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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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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 Business article listed in the contents as Trumpian psychedelics and published under the headline Altered state.

The article argues that Donald Trump’s sudden embrace of psychedelic medicines could accelerate a promising field, but in a way that exposes a deeper problem in American drug policy. Psychedelics may help treat depression, PTSD, addiction and anxiety. The issue is not whether the field deserves attention. It does. The issue is whether treatments should be pushed forward because the evidence is strong, or because they have caught the eye of the president and his circle.

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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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Maldives military diver dies while trying to recover scuba diving victims in underwater cave: Officials (r/news)

• Fitdoc50: I really hope I don’t die in an underwater cave. How to prevent this?
• shoulda-known-better: I thought the first rule was don’t go back for people in cave diving
• girusatuku: What is the #1 cause of death among cave divers? Cave diving. What is #2? Retrieving the bodies of those who died from #1.

Humpback whale released after spectacular rescue effort found dead (r/news)

• KimJongFunk: So many marine biologists and veterinarians advised against moving this whale but the social media uproar demanded action and this is what happened. RIP Timmy :(
• FrankieTheD: Once a whale at the point it’s disoriented and beaching its pretty slim odds right? Remember a few cases in the news it rarely works out
• Masterweedo: Sadly, I didn’t expect any other outcome.

At least 3 killed, numerous residential buildings hit in mass drone attack on Moscow region (r/worldnews)

• xmuskorx: Ukrainian telegram channels are posting oil infrastructure burning in Zelenograd and Solnechnogorsk (basically a suburb of Moscow)
• BionicShenanigans: Can you imagine hearing this a couple years ago? Ukraine has the initiative
• Sonyguyus: How dare Ukraine invade the country that invaded it first!

North America’s largest commuter rail system shuts down as workers strike (r/news)

• Humble_Diner32: I, a long time union member and a third generation union worker, stand with them. Let’s unionize the American workforce.
• RoyalZeal: I stand with the workers, if they were being taken care of they wouldn’t be striking.
• paleo2002: The LIRR is the largest commuter train system in North America? That’s sad. I thought NJT or something in California would be larger.

What industry is actually a complete scam, but everyone accepts it? (r/AskReddit)

• Embarrassed_Ask8293: Ticketmaster
• boomlakshmi: Wedding industry
• bigfatgeekboy: Time shares. Payday loans.

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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.

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Names are astronomy’s living archive

Phil Plait’s column uses a deceptively simple question - why do stars have such strange names? - to show how astronomy carries its history inside its vocabulary. A star name is rarely just a label. It can preserve a chain of translations, a cultural nickname, an old cataloging scheme, a technical measurement or a practical need created by a telescope.

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Techmeme surfaced this May 17, 2026 story in its Techmeme cluster, and the original article is Kim Zetter’s May 16, 2026 Zero Day report, Experts Confirm the Fast16 Malware Was Sabotaging Nuclear Weapons Tests, Likely in Iran.

What Fast16 was built to do

Fast16 matters because it reframes one of the oldest assumptions about cyber sabotage. The obvious image is a machine breaking: centrifuges spinning out of control, industrial equipment shutting down, or a facility losing power. Zetter’s report describes something quieter and arguably more corrosive. Fast16 appears to have been designed to make engineers trust the wrong numbers.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 International article listed in the contents as Military innovation in Ukraine and published under the headline Battlefield formation.

The article argues that Ukraine’s war effort has become a live laboratory for military technology. Drones, unmanned ground vehicles and AI-assisted systems are no longer peripheral experiments. They are increasingly central to how Ukraine supplies troops, strikes Russian forces, protects soldiers from exposure and compensates for being outmatched in manpower and traditional firepower.

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‘Point of no return’: 36 countries join special tribunal to prosecute Vladimir Putin (r/worldnews)

• asdhjasdhlkjashdhgf: When even Switzerland joins support for an international tribunal you should be able to see the writing on the wall.
• The-marx-channel: Putin’s place should be in the Hague
• Golden–: Yeah, this is meaningless unless you actually plan to arrest and prosecute him.

Mass casualty incident’ after explosion near Maine lumber complex (r/news)

• DNAturation: Sounds like a fire started and turned into a sawdust explosion.
• HorrorAd6729: Unbelievably dangerous situation. Reports indicate a wood shaving silo exploded while crews were already on the scene fighting a warehouse fire, which is why so many firefighters are among the 11 injured. Sending 10 patients to a Level 1 trauma center and calling multiple maydays shows just how catastrophic the blast was. Grateful that all mill staff were safely accounted for, but this is a massive blow to Mid-Coast Maine.
• b0xturtl3: Don’t forget most firefighters in Maine are volunteer.

Phoenix police fire sergeant who brought gun to ICE protest (r/news)

• mastermidget23: Reading the article, this pos went to the protest masked up with gun, literally on camera talked about how he was going to try to get them all to gang up on him to arrest them, while he had people in the distance film for evidence. Fucking psychopaths with no self awareness like Rittenhouse going to protests just to make them dangerous and still think of themselves as “the good guys”.
• OhNoIBoffedIt: Other cops are like “you’re supposed to be in uniform when you commit crimes, dude.”
• Iribumkiak: He is just going to get another police job in another jurisdiction.

What’s a problem humanity solved so well that younger people don’t even realize it used to be a huge issue? (r/AskReddit)

• obligated_existence: The hole in the ozone layer. One of our biggest (and only) global environmental success stories.
• Longwell2020: Clean water
• chickenmcdruggets: Anything solved by vaccines

TIL that Empress Ma was born poor and during a famine she stole cakes to feed her husband by hiding them in her breasts. The cakes were hot and she got burns. Later her husband became a rebel commander who became Emperor and made her his Empress. He was deeply devoted to her even as an Emperor. (r/todayilearned)

• StaleSunTease: hongwu turned into one of the most paranoid emperors in chinese history and she’s basically the only reason his purges didn’t get even worse.
• Own_Bar2063: This did not stop him from having a huge harem of Korean and Mongolian concubines, and from them he had 26 sons and 16 daughters.
• derpdelurk: I would also be devoted to someone that provided breast cakes.