AI, Rights & Responsibility: What Are We Giving Up? | TSG Ep. 873

Hey, everyone. Happy July 4th. Let Freedom Ring Freedom.

You're watching Text On Gain. Hi everyone, it's Alan Chival here for Tech Strung Gang. Hey, day before July 4th, it's our last show of the week.

We won't be on tomorrow as we celebrate freedom in its many forms. And, you know, freedom could be like a, like a Jonathan Livingston seagull thing. If you, if you let it go and it comes back to you, it's yours.

If it doesn't, it never was. And it's not something, you know, from, uh, many of us, we, we've taken it for granted living in, let's call 'em Western democracies, uh, personal freedoms and freedoms to do many things. And, you know, this is a year where I think we need to reflect and say, uh, what's that freedom worth to me?

Right? Am I willing to give up freedoms? But anyway, we'll talk more about it.

We've got that and more. We've got some healthcare cyber news on here and some GI ops news and more. We've got a great panel to talk to you about it with.

Let me introduce you. They've been on before. So you know, these folks out west.

We've, we've got the, uh, the czar of the Valley, John Swartz up in Canada, our Canadian DevOps leader, Garima b Powell, although she's based in Canada, to be fair. Ri Garima's, a worldwide DevOps leader, actually a big CD foundation, uh, leader as well. And then of course we have the dean in New York, Mike Ard.

Welcome, welcome guys. So Mike, it's another July 4th. Uh, it's rain.

It's supposed to rain down here. I was kind of bummed out. I wanted to go see some fireworks tomorrow night.

But really, July 4th isn't just about the fireworks, is it? Well, I hope not. There's more to it.

But, you know, it's interesting, you have this essay that's on Textron ai and I encourage everybody to go read it. And at least I feel like we're kinda on the, on the cusp here of having to reexamine the social contract by which we all kinda live. And, um, some of the question is, is to what degree is AI going to just be something we turn loose or do we need to come to terms with some way to kind of reconcile or manage this thing in a way that, uh, respects everybody else's rights?

And what's the definition of that? And John, of course, has had a piece talking about how there was an effort to, uh, limit the state's ability to regulate AI that was abandoned in this recent big, beautiful bill at the last moment. But, um, you know, walk us through your reasoning here.

Sure. So you, you mentioned the social contract, Mike, and, and there is, right, if I was a political science history major, and you know, we learned a lot about Rousseau and Locke and Voltaire and some of the other Philis Phil philosophers that our founding fathers here in the US kinda looked at, uh, Montague in, in how, in how they fashioned our social contract, right? We have, we have some principles in the US that, well, we had some principles in the us things like your rights end at the tip of my nose, right?

You could do what you want as long as it doesn't infringe on my rights. Things like better. 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man goes, goes to jail.

Um, personal freedoms, freedoms around economics, around, you know, the, one of the great things about the United States, and quite frankly, you know, modern Western civilization is economic mobility. We, and created more middle class people than the world's ever seen. Um, but every, every, you know, there are boundary points and there are forks in the road that we come to and some bigger than others.

And it seems like AI is one of these things that has the potential to be bigger. The internet, certainly as big as anything since the internet. 'cause when you think about it, the internet has wrought all kinds of change to our freedoms and good and bad ways.

We all thought it was great that everybody can have a soapbox to go off and talk about and give their opinions. But we forgot that opinions are opinions and facts are facts, and we're still dealing with the repercussions of that. Now, AI promises to have maybe even a bigger effect than the internet on our, what we do, how we do it on our freedoms.

Uh, you know, they always say about Singapore, for instance, Singapore has had great stability, security, prosperity, and they probably have traded off some personal freedoms. And the people who were okay with that, it was their social contract. Places like China, you know, where we have a less personal freedoms perhaps, right?

And the, and the government, uh, is more involved in our day-to-day activities. But, you know, we're past the point of pointing to China as the bad example. And we're somehow that still that shining city on the hill that Ronald Reagan spoke about.

Well, I don't know if that city is quite as shiny when it comes to talking about our freedoms. And AI has the potential to make it a lot less shiny. But here's the beauty of it.

