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Gravity’s roundness test

Phil Plait starts with a question that sounds like a bar bet for astronomers: what is the roundest object anyone has found in the universe? The trick is to define roundness carefully. The article is not looking for the smoothest surface. It is looking for the object closest to a sphere, with every point on its surface nearly the same distance from its center.

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Bluster Meets Markets

The article argues that America under Donald Trump can look more statist than it really is. The president talks as if prices, companies and capital flows should obey political command. Business leaders increasingly speak about industrial policy as a weapon in the contest with China. Yet markets have often proved harder to bend than the rhetoric suggests. Mortgage rates, petrol prices and share prices do not move simply because the White House wants them to.

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The Pragmatic Engineer surfaced this May 20, 2026 podcast episode, and the original episode page is Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhl.

Rust makes correctness part of the workflow

The episode is a useful explanation of Rust because Alice Ryhl does not frame the language as a prestige choice or a benchmark contest. She explains it as a language that changes where engineering effort goes. Rust asks developers to make ownership, lifetimes, error handling, and unsafe boundaries explicit earlier than many other languages do. That can make the first draft slower and the learning curve steeper, but it also moves classes of mistakes out of runtime debugging and into compiler feedback.

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US justice department ‘forever’ bars IRS from auditing Trump’s past tax returns (r/news)

• Salarian_American: In a sane world, asking to be exempted from all future auditing would be a reason to audit someone immediately.
• nickkom: Corruption, plain and simple
• cointoss3: Haha the justice department can’t affect future attorneys general from reverting this. Only way to make this for real for real is a law. Guidelines can always be amended.
• soundisloud: Absolutely ruined the integrity of America

NAACP calls for boycott of Southern college sports programs over voting rights (r/news)

• TurkeyVolumeGuesser: If only this would happen but I don’t see it
• MidnightMoon1331: Can we boycott the IRS and not pay taxes over slush fund and tax immunity too?
• Ok-Replacement6893: Hit them where it hurts them most.
• oldmaninparadise: Michigan, Wisconsin, Maryland, Penn. All great football programs. California, Oregon and Washington too. Problem is there are only 25 new slots per year per team.

Trump Wants Russia and China to Help Combat the International Court That Charges War Crimes (r/worldnews)

• TubeframeMR2: When a guy starts recruiting autocracies to weaken war crimes tribunals, you have to wonder what we don’t know.
• aircooledJenkins: “Trump, a good boy, Is Following The Orders His Leash Holders Have Given Him.”
• nativeridge_: Americans you have a suicidal government at the wheel and you are full speed off the road ploughing through the undergrowth
• Banana-phone15: So Trump wants to start a boy band for war criminals

What is a ‘single person luxury’ that people in relationships completely miss out on? (r/AskReddit)

• Ok-Refrigerator-8664: Never having to discuss plans with anyone. No discussion on dinner, what to watch, what to do, or where to go. You just do what you want all the time.
• LateNightLatin: Knowing things will be exactly where the left them. The amount of time I go looking for the kitchen scissors.
• headcase-and-a-half: Knowing that the piece of chocolate cake you left in the fridge will still be there whenever you want it.
• Fresh-Package5303: Being able to do absolutely nothing all weekend without having to explain it to anyone

TIL After Francis I exchanged himself in spanish captivity in 1526 with his two sons, aged 7 and 8, he annuled everything he signed in exchange for his release, but the kids remained in captivity for nearly 4 years. His eldest son and heir was scarred for life as a result (r/todayilearned)

• GarysCrispLettuce: Father of the Year 1526
• AskAskim: It’s pretty clear to me from all of history that “family” either meant something way tighter than we are familiar with now, or absolutely nothing.
• cometlin: TIL After King Francis I traded himself for his sons to escape Spanish captivity in 1526, he later annulled the agreement, leaving the boys imprisoned for years
• Exact_Touch_4794: This is similar to how Byzantine emperors also thought. Some even killed or blinded their own children. It’s all about how important you think you are and what God wants

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Claude 5=Nuclear bomb (Blind)

