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Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Starshot was announced as a new kind of moonshot: not a government mega-program but a billionaire-backed sprint to another star. The plan sounded almost mythic. A giant laser array on Earth would blast gram-scale spacecraft attached to ultralight reflective sails, accelerating them to about 20 percent of the speed of light and sending them toward Alpha Centauri. Sarah Scoles’s article follows what happened after the splashy launch and finds a more revealing story than simple failure. Starshot did not collapse because the dream was absurd. It stalled because even a dazzling idea cannot outrun the brutal combination of engineering difficulty, long timelines and a patron whose commitment turned out to be much smaller and less durable than advertised.

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What this article is about

This summary covers The Economist’s March 28th, 2026 United States article on pages 20-21, listed in the contents as Going on cyber-offence under the Cyber-security heading.

The article argues that America’s new cyber-strategy marks a real shift in emphasis. Washington still talks about strengthening digital defences, but it is now much more explicit about disrupting threats before they hit American networks. The piece treats that as a consequential change in posture, while warning that offensive ambition may be outrunning the state’s ability to defend its own systems well.

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What happened

The Pragmatic Engineer surfaced this April 14, 2026 piece, and the original post is The impact of AI on software engineers in 2026: key trends.

Gergely Orosz and Elin Nilsson use more than 900 survey responses from engineers and engineering leaders to describe how AI coding tools are changing daily software work in practice. The article is less interested in which model won last week and more interested in what happens once these tools become routine: who pays for them, who runs into limits, who benefits most, and what kinds of tradeoffs teams are quietly accepting.

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Trump says U.S. will blockade Strait of Hormuz after Iran peace talks fail (r/oil)

• TriXter69: Well if the goal is to cause oil to skyrocket and crash the global economy, this will definitely help with that
• Hurlyburly766: We’re double-closing it! So there!!!
• rude-a-bega: Blockade the blockade? Ok then

TISZA winning a super majority possible? (r/Destiny)

• Primary_Cod_3622: It’s looking good we europoors might make it. A supermajority is necessary for tisza to be able to operate normally as the system is so rigged. Also rural votes usually come in first. The rural areas especially fidesz strongholds have had a lower turnout than for example Budapest. Which last I checked had the highest in the country
• i5-2520M: Fucking awesome, looks like a definite supermajority based on what top analysts are saying
• PlentyAny2523: They just passed 133, if it holds they got it

Why do schools give awards for perfect attendance even though kids are constantly getting sick? (r/NoStupidQuestions)

• BrewertonFats: In public schools within the US, funding is directly tied to student attendance. Absent students cost the school money, as they impact the school’s ADA (adverage daily attendance). So of course they’d do everything they can to encourage kids to show up.
• abbot_x: In my kids’ schools “perfect attendance” actually means no unexcused absences. They don’t want kids coming in sick and they don’t want to penalize kids who have to miss school for family or religious reasons.
• jayron32: Many schools have stopped this because it encourages the spread of diseases. I have worked in many schools and haven’t seen this behavior in decades. Which is not to say it doesn’t still happen, but it’s not been the norm where I have worked, at least since the 1990s.

Are manual transmission cars available in every dealership? (r/AskAmericans)

• machagogo: Most car brands don’t even have models that offer them even as an option anymore. Manuals are going the way of the dodo. They are inferior to a modern automatic in every way but “fun to drive” for enthusiest cars.
• FeatherlyFly: Why? If it’s that important to you, just spend the little extra time looking for a model that has what you want. It’s not like walking onto a lot and buying whatever strikes your fancy has ever been a good financial choice.
• freebiscuit2002: No, not at all. Manual transmission cars are rather rare nowadays, and most car manufacturers don’t even make them for the US market. Overwhelmingly, customers prefer automatics.

What is the most universally liked food? (r/AskReddit)

• Maffers: Bread
• Myballs8: I’d say rice , it’s popular in europe , in american (both north and south) in most of asia and middle east …
• Resistant-Insomnia: Dough with a filling. Every culture has it. From samosas to pasties to burritos to borek to lumpias to gyoza and many more.

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AI Doom and layoffs? Naah, it’s just like the Industrial Revolution and past technological changes. (r/artificial)

• RavingWook: There’s going to be no work. If wealth isn’t distributed a revolution is inevitable.
• schrodingers_hit: I don’t care how many jobs are created if I’m no longer able to get work because AI does most of it. Those jobs being created are not for me and most people.
• Original_Ad2171: In the Industrial Revolution, the Luddites were at least given a chance to transition, train, or take new jobs. What’s happening now is workers being told AI will “augment” them right up until their job is cut.

Job Market is amazing for AI engineers (r/cscareerquestions)

• schrodingers_hit: Job market is amazing for all the top 1% people in any market.
• Original_Ad2171: This means 99% of people are not in the running. Let alone junior devs.
• AshWilliams01: this is so out of touch lol

At startup. We really do use AI to write all the code. (Blind)

• Low_Deposit_3530: At least you’re honest 🤷🏾‍♂️
• q*****: The money line is AI will replace smaller companies.
• M7Lt16: We are all getting acquired just wait

AI Inference Startup (Blind)

• ISPG88: Groq is furthest along for inference, especially in terms of software,, but we do more business and make more noise.
• rrua54: Also lambda, nebius.. Very competitive industry.

Vibe coding is ruining programming (Blind)

• newpepsie: Holy shit if the code is only the specific implementation of business logic etc then this is such a bad take.
• anon: Maybe, it still helps if you can explain what the logic is supposed to be in human language and can validate if the output matches.
• NooYht: Blaming code quality deterioration on AI while half the codebase was already spaghetti held together by tribal knowledge and caffeine is wild.

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A one-plank joke that turns into a real mountain ethic

Ethan Daly’s “Straight Lines” starts with a premise that sounds like a gag and then steadily reveals why it matters. The article follows New Hampshire skier Kyle Huston, who tours in a perfectly recognizable backcountry kit only to lock his skis together at the top and descend on a mono-ski. Daly leans into the absurdity because the absurdity is the point. Huston’s project is not useful in the modern ski-industry sense. It is harder than skiing, less stable than snowboarding and dependent on a discontinued oddball tool, Faction’s Le Split Mono. Yet that very impracticality gives the piece its force. Daly presents mono-ski touring as a conscious refusal of the sport’s usual logic of efficiency, progress and product churn.

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: HARD
• Problem: Merge k Sorted Lists
• Main tags: Linked List, Divide and Conquer, Heap (Priority Queue), Merge Sort

What the problem is really asking

Each input list is already sorted. The task is to combine all of them into one final sorted linked list without losing that order.

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Letter Combinations of a Phone Number
• Main tags: Hash Table, String, Backtracking

What the problem is really asking

Each digit from 2 to 9 maps to a small set of letters, just like an old phone keypad. Given a string of digits, the task is to return every possible letter string that could be formed by choosing one mapped letter for each digit.

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: 4Sum
• Main tags: Array, Two Pointers, Sorting

What the problem is really asking

The surface task is to return every unique quadruplet whose sum equals target.

The harder part is not the arithmetic. It is avoiding duplicate answers while still searching efficiently.

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Permutations
• Main tags: Array, Backtracking

What the problem is really asking

The input contains distinct integers, and the task is to return every possible ordering of those integers.

That means the algorithm is not trying to find one best answer. It is trying to systematically explore a decision tree where: