Powderhorn

Well, fuck.

Actually, if you have a moment, fuck, fuck, fuckitty fuck mcfuckface.

Despite having a very clear idea of the reasons we can't work, she and I have apparently decided (without the express written consent of the NFL) damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

The ongoing problem is when we touch. I've been in her apartment for a total of five days over the past two months, and ... things did not go according to plan. We just ... I don't really know how to explain it, as it's ineffable.

My body does not register touching her. You might think this is a bad thing, and it is, but likely not for the reasons you imagine. Rather, neither of us recognizes the other as a foreign body. Touching her hand was like grabbing my right hand with my left the night we met, setting everything in motion.

We can still easily pull off "old married couple" interactions. Cards. A nice fire in the fireplace. Some cold beers. Good music. Getting into bed naked. For your listening pleasure, I'll stop there.

We did such a good job of hating each other for like eight years. This detente is welcome but also alarming, given why this has to remain a fantasy.

In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting.

The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. The new machines weren’t just spinning cotton or shaping steel. They were operating at speeds that the human body—an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes—simply wasn’t built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there’s a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things.

Still, the machines pressed on.

So Massachusetts created the nation’s first Bureau of Statistics of Labor, hoping that data might accomplish what conscience could not. By measuring work hours, conditions, wages, and what economists now call “negative externalities” but were then called “children’s arms torn off,” policy makers figured they might be able to produce reasonably fair outcomes for everyone. Or, if you’re a bit more cynical, a sustainable level of exploitation. A few years later, with federal troops shooting at striking railroad workers and wealthy citizens funding private armories—leading indicators that things in your society aren’t going great—Congress decided that this idea might be worth trying at scale and created the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Measurement doesn’t abolish injustice; it rarely even settles arguments. But the act of counting—of trying to see clearly, of committing the government to a shared set of facts—signals an intention to be fair, or at least to be caught trying. Over time, that intention matters. It’s one way a republic earns the right to be believed in.

First off, no, they won't. The journalism of 30 years ago isn't coming back in any form. May as well be hoping for a resurgence of semaphore (granted, there is a news site with a closely related name).

"Normal" is a rather tricky thing to nail down in news, in much the same way that NOAA produces new "average" temperatures each decade to include only the prior 30 years.

What was normal in 1986 is not normal 40 years later.

The problem is, to break the problem of shareholder value, you would need thousands of people willing to buy papers, take on printing costs, hire lawyers ...

"But some papers are digital only," you may respond. Yes, and the proportion increases each week. When I learned the paper I worked at from 2010-2011 went to publishing a print edition only three days a week a few years later, it was a sign.

Time was, we had the monopoly on the AP feed locally, grocery circulars, what kid got a Little League trophy, and of course, quilting bees. Not to mention "Drunk Driver Runs Into Pole" (and we have art).

There are economic, systemic and sociological reasons for this. You may be able to shift one with out a clutch, but all three is an impossibility.

It is up to each of us to maintain media literacy and understand we're not going back to where we were. Vigilance is indicated.

This is admittedly from November, but it's the first deep-dive I've seen.

The story of the United States corn ethanol industry is a story about a sector that grew rapidly under a very specific set of policy, technology and market conditions. It filled a gap when gasoline demand was rising, when climate policy focused on incremental change, and when EVs were still a niche. It became a major part of the Midwestern political economy. It shaped land use patterns. It supported thousands of farmers and dozens of rural communities built around steady demand for transport fuel. That world is shifting and the signals point toward a twenty year horizon that looks very different from the previous twenty, with very significant implications for the Midwest’s economies and likely politics.

Corn ethanol grew from a small program focused on oxygenates into a national industry producing over 16 billion gallons annually, about 48 million metric tons. The Renewable Fuel Standard created guaranteed demand by requiring refiners to blend increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline. Direct subsidies through the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit helped expand capacity. By the late 2000s the industry had become large enough to hold political weight in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Nebraska. Ethanol plants became anchor employers. Farmers gained a new buyer that consumed nearly 40% of the national corn crop. The system became predictable and self reinforcing. All gasoline sold in the country now has about 10% ethanol added, with some higher blends available in some places. Once direct subsidies expired, the mandate and a large fleet of internal combustion vehicles kept the industry stable. That stability is now being tested by structural changes in transportation and energy.

