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A Brand Ages Out Of Its Moment

The article uses Allbirds’ strange reinvention to mark the end of an era in consumer goods. The wool-sneaker company became a symbol of Silicon Valley taste in the 2010s. In April 2026 it announced that it would rename itself NewBird AI and turn toward AI-computing infrastructure instead. Investors rewarded the pivot with a sharp jump in the share price, which says as much about the weakness of the old business as it does about excitement for the new one.

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Americans exposed to Hantavirus upset about being forced to quarantine in Nebraska (r/news)

• Negative-Solution108: Typical behavior for the time we live in. Even the smallest sacrifice is too much to ask
• Smooth-Boss-911: These are indeed the times we’re in. It’s all about “me me me” no one gives af about their community.
• Blazah: Sorry not sorry. Sit your butt in Nebraska till you can’t infect the rest of us. NOBODY trusts you to isolate in your own home. We’ve SEEN how people behave before.

Tennessee man jailed over Charlie Kirk post wins $835,000 settlement (r/news)

• sithelephant: ‘The meme Bushart posted that prompted his arrest read: “This seems relevant today…” and featured President Donald Trump and the words, “We have to get over it.” That quote, the meme explained, was said by Trump in 2024 after a school shooting at Iowa’s Perry High School.
• Hrekires: I’m almost certain that I’d be fired if I made a mistake that cost my company $835k in damages.
• bigredthesnorer: Can he sue the Sheriff for $2B?

Harvard faculty votes to make it more difficult for undergrads to earn As (r/news)

• lurpeli: Grade inflation is well known. Any top tier university is going to be giving largely As and Bs to all students even if they barely pass a class. Makes GPAs hardly matter.
• groglox: We had this and it made being an RA so much more stressful. The required GPA over 3.5 combined with how difficult achieving that actually was ended up creating some of the most stress-filled students I have ever seen.
• prodigaldummy: What is the purpose of a grade? Is it an objective reflection of a student’s mastery of a subject, or a reflection of a student’s mastery of a subject relative to their peers?

What is a minor, unwritten rule of society that absolutely infuriates you when people break it? (r/AskReddit)

• Legal_Interaction498: when a group of people spread out into a straight line on the sidewalk, completely blocking the way
• I_sleep_on_a_bed: When people blast whatever video they’re watching in public
• mossyfern45: Speakerphone in public

TIL that Tom Lehrer - MIT mathematician, satirist, and the guy who wrote both the Harvard fight song and a song teaching kids the periodic table - invented the Jell-O shot in the 1950s to sneak booze into a government Christmas party. (r/todayilearned)

• AcceptableWheel: He also made all his songs public domain when he was older specifically because he wanted rappers to sample him.
• Sage1969: TIL he died last year :(
• erksplat: A regular Renaissance Man.

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Meta really hired me just to fire me during bootcamp (Blind)

• goatse.cx (Boeing): Your resume will be 10x stronger with meta on it, even if only there for a month
• team-snow (Snowflake): Were you a low performer during the bootcamp?
• iqbdh (Meta): Layoff was leaked 2 months ago and you still join? And no backup plan?

META Layoff Thread (Blind)

• meta7890 (Walmart): Anyone know what the criteria is? My husband who is a TPM got impacted and has exceeded expectations for his annual review 2 years in a row.
• Blink404: Ex-Microsoft with 400k TC? How? Spill it here.
• sadi_life2 (Amazon): I’m seeing a lot of Meta product managers being laid off!

After Town Bans Flock, Councilmember Crashes Out, Proposes Internet and Phone Ban / A Texas councilmember will propose “a total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits" and “a total termination of all internet services." (r/technology)

• SlapThatAce: Looks like someone needs to have an audit done on their finances.
• jamesdmc: Looks like somebody just lost out on a backroom payday.
• Choice-Ad6376: Why is buying local city/town leadership not prosecuted more. This is obviously bribery across the country. This seems like layups for state ads to prosecute. 

AI Is Too Expensive: AI is, as it stands, not economically viable for anybody involved other than the construction firms, NVIDIA, and the surrounding hardware companies benefitting from the irrational exuberance of a data center buildout that doesn’t appear to be happening at the speed we believed (r/technology)

• Glittering-Living585: nvidia gets paid whether AI works out or not. that tells you everything about who’s actually winning here
• woodpaulusgnome: Ecologically it would be an absolute disaster if the speed at which we are informed this expansion is taking place. It amazes me that plans can be made to build without the required resources in place.
• North_Penalty7947: To date, ed zitron’s claims are more accurate than those of scam altman or slop musk.

