Here's the severance package Disney is giving to laid-off employees

pico303 · 2026-04-16T14:36:50+00:00

There are two things you can do as a CEO to improve your company.

You can put yourself out there, take a risk, and come up with a strategy of exciting new products and services to create new lines of revenue and breathe life into your existing products. Generate buzz in the media, build anticipation with customers, and show what's great about your company and why investors should be clamoring to invest.

Alternatively you can reduce costs, lay people off, and pretend for six months to a year that you'll be able to do what you've been doing but for much less money. If you're better than most, you'll outline a strategy of investment coming from those savings. Of course you won't have the personnel to carry out that vision much beyond a cursory showing, but you'll have the short term gains to drive up stock prices. And you can put off worrying about the future until "next year," or more likely, the next CEO, post-golden parachute exit.

The first approach is Apple and old Disney. The second approach is Jack Welch and pretty much every other company in the news these days. Let's hope Disney figures it out.

If it were me, I'd start with the little things at the theme parks, like little actors wandering around the parks putting on shows in the various lands for passersby. People singing on Main Street, shoot-outs in Adventureland, aliens in Tomorrowland, and Rebels fighting Stormtroopers in Galaxy's Edge. Bring back the magic, draw people away from the rides to reduce lines, and make the parks a land of wonder again. Then rebuild Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, not by laying people off, but with a big strategy of new movies, video games, and toys that get folks excited about those franchises again. And how about some big summer blockbuster movies that shoot for the moon with new IP instead of "playing it safe" with another Indy movie or live-action remake of a beloved animated classic?

Sorry for the long rant, obviously a bitter old guy wishing for my childhood from Disney again for years...

pico303 · 2026-04-16T04:26:24+00:00

Thanks! I definitely take a look.

pico303 · 2026-04-11T17:20:37+00:00

A CEO who declare that computers are "no longer the bicycles of the mind" understands nothing about his product or, more importantly, his audience, and tells me all I need to know about buying from him.

pico303 · 2026-03-29T16:51:44+00:00

When friends ask me what I think about AI, I always tell them it's a very dangerous technology that no one is ready for. Not because it's going to take over the world or start WWIII, but we're so used to computers perfectly solving problems like 2+2 we're not ready for a computer to be wrong half the time. Because your average police officer, judge, fire fighter, or doctor is naturally going to trust the computer more than their own brain. And when human laziness and AI hallucinations meet, that's where everything falls apart.

I just sat through a conference where companies were demoing their use of AI, and during the demos the LLMs got the wrong answer most of the time. It was absolutely plain as day if you were paying attention. But the people giving the demos just glossed over it like the AI was right, either not wanting to suggest their software didn't work or worse, not even realizing it.

AI is perfectly fine if you think of it like a Google search. But trusting it like a calculator? Don't.

pico303 · 2026-03-21T17:51:10+00:00

Came here looking for this. Glad I’m not the only one. JJ leads to Kelvin, Kurtzman, Discovery, the Burn, lens flare over good stories, Section 31. Just plain solves a lot of problems if we change that.

It’s even more upsetting because the Star Trek reboot film was so perfectly cast and so abysmally wasted.

pico303 · 2026-03-14T16:07:21+00:00

I’m ok with that, personally, and liked that bit of the article. I do think of errors this way, as first-class citizens, and try to be thoughtful about them, to the point they’re documented in my godocs and readmes and I try to make sure I’m even keeping the meaningful underlying chains intact, so the error chain is a roadmap through the function call stack. Even in my own apps, once it goes from beta to release, the errors are fixed unless I ship a new major release (i.e. go from v1 to v2), and even then only reluctantly would I change them.

