Coast Guard rescue swimmer rescues 16 people 140 miles off the coast of Baja California in pitch-black darkness while getting tossed by 8-foot waves. 24-year-old Josh Law is credited with the heroic rescue. At 1 a.m., a call came in at the US Coast Guard Air Station in Ventura, California, from a boat sinking in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Ensenada, Mexico. The Coast Guard crew geared up and jumped into the helicopter before making the long trek to the boat. The boat had capsized about 140 miles off the coast and threw more than two dozen people into cold water. When the crew finally located the wreckage, they lowered Law by cable from the helicopter into the water. He was the only rescuer in the cold water for 2 hours. Law was in pitch darkness with no moonlight, in 6- to 8-foot waves, rotor spray and turbulence, and hypothermic water. "I was experiencing exhaustion at that point... what I was experiencing was nothing compared to what they were at that point," Law said. "With one hand, I’m holding the survivor. With the other, I am signaling to the helicopter and working with the device," he said. He did this to rescue 16 survivors, placing them in the basket one by one before hoisting them up to the helicopter. With fuel running low, the crew raced to the Coast Guard station in San Diego, California, which is about 160 miles south of the Ventura station. Law said he treated the survivors during the flight. Some had injuries consistent with shark bites. All 16 were Mexicans, and the ones with injuries were treated when they got to shore. About half have since returned to Mexico. Eleven people on the boat were never found, but thanks to Law and the rest of the crew, 16 lives were saved. Beast.

CLAUDE MYTHOS JUST MOVED UP THE TIMELINE FOR QUANTUM COMPUTING Anthropic published it this morning. They gave Claude eight standard quantum subroutines, a checker that verifies the answer is right, and told it to find cheaper circuits. The big one is elliptic-curve point addition. That’s the step a quantum computer would run to break the keys behind Bitcoin and most of the internet. Claude found a design with 17x fewer gates than the best one humans had published, using 12% more qubits, it ran for 53 hours with almost no human input. Second one, a decoder inside Google’s own optimization algorithm. Claude cut the gate count 12x against Google’s construction and got the scratch qubits from 665 down to 19. Every estimate of when quantum computers become useful, or dangerous, assumes humans design the circuits by hand over years. If an AI does it in a weekend, every one of those timelines gets shorter. Anthropic’s own words: this could bring useful quantum computing “within reach sooner.” The people on the paper were Harvard’s Mikhail Lukin and Susanne Yelin. Lukin co-founded QuEra. $INFQ $IONQ $QNT $QBTS

Cavemen Issues Dire Warning That The Wheel Is Going To Eliminate Countless Jobs

After six years in stealth, Atomic Machines is out. Our mission: on-demand, universal command of matter. First beachhead: the Matter Compiler, an AI-native manufacturing system that builds working micro-machines from code alone. No per-product tooling. No process development. Different code, different machine.

Since the 1980s, the Sahara has shrunk by roughly 8%. Satellite data show widespread greening, a pattern that is playing out across the planet. Around 50% of Earth's vegetated land has become significantly greener, an area roughly three times the size of the United States. The dominant driver is not rainfall or land use change, it is rising atmospheric CO2. Higher CO2 lets plants photosynthesize more efficiently, they lose less water, they tolerate heat and dryness better. The effect is strongest along desert margins - across the Sahel, the Middle East, Australia's interior and the southern edge of the Sahara. Rising CO2 is making the deserts, and the planet as a whole, greener.

The Economist says AI created a million jobs in America. I read that twice. Then I found out who's getting hired and it made total sense. For two years the only headline was the same one. AI is coming for your job. Learn to code was dead. Entry level was finished. Everyone under thirty was about to be replaced by a chatbot. So The Economist did the thing nobody else bothered to do. They actually counted. They lined up every job AI created against every job it killed. The layoffs first, because that's the part everyone was waiting for. About 200,000 jobs gone since mid 2023. Real people, real pink slips, companies openly blaming AI. Customer service down around 10 percent. Admin and secretary roles down about 15. That part of the fear was true. Then they counted the other side. Around a million new jobs. Five made for every one destroyed. I sat with that number for a second because it's the exact opposite of what I'd been told to expect. Then I looked at where the jobs actually went, and the whole thing clicked. The biggest winners of the AI boom don't touch a keyboard. They're electricians. Here's the part nobody explains. AI doesn't live in the cloud. The cloud is a lie we tell ourselves. AI lives in enormous buildings full of computers that run hot enough to cook an egg, and those buildings have to be built, wired, cooled, and fed more power than a small city. So the money went there. Around 320,000 more jobs than normal in the industries that build these things. Electricians. HVAC techs. The people who wire electrical equipment. Utility crews. Companies are so desperate for them that data center jobs pay about 40 percent more than the same work anywhere else. The white collar side grew too. Roughly 730,000 above trend in the jobs sitting closest to AI. Engineers, software people, data scientists, plus a wave of roles that didn't exist three years ago like the people who label training data and the ones who bolt these systems into real companies. Even the jobs everyone said were doomed kept growing. Paralegals up 11 percent. Market research analysts up 6. The national average was around 2. Now the honest part, because I'm not here to sell you a fairy tale. This is an estimate, not a government census. Nobody at the Bureau of Labor Statistics stamped a form that says one million AI jobs. The Economist built the number from employment trends and some careful guessing, and the two sides aren't perfectly comparable. The layoffs are announced cuts. The million is jobs above where the trend line said we'd be. And "created by the AI boom" is doing heavy lifting. An electrician wiring a data center is real work. It is not AI hiring a million prompt engineers. But strip all of that away and one thing survives. The apocalypse everyone promised is two years late. The thing that was supposed to erase work quietly built a small city's worth of it instead. We spent two years scared of the wrong number.

Caveman Issues Dire Warning That The Wheel Is Going To Eliminate Countless Jobs buff.ly/u9nCQoL

🚨 WOW! The Ratepayer Protection Act, which forces DATA CENTERS and other high-demand electricity users to pay the FULL incremental cost of any grid upgrades, just passed almost UNANIMOUSLY in the House, 417-3 This bill is meant to protect REGULAR AMERICANS from having to foot the bill for grid upgrades needed to serve data centers and other similar facilities. It's VERY rare to see this sort of bipartisanship in the House nowadays All 3 nays were Democrats.

It's whatisnuclear dot com's 20th birthday today! Since I registered the site in 2006 I've had a wonderful time talking to people about nuclear power. Here's a short thread with some highlights.

The electricity price news just keeps getting better for Georgians. Georgia Power announced that new large-load contracts (overwhelmingly data centers) will save their customers nearly a billion dollars, erasing about $180 per year from their bills!

Maybe the best piece ESPN has ever produced. 25 years after 9/11 and I still watch this at least once a year. The story of Welles Crowther, a former Boston College lacrosse player who saved at a dozen lives. “The Man In The Red Bandana.”

If you want evidence that capitalism is a force for good, just visit a grocery store. My ode to the humble American supermarket, for @WSJFreeEx

The X Safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations: We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy. These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others included AI-generated cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public's expense. We remain committed to maintaining an open and authentic platform where people debate topics of public interest. We take seriously any attempts to undermine the integrity of the global town square and suspend accounts that violate our Authenticity policy.