Since this is a revenue diversification play for Broadcom, its in their interest to not restrict VMware’s software stack. While Broadcom is pervasive across enterprise infrastructure, it would needlessly devalue their VMware assets, which are not operating in a competitive vacuum.
Thus, the EC has made this one of the conditions for approving the deal — Broadcom must provide guaranteed access and interoperability relating to the “APIs, materials, tools, and technical support” that allow rival hardware companies (i.e. Marvell) to leverage VMware’s virtualization software. And on the same terms as Broadcom does.
It’s interesting the tact Broadcom has taken since their bid to acquire Qualcomm fell apart a few years ago. While that fell apart over concerns about Chinese influence, that really had all the trappings of creating a vertical chip monopoly. The Broadcom-VMware deal isn’t done, but getting EU approval means its a lot closer to happening.
I can’t tell you how much you messed up when the open source community is using Oracle as a favorable comparison. Full details on RHEL drama here.
This whole thing has become such a mess that even Oracle, which hasn’t always been seen as a champion of open source and which bases its Oracle Linux on RHEL, is coming out of this looking pretty good.
I love wrestling. I love goofy wrestling. Orange Cassidy is my favorite goofy wrestler. His whole gimmick is that he’s lazy and doesn’t really care. It’s glorious. This was his first match with AEW in 2020. Since then, he’s wrestled more than anyone in the company.
Sometimes the internet can still be fun. Recently I saw a thread going around on Bluesky, people sharing their favorite albums with black and white covers (I first saw Anil Dash share the post, which of course featured this gem by Prince. It’s a completely arbitrary distinction and also insanely fun to think about. Here are the ones I shared:
When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog
I mean we had to start with a Jen’s Lekman album right? This isn’t my favorite Jens album, but every time I revisit it, I’m shocked how well formed his songwriting sensabilities are for a debut release. That’s what was so striking discovering his music in my days at WRUW, he seemed so fully formed as an artist. “Tram No. 7 To Heaven” is kind of the perfect thesis statement for his early career. “Julie,” “You Are The Light,” “Higher Power” were all in the soundtrack to my 20s. (Is this album cover technically sepia? Yes)
Blur The Line
This album had me hooked from the start. “Oh God” is one of those songs that’s just perfect. Evocative and challenging lyrics, a glorious build, a bluesy rhythmic structure. I was onboard for whatever else was in store on this album, and it doesn’t disappoint. There’s something so wonderfully gritty in this album. There isn’t an ounce of romanticism in this alt country classic. Just glorious songs with a hint of twang and the piecing voice of the late Jessi Zazu.
Lost Themes
This album is pure kitsch. Expect a lot of chunky 80s synths, swirling arrangements, and driving dirges. I’m kind of a sucker for soundtracks to nonexistent movies. There’s something about trying to mentally place the music into a scene that adds a fun element to it. Lost Themes is just so darn specific, the perfect accompaniment to some imagined Carpenter gloom.
Tramp
I usually don’t enjoy albums so unblinkingly serious as Tramp. But Sharon Van Etten’s voice just melts me on some of these tracks. It’s not an album I can put on all the time, but when it hits, it hits hard. Her duet with Zach Condon on “We Are Fine” is exceptional.
I’d probably pick different albums on a different day, but no regrets with these picks.
Adding “Snapchat share sheet” to my list of tech tongue twisters.
Anthropic released its Claude 2 chatbot. I asked it to rewrite the US Constitution as a boy band song. It was fun.
We wanna form a more perfect union
Establish justice for all, from sea to shining sea
Make sure everyone can feel free
Provide for defense, for you and for me
Promote the welfare, general, you see
Secure the blessings of sweet, sweet liberty, yeah
For ourselves and our kids to eternity
Baby say you’ll agree and please ratify
This Constitution for you and I
Tech forward e-bike maker VanMoof hits the breaks
VanMoof tried to best the Apple of e-bikes. They were pretty, had a nice minimalist design, and bucked the trend of building a bike on readily available components. They counted on their style and tech stack to stand out. But we’ve seen the e-bike market explode with innovative products across the price spectrum in the last two years. Now it’s reported they don’t have a CEO and are trying to get funding to stay afloat.
VanMoof’s approach has been highly verticalized to date: It has designed the bike itself as well as the integrated app that controls it. It also has eschewed using off-the-shelf components in the building of the bike — a very common aspect of how bikes are made and fixed generally — opting instead to work with suppliers to manufacture custom components.
Ooooo a chart that shows a big drop! I am intrigued.
My problem with it is, the chart shows DNS ranking not traffic. It’s a dramatic drop, but given the modest scale of the y-axis, could be seen as a little misleading. Especially when Cloudflare offers actual traffic numbers. This is what they look like for Twitter over the last six months.
These show a slow decline with a precipitous drop-off in the last week. Which is not great for the company either. It just seemed weird for Prince to specifically reference traffic, but not link back to the figures from his own company that support his statement.
No Dignity in Journalism
I’m assuming Martin Pengelly went to a good school, studied hard, worked his way up through newsrooms to get to be the breaking news editor for The Guardian. Then he found himself writing this:
Twitter owner calls Facebook founder a ‘cuck’ as rancour grows over launch of Threads, a competitor to Musk’s network
Twitter owner Elon Musk has suggested he and Mark Zuckerberg should have “a literal dick-measuring contest” in the latest broadside aimed at his rival billionaire.
In a message inspired by the Meta chief executive’s launch last week of Threads, a Twitter competitor, Musk added a ruler emoji.
Using a slang word for “cuckold”, popular in rightwing circles as a term of derision, he also wrote: “Zuck is a cuck.”
Threads is a legitimately interesting development. Any platform that grows to 100 million users in a week in a gigantic story. But now we get the pabulum always associated with Musk. Somehow this makes him challenging Zuck to a fight quaint in comparison.
Testing out micro.blog. I evidently signed up for it a while ago but never posted anything. Now I have posted something.
