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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The driving technology company Mobileye plans to launch a robotaxi service in an as-yet-unnamed US city in 2027, it said earlier today. The service will be vertically integrated, using Mobileye's Moovit mobility platform to interact with customers booking rides, coordinate drivers, and so on. The Israeli company, which was bought by Intel in 2017 before going public again in 2022, says it will start with around 100 robotaxis early next year. The company first rose to prominence in the mid-2010s, when Tesla began using Mobileye's advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) as part of Autopilot. That relationship lasted until 2016, when Mobileye dropped Tesla as a customer after being alarmed that a driver assistance system was being sold to end users as driverless technology. Since then, Mobileye has continued to work with other partners on ADAS and autonomous vehicles. It has developed a new "SuperVision" ADAS that combines cameras and radar sensors, used by Porsche and Polestar, among others. On the robotaxi front, it has partnered with Volkswagen Group's MOIA to develop a commercially available robotaxi based on the VW ID. Buzz minivan, and last year, Mobileye revealed plans to work with Lyft to deploy robotaxis in Dallas, "as soon as" this year. [...] If Mobileye's experience with the initial 100 robotaxis goes well, it says it will scale up to around 17,000 robotaxis within the following five years. "The robotaxi revolution has only just begun, and its potential for transforming how we travel around the world continues to increase," Shashua said. "This initiative is not a replacement for our existing partnerships; it is an extension of them," said Amnon Shashua, founder and CEO of Mobileye. "We remain deeply committed to enabling automakers and mobility providers with Mobileye Drive. At the same time, operating our own service allows us to accelerate adoption, gain direct operational experience, and showcase the full potential of autonomous mobility."

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Snap is launching its first consumer augmented-reality glasses this fall for $2,195. "You can preorder a pair of Specs now at specs.com with a $200 refundable deposit, and Snap says they're expected to ship 'this fall' in the US, UK, and France," reports The Verge. From the report: This is a big moment for Snap: The company made a big entry into smart glasses with its original Spectacles in 2016, and the company has been toiling away on nonpublic AR versions of Spectacles over the past few years. CEO Evan Spiegel promised the company would launch consumer AR glasses in 2026 and even turned its smart glasses team into a separate business. The company says that Specs are "fully standalone, with no puck and no tether." (Which is perhaps a jab at Apple's Vision Pro, which is tethered to a separate battery pack.) They'll be offered in two sizes, a 47mm model weighing 132g and a 52mm model weighing 136g, and will have removable inserts that Snap says will support "a wide range of prescriptions." You probably won't mistake Specs, with their wide, bold frames, for any of Meta's smart glasses -- Snap clearly picked a design that it wants to stand out. (They're not my style -- I don't think I can pull off the "snow goggles, but fashionable" look -- though maybe Jony Ive might like them.) They have visible light and infrared cameras, and while the Specs are recording, a little LED bar will glow in the middle of the glasses. Both of the lenses will be able to show you content, and Snap says that its display system is powered by a "proprietary liquid crystal on silicon technology" that offers a 51-degree field of view and can show 16 million colors. The lenses can also go from clear to tinted in 10 seconds, Snap says. The Specs have two Snapdragon processors onboard, and while Snap isn't specifying exactly which ones they are, the company says that one is focused on "computer vision" while the other is focused on running AR Lenses. "Together, they enable fast hand tracking, low latency, and responsive interactions that help digital content feel anchored in the real world," Snap says. You can also expect up to four hours of battery life on a charge, which Snap says accounts for things like "audio and video playback, AI assistance, Bluetooth notifications, and more." The Specs come with a charging case that Snap says will offer four more charges for a total of 20 hours of battery.

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SpaceX has agreed to acquire Cursor for $60 billion in stock, adding the popular AI coding assistant to Elon Musk's newly public aerospace-and-AI conglomerate. CNBC reports: Cursor built a popular AI coding tool that helps software developers generate, edit and review code, and the company has experienced explosive growth since its founding in 2022. In November, Cursor said it crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue, according to a release at the time. Cursor was also ranked at No. 37 on the annual CNBC Disruptor 50 list in 2026. [...] Musk merged SpaceX with his AI startup, xAI, earlier this year, and the Cursor deal looks set to help revitalize the company's efforts to compete with rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI, which also offer popular coding tools. SpaceX expects the merger to close during the third quarter of this year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The transaction is subject to "requisite regulatory approvals," the filing said.

