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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://mashable.com/article/nasa-x-59-supersonic-jet-test-problem

Nothing seemed amiss as NASA's experimental X-59 supersonic jet touched down after its second test in the air, smoothly coasting onto the runway. 

But the sleek, needle-nosed airplane had completed only nine minutes in the air on Friday, March 20, before a cockpit warning light forced an early landing. That warning was separate from a caution light that occurred during an earlier takeoff attempt just before 10 a.m. P.T., said Cathy Bahm, project manager at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center.

The brief flight left from Edwards Air Force Base in California at 10:54 a.m. P.T. marked only the second time the aircraft had flown. While the team originally planned for about an hour, leaders stressed that even short flights provide new data for moving the project forward. You can watch the landing in the video below. 

[...] "Sometimes it's easy to forget that building this kind of experimental aircraft means creating something that never existed before," Pearce said during a news conference. "As far as X-planes go, it's not unusual."

The X-59 is part of a long-term effort to change how fast commercial airplanes fly over land. Traditional supersonic aircraft create a loud boom when they break the sound barrier, which is why the U.S. government bans routine supersonic passenger flights over populated areas. NASA and its contractor, Lockheed Martin, built the X-59 to fly faster than sound while producing only a "thump," with the goal of providing regulators and the industry with the evidence needed to reconsider the restrictions.

AnonTechie writes:

The project removes the birthDate field systemd added last week in response to age verification laws.

The project's latest move has not helped its reputation among the skeptics. Last week, developers merged a pull request adding a birthDate field to its user records, tied to age verification laws in California, Colorado, and Brazil.

Earlier, we covered what that actually means, but to recap, the field is optional, can only be set by an administrator, and systemd itself does nothing with the data. It is simply a standardized field in the user record file that other projects like xdg-desktop-portal can build age verification compliance on top of—distros that do not need it can ignore it entirely.

But "optional" has not been enough to stop people from treating it as a line being crossed, and now a solo developer has responded the way the open source community usually reacts: by forking.

[...] Compared to mainline systemd, the fork changes 12 files across 5 commits, all focused on scrubbing out everything related to the birthDate addition. That means not just the field itself but also the option to set a birth date via homectl, the relevant man page entries, display code, and tests.

Though, as of writing this, it was 37 commits behind from systemd, so that is something to keep in mind if you are hoping to implement this on a general-use or production system.

Jeffrey also maintains a companion repository, systemd-suite, which is meant for testing the fork. So, while this is very much a one-person project, there seems to be at least some technical groundwork behind it beyond the birthDate revert.

[Source]: IT'S FOSS

Previously: Age Checks Creep Into Linux, systemd Locks It in, Developer Defends Himself

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

He then seemed to slightly walk back the claim.

On a Monday episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a hot-button statement: "I think we've achieved AGI."

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a vaguely defined term that has incited a lot of discussion by tech CEOs, tech workers, and the general public in recent years, as it typically denotes AI that's equal to or surpasses human intelligence. In recent months, tech leaders have tried to distance themselves from the term and create their own terminology that they view as less over-hyped, more useful, and more clearly defined (although the new phrases they've come up with essentially mean the same thing as AGI). The term has also been the subject of key clauses in big-ticket contracts between companies like OpenAI and Microsoft, upon which a significant amount of money may hinge.

[...] But Huang then seemed to slightly walk back his earlier claims, saying, "A lot of people use it for a couple of months and it kind of dies away. Now, the odds of 100,000 of those agents building Nvidia is zero percent."

[Source]: The Verge

Original Submission

PiMuNu writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/24/foss_age_verification/?td=rt-3a

From TFA:

After weeks of debate, code to record user age was finally merged into the Linux world's favorite system management daemon.

Pull request #40954 to the systemd project is titled "userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records." It's a new function for the existing userdb service, which adds a field to hold the user's date of birth.

[...] The change comes after the recent release of systemd 260 but unless it is reverted for some reason, it will be part of systemd 261. One of the justifications is to facilitate the new parental controls in Flatpak, which are still in the draft stage.

[...] The TBOTE findings suggest that Meta is the biggest donor behind the lobbying for these age-verification laws and the App Store Accountability Act (ACCA). TBOTE claims it has directly traced more than $25 million, and that Meta could have spent upward of $2 billion on this over the last year. It also points to €10 million-plus spent lobbying in Europe.