AI also has the potential to make it brilliant, brilliantly shiny things it could do to equal the playing field. To give everyone an opportunity to bring more, to do more. Is there, I think it's up to us and not our government, us each one of you watching this, it's up to us to figure out what's the right use for ai.

How do we all leverage ai? What can we do to make AI make our lives better? Not take our jobs away, not increase the police state.

You know, with, we've spoken about many of these topics over the last couple weeks and months, but what can we do to make our lives better using AI to let freedom ring? And that, that's the really the point of my essay that I wrote. I do encourage you to watch it, but I think this is gonna be a pivotal year, a year to three years where we gotta figure this out.

'cause it could go either way, right? It's, I feel like we're at midfield and I'm flipping the coin. And John, you could call heads or tails.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, we're early. I mean, we're early in the narrative about ai and this one thing about this technology that I haven't really seen from many others is how polarizing it can be.

Like there are stark opinions or, uh, points of view, whether it's, it can be incredibly good or incredibly bad. I, I think like everything else, it will end up a mixture of both. And I think for the most part, it's gonna be positive.

I think our healthcare will be better, transportation's gonna get better content, democratization of, of certain people and things. But the always, the issue I think with this, as well as with the internet and previous technologies, is that people need to be responsible in their use of it. And I think as, as we've seen, they, they, they try to figure out a way or an in on, on, um, profiting from it, whether through illegal activities or just the land barrs that we have right now.

So it's gonna develop, I mean, it's, I think you're right al I think the next two to three years we're gonna really have a good definition of how this is work works within our, our homes or, or our, our workplaces. I think it's gonna be predominantly a positive experience, but right now we're kind of in the, um, the, the, uh, the boogeyman phase where it can do so many things badly or it can do so many things incredibly well. So we'll see.

See, Is this gonna be a social contract that we all agree to? Or am I someday just gonna go up on some website somewhere and train a bunch of AI agents to defend my inalienable rights at the expense of everybody else, and everybody else will do the same, and then we'll just fight it out on the web or in ether somewhere. I think that's a good point.

I mean, I think, I think we kind of do that right now, and I think social media ramped that up. So we're already accustomed to it. Maybe it intensifies with ai and that's kind of terrifying because I think of what you could do with ai, um, much far farther beyond anything that you could do with the internet or Facebook or X or what have you.

I think of DeepFakes, I think of like these influences, not just in our personal lives, but our, our own personal expense in terms of scams. Um, it's gonna be like a wild west. Yeah.

And I think we're gonna probably need some sort of regulation, which kind of brings me to this big beautiful bill act, which would've basically done away with any type of state laws or state regulation for a decade. Thank God that that went by the wayside. I I mean, ironically, even the most conservative Republicans, like Marsha Blackburn wouldn't stand for it.

Um, even Ted to, to Ted Cruz, all people. But it, it, you're right, Mike. I mean, this is, this is a danger we are going to face and it will happen.

It's just the extent of what's gonna happen and how farther it may perhaps divides us or brings us together. You know, Mike, you mentioned in alienable rights and we take for granted what we think those inalienable rights, right? Our creator hasn't doubted us with inalienable rights among them, you know, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I think I got that just about right. Um, I think we're at a point where we've gotta decide, really, what are those inalienable rights? I mean, if I could be stopped by some mass men in the street who, who claim to be, and maybe are in fact federal agents, but don't have any idea, refuse to give you ID, and they got masks and guns.

Well, I thought we had inalienable rights around that, right? We have a bill of rights, illegal search and seizures, stuff like this, habeas corpus things that our system has been built on. If we're gonna start trading those or, or cheapening those and let AI infringe on those inalienable rights, well then they're not inalienable anymore, right?

And that, that's the key. Johnny, you point about the big beautiful bill. I'll point out, it's not quite signed yet and it's not quite done.

It was kicked back to, had the house. We don't know if this is gonna stay in or not. But, but here's the thing about it.

