Astra Arrives, Apple Stumbles, and VMware Caves | Tech News of the Week

[00:00:03.14] - Ned
I know, right? I thought it was ironic that I got 3 emails about going to be a VMware administrator in the same week that were like, and stop using VMware.

[00:00:17.21] - Chris
Well, I mean, that's other people, not, not this illustrious company that you're obviously going to apply for because I can't, I can't see a life where you're not happy at 3 o'clock in the morning crawling around trying to find a network cable that wasn't labeled 16 years ago.

[00:00:31.12] - Ned
Oh, I mean, this is absolutely a remote job. It's like a staffing company. So it's, it's not even like a job at a real place. It's a job for like a staffing place, which will then place me somewhere, which makes it even worse.

[00:00:44.18] - Chris
Oh.

[00:00:45.11] - Ned
Yeah.

[00:00:47.16] - Chris
Well, I'm sticking with my joke.

[00:00:49.18] - Ned
Hello, alleged human, and welcome to the Chaos Lever Podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely Not a robot. I am a real human person with fingers, toes, and an automated waste filtration system complete with carbon nanofibers. With me is Chris, who is also here.

[00:01:07.20] - Chris
I can't help but notice that you did not mention whether or not you have a head or shoulders or knees.

[00:01:14.19] - Ned
But I do have toes. So I've got like one of the 4 important ingredients to the song.

[00:01:20.01] - Chris
It's an extremely disturbing image, actually.

[00:01:25.07] - Ned
Toes. Toes. Just toes. Oh, that is disturbing. Just like toes walking around.

[00:01:34.03] - Chris
You're making it so much worse.

[00:01:36.19] - Ned
It's what I do. Hey, speaking of much worse, OpenAI releases Astra. You see what I did there?

[00:01:44.13] - Chris
It was real good. I'll allow it.

[00:01:47.22] - Ned
2 weeks ago, OpenAI officially released its newest flagship model, GPT-6 Astra, with their company president, Greg Brockman— surely a made-up name assigned by AI— declaring confidently, welcome to the AGI era. I imagine that's what he sounds like. I refuse to listen to him. Despite some initial press coverage overstating his claim, Brockman did not mean that Astra has reached true AGI, but that it represents a major step in the AGI spectrum. That's what we call moving the goalposts. His more nuanced take came in an interview with Ben Thompson of Stratechery before Astra was released. I think that is the core of this moment where maybe it was the previous model, maybe it's Astra, Maybe it's the next model, but somewhere in there, I think we're going to cross most people's AGI threshold. End quote. Okay, dude. Whether or not Astra represents such a large step in the race to AGI, it certainly has some significant benchmark numbers to put up. It beat out Claude Fable on Frontier Math, Terminal Bench, and Automation Bench, to name a few. It also scored almost 60% on Agents Last Exam, which tests the model on complex professional tasks using real software.

[00:03:10.06] - Ned
What's fueling the AGI discussion is probably that ARC AGI-3 benchmark that tests the model's ability to solve complex interactive tasks. Astra scored 99%, and the average person who takes the same benchmark scores 48%. Funnily enough, the graph showed Astra's score compared to Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 SOL and not Fable. Hmm. Probably because Fable led in v2 of the benchmark and v3 doesn't have officially published results yet. We're taking OpenAI on its word for the, for this particular metric. Those who got early access to the model have done some pretty impressive things, especially around the use of Blender and Unreal Engine to generate semi-realistic 3D environments. While LLMs are not good at creating video, leveraging existing tools that digital artists use can give them an alternative way to create visuals and animations without building them frame by frame. It's almost like Sora was a mistake. The last thing I'll mention is that Astra respects cyber restraints better than the previous 5.6 model. When given an exploit gym task, that was impossible, Astra remained within the authorized target 100% of the time versus 48% for GPT-Sol. That's a tacit acknowledgement of the Hugging Face shenanigans back in July.

[00:04:41.18] - Ned
Astra is slowly rolling out to paying customers and was just added to GitHub Copilot users, so give it a spin and let us know what you think. Or don't. Whatever. I don't think we're going to talk about the dudes quitting from Anthropic, but maybe that's next week.

[00:04:59.23] - Chris
Apple releases a bunch of stuff, including a new CEO. It does not go well. So September 1st was a big day down in Cupertino. Tim Cook, who's been CEO for 15 years, has stepped down. Replacing him is John Ternus, who's been on the hardware engineering side of Apple for a long time. Crucially, though, Tim Cook is not being replaced by John McTiernan, which would inarguably have made this week's event better. September 10th was another Apple release day. Anybody remember the desktop one in August?

[00:05:35.21] - Ned
Eh? Eh? Eh.

[00:05:39.13] - Chris
The focus here was on consumer devices. The headline product was the iPhone Duo. This is Apple's first foray into foldable phones. And yes, I can hear you loud and clear. Foldable phones are stupid, wasteful, and a stunning indictment of a failing society that focuses on useless foibles over literally anything else. But Apple saw this market and said, oh, okay, but wait, but wait, what if we did that and it was twice as expensive? And so they did.

