Five Things Tech: Disposable Software, Data Center Energy, Solar, Battery Tech, Brain-Computer Interface
This is everything you should read about Tech right now.
This week the theme writes itself: everything is getting faster, and everything that powers it is racing to keep up. AI can now ship a working app in an afternoon, which is great until you ask who keeps all that disposable software running, and how much electricity the whole thing burns. Down at the physical layer the ground is shifting too, with solar finally edging past coal and tiny 3-D printed batteries getting genuinely impressive. And to close, a reminder of what this tech is actually for: a brain-computer interface giving an ALS patient his voice and a full-time job back.
Tech is just so crazy innovative these days, or maybe decades, it’s all a blur, it’s so fast…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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