The original hed on this was a bit misleading, so I rewrote it.

And it was: Are there any spaces in town where I could work on building out my van?

A user directed me to Asmbly, and the night I was there for the orientation, a guy in a van with a tree-frog decal was hanging out in the parking lot. We didn't talk that night.

As it happens, he was (/is?) the leader of the vanbuild community at the space. We first started talking four weeks later, when the next event was scheduled.

He's coming by this evening with my new fridge. It's going to be nice to be able to buy perishables again.

Which is cool and all, but far more happened than that.

He's a burner. So after several months, he invited me to join him at the warehouse (he's also let me crash in his garage several times to avoid temperature extremes) for a workshop on safely using flamethrowers.

I'm pretty certain Naked Fireman led the course, but I'd not get to know him for over a year. On Wednesday, I was hanging out with him, his daughter and his granddaughter, with a pipe being passed around.

I knew a bit about Burning Man, mostly because an intern at the paper in 2005 was a burner. Amusingly enough, he reached out to my then-girlfriend online, talking about how he didn't know how the paper had done copyediting without having him on staff.

You might think this would be an issue, but it's a city of 20,000, so at some point, you're going to face that issue.

Instead, I called him up and invited him out to a bar. We shot some pool, and I casually mentioned that I'd appreciate him not trying to hit on my girlfriend, and also -- fuck you for saying I don't know how to edit.

I didn't bring it into the newsroom. He was really good, and this was a personal issue that he had no issues respecting..

We last hung out when he was in town for the eclipse last year. Part of his polycule came down from Utah for it.

20 years after first hearing about the burner scene ...

It appears I'm going to attempt commune life. Now, this doesn't inherently follow from my physical involvement, but rather posting -- again -- on Reddit, asking what the local Discord was for the local scene after my first burn.

It was crickets for months. And then one day, a guy responded to me with a link. Somehow, I ended up at his house, and we talked Street Medics, which he runs locally, and well as general stuff. This was the night of the Los Angeles ICE protests, and I learned a lot about how people handle these situations.

I even got to try out a gas mask. As one does.

The next day, I'm back in my van, and I've been elevated to an admin on Discord -- something I suspect most of you know is really one step above my paygrade. It didn't take long to be booted down to standard user, but even less time to split the baby and make me a mod.

As a result, I met new people through the server in addition to the weekly event. And I started talking with another mod ... I don't even remember how we moved to DMs.

They just had a boarder leave, and as such, they have an open room they've offered to rent to me. We're just going to try it for a week before committing to something longer term.

The commune has yet to start up -- indeed, they're still looking for land (I get along famously with her husband, who is oddly not a burner himself), and they need to sell their house first.

They're chill people who share my values.

But seriously, who would have thought being priced out of fixed housing would cause gestures broadly all this?

You know, there's a pattern with these resignations ...

Tulsi Gabbard is stepping down from her position as Director of National Intelligence, citing her husband’s recent bone cancer diagnosis. In a resignation letter obtained by Fox News — the network that helped shape the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii into a conservative darling — Gabbard wrote that she was “deeply grateful for the trust you placed in me and for the opportunity to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the last year and a half.”

“Unfortunately, I must submit my resignation, effective June 30, 2026,” Gabbard wrote. “My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer,” and “I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle.”

Abraham’s “strength and love have sustained me through every challenge. I cannot in good conscience ask him to face this fight alone while I continue in this demanding and time-consuming position,” she added.

In a Truth Social post, President Donald Trump wrote that “unfortunately, after having done a great job, Tulsi Gabbard will be leaving the Administration,” and that she should “rightfully” spend time caring for her husband. “I have no doubt he will soon be better than ever. Tulsi has done an incredible job, and we will miss her.”

Activists released from Israeli custody after being detained on a flotilla trying to take aid to Gaza were subjected to abuse, organisers have alleged, with several hospitalised with injuries and at least 15 reporting sexual assaults, including rape.

Israel’s prison service denied the allegations, and Reuters was not able to verify them independently.

Germany said some of its nationals had been injured and that some accusations were “serious”, without giving further details. A legal source in Italy said prosecutors there were investigating possible crimes, including kidnapping and sexual assault.

An Israeli prison service spokesperson said in a statement: “The allegations raised are false and entirely without factual basis.

“All prisoners and detainees are held in accordance with the law, with full regard for their basic rights and under the supervision of professional and trained prison staff,” they said.

“Medical care is provided according to professional medical judgment and in accordance with ministry of health guidelines.”

The Israeli military referred queries to the foreign ministry, which referred them to the prison service.

Workers at local newspapers owned by Hearst allege the company is trying to “destroy unions” amid claims of widespread anti-union tactics, including violating union contracts and bad-faith bargaining.

The Albany Newspaper Guild, which represents the Times Union newspaper in Albany, New York, said it had been more than 17 years since the union had a contract and there had been little progress toward reaching a new one.

Wendy Liberatore, president of the Albany Newspaper Guild and the Saratoga county reporter at the Times Union, said the lack of pay increases at the newspaper had burdened employees who struggle to afford a higher cost of living, including higher deductibles for their healthcare plan. She also said that workers were concerned about Hearst eventually outsourcing jobs to AI.

“What bothers me is the effect on our members. It really hurts our members,” she said.

Liberatore noted the issue was seen across Hearst publications across the country. “Hearst newspaper management – in Albany, Connecticut, Austin and Dallas – is doing its best to destroy unions at its papers,” she said.

What a bunch of bullshit that Gannett finally signed a contract with the Austin American-Statesman guild, then turned around and sold the paper to Hearst, which had no binding need to follow that contract. Gannett had only purchased the AAS from Cox a few years earlier.

An enormous marine heatwave off the US west coast is ringing alarm bells among ocean and atmospheric scientists as new data shows its ecological and environmental effects are intensifying.