In the US, the main group pushing for these laws is the relatively young Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA). As right-wing think tank the "Institute for Family Studies" reported a year ago, this was assembled by over 50 conservative groups. Six months later, in July 2025, Bloomberg also reported that Meta was funding the DCA. For such a young and small organization, the DCA certainly seems to have had a rapid and almost disproportionate impact.

Nuff said.

The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux

Dylan, useful idiot with commit access, pushed age verification PRs to systemd, Ubuntu & Arch, got 2 Microslop employees to merge it, called it 'hilariously pointless' in the PR itself, then watched Lennart personally block the revert:

In March of 2026, systemd, the init system that boots most modern Linux distributions, merged a pull request adding a birthDate field to its user database. The stated purpose was compliance with California's AB-1043, Colorado's SB26-051, and Brazil's Lei 15.211/2025, a wave of age verification laws requiring operating systems to collect birth dates from users at account setup, then feed that data to app stores via a real-time API. The PR was submitted by a contributor using the GitHub handle dylanmtaylor. Within days it had 945 comments and was locked by maintainers. Someone opened a revert PR. Lennart Poettering closed it without merging on March 19th, saying the field is optional and systemd "enforces zero policy." The birthDate field is still in systemd. systemd PR #40954 revert PR #41179

The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/22/cern_eggheads_burn_ai_into/

Like the major league pitcher who comes to his kid's take-your-parent-to-school day, CERN's Thea Aarrestad gave a presentation at the virtual Monster Scale Summit earlier this month about meeting a set of ultra-stringent requirements that few of her peers may ever experience.

Aarrestad is an assistant professor of particle physics at ETH Zurich. AT CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), she uses machine learning to optimize data collection from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Her specialty is anomaly detection, a core component of any proper observability system. 

Each year the LHC produces 40,000 EBs of unfiltered sensor data alone, or about a fourth of the size of the entire Internet, Aarrestad estimated. CERN can't store all that data. As a result, "We have to reduce that data in real time to something we can afford to keep." 

By "real time," she means extreme real time. The LHC detector systems process data at speeds up to hundreds of terabytes per second, far more than Google or Netflix, whose latency requirements are also far easier to hit as well. 

Algorithms processing this data must be extremely fast," Aarrestad said. So fast that decisions must be burned into the chip design itself. 

Contained in a 27-kilometer ring located a hundred meters underground between the border of Switzerland and France, the LHC smashes subatomic particles together at near-light speeds. The resulting collisions are expected to produce new types of matter that fill out our understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics — the operating system of the universe.

At any given time, there are about 2,800 bunches of protons whizzing around the ring at nearly the speed of light, separated by 25-nanosecond intervals. Just before they reach one of the four underground detectors, specialized magnets squeeze these bunches together to increase the odds of an interaction. Nonetheless, a direct hit is incredibly rare: out of the billions of protons in each bunch, only about 60 pairs actually collide during a crossing.

When particles do collide, their energy is converted into a mass of new outgoing particles (E=MC² in the house!). These new particles "shower" through CERN's detectors, making traces "which we try to reconstruct," she said, in order to identify any new particles produced in ensuing melee. 

Each collision produces a few megabytes of data, and there are roughly a billion collisions per second, resulting in about a petabyte of data (about the size of the entire Netflix library). 

Rather than try to transport all this data up to ground level, CERN found it more feasible to create a monster-sized edge compute system to sort out the interesting bits at the detector-level instead.  

"If we had infinite compute we could look at all of it," Aarrestad said. But less than 0.02% of this data actually gets saved and analyzed. It is up to the detectors themselves to pick out the action scenes.

The detectors, built on ASICs, buffer the captured data for up to 4 microseconds, after which the data "falls over the cliff," forever lost to history if it is not saved.

Making that decision is the "Level One Trigger," an aggregate of about 1,000 FPGAs that digitally reconstruct the event information from a set of reduced event information provided by the detector via fiber optic line at about 10 TB/sec. The trigger produces a single value, either an "accept" (1), or "reject" ("0"). 

