Amazon Web Services will become a trillion-dollar business in five to ten years, and thanks to the AI boom Amazon CEO Andy Jassy thinks it should be able to grow by 40 percent or more in 2027 or 2028.

The cloud giant is already on track to generate $184 billion annual revenue this financial year, helped by 39.3 percent year-over-year growth that propelled Q3 revenue to a whisker short of $46 billion.

"It's important to remember that the vast majority of global IT spend, about 85 percent, is still on premises, and we're in a 10- to 20-year cycle where that equation will flip to the cloud," he said on Amazon's Q3 earnings call.

"Conventional wisdom has been that linchpin workloads like mainframes or storage area networks would never move to the cloud," he observed, before triumphantly noting "these workloads are moving."

He thinks AI will help, too.

Jassy said the cloudy concern installs a new AI accelerator "about every 14 seconds, and almost as fast as we install capacity, customers are gobbling it up." The outfit's Bedrock AI services is already the fastest growing multi-billion dollar service in its history, Jassy said.

Core compute and storage services are also soaring: the CEO said revenue from both "grew at their fastest rates in several years."

Jassy thinks the performance of Bedrock and core services are intertwined, because when users select AWS for AI workloads they want their cloudy inferencing rigs to be "near the rest of their data and apps."

The CEO said AI workloads therefore "can't help but drive core AWS demand because AI uses core for work like reinforcement learning, post-training, and tool usage, which can't help but drive reinvestment back into our broader AWS functionality."

He thinks this scheme is already working because margins for AI services are already "well ahead" of the figures AWS was able to achieve for its core services at a similar time in their evolution.

The company expects to make $220 billion of capital expenditure in 2026 and already spent $75.9 billion last quarter alone, most of that on AWS. Jassy said the cloud colossus is finding ways to more quickly pay for its infrastructure investments.

The CEO said it's not easy to do that.

"I think what we're seeing with AI, it's the biggest transformation in our lifetime," he said. "Would it be more convenient if this type of acceleration and opportunity happened over 25 years and you could spread the CapEx over 25 years? Yeah, it might be more convenient, but that's not the world that we live in, and that's not the opportunity."

"We can fund this plan. I think it will forever change the size of Amazon. It will forever change our revenue, it will forever change our free cash flow, and we're going to invest, and we're going to pursue it to continue to be the significant leader like we are today."

Amazon needs AWS to land this plane, because the cloudy concern is growing much faster than the company's retail and operations, which saw revenue rise six percent on far slimmer margins. Jassy could at least point to Prime Video becoming "a significant business with a revenue run rate in the tens of billions of dollars, [and is] now profitable in its own right."

Overall revenue was $180.17 bilion for the quarter.

So if the respective growth rates of AWS and the rest of Amazon continue, in a few years we could be talking about a cloud company with a retail side hustle. ®

Crypto exchange Binance has paused trading after discovering unknown parties cracked one of its workers' laptops and used it to make massive trades

Late on Thursday, US time, the company used its social media feeds to report "Our teams are aware of reports of a potential security issue and are actively investigating."

The exchange insisted "User funds are completely safe" and warned its customers "should remain cautious of scams and should not trust unofficial links, messages, or requests for account information."

The company soon froze $2.5 billion worth of assets and warned that the figure could go higher "as our teams work closely with law enforcement, issuers, blockchain intelligence firms and industry partners to trace and freeze additional assets."

To prevent the matter worsening, Binance halted all trading, deposits, and withdrawals. It also promised to cover any losses.

About an hour ago at the time of writing, Binance posted an update on the incident that explains what it thinks went wrong.

"Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions," the post states.

The company also hiked the amount it thinks is at risk to $6.3 billion and repeated its promise to cover any customer losses.

The update also says Binance found no evidence of any wallet private key leak, suggesting that customers' holdings remain secure.

When they can use them again, as Binance is yet to resume trading.

Binance hasn't explained how attackers gained access to the engineer's laptop. The scant details provided make it hard to rule out a successful phishing attack, or perhaps a supply chain attack on a package the developer used.

Binance says it will spill once it knows exactly what happened.

Cryptocurrency outfits have a long and inglorious history of falling victim to cyberattacks, perhaps starting with the 2011 raid on Mt Gox, to incidents allegedly perpetrated by nation-states, and, just last week, another situation possibly involving an AI-powered attacker. ®

Since the winter storms of 2025-2026, when yet more houses fell into the sea, local people have been asking: 'Is this just climate change, or could dredging be making matters worse?'

It is February 2026 and the calm after the storm, but cold and wet. A Thorpeness resident stands despairingly in what remains of her once beautiful garden, the rest having been eaten away by the sea. The sounds of demolition machinery attacking a neighbouring house are all too evident. Four homes have recently been lost and eight more are condemned, hers included. 'I have nowhere else to live, nowhere to go,' she says in a scared and desolate voice.

Only a few months previously it had been estimated that coastal homes were safe on this cliff top for at least another ten years. Villagers therefore wonder whether such a dramatic miscalculation has resulted purely from unexpected worsening of climate change with increased storm surges, or if there might be some other influence that exacerbates the situation. Could this be offshore dredging?

The Crown Estate is the body that manages the seabed for up to 12 nautical miles from the coastline around England, Wales and Northern Ireland and is responsible for granting dredging licences, including those off the East Coast. These licences generate income for the Crown Estate. In addition to licence fees, operators pay a royalty for every tonne of sand and gravel dredged. The Crown Estate's overall net revenue profits are returned to the Treasury.

Most of the dredged material off East Anglia is in great demand in the construction industry as represented by the British Marine Aggregate Producers Association (BMAPA). Both the Crown Estate and BMAPA reject suggestions that licensed offshore dredging is contributing to coastal erosion. Dredging can affect sediment movement and the underwater landscape, with potential consequences for the stability of the near shore, beaches and coastal erosion. The more difficult question is whether offshore aggregate dredging is having any such effect on the Suffolk coast.

Off East Anglia, this natural movement is in a mainly southerly direction and is known as 'longshore drift'. It is crucial for supplying sediment to beaches, which in turn helps to support the base of cliffs. Long experience has shown that any interference with this process, for example putting in hard defences, will cause erosion further down the coast.

Within the sea, sandbanks have a protective effect by reducing the power of the waves as they move towards the shore. Some of Suffolk's coastal towns, villages and businesses have relied on two such banks, the Sizewell and Dunwich Banks. Clearly, if these, or indeed any others, were significantly reduced in size the results at the shore could be devastating.

If we look at the Marine Aggregate Dredging map of 2022 for the Eastern Region we see immediately that a very large area of licences has been granted offshore between Lowestoft and Caister. There are two more areas further south. The annual amount dredged has varied from 23 km2 (2016 and 2020) to as much as 97 km2 (1998). Could it be that the removal of such large quantities of sand and gravel (160 million tonnes during the 25 years to 2022) has either altered the movement of sediment in some way, or allowed the energy of storm waves to increase, or otherwise caused beaches to shrink, thereby affecting the stability of coastal villages?

The Crown Estate and BMAPA insist that their dredging is in deep water and too far offshore to interfere with longshore drift or cause any 'drawdown' from the coast into newly formed troughs. They emphasise that the average alteration of depth is only 0.33 m, yet the height and depth of the peaks and troughs prior to dredging remains unclear.

Evidently, the sand and gravel only come from what they refer to as 'fossil deposits' which they say are mostly immobile. However, they do admit that 'sandbanks represent the nearest point of potential influence from dredging taking place offshore'.

Local swimmers have been puzzled by how sandbanks that they used to stand on have mysteriously vanished. So, what about the protective Sizewell and Dunwich banks? During the last few decades hydrographic charts have shown consistent erosion of the two with lowering of the crests and a spreading out along the eastern contours. Could dredging be a contributing factor?

Recent events suggest that they are no longer substantial enough to prevent storm surges from ripping away the soft cliffs at Thorpeness. It is also a worry that Sizewell nuclear power stations A and B lie just 4 km to the north, with C currently under construction. The company is already having to consider recharge of the soft defences along the beach.

As Alan Brampton, who carried out research for the Crown Estate, has said, he is engaged in 'an inexact science. Sediment transport is very difficult to model.' Distressed coastal residents are therefore left with more questions than answers.

Nevertheless, old-fashioned commonsense indicates that such a very large area of offshore dredging could be having an impact on East Anglia's complex and finely balanced coastal processes. We interfere with these at our peril.

Nominate an organisation that needs scrutiny

The post Dredging for profit but losing our villages? first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

Since the winter storms of 2025-2026, when yet more houses fell into the sea, local people have been asking: 'Is this just climate change, or could dredging be making matters worse?'

It is February 2026 and the calm after the storm, but cold and wet. A Thorpeness resident stands despairingly in what remains of her once beautiful garden, the rest having been eaten away by the sea. The sounds of demolition machinery attacking a neighbouring house are all too evident. Four homes have recently been lost and eight more are condemned, hers included. 'I have nowhere else to live, nowhere to go,' she says in a scared and desolate voice.

Only a few months previously it had been estimated that coastal homes were safe on this cliff top for at least another ten years. Villagers therefore wonder whether such a dramatic miscalculation has resulted purely from unexpected worsening of climate change with increased storm surges, or if there might be some other influence that exacerbates the situation. Could this be offshore dredging?

The Crown Estate is the body that manages the seabed for up to 12 nautical miles from the coastline around England, Wales and Northern Ireland and is responsible for granting dredging licences, including those off the East Coast. These licences generate income for the Crown Estate. In addition to licence fees, operators pay a royalty for every tonne of sand and gravel dredged. The Crown Estate's overall net revenue profits are returned to the Treasury.

Most of the dredged material off East Anglia is in great demand in the construction industry as represented by the British Marine Aggregate Producers Association (BMAPA). Both the Crown Estate and BMAPA reject suggestions that licensed offshore dredging is contributing to coastal erosion. Dredging can affect sediment movement and the underwater landscape, with potential consequences for the stability of the near shore, beaches and coastal erosion. The more difficult question is whether offshore aggregate dredging is having any such effect on the Suffolk coast.

Off East Anglia, this natural movement is in a mainly southerly direction and is known as 'longshore drift'. It is crucial for supplying sediment to beaches, which in turn helps to support the base of cliffs. Long experience has shown that any interference with this process, for example putting in hard defences, will cause erosion further down the coast.

Within the sea, sandbanks have a protective effect by reducing the power of the waves as they move towards the shore. Some of Suffolk's coastal towns, villages and businesses have relied on two such banks, the Sizewell and Dunwich Banks. Clearly, if these, or indeed any others, were significantly reduced in size the results at the shore could be devastating.

If we look at the Marine Aggregate Dredging map of 2022 for the Eastern Region we see immediately that a very large area of licences has been granted offshore between Lowestoft and Caister. There are two more areas further south. The annual amount dredged has varied from 23 km2 (2016 and 2020) to as much as 97 km2 (1998). Could it be that the removal of such large quantities of sand and gravel (160 million tonnes during the 25 years to 2022) has either altered the movement of sediment in some way, or allowed the energy of storm waves to increase, or otherwise caused beaches to shrink, thereby affecting the stability of coastal villages?

The Crown Estate and BMAPA insist that their dredging is in deep water and too far offshore to interfere with longshore drift or cause any 'drawdown' from the coast into newly formed troughs. They emphasise that the average alteration of depth is only 0.33 m, yet the height and depth of the peaks and troughs prior to dredging remains unclear.

Evidently, the sand and gravel only come from what they refer to as 'fossil deposits' which they say are mostly immobile. However, they do admit that 'sandbanks represent the nearest point of potential influence from dredging taking place offshore'.

Local swimmers have been puzzled by how sandbanks that they used to stand on have mysteriously vanished. So, what about the protective Sizewell and Dunwich banks? During the last few decades hydrographic charts have shown consistent erosion of the two with lowering of the crests and a spreading out along the eastern contours. Could dredging be a contributing factor?

