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Names are astronomy’s living archive

Phil Plait’s column uses a deceptively simple question - why do stars have such strange names? - to show how astronomy carries its history inside its vocabulary. A star name is rarely just a label. It can preserve a chain of translations, a cultural nickname, an old cataloging scheme, a technical measurement or a practical need created by a telescope.

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Techmeme surfaced this May 17, 2026 story in its Techmeme cluster, and the original article is Kim Zetter’s May 16, 2026 Zero Day report, Experts Confirm the Fast16 Malware Was Sabotaging Nuclear Weapons Tests, Likely in Iran.

What Fast16 was built to do

Fast16 matters because it reframes one of the oldest assumptions about cyber sabotage. The obvious image is a machine breaking: centrifuges spinning out of control, industrial equipment shutting down, or a facility losing power. Zetter’s report describes something quieter and arguably more corrosive. Fast16 appears to have been designed to make engineers trust the wrong numbers.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 International article listed in the contents as Military innovation in Ukraine and published under the headline Battlefield formation.

The article argues that Ukraine’s war effort has become a live laboratory for military technology. Drones, unmanned ground vehicles and AI-assisted systems are no longer peripheral experiments. They are increasingly central to how Ukraine supplies troops, strikes Russian forces, protects soldiers from exposure and compensates for being outmatched in manpower and traditional firepower.

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‘Point of no return’: 36 countries join special tribunal to prosecute Vladimir Putin (r/worldnews)

• asdhjasdhlkjashdhgf: When even Switzerland joins support for an international tribunal you should be able to see the writing on the wall.
• The-marx-channel: Putin’s place should be in the Hague
• Golden–: Yeah, this is meaningless unless you actually plan to arrest and prosecute him.

Mass casualty incident’ after explosion near Maine lumber complex (r/news)

• DNAturation: Sounds like a fire started and turned into a sawdust explosion.
• HorrorAd6729: Unbelievably dangerous situation. Reports indicate a wood shaving silo exploded while crews were already on the scene fighting a warehouse fire, which is why so many firefighters are among the 11 injured. Sending 10 patients to a Level 1 trauma center and calling multiple maydays shows just how catastrophic the blast was. Grateful that all mill staff were safely accounted for, but this is a massive blow to Mid-Coast Maine.
• b0xturtl3: Don’t forget most firefighters in Maine are volunteer.

Phoenix police fire sergeant who brought gun to ICE protest (r/news)

• mastermidget23: Reading the article, this pos went to the protest masked up with gun, literally on camera talked about how he was going to try to get them all to gang up on him to arrest them, while he had people in the distance film for evidence. Fucking psychopaths with no self awareness like Rittenhouse going to protests just to make them dangerous and still think of themselves as “the good guys”.
• OhNoIBoffedIt: Other cops are like “you’re supposed to be in uniform when you commit crimes, dude.”
• Iribumkiak: He is just going to get another police job in another jurisdiction.

What’s a problem humanity solved so well that younger people don’t even realize it used to be a huge issue? (r/AskReddit)

• obligated_existence: The hole in the ozone layer. One of our biggest (and only) global environmental success stories.
• Longwell2020: Clean water
• chickenmcdruggets: Anything solved by vaccines

TIL that Empress Ma was born poor and during a famine she stole cakes to feed her husband by hiding them in her breasts. The cakes were hot and she got burns. Later her husband became a rebel commander who became Emperor and made her his Empress. He was deeply devoted to her even as an Emperor. (r/todayilearned)

• StaleSunTease: hongwu turned into one of the most paranoid emperors in chinese history and she’s basically the only reason his purges didn’t get even worse.
• Own_Bar2063: This did not stop him from having a huge harem of Korean and Mongolian concubines, and from them he had 26 sons and 16 daughters.
• derpdelurk: I would also be devoted to someone that provided breast cakes.

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I hate the engineers at Anthropic and OpenAI. I also want to be one of them. (Blind)

• RnBnG (Uber): Ignore anyone trying to troll, it’s normal to grapple with a contradiction like this. I have prep notes on both Anthropic and OpenAI’s processes Well, if I’m being honest, I only have Anthropic but I am planning on getting my hands on info about Open AI howver I can.
• dhcuvsk (Amazon): Engineers are not doing much. It’s the researchers that are pushing the model breakthroughs.
• SqgE48 (Spotify): The problem is not the engineers… they are just doing their work, the problem is capitalism and the fact that now companies that dominate the fucking economy can do the same with way less.

Amazon is laying off in “secret” RIGHT NOW and it’s strategic. (Blind)

• rasesh (Amazon): BS … no silent layoffs are happening … I see lot of silent hiring infact
• XqXe67: Yet people will be clamoring to join the second they post a job.
• BB-18 (Google): What a POS company

Cisco announces record revenue and 4,000 layoffs in the same day (r/technology)

• darkrose3333: This country needs to rewrite its employment laws. Companies shouldn’t be able to layoff just to get a temporary bump on the books. Stop destroying peoples’ lives just so number go up you sick fucks
• Majestically-Silver: As someone who was affected by one of their layoffs last year and is still looking for work, fuck them.
• HoosierRed: Hey just remember that Tech is there to exploit you, not to carry us all into a better age.

