Yo, internet stranger. I hope you're having a great day and I hope you know you have more influence over your life. than you think.

Journalism industry vet here. Your friendly reminder that 90% of the stories you see or hear were originally pitched by a PR person. That is all.

Being a teenager in 1990s NYC basically meant living on $1.25 pizza slices, Jamaican beef patties, Chinese Mexican food and Halal cart chicken and rice. It was the best.

Vibe coding just makes human QAing 1000x more important.

Lots of stuff in Pluralsight Scale this week. AWS with virtual machines in virtual machines like a tech Inception. BigQuery queries get even bigger. Why cloud infrastructure makes AI deploys more annoying. Yup I'm reading the changelogs and product updates so you don't have to.

A very rare personal post: Saturday is my one-year-anniversary at @pluralsight.bsky.social. Being part of a team where we help people learn, get new jobs and get promoted is the best. I write our weekly cloud industry newsletter covering all things AWS/Azure/Google Cloud.

Be like Taco Bell. Have five core ingredients you can recombine infinitely. Then... Succeed in life.

All this talk of "the death of SaaS" is much overblown. Tech industry likes collective panics, this is no exception. Building wrappers and promptstorming for LLMs to replace SaaS is much, much, much harder than it sounds. Color me skeptical. What do you think?

Threads keeps growing and growing... Now with more mobile daily usage than Twitter/X according to a new Similarweb report. techcrunch.com/2026/01/18/t...

The story in 2026 is less “death of the PC” and more “merger of PC, cloud, and AI under Microsoft’s terms.” A smart article on where PCs are headed in the 2020s: www.computerworld.com/article/4119...

Good morning, conquer the damn world today.

Linux in the OpenAI Super Bowl ad. There we go!

Ain't no party like a Medieval Times party.

Oh man the future's gonna be weirder than we can possibly imagine.

A lot of great journalists losing their jobs. Time for the next challenge. 2020s and 2030s = Building a new information ecosystem for the news people need that isn't random algo videos and social posts. Let's do this.

Teen years: Massive skinhead fights at CBGBs, Los Crudos/Indecision/Madball/Candiria/all these ridiculously loud bands live, scaryass shows at City Gardens and Pipeline. Forties: ...Shopping at Costco and gardening.

A new day and a new chance to go down YouTube rabbitholes about Great Lakes shipyards.

Man, the more I find out about the AWS layoffs the sadder I get. Keep on logging onto LinkedIn and the feed reads like a memorial book. It hit the developer relations community so damn hard--folks working with AWS customers, making the YouTube vids and writing the blogs.. Ugh.

Dudes, dudettes.... You don't have to post everything on social media. You don't have to post nothing on social media at all. Your goal is to make social media work for *you*, not the other way around.

Wait .. you mean politicians acted badly and dishonestly? Never.

As a Hugo award winner I know once said, "Lolololololololol WTF."

RE: Amazon Fresh supermarkets shutting down... My 7-year-old was crying this morning when he found out. We live in the 'burbs, and our local Amazon Fresh is one of the only places we can walk to in kid distance. Easy 5 minute walk from our house.

Still working through For All Mankind on Apple TV. Just started Season 3. Holy hell this show is way better than I was expecting. Apple TV frickin knocks expensive prestige scifi shows out of the ballpark....

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Here is my grandparents story. www.tabletmag.com/sections/new...

Amazon's shutting down their Amazon Fresh supermarkets and Amazon Go convenience stores. Some Amazon Fresh locations will become Whole Foods, others will close altogether. Thoughts? www.aboutamazon.com/news/company...

Gary Larson, my dude, I think it's time to revive the Far Side... www.404media.co/scientists-d...

Really cool project - FastRender: a browser built by thousands of parallel agents Simon Willison has the details: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/23/...

this is the New York Times, describing an execution www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

My only contribution to all the Miami talk is that Miami has good coffee all sewn down... Not just the expensive high-end places (tho Panther is great). You can go to any random bakery or neighborhood place, even Publix, and get an a+ cafecito or cortado. Truth.

ChatGPT will start running ads for the first time in February. One ad example OpenAI gives is "an ad showing a particular sauce brand when a user looks up a recipe." Great idea? Terrible idea? Opportunities for mischief? 🤔 www.theinformation.com/articles/ope...

Doubling down on Bluesky this month just to see what the heck will happen. X is full of bots and Threads algo doesn't show interesting stuff. It's on.

So I see we're officially in the "Find Out" phase of Chicagoland Winter this week...

Sir, you're just a Staten Island turkey.

In the newest issue of Scale: RAM shortage impacting cloud spending, AWS' new European Sovereign Cloud, Pluralsight cloud insights and more! Signup link in comments.

Bring back Winamp and Kazaa and Instant Messenger and Dreamweaver. We need the millennial tech aesthetic again, bad.

Can't wait until my Iranian-American friends can visit the free county of their ancestors and their cousins are free of this regime. May this be the year.

Hello Miami.

Happy new year! Remember: You have a lot more control over your future than you think. You can get better at things, you can improve things, you can make your life and the lives of others a heck of a lot better. And there's no time like today to start. See you in 2026.

The urge to move to another country and start a new life running a capybara cafe.

There's an alternate universe where Chicagoland is just building a ton of housing and luring companies here and beating North Carolina and Florida and Arizona and everyone else at their own game... And it's amazing.

My 2026 goal: Read more damn books. Written books, ebooks, audio books, the whole damn mishegas. Gonna learn some stuff and entertain myself with stuff that isn't video. IT IS ON.

Live your life online like all your social medias and emails will be found in discovery 😂

"A foolish DOer will outperform a smart THINKer. Every time." I didn't write this, but it's the truth.

The latest Pluralsight Scale cloud computing briefing is here. AWS AI power moves, Google Cloud overhauling their partner program, Aurora DSQL cluster creation gets way faster... and (oh man!) it's our last newsletter of 2025!

I'm a native New Yorker who grew up on bacon egg and cheese sandwiches from the bodega. What's the Chicago equivalent?

Yes, companies need storytellers. Sales teams and ads and automated emails only go so far. If your customers don't know what your product does or how it helps them... You're in trouble. Which is where these folks who can explain complicated things simply come in. Yo.

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From @pluralsight.bsky.social Scale this week: Changing MSFT Azure AI sales targets | AWS budgeting tips | Inside the new Trainium chips. 🤖☁️😁 Swipe through for the cloud highlights tech leaders need to know.

Some Reddit moderators say a surge of AI slop on the site is eroding its authenticity and could lead to a feedback loop of AI models training on AI content (Kat Tenbarge/Wired) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

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