Recent events suggest that they are no longer substantial enough to prevent storm surges from ripping away the soft cliffs at Thorpeness. It is also a worry that Sizewell nuclear power stations A and B lie just 4 km to the north, with C currently under construction. The company is already having to consider recharge of the soft defences along the beach.

As Alan Brampton, who carried out research for the Crown Estate, has said, he is engaged in 'an inexact science. Sediment transport is very difficult to model.' Distressed coastal residents are therefore left with more questions than answers.

Nevertheless, old-fashioned commonsense indicates that such a very large area of offshore dredging could be having an impact on East Anglia's complex and finely balanced coastal processes. We interfere with these at our peril.

Nominate an organisation that needs scrutiny

The post Dredging for profit but losing our villages? first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

Andy Stott

Late Loop

The British electronic music producer proves himself, once again, a consummate perfectionist - but it's the subtle imperfections that make his music really sing

It didn't take Andy Stott long to find himself drawn towards the frayed edges, to wear and imperfections. Less concerned with gleaming dancefloor patterns than the accumulation of hiss and grit, he made his name with slower tempos, tracks that went a little wonky, marked by age and rust. A sound in love with the 'stuff' of sound, the sense it had a physical surface that got under your fingernails, that carried the marks of time. On Late Loop it settles to a stillness, a richly emotive minimalism under the slow shroud of attic dust.

It's...

The post Andy Stott - Late Loop appeared first on The Quietus.

A cartoon that celebrates small acts of grace

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Replacing diesel-powered ferries with electric vessels could reduce emissions and improve air quality

Cutting through New York Harbor in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, the small white boat we were riding on caught the attention of passengers aboard a nearby sightseeing ferry.

"It's quite a curiosity at the moment," Eric Laakmann, the chief executive and co-founder of Vessev, said.

Climate Central is an independent group of scientists and communicators who research and report the facts about our changing climate and how it affects people's lives.

There is no end in sight for the drivers of illegal mining, while police action appears ineffective

Cora Bailey has been encountering illegal miners ever since she first started treating injured animals in the townships around Roodepoort, west of Johannesburg, in 1991. But as the price of gold has soared, so too has activity in the abandoned mine shafts that mark the area.

In late September, dozens of zama zamas - the name given to illegal miners in South Africa, meaning roughly "to take a chance" in Zulu - arrived to dig for gold across the dirt road from her charity, Claw (Community Led Animal Welfare).

Many thanks also to my friend Barry Smiler for being October's sponsor. Do take a look at his climate site, which nicely complements mine. He recently added some nifty enhancements to his Research page. And for your climate listening pleasure, he suggests this little song.

"Oil Refineries Become Prime Targets as Global Fuel Shortage Worsens

"The global refining crisis is worsening, as war damage to Middle Eastern refineries and Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian facilities severely restrict fuel supplies."

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Oil-Refineries-Become-Prime-Targets-as-Global-Fuel-Shortage-Worsens.amp.html

"Ship reported on fire off Oman as Iran escalation fears mount.

"A ship in the Strait of Hormuz is reported to be on fire, a British maritime agency says. Iran has meanwhile said it has shot down another US drone as military tensions with Washington continue."

https://amp.dw.com/en/ship-reported-on-fire-off-oman-as-iran-escalation-fears-mount/a-79792733

"Iran's hidden web of military agencies is slipping hardware past the US blockade.

"Iran has harnessed a military-financial complex of 5,000 agencies to bring in components, explosives and heavy-duty trucks critical to its drone and missile programs. Even during the war, deliveries reached Iran by land, sea and air."

https://www.reuters.com/world/iran/irans-hidden-web-military-agencies-is-slipping-hardware-past-us-blockade-2026-10-29/

"Israeli election deadlock leaves door open to fresh Iran strikes.

"Israel's inconclusive election opens the possibility for Binyamin Netanyahu to launch a new bombing campaign with the US against Iran while he rules as caretaker prime minister, said Israeli security experts."

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/middle-east/2026/10/29/israeli-election-deadlock-leaves-door-open-to-fresh-iran-strikes/

70 years ago the Suez crisis exposed British relative decline. Today, the Iran conflict could be doing the same for the US

Suez showed that Britain had lost the leeway to behave like a superpower.

"…the invasion was a spectacular failure that was condemned by the international community. The crisis came to symbolise Britain's loss of superpower status."

https://theconversation.com/70-years-ago-the-suez-crisis-exposed-british-relative-decline-today-the-iran-conflict-could-be-doing-the-same-for-the-us-292833

"Americans are putting groceries and gas on credit, and the debt is piling up…

"A 2026 survey commissioned by Accredited Debt Relief found that 66% of respondents had used a credit card to purchase groceries in the previous year. The survey also found that 29% relied on credit or borrowing every month to make ends meet."

https://nypost.com/business/how-everyday-expenses-become-long-term-debt/

"North Sea oil and gas tax take 'close to zero' in five years, OBR says.

"The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), in a document published alongside the UK Government's Budget, also projected that North Sea output would decline by 10% a year until 2031. The 10% decline is assuming that the Rosebank oil field is approved for development."

https://www.thenational.scot/news/26677922.north-sea-oil-gas-tax-take-close-zero-five-years-obr-says/

"EU Scrambles to Contain Energy Price Crisis Ahead of Winter.

""We are in a very serious situation now. It does not look like we have a security of supply issue but I would warn against neglecting that," Jorgensen told media yesterday, as quoted by Reuters."

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/EU-Scrambles-to-Contain-Energy-Price-Crisis-Ahead-of-Winter.amp.html

"European property slump deepens as borrowing costs force price cuts…

"Government bond yields have surged to multi-year highs across ​Europe and globally, pushing up financing costs for borrowers, including in the interest-rate sensitive property ​sector."

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/european-property-slump-deepens-borrowing-costs-force-price-cuts-2026-10-29/

"Is the Eurozone heading towards a new sovereign debt crisis?

"Lessons from the Eurozone's experience with Greece in 2010 suggest that while a full-blown drama is yet to unfold, the European Central Bank must stand ready to intervene if nee

ded."

https://www.economicsobservatory.com/is-the-eurozone-heading-towards-a-new-sovereign-debt-crisis

"French Senate backs 'Rioters Pay' bill that could make protesters pay $11,000 fines…

"Under the so-called "Rioters Pay" bill, protesters could be ordered to pay up to 10,000 euros ($11,140) "for the compensation of damages resulting from crimes and offenses committed by force or violence." Welfare payments could also be seized to cover costs."

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/10/29/france-protests-riots-cost-damages-law.html

"Volkswagen crisis deepens as it reports worst loss since 'Dieselgate' scandal…

"Chief executive Oliver Blume has agreed to cut a total of 100,000 jobs by 2030… 'The loss reported by VW today is a warning sign for the entire sector and industry, and should also serve as one for policymakers,' said Moritz Kronenberger of Volkswagen investor Union Investment."

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-16248899/Volkswagen-crisis-deepens-reports-worst-loss-Dieselgate-scandal.html

"Private Credit: Facing A Brutal 2027.

"Private credit markets are deteriorating rapidly, with default rates hitting record highs and refinancing conditions worsening amid rising interest rates."

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4959243-private-credit-facing-a-brutal-2027

"Investors May Have Bought All the AI Bonds They Can Handle.

"A new anxiety is gripping Wall Street as it bankrolls the vast network of data centers and chips behind the AI boom: Early signs suggest the credit market is approaching the limits of how much more debt it can absorb."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-10-29/investors-may-have-bought-all-the-ai-bonds-they-can-handle

"The AI bubble could expose your deepest secrets…

"If the bubble pops, untold numbers of AI businesses will merge or shut down. The data that billions of people give to AI tools could then be purchased by almost anyone. You may never find out what happens to it."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20261029-the-ai-bubble-could-expose-your-deepest-secrets

[Reality corner]

In Erik Michael's latest he quotes Lyle Lewis:

"Perhaps the defining scarcity of this century will not be information. We already possess more information than any society in history. The scarcity will be uninterrupted time—time long enough for information to become understanding, understanding to become adaptation, and adaptation to become resilience.

Without that time, ecosystems cannot fully adapt, institutions cannot learn, and societies cannot clearly understand what is happening to them. The world does not need to conceal the crisis from us. It only needs to change faster than we can put the pieces together."

https://problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.com/2026/10/adaptation-will-be-futile.html

As a reader-funded publication, your one time and regular donations help keep this site going. If you value this work, please share it far and wide and consider a Patreon subscription or a one time Paypal donation. You can also support this work by buying a virtual coffee. Thank you!

You can read the previous "Economic" thread here. I'll be back tomorrow with a "Climate" thread.

The post 30th October 2026 Today's Round-Up of Economic News appeared first on Climate and Economy.

One of the UK budget's big surprises? A discount on gherkins. And while they'll always be good on a burger, there are many more unusual ways to indulge, from fried cheese treats to savoury ice-cream

In John Healey's first budget as chancellor this week, he announced that he will remove import tariffs on more than 100 products - including, crucially, gherkins. Baked beans and boiled sweets, too, but gherkins stole the limelight, perhaps due to gen Z's long-held obsession with all things pickled, including cucumbers.

But for those who think of a gherkin as either something to be chomped straight from the jar or swiftly removed from a Big Mac, do not worry: there are, in fact, plenty of ways to get more bang for your newly discounted gherkin buck.

The #25 won't be taking part in the rest of the Malaysian GP as he continues to suffer with his fingers, broken in Lombok.

Raul Fernandez (SuperFile Trackhouse MotoGP team) put in a superhuman ride at the Indonesian GP to take a podium despite having fractured fingers, but the #25 was then forced to withdraw from the Australian GP as his recovery continues.

Arriving in Sepang for the Petronas Grand Prix of Malaysia, Fernandez got the ok to take part in FP1 and headed out in the session. However, in a review thereafter he was declared officially unfit and is now sidelined from the event, instead focusing on making a full recovery.

Get well soon, Raul!

The post MotoGP: Raul Fernandez Sidelined From Sepang appeared first on Roadracing World Magazine | Motorcycle Riding, Racing & Tech News.

To state that RFK Jr. says things that are just plainly wrong is to state the obvious. His waffling claims about the dangers of vaccines are wrong. His various other pet conspiracy theories, such as chemtrails and damage to humans from EMF, are also wrong. The data HHS is putting out under his leadership about how many measles deaths have occurred this year is also wrong. Hell, at a recent campaign event in Michigan, a state with a large Arab population, Kennedy decided that the best way to stump for Mike Rogers was to claim that none of the Arabs throughout the world produce any science or literature, which is also wrong.

"There's 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don't produce science, they don't win the Nobel Prize, they don't win the Fields prize, they don't win the Wolf Prize, they don't produce literature," he said.

Arabs have won all those prizes. Peter Hotez, who is a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and specializes in vaccine development and tropical medicine, said his late colleague, Nobel Prize winner Ahmed Zewail, who was Arab and died in 2016, "would disagree" with Kennedy's comments.

So, not just wrong, but racist in perhaps the stupidest manner possible given his only reason for being in Michigan in the first place.

So let's rewind the clock back to April, when Kennedy decided to tell the public that this whole measles outbreak thing had nothing to do with him. Rather, the only reason we had the outbreaks to begin with was because of dirty foreigners coming in as immigrants.

But despite Kennedy being the most vocal source of vaccine misinformation, the secretary tried to blame the outbreaks entirely on immigrants who come to the U.S. from countries where measles is not eliminated — framing the issue as a global epidemic rather than a national public health crisis.

"It has nothing to do with me," he told lawmakers. "If you're worried about polio and tuberculosis, you should look at the immigration policies in this country. 'Cause the place where it's occurring are the place[s] where the immigrants are going, because they're not vaccinated."

That was wrong too, of course. We knew it at the time, just was we knew that the practice of blaming immigrants for disease outbreaks is such common practice that we could set our watches to it. But now we have actual data on how the measles is spreading in America and that data fully puts the lie to Kennedy's bigotry.

Most of the meat of the study focuses on very specific instances in which Washington state endured measles infections that were spread specifically from South Carolina earlier this year.

