Saturday, June 14
Daily News Stuff 14 June 2025
Lizard Oil Edition
Lizard Oil Edition
Top Story
- How Palm died for a second time. (Substack)
Written by Phil McKinney, who was the CTO of Hewlett Packard at the time HP bought and then promptly murdered Palm.
The CEO at the time of the acquisition was fired by the board before HP's new PalmOS products could launch, and the new CEO wanted nothing to do with hardware, and killed the entire lineup seven weeks after launch.
While the CTO was out recovering from emergency surgery.
And the new CEO was in turn fired by the board just months later, after spending $10 billion on British software company Autonomy and then being forced to write down its value by 80%.My first day back at HP will be burned into my memory forever. I was simply trying to grab lunch in the cafeteria at HP Labs when I found myself surrounded by what felt like the entire technical staff. They weren't there to welcome me back - they were there to hold me accountable.
Indeed they did. Those were dark days at Hewlett Packard.The scene was intense and unambiguous. Engineers and researchers who had watched the WebOS disaster unfold were pointing fingers and raising voices. Their message was crystal clear and brutal: "You can never take leave again - EVER!"
Their exact words still echo in my mind: "The CEO and board need adult supervision."
Tech News
- AMD just announced its cheapest and slowest X3D CPU yet - the Ryzen 5500X3D. (WCCFTech)
Expected to retail for around $150, it might be a decent option if you have an older AM4 system you want to upgrade.
- AIs are designed to tell us what we want to hear. Let's fix that by designing them to tell us what we don't want to hear. (Substack)
Oh, yeah, that'll definitely work.
- Corporate adoption of AI is slowing as it turns out that it's expensive and kind of useless. (The Register)
Gartner warned last year that end user organizations adopting AI could discover "500 to 1,000 percent errors of AI cost estimates are possible," because of vendor price hikes, not paying attention to the cost, or simply inappropriate use of AI.
Yeah, beancounters love it when bills are unexpectedly ten times higher than you told them.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Had to throw out two lizards today. Don't know how they keep getting in.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:20 PM
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1
There are lots of things that I don't want to hear, that are not actually useful for me to hear. Useful to hear (in moderation) is that I have plenty of problems in my own life, and fixing those is more valuable to me than being angry at very distant people for being wrong. Less useful, is someone from the UK, Russia, or Iran telling me that they hate Jews. (I'm pleasantly surprised that Israel attacked Iran. I did not appreciate the indication that France and the UK right now are run by PRC clients.)
Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, June 15 2025 12:41 AM (rcPLc)
2
AI is "...kind of useless..."? How about 'mostly useless and frequently dangerous'?
Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, June 15 2025 03:06 AM (KOtXO)
3
It'll disagree with you, but only in a way that reinforces your lack of instrospection.
Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 15 2025 09:30 AM (jc6Wm)
4
AI is a tool.
All tools are dangerous.
All tools in human hands are potentially dangerous, because just as humans are capable of marvelous wonders of tool invention, they are also capable of shocking horrors of tool misuse.
Humans are dangerous, and also immensely valuable.
Now, tools, some tools are just shit; they can be ineffective when people try to put them to good use, and all too effective at stupid applications, or at slipping out of control when they have power applied to them.
This AI stuff only looks as concerning as it does because we are decades into giving the professional managerial class types misleading training while they are at universities. I bitch a lot about research that is 'clearly' fraud, incompetence, and government propaganda. Yet, the non-research theories of behavior, that students absorb as their baseline, may be if anything worse.
All tools are dangerous.
All tools in human hands are potentially dangerous, because just as humans are capable of marvelous wonders of tool invention, they are also capable of shocking horrors of tool misuse.
Humans are dangerous, and also immensely valuable.
Now, tools, some tools are just shit; they can be ineffective when people try to put them to good use, and all too effective at stupid applications, or at slipping out of control when they have power applied to them.
This AI stuff only looks as concerning as it does because we are decades into giving the professional managerial class types misleading training while they are at universities. I bitch a lot about research that is 'clearly' fraud, incompetence, and government propaganda. Yet, the non-research theories of behavior, that students absorb as their baseline, may be if anything worse.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, June 16 2025 12:30 AM (rcPLc)
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