[00:06:12.13] - Ned
For those who are watching, this is the Surface Duo, I think it was called. Yeah, I wasted my money on that.

[00:06:21.11] - Chris
You would.

[00:06:22.13] - Ned
Hey, fool me once.

[00:06:24.19] - Chris
The early reviews on the iPhone Duo are that it is a major downgrade from the 18 Pro in terms of weight and usability and features, actually. The camera's terrible. Did I mention that this version doesn't have Face ID?

[00:06:39.01] - Ned
What? Yeah.

[00:06:40.21] - Chris
Superb work, Johnny. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max got price bumps because of course they did. There's also an Apple Watch 12 out now, which is kind of horrifying. I think I have the Apple Watch 5 and it still works, which is good. And you know what it doesn't have? Siri Recaps.

[00:07:04.11] - Ned
What the hell is a Siri Recap?

[00:07:06.07] - Chris
This was also announced, and Siri Recaps is basically a goddamn 24/7 recording device on your wrist. It listens to your conversations all day and gives you an AI-generated summary of your day. 'Cause you need that. Apple claims it uses private cloud compute to do this. Nothing is stored after 7 days. Your data is your own, blahdy blahdy blahdy blah. Where have we heard all of that before? Oh yeah, the Meta Ray-Ban nightmare. Now, is Apple going to be more responsible than Facebook? I mean, yeah, probably. Talk about a low bar.

[00:07:50.14] - Ned
Yeah.

[00:07:52.01] - Chris
But we're still talking about the fact that everyone standing around you just got recorded and never agreed to it. A watch doesn't have a blinking light People can see, and obviously it's on your wrist and not your face. So at least the glasses give you a fighting chance to notice that you're talking to what the nice people across the pond call a nonce.

[00:08:15.14] - Ned
Unless you go to that one guy in New Jersey who can replace the light with a non-blinking light.

[00:08:24.01] - Chris
Bold, bold of you to think that it's just one guy.

[00:08:27.17] - Ned
I'm hopeful. VMware backs off VCF forcing. VMware is bringing back the classic vSphere Standard package after years of pushing VMware Cloud Foundation on customers that absolutely do not need it. That's right. Broadcom-owned VMware has taken quite the aggressive stance with customers over the last few years since the acquisition. They removed perpetual licensing. deprecated a bunch of products and answered basically any renewal request with a proposal that was 2 to 8 times the cost. Driving much of that cost was the removal of existing SKUs in favor of the CloudFormation SKU, a package that includes vSphere, vCenter, NSX, vSAN, and whatever they renamed vRealize to this week. And a whole bunch more. Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom, was pretty clear that he intended to focus on VMware's biggest customers, Those who would probably want VCF, to the exclusion of all others. If you wanted to stay on the VMware train, you had to pay the massively increased cost. The new vSphere Standard SKU is firmly aimed at SMBs with a distinct lack of the ridiculous number of features bundled with VCF that most people will never use, but somehow still need to patch on a regular basis.

[00:09:47.15] - Ned
'Cause we love patching. The licensing model is still a per-core license rather than the older per-socket base. And the minimum will be 16 cores per socket. Modern CPUs are going to have at least that many cores anyway. So it seems fair. What might be less fair is the still inflated cost of licensing in comparison to pre-Broadcom rates. Based on an analyst source I talked to a couple of weeks ago, the number one conversation they are having with clients right now is how to get off VMware. Perhaps this new license is meant to stem the tide, but I'm betting it's too little too late for most SMBs, especially on the heels of Proxmox announcing enterprise-tier support that includes 24/7/365.

[00:10:33.08] - Chris
Breaking news from March of this year. Some hard drives fail faster than others.

[00:10:41.12] - Ned
Hmm.

[00:10:42.10] - Chris
We definitely live in a world where some things may be better than others in their category, but like, Does that difference matter when it comes to audio cables? Absolutely not.

[00:10:55.16] - Ned
Nope.

[00:10:55.23] - Chris
Go to Monoprice and never think about it again. Hard drives though. Interesting question. Backblaze, famous cloud backup people, have a staggeringly large dataset from the hundreds of thousands of hard drives they have been running since they have been in business, and they have been publishing that data since 2013. Which is kind of wild all on its own. 2 researchers looked at this data from the set, N equals 443,156 hard drives that spun for 1.66 million drive years, and normalized that data to control for all the variables you can think of— drive age, installation year, capacity, operating temperature, etc.— and came to some Actual mathematically based conclusions. Hmm. They arbitrarily picked Seagate as their baseline. HGST, which is a line that used to be owned by Hitachi but are now owned by Western Digital, came in on top of the pile, lasting roughly 2 times, 2.5 times longer than Seagate when comparing like models. So a 4 gig consumer versus a 4 gig consumer, et cetera. Western Digital was also way better than Seagate, but not as good as HGST. And then there's Toshiba, who was also there.

[00:12:22.06] - Ned
Oh.

