reinvent i think they they also have you know you can see this idea of templates scurrying about in in aws stuff they have they have like uh they announced this code catalyst thing which is kind of like uh you know like my i of course i haven't used it because i only make slides but it seemed like another go at like if you want to if you want to get like started easily on some applications running in a cloud thing here you go uh it'll do things for you now i don't think that one supports kubernetes which is fine they have many other options and uh you know there's even there's other op other things out there like you were just pointing out there's a something called scaffolding or scaffold i think that's part of uh backstage and other stuff and man there's lots of that templating going on and of course our own favorite spring boot has had that for a long time but but since you actually read this stuff ed or at least you type about it i assume you've read it yeah exactly what's what's what's your take on like and the other thing that was interesting in this area you know this kind of templating area is the the app composer which is like it's like i i think we need this new category it's not high code and not low code it's like mid code uh for for like helping doing uh serverless stuff or something but but what what caught your eye about those two things well i said they were interesting services they're gap fillers aren't they for amazon right they've already got a million services they're you know renowned for having whatever it is 17 18 ways of running containers add another one in probably now with code catalyst um and they all seem i mean you

know my takeaway after i watched everything around and read a bit about it i do a bit of reading but not a lot um it was just like yours actually templates on steroids i was like well i get this is a different area of templating right you've always been able to spin up whether it's an eks cluster choose whether you're using things like fargate how much the the technical bits do you care about um do you want to go for ec2 and do it yourself do you want eks do you want fargate do you want serverless completely just forget whatever bits you want to forget and then code catalyst is another pick your level of abstraction almost you know you're a developer you actually don't really want to even bother about separating out your project management to your code that right just spin it all up in code catalyst and it will instantiate all your aws services it'll spin up an environment it will handle your sort of issue tracking all in one place i mean you could probably do that with a bunch of disparate aws services already um but this is another way of saying you know what if you don't care about pieces a b and c i'll do those for you and then you worry about some other pieces um the old the old fully integrated stack yeah pretty much and you know aws is a building kit and you just pick how much of it you want to build and how much you don't i mean you know again i've said there's been a lot of focus from a lot of people on this getting started but i think everyone's realized in aws probably the worst they've almost provided too many tools and it's like we can do all this stuff there you go pick from one of these 50 and everyone's like i i don't know which one to use and which one how to use part three with part four okay pick part one that'll do one two and three for you which others do you want to add to it and it's just another one of those right we've got so many services it's a bit overwhelming let's wrap a bunch of them up for you and present it a little more simply um and that for me was code catalyst so i think all those individual pieces are there already but not as nicely bundled not as well integrated not as therefore appealing someone who says just give me an easy button for a load of this stuff and you know it it's similar to some of what tap does it comes from a different angle doesn't it i wouldn't say it's trying to solve a different problem it's still making it easier for developers to get code into production but it's so

as as you're as you're looking at these templates and accelerators bin like it seems this tell me that like like now that we're thinking about it it feels to me like eventually there's just going to be like some sort of open standard right or like you know just a few of them that are because and then by the time we have one someone will come up with something new and then the open standard will be the older thing that everyone's using and then you're trying to move to the new thing but nonetheless like yeah like how how many different ways could could there possibly be to like set up your project structure and generate your to use an older word your stubs uh that that you would use so i i i started to scratch beneath the surface a little bit on the code catalyst stuff and as i as i went down i did find an open standard as it happens there's uh there's something underneath the dev environment setup called um uh dev tools i think they've called it which is uh it looks kind of like a manifest for a developer environment you know so i'm expecting to use this language i'm expecting to use this idea i'm expecting to use these services i'm expecting to have these containers that sort of stuff where you can kind of define what goes into a developer environment and that's that on the face of it sounds like a a good idea you know and and there's been quite a few tools this year that have sort of tried to edge into this oh we'll create your ide for you but it will be in the cloud i know google did a similar thing at their google next didn't they they had a similar service to this where you could go and specify yeah how how you know what sort of developer environment you wanted what sort of compute should be behind that and then um you know that would appear for you i'm really interested to find out what happens with traction on these and how far they you know how how much traction they get with them because that's always been a bit of a sticking point i think developers kind of like the the local control that they often have over their own environment and being able to curate um what that environment behaves like and feels like is is

