🌶️ Hot Fudge Sunday for 2025-10-05

Last Week

Last week, Jason Pullo at ESP, a NexusTek company shared deep hospitality industry insights in Now Showing: Front Row for Hospitality IT’s Greatest Challenges and From Farm to Table to Tech: The Secret Sauce for Today’s Restaurant Success.

https://www.nexustek.com/insights/restaurant-technology-success-esp-nexustek

https://www.nexustek.com/insights/hospitality-it-challenges-now-showing

NexusTek also detailed the The Goldilocks Zone of Cyber Risk: Why Mid-Market Is “Just Right” for Hackers

https://www.nexustek.com/insights/mid-market-cybersecurity-risks-goldilocks-zone

I also concluded a lighthearted poll on VMware by Broadcom alternatives with an interesting result. 🥃

This Week

After I caught up on ideas and execution from my post analysis for my GoToSocial feed, I looked at build times for my blog creeping up to the 15 minute mark. This week I’ll be looking into profiling time spent in @11ty/eleventy-fetch and @11ty/eleventy-img to see if I can optimize while leveraging @11ty/eleventy-cache-assets.

As of today, I have 404 external images from 25 unique domains primarily due to migrating between newsletter platforms over the years.

Domain (FQDN)                            Image Count
---------------------------------------- -----------
assets.buttondown.email                  302
buttondown-attachments.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com 40
images.unsplash.com                      18
cuthrell.com                             17
live.staticflickr.com                    5
substackcdn.com                          3
upload.wikimedia.org                     1
storage.googleapis.com                   1
www.alcf.anl.gov                         1
spectrum.ieee.org                        1
media.licdn.com                          1
help.apple.com                           1
ieeexplore.ieee.org                      1
i.ebayimg.com                            1
www.cnet.com                             1
news.microsoft.com                       1
oxide-computer.imgix.net                 1
d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net            1
www.insightpartners.com                  1
kstatic.googleusercontent.com            1
assets-global.website-files.com          1
files.mastodon.social                    1
api.netlify.com                          1
www.fooddive.com                         1
buttondown-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com  1

So, a week of decisions and actions awaits!

📈 Markets Monday for 2025-09-29

Data storage, digital assets, sports, and insurance appear to be the spotlight themes or memes.

SymbolCompany Name% Change
SNDKSanDisk Corp+14.43%
ETSYEtsy Inc+13.67%
MARAMARA Holdings Inc+13.56%
CLSKCleanSpark Inc+12.84%
CIFRCipher Mining Inc+9.33%
IRENIREN Ltd+8.86%
WDCWestern Digital Corp+8.45%
INODInnodata Inc+7.14%
WULFTerawulf Inc+6.64%
COINCoinbase Global Inc+6.41%
BTDRBitdeer Technologies Group+6.12%
LMNDLemonade Inc+5.41%
MSTRStrategy Inc Class A+5.32%
STXSeagate Technology Holdings PLC+5.08%
GENIGenius Sports Ltd+5.06%
TTDThe Trade Desk Inc+5.04%

🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday for 2025-09-30

💰 + 🤖 Funding for AI-anything companies continues.

🤪 Wacky Wednesday for 2025-10-01

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbO1z13WP8o

Sidebar… I was reminded of a conversation I had years ago at SXSW, well before the democratization of video production AI. At one of those wacky crossover Interactive+Film+Gaming parties, I spoke with a young filmmaker who had interesting ideas about the future of movies and AI. This filmmaker’s concept was particularly intriguing: a “choose your own adventure” movie where the script would dynamically tailor itself to the viewer’s choices and preferences. In effect, what today would be the prompt is the pre-scaffolded LLM script, and the prompt is influenced by your taste graph (memory) and storytelling junction inputs (HITL). Long live the nepo baby filmmakers in the style of Dr. Ana Stelline.

I captured some of my thoughts back in 2019 1 but like much of my older content, the formatting is wackier than I’d prefer. I’m slowly going back and fixing it to look more like Markdown than HTML. LinkedIn has its moments, though. 2

🔙 Throwback Thursday for 2025-10-02

Let’s see what was happening on this day in years past.