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TechCrunch's Zack Whittaker argues that the U.S. government's abrupt export-control order forcing Anthropic to pull its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models offline was "never about an AI jailbreak" threat. Instead, it was driven more by "personality differences" between the AI company and Trump administration. Security experts say the reported guardrail bypass did not justify the order and warn that the move sets a troubling precedent: the government can unilaterally disrupt American software products without court approval, potentially undermining trust in U.S. AI providers. From the report: Katie Moussouris, a cybersecurity veteran and researcher who founded Luta Security, said in a blog post that Anthropic recently shared with her a private copy of a paper written by security researchers describing an alleged guardrail bypass in Fable 5. (The Wall Street Journal reports that the paper's authors are security researchers at Amazon.) Moussouris said that Anthropic reached out to ask for her take on the paper. Moussouris' blog post described how the researchers triggered the guardrail bypass, but said that the bypass itself "should never have triggered an export control." The difference is largely between asking an AI model to "review code for security issues" versus asking it to "fix this code." The end result is largely the same, even if the questions are posed slightly differently. "The behavior described in the paper cannot meaningfully be fixed, and any attempt would only weaken the model for defense," said Moussouris, who criticized the export control directive as hasty, heavy-handed, and misguided. Moussouris and dozens of other top security researchers and experts have since called on the Trump administration to revoke the export control order, calling the move to pull advanced cybersecurity capabilities from network defenders in the U.S. as "dangerous." Past administrations have made sweeping decisions on knowledge gaps. For instance, language used by the U.S. government during the 2010s to fix export law covering cybersecurity tools that could also be used for cyberattacks was so broad that inadvertently, it nearly outlawed legitimate security and vulnerability research. However, the Trump administration's directive appears retaliatory. Justin Hendrix, the editor of Tech Policy Press, said the Trump administration's move is "likely to raise alarms in foreign capitals about the reliability of American AI for critical applications." The message is that AI companies in the United States can't be trusted to operate without interference from the U.S. government. The Trump administration hasn't confirmed why it invoked its export control directive. Did the officials misread the report and freak out? Did Amazon CEO Andy Jassy say something to senior government officials that prompted the reaction, out of caution or spite? Was something lost in translation, or was this a way to pressure Anthropic, with whom the administration already has a fractious relationship? It's possible that the White House was unaware of the far-reaching consequences of the letter's demand and officials are scrambling to undo the damage of their own making. To quote Hendrix, "the climate is one of a cloud of suspicion that senior officials are picking favorites based on personal and political factors." The aftermath is that the government has set a dangerous precedent about how much control it intends to wield over the release of American-made software. This time the government took issue with Anthropic; tomorrow it could be with anyone else.

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The Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" is facing another issue just days after more than 1,500 packages were found carrying malware. According to Phoronix, over 70 AUR packages have reportedly been modified to insert Russian spam and profane messages into users' shell configuration files. From the report: Nicolas Boichat with his AI/LLM detection bot detected some questionable messages appearing in AUR content. Russian messages were being added post-install to the bashrc / zshrc / Fish configuration, etc containing offensive messaging. Those commits happened on the 14th, after the recent malware fiasco. And then over the past day reporting on dozens of AUR packages having similar Russian messages containing offensive language. The latest update on that thread indicates more than 70 AUR packages having this Russian spam / offensive messaging. Among those various Python packages, Ruby packages, Llama.cpp, and others. At least the AI/LLM bots are proving helpful here in proactively picking up on some of the AUR abuses until the fundamental situation can be better handled.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Linuxiac: Mozilla has released Firefox 152, the latest update to its popular open-source web browser, with updated settings, improved media controls, experimental JPEG XL support, and various platform-specific fixes for desktop and Android. A key update is the redesigned Firefox Settings page, which now features clearer groupings, improved navigation, and a more streamlined structure for easier customization. The release also expands built-in spellchecker support, adding dictionaries for Croatian, English (UK), Georgian, Persian, Slovenian, Tajik, Tamil, Tibetan, Turkish, Welsh, and Xhosa. [...] Importantly, Firefox now offers experimental support for JPEG XL, an image format with improved compression over WebP, JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Users can enable JPEG XL in the Firefox Labs panel within Settings.

