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Sabbatical, a.k.a. the adult gap year
There appears to be a growing trend of working adults taking sabbatical or gap years between jobs.
Mini-sabbaticals. Adult gap years. Micro-retirement. Extended career breaks go by many names and take many forms, from using the time between jobs to explore or taking an employer-approved leave to becoming a digital nomad or saving up for a monthslong adventure. Creating space for a reset, whether mental, physical or spiritual, is the common thread.
Cost, personal responsibilities and fears of being judged by colleagues, friends and family members are some of the obstacles that prevent people from hitting pause on their work lives and setting out in search of new perspectives, according to sabbatical experts and people who have taken sabbaticals.
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3D printed batteries
A superpowered Formula 1 car, a buzzing drone, a soldier’s pack, and a wearable smart device have this in common: They all need batteries. Ideally, those batteries could fit into oddly shaped nooks, curves, and voids, something that today’s cylindrical or rectangular cells struggle to do. Engineer Gabe Elias, who helped design the Mercedes-AMG Petronas racers that won seven consecutive F1 championships, cofounded a startup to 3D print batteries onto surfaces, flowing into those unused spaces in all kinds of devices and vehicles.
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Bad Bunny’s half time bush people
All the plants that made up Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl 60 set were people.
Hidden inside the sugarcane grass beside him were humans hired to stand there in costume. The realization that real people were cast to play hundreds of bushes at the Super Bowl turned the inconspicuous performers into a social media sensation overnight.
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Why everyone hates data centers
Why everyone hates data centers: raising utility bills, drinking all the water, and a persistent hum.
There are some obvious reasons. First is just the speed and scale of their construction, which has had effects on power grids. No one likes to see their power bills go up. The rate hikes that so incensed Georgians come as monthly reminders that the eyesore in your backyard profits California billionaires at your expense, on your grid. In Wyoming, for example, a planned Meta data center will require more electricity than every household in the state, combined. To meet demand for power-hungry data centers, utilities are adding capacity to the grid. But although that added capacity may benefit tech companies, the cost is shared by local consumers.
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Comic-Con bans AI
Thanks to a vocal contingent of creators, Comic Con will ban AI.
Separate decisions by San Diego Comic-Con and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) illustrate the depth of AI opposition within some creative communities — though they’re certainly not the only ones, with music distribution platform Bandcamp also recently banning generative AI.
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Olympic ice-skating, the Minions soundtrack, and copyright clearance
A Spanish figure skater, wanted to use songs from the Minions soundtrack for his Olympic routine, but that was put into jeopardy due to copyright clearance. What makes clearance especially difficult for the Olympics is you have to get the song cleared for the entire world.
In his post earlier this week where he lamented not being able to use the music, Guarino said, “I followed all required procedures and submitted my music through the ISU ClicknClear system back in August, and I competed with this program throughout the entire season.”
The sport’s governing body, the International Skating Union, said in a statement to Front Office Sports, “Copyright clearances can represent a challenge for all artistic sports. While the ISU does not have a contractual relationship with ClicknClear, we continue to work collaboratively with rights clearance stakeholders to ensure that thrilling performances can be accompanied by stirring music.”
Ultimately, he was able to get clearance.
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Two cities under siege
I’ve thought about this often lately, how much does today compare to the years running up to the American Revolution, where British troops attempted to force compliance in its populace? Boston 1770 and Minneapolis 2026 share similarities.
The rage from those pre-revolution clashes in Boston continued to linger for years into the Constitutional Convention, and then the debate over the Bill of Rights. The Founders were also students of history, and saw how the domestic use of the military led to the fall of the Roman Republic. This, in large part, is why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and why the Constitution splits control of the military between the president and Congress. You really can’t overstate how much the Founders worried about . . . exactly what we’re seeing in Minneapolis.
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People who can see collapse before it happens
I found myself nodding along to nearly everything in this article about why certain people can foresee collapse before others. Basically, it comes down to be able to see patterns.
Baron-Cohen’s work on hyper-systemising (2006) describes how autistic people naturally gravitate toward understanding structures, mechanisms, and causal patterns rather than social signalling. They notice inconsistencies, detect contradictions, and see what does not add up.¹
Collapse awareness begins here; with the realisation that the cultural story of infinite growth in a finite system fails even the most basic coherence test.
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10 things learned from AI code assistants
Benj Edwards tried numerous AI code assistants and came away with 10 lessons learned.
Claude Code, Codex, and Google’s Gemini CLI, can seemingly perform software miracles on a small scale. They can spit out flashy prototypes of simple applications, user interfaces, and even games, but only as long as they borrow patterns from their training data. Much like a 3D printer, doing production-level work takes far more effort. Creating durable production code, managing a complex project, or crafting something truly novel still requires experience, patience, and skill beyond what today’s AI agents can provide on their own.
