Only 65, damn:

Val Kilmer, a homegrown Hollywood actor who tasted leading-man stardom as Jim Morrison and Batman, but whose protean gifts and elusive personality also made him a high-profile supporting player, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 65.

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer. Val Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and later recovered, she said.

Tall and handsome in a rock-star sort of way, Kilmer was in fact cast as a rocker a handful of times early in his career, when he seemed destined for blockbuster success. He made his feature debut in a slapstick Cold War spy-movie spoof, “Top Secret!” (1984), in which he starred as a crowd-pleasing, hip-shaking American singer in Berlin unwittingly involved in an East German plot to reunify the country.

He gave a vividly stylized performance as Morrison, the emblem of psychedelic sensuality, in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” (1991), and he played the cameo role of Mentor — an advice-giving Elvis as imagined by the film’s antiheroic protagonist, played by Christian Slater — in “True Romance” (1993), a violent drug-chase caper written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott.

Kilmer had top billing (ahead of Sam Shepard) in “Thunderheart” (1992), playing an unseasoned FBI agent investigating a murder on a South Dakota Indian reservation, and in “The Saint” (1997), a thriller about a debonair, resourceful thief playing cat-and-mouse with the Russian mob. Most famously, perhaps, between Michael Keaton and George Clooney he inhabited the title role (and the batsuit) in “Batman Forever” (1995), doing battle in Gotham City with Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey), though neither Kilmer nor the film were viewed as stellar representatives of the Batman franchise.

I cannot tell a lie that Batman Forever was so terrible — it was like paying 10 bucks to watch a 2 and a half hour McDonald’s commercial — I haven’t seen a comic book/superhero movie in the theaters since, although that wasn’t Kilmer’s fault, and I’ve always liked him. I see that Heat is on Crieterion so I’ll have to carve out some time this weekend. R.I.P.

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I’m sure there was a lot of suspense about what line of work Kyrsten Sinema would go into after being a one-and-done senator specializing in making legislation worse substantively and politically. Maybe she would start working for the local food bank? Go into teaching? I wonder…

Former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the centrist dealmaker who wielded virtually unilateral veto power over the Biden administration’s legislative agenda, has landed on K Street.

The Arizona Democrat-turned-independent is joining the law and lobbying firm Hogan Lovells, where she will serve as a senior counsel in the global regulatory and intellectual property practice, the firm announced Monday.

Sinema said in an interview that she will not register to lobby, but instead will advise businesses across industries to “understand, anticipate and influence the shifting regulatory landscape” and help them “navigate the intersection of business and government.”

The hire marks a jackpot for the firm, given Sinema’s intimate involvement in shaping some of the most significant pieces of legislation of the last four years, including the Inflation Reduction Act, bipartisan infrastructure law and the CHIPS and Science Act, in addition to landmark gun control and marriage equality legislation and a scrapped border security bill.

Sinema, a former member of the Senate Banking, Commerce, Appropriations, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security committees, told PI she’ll be working mostly with clients in industries where she’s long “had interest and expertise,” including AI and technology, fintech, crypto and private equity. She said she was drawn to Hogan Lovells because of the firm’s growing global regulatory practice and its focus on leading-edge industries in the tech space.

Though her new role is Sinema’s most significant step into the influence industry since leaving office earlier this year, it isn’t her first. In January, Sinema joined the global advisory council at crypto exchange Coinbase alongside Chris LaCivita, President Donald Trump’s 2024 co-campaign manager. Sinema also formed the Arizona Business Roundtable, which retained Mehlman Consulting in January to lobby on tax issues.

Sinema was known as a reliable ally of the business community during her time in the Senate. She voted against several of former President Joe Biden’s labor nominees and opposed increasing the federal minimum wage, provoking the ire of the Democratic base.

Sinema also single-handedly rescued the carried interest loophole during IRA negotiations — a tax provision that proponents in private equity, real estate and venture capital are once again gearing up to protect.

Going all-out to ensure that private equity parasites pay much lower taxes on their income than ordinary wage workers doesn’t make a lot of sense if your primary goal is doing good policy as a Democratic legislator or getting re-elected in a swing state. If you’re interested in getting a whole lot of money to do not a whole lot of work, though, it’s a winning move.

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Elon Musk today said he has merged X and xAI in a deal that values the social network formerly known as Twitter at $33 billion. Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in 2022.

xAI acquired X "in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt)," Musk wrote on X today.

X and xAI were already collaborating, as xAI's Grok is trained on X posts. Grok is made available to X users, with paying subscribers getting higher usage limits and more features.

"xAI and X's futures are intertwined," Musk wrote. "Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI's advanced AI capability and expertise with X's massive reach."

