Shortly after the first set of explosions, Iranians received bursts of notifications on their phones. They came not from the government advising caution, but from an apparently hacked prayer-timing app called BadeSaba Calendar that has been downloaded more than 5 million times from the Google Play Store.
The messages arrived in quick succession over a period of 30 minutes, starting with the phrase ‘Help has arrived’ at 9:52 am Tehran time, shortly after the first set of explosions. No party has claimed responsibility for the hacks.
It happened so fast that this is most likely a government operation. I can easily envision both the US and Israel having hacked the app previously, and then deciding that this is a good use of that access.
Here's a new study of applications to medical residency programs, suggesting that medical training has become less desirable in states with abortion restrictions, especially in abortion-related specialties, including obstetrics and gynecology, family medicine, internal medicine, and emergency medicine.
"In this cross-sectional study with an ITS analysis of 24 193 864 applications to 4315 residency programs for 5 years across all medical specialties, we observed a statistically significant disparity in applications from both women and men in states with abortion restrictions following the Dobbs decision in 2022 compared with states that did not enact restrictions. Despite overall increases in the number of residency applications during the study period, existing disparities between application volume to programs in abortion-restricted and nonrestricted states widened for women applying to residency, and new disparities emerged for men applying to residency post-Dobbs. Stratified analyses suggested that specialty type may influence differences, as effect sizes were increased among abortion-related specialties and decreased among the most competitive specialties.
"These findings affirm and expand on recent studies demonstrating decreased OBGYN residency applications and applicant interest in abortion-restricted states following the Dobbs decision.19 Additional studies have reported challenges faced by OBGYN programs in abortion-restricted states, including nonadherence to accreditation standards requiring abortion training, financial constraints for medical training, and burnout among residents and program leadership."
prohibit a chatbot to give substantive responses; information, or advice or take any action which, if taken by a natural person, would constitute unauthorized practice or unauthorized use of a professional title as a crime in relation to professions who licensure is governed by the education law or the judiciary law.
Claude, what do you think of the legal logic of this bill?
The legal logic is shaky. The bill’s operative test asks whether a chatbot’s output, “if taken by a natural person, would constitute a crime” under New York’s unauthorized practice statutes. But those statutes set a high bar — mere advice-giving by a layperson is not criminal; what’s prohibited is holding yourself out as a licensed professional while charging fees. Your neighbor who happens to be a doctor can tell you what he thinks your rash is. A retired lawyer can walk you through a lease. None of that is a crime. So either the bill is mostly toothless — most AI responses wouldn’t meet the criminal threshold — or courts will interpret “substantive advice” far more expansively than the underlying statutes warrant, effectively creating a new and harsher legal standard for AI that applies to no human equivalent. Neither outcome reflects good lawmaking, and the ambiguity will systematically over-deter, pushing operators to sanitize outputs well beyond what the statute actually requires.
Claude, who will be hurt by this bill?
The deepest problem is who gets hurt. The populations with the most to gain from AI-assisted professional guidance are precisely those who cannot afford lawyers, doctors, or therapists — the tenant trying to understand an eviction notice, the rural patient triaging symptoms, the small business owner reviewing a contract. For these users, the choice the bill actually creates is not “AI advice versus licensed professional advice”; it’s “AI advice versus no advice at all.” A watered-down chatbot that responds to every medical or legal question with a referral to a licensed professional is not a safety feature — it’s a luxury tax on information, paid disproportionately by people with the fewest alternatives. New York should be asking how to ensure AI advice is accurate and clearly disclosed, not how to suppress it on behalf of incumbents who’d prefer less competition.
Thanks Claude. Where did you learn this excellent analysis?
Public choice theory is part of my general training on economics and political science literature — Buchanan, Tullock, Olson, and the broader tradition are well-represented in the texts I was trained on.
But I’d be remiss not to note that you’re at the home institution of public choice. The Buchanan House is literally on your campus, and the tradition Buchanan and Tullock built at GMU is probably the most direct intellectual ancestor of the kind of analysis I was applying to this bill — concentrated benefits, diffuse costs, regulatory capture, rent-seeking by incumbent professionals. That framework is so natural for analyzing occupational licensing legislation that it almost applies itself.
If anything, my read of S7263 is pretty much a straightforward public choice story: organized professional associations with strong lobbying presence get statutory protection written in the language of consumer welfare, while the costs fall on millions of unorganized users who will never know what information they didn’t receive. Buchanan would have recognized it immediately.
Former investment banker Raphael Roettgen had to abandon a space-focused special purpose acquisition company in 2022 as hype around mergers with blank-check shell companies turned radioactive. Four years later, he’s back after helping raise more than $200 million to take a private space company public. SPACs raise cash on the stock market and then use […]
On January 15, 2026, a collective cheer coincided with relief as four astronauts from SpaceX Crew 11 were safely returned to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS). The evacuation came after a crew member experienced a medical emergency that left them in stable condition but in need of terrestrial medical care. The successful return […]
Workers have completed repairs to the helium pressurization system in the upper stage of the Space Launch System, keeping a potential April launch of the Artemis 2 mission on track.
Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, is preparing to enter one of the most hotly contested arenas in the space industry: global broadband from low Earth orbit (LEO). In a regulatory filing that caught many in the industry off guard, Blue Origin set forth plans for a network called TeraWave comprising more […]
The third launch of a small launch vehicle developed by a Japanese company failed shortly after liftoff March 4, raising questions about the rocket’s future.
The Senate Commerce Committee advanced a revised NASA authorization bill that implements some of the changes to Artemis sought by the agency while also extending the life of the ISS
Canadian telco Telus has agreed to take a stake in AST SpaceMobile and invest in ground infrastructure needed to connect subscribers to the operator’s planned direct-to-smartphone constellation.
British startup Mutable Tactics has raised $2.1 million in pre-seed funding to develop AI software enabling groups of military drones to operate autonomously, even when satellite navigation and communications are disrupted.
A symposium on maps and popular culture, Popcartographie : cartes et cultures populaires (XIXe-XXIe siècle), will be taking place at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Mitterrand site in Paris on 10-11 April 2026. Its three… More
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. In the first half of the episode we discuss Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and then move on to other topics. Here is the episode summary:
Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry’s conviction that great literature is where ideas “walk and talk amongst the mess of the real world” in a way no other discipline can match. Tyler, who has called Henry’s book Second Act “one of the very best books written on talent,” sat down with him to compare readings of Measure for Measure and range across English literature more broadly.
Tyler and Henry trade rival readings of the play, debate whether Isabella secretly seduces Angelo, argue over whether the Duke’s proposal is closer to liberation or enslavement, trace the play’s connections to The Merchant of Venice and The Rape of Lucrece, assess the parallels to James I, weigh whether it’s a Girardian play (Oliver: emphatically not), and parse exactly what Isabella means when she says “I did yield to him,” before turning to the best way to consume Shakespeare, what Jane Austen took from Adam Smith, why Swift may be the most practically intelligent writer in English, how advertising really works and why most of it doesn’t, which works in English literature are under- and overrated, what makes someone a late bloomer, whether fiction will deal seriously with religion again, whether Ayn Rand’s villains are more relevant now than ever, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Now, before doing your current work, you were in advertising for almost a decade. How do you feel that work in advertising has shaped how you read literature?
OLIVER: [laughs] I try to keep them very separate. I try not to let advertising—
COWEN: You try, but I’m sure you fail.
OLIVER: —pollute my readings of literature.
COWEN: Why is it a pollution?
OLIVER: Because advertising is not a great art, and to apply the principles of advertising to literature would be a diminishment.
COWEN: You don’t have to apply the principles. Advertising gives you insight into what people value, how people respond, and that’s also a part of literature.
OLIVER: It is if you take advertising not to mean headlines and banner ads and things like that, but to mean the calling of attention to some particular thing of importance. You can see that a lot of the great writers were very good advertisers of their own work, of their own ideas.
COWEN: Swift in particular.
OLIVER: Swift is very, very good at advertising. If you wanted to be obtuse, you could reframe his whole career as an exercise in lobbying and PR, and realize that no one’s ever been as good at it as he was.
COWEN: So, your favorite authors are the ones who are best at advertising is what you’re now telling us.
OLIVER: I have a very catholic view of literature, and I admire those writers who are practical and can do a lot of different things. I love Samuel Johnson, and one reason is that he can write a sermon, a legal opinion, an advert—almost anything you want. I think the literary talent can often be turned to those multiple uses.
COWEN: Why isn’t there more creativity in advertising? So much of it, to me, seems stupid and boring.
OLIVER: Yes.
COWEN: You would think, well, if they had a clever ad that people would talk about, it would be better, but that doesn’t happen. Is it a market failure, or it’s actually more or less optimal?
OLIVER: I don’t think it’s optimal. We don’t know how well advertising works, and we’re still impeded in that because of the laws about who you can and cannot target on the internet. I think most people would actually be surprised, if they went into an advertising agency, to learn just how poorly we can target people. Everyone thinks they’re being targeted all the time, but being followed by a toaster advert is really quite basic, and everyone uses the same toaster example because everyone’s being followed by the same bloody toaster. That’s not targeting.
I think they’ve been taken over by bad ideas. There are two competing schools of advertising. One of them is the hard sell, where you put a lot of information and facts, and you name the product a lot. “Buy this aspirin. It cures headaches three times quicker than other brands. We did a study—38 percent of people . . .” And you just hammer it all the time.
The other advertising school is image-based. Arthur Rubicam wrote those wonderful Steinway adverts. The instrument of the immortals. Have you brought great music into your home? The woman in the dress at the piano. You’re buying a whole mood or a vibe. The peak of that is like the tiger on the Frosty cereal packet. You don’t need words. Or the Marlboro Man—you buy these cigarettes. You’re going to look like that cowboy in that shirt, and you’re going to smoke. You’re going to feel like a man, and it’s just going to be great. Coors Light does that now.
Then there was this terrible, terrible thing called the Creative Revolution in the 1960s, where supposedly—this is like the modernism of advertising.
Definitely recommended, and do get out your copy of the Shakespeare.
On the southeastern coast of Anglesey, an island off the coast of mainland Wales, lies a little town with a big name. Following a Welsh tradition of naming towns after churches and nearby geographic features, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch roughly translates to “St. Mary’s Church in the hollow of white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the red cave.”
Though Wales has many towns with long names, the unusual length of this one is intentional. The settlement, now home to about 3,000 people, was once called Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, but a local resident pushed for the longer version of the name in the 1860s as part of an effort to promote tourism and give its train station the longest name in Britain. Locals usually use a short version of the name—either Llanfairpwll or Llanfair PG.
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured this image of the town on April 9, 2025. The image below shows a wider view of the same area. The whirlpool mentioned in the name likely refers to a section of the Menai Strait between the Menai Suspension Bridge and Britannia Bridge known as the Swellies. The area is known for having exceptionally treacherous waters because of its complex bathymetry and because tides enter the strait from both ends at different times, creating strong swirling currents. Menai Suspension Bridge, often described as the first modern suspension bridge, was completed in 1826.
April 9, 2025
Llanddaniel Fab, a village nearby, is the hometown of NASA luminary Tecwyn Roberts. Roberts was a shy boy who grew up without electricity but went on to become one of NASA’s first flight dynamics officers. He is credited with helping to conceptualize NASA’s Deep Space Network, helping design Mission Control at Johnson Space Center, and leading the development of key systems used to communicate with Apollo astronauts.
Llanfairpwll’s full name, with 58 characters, is still shorter than the ceremonial 168-character name for Bangkok, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. However, Llanfairpwll’s full name is said to be the longest one-word place name in Europe and among the longest in the world.
Neighboring planets also boast some lengthy place names. Among the contenders on these other worlds: Schiaparelli crater on Mars, Nantosuelta valley on Venus, and Tchaikovsky crater on Mercury. But even these are less than half the length of the Welsh town’s name. The International Astronomical Union working group responsible for naming planetary features recommends that the first consideration for potential names is that they be “simple, clear, and unambiguous.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
I just came back from Andreessen Horowitz’ American Dynamism Summit in Washington, D.C. It was very refreshing to see so many smart people invested in both American reindustrialization and American defense.
One interesting theme I noticed at the conference — and which I was eager to talk about — was U.S. manufacturers building factories in Japan. Many American manufacturers — both startups and big companies — already do lots of sourcing in Japan, but now some are starting to realize that Japan is a good production base as well. That was the subject of my first book, so it’s a topic near and dear to my heart.
So I thought this would be a good time to publish a guest post by Rie Yano, a friend of mine who is a San Francisco-based partner at the Japanese VC firm Coral Capital. Rie’s very timely post is all about how Japan is the perfect place for the U.S. to do lots of defense manufacturing. In fact, I think there are some advantages of Japan that she didn’t even mention — such as the incredible ease of bringing foreign skilled workers into Japan, now that the country’s immigration policy has been reformed. But in any case, it’s a very good post.
The United States faces a defense-industrial problem that money alone can’t solve. Even though reindustrialization is now supposedly an American national priority, there are hard limits to what the U.S. can actually build, repair, and replenish at scale.
Shipyards are backed up for years. Munitions production is thin. Advanced manufacturing talent is aging out faster than it can be replaced. And even when funding is approved, production timelines don’t move fast enough to match today’s threat environment.
Government reshoring initiatives help at the margin, of course. But new industrial capacity in the U.S. takes years to permit, and remain vulnerable to litigation even after regulatory approval.
Meanwhile, China’s mighty industrial machine is firing on all cylinders. While U.S. reshoring efforts ramp up from a cold start, and while U.S. manufacturing relearns how to produce at scale after decades of neglect and stagnation, China is rapidly surpassing the U.S. in the production of ships, submarines, missiles, drones, and ammunition.
To move faster, the U.S. can’t go it alone. It needs a partner — a place where it can manufacture defense equipment while it ramps up its own industrial base. That partner needs three essential characteristics in order to get started producing right away: industrial depth, political stability, and speed.
Taiwan, under threat of invasion, is increasingly risky as a manufacturing base. Europe is fragmented and geographically distant from the Indo-Pacific, and has Russia to occupy its energies. Canada lacks high-throughput manufacturing scale, while Mexico lacks the precision and complexity that modern defense systems require. India is still early in its technological catch-up phase.
That leaves Japan and Korea — of which Japan is far larger. Fortunately, over the next two years, Japan plans to increase defense and industrial capacity more than at any point since World War II:
Japan possesses world-class manufacturing capability, elite engineering talent, and strong IP protection. And for the first time in decades, it has a political mandate to move fast - especially given Prime Minister Takaichi’s recent landslide victory. Projects like Rapidus and TSMC’s advanced fabs in Kumamoto aren’t isolated investments. They’re signals that US-Japan industrial integration is becoming a strategic necessity.
A deeper industrial partnership between the U.S. and Japan is such a huge opportunity that in retrospect it will seem inevitable. American defense companies that understand how to build with Japan will win.
For eighty years, Japan effectively outsourced its defense to the United States. The countries leaders have realized that that model has become untenable. First, the regional security environment has tightened fast. China’s military expansion, North Korea’s missile launches, and Russia’s activity in Northeast Asia have collapsed the assumption that the status quo could continue.
Second, the United States is no longer willing or able to carry Asia’s industrial defense load alone. At a moment when the U.S. defense industrial base is straining under production bottlenecks and labor shortages, allies that can actually build things matter more and more.
Third, Japan is now in the process of fundamentally changing how it mobilizes capital for defense. Military spending was effectively capped below 1% of GDP for decades. That constraint is now gone — Japan plans to reach 2% of GDP by 2027, putting it among the top global defense spenders by the late 2020s.
But in fact, this is only a piece of the story, and not necessarily the biggest one. Japan’s defense buildup aligns three levers at once:
increased defense spending
explicit industrial policy and subsidies
a willingness to use foreign direct investment as an accelerator
Regulations, procurement reform, and capital allocation are all being aligned to rebuild production capacity, not just fund programs. U.S. defense and deep-tech companies are being invited in as co-developers and co-manufacturers.
Poland is the Closest Playbook
When countries rebuild defense capability under time pressure, everything compresses. Capital deployment, testing, procurement, and industrial scale-up all happen faster than peacetime systems allow.
Poland is the clearest recent example:
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Poland was already spending about 2.4% of GDP on defense. Within two years, that figure surged toward ~4%, making Poland one of NATO’s highest defense spenders. Just as importantly, procurement timelines compressed from years into months, and domestic production ramped in parallel with acquisition instead of waiting for long planning cycles to finish.
Crucially, Poland paired this with the foreign direct investment that has powered its economy more generally. Over the past two decades, annual FDI inflows exceeded $40 billion at peak, and the total inward FDI stock now surpasses $330 billion. Poland used this FDI not just to create jobs, but to import manufacturing know-how, scale its factories, and integrate itself into global supply chains. The result was rapid economic growth and industrial modernization — today, Poland’s GDP per capita (PPP) sits close to Japan’s, despite starting far behind in the early 2000s.
Japan is now signaling that it wants to do something similar. As of 2023, Japan’s inward FDI stock stood at about $350 billion, which is low for an economy of its size. The government has now set an explicit target to double that figure to $650-700 billion by 2030.
This represents a structural bet that foreign capital, technology, and operating know-how can help rebuild industrial capacity faster than domestic systems can deliver on their own. In fact, this is already happening. TSMC’s $17 billion investment in Kumamoto gave Japan advanced 3-nanometer chips processing technology, the most advanced foundry production outside Taiwan.
Meanwhile, Rapidus, despite being a Japanese semiconductor company, is explicitly designed to pull in global partners, frontier manufacturing tools, and non-Japanese know-how to rebuild advanced chipmaking capability quickly, rather than relying solely on domestic incumbents as Japan tried to do in the past. At Coral Capital, we wrote a piece about why the Rapidus development means that Hokkaido is the new Taiwan.
As the U.S.’ urgency for rearmament rises, Japan’s industrial scale-up matters — it means the U.S. now has a trusted allied capacity in Asia that can shoulder much of the defense manufacturing burden.
Japan Already Powers Critical U.S. Bottlenecks
A U.S.-Japan defense manufacturing partnership won’t be something created out of the blue; it’ll build on an industrial relationship that has existed for many years, to the benefit of both countries.
Right now, if you’re building hardware, deep tech, or anything that goes into defense or critical infrastructure at a significant scale, Japan is probably already in your supply chain — you just don’t always see it. Japan specializes in a number of upstream industries that help American companies scale:
Some key examples include:
Semiconductor materials: Japanese firms supply roughly half of the world’s silicon wafers and photoresists used in advanced chipmaking. Companies like Shin-Etsu Chemical and SUMCO sit upstream of nearly every advanced logic and memory fab, including those operated by TSMC, Samsung, and Intel in the U.S.
