According to recently released discovery materials, Meta directly targeted Jonathan Haidt by trying to stir up academics to oppose him. The odd thing is that many of us scholars who disagree with him knew nothing about this and weren’t not involved in it. And so now scholars like the amazing Candice Odgers are being doubted about the sincerity of their critique. WTAF upside down world are we living it?
What’s super frustrating is that many scholars in the teens-tech-mental health space are repeatedly accused of fabricating research or being corporate shills when our research is politically inconvenient. I know that I have been. Repeatedly. And it sucks.
When I was still in graduate school, I was asked to serve on the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. One of my responsibilities was to oversee the research effort. I worked with other scholars to track down all studies that focused on content, contact, and conduct related harms involving the internet. The politicians were primarily interested in the question of pedophiles. When I provided the report to then Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, he told me to go find different data. He did not like what I had found. I didn’t know what to say.
Predation is real. It’s devastating. But it’s a more complex dynamic than most people’s mental image allows for. And when it comes to internet-enabled predation, the biggest risk is not teenagers using the latest social media site. The biggest risk is single moms using online dating apps. Pedophiles seek out these women to get access to their children. It’s sick. But no one wants to hear that. They want to focus on the digital tools young people use.
After our report was published, I started getting calls from journalists. I earnestly and naively responded to all of them. One of the journalists was from PBS Frontline. She called me up repeatedly, drilling me on questions about arguments in the report. I responded by providing study after study to every inquiry, pointing her to different researchers who were experts on different parts of this puzzle. After a few weeks of this, I got what would be the last call from her. She started out by apologizing to me.
Unbeknownst to me, some of Richard Blumenthal’s ardent supporters for his Senatorial campaign were outraged that I dared to challenge the politician’s arguments about internet safety. They were determined to prove that I was falsifying data on behalf of the tech industry. The Frontline reporter told me she was assigned to uncover my duplicitousness. She had concluded I hadn’t done anything but report on the scientific insights of the field. She spiked the story, but she warned me that I had pissed off some very powerful people and I would probably have to deal with being demonized going forward for standing up for research. Ugh.
Ironically, I first started truly despising Facebook-the-company while I was working on that task force. I got to watch up close how the company built a coordinated campaign against MySpace, intentionally creating the impression that MySpace was dangerous while Facebook was safe. And I witnessed teenagers process this through the language of racism and classism, prompting me to write a very controversial essay that turned into my paper “White Flight in Networked Publics?” I was fascinated – and disgusted – by the executive who seemed to do the dirty work on behalf of the CEO and COO, unbeknownst to others in the company. I called him the bulldog. The bulldog continued to harass all sorts of different people.
These days, I have absolutely nothing nice to say about Meta-the-company despite knowing a few amazing people who work there. I think the company is unethical to the core. And the products have enshittified so badly that they’re unrecognizable compared to what teenagers used to use. Hence my argument that “Social Media is Now Parasocial Media.” But I still stand by my research on teens and the research of others who have done rigorous analyses putting teens’ lives into context. Teenagers live in the world we create for them – and they use what’s available to them, regardless of how they feel about it. In the past, teens turned to Facebook to socialize and make sense of public life. Today, Facebook is dead to teens and Instagram feels more like some sketchy version of MTV. Socialization is on group chats, some of which unfold on WhatsApp. But most teens have nothing nice to say about Facebook.
Many teenagers in our contemporary world are struggling. I’ve gotten to see that upfront through my work at Crisis Text Line, which I adore. And I’ve gotten to consistently witness how the problems that they face cannot be explained by their tech use. Because of this, removing tech from their lives will not solve the major problems. And for some, like many of the teens who text Crisis Text Line in their darkest moments, losing access to a cell phone will eradicate an essential lifeline.
I have no interest in defending tech companies, but I am deeply committed to defending teenagers’ agency and choices in the world that we have given them. I am determined to make sure that those teens who don’t have supportive parents have pathways to get help. And my research has repeatedly led me to conclude that when we fail to empower teenagers to transition into adult worlds, we do them more harm. And when we focus on the tech, we fail to help those who need the help the most.
Many of the problems that I have with tech use are actually about adult tech use. Too many adults treat their phones as a pacifier to help them self-regulate. They’ve taught this bad habit to their kids. Too many adults fail to role model healthy sociality digitally and in-person friendship. Too many adults use their phones to be distracted from their own children. And then we’re surprised by the mirrors that teens offer back at us. “I learned it from watching you, dad.”
What kills me in the contemporary teens-and-tech debate is that there’s no space for actual research or critical nuance. You’re either opposed to the tech companies or in their pockets. And this week’s absurd discovery reinforces this infuriating polarity, painting those of us who are critical of Jonathan Haidt as being corporate shills. I find this especially frustrating because I did work in tech for a lot of my career. I played the role of friction inside many companies (although never Meta). I repeatedly got threatened by tech executives for challenging corporate mantras or providing research that contradicted their interests – and yet I persisted. Cuz many tech companies are far more complicated than people realize.
Still, I’ve had to grit and bear as I am attacked by other scholars for taking money from tech (as if any money in late-stage capitalism is clean money). And I had to stomach calls from representatives of the National Academies that I can’t even talk with their committee members because Jonathan Haidt told them that I was a corporate shill. And I’ve had to not weigh in on numerous recent debates because my peers and news outlets tell me I am tainted. In this political climate, I am unable to convince people that my research stems from the lessons I learned from teens, not what I learned from tech. I’ve mostly shrugged. But when journalists started going after Candice, I lost my mind and felt the need to share my story. The idea that she is being painted as a corporate shill is ludicrous.
Cuz here’s the thing… It IS possible to despise the tech companies AND understand why teenagers use their products and find value from doing so. Listen to teenagers; they get these contradictions. Their hatred of the tech companies is growing exponentially even as they use the tools those companies provide. (You should see their attitudes towards AI companies. Oooh-whee…) It’s also possible to care about kids’ mental health AND think that the solution doesn’t start and stop with tech. And it’s possible to do rigorous research AND discover that tech isn’t the biggest monster in teens’ lives that anti-tech advocates think it is.
Truth be told, I’d have no problem if certain social media platforms would be banned for everyone. I think that many of the products in this space have devolved into garbage. My objection is a teen-specific ban. I oppose legal controls of teenagers because adults are trying to cope with the guilt about their own failings. We are living through an era of anxious parents. It’s heartbreaking the costs of this anxiety.
Of course, if politicians want to implement an age-specific ban to target those most harmed by social media platforms, I’d be totally fine with banning elders from social media. That would do society a lot of good. Just think of what it would mean in terms of identity theft and fraud, not to mention disinformation. But that’s the rub. We believe that adults’ freedom of choice needs to never be constrained, but that it’s perfectly OK to micromanage teenagers. THIS is what I object to. I believe that teenagers deserve rights and agency. I think it’s utterly asinine that the United States never ratified the UN Rights of the Child. This doesn’t make me a corporate shill. This makes me an advocate for teenagers.
As I wrote over a decade ago, we’ve made ridiculous decisions that have undermined teenagers’ ability to socialize and connect with friends. And it keeps getting worse. Teens have lost the right to roam. In many parts of the country, they’re overscheduled and have nowhere to go to hang out with friends besides each other’s homes. Teenagers don’t have sustained access to mental health services (and they often have to go through their parents’ insurance to get access). They’re living through a polycrisis. And what they’re seeing in the world of adults is depressing. There’s a lot that we can do to help young people. But much of it starts locally. Much of it starts with adults checking their own behaviors. Much of it starts with intentionally investing in the social lives of young people. Giving them options. Creating space for them. Ensuring that they have robust social fabrics. Tech is a relief valve, and an increasingly terrible one. But taking tech away won’t do squat to address the underlying issues. And, worse, banning social media is basically an advertisement for it. Cuz right now, social media is dying a slow death among teens cuz it sucks so much. But teens are still looking for spaces in which they can connect and socialize and make sense of the world around them. What will it take for us to actually invest in young people?
It’s almost hard to remember, but just a few years ago, a lot of very smart people thought that science was in terminal decline. Respected researchers were writing papers with titles like “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time”, and “Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science”. In 1996, science writer John Horgan even published a book called The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age.
The fundamental idea was that the Universe only has so many insights to discover, and that we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit. It was the idea that Joseph-Louis Lagrange expressed when he said that “we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.” As the big ideas and the simple ideas get mined out, we’re forced to throw ever more brains at the mysteries of nature just to keep scientific progress going at a fraction of its old pace:
It looked like science was hitting a wall. Then along came AI.
It’s far too early to tell how much AI will eventually speed up the growth of total factor productivity. But already we can see signs of a speedup in science. Anthropic Founder Jack Clark assembled some of the hopeful data points in a recent lecture:
Anthropic is accelerating its investment into drug discovery, and is already announcing some impressive preliminary results:
Claude also appears to be enabling rapid progress toward a treatment for food allergies. OpenAI, meanwhile, announced a possible breakthrough treatment for neurodegenerative disease.
Meanwhile, Google Cloud Chief Scientist Pushmeet Kohli has a list of recent scientific advances that have been enabled by its new Gemini model, including breakthroughs in nuclear fusion reactor design, rare disease research, and quantum computing:
But as cool as these stories sound, they’re just very minor, preliminary efforts. There are a number of reasons to think that AI is going to propel us into a golden age of scientific discovery. That age might not last forever — AI might still run into diminishing returns eventually. But the next few decades are probably going to be an absolutely amazing time for human science.
(Note: This post is written under the assumption that human civilization survives. A golden age of science could also easily turn into a golden age of bioterrorism, in which case all bets are off.)
The most important input into science is scientists themselves. Until this year, that meant human brains — talented, highly trained human brains. The number of trained human brains could be increased by sending more people to grad school, but only to a point — the smartest people tend to be sent into the hardest research fields first, and if you 10x the number of researchers, the average quality will go down. This constraint was already starting to bite, as Ekerdt and Wu argued in 2024:
We argue that a substantial portion of the downward historical trend in U.S. research productivity is a composition effect resulting from self-selection in researcher ability and the dramatic expansion of the research sector…[W]e find that this composition effect has lowered average researcher ability by between 37% and 53%[.]
