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On the last leg of our 10-day road trip from Watsonville to Southern California, my wife Sarah and I bid farewell to family in San Diego County, packed up and departed the Great Western Hotel on the rocky shoreline of Carlsbad.

Heading north on Highway 5, we switched to Highway 1 through coastal towns such as Dana Point and Laguna Beach. Both of us have early memories of family trips in many of these spots. I even rode my bicycle through that area in the mid ‘70s with my friend Joe on a bike ride from Eugene, Oregon to San Diego.

Going through Los Angeles, we meandered through the mammoth port city of San Pedro. The endless rows of harborside cranes along Terminal Island, stacks of shipping containers, huge cargo ships from around the globe, all tied together with a spaghetti heap of bridges makes for dramatic views. 

ARTFUL Zany art packs the Handmade Marketplace in the Port of Los Angeles. 

The Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, similar to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, has proven to be a great stop and there’s no admission fee. Their website states that their mission “is to be a leader in accessible, science-based marine education where every person is inspired to understand, respect, and protect the ocean and all life it sustains.”

Along Highway 1, north of Santa Monica, we took the slow way through Pacific Palisades to see the widespread damage left by the Jan. 7, 2025 Palisades Fire that killed 12 people, and roared through 6,837 structures. The blaze started in the Santa Monica Mountains and left a heavy trail of damage through Pacific Palisades, Topanga and Malibu. 

RUINS Burned-up ruins of scores of homes dot the landscape along Highway 1 in Pacific Palisades where a massive fire swept through last year.

We saw hundreds of homes that were reduced to their concrete and brick foundations, side by side for miles. Along the oceanfront, rows of concrete stairways, foundation slabs and fireplaces were all that was left, their pricey real estate lots standing empty at the ocean’s edge.

By plan we continued north and met up for coffee with my longtime friend from the UC Santa Cruz days in the late 1970s. Roger bought a house in Oxnard several years ago. His folks bought a home in the Hollywood hills back in the late 1940s and he is a treasure trove of information about the Hollywood scene and its surroundings, past and present.

OLD AND NEW Downtown Los Angeles offers a wide array of older buildings and businesses mixed in  with the newer ones.

Then we headed home. We meandered through a number of coastal cities with the intent of revisiting some of them for a deeper view of their nature and history.

The midterm election primary season is nearing its end, with only a few contests remaining in a handful of states across the country. That means we have a ton of data about primary turnout to draw some inferences about what November will look like. And what that data shows is a surging Democratic primary turnout that suggests a massive blue wave is building that will sweep Republicans out to…

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Users of peer-to-peer networking outfit Tailscale might have struggled through some surprising outages beginning late last year. After a six-month investigation, the team finally knows why: A bug in SQLite’s write-ahead log that had remained hidden for 16 years. The Tailscale team announced in a Wednesday blog post that it had finally addressed the issue with the help of SQLite maintainers, who even had to create a new tool (with Tailscale funding) to log virtual file system activity in order to track the thing down, which Tailscale software engineer Alex Chan described as resisting “all our initial attempts to find it.” According to Chan, the problem goes deep into the nature of SQLite – so deep that the database maintainers actually had to add code to reproduce it. To understand what happened, it’s necessary to know how Tailscale works. The service, based on the WireGuard VPN protocol, directly connects devices in a virtual private mesh network. It’s designed to be low complexity and easy to implement for everything from remotely accessing a NAS to connecting teams in a unified private network. Each mesh network, or "tailnet," lives on one of several servers, where a SQLite database manages all the information about the tailnets it houses. “We’ve used SQLite as our primary database since 2022, and we chose it because it's well-known, reliable, and widely used,” Chan wrote in the company’s post-mortem. But a year ago, something went very wrong. “In our current backup pipeline, we take a complete snapshot of the database every few minutes, then upload the entire SQLite file to an S3 bucket,” Chan said, but in August 2025 those backups began detecting database corruption, repeatedly, with no obvious common trigger. The Tailscale team couldn’t reproduce the issue because there were no reliable triggers for it. No low-level code had been changed in months. A review of everything that touched SQLite turned up nothing. Working with the SQLite team, the Tailscalers tried to figure out what could be causing it – POSIX locks broken by close() calls? Nope. Mismanaged memory? Not that either. SQLite being used from multiple threads with thread safety disabled? Nuh-uh. “After every incident, we gathered more data, added more diagnostics, and systematically ruled out these theories,” Chan explained. The WAL-Reset bug comes out of hiding Suspicion was closing in on SQLite’s checkpointing process, which is how it takes new database entries out of a temporary hopper for addition to the master database file. SQLite has an option to improve performance and concurrency known as the Write-Ahead Log (WAL), which serves as the aforementioned hopper. Writing the WAL to the database occurs in a process known as checkpointing. “In most deployments, SQLite itself decides when to do a checkpoint, and the process is invisible to the end user and developer,” Chan said. “In our control plane, we take manual control of the checkpoint process so we can run fast and consistent backups.” The SQLite team wrote a new tool to take a closer look at the process: a virtual file system shim that extensively logs checkpointing activity. After waiting for the next corruption incident, the teams had their answer, dubbed the WAL-Reset bug. Described by Chan as “a rare data race in the SQLite source code between a checkpoint and write transaction,” it’s essentially a collision between checkpoints and writing data to the WAL. “If a write occurs at a specific time during a checkpoint, the checkpointing process gets confused — it thinks some of the pages have been copied from the WAL into the main database file, but they haven’t,” Chan said. Those pages are never written and are permanently lost, but pages that reference those pages are still written, corrupting the database and causing all hell to break loose. According to the SQLite team’s WAL-Reset writeup, the issue can be triggered only when WAL mode is active and multiple database connections are open on the same file, and because there has to be reading and writing going on at the same memory spot at the same time, it’s incredibly unlikely to happen in most situations. Tailscale’s decision to perform manual checkpoints was a rare exception. SQLite maintainers believe the bug was present going all the way back to version 3.7.0, released in July 2010; it’s now fixed, and the SQLite team recommends users update to a fixed version, though it stresses the bug is extremely unlikely to occur in ordinary use. “This bug, though rare, does have serious consequences,” the SQLite WAL-Reset notice states. The incident contains a useful reminder for devs: Even the most boring, reliable software poses risks when operated in a non-standard fashion. “Most people use SQLite in a standard configuration and never face this sort of issue,” Chan said. “By taking manual control of the checkpointing process and running at our own aggressive pace, we stepped off the well-trodden operational path.” ®

