Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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US Blocks All Offshore Wind Construction, Says Reason Is Classified

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, the US Department of the Interior announced that it was pausing the leases on all five offshore wind sites currently under construction in the US. The move comes despite the fact that these projects already have installed significant hardware in the water and on land; one of them is nearly complete. In what appears to be an attempt to avoid legal scrutiny, the Interior is blaming the decisions on a classified report from the Department of Defense. The second Trump administration announced its animosity toward offshore wind power literally on day one, issuing an executive order on inauguration day that called for a temporary halt to issuing permits for new projects pending a re-evaluation. Earlier this month, however, a judge vacated that executive order, noting that the government has shown no indication that it was even attempting to start the re-evaluation it said was needed. But a number of projects have gone through the entire permitting process, and construction has started. Before today, the administration had attempted to stop these in an erratic, halting manner. Empire Wind, an 800 MW farm being built off New York, was stopped by the Department of the Interior, which alleged that it had been rushed through permitting. That hold was lifted following lobbying and negotiations by New York and the project developer Orsted, and the Department of the Interior never revealed why it changed its mind. When the Interior Department blocked a second Orsted project, Revolution Wind offshore of southern New England, the company took the government to court and won a ruling that let it continue construction. Today's announcement targets those and three other projects. Interior says it is pausing the permits for all five, which are the only projects currently under construction. It claims that offshore wind creates "national security risks" that were revealed in a recent analysis performed by the Department of Defense, which apparently neglected to identify these issues during the evaluations it did while the projects were first permitted. What are these risks? The Interior Department is being extremely coy. It notes that offshore wind turbines can interfere with radar sensing, but that's been known for a while. In announcing the decision, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also noted "the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies." But the announcement says that the Defense Department analysis is classified, meaning nobody is likely to know what the actual reason is -- presuming one exists. The classification will also make it far more challenging to contest this decision in court.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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alvinashcraft
30 minutes ago
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Pennsylvania, USA
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Top News Stories About the Internet Archive: 2025

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In 2025, a global conversation emerged about memory, power and who controls the historical record. As governments deleted web pages, platforms broke links, and public data quietly (and not so quietly) disappeared, journalists around the world turned to the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine to understand what was being lost, what could still be saved, and why preservation matters more than ever. From investigations in The New Yorker and The New York Times to video features from the BBC and CNN, these stories capture how the fight to preserve the web became one of the defining information battles of the year.

Full list: https://archive.org/about/news-stories/search?mentions-search=2025 (1,700+ for 2025)

Top News Stories About the Internet Archive: 2025

Top News Stories Referencing Wayback Machine / Internet Archive: 2025

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alvinashcraft
30 minutes ago
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Microsoft to Replace All C/C++ Code With Rust by 2030

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Microsoft is taking an impressive step in modernizing its biggest codebases and will eliminate all C/C++ code by the end of the decade.

The post Microsoft to Replace All C/C++ Code With Rust by 2030 appeared first on Thurrott.com.

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alvinashcraft
31 minutes ago
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The Justice Department Just Released More Epstein Files

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The latest Epstein Files release appears to contain hundreds of photographs along with court records and other materials.
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alvinashcraft
31 minutes ago
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Advent of Code in Rust: Winners and Highlights

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Thank you to everyone who joined Advent of Code 2025 in Rust! It was inspiring to see many Rustaceans solving algorithmic puzzles, and celebrating the holiday coding season with the community.

Before the Advent began, Vitaly Bragilevsky published a blog post on how to use AI in Advent of Code challenge responsibly and effectively. This year’s AoC featured 12 puzzles, and from December 1–12, we celebrated by posting daily RustRover features in our RustRover Advent Calendar – a small gift for the community and a way to highlight tools that make your Rust experience even better.

And the winners are… 

We invited you to take on the AoC puzzles using Rust, join our leaderboards, and compete for top scores and random prizes. Now, it’s time to congratulate our 10 winners who stood out among all participants.

