Friday 28 August, 2026

Gold Coast Where we’re headed this weekend. Quote of the Day ”Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” H.L. Mencken Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news The Grateful Dead | Brokedown Palace (Live at Carter-Finley Stadium; Raleigh Link Long Read of the Day Silicon Valley’s long free ride is coming to an end. Tech companies are now increasingly unpopular with both the public and juries — which is why the other day Meta agreed to pay up to roughly US$18 billion, plus make major design changes to Facebook and Instagram, as part of a settlement it has agreed to in its most recent lawsuit about engineering teenage addiction into its products and services. What’s even more dramatic is the rising public hostility — in the US and elsewhere — to AI and to data-centres in particular. I’d been looking for a good write-up on this and now Brian Merchant has provided it in this Substack post. Americans overwhelmingly hate data centers. They overwhelmingly…