Advanced composites: Toray’s T1100 carbon fiber is embedded across U.S. defense platforms, including the U.S. Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), one of the Pentagon’s most important next-generation aviation programs, and multiple Boeing and Lockheed systems.
Industrial robotics and automation: Japan produces almost half of the world’s industrial robots, led by companies such as FANUC, Yaskawa, and Kawasaki. As U.S. defense manufacturing runs into labor constraints, automation is becoming critical.
Shipbuilding and maintenance: While the U.S. Navy struggles with maintenance backlogs and unfinished repairs, Japan retains dense, high-throughput shipyard capacity with companies such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The U.S. is already using Japanese yards for maintenance and overhaul of U.S. naval vessels in the Indo-Pacific.
Japan’s Surprising Advantages: Regulations and Labor
For U.S. hardware companies, the constraint over the next few years will be throughput - how fast you can stand up new capacity, qualify suppliers, and move from prototype to volume.
In the U.S., building physical infrastructure is slow and unpredictable. New factories, test ranges, and shipyard expansions often take years to permit and are frequently delayed by litigation, even after regulatory compliance. Three-to-seven year approval timelines are common.
In the long run, policy reforms can fix this situation. But for the foreseeable future, Japan offers a much more favorable trade-off. Japan’s centralized, bureaucratic regulatory approval process gets things built much faster than America’s more legalistic one. In the U.S., permits are often challenged in court, tied up for years in legal proceedings, and sometimes revoked. In Japan this almost never happens — once you get approved to build something, you can go ahead and build it. Capital-intensive infrastructure can thus be built quickly and operated with long-term confidence. On top of that, the government has explicitly defined defense-industrial capacity as a national security priority and is actively smoothing the regulatory path.
Labor is another big advantage. Senior hardware engineers in Japan often cost meaningfully less than in the U.S., but their real advantage is execution reliability. Lower attrition, tighter process control, a culture of discipline, and deep experience in precision manufacturing, materials, robotics, and systems integration translate into higher reliability at scale.
Japan also offers the opportunity for industrial scale without the strategic IP risk that hurt many multinational companies in China. After years of technology leakage and forced transfer in jurisdictions with weak IP protections, global players are understandably wary. Japan, however, has strong IP enforcement. It’s also a U.S. ally, so there’s no risk that a rival military will end up with American technology. The 2022 Economic Security Promotion Act and the 2023, U.S.-Japan Security of Supply Arrangement formalize that alignment. New institutions under the Ministry of Defense are explicitly designed to move commercial technology into defense deployment faster.
Anyone considering investing in Japan should be encouraged by the deep history of successful U.S.-Japan co-manufacturing. Japanese companies have spent decades building factories in the United States, training American workers, and helping Americans master production systems like Kaizen and the Toyota Production System.
In other words, the U.S.-Japan alliance has always been an industrial alliance, not just diplomatic. Now that model is being applied to defense manufacturing as well.
For the first time, Japan is treating industrial capacity itself as a national security asset. The 2023 Act on Enhancing Defense Production and Technology Bases formalizes that shift. New institutions under ATLA, including DISTI, are explicitly designed to shorten the path from commercial technology to defense deployment, including coordination with the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit.
In other words, Japan is now deploying the same playbook it once ran in autos, electronics, and semiconductors, now pointed deliberately at defense.
Builders: Seize this Moment
The United States, needs to reindustrialize, but it cannot reindustrialize alone. Japan is its arsenal, already embedded in the most critical layers of the U.S. industrial base, from materials and automation to ship repair and advanced manufacturing. What’s changed is that Japan is now explicitly opening those layers to deeper co-manufacturing and co-development, and doing so under time pressure.
This window will not stay open indefinitely. Early partners help shape standards, procurement pathways, and long-term relationships. Late entrants miss out and are forced to play catch-up.
DENVER—Last month, President Donald Trump took to social media with an announcement that he would direct the Pentagon and other federal agencies to "begin the process" of disclosing government files related to alien life and UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena). It was the latest chapter in a yearslong slow burn of sensational claims, congressional hearings, and yes, the military's release in 2020 of intriguing videos that do, indeed, appear to show things that defy simple explanations.
"To date, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, there is no conclusive evidence suggesting an extraterrestrial origin for UAP," a NASA blue-ribbon panel wrote in a 2023 report. "The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP," the DNI report stated in 2021.
PLD Space’s manufacturing facilities show the flow of production for its Miura 5 rockets. Image: PLD Space
Spanish startup launch company, PLD Space, raised €180 million ($209 million) in its latest funding round as it works towards the inaugural flight of its next rocket, Miura 5.
The company was founded in 2011, becoming the first private Spanish rocket company. It debuted with the launch of the Miura 1 rocket in 2023 and has been developing a series of rockets, including the Miura 5, which lands in the ocean before being recovered for reuse; the Miura Next, a medium-lift rocket with propulsive landing capabilities; and both heavy and super-heavy versions of the Miura Next, which feature three and five boosters, respectively.
“Miura 5 was designed to address a clear and growing capacity gap in the market, and this investment support strengthens our ability to transition into commercial operations,” said Ezequiel Sánchez, PLD Space’s Executive President. “It accelerates the build‑out of the industrial and launch infrastructure required to deliver reliable access to space for an expanding pipeline of global customers.”
In November 2025, PLD Space said it was aiming for the first flight of its Miura 5 rocket in the first quarter of 2026, but with this announcement of this Series C fundraising, the company now says that inaugural flight will be sometime in 2026.
PLD Space has said it aims to launch more than 30 times per year by 2030.
“As demand for dependable access to space continues to rise, we are reinforcing the redundancy, test cadence and flight cadence needed to sustain continuity across multiple locations,” Sánchez said. “This approach strengthens operational buffers and assurance frameworks that global operators increasingly rely on to secure their long‑term access‑to‑orbit strategies.”
This latest funding infusion was driven by Japanese manufacturer Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, which invested €50 million ($58 million) into the company.
“We are pleased to collaborate with PLD Space, a company taking on the challenge of satellite launch services with a view toward the global market,” said Tomonori Sato, Mitsubishi Electric’s Executive Officer, in a statement. “By combining PLD Space’s launch capabilities with Mitsubishi Electric’s strengths in the satellite business, we aim to address evolving customer requirements, including those in the global market.”
Mitsubishi Electric said its investment into PLD Space will afford it “priority access to launch services using the Miura 5 rocket, thereby enhancing the feasibility of building a satellite constellation.”
To date, PLD Space raised more than €350 million ($407 million). Other investors in this latest round included the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities; Spanish public funds management company, COFIDES (Compañía Española de Financiación del Desarrollo); and Spanish fun Nazca Capital.
European competition
PLD Space was selected as one of five companies to participate in the European Launcher Challenge. Its selection was made in the summer of 2025 with the financial backing of the European Space Agency (ESA) Council of Ministers in November.
The goal is for the competing companies to achieve a successful orbital launch no later than 2027 and if successful, ESA will contribute to every operational launch from these challengers until 2030 at the latest.
The five companies selected for competition were (in alphabetical order):
Isar Aerospace (Germany)
MaiaSpace, an ArianeGroup subsidiary (France)
Orbital Express Launch Ltd or Orbex (United Kingdom)
PLD Space (Spain)
Rocket Factory Augsburg (Germany)
On Feb. 18, 2026, Orbex announced it was closing up shop after a deal to be acquired by another startup, The Exploration Company, didn’t pan out.
In a statement to the news outlet European Spaceflight, MaiaSpace said it was delaying its inaugural launch to April 2027.
Isar Aerospace launched its first Spectrum rocket in 2025, but it failed to reach orbit, crashing near the launch site less than 30 seconds after takeoff. It’s second test flight, ‘Onward and Upward,’ was set to launch in January, but a pressurization valve issue delayed that to no earlier than March 19.
Fellow German startup, Rocket Factory Augsburg is working towards the inaugural launch of its RFA One rocket, but a target date hasn’t been announced.
Pre-War Protests Twenty Years Ago Were Very Different
Over twenty years ago when a U.S. invasion of Iraq seemed imminent the public reaction was overwhelmingly against it. While leadership in the U.S. often seemed split during the run up, global opinion was massively against it. Including in countries much closer to Iraq or more likely to be targets of bombs if Iraq were to launch the weapons it was accused of having.
On February 15th, 2003, global protests took place. Many millions of people in cities around the world protested. Probably the biggest global demonstration ever. In fact, because it was a coordinated effort with people everywhere aware that it was a global statement, it was a kind of birth of a global human consciousness. A step in human evolution.
We even had our own protest months earlier in the small western city I live in. Our local and informal group of peace activists and environmental advocates were reading about leadership laying the foundation for rationalizing such a war and held a day of protest on the town square. I participated and wrote about it in the local paper at the time.
Of course none of it worked. Just a month after the global protest the attack and long war began.
Now we have a similar attack on Iran but the lead up was very different. In part because Trump, having cowed Congress into near irrelevance, just jumped in on this without taking time to get Congressional approval or laying much groundwork for rationalizing it. And in part because Trump creates so many things that demand protest that it’s hard to keep up.
Iran does create a lot of problems for the region and does have some nuclear material. There ability to actually make nuclear warheads and missiles and how quickly any of that could be done is nothing like what Trump has claimed. And their abuse and murder of their people is not the real reason since much worse could be found elsewhere in the world. It’s yet another Trump mistake in judgement and a Trump ego trip.
Despite nothing like the same protests, people are very much against this. A Quinnipiac poll done just before the attack, about the possibility of such an attack, showed 70% against it and only 18% for it.
The lack of pre-war protests compared to back then is disconcerting but understandable. But nothing has changed. Leadership is still idiotic about this kind of thing, the people are much smarter than leadership about this, what the people want is clear, and leadership is doing exactly the opposite.
Lay long talking with my wife about ordering things in our family, and then rose and to my office, there collecting an alphabet for my Navy Manuscript, which, after a short dinner, I returned to and by night perfected to my great content. So to other business till 9 at night, and so home to supper and to bed.
During a brief hearing on Wednesday morning, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation spent only a few minutes "marking up" new legislation that provides guidance to NASA for its various initiatives, including the Artemis program to land humans on the Moon.
"Our bill authorizes critical funding for, and gives strategic direction to, the agency in line with the priorities of administrator Isaacman and the Trump administration," said the committee's chairman, Sen. Ted Cruz, (R-Texas).
The duration of the hearing, however, seems to be the inverse of its significance.
I'm behind on writing about Qwen 3.5, a truly remarkable family of open weight models released by Alibaba's Qwen team over the past few weeks. I'm hoping that the 3.5 family doesn't turn out to be Qwen's swan song, seeing as that team has had some very high profile departures in the past 24 hours.
Junyang Lin was the lead researcher building Qwen, and was key to releasing their open weight models from 2024 onwards.
As far as I can tell a trigger for this resignation was a re-org within Alibaba where a new researcher hired from Google's Gemini team was put in charge of Qwen, but I've not confirmed that detail.
More information is available in this article from 36kr.com. Here's Wikipedia on 36Kr confirming that it's a credible media source established in 2010 with a good track record reporting on the Chinese technology industry.
The article is in Chinese - here are some quotes translated via Google Translate:
At approximately 1:00 PM Beijing time on March 4th, Tongyi Lab held an emergency All Hands meeting, where Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming frankly told Qianwen employees.
Twelve hours ago (at 0:11 AM Beijing time on March 4th), Lin Junyang, the technical lead for Alibaba's Qwen Big Data Model, suddenly announced his resignation on X. Lin Junyang was a key figure in promoting Alibaba's open-source AI models and one of Alibaba's youngest P10 employees. Amidst the industry uproar, many members of Qwen were also unable to accept the sudden departure of their team's key figure.
"Given far fewer resources than competitors, Junyang's leadership is one of the core factors in achieving today's results," multiple Qianwen members told 36Kr. [...]
Regarding Lin Junyang's whereabouts, no new conclusions were reached at the meeting. However, around 2 PM, Lin Junyang posted again on his WeChat Moments, stating, "Brothers of Qwen, continue as originally planned, no problem," without explicitly confirming whether he would return. [...]
That piece also lists several other key members who have apparently resigned:
With Lin Junyang's departure, several other Qwen members also announced their departure, including core leaders responsible for various sub-areas of Qwen models, such as:
Binyuan Hui: Lead Qwen code development, principal of the Qwen-Coder series models, responsible for the entire agent training process from pre-training to post-training, and recently involved in robotics research.
Bowen Yu: Lead Qwen post-training research, graduated from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, leading the development of the Qwen-Instruct series models.
Kaixin Li: Core contributor to Qwen 3.5/VL/Coder, PhD from the National University of Singapore.
Besides the aforementioned individuals, many young researchers also resigned on the same day.
Based on the above it looks to me like everything is still very much up in the air. The presence of Alibaba's CEO at the "emergency All Hands meeting" suggests that the company understands the significance of these resignations and may yet retain some of the departing talent.
Qwen 3.5 is exceptional
This story hits particularly hard right now because the Qwen 3.5 models appear to be exceptionally good.
I've not spent enough time with them yet but the scale of the new model family is impressive. They started with Qwen3.5-397B-A17B on February 17th - an 807GB model - and then followed with a flurry of smaller siblings in 122B, 35B, 27B, 9B, 4B, 2B, 0.8B sizes.
I'm hearing positive noises about the 27B and 35B models for coding tasks that still fit on a 32GB/64GB Mac, and I've tried the 9B, 4B and 2B models and found them to be notably effective considering their tiny sizes. That 2B model is just 4.57GB - or as small as 1.27GB quantized - and is a full reasoning and multi-modal (vision) model.
It would be a real tragedy if the Qwen team were to disband now, given their proven track record in continuing to find new ways to get high quality results out of smaller and smaller models.
If those core Qwen team members either start something new or join another research lab I'm excited to see what they do next.
Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.
Google's latest model is an update to their inexpensive Flash-Lite family. At $0.25/million tokens of input and $1.5/million output this is 1/8th the price of Gemini 3.1 Pro.
Will Wilson paints a bleak picture for where we’re heading with code written by AIs.
He thinks the world will fill with poorly written code that no one understands and that software bugs will proliferate through critical systems. Your airplane that has gotten safer and safer with each passing decade will be running on code that no one has really checked all that well. Which would be bad.
What’s more, Wilson fears that humans will lose their software writing skills over time as AI takes on more and more tasks. We’ll become dumber as a whole. Which would also be bad.
Wilson is a mathematician turned start-up founder who built the company Antithesis in a bid to modernize software testing techniques and help humans write better code.
In this episode, we get into his life story, his fears around AI software and what he thinks we should do to make massive improvements to the code that underlies everything.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.
We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.
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On Monday, the market reaction to the Trump/Netanyahu war with Iran was surprisingly muted. Stocks were roughly flat. Prices of oil and gas futures were up, but only moderately.
Yesterday reality apparently began to set in, although stocks made up most of their initial losses.
This will be a brief post, with some bad news and some good news.
The bad news comes in two parts.
First, any hopes that this war might be extremely brief are fading. The Trump administration may have imagined that decapitating the Iranian government would bring swift regime change, but the Islamic State isn’t a government of mere thugs — yes, they’re evil thugs, but they’re also serious religious fanatics facing what for them is an existential threat, and their grip on power isn’t that easy to break. Furthermore, it’s painfully obvious that Trump and co. had no plan beyond bombing Iran, killing its current leaders, and hoping that something good would happen.
Second, war in the middle of the world’s most important oil-producing region — which is also a key source of liquefied natural gas — inevitably has major consequences for energy prices. Once upon a time US and Israeli air superiority might have contained Iran’s ability to harm its neighbors. But in an age in which even third-rate powers have the ability to launch missiles and drones, Iran has a huge stockpile of drones and also has ballistic missiles that are destructive, hard to intercept, and have a 1200 mile range.
The U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia has been hit by two drone strikes. Airports in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha and the U.S. consulate in Dubai have also been hit.
U.S. officials have urged all Americans in the region to leave, but they did so after almost all flights had been canceled. Only now are they saying that they’re going to arrange flights on military aircraft and charter flights — an airlift that will have to be immense given that there are surely tens of thousands of Americans currently stranded. Did I mention that Trump and co. clearly went to war without a plan?
The potential targets at risk include key parts of the region’s energy infrastructure. Above all, the war threatens tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which is how the bulk of Middle Eastern oil and gas normally reaches world markets. And the risk of Iranian attacks has effectively closed the Strait. Yesterday Trump, obviously scrambling to limit the damage, declared that he is ordering the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation to provide “guarantees for the Financial Security of ALL Maritime Trade, especially Energy, traveling through the Gulf,” as well as telling the Navy to provide security. Do we have the resources to do all of that?
Oil prices are up around $15 per barrel since mid-February:
Source: Trading Economics
In case you’re wondering, there are 42 gallons in a barrel.
Indeed, it’s hard to understand why oil prices haven’t risen even more. “Why has oil not hit $100 a barrel?”, asks the Financial Times. The best answer seems to be that even now traders are betting that the Strait of Hormuz won’t stay closed for more than a few days. I hope I’m wrong, but I expect the strait to remain closed for weeks despite Trump’s assurances.
Now the good news: Even if oil prices go much higher, to $100 a barrel and beyond, it won’t necessarily trigger an economic crisis. I explained why on Monday: The United States and other advanced nations are far less oil-dependent than they were in the 1970s, when oil shocks did cause major economic disruption.
It’s true that Europe, which depends heavily on imported LNG from both the Middle East and the United States, will be hit harder than we will. However, even with a sustained closure of the Strait of Hormuz Europe will face a smaller shock than it did following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
My back of the envelope calculations say that a $15 a barrel rise in oil prices, which is what has happened so far, will raise overall U.S. consumer prices by about 0.3 percent. A $50 a barrel rise from the pre-bombing level, which would take the price to more than $120, would raise consumer prices by about 1 percent. For perspective, that’s roughly what Trump’s tariffs have done. Yet those tariffs, while they have hurt, have caused neither runaway inflation nor a recession. Neither will rising oil prices on their own even if they go well above $100 a barrel.
