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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.

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Techmeme surfaced this May 20, 2026 story in its Techmeme cluster, and the original report is Sergiu Gatlan’s BleepingComputer article, GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension.

The developer toolchain is the target

The breach is striking because it did not start with an exotic cloud exploit or a direct attack on GitHub’s production systems. According to BleepingComputer’s report, GitHub said roughly 3,800 internal repositories were exfiltrated after one employee installed a poisoned VS Code extension. GitHub removed the malicious extension version, isolated the affected endpoint, and began incident response.

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META PLANS LAYOFFS IN 3 BATCHES GLOBALLY WEDNESDAY: RTRS (Blind)

• vNFr16: H1bs prioritized?
• xytcyiuo (eBay): Is anyone getting any work done with all this anticipation?
• UQu4gs6Z (Meta): Feeling anxious…
• GasonJ (Marqeta): Are debelopers affected though?

Is AI actually helping you ship faster? (Blind)

• rkigxvwkfi (Netflix): Only slightly in corporate setting because of review/planning/alignment/etc. much much faster for my side projects because i dont need any approval
• mXsM13: Everyone tells me how productive it has made them. I see 5000 line PRs left and right. But what is really being produced? Do any of the big tech sites have anything new and great? Are your releases bigger or better than before? I am just not seeing the end result.
• Ysbsbrb (Google): No because I just work less
• mUEm22 (eBay): coding is only a small part of software engineering. And most people don’t like AI documentation slop.

Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix (r/technology)

• EntireBig7258: building data centers in phoenix and then being surprised they make it hotter is like building a fireplace in a sauna and wondering why it got warm
• justmitzie: Great idea. Build something that raises temps and also sucks up water. In the desert.
• torgofjungle: Ahh I see we want to remove what little water was left in Phoenix
• Slippery-ape: In Phoenix at that. Where Asphalt remelts.

Senator Adam Schiff Proposes Bill Requiring Data Centers to Pay for Own Power (r/technology)

• mattreyu: Sorry, what now? Why on earth would power-hungry private companies not have to pay for their own power?
• alchemyDev: How the hell isn’t this already a thing?
• Decimit-: What is this magical idea of the business paying for the things they use??!!!
• FriedWhy: This is outraging! What’s next? Making companies pay taxes? Pay workers livable wages? The left just does not know when enough is enough. /s

314 npm packages just got compromised, 271 @antv, echarts-for-react, size-sensor, timeago.js (r/programming)

• SupermarketAntique32: Just another tuesday for NPM
• Maybe-monad: the s in npm stands for security
• dark_mode_everything: Why does this keep happening to us asks only package manager where this keeps happening regularly.
• Independent_Image_59: Is it just me or major CVEs got way too frequent now?

Creator of C++: “AI-generated code isn’t ready - it generates more bugs, more bloat, more security holes, and is nearly impossible to validate” (r/singularity)

• OrkWithNoTeef: It would take at least two singularities for AI to understand C++ variadic template metaprogramming compiler errors
• jferments: Code that people write using AI tools is not “impossible to validate”. You validate it exactly the same way you validate code written by humans who aren’t using AI tools.
• SgtChrome: Love Bjarne, but mentioning specific problems like that will look shortsighted when, two models down the line, AI will inevitably not make those mistakes anymore.
• AddingAUsername: As someone that (for some reason) likes C++, I can definitely say that using AI is much harder for it and much more micro-intensive. It’s much harder to vibecode etc. so I understand where he is coming from.

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What happened

GitHub’s official engineering blog published From latency to instant: Modernizing GitHub Issues navigation performance, a production writeup about making GitHub Issues feel fast by changing the client/server navigation architecture rather than treating the problem as a narrow backend-latency optimization.

The core idea is that a developer tool’s perceived performance is dominated by the loop between intent and visible feedback. Opening an issue, jumping to a linked thread, returning to a list, and scanning the next item are not isolated page loads. They are part of a triage workflow. GitHub therefore measured the work around Highest Priority Content, or HPC, an internal metric aligned with Largest Contentful Paint that tracks when the main issue content, usually the title or body, is rendered. The team bucketed navigations into instant, fast, and slow using HPC thresholds, then optimized the distribution rather than focusing only on the worst tail.

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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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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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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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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.

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Anthropic hiring is basically closed to the public (Blind)

• texasholde (Apple): Have you tried messaging a recruiter? That got me an interview without a referral.
• purefect (Everpure): Nah, they’re just closed to ex-Amazon workers.
• nzwswing79: I self reject before any anthropic job get posted

Stock up 17%. Cisco still firing people… (Blind)

• fj8ne7hs1 (Transformco): Cisco is not the company it once was a decade ago.
• greatful19 (Apple): I worked hard at Cisco 20+ years back! Glad I kept some of the old espp stocks!
• LegRooom (Google): I don’t know why people still ‘work hard’. Do the bare minimum and enjoy your time with your family.

Users turn to jailbreaking their older Kindles as Amazon ends support (r/technology)

• number1dipshit: Good! What kinda bullshit is that? You pay for a product and they just make it obsolete unless you break some rules? Fuck amazon
• CondiMesmer: If a company ends support, they should legally be required to open source and let it be flashed.
• killerrin: Just waiting for the EU to crack down on them…any day now.

Palantir Says SaaS Is Dead (r/technology)

• tc100292: Palantir dies when?
• Zeraru: Palantir’s business model is Supervillainy as a Service.
• electrobento: Palantir is an enemy to humanity.

America’s productivity boom started before AI, and a Stanford economist who decoded the Great Resignation says working from home is the reason why | Fortune (r/technology)

• bigfuzzydog: Someone tell that to my CEO who just this year brought us back to the office full time
• Toby-Finkelstein: Seems like a complete market failure because so many companies are cutting WFH
• DontAsk0205: Yet companies keep mandating RTO. The worst part is that there’s no reasoning with the people who make these decisions.

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What happened

GitHub’s official AI & ML blog published Building a general-purpose accessibility agent and what we learned in the process, a May 15, 2026 post about piloting a Copilot-backed accessibility agent that answers engineer questions and reviews front-end pull requests before accessibility defects reach production.