The internet did not build itself. Neither will whatever comes next. We spend our days talking about the shiny layer on top. The models, the apps, the demos. This week is about the layer underneath. The man who wrote the rules that let networks talk to each other is finally retiring. The data centers powering the boom are drinking more water than they admit. Quantum is speeding up but still years from mattering. The robots are learning to fold our laundry. And the rules for all of it remain unwritten. The foundation is never the headline. It should be.

Here are five things tech worth your attention.

The ‘Father of the Internet’ is finally retiring

Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as being the architects of the networking protocols that became the internet we know today. His work developing and popularizing TCP/IP — the basic set of rules that lets different computer networks talk to each other — beginning in the 1970s has been recognized with numerous honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Turing Award, among other honors.

Since 2005, Cerf has served as vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. (At this point, we can safely say the internet is fully evangelized, for good or ill.)

I had the pleasure to meet Vint Cerf some ten years ago or so at a luncheon in Berlin where we discussed tech regulation. It was a delight to listen to him talk about the inner workings of the internet.

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AI Data Centers Use Far More Water Than Most Tech Giants Report

Recently, Nvidia said it had solved the data-center water issue, showing off a closed-loop cooling system that doesn’t require additional water once filled. This design appears to be a win on two levels, says Gillingham, the Yale professor: It zeroes out direct use of water while also reducing the total amount of energy required for cooling.

Microsoft has committed to similar closed-loop tech. In 2024, the company announced that all its new data centers would use it, starting in 2027.

Unfortunately, most existing data centers use evaporative cooling systems that are energy-efficient but water-hungry, according to data from the 2024 Lawrence Berkeley report. Experts say retrofitting those could be prohibitively expensive.

Data centers are creating huge problems. But data centers are also hugely important and they need to be run profitably. So clever engineers will find solution to all the issues we currently see: too much water usage, to much power usage, too much noise - the list goes on and will be addressed.

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Quantum computing is about to get a lot more real

Capital is only one accelerant. The generative AI boom is also helping quantum developers move faster. Artificial intelligence coding tools are helping scientists accelerate the development of materials and components used in quantum designs, says Heather West, an analyst at IDC. That, in turn, is shortening the timelines on product road maps.

Industry consolidation has also helped, often by bringing different parts of the quantum stack under one roof.

Even is Quantum development is speeding up, I do not think we’ll notice anything really happening in this space in the next 5 years. It is still very early.

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We Didn’t Build the Atomic Bomb This Way

Artificial intelligence, funded overwhelmingly by private capital, has careened forward despite immense concerns about the effects it will have on labor, education, science, defense and civic life. A.I. companies have outpaced public oversight and, at times, successfully lobbied against it. The central achievements of the industry, the proprietary “frontier models” developed by companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, are guarded intellectual properties even as they are incorporated into schools, offices, hospitals, courts, commerce and our everyday devices. The public did not ask for these A.I. tools and now can hardly opt out of them.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to addressing the impacts that may be coming. But the scale of the concerns requires ambitious responses that serve the public. The United States can start by building a national A.I. laboratory.

This debate is just a few years too late, but it is still necessary that we discuss this.

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This Soft Robot Wants to Fold Laundry Without Pretending to be Human

Isaac 1 is meant to handle its main tasks autonomously, though Weave says teleoperation support can step in when needed. That point may be one of the more realistic parts of the project. Homes are inconsistent environments, full of changing furniture positions, loose objects, and edge cases that are difficult to predict. A robot that can ask for help may be more plausible than one claiming to solve every room by itself.

Folding laundry and picking up stuff my kids drop everywhere - this could be awesome. A professional cleaner is still cheaper though…

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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Here are five things tech worth your attention.

The state of the AI economy

These revenues are growing faster than previous IT-oriented waves, roughly three times more rapidly than the mobile or Internet waves.

While many companies have moved beyond occasional pilots, they are still in the early stages of scaling and deepening. In conversations Azeem has had with senior execs across a range of industries in Europe and the US (from industrials to insurance, from finance to pharma), the consistent message is that they intend to invest more heavily in AI in the coming years. Companies are also becoming more vocal about the impact of AI on earnings calls, with the caveat that half of the surveyed CEOs believe their jobs depend on getting AI right.

I don’t think this AI thing is going away anytime soon.

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The New Software Lifecycle

Static context is loaded on every turn, so it’s reliable and expensive. Dynamic context is loaded on demand, so you only pay for what a task needs.

Static context is loaded every turn: system instructions, rule files (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md), global memory, core guardrails. It’s reliable, and it’s expensive, because you pay for it on every single call. Dynamic context is loaded on demand: skills that fire when a task matches, tool results, documents pulled from RAG. You only pay for the bits a given task touches.

Get that balance wrong in one direction and you burn tokens and bury the signal. Wrong in the other and the agent forgets the rules that keep it safe. The paper’s advice, which I agree with, is to treat the boundary as a real architectural decision: reviewed in a pull request, versioned like code.

The trick that makes dynamic context scale is Agent Skills with progressive disclosure. The agent sees a little metadata at startup, loads the full instructions when a task matches, and only pulls in the heavy reference material when it actually needs it. That’s how one agent can carry dozens of skills and still only pay for the one it’s using.

We truly live in interesting times. I am constantly revising my setup and while it is getting more complex every week, the tools to manage the complexity are also getting so much better. Some I even write myself, or at least tell the agents to write them…

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The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet

The advent of A.I. has caused Silicon Valley types to fixate on the concept of “taste”; when machines can spit out images and words instantaneously, the thinking goes, humans must be discerning enough to separate the quality output from the slop. Ström-Awn described Claude’s default design choices as a mark of complacency, “a filtering mechanism” that exposes “people who didn’t spend the time” creating something unique. Nguyen brought up a credo of the mid-century American designers Charles and Ray Eames that defined the ideals of modernism: “The best for the most for the least.” What Claude Design offers, Nguyen said, is “the pretty good for the most for the least effort, and pretty low cost.” She continued, “You’re just paying a twenty dollar a month Claude Pro subscription instead of hiring a designer. Is this the modernist world we wanted?”

I actually think that this phenomenon is nothing new - we have a new wave in design and soon we will see the next wave and then everything will be a bit more sophisticated. The really cool thing is: even people like myself (I called myself web-designer 30 years ago just because I could do very basic website design) can now create pretty complex websites with good UX/UI.

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Smartglasses Are Inevitable. But What—or Who—Are They For?

Since the start, the idea of a face-worn computer has garnered skepticism, even hostility, and it’s understandable.

When most of us are trying to reduce our time in front of screens, it seems absurd to mount them right in front of our eyeballs. And why should we be OK with everyone we meet pointing internet-connected cameras at us? It feels like an assault on what little privacy we have left.

Then there’s the built-in AI. Artificial intelligence lets these glasses identify objects in our field of view, like a ficus tree or a Southern African meerkat. But there’s a growing unease with companies sticking generative-AI features into any and all products, and having a little AI djinn always whispering in our ear seems like a cautionary tale—or a “Twilight Zone” episode.

And yet there will be smartglasses, and you and I might even choose to wear them. They’re a technological inevitability, a new consumer-tech arms race for the last and best real estate on our bodies.

I will buy smartglasses as soon as they get progressive lenses, automagic shading and, most importantly, will be self-cleaning.

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Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

So what happened to bank tellers? Autor, Bessen, Vance, and the like are right to point out that ATMs did not reduce bank teller employment. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did. And that technology was the iPhone. The huge decline in bank teller employment that we’ve seen over the last 15-odd years is mainly a story about iPhones and what they made possible.

But why? Why did the ATM, literally called the automated teller machine, not automate the teller, while an entirely orthogonal technology—the iPhone—actually did?

Technology hits differently. But it brings constant change and disruption - yet we are still not getting used to it.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

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disposable software: software is now just paper plates

a year ago the best AI coding tools could finish a function. today it can read an entire codebase, plan a change, edit dozens of files at once, run the tests, fix what breaks, and ship a working version of whatever was asked for. that did not exist twelve months ago.

the engineer typing the code used to be the bottleneck. that is gone. describe what you want in plain english and a working app shows up. one human plus one model ships on a saturday what used to take a team a quarter.

anything that takes a week to ship today will take a day to ship by december.

so what is the point of building it to last?

So the big question is: how will we keep everything running if it is easier to build new stuff than keeping the old stuff alive? We need to figure out consistency, otherwise we will play catchup all the time with an everychanging code stack.

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How to tame AI’s voracious appetite for energy

Though experts say the fastest energy savings will come from software tweaks, some are also taking aim at the energy-hungry processing chips that fuel AI computations. Engineers have made chips increasingly efficient over time by packing more computing capacity into individual processors — reducing the energy required to shuttle data between chips that are working together to perform AI computations. Engineers have done this by shrinking the size of transistors — microscopic electrical switches that process data — inside the chips.

But because engineers are reaching the physical limits of how small transistors can be, “we need to think of alternate ideas to improve the designs,” says computer architect Ajay Joshi of the Boston University Photonics Center.

The recent boom in data centers is really posing some interesting problems that need to get solved. I assume that this will happen quickly, otherwise the costs of running these data centers would just be too high. And these advancements will benefit our daily lives in tremendous ways, from the electric grid to more energy efficiency to small language models on personal devices.

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Solar Beat Coal in US Electricity Mix for the First Time in May

Despite the Trump administration’s attempts to drive a coal revival, it has been steadily losing ground to other energy sources in recent years, squeezed out by cheap natural gas and rapidly falling renewable energy prices. Solar power, in particular, has been on a tear as prices drop exponentially.

Last month, the two lines finally crossed. Solar supplied 12.8 percent of US electricity in May, edging past coal’s 12.2 percent share to become the country’s third-largest source of power behind natural gas and nuclear, according to recent data from energy think tank Ember.

Well, it just makes more sense to do wind and solar than digging for coal or pumping oil and then ship it around the globe.

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The Secret Revolution in Battery Technology: 3-D Printing

In 2025, researchers published around 25,000 papers about 3-D printing of batteries and their components, yet only a handful of startups have even proposed commercializing the technology.

Attempting to beat existing battery giants has doomed many a company to the graveyard. New battery tech must compete on lifespan, durability, energy density, safety and cost—which is dependent on massive scale.

Some are trying to use 3-D printing to create efficiencies in existing battery manufacturing systems. A brave handful of startups are pursuing radical new designs and approaches. They’re starting with defense applications, where cost and scale are less of an issue.

A few months ago I met a startup founder who was building really small batteries for drones and other small devices. I was blown away by what they were doing and how powerful really tiny batteries have gotten. So incredible.

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AI and brain-computer interface allow speechless ALS patient to work a full-time job

A team of scientists from the University of California, Davis, published a paper Monday detailing a years-long study of a brain computer interface (BCI) system implanted in a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), which destroys motor neurons and causes loss of motor control and eventual paralysis. According to the team, their patient, Casey Harrell, has been living with BCI implants since 2023 that are still working today, giving him the ability not only to control a computer cursor with his thoughts, but also to speak.

I have serious concerns about brain-computer interfaces, but this is really awesome. I mean, just imagine how this can change the lifes of so many people for the better!

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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All the Ways Europe Is Ditching American Technology

The moves are widespread—and growing. Last week, the European Commission launched its official long-term plans to rely less on US technology. The European Parliament has switched the default search engine on its devices from Google to the French alternative Qwant. Thousands of workers in the French government are using its own open-source office software —dubbed LaSuite—as officials aim to “break free” from dependence on American tech firms. An open-source documents offering from more than a dozen European tech companies, called Euro-Office, is due to launch imminently. Cities across the Netherlands, France, and Germany are all moving away from Microsoft Office and Google Docs

It’s not just productivity software, either. The Dutch government is moving its code away from Microsoft-owned Github to its own repository. In a series of decisions, Finland reportedly decided not to move its election data to Amazon’s cloud services, while the organization behind Belgium’s.be top-level domain has said it will move away from AWS. Meanwhile, Eurosky has been spun up as an interoperable alternative to Bluesky on the AT Protocol that underlies both social networks.

Don’t get me wrong, there a lots of really great US tech products. But we need to find our own path in Europe and reduce the dependency on US tech.

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AI can design and run thousands of lab experiments without human hands. Humanity isn’t ready for the new risks this brings to biology

Hands-on work in the lab has traditionally been a bottleneck to translating designs into results. Even a brilliant study plan still depends on skilled human hands to carry out. That may not last, as cloud laboratories and robotic automation become cheaper and more accessible, allowing researchers to send AI-generated experimental designs to remote facilities for execution.

AI systems are now able to run experiments autonomously and at scale, but existing regulations were not designed for this. Rules governing biological research do not account for AI-driven automation, and rules governing AI do not specifically address its use in biology.

We need so many new ways to define guardrails, otherwise we cannot keep up with AI.

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The Real Cost Of Cooling GPUs In Space Might Shock You

Proponents tout the many wonders of computing in space: abundant solar energy, free cooling, and freedom from Earth-based disturbances like earthquakes, floods, and protesters. But a sober look at the physics of space-based computing paints a much more nuanced picture.

Free cooling is perhaps the biggest misconception. Space is cold, but it also has no atmosphere. That means the best heat-removal mechanisms, conduction and convection, are off the table. The only option is radiation. To prevent a chip from overheating in space, a large, costly surface area is required to dissipate the energy and then radiate it.

Solar energy is abundant, but collecting it with functional solar panels that maintain perfect alignment toward the sun is a complex task requiring extensive attitude control systems. On top of that, ionizing radiation in space from cosmic rays and other sources poses a unique challenge, degrading the solar panels, the radiative coolers, and the chips themselves. Because regular maintenance in space is difficult, redundancy has to be built in at launch, and cost estimates have to account for efficiency degradation over time.

I really don’t see why people remain so optimistic about datacenters in space. So much hype, just for one IPO…

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Pokémon Go data trained AI that could assist military drones in war zones

Niantic Spatial – a spin-off company from Niantic – announced its partnership with Vantor, a company that specialises in spatial detection software for drones, including those used by some militaries, in December.

The agreement is designed to allow drones to navigate and coordinate precisely in areas where GPS is not available.

Pokemon generated so much data and this is now being used to train drones that could get deployed across our cities. What a time to be alive.

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Making a vintage LLM from scratch

In short, to build an LLM you need 4 things:

• the data -- an LLM has no discernment or understanding. It will learn from anything you tell it to, good or bad. This is the longest process.

• tokenization -- the Tokenizer is a little program that converts words or letters into numbers (tokens). LLMs don’t understand words, they only understand numbers.

• pre-training -- it’s a confusing expression and it means “base-training”, where the LLM learns to autocomplete text. If you’re going for a 300m+ params, this is the most expensive process.

• fine-tuning -- where the LLM learns how to chat in turns, question & answer.

This is so cool. Not really useful, but I guess if you really want to understand how an LLM works, you have to build it yourself.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

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That gap is the most interesting story in tech right now, and it runs through everything below: Europe waking up to its tech dependency, data centers quietly becoming the most powerful buyers in hard tech, startups stuffing servers into homes to spare the grid, and a billionaire whose track record on big promises is worth counting. The hype is loud. The infrastructure is where the real fight is.

Grab a coffee and read this now! And hug a data center near you!

EU plots long game against US digital supremacy

Instead, the tech sovereignty package — motivated in no small part by U.S. President Donald Trump’s weaponization of Europe’s dependence on American firms — takes a longer-term view: boost the continent’s players so they can eventually challenge their U.S. rivals.

“We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement. “This is about protecting our citizens, defending our interests and making our own choices.”

Ever since I started using Linux some 30 years ago, I had this eerie feeling that our dependency on US tech is not in the best interest of Europe. Now finally politicians have come to understand just how import tech is for our everyday lives, our economy and our society. And just think about the gazillions of dollars the EU spends on crappy products from Microsoft that just lead to frustration…

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Thank God For Data Centers

This is true for obvious things like GPUs, inference chips, and DRAM, but it’s also true for companies that you wouldn’t typically associate with AI data centers, like supersonic turbines, enhanced geothermal, modular construction, high-voltage direct current grids, solid-state transformers, silicon photonics, optical fiber, lasers, batteries, and nuclear.

Many of these technologies have the potential to be better and cheaper than the incumbent technologies they aim to replace, but they have been too expensive and unproven to compete. With backlogs in all of the traditional inputs to Data Centers, however, developers are willing to pay up for new technologies that can deliver fast, which gives them the opportunity to scale up and cost down.

For these technologies, Data Centers act as a third type of Buyer of Capabilities, a commercial analog operating on DoD-style procurement logic but commercial timescales.

Given the size of the budgets, the relative smallness of any one input’s cost relative to the overall project cost and revenue opportunity, and the speed with which Data Centers are making decisions and putting down deposits, Data Centers may meaningfully increase the odds of success of hard tech companies and Vertical Integrators more than the market realizes.

I have to agree here, even though I do not want data centers taking over the landscape everywhere. They are huge and operating them poses many interesting new challenges. Solving these challenges will have plenty of amazing side-effects. Cheaper energy will be one of them.

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Startups are installing tiny data centers in people’s homes to reduce strain on the beleaguered electrical grid

Span’s XFRA models are part of a wider distributed network of AI infrastructure, using a home’s underused electrical capacity to create something similar to a cloud of compute that can be given to service providers. Span can install nodes at six-times the speed of centralized 100-megawatt data centers and at about one-fifth of the cost of construction.

The company charges a flat monthly fee of about $150. In return, it essentially pays a host’s electricity and internet bills. The computing power generated from the nodes are distributed to customers like hyperscalers and AI companies. XFRA is not designed to replace commercial data centers, according to the company, but rather to reduce strain on the grid.

And if those small datacenters all have some networking and proxy elements to them, they could also reduce the bandwith needed on the data networks.

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There’s Never Been a Better Time to Study Computer Science

At the same time, new courses could offer students an introduction to software development without the theoretical baggage and proof-writing they might have otherwise had to wade through. Geoffrey Challen, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, plans to offer a new course this fall in which he will teach students to develop software “without writing, reading, debugging, or viewing a single line of code,” he told me. Northwestern is also slated to offer an “entry-level creative coding” class for students without technical backgrounds. For all the talk of AI-literacy programs that teach students how to use chatbots, the real innovation might be in developing courses that train students in basic software-development skills. Most colleges require introductory writing courses because it’s understood that clear written communication is an important cross-disciplinary skill—even for students who plan to study physics or math. Classes that teach students how to use AI coding tools could become commonplace, providing students of all backgrounds with a baseline software-engineering skill set.

I think this is an amazing time to study computer science and of course it helps to understand how software works even if you will never have to write it yourself.

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Elon Musk Laid Out 602 Goals. We Counted How Many He Hit.

Strikingly, Mr. Musk’s annual rate of success declined over time, even as he made more promises. Of the 13 goals he declared in 2015, he later achieved nearly three-quarters of them, The Times found. But of the 27 claims he made in 2020, fewer than half have been accomplished on time. Some still have deadlines far in the future.

I think we should regulate and tax billionaires more. This is not healthy. Neither for them nor for our societies.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

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Europe cannot outspend Silicon Valley and Big Tech has to learn to talk to regulators like everyone else. Google is winning on efficiency while Mistral is winning on principles. Quantum computers are now generating randomness so pure it could secure your secrets. And somewhere between the infrastructure battles and the geopolitical posturing, a tech worker is writing the most honest job description in the industry. Five things this week that range from genuinely important to genuinely cathartic.

Grab a coffee and read this now!

France’s Answer to OpenAI Warns of Dangers of U.S. Tech Dominance

Mistral Chief Executive Arthur Mensch said his company’s—and Europe’s—biggest obstacle to tech independence was the scale of investment that is necessary. The company lines up debt to pay for data centers based on revenue it expects from signed contracts.

“We can’t put 50 billion [dollars] on the table to build a gigawatt ahead of demand,” Mensch said. “That’s potentially our biggest bottleneck.”

For a long time I was not that worried about US tech dominance, but that changed rapidly during the first Trump administration. And Mensch really stresses the biggest issue here: Europe has different spending habits and going all in on tech is not really what we are known for. This truly is a gigantic obstacle right now.

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Your AI bill is out of control. Google has been waiting for this moment.

The timing of Google’s new model is no coincidence. As companies embrace token-hungry AI agents they’re also paying closer attention to their bills. Meanwhile, smaller AI companies under pressure to generate revenue are cranking up the cost of their products, pushing customers to reconsider their AI spend.

That presents an opportunity to win on value rather than raw capability. It’s also where Google has an edge that will be hard for rivals to replicate — one it’s been working on for a quarter-century.

Google has played catch-up for the last two years and it starts to pay off. But we shouldn’t forget that Google was totally taken by surprise when the launch of ChatGOT 3.5 had such a huge impact. As a response, Google has totally revamped its core products, even search.

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AI companies want power fast. The electric grid’s gatekeeper wants them to learn the rules.

“The hyperscalers, when they do come speak to us, they don’t speak FERC,” Swett said. “Their complaints about the utilities, quite frankly, to me show a lack of understanding of how the utilities normally function and how the grid functions.”

Since that March gathering, those AI developers have been learning the language, according to multiple people in the tech industry. Swett’s remarks set off a two-month sprint to further engage with FERC in face-to-face meetings as the commission approaches a June release for its proposal that aims to bring data centers onto the big regional electric grids — at a faster pace than the likely five- to-10-year timeline that frontier AI companies say is too slow for the fast-moving technology.

Oh no, Big Tech has to talk to regulators, just like other business have done for decades. Cry me a river.

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A quantum computing system’s perfect randomness could keep your secrets safe

The scientists entangled two qubits kept at temperatures near absolute zero at the opposing ends of a 30-meter-long tube. When the two qubits were entangled, they shared the same positioning—in other words, if you measured both, you’d get the same output. The long tube was necessary to ensure enough physical separation so that no outside variables could bias the results, Renner says.

“To really be sure that it’s not predictable, I need to have a process where I’m really sure that this process is not described by classical physics,” Renner says.

That’s probably exactly how I would have done it. How random!
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Tech sucks

I’ve worked at three tech startups so far. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “tech startup,” has Latin roots which means, “to make no money.” Basically, a bunch of investors (people who seem to make all their decisions via putting up pictures and throwing them at dart boards) are going to keep beating a dead horse a little longer until it delivers on the proof of concept. Or, maybe it’ll all go bankrupt and somehow they’ll still retain some of that investment, possibly through taxes. I don’t know, I don’t claim to understand it.

What this means for the day-to-day of a tech worker, is you’re under pressure to perform, to do really, really good. To make long complicated lists about your goals and hopes and dreams and how they tie into the grand vision of the company. If you work really really hard, and show up for your company and treat your coworkers you won’t get a sizable raise. Image and ego stroking are the only things that matter.

What a glorious rant! And full of truth.
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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

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Five tech things (see what I did there?) that made me think this week. One involves particles in the stratosphere. One involves developers losing their edge. And one is the best community response to a corporate collapse I have seen in years.

The throughline, if there is one: technology keeps moving faster than our ability to govern it, understand it, or even agree on whether it is good for us. Geoengineering gets trialed before regulation exists. AI gets mandated before anyone asks developers what it does to their craft. Cars ship as software black boxes and owners only find out what that means when the company goes under. The Fisker community figured it out anyway, and that gives me more hope than most funded startups I see right now.

Enjoy Five Things Tech!

Can Some Very Tiny Particles Cool the Planet? One Tech Company Says Yes.

The materials produced by Stardust are made from amorphous silica, which is used as a food additive and in some consumer products, and calcium carbonate, a compound found in eggshells and limestone. The company said its particles were biodegradable, were not harmful to people or animals, and would not accumulate in the oceans or soil. Released in the upper atmosphere, the particles could reflect a small amount of sunlight away from Earth, the company said.

Geoengineering - is it good or bad? This idea certainly sounds like something a mad scientist in a dystopian science-fiction movie would try to develop, only to be stopped by the good guys. Or can we really safely use this globally to keep the temperatures down and make hotter regions livable again?

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Venture Capital Is Concentrating Faster Than Ever. What Happens To Everyone Else?

The fundamental question for the venture world now is: Does the rapid growth and capital concentration for the largest companies come at the expense of smaller startups, or does the success of OpenAI, Anthropic and the like expand the total addressable market for tech startups so drastically that it promises to grow and reshape opportunities across the entire ecosystem?

Everybody wants to be in on the mega-rounds, the safe bets of the probable industry leaders. It makes it very hard for startups that target specialist niches to gain any traction in their fundraising efforts.

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Fisker went bankrupt and owners built open source car company from the ashes

Within months of the bankruptcy filing, thousands of Ocean owners formed the Fisker Owners Association (FOA) — a nonprofit that quickly grew to 4,000 members and began operating as something between a car club, a tech startup, and an independent automaker.

The FOA hired independent tech experts who began reverse-engineering Fisker’s proprietary software patches. Members taught each other how to flash firmware. They organized bulk purchases of replacement parts — negotiating the price of key fobs down from roughly $1,000 each to a fraction of that through coordinated group buys. They hosted free global key fob pairing events, saving each owner $100 to $250.

This is a genuinely cool response to what could have been a total desaster. Cars are software black boxes and we need to better regulate this. Also, I’d love to be able to configure my own Android Auto or whatever it is called, because the latest release, which was 2 months ago, ruined my bluetooth…

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Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.

Oh well, get used to it. I really am not that sympathetic. Change is coming fast and we have to embrace it. The job of a developer will change tremendously, but developers will stay valuable, or becoming even more valuable when we do agentic coding and need to orchestrate agents to build software.

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World’s first native color LiDAR gives machines human-like vision

Ouster's technology is built around its new L4 chip, which embeds Fujifilm 's color science – the same expertise behind the company's imaging technology – to deliver hardware-level color processing. It integrates 42.9 GMACs of processing capacity, detects up to 20 trillion photons per second, and operates at 40 kHz with picosecond-level precision. Those numbers are dense, but they mean a single sensor can now read a traffic sign, detect whether the car ahead is braking by the color of its brake lights or produce topographic maps with real-world color data – all without additional hardware or calibration.

That is just really amazing and will improve the safety of autonomous vehicles even more.

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— Nico

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AI agents are breaking GitHub, algae robots swarm like locusts, and Japan has run out of robot wolves. This is a normal week in tech now. We also look at how Claude cracked open Apple's most hardened security in five days, and ask whether Apple's decision to sit out the great CapEx arms race is genius or a slow-motion mistake. Spoiler: they have done this before. The pace at which these stories are arriving is insane. Every edition of Five Things Tech we sit down to curate and find that the world has moved again, in directions that would have seemed implausible a year ago. The gap between science fiction and the morning news is basically gone. Buckle up.

Enjoy Five Things Tech!

Git is unprepared for the AI coding tsunami

Chacon believes GitHub’s current reliability issues stem from the current tsunami of agentic work.

This is “ironic” because GitHub was built to scale Git, he said. “But an influx of agents is pushing the service to the brink.”

The problem lies not with Git itself, but with everyone using one service, Chacon argued. Last year, GitHub had about 180 million users working across 630 million repositories – with 121 million created in 2025 alone, according to the company’s most recent annual Octoverse report.

It really is not that ironic that a decentralized versioning mechanism gets centralized and then becomes a bottleneck itself. GitHub is a great resource, hopefully it will be able to transcend into the future. We are also using it daily now for our software projects, which are of course powered by agentic coding. But even more importantly: gazillions of open source software repositories can be found on GitHub, which makes it such a valuable platform.

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New Algae Robots Swarm Like Locusts at the Flick of a Switch

Microbots that deliver drugs, perform surgery, or act as environmental sentinels are no longer science fiction. Swarms of these robots have especially captured the imagination of roboticists. Tweaking a swarm’s shape and size can allow it to tunnel into small spaces and do work that would thwart any single sophisticated robot.

This kind of stuff is mindblowing, don’t you think? How do people even get the idea to research this?

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Apple’s Security Has Been Tough to Crack. Mythos Helped Find a Way In.

Earlier this year, Anthropic’s AI found over 100 high-severity vulnerabilities in the Firefox browser over a two-week period. That is how many the rest of the world typically finds in two months.

Last September, Apple said it leveraged its hardware and operating system expertise into a technology called Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), which it described as “the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort, spanning half a decade.”

With Claude, building the code that exploited the two MacOS bugs took five days, Calif says.

So impressive. Both what Apple has done and how the team used Claude to find vulnerabilities.

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Apple’s Binary Bet

It’s just such a wild break from their peer group. And it keeps getting more wild. It seems like the most binary bet imaginable. Either Apple is right and the rest of Big Tech will have lit hundreds of billions – perhaps trillions when all is said and done – of dollars on fire, or Apple is going to be in big trouble.

Obviously, there will be some nuance there. Apple’s bet relies on a few factors, including that someone else is spending this CapEx on which Apple can rely. This is the “hybrid” approach to such spend that Tim Cook and others at Apple keep referring to. They’re basically saying that while they’ll do some of their AI work in-house, on their own servers, for the most part, they’ll partner with the others to rely upon their capacity. Most famously, Apple is now doing this with Google.

I think Apple is doing just what they did with the iPod and the iPhone - they let everybody spend gazillion to figure out how to make money with a certain technology and then they release the product people actually want and desire so much that they’ll spend a premium price on it.

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Japan runs out of robot wolves in fight against bears

Starting at around $4,000, each bespoke Monster Wolf is now equipped with battery power, solar panels, and detection sensors. Its speakers are programmed with over 50 audio clips including human voices and sirens audible over half a mile away. These aren’t assembly line products, however. Each Monster Wolf is custom made, and Ohta simply can’t keep up with the current demand.

What a time to be alive.

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— Nico

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Facebook for grown-ups. Bitcoin for the quantum age. War by drone. A chip that is embarrassingly efficient. And the man who turned Silicon Valley into a political force. I have been reading so you do not have to.

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Meta Is Dying. It’s About Time.

Death is different on the internet. Lifeless companies like AOL and Yahoo are still technically with us. You can visit their websites. They have customers. They may even be profitable, as they cut staff and monetize their last remnants of traffic. But they are, as the kids say, peak cringe. Many teens wouldn’t be caught dead with an AOL account, a Yahoo email address — or a Facebook profile.