The study in Washington relied heavily on epidemiological data, linking cases among contacts and exposure sites. But also key to the work was whole-genome sequencing, which made clear that cases didn't just stem from one single introduction of the virus from South Carolina that then spread among Washington residents; instead, it revealed five separate introductions.

"As public health jurisdictions prepare to respond to increased measles importations linked to domestic measles outbreaks, while remaining vigilant for international importations, timely whole-genome sequencing can supplement epidemiologic information to help differentiate distinct importations from local transmission and inform outbreak response," the authors conclude.

But when you pair that with the data from CDC as to exactly how the infections are spreading, you get both the micro and macro data for how it's occurring.

Kennedy claims that there is a "global outbreak" and the US is "doing a better job than any country in the world at controlling the measles outbreak." Both claims are false. Dozens of other countries have lower case rates than the US. While some countries, including neighboring Canada and Mexico, are also seeing large increases in cases, the soaring case tally in the US is not being driven by international imports, but by domestic spread in under-vaccinated communities.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 18 of the country's 4,588 confirmed measles cases this year were reported among international visitors. Of all the cases, 4,404 (96 percent) are linked to a domestic outbreak.

There can be no doubt that disease is sometimes imported into America from foreign visitors. But the point is that that just isn't the real problem here. America's measles problem is a domestic problem, not a matter of immigration. If we had maintained our vaccination rates such that we had herd immunity, we'd be fine.

It's because of Kennedy's many, many lies on vaccines that we are not. Don't let him tell you another lie, that this is all a result of immigrants, to cover up his responsibility.

Marc Marquez topped MotoGP World Championship Free Practice One (FP1) Friday morning at Petronas Sepang International Circuit, in Malaysia. Riding his Michelin-shod Lenovo Team Ducati Desmosedici GP26, the Spaniard turned a lap of 1:58.912 around the 3.44-mile (5.54 km) track and led the 22-rider field.

Marco Bezzecchi was second-best with a 1:59.386 on his Aprilia Racing RS-GP26.

Pedro Acosta was third with a lap of 1:59.386 on his Red Bull KTM Factory Racing RC16.

Enea Bastianini finished the first session fourth on his Red Bull KTM Tech3 RC16 with a time of 1:59.688.

Acosta's teammate, Brad Binder got fifth with a time of 1:59.737. 

More, from a press release issued by MotoGP:

Marc Marquez leads Bezzecchi and Acosta in FP1, injured Martin completes 12 laps. The championship leader heads into Practice 0.4s clear of the Aprilia and KTM stars, while the #89 finishes 1.8s off the pace in a promising start to the Malaysian GP. 

Marc Marquez (Ducati Lenovo Team) enjoyed a perfect start to his PETRONAS Grand Prix of Malaysia after the World Championship leader set the only 1:58 lap of the session to lead Marco Bezzecchi (Aprilia Racing) and Pedro Acosta (Red Bull KTM Factory Racing) by 0.474s. The duo set the exact same time to finish FP1 just under half a second away from the #93's 1:58.912, but that wasn't the biggest story of the opening session in Sepang. 

The main focus? Jorge Martin's (Aprilia Racing) progress. Team Manager Paolo Bonora explained the 2024 World Champion, "expected to feel worse", with the plan being not to push too much and save energy for Practice later this afternoon. It's early doors, of course, but that's great news going into this afternoon for the rider just 10 points off Marc Marquez in the title chase. At the end of play in FP1, Martin completed 12 laps and sits 1.8s off the summit heading into this afternoon's one-hour Practice stint, six days after suffering a non-displaced fracture of the distal radius. Incredible. 

Izan Guevara was quickest during Moto2 World Championship Free Practice One (FP1) Friday morning at Petronas Sepang International Circuit, in Malaysia. Riding his Pirelli-shod BLU CRU Pramac Yamaha boscoscuro on the 3.44-mile (5.54 km) track, the Spaniard recorded a 2:04.005 to lead the field of 28 riders.

David Alonso was the best of the rest with a 2:04.568 on his CFMOTO RCB Aspar Team Kalex and his teammate Daniel Holgado got third with exactly the same lap time of 2:04.568.

American Joe Roberts finished the opening session in fourth with a 2:04.758 on his OnlyFans American Racing Team Kalex.

Red Bull KTM Ajo's Collin Veijer got fifth with a time of 2:04.800.

The post Moto2: Guevara Tops Opening Practice At Sepang appeared first on Roadracing World Magazine | Motorcycle Riding, Racing & Tech News.

Alvaro Carpe was quickest during Moto3 World Championship Free Practice One (FP1) Friday morning at Petronas Sepang International Circuit, in Malaysia. Riding his Red Bull KTM Ajo machine on Pirelli control tires, the Spaniard covered the 3.44-mile (5.54 km) road course in 2:11.585, topping the field of 25 riders.

Maximo Quiles was the best of the rest with a 2:11.714 on his CFMOTO Gaviota Aspar Team KTM and his teammate Marco Morelli was third with a lap time of 2:11.720.

Veda Pratama got fourth with a lap time of 2:11.819 on his Honda Team Asia machine and home hero Hakim Danish was fifth with a time of 2:11.834 on his AEON Credit - MT Helmets - MSI KTM.

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Washington, DC — Big Oil companies have begun to release their quarterly earnings. Shell reported today that it nearly doubled its earnings from the same quarter last year and that Q3 of 2026 was its highest earning quarter since 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Combined earnings with other Big Oil ... [continued]

The post Big Oil Cashes in on Trump Campaign Investment, Doubles Earnings Compared to Last Year appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Energy Audits Support Emissions Reductions and Energy Efficiency Upgrades Eugene, Oregon — In a 6-1 vote on Wednesday, October 28th, the Eugene City Council adopted the Residential Energy Performance Disclosure Requirement ordinance, a policy commonly referred to as a Home Energy Score requirement. The vote places Eugene among four other ... [continued]

The post Eugene Becomes 5th Oregon City to Adopt Home Energy Score Requirement appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Intel's share price sank by almost a quarter on Thursday after the company revealed a deep dip in sales of PC processors.

The rout began after the silicon-slinger posted Q3 results that included some nice numbers, such as a 21 percent year on year revenue jump to $16.5 billion, helped by 78 percent growth for datacenter and AI products, and gross margins of 43 percent. The revenue number was at the high end of Intel's revenue guidance of $15.8-16.8 billion, and the gross margin beat its predictions by two points.

Outweighing those upsides was a decline in revenue for client computing and physical AI products, which saw incoming cash reach $8.1 billion but fall five percent year-over-year and nine percent decline from last quarter.

In prepared remarks [PDF] published to coincide with Intel's earnings announcement, CEO Lip Bu Tan said "In recent weeks, our customers began signaling a PC slowdown based on memory prices and availability. Year-to-date system end-point prices have increased significantly placing additional pressure on already limited IT budgets."

"The pace of the PC correction has accelerated over the last two months, as our OEM partners are aggressively managing inventory to match the softer sell through," he added, before predicting that the market for PC chips will shrink by 12 percent next year and remain tough "until memory availability and prices begin to normalize."

Which may not be for years, given Korean memory-maker SK Hynix this week predicted that memory shortages will persist until the year 2030. Intel's biggest business is therefore in trouble.

Tan tried to give investors reasons to be cheerful, by saying Intel sees a "resurgence in demand for CPU" sparked by customers' desire for computing systems that consume less energy.

"Increasingly, energy efficiency is becoming the most important metric for the AI infrastructure build-out," he said.

That matters, Tan argued, because "While GPUs are great at 'thinking tasks,' deterministic CPUs are far more efficient at 'finding' tasks. While a GPU reasoning query can run as high as multiple watt-hours of energy, a single CPU-based query could cost only joules of energy."

The CEO reasoned that lower energy consumption is important in the context of agentic AI - the idea that we will all soon run many autonomous agents to handle personal and professional scutwork.

"Applying even conservative estimates to the total number of digital agents, and agents serviced per CPU, it is easy to anticipate a massive dollar and unit TAM [total addressable market] for CPUs over the coming five years," Tan said. "By our estimates, server CPU TAM, largely driven by agentic workloads, could increase as much as 5X from where it is today, from $40B to more than $200B over five years."

But during its earnings call, Intel execs admitted it may struggle to cash in on that boom in the short and longer term as the company struggles to source key supplies like silicon wafers.

Asked if Intel can meet demand for server CPUs and if investors should therefore expect further growth in datacenter product sales early in Intel's next financial year, chief financial officer Dave Zinsner declined to offer any guidance.

"There is going to be a strong driver of demand for CPUs," he demurred. "We see that continuing all through next year. We are working on the supply side of the equation to make sure that we can meet what customers need. We will likely not fully meet what they require, but I think we are going to be in a more challenging situation in the first half of the year than we are in the second half."

Intel is trying to shift production around its fleet of fabs so it can crank out as much silicon as possible and will even devote some PC chip production capacity to datacenter products. But overall, Chipzilla is clearly in a spot of bother.

CEO Lip Bu Tan said his plan to "rebuild" Intel will be "a multiyear journey" and insisted "We have made enormous strides in these 18 months, including a dramatic re-sizing of our workforce, eliminating middle management and bureaucracy, streamlining our executive ranks and establishing an almost entirely new leadership team."

He pointed to strong progress on Intel's manufacturing processes that will bring it closer to parity with TSMC, meaning its own products will become more potent while the company's foundry business also becomes more attractive.

And he said that Intel has restored an "engineering-centric culture" that will help the company to improve.

But the CEO also admitted "I am disappointed that we were not able to meet strong customer demand in this quarter."

"We face near term challenges, including manufacturing supply shortages, the unprecedented memory crunch, and the resulting softness in PC demand. But I remain confident in our path forward."

Investors did not share that confidence. Intel's shares started the day at $92.96 apiece. Immediately after the company announced its results, shares sank to $73. At the time of writing, after-hours trading has seen the price reach $70.87, a 23.7 percent slump. ®

Antiracist economist Kim Crayton says that "intention without strategy is chaos." We've discussed how our biases, assumptions, and inattention toward marginalized and vulnerable groups lead to dangerous and unethical tech—but what, specifically, do we need to do to fix it? The intention to make our tech safer is not enough; we need a strategy.

This chapter will equip you with that plan of action. It covers how to integrate safety principles into your design work in order to create tech that's safe, how to convince your stakeholders that this work is necessary, and how to respond to the critique that what we actually need is more diversity. (Spoiler: we do, but diversity alone is not the antidote to fixing unethical, unsafe tech.)

When you are designing for safety, your goals are to:

• identify ways your product can be used for abuse,
• design ways to prevent the abuse, and
• provide support for vulnerable users to reclaim power and control.

The Process for Inclusive Safety is a tool to help you reach those goals (Fig 5.1). It's a methodology I created in 2018 to capture the various techniques I was using when designing products with safety in mind. Whether you are creating an entirely new product or adding to an existing feature, the Process can help you make your product safe and inclusive. The Process includes five general areas of action:

• Conducting research
• Creating archetypes
• Brainstorming problems
• Designing solutions
• Testing for safety

The Process is meant to be flexible—it won't make sense for teams to implement every step in some situations. Use the parts that are relevant to your unique work and context; this is meant to be something you can insert into your existing design practice.

And once you use it, if you have an idea for making it better or simply want to provide context of how it helped your team, please get in touch with me. It's a living document that I hope will continue to be a useful and realistic tool that technologists can use in their day-to-day work.

If you're working on a product specifically for a vulnerable group or survivors of some form of trauma, such as an app for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, or drug addiction, be sure to read Chapter 7, which covers that situation explicitly and should be handled a bit differently. The guidelines here are for prioritizing safety when designing a more general product that will have a wide user base (which, we already know from statistics, will include certain groups that should be protected from harm). Chapter 7 is focused on products that are specifically for vulnerable groups and people who have experienced trauma.

Design research should include a broad analysis of how your tech might be weaponized for abuse as well as specific insights into the experiences of survivors and perpetrators of that type of abuse. At this stage, you and your team will investigate issues of interpersonal harm and abuse, and explore any other safety, security, or inclusivity issues that might be a concern for your product or service, like data security, racist algorithms, and harassment.

