What The Fudge for April 26, 2026: Waymos on the 101, Scaling the BIPC, and the SpaceX IPO Pivot

Welcome to What the Fudge for April 26th, 2026. Lots of 26s. I look at this week as one of those stories of look what happens when you get to move around a little bit and see what's going on. I'm fortunate to have a job that lets me travel on occasion, and I found myself going out to San Francisco and the Bay Area. So when I did that, One of the things I noticed was when I got there, I realized my schedule wasn't going to let me do what I wanted to do, which was use BART or Caltrain and, you know, some of the last mile services using Lyft. I'm a Lyft user primarily, but it, it was interesting because of what I noticed while I was in motion thinking about what I was going to do. And I ended up renting a car, which I don't often do when I travel, but I did rent a car this time because I knew I'd be back and forth in a place where Caltrain schedules, BART schedules, and trying to wait for the Lyft to show up probably wouldn't have worked for my schedule. So kind of a unique situation. But anyway, I noticed lots and lots of Waymo vehicles on the 101, and that was something I was not expecting. I assumed that the Waymo vehicles, you know, these autonomous driving systems were limited to San Francisco, meaning the city areas, or possibly in the non-highway areas. So that was, that was quite a shock for me to see that on the road. And it got me thinking, there's Roy Amara, I think, is the person that said this thing about we, we tend to overestimate what can happen in a few years and we vastly underestimate underestimate what can happen in a decade or more. So that's sort of what happened to me. But it was an interesting data point. I had not really considered that since I've been away from San Francisco. You know, back in those days when I lived there, it was still— it used to be UberCab, then it became Uber. So the whole notion of summoning a car using a mobile device, you know, your phone, your iPhone or whatever, was still kind of cool. This is back in the day. Now we sort of take it for granted, but now I sort of was not calibrated for just how, how much progress had taken place in autonomous driving. I've certainly seen it when I've, you know, visited the Strip in Las Vegas and seen some of these limited edition offers where you have either a Zoox vehicle or a Waymo vehicle, etc., that might pick you up. And I've certainly seen Waymos around, you know, Austin, Texas, etc. But I just seeing those autonomous vehicles barreling down the 101, um, was, was really, uh, interesting. So anyway, this week all things Agentic AI shifted, and this is, this is true of what I heard at the Qlik Connect, um, in the prior update I had mentioned, as well as this week just in general in the news cycle, where this notion of as you bring in Agentic AI into the workplace, how does that shift where work takes place, and more importantly, where does risk begin and end? So a lot of stories around what's happening with the IDP side, which is the internal developer platform of use for these non-human agents. These might be kind of first-class users interacting directly with infrastructure. So there's all kinds of questions around security, governance. How do you determine what could happen when you unleash an agent that might work on something? There was even an interesting article being passed around around Yes, it's okay to let AI go work on projects, you know, you're never going to actually complete yourself if you're a developer, kind of empowering you as the developer to turn it loose and let it see what it does, maybe give it a fixed budget. But then there's elements beyond just security and governance, just basic data protection. Is there an instance where an agent might invoke something else that does not align to your particular exposure risk appetite for personally identifiable information, or PII? Does it mean that you really have to think clearly about who you're choosing, whether it's Anthropic's version of the world, OpenAI's version of the world, Gemini, Google's version of the world, Microsoft's version of the world of data protection? And then the key question then becomes, what's the relevant adoption rate? And I've had some fascinating conversations with people that have adopted some sort of center of excellence. And so I had made this kind of quip. I said, well, You know, in the old days it would have been called a Business Intelligence Center of Competence, or a BICC, but now what you probably have more is a Business Intelligence Person of Confidence, or a BIPC. And so, the BIPC is great for that person that's very confident, but it's certainly not a scalable operation. To get to a true center of competence, or a scalable business intelligence function, you've got to have wider adoption. And in a corporation, that might mean, for example, how do you roll out all of these AI-enabled toolsets to help change or alter or ideally improve— that's the goal— how folks work more effectively and shift to higher strategy or higher value tasks. And so I think the cautionary tale there is, you know, are the employees going to be using the most expensive technology available in the market right now to do things that would better be suited to basic automation? And I think that's a reasonable question to ask. I think there's also, uh, we're starting to see sort of the, the pushback in the news around whether or not layoffs are related to overhiring or, and, or the cost of the infrastructure to deploy the hardware, and, or whether or not simply just parts of a business are not healthy and they are shedding those divisions. And so I think the, the lens that's being applied is kind of interesting. Is one part it's a cultural critique. On other sides, it's a kind of a critique or an indictment of aggressive hiring, you know, in a post-ZIRP world, which is very much in the rearview mirror. But I think that some of the concepts around sovereign AI and how that's going to apply on a per-country basis, per-region basis, what that's going to mean in terms of networking technologies, how any consolidation amongst network providers might also include What would it mean for us to have both terrestrial and extraterrestrial communications? What will it mean in terms of post-quantum encryption for not just the data that's currently at rest, that might be still at rest in the future, but will that protected data truly be protected in a world where something that looks more like a science fiction scenario today? But it is interesting that quantum cryptography and other challenges to our understanding of what it means to protect data at risk are going to be challenged in the future. I think that's a reasonable expectation. And so I think the last thing I would bring up is, if you were not also aware, there's also some really amazing stuff coming back from NASA where in the space exploration side, we're starting to see some great images coming back from the Curiosity Rover. We're also starting to understand that some of the systems that are going to be involved in Artemis III, you know, with Artemis II kind of the rearview mirror. It's going to be really, really interesting to follow those updates and track, especially now that it is almost an expectation that there's going to be a handful of players that are going to be putting these payloads. And the cost of putting a kilogram into space, the competition amongst companies like, for example, SpaceX, that, that, uh, very, um intensive IPO buildup that's taking place right now in the news cycle, as well as Blue Origin. And frankly, there's other players too. If you're familiar with that svc.fudge.org, the Space Value Chain, it's probably worthwhile for me to go back and update that, do a pull request. So at that point in the conversation, we are now getting close to 8 minutes. So I'm gonna call it a wrap for this time around in What the Fudge for April 26th, 2026.