What it really was is it precluded, precluded the individual states from doing anything on ai, right? It was, it carved out for the federal government. And under the current administration, federal government mean that that could be, you know, again, back to your inalienable rights.

That could be a scary thing. Now, there's a little bit more history though. It wasn't as clean as, as just, oh, we're gonna take it out.

Initially, the Senate said, well, there's a little too crazy, just a flat out carving out of no state action for 10 years. So the initial version of the bill said, well, no, the states can, can legislate around ai, but if they do, they forfeit their rights to this 500 billion, 500 billion, let me say it again, 500 billion pot of money that if you're going to use it for broadband or ai, you forfeit your right to that $500 billion if you're gonna legislate around ai, which was, I guess, a little better than just flat out pro prohibiting them from doing it. Right.

A little bit more of a carrot than a stick, you know? And, and traditionally states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, they don't care about the money. They don't spend it on that anyway.

But even as you say, John Marsha Blackburn, who I don't think I've ever agreed with, one thing she's ever said publicly spoke up and said, wait a second, here's what she really said on the floor of the Senate. The federal government has a terrible record, a terrible record of, of legislating this stuff. Where's the real action taking place?

At the state level? It's the states who are consistently here in the us. 'cause we don't have the political will nationally to get things done.

It's the states who've come out with cybersecurity regulations, privacy regulations, trying to draw the line on where our inalienable rights cannot be trampled on, and to prohibit them from doing it. Because we think somehow the federal government's going to do it is really having no AI legislation at all. And we need to keep the states involved.

Now, whether the house will buy that or not, John, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, we're gonna, I mean, because of the, when we're we're filming this, it's probably gonna happen. It happens or didn't happen on Wednesday, but who knows.

But the interesting thing about Blackburn, you're right, Alan, I I have exactly the same opinion. I probably don't agree with her on 99% of what she, her thoughts are, but I have interviewed her and I found her actually to be a voice of reason in terms of what the federal government doesn't do, because the federal government has been absolutely hopeless, including anything like online privacy, AI related legislation. I, I think it'll be la say Fair any 20 years.

Yeah. I mean, 25, uh, Copa, it's like the last major or only significant, uh, related technology regulation they've done involving privacy or, or the internet. So, um, you know, it's good, it's interesting.

It's not, it's really a very weird bipartisan viewpoints from extremely liberal, extremely conservative folks tend to be in agreement on some of these things. So it's really hard to pin down. But, um, you know, the influence too, of Sam Altman and, you know, he testified in May about this, uh, about latest about regulation of, of ai, and he made a very strong argument against it, obviously, because his company is part of, uh, Stargate, the $500 billion AI infrastructure movement, which is kind of plotting along.

Um, that scares me. That's actually what scares me is the influence of some of these folks, especially in the tech side and their influence on, on government and, and the, the Trump administration. So The, that's, you Guys realize the rest of the world is kinda looking at the, this whole conversation in scratching its head.

Because in places like Canada, for instance, the assumption is, is that if the authority is not expressly given in the provinces, it resides in the hands of the federal government. Whereas we're the kind of the only country that has the opposite of that, and everybody else around the world is going, what are you guys debating? But, but here's the thing, and Garima, you may or may not be up on it, I don't know.

Canada's actually already enunciating some regulation around AI and so forth Privacy. I'll provide a technologist view on this because, you know, from a technology standpoint, I see there is a rise in a new role or a new era for tech diplomacy because a lot of these issues are kind of, you know, uh, related to the demography, the people sentiment. And, you know, the tech diplomacy is needed in certain aspects to ensure that there is a balance in how innovation can drive, you know, uh, you know, your healthcare forward, your digital infrastructure forward, but at the same time does not hurt, you know, the community sentiments, you know, protect the rights, uh, the privacy rights, uh, building data ethics and the frameworks.

So I think there's a lot needs to be done before we enforce, uh, these policies and decisions around, uh, a wider or broader community. So from a tech perspective, I believe that there is a lot of, uh, tech diplomacy needed in this. And, you know, even in Canada, we have different provinces, different needs, different needs of digital infrastructure.