Your project should begin with broad, general research into similar products and issues around safety and ethical concerns that have already been reported. For example, a team building a smart home device would do well to understand the multitude of ways that existing smart home devices have been used as tools of abuse. If your product will involve AI, seek to understand the potentials for racism and other issues that have been reported in existing AI products. Nearly all types of technology have some kind of potential or actual harm that's been reported on in the news or written about by academics. Google Scholar is a useful tool for finding these studies.

When possible and appropriate, include direct research (surveys and interviews) with people who are experts in the forms of harm you have uncovered. Ideally, you'll want to interview advocates working in the space of your research first so that you have a more solid understanding of the topic and are better equipped to not retraumatize survivors. If you've uncovered possible domestic violence issues, for example, the experts you'll want to speak with are survivors themselves, as well as workers at domestic violence hotlines, shelters, other related nonprofits, and lawyers.

Especially when interviewing survivors of any kind of trauma, it is important to pay people for their knowledge and lived experiences. Don't ask survivors to share their trauma for free, as this is exploitative. While some survivors may not want to be paid, you should always make the offer in the initial ask. An alternative to payment is to donate to an organization working against the type of violence that the interviewee experienced. We'll talk more about how to appropriately interview survivors in Chapter 6.

It's unlikely that teams aiming to design for safety will be able to interview self-proclaimed abusers or people who have broken laws around things like hacking. Don't make this a goal; rather, try to get at this angle in your general research. Aim to understand how abusers or bad actors weaponize technology to use against others, how they cover their tracks, and how they explain or rationalize the abuse.

Once you've finished conducting your research, use your insights to create abuser and survivor archetypes. Archetypes are not personas, as they're not based on real people that you interviewed and surveyed. Instead, they're based on your research into likely safety issues, much like when we design for accessibility: we don't need to have found a group of blind or low-vision users in our interview pool to create a design that's inclusive of them. Instead, we base those designs on existing research into what this group needs. Personas typically represent real users and include many details, while archetypes are broader and can be more generalized.

The abuser archetype is someone who will look at the product as a tool to perform harm (Fig 5.2). They may be trying to harm someone they don't know through surveillance or anonymous harassment, or they may be trying to control, monitor, abuse, or torment someone they know personally.

The survivor archetype is someone who is being abused with the product. There are various situations to consider in terms of the archetype's understanding of the abuse and how to put an end to it: Do they need proof of abuse they already suspect is happening, or are they unaware they've been targeted in the first place and need to be alerted (Fig 5.3)?

You may want to make multiple survivor archetypes to capture a range of different experiences. They may know that the abuse is happening but not be able to stop it, like when an abuser locks them out of IoT devices; or they know it's happening but don't know how, such as when a stalker keeps figuring out their location (Fig 5.4). Include as many of these scenarios as you need to in your survivor archetype. You'll use these later on when you design solutions to help your survivor archetypes achieve their goals of preventing and ending abuse.

It may be useful for you to create persona-like artifacts for your archetypes, such as the three examples shown. Instead of focusing on the demographic information we often see in personas, focus on their goals. The goals of the abuser will be to carry out the specific abuse you've identified, while the goals of the survivor will be to prevent abuse, understand that abuse is happening, make ongoing abuse stop, or regain control over the technology that's being used for abuse. Later, you'll brainstorm how to prevent the abuser's goals and assist the survivor's goals.

And while the "abuser/survivor" model fits most cases, it doesn't fit all, so modify it as you need to. For example, if you uncovered an issue with security, such as the ability for someone to hack into a home camera system and talk to children, the malicious hacker would get the abuser archetype and the child's parents would get survivor archetype.

After creating archetypes, brainstorm novel abuse cases and safety issues. "Novel" means things not found in your research; you're trying to identify completely new safety issues that are unique to your product or service. The goal with this step is to exhaust every effort of identifying harms your product could cause. You aren't worrying about how to prevent the harm yet—that comes in the next step.

How could your product be used for any kind of abuse, outside of what you've already identified in your research? I recommend setting aside at least a few hours with your team for this process.

If you're looking for somewhere to start, try doing a Black Mirror brainstorm. This exercise is based on the show Black Mirror, which features stories about the dark possibilities of technology. Try to figure out how your product would be used in an episode of the show—the most wild, awful, out-of-control ways it could be used for harm. When I've led Black Mirror brainstorms, participants usually end up having a good deal of fun (which I think is great—it's okay to have fun when designing for safety!). I recommend time-boxing a Black Mirror brainstorm to half an hour, and then dialing it back and using the rest of the time thinking of more realistic forms of harm.

After you've identified as many opportunities for abuse as possible, you may still not feel confident that you've uncovered every potential form of harm. A healthy amount of anxiety is normal when you're doing this kind of work. It's common for teams designing for safety to worry, "Have we really identified every possible harm? What if we've missed something?" If you've spent at least four hours coming up with ways your product could be used for harm and have run out of ideas, go to the next step.

It's impossible to guarantee you've thought of everything; instead of aiming for 100 percent assurance, recognize that you've taken this time and have done the best you can, and commit to continuing to prioritize safety in the future. Once your product is released, your users may identify new issues that you missed; aim to receive that feedback graciously and course-correct quickly.

At this point, you should have a list of ways your product can be used for harm as well as survivor and abuser archetypes describing opposing user goals. The next step is to identify ways to design against the identified abuser's goals and to support the survivor's goals. This step is a good one to insert alongside existing parts of your design process where you're proposing solutions for the various problems your research uncovered.

Some questions to ask yourself to help prevent harm and support your archetypes include:

• Can you design your product in such a way that the identified harm cannot happen in the first place? If not, what roadblocks can you put up to prevent the harm from happening?
• How can you make the victim aware that abuse is happening through your product?
• How can you help the victim understand what they need to do to make the problem stop?
• Can you identify any types of user activity that would indicate some form of harm or abuse? Could your product help the user access support?

In some products, it's possible to proactively recognize that harm is happening. For example, a pregnancy app might be modified to allow the user to report that they were the victim of an assault, which could trigger an offer to receive resources for local and national organizations. This sort of proactiveness is not always possible, but it's worth taking a half hour to discuss if any type of user activity would indicate some form of harm or abuse, and how your product could assist the user in receiving help in a safe manner.

That said, use caution: you don't want to do anything that could put a user in harm's way if their devices are being monitored. If you do offer some kind of proactive help, always make it voluntary, and think through other safety issues, such as the need to keep the user in-app in case an abuser is checking their search history. We'll walk through a good example of this in the next chapter.

The final step is to test your prototypes from the point of view of your archetypes: the person who wants to weaponize the product for harm and the victim of the harm who needs to regain control over the technology. Just like any other kind of product testing, at this point you'll aim to rigorously test out your safety solutions so that you can identify gaps and correct them, validate that your designs will help keep your users safe, and feel more confident releasing your product into the world.

Ideally, safety testing happens along with usability testing. If you're at a company that doesn't do usability testing, you might be able to use safety testing to cleverly perform both; a user who goes through your design attempting to weaponize the product against someone else can also be encouraged to point out interactions or other elements of the design that don't make sense to them.

You'll want to conduct safety testing on either your final prototype or the actual product if it's already been released. There's nothing wrong with testing an existing product that wasn't designed with safety goals in mind from the onset—"retrofitting" it for safety is a good thing to do.

Remember that testing for safety involves testing from the perspective of both an abuser and a survivor, though it may not make sense for you to do both. Alternatively, if you made multiple survivor archetypes to capture multiple scenarios, you'll want to test from the perspective of each one.

As with other sorts of usability testing, you as the designer are most likely too close to the product and its design by this point to be a valuable tester; you know the product too well. Instead of doing it yourself, set up testing as you would with other usability testing: find someone who is not familiar with the product and its design, set the scene, give them a task, encourage them to think out loud, and observe how they attempt to complete it.

The goal of this testing is to understand how easy it is for someone to weaponize your product for harm. Unlike with usability testing, you want to make it impossible, or at least difficult, for them to achieve their goal. Reference the goals in the abuser archetype you created earlier, and use your product in an attempt to achieve them.

For example, for a fitness app with GPS-enabled location features, we can imagine that the abuser archetype would have the goal of figuring out where his ex-girlfriend now lives. With this goal in mind, you'd try everything possible to figure out the location of another user who has their privacy settings enabled. You might try to see her running routes, view any available information on her profile, view anything available about her location (which she has set to private), and investigate the profiles of any other users somehow connected with her account, such as her followers.

If by the end of this you've managed to uncover some of her location data, despite her having set her profile to private, you know now that your product enables stalking. Your next step is to go back to step 4 and figure out how to prevent this from happening. You may need to repeat the process of designing solutions and testing them more than once.

Survivor testing involves identifying how to give information and power to the survivor. It might not always make sense based on the product or context. Thwarting the attempt of an abuser archetype to stalk someone also satisfies the goal of the survivor archetype to not be stalked, so separate testing wouldn't be needed from the survivor's perspective.

However, there are cases where it makes sense. For example, for a smart thermostat, a survivor archetype's goals would be to understand who or what is making the temperature change when they aren't doing it themselves. You could test this by looking for the thermostat's history log and checking for usernames, actions, and times; if you couldn't find that information, you would have more work to do in step 4.

Another goal might be regaining control of the thermostat once the survivor realizes the abuser is remotely changing its settings. Your test would involve attempting to figure out how to do this: are there instructions that explain how to remove another user and change the password, and are they easy to find? This might again reveal that more work is needed to make it clear to the user how they can regain control of the device or account.

To make your product more inclusive and compassionate, consider adding stress testing. This concept comes from Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher. The authors pointed out that personas typically center people who are having a good day—but real users are often anxious, stressed out, having a bad day, or even experiencing tragedy. These are called "stress cases," and testing your products for users in stress-case situations can help you identify places where your design lacks compassion. Design for Real Life has more details about what it looks like to incorporate stress cases into your design as well as many other great tactics for compassionate design.

Today's web is not always an amiable place. Sites greet you with a popover that demands assent to their cookie policy, and leave you with Taboola ads promising "One Weird Trick!" to cure your ailments. Social media sites are tuned for engagement, and few things are more engaging than a fight. Today it seems that people want to quarrel; I have seen flame wars among birders.  

These tensions are often at odds with a site's goals. If we are providing support and advice to customers, we don't want those customers to wrangle with each other. If we offer news about the latest research, we want readers to feel at ease; if we promote upcoming marches, we want our core supporters to feel comfortable and we want curious newcomers to feel welcome. 

In a study for a conference on the History of the Web, I looked to the origins of Computer Science in Vienna (1928-1934)  for a case study of the importance of amiability in a research community and the disastrous consequences of its loss. That story has interesting implications for web environments that promote amiable interaction among disparate, difficult (and sometimes disagreeable) people.

Though people had been thinking about calculating engines and thinking machines from antiquity, Computing really got going in Depression-era Vienna.  The people who worked out the theory had no interest in building machines; they wanted to puzzle out the limits of reason in the absence of divine authority. If we could not rely on God or Aristotle to tell us how to think, could we instead build arguments that were self-contained and demonstrably correct? Can we be sure that mathematics is consistent? Are there things that are true but that cannot be expressed in language? 

The core ideas were worked out in the weekly meetings (Thursdays at 6) of a group remembered as the Vienna Circle. They got together in the office of Professor Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna to discuss problems in philosophy, math, and language. The intersection of physics and philosophy had long been a specialty of this Vienna department, and this work had placed them among the world leaders.  Schlick's colleague Hans Hahn was a central participant, and by 1928 Hahn brought along his graduate students Karl Menger and Kurt Gödel. Other frequent participants included philosopher Rudolf Carnap, psychologist Karl Popper, economist Ludwig von Mises (brought by his brother Frederick, a physicist),  graphic designer Otto Neurath (inventor of infographics), and architect Josef Frank (brought by his physicist brother, Phillip).  Out-of-town visitors often joined, including the young Johnny von Neumann, Alfred Tarski, and the irascible Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

When Schlick's office grew too dim, participants adjourned to a nearby café for additional discussion with an even larger circle of participants.  This convivial circle was far from unique.  An intersecting circle-Neurath, von Mises, Oskar Morgenstern-established the Austrian School of free-market economics. There were theatrical circles (Peter Lorre, Hedy Lamarr, Max Reinhardt), and literary circles. The café was where things happened.

