The next chapter of our AI momentum
Message from Sundar Pichai We’ve made extraordinary progress to deliver on our full AI stack. We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute, and products that bring AI to more people than any other company. And you saw the incredible momentum at earnings across all our businesses, including Search, YouTube, and Cloud. Our Gemini models are in […]
Tiny Black Holes May Be Exploding Stars Across the Milky Way
An international research team has found that primordial black holes may trigger white dwarf stars to explode as Type Ia supernovae. These unusual explosions could also help explain a chemical abundance pattern observed among stars in the Milky Way, according to a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal. Primordial black holes (PBH) are hypothetical […]
The ”mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
Learning from the automation dreams of the first Machine Age “All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle.” Such was Mark Twain’s verdict on the Paige Compositor, a typesetting device which was among the most complex machines ever built up to that point […]
Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines for a Pretextual Weed Search
Police in Wisconsin used Flock to determine that a man “travels to Michigan frequently,” where marijuana is legal, then back to Wisconsin, where it is illegal. They then used his travel across state lines as tracked by Flock as part of the probable cause justification to search his car for weed; he was eventually arrested […]
Citigroup, Idaho, and Build-a-Bear Launched a Coordinated Attack on Me
knock-knock.net A multinational bank, a US state, and a custom teddy-bear workshop all unwittingly joined the same phone-fraud botnet. Here’s how to check whether one of your own machines got caught in the same honeypot. August 5, 2026 On August 1st, Citigroup, the State of Idaho, and Build-A-Bear launched a coordinated attack on me. They […]
How Blackwing Pencils are Made [video]
Oracle Just Halved Its Always Free ARM Limits
The short answer: shrink or consolidate before August 18, 2026# If you’re running any Ampere A1 ARM instance larger than 2 OCPUs or 12 GB of RAM — or more than one of them — you need to act before August 18, 2026, or Oracle will terminate the excess automatically. Your two free x86 instances […]
The ”Disability Dongle”: Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
Mood: Wanting to throw a $30,000 prototype into a lake. There is a feel-good genre of viral video that I call ”The Inspiration Porn Industrial Complex.” You know the one. It usually features a college engineering team, a dramatic piano soundtrack, and a disabled person strapped into a machine that looks like a Transformer having […]
Crickets as Pets
A pet cricket and his container made of a gourd. Watercolor by Qi Baishi (1864–1957). Keeping crickets as pets emerged in China in early antiquity. Initially, crickets were kept for their ”songs” (stridulation). In the early 12th century, the Chinese people began holding cricket fights.[note 1] Throughout the Imperial era the Chinese also kept pet […]
Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
Edit: To be clear, I’m not saying everyone or even a majority of people in the SF tech scene think this way. But some certainly do (e.g. the opening conversation is verbatim) and this post is about a particular core scene whose views carry disproportionate weight in the discourse and in policymaking. At a recent […]