While facebook might not be the current teen magnet, I still think that it makes sense to position itself as the place for the grown-ups. If only the algorithm would push more friends into the feed.

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Quantum Computing Is Testing Bitcoin’s Most Important Assumption

Quantum Safe Bitcoin replaces Bitcoin’s elliptic curve signatures with a hash-based signature puzzle that a quantum computer cannot efficiently shortcut, all within Bitcoin’s existing legacy script framework. The trade-off is cost: each transaction requires an estimated $75 to $150 in GPU compute, which is why the researchers themselves frame the scheme as a last-resort mechanism for securing large balances rather than a scalable replacement for everyday transactions.

What QSB delivers is a way for an individual holder to make a quantum-resistant transaction today without waiting for a network-wide upgrade. That is meaningful, particularly for institutions, custodians and large BTC holders seeking contingency options against future quantum threats.

Maybe FIAT, which is the crypto term for real money, is not such a bad idea after all?

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Ukraine’s rapid rise as an anti-drone powerhouse

In other words, the biggest European war of the 21st century was looking a lot like the First World War of the 20th century. Instead of the fast maneuvering of forces combined with air superiority that is typical of modern combat, the two forces were well locked into what were essentially fixed frontiers and trenches with neither side gaining dominance in the skies.

But the truly unexpected thing was what came next. Instead of simply being bogged down and hammering on each other’s positions, the reaction of both sides was to embrace military drones of various sizes to spy on or attack the enemy. This not only changed the nature of war in Ukraine, it also turned the conflict into a laboratory yielding results that the rest of the world is still trying to adapt to and learn from. And it isn’t just theoretical. It’s having real world repercussions in the Iran conflict and elsewhere.

The Ukrainians are really pushing it on all fronts.

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This New Chip Could Make GPUs Far More Efficient

To overcome these challenges, the researchers developed a hybrid design that combines a piezoelectric resonator with small, commercially available capacitors arranged in a specific configuration. This approach enables the converter to handle larger voltage drops more effectively.

The design was integrated into a prototype chip and tested in the lab. It successfully converted 48 volts down to 4.8 volts — a level commonly required in data centers — reaching a peak efficiency of 96.2 percent. The chip also delivered about four times more output current compared to earlier piezoelectric-based designs.

Chipdesign is so fascinating, don’t you think?

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The Venture-Capital Populist

The politics of the Valley was always a liberal sort of libertarianism: pro-choice, pro-immigration, idealistic, even utopian, arrogant about its mission of empowering individuals and connecting humanity, but indifferent to and ignorant of government, with an engineer’s contempt for the creaky workings of bureaucracy and the cluelessness of elected officials. Leave us alone to do our magic, which you can’t possibly understand, and everyone will benefit.

But about a decade ago, tech’s free ride ran into trouble. In 2013 Marc Andreessen, an inventor of the first popular web browser in the ’90s and now one of the Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, predicted to me a public backlash against technology companies over privacy rights, intellectual property, and monopoly power. With more foresight he would have included the addictive and corrosive effects of social media. Three years later, in 2016, Facebook enabled Russian meddling in an election that inflamed American divisions and sent Trump to the White House.

These people have to much money, power and influence. We need more and better regulations.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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Hyperscalers are spending billions, but only one layer is compounding—and it shows everywhere: Amazon is stockpiling chips and power while still searching for a winning model strategy, Google pulls ahead by embedding Gemini across its products, and Microsoft leans on distribution to mask model gaps. Meanwhile, the real profits are quietly shifting to the infrastructure layer with memory chips turning into luxury goods amid relentless AI demand, software itself is becoming fluid with “personal software on demand,” robots are learning to share skills across hardware, and even the foundations—like Linux—are showing cracks under the pressure of this new stack.

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The $112 Billion Quarter

Amazon is betting on vertical integration. It landed 2.1 million AI chips over the past twelve months & its chips business has crossed a $20 billion annual revenue run rate, growing triple-digit percentages year-over-year. OpenAI committed to consume approximately 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity through AWS starting in 2027. Anthropic secured up to 5 gigawatts.

But Amazon doesn’t own the model layer. Google does.

The hyperscaler that owns the model layer is growing the fastest.

Google can nicely integrate Gemini into their products. Amazon still tries to figure out how to make Alexa smart and Microsoft hopes that people stay ignorant about the “performance” of co-pilot.

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AI Has Made Memory Chips One of the World’s Most Profitable Products

While fears grow over whether AI services will eventually reap big profits, an epic windfall is flowing to the companies involved in the build-out of related infrastructure.

The historic run doesn’t look likely to end soon. Based on Samsung’s prebooked orders, the supply crunch is expected to grow worse next year, said Jaejune Kim, the company’s executive vice president for memory. “The available supply is far short of customer demand,” he said on a Thursday earnings call.

Since the start of this year, shares of Samsung have risen by 72%. SK Hynix’s shares are up 90% and Micron has gained 65%.

Memory is the new luxury.

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Why one longtime coder says vibe coding matters beyond tech

Up until now, no one has ever been able to get enough software. Engineering was very expensive. It took a lot of time. You had to buy stuff off the shelf.

What we don’t know is: A world in which it’s fast to customize, in which it’s easy to make something that’s really bespoke, and where engineering might be more of your service org — to help you as opposed to this alien entity bolted onto the org that does its own thing — how does that all fit into the future?

Personal Software on Demand - PSOD. I just coined the term, you read it here first.

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Robots With Different Designs Can Now Share Skills

Surprisingly, the approach doesn’t rely on AI. Instead, the researchers analyzed the physical properties of several robotic arms with three rotating joints—a popular design in commercial settings—to map out their limits.

To complete a task, a robotic arm must calculate how to bend each joint to reach its target. It also has to avoid pushing the joints past their physical limits or twisting them at weird angles. Engineers call these limits “singularities” because they cause the math governing the robots’ motion to break down. Failures can cause sudden and unsafe movements.

Turns out that robots can play together just nicely, which makes them more or less human? You decide…

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The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flat-footed

The critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-31431 and the name CopyFail, is a local privilege escalation, a vulnerability class that allows unprivileged users to elevate themselves to administrators. CopyFail is particularly severe because it can be exploited with a single piece of exploit code—released in Wednesday’s disclosure—that works across all vulnerable distributions with no modification. With that, an attacker can, among other things, hack multi-tenant systems, break out of containers based on Kubernetes or other frameworks, and create malicious pull requests that pipe the exploit code through CI/CD work flows.

Just at the time when I get my own linux server up and running after like 20 years, it gets hit by CopyFail. Yikes.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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The week in tech is basically: build stuff in cowboy country, burn the planet to feed GPUs, turn war into a drone SaaS line item, and then fix our eyes with liquid metal while billionaires LARP as end-times prophets. In other words, we’re speed-running a cyberpunk timeline where Texan hard-tech playgrounds churn out the hardware, gas-fired data fortresses belch more CO₂ than entire nations, defense departments subscribe to autonomy like it’s an enterprise license, and the same guys warning you about Armageddon are quietly trying to own the off-ramp.

Enjoy Five Things Tech!

‘Startup Cowboys’ Are Making This Texas Town the New Tech Hotspot

Aspiring software companies and AI firms are still flocking to San Francisco. But more robotics, energy and defense companies are setting up shop under the blistering Texan sun. Places like Proto-Town are the latest sign that Austin and its surroundings are becoming a base for these so-called “hard tech” companies.

In their downtime, the mix of Texans, company founders and engineers who live in Proto-Town like to ride around the flatlands on dirt bikes, head into Lockhart for barbecue or drive to downtown Austin to go two-step dancing.

Startups on the site are attracted to the state’s low regulation and the build-anything atmosphere of Proto-Town and the surrounding Caldwell County.

This sounds like fun and necessary - when tech companies turn too corporate, they lose the ability to innovate. It’s the classic innovator’ dilemma that is hitting the whole industry.

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How the Tech World Turned Evil

Class warfare doesn’t get more unhinged than this. Say what you will about the American plutocracy, it seldom frames its economic self-interest as a religious imperative. But even in its more innocent days, Silicon Valley inclined toward grandiosity, heralding not just a new technology but a new advancement in human consciousness. Now a prince of the technocratic elite was framing tech’s future prosperity quite literally as a battle against agents of Satan, with Thunberg and Yudkowsky cast as Gog and Magog. Suggest Thiel’s dominion could stand a bit more government oversight and he just might toss you into a lake of fire.

I remember the time when the internet was still largely uncommercial. It sure changed a lot and greed didn’t really do the ecosystem any good.

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New Gas-Powered Data Centers Could Emit More Greenhouse Gases Than Entire Nations

As tech companies race to secure massive power deals to build out hundreds of data centers across the country, these projects represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential climate cost of the AI boom.

The infrastructure on this list of large natural gas projects reviewed by WIRED is being developed to largely bypass the grid and provide power solely for data centers, a trend known as behind-the-meter power. As data center developers face long waits for connections to traditional utilities, and amid mounting public resistance to the possibility of higher energy bills, making their own power is becoming an increasingly popular option. These projects have either been announced or are under construction, with companies already submitting air permit application materials with state agencies.

Lawmakers should require new data centers only to use solar and wind power, which makes so much more sense than relying on fossile fuels for these huge buildings with their immense power consumption.

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Pentagon officials broadly detail $55 billion drone plan under DAWG

The DAWG essentially absorbed the Biden-era Replicator initiative designed to acquire thousands of low-cost “attritable” drones, particularly for use in the Pacific. In its latest iteration, the department is looking to supercharge development investments across an array of platforms and collaborative autonomy efforts.

But to do that, it will take a big investment in the form of a 24,070 percent increase over the $225.9 million DAWG received in fiscal 2026. Specifically, the Pentagon is seeking a $54.6 billion ask for research and development dollars in the FY27 budget request — $1 billion in the base budget and the remaining $53.6 billion coming from the more flexible future reconciliation pot.

These numbers are staggering. There are so many military and civilian use cases for drones that a whole new industry is currently spawning.