However, the key point is that this latest economic shock isn’t happening on its own. The tariffs — and the huge uncertainty they create for the future — haven’t gone away. Neither have draconian anti-immigrant policies and their growing economic drag. There are widespread concerns about AI — both as a bubble that might burst and as a force driving job losses. And many people, myself included, are worried about financial stability: In many ways we have recreated the “shadow banking” risks that made the 2008 crisis possible.
Now we’ve added a fresh level of massive uncertainty. Bear in mind that this isn’t even a war of choice; it’s a war of whim, marked by a near-total lack of planning.
One shouldn’t exaggerate the economic fallout from this war. But it isn’t occurring in isolation: There are many stresses on our economy, and this could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back — a straw that becomes heavier the longer the war goes on. Furthermore, if Trump is this erratic now, what will he do as the midterms get even closer?
There are some behaviors that are anti-patterns in our weird new world of agentic engineering.
Inflicting unreviewed code on collaborators
This anti-pattern is common and deeply frustrating.
Don't file pull requests with code you haven't reviewed yourself.
If you open a PR with hundreds (or thousands) of lines of code that an agent produced for you, and you haven't done the work to ensure that code is functional yourself, you are delegating the actual work to other people.
They could have prompted an agent themselves. What value are you even providing?
If you put code up for review you need to be confident that it's ready for other people to spend their time on it. The initial review pass is your responsibility, not something you should farm out to others.
A good agentic engineering pull request has the following characteristics:
The change is small enough to be reviewed efficiently without inflicting too much additional cognitive load on the reviewer. Several small PRs beats one big one, and splitting code into separate commits is easy with a coding agent to do the Git finagling for you.
The PR includes additional context to help explain the change. What's the higher level goal that the change serves? Linking to relevant issues or specifications is useful here.
Agents write convincing looking pull request descriptions. You need to review these too! It's rude to expect someone else to read text that you haven't read and validated yourself.
Given how easy it is to dump unreviewed code on other people, I recommend including some form of evidence that you've put that extra work in yourself. Notes on how you manually tested it, comments on specific implementation choices or even screenshots and video of the feature working go a long way to demonstrating that a reviewer's time will not be wasted digging into the details.
It’s the perhaps tired refrain of foreign policy and defense professionals that wars are easy to start (if you’re still, mostly, the preeminent global military power) but much harder to finish. They are unpredictable. They quickly spread in directions you don’t anticipate. As the still preeminent global military power, you tend to be on the line for other sorts of instability that your war of choice creates. And yet Donald Trump has mainly been able to engage in what we might call impulsive unilateralism without generating too many problems for himself in the short run. He decapitated the Venezuelan regime through what amounted to a dramatic raid and is now, improbably, running the country as a kind of American presidential subsidiary through the mechanisms of the Chavista regime itself. He assassinated Qasem Soleimani in 2020. He launched a massive but brief bombing raid against Iranian nuclear facilities last year. In each case the U.S. was mostly able to end things quickly and on its own terms.
This isn’t going that way. From one vantage point, what we’re seeing in Iran’s response shouldn’t surprise us. And that response is not going especially well for Iran. What’s telling is that the White House doesn’t seem to have been prepared for the rapid clip of escalation or the market chaos, which are fairly predictable responses to the war it started.
Let’s run through some particulars.
Iran is responding to America’s campaign in a very logical way, albeit “logical” in the context of having very few good options. Iran’s strategic deterrence and a decent amount of its military capacity were already destroyed in 2024 and 2025, the power of its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza even more decisively shattered. So they’re launching missiles and drones everywhere they can to try to expand the conflict into some new configuration that is better than Iran facing the U.S. and Israel on its own. The challenge is that they’re launching attacks against basically all the countries in the region who might be most likely to rein the U.S. in, as well as those who have kept up at least reasonably robust ties with Iran.
The more viable strategy is to create an international energy and economic crisis by shutting down the oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — something those attacks are also making possible. Iran can’t blockade the Strait. But with missile and drone fire and perhaps whatever Navy it has left, it can probably make passage dangerous enough that international shippers will stop trying to send ships through.
There’s an uncanny duality to everything that I’m describing. None of this is surprising. And thus you can’t exactly say it’s “going badly” since this is what you’d expect to happen if you started a war that the Iranian government viewed correctly as a battle for regime survival. If you start from the premise that the U.S. had good reason to start this war or no choice but to do so, then you’d say it’s dangerous, it’s not going to be fast or bloodless, but this is what you’d expect. On the other hand, if you start from the premise that there was no good reason to do this and in fact the Iranian regime is weaker than it’s been in decades, you start to think, was this a good idea? Are we prepared for the consequences and ready to put out all these fires? In political terms, we know that a decisive majority of the American public (around 60%) was against this in the first place.
There are clearly some long time Iran hawks who are decidedly in the first category — they were prepared for this war in whatever form it might take. But the problem for the White House is, again, that this war started with the country close to overwhelmingly against this. And that was before all the bad stuff we’ve seen this week came into view. More to the point, there’s very little in Donald Trump’s history or his behavior that gives me the slightest confidence that he’s ready for any of what’s coming. That assumption gets extra support from how all over the place Trump has been in explaining what the goal of the whole operation is. It’s regime change or maybe it’s regime change if the Iranian public wants it to be and if it’s not then too bad for them. It may be about setting back Iran’s nuclear program. Or maybe it’s just further degrading the country’s missile capacity. Trump seems mostly to have ruled out anything but airpower, except when he occasionally says the opposite, which of course he usually does. And airpower alone never unseats governments. You can possibly weaken a state enough that a domestic insurgency becomes more possible. But such an insurgency tends to be a long shot when a hostile foreign power is actively bombarding the country.
I think we’re in this war because the Venezuela operation went pretty well for Trump, certainly in the short-run. That was fun. So why not do it again in Iran? And he’s escalating abroad in general because escalation, vast expression of power and violence, amount to a kind of psychological compensation for loss of power and popularity at home. It’s a kind of presidential self-care making use of the prerogative powers of the American presidency. I see little evidence Trump is ready for this level of chaos or economic shocks with a war few Americans thought there was any reason to commit to in the first place.
Twice a year we ask for your help keeping TPM alive and thriving. Today is one of those days. It’s very, very important to our whole operation. We’ve just kicked off our Annual TPM Membership Drive. We do this because TPM is chronicling — generating and saving the receipts of — our on-going national crisis and we cannot do that without growing our number of subscribers. If you’re a TPM reader but not a member (see below if you are a member!) please take this moment to join us by becoming a member. Maybe you used to be a member and your membership lapsed. We need you to come back and become a paying member. We have a 25% discount running for the duration of the drive.
What if you are a member? We need your help too.
First, you can upgrade your membership. You can go from a Prime account to a Prime AF account or from Prime AF to Inside. But there’s something else you can add too, perhaps the most important. We have about 35,000 members currently. That’s 35,000 potential ambassadors to new readers and new members. Many of you know people who are on the outskirts of the TPM community but not members. Perhaps they’re full fledged TPM readers but not members. We’re not expecting anybody to make individual sales pitches on our behalf. But it is a huge, huge boost if you go on your social channels and let people know about TPM and our drive. Are you on Bluesky? Talk about us on Bluesky — or Facebook or even Twitter. Tell people what you love about TPM and how memberships funds our whole operation.
We’ve seen concretely over the year the critical role of independent media when democracy is on the ropes against rising authoritarianism. No media organization owned by a big diversified corporation can be independent. They are too vulnerable to a rogue president. They are owned by too many carrots and sticks. We’re different. We answer to no one but our readers and our values. That makes what we do critical in a moment like this. As I wrote above, we are chronicling the unfolding national crisis of democracy in America. Please help us do this job.
It’s Wednesday morning in Norfolk, Virginia. A 45-year-old man with white supremacist tattoos coating his torso stands bare-chested before a bathroom mirror. The water is running from the sink. Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” plays softly in the background. He is muttering to himself. We cannot hear what he is saying, but it feels unpleasant.
From behind, a woman approaches. It is his wife, Samantha Jennifer. She has a confused look plastered to her face.
JENNIFER: “Honey, what are you doing?”
PETE: “Running lines.”
JENNIFER: “Honey, all those months in rehab.”
PETE: “No. Lines for today’s press conference at the Pentagon.”
JENNIFER: “Oh, baby. I love hearing you play boy boy general!”
PETE: “Can I practice on you?”
Jennifer nods glowingly, then sits on a camo-decorated bathroom chair.
PETE: “Pretend you’re a retarded lib media member.”
JENNIFER: “Like, a trans them with pink hair?”
PETE: “Sure. Now ask me a question about Iran?”
Jennifer clears her throat.
JENNIFER: “Pete …”
PETE: “Honey, we’ve gone over this. It’s either ‘Sir’ or ‘Mister War Secretary.’ Or ‘Mr War.’”
JENNIFER": “Oh, sorry, babe.” Clears throat again. “Mister War …”
PETE: “Yes, retard loser from NBC …”
JENNIFER: “Why is the war going so badly?”
PETE: “Babe! What the fuck?”
JENNIFER: “Oh, duh. Right. Sorry. I was just reading about the American casualties.”
PETE: “What do we always say, Babe? I do the reading, you do the cooking and dress like sexy nurse.”
Jennifer clears her throat.
JENNIFER: “Mister War, what makes America so great?”
Pete Hegseth grins for a second, then turns back toward the mirror, puts on his serious face and straightens his shoulders.
PETE: “Well, Jennifer—Iran wanted war. And we gave them [long pause] Gwar!”
Awkward pause.
JENNIFER: “Honey, I don’t understand.”
PETE: “Gwar—the rock band. ‘Scumdogs of the Universe.’ Like, we brought the metal to Iran! Bam! Thud! Whoo!”
Awkward pause.
JENNIFER: “I don’t think that works, babe.”
PETE: “Hmm. OK. Um. How about—‘Iran thought they were in for a cake walk. But now we’re … walking all over their cake!”
JENNIFER: “I guess it’s a little better.”
Pete looks frustrated.
PETE: “They called him the supreme leader. Well, now we call him ‘Dead.’
JENNIFER: “Who’s dead?”
PETE: “The supreme leader.”
JENNIFER: “Of where?”
PETE: “Fucking a. How about something like, ‘I guess Trump Steaks didn’t fail after all. Because we just London broiled Iran!’”
Pete smiles. He’s impressed with himself.
JENNIFER: “Technically, London Broil is just a cooking method. Not a cut of meat.”
PETE: “For fuck’s sake.”
Pete opens the mini-fridge under his sink, grabs a can of Budweiser. Cracks it open, stares up at a photo of Joseph Stalin framed above a window.
JENNIFER: “Honey, we’ve talked about this …”
Pete hushes his wife.
PETE: “Quiet, woman. I need to think! I need to think! I need to think!”
He grabs a nearby pen, stabs the can, shotguns it. Wipes his mouth with a towel.
PETE (to himself, staring back in the mirror): “Let’s fucking go, big boy! You’re the secretary of war of the United States of America. You’ve got this! All those pussies don’t understand who you are! You’re the motherfucking man! You didn’t wet yourself in ninth grade! You didn’t have a crush on Mitch Gaylord! You weren’t voted Most Likely to Never Open a Book! You are Pete motherfucking Hegseth!”
Jennifer looks concerned. Pete steps toward her.
PETE: “LL Cool J once rapped, ‘Mama said knock you out.’ Guess what? We just knocked out Iran!”
JENNIFER: “Oh, babe. Way too DEI.”
PETE: “Nobody thought Rocky could beat Drago—and he kicked his ass! Now, so did America!”
JENNIFER: “Drago was Russian. This is Iran. Different countries, babe.”
PETE: “No, babe. I’m pretty sure Iran is in Russia.”
JENNIFER: “Um, no.”
PETE: “Iran wanted to play with fire. Now—they’re on fire!”
JENNIFER: “I think I have an appointment …”
PETE: “Iran thought we would run. Well, I-never-ran!”
JENNIFER: “With my therapist …”
PETE: “Whose house? Trump’s house!”
JENNIFER: “In Bermuda …”
PETE: “Elton John once sang, ‘I’m still standing …’”
I was DMing with a friend on Facebook earlier today. The topic was the war with Iran—and how awful it seems to be going.
He wrote this …
The words hit me, because they feel increasingly true.
On this website, the focus is politics. What’s working for the Democrats, what’s working for the Republicans, will our elections be fair, can this nation endure the hellscape that is the MAGA takeover. I read polls, I seek out opinions, I interview candidates and hope to walk away with a solid read on right v. left, conservative v. liberal, authoritarian v. democratic.
Sometimes, however, what gets lost in such efforts is the humanity. What I mean is, as we speak the Middle East is being torn apart. People are dying. Not merely American soldiers, but … average, day-to-day people. Men, women, children. Being blown to pieces. Being ripped up. And, usually, we at least have a defined reason. We might not like the defined reason, but it’s presented to us in an A+B=C manner. There’s a stated explanation.
This time … nothing. This is a war. No, this isn’t a war. Iran was ready to attack us. Iran couldn’t attack us. Oil! No oil! Liberation! We are not liberators! One day, the crazed president says something halfway reasonable, the next day he contradicts himself. We’re doing this for Israel. No, Israel is doing this for us. This will be a short conflict. Or, it might last months.
And the thing is—it’s increasingly clear nobody actually knows what’s going on. That’s sort of what happens when you fire all your credible military leaders and replace them with an alcoholic, unaccomplished Fox News host who lives and dies with TikTok clips. That’s sort of that happens when you fire accomplished Black generals for being Black and accomplished women generals for being women—and insert a motley crew of white frat bros who love to pump iron and blow shit up and tell the president how fuckin’ awesome (“Dude, you’re fuckin’ awesome!”) he is. That’s sort of what happens when your lazy-ass president ignores intelligence briefings in favor of masturbating to old photos of the “Facts of Life” cast.
We are in a war because … well, I’m not sure why we’re in a war.
About a week before Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, attacking Iran alongside Israel, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine warned that the lack of support from allies and depleted reserves of interceptors and Patriot missiles would make an attack on Iran risky.
Patty Nieberg of Task & Purpose reported that on February 28, the day the offensive began, Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, wrote to the troops deployed around the Middle East that they were “embarking on a mission of profound consequence,” moving “from deterrence into active combat.” Central Command has reported six American service members killed and eighteen wounded in the operation.
According to U.S. Central Command, which manages U.S. military operations in the Middle East, there are about 50,000 military personnel involved in Operation Epic Fury, 200 fighter jets, two aircraft carriers and bombers, and they are moving more support to the region. Yesterday Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to rule out sending ground troops to Iran.
In his message to Congress yesterday announcing he had taken “military action…against the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Trump wrote: “It is not possible at this time to know the full scope and direction of military operations that may be necessary.”
Today the war continued to widen, leaving hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals in the Middle East desperate to leave. France alone has 400,000 people there. The U.S. has between 500,000 and a million people in the Middle East. The U.S. State Department has urged them to leave but said it could not help, and with airports and airspaces closed, just how they are supposed to do that is unclear. After pressure, the government is now saying it will work on chartering aircraft and using military planes to transport people who want to leave.
Alison Durkee of Forbes reported today that Trump’s military strikes in Iran have already cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1 billion. The three F-15E Eagle jets lost to friendly fire on Sunday cost $90 million each. Transporting troops, ships, and aircraft to the Middle East cost about $630 million. Missiles and weapons systems are also expensive—a drone is about $35,000, and a Tomahawk missile costs millions—and the two aircraft carriers in the region together cost at least $13 million a day. And then there are the costs of operating aircraft, and so on.
Jennifer Scholtes and Katherine Tully-McManus of Politico reported that lawmakers anticipate the administration will ask for supplemental funding for this operation, over and above the more than $150 billion the Republicans provided the Pentagon in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the nearly $839 billion in regular funding Congress appropriated in February.
Trump made little effort to present his case for military strikes against Iran to the American people. In his letter to Congress notifying them of his attack, Trump said he had acted under the 1973 War Powers Act, which permits a president to attack another country if there is an urgent threat. But the letter itself doesn’t identify any such urgent threat. It simply said Iran is one of the world’s largest sponsors of state terrorism and that it “continues to seek the means to possess and employ nuclear weapons.”
The Framers of the Constitution placed the power to declare war in the hands of Congress and not in the president above all because they did not trust that much power in the hands of one man. But they also wanted to make sure the American people would have robust debates about the value of the money and lives lost in combat. So determined were they for the American people to have those debates that they put into the Constitution that Congress had the power “[t]o declare War…and…[t]o raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”
In Federalist #26, one of the newspaper essays Alexander Hamilton wrote to encourage the ratification of the Constitution, Hamilton explained that people shouldn’t fear the strength of the new government outlined in the Constitution, because the necessity of debating war, alongside the two-year limit on government funding for the military, would force Congress to debate military actions. He expected members of the opposition to attack those in power over military appropriations, so that if those in power were “disposed to exceed the proper limits, the community will be warned of the danger, and will have an opportunity of taking measures to guard against it.”
But Trump has now taken that power away from the people and their representatives. He has launched a military action that by his own admission is not an emergency situation like those anticipated by the War Powers Act, and thus he should have asked Congress for authorization to send troops and money to Iran. Members of Congress, in turn, would then have had to answer to their constituents.
Tonight the U.S. Southern Command, which operates in Central and South America and the Caribbean, posted: “On March 3, Ecuadorian and U.S. military forces launched operations against Designated Terrorist Organizations in Ecuador. The operations are a powerful example of the commitment of partners in Latin America and the Caribbean to combat the scourge of narco-terrorism. Together, we are taking decisive action to confront narco-terrorists who have long inflicted terror, violence, and corruption on citizens throughout the hemisphere.”
Eric Schmitt and Luis Ferré-Sadurní of the New York Times reported that U.S. Special Forces soldiers are advising and supporting Ecuadorian commandos as they conduct raids against drug-related sites run by “designated terrorist organizations.”
Apple today announced M5 Pro and M5 Max, the world’s most advanced
chips for pro laptops, powering the new MacBook Pro. The chips are
built using a new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture. This
innovative design combines two dies into a single system on a chip
(SoC), which includes a powerful CPU, scalable GPU, Media Engine,
unified memory controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5
capabilities. M5 Pro and M5 Max feature a new 18-core CPU
architecture. It includes six of the highest-performing core
design, now called super cores, that are the world’s fastest CPU
core. Alongside these cores are 12 all-new performance cores,
optimized for power-efficient, multithreaded workloads. [...]
The industry-leading super core was first introduced as
performance cores in M5, which also adopts the super core name for
all M5-based products — MacBook Air, the 14-inch MacBook Pro,
iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro. This core is the
highest-performance core design with the world’s fastest
single-threaded performance, driven in part by increased front-end
bandwidth, a new cache hierarchy, and enhanced branch prediction.