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Remote access tools do not need dramatic new features to improve security. Sometimes the more useful change is quieter, like stronger defaults that make weak encryption harder to use by accident.

Version:next-20260616 (linux-next) Released:2026-06-16

Remote support platforms sit close to the systems attackers want most: administrator workflows, technician accounts, and managed endpoints. That is why the SimpleHelp OIDC flaw is more serious than a routine authentication bypass vulnerability. For organizations running these platforms on Linux-based infrastructure, the risk is compounded by the ease with which these services are deployed and integrated into larger management stacks.

For those of us who live and breathe Linux and open-source infrastructure, the "management plane" is usually just a collection of familiar tools—SSH, APIs, and centralized orchestration. But in the world of proprietary enterprise networking, the management plane is often a black box. Cisco’s latest SD-WAN issue serves as a stark reminder that even when these proprietary systems rely on Linux components under the hood, their centralized nature makes them the ultimate high-value target.

New simulations suggest Venus' extremely slow backward rotation may have been triggered by a high-angle collision with a fast-moving object roughly one-tenth its mass. The impact could have dramatically altered Venus' spin and melted nearly its entire mantle. Universe Today reports: Venus' bizarre and extraordinarily slow retrograde rotation on its axis has long puzzled planetary scientists. But in a new paper presented at the recent European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, the authors argue that their models indicate that a high angle moon-sized, high-velocity impactor likely triggered Venus's strange 248-day rotation. And it probably happened within the first 50 million years of Venus' formation. [...] The team found that an impactor that is about a tenth of Venus' mass hitting the planet at a high angle could drastically slow the early young planet's rotation. Depending on the actual impact parameters, we can slow down a rapidly rotating early Venus to rotation rates that are that are compatible with long-term evolution towards a slow rotating planet, says [Cedric Gillmann, the paper's lead author and a planetary scientist at ETH Zurich]. Or even in some cases with large energetic impact that happen with a tangential impact that would even put planets early on in already a retrograde but faster rotation, he says. In the simulations, giant impacts expectedly produce surface magma oceans, the paper's authors note. Their relative depths vary depending on impact properties: from a shallow melt layer in the order of 100km thick to a fully molten mantle, they note. If the surface can radiate heat to space efficiently, the magma ocean cools down quickly, they write. If Gillmann and colleagues are correct, Venus' likely impactor also melted some 99 percent of Venus' mantle. That is, the interior structure that extends between its core and crust. You will get rid of that impact heat pretty efficiently, and after a few hundred million years, you end up seeing an evolution that is very difficult to distinguish from a case where you don't have an impact, says Gillmann. What role the impact may have played in Venus' lack of plate tectonics, however, remains open for debate. But it's known that Venus' lack of a large-scale carbon recycling mechanism likely led to its current runaway greenhouse.

