Jellyfish shut down three reactors at the Gravelines nuclear power plant in France this week, for the second consecutive year. North Sea warming has expanded jellyfish food supplies, growing populations large enough to clog industrial cooling intakes. France installed filter screens and monitoring systems after the 2025 incident. They were not enough. The BBC simultaneously revealed that NHS Blood and Transplant was broadcasting unencrypted patient data over a pager network trivially intercepted with a software-defined radio, years after the NHS formally committed to retiring pagers by 2021. Two infrastructure failures, two known problems, zero fixes.
The more interesting technical material is in the links. A browser-based emulator for the Voyager spacecraft Flight Data Subsystem lets you write and execute assembly code at 806.4 kHz, the actual clock speed of the 1970s JPL hardware. The site pairs this with live Voyager 1 distance data, current signal delay, and original JPL documentation. Separately, DONKEY.BAS, the 45-year-old DOS game co-written by Bill Gates to demo BASIC graphics, now runs in the browser. Both are worth five minutes of your time.
The piece worth reading in full is Marcin Wichary's retrospective on Apple's Touch Bar. Apple introduced the thin OLED strip in 2016 and killed it in 2023, and the consensus was that the hardware itself was the problem. Wichary argues the opposite: the failure was a software implementation that gave developers no coherent model for using it. The hardware was capable enough that hackers reverse-engineered the display for their own projects. If Wichary's argument holds, Apple shipped a genuinely useful input device and then made it impossible for anyone to treat it that way.
[READ ORIGINAL →]