Making the decision to keep or lose a collision is the job of the anomaly-detection algorithm. It has to be incredibly selective, rejecting more than 99.7 percent of the input outright. The algo, affectionately named AXOL1TL, is trained on the "background" — the areas of the Standard Model that have largely been sussed out already. It knows the typical topology of a standard collision, allowing it to instantly flag events that fall outside those boundaries. As Aarrestad put it, it's hunting for "rare physics."

The algorithm must make a decision within 50 nanoseconds. Only about 0.02% of all collision data, or about 110,000 events per second, make the cut, and are subsequently saved and transported to ground level. Even this slimmed-down throughput results in terabytes per second being sent up to the on-ground servers. 

Once on the surface, the data goes through a second round of filtering, called the "High Level Trigger," which again discards the vast majority of captured collisions, identifying only about 1,000 interesting collisions from the 100,000 events per second that come through the pipe.  This system has 25,600 CPUs and 400 GPUs, to reproduce the original collision and analyze the results, and produces about a petabyte a day.

"This is the data we will actually analyze," Aarrestad said.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/23/musk_terafab/

Elon Musk has put Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI in harness to build a chip fabrication outfit called "Terafab" capable of producing a terawatt's worth of computing power each year, then send most of it into space.

In a Sunday afternoon presentation, Musk said the world's chipmakers currently produce 20 gigawatts' worth of compute power each year, and that whatever new capacity his key suppliers Nvidia, Samsung, and Micron produce, he will buy.

But he can't see how they produce the terawatt of compute power he wants each year, so he has built an "advanced fab" in Austin, Texas, that he says can produce "any kind of chip," and lithography masks.

Musk said his companies have developed a recursive process that allows rapid chip production, plus frequent redesigns to improve performance.

He mentioned "some very interesting new physics" that he is "confident will work. It's just a question of when."

"We are going to push the limits of physics in compute and do some wild and crazy things," he said.

He plans to produce two chips. One will be dedicated to inference and for use on Earth, mostly in humanoid robots that he thinks will sell in volumes of one to ten billion a year. The upper range would mean robots outnumber humans in a year.

The second chip will power orbiting computers that ride in satellites packing just 100 kw of compute power – about the energy consumption of a rack packed full of high-end AI gear. In time, Musk expects to launch megawatt-scale satellites.

He also mentioned building a bigger version of SpaceX's Starship that can carry 200 tons into space and shared his back-of-the-envelope math that suggests putting a terawatt of compute into space, along with all the necessary solar power and other infrastructure, means launching 10 million tons into space every year.

Our back-of-the-envelope math suggests that means Musk needs to launch 50,000 Starships a year, or 135 a day at a rate of one giant rocket every ten minutes.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/23/asia_tech_news_roundup/

Australia's government on Monday announced a set of datacenter "expectations" to guide would-be bit barn builders who contemplate breaking ground down under.

The expectations strongly suggest that datacenter builders create their own electricity generation capacity, and pay for energy transmission and infrastructure costs. "Energy-intensive data centre proposals not closely aligned with the expectations will not be prioritised by Commonwealth regulatory assessments," states the formal expectations document.

The expectations also call on datacenter operators to prioritise Australia's national interest, use water sustainably and responsibly, invest in local skills and jobs, and do all that while strengthening the nation's "research, innovation and local capability."

Industry lobby group the Tech Council of Australia welcomed the expectations, as did the Electrical Trades Union.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=17&month=03&year=2026

Ten thousand StarLinks satellites: On March 16th, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base carrying 25 Starlink satellites. It was a routine launch for SpaceX, the 33rd of 2026. But those 25 Starlinks crossed a milestone. For the first time in history, more than 10,000 Starlink satellites were simultaneously circling Earth.

Consider where we started: When SpaceX launched its first operational Starlinks in May 2019, there were roughly 2,000 active satellites of all kinds orbiting Earth. Starlink alone now outnumbers the entire pre-2019 fleet five to one. The constellation has utterly transformed the orbital environment.

[...] The numbers are sobering. Since 2019, more than 11,596 Starlinks have been launched. Of those, more than 1,500 have already reentered the atmosphere as SpaceX retires older satellites to make room for newer models. Each re-entry deposits about 30 kg of aluminum oxide into the upper atmosphere--an uncontrolled chemistry experiment on a planetary scale.