something that they're quite passionate about you know they're like personalization essentially so i i yeah i don't know but but then we were talking weren't we about accelerators and templates and that sort of stuff i think about that as different i think about that as project source code you know where do i get the source code from because in an enterprise there are always private libraries you know that are unique to that enterprise that you need to use in order to get your stuff done and the larger the enterprise is the more of those they are the more difficult they are to bring together into a project you quite often have to go searching for different items and different bits and bring them all together so the the templating in in things like the accelerators is about making those patterns and conventions and practices part of the code generation step at the beginning of a project so um you know would you then take to your ide which traditionally is running on your laptop or on your on your desktop so um they're sort of slightly different to me i think about them maybe is slightly separate concerns yeah you know you bring up something uh uh i i have i have in my my uh ever growing list of homework assignments for myself i think there was there was there was remember you remember inner sourcing as a concept there was like an inner sourcing conference a little while ago uh that uh has some new sessions and i've been thinking like all this like developer portal and and kind of talk as as you were just going over like this idea of like inside an organization having a whole like world of code or whatever i've lost track of a sentence there but like that's that's what that whole inner sourcing thing was about back in the late 2000s so maybe it's worth revisiting that as a uh as an idea but i interrupted you ed what were you saying well hearing you talk about that there's about a lot of

this for me is it's getting that right level of um opinionation should we say so i i tell you great developers love their laptops and i used to i used to like installing software getting my hands on the bits because i didn't have to worry about someone else at that point that was just me with my laptop i can largely do what i want to do that's always going to be right for me and then there's that mix of saying but whether it's your company or in this case whether it's cloud provider someone prescribes what's right for you even if it's correct right company says here are our guardrails here's the things we need for compliance therefore you do these there's a bit of you think can i skip some of that and just do it through a laptop or whatever so i think that's why people always love laptop because you you pick and choose exactly what you want without someone saying yeah it'd be lovely if but you can't because because so whether it's tap whether it's going to be code catalyst some of the how well they work and how well they're adopted are how much do you constrain people do you actually if they make it quicker and easier for dev they'll do it right i think the same is true the cloud idees if they give you exactly what you've got in your laptop but it's quick and easy reproducible but people will go with it it just hasn't yeah and and if you work for twitter and you have to print out your code you might not have access to a printer in the cloud so you know you've got to think about these things right exactly it needs a good export to pdf or docx file uh option that that would be great you know that's the kind of that's the kind of feature that if you focus on it too much you'd end up with like like setting the fonts that you use and the uh the you know justification like alignment you'd really go down a rabbit hole well you don't need to do what was there anything else from the uh the giant reinvent that uh popped out at you two that seemed interesting i mean there was there was tons of things as i mentioned earlier but like uh you know it's always fun just to choose a couple of them yeah genuinely go ahead dad i'd say tons of things but it went over my head more than in previous years i think they're again moving up the stack right so as

an infrastructure sort of grounded person there was always new instances this at the other and this year it was a lot more industry related things you know even the keynotes were organized more into topics and sessions um and therefore there was more of it i listened and glazed over because i know it runs forever and there's always that oh what's going to be next it's going to be some big headline thing yeah not so much um which is just maturity i suppose they've been around for so long we kind of know what to expect so no massive takeaways yeah i interrupted yeah no i missed i missed most of it to be honest i was preparing for other talks and and things so i didn't i did want to see a little bit more of it but i i didn't get to but but ed was there anything you know the present climate uh you know worldwide that is uh you know difficult challenging for a lot of a lot of businesses was there was there any visible signs of any sort of slowdown in the clothes cloud space or any consolidations or any anything that would give you an indication that there's you know economic headwinds not well they talked about that a little bit um and actually bernard golden wrote a good piece which i did include in my newsletter for those who get that one um which was essentially saying no for the cloud providers they will knuckle down a bit right and they will no doubt see customers saying we need to contain costs to set the other but they are all pointing out that they're continuing to build and they will stop building when the demand goes um and actually all the cloud builders are still investing heavily so you know this article by bern golden it's not the m1 it's out on the interwebs can't remember what the title is i'm sure if you search for it you'll find it but it was still essentially saying growth for the cloud providers is still going to be good they're still building out cloud regions of billions of dollars in revenue and investing in various countries i think business will carry on their numbers will dip a little right just from seasonal should we say but um i think it's business as usual for them well i i don't know if you two have encountered this but i think in the past month uh i i've encountered uh almost completely contradictory like stories