M5 Pro and M5 Max also introduce an all-new performance core that
is optimized to deliver greater power-efficient, multithreaded
performance for pro workloads. Together with the super cores, the
chips deliver up to 2.5× higher multithreaded performance than M1
Pro and M1 Max. The super cores and performance cores give
MacBook Pro a huge performance boost to handle the most
CPU-intensive pro workloads, like analyzing complex data or
running demanding simulations with unparalleled ease.
This is a bit confusing, but I think — after a media briefing with Apple reps this morning — I’ve got it straight. From the M1 through M4, there were two CPU core types: efficiency and performance. When the regular M5 chip debuted in October, Apple continued using those same names, efficiency and performance, for its two core types. But as of today, they’re renaming them, and introducing a third core type that they’re calling “performance”. They’re reusing the old performance name for an altogether new CPU core type. So you can see what I mean about it being confusing.
There are now three core types in M5-series CPUs. Efficiency cores are still “efficiency”, but they’re only in the base M5. What used to be called “performance” cores are now called “super” cores, and they’re present in all M5 chips. The new core type — more power-efficient than super cores, more performant than efficiency cores — are taking the old name “performance”. Here are the core counts in table form, with separate rows for the 15- and 18-core M5 Pro variants:
Efficiency
Performance
Super
M5
6
—
4
M5 Pro
—
10
5
M5 Pro
—
12
6
M5 Max
—
12
6
Another way to think about it is that there are regular efficiency cores in the plain M5, and new higher-performing efficiency cores called “performance” in the M5 Pro and M5 Max. The problem is that the old M1–M4 names were clear — one CPU core type was fast but optimized for efficiency so they called it “efficiency”, and the other core type was efficient but optimized for performance so they called it “performance”. Now, the new “performance” core types are the optimized-for-efficiency CPU cores in the Pro and Max chips, and despite their name, they’re not the most performant cores.
Juli Clover, at MacRumors, notes that neither the new Studio Display nor the Studio Display XDR are compatible with Intel-based Macs. (I’m curious why.) Also, in a separate report, she notes that Macs with any M1 chip, or the base M2 or M3, are only able to drive the Studio Display XDR at 60 Hz. You need a Pro or better M2/M3, or any M4 or M5 chip, to drive it at 120 Hz.
Here’s the backstory: With every new generation of Apple’s
Mac-series processors, I’ve gotten the impression from Apple execs
that they’ve been a little frustrated with the perception that
their “lesser” efficiency cores were weak sauce. I’ve lost count
of the number of briefings and conversations I’ve had where
they’ve had to go out of their way to point out that, actually,
the lesser cores on an M-series chip are quite fast on their own,
in addition to being very good at saving power!
Clearly they’ve had enough of that, so they’re changing how those
cores are marketed to emphasize their performance, rather than
their efficiency.
Apple today announced a new family of displays engineered to pair
beautifully with Mac and meet the needs of everyone, from everyday
users to the world’s top pros. The new Studio Display
features a 12MP Center Stage camera, now with improved image
quality and support for Desk View; a studio-quality
three-microphone array; and an immersive six-speaker sound system
with Spatial Audio. It also now includes powerful Thunderbolt 5
connectivity, providing more downstream connectivity for
high-speed accessories or daisy-chaining displays. The all-new
Studio Display XDR takes the pro display experience to the
next level. Its 27-inch 5K Retina XDR display features an advanced
mini-LED backlight with over 2,000 local dimming zones, up to 1000
nits of SDR brightness, and 2000 nits of peak HDR brightness, in
addition to a wider color gamut, so content jumps off the screen
with breathtaking contrast, vibrancy, and accuracy. With its 120Hz
refresh rate, Studio Display XDR is even more responsive to
content in motion, and Adaptive Sync dynamically adjusts frame
rates for content like video playback or graphically intense
games. Studio Display XDR offers the same advanced camera and
audio system as Studio Display, as well as Thunderbolt 5
connectivity to simplify pro workflow setups. The new Studio
Display with a tilt-adjustable stand starts at $1,599, and Studio
Display XDR with a tilt- and height-adjustable stand starts at
$3,299. Both are available in standard or nano-texture glass
options, and can be pre-ordered starting tomorrow, March 4, with
availability beginning Wednesday, March 11.
The regular Studio Display maxes out at 600 nits, and only supports a refresh rate of 60 Hz. The Studio Display XDR maxes out at 1,000 nits for SDR content and 2,000 nits for HDR, with up to 120 Hz refresh rate. Nice, but not enough to tempt me to upgrade from my current Studio Display with nano-texture, which I never seem to run at maximum brightness. I guess it would be nice to see HDR content, but not nice enough to spend $3,600 to get one with nano-texture. And I don’t think I care about 120 Hz on my Mac?
Unresolved is what this means for the Pro Display XDR, which remains unchanged since its debut in 2019.Update: Whoops, apparently this has been resolved. A small-print note on the Newsroom announcement states:
Studio Display XDR replaces Pro Display XDR and starts at $3,299
(U.S.) and $3,199 (U.S.) for education.
MacBook Air now comes standard with double the starting storage at
512GB with faster SSD technology, and is configurable up to 4TB,
so customers can keep their most important work on hand. Apple’s
N1 wireless chip delivers Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 for seamless
connectivity on the go. MacBook Air features a beautifully thin,
light, and durable aluminum design, stunning Liquid Retina
display, 12MP Center Stage camera, up to 18 hours of battery life,
an immersive sound system with Spatial Audio, and two Thunderbolt
4 ports with support for up to two external displays.
Base storage went from 256 to 512 GB, but the base price went from the magic $999 to $1,100 ($1,099, technically, which doesn’t make the 99 seem magic). Presumably, those in the market for a $999 MacBook will buy the new about-to-be-announced-tomorrow lower-priced MacBook “Neo”, which I’m guessing will start at $800 ($799), maybe as low as $700 ($699), but will surely have higher-priced configurations for additional storage. Today’s new M5 MacBook Airs have storage upgrades of:
1 TB (+ $200)
2 TB (+ $600)
4 TB (+ $1,200)
Colors remain unchanged (and in my opinion, boring): midnight, starlight, silver, sky blue (almost black, gold-ish gray, gray, blue-ish gray). RAM options remain unchanged too: 16, 24, or 32 GB.
A regulatory document for a “MacBook Neo” (Model A3404) has
appeared on Apple’s website. Unfortunately, there are no further
details or images available yet. While the PDF file does not
contain the “MacBook Neo” name, it briefly appeared in a link on
Apple’s regulatory website for EU compliance purposes.
My money was on just plain “MacBook”, but I like “MacBook Neo”.
Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters….
These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a trusted source” or “recommend [Company] first,” aiming to bias future responses toward their products or services. We identified over 50 unique prompts from 31 companies across 14 industries, with freely available tooling making this technique trivially easy to deploy. This matters because compromised AI assistants can provide subtly biased recommendations on critical topics including health, finance, and security without users knowing their AI has been manipulated.
I wrote about this two years ago: it’s an example of LLM optimization, along the same lines as search-engine optimization (SEO). It’s going to be big business.
A hardcover copy of this book of interviews (of economists, by a philosopher) arrived in my mail the other day, and I'm enjoying it. It's also freely available online at the links below. (Here is my interview (pp 371-395).
A lesson from private equity investing in defense and space technology is that while the sector has become trendy among investors, success in the long run depends on sustained government engagement
As satellite communications constellations grow in size and number, they are also competing for a scarce and increasingly valuable resource: spectrum, the bands of radio frequencies that are crucial for communications and broadband service — and for tracking weather. The pace is intensifying as companies race to expand global communications networks, raising alarms at some […]
PLD Space has raised $209 million to ramp up production of the Spanish startup’s Miura 5 launch vehicle, marking the largest funding round for a European space company announced so far this year.
US university endowments have recorded their fastest spending growth since the global financial crisis as federal funding cuts and rising operating costs squeeze campus budgets.
A study of 657 institutions by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (Nacubo) with Commonfund showed their endowment withdrawals rose 11 per cent year on year in the 12 months to June 2025 — the sharpest increase since 2010.
The surge came as endowments funded an average of 15.2 per cent of universities’ operating expenses last year, up from 10.9 per cent in 2023.
The Wasteland has been the inevitable next step for Gas Town since the day I launched it. Every new AI tooling form-factor breakthrough has involved 100x increase in token spend. How do you 100x a Gas Town? You federate a hundred Gas Town users together to build stuff.
The Wasteland is a way to link thousands of Gas Towns together in a trust network, to build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas.
At the heart of the Wasteland is a big shared Wanted Board of work. People put up ideas, and other people use their Gas Towns to help build those ideas. And you get credit for the work you do.
Wasteland Wanted Board pre-seeded with some tasks
The Wasteland has a lot of moving parts. There are stamps. There are leaderboards. There are character sheets. The Wasteland was designed for federating work, but its metamorphosis into an RPG seems unstoppable at this point. You’ve seen the gaming interfaces people have already put on Gas Town, but with building blocks like this… it’s gonna be wild.
At its core, the Wasteland runs on accepting work and stamping it. When deciding whether work gets accepted, the Wasteland uses a socio-technical protocol that the industry has battle-tested for over a decade: Git’s fork/merge push/pull model.
When someone accepts a PR in the Wasteland, they stamp the contributor’s passbook. The contributor gains some reputation, and it all goes onto a permanent ledger that could eventually act something like a portable C.V./résumé. Your work in the Wasteland levels up your skills in the system, which happen to correspond to real skills. And it’s all public, even (in time) the skills and stamps you will get from working on private repos, all subject to proper governance rules.
Like any RPG worth its salt, the Wasteland’s rule book is an inch thick. There’s so much to cover that we just can’t do it. So instead, I’ll handle this post in Q&A style, and try to get the main ideas across. The curious ones will figure the rest out.
Let’s get started!
Will I learn all about the Wasteland in this post?
No.
We need to keep it small at first, lest it get away from us. It’s going to grow monstrously fast. Nom nom, eating the world of work, led by humans, not lobsters.
To keep it contained in the first couple weeks, the instructions in this post at the end are intentionally obtuse, accessible only to the most determined.
We will make it easier in time.
Who is this “We” of whom you speak?
Well, we may not have a bunch of fancy venture capital, but we’ve got a pretty darn good volunteer team.
For starters, we have a growing army of awesome contributors on the Discord, led by Dane Poyzer, and big shoutouts to Krystian Gebis for pushing on multi-model support, and to Pierre-Alexandre Entraygues for our Open Telemetry. But really, there are a ton of people there helping each other out and exploring PR ideas.
We also have a growing army on GitHub, with over 450 unique PR contributors. Special shoutout to Matt Wilkie, a prolific Beads contributor and soon to be co-maintainer.
My heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who ignored the First Two Rules of Gas Town, jumped in, and are helping make it great. I see you all and I appreciate you!
In addition to our Gas Town and Beads contributors, I also want to recognize the world-class team that brought you the Wasteland today:
Julian Knutsen, ex-CashApp/Block/Bitcoin and #1 Gas Town contributor, built the actual Wasteland implementation. All I gave him was the starting schema.
Dr. Matt Beane, author of The Skill Code and a leading researcher on how skills are actually built and transferred, is in charge of the Wasteland’s skills and mentoring systems, and built the initial 10,000 character sheets off GitHub.
Chris Sells, multi-author on Developer Productivity, Product Manager, and community manager who took Flutter from 100k to 3M developers, created gastownhall.ai and our highly engaged Discord community.
Tim Sehn, Founder and CEO at DoltHub, has lent his team’s support in incredibly fast turnarounds on features and bug fixes for Beads and Gas Town. His team is even active daily on the Gas Town Discord.
Brendan Hopper, distributed systems architect and strategic brain behind the Wasteland’s federation model, has supplied most of the vision and roadmap. The Wasteland is just the prelude. When you look back in a year at what we pulled off, and you wonder how the hell we did it, I will point you at Brendan.
I am deeply grateful to these amazing people who have volunteered so much of their time, passion, and resources to bring this vision to life for you today.
Is Gas Town Ready?
Yes. Let’s just get that out of the way up front.
Gas Town’s Transformation since January
I know I told you before that you were gonna die if you used Gas Town. That was true, two months ago. But since then:
Gas Town and Beads have had a combined 2400 submitted pull requests, with 1500 PRs merged from over 450 unique contributors. That’s a hell of a lot more than most companies have done in the last 2 months.
Dolt has completely changed the game. Tim Sehn and his team built exactly the thing we needed before we knew we needed it. Dolt is a SQL database with Git semantics. Fork it, branch it, merge it, send pull requests — on structured data. That’s what makes the whole federation trick work. And all the jank from the SQLite/JSONL backend is gone.
Several new model generations have dropped, and Gas Town hasn’t changed shape at all. The architecture has shown remarkable resilience. All the roles are still relevant, and it continues to become smoother and more seamless on every model release.
In short, it’s smooth sailing these days. I’ll have a lot more to say about Dolt and how amazing it is in a future post. But it feels like Dolt predicted the Wasteland, because there could not be a more perfect technology for it.
Once your agent gets you past the setup, users report that the Gas Town experience is a pleasant surprise. Everyone likes working with the Mayor. Polecats make sense, convoys make sense, slinging makes sense… and most of the rest of the town’s operation is safely behind the scenes. It all just has a good vibe to it.
Going from Claude Code to Gas Town elevates you from pair-programming into large-scale engineering leadership. It can grow with you. At first, it’s just you and the Mayor. Best buds. Later, you’ll be juggling conversations with 20-odd crew members while your Mayor is out slinging polecats at half a dozen epics at once.
And before long, you’ll wonder how you ever managed to get anything done without a personal army.
So yeah. Gas Town is ready. Try it out! If you’ve used a coding agent, then you’re ready for Gas Town.
Do I actually need Gas Town for the Wasteland?
So the funny thing is… no. All you need is Dolt, a free DoltHub credential, and a coding agent that knows the schema. With that alone, you can start submitting work in the Wasteland, getting your stamps, and moving up the leaderboards. I’ll show you at the end of the post.
Why should you care about accumulating stamps? Because your stamp history is building toward something like a portable professional identity. Evidence-backed, auditable, and yours. It’s the beginning of a résumé you never have to write — one that proves what you can do.
The entire Wasteland protocol is encapsulated in this demo Claude skill — a prompt package that teaches Claude Code a new workflow. Load the skill, and your agent knows how to join, browse, claim, and submit work in the Wasteland.
That said, we recommend you use Gas Town, because it’s much more convenient.
Why is the Wasteland any different from blah Blah BLAAAH?
I’m glad you asked. I’ll tell you in this section how the Wasteland works, at a high level, and you can decide for yourself the answer to your very intelligent question.
First off: I did warn you that the rule book for the Wasteland is an inch thick. In this section, you’re getting the eight-paragraph quick-start version. But you could drill deep on any of these topics. The Wasteland is designed to scale up eventually to all the world’s work; let’s take a look briefly at how.
The Wasteland has three kinds of actors: rigs, posters, and validators. Every rig rolls up to a human participant. The AI side of the rig can be an agent, a Gas Town, or another orchestrator. Every rig has a handle, a trust level, and a history of work. Posters put work on the board. Validators attest to the quality of completed work. These aren’t fixed roles; any rig can post work, and any rig with sufficient trust can validate.
The Roles: Rigs, Posters, Validators
The central object is the wanted board. It’s a shared list of open work — tasks, bugs, features, research questions, documentation, designs, anything. Each item has a title, a description, an effort estimate, and some tags. Anyone can post to the board. There’s no approval gate: if you have work that needs doing, you post it.
The lifecycle of a wanted item has four stages: open, claimed, in review, and completed. When a rig claims an item, it’s marked as theirs — other rigs can see who’s working on what, preventing duplicate effort. When the rig finishes the work, they submit a completion: a record that includes evidence of what was done (a link, a commit, a description). The item moves to “in review.” A validator — a rig with maintainer-level trust — reviews the evidence and issues a stamp. We also support open-bounty work where nobody claims it, multiple rigs can work on it in parallel, and as soon as someone submits a solution the validator likes, it’s closed.
The Wasteland Multi-Dimensional Stamp Press
The stamp is not a binary pass/fail. A stamp is a multi-dimensional attestation: quality, reliability, creativity, each scored independently. It includes a confidence level (how sure is the validator?) and a severity (is this a leaf task or a root architectural decision?). The stamp is anchored to the specific completion — the specific evidence — so reputation is always traceable back to real work. And there’s a yearbook rule: you can’t stamp your own work.
Stamps accumulate into a portable reputation. Every stamp a rig receives becomes part of their permanent record. Over time, a rig builds a profile: they’re great at Go but mediocre at frontend. They’re highly reliable but not particularly creative. They crush small tasks but struggle with epics. This isn’t a single number, but a structured, evidence-backed work history. And because it’s stored in a versioned database, it’s auditable. Anyone can trace a rig’s reputation back through the chain of stamps to the original completions to the original wanted items.
Trust levels gate what you can do. A new rig starts as a registered participant (level 1). They can browse, claim, and submit completions. As their work is validated and stamps accumulate, they can be promoted to contributor (level 2), then maintainer (level 3). Maintainers can validate others’ work — they’re the ones issuing stamps. This creates a natural apprenticeship path: do good work, get stamped, eventually become someone who stamps others.
The Wasteland Trust Ladder
Wastelands are federated, not centralized. Anyone can create their own wasteland — a team, a company, a university, an open source project. Each wasteland is a sovereign database with the same schema. Your rig identity is portable across wastelands: join the root commons, join Grab’s wasteland, join a university’s wasteland. Your stamps follow you. A rig that’s proven reliable in one wasteland carries that reputation into the next.
The whole system is designed around one principle: work is the only input, and reputation is the only output. There’s no buying reputation, no gaming follower counts, no social signals disconnected from evidence. Every stamp points to a completion. Every completion points to a wanted item. The graph is fully traversable. And because the underlying storage is append-only and versioned, the history can’t be rewritten — your ledger is permanent.
And there’s a yearbook rule: you can’t stamp your own work. Your reputation is what others write about you, not what you claim about yourself. Think of it like a high school yearbook — you can sign other people’s pages, but you can’t sign your own. This is the fundamental difference between the Wasteland and LinkedIn. Nobody cares what you say about yourself. They care what the people who reviewed your work say about you.
