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A forecast for the sun’s temper

Solar flares are not just spectacular eruptions on a distant star. When they are aimed the wrong way, they can disturb the technological systems that modern life keeps in orbit and on the ground. A flare releases intense radiation from the sun’s surface, and it can be followed by a coronal mass ejection, a giant bubble of magnetized plasma. If that material reaches Earth, it can trigger geomagnetic storms that threaten satellites, communications, navigation systems, power grids and astronauts.

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Clean power’s crisis dividend

The article argues that the new Gulf war has made clean energy look less like a climate preference and more like a security asset. The immediate temptation is to assume coal will be the main beneficiary of disrupted energy markets, especially in countries that have domestic coal but rely on imported liquefied natural gas. Coal is indeed getting a short-term lift. But The Economist’s sharper point is that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz strengthens the case for solar, wind and other renewables even more.

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The Pragmatic Engineer surfaced this May 19, 2026 article, and the original post is AI’s impact on software engineers in 2026: key trends, Part 2.

The productivity story is getting messier

Gergely Orosz’s latest survey analysis is interesting because it treats AI coding tools less like a single productivity lever and more like an organizational stress test. The piece draws on more than 900 responses from The Pragmatic Engineer subscribers and closes a series on how software engineers are actually using AI tools in 2026.

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A solar plant in Minnesota planted flowers beneath its panels, and soon monarch butterflies and dozens of new plant species began to appear (r/news)

• Rattus_NorvegicUwUs: Finally. Some good news.
• Laniidae_: This is solarpunk and I’m here for it
• CMG30: It’s almost like the push to ban solar on agricultural land is a paid astroturf campaign to delay renewable energy and preserve fossil profits…
• guinnypig: There are a zillion of these solar farms around me. I want this to happen so badly!

2 Navy jets crash during air show in Idaho, 4 crew members eject safely (r/news)

• bassicallyinsane: What a great use of 136 million dollars
• MountainlessBiking: I’m glad when I fuck up at work it’s just an email or something. I can’t imagine the verbal abuse this would cause 
• Rare_Contract_8657: I’d be really interested to see what caused the crash. Was it user error? Equipment malfunction? Glad the pilots are all safe though!
• NigeySaid: I saw the video and I’m still baffled by them all surviving

Latest militant attacks on schools in Nigeria leave more than 80 children missing, officials say (r/news)

• OkBuy4754: Heartbreaking. Nigeria needs real security reform, not just empty promises again.
• IBitePrettyPeople: Religious warfare in the big 2026
• Vepariga: only the weak prey on the defenseless.

Zelenskyy Confirms Ukraine Was Behind Massive Moscow Drone Strike (r/worldnews)

• dimgwar: Tell Cersei,. I want her to know it was me
• CaptCurmudgeon: I love that phrasing – long range sanctions.
• Undernown: This really hammered home how Ukraine allowed Putin to have a safe victory day parade.

Who destroyed their own career within seconds by being an idiot? (r/AskReddit)

• SparkyandDolche: The people on the Coldplay “kiss cam.”
• AdeptVeterinarian541: The white lady who called the cops on a black man who was bird watching in a public park and asked her to put her dog on a leash. When she called the police she was screaming about a “black man trying to get me” and he was this nerdy looking guy who watches birds. She had a very lucrative job at Franklin Templeton Investments, she was fired.
• NOT-packers-fan2022: The FBI agent that did the back flip in a bar, dropped his gun, grabbed it, negligent discharge, someone was hit but lived, arrested, prosecuted and terminated.
• cageytalker: That woman who tweeted that she was flying to Africa and she hoped she didn’t get AIDS. She turned off her phone and when she landed, she saw that her life exploded.

TIL in 2014, Ben Affleck received a lifetime ban from the blackjack tables at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas after surveillance footage showed him counting cards during a high-stakes game. Security informed him he was “too good” and classified him as an advantage player. (r/todayilearned)

• WelshBathBoy: This is why the house always wins, making perfectly sensible game play ‘against the rules’. Counting cards is just using a bit of deduction by keeping tabs of the cards played - hardly cheating.
• wrighteghe7: This is such a hilarious rule. What kind of fucking game is it where its “cheating” if you win at it and why people play it still?
• I_Never_Use_Slash_S: Guess he wasn’t acting in The Accountant.
• SorryAboutLater: How can you tell if someone is counting cards? Can you just kick anyone out for winning and accuse them of this.