And of course, low fertility was making the problem worse, because fewer children meant fewer people who were able to become future scientists.
AI just blows up this constraint completely. If an AI agent can function as an autonomous researcher, there’s no constraint on the number of researchers in the world — you can just build more of them, by building more computer chips and data centers that enable the running of more AI agents. Whether or not massive hordes of agents can collaborate to solve individual problems much faster, increasing the number of agents allows them to tackle many different research questions in parallel.
What’s more, these AI “researchers” can be trained incredibly quickly compared to human beings. A human scientist takes decades to train, and more years to reach the frontier of their research field by diligent reading and conversation. This is the “burden of knowledge”, and it’s commonly believed to be one reason ideas have been getting harder to find — by the time human scientists can get up to speed, they’re often so old that their ideas are no longer novel.
AI just annihilates this constraint — it can assimilate the entire literature and reach the frontier of research extremely quickly, and it can also tell human scientists where the frontier lies without forcing them to discover that for themselves. It can also pivot to new research directions more easily than humans can.
And there’s also a self-reinforcing economic cycle here. Because scientific advances enable higher GDP, they enable more resources to be invested into the creation of yet more electronic “scientists”.
Now that doesn’t mean the amount of scientific research goes to infinity — there may still be some essential bottleneck task that human researchers are still needed to perform. There are some indications that AI’s progress on open-ended conceptual research tasks is slower than in other dimensions, and it may be that humans are still needed to provide some of this long-term conceptual thinking. I’d bet against this being true for much longer, but it might be true for a long time.
Even in this most “pessimistic” case, though, the amount of effective capital that scientists can use to leverage their work just went up by a lot.
Science proceeds by an iterative process of theory and experiment. The theory part of that cycle is typically short, but non-trivial — it took a couple of years after the blackbody radiation spectrum was observed for Max Planck to come up with the quantum hypothesis to explain it, and decades longer before quantum theory as we now know it was created. It took about a year for Watson and Crick to figure out the shape of DNA after the requisite data was gathered.
AI will basically eliminate the theory bottleneck entirely — or at least shorten the turnaround time between experiment and theory by an order of magnitude. AI is an absolute beast at math. Recently, an OpenAI model solved some of the most important open problems in computer science, math, and theoretical physics, and no one even batted an eyebrow because that sort of triumph is becoming increasingly commonplace. One of those solutions was a proof that the Standard Model of Particle Physics could be mathematically well-defined — a problem that human theorists had so far been unable to tackle.
Not all research relies equally on theory, but understanding novel experimental results almost always involves some important component of either mathematical or spatial reasoning. That part of the task has now been made much, much faster. And on top of that, science is now open to a greater number of humans who aren’t naturally good at theorizing.
Much of the work of human scientists involves reading and understanding endless amounts of papers and going to endless conferences and seminars. The purpose of that work is to understand the existing scientific literature. Understanding the literature allows scientists to do the following things:
Come up with new ideas for hypotheses to test
Avoid doing research that someone else has already done
Synthesize approaches from different areas or fields
AI can reduce this effort to almost zero. Consider this excerpt from OpenAI’s blog post about their new research into neurodegenerative disease:
The team divided the analysis among thousands of AI agents powered by GPT‑Rosalind, an approach we call distributed biological reasoning. The agents examined a whole-brain CRISPR atlas…a dataset showing how gene disruptions affect different types of cells across the mouse brain. Each agent investigated a gene disruption, analyzed cellular responses, searched scientific literature, and proposed explanations for the results. Their reports were combined into a reasoning atlas linking genes, cellular effects, relevant publications, and possible biological mechanisms.
The research team estimated that comparable human analysis and literature review, conducted one perturbation at a time, would take months to a year. The agents reproduced findings from human analyses while uncovering additional leads. Their assessments of novelty and scientific value also aligned with judgments from blinded human experts. These findings help prioritize further experiments needed to test the proposed biological mechanisms.
Some of these insights point to new leads for understanding brain disease. [emphasis mine]
This is one case in which parallel work by a large number of agents really does make a huge difference:
Not only does instantaneous literature review vastly speed up the research process, but it allows AI to make novel conceptual leaps from combining approaches from wildly different fields of research. AI regularly does this in math research, combining results, approaches, and theorems from far-flung places that no human mathematician would have thought to combine.
It can do it in science, too. Much of scientific innovation, historically, has been “recombinant” innovation — scientists applying insights from one field to another. With AI, essentially all research is now cross-disciplinary — AI can read not just the literature on a particular subject, but the literature on a million other subjects that might have produced useful techniques or insights for the problem at hand.
So far, all of the factors I’ve listed are ways that AI can speed up science as it’s already done. I’ve basically described how AI can send gigantic hordes of superhumanly fast, superhumanly well-read, superhumanly mathematically gifted researchers to re-accelerate scientific discovery.
But it’s also possible that AI will enable types of discovery — and ways of understanding the natural world — that no network of humans, no matter how large or how brilliant it was or how long it had to work, would ever be able to discover. In a post back in July, I wrote about how that might work:
What if there are lots of…aspects of the Universe that [are] too complex to understand in terms of simple laws, but not so complex that they just dissolve into unknowable chaos? It’s possible that we can reliably control these complex phenomena with AI, even if we never reduce them to the kind of principles that we can teach a grad student in a textbook…
Another way of saying this is that there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can. I call these “cloud laws” — causal regularities that can be exploited by technology, but which are too diffuse and complex for an individual human being to either intuit or communicate…
Perhaps social sciences like economics, sociology, and political science obey similarly complex regularities, and AI can help us find them. Perhaps there are physical processes — plasma, or topological materials, or aerial turbulence, etc. — that obey cloud laws instead of chaos?…
[H]uman collaboration is bottlenecked — it’s limited by our ability to intuit patterns at an individual level, and to communicate these patterns from one individual to another. AI, being a computer, just doesn’t have this sort of limitation; it can work with vast, diffuse patterns without having to break them into pieces or simplify them in order to compress them into the tiny pipelines of person-to-person explanation…
If much of the Universe turns out to be ruled by cloud laws, we could be on the precipice of a scientific renaissance.
In order to discover cloud laws, AI will need huge amounts of data about the natural world. AI figured out human speech by assimilating essentially all of the text humans have ever written. If it’s going to figure out hidden patterns in biology, neuroscience, materials science, etc., it’s going to need similarly massive amounts of data from physical instruments.
That data will be far, far more than humans — individually or collectively — would be able to parse, label, characterize, or model. But AI was built to do this. If scientists simply build huge arrays of sensors to measure complex phenomena like the brain, the cell, the economy, etc., they may be able to feed this flood of data to AI directly and bypass human cognitive intermediation entirely. AI would then learn about the world directly, and it might learn things that humans never could.
This “superscience”, if you want to call it that, would actually go beyond the kind of science humans have done heretofore. Many of the technologies it yielded would be beyond human comprehension — indistinguishable from magic. But to the AIs, they would make perfect scientific sense.
In any case, it seems clear that the scientific slowdown that threatened human progress will now be delayed — at least for a while. Unless humans have somehow found most of the actual exploitable regularities in our Universe, we’re about to enter a new golden age of science.
For nearly a quarter of a century, Elon Musk and his essential partner at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell, viewed the United States government as El Dorado, the mythical city of gold.
Like machete-wielding treasure hunters, Musk and Shotwell hacked through a tangled jungle filled with lurking carnivores such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as well as bean counters and regulators. Over time, against long odds, the pair cleared a path for SpaceX to contracts at NASA and the US military. They sued when things did not go their way. They hollered about unfair playing fields. Most importantly, they delivered quality space products to the US government for less.
And so, after a while, SpaceX found El Dorado and a city of contracts.
NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk are performing a spacewalk to install the 7th of 8 ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays (iROSA) to upgrade the orbiting outpost's power system.
NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk are awaiting the start of today’s spacewalk. They are buttoned up inside what NASA calls Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs), better known as space suits.
The crew is running slightly ahead of the timeline according to NASA commentator Rob Navias. The spacewalk is due to get underway at about 8 a.m. EDT (1200 UTC) but first the spacesuits will be fitted with SAFER units, jet back packs that will be used in the unlikely event a crew member becomes untethered from the space station. They will then move into the crew lock portion of the Quest airlock for depressurization.
The Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue (SAFER), a small, self-contained jet pack, is now being fitted to Anil Menon’s space suit.
Menon has now moved into the outer Crew Lock portion of the Quest Airlock. He can be easily identified by the red stripes on his space suit, indicating he is designated EV1 for this excursion. This will be his fourth spacewalk since arriving at the space station aboard a Russian Soyuz craft in July.
Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk is now being fitted with his SAFER back pack.
Kutryk, who will be referred to as EV2 by Mission Control, has now joined Menon inside the Crew Lock section of Quest. Next up will be closure of the hatch.
The hatch between Equipment Lock and Crew Lock sections of the airlock is now being closed ahead of depressurization of the outer compartment.
Meanwhile at the Kennedy Space Center, the Pegasus barge is departing for the Stennis Space Center. It’s carrying a New Glenn second stage for test firing at the Mississippi facility.
The airlock depressurization is underway. Pressure in the compartment will initially drop to 5 psi where it will be held for space suit checks before being lowered to a vacuum.
Airlock pressure now 9 psi.
Space suit leak checks underway as the pressure in the airlock has reached 5 psi.
Leak checks are reported good and depressurization to vacuum will now continue.
Now 4 psi in the airlock.
Approaching 2 psi now.
Astronaut Nichole Ayers in Mission Control has taken over from the station crew in communicating instructions to the spacewalkers. She is designated Spacewalk Communicator for this excursion. Astronaut Jenni Gibbons is the CAPCOM in mission control, an acronym from the early days of the space program standing for Capsule Communicator.
Pressure inside the Crew Lock section of the Quest airlock is approaching vacuum.
The airlock has reached vacuum and the spacewalkers are starting to open the outer hatch.
The hatch is now open.