So, I mean, there's no straightforward answer to this, but yes, again, the question is, you know, when you talk about democratization, who is accountable? You know something when something goes bad, right? Yep.

So that, that's the question to be answered. And of course, the eu, the eus out ahead on this, right? The EU iss already spoken and, and acting on it.

But to your point, Mike and, and John about, you know, the $500 billion, um, project, what's it, spotlight? Searchlight, Stargate. Stargate SG one, right?

Stargate. What, what's interesting here, right? It recently came out, nothing's been done with Stargate yet, and nothing's been done.

There was a, in typical fashion of, of the administration, we had, we had bright lights, big city press conference, made all kinds of announcements. Nothing's been done. All of these pledges and everything else sound great.

In the meantime, the government's gonna put a $500 billion fund into ai. So 500 billion of, you know, of government money perhaps going in there. You know, let's not lose sight that this big beautiful bill conservatively adds three, three and a half trillion dollars to our already high deficit three and a half trillion dollars to the deficit that will bring our debt to like 125% of our GDP.

And it's, it's done on the backs of, of taking out money from people's Medicaid and, and college financing and other things to give billionaires and millionaires great tax credit so they can invest in AI and things like this. Guys, I'm gonna end, we got to end this segment, but I'm gonna end it with this. It's July 4th.

People died and fought for your freedom. Don't stand by and let them take your freedoms away from you. That's all I'm gonna say on it.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back. You're watching Textron Gang, Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation.

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Hey, folks, we're back and we're continuing this conversation about politics and while also adding a little criminal element to it as well. 6 billion healthcare fraud scam. It's been going on for a while and involved all kinds of folks from nurses to doctors to, you know, full blown criminals.

And John, I gotta tell you, here's the thing that drives me crazy about this. 6 billion going out the back door somewhere. And I'm sure there's more of this, and I don't really mean to see and sound like, you know, I'm anti-government, but this is crazy.

I mean, for all the Doge investment and for all the stuff that we've been doing, can we just figure out how to maybe contain the fraud so that we have enough money to support the people we need to support? Yeah. Yeah.

I'm afraid that we we're gonna probably see more of this, uh, uh, because as we all know, when, uh, new te tech technology comes along or something that is existing is, is amplified, like the internet under ai, we're gonna see a lot of bad guys take advantage of the system. And here they definitely did. Um, there was this absolutely complex fraudulent schemes where these foreign operators, I, I think 30, nearly 30 people in Estonian Pakistan were part of this, uh, this transnational criminal organizations, um, were accused of buying medical supply companies to which they file false claims.

One of the things that, that jumped out at me, and it kind of refers to our first segment, was that executives with marketing companies in Pakistan allegedly used deepfake technology to create these fake recordings of Medicare patients who apparently were agreeing to receive certain healthcare products and then filing false claims. So there's a use, again, of, of ai. Um, at the same time, our government doesn't want us to do anything about that for now.

Um, again, as you said, Mike, um, criminals with the bad guys really do take advantage of, of technology because they, in a sense, are like the pioneers in its use in many ways. And then we try to counteract what they do. And, and the great irony, as you said, is Doge was all about efficiency.

Governments, uh, lack of getting rid of waste. Yet here we're seeing this incredible amount of waste that of all things involves Medicare, uh, at a time when we're talking about, about cutting those benefits for folks as part of a big, beautiful bill. So it's all kind of a crazy world, but it's not entirely surprising.

And my fear is that, um, healthcare, which I think has the most potential in terms of AI use, will also be a target. So it's gonna greatly benefit us down the road in terms of how we look at healthcare through ai, but we're also gonna probably encounter more schemes and scams and potential dangers to our, our, not just our health, but our pocketbook. Yeah, I, I'll, I'll jump in if it's okay.

By all means, I have more to say, but go ahead. How, how many people out of these 324 are gonna serve in Congress or the Senate one day? Because we, we've got our fair share serving right now who have been implicated, or their companies have been implicated, convicted, and had to pay for Medicare fraud.

