Powderhorn

No less than Stephen Pinker claiming this is news?

This happened with a fresh-out-of-college designer (god forbid copyeditors had editing skills) in 2016. In Austin. I was there that night.

I was on a different team, but come morning, yeah, we were all mocking her for her lack of a hyphen. At the same time, I was the only designer exempt from running a site's heds verbatim. Of course something like this was going to happen.

To claim this recently happened with a nonsensical upside-down folio is ... I usually reach for "absurd" here, and as I've already burned "nonsensical," I'll just go with "unhinged."

Pinker knows better, and I'm slightly inclined to point out the provenance that claims a local paper (already an ethical violation) was responsible for what I saw happen in real time in Austin.

God, I hated those stylesheets, but they're rather damning when it comes to proving A) this was designed at the hub; and B) you're claiming local reporting -- complete with byline -- you didn't do.

Anyone still confused about why I walked away?

With 22 minutes to spare, we once again have a TACO retreat. But in two weeks, it'll still be Tuesday.

The US and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire on Tuesday evening after a last-minute diplomatic intervention led by Pakistan, canceling an ultimatum from Donald Trump for Iran to surrender or face widespread destruction.

Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire agreement came less than two hours before the US president’s self-imposed 8pm Eastern time deadline to bomb Iran’s power plants and bridges in a move that legal scholars, as well as officials from numerous countries and the Pope, had warned could constitute war crimes.

Just hours earlier, Trump had written on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” B-52 bombers were reported to be en route to Iran before the ceasefire agreement was announced.

But by Tuesday evening, Trump announced that a ceasefire agreement had been mediated through Pakistan, whose prime minister Shehbaz Sharif had requested the two-week peace in order to “allow diplomacy to run its course”.

When the first M1 Apple Silicon systems sprouted at the end of 2020, we loved the tech but not the walled garden it grew in. Apple had complete control over all its platforms and could set its own rules, but only to become more Apple-y. There was a whole world outside that area where Apple Silicon would never tread, even if Cupertino could iterate fast enough to keep up. Plus, Apple's appliance sensibility limited its expansion options, especially with performance dependent on its own silicon.

More than five years on, that remains true. Yes, the architecture can iterate at least as fast as anything else in its class. It turns out that gigabit Wi-Fi, 10 Gb Ethernet, and high speed expansion is not such a problem anymore. Otherwise, if you ignore embedded niche cases that nobody cares about, Apple is still where it started, in desktops and laptops. It has even lost one form factor. And ironically, the most exciting new machine for years, the Macbook Neo, doesn't even have an M-type SoC in it.

And yet, that Macbook Neo has given the Windows world the fear, precisely because of the Apple Silicon walled garden strategy. A simple equation has reached a critical point, and it may be irreversible. Every year of Apple Silicon, the experience of using a Mac has gotten better. Every year of Windows 11, the experience of using a PC has gotten worse.

Sixteen miles north of Albuquerque, in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, an Intel chip plant sits on more than 200 acres of land. The site was established in the 1980s, part of it built on top of a sod farm. In 2007, as Intel’s business faltered, operations in one of the key fabs, Fab 9, came to a halt. Employees say families of raccoons and a badger took up residence in the space.

Then, in January 2024, the dormant fab was booted up again. Intel funneled billions into the facility, including $500 million it was granted from the US CHIPS Act. Now, Fab 9 and its neighbor, Fab 11X, are critical infrastructure for one of Intel’s quietly fast-growing businesses: advanced chip packaging.

Packaging involves combining multiple chiplets, or smaller components, onto a single, custom chip. Over the past six months, Intel has been signaling that its advanced packaging business, which operates within the Foundry chip-making arm of the company, is having a growth spurt. The company’s efforts around this have it going head-to-head with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, which far surpasses Intel’s production in terms of scale. But in an era where AI is driving demand for all kinds of computing power, and leading nearly every major tech company to consider making its own custom chips, Intel thinks this effort can help it grab a bigger slice of the AI pie.

