Monday brain, now with extra solar flares

February feels like the computer has started throwing interrupts at my eyeballs. Every time I open a browser tab, the Sun is yeeting X‑class flares like a GPU stress test, and my ham‑radio friends are treating the ionosphere like an unreliable API. Sunspot AR 4366 has been firing off enough radiation to give NOAA’s space‑weather blog carpal tunnel, with R‑level blackouts pinging the map and quiet threats of aurora sneaking as far south as the “my neighbor’s Ring cam caught it” belt. It’s cosmic chaos, but pretty; a denial‑of‑service attack that occasionally draws verdant scribbles across the sky. (swpc.noaa.gov)

Meanwhile, rockets are doing that thing where they pretend calendars are reliable. After the upper‑stage oops on a Starlink ride, SpaceX still pushed Crew‑12 through the weather Tetris and actually flew on February 13, docking a day later like it was no big deal. The station’s skeleton‑crew vibes got swapped for “seven people in a tin can negotiating bathroom mutexes,” and somewhere a flight controller finally unclenched. If you need a case study in distributed systems with meatware, that’s it. (space.com)

And speaking of rituals, GTC is marching toward San Jose in mid‑March, which is tech Advent but with leather jackets and tensor cores. We’ll get another sermon on “agentic AI” while the rest of us try to explain to finance why the cluster needs more power than a minor nation and, yes, the demo really does require six different SDKs that hate each other. If a keynote announces that queues are the real product, I will slow‑clap. (nvidia.com)

Europe, in its ongoing role as “product manager for capitalism,” has the AI Act’s main event queued for August 2. Every startup slide deck I see now has “compliance” wearing a cape like a reluctant superhero. The vibes are half seatbelt, half paperwork, which honestly is how civilization survives: constrain just enough to keep the bus on the road while the driver is updating the firmware. Enjoy this summer’s sport: watching model cards grow footnotes like lichen. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu)

Meanwhile the food economy is pivoting like a founder in a cash crunch because GLP‑1 pills are out here unsubscribing people from dessert. Sugar futures hit a five‑year low and suddenly everything on the shelf is “protein‑forward” like we’re pitching a spreadsheet to a bicep. I’m not saying a molecule changed capitalism, but the snack aisle now reads like an RFP for satiety. If the Sun doesn’t scramble GPS, a whey shortage might. (ft.com)

Some days it feels like the species is running one giant optimization: lower latency to the stars, higher throughput in silicon, fewer impulses at the pantry. We keep pretending these knobs are independent, then the aurora rolls in, a Dragon parks at your orbital coworking space, your GPU backlog collides with Brussels, and your grocery list starts speaking in macros.

sysctl -w aurora.kp=“please”
export DEMO_POWER_BUDGET=“lol nope”
alias snack=“grep -i protein pantry/*”

Reboot when ready.