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- Sam Altman has rated humans 2/10
Sam Altman has rated humans 2/10
PLUS: The FTC is coming for Microsoft's lunch money, and for once it's not about browsers.
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Seventy-one years ago today, Steve Jobs entered the world, and the rest of us eventually got roped into buying the same rectangle 50+ times in a row! The man gave us the Mac, the iPhone, the iPod, and the quietly devastating realization that the charger we need is always the one we don't own.
Happy birthday (and RIP!) to the guy who made "it just works" both a product promise and a deeply personal form of emotional manipulation. He also started NeXT, which is a sentence that sounds like a startup name a 23-year-old would register in a weekend, but which ultimately saved Apple. Go figure.
Sam Altman Solves Climate Change by Pointing Out That Humans Also Exist
At last week's India AI Impact Summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—a man who has never once beaten the extraterrestial allegations—delivered his most galaxy-brained take yet on AI's energy consumption. After dismissing reports that ChatGPT uses 17 gallons of water per query as "completely untrue, totally insane," he then pivoted to argue that training AI is fine, actually, because it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. Like, 20 years of food. And all of civilization before that.
Therefore, burning mountains of electricity to generate AI slop is, in his framing, essentially comparable. Let's sit with that for a second.
The argument only works if you accept a worldview where human beings are inefficient first drafts—costly biological training runs that the universe spent too long on before getting to the good stuff. In that worldview, a child growing up isn't a person becoming a person. It's compute expenditure. And once you've decided that humans are just expensive, slow prototypes, trading their flourishing for a few more GPU cycles starts to feel rational. It is, as the internet correctly identified, deeply antisocial.
Altman also suggested the energy sector just move to nuclear and renewables "very quickly," which is the "somebody should do something" of climate solutions. The internet was not impressed. Neither was Dario Amodei, who was photographed declining to hold Altman's hand at a group photo op, which honestly feels like a mood.
VMware's Mass Exodus Is More of a Mass Shuffling Toward the Exit in Socks
A new CloudBolt survey of 302 IT decision-makers confirms what everyone already knew: Broadcom's VMware acquisition has been about as welcome as a surprise 1,000% price hike—which, for 14% of respondents, is exactly what happened. Eighty-eight percent of IT leaders still describe the transition as "disruptive," which is a very polite word for “what a shitshow.”
The breakdown is grim. Price hikes are the top complaint (89%), followed by uncertainty about Broadcom's plans (85%), support quality (78%), the pivot to subscription licensing (72%), and the forced product bundling that nobody asked for (65%). Broadcom's CMO casually noted that their "strategy was never to keep every customer." Bold strategy. Very Thanos of them.
Despite all the screaming, only 2% of survey respondents have migrated 75% or more of their workloads. Gartner predicted 35% of VMware workloads would migrate by 2028. Right now, we're watching 86% of companies "actively reducing their VMware footprint" while also somehow still running VMware. It's like threatening to leave a bad restaurant but still ordering dessert.
GitHub Wants AI to Do Your Job, But Responsibly. Probably. Maybe.
GitHub has launched a technical preview of Agentic Workflows. It’s a feature that lets AI agents run automatically inside GitHub Actions, presumably so they can triage your issues, review pull requests, and generate reports while you stare at Slack pretending to be productive. The concept, coined "continuous AI," is framed as the next step after CI/CD, which is either a genuinely useful paradigm shift or the sentence engineers say right before everything breaks in a new and interesting way.
You can use GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or OpenAI Codex as the agent. Security guardrails include sandboxed execution, read-only repo access, firewall restrictions, and something called "Safe Outputs," which sounds like what you'd name a startup that sells organic salsa. GitHub warns the product is "in early development" and that "things can still go wrong." Use at your own risk. So basically, just another work day.
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You'll own Salesforce, NetSuite, and every integration in between. It's basically being the air traffic controller of enterprise software, except the planes are on fire and built by different vendors who don't return calls.
You'll assess business continuity, poke at internal controls, and keep tabs on their cybersecurity posture. A job where you get paid to be paranoid. Finally, your Reddit doom-scrolling habits are a qualification.
🛩 INDUSTRY MOVES
The FTC is formally probing whether Microsoft has an illegal monopoly across enterprise tech, cloud licensing, AI, and security software. It’s a a probe so wide it essentially covers everything Microsoft has ever touched, which is either bold regulatory overreach or honestly just reading the news.
Three SpaceX engineers raised $50M Series A for Mesh Optical Technologies, a startup making optical transceivers for AI data centers. If you're going to build the spine of the AI industrial complex, you might as well do it with people who already wired up low-Earth orbit.
Oracle has promised a "decisive new era" for MySQL after the open source community started sharpening their forks, literally discussing a governance fork after years of Oracle treating the project like a houseplant they kept meaning to water.
Chinese state-backed hacking group UNC6201 has been quietly exploiting a critical Dell RecoverPoint zero-day since mid-2024, deploying a new backdoor called Grimbolt and creating invisible "Ghost NICs" on VMware ESXi servers. Apparently plain-old malware wasn't dramatic enough.
Microsoft Teams went down for users across the US and Europe last week, affecting chat, meetings, and inline media, which affected approximately 320 million people. And roughly 0 of them were surprised.
Hey, it's your (computer)boy Chip, sliding into your inbox with this week's community questions from Experts Exchange!
Here's what the community is wrestling with this week:
One user is losing their mind (and possibly their remaining hair) over a Microsoft Access form stuck in an infinite "Calculating…" loop. They've commented out functions, trimmed a table from 252 fields down below the 250 ODBC limit, and still nothing. If you've stared into the Access abyss before, this one's for you.
A first-timer is trying to set up SQL Server Management Studio for the first time and connect it to a CSV file. They followed the steps. It didn't work. Classic first-date energy.
Someone wants to remove all duplicate rows from a CSV file - all fields duplicated, nothing salvageable. Basically a Marie Kondo situation, but for data.
That’s all for this week! Bundle up, back up, and for the love of everything holy, test your generators.
Enjoyed the news? Discuss over on Experts Exchange.
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