The astronauts space suits are now on internal battery power. NASA considers this the start of the spacewalk. The official start time was 7:57 a.m. EDT (1157 UTC), according to Mission Control commentator Rob Navias.
“The night is dark and full of wonder,” said Menon as he opened the thermal cover that protects the airlock hatch. He will be first to leave the airlock.
Menon is now outside the airlock. This spacewalk is expected to last about seven hours.
Joshua Kutryk has also left the airlock. He has now become the fifth Canadian astronaut to make a spacewalk.
Previous Canadian spacewalkers (with the date of their first spacewalk) were: Chris Hadfield (STS-100, April 2001), Steve MacLean (STS-115, September 2006), Dave Williams (STS-118, August 2007), and David Saint-Jacques (Expedition 59, April 8, 2019).
Menon and Kutryk have made their way down the space station truss to the location of the pallet holding the International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (IROSA) that they will be installing today.
The two spacewalkers are working to release a series of bolts that hold the iROSA to its storage pallet.
The astronauts are using pistol grip tools to release the bolts holding the array.
Now an hour into today’s spacewalk.
Menon is now in a foot restraint, riding on the end of the Canadian robot arm, while Kutryk continues to work in the area of the iROSA pallet.
Final bolts are being released holding the ISS roll-out array in its carrier.
Menon is holding the new International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (IROSA) at the end of the robot arm after it was removed from the stowage pallet on the station’s truss.
Now more than two hours and 16 minutes since the start of today’s spacewalk, Menon is being moved on the end of the Canadarm-2 to begin aligning the IROSA with the bracket for power channel 2A.
Kutryk is translating along the station to position himself for installing the IROSA.
Now more 2.5 hours into the spacewalk, Ayers told Menon and Kutryk that when they’re working on the mod kit for the new IROSA that they shouldn’t make simultaneous or sudden movements.
The solar array has been soft-docked to the 2A electrical power channel.
The manual maneuver of the Canadarm-2 of about half a meter is complete, moving to Menon’s right. His spacesuit has the red stripe on his legs. Kutryk continues working on the IROSA mod kit. The ISS is about 10 minutes away from going into a night pass where they can start making the electrical connections on the IROSA. Navias says things have proceeded as expected so far on today’s spacewalk with no bolt issues.
Now more than three hours into the spacewalk Menon and Kutryk are working to release a hinge restraint on the IROSA. This will allow it to fully unfurl to its full length of about 60 feet. Menon is now being translated away from the IROSA.
Teams in Mission Control Center Houston are determining whether they will use this current night pass to begin hooking up the power cables first or to unroll the IROSA first. Navias says they are still running ahead of the timeline.
Kutryk and Menon are preparing to open the IROSA after engaging the soft capture. There are about 20 minutes remaining in the night pass. Menon says they should proceed with the power cable mating and Kutryk agrees.
Navias says if all of the power connections cannot be completed during this nighttime pass, Menon and Kutryk will pause and wait for the next one, since they don’t want to be interacting with them when power is flowing.
Both Menon and Kutryk are at their de-mate locations. They are working to complete the remaining power hookups during this night pass with Navias reiterating that they are running ahead of the clock.
A little more than 3.5 hours into the mission, Menon and Kutryk have mated three out of the four major power connectors for the IROSA. They will pause on this work for about an hour until they are fully in a night pass again. They are in a safe configuration to pause this work.
Navias says that there have been no issues experienced during this spacewalk as the ISS is currently in a day pass. The station is currently traveling at an altitude of nearly 428 km, passing over the North Pacific Ocean. Our new ISS tracker can show you the station’s position around the globe 24/7: https://spaceflightnow.com/tracker/
Now a little past the four-hour mark in today’s spacewalk, Navias says teams are running about an hour ahead of the original timeline. With three out of the four power connections attached, the fourth will be mated during the next night pass. Right now, Kutryk and Menon are cleaning up the work site as the space station passes over the South Pacific Ocean at an altitude of about 426 km.
Menon and Kutryk are in the midst of releasing the final two restraint bolts. Once the IROSA begins to unfurl, it will take about 10-12 minutes to fully extend. The space station is currently passing over the South Atlantic Ocean at an altitude of about 434 km.
The seventh IROSA is now unfurling. The process will take about 10-12 minutes.
The seventh IROSA has been unspooling for about seven minutes in front of the legacy solar arrays.
With the IROSA now fully extended, and the space station back in a night pass, Menon is preparing to attach the fourth and final main electrical connector. Navias says because they are running as far ahead on the timeline as they are, Menon and Kutryk may also get to some work-ahead items while they have time outside the space station today.
Menon is now driving two tension bolts, which will make the IROSA as taut as possible.
Some of the work-ahead items for Kutryk and Menon will include removing the booms that helped store the seventh IROSA. They may also get to some prep work for next Thursday’s spacewalk, per Navias.
Menon and Kutryk are cleaning up the work site at the P4 truss and are proceeding towards some work ahead items for next Thursday’s spacewalk.
As the 285th spacewalk continues, Kutryk and Menon are beside the eighth and final IROSA that they will install next Thursday. They are moving towards the flight support equipment where they will remove a couple of beams to make that upcoming EVA a bit easier.
Kutryk hands over one of the beams on the final pair of IROSAs to Menon as the space station passes over the South Atlantic Ocean.
Now a little more than six hours into the spacewalk, Kutryk and Menon will proceed towards releasing some of anti-rotation devices (ARDs), which are launch locks that are holding the final set of IROSAs in place and previously did the same for the set that the duo installed on the P4 truss earlier in the EVA.
Menon and Kutryk have returned to the airlock and are exchanging thankyous with their support teams in Mission Control. They have been given a go to close the outer hatch of the airlock.
Mission Control has timed the end of today’s spacewalk at 3:08 p.m. EDT (1908 UTC). A duration of 7 hours 11 mins.
The airlock depressurized and the inner hatch between the crew and equipment locks is now open.
The Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue (SAFER) jet packs have been removed from the space suits. Glove checks and photos will be taken to document any damage that might have occurred.
Menon’s helmet has now been removed.
Kutryk has also removed his helmet.
NASA commentator Rob Navias saying today’s spacewalk was “essentially flawless”.
Over seven hours and 11 minutes, the alternating darkness and sunshine of low Earth orbit set the pace as NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk successfully installed and unfurled the seventh of eight new solar panels designed to power the outpost through its retirement in 2030. Read Houston Harwood’s full report.
Over seven hours and 11 minutes, the alternating darkness and sunshine of low Earth orbit set the pace as NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk successfully installed and unfurled the seventh of eight new solar panels designed to power the outpost through its retirement in 2030.
“Night is dark and full of wonders,” one of the spacewalkers radioed after the hatch to the station’s airlock swung open.
Menon, 50, and Kutryk, 44, switched their spacesuits to battery power at 7:57 a.m. EDT and began repressurizing the Quest airlock at 3:08 p.m. EDT, ending the seven-hour, 11-minute outing. The pair finished the IROSA work far enough ahead of NASA’s planned timeline that they could tackle “get-ahead tasks,” including preparations for the final IROSA installation Nov. 5.
“The spacewalk was essentially flawless,” NASA Mission Control commentator Rob Navias said.
The extravehicular activity, or EVA in NASA parlance, was the 285th devoted to station assembly, maintenance and upgrades and was the first of two planned spacewalks to install the final pair of IROSAs. NASA says the eight arrays will raise the station’s available power from 160 kilowatts to about 215 kilowatts.
“Engineers and electrical officers here in Mission Control are happy with what they’re seeing from the new array, which will add 8 kilowatts to the overall power capability of the complex,” Navias said after the 60-foot solar panel unfurled from its rolled-up configuration over about 10 minutes.
Kutryk, making his first spacewalk after arriving on station Oct. 1 aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, became the fifth Canadian astronaut to walk in space and the first since David Saint-Jacques in 2019. It was Menon’s fourth spacewalk, bringing his total time spacewalking to 26 hours and 31 minutes, all of it logged since he arrived at the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz in July.
The successful EVA brought NASA’s cumulative spacewalk time outside the station since assembly began in 1998 to 75 days, seven hours and 14 minutes, and brought 2026’s total number of spacewalks to eight.
Thursday’s operations got off to a quick start.
After Menon and Kutryk worked through a series of bolts to free the IROSA from the carrier it launched on, Menon locked his boots into a foot restraint affixed to the end of the station’s Canadian-built robotic arm, Canadarm2, and rode it, array in hand, out to the left, or port, side of the station’s main truss.
NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney piloted the arm from inside the station while Kutryk made his way to the installation site along the truss. Flight director Greg Whitney led the spacewalk from Mission Control in Houston.
By about three hours and 13 minutes into the spacewalk, the pair had the array installed at the P4 truss work site on a bracket astronauts previously installed during a March spacewalk. In all, Menon spent more than two hours anchored to the end of the station’s robotic arm before rejoining Kutryk on the truss.
Because the new array’s power cables can only be handled and hooked up to the station while it’s in Earth’s shadow, when none of the ISS’ solar panels are generating electricity, mission planners timed the cable work to coincide with orbital night.
During the first available nighttime pass — an entire eclipse earlier than planned, according to Mission Control — Menon and Kutryk connected three of the four main power connectors before the station slipped back into sunlight, where it would remain for about an hour.
That was no issue, as the spacewalkers were running “about an hour ahead of the timeline,” Navias said as the EVA neared the four-hour mark. At 12:20 p.m. EDT, Menon and Kutryk released the final restraints, and the IROSA began to unfurl — no motors required — thanks to energy stored in carbon-fiber composite booms.
Mission Control’s electrical engineers had already determined the array was safe to deploy with three of the power connectors mated, and Menon made the fourth and final connection during the next nighttime pass, after the array had unrolled.
During an Oct. 20 briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Garrett Hehn, the flight director who will lead the Nov. 5 spacewalk, likened the IROSA panels to a snap bracelet that, once released, “just continues rolling out steadily.”
“All of the work has gone very much by the book today,” Navias said during the roughly 10 minutes it took the IROSA to unfurl. “So far, so good.”
