Predicting internal politics at Disney: always one of my favorite things. I haven’t worked there in years and I wasn’t in a position to have good internal scoops on this stuff anyhow, so that’s my disclaimer. What we know for sure: Bob Iger just returned to Disney; it was announced late on a Sunday night. Bob Chapek is completely gone. He just had his contract renewed this summer. Iger has a two year contract and will explicitly be responsible for developing his successor. This is all very sudden. ...

Movies reviewed this week: Seance on a Wet Afternoon, Girl with Green Eyes, Don’t Play Us Cheap, Slash/Back, Darling, The Knack… and How to Get It, and Incendies.

One of the ways I knew I was getting sick was that my ability to code dropped through the floor, so I’ve been fiddling with things from time to time as a test. I’m still veering between faint positive tests and negative tests, but I got a wild hair and wrote some Python today. Credit for the underlying text and mechanics goes to Oliver Darkshire (original). I have taken the liberty of skipping assassination attempts when there’s no chance of success and decided that you can’t try an assassination attempt after an ending is reached. ...

Dave Troy is still killing me. No, actually, I would not. I would expect Elon Musk (which is who he means) to maintain Twitter (which is what he means) in a functional state no matter how much it cost so that they could pile information chaos on top of economic chaos. Why would you stagger those two things? Blow up Twitter now and the world has time to recover. Fucking terrible. At some point I’ll write up a general debunk. ...

Well, “no big Paxlovid bounce” remains true, but last week was certainly a small one. I tested positive again on Friday and the weekend was pretty much no fun; no huge symptoms but I’ve just been tired and a bit fuzzy. Testing negative again today, which hopefully will continue. S. is still fine. We’re masking diligently, we have house zones we keep to, and we have air purifiers running.

Movies reviewed this week: The Long Good Friday, Billy Liar, Picnic, The Servant, Annette, and The Hard Way.

Phew. No big Paxlovid bounce, thankfully. This is what I thought of when I heard about Tesla engineers coming over to validate Twitter code. It’s both true that the author seems pretty savvy and that the culture over at Tesla is focused on velocity over anything. Good times. Let’s get all the Twitter stuff out of the way! Evelyn Douek has smart things to say about Twitter’s regulatory challenges. Not just in the US, not just in the EU – India’s going to be a huge headache. This layoff guide for Twitter employees is worth reading for anyone who’s nervous about their job. Or anyone, really. Use your work laptop in a way which will enable you to execute on those precautions quickly. One billion dollars in infrastructure cuts? This is already working out badly (original). Sympathies to the guy who just went on call for a bunch of systems he doesn’t know. Gergley has a good thread on the problems ahead. Here’s another SRE still employed by Twitter, and he thinks it’s gonna be ugly. Rakyll is a well-respected principal engineer in the reliability biz; she’s pessimistic (original) and thinks people are leaving. Tangentially related: Starlink is inevitably having to throttle bandwidth. Some math: Starlink wants $5K/month for 2 terminals with a total of 350 Mbps download. That’s cheap and cool but the existing mobile solutions can deliver bandwidth in the Gbps range. OK, that’s enough horrified observation of the train wreck. Mastodon is treating me OK so far. ...

I got access to Lex, one of those AI writing assistants, so I tried to do the inevitable. Bold text is mine. I’m not sure this is entirely useful.

Capturing this for my own reference and in case reading about the mechanics of health care are useful to anyone. I had not previously had covid to the best of my knowledge.

Movies reviewed this week: Wendell & Wild, Emily the Criminal, Anna and the Apocalypse, Good Morning, Tom Jones, Interceptor, Barbarian, and Gomorrah.