YAML? That’s Norway problem (r/programming)

• rminsk: Don’t use PyYAML. It is no longer maintained and only supports YAML 1.1. Try a different library like ruamel.yaml that supports YAML 1.2.
• jletourneau: Ontario is another one that hits this problem. The truthiest province.
• CrackerJackKittyCat: Ah, this generation’s New England ZIP codes in CSV vs Excel.

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What happened

Cloudflare’s official blog published Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us, a May 18, 2026 post about testing frontier security models on Cloudflare’s own code and about the production workflow needed to turn autonomous vulnerability research into useful defensive work.

The post is strongest when it separates model capability from security-system capability. Cloudflare says Mythos Preview changed the kind of work a model could complete: instead of stopping after a plausible bug report, it could reason across smaller primitives, build an exploit chain, write proof-of-concept code, compile and run that code in a scratch environment, then revise the hypothesis when execution disagreed. That loop matters because vulnerability research is not only a search problem. A suspected flaw becomes operationally meaningful when there is evidence that it is reachable, exploitable, distinct from other findings, and worth the cost of remediation.

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Gravity’s roundness test

Phil Plait starts with a question that sounds like a bar bet for astronomers: what is the roundest object anyone has found in the universe? The trick is to define roundness carefully. The article is not looking for the smoothest surface. It is looking for the object closest to a sphere, with every point on its surface nearly the same distance from its center.

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Bluster Meets Markets

The article argues that America under Donald Trump can look more statist than it really is. The president talks as if prices, companies and capital flows should obey political command. Business leaders increasingly speak about industrial policy as a weapon in the contest with China. Yet markets have often proved harder to bend than the rhetoric suggests. Mortgage rates, petrol prices and share prices do not move simply because the White House wants them to.

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The Pragmatic Engineer surfaced this May 20, 2026 podcast episode, and the original episode page is Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhl.

Rust makes correctness part of the workflow

The episode is a useful explanation of Rust because Alice Ryhl does not frame the language as a prestige choice or a benchmark contest. She explains it as a language that changes where engineering effort goes. Rust asks developers to make ownership, lifetimes, error handling, and unsafe boundaries explicit earlier than many other languages do. That can make the first draft slower and the learning curve steeper, but it also moves classes of mistakes out of runtime debugging and into compiler feedback.

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US justice department ‘forever’ bars IRS from auditing Trump’s past tax returns (r/news)

• Salarian_American: In a sane world, asking to be exempted from all future auditing would be a reason to audit someone immediately.
• nickkom: Corruption, plain and simple
• cointoss3: Haha the justice department can’t affect future attorneys general from reverting this. Only way to make this for real for real is a law. Guidelines can always be amended.
• soundisloud: Absolutely ruined the integrity of America

NAACP calls for boycott of Southern college sports programs over voting rights (r/news)

• TurkeyVolumeGuesser: If only this would happen but I don’t see it
• MidnightMoon1331: Can we boycott the IRS and not pay taxes over slush fund and tax immunity too?
• Ok-Replacement6893: Hit them where it hurts them most.
• oldmaninparadise: Michigan, Wisconsin, Maryland, Penn. All great football programs. California, Oregon and Washington too. Problem is there are only 25 new slots per year per team.

Trump Wants Russia and China to Help Combat the International Court That Charges War Crimes (r/worldnews)

• TubeframeMR2: When a guy starts recruiting autocracies to weaken war crimes tribunals, you have to wonder what we don’t know.
• aircooledJenkins: “Trump, a good boy, Is Following The Orders His Leash Holders Have Given Him.”
• nativeridge_: Americans you have a suicidal government at the wheel and you are full speed off the road ploughing through the undergrowth
• Banana-phone15: So Trump wants to start a boy band for war criminals

What is a ‘single person luxury’ that people in relationships completely miss out on? (r/AskReddit)

• Ok-Refrigerator-8664: Never having to discuss plans with anyone. No discussion on dinner, what to watch, what to do, or where to go. You just do what you want all the time.
• LateNightLatin: Knowing things will be exactly where the left them. The amount of time I go looking for the kitchen scissors.
• headcase-and-a-half: Knowing that the piece of chocolate cake you left in the fridge will still be there whenever you want it.
• Fresh-Package5303: Being able to do absolutely nothing all weekend without having to explain it to anyone

TIL After Francis I exchanged himself in spanish captivity in 1526 with his two sons, aged 7 and 8, he annuled everything he signed in exchange for his release, but the kids remained in captivity for nearly 4 years. His eldest son and heir was scarred for life as a result (r/todayilearned)

