Mastodawn

Tech companies defeat bill as AI drains local water supplies https://www.theolympus.net/13531/

Washington House Bill 2515, which aimed to make data centers pay for their own grid infrastructure and use clean energy, failed in March 2026. Despite passing the House, the bill was defeated in the Senate following heavy lobbying from tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon. They will keep using clean water and electricity but bill needs to be paid by locals.

Tech companies defeat bill as AI drains local water supplies

Washington state is home to about 126 artificial intelligence data centers. These data centers evaporate millions of gallons of freshwater each day to provide cooling, but at the cost of draining local resources. The rapid expansion of these data centers strains regional drinking water supplies, as well as increasing blackout risk due to the high...

The Olympus

chrismckee Mar 7

Red Mar 7

I spent seven years in the "move fast and break things" culture on an incident response team. It's a garbage way of doing business.

Maybe share this with your dev friends. And if they're a leader, maybe share it with 'em again in a week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk0hIOAwf6M

AI Cognitive Debt: The Crisis Nobody Sees Coming

YouTube

chrismckee Mar 7

Devine Lu Linvega Mar 6

I love how vibecoded commits are called vommits. It's so perfect.

chrismckee Mar 5

tante Mar 5

This case shows how Open Source will die. With anyone just being able to pipe existing code and tests through an LLM and claiming that to be "clean room" (which is hogwash) no licensing can protect your work from being accumulated and monetized by anyone. The commons are actively being shredded in front of our eyes.

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/pull/322

chardet 7.0: ground-up MIT-licensed rewrite by dan-blanchard · Pull Request #322 · chardet/chardet

Summary This PR is for a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. It maintains API compatibility with chardet 5.x and 6.x, but with 27x improvements to detection speed, and highly accurate suppo...

GitHub

chrismckee Mar 5

Kevin Beaumont Mar 5

chrismckee Mar 5

Gabriele Svelto Mar 4

A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 🧵 1/5

chrismckee Mar 5

Tim Bray Mar 4

From @nelson
GitHub status
https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

A more honest third party monitor of GitHub services. The vital service has under 92% of uptime for the last three months. Rumor is they are migrating everything to Azure and it is going very badly

The Missing GitHub Status Page

chrismckee Feb 19

Frederic Branczyk

Feb 19

If you ever wondered how profilers work 🤓

https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2026/02/19/call-stacks-and-unwinding-101

Call Stacks and Unwinding 101

How Profilers Work: Part 1

Do more with less. | Polar Signals

chrismckee Feb 17

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/hideki-sato-designer-of-segas-consoles-dies-age-75/

Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega’s consoles, has died

Sato helmed design for consoles including Mega Drive, Saturn, and Dreamcast

Video Games Chronicle

chrismckee Feb 13

abadidea Feb 12

I can't stop thinking about the LLM-generated compiler that passes all the unit tests but emits inner loops that benchmark over 150,000x slower than a gcc debug build. I couldn't possibly have intentionally come up with such a funny demonstration of the point of genuine expertise https://harshanu.space/en/tech/ccc-vs-gcc/

CCC vs GCC

A Guide to comparing Claude Code Compiler with GCC

Harshanu

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