Just after taking office in 2025, President Donald Trump picked a fight with Yemen's Ansarullah, whom Americans routinely call "the Houthis." Trump got a refresher in the limits of American military power, a lesson reinforced from Korea, Laos, and Vietnam to Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq. The U.S. military can cause a lot of damage, but it can't win wars unless it beats up on weaklings like Grenada and Panama. After U.S. forces killed many civilians but failed to break the resolve of the Yemeni forces, a chastened Trump called it quits.

Trump then fought a short war with Iran and claimed to have "obliterated" their nuclear facilities before employing the full might of the U.S. military to kill scores of unarmed civilians in so-called drug boats and kidnap Nicolás Maduro, the president of the poor, weak country of Venezuela.

In February, Trump launched a second Iran war because the U.S. military failed. He now claims that Iran was, despite the 2025 conflict, just two weeks away from developing a nuclear missile. Trump's second Iran war followed a predictable pattern. The U.S. was able to wipe out an elementary school and wreck hospitals and apartment buildings with no problem. But in the process, its major military bases in the Middle East — the keys to decades of American power projection in the region — were (truly) obliterated; its inability to protect itself or its allies were laid bare; and the vulnerability of its archipelago of bases around the world, including inside the U.S., was exposed.

After twice failing to defeat Iran, an economically strapped regional power, Trump is now mulling a third Iran war. If he goes ahead with it, the conflict is likely to ignite an even greater conflagration in the region where Ansarullah has been battering Saudi Arabia's airports and oil infrastructure, as well as its proxies in Yemen, for weeks.

To understand the forces that fought Trump to a standstill in 2025 and those he has been unwilling to engage on behalf his Saudi allies in 2026, TomDispatch regular Juan Cole — who writes the indispensable Informed Comment — offers the most comprehensive analysis I've seen of the forces that the mainstream press continues to call the "Houthi militia" and how they've exposed American weakness to an extent not seen in generations.

— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch

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The failure of Tel Aviv and Washington to achieve their war aims in Iran has resulted in the most dramatic American retreat from a region since the U.S. flight from Vietnam in 1975. This startling American defeat — after a generation of forever war failures and stalemates — has been thrown into broad relief by the resumption of another regional conflict that has received far less attention than the Trump administration's sputtering war with Tehran. This fall, the forces that most Americans know as "the Houthis" have conducted a blitzkrieg in their native Yemen and have been pummeling Saudi Arabia's aviation and energy infrastructure with missiles and drones. In doing so, they have put a spotlight on the limits of American power, and the shrinking U.S. military footprint, in the Middle East. 

The long-standing conflict between Saudi Arabia and northern Yemen's Ansarullah, or "Helpers of God," led by the Houthi clan, heated up again in July 2026, when Saudi Arabia struck Sanaa International Airport to prevent a Houthi delegation from landing on its return from the funeral in Iran for slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Ansarullah government launched its own attacks and, in October, managed briefly to close Saudi Arabia's own airport. The renewed war has now expanded into a regional conflict, with Pakistan, Türkiye, and, recently, Egypt, pledging to defend the kingdom from attack, though none of these regional powers appear eager to conduct operations in Yemen itself. Notably absent from the current conflict is Saudi Arabia's most powerful ally, the United States, since President Donald Trump has repeatedly declined to intervene on behalf of his Saudi allies.

The typical U.S. press framing of Ansarullah as an "Iran-backed militia" is inaccurate, since the movement has local, Arab nationalist reasons for its actions and is a full-scale government that rules some 80 percent of Yemen's population. Still, it does receive surreptitious technical and military support from Iran, though nothing like the hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of high-tech armaments — from kits turning 2,000-pound "dumb" bombs into precision munitions to advanced air-to-air missiles — that the U.S. provides the Saudis. Ironically, Trump's war on Iran, fought in conjunction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, weakened the Saudis and exposed their vulnerabilities to military attack by Iranian drones and missiles, impelling them to seek a symbolic win over a less formidable enemy in neighboring Yemen. But the weaknesses exposed by Iran's drones helped encourage a vigorous Ansarullah rejoinder.

The American refusal to join Saudi Arabia's war signals a profound degradation in U.S. capabilities and standing in the Middle East. The U.S. military had, for decades, dominated the region from a network of about 20 major bases. The U.S. Navy operated out of the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet in Manama, Bahrain. The U.S. Air Force flew missions from the massive al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which housed 10,000 U.S. personnel. Thousands of ground troops were barracked in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. The Pentagon admitted that "Iranian strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict. In addition, dozens of U.S. aircraft were destroyed or damaged during OEF."

The naval base at Manama, one of America's most important naval facilities and headquarters of the Navy's Fifth Fleet, was destroyed by Iranian strikes. (Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao admitted last month that Iran "blew the hell out of Bahrain.") The loss of Manama led to supply shortages and poor morale aboard the USS Lincoln and other ships patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, bedeviling Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

The CIA offices at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh were annihilated. Iran struck al-Udeid's evacuated Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar, from which the Pentagon had directed its strikes on enemies as diverse as the Taliban and ISIL over recent decades, and rendered this facility inoperable. All U.S. troops were also withdrawn from Iraq, a process accelerated by the inability of U.S. missile interceptors to protect them from attacks by Iran and allied Shiite militias there.

Related Iran War Has the U.S. Military on the Brink of a "Breakdown"

Iran's deployment of swarms of Shahed drones caused the United States and Israel to use up much of their stock of interceptors, which are time-consuming and expensive to replace. A basic Shahed costs as little as $20,000, though new hardened versions are more expensive — whereas a Patriot interceptor costs $4 million. One reason the Trump administration may be reluctant to intervene in Yemen is that if the U.S. cannot fly missions from al-Udeid, and cannot be sure any new fighter-jet fleets stationed in the region will be safe from Iran, given the paucity of interceptors, the Pentagon will have a limited ability to rescue any U.S. pilots shot down over Yemen.

Saudi Arabia launched a war against the ascendant Ansarullah in 2015 when the latter staged a coup in the capital of Sanaa. The Ansarullah movement is rooted in Yemen's Zaidi Shiism, though it is more radical than traditional Zaidism. (Zaidi Shiism differs substantially from Iranian Shiism, having no ayatollahs and having relatively good relations with Sunnis.)