• GarysCrispLettuce: Father of the Year 1526
• AskAskim: It’s pretty clear to me from all of history that “family” either meant something way tighter than we are familiar with now, or absolutely nothing.
• cometlin: TIL After King Francis I traded himself for his sons to escape Spanish captivity in 1526, he later annulled the agreement, leaving the boys imprisoned for years
• Exact_Touch_4794: This is similar to how Byzantine emperors also thought. Some even killed or blinded their own children. It’s all about how important you think you are and what God wants

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Claude 5=Nuclear bomb (Blind)

• TheRealBoz (Meta): Even when using Claude to write most code, it hasn’t made people much faster. It also can’t function without a SWE. Even if the next model makes less mistakes and has a bigger context, still wont change the real bottlenecks.
• nhci (Amazon): Worst part is, someone with an MBA is going to see this and believe it.
• uqwH11 (Google): Not sure what you are smoking OP. It is still a mid productivity boost for anything reasonably hard, and nowhere close to replace actual SWE. It is not 10x, not even 2x for things which are hard and actually time consuming. Nobody cares how fast it can build crappy CRUD website or another HTML-based game nobody will play.
• AeJP42 (Indeed): The last time I asked Claude 4 to write me some unit tests it wrote tests for functionality that literally didn’t exist and then mocked everything so they would pass anyway, lol

I’m about to get laid off from Meta (Blind)

• muul (JUUL): For Meta you usually get 16 weeks of salary severance and then additional 2 weeks per year based on years of service. Whatever is not vested by your termination date is gone. Both of these are pretty standard stuff for tech.
• mstrchf117 (Google): It’s sad, how long did you work at Meta?? It’s a shitty thing to do after they make you grind leetcode during interviews.
• rWIT40: Just in case, I’d suggest signing up for Blind with your current company before you get laid off. That way you can actually see what’s going on after the layoffs.
• Vh31sK (Airbnb): Your post is confusing. Are you getting laid off or are you getting fired? These are not the same thing.

‘The Worst Leak That I’ve Witnessed’: U.S. Cybersecurity Agency Leaves Its Digital Keys Out in Public on GitHub (r/technology)

• thegooncity: The worst leak they’ve witnessed so far.
• scamdrill: Six months of GovCloud admin credentials sitting in a public repo named Private-CISA, in a file called importantAWStokens, and the official statement is “no indication sensitive data was compromised.” I mean, technically true — nobody needed to compromise it. It was just sitting there. Like a buffet.
• SparkStormrider: I wish I could say I am shocked, but the level of ineptitude in govt. at all levels is astounding. Just like in Trumps last stint as President. Rudy Guliani (sp?) was put over cyber security and they deployed a public facing SQL server with ZERO protections. It got owned in a few minutes after deployment. And that’s just one of what we know about…
• Imoutofchips: They chased away every competent person they had. Just crooks and idiots left.

Google Search as you know it is over (r/technology)

• bitskewer: How are they paying for this? Seems like they’re cannibalizing their ad referral business while providing zero-cost AI services. Surely this isn’t sustainable?
• jmonschke: The “enshitification” of Google search is not an accident. It was an intentional decision made within Google, because when you find what you are looking for on the first page, they can’t serve you as many ads.
• willieb3: The problem is that google is scraping websites and bypassing ad revenue that should go to websites. I used to want google to reach my website, but now there is legitimately nothing in it for me so I am actively blocking Google’s bots.
• NicolasCageFan492: We really had a good thing going before algorithms.

Gen Z’s AI backlash is getting louder (r/technology)

• Samski877: Gen Z graduating into a job market where companies want “entry level candidates” with 5 years experience while simultaneously replacing half the entry level work with AI is genuinely brutal timing.
• chriskot123: I don’t think this is specific to Gen Z…as a millennial, there is a TON of backlash from us (and even Gen x) as well.
• ischickenafruit: “AI is going to replace you and make me rich” is not exactly a winning message.
• SNTCTN: I love getting emails from people who clearly didn’t read what I sent and just had AI write a response for them.

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What happened

Google DeepMind’s official blog published Co-Scientist: A multi-agent AI partner to accelerate research, a May 19, 2026 post about a Gemini-based multi-agent system for generating, criticizing, ranking, and refining scientific hypotheses.

The post is interesting because Co-Scientist is not framed as a single chatbot that happens to know a lot of biology. It is an orchestration system that tries to copy part of the scientific method: generate candidate explanations, expose them to adversarial review, compare them against alternatives, revise them, and hand the researcher a stronger proposal. That makes it a useful example of agent design in a domain where a fluent final answer is not enough. The system has to manage uncertainty, novelty, evidence, and downstream experimental cost.