🔗 Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal
I get that Anthropic are severely compute-constrained, but in a world where the very existence of “AI data centers” is a red-hot political issue (see recent news out of Utah for a fresh example), signing up with this particular data center is a really bad look
💬 Simon Willison
The World: “That has got to be AI.”
Great Photographers Around The World: “Hold My Beer.”
🔗 Explore 25 Incredible Photos of the Milky Way Captured Around the World
There are so many on the click through - but of course I would highlight one (of two) from New Zealand.
Every year, this collection reminds us that photographing the Milky Way is not only about technique or planning. It is about curiosity, patience, and the desire to experience the night sky in places where it still feels wild.
💬 Dan Zafra
(Dan is the editor of ‘Capture the Atlas’ and curator of the annual contest.)
🏢 Moss just wrote: 🔗 The biggest leadership oversight in modern organisations
in many organisations, the “people piece” has been relegated to the HR function.
💬 Moss Burmester
‘relegated’ - not ‘delegated’ is an interesting choice of words and highlights a more general problem - more on that in the comments.
HR systems are built around compliance, process, and record-keeping.
….
Why does engagement matter? Because performance is produced when people are deeply engaged and aligned in the business strategy
💬 Moss Burmester
Sounds to me they should be building ‘Systems of Engagement’
I sometimes have a hard time putting into words that clearly explain my position and feelings on a topic. Take The Met Gala for example. Jax and I talking and I just couldn’t explain my contempt for it. Result - Jax writes it off:
Well you never like this kind of stuff.
💬 Jax
No more struggles 🔗 Robert L Arnold clearly lives in my brain.
This reminds me that I need to find my ‘Hacker’ rant …
🔗 Your Data Lake’s Vulnerability Problem Is Really an Identity Problem
One contractor laptop. Multiple enterprise environments compromised. That’s the actual story.
In mid-2024, at least 165 organizations got hit through their Snowflake instances. AT&T lost over 50 billion call records. Ticketmaster, Santander, Advance Auto Parts. The headlines wrote themselves: Snowflake hacked.
Except Snowflake wasn’t hacked. Mandiant, CrowdStrike, and Snowflake all reached the same conclusion in their forensics. No zero-day. No flaw in the cryptographic platform. No internal compromise of Snowflake’s corporate network. No brute-force attacks against API limits.
What actually happened? UNC5537, a financially motivated group also tracked as Scattered Spider and ShinyHunters, walked through the front door with valid stolen credentials. Those credentials were harvested over years by commodity infostealer malware (VIDAR, LUMMA, REDLINE) running on the personal laptops of third-party contractors. The same laptops these contractors used for gaming and pirated software also held the keys to their clients' enterprise data lakes.
💬 Logan @ LLBLL
There’s those 🖇️ Pace Layers creeping in again - and I definitely like using ‘category’ as a distinguishing mark. Years ago I wrote piece that asked if 🖇️ New Zealand had ‘Crossed The Chasm’
🔗 The war between fast and legitimate is here
If you’re running a startup, you’re in the speed game, and pretending you’re running a regulatory agency is a category error. If you’re running a regulatory agency, you’re in the legitimacy game, and it’s something of a vapid conceit to pretend to be running a startup. Most of the dysfunction in contemporary institutions comes from this same category confusion
💬 Joan Westenberg
🔗 Daring Fireball: Luca Maestri Runs the Cafeteria
Got to say - I would love it if Apple included Filemaker in Creator Studio.
… but is it? When someone asks me ‘where I am from’ … I try to understand the question that is really being asked, because the context reveals many different answers.
🔗 Don’t Fall for the Tucker Carlson Apology Tour
Exactly - and the rest of them - when they start theirs. (Coming soon to a local podcast soon.)
🔗 Daring Fireball: X, the Platform of Free Speech
Definitely looking forward to Gil’s ‘🔗 The Nerd Reich’.