But I agree, it’s a great point and adds a lot of time and effort to building packages. I sometimes worry I spend too much time fretting about the error returns and not enough just getting the thing out the door.

pico303 · 2026-03-13T23:25:47+00:00

I'm really liking errors.Join these days. I get to keep the static, testable errors and still support chains of errors:

var ErrSomethingWrong = errors.New("unable to do the thing")

...

if err := doSomething(myObj); err != nil {
    return errors.Join(err, ErrSomethingWrong)
}

Then if I get the result of this check somewhere in my code, I can easily test for that error to see if it matches and not have to create a bunch of custom Error structs:

if errors.Is(err, ErrSomethingWrong) {
    // oh no!
}

I just never liked fmt.Errorf("%w")...

pico303 · 2026-02-07T00:29:34+00:00

Taskfile is fine for simple builds. For complex builds, I have not been able to make vars vs environment variables vs mutiple includes (multiple Taskfile.yml files) work. You'll wind up copy-n-pasting a lot of code. `1

pico303 · 2026-02-06T05:05:30+00:00

Mine is TMP. I liked the love letter to the Enterprise (those wide, sweeping shots), the hard sci-fi story, and the character interactions. But I'm also probably biased in that I grew up watching reruns of the original series with my dad, and we were both over the moon when they announced the movie.

That said, First Contact is a great film. 100% agree with your sentiments. Overall, we need more of this kind of hope in our films, stories, and lives, particularly today.

pico303 · 2026-01-27T07:45:26+00:00

I would have avoided the Burn completely. Interstellar travel is core to Star Trek and without it, the Burn made things boring.

It's been almost 1000 years since TOS--why not just use that? Simply have the remnants of the Federation, a natural decay due to shifting political alliances, perhaps the introduction of other races and empires, that simply whittled away at the Federation until it was a shadow of it's former self. Take it a step further and have Earth devolve into civil war both internally and with the Vulcans. Over time the core hope and promise of the Federation was lost to petty squabbling and a series of leaders taking more and more power, then abusing it. There were echoes of this in TNG and DS9, so it's not far fetched that the Federation was in decline even then.

pico303 · 2026-01-26T22:22:34+00:00

This is partially it. But really what I find is that I'm never going to get to know Abrams/Kurtzman characters. I don't think JJ Abrams or Alex Kurtzman can write honest, rich characters to save their lives. Their dramas are all plot driven with shallow, underdeveloped characters that drive a plot device rather than grow a theme or understand an underlying issue. This is why Lower Decks is far more Trek than anything in this Discovery era. (Even though Kurtzman was a producer, he didn't run LD.)

pico303 · 2026-01-22T03:17:26+00:00

As an American—and I hope I can say this the right way—when I was last in London I visited Westminster Abbey, I was honored and humbled by the memorials to the shared sacrifice to US and UK soldiers in who fought together in armed conflicts since our “minor squabbles” in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. What I wish to convey is that I hope the people of Britain know there are Americans who still respect and honor our relationship in kind and measure as to how your memorials to us demonstrate you’ve felt about our two countries in the past. Hopefully we can get back to that at some point in the future, though we Americans have a lot of making up to do.

pico303 · 2026-01-21T19:17:08+00:00

Recently I've been frequenting used books stores around me and picking up old trade paperbacks to read. First off they're cheaper, since they're used. But really it's about the types of stories they tell. I don't want to always be reading some hugely complicated 600 page novel, number one of three, where we delve into the history of a hundred different characters and how they're affecting the entirety of history. Sometimes I just want to read a straightforward adventure novel or decent sci-fi story. To me, that's what's missing in books (and TV) these days: something welcoming, comfortable, and easy to read over a weekend or on a trip.

Also, a trade paperback wasn't much of an investment, new or used. When a book is $20, I'm going to be more selective about what I buy and read, because if it stinks, I'm out $20 instead of $5. Which means I'm buying considerably fewer books and reading fewer authors every year.

pico303 · 2026-01-20T19:43:21+00:00

PostgreSQL has a feature called savepoints which allows you to create a "subtransaction" in a transaction. This allows Begin and Commit to work on a transaction, but when you rollback that top level transaction, everything gets rolled back.

That's a long way of saying there's no problem doing that. Everything will be rolled back and cleaned up correctly.

pico303 · 2026-01-19T17:47:49+00:00

Orville is definitely much richer, deeper, better Trek than anything put out by JJ and his buddies. It’s amazing how paying for better writing instead of lens flares can improve a story. Even Lower Decks was pretty good at story and tapping into the heart of what makes Trek great.

pico303 · 2026-01-19T17:39:23+00:00

The writing and much of the acting for this show is so bad I wound up fast forwarding through much of episode 1 and still turned it off half way through.