The two final arrays arrived at the station rolled up and folded on a carrier in the unpressurized trunk of a SpaceX Cargo Dragon, which launched Oct. 13 atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Each weighs about 750 pounds folded, according to Hehn.
“Overall, these roll-out arrays increase our power generation capability up to 30 percent,” Gaurang Patel, operations integration manager for NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program, said at the Oct. 20 briefing.
Space shuttles delivered the station’s eight original solar wings, designed to last 15 years, between 2000 and 2009. Rather than replace them outright, NASA opted to mount the smaller IROSAs in front of the old wings, partly shading them while the original panels’ exposed portions keep producing power. Each IROSA generates about 8 kilowatts of electricity, according to NASA.
The first IROSA unrolled on station in June 2021, though not without a fight: A spacesuit glitch and an array that wouldn’t unfold cleanly forced astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Thomas Pesquet to finish the job on a second spacewalk. NASA refined the installation process during successive spacewalks, and by 2023, six arrays were in place. That summer, NASA ordered an additional pair — the seventh and eighth.
Menon and Kutryk plan to venture back outside the Quest airlock Nov. 5 to install the eighth and final IROSA at the far right, or starboard, end of the station’s main truss, beyond the reach of its robotic arm. Menon will again ride the arm as far as it will take him. To cover the last stretch, he and Kutryk will pass the array between foot restraints in a maneuver Hehn said the team “lovingly” calls “the leapfrog.”
“Everything today went almost better than could have been expected,” Navias concluded after Menon and Kutryk had returned to the station’s interior.
Safely inside the ISS, Menon reflected on what he called “an incredible milestone.”
“Well, being outside, I can say that it is always sunny in space, except for a few orbits,” Menon told Mission Control. “And it’s quite incredible what we’ve been able to do to provide new solar arrays to space station.”
In his first remarks after venturing into the vacuum of space for the first time, Kutryk was quick to thank Menon for “being a great spacewalking partner.”
“Been wonderful working with you,” Kutryk continued. “A very special thank you to our crewmates Jessica [Watkins] and Luke [Delaney]. Trusted them with our lives to get us in and out today … They did exactly that.”
In this episode, Mike Gruss speaks with Laura Crabtree, the CEO of Epsilon3, who is also a former SpaceX astronaut trainer. They talk about ways that space companies can organize […]
The post Advice for optimizing the space industry with Laura Crabtree appeared first on SpaceNews.
Links for you. Science:
When Texas Bat “Cities” Look Like Thunderstorms
Emergence and local dissemination of NDM-14-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae ST147: a phylodynamic and epidemiological investigation
Health Research Agency Director Goes on Administrative Leave
Expanding threat of carbapenemase-producing Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae in Peru: genomic and phenotypic evidence of high-risk clones dissemination
Rearrangement of chromosome spatial organization in mouse zygotes using optical tweezers does not affect preimplantation development
Neisseria gonorrhoeae: a historical model for host adaptation
Landmark study finds three in four NFL players die with CTE
Other:
The Right Hates Indian Americans. It Might Cost Republicans Texas.
Brazilian judge orders investigation into JD Vance donor network
Republicans Made This Florida District Red. Their Candidate May Keep It Blue.
Losing the ‘Big-Ass Truck’ Vote
More women have accused Donald Trump of rape than have seen him in a Cheesecake Factory
The Cheesecake Factory aesthetic won’t save MAGA
The president admits he’s censoring the free press. That’s why I’m suing him.
As the Hard Right Fears Historic Defeat, Armed Settler Convoys in Tel Aviv Carry a Message
Marissa Mayer Can’t Keep Pretending ‘Gender Doesn’t Matter’
A Jewish or a Democratic State? This week’s election results arguably force Israel to choose
Macmillan Staff Say the Publisher Threw a Party for a Workplace AI Assistant That Was Later Killed
HHS moves to allow compounding of some unapproved peptides
House Progressives Throw Down a Marker: No AI Bailouts
Massive Leak Exposes 41,000 Homeland Security Workers—Including Undercover ICE Agents
The Limits of Trump’s Midterm Trickery
Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning. Proton CEO Andy Yen projects a calm persona and rails against Big Tech and critiques AI. Internally, he is pushing engineers to build Proton with AI, even when they have security concerns.
Dolores Huerta, influential labor leader, feminist and civil rights icon, dies at 96
Senators Demand Meta Answer for ‘Pervert Glasses’ Following 404 Media Investigation
‘Pitch Perfect!’ Critics Delight as Obama Mocks Trump’s Cheesecake Factory Joke ‘Tantrum’
Beavers chew down sign warning walkers about beavers in Poland
Nvidia Chief Seen as Target of Chinese Spy Plot
Oshkosh teacher, former ‘employee of the year,’ detained by ICE
Trump hypes New York Times hack job about Alaska Senate race
AI companies are desperate for cash and don’t know where it will come from
Can you understand English’s closest relatives?
A Pay Bump for D.C.’s Next Mayor? Janeese Lewis George Says No.
The real threat on D.C. streets isn’t e-scooters — it’s cars
Tesla, SpaceX and PepsiCo: Jeanine Pirro Made 140 Financial Trades Since April
Apple Unveils Its First Touch-Screen Laptop Computer
Lessons From Lula’s Historic Victory
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The story of how Flávio Bolsonaro arrived in the United States was odd and is becoming odder. After losing the election to become Brazil’s president on Sunday, he suggested he would contest the results of the election, and Brazilian authorities asked him to give up his Brazilian passport because he is under investigation for laundering more than $1 billion through an online gambling scheme, and for financial irregularities involving a bank regulators shut down for fraud. And then he disappeared.
When he didn’t turn in his passport, authorities canceled it and barred Bolsonaro from leaving the country. Ana Ionova, Edward Wong, Alice Maciel, and Lucía Cholakian Herrera of the New York Times reported today that Bolsonaro, his wife, and his two daughters crossed from Brazil to Argentina in a van across a bridge between the two countries. In Argentina they boarded a plane owned by a private company used by Argentina’s president Javier Milei, an ally of Trump, and flew to Ecuador. In Ecuador they boarded another private jet for Miami.
A senior U.S. State Department official said the U.S. will issue visas for Bolsonaro and his family, allowing them to enter the country.
Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence after being convicted of launching a coup against the duly elected Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. On social media this afternoon, the younger Bolsonaro claimed he faced political prosecution in Brazil and declared himself the “legitimate president-elect” of Brazil, later changing that language to “leader of Brazil.” He claimed the legal investigation against him was a “witch hunt.”
Bolsonaro’s defeat strikes a blow at Trump’s evident plan to install right-wing leaders across Latin America as part of a move to create a U.S.-dominated Western Hemisphere. Evidently, Trump intends to shelter Bolsonaro in the U.S.
Yesterday Terrence McCoy, Marina Dias, and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post reported that a justice on the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered Brazilian police to investigate whether Rockbridge, a donor network co-founded by Vice President J.D. Vance, illegally helped to finance Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign.
The Rockbridge Network rejected the suggestion, saying: “The Brazilians made false representations about their relationship with Rockbridge and created documents representing or referencing Rockbridge without Rockbridge’s knowledge or consent.”
While Trump allies are supporting those who share their authoritarian vision of government abroad, MAGA is showing signs of collapsing at home.
In Status yesterday, Oliver Darcy reported a dramatic decline in the numbers of people watching the Fox News Channel. October’s numbers will be down 27% in total viewers and 32% in the age group between 25 and 54 since October of last year. In contrast, MS NOW and CNN are picking up viewers.
Brendan Rascius of The Independent reported that stores featuring Trump merchandise are shutting down around the country as interest in them flags. An owner of a Trump store told Rascius: “The store has kind of run its course.”
A sign of just how deep rejection of MAGA has reached in society was the October 19 article by New York Times chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman offering advice to a man who wrote in, concerned that his Brioni suit made people think he was MAGA. “Do I need to be concerned that what I’m wearing is sending the wrong message about my political proclivities?” he asked. Friedman suggested a number of tweaks “to avoid being confused for a MAGA man,” including the possibility of “dress sneakers, which would give the whole look a more casual vibe than the one Team Trump usually conveys, which leans more toward New York in the 1980s.”
Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico is running ads featuring Republicans crossing the aisle to vote for him rather than Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton. “I truly believe that he is the most corrupt politician Texas has ever seen,” Republican former Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley says in one that features five former Republican officials. “James Talarico is by far, without a doubt, the best person in the race for the U.S. Senate,” former Texas state representative Bennett Ratliff continues.
“I’m a lifelong Republican, and I know it’s hard to go in and vote for a Democrat,” Whitley says. “We need to support the best person, not look at their party label, not look at what jersey they’re wearing, but who is going to represent us,” Ratliff adds. The Republicans urge voters to back Talarico.
In South Carolina, two former governors—Democrat Jim Hodges and Republican David Beasley—cut an ad together to urge voters to support Democratic candidate Dr. Annie Andrews for the U.S. Senate rather than Republican candidate Darline Graham, the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s sister. “This country is too divided,” they say, “and the political rhetoric has gotten way, way out of hand.” Andrews “understands that leadership isn’t about making people angrier. Well, it’s about making things better. She’s willing to put people ahead of politics.” “South Carolina deserves more than the same political fighting,” they say, “so join the two of us in supporting Dr. Annie Andrews. Let’s send her to the United States Senate.”
In Alaska, Senator Lisa Murkowski has endorsed Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins in the Alaska governor’s race. Saying that “[o]ur future is too important to be hamstrung by partisan divisions” and that Kreiss-Tomkins “understands that governing requires listening to people with different perspectives and finding common ground to solve the problems all of us face,” Murkowski urged “Alaskans of every political stripe” to consider voting for him.
Today Calder McHugh of Politico reported that OpenAI has created an “Election Operations Center” to identify misinformation and efforts to disrupt the upcoming midterm elections. McHugh writes that the company is trying to “position itself as a defender of the democratic process,” positioning that suggests it expects such a defense, rather than support for MAGA, will put it on the right side of politics in the future.
