bet on solar not AI

“Those who love how machines ‘think’ tend to think like machines themselves.” —Fiona Tribe

Software engineering in 2026 be like “we need you to be physically present in the office so we can replace you with AI” —Tilton Raccoon

“No, I don’t want an AI assisted experience. I want clean air, forests, and a future for the next generation.” —Greenpeace

Oh, sure—when *the company* automates my job and keeps collecting the profits, that’s “innovation,” but when *I* automate my job and keep collecting a paycheck, that’s “time clock fraud.” —Max Leibman

Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” —Antoine Buteau

I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here’s What I Actually Handed Over.

When you click “verify” on LinkedIn, you’re not giving your passport to LinkedIn. You get redirected to a company called Persona. Full name: Persona Identities, Inc. Based in San Francisco, California.
For a three-minute identity check, this is what Persona collected:

My full name — first, middle, last
My passport photo — the full document, both sides, all data on the face of it
My selfie — a photo of my face taken in real-time
My facial geometry — biometric data extracted from both images, used to match the selfie to the passport
My NFC chip data — the digital info stored on the chip inside my passport
My national ID number
My nationality, sex, birthdate, age
My email, phone number, postal address
My IP address, device type, MAC address, browser, OS version, language
My geolocation — inferred from my IP

And then there’s the weird stuff:

Hesitation detection — they tracked whether I paused during the process
Copy and paste detection — they tracked whether I was pasting information instead of typing it

Behavioral biometrics. On top of the physical biometrics. For a LinkedIn badge.

“The university isn’t a trade school. But we’ve spent decades pretending it is, and directing students toward ‘practical’ majors while treating the humanities as indulgences. AI is showing us what happens when the practical becomes automated. Suddenly we need the people who spent years thinking about consciousness, beauty, meaning, and ethics. Suddenly the ‘useless’ knowledge is the knowledge we don’t have.” —Found History

What We Talk About When We Talk About AI (Part Five)

Advocates of AI can be deft practitioners of circular logic. Ask them how the economics are supposed to work, they will tell you the AIs will answer that when they get advanced enough. Same for the cost of datacenters, the climate impacts, education, and medicine. More and more stochastic parrots will somehow solve all of it, and we will all live in a heavenly state, techno-raptured by the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk. With every round of doubt about AI, the promises get bigger and more insane. The AI companies act like addicts — strung out, insane, looking for ever bigger fixes from the stock market, but one day they will get cut off.

Goodbye to the idea that solar panels “die” after 25 years

Solar panels are usually sold with 25 to 30 years of performance promises. But what happens after that, when the warranty language is long gone and you are still hoping your roof system keeps shrinking the electric bill?

A new analysis led by Ebrar Özkalay at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland suggests the answer can be surprisingly good. Looking at six solar arrays in Switzerland that have been running since the late 1980s and early 1990s, the team found most panels still produced more than 80% of their original power after three decades.

A line chart plots global capacity of solar power measured in gigawatts. From 2010 capacity starts to grow exponentially, way beyond a series of predictions drawn as lines in yellow. Actual installations have been more than 3x higher than their five year forecasts. —Information is Beautiful