Yeah, let me get out infront of the comments that will be full of the usual “Big Blue is so 1970s” snark, because nothing says “edgy” like dunking on the company that literally built the infrastructure the entire digital world runs on.

But let’s be real for a second. While everyone was busy calling IBM boring, stodgy, or “the company your grandpa still uses,” they were out here creating one foundational technology after another:

    The hard disk drive (1956 RAMAC — the first one ever)
    The floppy disk that made personal computing actually personal
    DRAM — the memory chips inside literally every device you own
    The relational database and SQL that power basically the entire internet
    Fortran, the first high-level programming language
    Magnetic stripe cards (you know, the thing that made credit cards and ATMs work)
    Silicon-germanium chips that make your smartphone’s Wi-Fi, GPS, and cellular actually fast

And while we’re on the subject of “irrelevant old tech”: over 87% of the world’s credit card transactions still run on IBM mainframes every single day. Your salary, your rent, your impulse buy at 2 a.m. — all of it humming along on the same “dinosaur” systems the cool kids love to mock.

So sure, pile on the hate. IBM’s used to it. They’ve been the Rodney Dangerfield of computing for decades: “No respect, no respect at all!” But every time you swipe a card, save a file, run a query, or (now) watch a quantum computer match real lab data on magnetic materials you’re standing on IBM’s shoulders. They didn’t just ride the wave. They built the ocean.

Keep innovating, Big Blue. The haters will be back next week to complain about something else you quietly made possible.

Finally, the untold story of how the Hobbits discovered microaggressions and how the Ring got canceled for being a symbol of systemic oppression. Shadow of the Past? Perfect title â" itâ(TM)s literally the shadow that swallowed Colbertâ(TM)s once-great Late Show, the one that started hilarious and then slowly petered out under an avalanche of politics until half the audience ghosted it for good. Middle-earth just got Colbertâ(TM)d. Hard pass.

I agree. The last thing I want is a 0 rated death trap made with Chinese cells parked right next to a wooden structure.

We are having a hard enough time as it is already debugging code generated by LLMs and now someone wants to make it even more obscure??

Ah, yes, because nothing screams “bold post-Brexit innovation” like gene-editing barley so cows can burp less methane while we get juicier steaks faster. Bravo, UK! You’ve finally hopped on the GMO train—not for the boring old reasons like, y’know, feeding starving people or actually solving real agricultural problems—but because an island that contributes roughly 1% of global emissions (look it up, it’s adorable) is dead-set on slashing its own cow farts by a whopping 15%. That’s right, folks: the planet’s fate hangs in the balance of British livestock flatulence, and this single-letter DNA tweak is apparently the heroic fix.

Even Bill Nye—the guy who used to side-eye GMOs like they were radioactive—eventually came around and endorsed them specifically as a tool against world hunger. But nah, why bother with anything as pedestrian as ending famine when you can virtue-signal about climate while the actual heavy emitters (China, India, the US) keep right on trucking? Genius. This isn’t science; it’s eco-therapy for a nation convinced their pasture tweaks will cool the globe.

And the best part? It’s not even “GMO” in the scary EU sense—no foreign genes added, just two switches flipped off. Yet here we are, celebrating it because it makes the meat industry slightly more profitable and the cows slightly less gassy. Truly, the future is moo-ving in the right direction straight into irrelevance. Well played, Britain. Well played.

Instead of being angry, cap the gas line at your other residence (wow, you have two, that's more than 95% of us which means you have more financial freedom to get what you want) and install another induction cook top like you have at the other residence. As you said, you'll breathe less "toxic gas" and not have to use that awful fossil fuel anymore.

But the key here is CHOICE. It's obvious from the fight that a lot of people do not want to be forced into electric appliances, and that is their choice. The indoor air pollution theme only came into play recently to give extra leverage to what was a campaign against fossil fuel for CO2 reasons.

For the record, I am rather sensitive to the smell of natural gas and propane, yet I have a natural gas connection and an electric range. I don't have any of the "leaks" you speak of, and you should call a plumber to check every pipe joint if you have these leaks.

So let's let the people have their choice and focus environmental aspirations on big polluters instead of small fry, because we won't waste our social capital making people angry over a very minor source of CO2 as compared to others.

Russia’s latest smear on Pavel Durov and Telegram is unfortunate, but predictable. Telegram is the real free speech winner, and has quietly become the ultimate Reddit replacement, packed with the freshest uncensored takes on politics, borders, elections, and culture that Big Tech’s corporate overlords have scrubbed from every other site. No algorithms throttling wrongthink, no power mods nuking voices, just individual channels and groups free from breathing down-your-neck moderation. There’s a thriving community for everyone if you can find it the channel, all hidden away from the echo chamber.

It took decades.

When I was growing up refrigerators and cars used Refrigerant 12, also known as Freon or CFC-12. It was non-flammable, efficient, nominally non-poisonous and safe, and easily made. It was even a critical ingredient in asthma inhalers. It had one problem, however. It was a Super Pollutant that punched tiny holes into the ozone layer. (It was only later, after the ozone problem was solved by banning CFCs, did global warming numbers begin to pop up next to replacement refrigerants like HFC-134a as well as historical references to R-12. Nobody cared about GWP before, and I should point out that GWP is about global warming potential, which in reality is likely far less.) Next, the new Super Pollutant was HCFC-22, which did far less ozone damage but still had to be banned... in favor of HFC-410a with a larger GWP! Now the new Super Pollutants are HFC-134a and HFC-410a, etc

My point is simple: every time a problem is addressed, someone will lose their sh*t with the replacement chemical eventually, forcing everyone to make yet another costly change. I am not against progress, but this doesn't have to be done with a heavy-handed phase out. It could be done simply by making new devices with new refrigerants, while not restricting production of current gasses.

Mark my words: when HFCs are no longer available as refrigerants, someone will come for HFO refrigerants, like R-1234yf, even though the GWP is less than that of carbon dioxide, because they will find something wrong with it. There is also money to be made in forcing an industry to adopt new tools, equipment, chemicals, and processes. And for those who say this is based on good earth science, I will remind you of the countless predictions about sea level and global temperature that have never come to fruition.

Divisive? Heh

Scott was a unifier for all of those who slogged it out in the office.

I believe the biggest problem here is variability and proving causality. A pollution emitter located deep inland releasing a gigaton of PM 2.5 will cause different asthma effects based on HOW that PM 2.5 is emitted, i.e. height of the smokestack. And if that same emitter was located on the east coast of the US all of the PM 2.5 would be carried out to the Atlantic Ocean, instead of over land due to established wind currents, further changing lives impacted. So it is an extremely difficult metric to use and guarantee asthma cases or early deaths (accuracy).

Oh sh** I just fell over laughing

Maybe it's because I'm in the northeast, but Kerosene is only used for space heaters here, and typically only as an auxiliary or novelty heat source. Most, but not all, of us use electricity space heaters if oil and gas are not available. Instead of "throwing out their kerosene" perhaps the author should say "using even less from the grid."

"With just one week of AI-powered processing, augmented by 38.5 hours of human expert assistance"

Then it isn't "made by AI" then, is it? It's similar to letting an LLM write a letter that later requires heavy editing.