Tales from the jar side: Arc of AI conference, MCP fears, Tesla takedown day, DOGE to replace tons of COBOL with Java, and the usual social media posts
Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of March 23 - 30, 2025. This week I taught week 2 of my Spring in 3 Weeks course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform. I also taught my regular schedule at Trinity College (Hartford).
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Prompt Stuffing vs RAG
This week I’m headed to Austin, TX for the Arc Of AI conference.
My talk is on Prompt Stuffing vs RAG. My primary example is based on the rap feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, so that ought to be interesting. I’ll report more about that in next week’s newsletter.
Model Context Protocol
This week OpenAI announced that it was going to support the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard from Anthropic, which is potentially a big deal.
The basic idea is that it’s a formal way to allow AI models to talk to tools, and even each other, which is a necessary step on the way to AI agents. I looked at the spec, but it rapidly got complicated. I did add it to my Claude client running on my Mac, and now can do some file manipulation and some SQL database stuff (with SQLite 3). I also noticed that both LangChain4j and Spring AI have already added support for MCP servers and clients.
I’m still not sure about this, though. The post I included gives me the same vibes as SOAP-based XML web services back in the early 2000s, which grew rapidly and then collapsed into piles of complexity and angle brackets.
I think I’ll keep an eye on this and see how it goes rather than jump on the bandwagon now.
#TeslaTakedown Day
Like most people, I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with Elon Musk over the years, which got much worse when he bought the co-presidency and sicced his minions on massive operations he knows nothing about.
Speaking of knowing nothing, I remember a post (which I can’t find anymore, sadly) that said something like:
When Elon worked with rockets, I didn’t know anything about rockets, so I believed he knew what he was doing. When he talked about cars, I didn’t know anything about electric cars either, so again I believed him. But now he’s talking about software, and I’ve been working with software my whole career, so now it’s obvious he hasn’t a clue what he’s saying.
Believe me, that’s a cleaned-up version of the original post. My awakening to how truly idiotic Elon is started when he first introduced the horrible looking disaster that is the Cybertruck, and was foolish enough to throw steel balls at its windows in front of a live audience, nicely shattering them.
Everything I’ve learned about him since then has only made me more embarrassed that I ever thought he was intelligent, so say nothing of the fact he is clearly a Nazi. So over the years I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable owning a Tesla Model 3.
I ordered my Model 3 the first day they were available for pre-orders, which was April 1 (of course — this is Elon we’re talking about, and Elon thinks he’s way funnier than he actually is), 2016. We knew at the time the car wasn’t scheduled to be released until 2018, but I was willing to wait. I happened to be recording a video in Boston at the time, so I was able to head over to an actual Tesla dealer and put in my order right away. That put me ahead of all the online people, who weren’t able to order one until that evening.
I picked up my long-range, all-wheel drive Model 3 in August of 2018. My wife and I had to travel to New York to get it, because the auto dealers in Connecticut managed to block Tesla (and all other direct-to-consumer dealers) from having a showroom in the state. That’s still true, by the way. Legislating your business model must be nice when you can do it.
I have to admit that in the 6 1/2 years since then, the car has given me virtually no trouble at all. I did have to have a battery for the starter motor replaced, and I changed the tires once, but otherwise there has been no maintenance at all. The ride is not terribly smooth, but the car has always worked as advertised. Heck, I still like it. My problem is with the owner of the company, not the product.
By the first few months of this year, however, I couldn’t stand it anymore. A couple weeks ago I traveled to several dealers with my son, looking at alternatives. My son has had sales-related jobs for many years, so he knows the tricks, whereas I’m not good with salespeople in general. We wound up looking at a Subaru (which is the same EV that Toyota offers), a Honda, and a Hyundai, and I checked out a few more online. All of them were reasonable alternatives.
(The one I told my financial person I was going to buy was this Lucid Sapphire, which starts at a cool $249,000. He didn’t believe me, but, then again, he’s met me before.)
At a BMW dealer, however, I saw an i4 and heard about their lease rates, which brought everything into a much more affordable range. The one I got, shown above, doesn’t have a great range (around 280 miles, but we’ll see), but it is all-wheel drive and has all the cool bells and whistles. I got it on a three-year lease, so if the technologies change as much as I expect them to, I can re-evaluate my situation then.
I should note that when I talked to the BMW dealer, they told me they had eight (!) Teslas on the lot, showing how many people were eager to get rid of theirs. He did tell me about one person who bought a Cybertruck and was so fed up with the reaction of others that he traded it in for a Mercedes in less than a month, losing over $20K in the process. I’d have some empathy for that, but I’m afraid I can’t muster up any kind of sympathetic feelings toward the kind of person who would buy one of those monstrosities, especially now.
As for the hashtag #TeslaTakedown, it turns out that yesterday happened to be the Tesla Day of Action, where people were protesting at Tesla dealerships all over the country. That wouldn’t have been practical for me, given that Connecticut doesn’t really have any (with the exception of the Mohegan Sun reservation, which technically isn’t Connecticut). The fact that the car I bought happened to arrive yesterday was just a coincidence, but a welcome one.
Social Security is doomed
Oh, and speaking of Elon and software, this little gem came out this week:
Say what you will about COBOL, and lots of people have, but it’s the language of mainframes, and mainframes are still the greatest transaction processors ever created. Anyone stupid enough to think they can just replace tens of millions of lines of highly tuned production COBOL in a matter of months should never be allowed around anything more complicated than a can opener, and that only with adult supervision. You know they think they can use Grok (Elon’s production AI) to generate all the replacement code for them, and all I can say is I hope they have good source code control, because they’re going to need to undo mountains of changes after that mess. They’ll need tons of test cases, too — who am I kidding? The sorts of developers DOGE is hiring have no clue about good software practices. Holy bull in a china shop, Batman.
I’d say they deserve every bad thing that happens to them, but the millions of social security recipients who rely on those funds definitely don’t. I know this administration is filled with stupid people doing stupid things, but they have no idea about the fury they’re going to receive the first time they miss a social security payout.
This is going to get very, very ugly.
Toots and Skeets
Harsh but fair
Okay, I laughed. Kind of risky to post that, though, given this:
Probably not a pleasant story.
Maybe she was warned
The dog might have a point.
First Pulitzer awarded for lurking in a group chat
There were a whole series of these memes, as you might imagine.
This worked too:
The Signal people were on the ball:
Or, even better, this:
Yeah, I can see how that might be a problem.
Arnold voice with Italian accent
Reminds me of this, from Into the Spiderverse:
I used that in the lead up to Super Bowl LIV, of course. In case you don’t remember, that was about Dr Olivia Octavius, also known in the comics as Doc Ock.
For my interviewing seniors
That chicken really shouldn’t cross that road.
Finally, an actual Ewok joke
Have a great week everybody.
Last week:
Week 2 of Spring in 3 Weeks, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
My regular schedule at Trinity College (Hartford)
This week:
Arc of AI conference in Austin, TX
Week 3 of Spring in 3 Weeks, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
My regular schedule at Trinity College (Hartford)