About a third of Yemenis are Zaidis, who predominate in the north of the country, and many have long resented the dominance of their politics and culture by neighboring, oil-rich, Sunni Saudi Arabia, whose official ideology is hard-line Wahhabism, a puritanical form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of the Quran. Wahhabi proselytizing among the Shia enraged the Houthi clan and their followers began rebelling against the government of military dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2004. But when he was deposed by popular demonstrations during the Arab Spring in 2012, Saleh gradually allied with the Houthis, and by 2015 about half the Yemeni military rallied to their side, along with some major Sunni tribes.

Related The Real Outrage About the Yemen Signal Group Is That It Called for Attack on Civilian Home

In response to the Houthis' rise, a Saudi-led coalition that included the United Arab Emirates began bombing Yemen in 2015. Until 2022, the U.S, then militarily dominant in the region, provided the Saudis with strategic advice, weaponry, and in-air refueling for their fighter jets in the Yemen war, though Riyadh's tendency to bomb civilian infrastructure rather than confining themselves to military targets caused tension between the two allies. While the Saudis and their coalition pushed the Houthis out of much of the south of the country, including Aden, they were unable to dislodge them from the north. The Saudis implicitly acknowledged their failure with a United Nations-brokered truce in April 2022, which largely held until this past summer.

America's forever wars against Middle Eastern countries that decline to accept the Israel project or American corporate neocolonialism helped reignite the Saudi-Yemeni conflict. Iran is the last major state in the region that rejects Israel and is off-limits to U.S. corporate investment, a stance that inspires much of Washington's animus. Netanyahu was therefore easily able to persuade Trump, as a privileged visitor to the White House Situation Room, to attack Iran in February.

The glib expectation of Netanyahu and of his Mossad chief at that time, David Barnea, that the Islamic Republic would crumble if Israel murdered Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and around 50 other high-ranking regime figures proved wishful thinking. The notion that Iran was vulnerable to a tightened petroleum blockade was turned on its head by the hard-liners who ascended to power after Khamenei's death. Largely veterans of the grueling eight-year Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the country's new leaders pursued a policy of "de-basing" toward the United States, taking out its main regional military facilities.

By successfully striking Saudi Arabia, Iran demonstrated that the kingdom's ability to protect itself is imperfect and its infrastructure is vulnerable.

In addition, Iran launched precision strikes at the energy facilities of their Arab Gulf neighbors who had hosted those American bases. They struck Kuwait's national petroleum company and its fields and refineries. They took out 17 percent of the production of Qatar's Ras Laffan natural gas facility, even though Doha had good relations with Tehran and had mediated for Iran. Tehran also struck ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, using missiles and drones, scaring the major shipping insurers into withdrawing their contracts. Few shipping magnates would risk cargoes worth billions of dollars without insurance.

Related Pentagon Fears Drone Attacks on U.S. and Foreign Bases

Iran threw the world into an energy crisis reminiscent of the 1970s, which would have been even more devastating had China not released oil from its vast private and public petroleum reserves and cut its oil imports from 11.5 million barrels a day to under 9 million barrels a day, a move partially enabled by its turn to electric vehicles, which saved it 1.5 million barrels a day. High gasoline and diesel prices hurt Asia more than the United States, but prices rose globally. A third of the world's helium, essential for cooling computer chips in the production process, comes from the Gulf, and that supply was also interrupted, increasing the price of electronics.

By successfully striking Saudi Arabia, Iran demonstrated that the kingdom's ability to protect itself is imperfect and its infrastructure is vulnerable. By blockading the Strait of Hormuz in a way that the United States had difficulty undoing, Iran demonstrated the vulnerability of key world maritime arteries, something Ansarullah had already highlighted by striking at shipping in the Red Sea to protest the Gaza genocide. 

When the Saudis bombed Sanaa's airport in July 2026, Ansarullah's leadership appears to have decided that Riyadh posed an ongoing existential danger to their state and sought to strangle the Yemeni economy, just as Israel had done to Gaza. Moreover, they sensed that the kingdom could be rolled back in the wake of the failure of the Israeli-U.S. war on Iran. Just as Iran had weakened the Gulf Arab states with its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the Houthis believed they could seriously degrade the Saudi economy by blocking Riyadh's shipping through the Bab al-Mandab, "the Strait of Tears," between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

Saudi exports through the Strait of Hormuz had fallen substantially. The kingdom did, however, have an escape valve: its East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Ships loading at Yanbu then headed for Saudi Arabia's major Asian markets through the Bab al-Mandab. If Ansarullah could make the tanker captains fearful of this transit, they could reduce Saudi Arabia's income even further. The Houthi spokesperson, Muhammad Abd al-Salam, warned that the prohibition of Saudi shipping was only the first step in a tit-for-tat strategy of "blockade for blockade." The idea wasn't original. The Saudis and the U.S. had often attempted to blockade petroleum imports to northern Yemen during the seven-year Saudi-Yemeni War.

Related Yemenis Unable to Reach Hospital Are Part of the Iran War Death Toll

In the subsequent three months, Ansarullah deployed missiles and drones constructed from Iranian models by military engineers trained by the old nationalist government of Ali Abdullah Saleh, many of whom had joined the Ansarullah military, in what has been called a Yemeni "military industrial complex."

Just as the kingdom's interceptors had proven unable to prevent Iranian strikes on targets such as the CIA section of the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, they sometimes failed to halt the barrage of Yemeni missiles and drones. Refineries and oil installations, even the headquarters of the state oil giant, Saudi Aramco, in Dhahran, were hit. In October, Ansarullah closed Riyadh's International Airport, just as the Saudis had attempted to close that of Sanaa in July. Ansarullah also surged out of their mountain strongholds and made a major push to Yemen's southwest coast, taking the strategic port of Mocha overlooking the Bab al-Mandab. They also moved on Taiz, an inland industrial city of nearly 1 million inhabitants, one of the last major population centers not already under their control, in a campaign that tested the ability of the small Saudi-backed government of Rashad al-Alimi in Aden to resist it.

Read Our Complete Coverage

TomDispatch

Just as the Vietnam War was one conflict among many fought in the Third World during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so the Saudi-Yemeni War of 2026 is part of the larger struggle between the U.S. and Israel and Iran. Still, just as Vietnam was more about Vietnamese anticolonialism, nationalism, and sovereignty than about Communism and the ownership of the means of production, so the Saudi-Yemeni War is about Yemeni autonomy more than it is about the loose Houthi alliance with Iran. The conflict is not primarily between Zaidism and Wahhabism, though religious tensions are part of the story, but is far more rooted in a struggle between desperately poor Yemeni highlanders and fabulously wealthy Saudi sheikhs.

