Martijn Veldkamp

Category: LinkedIn

  • Regulation is a design input

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    MartijnVeldkamp
    in ,

    Here in the Netherlands you do not decide how many cows you want and then go build a barn. It runs the other way around, and it is a little bit brutal process about it. Your land has a so called phosphate allowance. The manure rules, the nitrogen rules, the whole beloved circus of mestwetgeving,…

  • The fragility you can already see

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    MartijnVeldkamp
    in ,

    Every year around now I walk the fields before the first proper autumn storm rolls in off the sea. Not for anything romantic. The horses have leaned on something they were not supposed to lean on, and there is a post near the back fence that has been quietly rotting since spring. I know the…

  • The muscle you decided NOT to build

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    MartijnVeldkamp
    in ,

    We keep 10 chickens, well 9, because one has run off to hide somewhere and we only see her every couple of weeks. But they taught me something I keep dragging into work conversations where it does not obviously belong. We have raised a batch from eggs, got some chickens from neighbours, some migrated our…

  • You bought a logo, not the understanding

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    MartijnVeldkamp
    in ,

    You can buy a company’s code, its customers and its logo in an afternoon (well sort of, you know what I mean). What you cannot buy, is the reason any of it was built the way it was. Twice in my career I’ve watched a company buy another company mostly for a logo and the…

  • Gratis af te halen

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    MartijnVeldkamp
    in ,

    After I got back from camping and rediscovered that tap water is a miracle (last week’s story), I did the other summer ritual, I cleared out the barn. Which is how I ended up with a perfectly good wooden cabinet, a bicycle, and a box of tools I was never going to use again, and…

  • Luxury Amnesia

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    MartijnVeldkamp
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    Every summer I do something that, on paper, makes no sense. I leave a farm that has hot water, rain shower, a real bed, and three horses who expect breakfast, and I go sleep in a field, on purpose, in a tent. Where the water comes out of a communal tap forty meters away and…

  • LinkedIn respects your privacy

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    MartijnVeldkamp
    in ,

    There is a fence near where I walk the dogs. It runs about fifteen meters along the edge of a field and then simply stops. It connects to nothing, it keeps nothing in and nothing out. On both sides is the same wet Dutch grass and the same indifferent sheep. For years I have looked…

  • Did anyone brief the Agent?

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    MartijnVeldkamp
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    In January 2024, a DPD chatbot told a customer, in writing, that DPD was the worst delivery company in the world. The customer had asked it to. The chatbot agreed, enthusiastically, and then wrote a poem about it. Nobody had run it through media training That is the sentence that should haunt every technology leader…

  • The Metric that eats itself

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    MartijnVeldkamp
    in ,

    There is a slide that has been appearing in decks lately. It has a bar chart. The X-axis is team names or business units. The Y-axis is tokens consumed. There is a goal line. Some bars are red. The slide is usually called something like “AI Adoption Dashboard” or “Generative AI Utilization” or my personal…

  • The Delegation Illusion

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    MartijnVeldkamp
    in ,

    I asked my AI assistant to sort my email and hand them over to new director of Vrienden van de Alk. It archived 200 messages, declined three meetings, and replied to an email with a question about project status with a synthesized summary that was technically accurate and contextually completely wrong. It had processed my…