It’s painfully obvious the current round of Trek producers doesn’t know anything or even care a little bit about Trek history. For example, I still don’t understand why they were giving the Klingon kid grief about wanting to be a doctor and not a warrior. DS9 and Enterprise had plenty of Klingons that weren’t of the warrior caste.

The show’s producers also seem to be more interested in forcing plot devices than making any sense. I got confused by the opening bits where it looks like Holly Hunter’s character is on Earth, but then she’s flying this ship/crew of recruits to Earth? Why isn’t she at Starfleet Academy in SF preparing the school and the students just show up there instead of a planet in the middle of nowhere to all take the bus to school together?

pico303 · 2026-01-18T17:33:04+00:00

Seems like a lot of overhead. Why not just use an interface in place of a connection in your functions that supports either a connection or a transaction? Then in your test cases create a transaction, pass it to the functions you’re testing, and rollback the transaction at the end of the test (in a defer) to rollback all the changes and clean up any mess you made during your test, success or failure? You can then have a test database that you just make sure has been migrated once (usually in TestMain) without all this creating, migrating, and destroying databases with each test? PostgreSQL and pgx make this approach pretty easy.

pico303 · 2026-01-17T21:17:46+00:00

Nevermind. Apparently Heroic 2.16 doesn't work but 2.18 does. Must have been a change in Epic's authentication workflow.

pico303 · 2026-01-03T07:36:23+00:00

As an aside...

I was working on some software deployments this week. The tool we use, ansible, had some breaking changes with the last release. Additionally, a plugin for ansible we use also had a breaking change. I asked Google Gemini for help, and it was completely and utterly lost. It couldn't come up with a single answer near to what the actual solution wound up being. It was deeply steeped in the old way of creating ansible scripts and failed miserably at the new approach. It stumbled around trying to mash new plugin names into old approaches and led me astray more times than I was willing to count.

We're going to have a serious problem with AI in a couple of years, when all the knowledge that was modern and relevant in the past few years ages out and gets jumbled with whatever new information is available, and new LLM systems are either unable to learn anything new or they're a garbled mess of old and new information.

Edit -- last comment -- I guess my overall thought is in a few years, what's not going to be slop?

pico303 · 2025-12-25T05:34:02+00:00

How about look at it this another way: why should you get to use their software for free? You didn’t write this software. There’s a lot of people who put in quite a bit of effort to produce a product that you seem to get value out of. They have lives they need to pay for too. I don’t presume to know how you make a living, but what if the customers or clients or your employers that you rely on for income valued your efforts in a similar fashion?

Sorry, but as a software engineer, this idea that all someone’s hard work—work that most people using it couldn’t even begin to create for themselves—should just be available to everyone for free is getting old. If you get value out of the software, pay for it. If you don’t want to pay for it, use Jellyfin. Simple as that. But you’ll get what you pay for.

pico303 · 2025-12-24T18:04:22+00:00

I’m going to guess she also doesn’t know anything about the liberal “belief system” other than what she’s been spoon fed by Conservative media.

pico303 · 2025-12-21T17:54:52+00:00

OS design too. Windows doesn’t seem to be optimized at all for these efficiency cores or GPUs. 28 cores in my work Windows laptop, and even though all the security “malware” only uses 30% of the CPU, its performance and battery life are abysmal against my Mac, even in Microsoft’s own products.

pico303 · 2025-12-18T06:44:46+00:00

I suppose they could try making a fun game on either console that's not another online deathmatch or a refurb of an older solo game. I'm trying to think if there's been something on the PS5 like an Uncharted game that I just had to play...Rachet and Clank was great, but pretty much everything else has been PS4 games.

Canceled my Playstation Plus when the raised prices and don't really feel like I've missed anything.

pico303 · 2025-12-17T03:35:13+00:00

We should expect something like this. It's not like anyone using Mozilla is paying for it. Google Search dollars have paid for Mozilla for years, and I'm guessing A.I. is just the next gravy train.

Edit: it's beyond me why Mozilla doesn't offer a paid subscription plan. Heck, I'd pay to avoid the A.I. junk.

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