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I help boards and senior leaders turn bold technology ideas into measurable business…
Articles by Bruce
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Nobody ever hired a builder because of their drop saw
Nobody ever hired a builder because of their drop saw
Imagine a builder knocking on your door. "Hi, I've got the latest Milwaukee drop saw, 305mm sliding compound, laser…
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Five Board-Level Questions to Ask Before Funding an AI Pilot
Five Board-Level Questions to Ask Before Funding an AI Pilot
Artificial intelligence is on the agenda in boardrooms everywhere from global corporations to New Zealand’s own…
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Things that must – and will – change in the NZ IT marketplace
Things that must – and will – change in the NZ IT marketplace
IT in New Zealand has already undergone major changes over the last few years. According to IDC New Zealand, the…
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Bruce Trevarthen shared thisFair warning - this one’s a bit technical. Those who know me well will know I don’t lean on that too often, but every now and then something crosses my desk that’s worth getting into the weeds on. This is one of those posts. If you're deploying LLMs, you already know the KV cache is an absolute memory hog. It’s the silent killer of long context windows. I’ve been looking into TurboQuant, and its approach to quantization is genuinely brilliant. KV cache memory pressure is the unglamorous bottleneck nobody wants to talk about when they’re pitching self-hosted LLM infrastructure. It quietly kills your VRAM budget long before context windows get interesting. TurboQuant has a genuinely clever approach to it. Rather than fighting outliers in the data distribution the way standard quantisation does, it sidesteps the problem entirely - random rotation plus polar coordinate encoding flattens the distribution enough that you can compress cache values down to 3-4 bits per value. For context, your KV cache is typically sitting in 16-bit or 32-bit floating point. Getting to 3-4 bits without the model noticing is the interesting part. Roughly 6x memory reduction. Up to 8x throughput on long context workloads. No meaningful accuracy loss on reasoning or code tasks. That’s a meaningful set of wins from what is essentially a smarter compression strategy. At 14th Street we spend a lot of time on this layer of the stack. The interesting engineering problems in LLM infrastructure aren’t usually the model itself - they’re the system-level constraints that determine whether running your own inference is actually viable. This is a good example of the kind of work that moves that needle. Worth a look if you’re building in this space. #LLMs #AIEngineering #SelfHostedAI #TurboQuant
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Bruce Trevarthen shared thisKia ora network. If you are wondering what the rise of AI actually means for software engineering, this recent piece from O'Reilly is well worth a read. The guts of it is that software engineering day jobs are shifting. Writing code from scratch is no longer the main event. Instead, developers are stepping up to manage and review AI generated code. AI is a fantastic tool for churning out boilerplate, but it can still be a bit of a loose unit when it comes to accuracy and making things up. Here are the main takeaways from the article. First, reviewing and validating code is now your new baseline. Instead of writing every line, your day-to-day job involves catching the hallucinations and making sure the output is actually solid before it gets anywhere near production. Second, because the grunt work is handled, the big picture is more critical than ever. We need to focus on system architecture, security, and solving real business problems rather than just memorising syntax. Finally, while having almost anyone prompt an AI to build a quick prototype is fun, real production systems still require the hard yards. Proper testing, scaling, and robust engineering principles are what stop the whole thing from falling over. At the end of the day, the fundamental skills still pay the bills. The tools have changed, but good design and clear requirements are what keep projects on track. Link to the full article is below. Keen to hear what developers think. Are you finding your role shifting more towards code review and architecture these days? https://lnkd.in/etrWuXf8 Next week: I'll talk about commercialisation, we are seeing the startup landscape balloon with iterations of the same solutions, the winners will be those who are market led and who have commercialised beyond "check out my cool thing".