about about all of your macroeconomic secular headwinds and tailwinds and everything uh you know one there will be a story about all these tech people being laid off and then there's another story about how uh you know survey shows uh large companies still can't hire enough tech people and then and then like what's happening with spending and then i saw another thing that was like you know cio's plan to keep spending lots of money on their it stuff so so we'll have to see but i think maybe you know uh those articles we should write a third round of them using this this brand new chat gpt thing because i think i'm obsessed with this thing on you you've been you've been hitting this all week i i think i think i just i well i only started yesterday in in my defense was it only yesterday maybe at the tail end of monday so but it's only wednesday as we record but you know i think like all of us i generate a lot of text and i also consume a lot of text about the secular uh economic headwinds that are pushing your tailwinds uh and things like that in the macro environment uh with currency conversions and uh like i i think a lot of that text could be written pretty effectively by this this thing now to give you an idea of it you know it's the same thing that one that was making all those funny pictures over the summer but you log into and it's a chat interface and as i here here was i'm not going to read it i was thinking we could do a whole episode just generated by this thing but that would be a little too much but for example uh one of the things i did yesterday is i asked it to write like an email uh to send to my boss about why okrs are bad and we shouldn't do them and and i gave it a few little hints here and there like some of the points i wanted to make and then i said it should be about six paragraphs and it wrote a pretty good like i gave it the only two you can since it's a chat you can ask it to like uh do things differently so the only tuning that i did was to ask it to be more casual and also add in a part you know just to ps at the end that we still needed to approve budget for the hot dog party that's coming up soon and we're cutting

costs by having people bring their own condiments uh but i did that and it was a pretty persuasive uh memo i feel like i could have maybe sent that to to someone to argue against okrs now the fun thing to do when you do that is to say like that was great now argue the other side and it'll perfectly put out another argument about why okrs are good and um i don't know have you all had a chance to uh it's totally free to use have you all had a chance to uh generate some text ask some questions well i haven't yet i will try it but i haven't yet and that's because of dali and very you know those sort of uh picture generating tools i see the pictures that other people generate based on like you know a sentence and then i give it a sentence and the stuff that comes out is absolute garbage so you're like what what how am i doing this wrong i don't get it you know you get these beautiful i don't know uh cloud punk style images or whatever with super fine detail at 4k resolution and i put it in there and it looks like a toddler's painting with water paints you know yeah complete rubbish so yeah draw me a banana in a toddler style or whatever you know i i tried using that over the summer and i wanted a picture of of waylon jennings and nietzsche reading a news article and nietzsche was the the barista and i didn't quite understand what i was going for but the picture was interesting like you know i wanted i wanted him serving up some uh some coffee or something but at least waylon jennings had a cowboy hat and like a cigar a cigarette so you know it was pretty good but you know i think the tech stuff is a little better i mean i don't i'm sure there's some sort of like how humans work stuff behind this but like for some reason like a picture has to be better than text maybe like because when you're reading text you can kind of like fill in the details but a picture like has to be super

abstract like i was just thinking what is the deal with all the kids cartoons nowadays like all the characters look the same with like giant heads and their midsections are also giant and bulbous like there's this distinct style that's just like very displeasing uh but with text you know it doesn't actually have to be that great or even accurate as the stuff generated by this this shows like let now now on the other hand let me let me read you all another thing i asked it this this is very short so i'll read you i ask it write a haiku that speculates that ranch dressing existed before the big bang and it said ranch dressing divine before the big bang comma it was eternal condiment and uh i think that's pretty good it is surprisingly effective i mean i had to play around and it the stuff i asked it it generally sort of answered there's a mixture either the stock answer i am an ai blah blah blah and i don't know about specific frameworks or companies or whatever it might be yet sometimes it does you know whoever it or spectro cloud did a blog post where they asked it a load of kubernetes questions well for me that's a specific technology or friend but it came up with very good answers for that exactly that was a good find it just said no don't know anything about that whatsoever um so it's still quite hit and miss but it is persuasive when you get to a decent conversation a bit of back and forth which is obviously what it's designed for um yeah and that's the thing that's what i that's what i haven't experimented with the most is like actually i think now that you pointed out that interview i think that's something i want to try next right because there's there's three things i tried with you can tell i'm excited about it because i just keep talking about it but like one i asked it to tell me what my wife wants for christmas and it truthfully said oh i don't have access to uh you know private information but you could try asking her which is just like whoa hold on common sense person it's a very good consultant it depends is very often it's answer totally totally well there's various things you might want to consider