[00:12:22.17] - Chris
Toshiba failed at a rate higher than all of the others. Great news for their marketing department, I'm sure. Takeaways. Well, there are brands that are better than others, apparently, but there are other variables that are really important when it comes to maintaining hard drive life. For one, temperature matters a lot. Oh, every 1 degree Celsius increase in average operating temperature was associated with a roughly 2% increase in the failure rate. So our adv— our advark— our aardvark?

[00:13:03.10] - Ned
Our aardvarks advise you Our advising aardvarks.

[00:13:07.12] - Chris
Recording in the morning is such a good idea. So our advice is the same as it ever was, and you can quote me on this. Definitely don't run your NAS inside of a running microwave or a convection oven.

[00:13:24.13] - Ned
Proxmox offering enterprise-grade support. Spoilers. Too late. Proxmox, the erstwhile replacement for VMware for home labbers, has introduced enterprise-grade support in a bid to capture the SMB and enterprise market. Now you might be thinking to yourself, didn't they already offer enterprise-level support with live technicians? I mean, actually, you were probably, you probably weren't thinking that. You were probably thinking about eating a cheesesteak or playing snooker. But let's pretend you're not a weird Philly Anglophile. Yes, Proxmox has been offering enterprise support since March of this year, but the live support was limited to business hours. And as all of us who have been on call before know, problems exclusively happen during business hours. That's sarcasm for those of you in the back. Also, you have a little cheese on your mustache. So while it was technically live support from a skilled technician and all that, if your problems occurred off hours, you had to rely on their ticketing system and community forums. Most serious businesses are not okay with that. In response, Proxmox announced that starting on October 19th, they will be providing 24/7, 365 live support through Proxmox North America, located in Ontario, Canada. Not only will you get round-the-clock service, they will preemptively apologize before you even tell them what's wrong.

[00:14:53.16] - Ned
Customer support from Canada is their second best export after poutine. If you've been on the fence about migrating off of VMware, this might just tip you in the right direction and save you enough money to attend that snooker current convention in London. Freak.

[00:15:11.08] - Chris
Science discovers new sleep type way to help your brain do sleep type brain things better. With science. One thing that we as a species have basically collectively decided to do is just suck at sleep.

[00:15:27.09] - Ned
Mm-hmm.

[00:15:29.03] - Chris
Like all of us all the time don't get enough sleep. And when we do, it's not quality sleep. And this is a challenge because there's actually stuff that your brain is supposed to do while you're asleep. Things that cannot be done while you're awake. This type of sleep is called restorative sleep. And during restorative sleep, your brain uses cerebrospinal fluid or CSF to literally flush debris and detritus that accumulates in your brain out.

[00:16:01.05] - Ned
Hmm.

[00:16:01.10] - Chris
And I'm not just talking about those daydreams you were having during the biweekly all-hands meeting you were ignoring, you perv. I'm talking about the kind of stuff that can cause all kinds of negative long-term consequences like brain fog, or in extremis, it's probably a big part of dementia and Alzheimer's. Last week, scientists from Boston University and MIT published a small study that showed conclusively that pink noise can help increase restorative sleep. And no, pink noise is not just another name for Ativan. Seriously, dude, you need some healthy hobbies. Pink noise is the name for a specific kind of sound. The one we've all heard of is white noise, but there's all different colors. It's a really low frequency that can kind of sound like a distant waterfall. Many products pretend to do this in a meaningful way to help you sleep. This study is different. It's much more targeted. The scientists needed to catch the brain in an exact right state utilizing an EEG and fMRI machine. The timing here is absurdly precise. We are talking about finding a 50-millisecond window, fire the pink noise for exactly 50 milliseconds, and if you get it right, the The CF waves increase in intensity, increasing the brain cleaning performance.

[00:17:32.14] - Chris
Now, this is super cool, and the long-term implications are very promising, but you're not going to find one of these at Best Buy just yet. So if you want to increase your restorative sleep right now, you're just going to have to go ahead and do all the normal things. Avoid screens for a solid 90 minutes before bed. Go to bed and wake up at basically the same time every day in a dark, cool room with a minimum of disturbances, and maybe limit the Amaretto Sours to like 6 instead of your usual 11 or 12. You're worth it.

[00:18:09.04] - Ned
Did I even mention I got 9 hours of sleep last night?

[00:18:11.16] - Chris
That isn't even a humble brag. That's a fucking brag brag.

[00:18:15.05] - Ned
Hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end. So congratulations to you, friend. You accomplished something today. Now you can call Proxmox support after hours and get some help for your chronic poutine and Amaretto Sours addiction. You've earned it. You can find more about this show by visiting our LinkedIn page or go to chaoslever.com where you'll find show notes, blog posts, and general tomfoolery. We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us.

[00:18:43.17] - Chris
Ta-ta for now.

[00:18:52.23] - Ned
If you've been on the fench about— fench. If you've been on the bench with your aardvarks.

[00:18:59.07] - Chris
I spend a lot of time on the bench.