The first challenge appears in the gasoline market itself. EIA data from 2015 through 2019 shows finished motor gasoline stabilizing at roughly 140 billion gallons a year. The post pandemic rebound never reached that range again. By 2024 gasoline demand had slipped below pre pandemic levels even though the population was larger than in 2019. The shift is not a statistical quirk. Efficiency gains, hybrid penetration and improved powertrain design are pushing gasoline demand down. Even modest EV adoption affects fuel consumption more than most people expect because each EV replaces an entire household’s gasoline demand, not a small slice of it. Hybrid and work from home models that are common after COVID also inhibit demand. Gasoline peaks are rarely jagged events. They plateau and then begin slow but durable declines. Ethanol demand sits inside that shrinking pool. Rising blend rates cannot compensate if the base declines year after year.

The real opponent of digital sovereignty is "enterprise IT" marketing, according to one Red Hat engineer who ranted entertainingly about the repeated waves of bullshit the industry hype cycle emits.

During a coffee break at this year's CentOS Connect conference, The Reg FOSS desk paused for a chat with a developer who was surprised but happy to find us there. We won't name them – we're sure that they'd prefer to keep their job rather than enjoy a moment of fame – but we much enjoyed their pithy summary of how IT has faced repeated waves of corporate bullshit for at least 15 years now, and how they keenly and enthusiastically anticipate a large-scale financial collapse bursting the AI bubble.

This vulture has been working in the tech field for some 38 years now, and the Linux developer we spoke with has been in the business nearly as long. We both agreed that the late 20th century – broadly, the period from the early 1990s onward for a decade or so – had mostly been one of fairly steady improvement. Then, they suggested, roughly following the 2008 credit crunch, we've had some 15 years of bullshit in tech.

Developers looking to gain a better understanding of machine learning inference on local hardware can fire up a new llama engine.

Software developer Leonardo Russo has released llama3pure, which incorporates three standalone inference engines. There's a pure C implementation for desktops, a pure JavaScript implementation for Node.js, and a pure JavaScript version for web browsers that don't require WebAssembly.

"All versions are compatible with the Llama and Gemma architectures," Russo explained to The Register in an email. "The goal is to provide a dependency-free, isolated alternative in both C and JavaScript capable of reading GGUF files and processing prompts."

GGUF stands for GPT-Generated Unified Format; it is a common format for distributing machine learning models.

Llama3pure is not intended as a replacement for llama.cpp, a widely used inference engine for running local models that's significantly faster at responding to prompts. Llama3pure is an educational tool.

Weather agencies and climate scientists have pointed to the possibility of an El Niño forming in the Pacific Ocean later this year – a phenomenon that could push global temperatures to all-time record highs in 2027.

Both the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology have said some climate models are forecasting an El Niño but both cautioned those results came with uncertainties.

Experts told the Guardian it was too early to be confident, but there were signals in the spread of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific that suggested an El Niño could form in 2026.

The cycle of ocean temperatures in the Pacific – known as the El Niño southern oscillation (ENSO) – is linked with extreme climate events around the world.

When warmer-than-average waters gather in the east of the equatorial Pacific and extend to the coast of the American continent, this is known as an El Niño and tends to give global temperatures a boost and, in Australia, can be linked to drier and hotter conditions.

Several years ago, Michael Pollan had a disturbing encounter. The relentlessly curious journalist and author was at a conference on plant behaviour in Vancouver. There, he’d learned that when plants are damaged, they produce an anaesthetising chemical, ethylene. Was this a form of self-soothing, like the release of endorphins after an injury in humans? He asked František Baluška, a cell biologist, if it meant that plants might feel pain. Baluška paused, before answering: “Yes, they should feel pain. If you don’t feel pain, you ignore danger and you don’t survive.”

I imagine that Pollan gulped at that point. I certainly did when I read his account of the meeting in his latest book, A World Appears. Where does it leave our efforts at ethical consumption, if literally everybody hurts – including vegetables?

Thankfully, Baluška seems to be an outlier. “Plants are down with a lot of our eating,” Pollan tells me, over Zoom from his light-filled office in Berkeley, California, a cliff of books on one side and sweeping views across the bay to the Golden Gate Bridge on the other. He’s a genial presence, his owlish glasses and perfectly smooth head making him seem like the archetypal sage, though a rather spry one (he is 71). “A lot of plants are designed to be” – he corrects himself – “they evolved to be eaten. Grasses, for example, need ruminants.” And as another scientist told him, pain is only useful if you can move quickly. “If you’re a plant, pain would not be of any value. You’re aware that something is chewing on you, but pain only works when you can run away.”

