Quote for the day:
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” -- Mark Twain
Gazing into the future of eye contact
Eye contact is a human need. But it also offers big business benefits. Brain
scans show that eye contact activates parts of the brain linked to reading
others’ feelings and intentions, including the fusiform gyrus, medial prefrontal
cortex, and amygdala. These brain regions help people figure out what others are
thinking or feeling, which we all need for trusting business and work
relationships. ... If you look into the camera to simulate eye contact, you
can’t see the other person’s face or reactions. This means both people always
appear to be looking away, even if they are trying to pay attention. It is not
just awkward — it changes how people feel and behave. ... The iContact Camera
Pro is a 4K webcam that uses a retractable arm that places the camera right in
your line of sight so that you can look at the person and the camera at the same
time. It lets you adjust video and audio settings in real time. It’s compact and
folds away when not in use. It’s also easy to set up with a USB-C connection and
works with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and other major platforms. ...
Finally, there’s Casablanca AI, software that fixes your gaze in real time
during video calls, so it looks like you’re making eye contact even when you’re
not. It works by using AI and GAN technology to adjust both your eyes and head
angle, keeping your facial expressions and gestures natural, according to the
company. New York passes a bill to prevent AI-fueled disasters
“The window to put in place guardrails is rapidly shrinking given how fast this technology is evolving,” said Senator Gounardes. “The people that know [AI] the best say that these risks are incredibly likely […] That’s alarming.” The RAISE Act is now headed for New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk, where she could either sign the bill into law, send it back for amendments, or veto it altogether. If signed into law, New York’s AI safety bill would require the world’s largest AI labs to publish thorough safety and security reports on their frontier AI models. The bill also requires AI labs to report safety incidents, such as concerning AI model behavior or bad actors stealing an AI model, should they happen. If tech companies fail to live up to these standards, the RAISE Act empowers New York’s attorney general to bring civil penalties of up to $30 million. The RAISE Act aims to narrowly regulate the world’s largest companies — whether they’re based in California (like OpenAI and Google) or China (like DeepSeek and Alibaba). The bill’s transparency requirements apply to companies whose AI models were trained using more than $100 million in computing resources (seemingly, more than any AI model available today), and are being made available to New York residents.The ZTNA Blind Spot: Why Unmanaged Devices Threaten Your Hybrid Workforce
The risks are well-documented and growing. But many of the traditional
approaches to securing these endpoints fall short—adding complexity without
truly mitigating the threat. It’s time to rethink how we extend Zero Trust to
every user, regardless of who owns the device they use. ... The challenge of
unmanaged endpoints is no longer theoretical. In the modern enterprise,
consultants, contractors, and partners are integral to getting work done—and
they often need immediate access to internal systems and sensitive data. BYOD
scenarios are equally common. Executives check dashboards from personal tablets,
marketers access cloud apps from home desktops, and employees work on personal
laptops while traveling. In each case, IT has little to no visibility or control
over the device’s security posture. ... To truly solve the BYOD and contractor
problem, enterprises need a comprehensive ZTNA solution that applies to all
users and all devices under a single policy framework. The foundation of this
approach is simple: trust no one, verify everything, and enforce policies
consistently. ... The shift to hybrid work is permanent. That means BYOD and
third-party access are not exceptions—they’re standard operating procedures.
It’s time for enterprises to stop treating unmanaged devices as an edge case and
start securing them as part of a unified Zero Trust strategy.3 reasons I'll never trust an SSD for long-term data storage
SSDs rely on NAND flash memory, which inevitably wears out after a finite number
of write cycles. Every time you write data to an SSD and erase it, you use up
one write cycle. Most manufacturers specify the write endurance for their SSDs,
which is usually in terabytes written (TBW). ... When I first started using
SSDs, I was under the impression that I could just leave them on the shelf for a
few years and access all my data whenever I wanted. But unfortunately, that's
not how NAND flash memory works. The data stored in each cell leaks over time;
the electric charge used to represent a bit can degrade, and if you don't power
on the drive periodically to refresh the NAND cells, those bits can become
unreadable. This is called charge leakage, and it gets worse with SSDs using
lower-end NAND flash memory. Most consumer SSDs these days use TLC and QLC NAND
flash memory, which aren't as great as SLC and MLC SSDs at data retention. ... A
sudden power loss during critical write operations can corrupt data blocks and
make recovery impossible. That's because SSDs often utilize complex caching
mechanisms and intricate wear-leveling algorithms to optimize performance.