Medicare fraud seems to be rampant. This is the latest, this is a big one, 14 point a half billion, but, you know, you can't throw the baby out with the bath water. But, you know, for all the noise about Doge and everything, and all these, you know, big cost cutters, seems like, you know, some work needs to be done in that system.

We gotta design a better mouse chop. Yeah, and that comes back to my next point, which I know we have this notion in the land of cybersecurity that we don't blame the victim, but you know what, I think in this case, there's some folks who work for these agencies that need to get fired. It's clearly somebody's asleep at the wheel, and at this tune of 14 billion plus, God knows how much else is going out there.

It's broken. So we need to kinda like really have a conversation regardless of whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, this system is fundamentally broken, needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. And maybe we need a commission to go do that.

That's bipartisan. And this is all they do. We, we don't do bipartisan commissions anymore.

That that's an issue. I think occasionally we can come up with an issue that maybe we can all agree on that this is just insane. Well, the, the problem is you're going to get one group that says the whole thing's broken, scrap it.

You're going to get another group that says, well, we can't scrap it because it's mission critical. People's lives depend on it, and there's gotta be a middle ground where, no, you're not gonna scrap it, but you're gonna make a pe. You know, this is the kind of thing, and I'm a child of my times, right?

I, I get this, but this is exactly the kind of thing where Bill Clinton would take Al Gore and Al Gore would lead that bipartisan commission, and they'd come up, maybe it'd take 18 months, and it wouldn't be on the headlines every day, but they'd come up with a plan for Medicare two, or whatever you want to call it, that would, would, would do things like this, right? We don't have those, you know, Lyndon Johnson was given a charter to build a space program, and we wound up in the moon in eight years, not because it's easy, because it's hard, right? Clinton gave Gore to reinvent government, and for the first time, and the only time in my lifetime, we actually ran budget surpluses.

When was the last time we did anything like that? That's what's needed here. And it's hurting folks in these red states more than it does.

It's where the, it's pretty clear that a lot of those folks are more dependent upon, i i Services. This isn't a red or blue issue. The fact that it's wrought with, you know, potential for fraud is, I don't think anyone argues.

I think the, the question is, is that a reason not to do it all together? Or what do you do to fix it? What do you do to fix it?

I mean, let, let's face it, we're, we're the last industrialized country that doesn't have socialized medicine anyway. And all these other countries figure out a way to do it. And in spite of what the media may tell you, they do it well, they do it well, we can't figure it out.

And, and we get this craziness. I mean, people, people complain about those services in Europe all the time, but last time I, they complain about our services too. But, you know, at the end of the day, the standard of healthcare in Europe and Canada and other places where they have socialized medicine is pretty damn good.

You know, I, the last time I was in Singapore, I, I, I cracked a tooth and I had to get a root canal, some of the best dental care, best equipment I ever had. I think it cost me, I don't know, $65 probably cost me a thousand dollars or more here. Right?

That's with insurance, right? With insurance, exactly. That's with my insurance.

So, you know, this nonsense that people complain, everybody complains, everybody. That's how, that's the nature of that beast. But I'm telling you that there's gotta be a better way.

I think it's unlike the whole climate too, is like we used to have a lot of bipartisan bills, like you mentioned Clinton and LBJ and all the legislation, especially with LBJ that was accomplished, and now it's, there's so much divisiveness. Um, we, going back to Clinton's administration and LBJ are talking about pragmatic, very smart people who knew how to get things done versus rank amateurs who are not especially brights. Yeah.

Which is the climate we're in now, or have been in now for, um, there will be eight. Well, But even, I mean, look, I don't want to just pick out democratic administrations. Ronald Reagan got things done, Reagan, I, I didn't agree with a lot of his positions, but he got things done bipartisan, poppy Bush did, right?

Well, Reagan was successful because Tip O'Neill was willing to have the conversation. Well, it takes two to tango, certainly it takes two. And, and, you know, look, I see what goes on in New York.

Not gonna get all political, but you see what goes on in New York City with this mayoral campaign and stuff, and, you know, can you blame people? Who should I vote for here? The guy who left the governor's mansion in disgrace, or this other guy who's a Democrat socialist, maybe anti-Semitic to boot who, you know, you're not giving them a choice.