Let’s give a big round of applause to the top five Rust developers who dominated the combined leaderboards with impressive results out of 71 participants:

  1. Duro – 2017 (for the second year in a row, as in 2024!)
  2. JohnX4321 – 1996
  3. MaRcR11 – 1961
  4. Giacomo Stevanato – 1910
  5. Agnibha Chakraborty – 1885

Additionally, here are five participants were randomly selected as prize winners:

  • bragrseg – 576
  • ViincentLim – 1585
  • N. Adhikary – 813
  • Gunter Schmidt – 435
  • Saurav Kumar – 676

We reached out to the winners who had social media contact information listed on their GitHub profiles. If you didn’t include contact details, please reach out to rustrover-support@jetbrains.com, and we’ll be happy to send you your prize. Congratulations to all our winners and to everyone who took part! 

Keep learning and building in Rust

The Advent of Code puzzles are available year-round, so get ready for the next AoC by exploring resources to strengthen your Rust skills:

A huge thank-you to Eric Wastl and the Advent of Code team for creating such an inspiring tradition. Let’s keep learning, building, and having fun with Rust and see you next year for another round of AoC!

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alvinashcraft
31 minutes ago
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2025 was for AI what 2010 was for cloud (xpost)

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The satellite, experimental technology has become the mainstream, foundational tech. (At least in developer tools.) (xposted from new home)

I was at my very first job, Linden Lab, when EC2 and S3 came out in 2006. We were running Second Life out of three datacenters, where we racked and stacked all the servers ourselves. At the time, we were tangling with a slightly embarrassing data problem in that there was no real way for users to delete objects (the Trash folder was just another folder), and by the time we implemented a delete function, our ability to run garbage collection couldn’t keep up with the rate of asset creation. In desperation, we spun up an experimental project to try using S3 as our asset store. Maybe we could make this Amazon’s problem and buy ourselves some time?

Why yes, we could. Other “experimental” projects sprouted up like weeds: rebuilding server images in the cloud, running tests, storing backups, load testing, dev workstations. Everybody had shit they wanted to do that exceeded our supply of datacenter resources.

By 2010, the center of gravity had shifted. Instead of “mainstream engineering” (datacenters) and “experimental” (cloud), there was “mainstream engineering” (cloud) and “legacy, shut it all down” (datacenters).

Why am I talking about the good old days? Because I have a gray beard and I like to stroke it, child. (Rude.)

And also: it was just eight months ago that Fred Hebert and I were delivering the closing keynote at SRECon. The title is “AIOps: Prove It! An Open Letter to Vendors Selling AI for SREs”, which makes it sound like we’re talking to vendors, but we’re not; we’re talking to our fellow SREs, begging them to engage with AI on the grounds that it’s not ALL hype.

We’re saying to a room of professional technological pessimists that AI needs them to engage. That their realism and attention to risk is more important than ever, but in order for their critique to be relevant and accurate and be heard, it has to be grounded in expertise and knowledge. Nobody cares about the person outside taking potshots.

This talk recently came up in conversation, and it made me realize—with a bit of a shock—how far my position has come since then.

That was just eight months ago, and AI still felt like it was somehow separable, or a satellite of tech mainstream. People would gripe about conferences stacking the lineup with AI sessions, and AI getting shoehorned into every keynote.

I get it. I too love to complain about technology, and this is certainly an industry that has seen its share of hype trains: dotcom, cloud, crypto, blockchain, IoT, web3, metaverse, and on and on. I understand why people are cynical—why some are even actively looking for reasons to believe it’s a mirage.

But for me, this year was for AI what 2010 was for the cloud: the year when AI stopped being satellite, experimental tech and started being the mainstream, foundational technology. At least in the world of developer tools.

It doesn’t mean there isn’t a bubble. Of COURSE there’s a fucking bubble. Cloud was a bubble. The internet was a bubble. Every massive new driver of innovation has come with its own frothy hype wave.

But the existence of froth doesn’t disprove the existence of value.

Maybe y’all have already gotten there, and I’m the laggard. 😉 (Hey, it’s an SRE’s job to mind the rear guard.) But I’m here now, and I’m excited. It’s an exciting time to be a builder.

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alvinashcraft
32 minutes ago
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