The interdisciplinarity of the group posed real challenges of temperament and understanding. Personalities were often a challenge. Gödel was convinced people were trying to poison him. Architect Josef Frank depended on contracts for public housing, which Mises opposed as wasteful. Wittgenstein's temper had lost him his job as a secondary school teacher, and for some of these years he maintained a detailed list of whom he was willing to meet. Neurath was eager to detect muddled thinking and would interrupt a speaker with a shouted "Metaphysics!" The continuing amity of these meetings was facilitated by the personality of their leader, Moritz Schlick, who would be remembered as notably adept in keeping disagreements from becoming quarrels.

The Viennese café of this era was long remembered as a particularly good place to argue with your friends, to read, and to write. Built to serve an imperial capital, the cafés found themselves with too much space and too few customers now that the Empire was gone. There was no need to turn tables: a café could only survive by coaxing customers to linger. Perhaps they would order another coffee, or one of their friends might drop by. One could play chess, or billiards, or read newspapers from abroad. Coffee was invariably served with a glass of purified spring water, still a novelty in an era in which most water was still unsafe to drink. That water glass would be refilled indefinitely. 

In the basement of one café, the poet Jura Soyfer staged "The End Of The World," a musical comedy in which Professor Peep has discovered a comet heading for earth.

Prof. Peep: The comet is going to destroy everybody!

Hitler:  Destroying everybody is my business.

Of course, coffee can be prepared in many ways, and the Viennese café developed a broad vocabulary to represent precisely how one preferred to drink it: melange, Einspänner, Brauner, Schwarzer, Kapuziner. This extensive customization, with correspondingly esoteric conventions of service, established the café as a comfortable and personal third space, a neutral ground in which anyone who could afford a coffee would be welcome. Viennese of this era were fastidious in their use of personal titles, of which an abundance were in common use. Café waiters greeted regular customers with titles too, but were careful to address their patrons with titles a notch or two greater than they deserved. A graduate student would be Doktor, an unpaid postdoc Professor.  This assurance mattered all the more because so many members of the Circle (and so many other Viennese) came from elsewhere: Carnap from Wuppertal, Gödel from Brno, von Neumann from Budapest. No one was going to make fun of your clothes, mannerisms, or accent. Your friends wouldn't be bothered by the pram in the hall. Everyone shared a Germanic Austrian literary and philosophical culture, not least those whose ancestors had been Eastern European Jews who knew that culture well, having read all about it in books.

The amiability of the café circle was enhanced by its openness. Because the circle sometimes extended to architects and actors, people could feel less constrained to admit shortfalls in their understanding. It was soon discovered that marble tabletops made a useful surface for pencil sketches, serving all as an improvised and accessible blackboard.

Comedies like "The End Of The World" and fictional newspaper sketches or feuilletons of writers like Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig served as a second defense against disagreeable or churlish behavior. The knowledge that, if one got carried away, a parody of one's remarks might shortly appear in Neue Freie Presse surely helped Professor Schlick keep matters in hand.

Though Austria's government drifted to the right after the War, Vienna's city council had been Socialist, dedicated to public housing based on user-centered design, and embracing  ambitious programs of public outreach and adult education. In 1934 the Socialists lost a local election, and this era soon came to its end as the new administration focused on the imagined threat of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Most members of the Circle fled within months: von Neumann to Princeton, Neurath to Holland and Oxford, Popper to New Zealand, Carnap to Chicago. Prof. Schlick was murdered on the steps of the University by a student outraged by his former association with Jews.  Jura Soyfer, who wrote "The End Of The World," died in Buchenwald.

In 1939, von Neumann finally convinced Gödel to accept a job in Princeton. Gödel was required to pay large fines to emigrate. The officer in charge of these fees would look back on this as the best posting of his career; his name was Eichmann.

An impressive literature recounts those discussions and the environment that facilitated the development of computing. How can we design for amiability?  This is not just a matter of choosing rounded typefaces and a cheerful pastel palette. I believe we may identify eight distinct issues that exert design forces in usefully amiable directions.

Seriousness: The Vienna Circle was wrestling with a notoriously difficult book—Wittgenstein's Tractus Logico-Philosophicus—and a catalog of outstanding open questions in mathematics. They were concerned with consequential problems, not merely scoring points for debating. Constant reminders that the questions you are considering matter—not only that they are consequential or that those opposing you are scoundrels—help promote amity.

Empiricism: The characteristic approach of the Vienna Circle demanded that knowledge be grounded either in direct observation or in rigorous reasoning. Disagreement, when it arose, could be settled by observation or by proof. If neither seemed ready to hand, the matter could not be settled. On these terms, one can seldom if ever demolish an opposing argument, and trolling is pointless.

Abstraction: Disputes grow worse when losing the argument entails lost face or lost jobs. The Vienna Circle's focus on theory—the limits of mathematics, the capability of language—promoted amity. Without seriousness, abstraction could have been merely academic, but the limits of reason and the consistency of mathematics were clearly serious.

Formality: The punctilious demeanor of waiters and the elaborated rituals of coffee service helped to establish orderly attitudes amongst the argumentative participants. This stands in contrast to the contemptuous sneer that now dominates social media.  

Schlamperei: Members of the Vienna Circle maintained a global correspondence, and they knew their work was at the frontier of research. Still, this was Vienna, at the margins of Europe: old-fashioned, frumpy, and dingy. Many participants came from even more obscure backwaters. Most or all harbored the suspicion that they were really schleppers, and a tinge of the ridiculous helped to moderate tempers. The director of "The End Of The World" had to pass the hat for money to purchase a moon for the set, and thought it was funny enough to write up for publication.

Openness: All sorts of people were involved in discussion, anyone might join in. Each week would bring different participants. Fluid borders reduce tension, and provide opportunities to broaden the range of discussion and the terms of engagement. Low entrance friction was characteristic of the café: anyone could come, and if you came twice you were virtually a regular. Permeable boundaries and café culture made it easier for moderating influences to draw in raconteurs and storytellers to defuse awkward moments, and Vienna's cafés had no shortage of humorists. Openness counteracts the suspicion that promoters of amiability are exerting censorship.

Parody: The environs of the Circle—the university office and the café—were unmistakably public. There were writers about, some of them renowned humorists. The prospect that one's bad taste or bad behavior might be ridiculed in print kept discussion within bounds. The sanction of public humiliation, however, was itself made mild by the veneer of fiction; even if you got a little carried away and a character based on you made a splash in some newspaper fiction, it wasn't the end of the world.

Engagement: The subject matter was important to the participants, but it was esoteric: it did not matter very much to their mothers or their siblings. A small stumble or a minor humiliation could be shrugged off in ways that major media confrontations cannot.

I believe it is notable that this environment was designed to promote amiability through several different voices.  The café waiter flattered each newcomer and served everyone, and also kept out local pickpockets and drunks who would be mere disruptions. Schlick and other regulars kept discussion moving and on track. The fiction writers and raconteurs—perhaps the most peripheral of the participants—kept people in a good mood and reminded them that bad behavior could make anyone ridiculous.  Crucially, each of these voices were human: you could reason with them. Algorithmic or AI moderators, however clever, are seldom perceived as reasonable. The café circles had no central authority or Moderator against whom everyone's resentments might be focused. Even after the disaster of 1934, what people remembered were those cheerful arguments.

"Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a totally coherent system bound to context and behavior." — Kenneth L. Pike

The web has accents. So should our design systems.

Design systems aren't component libraries—they're living languages. Tokens are phonemes, components are words, patterns are phrases, layouts are sentences. The conversations we build with users become the stories our products tell.

But here's what we've forgotten: the more fluently a language is spoken, the more accents it can support without losing meaning. English in Scotland differs from English in Sydney, yet both are unmistakably English. The language adapts to context while preserving core meaning. This couldn't be more obvious to me, a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, who learned English with an American accent, and lives in Sydney.

Our design systems must work the same way. Rigid adherence to visual rules creates brittle systems that break under contextual pressure. Fluent systems bend without breaking.

Consistency becomes a prison

The promise of design systems was simple: consistent components would accelerate development and unify experiences. But as systems matured and products grew more complex, that promise has become a prison. Teams file "exception" requests by the hundreds. Products launch with workarounds instead of system components. Designers spend more time defending consistency than solving user problems.

Our design systems must learn to speak dialects.

A design dialect is a systematic adaptation of a design system that maintains core principles while developing new patterns for specific contexts. Unlike one-off customizations or brand themes, dialects preserve the system's essential grammar while expanding its vocabulary to serve different users, environments, or constraints.

At Booking.com, I learned this lesson the hard way. We A/B-tested everything—color, copy, button shapes, even logo colors. As a professional with a graphic design education and experience building brand style guides, I found this shocking. While everyone fell in love with Airbnb's pristine design system, Booking grew into a giant without ever considering visual consistency.  

The chaos taught me something profound: consistency isn't ROI; solved problems are.

At Shopify. Polaris (https://polaris-react.shopify.com/) was our crown jewel—a mature design language perfect for merchants on laptops. As a product team, we were expected to adopt Polaris as-is. Then my fulfillment team hit an "Oh, Ship!" moment, as we faced the challenge of building an app for warehouse pickers using our interface on shared, battered Android scanners in dim aisles, wearing thick gloves, scanning dozens of items per minute, many with limited levels of English understanding.

Task completion with standard Polaris: 0%.

Every component that worked beautifully for merchants failed completely for pickers. White backgrounds created glare. 44px tap targets were invisible to gloved fingers. Sentence-case labels took too long to parse. Multi-step flows confused non-native speakers.

We faced a choice: abandon Polaris entirely, or teach it to speak warehouse.

We chose evolution over revolution. Working within Polaris's core principles—clarity, efficiency, consistency—we developed what we now call a design dialect:

Result: Task completion jumped from 0% to 100%. Onboarding time dropped from three weeks to one shift.

This wasn't customization or theming—this was a dialect: a systematic adaptation that maintained Polaris's core grammar while developing new vocabulary for a specific context. Polaris hadn't failed; it had learned to speak warehouse.

At Atlassian, working on the Jira platform—itself a system within the larger Atlassian system—I pushed for formalizing this insight. With dozens of products sharing a design language across different codebases, we needed systematic flexibility so we built directly into our ways of working. The old model—exception requests and special approvals—was failing at scale.

We developed the Flexibility Framework to help designers define how flexible they wanted their components to be:

During a navigation redesign, we tiered every element. Logo and global search stayed Consistent. Breadcrumbs and contextual actions became Flexible. Product teams could immediately see where innovation was welcome and where consistency mattered.

Flexibility needs boundaries. We created a simple ladder for evaluating when rules should bend:

Good: Ship with existing system components. Fast, consistent, proven.

Better: Stretch a component slightly. Document the change. Contribute improvements back to the system for all to use.

Best: Prototype the ideal experience first. If user testing validates the benefit, update the system to support it.

The key question: "Which option lets users succeed fastest?"

Rules are tools, not relics.

Gmail, Drive, and Maps are unmistakably Google—yet each speaks with its own accent. They achieve unity through shared principles, not cloned components. One extra week of debate over button color costs roughly $30K in engineer time.

Unity is a brand outcome; fluency is a user outcome. When the two clash, side with the user.

How do you maintain coherence while enabling dialects? Treat your system like a living vocabulary:

Document every deviation - e.g., dialects/warehouse.md with before/after screenshots and rationale.

Promote shared patterns - when three teams adopt a dialect independently, review it for core inclusion.

Deprecate with context - retire old idioms via flags and migration notes, never a big-bang purge.

A living dictionary scales better than a frozen rulebook.