yeah yeah and and that that showed up in that interview about kubernetes where the guy even asked it like you always say that and and there was a very good defense of it it was like well there are many different uh situations and options and then and then the the the next thing i i think i want to experiment with it is like i don't i i think this would be fine i wrote about this in my little newsletter this week is like you know my my son is 12 and my daughter is nine and and they are having to write more and more in school and i feel like you could ask this they could talk with this thing to like help them learn about writing now the danger is that they just plagiarize it which that's unethical but it's more a danger of like if you just copy and paste stuff you don't actually learn how to do it but there's got to be some like way you could just have it kind of teach you the basics of it right like i don't i don't know what y'all had in um i always get what a private school versus a public school is in the uk mixed up but like during your your schooling like but you know in in in u.s schools you learn the five paragraph essay you spend like three years doing this and like it just like i can't imagine the teachers are like oh goody time to teach the five paragraph essay right whereas like you you could probably go to go to this thing and say like write me a five paragraph essay about dinosaurs and like you could have you could have each student generate that and then in the same way that you might diagram a sentence you could kind of like diagram the essay and you're kind of like reverse engineering what a five paragraph essay is and that seems like it would be a fun pedagogical thing uh to do so we'll see if that works well i like the fact that you can tell chat gpt to write in the style of someone else can't you so i could say write me a letter in the style of michael Coté and i would get Coté isms uh throughout right that would that would be you know it says it's corpus uh only goes back to 2021 but thankfully that's still 20 years

of me writing stuff online but this is the thing right i think we should all be very worried because if you think about it we've seen already deep fakes dali um james earl jones voice in star wars is now going to be an ai right plus something that'll write scripts so between those things like there's not much left for us to do is there you could you could you could either be the victim of a deep fake yourself where they say you know here's michael's face and then here's how he talks and then here's how he you know uh writes and then make it look like michael said something it's exactly right now now that's the third thing that i'm i'm thinking about and experimenting with using it is like how does this how far does this go into the writing process for for writing stuff now now you know i i have i've been in many roles in my career where you basically just need to like write some stuff and and like you know for better or worse and so like uh like this time of year uh people always wanted me to write prediction pieces right and i actually went in and asked it to write me five predictions for 2023 i i i forgot about this i need to go back and look at it and you know i suggested that use some gartner and forrester numbers and talk about blockchain and and a few other things and so like and then i also asked it there's two other things that are there there's there's three other things that are that are instructive here one one of our colleagues asked it to write a conference abstract about secure software supply chains and kubernetes and i have to say it was a pretty good start and then i and then having submitted to a lot of talks what i suggested to him is he asked it to this part see might be really useful is like i asked him to shorten it down to like 300 uh words because i think if you submit

to like sessionize you're restricted to 300 words in your abstract right and so like it chopped it down to 300 words and it was still pretty effective right so next time i have like an 800 word session abstract and the things like you only get you know 350 words i'll maybe i'll go over here and just be like can you shorten this to 150 words and and we'll see what it says that is good you get that i get that all the time because every time i submit a piece of content you know internally you got to fill in forms and stuff and they all exactly size boxes for that yeah and oh and now you're making me think that uh grammarly on it does it fight with itself you know one artificial intelligence that would be awesome the sentence structure is incorrect and it automatically rejigs it or something that'd be great a face off yeah and and so so there's and then two other things i tried one so if you remember in the the devops platform engineering thing last month there was a big a big uh a big stink up about like uh some some headlines about devops is dead and it's going to be replaced so i gave it a little bit of coaching and you know i i posted these on my blog but i asked it to write a piece uh a thought piece that about devops is dead right and i kind of gave it some ideas and it wrote a a pretty good thought piece again it will not again but you know it gets it's like a 40 to 70 percent start like you would have to take it and as you were kind of indicating earlier ben you'd have to go in and like make it accurate well i saw right i saw that and your your prompts were very good already yeah yeah right it was already enough in the prompts for you to kind of go totally and where michael's going with this it's it's it's really well totally and it's kind of like chopping down it's the at the opposite of chopping down an abstract to 300 words is what you can tell it is like here's like some ideas can you write 1200 words on that and it'll just go through and like you know you'd have to polish it a little bit because you can start to detect that this is basically like uh you know a middle school person writing an article it doesn't quite what's the