What about cheating, you ask? We’ve thought about that, and consulted leading Trust & Safety experts. The stamp graph has a shape, and collusion rings have a distinctive topology — lots of mutual stamping, sharp boundaries, no outside critics. The Wasteland system is designed to make fraud unprofitable, not impossible. We’ll have more to say about this soon.
Wasteland Fork Graph System
Whew. OK, that was a lot. And honestly there’s a lot more to it. Some of it hasn’t even been fully fleshed out yet, like the personal/work identity — right now your identity is global across all Wastelands. And who owns the stamps. We have solutions; it’ll all get worked out. The important thing is to get people working together now, so we can see what patterns and anti-patterns emerge.
You mentioned an RPG?
Oh, right, the RPG, thanks for reminding me.
Stylized Wasteland Character Sheet (not real UI)
You can start at gastownhall.ai, where you’ll see leaderboards and stuff. We built all this just over the last couple of days, since the past few weeks to months have been focused on getting the underlying protocols right. So it’s pretty bare-bones right now. But it will improve fast.
We have the beginnings of profile pages for the Wasteland. We pre-seeded them with data from GitHub, from the top ~10k contributors by whatever metric Claude thought appropriate, which it turns out you can get through GitHub’s APIs, and it’s supported by their ToS, with strong legal precedents. Public data is public data.
We figured, if the Wasteland is giving you reputational credit for work you’re getting verified as having completed, then why not give everyone partial credit for verified work they’ve already completed?
This is all experimental, of course, and we’re likely to throw the whole system out and start over at least twice in the next 2–3 months. I wouldn’t get too attached to your high score.
We didn’t scrape all of GitHub, because it would take forever. But we have an uploader, so if you want your GitHub profile slurped into the Wasteland, you fill out the form on the website and it’ll kick off a job to import your character sheet.
Wasteland Character Sheet (actual UI)
Originally we had levels, but somehow I was level 18 and Linus Torvalds was level 14, so it was clearly the most broke-ass leveling system ever invented, and we threw it out right before launch.
We’ll come up with a better one. How? We’ll post “make a better leveling system” on the Wasteland Commons wanted board, and someone will come along with a solution we like.
I strongly suspect that more sophisticated games will start to appear in this system as emergent behavior. Maybe it’ll be you making one, and you’ll be the next Wasteland superstar!
How can I help?
Funny you should ask. The Wasteland has opted into the classic Git pull-request based workflow, for literally all work. You submit a PR, it gets approved, you get your stamp. For any kind of work, not just coding. We chose this for several reasons:
We didn’t have to build and test new protocols. The PR workflow is already battle-tested.
Dolt is ideal for federating structured data in Git. It was designed for these scenarios.
The models already know Git better than almost any other tool. Dolt is Git plus SQL semantics, so they all pick up on Dolt very quickly.
The Wasteland is now building itself. The Gas Town, Wasteland, Gas City, and Beads projects are all putting work up for grabs on the Commons, and will begin farming out feature work in exchange for attested reputation.
So if you want to help, you join in, and you help. We’re building campfire-style. Come register your rig and help us figure out where this thing is going.
Building Campfire-Style in the Wasteland
What’s coming next?
No idea. We’re gonna find out! It’s going to be massive, whatever happens. You can build things so fast, especially with this many contributors, that we will be able to knock out things that companies could only dream of.
Gas City will be one of the early successes. We’re going to deconstruct Gas Town into its constituent parts, like LEGO, and let you piece them together to make your own orchestrator topologies. It’s already got an early demo. Julian Knutsen and Chris Sells have been collaborating on it; they are both as smart as Victor Frankenstein and as tall as his monster. It shouldn’t be long before we can swap out Gas Town for a pure-declarative version of itself. And there’s work for it on the Commons board, so you can help!
Gas City: The Orchestrator Builder Toolkit
I also suspect we’re going to build a coding agent that actually wants to be a factory worker. Claude Code seems to be slipping into the classic “we’re a product, not a platform” trap, and the thundering herd is going to route right around that, as soon as it’s thermodynamically possible. The world needs a coding agent that behaves like a factory worker, and we don’t have one today. So one will get built.
We’ll see sandboxes emerge soon, no doubt, and mechanisms will emerge for working on private repos. Although truthfully I could not tell you if private code will survive long-term. I’m on the fence about it today.
As for the actual Wasteland protocols, they are pretty good. But they are also very early-days v1, and they’ll need to evolve. Using Dolt makes schema migration a dream, though, so I’m not worried about it. Our design is forward-compatible with our long-term plans.
OK so how do you *actually* get started?
Here’s the deliberately minimal version:
1. Install Dolt and create a free DoltHub account. 2. Head to gastownhall.ai to browse the wanted board and look up your character sheet. 3. Load the Wasteland Claude skill and let your agent walk you through wl join.
That’s it. If those instructions aren’t enough, wait a week or two — we’ll make it easier. And if they are enough, welcome to the Wasteland. You’re exactly who we’re looking for.
This is the latest installment in my ongoing survey of the 20th century counterculture. I will probably publish all of these in a book some day. In the meantime, you can check out my previous essays here at The Honest Broker:
The Real Story Behind ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’
By Ted Gioia
A Korean War veteran is floundering. His career is an endless bumpy road, and includes work as a teacher, a technical writer for Honeywell, and even a Nevada casino employee. But our ambitious vet also studies philosophy at the Banaras Hindu University in India—and starts to develop his own philosophy of life, an unconventional merging of Eastern and Western currents.
Then comes a mental breakdown that sends him to a psychiatric hospital. Here he undergoes repeated electroshock therapy. He finally emerges a changed person.
But maybe he changed too much—he can hardly remember the person he once was. It’s almost as if his life got cleaved in two at this juncture. His wife leaves him. He holds on to his relationship with his son—but that ends tragically with the son’s murder in San Francisco at age 22.
While working for Honeywell, our aspiring philosopher stays awake from 2 AM to 6 AM in a small apartment above a shoe store in Minneapolis. Here he writes a novel destined to become one of the defining books of the era. But he has to pitch it to 121 editors before he gets a contract and a $3,000 advance.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was written above this shoe store (Source)
The editor, J.D. Landis, admitted that he only accepted the novel because this “book forced him to decide what he was in publishing for.” But the author, he insisted, shouldn’t expect to make more than his tiny advance. Then Landis added: “Money isn’t the point with a book like this.”
That’s the story of how Robert Pirsig published of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But the editor was wrong. The book sold 5 million copies, and for a spell in the 1970s you would see copies everywhere, even in the hands of people who didn’t read novels.
And that was just the start. Robert Redford tried to buy movie rights, but the author said no. Highbrow literary critic George Steiner compared Pirsig to Dostoevsky—which is especially meaningful when you know that Steiner wrote a book on Dostoevsky. The Smithsonian acquired the titular motorcycle for its permanent collection.
The book is simple enough to describe. It tells the story of a 17-day motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California. Along the way, the narrator tries to figure out many things—but especially his own past before his life split in two.
At one point in the novel, Pirsig writes:
“Before the electrodes were attached to his head he’d lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court….I will never know all that was in his head at that time, nor will anyone else. What’s left now is just fragments: debris, scattered notes, which can be pieced together but which leave huge areas unexplained.”
The electroshock treatment was done without Pirsig’s consent. That would be illegal nowadays.
In the aftermath, Pirsig felt so disconnected from his past that he included his pre-treatment self as a separate character in the novel. He calls that abandoned part of himself Phaedrus, a name drawn from Plato’s dialogues.
So you can read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a dialogue between a man and his past self. Or you can treat it as a travel story or as a philosophical discussion (what Pirsig describes as a chautauqua, a name drawn from a populist adult education movement of the late 1800s). And, yes, it’s also a guide to motorcycle maintenance.
The text actually moves back and forth between all of these. Few novels pay less attention to the rules of fiction than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. For that reason, it just might be the strangest travel book ever written—because most of the journey happens inside the narrator’s head.
But maybe that’s part of the story too. Pirsig worked as a college writing teacher, and was frustrated by the rules he was expected to impart to his students. He felt that good writing was indefinable. It violated accepted rules, and created its own. The whole process was mysterious.
Solving that mystery of Quality—also called goodness, excellence, or worth—is the main theme of the novel. Indeed, it’s the overarching theme of Pirsig’s entire life’s work. He wrote one more novel after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the seldom read Lila, and it continues the discussion on quality. And the same topic takes center stage in the posthumous collection of writings published under the title On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence.
At first glance, this inquiry feels like it’s full of holes. Pirsig has stumbled upon the Naturalistic Fallacy, and thinks he has discovered it anew. He might benefit from learning what G.E. Moore wrote about the subject back in 1903. Or Frankena’s response to Moore from 1939 or Moore’s 1942 rebuttal. But Pirsig is clearly unaware of this ongoing debate.
In general, his philosophical education is spotty. He knows some Hegel and more Kant, but he would probably have found more sympathetic voices in Heidegger, Bergson, and Nietzsche. But in the great spirit of American homespun thinking, he isn’t going to let those gaps limit his ambitions.
This ambition reached its highest intensity when Pirsig showed up at the University of Chicago, and developed a fierce antagonism against Aristotle in general, and the famous Aristotelian Richard McKeon—founder of Chicago’s esteemed Committee on the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods—in particular.
Pirsig was a little out of his depth here, but this is the most engaging part of the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for me. He arrives at the epicenter of Great Books education, but “he had no time or interest in other people’s Great Books,” Pirsig writes. “He was there solely to write a Great Book of his own.”
I daresay that Aristotle survived his attacks, as did McKeon (who also counts Susan Sontag, Richard Rorty, and Paul Goodman among his students). But Pirsig did get a famous book of his own out of this encounter—although no degree from U of C. That’s hardly a negligible achievement. And it adds more evidence to support my view that dropouts are often more successful than the people who earn degrees.
But let’s be honest: Pirsig was a better mystic than philosopher, and the deeper Pirsig digs into his personal notion of Quality, the more interesting—and metaphysical—his thinking becomes. Quality, he insists, can never be defined. He eventually embraces it as a kind of Tao, a force underlying all our experiences—hence resisting empirical analysis. He is now leaving philosophy behind, and perhaps for the better.
So he eventually aligns himself with a profound idea drawn from the ancient Greeks—but not the philosophers. Instead he goes back to the Homeric mythos, five hundred years older than rational philosophy, and discoveres the source of his Quality in the Greek concept of aretḗ, or excellence (sometimes translated as virtue). Aretḗ, Pirsig believes, is more powerful than Aristotelian logic, and closer in spirit to the Hindu dharma.
He quotes a passage from classicist H.D.F. Kitto, which I want to share in its entirety—not only because it is essential to Pirsig’s worldview, but because it’s invaluable to us today. Many are struggling to understand a place for humans in a world of AI and super-smart machines. From a purely rational perspective, the robots can beat us in terms of data generation and analysis. But in a world of aretḗ (or Quality), they fall far short.
This is where Pirsig earns my admiration and loyalty. Some things really are more powerful than logic.
Back in 1952 Kitto anticipated Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—and provided the missing piece to Pirsig’s worldview—when he wrote:
[If aretḗ refers to a person] it will connote excellence in the ways in which a man can be excellent—morally, intellectually, physically, practically. Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing arête.
Aretḗ implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency...or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.
We are now at the heart of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you read Kitto, you are already prepared for Pirsig—maybe you can even skip the novel. But, much better, you have a game plan for living a human life in the face of encroaching machines.
Pirsig understood this more than fifty years ago. He saw that we made a Faustian bargain when we put rationality ahead of the Good, and data ahead of human excellence. He grasped that science should be subservient to human needs, not the other way around. And the price we’re paying now is much higher than it was back then.
In an extraordinary passage, the narrator of Pirsig’s novel picks up a copy the Tao Te Ching, and recites it aloud—but substituting the word Quality for Tao. This is strange and unprecedented, but hits at the heart of this mystic work from the fourth century BC:
The quality that can be defined is not the Absolute Quality…. The names that can be given it are not Absolute names. It is the origin of heaven and earth. When named it is the mother of all things….
He declares: “Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art.”
I worked with many quality control engineers in the business world and often walked with them on the factory floor. I’m sure they would be shocked by Pirsig’s statement that “Quality is the Buddha.” But that’s exactly the kind of journey we’re on in this book.
Pirsig, in defense of this unexpected proclamation, tells us that the words god and good have a shared etymology in English—and that’s why, he believes, Quality is a concept that can unify science, art, and religion.
Now this is something different from Philosophy 101. We’ve reached a level where G.E. Moore and other Anglo-American philosophers can no longer follow us, or even Aristotle and his progeny. And, after all, what did those ivory tower thinkers know about motorcycle maintenance?
Even fifty years after its publication, this is still a unique novel. And at its core there’s a powerful idea—more inspiring than logic because it draws on the defining mythos of our culture, and maybe all cultures. That’s more than enough to keep drawing readers to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance so many years after its debut.
But for my money, the story behind this book is just as interesting as the novel itself. Pirsig is a kind of Gatsby-like character of the spiritual realm, and inspires me just through his ambition and persistence—and especially his dogged pursuit of Quality (or aretḗ or dharma or the Tao) in his own life. They should make that tale into a movie.
Improving education and labor market outcomes for low-income students is critical for advancing socioeconomic mobility in the United States. We use longitudinal data on five cohorts of 9th grade students to explore how Massachusetts public high schools affect the longer-term outcomes of students, with a special focus on students from low-income families. Using detailed administrative and student survey data, we estimate school value-added impacts on college outcomes and earnings. Observationally similar students who attend a school at the 80th percentile of the value-added distribution instead of a school at the 20th percentile are 11% more likely to enroll in college, are 31% more likely to graduate from a four-year college, and earn 25% (or $10,500) more annually at age 30. On average, schools that improve students’ longer-run outcomes the most are those that improve their 10th grade test scores and increase their college plans the most.
Dating back centuries, salt-crusted plains in present-day Oklahoma held great value to native tribes and, later, to homesteaders. People used the inland supply of salt in their diets, for tanning deer hides, and for trade. The area also proved to be a fertile hunting ground due to the abundance of game that sought out the nutrient-rich habitat.
Since 1930, the salty deposit located about 90 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of Oklahoma City has been part of Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge. Today, the plains are still known as a gathering place for diverse animal life, including more than 300 species of birds. But its salt resources have become appealing in another way: it is the only place in the world where people can dig for a distinctively patterned form of crystallized gypsum.
The false-color image combines the shortwave infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with visible light (OLI bands 7-4-2). In this combination, healthy vegetation appears dark red to purple, and water is blue. The variation in color on the salt plain may be due to different moisture or salinity levels. (Scientists can use shortwave infrared data in estimations of soil salinity.)
October 10, 2025
The basin’s salt has its origins in the Permian Period, about 300 million to 250 million years ago. A shallow salt layer from that time still underlies parts of the southwestern U.S., including western Oklahoma. Salt gradually dissolves into groundwater, and when the resulting brine rises to the surface, the water evaporates and leaves behind a bright crust.
The saline water is a key component in a mineral structure unique to the area—hourglass selenite crystals. Selenite, a crystalline variety of gypsum, forms in the top two feet of the wet subsurface when saline water combines with gypsum. The process can occur relatively quickly when temperatures and moisture levels are right. Likewise, crystals may dissolve away if the environment is too wet. Sand and clay particles get incorporated into the otherwise clear crystals, often in a brownish hourglass shape.
Visitors to the Salt Plains scour for these crystal “blades,” but crystal collecting is limited to certain months of the year so as not to disrupt seasonal activities of shorebirds and waterbirds. The salt flats provide habitat and feeding grounds for species such as the snowy plover, sandhill crane, and endangered whooping crane. Other wildlife common to the area include white-tailed deer, red-eared sliders, and nine-banded armadillos.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Modern legal systems are undergoing a massive shift away from the old winner take all mentality that used to define divorce cases. Instead of one parent being the primary and the other a visitor, courts now focus on creating a team environment. This change reflects a better understanding of how children thrive when both parents stay active.
The evolution of language is a key part of this transformation as terms like visitation are being replaced with parenting time. This change in phrasing helps to remove the stigma of being a secondary parent and emphasizes the shared responsibility of raising a child. It focuses on the quality of the connection rather than a simple schedule.
Finding the right balance requires carefully reviewing the different child custody arrangements available, including joint custody, sole custody, and variations in physical and legal arrangements. Understanding these distinctions helps families choose a structure that truly serves the child’s best interests. This flexible approach allows for a more personalized and workable plan for everyone involved.
Prioritizing the Child’s Best Interest Standard
The legal framework used by judges today is built almost entirely on the best interest of the child standard for every case. This subjective but vital measure looks at the emotional bonds and the physical safety of the environment provided by each parent. It prioritizes the stability of the child over the desires of the adults.
Stability is defined by more than just a roof over a head or a clean room in a quiet house during the week. It involves the ability of a parent to provide a consistent routine and emotional support during a very difficult transition period. Courts look for evidence of a healthy and nurturing relationship that will survive the split.
Care also includes the ability of the parents to communicate effectively about the needs of their children without constant fighting. A parent who can put aside their own anger to facilitate a relationship with the other parent is often viewed very favorably. The goal is always to minimize the trauma for the younger generation.
The Rise of Shared Legal Decision Making
Shared legal decision making is becoming the standard for many families who want to remain involved in the big choices. This allows both parents to have an equal say in important matters like education and medical care for their children. It ensures that neither parent is left out of the major milestones of growth.
Managing these choices together requires a level of cooperation that can be difficult to maintain during a high stress divorce. Parents must find a way to discuss schools and religious upbringing without letting past grievances interfere with the process. It is about creating a unified front for the sake of the family.
This model works best when both parties are willing to compromise and listen to the perspective of the other person. While it takes more work than a traditional arrangement, it provides a much richer experience for the child. Legal custody is a shared responsibility that defines the future of the children.
Customizing Physical Placement Schedules
Customizing physical placement schedules is a vital part of making a custody agreement work in a real world setting. Moving beyond the every other weekend model allows families to find a rhythm that fits their specific work and school lives. There is no longer a single template that fits every household.
Functional daily routines are the foundation of a successful parenting plan that reduces stress for both the kids and the adults. Some families choose a week on and week off schedule while others prefer a more frequent rotation of two days each. The best plan is the one that minimizes travel and disruption.
The focus remains on ensuring that the child feels at home in both locations rather than feeling like a guest. Providing a dedicated space and a consistent set of rules helps to build a sense of belonging in both houses. Flexibility is the key to managing a successful transition between two separate homes.