The plutocratic Saudi ruling elite is closely tied to Washington and has secret dealings with the Israelis, with whom it shares a distrust of the poverty-stricken Palestinian resistance, and views Ansarullah as cat's paws of Iran in the Arabian Peninsula and as radical republicans trying to overthrow the region's oil monarchies in favor of populism. For its part, Ansarullah are Arab nationalists, anti-American, and seek to use oil resources for populist purposes. And they have been willing to attack Israel to defend the Palestinians of Gaza from genocide.

Last week, Ansarullah battered targets across Saudi Arabia, prompting a further pullback from the region by Washington. The Yemeni forces attacked King Fahd International Airport in Dammam. An Ansarullah spokesperson said the group also targeted the Saudi defense ministry in the capital, Riyadh, along with an Aramco site in Yanbu, and an airport in the southern city of Abha. Reports also emerged of an attack on another Aramco oil field.

"Houthis have increasingly engaged in hostilities against Saudi Arabia, including attacks on civilian airports and other critical infrastructure," wrote State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott in an October 21 post on X, after the wave of attacks, ordering "non-emergency U.S. government employees and their family members" out of Saudi Arabia.

It's just the latest evidence of the most significant regional retreat by the U.S. in half a century and evidence of profound American military decline. The outcome of their war with the Saudis will not determine the issue of the U.S.-Israeli contest with Iran, but the very ability of Ansarullah to prosecute it points to the profound weakening of the American posture in the Middle East.

The post The Incredible Shrinking Superpower appeared first on The Intercept.

Rob van den Brand lives in 's-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands. He loves to read, think, take walks, cook meals with his wife, and travel. His main skill is optimizing systems, which he applies in his work as a bookkeeper and financial advisor. He also has many thoughts about societal systems and how to improve them. He might write them down one day.

I can be found on LinkedIn and Instagram.

• Schneider Slider Rave XB. This is my favourite pen. It feels comfortable and well balanced in my hand. It's also inexpensive and just writes well. I have one pen and then buy refills whenever I need them.
• Nano tape. My wife recently discovered Nano tape. We used it for fixing a bunch of power strips to the wall. It's amazing how well they hold, it feels (and is) very solid. For someone who doesn't like to drill when not absolutely needed, this was a lifesaver.
• HP Smart Tank 7001. This is an anti-recommendation, can I do that? Not wanting to deal with ink cartridges any longer, I decided to try an ink tank printer and chose this HP model. The first one was "incontinent", it spilled little yellow ink blots over the prints. I submitted it for repair but got a new one. On that one, the scanner didn't work. I submitted it for repair but got a new one. That one had incontinence like the first one, but I decided to live with it, because I didn't want to go through all the hassle again. Aside from the occasional yellow spots on my prints, I've been pretty satisfied for about a year. But now, it decided to stop printing blue. My favourite colour!! It's all very frustrating, don't buy this one!

• Deep Questions (Cal Newport's podcast). I love listening to podcasts doing chores around the house. This is one of my favorites, because it combines the topics of productivity, learning and (the conscious use of) technology. Recently, there have been a lot of episodes on AI. His perspective is critical and anti-hype which has helped ground my own stance about AI, which is enthusiastic (long term) and skeptical (short term) at the same time. All the other episodes are good as well and are about "cultivating the deep life".
• Emotional Exploration Tool. I use writing to "process" my emotions. That sounds rather technical, I know, but it's about discovering, feeling and releasing emotions that have been stuck somewhere. The thing is: I have no interest in saving these types of notes. The value is in the act of writing. That's why I enjoy this tool. I just write freely or based on a prompt. Afterwards, the words disappear into the void. Wonderful!

Goals, plans, vision documents, mission statements…I get what they are about, but somehow these have never worked for me. I can write one, sure. But then I just go about my life and some things happen and others don't. Still, I do like to reflect about my life and the direction it could take. That's why I'm experimenting with this question:

What wants to happen?

My theory is that if I align with what the universe wants to happen, the actions/projects that come up in my mind can be completed with ease and flow, having the support of invisible but real forces. And that has been my experience so far. It does mean I have to bypass my rational thinking brain, but that's working overtime anyway. It's lovely to be able to trust this question.

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Boston Dynamics makes those cute little robot dogs that amaze and amuse us in videos like this one. How could anyone possibly object to something so endearing? When it was revealed recently that four of its robot dogs have been acquired by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for $1.3 million, ... [continued]

The post Boston Dynamics Workers Protest Use Of Robot Dogs By ICE appeared first on CleanTechnica.

A rousing call to reach for the pitchforks, Nick Hayes' 'The Medicine Tree' — our October Book of the Month - shows that community and land culture grow and thrive wherever they are allowed to, writes Abi Andrews.

In the verdant home counties, among chequered fields and kite-flecked skies, is an Oxfordshire estate that appears much like any other — an arcadian emblem of Englishness; a signifier of assumptive hereditary power. But something radical has taken root. Since the 1970s, the Lord of the manor has been practicising organic farming on some of the estates' lands, has opened up some of that land to others, and around this, a mixed community of growers, rural skills keepers and heritage craft makers has formed. Currently transitioning to become England's first community-owned estate, the Hardwick Estate will soon be handed from its heirs to the non-landed-gentry residents who have made their lives and livelihoods there over the decades.

Touching on so many things that tangle back to the rot at the heart of contemporary England, Hardwick is the setting for Nick Hayes' spirited investigation into hereditary land ownership in the UK, its inextricable links with ongoing global colonialism, and the contradiction at its centre, between owning land and belonging on it.

Estates have their tentacles around the world, gaining their wealth by extracting it from elsewhere, and this particular estate has the origins of its wealth ensnared with railway expansion across Canada — the opening of frontiers that enabled the thieving of land and resources from Indigenous populations who lived there. This period saw a clash of two very different worlds. One had a reciprocal relationship with the animate land on which its sustenance and flourishing depended. The other had a rational, alienated conception of land as something that must become the exclusive possession of a person, usually a man, by right of a deed written on paper. Hayes deftly sets this up as a kind of magical thinking — a spell we have been hoodwinked into.

