2023
I was just reminded that we moved to San Francisco on Halloween and moved away on Halloween. This seems somehow significant.
Oracle says ‘oui’ to European cloud sovereignty. Big Red launches EU Sovereign Cloud to help enterprises satisfy European data privacy and sovereignty regulations. My latest, on Silverlinings.
Whenever I hear an anti-woke clown going on about soyboys, alpha males, beta males, and the importance of traditional masculinity, I think: A foundational value of traditional masculinity is physical courage.
I want to ask the clown: How much bullfighting have you done? What mountains have you climbed? What’s your military combat record?
I like a latte now and then, a beverage that wingnuts denounce fervently, enjoyment of which is a sure marker of beta males. When I have a latte, it’s soy or oat milk because regular milk makes me fart something fierce. Is farting an alpha-male thing?
Seven Rules For Internet CEOs To Avoid Enshittification (Mike Masnick / Techdirt)
These are good rules for building a healthy Internet business, or a healthy business of any kind. All the rules are built on the first: “Tell your investors that you’re in this for the long haul and they need to be too.”
Also: Treat the users as the cherished asset that make your site useful and valuable. Users are not products that should be exploited and used up.
When the press talks about the layoffs and chaos generated by a series of completely pointless mergers the blame always falls on ambiguities like a “weakening macroeconomy” and not, say, blistering incompetence by the fail upwards trust fund brunch-lords in the c-suite, obsessed with setting their brands on fire just for a tax break and a fat bonus.
— Warner Bros Discovery Merger Gets Dumber As Layoffs Continue And Company Licenses Streaming Content To… Netflix. (Karl Bode / Techdirt)
“Cellphones were for emergencies, or for calling people when you were drunk.” Dan Kois at Slate asks fellow GenXers to reminisce about technology, work, socializing and entertainment in the long-ago time of 2002.
VMware’s plan for cross-cloud conquest. I talked 1:1 with Vittorio Viarengo, VMware VP of cross-cloud services, about plans to prosper by delivering software to unify applications across multiple clouds and on-premises. But will those ambitions survive the Broadcom acquisition? Read about it on Silverlinings—and read to the end for links to Viarengo’s music videos.
On Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster has a good backgrounder on the Titanic submersible:
Ok look, in my spare time I do volunteer wilderness search and rescue, so I am the last person to look askance at anyone for doing stupid things in the name of pointless adventure. If your soul calls you to risk death on a mountain in Maine, I will do my best to reach you in time, and if it calls you to die in a carbon fiber and titanium can at the bottom of the Atlantic, I will salute you and hope for your sake it was a hull breach, comrade. 🫡
Much of it is in the form of a FAQ:
Is this submersible, like… safe?
Lmao no….
Meanwhile, on Twitter, free speech absolutist Elon Musk has declared “cis” and “cisgender” to be slurs.
Good heavens, I’ve been calling myself “cis” since I first heard the word. I use it to describe myself whenever I opine on LGBTQ issues, to disclose my perspective. This comes up more often than you might expect, because opining about things is what I do.