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A Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket's upper stage broke apart shortly after last week's June 9 launch, likely creating 100 to 150 pieces of debris in a busy region of low-Earth orbit crossed by the ISS and lower-altitude Starlink satellites. Most fragments should reenter within months because of atmospheric drag, but experts say the incident adds to a worsening trend as China leaves more large rocket bodies in orbit while expanding its launch rate. Ars Technica reports: The US Space Force confirmed the breakup event in a post on space-track.org, a website used by the military to distribute orbit data to the public. "The tracked pieces are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment to support spaceflight safety," the Space Force wrote in an advisory. "There are currently no threats to human spaceflight. Analysis is ongoing." So far, the Space Force has not added any of the debris fragments to the official catalog of human-made space objects. [...] The bad news is that the Zhuque-2E's breakup is the latest chapter in China's growing contribution to the space junk problem. After decades of leaving spent rocket bodies in orbit, launch operators in most countries now reserve enough fuel to steer their upper stages back to Earth for controlled reentries. Rocket bodies attributed to Russia and the former Soviet Union account for the bulk of the launch-related debris in long-lived orbits, followed by China and the United States. But the Russian and American numbers are declining or holding steady, while the mass of Chinese rocket bodies in these long-lived orbits has grown by more than 150 percent in the past five years, according to a new analysis by Space Domain Awareness expert Jim Shell. The increase comes as China ramps up launches of its own megaconstellations designed to compete with SpaceX's Starlink. Rocket bodies are the most concerning sources of space debris because they are typically fairly large in size and mass, often with residual propellant and high-pressure gases that can trigger an explosion. There is no way to maneuver or dispose of them if left abandoned in orbit after releasing their payloads. McKnight characterized the recent breakup of the Zhuque-2E rocket as a "slight space safety issue," but the trend is not good. China's Long March 6A rocket has an especially bad track record, including two explosions that littered a higher-altitude low-Earth orbit with more than 1,000 debris fragments, where they will remain for decades or centuries. "Three of the top four breakup events in LEO are of Chinese origin, with two of these events being from Chinese (rocket body) explosions in the last four years," McKnight said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A group made up of dozens of cybersecurity experts, including several well-known veterans of the industry, published an open letter to the U.S. government asking it to lift the export control order on Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models. According to the open letter, "this action has taken the best models away from [cybersecurity] defenders" who now can't use the models to find vulnerabilities and make their software and products more secure. "To pull the best capabilities away from defenders without a good reason when our adversaries are rapidly advancing is dangerous," read the letter. On Friday, the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to limit the export of Fable and Mythos, citing national security concerns, without explaining the specific reasons behind the order, according to Anthropic. In response, the company suspended access to the models to all users worldwide. As of this writing, the letter is signed by 76 cybersecurity experts, including Alex Stamos, former Facebook chief of security; Casey Ellis, the founder bug bounty platform Bugcrowd; Jon Callas, famed cryptographer and former Apple security design and architecture manager; Paul Vixie, computer scientist ; Dino Dai Zovi, the former head of applied security engineering at Block; Katie Moussouris, the founder of Luta Security; and Rachel Tobac, the CEO of the security awareness training firm SocialProof Security. [...] Anthropic said that the White House export control order may have been based on a report that there was a method to bypass -- or jailbreak -- Fable to unlock its powerful Mythos-level capabilities. According to Katie Moussouris, one of the signatories of the open letter, the method was demonstrated by Amazon researchers in a paper that is not public but that she has reviewed. But Moussouris said in a blog post that the paper did not actually demonstrate a real jailbreak. Instead, she wrote, the researchers simply asked Fable to fix open source code with public and known vulnerabilities along with "deliberately planted vulnerabilities," after the model initially refused to "review the code for security issues." "The behavior described in the paper cannot meaningfully be fixed, and any attempt would only weaken the model for defense," Moussouris wrote. "Defenders need to be able to ask AI to fix the bugs in a file, explain why the fix matters, and write tests that confirm the patch works. That is not a guardrail bypass. It is the most valuable thing an AI model can do for defensive security: executing the find, fix, and test loop defenders run every day." Moussouris' critique was echoed in the open letter, which also said that the group of experts believe the model capabilities in the Amazon paper "can be replicated" on OpenAI's GPT-5.5, on Anthropic's own publicly available Claude Opus 4.8 and Sonnet, "and even Chinese models like Kimi 2.7." Moussouris told TechCrunch that "the bugs used to demonstrate the techniques in the paper can be found using the other models. The method in the paper is a guardrail bypass technique. Other models that lack the Fable guardrails often won't refuse the straightforward request to look for security bugs, so they don't need a bypass." The letter also asked for transparently and fairly enforced regulations created by "a democratic rule-making process" that are based on scientific research done by industry and academic experts, and "used only to the minimal extent necessary to ensure the safety of the American public."

