Andrew Kesterson

"Love God. Live Righteously. Die Well."
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# News - 2026 - Week - 28

2026-07-09 Technology Current Events 2.6k words

## Money and Work

Major US banks are going to acquire the major debit processors which would allow them to hike debit card processing fees to literally whatever they want. I’m sure they’ll charge a just price and not whatever the market will suffer.

Lots of people who have endured recent layoffs have been asking questions like “what about loyalty?”, “what about my sleepless nights”, “what about my contributions?” TheDailyWTF does an excellent job of explaining that they simply do not care, and will probably hang you out to dry for a nickel. I’ve talked about this in part 3 of my advice for new managers, but most younger workers already understand this: you do exactly what’s in your job description, you put in your 40 hours, and nothing more. Because chances are they’ll give you no more than that, and maybe less, if given the chance.

## The Sloppening

It looks like the AI companies are tired of NVIDIA holding all the cards. OpenAI is introducing Jalapeno, its own AI inference chip. Supposedly it’s really great, but it’s also vaporware at this point. DeepSeek is also manufacturing its own chip to reduce dependence on Huawei. It will be interesting to see what happens if/when these chips become real. Maybe we could have our damn GPUs and DDR5 back.

Eventually those inference chips will be reading your zoom transcripts. All the brain power in the world and we’re using it to checks list look for naughty words in the zoom transcript. (Protip: They already ARE reading the transcripts.)

While the agent that flags you (rightly or not) for engaing some kind of fireable behavior will never have an identity in the way that will allow you to track it down and give it a piece of your mind, Vercel via Better Auth is designing an identity and auth solution for agents. As agents assume more and more responsibility and take more and more actions on our behalf, we’re definitely going to need to solve the problem of identity delegation with separation. Meanwhile, others are asking if DNS could become the basis for AI Agent identity. I love to see what kinds of problems will come from that. (It’s not DNS. There’s no way it’s DNS. It was DNS.)

If you work in the DevSecOps or AI/ML world, you may need to deploy AI models as part of your job. If you’re running Kubernetes and are used to the Crossplane model for managing arbitrary infrastructure through Kubernetes, you can now use ModelPlane as a unified control plane for inference workloads. I don’t have personal experience with it, but if it’s like crossplane, it will be pretty great to use if you can convince some other poor sunnuvabitch to do the hard thinking of getting it all set up and working. Oh, and debugging it when it breaks, because God knows where the actual error is going to show up in the logs.

I’m really not a pessimist. I’ve just taken many, many trips around the block, and I know how this bus ride tends to go.

We’ve all been watching GitHub start to rot in real time, and with blood in the water, the AI companies are offering source code hosting alongside model usage. Don’t fall for it - don’t cast your pearls before swine. Host your own source. Don’t give them your data.

But hey, if nothing else, GitHub can burn you a copy of your repo on CD-ROM. Nevermind that the people asking for this already own the code locally, and probably don’t even have a CD ROM drive to put the disc in. This is the most ridiculous hipster bullshit. And people are standing around wojacking like it’s so stunning and brave.

It's not the living. It's not even the planet. It's the people who buy their GitHub repo on CDROM.

## Corporate Cyberpunk Dystopia

Walmart is making a deal to buy dedicated nuclear power. WalMart datacenters are massive, and few people understand just how big Wal Mart is, both as an employer and as a corporate entity generally. Imagine waking up one day and going to work as a Sam’s Club Nuclear Engineer. Don’t laugh - the American taxpayer is loaning out $18 BILLION dollars to develop 10 new large nuclear reactors. I don’t know how many of those are slotted for WalMart, but, time will tell.

Physical copies of Grand Theft Auto 6 will not ship with … physical media. Isn’t that kind of the point of buying a physical copy? Meanwhile PlayStation is ceasing production of physical media for future playstation consoles. You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. Or, you won’t be happy, and … they won’t care.

