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Sometimes, a Bug is a Blessing ⇢

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Paul Kafasis shared a delightful story from Rogue Amoeba’s history:

In the realm of computers, bugs are generally a bad thing. Every year, our team ships dozens of free updates to eliminate bugs that are an inescapable byproduct of the countless variables in software development. Rarely, though, a bug can be beneficial. Back in 2002, a software bug saved Rogue Amoeba.

It started when we shipped the very first version of Audio Hijack. We wanted to give potential customers the ability to fully test the app prior to purchase, but we weren’t sure how best to limit that free trial. Our initial download provided 15 full days of completely unlimited usage.

I won’t spoil what happened.

Google’s First Nuclear Reactor Project is Coming to Tennessee ⇢

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It’s not new news that big tech companies have been looking at nuclear for powering their datacenter, but Google is making some news in my home state. Here is Amanda Peterson Corio, the company’s Global Head of Data Center Energy:

Today we announced the first deployment of Kairos Power’s advanced nuclear reactor — the Hermes 2 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee — through a new power purchase agreement (PPA) between Kairos Power and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Marking the first purchase of electricity from an advanced GEN IV reactor by a U.S. utility, this agreement will enable 50 megawatts (MW) of nuclear energy on TVA’s grid that powers our data centers in Montgomery County, Tennessee and Jackson County, Alabama.

Last October, we began a long-term collaboration with Kairos Power to unlock up to 500 MW of nuclear power for the U.S. electricity system through multiple deployments of their small modular reactor. With this next step, we are creating a three-party solution where energy customers, utilities, and technology developers work together to advance new technologies that can help meet the world’s growing energy needs with reliable, affordable capacity.

TVA will buy power from the Kairos plant starting in 2030.

Oak Ridge is a name that may be familiar to some, as the site was part of the Manhattan Project. My wife’s grandmother worked there as a chemist many decades ago.

I don’t have strong feelings about nuclear power, but this is definitely another example of how the demands of AI and other services continue to grow at an alarming rate.

Relay Turns 11 ⇢

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Relay 11

Today marks Relay’s 11th birthday, as noted by Myke Hurley:

In recent months, there’s been a fresh wave of chatter about the “death of podcasting” — this time aimed at anything expensive or audio-only. I often joke that I’ve seen podcasting declared dead three or four times over the course of my career, and this is simply the latest chapter.

What many people fail to recognise, or have only just realised, is that this medium thrives when shows are made by people who care — people who are passionate and started podcasting simply because they loved it. The kinds of shows we make — talk shows for niche audiences — continue to succeed long after the big-budget projects fade away. Why? Because we have an audience that supports us, grows with us, and changes with us.

Our listeners care — they care about what we create, and they care about the conversations we have. That’s the true joy of this medium, and it’s why I keep showing up every day — more than 4,000 days later.

For a long time, people told us that shows like ours wouldn’t last, so to see our little network continue to provide hours of commentary and entertainment each week is a true blessing.

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MacSurfer Returns ⇢

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I’ve been in this racket long enough to see plenty of other websites, podcasts, and commentators come and go.

One of those names from the past is MacSurfer, an old-school link aggregation website keeping up with news from across the Apple ecosystem. Back in the day, getting a link on Macsurfer’s Headline News would mean serious traffic for a younger version of me.

While I first knew about MacSurfer in 2005 or so, I was a decade late; the site started back in 1995 WHEN I WAS JUST NINE YEARS OLD. Sadly, it was shuttered in 2020 due to revenue issues, but weirdly, the site seemed to spring back to life this week. Eric Schwarz was able to chat with its new owner, Ken Turner:

Eric Schwarz: It sounds like you were a fan of the old MacSurfer, what are you hoping to do with its revival?

Ken Turner: I joined Apple as a software engineer in 1997 and my manager told me about MacSurfer in one of our first meetings (really!) I became an almost daily visitor ever since. When it went dormant several years ago, I missed a daily news roundup of everything happening in the Apple world. My hope, partially selfish, is to bring it back to fill that need again.

After reading the entire thing, I’m encouraged that Turner is excited to bring back the site, and I think he has some interesting ideas on how to do it.

An Exploration of Lotus Agenda ⇢

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Kevin Lipe, in a follow-up post to his Pocket 8086 series here on 512:

I’d been Agenda-curious for a long time, but never tried to actually use it for real. I booted it up on my Pocket 8086, watched cards crawl into place, watched queries resolve themselves into slices of sense, and realized with annoying clarity: none of the modern “task management” apps I’ve used—not Todoist, not OmniFocus, Amazing Marvin, Remember the Milk, not Microsoft To Do—could do any of this. Not really. Agenda wasn’t “a to-do list.” It was a cognitive environment, a place where items could belong to more than one thing at once, where priorities didn’t march in a line but emergedfrom the way pieces related to one another.

This is not a user guide (Tavis Ormandy already wrote a careful, generous one here). It’s more of a lament—or maybe more of a small civic memorial—for an unexplored avenue in productivity software that modern tools only approximate in fragments. The utopian tools-for-thought vision of Agenda didn’t vanish because it was wrong; it vanished because it was weird and unprofitable.

Mr. Musk Goes to Nashville ⇢

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Another Elon Musk company is doing things in another Tennessee city, as Hannah McDonald reports:

Aerial footage from Sky 5 shows a freshly dug pit near the base of the State Capitol, a visible sign of progress on The Boring Company’s controversial underground transportation project in Tennessee.

The 10-foot-deep, 20-by-20-foot test pit was dug this week to study the rock beneath downtown. It’s part of the company’s plan to eventually shuttle passengers between the airport and downtown in Teslas through twin tunnels, aiming for a nine-minute trip by 2027.

“By the way, tough place to tunnel in Nashville,” said Steve Davis, CEO and President of The Boring Company. “You have extremely hard rock, like way harder than it should be.”

The initial digging began before the company asked the city for official approval.