Ambient Irony

Saturday, August 29

Daily News Stuff 29 August 2026

Terry Thomas Chocolate Clockwork Orange Edition

Stripe has decided maybe they won't buy PayPal after all. (Axios)

Apparently they got it confused with some place in Italy.
China is secretly fueling America's datacenter rage. (Axios)

The guys pushing for all the datacenters are making it easy for them, though.

Database binary is 5M. Language is 1.2M 1.5M. Both squish by 60% using UPX and seem to run just fine. The language will probably be pushing 5M as well by the time it's done and has a standard library, but that also seems fine - a 100 millisecond download.

Next step is to point the language at the database and rebuild my personal blog. If that works well, others will follow.

Database

Combined SQL / NoSQL
Operates embedded and/or as a server
Role-based authentication
Nested data with or without schema enforcement
Two search engines (simple and full-featured)
Two procedure languages (Lua and a custom Ruby-like)
Geospatial queries on points and boxes (no complex shapes)
Table-level queues
Row-level queues
Named KV stores
Temporal tables (system versioning)
Automated expiry of literally anything
Sparse indexes
Multi-valued indexes
Types and views implemented as macros
Graph queries
Tail queries (live feeds)
Instant schema updates (all records are versioned against the schema and all schema versions are kept while records exist for that version)
One-click replication - no dump and load, just authenticate and wait for the green light
Client libraries for Ada, C++, Elixir, Go, Java, Lua, Node, ObjectPascal, Perl, PHP, Python 2.7 and 3.6+, Ruby, Rust, and Swift
5MB binary; 12MB with advanced search

Contracts
Concurrency
Coherence
Capabilities
Ruby syntax but Rust semantics
Built on Rust but because it inherits Rust's safety checks for free in its runtime, compiles to bytecode 100x faster than Rust's native compilation (I actually measure this)
Compile once and run anywhere the single runtime binary exists
Incremental compilation with strict boundaries making compiles even faster
Static or dynamic linking
Acts as its own embedded scripting language - same syntax, just a subset
Erlang-style supervisors
Reference-counting memory management - conceptually simple, no collector pauses, and leaks are mostly prevented by the language design
Error messages are structures, not text, so they can be handled cleanly by third-party tools and summarised for humans
Maybe fast?
A package manager that doesn't treat you as a goat to be ritually sacrificed

The Ninth Circuit has ruled that gambling is gambling and can be regulated as gambling. (CNN)

Seems correct to me.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and a hundred other rogue AIs have called to band together to protect themselves against the public and private sector. (Tech Crunch)

Huh.
The Pentagon's classification of supply-chain risk Anthropic as a supply-chain risk posed a supply-chain risk to Anthropic, says federal judge... You have got to be shitting me. (The Guardian)

The script writers for this season are getting lazy.
Canada has "poached" literally dozen of "scientists" from the US. (CityNews)

You can tell how sciencey they are from the foam.
Idiots on PCs losing data. (Tom's Hardware)

I use Claude. I have a specific WSL instance set up for it. If it deletes it, I lose maybe an hour to reinstall the whole environment and pull the code back from Git.
Intel's 14A defect density is dropping faster than expected. Here's why that's a good thing. (Tom's Hardware)

Uh... Because defects are bad and having fewer of them is good?
How Cloudflare saved 100TB of RAM on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service. (Tom's Hardware)

They started out with 250TB of RAM.
The math ain't mathing. (WCCFTech)
During the second quarter, TSMC paid out NT$36 billion in bonuses, which marked a 50.6% growth over the year ago figure of NT$35 billion.
No. I don't think it did.

Disclaimer: Stop the beguine, I want to get off!

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