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The Federal Data Center Enhancement Act (FDCEA) is set to expire in September without an apparent replacement, potentially ending requirements for federal agencies to report on data-center efficiency, resilience, energy and water use, and contractor sustainability. Wired reports: Despite the public backlash, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the government agency that sets guidance for how agencies implement policies in line with the president's agenda, is not providing any plans for how federal agencies should manage the sunset or continue to implement reporting beyond the timeline of the law. This, current and former workers at OMB and the General Services Administration (GSA) say, signals that the Trump administration is set to take an even more hands-off approach to data center oversight and regulation. A replacement for the requirements laid out in FDCEA would, in other administrations, have been in the works for months ahead of its expiration. An employee with the GSA, the agency that oversees the government's IT services and helps to implement the FDCEA, says that the lack of any sort of plan is highly uncommon. The employee spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. "Never in the history of data center policies has a policy expired without another one having been painstakingly worked on for three years behind the scenes," says the GSA employee. "The technology has changed so much it's not about getting everything right, it's about doing the best they can and updating to a new policy. They claim they're going to make sure private companies pay their fare share, but they haven't explained how they'll do that." [...] There has been a burst of data-center-related legislation introduced in Congress this year, from bills that mandate environmental reviews of data centers to bills designed to protect local moratoriums. However, it appears that none of these bills are designed to address the requirements in FDCEA, nor do they specifically address federally run or leased data centers. [...] A search of reginfo.gov, the OMB website that contains reports on the president's Unified Agenda, also turns up nothing for the FDCEA. "By letting this expire, OMB is going to enter into this new age of prioritizing rapid AI development over any sort of centralized control or rigorous standards," says the anonymous GSA employee who spoke to Wired. "In the absence of a new policy from OMB, [GSA] has no directive or measurable standards with which to point agencies towards managing data centers efficiently."

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alternative_right shares a report from The Hill: The FBI released an urgent security warning to the public about a fast-acting scam targeting Microsoft 365 users on Teams, Outlook and OneDrive. The agency warned that the hacking platform Kali365 seeks out OAuth device codes, allowing scammers to sneak past multi-factor authentication codes, and without the need for a password, to access Microsoft accounts. Scammers will send a phishing email impersonating a trusted document-sharing service with a device code and instructions on how to verify, according to the FBI. "Kali365 lowers the barrier of entry, providing less-technical attackers access to AI-generated phishing lures, automated campaign templates, real-time targeted individual/entity tracking dashboards, and OAuth token capture capabilities," the FBI stated. The platform is sold to scammers with a $250 per month subscription. The FBI, which first detected Kali365 in April, described the hacking platform as an "emerging Phishing-as-a-Service platform." Hackers with limited skills can access advanced phishing tools through the platform, according to NordPass.

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Google is removing Chrome's last remaining workarounds for Manifest V2 extensions, effectively ending support for legacy ad blockers such as the original uBlock Origin. 9to5Google reports: CyberNews points out a Chromium commit that removes support for the "kExtensionManifestV2Disabled" flag, which is referred to as "dead code" seeing as Chrome no longer supports Manifest V2 extensions. This removal acts as the final stop for many Manifest V2-based ad blocker extensions that were still in use today -- the flag was effectively a loophole to continue using these extensions. A Googler on the commit explains: "MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality. We won't be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we've actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately). Of course, other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire." This will also impact other Chromium-based browsers, though the comment notes that "other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire." Neowin points out that Microsoft Edge and Opera are likely to follow suit. Chrome 150, set to be released later this month, will remove this flag, while other leftover bits of Manifest V2 will be removed in the v151 release.