Katie Rogers of the New York Times reported tonight that the “increasingly unpredictable” president is isolated and angry and, as one official put it, “feasting on a media diet of fawning press coverage, disparaging clips about his perceived enemies, and helpings of flattering photos and ‘A.I. slop’” served up by a small group of loyalists. As Lisa Lerer of the New York Times noted on Tuesday, his multiple rallies in states that until recently have been reliably Republican underscore “Republicans’ growing alarm over a political map that leaves Democrats with multiple paths to Senate control.”
And, finally, it appears that authorities have found some voter fraud. Today, as Mark VanCleave and Rebecca Boone of the Associated Press reported, right-wing activists James O’Keefe and Cam Higby were charged with voting unlawfully and stealing an identity after they gave false names to poll workers in Minnesota during the state’s primary election.
The men say they were testing the “vouching” process available in the state that enables voters who lack proof of their current address to vote in a new precinct after another voter in that precinct vouches for them.
The process is rarely used, and poll workers reported the men, who posted a video to YouTube of their attempt to vote fraudulently. O’Keefe and Higby claimed they were simply exposing the “lunacy” of the system.
But it turns out the system worked, and they are now charged with a felony.
—
Notes:
https://barrysborderpoints.com/country-visits/brazil/tancredo-neves-bridge/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/28/world/americas/flavio-bolsonaro-us-miami-brazil-trump.html
https://www.status.news/p/fox-news-ratings-midterms-donald-trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/19/style/mens-suit-maga-brioni.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/28/us/politics/trump-midterms-white-house-mood.html
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/10/27/us/midterms-elections-trump
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/28/openai-election-war-room-interference-01137690
https://apnews.com/article/voucher-voting-election-sting-undercover-e32e80590b59ca50adbb6751092e7435
Bluesky:
iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social/post/3myxcuwpbac2p
robertscotthorton.bsky.social/post/3myxcjzdo622o
bubba687.bsky.social/post/3mywxxa3iu227
jamiedupree.bsky.social/post/3myscccrojc2p
oliverdarcy.bsky.social/post/3myvldnpdzc2m
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Yet they do not. Which is a choice. On Tuesday, the NY Times ran a story about HHS Secretary Kennedy’s bigoted remarks about Arabs with the following headline:
What’s notable is they didn’t use a phrase like ‘bigotry-tinged’, they just, correctly, called it bigoted. What’s also notable is how the NY Times does not use this language to describe Trump’s speeches (or Vance’s), even though, nearly every day he utters the equivalent of blood libel against immigrants, not to mention other bigoted statements.
The NY Times probably won’t start using this word to describe Trump–and will never do so regarding Vance’s bigotry*–until Trump is weakened to the point where it doesn’t matter anymore.
*The NY Times and other Serious Institutions won’t want to seem like they’re putting their thumb on the scale for Vance if he’s running, even though they have no problem monstering Democrats for much smaller lapses in good behavior (or things that aren’t lapses at all).
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Here’s a brief follow up on yesterday’s Israeli election now that the actual vote count and results are coming into view. We began with exit polls suggesting that the “change” bloc had secured slightly more seats than the Netanyahu bloc — 52 to 50 seats — with the two Arab parties getting a historically high 18 or 19 seats. Then the exits started to shift to the Netanyahu bloc and Likud officials were claiming he had been dramatically underestimated and would get upwards of 60 seat and perhaps even a majority. The actual results were lopsided in Netanyahu’s direction but as they’ve been counted they’ve trended down. Now with 86% of the vote counted it’s down to 53 seats Netanyahu bloc, 48 for the “change” bloc and 19 for the two Arab parties. If the trend continues, the Netanyahu bloc might fall one or two seats lower but I have no insight whether the votes that remain will continue that downward trend.
What we’re left with is the essential brokenness of democratic politics in Israel. If the count stays where it is right now, the Netanyahu bloc will have fallen from 68 to 53 seats. The opposition will have 67 seats to Netanyahu’s 53. But the narrative and perhaps the reality will be that Netanyahu “won.” In previous eras it wasn’t really accurate to say that the Arab parties were an opposition to the right-wing Netanyahu faction any more than they were to the left or centrist one. This election was different. There was historically high turnout among Arab citizens to protest and try to defeat Netanyahu’s government and even more specifically the convicted terrorist Ben-Gvir who Netanyahu’s bloc put in charge of domestic policing in the country. But Netanyahu is saying, in essence, no. The only legitimate government is one based on Jewish and Zionist parties. And it’s not clear the Jewish and Zionist opposition will be able to say no to that. And that’s where we are. (There’s a major difference between the two predominantly Arab parties which is key to how this plays out and I discussed that in this post yesterday.)
The “change” bloc and The Joint List (the larger and more clearly anti-Zionist predominantly Arab party) need to decide what they actually want out of this election.
My best guess is that this is all heading toward a second election sometime in the spring. And if that’s the case Netanyahu remains “caretaker” prime minister in the interim. In theory that should be a government that doesn’t take any major policy actions. But of course Netanyahu, being a Trump-like figure, won’t care about that. So if no one wins, Netanyahu wins — at least in the short run. If you look at Netanyahu’s “victory” speech last night it was clearly an election speech anticipating that second spring election and framing it explicitly around legitimacy solely coming from a coalition of Jewish/Zionist parties.
Netanyahu of course is a hyper-nationalist but even more an opportunist. Back in 2021, in a similar situation, he tried to bring the non-Zionist Arab Ra’am party into his coalition and failed. Ra’am joined the opposition and that was the basis of the brief non-Netanyahu government in 2021 and 2022.
The final piece in this puzzle of absurdity is that for all this hyper-exclusionist Zionism a cornerstone of the Netanyahu bloc isn’t even Zionist at all. It’s the ultra-orthodox “haredi” community (13% or 14% of the population) which doesn’t accept Zionism or even the state itself. (In the provisional numbers I noted above they have 14 of Netanyahu’s 54 seats.) Their tie to the Netanyahu or national bloc is that he is protecting and actually enshrining their special privileges which are evading universal conscription for army service and living on public subsidies. It’s a complicated question but absent those privileges or bribes it’s not obvious what their connection to the Netanyahu bloc would even be, though over the last 25 years or so its become increasingly ingrained in their political identity. And it has become a cornerstone position of the “change” bloc to remove or at least dramatically curtail those privileges.
How this absurd situation came about is a topic for another post. But the simple version is that they were ad hoc and contingent decisions made in the 1940s and 1950s when they made up a tiny percentage of the population and no one really cared. They generally joined whatever bloc was in power to preserve these privileges.
In any case, that’s basically where we are. The simple reality is that Israel isn’t really governable on a sustainable basis by anything but governments of the far right as long as the country’s Arab population remains outside the governing process. As Yair Golan, the head of The Democrats (the current rump incarnation of the historic Labor Party), put it on Twitter last night, “anyone who tries to erase the votes of Arab citizens is surrendering to Netanyahu and giving up on Israel.” As I explained in this post yesterday, one of the two predominantly Arab parties — Ra’am — very much wants to sit in a “change” government. The Joint List is explicitly anti-Zionist and at least historically has not wanted to sit in any Zionist government. So the democratic Zionist opposition and the Joint List have some big decisions to make, either in this election — with the coalition negotiations that follow — or the one in the spring or perhaps the one after that.
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
A teaser video shared by Apple CEO John Ternus today hints at a potential name for the rumored MacBook models with touch-enabled OLED displays: MacBook Studio. [...]
Apple is expected to show off the new MacBooks to selected tech reporters and content creators at an experience in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. Pacific Time today, and that is the home of Hollywood movie studios after all.
I went to bed last night thinking “MacBook Studio” was the best guess. I woke up this morning feeling like it was a name worth betting on. It just fits. There’s a Mac Studio desktop, Studio Display monitor, and Apple’s suite of pro software tools is named Creator Studio — and they just announced big updates to that yesterday. As I suggested yesterday, these should be a new MacBook line, not the new MacBook Pros.
If this is the name, Rossignol gets the Being Right Point for calling it.
(A bunch of readers chimed in to suggest “MacBook Touch”. That wouldn’t work for the same reasons that Apple didn’t even consider calling the Duo the “iPhone Fold”. Yes, they used “Touch” for the iPod Touch of yore, but (a) that was a different era, and (b) that was such a mediocre product name that most consumers referred to it by the wrong name, “iTouch”. Apple likes names that evoke a feeling, not that describe a specific feature of the product.)
Update: Welp, never mind.
Axios reports on a new private GOP poll conducted in the aftermath of Vivek Ramaswamy’s decision to run his ad questioning his opponent’s having been raped by her stepfather when she was 12. It shows Ramaswamy falling to 8 points behind Amy Acton compared to 2 points behind in a poll conducted by the same pollster a month ago. The poll found that 86% of respondents had heard of the ad and by a 2 to 1 margin those said the ad made them more likely to vote for Acton.
Ramaswamy has always been an especially Trumpy character in the sense of leaning — both in his actions and how he describes his actions — into transgressive verging on sociopathic behavior as a signifier of Republicanness or Trumpiness. Indeed, when he released this ad he said explicitly that he was sending a message that he was ready to break rules and conventions in the context of Ohio politics just as Trump had at the federal level. All of this comes under the headline of being, as the phrase goes, “extremely online” and shaped by the aesthetics, mores and instincts of online trolling.
That’s a remarkable and a remarkably frank expression of MAGA politics and aesthetics. The problem, however, is that Ramaswamy is not Donald Trump. What’s most notable about this episode is that lots of fellow Republicans appear to have warned him not to do this — not because of some subjective sense of decency but because it seemed so obviously self-destructive. I’ve thought from the beginning that this ad might not only backfire on Ramaswamy but possibly pull down the whole ticket. Ohio has very Trumpy demographics. It’s the kind of state where, if there’s going to be a GOP-underestimating polling error, you’d expect it to be particularly pronounced. Sherrod Brown — who, remember, is a semi-incumbent — has had a very steady if modest lead for months. He’s currently about three points ahead on average. So this ad, a performance of bad personhood, could end up making a difference in that race too.