In college, I used to think I was very clever in arguing to vegetarians that it's unethical to only eat things that can't "run away." And here it shows up again, nearly 30 years later.

Because nothing says "fun" quite like having to restore a RAID that just saw 140TB fail.

Western Digital this week outlined its near-term and mid-term plans to increase hard drive capacities to around 60TB and beyond with optimizations that significantly increase HDD performance for the AI and cloud era. In addition, the company outlined its longer-term vision for hard disk drives' evolution that includes a new laser technology for heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), new platters with higher areal density, and HDD assemblies with up to 14 platters. As a result, WD will be able to offer drives beyond 140 TB in the 2030s.

Western Digital plans to volume produce its inaugural commercial hard drives featuring HAMR technology next year, with capacities rising from 40TB (CMR) or 44TB (SMR) in late 2026, with production ramping in 2027. These drives will use the company's proven 11-platter platform with high-density media as well as HAMR heads with edge-emitting lasers that heat iron-platinum alloy (FePt) on top of platters to its Curie temperature — the point at which its magnetic properties change — and reducing its magnetic coercivity before writing data.

As the 2026 Olympic Winter Games begin today, news articles are swelling with juicy claims that male ski jumpers have injected their penises with fillers to gain a flight advantage.

As the rumor goes, having a bigger bulge on a required 3D body scan taken in the pre-season could earn jumpers extra centimeters of material in their jumpsuits—and a suit’s larger nether regions provide more surface area to glide to the gold. Even a small increase can make a satisfying difference in this sport. A 2025 simulation-based study published in the journal Frontiers in Sports and Active Living suggested that every 2 cm of extra fabric in a ski jumpsuit could increase drag by about 4 percent and increase lift by about 5 percent. On a jump, that extra 2 cm of fabric amounts to an extra 5.8 meters, the simulations found.

Elite ski jumpers are aware of the advantage and have already crotch-rocketed to scandal with related schemes. Last year, two Norwegian Olympic medalists, Marius Lindvik and Johann Andre Forfang, and three of their team officials were charged with cheating after an anonymous video showed the head coach and suit technician illegally restitching the crotch area of the two jumpers’ suits to make them larger. The jumpers received a three-month suspension, while the head coach, an assistant coach, and the technician faced a harsher 18-month ban.

"Getting ready for a ski jump, or just happy to see me?"

Enforcement against polluters in the United States plunged in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, a far bigger drop than in the same period of his first term, according to a new report from a watchdog group.

By analyzing a range of federal court and administrative data, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project found that civil lawsuits filed by the U.S. Department of Justice in cases referred by the Environmental Protection Agency dropped to just 16 in the first 12 months after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. That is 76 percent less than in the first year of the Biden administration.

Trump’s first administration filed 86 such cases in its first year, which was in turn a drop from the Obama administration’s 127 four years earlier.

“Our nation’s landmark environmental laws are meaningless when EPA does not enforce the rules,” Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said in a statement.

The findings echo two recent analyses from the nonprofits Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and Earthjustice, which both documented dwindling environmental enforcement under Trump.

I have seriously considered writing one of these to have in the can, ready to publish. This is a gut punch. (Still, I finally got sick of three errors in the hed and circled back to fix them. And dear god, cadence. You wanted contractions in the first two opportunities, but not in the fourth where one was used.)

Dear reader, for the first time since I became a journalist, I have to tell you I wish you weren’t reading what I’ve written. Because if you’re reading this, it means I’m no longer in this world – or any other. I’ve died. Shit, it’s hard to write this, but that’s the way it is. I’ve died, and I don’t want to leave without saying goodbye and sharing a few final thoughts.

I’ve been a very fortunate person. I was fortunate to have been born in a European country that, although still under the yoke of Franco’s regime, very soon afterwards began to progress economically, socially and politically. Luck, and it was only luck, made my destiny infinitely easier than that of hundreds of millions of children who are born in regions of the world ravaged by hunger, poverty and war.

Even in this difficult moment I’m going through, I don’t think I have the right to complain or to moan about my lot. How can I play the victim knowing these historical inequalities and injustices? How can I lament my fate when we see what is happening even now, in Africa, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Yemen, Iran or in Palestine? I can’t say for sure, but I imagine that my last thought – the last image that passes through my mind before I shut down – will be of the children massacred in Gaza and of the surviving Palestinians who face a terrible future. What I do know is that I will leave this world without understanding why the international community chose to remain impassive while Israel perpetrated a genocide right before its eyes, broadcast live, minute by minute, massacre by massacre.