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If more than 12 million enterprise systems can be exposed by flaws in a security control designed to harden Linux, it's probably worth asking whether Linux gives people a false sense of security. That's a question that has come up repeatedly throughout 2026.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A decade ago, AMD added a protection to its high-end CPUs to protect them against cold boot attacks and other types of physical exploits that siphon sensitive data out of the connected memory chips. Short for Transparent Secure Memory Encryption, TSME encrypts the entire contents stored in memory, making the data useless to physical attackers. Over time, AMD added TSME to lower-end processors, including the consumer version of its Ryzen chips, a CPU that costs less than the Pro version. Over the years, users of these lower-end chips have gotten used to the added security. Recently and without warning or notice, this lower-end line of AMD chips suddenly dropped the protection, and did so in a way that was impossible to detect on Windows machines and required a fair amount of technical work when using Linux. AMD has yet to say why TSME worked on these CPUs, or even to confirm the change. AMD declined to answer questions sent by email other than to say TSME "is a security feature only applied to PRO CPUs as part of AMD PRO Technologies." The statement is the first known time the chipmaker has explicitly made this restriction public. [...] There's no indication that AMD ever advertised or marketed TSME as being available in consumer CPUs. AMD has long said that a related memory protection, Secure Memory Encryption (SME), is available only in the Pro and Epyc CPU tiers. SME is OS-managed. It uses a single key and allows the OS to selectively encrypt individual memory pages. TSME is firmware-managed. It encrypts all RAM with no OS involvement. When active, it provides protection against physical attacks, including cold boot exploits, DRAM interface snooping, and memory module removal. It activates silently when enabled in the BIOS, making it the more practically useful of the two protections. Ben Kilpatrick, a self-described "privacy-conscious Linux hobbyist," discovered that TSME had stopped working on his consumer Ryzen processor despite remaining enabled in the BIOS. He spent months investigating, persuaded MSI engineers to test multiple CPUs, motherboards, and firmware versions, and filed a public AMD bug report that traced the change to newer AGESA firmware apparently disabling TSME on consumer chips while retaining it on Pro and EPYC models. "AMD engineers' comments, such as those mentioned above, and the years of TSME working just fine in the lower-cost tier processors, have understandably conditioned Kilpatrick and other users to reasonably regard it as an expected part of the chip package," reports Ars Technica. "AMD quietly removing it and providing no acknowledgment or explanation strikes these users as something of a betrayal." Joe Fitzgerald, an expert in silicon-level security, said in an interview: "They could have not realized they did it leading to their cagey responses, or they could have done it intentionally and tried to get away with it, leading to the same cagey responses. But I really feel like an explanation should be in order, even if it was 'TSME was never supposed to be supported. We did ship some firmwares that erroneously enabled it, but you shouldn't use them since we can't guarantee it'll work properly.'"

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Almost exactly three years ago the Oceangate submarine implosion happened. The disaster came about when a billionaire called Stockton Rush created his own unclassified submarine to go sightseeing on the Titanic. Ignoring all advice from experts he created a "macgyveresque death trap" that eventually killed him and sadly also 4 innocent people. The whole thing was a massive display of stupidity and arrogance with unfortunate outcomes. We are not going to go into the actual event any deeper, but those interested can find lots of material online.

Instead we are going to look more deeply into one often overlooked points of Stockton Rush's character. Apparently he felt like he was something of a "new James T. Kirk" (link1 paywalled, link2). Liking Star Trek is not that unusual. I'm guessing that more than 99% of the readers of this blog are fellow Star Trek fans. The problem lies elsewhere, but to understand it we first have travel back in time.

A brief overview of the British navy during the Napoleonic wars (by a non-historian, so probably inaccurate)

The original concept for Star Trek was, approximately, The Adventures of Horatio Hornblower in Space! The Enterprise is basically a British warship sailing through the vast ocean of outer space. The command structure mirrors this, where you have a captain, navigator, ship's doctor and so on. The Next Generation leaned into this even further by having a first officer and so on. The original Star Trek never went into detail on how the main cast got to their current positions, just that there was an Starfleet Academy they went to.

In the Napoleonic era of Hornblower things were quite different. Anyone who wanted to become a captain pretty much had to be from the upper classes. They had to obtain a letter of recommendation so that they could join a vessel as a midshipman at the age of 13 or so. They were expected to be able seamen by this time and then spent the next six to seven years working on the ship rigging sails and doing all manner of random jobs. This went on for six to nine years depending on circumstances, after which the person could take a formal examination to become a lieutenant. The test was not trivial, many people could not pass even after trying multiple times.

A lieutenant then had to work successfully for several years before obtaining the rank of captain. Even that did not guarantee a commission. Some captains never commanded a ship simply because there were not enough of them to go around. All in all becoming a ship's captain was a long and difficult journey. In a surprisingly non-British turn of events it was not possible for aristocrats to sneak past the gates. Getting a midshipman position was obviously easier with connections, but the lieutenant's test was something they had to pass on their own.