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Bruce Trevarthen shared thisI've been watching my feed fill up with 'AI-powered!' posts and I keep thinking the same thing, nobody ever hired a builder because of their drop saw. So I wrote about it....Nobody ever hired a builder because of their drop sawNobody ever hired a builder because of their drop saw
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Bruce Trevarthen shared thisI've been eating breakfast at Scott's Epicurean for years, watching this thing go up across the street. Every few weeks, a bit more progress. Steel, concrete, that Hinuera stone going on the walls. And honestly? I never got that excited about it beyond an improvement for the city. I'd been to Founders Theatre plenty of times growing up. Heard this new one was 1,300 seats. Thought "yeah, it'll be good for Hamilton, nice to have something modern." That was about it. Last night I went to the opening. I was wrong. I've been inside a lot of theatres. Auckland's Town Hall, Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Aotea Centre, St James in Wellington. I was in the Sphere in Vegas a fairly recently too. I'm not saying the BNZ Theatre is the Sphere. But I am saying this: for a city of 192,000 people, what they've built here is genuinely impressive. The acoustics, the sightlines, the fit and finish on everything. The architects who designed this also did the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal Opera House, and you can tell. It doesn't feel like a regional venue. It just feels like a really good theatre. But the building wasn't the only thing that got me. The opening show was insane. Think about what they did here. Brand new $80 million facility. Staff have had access to the building for maybe a few weeks. Every politician, funder, and critic in the region watching. First night, everything on the line. The sensible thing would be to keep it simple. Don't overcomplicate it. Minimise the risk of something going wrong. Instead they put on a 450+ person extravaganza. Full live orchestra. Dance troupes. Acrobats. Kapa haka. Musicians. All of it coordinated together with lighting, sound, dozens of individual microphones that need to be switched on and off at exactly the right moment. The technical coordination alone would be a nightmare, let alone getting the performance right. And they nailed it. In a building most of them had barely rehearsed in. That's not luck. That's a region full of people who know what they're doing and aren't afraid to back themselves. Which kind of sums up Hamilton right now. Ten years ago we were around 150,000 people. Now we're pushing 192,000 and we've been the fastest growing city in the country three years running. 572 new businesses in the last 12 months. International flights back at the airport. Peacocke going in, Ruakura developing, the expressway done. People aren't just passing through anymore. They're moving here. And last night felt like the moment the city finally caught up with what it's becoming. I sat there watching 450 locals deliver a show that would hold its own anywhere, in a building that would hold its own anywhere, and I thought, we actually built this. This region. The trusts, the council, the donors, the community. Almost a decade of work and fundraising and planning, and they pulled it off. I was wrong to underestimate it. If you haven't been inside yet, go. #Hamilton #Waikato #BNZTheatre #NewZealand
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Bruce Trevarthen shared thisLatest project, had a lot of fun testing all the design variations on this one over the last few months, product development has its perks, haha. But I might need to test it again tomorrow, and on the weekend, and probably next week. Nothing beats perfect steak cooked over coals. https://lnkd.in/eMkQkfZJ #BackPackQ
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Bruce Trevarthen shared thisThe remote agent proxy mode is something I use to keep an eye on services within the private network, dev servers, switches, printers. It's handy on AWS and Azure too, not only giving you telemetry of the virtual server it is running on, but allowing you to monitor things in a private network without complicated firewall routes or expensive NAT gateways.Bruce Trevarthen shared thisMost monitoring tools struggle the moment your critical systems sit behind a firewall. That is where UptimeSquirrel’s Remote Agents step in. Our lightweight agents run inside your private network and securely connect out to the UptimeSquirrel cloud platform. No inbound ports. No complex VPNs. No extra infrastructure to maintain. You get full visibility of internal services like databases, internal APIs and line-of-business apps while keeping your security posture intact. If you are running IT across multiple offices, on-prem systems or hybrid environments, this is the simplest way to get dependable status checks without exposing anything to the internet. UptimeSquirrel makes monitoring boring again. The way it should be. Learn more at UptimeSquirrel.com