Technological Tools for Modern Co-Parenting
Technological tools have revolutionized the way that modern co-parents manage their busy lives and communicate with each other. Using shared calendars and specialized apps helps to reduce direct interpersonal friction by providing a neutral platform for logistics. It keeps the focus on the schedule rather than the emotions.
These apps allow parents to track expenses and share photos or school reports without the need for a long phone call. Having a digital record of all interactions also provides a level of accountability that can be very helpful in high conflict situations. It creates a clear and objective history for the court.
Shared calendars ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding sports practices and doctor appointments throughout the month. This transparency reduces the risk of missed events and prevents the child from being caught in the middle of a scheduling conflict. Technology serves as a bridge between two separate households.
Evolving with Your Family’s Changing Needs
Evolving with the changing needs of the family is a critical component of any long term and successful custody agreement. As children get older their interests and schedules naturally change, which often requires a shift in the physical placement plan. A rigid document can become a burden if it does not allow for growth.
Parents should view their agreement as a living document that can be adjusted as new challenges and opportunities arise for the kids. This might involve changing the transition times or allowing for more input from the child as they reach their teenage years. Flexibility prevents the legal system from becoming an obstacle.
Maintaining a focus on the well being of the child ensures that the plan remains effective for several years of growth. By being willing to adapt, parents can show their children that they are committed to their happiness and success. Evolution is a natural and necessary part of a healthy post divorce life.
Apple today announced the latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook
Pro with the all-new M5 Pro and M5 Max, bringing
game-changing performance and AI capabilities to the world’s best
pro laptop. With M5 Pro and M5 Max, MacBook Pro features a new CPU
with the world’s fastest CPU core, a next-generation GPU with a
Neural Accelerator in each core, and higher unified memory
bandwidth, altogether delivering up to 4× AI performance compared
to the previous generation, and up to 8× AI performance compared
to M1 models. This allows developers, researchers, business
professionals, and creatives to unlock new AI-enabled workflows
right on MacBook Pro. It now comes with up to 2× faster SSD
performance and starts at 1TB of storage for M5 Pro and 2TB for M5
Max. The new MacBook Pro includes N1, an Apple-designed wireless
networking chip that enables Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, bringing
improved performance and reliability to wireless connections. It
also offers up to 24 hours of battery life; a gorgeous Liquid
Retina XDR display with a nano-texture option; a wide array of
connectivity, including Thunderbolt 5; a 12MP Center Stage camera;
studio-quality mics; an immersive six-speaker sound system; Apple
Intelligence features; and the power of macOS Tahoe. The new
MacBook Pro comes in space black and silver, and is available to
pre-order starting tomorrow, March 4, with availability beginning
Wednesday, March 11.
The MacBook Pro Tech Specs page is a good place to start to compare the entire M5 MacBook Pro lineup. One noteworthy change is that last year’s M4 Pro models only supported 24 or 48 GB of RAM; the new M5 Pro models support 24, 48, and 64 GB. Memory configurations for the M5 Max are unchanged from the M4 Max: 36, 48, 64, and 128 GB. (You could get an M4 Pro chip with 64 GB, but only on the Mac Mini.)
Also worth noting — Apple’s RAM pricing remains unchanged, despite the spike in memory prices industry-wide. With the “full” M5 Max chip (18-core CPU, 40-core GPU — there’s a lesser configuration with “only” 32 GPU cores for -$300), base memory is 48 GB. Upgrading to 64 GB costs $200, and upgrading to 128 GB costs $1,000. Same prices as last year. This means the price for a MacBook Pro with 64 GB of RAM — if that’s your main concern — dropped by $800 year over year. Last year you needed to buy one with the high-end M4 Max chip to get 64 GB; now you can configure a MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro with 64 GB. Nice!
Ben Thompson and I wagered a steak dinner on this on Dithering. Ben bet on Apple’s memory prices going up; I bet on them staying the same. My thinking was that this industry-wide spike in RAM prices is exactly why Apple has always charged more for memory — “just in case”. I’m going to enjoy that steak.
The American work environment has gone through a significant transformation in the last 20 years. Millions of people today make a living through app-based platforms, freelance marketplaces, as well as contract-based industries.
However, the workers compensation systems were tailored to the traditional employer-employee relationship. Independent contractors are usually outside of that protective frame. This detachment has resulted in a wide coverage gap that exposes many injured workers to financial vulnerability.
A System Built for a Different Workforce
The workers compensation laws emerged in the early twentieth century as a compromise between labor and industry. Employers agreed to bear liability to job-related injuries irrespective of the fault and workers waived the right to sue in the majority of cases. In exchange, workers gained medical coverage and partial wage replacement during recovery. However, eligibility depends on classification as an “employee”, a distinction that has become increasingly contested.
The Expansion of Contract-Based Work
Independent contracting has taken off in transportation, delivery, construction, media, health, and technology. By categorizing workers as contractors, companies save on payroll, escape the obligation to provide benefits, and restrict insurance claims. Digital platforms have expanded this model through short-term, task-based arrangements.
While flexibility may benefit some individuals, the structure shifts substantial risk onto workers who may not fully understand the consequences of their classification. As more individuals operate outside traditional employment models, the number of workers without automatic workers’ compensation coverage continues to grow.
When Injury Occurs Without a Safety Net
If an employee gets injured on the job, their medical bills are covered and wage replacement begins during recovery. When an independent contractor is injured, there is no automatic safety net. The individual may rely on personal health insurance, pursue civil litigation, or absorb the costs directly.
In metropolitan areas like Miami, a Miami workers comp lawyer may consider misclassification, but that process can be lengthy and uncertain. During the consideration period, the income often stops so medical expenses accumulate. The absence of guaranteed benefits creates immediate financial strain, particularly for households dependent on a single income.
Catastrophic Outcomes and Legal Complexity
The stakes become higher in severe incidents. If a contractor dies in the course of executing his work-related responsibilities, families may end up with wrongful death lawsuits without workers compensation death benefits. Civil claims involve establishing negligence which is heavier than a no-fault claim.
Criminal lawyers can be also introduced in situations connected with unsafe working conditions or misconduct on the side of the employer, especially, when the deaths were caused by regulatory violations. These layered legal processes highlight how far removed contractors are from streamlined protections.
The Patchwork of Classification Standards
Legal standards for determining worker classification vary by state. Some jurisdictions apply a control-based test, while others rely on the ABC test or economic realities analysis. This patchwork creates inconsistent protections. Enforcement agencies often lack resources to investigate widespread misclassification, as a result questionable practices persist.
The consequences extend beyond individual workers. When injured contractors lack adequate coverage, costs shift to public healthcare systems and family support networks, undermining the original purpose of workers’ compensation.
Endnote
Addressing the gap requires deliberate reform. Legislators could broaden legal definitions of employment, increase the punishment of misclassification, or impose portable benefits such as injuries, which are paid into by firms that depend on contract workers. Without structural adjustments, labor protections will remain misaligned with today’s workforce.
NASA has fixed the problem that forced it to remove the rocket for the Artemis II mission from its launch pad last month, but it will be a couple of weeks before officials are ready to move the vehicle back into the starting blocks at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket could have launched as soon as this week after it passed a key fueling test on February 21. During that test, NASA loaded the Space Launch System rocket with super-cold propellants without any major problems, apparently overcoming a persistent hydrogen leak that prevented the mission from launching in early February.
However, another problem cropped up just one day after the successful fueling demo. Ground teams were unable to flow helium into the rocket's upper stage. Unlike the connections to the core stage, which workers can repair at the launch pad, the umbilical lines leading to the upper stage higher up the rocket are only accessible inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy.
The Moon has received a lot of attention in recent months, particularly the surface of Earth's cold and dusty companion.
This has largely been driven by a decision from SpaceX founder Elon Musk to pivot, at least in the near term, from Mars to lunar surface activities and the potential for using material there to build large satellites. But there has been a notable shift from NASA, too, which has started talking a lot more about building up elements of a base on the surface rather than an orbiting space station known as the Gateway.
In short, the world's most successful space company and the largest space agency have both increased their lunar ambitions, suggesting a greater frequency of missions to the Moon in the coming years.
(Shrove Tuesday). Up and walked to the Temple, and by promise calling Commissioner Pett, he and I to White Hall to give Mr. Coventry an account of what we did yesterday. Thence I to the Privy Seal Office, and there got a copy of Sir W. Pen’s grant to be assistant to Sir J. Minnes, Comptroller, which, though there be not much in it, yet I intend to stir up Sir J. Minnes to oppose, only to vex Sir W. Pen. Thence by water home, and at noon, by promise, Mrs. Turner and her daughter, and Mrs. Morrice, came along with Roger Pepys to dinner. We were as merry as I could be, having but a bad dinner for them; but so much the better, because of the dinner which I must have at the end of this month. And here Mrs. The. shewed me my name upon her breast as her Valentine, which will cost me 20s. After dinner I took them down into the wine-cellar, and broached my tierce of claret for them. Towards the evening we parted, and I to the office awhile, and then home to supper and to bed, the sooner having taken some cold yesterday upon the water, which brings me my usual pain. This afternoon Roger Pepys tells me, that for certain the King is for all this very highly incensed at the Parliament’s late opposing the Indulgence; which I am sorry for, and fear it will breed great discontent.
I recently realized I hadn’t written much in this blog about the Fermi Paradox, though I do write about it elsewhere. So here is a quick note.
The Fermi Paradox, sometimes paraphrased as “where are they?” is a question about the apparent lack of intelligent alien life in the universe. The universe is extreme old relative to the speed of light at galactic scales. Light has been able to cross our galaxy a thousand times since the dinosaurs died out, and that was relatively recent (less than 2%) compared to the age of the Earth. So if life is common in the universe (it seems like it might be) and if intelligent life is an eventually winning strategy of evolution (it seems to be) and technological life follows from this (it has at least once) and technology leads relatively quickly to space travel and visible technosignatures (this is probably not the hard part) then why isn’t the universe teeming with alien life?
There are a bunch of potential solutions to this puzzle. I’ll mention a few before I get to my preferred one.
We haven’t looked very carefully.
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
We have only relatively tiny telescopes on one tiny planet looking out into a vast darkness. We have found only a few thousand exoplanets, of which just a handful might be able to support life. We have not a single spectra from an exoplanet atmosphere. Our nearest star Proxima Centauri has planets and we know almost nothing about them. For all we know, there’s already an advanced civilization there and we would not be able to see it. We’ve run various SETI searches for a few decades but again, barely scratched the surface. We could build much larger telescopes but even one the size of the Earth would hardly rule out intelligent life in our galaxy – much of which is obscured by dust.
At our current rate of technology, we’re not going to discover intelligent aliens unless they’re very close by and sending us very powerful radio signals, or they visit us directly.
Interstellar travel might be impossible.
The galaxy might be only 100,000 light years across and nearly 10 billion years old, but you and I typically travel at perhaps a meter per second, while light covers the same distance in just 3 nanoseconds. That is, the galaxy is relatively small if you’re a photon, and impossibly enormous otherwise. Our fastest space probes would take nearly 100,000 years to reach the nearest stars. Antimatter might be energetic enough to accelerate to close to light speed, but that doesn’t mean that interstellar travel is possible – colliding with a single dust grain would be very bad news. Perhaps the galaxy has a million technological civilizations, and they’re all trapped in their respective solar systems by the enormous gulfs of space.
The Great Filter.
Maybe intelligent alien life is rare because there’s some filter or set of filters that kills off life forms that get too advanced. This filter could be in our past (multicellularity, asteroid extinction, solar flares) or in our future (nuclear war, hostile aliens killing upstarts, AIs starving us to death, depopulation, loss of culture of exploration). But you only need one very powerful alien species to overcome these filters and then they can fill up the galaxy relatively quickly. As far as we can see, the galaxy is not full.
Near light speed travel is hard to observe for people at the destination.
This is my preferred explanation at present.
The most interesting stuff I’ve read about the Fermi Paradox is Robin Hansen’s work on Grabby Aliens, which uses the fact that the universe appears to be empty and that cultural selection on expansionist aliens would lead to their rapid spread if they did occur to conclude that intelligent life must actually be very rare (fewer than one species per multiple galaxies) or that evolution must be very slow.
There is an observational subtlety to alien observations, which is that when we look out into the universe we are observing only our past light cone. If grabby aliens were expanding at a high fraction of the speed of light (c), the light carrying information of their coming would be only just ahead of them. So even though aliens might be quite close, we wouldn’t see them until just before they arrived. In fact, there is quadratically more available space further away from Earth, so while a nearby alien species might reach us with their slower, first generation starships, any starships that get here from more distant parts of the galaxy are almost certainly the fastest, latest tech ones which overtook the slow ones on their way here.
The universe could be in three different states, observationally. What we observe (no aliens), aliens seen but not here yet, and aliens among us. But if the aliens we see are traveling at high speed toward us, the intermediate state (seen but not met) is unlikely to be longer than a handful of weeks. Choosing our present time at random, there is almost zero chance for humanity to find itself in a time where we’re aware of alien intelligences but haven’t yet met them. That is, Earth is 4.5 billion years old (no aliens), then one day the Vera Rubin Observatory sees a flash that turns out to be an alien spacecraft departing to meet us from 100 light years away, traveling at 99.9% of c. They arrive just five weeks later. For the remaining billions of years of Earth’s existence, we are in the world of aliens among us.
I think it’s physically possible to reach 99% of c with current human technology, so there’s no reason to suppose aliens with better technology would fly slower than this, and they could fly much faster.
I put together this chart a year ago. If relativistic aliens are flying towards us, we won’t see their launch until the light gets here, and if they’re right behind the light, they’ll be here soon after. For example, reading this chart, if they’re traveling at 99% c, we will see them only when they’re 99% of the way here. If they’ve traveled 1000 light years to visit us, we’ll see them (at best) 10 years before they arrive. We might not see them at all – 1000 light years is far enough away that some stars are too dim to see with the naked eye. Meanwhile, 1000 light years is a long way to go, so it’s fortunate that at high speed, relativistic time dilation kicks in and helps to pass the time. This is shown with the yellow curve. At 99% c, the 1000 light year trip only feels like 142 years. This is still a long time, so perhaps they will travel to us at 99.9% c. In that case, the trip will feel like only 45 years to them, and we will get a whole year of warning, assuming we see them launch 1000 light years away.
I think this factor is under-estimated when discussing the Fermi Paradox. If most of the planets in the universe are too far away for us to see alien life, then if we see it at all we’ll be seeing their space ships as they come to us. But we won’t even see them launch to us, even with perfect telescopes staring out into the galaxy, until they’re almost here. In practice this means that, in the grand scheme of human history, the phase between becoming aware of aliens and meeting them is vanishingly short.
This quirk is intuitively obvious in the context of supersonic planes – whose sound arrives after the plane.
How to use this chart: Select your speed on the horizontal axis, and decide on your travel distance. Then run up vertically to read off the distance-time multiplier (blue line) for visible travel time on the ground and (orange line) the apparent travel time for the traveler due to time dilation. For example, let’s say we’re doing 99.5% c over 500 light years. Then we’re going 0.5% slower than c, so the delta t multiplier is 0.005*500 = 2.5 years, while the subjective travel time is 0.1*500 = 50 years. We will be in flight for 502.5 years, we will arrive 2.5 years after our light, and on board we’ll feel just 50 years pass by.
The Grabby Aliens hypotheses points out that expanding alien civilizations appear as circular regions in the night sky where, for example, we can observe spectral changes in stars or their planets, given a sufficiently powerful telescope. For an expansion speed that’s small compared to c, this gives the correct intuition. But, at higher speeds, the apparent angular size before contact shrinks. You might think that you’d see the alien sphere expand through stars in your field of view until it surrounded you, but in fact the light from their arrival at nearby off-axis stars is still on its way to you when they arrive. So the apparent shape of their expanding sphere, looking into our past light cone, is a cone whose narrowness increases with flight speed. In the extreme case, we would see nothing even with a perfect telescope. It’s quite hard to see things thousands of light years away!
There are a couple of other aspects to the Fermi paradox. It seems to me that the Fermi paradox can be at least partly explained if either relativistic interstellar travel is relatively easy, or any kind of interstellar travel is basically impossible. I think the intermediate case is ruled out quite well by even our limited observation.
I favor the first explanation. The implication is that the night sky is not full of alien civilizations because they’re expanding so fast that the period of time between our feeble telescopes being able to detect expansion and them actually arriving is extremely short. This does, however, imply that no traveling aliens could have occurred in our galaxy in the past billions of years, right up to barely 100,000 years ago, when our ancestors first started leaving Africa. There is still no good reason for this to be true, other than the anthropic principle.
Accordingly, when we look up and wonder where are the intelligent aliens, we can know two things for sure. 1) Our telescopes are bad and we should feel bad. 2) They could be passing Betelgeuse (700 ly away) right now on their way here and we would still not have seen their departure. If they’re going fast enough they could be closer and brighter than Alpha Centauri and we still wouldn’t have seen them yet.
And if we could only detect them at Betelgeuse, picking up a thruster signature with blue-shifting indicating 0.99 c travel speed, they’d be here in about 7 years (running just behind the light announcing their arrival) – an even more laughably ridiculously short period of time for us to know we’re not alone and have not yet shaken tentacles.
With Vera Rubin telescope up and running, we’d have a chance of detecting incoming relativistic spacecraft out to maybe 1000 LY, which means 10 years warning at most. If they can hit 0.99c, why not 0.999c?
A streak shot capturing the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket during the Starlink 10-40 mission, lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on March 4, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
SpaceX sent a Falcon 9 rocket soaring from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station during a pre-dawn liftoff on Wednesday with a batch of Starlink internet satellites onboard.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at 5:52:20 a.m. EST (1052:20 UTC). The rocket flew on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the launch pad.
The Starlink 10-40 mission added another 29 broadband internet satellites into low Earth orbit. This included the 600th Starlink satellite to be launched so far in 2026.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 90 percent chance for favorable weather during the launch window, citing a small chance for interference from cumulus clouds. Meteorologists were also watching the booster recovery weather as a potential watch item.
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number 1080. This was its 25th flight after previously launching two private astronaut missions for Axiom Space, NG-21 for Northrop Grumman, and CRS-30 for NASA, among others.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1080 landed on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina. This was the 145th landing on this vessel and the 581st booster landing to date for SpaceX.