Musk said the combined company will "build a platform that doesn't just reflect the world but actively accelerates human progress."

xAI and X are privately held. "Some of the deal's specifics were not yet clear, such as whether investors approved the transaction or how investors may be compensated," Reuters wrote.

The reported value of the company formerly called Twitter plunged under Musk's ownership. Fidelity, an X investor, valued X at less than $10 billion in September 2024. But X's value rebounded at the same time that Musk gained major influence in the US government with the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

On the AI front, Musk has also been trying to buy OpenAI and prevent the company from completing its planned conversion from a nonprofit to for-profit entity.

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The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.

“Of course one of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se but [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions,” an SSA technologist tells WIRED.

The Social Security Administration did not immediately reply to WIRED’s request for comment.

SSA has been under increasing scrutiny from President Donald Trump’s administration. In February, Musk took aim at SSA, falsely claiming that the agency was rife with fraud. Specifically, Musk pointed to data he allegedly pulled from the system that showed 150-year-olds in the US were receiving benefits, something that isn’t actually happening. Over the last few weeks, following significant cuts to the agency by DOGE, SSA has suffered frequent website crashes and long wait times over the phone, The Washington Post reported this week.

This proposed migration isn’t the first time SSA has tried to move away from COBOL: In 2017, SSA announced a plan to receive hundreds of millions in funding to replace its core systems. The agency predicted that it would take around five years to modernize these systems. Because of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the agency pivoted away from this work to focus on more public-facing projects.

Like many legacy government IT systems, SSA systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper. The Defense Department essentially pressured private industry to use COBOL soon after its creation, spurring widespread adoption and making it one of the most widely used languages for mainframes, or computer systems that process and store large amounts of data quickly, by the 1970s. (At least one DOD-related website praising Hopper's accomplishments is no longer active, likely following the Trump administration’s DEI purge of military acknowledgements.)

As recently as 2016, SSA’s infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages, the agency’s Office of the Inspector General found. In fact, SSA’s core programmatic systems and architecture haven’t been “substantially” updated since the 1980s when the agency developed its own database system called MADAM, or the Master Data Access Method, which was written in COBOL and Assembler, according to SSA’s 2017 modernization plan.

SSA’s core “logic” is also written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, a former senior SSA technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer says. Even minor changes could result in cascading failures across programs.

“If you weren't worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, a technology strategy consultancy that helps government modernize services, about completing such a migration in a short timeframe.

It’s unclear when exactly the code migration would start. A recent document circulated amongst SSA staff laying out the agency’s priorities through May does not mention it, instead naming other priorities like terminating “non-essential contracts” and adopting artificial intelligence to “augment” administrative and technical writing.

Earlier this month, WIRED reported that at least 10 DOGE operatives were currently working within SSA, including a number of young and inexperienced engineers like Luke Farritor and Ethan Shaotran. At the time, sources told WIRED that the DOGE operatives would focus on how people identify themselves to access their benefits online.

Sources within SSA expect the project to begin in earnest once DOGE identifies and marks remaining beneficiaries as deceased and connecting disparate agency databases. In a Thursday morning court filing, an affidavit from SSA acting administrator Leland Dudek said that at least two DOGE operatives are currently working on a project formally called the “Are You Alive Project” targeting what these operatives believe to be improper payments and fraud within the agency’s system by calling individual beneficiaries. The agency is currently battling for sweeping access to SSA’s systems in court to finish out this work. (Again, 150-year-olds are not collecting social security benefits. That specific age was likely a quirk of COBOL. It doesn’t include a date type, so dates are often coded to a specific reference point—May 20, 1875, the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre.)

In order to migrate all COBOL code into a more modern language within a few months, DOGE would likely need to employ some form of generative artificial intelligence to help translate the millions of lines of code, sources tell WIRED. “DOGE thinks if they can say they got rid of all the COBOL in months then their way is the right way and we all just suck for not breaking shit,” says the SSA technologist.

DOGE would also need to develop tests to ensure the new system’s outputs match the previous one. It would be difficult to resolve all of the possible edge cases over the course of several years, let alone months, adds the SSA technologist.

“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” the former senior SSA technologist working in the office of the chief information officer tells WIRED. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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chucktaylorupset:

thememedaddy:

(via hornedchick)

Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.

My life as a mercenary sysadmin can be interesting. Sometimes I find things, and sometimes I hear things. Now and then I say things.

Right now, I think it's probably best if you uninstall atop. I don't mean just stopping it, but actually keep it from being executed.

I'm not talking about the OG top, or htop, iftop, or anything else with a "top" name. Just atop.

I can go into why another time.