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Bruce Trevarthen shared thisSome well-integrated features coming to life on the platform, nice to have everything in one place.Bruce Trevarthen shared thisStop switching tabs. Start connecting ideas to action. We’ve all been there: You brainstorm in one app, track tasks in another, and document everything somewhere else. The context switching is killing your team's flow. Today, we’re changing that. We are thrilled to announce a massive evolution of the Syncaida platform. We’ve brought everything together into one seamless workspace. Introducing our new fully integrated suite: -- Real-time Whiteboards: Ideate visually and collaborate instantly. -- Structured Workboards: Manage tasks, sprints, and progress without the clutter. -- Actionable Wikis: The latest feature. Link directly to Workboard tasks right inside your documentation. Read a spec, click a task, and update status without ever leaving the page. It’s time to close the gap between thinking and doing. Swipe through to see the new tools in action... 👉 Ready to streamline your stack? Give the new features at Syncaida a try: www.syncaida.com #Productivity #SaaS #Collaboration #ProjectManagement #RemoteWork #Syncaida
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Bruce Trevarthen shared thisExcited to announce a new project: https://www.syncaida.com/ Your thoughts are welcome, the concept is to combine the most used collaboration elements (whiteboards and task lists) without all the fluff, then make it accessible (free) with paid (team) versions being reasonable. All comments and feature ideas are welcome 😊
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Bruce Trevarthen shared thisSay what you will about my week, but Sentry.io MCP is the best thing to happen to me this week - I absolutely love it. If you're developing software and not using this, rethink your toolchain. https://lnkd.in/g7nacXvbYes, Sentry has an MCP Server (...and it’s pretty good)Yes, Sentry has an MCP Server (...and it’s pretty good)
Bruce Trevarthen commented on a post
2w
This is very interesting Andrew, we do something similar in the tarrif models in Ambient Context, not identical but a similar intent. I’d be keen to chat with you about what you’re doing.
Bruce Trevarthen commented on a post
2w
The irony of the AI moment is that it might do more for human connection than any technology before it - not because it delivers it, but because it makes the absence of it impossible to ignore. When the hype clears, the hunger for real conversation, creative risk, and ideas that resist easy answers will be sharper than ever.
Bruce Trevarthen replied to a comment
1mo
Stephen Ponsford Don’t get me wrong, agentic is absolutely and entirely how code gets written now. Anthropic themselves admit to 100% of their code being written by Claude. That makes perfect sense, but that’s not the ensemble that is Software Engineering.
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Bruce Trevarthen reacted on thisBruce Trevarthen reacted on thisThanks to Heather Claycomb, MBA, APR, FPRINZ from HMC for having me and Richard Rennie on the Crunch podcast. Here, a couple of industry veterans discuss the latest in rural media. Both of us can remember when we only had three TV channels! Worth a listen. https://lnkd.in/epSKC_X5
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Bruce Trevarthen reacted on thisBruce Trevarthen reacted on thisBig boost for the Waikato ✈️ A $9.8M upgrade to extend Hamilton Airport’s runway is underway, backed by a $6.5M government loan. This will strengthen resilience for the region and New Zealand’s aviation network. With an extra 255m added, the runway will reach 2,450m, opening the door for larger aircraft like B787s and A330s to land and take off. Another feather in the cap for our airport, connectivity and growth. Well done Mark Morgan and team - Hamilton Airport NZ.
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Bruce Trevarthen reacted on thisI posted a note yesterday of support for a reset of how we treat digital in primary care as a critical infrastructure and compared by analogy the contrast with our building and city planning regulations. https://lnkd.in/exi8gWaa There are to be fair a lot of challenges with building industry and planning and related regulatory framework, and am not suggesting to mimic. There, however, are I believe genuine learnings for the digital world in health. Firstly In the world of building, we accept that there are some things that are complex and not reasonable for lay-person to assess. Yet our in privacy obligations and our present digital guidance on health IT, we have explicitly placed the burden of assessment and the evidence on our health providers. In building and planning there are formal authorities, standards are co-developed with industry. Compliance costs and certification costs are explicit. There is little of these in place in a structured way in digital in health nor has we as a digital health community come together to progress as a community. We are quick to respond, but slow to collaborate. However, I think it is well past time to have an open discussion as a digital community in health, including our regulators, our stakeholders and importantly those we serve about: - What is reasonable, - who should assess and against what standard, - how much or little regulation should we have, what are the objective standards, - and importantly how much cost is too much or too little. Am hopeful now is the time to reset and engage as a health community in this critical topic.