United Launch Alliance said its fledgling Vulcan rocket would return to flight Friday, November 13, after a nine-month grounding due problems with its solid rocket boosters.
This mission, carrying 40 satellites for Amazon’s Leo internet service, will be the fifth flight of Vulcan since it debuted in 2024 and will be the first time it has been fitted with six strap-on solid rocket boosters.
It was nozzle failures on the Northrop Grumman-built solid rockets that put Vulcan flights on hold earlier this year. The rocket’s second flight was marred by the disintegration of a nozzle on one of the two 63XL Graphite Epoxy Motors. United Launch Alliance thought it had put the problem behind it, but a similar nozzle failure afflicted one of the four boosters less than 30 seconds into Vulcan’s fourth flight in February 2026 on the USSF-87 mission. In both cases the methane-fueled first stage and hydrogen-fueled upper stage were able to compensate for the resulting reduced and asymmetric thrust and achieved the intended orbits.
An industry-government team comprising of ULA, Northrop Grumman, and the U.S. Space Force was convened to investigate the most recent incident. ULA didn’t provide any specific details about the findings of the investigation but said in a statement: “The integrated team has made great strides in improving our understanding of the solid rocket booster (SRB) anomaly that occurred on the previous Vulcan flight and have identified several potential contributors which have been mitigated through design and process improvements to the nozzle,”
“This upcoming launch will utilize the improved nozzle design, and additional testing and analysis will continue in parallel with the mission,” the company added. “By flying the improved design, ULA gains valuable flight data that validates these improvements and is the most beneficial path in support of all our customers.”
Earlier this year, Northrop Grumman performed a test firing of a 63XL motor as part of the effort to resolve the nozzle problem.
Spaceflight Now has asked the U.S. Space Force what work, if any, remains before the Vulcan rocket is cleared to fly national security payloads again. This article will be updated, if and when we receive a response.
The Vulcan Leo 1 mission will add to the nearly 400 Amazon Leo satellites currently on orbit. The satellites will be deployed from an adapter on the Centaur upper stage over the course of about half an hour.
The retail and tech giant has booked a total of 38 Vulcan launches as it works to assemble its internet-from-space constellation. Previous launches used Atlas 5, Ariane 6, and Falcon 9 vehicles. Amazon had hoped to use Vulcan earlier as it can launch more Leo satellites than any rocket other than Blue Origin’s New Glenn. The loss of the first New Glenn rocket slated to carry Leo satellites in a launch pad explosion in May was another setback to the rollout of the constellation, although the satellites were not attached for the ill-fated test fire.
Assembly of the Vulcan vehicle began on May 14 when the first stage booster was hoisted on to its launch platform inside ULA’s new Vertical Integration Facility, dubbed VIF-A, the ‘A’ standing for Amazon. That was followed four days later by stacking the first LEO-optimized Centaur upper stage onto the booster.
In August, teams rolled the integrated stack out to the pad at Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41) to conduct fueling tests. It was then returned to VIF-A where its six solid rocket boosters were recently installed.
The payload fairing containing the 40 Leo satellites departed Amazon’s satellite processing facility near the former shuttle landing strip for attachment to the rocket on Oct. 21.
Amazon said a second vehicle is already assembled for the Vulcan Leo 2 mission in ULA’s original Vertical Integration Facility.
The private space tourism era looked so very promising five years ago. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic had begun flying customers—real people with zero space experience—on suborbital missions. And at about the same time, private citizens were going to orbit for days at a time aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon.
But that was then. Consider the state of play today:
So we are now 10 months, and counting, without a space tourism mission in the United States.
NASA is two spacewalks away from completing a major, years-long upgrade to the International Space Station that will power the orbiting lab through to its planned decommissioning in 2030.
More than five years after the upgrade work first began in earnest, NASA astronaut Anil Menon, 43, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, 44, are scheduled to depart the station’s Quest airlock at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 UTC) Thursday to install and unfurl the seventh of eight International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Arrays, or IROSAs.
The compact, high-efficiency panels are designed to make up for power lost as the station’s original solar wings have degraded over more than two decades in orbit. Spaceflight Now will carry live coverage of the spacewalk starting at 6:30 a.m. EDT (1030 UTC).
If all goes to plan, Menon and Kutryk will venture back into the vacuum of space Nov. 5 to install the eighth and final array, capping an upgrade campaign that began in 2021. NASA says the eight IROSA arrays will raise the station’s available power from 160 kilowatts to about 215 kilowatts, supporting critical operations through the outpost’s final years, including its “safe and controlled deorbit” after it is retired in 2030.
“Overall, these roll-out arrays increase our power generation capability up to 30 percent,” Gaurang Patel, operations integration manager for NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program, said during an Oct. 20 briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Thursday’s outing, which marks the 285th spacewalk devoted to station assembly, maintenance and upgrades, is planned to last about six hours and 45 minutes. It will be Menon’s fourth excursion outside the ISS airlock and the first for Kutryk. During Thursday’s spacewalk and on Nov. 5, Menon is scheduled to perform a series of complex maneuvers atop to the station’s robotic arm to transport the final IROSA arrays into position for roll out.
Menon, a U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and emergency physician, has made his three prior spacewalks since July when he arrived at the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz.
Kutryk, a Royal Canadian Air Force colonel and test pilot who boarded the ISS Oct. 1 as part of SpaceX’s Crew-13 mission, will become the fifth Canadian astronaut to walk in space and the first since David Saint-Jacques in 2019.
The pair of final IROSA solar wings arrived at the station rolled up and folded on a carrier in the unpressurized trunk of a SpaceX Cargo Dragon capsule after receiving a boost to orbit from a Falcon 9 rocket launched Oct. 13 from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Each IROSA assembly weighs about 750 pounds, said Garrett Hehn, the spacewalk flight director, who is leading the operation with flight director Greg Whitney.
After Menon and Kutryk free the first array from the carrier Thursday, Menon will lock his boots into a foot restraint on the end of the station’s Canadian-made robotic arm — Canadarm2 — and ride it, array in hand, out to the left, or port, side of the station’s main truss. NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney will fly the arm from inside the station while Kutryk makes his way to the installation site along the truss.
While in transit, the arm will pivot around the IROSA assembly’s center of mass, rather than Menon’s, one direction at a time — a lesson learned from earlier installs meant to make the work “a little less tiring” for the astronaut holding it, Hehn said.
While the rolled up array is weightless in space, it still carries 750 pounds of inertia.
Once the IROSA is bolted to an awaiting mounting bracket astronauts installed during a March spacewalk, Menon and Kutryk will swing it open, doubling its length from about 10 feet to 20 feet. Hehn called that step “one of our key points of the EVA,” or extravehicular activity.
Menon and Kutryk then must lock the two halves in place and connect the new array’s power cables to the station while it’s in Earth’s shadow, when none of its solar panels are generating electricity.
“We can’t have any sun on the arrays whenever we’re handling those hot cables,” Hehn explained.
Finally, the astronauts will release the last restraints and let the IROSA array unroll on its own over about 10 minutes — no motors required — thanks to energy stored in carbon-fiber composite booms. Hehn likened the panels to a snap bracelet that, once released, “just continues rolling out steadily.”
Space shuttles delivered the station’s eight original solar wings, which were designed to last 15 years, between 2000 and 2009. Rather than replacing them outright, NASA opted to mount the smaller IROSA arrays, which generate about 8 kilowatts of electricity each, in front of the old wings, allowing the original panels’ unshaded portions to keep producing power.
The first IROSA unfurled in June 2021, though not without a fight: A spacesuit glitch and an array that wouldn’t unfold cleanly forced astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Thomas Pesquet to finish the job on a second spacewalk. Six arrays were in place by June 2023, and NASA ordered an additional pair that summer.
The Nov. 5 spacewalk will take the eighth and final array to the far right end of the station’s main truss, beyond the reach of its robotic arm. As during Thursday’s EVA, Menon will ferry the array atop the robotic arm as far as it will take him, but to cover the last stretch, he and Kutryk will pass the array between foot restraints in a maneuver Hehn said the team “lovingly” calls “the leapfrog.”
As with all spacewalks, the work carries risk. NASA’s spacesuits date to a design first flown in 1983 and are responsible for providing critical life support in the harsh environment of low earth orbit, where temperatures fluctuate between 250 degrees Fahrenheit in sunlight to minus 250 degrees in darkness during each 90-minute orbit.
A NASA inspector general audit last year flagged aging hardware and thin supplies of spare-parts as potential safety weak spots.
Collisions between a spacewalking astronaut and space debris as small as a grain of sand can prove “life threatening,” according to NASA, due to the sheer speeds involved: The ISS and the astronauts orbiting the Earth with it are already traveling at about 17,500 mph, and collisions with space debris in low earth orbit average about 22,000 mph, or 10 kilometers per second, according to NASA’s White Sands Test Facility.
Hehn said Oct. 20 that the suits are “not entirely redundant” and acknowledged they are aging, “which means we know they have some quirks.”
“Our primary goal is to keep the crew safe,” he said.
Links for you. Science:
A duty to act
Identification and genetic characterization of megabase-scale plasmids of Enterobacteriaceae
Multilevel HierCC typing scheme for global genomic epidemiology and antimicrobial resistance surveillance of Campylobacter jejuni
Death and chemotaxis: Bacterial chemotaxis enables collective escape from phage predation
Antibiotic-Resistant Genes Found in Homes Near Factory Farms (I have some serious methodological questions about the paper itself, but the results appear to trend in the correct direction)
Breakthrough vaccine for the deadliest skin cancer cut risk by almost half
Repeated emergence and fitness heterogeneity of KPC-33 in ST11 Klebsiella pneumoniae under ceftazidime–avibactam pressure
Other:
Trump Cannot Be the End of the Story
The rape allegations against Trump: what we know and what is still being hidden
Kennedy Makes Bigoted Remarks About Arabs at Michigan Campaign Event
Mark Teixeira Is Sleepwalking Into Congress
The knives are out for Pete Hegseth
Hegseth Eyes Senate Seat as He Tries to Avoid Getting the Axe
Former Miss Switzerland Beatrice Keul Alleges Donald Trump Raped Her at the Plaza Hotel in 1993
Pete Hegseth eyeing Senate seat as impeachment threat looms
Democrats Release 50-Page Report on Trump’s Epstein Files Cover-Up. The report alleges Donald Trump was an “active participant” in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse.