And the crux of his argument is that the colonialism that allowed for the accumulation of such wealth and power was begun, tested and perfected, on home soil. The very methods by which Indigenous people are colonised around the world — the theft of land, exclusion from means of sustenance, as well as the cultural genocide committed by the distruption of ceremony and the banning of song, dance, language — much of this was practiced first when the commons were taken from the peasants of England. We find ourselves a landless people, deprived of our indigeneity. Now this claim might be a risky one to make if handled less nimbly, and a review short as this one can't do justice to the way this is done; you will simply have to read the book. But to condense to a sentence: belonging to land is not about descent but instead relation. We are at the far end of a process that colonised countries and peoples are still undergoing — that is, almost absolute alienation from the land and its spirit. They honed their spirit-breaking on us. We have more in common with the peasants of the world than we are led to believe, and it is only for the good of the powers that be that this is disrupted and hidden from us.

Hayes finds glimmers of an animist past lingering in English stories and traditions, but much of his evidence comes from what he finds growing at Hardwick, where a land-based culture has been given space to flourish. Before arriving at Hardwick, lots of its inhabitants were squatters, drifters, boaters, travellers. In its ways, the community is fumbling towards a memory of being-of-this-land (we might call it indigeneity where we take this to be about being-in-relation) — at Hardwick new shoots appear from something severed but never killed off entirely. There is no going back to the commons, but neither are we detached from its history.

I must admit, I was a little skeptical of this book and its premise at first. That comes from my own prejudice against what I will call philanthropic landlordism. Like with another such landed-gentry-redemption-story that has taken the publishing world by storm in recent years (I'm talking about Isabella Tree's Wilding) there is something of the fervent platforming of decent acts by people with the means to undertake them that rubs me up the wrong way. Why do we so enthusiastically praise the inheritors of wealth for being a bit less rubbish with their massive assets? Often these rewilding initiatives come about because the estate can't turn a profit and there are grants available to change their land use. Hugh Crossley, heir of the Somerleyton estate in Suffolk, told Countryfile that his main motivation for rewilding his own estate may have just been to be contrary to the Victorian-garden-sensibility of his father. I don't trust philanthropy, I don't trust leaving important work to the whims of rich people, holding out for those whose vastly disparate worldviews might line up with your own on some ethical planes or whims.

Likewise, where estates are opening themselves up to the enterprises of us commoners, it's not even necessarily from a sense of responsibility or even generosity, but rather that deteriorating estates have become harder for one family to manage. Let someone set up a vegetable enterprise in the crumbling kitchen garden! I have twice been to the Organic Growers Gathering, a small festival that has taken place on the Hardwick estate, and attended talks on exactly this tactic of landless landworkers approaching estates in order to get access to land on which to grow food for a living. There was a bristle from some in the crowd, it felt like coming with a begging bowl — a bit too on the nose in its likeness to feudalism. A comparative viewing of the recent film Our Land (based on another arm of Hayes' land-rights work, the Right to Roam campaign) gives countervailing profiles of three estate owners who are wholly against (or tepid in their acceptance of) peasants even setting foot on their land for an afternoon stroll, let alone giving them over to community ownership and disinheriting themselves. Isn't Hardwick just a utopic anomaly, reliant on the whim of a guilt-ridden heiress?

But Hayes has preempted my reservations. Hardwick isn't allowed to stand simply for goodness prevailing because alongside it is the neighbouring, evil twin estate, Mapledurham. This tale of two estates does a fine job of tempering any optimism with the futility of what we are up against. Hayes' friends on Mapledurham face eviction from the house they have lived in for decades, and their story is as horrific as it is ordinary. Their change of fate at the passing of the land to its new heir reveals the precarity of philanthropic landlordism, and its dependence on the whims of a landlord's personality or politics. And yet more dispiriting still, the landed gentry are a dying breed. Hurray! But wait…the new aristocracy that replaces them are multinational corporations and globally, extractivism is more intense than it has ever been. These corporate bodies can't be hoped to have a change of heart about their dubious inheritance — they're not even people. The lord of the manor starts to appear a rather simpering, tame foe…

The Medicine Tree gives us something to work with, a vision, and visions can be replicated. Visions can be multiplied and stacked, so that you might imagine every manor house taken over by the common people. This isn't unprecedented — there are communities living in the derelictions of wealth and power across the UK: old Georgian rectories, halls, and once-stately houses. The Old Hall in Suffolk, or Braziers Park, also in Oxfordshire, are examples. The book stokes more militant impulses too. Will Hayes throw a rock through the window of the evil estate's mansion? Might we be incited to storm and squat all the stately homes that sit empty? And what if we just ignored it, this magical thinking of landlordism? A nice accompaniment to reading is to go along to the William Morris gallery for their current exhibition Earthly Paradise: Radical Alternative Living in the UK, for more on the UK's colourful history of squatting, or taking the housing it needs.

But I think the main thing I have taken from this book is that community, given the means, wants to be, it flourishes. Hayes puts specifics on what exactly it is you are missing when you are yearning for 'community'. It's a Ceilidh band. It's dancing, it's creating new rituals. But most importantly it's mutual aid, coming to the help of your 'kith' and knowing this will be reciprocated. "I'm wondering if land culture just grows like weeds," Hayes ponders. So too, community. There is a sense of completeness in that, at a place where the walls once guarded exclusive flourishing, mutual aid has popped up like dandelions. This answers in a way my initial hesitance at using a setting that doesn't seem replicable — because it's not so much the rock Hayes is showing us, but the moss. Community need not wait for the perfect conditions (like a disinherited estate) to be able to build itself. Hardwick's community built up over the decades prior to the estate's handover. What Hayes shows us is that even where its future is on shaky ground, might collapse or have the rug (or housing) pulled from under its feet, community wants to be.

Peasantry is in vogue, on the very fringes of the UK at least. Courses on landwork offered in London are churning out Level 2 qualified organic horticulture students, and an opening in a market garden in the city will receive hundreds of qualified applications. Training centres are setting up, offering more routes to land skills, like the Apricot Centre in Devon or Black Mountains College in Bannau Brycheiniog. This training pulls in first generation land workers from all sorts of backgrounds, many of them burnt out from modernity, and looking for a way to reconnect with the land around them, myself included. Across the country, it's difficult to get an entry-level grower job without first undergoing a good deal of unpaid work. This is the tiniest bottle-neck, and it is unbeknownst to most of society. But it's there and it's wearing dirty Blundstones. It feels to me sometimes like we might be living through a back-to-the-land moment like was had in the 70s. But whereas the 70s iteration was a movement towards self-sufficiency, this time, we will go together.