Terry Godier released an absolutely stellar piece, “The Last Quiet Thing” that perfectly captures the problem with the modern technology we’ve built. Not just smart devices, but every damn thing. It’s all tech debt that we’re living with every single day, in every part of our lives. Well worth the read. As mkultra.monster said this week, “No wonder I’m tired all the time”.

But if you’re tired, there’s a selfhosted app for that. Install TiredArr and outsource your nap scheduling, aggregation and execution. One of the most honest app writeups I’ve seen in a while.

All that being said, it’s not all doom and gloom; there are still reasons to be excited about technology. Don’t let the enduring hellscape that is the modern commercial internet corposphere get you down.

## Technology Generally

Jeremy raises an interesting question:

> If everything is a computer, why is hardly anything something I can actually use as a computer?

The answer of course is that most things that contain a computer are not meant to be used as a general purpose computer. They are an appliance. In much the same way that your washing machine contains a timer, a motor, and a water pump, yet you were never meant to access and use these things for other purposes. As much as you may not like to admit it, your phone has more in common with your washing machine than it does with your personal computer, in terms of the designer’s intentions for how you interface with it.

Speaking of design choices, I have to agree with lazybea.rs that GMail is awful in basically every respect. Although, to be fair, MOST email clients are also terrible. This is because of the design choices made over thousands of iterations of turning it into an appliance that has raced to the bottom to serve the lowest common denominator (and, along the way, every marketer who is both feeding you ads and consuming data from your mail). But instead of fixing them, we’re all just moving away from email, so it’ll never get fixed, but we can never actually get away from email, so we’ll never stop suffering.

This is fine. There’s a very good chance that, by the year 2029, some major computing event is going to occur that will destroy our previous notions of all that which is normal in the technology space. The major players are moving their deadline for Post-Quantum Computing Encryption to 2029 - which is very interesting, because at this time, we don’t actually have relevant quantum computers that allow us to meet the bar of having a post-quantum computing encryption standard. The fact that they’re moving this deadline up to 2029 most likely means that there’s a skunkwork project out there that either A) will very soon or B) already has a quantum computer that can break our known encryptions in a repeatable and accessible way. I’m personally curious to see what the quantum computing revolution will look like; we have a very narrow perception of what a computer is because we’ve been using Von Nuemann architecture for so long, its easy to forget that’s not the only possible definition of a computer.

Maybe Chrome won’t suck on a quantum computer.

In lighter projects, Andreas is working through building an IR remote receiver/controller for their RPi media center. It’s part of their 2026 “Make Something” challenge and looks like a fun project to follow along with.

It looks like the Slate Truck is going to actually come to market. I think the Slate Truck is really interesting, but it’s really hard to beat the versatility of a standard gasoline engine. You just feed it, and it keeps running, basically forever. Having a range limit and having to charge it feels … uncomfortably limiting. Then again, electric charging stations are becoming far more common, so maybe it is less of an issue than I’m imagining.

Meanwhile, a study shows exactly what we’ve known all along: that the Toddler Destroyer effect is real. Vehicles with incredibly tall hoods result in more deaths per year than vehicles in the same class that do not have tall hoods. We call modern pickups “Toddler Destroyers” for this reason. But part of the reason they’re built so ridiculously tall, short (in length) and thick is due to the modern EPA “CAFE” regulations on trucks. These same roles are also why we can’t have small pickups anymore.

There’s another company that’s trying to revive the small American made pickup with a gasoline engine, but I lost the link to that one. Hopefully I’ll come across it again.

## Philosophy

Alicia wrote a great article in which she posits that “… Happiness isn’t the goal. Being fully alive is.“. Because of this, she does not wish you happiness. She wishes that you have a full life that is painted with all the colors of the spectrum - even the dark colors. As a Christian, this is a topic that I sometimes struggle with, and frequently help others struggle with: the idea that you can have enduring joy in your life even in the absence of happiness. Part of it comes from the idea that there is value in suffering, and in fact, that suffering itself is a Holy thing. But even without the religious view of suffering, one can appreciate that if you spend your life chasing happiness, rather than the full experience of life itself, you will be miserable basically all the time. Happiness will come and go; let love and joy persist anyway.