The unusual area of warm water has persisted since peaking in size during September 2025 and still stretches thousands of miles from the California coastline – more than halfway across the Pacific – affecting a vast triangle-shaped region of oceanic habitats from Hawaii to British Columbia and southward to Mexico.

As recently as early April, marine scientists had hoped that the heatwave might diminish and the worst of its effects might be avoided. However, new projections released last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) show it is now expected to expand and strengthen in the months to come.

Celebrities, politicians and New Yorkers have paid their respects to Stephen Colbert as The Late Show aired its final episode on Thursday.

The long-running chatshow, which started back in 1993, was cancelled last year by CBS, purportedly because of a financial decision. But many believed it was a result of the network’s increasing closenesss with Donald Trump, whom Colbert regularly criticised.

Last night’s episode saw the host bid an emotional farewell with the help of celebrity guests including Paul McCartney, Paul Rudd, Ryan Reynolds and Bryan Cranston.

“We love doing the show for you but what we really love is doing the show with you,” he said to the audience at home.

Truly the end of an institution. He will be missed.

As Meta races to recenter itself around artificial intelligence, the tech giant is mandating that more than 7,000 workers must move to new teams, and it’s radically changing some employees’ jobs. The Guardian has also learned that some of these reassigned employees will shift to two new teams: one building AI cloud infrastructure and another that’s building an internal AI agent codenamed Hatch.

Late last week, Meta employees received a notice that engineers had been “selected” for reassignment and would begin reporting to the cloud infrastructure and Hatch teams by the end of this week. Meta made a similar move last month when it reshuffled at least 1,000 engineers on to a new data labeling team called Applied AI, or AAI – at first giving them the option to volunteer, but later telling workers: “Transfers aren’t optional.”

“Our work, infrastructure and our products are fundamentally changing as a result of the continued acceleration of AI,” wrote Peter Hoose, vice-president of production engineering at Meta, in an internal post about the two new teams viewed by the Guardian. “The pace of what we are building is unprecedented, and these are exactly the kind of challenges that define what we do best.”

A Meta employee referenced last month’s reshuffle in a comment on Hoose’s announcement, writing: “Does ‘selected’ imply this is an [Applied AI]-style draft rather than a voluntary move?”

Further proof the Meta doesn't know what the Zuck it's doing. The rebrand has gone swimmingly, given all the time we spend in the legless metaverse.

The justice department quietly added a provision barring the IRS from auditing Donald Trump’s tax returns on Tuesday, amending a widely criticized agreement that creates a secretive and loosely controlled $1.776bn fund to compensate allies of the president.

The addendum, signed by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, says the government is “forever barred” and “precluded” from examining the tax returns of Trump, his family, company and “related companies”. The agreement applies to anything filed before the agreement was reached. It was posted on the justice department website on Tuesday morning, a day after the department announced creation of the fund.

The inclusion only adds to mounting scrutiny of the wider agreement reached on Tuesday. The arrangement was announced after Trump said he was dropping a $10bn lawsuit against the IRS and other specious claims against the government in exchange for creating the compensation fund. IRS officials recommended fighting Trump’s lawsuit, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, but the agency decided to settle it anyway, raising further questions about improper interference.

AI is, as it stands, not economically viable for anybody involved other than the construction firms, NVIDIA, and the surrounding hardware companies benefitting from the irrational exuberance of a data center buildout that doesn’t appear to be happening at the speed we believed.

Every AI startup loses millions or billions of dollars a year, and nobody appears to have worked out a way to stop hemorrhaging cash. Hyperscalers have invested over $800 billion in the last three years, with plans to add another $700 billion or so in 2026 and another $1 trillion in 2027, meaning that they need to make at least three trillion dollars in AI specific revenue just to break even, and $6 trillion or more for AI to be anything other than a wash. I went into detail about this (albeit at a lower, pre-2026/2027 capex number) in a premium piece last year.

To give you some context, Microsoft made $281 billion, Meta $200 billion, Amazon $716 billion, and Google $402.8 billion in revenue in their most-recent fiscal years for every single product combined, for a total of $1.599 trillion. None of them will talk about their actual AI revenues. Yes, yes, I know Microsoft said that it had $37 billion in AI revenue run rate ($3.08 billion a month or so) and Amazon had $15 billion, or around $1.25 billion a month, but both of these are snapshots of single months that are meant to make it sound like they’re going to make that much in a year but in the end, you don’t actually know anything about how much money they’ve made from AI.

The terms "blindingly obvious," "logical consequence," and "that is not how it works" appear nowhere in the government handbook of internet legislation. In particular, the discovery that imposing age access controls on websites has pushed users to VPNs has come as a huge surprise to legislators in the UK, the EU, Canada, and Australia. Nobody here knows how old VPN users are, be they kids unwilling to lose access or adults unwilling to disgorge personally identifying data to who knows what.

As they recover from this shocking discovery, these fine people are looking at ways to control VPNs, whether by adding age verification here too or by some magical "digital age of consent" technology that somehow evades the paradox that demanding more personal information in the name of safety itself reduces safety. Yet here, as in so many ways, the rest of the world is lagging behind America – more specifically, the great state of Utah, which has just enacted an anti-VPN law.

This law makes it compulsory for any site that the state says needs age verification – porn, basically – to impose those checks on anyone physically in Utah whether or not they are using any VPN. Those would be the same VPNs whose sole purpose is to prevent the geolocation of their users. Which would seem, and is, another paradox.

I'd not go online without a VPN. There's absolutely no reason my ISP needs my browsing history. And at about $6/month, it's not exactly breaking the bank.

What I'd not use is any VPN provider that sponsors YouTube content. A free VPN has to make their money from somewhere.