It is only a taboo against the tearing of pages from books that stops me from slicing Hayes' illustrations out to frame them. The book is lively, pacey, and the embeddedness of Hayes living in and from his subject is snug to the book's own endeavour for placeness — he's in the Ceilidh band with the rest of the book's cast of characters. It's participatory writing, and you feel swept up into the throng of it too. The eponymous tree of the book's title has a mythic quality, in the way it conducts all of the topics of the book like a lightning rod. It's almost uncanny the serendipity with which the tree, the setting, and our narrator all fit around the subject, and this manages to never feel ham-fisted. You get the feeling Hayes was born to moor his boat next to the Medicine Tree, to write this book, which might in part carry forward the land-movement he calls our attention to. It might sit alongside its moment in a similar way that Wilding does against the current appetite for 'rewilding' land, but instead adjacent to the land's re-commoning. The Hardwick community has set the tone. One heiress is already atoning. Pick up the pitchforks then, let's go.

*

'The Medicine Tree: Repairing the Rotten Roots of England' by Nick Hayes is out now and available here, published by Allen Lane. Read an extract from the book here. Read an interview with Nick Hayes here.

Abi Andrews is a writer, researcher and conservation worker. Her debut novel 'The Word for Woman is Wilderness' was published by Serpent's Tail, and she is currently working on a nonfiction book about solidarity with animals.

The Comu Action Pro is a surprisingly capable little recorder; the hoops Apple makes these developers jump through are dopey.

I was excited to try the Comu TN20 Pro, as I wanted an AI transcription device. Recording oral stories and getting a quick transcription is something I'd wanted for a while, and I kept forgetting my iPhone should just do it for me. — Read the rest

The post This excellent little AI recorder makes me resent the App Store appeared first on Boing Boing.

Overgrown is a Chrome browser extension that plants seeds in neglected browser tabs, which slowly become overwhelmed by spreading foliage. Creator Charlie Gerard was inspired by a creative exercise around the word and decided to do something special.

I then wanted to apply this idea to the digital world, and the word "abandoned" made me think of my browser tabs… What if my tabs were slowly taken over by plants the longer I left them unread?

— Read the rest

The post Chrome extension lets weeds overgrow your neglected browser tabs appeared first on Boing Boing.

Maximize value, not token usage, Amazon has told its engineers, citing concerns about rising AI costs and complexity.

Amazon made the strategy shift public on Tuesday in a note to engineering teams outlining the changing role of its software development engineers in the age of AI.

"Our most prolific engineers have demonstrated that neither the developer role nor their output is defined by the use of AI," Amazon VP and distinguished engineer Terk Terkowitz wrote in the note. "We're now in the era of the Renaissance Developer, blending AI tools with human judgment and domain expertise to build entirely new things."

In other words, Amazon wants its developers using AI, but burning through tokens isn't the same thing as getting useful work done.

Rather than define the developer role by how AI is used, the memo focuses on what isn't changing so fast: the need to deliver useful software and results for customers and the business.

"It is difficult to define, in a way that will stand the test of time, what good AI powered engineering practices look like," the memo continues. "We have decided to focus on what is not changing as we evolved the SDE roles … the outcomes that matter aren't changing, even if the inputs, tools, and techniques are changing faster than ever."

What that means for software developers in the present moment is that AI input metrics, even if Amazon has seen some correlation with increased productivity and delivery on tokenmaxxing teams, aren't what Amazon sees as a measurement of good use of developer time and resources.

"We are all aware of how deeply flawed these metrics are, primarily because they are disconnected from what matters," the memo argues.

"[U]sing these metrics could, if used as a target instead of a measure, drive negative outcomes, increasing costs, and increasing complexity," the memo continues, referring to tokenmaxxing costs and overly complex code that's at odds with Amazon's mission to "invent and simplify."

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the memo's intent was to discourage tokenmaxxing, pointing us to comments from AWS CEO Matt Garman from June in which he encouraged developers to measure outcomes, not token consumption, in making proper use of AI tools for software development.

Amazon also wants its developers thinking more about how AI can help "improve delivery for customers" and business units, not just trying to find a place to stick it to prove it's working for them. The memo calls out some engineering teams who've "become less connected to their customers and business," and says teams that are more engaged with their products and business roles "are able to take the most advantage of AI and agentic software development," in essence calling for more teams to take a similar approach.

"If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing," the memo said. "An engineer who can explain where AI does not yet help their work is demonstrating the judgement we are asking for."

Amazon's take in the memo is starkly similar to what Microsoft told its own internal development teams in August, right down to stressing a focus on returns for customers and business instead of maximizing input.

"Tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for," Microsoft EVP Jay Parikh told developers. "I want all of us focused on maximizing outcomes that move the needle for our customers and our business."

With that, the writing seems to be on the wall for the throw-AI-at-everything-and-see-where-it-sticks approach to integrating the tech. When two companies that large start to question whether AI token consumption is a useful measure of productivity for their thousands of software engineers, it's possible the rest of the world will soon start sipping those tokens instead of chugging them.

That, or we'll soon see even more enterprises begin to embrace the philosophy of relying on "good enough" open-weight models that can handle many tasks at a fraction of the cost of more expensive alternatives - Garman made a similar case for choosing cost-effective models based on the task back in June.

If you're a bubble, that approach looks an awful lot like a pin. ®

GitHub's Universe conference kicked off in San Francisco on Wednesday with news that its infrastructural universe is expanding to address staggering demand from AI agents.

GitHub recorded 7.4 billion code commits in September 2026, five times more than hit its servers a year earlier. This surge in traffic over the past year, the result of developers running AI agents and generating increased amounts of programming code, caught the company unprepared and led to a series of outages and service availability woes.

AI-driven code commits started becoming a problem last December, and led to problems in February, April, August, not to mention the months in between. On May 7, the site's 90-day availability hit a low of about 84 percent, according to reconstructed data from GitHub's status page.

GitHub execs apologized and promised to do better. Those commitments have put four million CPU cores and 160 petabytes of high-speed storage on its infrastructure roadmap, alongside extra compute capacity for GitHub Actions, the company's beleaguered continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

The Microsoft-owned code hosting biz also says it is redesigning its technical architecture (an effort discussed previously) to separate compute and storage, with the expectation that will enable 35x more throughput.

