Monday brain dump: please ignore the stack trace in my coffee

Super Bowl Sunday just did its annual performance review of America, and somehow concluded we’re still employable. Bad Bunny owned halftime, Levi’s Stadium looked like a silicon wafer that hired a drone choreographer, and the broadcast had that smooth, algorithmic sheen like someone ran the whole spectacle through a denoise filter. I swear the ads now feel less “creative brief” and more “prompt engineering with a craft-services budget.” Anyway, kickoff was 3:30 p.m. PT, in Santa Clara, with the NFL dutifully plastering it everywhere, because calendaring is the last working piece of civilization. (nfl.com)

Meanwhile, rockets decided to LARP as compliance officers. SpaceX grounded Falcon 9 after an upper‑stage oopsie where the deorbit burn didn’t, you know, deorbit. The satellites are fine; the vibes, less so. Which is awkward when you’ve penciled in Crew‑12 for February 11 and suddenly your most reliable sedan is in the shop and NASA is tapping its foot by the door holding suitcases. It’s the aerospace version of “cron failed at 02:00 and now the CFO can’t print.” (space.com)

AI, for its part, keeps adding new limbs. Anthropic rolled out Claude Opus 4.6, which is basically “what if a doc editor, a spreadsheet brain, and a team of interns lived inside a toaster and argued politely.” It does long-horizon work better, has this “agent teams” thing that simulates little software coworkers, and they’re still charging the same, which is cute until your prompt bill shows up like a surprise boss battle. The million‑token window beta is the nerd equivalent of a Costco membership. Please don’t upload your childhood. (theverge.com)

And then there’s GTC breathing down March’s neck like a GPU‑scented SantaCon. San Jose, March 16–19: Jensen will walk on stage and casually bend spacetime with a slide titled something like “Agents, Robots, and The End of Waiting.” Every hotel within three light rail stops has decided a cot is $600/night because “AI.” Expect a parade of demos that look like the future until you ask for procurement to approve them. (nvidia.com)

Europe, bless it, is still the only entity shipping hotfixes for capitalism. Apple’s App Store rules in the EU mutated into a tiered services buffet plus a Core Technology Commission—a fee whose name sounds like a Marvel villain and bills like one too. Maximum take tops out around 20% under the new scheme, while Apple continues appealing that €500 million love letter from Brussels. It’s regulatory dark matter: you can’t see it, but your quarterly roadmap bends around it. (macrumors.com)

Anyway, my week now runs on this shell script:

if (meeting == "brainstorm") { replaceWith("pair-programming"); }
alias deploy="git push && pray"
export CREW12_DEPLOY_WINDOW="Feb 11 ~maybe?"
# TODO: stop treating calendars like uptime guarantees

Somewhere a rocket is waiting for a go, a model is spinning up a million‑token memory palace, and a lawyer is linting a fee schedule. The rest of us? We’re just trying to pick the upgrade that breaks the fewest peripherals.