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Bruce Trevarthen liked thisSuch a privilege to be in Wellington today presenting on AI for the platform.org.nz annual conference. A bit intimidating to be speaking after the inspiring Dr Mai Chen Dr Frances Hughes and the honourable Matt Doocey. Great audience and really engaged with some genuinely thoughtful questions.Home - Platform Trust | Growing healthy and connected communitiesHome - Platform Trust | Growing healthy and connected communities
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Bruce Trevarthen liked thisGreat reflections from Dylan in this articleBruce Trevarthen liked thisAs someone who works in data, my concern with AI has always been whether the productivity it creates actually goes anywhere useful. I have written an article about the research behind why most efficiency gains are being absorbed rather than directed, what's actually helped in our team, and why I think NZ is getting the productivity conversation wrong. #AI #Productivity #FutureOfWork #NewZealand #Leadership #Data
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Bruce Trevarthen liked thisIt's free, why would I pay for an AI tools when my staff can use for free? ⚠️ Your staff are cutting and pasting and uploading your confidential and likely private data into a platform. That data in full or summary stays in that platform and under the employee or contractors control. ⚠️ Your company or organisation is legally responsible for the data you no longer control. ⚠️ For professional services companies, your clients details, names, addresses, topics of issue and opportunity are all not in your control. ⚠️ Even if you get your employee or contractor to delete all chats, files, projects, code that they have uploaded, it is highly probable the AI toll will still "remember" the key details to offer them back to the employee or contractor later, even if unintended. So... rather than ban it, I think AI has now become so ubiquitous that if you are aware of the above and it matters to your organisation, almost all organisations will shortly if not already be providing an organisation provided and assured AI tool. It isn't in my view now an option not to.
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Bruce Trevarthen reacted on thisBruce Trevarthen reacted on thisWhat a great privilege to be a sponsor of the Tauranga Business Chamber business awards. Thanks to Matt Cowley and the team for having us. And a big congratulations to the team at Nomu Matcha for winning the Marketing Impact Award. What a great story. Very proud to sponsor the award and create the lovely design work for the event. We aim to continue being part of the thriving Tauranga economy. For Tauranga and for King St, the best days are ahead. #businessexcellence
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Bruce Trevarthen reacted on thisBruce Trevarthen reacted on thisProductive individuals do not make productive firms. Most AI products evoke the feeling of being productive without driving value. The publicised AI use you see is individuals "productivity-maxxing" on Twitter or in company Slack channels, with zero real impact on the organisation. The "services as software" motif points in the right direction but offers no blueprint. The shift is building the technology and the institution together. Productive organisations need "Institutional Intelligence." The assembly line of tomorrow. -- Repost to help leaders see past the productivity theatre Follow me Chris Parsons for practical AI insights Try my newsletter AI Leaders Newsletter by Chris Parsons for weekly hands-on AI content
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Institute of Directors in New Zealand
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Steve Dickinson
Steve Dickinson
Unknown dependencies and incorrect assumptions about how things connect have been a constant issue across all of the IT projects I've worked on for the past 30+ years. <br>As CEO of HursleyHub I've made it my mission to find a better way for anyone involved in IT projects to gain insights and become knowledgable about these interdependences, bringing a sense of inclusion to everyone and supercharging decision-making skills. <br>A passion for technology and finding ways for people to untangle and understand complexity, combined with relentless optimism, are part of my DNA.
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