All right, let me, let me vote for the, for the criminal. Who's in, who's in there now anyway, right? That's not a choice for people.

This isn't just a Republican issue. The, the, the, the blue states and the Democrats are just as guilty for failing to give people a a Oh, yeah. It's, it's a choice.

That's an issue for both parties. I mean, they can't work together. I mean, it's, it's not, you don't blame one side that we blame both sides.

It's, you know, and is it any wonder that no one wants these jobs? Right? Right.

I can even jump in here. Go ahead. Right.

So let's steer this away from political technology mess, right? So I think from a technology standpoint, uh, I spot two big problems in this. One is the scale, and the other one is sophistication.

So we have to tackle both of them, right? And when you look at like all these compliance checklist, uh, HIPAAs of the world and high techs of the world, I think this is a wake up call for them. You know, try to kind of also bring some money on the table.

Try to kind of introduce new sophisticated audits, checklist assessments, because the, the fraud at this scale, if it happened, I mean, technology can be a lever to put the positive side of all this, right? So how do you, um, control the supply chain, for example, what security controls you have in that I identity access management, if somebody is using defects, right? So all this can also bring some kind of positive, you know, revolution or evolution for healthcare in the technology side.

And I, I strongly advocate that somebody needs to look at the audit assessment and the, uh, HIPAAs of the world to see how we can improve this in the best of, you know, the Technology. I agree with you, gima. This isn't, at the end of the day, a technology issue.

This, this particular, you know, Medicare, there's no reason. And maybe that's what a panel would need to do. Put in design a better system, design a better system, do Not let a good crisis go into waste.

Come on. Alright, let's take a break. Let's get off the politics.

I promise you. We're back. Next.

We're giddy up GI ups. It's something safe. You're watching Textron gag.

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Hey, folks, we're back and Alan promised you a political free discussion, but I think he just lied, but we'll get back to you in a second. com, put together by the folks at Okta Post Deploy. And it's suggests that people are adopting GI Ops alongside new platforms.

So therefore, it's evolutionary and it's mainly being driven by the rise of things like Kubernetes, and then people are willing to reconsider their software engineering practices. There's also a whole conversation going on around platform engineering, but Karima, what's your take on what's going on here as GI UPS and platform engineering kind of, uh, joined to the hip somehow, orthogonal to each other, and what makes people actually change their workflows? Okay, so let's reflect on the findings of the report first, and I was looking at the report, uh, it seems that, uh, 660 software development professionals, uh, put their views onto this report.

93% said they have adopted Git ops in some way, shape, and form, right? And the maturity of that depends on different factors. There is also like an increase in adoption of GitHubs.

Uh, so there is, uh, a definite kind of rise of, you know, interest in the community. And GI tops has helped, you know, industry segments to kind of push the needle for reliability, um, auditability collaboration and all those kind of, uh, you know, good components which, uh, technology can bring forward. Traceability is another one, right?

So I think, uh, GitHubs has come a long way. I wouldn't say that GitHubs is a silver bullet though, because, you know, it has its own flaws. If you ask the community, I mean, the open source community is very vocal about things which doesn't work, or GitHubs doesn't fix, right?

So if you think about like large organizations with, you know, multiple repositories, siloed environments, there is a lot of challenge in onboarding to such kind of, you know, revolutionary change, right? So if you have seen the report, 7% also say that they would stop using GI Ops. I think they, these 7% work for large ecosystem or large enterprises and probably are, uh, stifled by the siloed environment and the ecosystem.

And there are many environments, uh, in like big enterprises, right? So there, they're where I think platform engineering comes, uh, as savior. And I, I also feel that, you know, platform engineering will not be a server bullet.

Um, as you say, I mean, it works for big enterprises to be honest. I mean, platform engineering, if you see like how, and who are the takers of the, this kind of movement is like big large enterprises, tier one customers, right? So those are people who will be, uh, you know, onboarding to that.