During an abrupt shutdown, these processes might fail to complete correctly,
leaving your data corrupted.Beyond the Paycheck: Where IT Operations Careers Outshine Software Development
On the whole, working in IT tends to be more dynamic than working as a software
developer. As a developer, you're likely to spend the bulk of your time writing
code using a specific set of programming languages and frameworks. Your
day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year work will center on churning out
never-ending streams of application updates. The tasks that fall to IT
engineers, in contrast, tend to be more varied. You might troubleshoot a server
failure one day and set up a RAID array the next. You might spend part of your
day interfacing with end users, then go into strategic planning meetings with
executives. ... IT engineers tend to be less abstracted from end users, with
whom they often interact on a daily basis. In contrast, software engineers are
more likely to spend their time writing code while rarely, if ever, watching
someone use the software they produce. As a result, it can be easier in a
certain respect for someone working in IT as compared to software development to
feel a sense of satisfaction. ... While software engineers can move into
adjacent types of roles, like site reliability engineering, IT operations
engineers arguably have a more diverse set of easily pursuable options if they
want to move up and out of IT operations work.Europe is caught in a cloud dilemma
The European Union is worried about its reliance on the leading US-based cloud
providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform
(GCP). These large-scale players hold an unrivaled influence over the cloud
sector and manage vital infrastructure essential for driving economies and
fostering innovation. European policymakers have raised concerns that their
heavy dependence exposes the continent to vulnerabilities, constraints, and
geopolitical uncertainties. ... Europe currently lacks cloud service providers
that can challenge those global Goliaths. Despite efforts like Gaia-X that aim
to change this, it’s not clear if Europe can catch up anytime soon. It will be a
prohibitively expensive undertaking to build large-scale cloud infrastructure in
Europe that is both cost-efficient and competitive. In a nutshell, Europe’s hope
to adopt top-notch cloud technology without the countries that currently
dominate the industry is impractical, considering current market conditions. ...
Often companies view cloud integration as merely a checklist or set of choices
to finalize their cloud migration. This frequently results in tangled networks
and isolated silos. Instead, businesses should overhaul their existing cloud
environment with a comprehensive strategy that considers both immediate needs
and future goals as well as the broader geopolitical landscape.Applying Observability to Leadership to Understand and Explain your Way of Working
Leadership observability means observing yourself as you lead. Alex Schladebeck shared at OOP conference how narrating thoughts, using mind maps, asking questions, and identifying patterns helped her as a leader to explain decisions, check bias, support others, and understand her actions and challenges. Employees and other leaders around you want to understand what leads to your decisions, Schladebeck said. ... Heuristics give us our "gut feeling". And that’s useful, but it’s better if we’re able to take a step back and get explicit about how we got to that gut feeling, Schladebeck mentioned. If we categorise and label things and explain what experiences lead us to our gut feeling, then we have the option of checking our bias and assumptions, and can help others to develop the thinking structures to make their own decisions, she explained ... Schladebeck recommends that leaders narrate their thoughts to reflect on, and describe their own work to the ones they are leading. They can do this by asking themselves questions like, "Why do I think that?", "What assumptions am I basing this on?", "What context factors am I taking into account?" Look for patterns, categories, and specific activities, she advised, and then you can try to explain these things to others around you. To visualize her thinking as a leader, Schladebeck uses mind maps.Data Mesh: The Solution to Financial Services' Data Management Nightmare
Data mesh is not a technology or architecture, but an organizational and
operational paradigm designed to scale data in complex enterprises. It promotes
domain-oriented data ownership, where teams manage their data as a product,
using a self-service infrastructure and following federated governance
principles. In a data mesh, any team or department within an organization
becomes accountable for the quality, discoverability, and accessibility of the
data products they own. The concept emerged around five years ago as a response
to the bottlenecks and limitations created by centralized data engineering teams
acting as data gatekeepers. ... In a data mesh model, data ownership and
stewardship are assigned to the business domains that generate and use the data.
This means that teams such as credit risk, compliance, underwriting, or
investment analysis can take responsibility for designing and maintaining the
data products that meet their specific needs. ... Data mesh encourages clear
definitions of data products and ownership, which helps reduce the bottlenecks
often caused by fragmented data ownership or overloaded central teams. When
combined with modern data technologies — such as cloud-native platforms, data
virtualization layers, and orchestration tools — data mesh can help
organizations connect data across legacy mainframes, on-premises databases, and
cloud systems.
Accelerating Developer Velocity With Effective Platform Teams
Many platform engineering initiatives fail, not because of poor technology
choices, but because they miss the most critical component: genuine
collaboration. The most powerful internal developer platforms aren’t just
technology stacks; they’re relationship accelerators that fundamentally
transform the way teams work together. Effective platform teams have a deep
understanding of what a day in the life of a developer, security engineer or
operations specialist looks like. They know the pressures these teams face,
their performance metrics and the challenges that frustrate them most. ... The
core mission of platform teams is to enable faster software delivery by
eliminating complexity and cognitive load. Put simply: Make the right way the
easiest way. Developer experience extends beyond function; it’s about creating
delight and demonstrating that the platform team cares about the human
experience, not just technical capabilities. The best platforms craft natural,
intuitive interfaces that anticipate questions and incorporate error messages
that guide, rather than confuse. Platform engineering excellence comes from
making complex things appear simple. It’s not about building the most
sophisticated system; it’s about reducing complexity so developers can focus on
creating business value.
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