At the same time, don’t do the easy thing. mkultra.monster wasn’t talking about theology of phylosophy when they said this, but I agree. Don’t do the easy things. Or at least, don’t do the easy thing all the time. Examine the actions you’re taking, consider whether or not you’re sliding along through easy choices, and whether or not you could be improving your life, your future, or even your persistent joy, by making harder choices. Like I wrote in one of my previous articles, realize that comfort is gonna kill you, and adopt the wisdom of “Hard Way”.

Speaking of choices and hard things, bucking the general trend of your society or of your era can be an especially difficult thing. But it can be very important for your own mental health, your lasting joy, and your survival. Consider the choice to specialize or be a generalist. Some people will tell you that unless you can master something, you should not bother. I strongly disagree, and encourage dabbling. zkrbo writes this week about the struggle of allowing themselves to be a generalist and I think a lot of us can identify with them. Part of the reason we feel its not okay is because of the modern economic theories that demand specialization as a way to produce revenue which is ultimately how we measure our worth. But that’s enlightenment humanist bullshit, which I roundly encourage rejecting, and encourage you to embrace being a generalist dilettante.

## Entertainment

If you’re into cozy gaming, here’s one for you. I’ve never really wanted to run a little japanese corner store, but inkonbini is really making me want to try. My parents ran a small general store before I was born, and I’m honestly kinda upset I missed that time. Running a retail establishment in the time before the internet just seems like such a fun thing. I’m sure the reality is nowhere near that. I also love the idea of running a hot dog cart, and that’s far more acheivable, so who knows maybe I’ll find out.

In other gaming news, Hasbro is happily destroying Dunegons and Dragons. The video does a good job of explaining the myriad of problems currently destroying the brand, but suffice to say, they’ve gone mad, and I’m not sure the customers are going to forget it this time. Hasbro is introducing “CharacterOS” which will sell you AI versions of NPCs which will interact with your players via audio. They’re offering AI dungeon masters. They’re moving their new content to D&D Beyond, a digital subscription live service, and are going to stop printing books. Fucking hell.

Look, I’ve been playing D&D since the old days. My dice bag has an old school TSR dragon logo patch stitched to the outside. I’ve been around that long. And Hasbro is engaging in some fuckery the likes of which we’ve never seen. I’ll be honest, with the state that Pathfinder is in, I’m not sure that we even need core D&D anymore. Maybe Hasbro needs to learn an expensive lesson.

In the same wheelhouse, [SI]ilberheim](https://indiegamesplus.com/new-silberheim-evolving-card-game-extended-beta-available-to-test-for-free/) is a digital CCG that is entering an extended beta available for free. I’ll be honest, I don’t understand the draw of electronic CCGs. You don’t get the joy of physically collecting things. You don’t get the community of nerding out around a table with other collectors. You’re just going through the mechanics, and your entire collection is digital, which may very well all go away if and when the game shuts down. I jut don’t get the attraction. But hey, whatever, it’s yo baby…

Finally, here’s some cool stuff I found on Newgrounds recently. It’s easy to forget that one of the internet’s oldest digital playgrounds is still out there, and people are still doing cool things on it.

- Mimi’s Delivery Service
- Strange things are happening at the illegal drug exchange point
- Good Kid - Cicada
- Someone reanmiated an entire Tom & Jerry episode with Deltarune characters in a pixel art style

## Humans of the Internet

I believe that if you’re a human on the internet these days, one of the most important things you can do is write. It doesn’t have to be polished, or have a defined audience. It can be sloppy, misspelled, rambling, nonsensical drivel. It can be pictures of you in a peter pan costume looking for love (if you know, you know). Just share it. Whatever it is, share it. Not for others, to get a response, just for yourself.

If you want to discover some other humans spouting their craziness out into the void, The IndieWebDB is a neocities page that has collected ~150 websites, 278 webrings, and 240 cliques at the time of this writing.

> The powerful play goes on,
> and you may contribute a verse.
> Just share it.

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