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This artificial retina doesn’t just aim to restore sight—it opens a hidden channel of vision

The artificial retina developed by this research team has two primary components: a phototransistor array and a set of liquid metal micropillar electrodes. The phototransistor array is a grid of tiny, light-sensitive devices that can detect near-infrared light (i.e., light that is just beyond visible wavelengths) and convert it into electrical signals.

Liquid metal micropillar electrodes, on the other hand, are pillar-shaped structures made of a soft liquid metal that conducts electricity. These structures deliver the electrical signals produced by the phototransistors directly to cells in the retina that send visual information to the brain, known as retinal ganglion cells. In most cases of retinal degeneration, these cells are less affected than photoreceptor cells, thus they might still be able to transmit information to the brain.

Ray-Ban Meta smart-glasses are so 2025.

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— Nico

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Europe might actually have a shot at winning the quantum computing race because there is no legacy advantage to overcome, just pure math and capital deployment. But before you celebrate, consider this: Google and Cloudflare just moved their post-quantum cryptography deadlines up to 2029 (five years earlier than planned) because new research suggests cryptographically relevant quantum computers may arrive sooner than anyone expected. Meanwhile Anthropic’s Mythos model is already pulling off digital bank heists, orchestrating complete attacks from bypassing security protocols to breaking into digital vaults, the kind of critical bugs normally found only by the world’s best hackers. And while we worry about quantum threats and AI security risks, AI is already designing the next generation of chips that will accelerate both quantum computing development and AI capability itself, creating a feedback loop nobody fully understands yet.

Oh, and half of all PHP developers have over 15 years of experience with only 15% having five years or less, which means the language powering a massive chunk of the web is facing a retirement crisis with no replacement workforce in sight. So we have quantum computers racing toward breaking all our encryption, AI models that can hack entire systems, chip design entering an AI-accelerated era, and the infrastructure holding up the current web slowly aging out without successors. The rest of the 2020s are going to be wild.

Enjoy Five Things Tech!

Quantum computing: A tech race Europe could win?

“At the end of the day, it’s a math challenge. There is no unfair advantage from legacy technology like classical computing or something like that, so there is no reason to be shy.”

The main challenge, says Peronnin, is putting the capital together. “But Europe is definitely not poor and this is a technological opportunity for Europe to reshuffle a bit the cards in terms of autonomous strategy and our ability to have economic leading players,” he says.

There is a strong feeling that while Europe missed the boat on so many tech revolutions of recent years, at least when it came to transitioning from the research to the industrial stage, things could be different this time.

I currently have the feeling that while Europe is doing pretty okay with Quantum, we will soon be overtaken by USA and China when they utilize their AI compute to drastically advance Quantum research and design.

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Recent advances push Big Tech closer to the Q-Day danger zone

Earlier this month, both Google and Cloudflare bumped up their internal deadline for PQC (post-quantum cryptography) readiness to 2029, an acceleration of roughly five years. The moves were largely prompted by two pieces of research showing that CRQC (cryptographically relevant quantum computing/computer) may arrive sooner than previously estimated.

While there’s little known evidence that a CRQC will emerge in the next four years, the revised deadlines set a good example for peers such as Amazon and Microsoft, whose timelines are two to six years longer. They also largely align with US government goals; the Defense Department is requiring all national security systems to use quantum-safe algorithms by December 31, 2031, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology is calling for the deprecation of vulnerable algorithms by 2035. While many experts strongly doubt CRQC will arrive by 2029, others say an industry-wide acceleration is necessary given the stakes and the difficulty of the work required to be ready.

The next few years will be interesting. The Y2K situation was concerning, but this is really an important race to harden our systems.

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How Anthropic Learned Mythos Was Too Dangerous for the Wild

Mythos orchestrated the digital equivalent of a bank robbery: getting past security protocols and through the front door of networks, and breaking into digital vaults that gave it access to online treasures. AI had picked locks, but now it could pull off an entire heist.

Carlini and some of his colleagues began alerting staff to what they’d found. And each day they continued to discover high-severity and critical bugs in the systems Mythos probed, the kind of flaws normally uncovered by the world’s best hackers.

Speaking of which, some stuff will break long before 2029, it seems.

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AI Could Democratize One of Tech’s Most Valuable Resources

Designing computer chips is one of the most consequential—and tricky—jobs on the planet. Chip engineers need to figure out how to arrange a vast number of components across a piece of silicon to optimize different functionality. After a chip is first designed, its performance has to be carefully tested and verified in an iterative process before the designs can be sent off to a foundry.

Nvidia’s designs are crucial for modern AI, with each new generation of chip allowing companies to train more powerful AI models using hundreds or thousands of processors networked together inside vast data centers.

So if this is already happening with “classical” silicon chips, I do not see why this won’t accel the development of Quantum computing real soon now.

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Who will maintain the web when PHP’s veterans retire?

The survey of over 700 developers worldwide indicated that over half of the PHP users surveyed reported having more than 15 years of experience with the language, while only 15% had five years of experience or less. This points to a maturing workforce with fewer new developers entering the ecosystem, Perforce officials said.

In fact, hiring rose to one of the top challenges facing PHP teams in 2026, and for managers and directors, it was the number one concern. Moreover, 24% of respondents cited a lack of personnel with the right skills and experience as a leading operational challenge.

I remember when PHP was still called PHP FI and I started using it with version 2.5 - a looong time ago, probably 30 years or so. Back then, the combination of PHP/MySQL was all the rage.

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— Nico

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This is great news to me: France is ditching Windows for Linux across its government by autumn 2026, driven by Trump's sanctions weaponized against critics and a broader EU push for sovereignty, with DINUM leading migrations that include collaboration tools, AI platforms, and databases; others like Austria, Denmark, and Schleswig-Holstein are already swapping Microsoft for open-source, proving it's doable and could redirect billions into building better alternatives.

NASA's Artemis II Orion capsule packs a radiation-hardened, fault-tolerant computer handling life support and comms 250k miles out where downtime kills, everything redundant except Outlook as usual.

Autonomous vehicles are going electric for high-utilization capex payback, sensors and GPUs guzzling power that combustion engince powered cars can't match efficiently; can't wait for my car to park itself.

The internet's bifurcating into agentic layers of structured data for bots negotiating at scale and human realms trading on trust and creativity, with wild economics splitting subscriptions from data markets we barely grasp.

Over-the-air computation flips radio interference from curse to feature, letting wireless networks sum or average data via superimposed signals before digital processing even kicks in, wild throwback to old interference woes now crunching numbers.

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France Orders Windows-to-Linux Switch Across Government

The pressure runs deeper than preference. Since taking office in January 2025, the Trump administration has weaponized sanctions against critics including International Criminal Court judges, effectively cutting them off from U.S. tech services, closing their bank accounts, and blocking transactions with American companies. For European governments running their digital infrastructure on U.S. software, that is not an abstract risk. It is a demonstrated capability.

The European Parliament voted in January to direct the European Commission to identify areas of excessive foreign dependency. France is not alone in acting on it. Austria’s armed forces have switched from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Denmark’s government committed to the same. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein migrated 44,000 employee inboxes away from Microsoft to open-source alternatives. Germany mandated the Open Document Format for all government files, explicitly excluding Microsoft’s proprietary formats.

This makes so much sense and is long overdue. European governments pay billions each year for Microsoft Software and if the use only a fraction of that each year, they can build amazing open source software.

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How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer

This month’s Artemis II mission carrying a crew of four around the Moon for the first time in over 50 years is supported by one of the most fault-tolerant computer system built for spaceflight. Unlike Apollo, the Orion capsule’s computing architecture manages nearly all of the vessel’s safety-critical functions, from life support to communication routing.

When a mission is 250,000 miles from Earth, failure is unrecoverable. There are no runways for emergency landings and no technicians to swap out a fried motherboard. Every subsystem must be designed to survive cosmic-ray bit flips, radiation-induced latch-ups, and hardware faults without a single second of downtime.

Everything worked, except for Outlook, of course.

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Autonomy is real now

Autonomous vehicles are generally going to be high-utilization vehicles. That’s true because they can be, but also because they need to be in order to justify such high capex. This is an ideal scenario for the electric drivetrain, which has lower maintenance and lower energy costs than the internal combustion engine.¹ The more a vehicle is utilized, the more these operational advantages matter when it comes to the total cost of ownership. Additionally, all of those expensive sensors and chips which need to be packed into an AV also need to be powered, which compounds the efficiency advantage of going electric. It’s just silly to contemplate running 13 cameras, 4 LiDAR units, 6 radar units and multiple GPUs on an internal combustion engine.

I am actually looking forward to letting my car find its parking spot somewhere nearby.

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The New Internet is Coming

This bifurcation won’t just be philosophical, but will reshape value exchange online. The agentic internet will become the backbone of automation, powering decisions, transactions, and supply chains. Its value will lie in speed, scale, and interoperability.

The human internet, on the other hand, will trade in trust, context, creativity, and emotional intelligence, qualities agents can’t fully replicate.

This is where the economics get interesting. Value flows will diverge. Subscription models, creator economies, and premium content will likely skew toward human audiences, while data licensing and training-data markets grow around the agentic mode.

I don’t think we have even begun to understand what this change means.

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Over-the-Air Computation Uses Radio Interference to Crunch Data

The idea takes advantage of a basic physical fact of electromagnetic radiation: When multiple devices transmit simultaneously, their wireless signals naturally combine in the air. Normally, such cross talk is seen as interference, which radios are designed to suppress—especially digital radios with their error-correcting schemes and inherent resistance to low-level noise.

But if we carefully design the transmissions, cross talk can enable a wireless network to directly perform some calculations, such as a sum or an average. Some prototypes today do this with analog-style signaling on otherwise digital radios—so that the superimposed waveforms represent numbers that have been added before digital signal processing takes place.

I remember radio interference from back in the day but I didn’t know it could be useful for data crunching.

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— Nico

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A college‑age researcher used a cat‑meme clip to socially engineer his way into clues about a massive residential‑proxy–based cyberweapon, eventually exposing a network that could have hit tens of millions of consumers and up to a quarter of the world’s corporations.

In the Persian Gulf, military‑grade GPS jamming and spoofing to counter drones and missiles are turning everyday delivery‑app drivers into analog navigators, forcing them to rely on memory and landmarks when their maps vanish, and underscoring how easily “defensive” electronic warfare can bleed into civilian workflow.