thing in the symptoms the simpsons that where it's like in short libya is a land of contrasts like you know it almost gets to the land of contrast uh problem there but so but then what you did what i did is you can ask it to write the opposite of that so basically like well let's say if if uh i thought the devops is not dead and again i i fed it a few ideas and it and writes that and then uh also along those lines uh i asked it to write uh a piece that was basically like you should uh not build your own kubernetes versus you should uh you know you should not build your own kubernetes and you should buy it versus you should totally build your own kubernetes install and so like you know the i i to this is the first time i think maybe this phrase has been used literally these things just write themselves like and so like i i feel like like you know if if there's a lot of thought pieces out there across and i i know especially you probably see these ed when you're scanning the headlines just across all sorts of random tech news websites out there and man this is like perfect for those like if if if you were like there's a certain scenario that i'm sure none of us have done where someone comes to you and had like wants to write on some topic and they might even have some ideas and they might even have like ghost written something for you and then you know you could go in there and just you got to go in there and kind of like fix it up but like that whole step of someone having a topic and like getting the starter for you you could totally do it in like 30 seconds which with just a little bit of ideas of what you want to say it's uh it's pretty bonkers so to your point ben uh it's good that you're getting back into programming because i don't know if marketing is going to exist anymore just we're going to what i'm curious with is this seems to do some coding doesn't it i saw which i've yes i've got people talking about it saying i've given a code sample and it fixed it and i was like now how does that work because i understand like the ai and the pattern

matching and just giving it a big database for conversational stuff where does it get coding knowledge from how much other stuff is in there you know can you give it maths equations chemical formulas how much sort of knowledge does it have in that respect probably yeah there's no safety in coding Coté well i i think there you know i i am no i am no ai ml whatever person right but it does seem like the limitations unless you applied some sort of like william burroughs like cut up technique the limitation is like you won't be able to come up with something new like because the problem is like like like i was saying you need the the corpus the body of stuff that it does its predictive writing on and and so like if you were to for example if we were to make up a new word well this would be a fun experience like uh let's call it like buternetes which is is just like a new technology you should be looking into and we ask it to write that essay it probably wouldn't be that useful right like it might have all the shape of someone promoting a buternetes but like it wouldn't actually say anything right like there wouldn't be anything useful whereas like if for some reason the spring community and the kubernetes community decide to merge and become one thing and name the output buternetes right like they would and they wrote for four years about it it could probably generate some overview of it and talk about it like this reminds me of another thing for example uh i was thinking like you know ben and i make these little videos and log videos and i thought like what if i have it generate the script for these little videos so i asked i did two of them i asked one of them how does a product manager for software manage a backlog i think it did a pretty good job like it was kind of like a uh how long did it last maybe like 30 60 seconds and then i asked another one which it it it didn't do good at the prompt i asked it to define to talk about what a spotify golden path is and it got a little tripped up and said it it talked

about what continuous integration and continuous deployment is but it did it pretty well so like you could just go in and remove the spotify stuff but then i took those and i wasn't pretending like i wasn't doing this i was very upfront about it so i could be ethical but then i just went and made two of those little youtube shorts and there you go so you could imagine again this is why our marketing jobs we got to start worrying ben like i don't know or or maybe this is maybe i'll get to the last point the jevons paradox thing but like you know if if you could pump out like 50 of these videos a month you could probably start to tune and like think about the right kind of content and the reason you could do it is like like it only took me i don't know maybe 30 minutes to do that video like the one about each of those videos which as you know ben is very quick for for a video like it's you know of course you've got to do like the one the one take thing and then use like descript or something to chop it up or whatever you even have to put your pants on and everything don't you you have to well not not with the current view that i have here i could just i could just have yeah but you do yours outside i'm pretty sure you're not going out yeah yeah and and so so like so that that's all as you can tell i think it's all pretty thrilling but it was also making me think and this is like what i wrote up in the newsletter is like you know you know the idea of insight reliability engineering of developer of toil right like it's repetitive manual tasks that don't add any value and an sre person should spend i think it's like 50 of their time i would imagine if you're doing your platform stuff initially it's probably like 80 of your time but you should always spend a lot of time automating toil and as you go through like what a lot of these things what this thing is good at is making me realize it's really good at just like office worker toil and even marketing toil right like it's kind of a toil thing to come up with like your first pass at some copy and it's a little bit of toil if you want to make a video defining a backlog to like think about how you would phrase it and then it's even more toil to like ask you