[...] With so many Starlinks circling Earth, the orbital environment is increasingly unstable. It's "an orbital house of cards," according to a study led by Sarah Thiele of Princeton University, which finds that a severe solar storm could kickstart widespread catastrophic collisions in as little as 2-3 days. SpaceX itself reported to the FCC that Starlink satellites performed roughly 300,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers in 2025 alone.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280 https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643

arXiv:2512.09643 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2512.09643v2 [astro-ph.EP] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.09643

Original Submission

Concerns Raised Over Shahed Kamikaze Drone Listings on Alibaba

Arthur T Knackerbracket and c0lo write:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/concerns-raised-over-shahed-kamikaze-drone-listings-on-alibaba-they-featured-ai-guidance-to-lock-onto-people-building-vehicles-ships-etc

Chinese eTail giant Alibaba has removed listings and suspended the accounts of sellers that were found to be advertising “cruise missiles” and “suicide attack drones.” Australia’s ABC News uncovered the concerning sales of several one-way attack drone models, some of which looked strikingly similar to the Iranian Shahed design, others with a cruise missile profile.

The Alibaba “commercial” listings touted the drones as “pesticide sprayers,” or for “aerial mapping”. However, ABC dug into the product catalogs to confirm the Shahed-a-likes were “suicide attack drones” capable of carrying 2kg (4.41 pound) warheads for distances up to 100km. Moreover, with their thermal imaging and AI guidance, these devices could "achieve autonomous locking of targets (people, building, vehicles, ships, etc.)”

These kamikaze drones would not be casual impulse buys. ABC reports that the listing prices of the cruise missile style drones were approaching $50,000. If that sum was reported in Australian dollars, it equates to approximately USD $35,000.

ABC continued to look closely through the various supplier catalogs it found from the Alibaba suppliers. One of the China-based suppliers offered five kinds of "suicide attack drones" with two having near identical dimensions and specs to the Iranian-made Shahed 136, says the news report.

Drones inhabit a twilight dual-use segment of the commercial landscape. Many can quickly and easily be adapted for peaceful purposes or war duties. An Alibaba statement received by ABC News, was clear, though. The online retailer stated that it “strictly prohibits the sale of military weapons.” It also acted quickly to remove what it characterized as non-compliant third-party listings.

Talking to a handful of the suppliers, the Australian news organization saw that the sellers generally didn’t care what the drones they sold were used for. For example, one of the retailers contacted shrugged “After the customer makes a purchase, what they use it for has nothing to do with us.”

Importantly, just because these kamikaze drone adverts exist, it doesn’t mean that the advertisers would actually ship these exact products.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/23/palantir_fca/

US data miner Palantir has quietly landed inside the UK's financial watchdog, plugging into a trove of sensitive data as Whitehall simultaneously insists it wants to wean itself off exactly this kind of dependency.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has handed the American analytics biz a three-month trial contract worth more than £30,000 a week to analyze its internal "data lake," a sprawling repository of regulatory intelligence covering fraud, money laundering, insider trading, and consumer complaints.

According to The Guardian, which first reported on the deal, Palantir will gain access to data including case files, reports from banks and crypto firms, and even communications data such as emails, phone records, and social media material tied to investigations.

The idea, at least on paper, is straightforward: use Palantir's software to help sift signal from noise across the roughly 42,000 businesses the FCA oversees, and spot patterns of financial crime faster than human analysts can manage alone.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. Palantir has spent the past few years embedding itself across the British state – from the NHS to policing and defense – racking up more than £500 million in public sector contracts in the process.

Critics have long described this as a classic "land and expand" strategy: start with a narrowly scoped deployment, prove value, then become very hard to remove. The FCA deal, which appears to follow the same pattern, arrives just days after the government signaled that it wants to rethink how it buys technology, amid concerns about overreliance on a small number of large vendors and the need for more "sovereign" capability.

Yet here is another sensitive system being handed, at least temporarily, to a US company whose entire business is built on ingesting and analyzing other people's data.

The FCA, for its part, has stressed that Palantir is acting strictly as a "data processor," that all data remains hosted in the UK, and that the company cannot use the information to train its own models.