Meanwhile, in Wuhan, Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxis suddenly froze mid‑traffic, stranding travelers and generating at least one highway collision, a reminder that even the most advanced autonomy still ships with the kind of “nothing works” moments drivers knew all too well in the analog age.

A look back at Apple in the 1990s shows that the company didn’t just sleepwalk through its post‑Jobs exile; it iterated the Mac, invented the PowerBook, and made strategic bets that quietly laid the groundwork for its later comeback, inviting a more nuanced take on the “Jobs‑as‑sole‑savior” narrative.

Finally, midway through the Artemis II lunar‑flyby mission, astronauts called down to Mission Control puzzled by “two Microsoft Outlooks” that refused to work, turning a low‑level office‑app quirk into a meme‑worthy question: who thought Outlook, of all terrestrial tools, belonged on a spaceship bound for the moon?

Enjoy Five Things Tech! Also, cherish the GPS signal! 🤖

The College Student—and His Cat Meme—Who Hunted the World’s Biggest Cyberweapon

At one point, he asked for some technical details. He followed up with the cat meme: a six-second clip that showed a hand adjusting a necktie on a fluffy gray cat.

Brundage didn’t expect it to work, but he got the information. “It took me by surprise,” he said.

Eventually the leaker hinted there was a new vulnerability on the internet. Brundage, who is 22, would learn it threatened tens of millions of consumers and as much as a quarter of the world’s corporations. As he unraveled the mystery, he impressed veteran researchers with his findings—including federal law enforcement, which took action against the network two weeks ago.

Chad Seaman, a researcher at Akamai, joked at one point that the internet could go down if Brundage spent too much time on his exams.

Social Engineering to take down an evil hacker, that is a nice twist and shows how important it is to understand your opponents.

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In the Gulf, GPS jamming leaves delivery drivers navigating blind

As the conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran rages on for the second month, gig workers say these kinds of GPS-related disruptions have become routine. Military forces across the region are increasingly deploying electronic systems that interfere with Global Navigation Satellite System signals, including GPS, to defend against drones and missile attacks. These systems can jam signals entirely or spoof them by feeding false location data to receivers. The interference often spills into civilian life, disrupting the lives of millions of people who rely on tools like maps. For delivery drivers, the breakdown is both immediate and disorienting.

I didn’t think of this angle before, but sure, if you need to rely on GPS to get your job done, you’re screwed.

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Robot Taxis Stop in Traffic in Chinese City, Stranding Travelers

The police in Wuhan, a large metropolis in central China, announced on Wednesday that they had received a “succession” of reports that self-driving cars had stopped. The cars were part of the extensive Apollo Go program of self-driving cars run in Wuhan by Baidu, a large Chinese internet company.

The police said an unspecified “system failure” had occurred, and did not say how many cars had been affected. Baidu has hundreds of the cars in Wuhan, where they have become a common sight.

I think self-driving cars will make our roads safer and our cities more livable. We will have to get used to these kind of scenarios though, where all of a sudden nothing works. Like back in the 70s when the car just wouldn’t start in the morning or would just go silent in the middle of an intersection. We tend to forget that new technology always needs some time.

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The triumphs and failures of Apple without Steve Jobs

It’s a famous story on its way to becoming legendary: Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple in 1985, spent more than a decade in the wilderness, and then returned to Apple in 1997 to save it from bankruptcy and transform it into one of the world’s most valuable companies.

That’s true, so far as it goes, but this interregnum is too often simplified as when Apple CEO John Sculley got rid of Steve and ruined the company. And that’s really not true. Not only was the Jobs who was ejected from Apple completely unprepared to run the company (as his disastrous but educational years at NeXT would prove), but the Apple of this period had some real accomplishments.

From making necessary changes to the Mac to the creation of the PowerBook, Apple didn’t simply weather the 12 years without Jobs. The company made shifts, adaptations, and decisions that would become foundational to its future. Were there missteps? Most definitely. But ignoring Apple’s successes over those dozen years undermines the truer, deeper story of how Apple survived to become the behemoth it is today.

I remember that phase very well. I started university in 93 and bought a Mac Performa 600, later I bought a used Powerbook 145b, which I would carry into the library even though the battery would last only for 30 mins and of course there where no sockets anywhere as people still used pencil and paper.

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Artemis II Astronauts Have ‘Two Microsoft Outlooks’ and Neither Work

In 1969, the three astronauts of the Apollo 10 mission conducted a momentous “dress rehearsal” for putting humans on the lunar surface for the first time. It was a historic, inspiring moment for humanity; Astronaut John Young watched from a command module spacecraft as Thomas Stafford and Gene Cernan broke away and flew a lunar module within 10 miles of the moon’s surface, then reunited to return home to Earth. It’s from this mission that we have one of the most powerful transcripts in NASA history:

“Who did what?” Young asked. “Where did that come from?” Cernan added.

“Give me a napkin quick,” Stafford said. “There’s a turd floating through the air.”

The provenance of the poop remains one of the great mysteries of spaceflight. Today, in the early Earth-morning hours of the Artemis II astronauts’ history-mirroring mission around the moon, we have another: Why is Microsoft Outlook not working in space?

How can they think that relying on a Microsoft product when flying to the moon would be a good idea?

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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The quiet comeback of the CPU, a solar‑powered tractor that walks behind the farmer, and a missile that costs less than a car are all quietly reshaping the world in ways that feel more like sci‑fi than business‑as‑usual headlines.

AI is reviving CPUs as workhorses for agentic workloads, solar micro tractors are lifting small‑scale farming in Malawi, cheap hypersonic missiles are reshaping global defense economics, and the quantum threat to today’s encryption is pushing a quiet but urgent shift to post‑quantum standards - all underscored by the simple idea that most of the energy we use already comes from the sun, if only we would stop treating it like a backup option instead of the default.

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The CPU Was Left for Dead by AI. Now AI Is Bringing It Back.

For the past few years, central processing units, or CPUs—the core engines of most computers, from laptops to smartphones to data-center servers—have been something of an afterthought in the world of artificial-intelligence computing. Now, thanks to how fast AI is changing, they are the belles of the ball.

The explosion of so-called agentic AI has driven a wave of demand for CPUs, and chip companies are moving quickly to capitalize on it. Nvidia, the semiconductor giant, is known best for making powerful graphics processing units, or GPUs, which accelerate the computing needed to train and run complex AI models. It announced last week that it would offer a new server rack consisting only of its Vera CPUs, with no graphics cards attached.

We all love a good comeback story!

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Solar-powered micro electric tractors bring light to farmers in Malawi

Developed by Aftrak, a business spun out of Loughborough University, in England, the waist-height “micro electric tractor” powers itself forward, while a farmer steers it as they walk behind. It features a steel “hardpan breaker” that pierces the layer of compacted soil commonly found at the surface of manually farmed fields in sub-Saharan Africa.

Breaching this layer and making deep furrows allows roots and rainwater to penetrate the soil, which slows soil erosion and maxmizes water absorbtion, making the soil more resilient to droughts.

This is a great example of the power of technology. Just imagine how this can increase the standard of living for so many people.

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One Way or Another, Most of Our Electricity Comes From Solar Power

Of course, the Earth is curved, so that declines as you move toward the poles. But in a good spot, with a panel that has a conversion efficiency of 20 percent, you can get up to 200 W/m2. That means it takes just a few panels to provide all the electricity a home needs. So yes, most of the energy we use comes from the sun. You might even think of fossil fuel deposits as batteries, storing solar power for future civilizations. But with the old technologies, we’re getting that energy indirectly, after multiple conversions from one form to another—and inevitable losses along the way. Why not cut out the middlemen and go direct? No carbon emissions, no air pollution, no radioactive waste, no mining or transportation costs. And the sun’s going to keep shining for 5 billion years.

It’s so absurd that we are talking about gas prizes right now. We should all have EV and get energy from local solar and wind parks.

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China’s ‘dirt cheap’ hypersonic missiles could upend global defence markets

The ‘cement-coated’ YKJ-1000 could prove ‘formidably competitive’ internationally if sold at the relatively cheap price of US$99,000

Chinese aerospace firm Lingkong Tianxing unveiled a hypersonic glide missile last week that has a range of up to 1,300 km (800 miles) and a top speed of Mach 7.

A rocket that costs as much as a car and can be fired out of something that looks like a shipping container. While we are still trying to understand how drones change warfare, here comes the next huge challenge.

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Quantum frontiers may be closer than they appear

Quantum computers will pose a significant threat to current cryptographic standards, and specifically to encryption and digital signatures. The threat to encryption is relevant today with store-now-decrypt-later attacks, while digital signatures are a future threat that require the transition to PQC prior to a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC). That’s why we’ve adjusted our threat model to prioritize PQC migration for authentication services — an important component of online security and digital signature migrations. We recommend that other engineering teams follow suit.

2029 - that’s very soon. I guess it is time to start thinking about encryption again.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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China’s robotics boom feels equal parts thrilling and dystopian: deep‑learning‑driven humanoid robots are learning to navigate the physical world the way ChatGPT learned language, by ingesting data until something vaguely like dexterity emerges, and the ambition is to replace legions of factory workers with machines that do not complain, unionize, or ask for bathroom breaks. At the same time, Russia is pulling off a spectacular self‑own: after systematically blocking Meta, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Musk, and everyone else, the Kremlin has now turned much of its own connectivity into a rolling outage, leaving millions of citizens staring at dead‑end apps while their bot armies keep spamming Western inboxes. And on top of all that, Cloudflare’s CEO warns that bots will soon swamp human traffic online, so if you’re still building websites as if only people will visit them, you are already running your stack on an outdated assumption.

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The Myspace Dilemma Facing ChatGPT

Will the AI market be any different? No and yes. A year ago, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was a generic name, the Coke or Kleenex of generative-AI chatbots. Today, its competitors, especially Anthropic’s Claude, are advancing quickly. OpenAI’s fall from favor looks inevitable.

But AI appears to work nothing like delivery apps, smartphones, social networks, or even computer operating systems. If ChatGPT becomes outmoded, it won’t be the result of OpenAI losing ground or failing to innovate. Instead, the entire generative-AI sector will have become a commodity, like soft drinks or facial tissues. That process has already begun.