"We're also migrating to a multi-region deployment in Azure, while continuing to serve incredible levels of traffic from developers around the world," said Jay Parikh, EVP of CoreAI, Microsoft, in a blog post provided to The Register. "We expect to complete the migration early next year. Those investments give us more room to grow. The next step is building the systems that handle the work."

Also at the its Universe event, GitHub announced general availability of Copilot Fusion, the company's model routing service that was previewed under the name HydraFusion. The idea is that allowing GitHub to route requests to different models can improve task-completion rates while reducing token consumption costs.

"Different tasks need different models," said Parikh. "Developers shouldn't have to manage every model choice to get the right result at the right price. Copilot Fusion evaluates what a task needs across reasoning, code generation, debugging, and tool use, then chooses how to execute across one or more models. In the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, Fusion Max scored within two points of Opus 5.5 Max at half the cost and 40% less time per task."

GitHub is making more bells and whistles available through its Copilot app, including Copilot Projects, for coordinating parallel work; Copilot Connectors, for simplifying how Copilot connects to MCP servers; and Copilot Automations, which are reusable agent tasks.

And in what appears to be an effort to boost Copilot usage in the workplace, GitHub is extending Copilot access to all GitHub Enterprise users without requiring any additional per-seat purchases. Customer still get billed for the tokens they use.

Microsoft's code collab biz is also expanding its suite of AI services for developers with an offering called AI Scans, which checks pull requests for vulnerabilities in languages not addressed by rule-based scanning and in code that's already merged, plus new reachability analysis tools that allow development to focus on issues that are plausibly exploitable. Another new offering is a package firewall that checks enterprise policy settings before fetching npm packages. ®

Weather drones are being tested to help update forecasts of extreme weather more quickly, and could help us prepare earlier for upcoming winter storms.

With an unprecedented El Niño increasing the chance of storms and wet weather in Europe this winter, meteorologists will be looking at new and developing tools to help them forecast as accurately as possible.

The ability of new types of weather drones to collect more information ahead of incoming bad weather has already attracted the attention of financial traders.

Energy traders have to buy and sell electricity produced from sources like wind and solar farms. They need to judge the supply and demand as quickly as possible. This means they need updates to weather forecasts so they can predict when clouds might shade solar panels, or if an approaching storm could increase wind turbine generation.

US researchers have recently highlighted that the ability of drones to collect information on air pressure and wind speed, for instance, in real time is proving useful for forecasting extreme weather events faster.

Meanwhile, UK researchers are pushing the technology further by using drones to collect valuable data inside clouds. Clouds are fundamental to many weather effects, including rain, fog, lightning, hail and extreme winds.

In 2024, the World Meteorological Organisation hosted its first demonstration of weather drones. These drones measured temperature and wind speed, and focused on the lowest few kilometres of the atmosphere.

This use of drones is being developed with the expectation that they can be used as part of a network of drone stations by meteorological agencies, to complement traditional networks of weather stations.

These drones can be deployed remotely from a dock, allowing routine measurement of the lower atmosphere to inform weather forecasts. This is similar to how weather balloons currently operate. Drones, however, have the potential to provide data at much higher frequency, and more quickly. Data could be collected hourly or more often, and with less waste such as lost weather balloon equipment.

A new research project, Drone Observation Of Clouds (DOOC), led by the University of Leeds, is working out if new kinds of measurement could become part of weather forecasting in the future. They are looking at measuring the most uncertain component of weather and climate, clouds.

Between June and November 2026 DOOC has been flying and collecting measurements at a site in Yorkshire, UK. Leeds-based drone operator, Menapia, has collaborated with University of Leeds to obtain permission to fly in an unusually narrow column of air up to 1,600 metres.

That small section of airspace enables a weather drone to measure temperature, humidity, wind and cloud particles at all heights between the ground and 1,600 metres. At only 30m wide, this narrow piece of airspace only makes sense for a rotor drone that can ascend perfectly vertically.

A particle counter is mounted on the drone and can determine the size and concentration of cloud droplets. It has been developed and tested for almost a decade, honing it to be suitable for drone-based measurement.

The DOOC project will build on recent forecasting advances at the UK Met Office. UK forecasts now use a much more detailed representation of cloud physics to make forecasts more accurate.

Drone-based measurements of weather and clouds could offer the next breakthroughs in the rapidly growing field of AI weather forecasting. AI weather forecasting leans more heavily on data than traditional forecasting methods. So, the collection of routine observations of the atmosphere has become more important than ever.

As US researchers are also finding, one of the greatest challenges is how to work with regulators to enable drone operation for research alongside traditional air users, as well as commercial and military drone users.

Scientists are arguing for new infrastructure investment and regulatory support to make the most of this developing drone technology.

Drone observations have the potential to greatly benefit wider society through the improved weather forecasts, which will mean the ability to prepare better for upcoming extreme weather earlier, and potentially put protection in place.

Declan Finney receives funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)

Jessica Girdwood receives funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) in addition to the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).

Icelandic government officials recently met to discuss a dramatic scenario: what if the current that circulates Atlantic waters weakened significantly, or collapsed altogether?

The ocean currents are changing, with major implications for climate around the world. Yet our new research suggests most governments are not preparing for this possibility. Of 91 national adaptation plans submitted to the UN climate convention, only two even mention that key Atlantic current, and neither sets out concrete action in response to its possible collapse.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or Amoc, is part of the giant conveyor belt of ocean currents that moves warm surface water northward in the Atlantic and sends colder deep water back south. It plays a critical role in regulating the global climate by redistributing heat around the planet, influencing weather patterns and temperatures far beyond the Atlantic basin.

As the climate warms, the Amoc is weakening, and could continue to do so throughout this century. While a full collapse, in which major ocean currents completely reorientate, is unlikely before 2100, a recent study projected a 50% weakening of the Amoc by the end of the century under an intermediate emissions scenario. A collapse would not be unique in geological history. Studies show that the Amoc has undergone dramatic changes before, including a near-complete shutdown around 17,500 years ago, after the coldest period in the last ice age.

A slowdown or collapse would have major implications for temperature and rainfall around the world. In northern Europe, the loss of the heat Amoc transfers northwards from the tropics could lead to winter cold extremes of -20°C in London.

Climate model experiments in which the Amoc is shut down show an average 29% weakening of the West African monsoons and 19% weakening of the Indian summer monsoon, increasing risks of food and water insecurity in regions that rely on monsoon rains. Other studies suggest an increased risk of severe drought in parts of Central America, West Africa and the Amazon region. Fisheries and sea level would also be affected.

