Linked List: September 11, 2023

Monday, 11 September 2023

CNBC has another excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk, this one telling the tale of Musk and his cousins moving thousands of servers from a data center in Sacramento to another in Portland:

“You’ll have to hire a contractor to lift the floor panels,” Alex said. “They need to be lifted with suction cups.” Another set of contractors, he said, would then have to go underneath the floor panels and disconnect the electric cables and seismic rods.

Musk turned to his security guard and asked to borrow his pocket knife. Using it, he was able to lift one of the air vents in the floor, which allowed him to pry open the floor panels. He then crawled under the server floor himself, used the knife to jimmy open an electrical cabinet, pulled the server plugs, and waited to see what happened. Nothing exploded. The server was ready to be moved.

“Well that doesn’t seem super hard,” he said as Alex the Uzbek and the rest of the gang stared. Musk was totally jazzed by this point. It was, he said with a loud laugh, like a remake of Mission: Impossible, Sacramento edition.

It’s all a bunch of yucks until it turns to yikes:

The servers had user data on them, and James did not initially realize that, for privacy reasons, they were supposed to be wiped clean before being moved. “By the time we learned this, the servers had already been unplugged and rolled out, so there was no way we would roll them back, plug them in, and then wipe them,” he says. Plus, the wiping software wasn’t working. “Fuck, what do we do?” he asked. Elon recommended that they lock the trucks and track them.

So James sent someone to Home Depot to buy big padlocks, and they sent the combination codes on a spreadsheet to Portland so the trucks could be opened there. “I can’t believe it worked,” James says. “They all made it to Portland safely.”

A profound sense of urgency is beneficial to a leader, up to a point. Despite CNBC’s framing, Musk clearly goes way past that point. This entire endeavor was absurdly and unnecessarily reckless. In addition to the privacy violations, yanking these servers out of Sacramento, against the direct advice of Twitter’s infrastructure team, directly led to months of instability for users.

Qualcomm Announces Renewed Deal With Apple for 5G Modems ★

Ian King and Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is extending an agreement to get modem semiconductors from Qualcomm Inc. for three more years, a sign that its ambitious effort to design the chips in-house is taking longer than expected. Qualcomm shares surged on the news.

The new pact will cover “smartphone launches in 2024, 2025 and 2026,” Qualcomm said in a statement Monday. The companies’ agreement had been set to end this year, and the latest iPhone — due on Tuesday — was expected to be one of the last to rely on the Qualcomm modem chip. […]

“This agreement reinforces Qualcomm’s track record of sustained leadership across 5G technologies and products,” the San Diego-based chipmaker said. Though the financial terms of the new deal weren’t disclosed, Qualcomm said it was similar to the previous arrangement signed in 2019.

Funny how they announced this today, and even funnier that there’s no quote from anyone at Apple. Qualcomm, seemingly, has Apple over the barrel on these 5G modems.

Update: Keep in mind that Apple has been trying to build its own 5G modems for years now. Back in 2019 they bought Intel’s modem business — the same year they settled (effectively, losing) a lawsuit with Qualcomm. And then there was this story over the summer, where Apple accused Qualcomm of harassing Apple executives by subpoenaing them for a lawsuit filed by the FTC. These two companies do not like each other.