None of the releases by OpenAI in the last 12 months got me excited. Claude and Gemini are setting the pace right now and also the direction of development. OpenAI sits between a rock and hard place now.

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How Pokémon Go is giving delivery robots an inch-perfect view of the world

Now Niantic Spatial is using that vast and unparalleled trove of crowdsourced data—images of urban landmarks tagged with super-accurate location markers taken from the phones of hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players around the world—to build a kind of world model, a buzzy new technology that grounds the smarts of LLMs in real-world environments.

The company’s latest product is a model that it says can pinpoint your location on a map to within a few centimeters, based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in view. The firm wants to use it to help robots navigate with greater precision in places where GPS is unreliable.

Interesting turn of events. Millions of people walk around catching imaginary pokemon figures and now those datapoints help delivery bots. I didn’t see that coming.

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Inside China’s robotics revolution

As in much of the world, AI has become part of everyday life in China. But what most excites Chinese politicians and industrialists are the strides being made in the field of robotics, which, when combined with advances in AI, could revolutionise the world of work. The technology behind China’s current robotics boom is deep learning, the mathematical engine behind large language models such as ChatGPT, which learn by discerning patterns from huge datasets. Many researchers believe that machines can learn to navigate the physical world the way ChatGPT learned to navigate language: not by following rules, but by absorbing enough data for something like human dexterity to emerge. The aim, for many technologists, is the development of humanoid robots capable of performing factory labour – work that employs hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The current developments in humanoid robotics are breathtaking, but still I can’t envision having these robots around us all the time.

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A superpower goes offline

Telegram would be joining a home screen’s worth of apps that have become useless to Russians. Kremlin policymakers have already blocked or limited access to WhatsApp, along with parent company Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Google’s YouTube, Apple’s FaceTime, Snapchat and X, which like SpaceX is owned by Musk. Encrypted messaging apps Signal and Discord, as well as Japanese-owned Viber, have been inaccessible since 2024. Last month, President Vladimir Putin signed a law requiring telecom operators to block cellular and fixed internet access at the request of the Federal Security Service. Shortly after it took effect on March 3, Moscow residents reported widespread problems with mobile internet, calls and text messages across all major operators for several days, with outages affecting mobile service and Wi-Fi even inside the State Duma.

I am sure that Russian people will continue to figure out how to circumvent the firewalls. Also, I wish they would also take their bot-armies offline that spam Western democracies with their crap.

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Online bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO says

Prince explained that bots’ web usage has been increasing alongside the growth of generative AI technology because bots are capable of visiting far more sites to get answers for users’ chatbot queries.

“If a human were doing a task — let’s say you were shopping for a digital camera — and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that’s doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit,” Prince said. “So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account.”

Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google’s web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company is used by one-fifth of all websites. But beyond some other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and bad actors.

I didn’t expect this to happen so soon. So now we have to build websites for humans and agents.

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— Nico

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Iran's targeted cyber strikes on Gulf states' AI data centers, hitting Amazon-hosted services like Abu Dhabi banking and Careem apps, expose how these multi-billion hubs are soft targets in regional conflicts, especially with vulnerable undersea cables, likely redirecting investments to safer spots amid escalating tensions.

Meanwhile, offshore wind farms' radar interference is being flipped into a defense asset for better low-altitude missile detection via shared turbine signals, while Pentagon eyes Ukraine's rapid drone innovations to counter Iran's cheap swarms that outpace legacy U.S. missiles.

Tech's circular swings resurface old ideas in new guises until the right tweak clicks, much like MIT's photonic "ski jumps" beaming light off chips to turbocharge quantum computing by solving on-chip light-trapping woes.

Fascinating how geopolitics and engineering hacks keep reshaping our digital battlegrounds.

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Why Iran is targeting the artificial intelligence infrastructure of Gulf countries

Since Amazon is the preferred partner of many companies and governments in the region, the attacks caused immediate disruptions: customers of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, one of the largest banks in the Emirates, had trouble accessing their online banking services; readers of the business news outlet Enterprise were unable to access its website; and users of the Careem app were unable to order a taxi or food delivery.

Iranian attacks against the digital ecosystems of its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf are considered among the first military actions of their kind in the world, and have exposed new vulnerabilities in these countries, including their multi-billion-dollar investment to become a hub for the development of artificial intelligence (AI). For Iran, it has been a cheap and effective way to disrupt public and private services, while for its neighbors in the region, it has served as a warning about their economic diversification strategies.

Those big data centers are easy targets that are hard to defend - and the underwater fiber cables are also a vulnerability in a war. It will be interesting to see how the war in Iran will lead to a rededication of data center investment budgets as it probably now is easier to justify building datacenter in calmer regions.

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How Do Wind Farms Interfere With Radar?

Putting surface radar on turbines is something many offshore wind operators do already to track their crew vessels and to detect unauthorized ships within their arrays. Sharing those signals, or even sharing the equipment, can give national defense forces an expanded view of ships moving within and around the turbines. It can also improve detection of low altitude cruises missiles, says Bekkering, which can evade air defense radars.

I wasn’t aware of this issue with nationals security and windparks, but it is good to see that engineers are figuring out how to use windparks as an advantage when it comes to defense.

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The Circular Nature of Technology

One unexpected way artificial intelligence has changed my life is by making me nostalgic. Watching the technology sector evolve over the last few decades, I’ve begun noticing something less discussed: many trends in technology repeat in a circular fashion.

What looks like progress is often oscillation. Technology rarely moves in straight lines: it swings between extremes before settling into something more balanced. To express the case for this circularity, I’m going to outline a few examples out of several in different areas of technology.

The interesting thing about tech that oftentimes we need multiple approaches that differ just a tad and then we finally figure out how it works.

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Iran adds new urgency to Pentagon’s Ukraine drone deal

The Iranian counterattack with cheap, easily produced drones has exposed a vulnerability for the U.S. and its regional allies, adding new urgency for the Pentagon to close a deal with Ukraine that has been in the works for the better part of a year.

Any agreement on sharing technology to counter Iranian drones could be a boon for the U.S. and many of its closest partners, who are shooting multi-million dollar missiles at $50,000 drones. It also marks one of the few times Ukraine can publicly offer the U.S. something of immediate value as it seeks financial and military support for its four-year campaign against Russia.

Drone tech is evolving so quickly right now, it is so hard to keep up, especially for the legacy companies of the defense industry. The Ukrainians have perfected the release early, release often model of drone tech.

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MIT scientists built photonic ‘ski jumps’ that beam light off chips for faster quantum computing

Inside most photonic chips, light races through tiny optical wires. It carries information far faster than electricity can in many conventional systems. But once that light is trapped on the chip, sending it out into open space in a controlled, scalable way becomes much harder. A team led by researchers at MIT and MITRE now says it has built a way around that bottleneck. They did this using microscopic structures that curl upward from the chip surface like ski jumps.

Chip technology is something I do not understand the least bit (pun intended), but I find this utterly fascinating.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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Meanwhile, philosopher Hans Jonas reminds us that organisms aren't mere machines and minds aren't just computers, a perspective gaining traction among neuroscientists and physicists as we wrestle with what makes intelligence actually intelligent.

Ukraine has flipped the script from weapon recipient to weapons innovator, with European nations like Germany now partnering through "Build With Ukraine" to access battle-tested drone and electronic warfare expertise, which I've seen firsthand working with a German startup that hired a Ukrainian AI drone specialist whose frontline experience is simply unmatched.

The debate over which arcade deserves the "world's largest" title matters less than the nostalgia it triggers, that symphony of trilling game sounds and pizza smell transporting any 80s kid back to simpler times when pockets full of coins meant an afternoon of pure joy.

These shifts in software creation, our understanding of life and intelligence, warfare innovation, and cultural memory all point to how quickly our assumptions about what's possible keep getting upended.

This is my very subjective and opinionated selection of articles you should read this week.

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The Factory Model: How Coding Agents Changed Software Engineering

New website creation is up 40% year over year. New iOS apps are up nearly 50%. GitHub code pushes jumped 35% in the US. All of these metrics were flat for years before late 2024. The graphs look like hockey sticks. People who have never written a line of code are building and launching software.

Keep in mind, we can and should note that more quantity does not necessarily mean better quality. But the fact remains that the barrier to creating software has dropped dramatically, and that is a fundamental shift in the landscape of software engineering.

The barrier to creating software has genuinely dropped. That is not hype. What it means for professional engineers is not that their skills are less valuable, but that the skills that matter have shifted up the stack, as they have in every previous transition.

This is such a huge change we are going through right now and most people do not even realize it. I am spending so much time with coding agents and I just enjoy it. Check out ANTIGRAVITY.md for a start with Google Antigravity.

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Why organisms are more than machines

There are basic technical grounds to be skeptical of that claim, but beyond that, a much deeper issue lies at the boundary between science and philosophy: What makes life different from non-life? Why is a rock inert and insensate, while even the simplest cell manifests open-ended activity in the relentless pursuit of staying alive? Since the only systems that indisputably display intelligence are alive, if we can’t understand life, we’re probably missing something essential about intelligence.

Sixty years ago, an influential but little-known philosopher named Hans Jonas gave a potent, creative, and radical answer to this question of what makes life different from non-life. In the decades since, the power and reach of his perspective have gained traction. Today, for a growing group of researchers — in fields ranging from neuroscience to the physics of complex systems — Jonas has become an incisive voice arguing forcefully that organisms are more than just machines, and minds are more than just computers.

This is something to think about.

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How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

A project like this would normally take a team of engineers months, if not years. Several teams at various companies have attempted it, and the scope is just enormous. We tried once at Cloudflare! Two routers, 33+ module shims, server rendering pipelines, RSC streaming, file-system routing, middleware, caching, static export. There’s a reason nobody has pulled it off.

This time we did it in under a week. One engineer (technically engineering manager) directing AI.

The first commit landed on February 13. By the end of that same evening, both the Pages Router and App Router had basic SSR working, along with middleware, server actions, and streaming. By the next afternoon, App Router Playground was rendering 10 of 11 routes. By day three, vinext deploy was shipping apps to Cloudflare Workers with full client hydration. The rest of the week was hardening: fixing edge cases, expanding the test suite, bringing API coverage to 94%.