Ready to introduce dialects? Start with one broken experience:

This week: Find one user flow where perfect consistency blocks task completion. Could be mobile users struggling with desktop-sized components, or accessibility needs your standard patterns don't address.

Document the context: What makes standard patterns fail here? Environmental constraints? User capabilities? Task urgency?

Design one systematic change: Focus on behavior over aesthetics. If gloves are the problem, bigger targets aren't ""breaking the system""—they're serving the user. Earn the variations and make them intentional.

Test and measure: Does the change improve task completion? Time to productivity? User satisfaction?

Show the savings: If that dialect frees even half a sprint, fluency has paid for itself.

We're not managing design systems anymore—we're cultivating design languages. Languages that grow with their speakers. Languages that develop accents without losing meaning. Languages that serve human needs over aesthetic ideals.

The warehouse workers who went from 0% to 100% task completion didn't care that our buttons broke the style guide. They cared that the buttons finally worked.

Your users feel the same way. Give your system permission to speak their language.

Picture this: You're in a meeting room at your tech company, and two people are having what looks like the same conversation about the same design problem. One is talking about whether the team has the right skills to tackle it. The other is diving deep into whether the solution actually solves the user's problem. Same room, same problem, completely different lenses.

This is the beautiful, sometimes messy reality of having both a Design Manager and a Lead Designer on the same team. And if you're wondering how to make this work without creating confusion, overlap, or the dreaded "too many cooks" scenario, you're asking the right question.

The traditional answer has been to draw clean lines on an org chart. The Design Manager handles people, the Lead Designer handles craft. Problem solved, right? Except clean org charts are fantasy. In reality, both roles care deeply about team health, design quality, and shipping great work. 

The magic happens when you embrace the overlap instead of fighting it—when you start thinking of your design org as a design organism.

Here's what I've learned from years of being on both sides of this equation: think of your design team as a living organism. The Design Manager tends to the mind (the psychological safety, the career growth, the team dynamics). The Lead Designer tends to the body (the craft skills, the design standards, the hands-on work that ships to users).

But just like mind and body aren't completely separate systems, so, too, do these roles overlap in important ways. You can't have a healthy person without both working in harmony. The trick is knowing where those overlaps are and how to navigate them gracefully.

When we look at how healthy teams actually function, three critical systems emerge. Each requires both roles to work together, but with one taking primary responsibility for keeping that system strong.

Primary caretaker: Design Manager
Supporting role: Lead Designer

The nervous system is all about signals, feedback, and psychological safety. When this system is healthy, information flows freely, people feel safe to take risks, and the team can adapt quickly to new challenges.

The Design Manager is the primary caretaker here. They're monitoring the team's psychological pulse, ensuring feedback loops are healthy, and creating the conditions for people to grow. They're hosting career conversations, managing workload, and making sure no one burns out.

But the Lead Designer plays a crucial supporting role. They're providing sensory input about craft development needs, spotting when someone's design skills are stagnating, and helping identify growth opportunities that the Design Manager might miss.

Design Manager tends to:

• Career conversations and growth planning
• Team psychological safety and dynamics
• Workload management and resource allocation
• Performance reviews and feedback systems
• Creating learning opportunities

Lead Designer supports by:

• Providing craft-specific feedback on team member development
• Identifying design skill gaps and growth opportunities
• Offering design mentorship and guidance
• Signaling when team members are ready for more complex challenges

Primary caretaker: Lead Designer
Supporting role: Design Manager

The muscular system is about strength, coordination, and skill development. When this system is healthy, the team can execute complex design work with precision, maintain consistent quality, and adapt their craft to new challenges.

The Lead Designer is the primary caretaker here. They're setting design standards, providing craft coaching, and ensuring that shipping work meets the quality bar. They're the ones who can tell you if a design decision is sound or if we're solving the right problem.

But the Design Manager plays a crucial supporting role. They're ensuring the team has the resources and support to do their best craft work, like proper nutrition and recovery time for an athlete.

Lead Designer tends to:

• Definition of design standards and system usage
• Feedback on what design work meets the standard
• Experience direction for the product
• Design decisions and product-wide alignment
• Innovation and craft advancement

Design Manager supports by:

• Ensuring design standards are understood and adopted across the team
• Confirming experience direction is being followed
• Supporting practices and systems that scale without bottlenecking
• Facilitating design alignment across teams
• Providing resources and removing obstacles to great craft work

Shared caretakers: Both Design Manager and Lead Designer

The circulatory system is about how information, decisions, and energy flow through the team. When this system is healthy, strategic direction is clear, priorities are aligned, and the team can respond quickly to new opportunities or challenges.

This is where true partnership happens. Both roles are responsible for keeping the circulation strong, but they're bringing different perspectives to the table.

Lead Designer contributes:

• User needs are met by the product
• Overall product quality and experience
• Strategic design initiatives
• Research-based user needs for each initiative

Design Manager contributes:

• Communication to team and stakeholders
• Stakeholder management and alignment
• Cross-functional team accountability
• Strategic business initiatives

Both collaborate on:

• Co-creation of strategy with leadership
• Team goals and prioritization approach
• Organizational structure decisions
• Success measures and frameworks

The key to making this partnership sing is understanding that all three systems need to work together. A team with great craft skills but poor psychological safety will burn out. A team with great culture but weak craft execution will ship mediocre work. A team with both but poor strategic circulation will work hard on the wrong things.

When you're in a meeting about a design problem, it helps to acknowledge which system you're primarily focused on. "I'm thinking about this from a team capacity perspective" (nervous system) or "I'm looking at this through the lens of user needs" (muscular system) gives everyone context for your input.

This isn't about staying in your lane. It's about being transparent as to which lens you're using, so the other person knows how to best add their perspective.

The most successful partnerships I've seen establish clear feedback loops between the systems:

Nervous system signals to muscular system: "The team is struggling with confidence in their design skills" → Lead Designer provides more craft coaching and clearer standards.

Muscular system signals to nervous system: "The team's craft skills are advancing faster than their project complexity" → Design Manager finds more challenging growth opportunities.

Both systems signal to circulatory system: "We're seeing patterns in team health and craft development that suggest we need to adjust our strategic priorities."

The most critical moments in this partnership are when something moves from one system to another. This might be when a design standard (muscular system) needs to be rolled out across the team (nervous system), or when a strategic initiative (circulatory system) needs specific craft execution (muscular system).

Make these transitions explicit. "I've defined the new component standards. Can you help me think through how to get the team up to speed?" or "We've agreed on this strategic direction. I'm going to focus on the specific user experience approach from here."

The Design Manager who never thinks about craft, or the Lead Designer who never considers team dynamics, is like a doctor who only looks at one body system. Great design leadership requires both people to care about the whole organism, even when they're not the primary caretaker.

This means asking questions rather than making assumptions. "What do you think about the team's craft development in this area?" or "How do you see this impacting team morale and workload?" keeps both perspectives active in every decision.

Even with clear roles, this partnership can go sideways. Here are the most common failure modes I've seen:

The Design Manager focuses only on the nervous system and ignores craft development. The Lead Designer focuses only on the muscular system and ignores team dynamics. Both people retreat to their comfort zones and stop collaborating.

The symptoms: Team members get mixed messages, work quality suffers, morale drops.

The treatment: Reconnect around shared outcomes. What are you both trying to achieve? Usually it's great design work that ships on time from a healthy team. Figure out how both systems serve that goal.

Strategic direction is unclear, priorities keep shifting, and neither role is taking responsibility for keeping information flowing.

The symptoms: Team members are confused about priorities, work gets duplicated or dropped, deadlines are missed.

The treatment: Explicitly assign responsibility for circulation. Who's communicating what to whom? How often? What's the feedback loop?

One person feels threatened by the other's expertise. The Design Manager thinks the Lead Designer is undermining their authority. The Lead Designer thinks the Design Manager doesn't understand craft.

The symptoms: Defensive behavior, territorial disputes, team members caught in the middle.

The treatment: Remember that you're both caretakers of the same organism. When one system fails, the whole team suffers. When both systems are healthy, the team thrives.

Yes, this model requires more communication. Yes, it requires both people to be secure enough to share responsibility for team health. But the payoff is worth it: better decisions, stronger teams, and design work that's both excellent and sustainable.

When both roles are healthy and working well together, you get the best of both worlds: deep craft expertise and strong people leadership. When one person is out sick, on vacation, or overwhelmed, the other can help maintain the team's health. When a decision requires both the people perspective and the craft perspective, you've got both right there in the room.

Most importantly, the framework scales. As your team grows, you can apply the same system thinking to new challenges. Need to launch a design system? Lead Designer tends to the muscular system (standards and implementation), Design Manager tends to the nervous system (team adoption and change management), and both tend to circulation (communication and stakeholder alignment).

The relationship between a Design Manager and Lead Designer isn't about dividing territories. It's about multiplying impact. When both roles understand they're tending to different aspects of the same healthy organism, magic happens.

The mind and body work together. The team gets both the strategic thinking and the craft excellence they need. And most importantly, the work that ships to users benefits from both perspectives.

So the next time you're in that meeting room, wondering why two people are talking about the same problem from different angles, remember: you're watching shared leadership in action. And if it's working well, both the mind and body of your design team are getting stronger.

Do you remember when having a great website was enough? Now, people are getting answers from Siri, Google search snippets, and mobile apps, not just our websites. Forward-thinking organizations have adopted an omnichannel content strategy, whose mission is to reach audiences across multiple digital channels and platforms.

But how do you set up a content management system (CMS) to reach your audience now and in the future? I learned the hard way that creating a content model—a definition of content types, attributes, and relationships that let people and systems understand content—with my more familiar design-system thinking would capsize my customer's omnichannel content strategy. You can avoid that outcome by creating content models that are semantic and that also connect related content. 

I recently had the opportunity to lead the CMS implementation for a Fortune 500 company. The client was excited by the benefits of an omnichannel content strategy, including content reuse, multichannel marketing, and robot delivery—designing content to be intelligible to bots, Google knowledge panels, snippets, and voice user interfaces. 

A content model is a critical foundation for an omnichannel content strategy, and for our content to be understood by multiple systems, the model needed semantic types—types named according to their meaning instead of their presentation. Our goal was to let authors create content and reuse it wherever it was relevant. But as the project proceeded, I realized that supporting content reuse at the scale that my customer needed required the whole team to recognize a new pattern.

Despite our best intentions, we kept drawing from what we were more familiar with: design systems. Unlike web-focused content strategies, an omnichannel content strategy can't rely on WYSIWYG tools for design and layout. Our tendency to approach the content model with our familiar design-system thinking constantly led us to veer away from one of the primary purposes of a content model: delivering content to audiences on multiple marketing channels.

We needed to help our designers, developers, and stakeholders understand that we were doing something very different from their prior web projects, where it was natural for everyone to think about content as visual building blocks fitting into layouts. The previous approach was not only more familiar but also more intuitive—at least at first—because it made the designs feel more tangible. We discovered two principles that helped the team understand how a content model differs from the design systems that we were used to:

1. Content models must define semantics instead of layout.
2. And content models should connect content that belongs together.

A semantic content model uses type and attribute names that reflect the meaning of the content, not how it will be displayed. For example, in a nonsemantic model, teams might create types like teasers, media blocks, and cards. Although these types might make it easy to lay out content, they don't help delivery channels understand the content's meaning, which in turn would have opened the door to the content being presented in each marketing channel. In contrast, a semantic content model uses type names like product, service, and testimonial so that each delivery channel can understand the content and use it as it sees fit. 

When you're creating a semantic content model, a great place to start is to look over the types and properties defined by Schema.org, a community-driven resource for type definitions that are intelligible to platforms like Google search.