know to do budget justification for a hot dog party right like and and like all of and i was thinking like back when i was in corporate strategy like i would have these drive-by strategy assignments where like someone would come by and be like oh one of the uh one of the board members thinks that it would be a good idea for us to get into uh the the software development tools business so i'm gonna need can you write me a memo to send them totally with my name on it instead of me the person writing it uh like a memo talking about what we should do here and it's pretty good at doing that too you can just like i mean it just to to i won't use the word since this is family friendly but the um the uh uh you know the the the cow excrement word like if it's that kind of that kind of work like you could totally eliminate a ton of that work which then to use a james water notion you can go up the value line you don't really have to worry about like all that low level uh cow waste stuff so i think that's a good way for us us uh knowledge workers to start experimenting with it to to focus on how can we eliminate knowledge worker toil uh that that we need to do kind of like your grammarly thing maybe what we should do is the next time we have to file expenses we could just say we can get the concur ai to talk with this ai and just kind of like tell us the result instead of having to do anything you you owe 15 000 pounds yeah maybe we wouldn't like that result oh that that's well because what you would have to say is and don't take no for an answer and then and then maybe it would just burn out that's when you ask it to argue the other way maybe you could get it to onboard suppliers maybe though yeah no totally that i think that's you know and and i was trying to think of the commercialization things right and that's the part that like would be valuable is you can't really like you couldn't for example like let's say you had to do gdpr verification right like for a i i don't

know theoretically at some company you might have to do uh gdpr verification for a new third-party vendor and so you could kind of like feed it your company's policy and then feed it a bunch of stuff from the third-party vendor and basically just be like can you fill this out for me and do a good job in the style of me and then like like that would be amazing and then but see like you could think that's terrible but then the whole point of the the adopting the mentality of the toil thing is like well instead of me even doing it the person who's doing this audit should just do that on their own like why am i even involved in this right like just you know get that person doing it can do it no need for like a help desk and so anyhow maybe there's hope for a lot of that stuff we'll see next time i have to argue something in a bureaucracy i i might i might try to use it there's not much hope if you work on the help desk well but that but see this is this gets to the jevons paradox thing is like what you see when you automate things is that like it's not that people and and this is this is the there's two there's a there's a uh capitalist friendly and then a worker not friendly aspect of this is like and i think jevons paradox it comes comes from one of your uh one of your countrymen way back in the industrial revolution is is they realized that the more efficient you make a factory uh it causes more energy use so which is because like you free up time so it means like you create more waistcoats or whatever right like you don't there's a reason we have the phrase do more with less we don't have the phrase do less with less right like you always want you want to do more so like that means that like if you automate this stuff then again maybe we can focus on things that are more interesting but then the downside of that is jevons paradox doesn't say that when we automate things now we get to have like a 20 hour work week that's really what we would want that maybe that's Coté's rejoiner to jevons paradox is like i i would like this to mean we have we get to work less as we're more

efficient i i love how excited by this you are i really do i find that really uh really good but to me it feels like a jurassic park moment like oh yes oh look we can make real dinosaurs that's gonna end well let's do that i i can't help but think about the other uses and if you follow podcasts like i don't know dark net diaries or something like that you know where where technology has been subverted in so many ways so many times you can't help but be concerned about that there are new laws coming into the uk around the use of tools like um deepfake for example you know there's talk about new new laws around that because they are being abused for things that they shouldn't be used for or that we wouldn't consider them a valid use for so um yeah i i can't help but can also have a slight maybe it's because i'm british maybe that's what it is i i think i think i think i mean it's it's it's like any other like big technology this isn't a dismissive thing but yeah i agree there's all sorts of like crazy bad stuff you could do but maybe we should finish out yeah unless what are your what are your last thoughts ed are you going to uh are you going to start using this for uh for something gpt what it thinks i should say i don't know i'll i'll give i'll give you one one more example in favor of this right an example of toil is i posted this as well over on my my my weblog at Coté.io but we we asked recently to get our kids out of school over here in the netherlands for thanksgiving uh you know because we're americans and and i this was in the past but i thought like what if we need to do this again so i asked it to write a letter asking the school and it was like uh it was pretty perfect like it had it had the right tone that you would be asking an authority figure and it like kind of asked in the right way and it even had the thing of like i understand this will

