Sizzlethon 2023 is over and you finally get a break from my relentless self-promotion. It was worth it, because we raised $1,544 for Cafs and gained 199 new Sizzle subscribers - hopefully lots of them decide to pay when the trial is complete!. I made the donation this morning: Big thanks to everyone that shared The Sizzle with friends, colleagues and strangers. Also cheers to the LAST Club, who topped the leaderboard with 27 referrals. If you're into Lean, Agile and Systems Thinking (LAST!) you need to check them out.
Sam Altman is back as CEO as OpenAI and the board that sacked him is now gone, replaced with an "initial board" consisting of Bret Taylor as Chair, Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. Altman tweeted, "i love openai, and everything i've done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together. when i decided to join msft on sun evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team. with the new board and w satya's support, i'm looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with msft". So that's that, OpenAI can now concentrate on building the Torment Nexus.
First announced back in May 2022, Broadcom (mostly known for its range of networking & server chips) has finally closed its acquisition of VMware (server virtualisation & management) after the Chinese government agreed to the US$69b deal. The press release says "we can now come together and have the scale to help global enterprises address their complex IT infrastructure challenges by enabling private and hybrid cloud environments and helping them deploy an apps anywhere strategy", but ask anyone how Broadcom operates as a business and they're a pack of hard bastards that are more interested in bean counting than engineering. For now it feels like business as usual, but we all know how that goes. Ask Redhat and IBM, or Sun and Oracle.
The government's long awaited 2023-2030 Cyber Security Strategy is now public. The press release for it says "Australia was in a cyber slumber" but now the "Albanese Labor Government is determined to act decisively and do what is necessary to protect Australians from the fastest growing threat that we face as a nation", putting "cyber criminals on notice". I'm sure they're shaking in their boots. The Strategy also comes with $586.9m of additional funding to implement various programs like "$4.8m in establishing long-overdue consumer standards for smart devices and software", "$9.4m to build a threat sharing platform for the health sector", "$8.6m in professionalising our cyber workforce and accelerating the cyber industry" and more. If you want some analysis of the strategy (you don't pay me enough to read it), this article on The Conversation is the only one I've seen not behind a paywall.
EP–133 K.O. II. is a portable and powerful synthesizer, sampler and composer. Featuring a fully reworked sequencer, brand new punch-in 2.0 effects and a workflow that lets you go from idea to track faster than ever. (Teenage Engineering)
📻 Decadence - Cosmic Psychos
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