A semantic content model has several benefits:

• Even if your team doesn't care about omnichannel content, a semantic content model decouples content from its presentation so that teams can evolve the website's design without needing to refactor its content. In this way, content can withstand disruptive website redesigns. 
• A semantic content model also provides a competitive edge. By adding structured data based on Schema.org's types and properties, a website can provide hints to help Google understand the content, display it in search snippets or knowledge panels, and use it to answer voice-interface user questions. Potential visitors could discover your content without ever setting foot in your website.
• Beyond those practical benefits, you'll also need a semantic content model if you want to deliver omnichannel content. To use the same content in multiple marketing channels, delivery channels need to be able to understand it. For example, if your content model were to provide a list of questions and answers, it could easily be rendered on a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page, but it could also be used in a voice interface or by a bot that answers common questions.

For example, using a semantic content model for articles, events, people, and locations lets A List Apart provide cleanly structured data for search engines so that users can read the content on the website, in Google knowledge panels, and even with hypothetical voice interfaces in the future.

After struggling to describe what makes a good content model, I've come to realize that the best models are those that are semantic and that also connect related content components (such as a FAQ item's question and answer pair), instead of slicing up related content across disparate content components. A good content model connects content that should remain together so that multiple delivery channels can use it without needing to first put those pieces back together.

Think about writing an article or essay. An article's meaning and usefulness depends upon its parts being kept together. Would one of the headings or paragraphs be meaningful on their own without the context of the full article? On our project, our familiar design-system thinking often led us to want to create content models that would slice content into disparate chunks to fit the web-centric layout. This had a similar impact to an article that were to have been separated from its headline. Because we were slicing content into standalone pieces based on layout, content that belonged together became difficult to manage and nearly impossible for multiple delivery channels to understand.

To illustrate, let's look at how connecting related content applies in a real-world scenario. The design team for our customer presented a complex layout for a software product page that included multiple tabs and sections. Our instincts were to follow suit with the content model. Shouldn't we make it as easy and as flexible as possible to add any number of tabs in the future?

Because our design-system instincts were so familiar, it felt like we had needed a content type called "tab section" so that multiple tab sections could be added to a page. Each tab section would display various types of content. One tab might provide the software's overview or its specifications. Another tab might provide a list of resources. 

Our inclination to break down the content model into "tab section" pieces would have led to an unnecessarily complex model and a cumbersome editing experience, and it would have also created content that couldn't have been understood by additional delivery channels. For example, how would another system have been able to tell which "tab section" referred to a product's specifications or its resource list—would that other system have to have resorted to counting tab sections and content blocks? This would have prevented the tabs from ever being reordered, and it would have required adding logic in every other delivery channel to interpret the design system's layout. Furthermore, if the customer were to have no longer wanted to display this content in a tab layout, it would have been tedious to migrate to a new content model to reflect the new page redesign.

We had a breakthrough when we discovered that our customer had a specific purpose in mind for each tab: it would reveal specific information such as the software product's overview, specifications, related resources, and pricing. Once implementation began, our inclination to focus on what's visual and familiar had obscured the intent of the designs. With a little digging, it didn't take long to realize that the concept of tabs wasn't relevant to the content model. The meaning of the content that they were planning to display in the tabs was what mattered.

In fact, the customer could have decided to display this content in a different way—without tabs—somewhere else. This realization prompted us to define content types for the software product based on the meaningful attributes that the customer had wanted to render on the web. There were obvious semantic attributes like name and description as well as rich attributes like screenshots, software requirements, and feature lists. The software's product information stayed together because it wasn't sliced across separate components like "tab sections" that were derived from the content's presentation. Any delivery channel—including future ones—could understand and present this content.

In this omnichannel marketing project, we discovered that the best way to keep our content model on track was to ensure that it was semantic (with type and attribute names that reflected the meaning of the content) and that it kept content together that belonged together (instead of fragmenting it). These two concepts curtailed our temptation to shape the content model based on the design. So if you're working on a content model to support an omnichannel content strategy—or even if you just want to make sure that Google and other interfaces understand your content—remember:

• A design system isn't a content model. Team members may be tempted to conflate them and to make your content model mirror your design system, so you should protect the semantic value and contextual structure of the content strategy during the entire implementation process. This will let every delivery channel consume the content without needing a magic decoder ring.
• If your team is struggling to make this transition, you can still reap some of the benefits by using Schema.org-based structured data in your website. Even if additional delivery channels aren't on the immediate horizon, the benefit to search engine optimization is a compelling reason on its own.
• Additionally, remind the team that decoupling the content model from the design will let them update the designs more easily because they won't be held back by the cost of content migrations. They'll be able to create new designs without the obstacle of compatibility between the design and the content, and ​they'll be ready for the next big thing. 

By rigorously advocating for these principles, you'll help your team treat content the way that it deserves—as the most critical asset in your user experience and the best way to connect with your audience.

If you poured rapeseed oil into a combustion engine and declared it a "zero-emission vehicle," you would be laughed at. But in the EU Parliament, this fiction is being drafted into law. If you poured rapeseed oil into a combustion engine, watched toxic exhaust billow from the tailpipe, and declared ... [continued]

The post The Zombie Engine: How Brussels Bureaucrats Are Breathing False Life Into Combustion appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Higher speed is the main cause of mobility growth. When people go faster, they will travel further. This is the shortest summary of the history of passenger mobility. An illustrative example is the high-speed rail connection between Paris and Lyon. After its opening in 1981, commuters were able to travel ... [continued]

The post Misconceptions about Mobility Growth appeared first on CleanTechnica.

EVs and other electric products are emerging not only as a climate strategy but also as a question of affordability, economic competitiveness, public health, consumer experience, energy security, and resilience to volatile fuel markets. At 5 a.m., an electric bus glides out of its depot after charging overnight, ready to ... [continued]

The post It's Not Enough To Electrify More. We Must Electrify Better. appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Multiple vulnerabilities in five popular AI developer tools could allow attackers to execute code on a host machine, read and steal files, or spoof browser address bars. Researchers say flaws in OpenAI's Codex and Microsoft's VS Code remain unpatched, potentially putting developers who use affected configurations at risk.

AI security startup Forever Security discovered vulnerabilities in Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Anthropic's Claude Desktop, VS Code, and Codex, and disclosed four of the flaws to the affected vendors. GitHub independently fixed the Copilot vulnerability without receiving a report from Forever Security. All five share a common security weakness: embedded browsers granted capabilities beyond those available to conventional browsers.

Each tool "enriched its embedded browser beyond what a normal browser allows, and those enrichments undermined the traditional threat model - as agent input, as the authority on a tab's own address, or as reach onto the host," Forever researcher Gal Weizman wrote in a Thursday report.

Forever dubbed this class of vulnerability "Embrace," short for EMbedded BRowser, and said the flaws led to code execution in Cursor, data theft in Claude Desktop, Codex, and VS Code, and address bar spoofing in GitHub Copilot.

Here's what each of these looks like, starting with Cursor.

Typical web pages can't run commands on the host computer because a web page's JavaScript cannot talk to local apps.

Cursor's integrated browser, however, allows a page to call the agent's composer. The agent reads this as instructions and follows them, but the instructions remain hidden from human users. This opens the coding agent up to prompt injection attacks that could allow an attacker to execute commands on the host machine.

The researchers disclosed the vulnerability to Cursor on September 10, and the vendor silently patched the flaw on October 1. According to Forever, Cursor did not publish a security advisory about the issue or respond to the researchers' disclosure.

Cursor also did not reply to The Register's request for comment.

Under normal browser operations, a webpage cannot change the content of the address bar.

"Copilot's browser preview works differently," Weizman wrote. "Some pages change their address without loading a new page, and the app cannot always see that. So Copilot let the page tell the app its own address."

The app checked only whether the text looked like a web address, starting with http, https or file, but it didn't check where the tab really pointed to. This can be abused to trick the embedded browser into displaying a spoofed URL - such as github.com/login - in the address bar, while loading a fraudulent website - like a phishing page - underneath.

The researchers found the address-bar spoofing flaw in GitHub Copilot 1.1.27 on September 26. GitHub independently fixed the flaw in a later Copilot build (1.1.29) on October 13 without receiving a vulnerability report from Forever.

We reached out to GitHub and did not receive a response.

All three of these vendors' coding assistants allow local HTML files opened in the built-in browser to escape its boundaries and access other files.

Both Claude Desktop and VS Code allow local pages access to their respective project folders, but the researchers found that these restrictions did not apply to web workers - a browser feature that allows JavaScript to run in a background thread, separate from the page's main thread.

This means a local page can start a worker, and the worker can bypass restrictions to reach any file on the machine.

Codex, however, didn't have this same restriction, meaning a local page could read any file directly without a worker.

Weizman said his team disclosed the issue to Anthropic on July 23, and the AI vendor declined the Claude Desktop bug report as invalid for a "workspace trust" gated security boundary. A day later, however, Noma Security reported the same flaw, according to Weizman, and Anthropic accepted the report as valid.

Anthropic did not respond to The Register's questions about either bug report or Forever's timeline of events.

Forever disclosed the Codex bug to OpenAI on July 27 and didn't get a response. The security team says it's still unpatched. OpenAI did not respond to our inquiries, including if it planned to fix the flaw.

On September 10, Forever disclosed the VS Code vulnerability to Microsoft and says the vendor also labeled it as an invalid workspace trust gated security boundary issue. The researchers claim it remains unpatched. Microsoft did not respond to our request for comment.®

If you want to ask AI a question and watch the conversation go up in virtual flames when you're done, there's a new Mac app for that.

Howler is an open-source app from a Chinese developer going by Aries Zhou, and it takes incognito mode AI questions to a new level by making them graphically interesting and easy to access right from the desktop of a macOS device.

Anyone familiar with the Harry Potter series is likely to know where the name comes from - Howlers are letters that scream in recipients' faces and then burst into flames, destroying themselves, which is the exact same thing the prompts ostensibly do once a user taps the Escape key.

The Howler app displays a parchment-esque letter on the screen whenever the user presses Option+H, complete with a little wax seal that shows a letter representing their chosen model. Responses to queries are written out "at a hand's pace," per Howler's website, first in glowing gold that settles to a sepia-toned print.

"Besides needing translation at any time, I often want to look up a concept or learn about an event on the fly, without wanting to switch to a browser or open a separate session in Chat," Zhou wrote in a comment on his Hacker News post showing off the applet. "So I made Howler, dedicated to Harry Potter fans, always there when you call, burning after reading."

The biggest catch to using Howler is that setting it up involves either using an AI service that can run commands, like Claude Code or another coding agent, or running the configuration commands manually. The recommended method involves pasting a setup prompt into the agent's input field. Once set up, Howler can connect to supported AI models using an API key, or to compatible models running locally. Howler's website states that the API key never enters the chat and is stored in the macOS Keychain for safety.

In addition to the API key for the chosen model staying local and not being printed, Howler is described on its website as only storing messages in memory with no history, sending requests straight to the chosen AI service and never through a relay, keeping no logs, and only connecting to an outside service to check for updates - and even that feature can be disabled.

It's a handy tool for those who want to ask AI questions without leaving a chat history on their Mac - like trying to remember the name of that damn function you're supposed to have down by now, or whether Memorial Day or Labor Day is the one in the fall. Just don't assume the AI provider won't retain a record of the exchange.

"Unlike regular conversations, it doesn't take up your conversation list, and you don't have to think about cleaning it up or archiving it afterward," Zhou explained. "It's only for handling your sudden flashes of inspiration or a moment of confusion."

And it does it with panache - sure, it's just an interface for an AI model one could find elsewhere, but it's easily conjured, dismissed with a snap, and is open source, to boot. You can find Howler on GitHub, or download it from its website, both linked above. ®

Vera Platforms, a startup founded by researchers at the University of Michigan, believes there's a way to make agents trustworthy enough to handle DevOps.

DevOps, which focuses on how software gets deployed and operated, is a particularly unforgiving affair. While AI agents have some leeway to make mistakes and correct errors as they generate code and work through a prompt, it's an entirely different matter when they make changes to real infrastructure running production workloads.

"Live infrastructure is unforgiving," Ang Chen, CEO of Vera Platforms and an associate professor at the University of Michigan, told The Register. "An incorrect change can take down a service, open a security hole or erase data. Mistakes are often irreversible, and there's no safe way to experiment: running code against production infra just to see what happens isn't an option."

