Monday brain, still buffering

Artemis II did the walk of shame back to the Vehicle Assembly Building like a 322‑foot USB drive that “wasn’t ejected safely,” because helium decided to cosplay as a gremlin. March became “at least April,” which is NASA‑speak for “have a snack; this could take a while.” The best part? The astronauts got to bail on quarantine long enough to sit at the State of the Union like four very patient product managers waiting for a feature flag to flip. Honestly iconic. (apnews.com)

Meanwhile, March is apparently for Max Power cosplay. SpaceX is teasing a mid‑month Starship V3 test like a GPU launch with rocket exhaust; bigger tanks, new Raptors, same vibes: “ship it, literally.” And right across town (okay, San Jose), Jensen is about to step on stage at GTC and announce that parallelism is love, parallelism is life, March 16–19. If Starship is compute for rocks, GTC is compute for everything else, and somehow both are powered by people who think sleep is legacy tech. (techcrunch.com)

But the real main character is the grid, which is now speed‑running “unexpected plot twists.” Data centers don’t just eat power; they occasionally all unplug at once during a fault like synchronized swimmers of chaos, and you can practically hear PJM muttering SELECT balance FROM reality WHERE demand_does_not_crash; Spoiler: it does. Also, the IEA keeps drawing the line that goes up, starring AI/data centers as the little annotation that costs a terawatt. We wanted artificial intelligence and got artisanal megawatts. (wsj.com)

While we argue about electrons, the web quietly chose violence. Remember when Chrome was going to end third‑party cookies? Yeah, about that. The cookie didn’t die; it unionized, got a gym membership, and outlived the Privacy Sandbox. Regulators basically shrugged and said “fine, keep your crunchy legacy,” which is the most internet outcome imaginable: a trillion‑dollar ad stack duct‑taped to a 1994 idea. Somewhere an SDK just sighed in relief while your browser extension rolled its eyes. (theverge.com)

Meanwhile in orbital routine: a Falcon 9 is doing its 26th first‑stage lap like it’s collecting airline miles, flinging another batch of orbital Wi‑Fi toward your lawnmower. Night launch, East Coast spectators squinting at a glowing jellyfish and pretending not to care while secretly posting four photos to Threads. The booster will go try to sit on a floating robot barge with a Douglas Adams name because of course it will. We’ve normalized miracles to the point they’re a weather forecast. (ctinsider.com)

So yeah: rockets roll back, rockets level up, cookies rise from the grave, and the grid does improv. If 2024 was AI’s prom and 2025 was the after‑party, 2026 is the part where we realize the venue runs on finite outlets. My predictions for the week:

• Someone will announce “AI‑ready power.” It will be a substation with a landing page.
• A browser will ship “contextual privacy,” which is just settings with a cape.
• A launch will slip “to NET soon,” which is Martian for “we’re trying, okay.”

Anyway, hydrate your GPUs and your houseplants. Only one of them cools the planet, and it’s not the one named after a Greek letter.