It's not just for Systems Administrators anymore
The Content Treadmill is Now a Death Race, Apparently
Warner Bros. Discovery, that giant media Frankenstein built of three other giants that were already too big, might be selling its content rights—potentially exclusively—to Netflix. Why? Because the entire WBD corporate structure is essentially balanced on a mountain of debt, which, it turns out, is a terrible place to build a streaming service.
Reports have Netflix in the pole position for these talks, which I'm sure is just thrilling for all the other companies that bet their entire future on exclusivity. WBD needs cash, and Netflix needs content to keep the subscriber growth graph from flatlining. This is the whole "competition" model now: one company racks up impossible debt, the other one vacuums up the intellectual property, and you pay three times as much to see the same five movies shuffled between them.
We were promised a thousand channels. We got three giant, debt-ridden pools with the same water, and the lifeguards are fighting over who gets to keep the life raft.
State Department Gets Into Content Moderation
The State Department is looking at new rules to deny visas to people involved in 'censorship,' which the policy defines to include content moderation and fact-checking. The stated goal is to protect free speech, which is a nice concept when it's not being leveraged to make someone else's compliance job a total nightmare.
Imagine being an immigration officer and having to decide if a fact-checker at some overseas non-profit violated the new Anti-Censorship Act. This is what happens when you turn a political beef into an executive branch directive: the people on the ground get handed a 400-page YAML file and told to make sure everyone agrees with the definition of truth, which changes every Tuesday. I'm just saying, the queue at the embassy is going to start looking like a Layer 8 denial-of-service attack, and I don't envy the people who have to process all that paperwork. It just seems like a lot of work for a thing that wasn't exactly what anyone wanted. Anyway.
Success Looks Like Being Permanently Stressed
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who runs a company that dictates the pace of the entire tech industry, admitted he works seven days a week in a state of "constant anxiety." The fear? Going bankrupt.
The guy's net worth is measured in the tens of billions of $, but he's apparently still living like an early-stage founder whose seed round is about to run out. This is the end state of the hustle culture: you win, you get all the chips, and the reward is not relaxing, but a lifetime of panic that someone will take your stack. Maybe don't tell the rest of us clocking out at 5:01 PM that this is the ideal. We get enough anxiety from just dealing with the change control logs.
BRIEFS:
- US and Canadian agencies are warning that PRC state-sponsored actors used Brickstorm malware through a back door for "potential sabotage" of public sector and IT systems. It’s not just your home router. It's everyone's.
- In an extremely on-the-nose development, an anti-AI activist named Sam Kirchner has gone missing. Nobody seems to know where. Maybe the AI finally started taking the criticism personally.
- People are still blogging, apparently, but they describe it as "screaming into the void." This is better than the alternative, which is publishing on a major platform and having 200 people tell you why your core assumptions are wrong.
- Researchers filmed a rat, in real-time, snatching a bat out of the air and eating it. This has nothing to do with technology, but is a helpful reminder that nature is the most metal thing running, and we should stop worrying about our P&Ls.