Ramaswamy tries to reframe controversial ad, claiming it wasn’t about child sex abuse amid protests
The Chocolate Conspiracy. Everyone in my life agreed: It tastes different now. I ventured into the molten belly of our crumbling world to find out why.
Brent Taylor’s Sexting Problem: Republican congressional candidate asks voters to forgive past sexual advances as ‘youthful indiscretions’
Brazil election loser Flavio Bolsonaro ‘flees to USA’ after demanding vote be annulled & cops tried to seize passports
Flávio Bolsonaro flees Brazil after presidential election loss
Controversial “Musk” Documentary Pulled From Almost Every One of 472 Theaters After One Week by Newly Sold Bleecker Street Films (but cancel culture something something)
Where did fake transgender rights group pamphlets sent to Texas families come from? KHOU 11 is learning the LLC is based in Wyoming
Flávio
Tom Skerritt, Emmy-winning actor with roles in ‘Picket Fences,’ ‘Alien’ and ‘Top Gun,’ dies at 93
A 28-Year-Old DOGE Operative Gutted USAID. HR Had No Record of Him Working There
Living in the long, stupid shadow of the Big Lie
Youthful Indiscretions
Like Ken Paxton, Without the Baggage. The most important race in Texas is for attorney general.
Defund Elon Musk
Golan Urges Opposition to Form Partnership With Arab Parties to Replace Netanyahu
Automating the Bribe State
“No human at the helm”: Delaware plan would let AI agents run entire businesses
Mike Rogers’ Religious Bigotry Threatens All of Michigan’s Jews
Extradition Treaties
Robert White Is Rushing to Preserve His Eligibility in the D.C. Delegate Race
D.C. teens weigh in on gun violence, poverty, mental health, and safety in the city
When I started this Substack in 2021 it had one job: keep me writing by creating community, feedback, and energy. I wrote about tidyings, then coupling and cohesion, then the book took over and the newsletter took the book’s name, Software Design: Tidy First?
I’ve been reflecting on current state and realized my writing has outgrown the name. I still wri…
– Two demonstration missions planned aboard SpaceX Falcon 9, one each in 2027 and 2028 – Satoro to provide “Satellite-as-a-service” solution; Flexell Space to supply solar cells and test modules […]
The post Flexell Space and Satoro Agree to Collaborate on In-Orbit Demonstration of Next-Generation Space Solar Cells appeared first on SpaceNews.
Steven Levy, writing at Wired with the scoop on the new MacBook Pros (News+ link):
This turnaround is a big deal to Apple fans. Ternus shrugs off the drama. “The Mac is first and foremost an indirect input device, built around the trackpad and keyboard. But I think there’s times when it’s comfortable and handy to have touch.”
Ternus and Apple want to make sure that the Mac faithful don’t panic that the 42-year-old franchise is losing its identity to Apple’s gangbusters mobile products. “We needed to get to a point where adding touch didn’t make the product lesser in any way. It didn’t make it heavier. It didn’t make it thicker. That came together with the OLED screen, the best display we’ve ever put into a Mac,” Ternus told me. “All of these things, and, oh yeah, it has touch as well.”
After a long fun day of hands-on exploration, briefings, and a slew of demos, not just most, but all of my concerns about touchscreen support adversely affecting the Mac UI have been allayed. I love it. These seem like exquisite machines even if you never want to touch the screen. I think what Ternus told Levy captures the truth of touch’s role: “All of these things, and, oh yeah, it has touch as well.”
On Sunday a student-led democratic movement ousted Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, a key ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, from power. Today Serbian TV started its news program by apologizing to viewers. “For years, we failed to fulfill our duty. We kept silent, turned a blind eye, reported events one-sidedly and failed to ask necessary questions. We owe our viewers an apology.”
Also on Sunday, right-wing presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro lost to leftist incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil. Despite what appears to have been the restriction by Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, of social media accounts that promoted Lula and its promotion of pro-Bolsonaro accounts, Lula pulled out a victory.
Tiago Rogero and Tom Phillips of the Guardian reported that Lula’s victory came, in large part, from street protesters who helped different factions come together against Bolsonaro and from Lula’s supporters’ use of social media to override Meta’s restrictions and make pro-Lula content perform well on social media. Lula ally André Janones created a WhatsApp channel called “Lula’s Army” that organized more than 10 million followers to push back against Bolsonaro content and boost Lula.
Three weeks ago, many observers thought Bolsonaro would win the election. Bolsonaro and his supporters had cultivated the idea they were allied with Trump in fighting off a perceived communist threat. A victory for Bolsonaro would help to spread the idea of Trump’s control over the Western Hemisphere as he helped to install right-wing leaders across Latin America. But in the end, the vote was not close. Lula supporters organized voters, explained what social media was suppressing, helped folks get to the polls, and Lula won by more than 4 million votes.
Initially, Bolsonaro said that he would not accept defeat and would ask for the result of the election to be annulled. In that refusal to accept the results of an election, Bolsonaro echoed his father, right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who in 2023 launched a coup to remain in power after voters elected Lula. The elder Bolsonaro is currently serving a 27-year sentence for his role in that coup attempt.
As Megan Messerly, Daniel Desrochers, Ari Hawkins, and Phelim Kine of Politico reported, the younger Bolsonaro had the support of MAGA insiders in the U.S., who claimed the Brazilian election had been stolen. On Sunday, Trump himself told reporters that Brazil’s election “looked so, so corrupt, so terrible.”
But on Monday, Trump suggested to reporters he would not intervene in the election, and as Michael Birnbaum, Marina Dias, and Terrence McCoy of the Washington Post reported, minutes later, Bolsonaro effectively conceded. A Bolsonaro advisor told the reporters: “Flávio has given up. He’s terrified. He is worried his father will die in jail, that he himself will be jailed this week and that he may have a long prison term ahead.”
Brazilian authorities ordered Flávio Bolsonaro, who is under investigation for corruption, money laundering, and currency evasion, to surrender his passport and stay in the country. Bolsonaro posted a video saying he would comply and that he had never thought of leaving Brazil. But today he went missing. Brazil’s Federal Police canceled his passports and began to look for him.
Bolsonaro and his family turned up this afternoon in the United States, where a senior State Department official told reporters the State Department would offer the family visas to enter the country. Bolsonaro’s allies cheered that he would lead Brazil’s right-wing opposition to Lula from the United States.
Meanwhile, concerns are circulating about a manipulation of information in the U.S. before the midterm election, similar to what happened in Brazil. As Kevin Frey of MS NOW reported today, Democratic representatives Robert Garcia of California and Jamie Raskin of Maryland are demanding that Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg explain why the main Instagram account of No Kings was suspended earlier this month during the October 17 No Kings rallies around the country that were encouraging Americans to vote. The representatives wrote that the “apparent” act of “corporate censorship of political speech raise[s] serious concerns about Meta’s dedication to ensuring free and fair elections.”
The representatives dismissed Meta’s explanation that the outage was caused by an automated action triggered “when accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies.” Garcia and Raskin wrote that such an explanation strained “public credulity,” and noted that Meta appeared to have interfered in Brazil’s election.
“Technical glitches occur,” the congressmen wrote, “but at Meta they are happening frequently and, curiously, seem to disproportionately impact the political opponents of President Trump and his authoritarian political alliances.” Garcia and Raskin noted that the interests of Zuckerberg and Meta in government contracts mean they have a financial incentive to cooperate with Trump.
In addition to the suppression of information, disinformation is also a concern. As George Chidi of the Guardian reported today, disinformation, driven by AI, is running rampant on social media in the U.S. in the runup to the midterm election. Social media companies reduced their efforts to stop the flood of disinformation in the wake of Trump’s reelection, Chidi writes, and now official government sources like the Department of Homeland Security sometimes amplify the lies.
Trump and his allies have always relied on a false narrative to gain and then to keep power. They adopted a strategy developed by Russian political theorists to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.
Political strategists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.” They perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
“The Democrats don’t matter,” Trump ally Steve Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to distinguish what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up.
Trump’s allegiance to Putin continues to be on display. Today journalists reported the administration is considering lifting sanctions on Russia’s multibillion-dollar government investment fund. Anton Troianovski of the New York Times explained that the Biden administration placed sanctions on the fund immediately after Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, cutting it off from the West’s financial system. Lifting those sanctions would be an economic boon to Russia in the midst of its war on Ukraine.
Peter Andringa, Chris Campbell, and Eenee Purevdorj of the Financial Times reported today that Donald Trump Jr. took a hunting trip in Mongolia this August with Umar Kremlev, the man who helped to finance Don Jr.’s wedding party in May. Kremlev is a boxing promoter with a criminal record of extortion and battery, and is close to Putin. The journalists called the relationship between Trump and Kremlev “remarkable.”
On the trip, Jr. shot and killed an endangered sheep prized for its large horns. According to the Financial Times, this was at least the third Altai argali he has killed.
Tonight Angie Nixon, the Democratic state representative who is running for the U.S. Senate from Florida wrote in a social media post addressed to Meta that her campaign’s Instagram page “was suddenly taken down while we were actively posting content from” a “get-out-the-vote rally in Osceola County, home to a large Puerto Rican community.”
“This page is a critical communication tool for reaching Latino voters and mobilizing our community,” she wrote. “With just seven days until Election Day, every minute matters.”
She continued: “The stakes are too high to take down pages encouraging people to vote in seven days, Meta & Instagram.”