One point in favor of the sprawling Linux ecosystem is its broad hardware support—the kernel officially supports everything from ’90s-era PC hardware to Arm-based Apple Silicon chips, thanks to decades of combined effort from hardware manufacturers and motivated community members.

But nothing can last forever, and for a few years now, Linux maintainers (including Linus Torvalds) have been pushing to drop kernel support for Intel’s 80486 processor. This chip was originally introduced in 1989, was replaced by the first Intel Pentium in 1993, and was fully discontinued in 2007. Code commits suggest that Linux kernel version 7.1 will be the first to follow through, making it impossible to build a version of the kernel that will support the 486; Phoronix says that additional kernel changes to remove 486-related code will follow in subsequent kernel versions.

Although these chips haven’t changed in decades, maintaining support for them in modern software isn’t free.

“In the x86 architecture we have various complicated hardware emulation facilities on x86-32 to support ancient 32-bit CPUs that very, very few people are using with modern kernels,” writes Linux kernel contributor Ingo Molnar in his initial patch removing 486 support from the kernel. “This compatibility glue is sometimes even causing problems that people spend time to resolve, which time could be spent on other things.”

Too soon?

The Supreme Court yesterday overturned a 5th Circuit ruling that could have forced Internet service provider Grande Communications to terminate broadband subscribers accused of piracy.

Yesterday’s ruling follows a precedent-setting decision last month in which the Supreme Court threw out a 4th Circuit ruling against Cox Communications, another ISP accused by record labels of not doing enough to fight piracy. In the case involving Cox and Sony, the court said that “a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”

N.B.: This looks an awful lot like the litigation and resolution surrounding VCRs. (Ask your parents.)

Cox is one of several cases in which record labels sought financial damages from ISPs that continued to serve customers whose IP addresses were repeatedly traced to torrent downloads or uploads. In October 2024, record labels Universal, Warner, and Sony got a win over Grande when the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit decided the ISP was liable for contributory copyright infringement.

The conservative-leaning 5th Circuit court held in a 3-0 decision that “Grande knew (or was willfully blind to) the identities of its infringing subscribers” but “made the choice to continue providing services to them anyway, rather than taking simple measures to prevent infringement.” But the 5th Circuit now has to reconsider the Grande v. UMG case after a two-sentence ruling issued yesterday by the Supreme Court.

Grande’s petition “for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for further consideration in light of Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment,” the Supreme Court said.

In the realm of his other unrealistic plans and potentially broken promises, Elon Musk's Terafab stands out as one of the biggest pipedreams, promising to boost semiconductor production by 50x for the benefit of orbital datacenters. But hey, this idea must have legs, because now Intel has announced it is joining the aspiring Bond villain's initiative.

"If you add up all the fabs on earth combined, they're only about 2% of what we need for the… Terafab project," Musk said.

In case you were wondering, Musk has never built a wafer fab before. Neither have any of his companies. So when the world's richest man revealed a pie-in-the-sky plan to build a factory capable of churning out enough chips to make his dream a reality, folks were understandably skeptical.

Fabs are among the most complex and expensive facilities in the world. It can cost $30 billion and take as long as five years to bring a modestly-sized facility online, and that's if you already know what you're doing.

There is nothing modest about what Musk has proposed.

But at least it's "going to be happening" in a city with skyrocketing electrical costs and in a yearslong drought.

"We will have all of the equipment necessary to make a chip of any kind [including] logical memory," Musk said of the first Terafab facility, which will purportedly be located in Austin, Texas, which has become the fabulist hecto-billionaire's geographic center of gravity over the last few years. "So in a single building, we can create a lithography mask, make the chip, test the chip, make another mask, and have an incredibly fast recursive loop for improving the chip design."

Let's be reasonable. It's not going to be "in" Austin, because then the city has jurisdiction. Just look out for annexation, Elon.