"Effective use of technology is vital in the fight against financial crime and helps us identify risks to the consumers we serve and markets we oversee," an FCA spokesperson told The Register. "We ran a competitive procurement process and have strict controls in place to ensure data is protected."

Those assurances mirror language used in earlier public sector deals, particularly in the NHS, where officials have repeatedly argued that contractual controls and technical safeguards govern use. Whether that is enough to calm critics is another matter.

There's also the small matter of optics. Palantir's track record – spanning US defense, intelligence, and immigration enforcement – has made it a lightning rod for concerns about surveillance and civil liberties, especially when deployed in civilian contexts.

Still, for regulators under pressure to do more with less, the appeal is clear. The FCA is sitting on vast amounts of data, much of it underused, and AI vendors are lining up to promise that they can turn it into actionable intelligence.

Whether that promise outweighs the risks of handing the keys – even temporarily – to a company that has made a habit of sticking around is a question the UK keeps asking, and so far, keeps answering the same way.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Juan Carlos Pino says charcoal-conversion 'the best option we have'

Juan Carlos Pino, a Cuban mechanic with an eighth-grade education, may have found a way to outsmart the U.S. oil blockade.

Employing the kind of ingenuity many Cubans have developed over decades of U.S. ‌sanctions, Pino, 56, modified his 1980 Polish-built Fiat Polski to run on charcoal, a cheaper and more abundant fuel than gasoline since Washington cut off oil shipments to the Caribbean island in January.

[...] "In a crisis like this, ⁠it's the best option we have," said Pino, who wants to ‌modify a tractor next. "We need mobility, we need to be able to plant crops."

Pino built his device entirely from scrap and repurposed items. The charcoal burns inside a converted propane tank that is sealed shut with the lid of a transformer. A filter is made from a stainless steel milk jug stuffed with old ⁠clothes.

[...] Enter the inventor. Pino once created a machine, built from a motorcycle, to milk three cows at a time. He said he'd been contemplating the charcoal-fired automobile for several years, inspired at first by his late uncle. Pino also ​credited open-source technology promoted by Edmundo Ramos, an Argentine innovator behind DriveOnWaste.com.

[...] He said just about any engine can be converted to run on charcoal by drawing ⁠hot gas ⁠instead of gasoline into the carburetor.

Pino rolled out the charcoal-powered Polski on March 4. In one early test run, the car completed an 85-kilometre trip, reaching a top ​speed of 70 km/h.

[...] Cruz knows something about Cuban jury-rigging. He drives a 1953 Pontiac that runs on a 1940s Perkins engine with a Mercedes transmission, a steering system from the Czech group AVIA, and a differential made by the East German company ⁠Ifa.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

The FCC has deemed even US-based companies' products a security risk if they're made anywhere overseas.

The Federal Communications Commission has released a notice today designating any consumer routers manufactured outside the US as a security risk. The rule states that new foreign-made product models for network routers will land on the Covered List, a set of communications equipment seen as having an unacceptable risk to national security. Previously purchased routers can still be used and retailers can still sell models that were approved by the prior FCC policies. In an exception to the usual rule, routers included on the Covered List can continue to receive updates at least through March 1, 2027, although the date could potentially be extended.

The move stems from a goal in the White House's 2025 national security strategy that reads: "the United States must never be dependent on any outside power for core components—from raw materials to parts to finished products—necessary to the nation’s defense or economy."

[Source]: engadget

Original Submission

hubie writes:

"This is a serious warning shot"

Germany recently banned TCL from marketing some of its TVs as QLED (quantum dot light-emitting diode), with a Munich court ruling that the TVs lack the quantum dot (QD) structure and performance associated with QLED TVs. The decision increases pressure on TV companies to be more honest with their marketing.

Samsung has actively campaigned against TCL's use of the term QLED. A year ago, Samsung sent Ars Technica results from testing performed by Intertek, a London-headquartered testing and certification company, on TCL's 65Q651G, 65Q681G, and 75Q651G. The results showed that the TVs lacked sufficient amounts of cadmium and indium (two chemicals used in QD TVs, either individually or in combination). Intertek reportedly tested the optical sheet, diffuser plate, and LED modules in each TV using a minimum detection standard of 0.5 mg/kg for cadmium and 2 mg/kg for indium.