And, and of course, uh, if you think about the challenges which we have like spoken about from a GitHub's perspective, platform engineering could resolve those challenges in certain ex extent, and they can bring some advanced tooling, which I can talk a later, a little bit later. I, I also want, uh, other panelists to be contributing to this discussion. So I give it back to Mike, you, and maybe you can come back to me, uh, for some more future roadmap items.

Absolutely. Alan, I can't help but wonder sometimes when I look at all this stuff is, is this just like fashion trends and software engineering? We just kinda like bounce back and forth between things and, you know, this, this, this month, you know, it's wide lapels and, and thin tots.

You know, I don't want to sound like one of these old fogies who say, oh, there's nothing new under the sun, but there is nothing new. No, I'm kidding. There are new things.

But just a couple words here. First of all, this survey comes to us from Octopus Deploy. The people who acquired, uh, Codefresh, who are the people behind Argo, which is the main GI ops, uh, platform, open source platform, and there's, and they offer hosted GI ups.

Um, so, you know, you gotta take the findings, I think with a bit of a grain of salt. And so I, I would caution and, and mention that. Secondly though, you know, I was at Platform Con last week in, in, in the in-person day in New York City.

The virtual event went on all week, and there was an in-person day in London. You know, they used to say about platform engineering. Well, once you got your Kubernetes set up, it's all good, right?

That that was the beginning and the end of platform engineering. But no, it's, that's not, it's not just Kubernetes. The big emphasis in platform engineering now is on what we call IDP, right?

Internal development, internal developer platforms. And you are right, reemer, it's a big company game, right? Because you've gotta have enough developers to, to go develop a platform or use a platform that they're all going to use.

So you have some standardization. Now, part of that IDP extends into the DevOps CICD tail, if you will. And that's where the GI ops lies.

So this is right in the sweet spot for platform engineering. You are using Kubernetes, you got an IDP, why not incorporate, you know, GI UPS in there as your way to, to move that along. GI Ops has always been closely linked with, with Kubernetes, with Cloud Native, right?

Because the old CI CDs Jenkins, some of the older ones like that, didn't really work with Kubernetes and cloud native natively. Um, gis, GI ops did. So I, I do think in, in spite of the obvious bias of, of the company doing the survey, I think the results are pretty much show what the, where the market is, it is being adopted.

I think larger organizations that are using IDPs are using GI ops as part of that, and they, because they increasingly are using a cloud native architecture, microservices, and everything that goes with it. Yeah, I will actually add to this discussion because, you know, uh, whether it is platform engineering or, uh, GitHubs, you know, there's, so, like I start with GitHubs, like what key challenges which are not addressed by GitHubs, and then we can also discuss if they are, uh, addressed by platform engineering or not. So for example, the big challenge which we see from a practitioner's perspective is secure, uh, secrets management, for example, GitHub's has been struggling with that, uh, inherently, and it doesn't solve that problem of secure secret management, right?

So probably this is something which needs to be solved through GitHub's community itself, you know, the future roadmap item and, you know, how do you integrate, uh, many, uh, you know, environments and storing secrets and get, uh, you know, and making it safe, right? Um, another, uh, main problems when you see the adoption percentage is also related to branching and environment management. So to a certain extent, environment management can, like the problem can be solved by platform engineering, right?

But branching strategy is another issue, which probably platform engineering will not solve, but probably the community and the, the teams and the enterprise themselves have to think about a structure, how to create, like how to not to create an unnecessary complexity in the environment, right? So these are a few things and challenges, and if you think about, uh, portability or vendor lock in, maybe platform engineering, uh, is a good kind of savior in that context, because probably, uh, with GitHub's, uh, if, uh, this is a concern from the community that, you know, it's limiting portability or it's tightly coupling tools, I think platform engineering can also become some, some kind of, you know, um, change trigger in this, uh, visibility. And auditability, auditability, for example, is a big, uh, area because, you know, it's not very easy to relate what changes happened when, you know, live deployments happen.

It's, it's still kind of, uh, you know, in the inception stages of, you know, bringing that control and traceability with GitHubs. So hopefully the, this will be a future roadmap item in the GitHubs community, for example, where, uh, you know, we can have an AI assisted GI ops tooling to resolve these kind of problems. And if you remember, uh, our, like last discussion, Ellen, around MCP, right?