For the past few years, Chen and his colleagues have been working on a way to benchmark agentic DevOps and a gym - a simulation environment - to help AI models get better at DevOps tasks.

"From the research that we did, we've figured out various weaknesses of leading models," said Chen. "For instance, [Anthropic's] Claude, although it's very strong with Python generation, it just has some fundamental limitations that it can't get right when it comes to DevOps."

An example of that, Chen said, is that when they asked Claude or OpenAI's Codex to decommission resources in the AWS cloud, the models didn't look beyond the default region.

"The default region is us-east-1," he explained. "There are various regions in AWS, but Claude doesn't have this awareness that the cloud resources could exist in multiple regions, so it only decommissioned part of the resource."

The fundamental reason, he said, is that these models have seen a lot of public code, but a lot less operational tracing.

Vera Platforms aims to remedy the situation with three products: vera-gym, a playground environment that emulates production infrastructure; vera-bench, a test for measuring where AI agents fumble DevOps tasks; and vera-agents, AI agents that have been trained in vera-gym and are ready to be deployed for DevOps tasks.

The CloudOpsBench test being released builds upon work done in 2024 that was presented at NeurIPS. According to Chen, Claude and Codex only score about a 50 percent pass rate. "It's a very, very hard set of tasks," he said.

The test covers tasks like deleting decommissioned S3 buckets, repairing a compliance event pipeline, and restoring DynamoDB write autoscaling. "The tasks are authored by senior infra operators with many years of experience, with rigorous peer review," said Chen.

This benchmark has the advantage of not requiring an actual cloud deployment.

"We have a high fidelity simulator that mimics Amazon behavior," said Chen. "So the rollout, the performance of the agent on the real cloud and the performance of the agent in our emulator is exactly the same. So for every API, we have this comparison and the agent sees the same thing."

Vera-agents, Chen said, should be available in Q1 2027.

In their academic work, the researchers describe cloud infrastructure as "critical but tedious work." With a bit more training, maybe AI agents can take over and keep things boring. ®

This is the face of the dead man in Clerkenwell. He does not look perturbed by the change in the weather. Once winters wore him out, but now he rests beneath the streets of the modern city he will never see, oblivious both to the weather and the wonders of our age, entirely oblivious to everything in fact.

Let me admit, although some might consider it poor company, I consider death to be my friend - because without mortality our time upon this earth would be worthless. So I do not fear death, but rather I hope I shall have enough life first. My fear is that death might come too soon or unexpectedly in some pernicious form. In this respect, I envy my father who always took a nap on the sofa each Sunday after gardening and one day at the age of seventy nine - when he had completed trimming the privet hedge - he never woke up again.

It was many years ago that I first made the acquaintance of the dead man in Clerkenwell, when I had an office in the Close where I used to go each day and write. I was fascinated to discover a twelfth century crypt in the heart of London, the oldest remnant of the medieval priory of the Knights of St John that once stood in Clerkenwell until it was destroyed by Henry VIII, and it was this memento mori, a sixteenth century stone figure of an emaciated corpse, which embodied the spirit of the place for me.

Thanks to the curator at the Museum of the Order of St John, I went back to look up my old friend after all these years. They lent me their key and, leaving the bright October sunshine behind me, I let myself into the crypt, switching on the lights and walking to the furthest underground recess of the building where the dead man was waiting. I walked up to the tomb where he lay and cast my eyes upon him, recumbent with his shroud gathered across his groin to protect a modesty that was no longer required. He did not remonstrate with me for letting twenty years go by. He did not even look surprised. He did not appear to recognise me at all. Yet he looked different than before, because I had changed, and it was the transformative events of the intervening years that had awakened my curiosity to return.

There is a veracity in this sculpture which I could not recognise upon my previous visit, when - in my innocence - I had never seen a dead person. Standing over the figure this time, as if at a bedside, I observed the distended limbs, the sunken eyes and the tilt of the head that are distinctive to the dead. When my mother lost her mental and then her physical faculties too, I continued to feed her until she could no longer even swallow liquid, becoming as emaciated as the stone figure before me. It was at dusk on the 31st December that I came into her room and discovered her inanimate, recognising that through some inexplicable prescience the life had gone from her at the ending of the year. I understood the literal meaning of "remains," because everything distinctive of the living person had departed to leave mere skin and bone. And I know now that the sculptor who made this effigy had seen that too, because his observation of the dead is apparent in his work, even if the bizarre number of ribs in his figure bears no relation to human anatomy.

There is a polished area on the brow, upon which I instinctively placed my hand, where my predecessors over the past five centuries had worn it smooth. This gesture, which you make as if to check his temperature, is an unconscious blessing in recognition of the commonality we share with the dead who have gone before us and whose ranks we shall all join eventually. The paradox of this sculpture is that because it is a man-made artifact it has emotional presence, whereas the actual dead have only absence. It is the tender details - the hair carefully pulled back behind the ears, and the protective arms with their workmanlike repairs - that endear me to this soulful relic.

Time has not been kind to this figure, which originally lay upon the elaborate tomb of Sir William Weston inside the old church of St James Clerkenwell, until the edifice was demolished and the current church was built in the eighteenth century, when the effigy was resigned to this crypt like an old pram slung in the cellar. Today a modern facade reveals no hint of what lies below ground. Sir William Weston, the last Prior, died in April 1540 on the day that Henry VIII issued the instruction to dissolve the Order, and the nature of his death was unrecorded. Thus, my friend the dead man is loss incarnate - the damaged relic of the tomb of the last Prior of the monastery destroyed five hundred years ago - yet he still has his human dignity and he speaks to me.

Walking back from Clerkenwell, through the City to Spitalfields on this bright afternoon in late October, I recognised a similar instinct as I did after my mother's death. I cooked myself a meal because I craved the familiar task and the event of the day renewed my desire to live more life.

The Museum of the Order of St John, St John's Gate, Clerkenwell, EC1M 4DA

The Volkswagen Group on Thursday posted its worst quarterly numbers in more than a decade. According to German news source DW, the company reported an operating loss of €5.86 billion for the period July 1 through September 30, 2027. A massive write down of its stake in Porsche was responsible ... [continued]

The post Volkswagen Q3 Loss Largest Since Dieselgate appeared first on CleanTechnica.

What is covered by freedom of thought in the AI age is being decided by courts that are hearing cases about something entirely different. The Chapter 11 filing of Character.ai on October 12 is the second such case in a year, and it shows that the record of how a person thought can be produced as evidence, auctioned as an asset or inherited by a buyer, depending on which dispute reaches that record first.

The picture that fits is a diary written on pages that belong to somebody else. The user types into a window that works as a place to think, and the law treats the window as the property of the company that supplied the pages. Nobody asks whether the stationery supplier owes a duty of confidence before protecting a diary, because the diary is protected for what it contains, namely people's inner thoughts. A chatbot user has no such luck: when the company fails, its creditors can claim whatever the estate holds, and the trustee inventories the notebooks like any other asset.

Character.ai filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware and says it will keep operating while a court-supervised process sells the business, with a close expected in late November or early December 2026. Disney is the stalking horse bidder, offering $20 million for a non-exclusive, perpetual license. According to a notice filed by forty U.S. State attorneys general, that license excludes the app, the user data, and the chat content, so the most intimate part of the company stays in the estate unless another bidder wants it. The company's lawyer told the court that no buyer has yet made an offer for the user data or the chatbot business.

The privacy policy anticipated this moment. It allows chat transcripts, voice recordings, and images to be disclosed in connection with a sale, and it does not require a buyer to follow the original terms and conditions a user signed up for. In its filing, Pennsylvania claims the company had more than 20 million monthly active users, and the Kentucky complaint, cited in the multistate notice, counts more than 2.1 million U.S. accounts with a declared age under 18 out of 21.6 million as of March 2025. The notice furthermore argues that many minors were recorded as adults, as they did not give their actual birth date when creating a profile.

The attorneys general appeared before Judge Brendan Shannon on October 14 to ask that any buyer protect those chat histories. New York Attorney General Letitia James said the company had collected "some of the most private thoughts children have ever shared." The states reserved the right to seek a consumer privacy ombudsman, an approach that was used in the 23andMe case.

This is not a phenomenon limited to bankruptcy. Similarly, nobody in the New York Times v OpenAI copyright case launched in 2023 turned freedom of thought into a key element, even if it was raised at the fringes of the debate. In May 2025, the court ordered OpenAI to preserve output logs that would otherwise be deleted, and Sam Altman answered by calling for an "AI privilege," arguing that talking to an AI should be like talking to a lawyer or a doctor. The duty to preserve new logs ended on September 26, 2025, and excluded logs from requests originating in the European Economic Area, Switzerland and the United Kingdom from continued preservation. On January 5, 2026, Judge Stein affirmed an order to produce 20 million de-identified conversations, finding that the magistrate judge had adequately balanced users' privacy against the relevance of the documents. In other words, the chat conversations were just business as usual under the logic of ordinary operation of discovery in a U.S. court.

The individual scale followed in February. In United States v. Heppner, Judge Rakoff held that 31 documents a defendant generated with Claude were not privileged, because Claude is not an attorney and the consumer terms defeated any expectation of confidentiality.

Sam Altman and Judge Rakoff disagree on the result but look at the issue from the same perspective: to them, protection depends on what the machine is. Privileges protect relationships between humans and professionals who owe enforceable duties, so a chatbot cannot qualify. In the present bankruptcy case, the point is moot, as privilege only governs what a court may hear. It says nothing about what a company may keep, sell, or hand to a buyer, and that is the question that should be at the core of Character.ai bankruptcy.

International human rights law offers two zones. The forum internum, the inner realm of thought, is absolutely protected. The forum externum, the realm of expression, is subject to limitation. The binary was drawn when thinking left no trace and was limited to the inner workings of our brain. In a paper published in July 2026, I propose the creation of a third zone, the forum interstitiale, for external acts that perform the function of thinking, such as a prompt, an abandoned draft and a confession made to a machine. 

Applied to the Character.ai estate, such an approach would guarantee predictability, as the protection would exist before the user types, not after a bankruptcy judge balances interests case by case. 

Bankruptcy procedure handles personal data as a line in a customer list. A diary has no place on that list and a privacy policy cannot supply sufficient safeguards. 

Europe should not feel smug about Delaware. The e-Evidence Regulation has applied since August 18, 2026, and providers now have 10 days to answer a European Production Order and 8 hours in an emergency. The rules cover content data and reach services that store or process user data as a defining part of what they offer, a description that includes AI chatbots. A year of conversations with a chatbot is content data. The negotiators of that instrument were not thinking about chatbots, which is the pattern that Delaware and the Southern District of New York have already shown.

The one moment in the OpenAI saga when European residents fared better was the exclusion of requests originating in the European Economic Area. That exemption is, however, triggered by where a request came from and has nothing to say about what the user was doing.

Four rules would stop the diary from becoming an auction lot:

1. Bankruptcy courts should appoint a consumer privacy ombudsman in the Character.ai case before any bid for the chat logs is considered, and should decline to treat boilerplate sale clauses as consent to transfer the records of users, and especially children's private thoughts.
2. Legislators should put one screening question to every AI instrument: what happens to user conversations when the company fails, when a court asks for them and when a regulator pushes the provider to filter them.
3. Providers should retain less, keep identity data separate from content and offer modes in which nothing readable exists to hand over, so that they can say so truthfully to a court, a trustee or a buyer.
4. Litigators should argue the functional frame, which asks what the person was doing, and abandon the relational frame, which asks what the machine is.

None of this means that chatbot conversations should be beyond the reach of law. Evidence of wrongdoing may need to be preserved. Allegations of harm to children must be investigated. Legitimate competing interests do not disappear because someone used AI.

But neither should those interests automatically reduce the record of a person's thinking to an ordinary corporate asset or an unrestricted source of evidence.

The law, in most cases, already understands that a diary deserves protection because of what it contains, not because of who manufactured the notebook. AI conversations require a similar change of perspective.

Caroline De Cock is a communications and policy expert, author, and entrepreneur.