So how can countries prepare for changes in ocean circulation whose timing is highly uncertain? Our research identifies practical steps to incorporate Amoc-related risks into adaptation decision-making.

Of the 91 national adaptation plans reported to the UN climate convention so far, only two mention the Amoc. Brazil's plan devotes a dedicated box to warning that its shutdown could push the Atlantic rain belt southwards, tipping the Amazon rainforest towards collapse. Ireland - which relies on the Amoc to sustain its mild climate - mentions that "reliance solely on adaptation may prove insufficient" in case of Amoc collapse, concluding that no national plan can prepare for such tipping points.

Amoc is a particular challenge for adaptation. It represents a very high impact scenario whose likelihood is very difficult to quantify. And yet if the current were to collapse, some parts of the world could experience climate changes in the opposite direction to those they are preparing for, most notably colder winters in north-western Europe.

This is important because many adaptation investments need to be robust to a wide range of potential changes to be effective. Consider a country planning to build a new reservoir to cope with more variable rainfall amounts under climate change. If instead the rainy season becomes shorter and there is less rain overall, the reservoir may seem like a bad investment.

Similarly, in countries that depend on monsoon rains, a weakening or collapse of the Amoc could mean even less rainfall than is projected under climate change. Along Atlantic coastlines, changes in sea level and ocean temperatures could affect how well coastal defences work. Changes in fish stocks could also threaten communities that depend on fishing.

Many investments made now will remain in use for decades. Investments that perform well under moderate Amoc weakening but poorly if the current weakened much more could expose countries to major losses and damages, especially poorer countries with fewer resources to respond to surprises.

In our study, we outline five ways policymakers can start preparing now.

1. Identify the investments and countries most at risk. Countries that rely heavily on monsoon rainfall, fisheries, or have major investments along the Atlantic coast may be especially exposed, as are countries with limited ability to respond to surprises.

2. Stress-test key investments. This means using computer simulations with Amoc-collapse scenarios to check whether these investments would still achieve their intended purpose under very different conditions, such as changes in temperature, sea level or rainfall.

3. Favour flexible solutions. Choose investments that can be adapted or expanded as conditions change, such as infrastructure projects that are built in stages or are easily upgradeable, or wide diversity of water supply or coastal defence options.

4. Use Amoc monitoring to inform adaptation decisions. Sustained funding for ocean monitoring is needed to track changes in ocean circulation, but governments should also regularly reassess whether their adaptation investments remain effective as our knowledge of Atlantic currents evolves.

5. Reassess global climate projections. Explore the implications of major Amoc weakening or collapse for global climate projections, including estimates of future warming. The Amoc influences how much carbon the oceans absorb from the atmosphere, so changes in its circulation could affect both how countries adapt to climate changes and how much further warming they need to prepare for.

These actions do not require predicting whether or when the Amoc will collapse, and should not take attention or resources away from responding to heatwaves, droughts, floods and other impacts of climate change that already happening. Efforts to rapidly cut greenhouse gas emissions remain crucial.

What countries can do is start testing long-term investments against scenarios involving major Amoc weakening, helping to ensure that infrastructure, water supplies and other adaptations remain effective in all plausible futures.

Brenden Jongman is affiliated with The World Bank and received support from The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery.

Jim Hall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

After Florida cop Brian Louis Sguros performed a welfare check at Dennis West's home and found his dead body, he did what any reasonable law enforcement officer would do under the circumstances: he moved in, assumed West's identity, and renovated the Lauderhill dwelling. — Read the rest

The post Florida cop moved into dead man's house, renovated it and impersonated him appeared first on Boing Boing.

A long-awaited OLED upgrade to Apple's iPad Mini launched this week with an international marketing campaign. But a moment in one ad has drawn controversy in South Korea, as the pinch gesture in it means "you have a small penis" and carries popular connotations of feminism. — Read the rest

The post iPad Mini ad edited in Korea to remove gesture inadvertantly mocking your penis appeared first on Boing Boing.

Ukrainian ransomware crook Artem Stryzhak has been sentenced to 70 months in the slammer by a New York federal court for his role as an affiliate of the Nefilim and Hive ransomware gangs.

Prosecutors believe the cybercriminal began working with Nefilim in or around June 2021, while living in Barcelona, Spain.

The Nefilim ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation was known for targeting wealthy companies, with its operators encouraging affiliates to pursue businesses capable of paying substantial ransom demands.

One of Nefilim's most high-profile attacks was on Australian logistics giant Toll Group in 2020, encrypting its files roughly three months after it suffered a separate Mailto ransomware attack.

Court documents [PDF] state that Stryzhak agreed with alleged Nefilim boss Volodymyr Tymoshchuk, who remains at large, to pay the ransomware crew a 20 percent cut of the ransom proceeds he collected.

Tymoshchuk told Stryzhak that his preference was for attacks to target companies based in the US, Canada, and Australia that turn over more than $100 million annually. This guidance was soon tweaked to encourage targeting companies in the same regions with more than $200 million in annual revenue.

Prosecutors claim that around the time Stryzhak joined forces with Nefilim, he also signed up to the Hive ransomware operation as "one of its earliest affiliates," and used its platform to attack approximately seven victims. Hive's operators claimed they targeted circa 1,500 victims worldwide between June 2021 and January 2023.

According to separate court documents [PDF], Hive's victims included a law firm and an Ohio hospital, which paid approximately $1.7 million in Bitcoin after the gang initially demanded $2 million during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before its infrastructure was seized in an international law enforcement operation in January 2023, Hive was known for attacking healthcare facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as being one of the ransomware groups that battered Costa Rica in 2022.

Brett Leatherman, assistant director at the FBI's cyber branch, described Stryzhak as a "prolific cybercriminal" who played a role in groups that were responsible for more than $100 million in victim damages.

"Today's sentence reflects the seriousness of Stryzhak's crimes and demonstrates the FBI's global reach and extensive network of international partners," he said.

"Multiple field offices contributed to this investigation, and our work does not end here. We will continue to leverage every tool at our disposal to track down Stryzhak's co-conspirators and hold them accountable, including Volodymyr Viktorovych Tymoshchuk."

Stryzhak was arrested by Spanish police in June 2024 before being extradited to the US in April 2025.