• TheRealBoz (Meta): Even when using Claude to write most code, it hasn’t made people much faster. It also can’t function without a SWE. Even if the next model makes less mistakes and has a bigger context, still wont change the real bottlenecks.
• nhci (Amazon): Worst part is, someone with an MBA is going to see this and believe it.
• uqwH11 (Google): Not sure what you are smoking OP. It is still a mid productivity boost for anything reasonably hard, and nowhere close to replace actual SWE. It is not 10x, not even 2x for things which are hard and actually time consuming. Nobody cares how fast it can build crappy CRUD website or another HTML-based game nobody will play.
• AeJP42 (Indeed): The last time I asked Claude 4 to write me some unit tests it wrote tests for functionality that literally didn’t exist and then mocked everything so they would pass anyway, lol

I’m about to get laid off from Meta (Blind)

• muul (JUUL): For Meta you usually get 16 weeks of salary severance and then additional 2 weeks per year based on years of service. Whatever is not vested by your termination date is gone. Both of these are pretty standard stuff for tech.
• mstrchf117 (Google): It’s sad, how long did you work at Meta?? It’s a shitty thing to do after they make you grind leetcode during interviews.
• rWIT40: Just in case, I’d suggest signing up for Blind with your current company before you get laid off. That way you can actually see what’s going on after the layoffs.
• Vh31sK (Airbnb): Your post is confusing. Are you getting laid off or are you getting fired? These are not the same thing.

‘The Worst Leak That I’ve Witnessed’: U.S. Cybersecurity Agency Leaves Its Digital Keys Out in Public on GitHub (r/technology)

• thegooncity: The worst leak they’ve witnessed so far.
• scamdrill: Six months of GovCloud admin credentials sitting in a public repo named Private-CISA, in a file called importantAWStokens, and the official statement is “no indication sensitive data was compromised.” I mean, technically true — nobody needed to compromise it. It was just sitting there. Like a buffet.
• SparkStormrider: I wish I could say I am shocked, but the level of ineptitude in govt. at all levels is astounding. Just like in Trumps last stint as President. Rudy Guliani (sp?) was put over cyber security and they deployed a public facing SQL server with ZERO protections. It got owned in a few minutes after deployment. And that’s just one of what we know about…
• Imoutofchips: They chased away every competent person they had. Just crooks and idiots left.

Google Search as you know it is over (r/technology)

• bitskewer: How are they paying for this? Seems like they’re cannibalizing their ad referral business while providing zero-cost AI services. Surely this isn’t sustainable?
• jmonschke: The “enshitification” of Google search is not an accident. It was an intentional decision made within Google, because when you find what you are looking for on the first page, they can’t serve you as many ads.
• willieb3: The problem is that google is scraping websites and bypassing ad revenue that should go to websites. I used to want google to reach my website, but now there is legitimately nothing in it for me so I am actively blocking Google’s bots.
• NicolasCageFan492: We really had a good thing going before algorithms.

Gen Z’s AI backlash is getting louder (r/technology)

• Samski877: Gen Z graduating into a job market where companies want “entry level candidates” with 5 years experience while simultaneously replacing half the entry level work with AI is genuinely brutal timing.
• chriskot123: I don’t think this is specific to Gen Z…as a millennial, there is a TON of backlash from us (and even Gen x) as well.
• ischickenafruit: “AI is going to replace you and make me rich” is not exactly a winning message.
• SNTCTN: I love getting emails from people who clearly didn’t read what I sent and just had AI write a response for them.

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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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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Sequence Reconstruction
• Topics: Array, Graph Theory, Topological Sort

What the problem is asking

The input gives a target sequence nums and a list of shorter sequences. Each shorter sequence says, “these numbers must appear in this relative order.”

The task is not just to ask whether nums can be built from those constraints. It asks whether nums is the only shortest sequence that satisfies every constraint. If another sequence of the same shortest length can also satisfy the constraints, the answer is False.

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Darkness that makes stars

Phil Plait’s column begins by turning away from the spectacular images that usually define modern astronomy. The universe is full of exploding stars, colliding galaxies and glowing nebulae, but some of its most important objects are visible because they are dark. The article focuses on Bok globules: small, dense clouds of gas and dust that can look like holes punched into a starry background.

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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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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as Grouse and chairlifts and published under the headline Last resorts.

The article turns a small Alpine conservation problem into a useful lesson about design. Black grouse have been flying into chair-lift cables at ski resorts for years, often fatally. Resorts tried to help by hanging warning markers from the cables. The trouble was that many of those markers were red, and new research suggests red is precisely the wrong signal for the birds.