At the time, a TCL representative told me that TCL had "definitive substantiation for the claims made regarding its QLED televisions."

But based on previous dissections of TCL TVs shared online [Videos not reviewed - Ed.] and conversations with industry experts, it seems those TVs may employ some QDs but not enough to offer a significantly wider color gamut than similarly specced, non-QD rivals. It's common for TVs marketed as QD, especially budget sets, to primarily rely on phosphors or a combination of phosphors and QDs at varying ratios, for color conversion. That's instead of, as the terms QD TV and QLED suggest, QDs. Phosphors are cheaper than QDs, and their associated color performance in displays is not as good.

Other manufacturers, including Samsung [Videos not reviewed - Ed.], have been accused of marketing TVs that rely heavily on phosphors as QD or QLED.

[...] "Some products marketed as 'QLED' use conventional backlight architectures (standard phosphors, optical films, diffuser plates) and rely on picture modes or software tuning to create a more saturated 'vivid' look," a January whitepaper by TÜV Rheinland and QD supplier Nanosys reads. The whitepaper, "Re-defining a 'true' Quantum Dot Display," also points to devices that have QD material at "trace levels, or in packaging and integration designs that limit excitation and light extraction of certain wavelengths."

"In these cases, the display may still achieve competitive headline gamut coverage, yet the measurable optical signature of an effective QD system is absent or minimal," the whitepaper says. "The spectrum, color, volume behavior at high luminance, chromaticity stability, and temporal response can remain similar to those of non-QD LCD solutions."

For now, the German ruling brings needed scrutiny to "QLED" and other potentially misleading display terms.

[...] With TV marketing remaining murky—and often misleading—digging into detailed performance reviews remains the most reliable way to gauge how a display might perform in the real world.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

From CNN:
Supreme Court says internet service provider isn't liable for bootlegged music downloads

In a major loss for the nation's music industry, the Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a major internet service provider is not liable for copyright infringement because it failed to kick known copyright violators off its network.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion for a unanimous court.

The nation's largest record labels want to hold internet providers liable for copyright infringement because they declined to cut off online access to users they know are downloading bootlegged music.

[....] "Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights," Thomas wrote.

[.... rest omitted ....]

This is a sad shocking blow to the poor sad music industry. I shed so many tears for them. (Okay, not really)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

As a managerial strategy, it seems a little misguided:

According to a column by the New York Times’ Kevin Roose, employees at companies including Meta and OpenAI compete on “internal leaderboards that show how many tokens[…]each worker consumes.” At Meta in particular (and also Shopify), Roose says volume of A.I. used has become a metric that goes into people’s evaluations, with managers “rewarding workers who make heavy use of A.I. tools and chastening those who don’t.”

Analogies are tricky here. One is tempted to say it’s like making painters compete to use the most paint, but even if the paint is just being splattered as quickly as possible, it’s at least going to be visible when the project is done. It’s a bit more like telling soldiers to gauge their battlefield success by the number of bullets fired, but suppressive fire that doesn’t hit anything has its place in war strategy. The best analogy I can come up with is this: it’s like NBA mascots being evaluated by how many t-shirts they fire out of their t-shirt cannons, but the t-shirts are made by Hermès.

The resulting numbers, in terms of both tokens and money, are absolutely staggering. One OpenAI engineer, according to Roose, burned through 210 billion tokens, which Roose equates to 33 Wikipedias. A Swedish software engineer claims to Roose that his company spends more than his salary on his Claude Code tokens alone.

This “tokenmaxxing” trend clearly stems in part from the use of “claws,” agentic AI platforms like OpenClaw, which are this year’s biggest supposed innovation in AI. OpenClaw’s virality was part of the big shift away from OpenAI’s GPT models and toward Claude this year by AI fanatics, and OpenAI subsequently hired OpenClaw’s creator, seemingly in a bid to maintain its position as the industry leader.

But even when used without an external claw platform Claude Code is becoming more and more like OpenClaw lately, with a feature rolling out last week that allows greater and greater on-the-go vibe coding, by letting users communicate with Claude Code more easily on their phones.

Original Submission