So the flux, uh, community has come up with an NCP server, for example, which integrates that, that capability and bring agent tech AI into the mix. So that's another area of, you know, um, looking at it from a GitHubs perspective, how do you make AI technology more accessible for GitHubs? And you know, what kind of ecosystem, uh, you know, uh, connections you can make.

So we can be more ecosystem centric. We have to have more, uh, flexibility in the approach how we are deploying this into a large ecosystem or large enterprise. I gi I leave you with these, uh, points because I think this will also give some indications of the work needed to be done in the community for the tops.

You know, Alan, we talk about these topics a lot, and there's always a conversation about all the things that need to be improved in the land of software engineering. And yet every morning I wake up and there's just tons and tons of applications that seem to be deployed and working. So like what, you know, is this just magic?

Because if you go to a business executive, he goes, what problem? The softwares, Well, you are right. You know, we are, we are generating, whether it be through AI or not, we generate more code and more applications every year than we did the year before by a wide number.

No doubt about it. But it's also because software and technology is becoming so much more important and ingrained into almost everything we do. So you need, you need more software, you need more applications.

And you know, we, we forget the whole idea of writing, you know, software and, and creating applications is what, 75 years old, right? It's not that old. And, and so it's still to a, it it's still more art than science, though.

I, I think we've made a lot of progress towards science, making it a science, not just an art. You know, it used to be developers basically crafted code and applications in like a, a vacuum, like a, like an old time craftsman in Europe working on wood or clocks or Swiss, you know, Swiss folks making watches. Where now it's, it's much more industrialized, it's much more scalable, it's much more, it's not that craftsman per se.

Hey, we all could be software developers in the world of ai, right? Um, so we're, you know, there, there's so much riding on our software. Every company's a software company.

Software is eating the world. There's so much at stake, of course, it's, it's continuous improvement, continuous Involvement. I mean, well, it's, uh, also not, uh, shy away from the fact that no tool, no platform can save a poorly designed software Yeah.

That this is true too. Crap in and scrap out. So how much of our software is poorly designed?

A lot of it just outta curiosity, A lot of it, and it can always be made better. That's, that's the nature of this beast. Mm-hmm.

But we're getting, so here's the good news. We're getting better every day, and we're, we're, you know, the science gets better, the, the best practices get better. And, and that's, you know, that's why we sit here and talk about these things.

Otherwise, we'd be talking politics all day. But if I'm a developer and I perceive myself to be an artisan, am I gonna really, you know, emotionally warm up to the notion of science? And we talked about this in previous shows, but who the hell wants to go to work in a factory in the first place?

Well, this is true, this is true, but I think, I think the generation of software developers who think of themselves as artisans, Look, I I I would say that, you know, as a software practitioner, I have the left hand side of the brain and the right hand side of the brain, right? So the left hand side of the brain is co-creation with new technology, more creative side of it. And this is, again, community driven collaboration.

And right hand side is more systematic, system oriented system architecture. All this like is required, uh, as an individual. So I think both sides have to grow together.

Agree. My, it does take my left brain and right brain argue with each other all day long, which is why you find myself seeming mumbling to myself down the hallway. Yeah, Well, but, but that's what it takes.

It takes, it takes a whole brain. Anyway, hey, we're over time. I got to, uh, end this one.

Um, John Reemer. Mike, thanks for joining today. Thank you for watching this episode of Textron Gang.

We do have a full, uh, uh, Textron TV schedule immediately following, so stay tuned for that. If you're watching this on the live stream, if you're watching this on, I don't know, Textron tv or the YouTube channel or the OTT, thank you for, for taking time to click in. We appreciate it.

As I mentioned, we will not be on, uh, Friday, tomorrow, Friday, uh, July 4th for, uh, independence Day here in the US and wherever you are, cherish your freedoms. Enjoy the weekend and until Monday then. This is Alan Schmo for Textron Gang.

Wear out.