The AI Backlash Could Get Very Ugly (r/technology)

• Syzygy2323: I’m just waiting for the AI bubble to burst so I can buy RAM and SSDs again without taking out a second mortgage.
• RidetheSchlange: An AI backlash would not be ugly. It would be warranted.
• Luna-D-reams: “Why is everyone so mad at me? I’m only trying to take everyone’s jobs, water, and electricity!”

Power Prices in Eastern U.S. Spike 76% Thanks to AI Data Centers / A new report calls the impact significant and “irreversible.” (r/technology)

• Severus-Snape-DaGod: Data centers should be required to finance and build their own power generation instead of shifting those costs onto residents.
• King_Kung: I’m pretty sure we could reverse it if we really wanted to
• Curious_Maximum_639: Irreversible because corporations only increase prices.

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What happened

Cloudflare’s official engineering blog published Our billing pipeline was suddenly slow. The culprit was a hidden bottleneck in ClickHouse, a post about a production performance regression in a petabyte-scale ClickHouse deployment and the upstream database changes Cloudflare made to fix it.

The setting is unusually concrete. Cloudflare uses ClickHouse to run millions of daily analytical queries that determine customer usage, support billing for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and feed fraud systems and other operational workflows. The affected platform, Ready-Analytics, lets internal teams stream data into a shared ClickHouse table instead of hand-designing separate schemas. Records are distinguished by namespace, sorted within each namespace by an indexID, and ordered by timestamp, giving the table a primary key shaped around tenant-specific query patterns.

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Why asteroid scares usually change

Phil Plait uses a familiar kind of alarming headline as the starting point: astronomers spot a newly discovered space rock, early calculations show a nonzero chance of impact, and the public briefly hears that an asteroid might hit Earth. The article’s point is not that such warnings are meaningless. It is that they are provisional by design.

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Techmeme surfaced this May 15, 2026 Wired story in its Techmeme cluster, and the original article is Maxwell Zeff’s Greg Brockman Officially Takes Control of OpenAI’s Products in Latest Shake-Up.

What changed

OpenAI is reorganizing its product leadership again, and the important part is not just the title change. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s cofounder and president, is now formally leading product strategy in addition to his infrastructure work. Wired reports that Brockman had already been overseeing products on an interim basis while Fidji Simo, the CEO of AGI deployment, was on medical leave. The new memo makes that arrangement official and pairs it with a broader consolidation of OpenAI’s product surface.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 Finance & economics Buttonwood column listed in the contents as Too-stablecoins and published under the subtitle Why the stablecoin market is fizzling.

The article argues that stablecoins have not yet become the financial revolution their boosters promised. They are meant to be the sober part of crypto: digital tokens pegged to the dollar and backed by safe assets such as Treasury bills. That design should, in theory, make them useful for payments, attractive as a store of value in unstable economies and helpful to America by increasing demand for government debt.

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US border patrol chief resigns after claims of sex with prostitutes abroad (r/news)

• Mutopiano: It’s always the ones you most suspect.
• Hrekires: Normally I wouldn’t care about consensual behavior between adults but considering Border Patrol would kill US citizens for less… please kindly fuck off.
• IlVeroStronzo: This guy just went to do abroad what he can’t do back home legally or for cheap lol

Emails show FBI Director Kash Patel’s Hawaii trip included ‘VIP snorkel’ at a Pearl Harbor memorial (r/news)

• southendgirl: Is this an Onion article?
• TheGooch01: Fucking head of the FBI is on permanent make-a-wish vacation.
• Ok_Pollution7093: VIP snorkel at a memorial is wild. Read the room.

US agents arrest tourist after video shows a rock hurled at endangered Hawaii monk seal’s head (r/news)

• Nv2U: First time I’ve seen “US agents arrest…” in a headline lately and been happy.
• brispence: I’m sure there would be a line of people waiting around the island to throw a rock at this chud’s head.
• Hnl2Nrt2025: I believe there are some local people in lockup ready to greet him

CDC says 41 people being monitored for hantavirus in US (r/news)

• Xsiah: Over 3000 people in the US have had measles this year - how about you monitor them and everyone they’re infecting with their stupidity, or the stupidity of their parents.
• Flash_ina_pan: K, hopefully it doesn’t spread. I don’t think I could stand dealing with the absolute shitbirds a national medical emergency tends to bring out, again.
• Loose_Clock4873: Are we supposed to drink bleach yet?

US man convicted of running secret Chinese ‘police station’ in NYC (r/news)

• dotBombAU: They are doing this all over the world.
• xdeltax97: This is everywhere unfortunately
• Haunting_Explorer376: No shit. There was a expose on the one in Vancouver a few years ago