5 Years Ago: October 2, 2020

👻 CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter were called to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee just before Halloween.

10 Years Ago: October 2, 2015

🄶 Google becomes a subsidiary of Alphabet.

15 Years Ago: October 2, 2010

🛜 AT&T and T-Mobile announced mobile cellular data and WiFi connectivity in NYC Subway stations.

✅ Final Thoughts Friday for 2025-10-03

The biggest story this week is the (new) biggest private equity deal in history for a familiar name… Silver Lake.

And now… a similar playbook is running

The week saw the acquisition of video game giant Electronic Arts (EA). A consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and private equity firm Silver Lake is taking the company private for approximately $55 B.

https://www.techmeme.com/250929/p16#250929p16

Why (new) biggest?

Back in my days at VCE, the VMware, Cisco, and EMC relationship became more one-sided when we became an EMC Federation company in 2015. Later that same year, we were acquired again by Michael Dell and… private equity firm Silver Lake to become Dell Technologies in what was the biggest deal ever at that time.

https://fudge.org/archive/my-fifth-year-at-vce/

🔮 Sneak Peak Saturday for 2025-10-04

I try to avoid political discourse in my newsletter and writing. This week, I cannot. As I sifted through the Friday news cycle for stories meant to be forgotten by Monday, it became clear that in the world of peak patronizing publishing, Washington, D.C., has served up a masterclass in burying news.

While the loud, headline-grabbing drama of our U.S. government shutdown dominated the week, the truly messy consequences were saved for a quiet Friday morning reveal. Indeed, truth is stranger and increasingly more disappointing than fiction.

“We’ve been trying to reach you about your Expired Auto Warranty Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act”

Let’s inspect the blinking engine maintenance light story that slipped into the news stream while everyone was still processing the week’s political theater and hand-wringing.

https://www.techmeme.com/251003/p11#a251003p11

On the surface, this might look like a dry, procedural update. But that’s precisely the point. This isn’t just procedure; it’s a critical failure of government with national security implications, and its timing is exquisitely strategic.

This is a political news dump, not a corporate one, but it follows the same playbook. Here’s why:

  1. Delayed Impact: Had this been a headline on Wednesday, it would have added a terrifying national security dimension to the shutdown debate. By Friday, it’s just another piece of news in a week full of “flood the zone” shenanigans.

  2. Conflation Complexity: Let’s be honest, “CISA” as a four-letter word doesn’t make for a catchy, outrage-inducing headline. Worse, it sounds like bureaucratic alphabet soup and a frustrating game of acronym overloading because context really does matter. The context of CISA (Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act) is very different from CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency). Was this copypasta acronym use intentional? Great question, but it ultimately does not matter. Either way, the dry, technical nature of the subject matter is used to obfuscate the messy reality: that the legal framework for information sharing regarding cyber attacks was allowed to simply evaporate due to political infighting.

  3. Reinforced Trope: This story is presented as an almost unavoidable, bureaucratic consequence of the shutdown. It normalizes an arguably catastrophic failure. The underlying cliché is that “oh shucks golly gee whiz y’all, this is just how Washington works.” It’s peak patronizing because it assumes the public is too jaded or distracted by the shutdown spectacle to grasp the severe implications of this specific failure. The message is, “Yes, this is bad, but it’s just part of the messy process, go back to sleep America,” when it should have been updated in an enduring non-partisan partnership model that reflects our modern threat landscape.

In truth, there are other bills to replace CISA (A for Act). Hopefully the acronym is eventually changed to a more clever backronym such as Liability for Immediate Cybersecurity Event Sharing National Enforcement (LICENSE) Act that would make expiration concerns a bit more on the nose.

#OpenToWork Weekly

I participated in a #NeverSearchAlone #JSC after rebooting Cuthrell Consulting and joining NexusTek.

I added those #OpenToWork from my LinkedIn network to this newsletter. Over time, we’ve grown an Alumni 🎉 section for those that transitioned to their next career adventure.

Alumni 🎉

Those in my network that are #OpenToWork:

View this page on GitHub.

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