What changed from those earlier attempts? AI got better. Way better.

$1100 spent for coding agents and then Next.js got rebuilt.

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Ukraine Depended on Western Weaponry. Now That Script Has Flipped.

European nations are snapping up Ukrainian front-line know-how, helping NATO militaries rewire themselves for a transformed battlefield that is dominated by drones and electronic warfare, and where even new weapons can become obsolete in a few months.

For countries like Germany, the “Build With Ukraine” initiative allows them to couple state subsidies with Ukrainian innovation, revitalizing sluggish economies and retooling ailing factories. For Ukraine, it means more weapons to its troops—paid for by its allies.

I am working with a German drone startup that just hired a Ukrainian AI drone specialist and sureley he has a really strong experience that is hard to match anywhere else.

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Which of these two arcades is the “world largest”—and does it matter?

That’s just one of the arcade[s many rarities, all beautifully laid out in an expansive, red-carpeted room with just barely enough lighting to keep you from tripping over your friends as you wander around, mouth agape.

The constant trilling tones of all those vintage machines make for a discordant symphony better than any orchestra could produce. You also get a whiff of the pizza and french fries from the cafeteria down the hall. Like Proust with his madeleines, it’s enough to warp any child of the ’80s back to simpler times.

I remember quite well the time I spent in arcades when I was a kid. Great times, and so many coins in my pockets that I spent for awesome games.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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This is my very subjective and opinionated selection of articles you should read this week.

Enjoy Five Things Tech! 🤖

Inside Apple’s Push to Build an All-American Chip

The quarter-mile long facility begins with a digital-era Stonehenge: a room of 35-foot-tall machines that grow torpedo-shaped silicon ingots weighing hundreds of pounds. The ingots are cut into wafers, polished and placed into special shipping containers that will carry them throughout the chip supply chain so their delicate properties aren’t ruined.

Apple is helping the company sell its wafers by pushing TSMC and other chip makers to use them, said Mark England, president of GlobalWafers’s U.S. operation. The company hopes Apple’s help will enable it to expand the facility faster, said England, in part to take advantage of tax credits.

Apple designs its own chips. TSMC makes them. Apple has helped anoint TSMC as the world’s dominant chip manufacturer by committing to use TSMC’s leading-edge technology, also called a process node, in its designs. That gives TSMC confidence to invest gigantic sums in the new plants each successive chip generation requires.

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Your smart TV may be crawling the web for AI

The catch? With Bright’s SDK, a viewer’s smart TV becomes part of a massive global proxy network that crawls and scrapes the web. Including apps running on desktop PCs and mobile devices, the company claims to operate 150 million such residential proxies worldwide. Together, these devices gather petabytes of public web data from a wide range of different locations and IP addresses. This approach allows the company to capture localized versions of websites, but also helps to circumvent web crawler blacklists.

And I always wondered how those residential proxies really work. Now I know.

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A World Where All Is Free? That’s Elon Musk’s Theory of ‘Sustainable Abundance.’

Mr. Musk’s push for sustainable abundance is a window into what appears to be his rising techno-optimism. It is a major departure from his position a decade ago when he said unchecked A.I. would destroy the human race.

The concept gives Mr. Musk, 54, an organizing mission for his companies, which he can use to promote and expand his businesses through new technologies. It helps explain why Tesla is trying to shift from electric cars, where sales have flagged, to servant-like robots called Optimus. SpaceX, which merged with xAI this month, has said it wants to build A.I. data centers in space and “self-growing bases on the Moon,” as it prepares for an initial public offering that could take place as soon as June.

I think that Mr. Musk, 54, should shoot himself up to Mars and stay there.

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The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents

While skills measured by these tests, like literacy and numeracy, aren’t always indicative of intelligence, they are a reflection of cognitive capability, which Horvath said has been on the decline over the last decade or so.

Citing Program for International Student Assessment data taken from 15-year-olds around the world and other standardized tests, Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores. He blamed students having unfettered access to technology that atrophied rather than bolstered learning capabilities. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 also didn’t help.

I’m not alarmed by this. I think we are all running in high speed right now and trying to ty our shoelaces by doing so. We are still in the early days of figuring out the digital stuff around us.

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Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible

Most people call them “internet cables,” but technically, fiber-optic transmission was developed for telephone calls. One of the people involved was an English scientist named Alec Reeves, who also spent his time working on psychokinesis and telepathy. With fiber, voices become light, pulsate across spiderweb-thin strings of glass, and become voices again in your handset on the other end. Maybe there isn’t that much of a conceptual leap between that and moving things with your mind. TAT is short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone, and TAT-8—built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom—was the eighth transoceanic system across the Atlantic. It was the first to use optical fibers to transmit traffic between Europe and the United States. Fiber optics for communication had only been worked out in theory in the 1960s, and terrestrial cables were first used in the 1970s. But using this technology to span continents was practically tantamount to human galactic expansion. When TAT-8 went into service on December 14, 1988, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov spoke on video link from New York to audiences in Paris and London: “Welcome everyone to this historic transatlantic crossing,” he said, “this maiden voyage across the sea on a beam of light.” AT&T made a TV ad, in which an earnest voice-over promised a “worldwide intelligent network” where people could send information in any format to anyone they want.

And I remember how expensive those trans-atlantic calls where in the late 80s, early 90s. Something my kids will never understand. To me, those cables are just a marvelous piece of technology.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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Welcome back to Five Things Tech! Innovation needs risk, but Europe has made risk expensive. When firing costs four times more in France or Germany than in the U.S., experimentation slows, and so does ambition. Yet maybe the real problem isn’t labor law at all, but a deeper cultural complacency: too little appetite to back new ideas with big, sustained investments. Meanwhile, a global wave of digital regulation, from teen social media bans to surveillance debates, shows how much we struggle to balance progress and protection.

Oh, and in case you missed it: Meta’s AI glasses are already causing chaos in classrooms, nanoLEDs are literally bending light, and U.S. funding for internet freedom just fell off a cliff. So much going on in Tech - read up!

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Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla

What really sets Europe apart from states like California is different. Relative to income, it costs large companies four times more to lay off Germans and French than American workers, a difference arising entirely from different regulatory approaches. As a result, it virtually never happens: Americans are ten times more likely to be fired than Germans in any given year. In this respect, the European economy differs greatly from the American one. By American standards, a European business has to be exceptionally confident that it will want an employee for a long time before hiring them.

This may sound like a great virtue of European life, and in a way it is. But it has costs. If you make it expensive to fire people, then companies may pay them less in order to balance out employment costs, or they may not employ people at all. To understand the innovation gap, however, there is a third effect that is even more important. If it is expensive to lay people off, employers avoid creating jobs that they might subsequently discontinue. Innovation involves experimentation and risk, so jobs in innovative areas of the economy are more likely to be discontinued than jobs elsewhere. High severance costs create a fundamental incentive for European businesses to avoid innovative areas and concentrate on safe, unchanging ones. In the long run, this is a recipe for decline.

This article has been discussed online the last few days, so I guess I need to chime in. I do not think it is the labour laws that is holding Europe back, it is a lack of appetite to invest into new ideas and then follow through with even larger investments. Complacency is slowing the contintent down more than its labour laws.

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From Paris to New Delhi, the Push to Ban Teens From Social Media Is Going Global

What started as an isolated regulatory gamble by Australia last fall has spread to more than a dozen capitals, where leaders are seizing on issues raised by childhood scrolling to appeal to parents across the political spectrum.

It adds to a growing backlash against teenage smartphone use, which is being blamed by some critics for deteriorating mental health and an epidemic of screen addiction.

From Paris to New Delhi, limits on children’s access to apps such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube are now being debated or implemented, marking a tipping point in the conversation about regulating social media and a potential blockage in tech companies’ pipeline of users.

As a parent, I think it is better to educate than to take away - and I also think that we need to regulate better. TikTok, Meta and others should not be able to create algorithms that suck people in so much.

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Meta’s A.I. Smart Glasses Are Wreaking Havoc in Schools Across the Country. It’s Only Going to Get Worse.

After pushing billions of dollars into the metaverse, Meta has now found overwhelming demand for its Ray-Ban display glasses, which allow users to take photos, stream content, and talk to an A.I. assistant. Waitlists for the product have surged, and the company’s pivot away from the metaverse and toward smart glasses has become aggressive: Hundreds of Meta workers in the Reality Labs division and virtual games studios were laid off, product rollout was paused to address the supply shortage, and it was reported that Meta and EssilorLuxottica, Ray-Ban’s owner, are discussing possibly doubling production capacity for the A.I.-powered glasses by the end of this year, all in a bid to capitalize on the growing demand as well as get ahead of competitors.

But its usages—specifically its ability to capture photo and video—have raised questions about how the devices will be applied in real life, especially in settings among children and young adults. Issues around academic dishonesty, classroom surveillance, and harassment have been growing in recent years but have been exacerbated as students gain access to the controversial wearable.

These kinds of glasses will be common place very soon and we will have to live with it. As always, not everyone is using new technology the right way. Again, we need better regulation.

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New Approaches to LED

But the tiniest nanoLEDs may have even more exotic applications, because they’re smaller than the wavelengths of their light. “From a process point of view, you are making a new component that was not possible in the past,” Shih says.

For example, Shih’s group showed their nano-OLEDs could form a metasurface—a structure that uses its pixels’ nano-sizes to control how each pixel interacts with its neighbors. One day, similar devices could focus nanoLED light into laser-like beams or create holographic 3D nanoLED displays.

Wow, that is truly stunning stuff.

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US funding for global internet freedom ‘effectively gutted’

Meanwhile, the Trump administration this January withdrew from the Freedom Online Coalition, a global alliance set up by the US to defend digital rights.

The cuts risk curtailing technologies that helped Iranians to coordinate during recent anti-government protests, and that allowed videos and images of massacres to reach the outside world. They could have a major impact in other nations too; the efforts of groups in Myanmar to get past the junta’s “digital iron curtain”, and the ability of users in China to avoid surveillance.

Despots everywhere are happy about Trump and his MAGA idiots.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

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