Every day I meet strangers who share intimate details with me. It’s called reading. In a newspaper piece a former sex addict recalls her need for BDSM (“when a sexual partner hurt me, I felt seen”) and how she conquered her dependency. On Substack an actor describes her grief on losing a baby (“After the miscarriage, I became convinced my daughter was backstage. I would push back the costumes on the rack and almost expect to find her”). And then there are the published memoirs, first-person stories of trauma, displacement and heartbreak. It’s not just women who unburden themselves, of course. As Martin Amis says in his memoir, Experience: “We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the CV, the cri de coeur.”

Recent memoirs have upped the ante, though. What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers) is now open to anyone with a story to tell – “nobody memoirs”, the American journalist Lorraine Adams has called them. Candour is the key, no matter how fraught the consequences. “Most writers I know,” Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts, “nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things – or the horrible thing – that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they desire”. But she takes that risk, addressing the book to “you”, her fluidly gendered husband Harry (who’s angry when she shows him a draft), while exploring identity, pregnancy, motherhood and sexuality.

“The words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the concrete floor”; this appears in the first paragraph of The Argonauts in 2015. It’s hard to imagine an author volunteering that 30 years ago, or being allowed to be so passionately upfront (and violently facedown) at the start of the story. I remember the embarrassment I felt in the 1990s, walking into the office one morning, after a reviewer in the Sunday papers had noted a passage in the memoir of my father I’d written in which I describe masturbating in the bath around the time of his death. What possessed me to disclose that? What would my colleagues think of me? I wouldn’t need to be so blushingly shy about it today.

Warning: long read.

Guests were enticed with the promise of luxury villas overlooking aquamarine seas; a world-first crypto resort where the tech elite could commune over the latest digital innovation in opulent surrounds.

The promotional material from June last year pitched a sprawling, futuristic development that would hug the coastline of Timor-Leste, one of the world’s poorest countries, and donate a percentage of profits to philanthropy.

But in February, when a joint investigative team visited the proposed site of the AB Digital Technology Resort – separated from Dili airport by a barbed-wire fence – we found an empty plot dotted with shrubs.

The planned resort is at the heart of a four-month investigation by the Guardian and Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project into an obscure cryptocurrency and blockchain network known as AB.

As I've always said, there are just too many labels.

Billionaire Bill Ackman’s hedge fund has offered to buy Universal Music Group (UMG) in a deal that values the world’s biggest music company at about €55bn (£48bn).

Pershing Square, the New-York based hedge fund, has made a bid for the business, which is home to artists including Taylor Swift and Elton John, with a cash and stock deal that would move its stock market listing from Amsterdam to New York.

Ackman said in a statement that while the company, which is led by the British-born Sir Lucian Grainge, had done “an excellent job nurturing and continuing to build a world-class artist roster and generating strong business performance”, its share price had lagged owing to issues “unrelated to the performance of its music business”.

The Iran war is also a climate war. Beyond its terrible human costs, the war’s disruptions of oil, gas, fertilizer and other shipments is another reminder of the risks inherent in basing the world economy on fossil fuels. The war’s jets, missiles and aircraft carriers, and the tankers, refineries and buildings they blow up, represent millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions that further imperil a climate system that is already “very close” to a point of no return, scientists say, after which runaway global warming could not be stopped. Nevertheless, petrostate leaders around the world continue doing their utmost to stave off a desperately needed course correction.

Now, a little noticed ray of hope may be peeking over the horizon.

At the UN Cop30 climate summit last November, Saudi Arabia led a group of petrostates in vetoing calls to develop a “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels globally; indeed, the words “fossil fuels” were not even mentioned in the final text agreed at Cop30. But the 85 countries on the losing end of that veto may soon turn the tables.

Many of those governments will gather in Colombia on 28-29 April for a conference to begin a global transition away from oil, gas and coal. Critically, the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels will not be governed by UN rules, which require consensus, but by majority rule, thus preventing a handful of countries from sabotaging progress as petrostates did at Cop30. What’s more, the underlying terrain of this conference will no longer be principally politics, but economics: not the words that canny negotiators can keep in or out of a diplomatic text, but the implacable market forces that shape the world economy, including the potential emergence of a de facto economic superpower.