take some consideration like that that kind of stuff in there and it was just like wow i would have never thought to write it like that like and this is like pretty good and then i bet also if they replied to your email you could put it back into the chat and be like can you reply to this email right like unfortunately like the the tier that it has isn't persistent enough that it would it lasts that long anyways but the last thing that i did you know you can also do funny stuff like the ranch dressing is is i asked it to come up with 12 ideas for blog posts on monster truck models uh and and and it's it's a blog it's a blog that that covers monster truck models but occasionally writes about microsoft clippy and i'll just get i won't read all of them but it got it got pretty good it was it was building the perfect monster truck model diorama that's that's a good idea and then you got uh the top monster truck models competition to check out also good i like that one and then finally microsoft clippy meets the world of monster truck models interesting well on that note i i'm gonna go ask uh maybe go ask this thing to write some show notes for us uh probably about 10 000 words worth we'll see how many words it can go up to i'm gonna go and start a text blog may or may not be me and uh with that i can't i can't wait until they add voice onto this if you added voice recognition and then speech you know be like a really useful google voice thingy right alexa write my reinvent keynote yeah it's like alexa's useless right but if it could do this this would be amazing i mean once once you can feed your own stuff into it i mean i mean that's how that's got to be one of the ways they would commercialize it right it also it also like just to trail off it makes you wonder like wow maybe all that watson stuff was just before its time like this this could actually uh i don't know we'll see next week if uh if we're still here or not or if uh if if uh microsoft clippy has taken over max headroom yeah be max headroom yeah i was gonna say we'll

come max headroom yeah i love that tv show i found i found where you can uh they have all those in youtube you can uh go peruse them if you want it's kind of it's impossible to buy them gpt max headroom will live again oh yeah i gotta get i need to try doing everything in the style of max headroom yeah and folks if you uh watch us on youtube next week it may be three max headrooms all right well if you if you want to see the show notes to to all of this i'll try to put in some links to to uh well obviously the the aws stuff and maybe some of those examples of uh output that i talked about you can go to tonsutalk.com and uh just find this episode uh and and as always we uh we're not here every week but we usually also if you're listening to the podcast we stream it live there was some fun commentary uh in in the the uh the chat there and uh we'll see everyone next time bye bye all right well i haven't ended the broadcast yet but that that was good and uh just in time yep like i was saying in the style of max headroom we'll see what we'll see what it's like i think i think oh you know another thing i tried that was fun is i i asked it you were kind of not alluding but you're getting close to this bin i asked it to uh write a favorable review of the columns i wrote at the register between 2012 and 2018 and it was pretty good although it exp it also exposed it also exposed one of the things you know you you were talking about is i then asked it to specific i mean to reference specific columns and so it used it used two column you know titles for column names and i was like is that a column name that i used and so i went and searched and it just said totally made up names for columns like not not a title i used at all so you gotta you gotta check into that i think i think ben is still speechless he's like this uh you're you're unleashing a torrent

of problems that's yeah that's what's going on here honestly yeah i well yeah yeah thanks to everyone who uh who was on the chat as well as a few tindall was on the chat today uh tindall uh is uh everyone's talking about chat gpt and i'm here building crud and being totally out of the loop absolutely you haven't got up to cqrs yet uh maybe maybe you have a look at that wow what a joke one for the deaths and uh ed someone also said are you also uh house sharing with all those other people are you who also i do i have a very generous house sharing policy i will find i would so that's what i need next week is i need to get a dali background obviously something that is genuinely unique yes that would be awesome yeah maybe you could ask unique podcast background and see you you could you could ask the chat thing to give you a prompt to give dali that would come up with a unique zoom background and then and then see if you can chain that prompt together and visualize and it should be it should include the dark corners of your mind as well i think you know not just the light ones but the dark ones as well should be a little bit of i don't know freddy krueger in there you know some sort of nightmarish there you go like like do it something something like and and make subtle allusions to the dark corners of my mind palace brilliant yeah all right well let's put it that way i'm gonna wrap up the broadcast here we'll see the streamers next time bye bye bye again

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