All of this is to say that every captain of the time was an expert with decades of working experience on many different positions aboard the ship.

What does a captain actually do?

[Note: I have not fact checked this portion at all. Feel free to consider it fanfiction.]

The year is 1808 and we are aboard a British warship about to leave for a mission of great importance. The captain gives the order to set sail. Whistles are blown, bells are rung and sailors springs into action. Every single man, with one exception, is either doing manual labour or directly supervising their underlings. That exception is the captain, who seemingly stands around doing nothing (at least if you ask the crew). This is not so.

What he is doing is crucial. He is observing the state of the ship and her crew. This includes things like overall crew morale, any aberrations from normal operations that could cause problems, thinking of workflow improvements and so on. In a sense he has to sense the ship itself. This only works because of two things. First of all he has personal experience doing the exact work he is observing. If you have not personally "been there", you can't really know if a crew is working well or not. You need a "gut feeling" to be able to sense this. Secondly the captain does not have any manual labour so he can focus all of his mental energy on observing the ship's state. He is preparing for all the unexpected things that may occur in the future. This can only happen if your brain is free from menial tasks.

This is exactly what most books on business and project management advocate. It is a time tested way of improving your chances of success. A highly skilled commander can take an average team of people and lead them to victory. It is the basic plot of most military and sports movies.

Getting back to the present

Now take a typical modern day billionaire-via-inheritance and show them Star Trek at an impressionable age. Do they see the advantages of education, hard work and ethics? The foundation upon which Gene Roddenberry carefully built the show? Hell no! What they see is this (TNG screenshot used because TOS did not have a suitable maritime episode).

And then they think: "Wow! I want to be exactly like that! Parading around in a funny hat while everyone obeys my orders without question is my life's mission from now on. And I get to have sexy space sex with hot sexy space ladies of sex whenever I want. This appeals to me even more profoundly than Atlas Shrugged." Some of them might go on to watch Master and Commander and shed tears upon realizing that they cant publicly flog employees for failing to salute their superiors. Yet. Expect this to be made legal in Silicon Valley any day now.

Liking Kirk is not in any way a bad thing. Wanting to "be just like Kirk" is, because in the real world running a business like Kirk runs the Enterprise is a terrible way to do things. An example will illustrate this nicely. Let's imagine a random episode where the Enterprise has gotten into trouble. Eventually Kirk will call for Scotty and tell him: "You need to <babble> <babble> <babble>." Scotty will then reply with a varying level of scottish accent something like: "I cannae change the laws of physics, captain". Kirk will then say the same thing again, just more aggressively and in a close up shot. Scotty replies with "Well in that case I can get it done in sixty minutes." Kirk counters with: "You have five." And thus the problem is solved. Kirk gets a commendation for incredible valour under stress while Scotty, who did all of the actual work, is never mentioned.

In "Kirk style" management the Big Boss tells his underlings what to do. If they try to give any sort of feedback, the Boss ignores everything and just repeats his original orders again and again until the other party yields. The only reason underlings ever resist The Vision is that they are lazy and it is the job of the manager to put them in their place. This seems like a bit from a comedy show, but I have unfortunately worked under bosses like this. Either you try to talk at least some sense into them, fail, get labeled as a "not team player", watch the project crash and get blamed for the failure, or you try to do the impossible task given to you, fail watch the project crash and get blamed for the failure.

Another major problem with Kirk is that due to the way tv shows and movies need to be structured, he is actually an obsessive gambler. The stakes must always get higher and the ways to get out of trouble must become ever crazier. Kirk will break any and all laws and regulations he sees fit and then, once he has succeeded, no disciplinary action is taken. The ends justify the means. Idolising this sort of behaviour leads to thinking that wild one-in-a-million gambits will succeed at least 99 times out of a hundred. And even if it fails, you can get out of it by betting everything on an even bigger gamble. The real world does not work like that. Reality is not a story and you are not its hero. It does not owe you eternal, or even eventual, success. Had Stockton Rush survived his death trap, he would most likely have faced criminal charges and, if convicted, gone to jail.

The myth of the existence of the professional manager

Let's make one last detour in the 1800s and assume that the 7th Earl of Sidcup or some such really wants to get his idiot son instated as a captain. He and contacts the appropriate naval officers.