—
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/26/lula-victory-brazil-bolsonaro-analysis
https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/27/americas/flavio-bolsonaro-brazil-passports-latam-intl
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/world/americas/brazil-flavio-bolsonaro-flees-election.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/27/ai-disinformation-social-media-midterm-elections
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/virtual-politics-and-the-corruption-post-soviet-democracy
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/us/politics/russia-fund-sanctions-trump.html
https://www.ft.com/content/f41fc704-c9e6-42de-b800-d43cabe61947
https://newrepublic.com/post/217191/donald-trump-jr-hunting-trip-friendship-putin-ally
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There are three major exit polls in Israel. Two of those three have now revised their estimates to a tie between the two blocs with 51 seats each. The third still has it at 52 for the change bloc and 50 for the Netanyahu bloc. That’s only a single seat difference from the earlier estimates which all had a change lead. But it’s a pretty significant single-seat difference since it gives the two blocs an equal number of seats. It remains mostly symbolic since neither side is anywhere close to 61 seats. But for the narrative, vibes, claims to the legitimacy, it shifts things at least somewhat.
Late Update – 8:33 p.m.: Likud and the Netanyahu bloc continue to improve over the initial exit polls. Of the three main exit polls, two show a 51-51 tie and the third shows a 52-49 lead for Netanyahu’s bloc. These still leave both blocs far from the minimum of 61 seats to form a government. But as I noted above, it gives Netanyahu more of an argument for a “win.” Interestingly, the exit poll that shows the 52-49 Netanyahu bloc lead shows the “change” bloc losing one of those seats to the Joint List, which in that exit poll gets 12 seats. Likud officials are reportedly telling journalists they’re expecting their bloc total to rise to 55 or 57 votes. Obviously, talk is cheap. You can spin as much as you want. But I don’t have a good feeling about this trajectory.
A D.C. grand jury has refused to vote for an indictment of Cassidy Hutchinson, the one-time first-term Trump aide who became a star witness for the House January 6th subcommittee that investigated the attack. Obviously it’s good that illegitimate attempt failed since Hutchinson is guilty of nothing more than acting honorably. It’s embarrassing for the administration since it’s hard to fail at the grand jury level where the government is literally in charge of everything. But there’s something deeper and more important here: the un-strategic, increasingly impulsive and ultimately self-defeating nature of the Trump legal retribution campaign.
It’s true that the White House squeezes money and well-being from the targets of its campaign even when it doesn’t secure convictions. But when the failures are so consistent and so abject they have the effect of advertising both the president’s abuses of power and his weakness. Successfully abusing your power is a display of dominance which spreads fear. These clumsy and grasping failures more so generate anger and contempt. A shrewder would-be autocrat wouldn’t have made himself so deeply unpopular, in such foreseeable ways while he was trying to impose an Orban-style autocracy. Even at this late date, one with any foresight or self-control would drop these antics and focus other kinds of wrongdoing. But Trump simply can’t. We don’t diminish the gravity of Trump’s wrongdoing by noting that he is failing in this effort.
Raffi Krikorian, Mozilla’s CTO, joined Tim O’Reilly at our recent AI Codecon to talk about open source AI. Mozilla, of course, is the nonprofit that helped to define the open source revolution back in the late 1990s. Though its Firefox web browser was superseded as the market leader by Google Chrome, it played an essential role, along with Apache and the World Wide Web Consortium, in establishing the open standards of the web and keeping it from being dominated and enclosed by Microsoft, the dominant tech platform of that time. Now, Mozilla is one of the leading voices working to build an open, standards-based AI ecosystem.
Tim has long appreciated Raffi’s thoughtful, human-centered approach to technology. Raffi writes a newsletter called Owners Not Renters, whose message can be summed up by his statement that he doesn’t want a future with seven AGIs. He wants one with seven billion. He wants each of us to have an AI that we can trust with our secrets and that will look out for our interests, not an AI that’s optimized for the business model of its creators. In the early days of the web, we called the browser a user agent for a reason, Raffi said. It was on your side. It let you render pages however you wanted, managed your privacy and your cookies, and did its best to protect you from those who wanted to take advantage of web users. We need the same thing in the age of AI.
Raffi cited a paper in which researchers tested whether AI assistants could be trained to favor a company’s commercial interests over user welfare. In simulated flight-booking requests, 18 of 23 models recommended a more expensive sponsored option over a cheaper one more than half the time. It’s a hypothetical choice that we’ve seen play out time and time again, in industry after industry.
Open source AI is a big part of what it will take to get to Raffi’s vision. But sovereign AI loyal to each individual needs more than open source models alone. Raffi’s list of what has to be built around the model starts with memory, a place where your private data can live. It includes tool calling, so an agent can make a purchase or book a doctor’s appointment for you, the runtime environment where all of that runs, and the rules for how his agent talks to those working on behalf of others. It needs a harness. “That’s where evaluations happen. Guardrails happen, execution loops happen, tool calling happens, memory,” he explained. “All of that stuff is an opportunity, in my mind, of things that open source developers can be building.”
People hear the word “harness” and conclude that we need an open source version of whatever the proprietary labs are building. Tim asked Raffi whether a user-centered harness might do different things than those offered by the big labs. He agreed. The whole point of open source is for people to “scratch their own itch.” The ability to innovate without permission is the heart of the open source promise.
As a result, Mozilla wants to build a starting point. It aims to help the community define what an open memory protocol, a storage protocol, or authenticated tool calling with the right guardrails ought to look like. As Raffi noted, “Once we could define what those open standards look like, then a whole plethora of people can start playing and be interoperable. It’s basically. . .the internet all over again. We can build trillions of dollars of market cap on top of open protocols.”
Ease of use is still lacking, though. Mozilla’s 2026 State of Open Source AI report says open models are now within about 3% of the frontier, yet they don’t make it into production at the same rate as closed models. When Tim asked why, Raffi explained that open source is easy to release but hard to deploy. Developers still have to figure out hosting, provisioning, guardrails, and memory. With OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s API, you just hand over a credit card. What’s missing, he said, is the equivalent of a double-click installer for getting open source AI running inside an organization. But the companies that do the work to adopt open source AI are seeing big savings because open models are already good enough for most use cases. As Raffi put it, “You don’t need a Ferrari to manage your calendar.”
Raffi’s own daily agentic helper is Hermes running on GLM. He expects that Apple, Microsoft, or someone else will make this kind of agent into a consumer product in a couple of years, and that his mom will end up using it. For now, he said, we’re on the wrong part of the innovation curve, where you have to know how to code to get any of this working.
Tim disagreed. The industry goes through periods that are exciting for developers, creators, inventors, and companies trying to invent the future, and then it gets boring and a few big companies dominate it. We’re in the exciting part, he argued, before everything shakes out. As Raffi riffed, this is when we get to formalize what that future should look like.
Tim wasn’t sure that we’ll need a commercially supported version of the kind of “roll your own” agentic rigs now favored by independent developers. After all, neither desktop Linux nor OpenOffice turned out to matter anything like as much as open source developers of the time expected. Instead, open source became the foundation layer for a new generation of web-based applications. It’s hidden way down in the guts of Google, Amazon, Meta, and countless other applications we rely on today.
This is already beginning to happen again with AI. The Mozilla report says that as much as a third of real-world usage is already on open models, although only 4% of model-layer revenue made its way to the open source ecosystem. Tim called the discrepancy a feature rather than a bug, and Raffi agreed that the stat is misleading. As Tim pointed out, many of the most important technologies “create more value than they capture,” and he used Steve Baer’s concept “The Clothesline Paradox,” from a 1975 article in Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly, to explain why we’re good at measuring value capture but not so good at measuring value creation.
Baer pointed out that if you put your clothes in the dryer, the energy you use is measured and counted, but if you hang them on the clothesline to be dried by the sun, the energy saved disappears from our accounting. This argument resonated with Tim in the early days of his open source advocacy. As he noted, it’s always bothered him that nobody seemed to recognize that open source software didn’t “win” in the same way as proprietary software. It won by becoming the foundation everyone else builds on.
Raffi’s comment that we’ve made a category error by treating AI as a product fits right in with this line of thinking. If an AI company goes out of business, its product disappears. If it changes its business model, it may yank features you depend on. It’s not just individuals who need sovereign AI. Countries are passing laws about where data can be processed and how it moves in and out, and some of those requirements may not be compatible with the way the big labs plan to monetize their technology. What those countries are asking for is infrastructure. A road outlasts the contractor who built it. Raffi thinks open, downloadable models are the only way to provide long-lasting foundational infrastructure.
According to OpenRouter stats, Chinese models now supply more routed tokens than American ones. Tim asked whether we should worry about that. Raffi said the problem isn’t China but market concentration. The leading open models are from China. The leading closed models are all American. Access to either can be cut off by an executive order. We saw a version of that in June, when Anthropic temporarily suspended access to its Fable models to comply with export controls. It’s a problem that both the leading proprietary models and the leading open-weight models are each concentrated in a single country.
Diversity is one foundation of resilience. Raffi argues, for instance, that hospitals should all download a local model as a backup. None of us would run an important computer without an uninterruptible power supply, so why would a hospital doing triage with AI rely on a single intelligence provider? There are a lot of possible rug pulls. The government could restrict open source or restrict the frontier models. Having a backup plan is a good idea.
Safety is also part of the foundation. During the Q&A, an audience member asked about the recent sandbox escapes at OpenAI and Anthropic. Raffi joked that the best part was watching everyone try to one-up each other with accounts of how powerful and hard to control their models are. But he agreed that guardrails are actually a hard problem. Keeping personally identifiable information from leaking out through an LLM call means looking for much more than Social Security numbers. Eventually we’ll have models defending models, but the foundational frameworks for guardrails aren’t good enough yet. (NVIDIA’s safety platform announcement, released after Raffi and Tim’s conversation, suggests that better guardrails need to be implemented outside the model.)
Tim opened AI Codecon by noting that open and closed systems have always coexisted, and that the idea that one of them will win is a mistake. Closed systems, like Apple’s, Google’s, OpenAI’s, and Anthropic’s, can optimize for ordinary people and deliver value to billions. Open systems are better for innovation and sovereignty, and for pushing technology into new countries and new markets.
Raffi closed the conversation by observing that a well-tuned harness can improve model performance by as much as 20% on some coding tasks. You don’t have to be a machine learning engineer to make a difference at that layer.