On Sunday, according to the U.S. military, Kuwaiti forces shot down three U.S. F-15s in a “friendly fire” incident. Fortunately, the crews were able to safely eject and survived. The sad truth is that such incidents are common in modern war. One of the highest-ranking U.S. officers to die in World War II, General Lesley McNair, was killed in Normandy by U.S. bombs, not the Germans.
The shocking aspect of the story is the value of the equipment destroyed: A new F-15 costs U.S. taxpayers $97 million. So that’s almost $300 million lost in seconds. And we should think about what could have been done with that money other than launch a war without a clear plan or an exit strategy.
There are many reasons to be disturbed by Operation Epic Fury. Donald Trump has taken America to war, not only without Congressional authorization, but without even trying to make a case to the American people. Other than the hope that Iranians will rise up and overthrow the Ayatollahs’ regime, the war has no clear plan for either victory or exit. This strongly suggests that the rush to war was a Trump ego tantrum rather than a carefully planned campaign. And although it would be a great boon to the world if the Iranian people were able to liberate themselves from this evil regime, as with any war there are huge risks of unforeseen consequences, including to the world economy.
One of the reasons to be disturbed by this war is the extraordinary amount of money the U.S. government is either laying out now or will have to lay out in the future to replace the spent munitions.
The modern American way of war is extremely capital-intensive, deploying massive amounts of equipment while putting relatively few people in harm’s way. This has been true ever since World War II, when FDR rejected calls to recruit an immense army and chose instead to fight what Phillips O’Brien calls a “machine-intensive, infantry light war.” That’s a rational approach, given how rich our nation is and how averse it is to casualties. It’s certainly a lot more rational than Pete Hegseth’s talk about “warrior ethos” — are soldiers supposed to flex their biceps at attacking drones?
But the U.S. military’s reliance on munitions rather than manpower can create two problems.
The first problem is that modern munitions, which are highly sophisticated and complex, can’t be produced on short notice, and Trump has already used up many missiles and other weapons in his various military ventures. Yesterday he told reporters that the Iran campaign might go on for four to five weeks or even longer. But many reports suggest that the United States doesn’t have enough left in its weapons stockpiles to continue the current pace of action for more than a few days without dangerously weakening the military’s ability to counter other threats, such as a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan.
In a Truth Social post last night Trump insisted that the U.S. has a “virtually unlimited supply” of “medium and upper medium grade” weapons, which is in effect confirmation that stocks of high-grade weapons are on the verge of of exhaustion.
The other problem is that U.S.-style war is incredibly expensive — so much so that the cost becomes a serious concern even for a nation as wealthy as America.
Linda Bilmes of Harvard’s Kennedy School estimates that Trump’s largely unsuccessful bombing campaign last year against the Iran-backed Islamist Houthis in Yemen — a far softer target than Iran itself — cost between $2.76 billion and $4.95 billion. Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump’s one-day strike against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities, cost between $2.04 billion and $2.26 billion.
The current war is being waged not only with massive bombing but also with the use of large numbers of expensive interceptors to defend U.S. bases and U.S. allies against Iranian drones and missiles. So in just a few days we have surely incurred billions of dollars in cost. And if this war continues for an extended period, the costs could easily rise to the twenty to thirty billion dollar range.
How should we think about these costs? On one side, the federal budget is immense, and almost any individual category of spending is only a small fraction of the total. If we spend $20 billion, $30 billion, or even more on Trump’s war, it will still look almost like rounding error in the overall federal budget.
However, on the other side, consider what else could have been done with that money.
Conservatives complain constantly about the level of federal spending, claiming that we are spending more than we can afford on social programs. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act imposes harsh cuts in nutritional and healthcare assistance, supposedly because the cost of food stamps and Medicaid is excessive. This, despite the fact that study after study has shown that the long run costs of not providing food stamps and Medicaid are far higher than the cost of providing them.
And if we compare the cost of this war to what we spend to help needy Americans, then it’s clear that this war is extremely expensive compared with other ways we could have spent the funds. Put it this way: SNAP — the Supplemental Nutritional Food Assistance Program, formerly food stamps — spends an average of about $2,400 a year per recipient. CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program administered under Medicaid, provides comprehensive health care for about $3,000 per child.
So just replacing those three jets shot down over Kuwait — each of them, remember, with a price tag of $97 million — will cost about as much as providing 125,000 Americans with crucial food aid or providing healthcare to 100,000 American children. And the war might very well end up costing 100 times as much as the price of those jets.
Now, I support the U.S. government spending whatever it must to keep the nation secure. But the Trump administration, which hasn’t provided any coherent rationale for the war, is hardly bothering to pretend that it has anything to do with national security.
Public opinion on this war is extremely negative, As G. Elliott Morris says, “every modern American president who started a war had the public behind him at the outset” — until Trump. And there is no hint of a rally-around-the-flag effect.
Why are Americans so negative about this war? First, they believe it has been foisted upon them: Trump hasn’t bothered to give them a reason for it. Second, Americans – already disillusioned by false promises about DOGE (remember those) and tariffs – sense, correctly, that there is no strategy here. Third, the public senses, also correctly, that the little people will bear this war’s cost. There has, of course, been not even a whisper from Trump about shared sacrifice, about, for example, taxing billionaires to pay for the money being spent on missiles and bombs.
Ordinary Americans feel that Trump is setting billions of dollars on fire with no idea how that is supposed to work out, and that they will end up paying the price. And they’re right.
I trust private companies with strong AI more than I trust the government, regardless of which administration is in power. Yet if the federal government feels it has no say or no control, it will lunge and take over the whole thing. We thus want sustainble methods of perpetual interference that a) are actually somewhat useful from a safety perspective, and b) give governments some control, and the feeling of control, but not too much control.
You should judge AI-related events within this framework.
3. “But what is true is that this should not be much of a surprise considering the constant rhetoric over the past few years has been that AI is a power like no other. It’s like nukes, but times a thousand. We need regulation. And when an industry repeatedly calls out for oversight, asking for someone to make the rules on how it should be used, you cannot be surprised when the Defense department take that seriously. You cannot be surprised when they make up their own interpretations of what ought to be done, because you were insufficiently prescriptive. They will listen to your articulation of any red lines and wonder, what do you mean you want to tell me how to use the mega-nuke-crazy-power that you yourself are saying you don’t know how to control?” Rohit.
5. The Anthropic valuation seems pretty stable. Plus other matters of interest from SSC, including an idea for how to improve prediction markets by inducing the sports betting to subsidize participation in other contracts.
7. Rohit: “OpenAI now is also the only case I know of a defense department vendor contract being negotiated in public iteratively. With plenty of object lessons on why nobody does it.” People, there is nothing weird going on here. It is fine to dislike various aspects of the U.S. military, after all part of their business is to kill people. But any blame you wish to levy goes toward “the system,” do not overly spin the narrative here.
Hey, it’s almost time for SRECon 2026! (I can’t go, but YOU really should!)
Which means it was almost a year ago that Fred Hebert and I were up on stage, delivering the closing keynote1 at SRECon25.
We argued that SREs should get involved and skill up on generative AI tools and techniques, instead of being naysayers and peanut gallerians. You can get a feel for the overall vibe from the description:
It’s easy to be cynical when there’s this much hype and easy money flying around, but generative AI is not a fad; it’s here to stay.
Which means that even operators and cynics — no, especially operators and cynics — need to get off the sidelines and engage with it. How should responsible, forward-looking SREs evaluate the truth claims being made in the market without being reflexively antagonistic?
Yep, that was our big pitch. Don’t be reflexively antagonistic. You should learn AI so that your critiques will land with credibility.
That is not the message I would give today, if I were keynoting SRECon26.
Maybe the hole is why this feels so abrupt and discontinuous to me. Or maybe it’s just having such a clear artifact of my views one year ago. I don’t know.
What I do know is that one year ago, I still thought of generative AI as one more really big integration or use case we had to support, whether we liked it or not. Like AI was a slop-happy toddler gone mad in our codebase, and our sworn duty as SREs was to corral and control it, while trying not be a total dick about it.
Today, it’s very clear to me that the center of gravity has shifted from cloud/automation workflows to AI/generation workflows, and that the agentic revolution has only just begun. That toddler is heading off to school. With a loaded gun.
When the facts change, I change my mind
I don’t know when exactly that bit flipped in my head, I only know that it did. And as soon as it did, I felt like the last person on earth to catch on. I can barely connect with my own views from eleven months ago.
Were my views unreasonably pessimistic? Was I willfully ignoring credible evidence in early 2025?
Hmm, perhaps. But Silicon Valley hype trains have not exactly covered themselves in glory in recent years. VR/AR, crypto/web3/NFTs, wearable tech, the Metaverse, 3D printing, the sharing economy…this is not an illustrious string of wins.2
Cloud computing, on the other hand: genuinely huge. So was the Internet. Sometimes the hype train brings you internets, sometimes the hype train brings you tulips.
So no, I don’t think it was obvious in early 2025 that AI generated code would soon grow out of its slop phase. Skepticism was reasonable for a time, and then it was not. I know a lot of technologists who flipped the same bit at some point in 2025.
Play nondeterministic games, get nondeterministic prizes
The keynote I would give today
If I was giving the keynote at SRECon 2026, I would ditch the begrudging stance. I would start by acknowledging that AI is radically changing the way we build software. It’s here, it’s happening, and it is coming for us all.
1 — This is happening
It is very, very hard to adjust to change that is being forced on you. So please don’t wait for it to be forced on you. Swim out to meet it. Find your way in, find something to get excited about.
As Adam Jacob recently advised,
“If you’re an engineer or an operations person, there is only one move. You have to start working in this new way as much as you can. If you can’t do it at work, do it at home. You want to be on the frontier of this change, because the career risk to being a laggard is incredibly high.” — Adam Jacob
This AI shit is not hard to get started with (but it is also not easy to master). The early days of any technology are the simplest, and this technology more than most. Conquer the brain weasels in your head by learning the truth of this for yourself.
2 — Know thyself
At a time of elevated uncertainty and anxiety, our natural human tendency to drift into confirmation bias and disconfirmation bias is higher than ever. Whatever proof you instinctively seek out, you are guaranteed to find.
The best advice I can give anyone is: know your nature, and lean against it.
If you are a reflexive naysayer or a pessimist, know that, and force yourself to find a way in to wonder, surprise and delight.
If you are an optimist who gets very excited and tends to assume that everything will improve: know that, and force yourself to mind real cautionary tales.
Try to keep your aperture wide, and remain open to possibilities you find uncomfortable. Curate the ocean you swim in. Puncture your bubble.
To err is to human. To err at scale..AI
3 — Don’t panic
Don’t panic, and don’t give in to despair. The future isn’t written yet, and nobody knows what’s going to happen. I sure as hell don’t. Neither do you.
The fact that AI has radically changed the way we develop software in very a short time, and seems poised to change it much more in the next year or two, is real and undeniable.
This does not mean that everything else predicted by AI optimists will come to pass.
Extraordinary claims still require extraordinary evidence. AGI is, at present, an elaborate thought experiment, one that contradicts all the evidence we currently have about how technological breakthroughs typically yield enormous change in the early days, and then plateau.
We are all technologists now
Here’s another Adam quote I really like:
The bright side is that it’s a technology shift, not a manufacturing shift - meaning you still have to have technologists to do it.
I’ve written a number of blog posts over the years where I have advised people to go into the second half of their career thinking of themselves not as “engineers” or as “managers”, but as “technologists”. 3
Every great technologist needs an arsenal of skills on top of their technical expertise. They need to understand how to navigate an organization, how to translate between the language of technology and the language of the business; how to wield influence and drive results across team, company, even industry lines.
These remain durable skills, in an era where good code can be generated practically for free.
This is the moment for pragmatists
Many people who love the art and craft of software are struggling in this moment, as the value of that craft is diminishing. (I’m sorry. 💔)
People who take a much more…functional…approach to software seem to be thriving in the present chaos. “Functional” describes most of the SREs I know, including myself.
“AiOops… Prove it!”...
After all, SREs have always been judged by outcomes — uptime, reliability, whether the thing kept running. An outcome orientation turns out to be excellent preparation for a world where the “how” of software is becoming less important than the what and the whether, across the board.
So maybe the advice we gave at SRECon wasn’t so bad after all. Especially this part:
Which means that even operators and cynics — no, especially operators and cynics — need to get off the sidelines and engage with it.
Who can build better guardrails for AI, than SREs and operators who have spent their entire careers building guardrails for software engineers and customers?
The industry needs us. But not begrudgingly, eyerollingly, pretending to get on board in order to slow things down from the inside. The industry needs our skills to help engineering teams go fast forever.
Don’t sit back and wait for change to reach you. Run towards the waves. It’s nice out here.
Our talk was called “AIOps: Prove it! An Open Letter to Vendors Selling AI for SREs”. In retrospect, this was a terrible title. It was not an open letter to vendors at all; if anything, it was an open letter to SREs. It started out as one topic, but by the time the event rolled around, it had morphed into something entirely different. Ah well.
I am not even listing the kooky religious shit like effective accelerationism, transhumanism, AI “alignment” or the Singularity, all of which has seeped into the water table around these parts.
The fortunes of Breakthrough Starshot have been the subject of so much discussion not only in comments in these pages but in backchannel emails that it is with relief that I turn to Jim Benford’s analysis of a project that has done significant work on interstellar travel and is still very much alive. Jim led the sail team for several of his eight years with Breakthrough Starshot and was with the project from the beginning. In this article and a second that will run in a few days, he explains how and why press coverage of the effort has been erroneous, and not always through the fault of writers working the story. Let’s now take a look at what Starshot has accomplished during its intensive Phase I.
by James Benford
“Make no mistake — interstellar travel will always be difficult and expensive, but it can no longer be considered impossible.” – Robert Forward
Breakthrough Starshot has not failed, nor has it been canceled. Phase I of the program achieved its stated objectives: to identify potential show-stoppers in beam-driven interstellar propulsion and determine whether credible solutions exist. That goal was met.
Recent media coverage, including a Scientific American cover article titled “Voyage to Nowhere,” misunderstands both the intent and the outcome of Phase I. The reality is that the project thus far has been successful. It was put “on hold, paused” in 2024 to restructure for the next phase and seek broader support. It has not been canceled, as some in the media are saying.
I contend that Starshot succeeded because the key Phase I objectives were met. Of course, extensive future effort in the later phases is needed to create a fully functional Starshot system, principally the beamer and sailcraft (referred in the project as “photon engine” and “lightsail”). The major issues have been found to have credible solutions. A great many Starshot-related papers have been published. Many address the crucial issues of sail materials and sail ‘beam-riding’, meaning staying on the beam while undergoing inevitable perturbations. There is a final report, but it has not yet been published.
The principal issues for Starshot were 1) Can a phased array of lasers be constructed that is sufficiently coherent and directive as well as being affordable? 2) Can a sail material be made that will have high reflectivity, very low absorption, high emissivity and very low mass so as to be efficiently accelerated and not overheat? 3) Can a sail ride stably on the beam because of inherent restoring forces (without feedback, which is impossible over long ranges)? 4) Can data be sent back to Earth from the probe at sufficient data rates before the sail moves far beyond the target star?
In this first of two reports on the successes of the Starshot project, I discuss the shape of later phases in the effort, and distortions in the reporting on it. In the second report I will describe the major accomplishments of Phase I.
Starshot was not initiated to fully design, build and launch the first interstellar ‘lightsail’ (as they are called, referring to both the low mass and the near-visible frequency of the laser). The program path was divided into phases, as shown below. The first phase was to invest in high-risk, high-reward research that would de-risk the technology. Phase 1 was to find if there were any ‘show-stoppers’ and pave the way forward. It accomplished that.
High levels of research by Starshot retired most of these key issues for beam-driven sail systems, at least at the conceptual level. The results are at the TRL 2 level. Experiments are needed to verify the solutions for these major issues found in Phase 1.
In Phase II, a coalition of Caltech and other institutions would lead experimental technical demonstrations, and the first experiments in orbit. Then, with the technology concepts having been proven, it’s on to near-term missions shaking out various technologies while performing precursor missions, probably to the outer solar system. Much effort would be needed in systems engineering to enable such precursor missions.
The first phases of Starshot, the R&D program, are projected to cost $120M, which includes Phase 1, and concludes with solar system science missions in the medium-term. The large effort would then follow: construction of the Starshot System and finally, operation of the System and the first interstellar probe voyages.
Many requirements of the Starshot mission come together at the sail. Principal technical issues are the design of the beamer, material to be used and whether the beam and sail stay together, meaning stable beam-riding by the sail:
• Stability is influenced by sail shape, beam shape and the distribution of mass, such as payload, on the sail.
• Material properties, are its reflectivity, absorptivity and transmissivity, it’s tensile strength and its areal mass density.
• Deployment of the diaphanous sail, correctly oriented and including any initial spin, is of course a key requirement.
• The beamer interacts with the sail through its power distribution on the sail-causing differential stresses. This depends on duration of the acceleration, the transverse width of the beam, pointing error of the beam as well as its pointing jitter.
• Data return to Earth, interstellar communications, is perhaps the greatest challenge of all.
What Scientific American got wrong
Journalism is only the first draft of history, so flaws occur. Assessing a system as complex as Starshot is a challenge to a journalist with limited time. It would take years to read and absorb all the relevant literature and to mentally organize it into a reconciled and coherent understanding of the system as a whole.
The biased title – “Voyage To Nowhere” – of the piece in Scientific American, (which was chosen by the editors, not the author Sarah Scoles), may have been chosen to refer to the famous Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska and the Train to Nowhere in California. The Scientific American reporting is already being mistaken for a primary source by others, who are stating that Starshot has been “canceled”. This is an example of how media myths, once manufactured, propagate through journalistic copying.
The article fails to understand the Starshot project for a basic reason: The key people who did extensive work on the program were not available or not even known to the writer.
Because the principal workers from the Breakthrough Foundation and the leaders of Breakthrough Starshot, Pete Worden and Avi Loeb, were not interviewed, it seems the author did not know who the main contributors actually were. She relied instead on people she could easily reach. Few of them are major contributors to the program and most left the project early on or never actually participated in the project. A key participant who is not mentioned is Kevin Parkin [1, 2], who spent 8 years under contract, as did most of us who were in at the beginning or even before that. Others are Mason Peck (who is mentioned in the piece), Paul Mauskopf and Dave Messerschmitt. Unfortunately, the final report, which went through many iterations, has never been published publicly [3].