"My offspring needs to become a captain of a ship post haste!"

"Well first he has to become a midshipman and ..."

"Phah! None of that nonsense. It's way too slow and not becoming of my statute. Also my son is 35 years old so the post of a midshipman would be beneath him."

"I see. Well what sort of prior naval experience does he have?"

"None."

"Has he even ever been out to sea?"

"Not to my knowledge. But that does not matter. He is highly skilled in using the abacus excelius to compute annual budgets."

"By himself?"

"Of course not. That is what secretaries are for. He just gives them orders. That he can do. And that is all that matters. Same as in sailing."

This person is unlikely to get his wish with this line of reasoning. On the other hand in modern business life this is common. For example when startups get VC money, a common requirement is that they need to get a "proper manager" as a CEO. Typically this means the investor's friend, and more often than not an MBA.

Contrary to common belief, having an MBA does not make you incompetent at managing a technical company (though there is a strong positive correlation). It is entirely possible to be a good manager on a field you have no personal experience in. You just have to have a lot of humility, listen (actually, properly listen) to your employees and let the people with hands-on experience make the most technical, product and development decisions. In other words you have to be the enabler, not the maverick decision maker. People with these sorts of personality traits are rare and typically their career choices steer as far away from getting an MBA as possible.

The absolute worst thing happens if the CEO in question combines the (lack of) skills of an MBA with the attitude of Kirk. That leads to incompetent decisions based on willful ignorance, executed with the fury of an egomaniac who refuses to even entertain the notion that they might be wrong. Further, any person inside the organisation who dares to point out potential flaws in the plan will soon find themselves outside said organisation. Disagreement is treason. Treason shall not go unpunished.

In the 1800s the British navy could be said to be the best in the world. It seems plausible that one component of this success was the requirement that the officers running their ships had to have actual experience operating the ship. Not looking at other people operating it. Not pretending to read about operating it for a test. Actually doing it. If we look around how MBA wielding sociopath CEOs are enshittifying absolutely everything about the tech industry, bringing this requirement back into active use starts to feel awfully tempting.

Epilogue: Why doesn't everything immediately explode?

A reasonable counterpoint to everything written above would be that if managers truly are that bad, shouldn't all those companies be bankrupt by now? In an ideal world they would be, but there are opposing forces that keep them going.

The first one is that all corporations have inertia. If you took an established major company and actively started to mismanage it to death, it would still take years for things to eventually collapse. 

The second one is a dirty little secret. Many employees care more about the product they work on than "corporate visions" that seem to stem from overuse of peyote. They don't blindly obey idiotic commands but instead try to make things silently work within the system. Basically this means that corporations thrive despite their mad kings, not because of them. I know several people who have worked in these kinds of organizations and this is not as rare of an occurrence as one might imagine.

I have also experienced it personally. Years ago I was at a company, whose CEO (who, to the best of my knowledge, did not have an MBA) wanted to change the company's product so that it would do a specific thing X. Everybody thought this was a horrible idea and tried to reason with him using solid business and technical reasons (which turned out to be 100% correct). That failed. Spectacularly. This lead to an eternal series of secret meetings. The participants were main developers and all managers except the CEO. The only item on the agenda was "How can we make the CEO think that we did what he ordered while doing the exact opposite".

Eventually we did succeed, but boy was that a surreal couple of weeks.

Longtime Slashdot reader necro81 writes: The heavily promoted, $499 T1 "Trump Phone" was originally said to be "Made in the USA" and ship in September 2025. Later, that was downgraded to "Assembled in the USA." Given the Trump Organization's lack of engineering or supply chain expertise, many assumed the "T1" would just be a private-label phone made by someone else. After a number of delays, the first phones are finally shipping. iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro -- a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA," that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros. iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design,' but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I'm failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I've certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time." Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs on YouTube also published a comprehensive video of his experience ordering, unboxing, and tearing down the phone. "From pre-order emails landing in Gmail spam thanks to botched DMARC records, to paying for the $47.45 Trump Mobile 47 Plan over the phone, the entire buying experience was a disaster worthy of its own review," writes Nelson.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.