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Tokenmaxxing is a problem and it makes actual legitimate workers look bad. (Blind)

• wDEN53 (Booking.com): more tokens = more hallucinations, just wait for this shit to blow up in a really bad way, then, perhaps, this obsession will settle
• ca\$ (Capital One): I token max by doing my actual job. I don’t have time to waste an AI budget I just have too much work to do. Routinely I run 10 claudes at a time
• gritwest (Careem): When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure ~ Goodharts Law
• rav444m3 (Microsoft): It’s also an asshole move. There’s a real physical cost to AI and it’s incredibly wasteful with physical infrastructure

Microsoft AI vs. Microsoft CoreAI WLB (Blind)

• gmKY75 (Microsoft): I’d say it’s team dependent but generally coreAI is more relaxed. MAI has at least 4 days RTO, coreAI is 3
• extmem (Meta): MAI is higher pay and CoreAI is just Microsoft pay
• nzwswing79: Layoffs expected, no wonder both are toxic
• HAw!qwtz (Microsoft): Internal transfer from Azure to MAI, any salary increase?

Google L7 or OpenAI L5? (Blind)

• &=(1«31) (OpenAI): OpenAI is an incredible place to work. Far far better than Google.
• ventiventi: OpenAI for sure. You want to join Google in 2005 rather than Google in 2026
• djskdbejeo (Apple): TC for l5 OpenAI should be 1.5M. They cut your rsu in half
• xrhaig8 (Google): Until Altman is gone from OAI I would choose Google, guy is a walking lawsuit.

A security researcher says Microsoft secretly built a backdoor into BitLocker, releases an exploit to prove it (r/technology)

• notanfan: The researcher explained that they “just can’t come up with an explanation beside the fact that this was intentional. Also for whatever reason, only windows 11 (+Server 2022/2025) are affect, windows 10 is not.”
• New-Ranger-8960: There has never been a better time to ditch Microsoft products and services
• asdf_lord: Operating systems are too important to be closed source.
• Mama_Office_141: Snowden leaks told us this in 2013. The whole world should be moving away from American software like France is doing

An AI hate wave is here (r/technology)

• freshairequalsducks: Needs more hate tbh
• Laserdollarz: AI has its uses and place. Stop shoving it into everything and it wouldn’t get a fraction of the hate it currently gets. 
• hypernsansa: Should’ve started earlier, if you ask me
• unwelcome_flesh_sack: Let it build into a hate monsoon which covers the earth. Fuck these billionaire assholes trying to create a cyberpunk dystopia.

LinkedIn user hides AI prompt injection in bio to force recruitment spam to be sent in Olde English prose — bots also also manipulated to address user as ‘My Lord’ (r/technology)

• Sweaty_Rub4322: Is this the only way to even get your application looked at at this point?
• williamgman: LinkedIn = Facebook for work.
• gplusplus314: The actual article is garbage. Anyone find the actual prompt injection example?
• ScheduleNo5736: This is genuinely brilliant AND terrifying at the same time ngl

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Find All Duplicates in an Array
• Topics: Array, Hash Table, Sorting

Problem gist

The input is an array nums of length n. Every value is in the range 1 through n, and each value appears either once or twice. The task is to return every value that appears twice.

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A newborn star’s violent surroundings

The article uses a striking James Webb Space Telescope image to explain a brief, turbulent phase in star formation. The object at the center of the story is HH 49/50, a Herbig-Haro object in the Chamaeleon I Cloud complex about 625 light-years from Earth. Its nickname, the “cosmic tornado,” comes from the way hot gas and dust appear twisted into a long, curling structure.

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Techmeme surfaced this May 18, 2026 story in its Techmeme cluster, and the original article is Bloomberg’s NextEra-Dominion Deal Signals Era of AI Utility Mega-Mergers. The same cluster pulled in useful supporting reporting from DatacenterDynamics, Axios, and Utility Dive.

Why a Utility Merger Became an AI Story

NextEra’s planned acquisition of Dominion is not a software story, but it is one of the clearer signs that AI is changing the physical shape of the technology industry. The deal would combine Florida Power & Light’s parent company, already the largest US utility by market value and a huge renewables developer, with the dominant utility serving Virginia’s data center corridor. That turns an electricity merger into an AI infrastructure event.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 Business article listed in the contents as Trumpian psychedelics and published under the headline Altered state.

The article argues that Donald Trump’s sudden embrace of psychedelic medicines could accelerate a promising field, but in a way that exposes a deeper problem in American drug policy. Psychedelics may help treat depression, PTSD, addiction and anxiety. The issue is not whether the field deserves attention. It does. The issue is whether treatments should be pushed forward because the evidence is strong, or because they have caught the eye of the president and his circle.

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What happened

Uber’s official engineering blog published Beyond Prediction: Solving the Multiple Knapsack Problem at Scale: How Uber Optimizes Incentives, a May 14, 2026 post about Tarot, Uber’s internal targeting platform for allocating incentives under large-scale marketplace, budget, and user-experience constraints.

The post is interesting because it treats incentive targeting as an optimization system rather than a ranking model. A simpler growth stack might ask which offer has the highest predicted effect for each user. Uber’s problem is harder: millions of users, many possible incentives, multiple lines of business, separate quarterly budgets, concurrent campaigns, and a hard limit on how many offers a person should see. At that scale, a locally strong prediction can be globally wrong if it consumes the wrong budget, blocks a better incentive, or improves one marketplace objective while harming another.