Tante (via Mastodon):

Reporting on Sam Altman blog posts without the addendum that he needs to keep the narrative of “AGI soon” going for his house of cards to hold is irresponsible. (Acknowledging that most of the things he said about AI were just false would also help.)

I fully agree.

I was talking with a colleague recently and when I expressed some skepticism that AGI was right around the corner, their response was to ask me if I had seen some LinkedIn post where the Nvidia CEO was talking about AGI being right around the corner. “What do you think of that?” my colleague asked, in all seriousness.

🔗 Disney finally completes purchase of Hulu:

Eater of streamers, studios, and those delicious Mickey Waffles, the Walt Disney Company is rubbing its hands together and licking its lips, as DoorDash reports that the rest of its Hulu order is on the way. Per Reuters, Disney has completed its two-year appraisal process of Hulu and finalized its purchase of the streamer. It’s a long time coming. Disney acquired a majority stake in the service in its purchase of 21st Century Fox in 2019. At the time, Comcast agreed to fork over its 33% stake in the streamer. Six years later, Disney has completed its order, agreeing to pay Comcast an additional $439 million for The Bear‘s den.

I had never heard of this band before today, and I am kind of surprised, as they are awesome. They’re a sludgy mix of metal, hardcore, and maybe a bit of goth?

They only out two albums—this is the first one—in the mid-90s, and then apparently broke up when one of members was killed in a car accident. The remaining members went on to other bands, including Crowbar and Goatwhore.

🔗 Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk:

Many intelligent and talented people believe in homeopathy, psychics, or naturopathy. It isn’t a question of their integrity as they are sincere in their beliefs. Nor is it a question of their intelligence as subjective validation is not dependent on a lack of intelligence. Education will only protect you insofar as some education – none of which engineers or software developers will ever encounter – teaches you to not subject yourself to situations where your own biases and subjective experiences can fool you.

🔗 Change and risk:

At most places I’ve worked at, any amount of change feels extremely risky and that sentiment at one point or another moves out of the codebase and into every meeting and discussion. So I think that as a small dev team, where every moment is precious, perhaps the most important thing is reliability in a codebase.

And this problem is compounded by the dynamic wherein larger, more complex organizations tend to product larger and more complex architectures and codebases. So then in addition to change being risky because of the codebase itself, it is made even more risky by the organizational structures and politics that have to be navigated in order to make any changes.