In announcing Stryzhak's sentencing, the Justice Department took the opportunity to remind the public that rewards totaling up to $11 million are available for qualifying information about alleged Nefilim operator Volodymyr Tymoshchuk and other key ransomware suspects. ®

When the Bristol Channel flooded in 1607, it was not just one of the worst natural disasters in British history, it was also a sign, for many, that they had strayed from the path of God. Erik Crnkovich examines the overlap of miraculous weather and the early modern printing industry, which cultivated a thirst for all things occult, exotic, and odd.

A cartoon from an ex-Google software engineer, titled "Welcome to Google," made the rounds a while back. It featured two diverging roads, neither passable. One was the main road, marked as deprecated ("don't even think about it," the sign read). The new road, however, was marked as still under construction ("Danger"), and so was unusable as well.

That was the no-win choice two million frontend developers faced in 2014, when Google unexpectedly deprecated its popular JavaScript framework, AngularJS, in favor of Angular 2, which had a radically different architecture, a confusing name, no upgrade path, and wasn't even fully released yet.

So, many developers turned the wheel and headed to Reactville or Vuetown instead.

How Google botched the Angular upgrade provides timely lessons in how not to update a software package, which former Google Developer Advocate Stephen Fluin outlined in a talk at the All Things Open conference last week.

"Uncertainty kills motivation," said Fluin. "When you're taking away everything [developers] know and love, they're going to feel disheartened."

Fluin is now head of developer relations for Buildkite, but he worked for Google from 2016 to 2021 on the Angular project.

"Things were a little bit rough at the time. It was a bit of a death march," he told the audience. "We had no idea when Angular 2 was going to come out, and the core fundamentals of Angular kept changing."

Google had good reasons for updating Angular.

The AngularJS team had been snatched from Google's infrastructure division and placed under its ad division, where the software could be more fully exploited. To support operations of that size, Angular needed greater rigor.

The original AngularJS was launched in 2009 as a side project of Google engineer Miško Hevery, who wanted to extend HTML. Google pulled AngularJS into an internal project because Google developers found it easier to work with than the Java-based Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

The framework quickly caught on with outside web developers too, who readily understood the angle brackets of HTML (hence the name) and wanted more interactive components.

Hevery built AngularJS 1.3 with a traditional controller model, which handled all user input, logic and data transport under the JavaScript $scope object.

Angular 2, announced at the ng-europe 2014 conference, was a major shift in architecture. It shifted to a component model, with each HTML template enjoying its own class properties. After a forced, unhappy dalliance with Google's Dart, the team rewrote Angular completely in TypeScript, with no backward compatibility whatsoever.

It was a lot to take in, and the introductory talk at ng-europe seemed to spook Angular developers more than inspire them. For each discarded feature, the speakers displayed a graphic of a tombstone ("RIP Controllers") and played a recording of a church bell tolling in the background.

"That talk is still infamous today for what it did to the community," Fluin said. "All these things that you know and love about AngularJS are gone. They're dead. And nobody knew this was coming."

In general, it was not a good time for software migrations, Fluin noted in his talk. Python was having a rough time migrating from version 2 to 3, as was the KDE desktop moving from version 4 to version 5. And the rocky transition from GNOME 2 to 3 still loomed in the rearview mirror for many.

"If you're trying to bring your developers with you, give them a path. Don't just kill your old thing and then not have a new thing ready," Fluin advised.

Many devs defected to React and Vue.js, two other JavaScript frontend frameworks that also embraced the component model and were already in production.

In the 2016 State of JS Survey, React was the most popular frontend framework, with 53 percent of JS devs reporting that they had used it. Angular's audience was heavily bifurcated; 30 percent still used the classic version while only 13 percent used Angular 2. Ten percent of users adopted the still up-and-coming Vue.

Angular 2 was finally released in September 2016, followed by Angular 4 the following March. Version 3 was skipped entirely for no discernable reason. Meanwhile, AngularJS classic, which was not formally retired until the end of 2021, was updated to version 1.5 in the spring of 2016, introducing components.

Muddying the waters further was the naming of the frameworks, which confounded many casual observers. Was AngularJS different from Angular 2? And was the "2" part of the Angular name, signaling the complete architectural shift, or its version number?

Getting the public to understand the name change turned out to be a major quagmire. Fluin said: "We had to fix public communication guidelines. We had to train experts. We had to fix Google's knowledge graph," which is Google's database of facts about the world.

"Naming and versioning matter," he told the audience. "They don't matter in a pure technical sense, but they matter to human beings because it's human beings you're trying to keep up to date with."

It would be easy to blame the Google brass for nearly shipwrecking Angular, but it has been a success at meeting Google's needs. Today, the component-driven Angular powers Gemini's user interface, Google Analytics, and countless other Google apps. It is now converging with Google's internal Wiz high-performance framework, originally designed for the ill-fated Google+ social network.

Angular has also settled into a more predictable and user-friendly update pattern. Updates have a routine release cadence, currently twice a year. They dutifully follow semantic versioning guidelines, with major version numbers signifying breaking changes. Google tests each new version of the framework on its own apps before releasing it publicly. Any feature slated for removal is deprecated for a year first.

But in retrospect, Google may have been better off giving Angular 2 an entirely different name, even if it meant building up a new user base from scratch.

"JavaScript developers loved trying new frameworks. So, pretending to be a new framework might have been better," Fluin told The Register. ®

The Hilaritas Press edition of the first book of the Cosmic Trigger trilogy. 

Cosmic Trigger; The Final Secret of the Illuminati, first published in 1977 and published in a new edition by Hilaritas Press in 2016, is one of Robert Anton Wilson's most popular and influential books. It's the first in three Cosmic Trigger books that RAW published. (The second one, Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth, also available as a Hilaritas edition, is a personal favorite of mine.) 

With the 50-year anniversary of the publication of Cosmic Trigger I looming, Mike Gathers has  suggested that something should be done to mark that anniversary. Rasa was pleased by the suggestion and has decided that a new hardback edition, with some sort of extra features, would be a good idea. Ideas for what to have in the new edition are now being discussed. 

China spent much of the 2010s electrifying urban bus fleets while most countries were still testing whether battery-electric buses could replace diesel. By the end of 2025, it had 551,400 new-energy urban buses, representing 87.5% of the fleet. That early success has brought China to a stage other countries will ... [continued]

The post China Steps Back From Promoting Second-Life EV Batteries appeared first on CleanTechnica.