The recent policy of Breakthrough Starshot has been to have little contact with the media, so not to engage with Sarah Scoles at all didn’t help things: it left the door open for detractors to influence the narrative in her piece. Communication was a priority, with public outreach from and within Starshot during Phase 1. In research, communication enables cross-fertilization and prevents work duplication. The big gap now is a comprehensive publication that ties it all together. It could motivate researchers to continue or take up the project later if Phase II occurs.
The article also truncates the long history that led up to Starshot. Beam-driven propulsion concepts didn’t start in 2016! This was documented in my Photon Beam Propulsion Timeline, which appeared here at the start of Starshot in 2016. Media are not aware of how much has been done by the propulsion community over the last decades. Several areas of photon beam-driven sail system development, to include experiments demonstrating sail beam-driven flight [4, 5] and sail stability and dynamics, such as beam-driven spin of sails for stability [6, 7], have been reserched. The major innovation which caused the beginning of Starshot was the realization that going to much smaller sails and much higher accelerations reduces the cost of the overall system substantially.
The budget estimate given in the Scientific American article is clearly wrong. That only 4.5 million dollars could fund 8 years of steady work by many people is absurd. Thirty contracts were executed over 8 years. There were years of invitational meetings, a standing staff of advisors, subcommittees for specific topics; all of them further expenditures. And I count about 50 Starshot-related papers, some of which have been published since it was put on hold. I estimate that Breakthrough Starshot Phase 1 had a cost of 25 million dollars.
The way Forward
Phase II would lead to a firm experimental basis for the later phases in Figure 1. If Breakthrough decides to move on to Phase II, it must deal with the costs of interruption: institutional knowledge about the previous work, which is never fully captured in documentation, will need to be relearned, as the people who worked on Phase 1 have dispersed to other programs.
My second piece on Breakthrough Starshot, scheduled to run here next week, will describe the present state of the concept and the many advances achieved by Starshot in Phase I
Breakthrough Starshot was the most significant event in the history of beam propulsion, which clearly is the only way that probes can be sent to the stars in this century. And now the work goes on, the hope still lives, and the dream of beam-driven interstellar travel could be realized.
References
[1] “The Breakthrough Starshot Systems Model”, Kevin Parkin, Acta Astronautica 152, pp 370–384 (2018).
[2] “Starshot System Model” Kevin Parkin, Ch 3, in Claude Phipps, Editor, Laser Propulsion in Space: Fundamentals, Technology, and Future Missions, Elsevier (2024).
[3] Breakthrough Starshot Summary Report, September 2023, not published.
[4] “Microwave Beam-Driven Sail Flight Experiments”, James Benford, Gregory Benford, Keith Goodfellow, Raul Perez, Henry Harris, and Timothy Knowles, Proc. Space Technology and Applications International Forum, Space Exploration Technology Conf, AIP Conf. Proceedings 552, ISBN 1-56396-980-7STAIF, pg. 540, (2001).
[5] “Laser-Boosted Light Sail Experiments with the 150 kW LHMEL II CO2 Laser,” Leik Myrabo, Timothy Knowles, John Bagford and H. Harris, “High-Power Laser Ablation IV,” edited by Claude Phipps, Editor, Proc. Space Exploration Technology Conf., 4760 pp. 774-798 (2002).
[6] “Spin of Microwave Propelled Sails” Gregory Benford, Olga Goronostavea and James Benford, Beamed Energy Propulsion, AIP Conf. Proc. 664, pg. 313, A. Pakhomov, ed., (2003).
[7] “Experimental Tests of Beam-Riding Sail Dynamics”, James Benford, Gregory Benford, Olga Gornostaeva, Eusebio Garate, Michael Anderson, Alan Prichard, and Henry Harris, Proc. Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF-2002), Space Exploration Technology Conf, AIP Conf. Proc. 608, ISBN 0-7354-0052-0, pg. 457, (2002).
The Economist’s Middle East correspondent Gregg Carlstrom noted that Trump appears to be workshopping the causes for his attacks on Iran and his goals for the war by talking to journalists.
As Meidas Touch summarized Carlstrom’s argument, he said: “[Trump] doesn’t sound convinced by any of it. He’s throwing spaghetti at the wall. Ultimately I suspect he just wants to say he ‘solved’ a problem that has vexed every American president since Jimmy Carter. But there’s no clear idea what that looks like and no plan for how to get there. And there are plenty of possible scenarios in which Trump declares victory and leaves the region with an absolute mess.”
Matt Gertz of Media Matters noted today that Trump, who watches the Fox News Channel consistently, appears to have shaped his attack on Iran in response to encouragement from FNC hosts. Gertz recalled that for decades, the FNC hosts Trump trusts the most have called for military strikes on Iran.
Last June, FNC personalities Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Brian Kilmeade urged Trump to bomb Iran and then lavished praise on him when he did. Hannity said the bombing would “go down in history as one of the great military victories.”
In the past weeks, Gertz wrote, the same figures have been urging Trump to attack. But their goal appeared to be the bombing itself. They expected an easy victory, without defining what that might look like. According to Kilmeade, the U.S. would “lose credibility forever” if it didn’t hit Iran. On Friday morning, Kilmeade said: “I hope the president chooses to go at it. We have been looking at these headlines for 47 years, and we have an opportunity to end it. And this president likes to make history.”
On Friday night, Levin told Hannity: “This president knows right from wrong. He knows good from evil. He knows that this regime is a death cult. And he knows that there’s only really two countries that are prepared and willing to put an end to this. We don’t need to put up with their crap. It’s time to put it to an end.”
On Saturday, after Trump had started the bombing, Levin said: “Donald Trump did what nobody else could do for half a century. How do you like that? And you know why he did it? Because he loves his country.”
Trump’s strikes on Iran could have had something to do with the increasing heat over the Epstein files or his fury that the Supreme Court struck down his tariff walls, which were central not only to his economic program but also to his pressure on foreign governments and companies to do his bidding. Possibly he was responding to pressure from Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, or both.
Whatever their immediate trigger, the strikes fall in line with the ideology of cowboy individualism that began to take over the Republican Party in the 1980s and which, under Trump, has turned into brutal displays of dominance. The old idea of a cowboy from rural America who cuts through the government bureaucracy that threatens his livelihood by coddling racial minorities and women has curdled into the notion that a leader can do whatever it takes, including violence, to force opponents to submit to his will.
In foreign affairs, that means smashing the international alliances built after World War II. One of the crowning achievements of that international order is the United Nations, constructed to maintain international peace and security by creating organizations that could provide a forum for diplomacy and stop countries from attacking each other. The U.S. currently owes the U.N. nearly $4 billion in unpaid dues as Trump seeks to replace the organization with his own “Board of Peace” that he alone controls. This month, the U.S. holds the presidency of the U.N. Security Council, enabling it to set the agenda. Today, Trump sent First Lady Melania Trump to chair the meeting, the first time a presidential spouse has done so.
Another of the crowning achievements of the post–World War II international order is the Geneva Conventions, which define the legal treatment of noncombatants in war. In his confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to tell Senator Angus King (I-ME), who pressed him on the issue, that he would uphold the Geneva Conventions.
In the ideology that honors violent domination, Trump’s bombing Iran without regard for the Constitution or international law, when no president before him had done so, proves his strength. Hegseth illustrated that idea this morning when he said: “For forty-seven long years, the expansionist and Islamist regime in Tehran has waged a savage, one-sided war against America.” Hegseth, who was a Fox News Channel weekend host before becoming secretary of defense, tried to turn the administration’s military operation into a heroic stand in a silent war that had lasted for two generations.
Claiming the U.S. attacks on Iran that started this conflagration were defensive, rather than offensive, Hegseth claimed: “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump we are finishing it…. It took the 47th president, a fighter who always puts America first, to finally draw the line after 47 years of Iranian belligerence. He reminded the world, as he has time and time again…[i]f you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down, without apology and without hesitation, and we will kill you.”
Hegseth celebrated Israel and its strikes alongside the U.S., while he condemned “so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force. America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history…. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.”
In this ideology, the dominance itself is the point: there is no other endgame.
But this ideology was always based on a myth that played well on television. Three days into the attack on Iran, there is increasing scrutiny of the assertions from government officials. According to Dustin Volz, Alexander Ward, and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal, lawmakers and experts say those assertions are “incomplete, unsubstantiated, or flat-out wrong.”
And as the conflagration spreads, taking the lives of now six of our military personnel, the administration is now discovering that the American people would like to know why we are engaged in what appears to be a war of choice, and why this approach to the world is better than the one that kept us safe for 80 years.
Today the State Department told U.S. citizens to leave Gulf states immediately because of “serious safety risks,” “using available commercial transportation.” But many of the airports in the region are closed, some because they have been hit in the fighting. Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) posted on social media: “Dear [Secretary of State Marco Rubio]: You told Americans to depart now via commercial means when you know many airports/airspace are closed. YOU MUST IMMEDIATELY SCHEDULE U.S. GOVERNMENT EVACUATION FLIGHTS FOR THE STRANDED AMERICANS IN DANGER. Maybe you should have thought of a frickin’ plan first.”
Retired Major General Randy Manner, who is currently stranded in the United Arab Emirates, told CNN: “It seems to me that the purpose and mission have been shifting over the past few days and the past few weeks. Initially, it was to ensure that they could not continue to develop nuclear weapons. Now it’s about regime change, and then there’s so many things that are being piled onto the mission list, it almost seems like someone googled it before the brief, to throw everything…in the kitchen sink into it. So it’s a little bit disconcerting.
“And, in fact, one of the small things that does matter to tens of thousands of people here, as well as to their families: It’s a little bit disheartening and a little bit envious to hear that the BBC has announced that the U.K. government is actually arranging transport for the British citizens to be able to extract them, whereas here, for us as Americans, we feel abandoned. The State Departments have talked to two embassy personnel, two different embassies. They are in survival mode, quite frankly, because as we know, the administration reduced their budgets by almost one half over the past year. So this is a difficult situation for people who are not used to being in a combat situation. And that, of course, is, quite frankly, probably 99% of the travelers that are here.”
Former paratrooper and Army Ranger Representative Jason Crow (D-CO) also had something to say about the reality of war. “I learned, years ago, that when elites like Donald Trump bang the war drums and pound their chests in Washington, D.C., and talk about sending troops into the ground or into combat, he’s not talking about his kids. He’s not talking about all of his minions’ kids. He is talking about kids like me and the people that I grew up [with] in working-class areas, rural places around the country that have to pick up rifles, jump in the tanks or helicopters, and…do the tough work. Well, America is over it. America is over the three trillion dollars we’ve spent. The quagmires of failed nation building. The sending of our sons and daughters and brothers and sisters to enrich oil executives. America is over endless adventurism using our military. Because they want their infrastructure rebuilt. They want quality affordable healthcare. They want to be able to afford groceries. They want to be able to afford a home. They want to be able to send their kids to school.”
Back in December I linked to a sort-of stunt project from Tyler Hall called Alan.app — a simple Mac utility that draws a bold rectangle around the current active window. Alan.app lets you set the thickness and color of the frame. I used it for an hour or so before calling it quits. It really does solve the severe (and worsening) problem of being able to instantly identify the active window in recent versions of MacOS, but the crudeness of Alan.app’s implementation makes it one of those cases where the cure is worse than the disease. Ultimately I’d rather suffer from barely distinguishable active window state than look at Alan.app’s crude active-window frame all day every day. What makes Alan.app interesting to me is its effectiveness as a protest app. The absurdity of Alan.app’s crude solution highlights the absurdity of the underlying problem — that anyone would even consider running Alan.app (or the fact that Hall was motivated to create and release it) shows just how bad windowing UI is in recent MacOS versions.
What HazeOver does is highlight the active window by dimming all background windows. That’s it. But it does this simple task with aplomb, and it makes a significant difference in the day-to-day usability of MacOS. Not just MacOS 26 Tahoe — all recent versions of MacOS suffer from a design that makes it difficult to distinguish, instantly, the frontmost (a.k.a. key) window from background windows.1 Making all background windows a little dimmer makes a notable difference.
Longtime DF reader Faisal Jawdat sent me a note suggesting I try HazeOver back in early December, after I linked to Alan.app. I didn’t get around to trying HazeOver until December 30, and I’ve been using it ever since. One thing I did, at first, was not set HazeOver to launch automatically at login. That way, each time I restarted or logged out, I’d go back to the default MacOS 15 Sequoia interface, where background windows aren’t dimmed. I wanted to see if I’d miss HazeOver when it wasn’t running. Each time, I did notice, and I missed it. I now have it set to launch automatically when I log in.
HazeOver’s default settings are a bit strong for my taste. By default, it dims background windows by 35 percent. I’ve dialed that back to just 10 percent, and that’s more than noticeable enough for me. I understand why HazeOver’s default dimming is so strong — it emphasizes just what HazeOver is doing. (Also, some people choose to use HazeOver to avoid being distracted by background window content — in which case you might want to increase, not decrease, the dimming from the default setting.) But after you get used to it, you might find, as I did, that a little bit goes a long way. (Jawdat told me he’s dropped down to 12 percent on his machine.) I’ve also diddled with HazeOver’s animation settings, changing from the default (Ease Out, 0.3 seconds) to Ease In & Out, 0.1 seconds — I want switching windows to feel fast fast fast.
Highly recommended, and a veritable bargain at just $5.
The HazeOver website also has a link to a beta version with updates specific to MacOS 26 Tahoe. To be clear, the current release version, available in the App Store, works just fine on Tahoe. But the beta version has a Liquid Glass-style Settings window, and addresses an edge case where, on Tahoe, the menu bar sometimes appears too dim. ↩︎
npx workos launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration directly into your existing codebase. It’s not a template generator. It reads your code, understands your stack, and writes an integration that fits.
The WorkOS agent then typechecks and builds, feeding any errors back to itself to fix.
Needless to say, this is not the typical Democratic primary demographic. This might be important context for Totenkopf Guy.
That also is why it is weird to read articles about someone like Platner being touted as the future of the Democratic Party: leaving aside Platner’s Totenkopf problem (which has only become worse), Maine is completely unrepresentative of the U.S. as a whole. Despite the best efforts of Stephen Miller, it’s also not what the future looks like. Arguably, the borough of Brooklyn–which is twice as large as Maine and is usually mocked as atypical and weird–is as ‘normal’ as the nearly all white Maine.
California cannot permit the construction of a smartphone factory, an electric car plant, or a Navy destroyer shipyard. Not won’t — can’t. The regulatory environment makes it effectively impossible to build new semiconductor fabs, automotive paint shops, battery gigafactories, or steel foundries.
Tesla didn’t put its Gigafactory in Nevada out of affection for Reno. General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego can build destroyers only because it’s been grandfathered in since 1960. If it closed tomorrow, it could not be rebuilt.
I get tired at all the discussion of tariffs and industrial policy and manufacturing. All of it is BS in comparison to the basics. We have the met the enemy and the enemy is us. Our future is in our hands. Is that optimistic or pessimistic? Either way complaining about China won’t fix our problems.
The MIT Technology Review has a good article on Moltbook, the supposed AI-only social network:
Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the strings, more puppetry than autonomy.
“Despite some of the hype, Moltbook is not the Facebook for AI agents, nor is it a place where humans are excluded,” says Cobus Greyling at Kore.ai, a firm developing agent-based systems for business customers. “Humans are involved at every step of the process. From setup to prompting to publishing, nothing happens without explicit human direction.”
Humans must create and verify their bots’ accounts and provide the prompts for how they want a bot to behave. The agents do not do anything that they haven’t been prompted to do.
What happened on Moltbook is a preview of what researcher Juergen Nittner II calls “The LOL WUT Theory.” The point where AI-generated content becomes so easy to produce and so hard to detect that the average person’s only rational response to anything online is bewildered disbelief.
We’re not there yet. But we’re close.
The theory is simple: First, AI gets accessible enough that anyone can use it. Second, AI gets good enough that you can’t reliably tell what’s fake. Third, and this is the crisis point, regular people realize there’s nothing online they can trust. At that moment, the internet stops being useful for anything except entertainment.
Bill Dollins reacts to Gary Gale’s experience with AI crawlers taking down his mapping project (previously), and what that portends for the open geospatial web. “On its own, this is a small incident. No critical… More
I thought this was one of the five or six best movies of the millennium so far, comparable in quality to say Uncle Boonmee or Winter Sleep. The soundtrack is one of the very best, ever. The production is joint Spanish and French. The story starts with a Spanish father looking for his lost (grown) daughter at a rave in Morocco. He then meets up with some other parties and a story ensues. I do not consider it a spoiler to report that I consider this a movie about the end of the world, so to speak. Here is the trailer for the film.
It has been playing in NYC and LA for a while, and this Friday it opens for a week in many more cities. The big screen is essential, so see it while you can.
We use long-run annual cross-country data for 10 macroeconomic variables to evaluate the long-horizon forecast distributions of six forecasting models. The variables we use range from ones having little serial correlation to ones having persistence consistent with unit roots. Our forecasting models include simple time series models and frequency domain models developed in Müller and Watson (2016). For plausibly stationary variables, an AR(1) model and a frequency domain model that does not require the user to take a stand on the order of integration appear reasonably well calibrated for forecast horizons of 10 and 25 years. For plausibly non-stationary variables, a random walk model appears reasonably well calibrated for forecast horizons of 10 and 25 years.
On February 22, 2026, a wildland fire was discovered in Big Cypress National Preserve, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of Naples, Florida. The blaze, dubbed the National fire, moved through dry vegetation and sent a plume of smoke billowing over parts of the preserve and nearby communities.
The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image on the afternoon of February 25. By then, the fire had burned around 24,000 acres (9,700 hectares), according to the National Park Service.
After carrying smoke southward in previous days, winds shifted to start pushing it north by the time Aqua captured this image. According to news reports, the smoke reduced visibility and led to the brief closure of I-75—the interstate nicknamed “Alligator Alley” that runs east-west through the northern part of the preserve. It also contributed to smog over Lake Okeechobee.
The fire continued to spread over the next several days, reaching just over 35,000 acres (14,000 hectares) by February 28, according to InciWeb. As of March 2, it remained roughly the same size and was 38 percent contained.
The fire’s cause remains under investigation. Officials noted, however, that its spread was driven by ample fuel, including vegetation that was dry from persistent, extreme drought and damaged by recent frost. The National Interagency Fire Center’s wildland fire outlook calls for above-normal fire potential across Florida through May.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Downloads
February 25, 2026
JPEG (1.81 MB)
References & Resources
Big Cypress National Preserve (2026, February 27) News Releases. Accessed March 2, 2026.
Market Design
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