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas and comedian Janesh Rahlan take on the AI-powered Flock Safety surveillance systems on this week’s episode of “Room Temp.” The number of privacy abuses and attempted privacy abuses connected to Flock cameras has grown and the majority of Americans do not like the technology, regardless of their personal political affiliation. Janesh pointed to a recent…

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The Mission Robotic Vehicle is making the first attempt to attach a new thruster to an aging satellite.

⚡ Quick Take

• After appearing in Superman, and soon, in Lanterns on HBO Max, Nathan Fillion will play Green Lantern Guy Gardner in the animated HBO Max series Mister Miracle.
• Guy Gardner is not in the Mister Miracle comic book by Tom King, but he’s bringing him into his adaptation of his own series for animation.
• Nerdist’s take: After his roles in Superman and Lanterns, Fillion’s character might be the connective tissue between DCU projects.

If there was any question that the upcoming Mister Miracle animated series from DC Studios takes place in the DCU, this latest news erases any doubt. According to Entertainment Weekly, it seems Nathan Fillion will reprise his role as Green Lantern Guy Gardner in Mister Miracle. His character first appeared in Superman, and pops up soon in Lanterns. Showrunner Tom King, who also wrote the critically acclaimed Mister Miracle comic book the show is based on, had this to say about Fillion joining the cast as the galaxy’s most obnoxious member of the Green Lantern Corps:

We brought Nathan into Mister Miracle’s show, and doing that, it’s just so wonderful. He brings that energy to every aspect of it. And you would think it would be different tonally from [Lanterns], but it blends because that’s who Guy is. He’s that guy who is over the top. We all know that guy who’s a little bit like that.

Is DC Studios positioning Guy Gardner as the DCU equivalent to Nick Fury in the MCU? The one character who dips in and out of different projects, uniting the narrative? It certainly seems to be the case. He is Earth’s resident Green Lantern after all. So if Mister Miracle brings in cosmic elements from the New Gods mythology, it makes sense the Lanterns would be interested. Guy doesn’t appear in the Tom King/Mitch Gerads mini-series that Mister Miracle the animated show is based on. But then again, Lobo didn’t appear in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. And DC Studios added him in for the Supergirl film.

DC Studios

So far, Nathan Fillion remains the only actor confirmed by DC Studios for Mister Miracle. James Gunn has stated that the same voice actors will play major roles from animated projects in live-action. So whoever plays Scott Free/Mister Miracle, his wife Barda, and other New Gods characters like Orion will play their live-action counterparts. Most importantly, DC Comics’ biggest bad, Darkseid, is a big part of Mister Miracle. So the voice actor they cast will be the eventual version of Darkseid in film. Apparently, DC has cast all the voice actors already, we’re just waiting on an announcement from James Gunn. Hopefully, any day now.

The post Nathan Fillion Will Voice Guy Gardner in MISTER MIRACLE appeared first on Nerdist.

We've got good news for developers who are enamored with Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects but don’t want to be tied into that company’s backend infrastructure. Last week, Node.js creator Ryan Dahl unveiled his latest project, celld, which he described on X as “a self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects and Workers implementation.” Dahl’s celld model is compatible with Cloudflare’s Workers and Durable Objects’ JavaScript APIs, but he claims that it is much less expensive to run. The project is no mere budget-minded open source rip. On celld’s web page, Dahl and his team characterize their replication of the Durable Objects architecture as a “love letter.” Cloudflare’s Durable Objects is a single-threaded object with a unique global ID and its own storage, where user data is stored in its own copy of SQLite. It runs on the Cloudflare serverless Workers runtime, which runs apps embedded in isolates—a type of lightweight virtual machine supported by Google's V8 JavaScript engine. First devised by Kenton Varda and Cloudflare, Durable Objects is “one of the best primitives distributed systems has been handed in years,” celld’s creators write. Unlike traditional serverless platforms like AWS Lambda, the Durable Objects model co-locates the data with compute, while using single-threaded execution to eliminate complex concurrency issues. “A primitive this good deserves to run anywhere,” the celld page states. Serverless but stateful Since its introduction in 2020, Durable Objects has been used to build low-latency, highly distributed Web applications. It is a stateful serverless execution environment, a data cache that can also do computation. Using the WebSocket API, the Durable Object can connect many simultaneous users at once in a live environment. WebSockets’ Hibernate mode can put the object to sleep, so cloud bills don’t accrue when no one uses the app. As a result, the stateful serverless model is best suited for real-time collaborative applications, such as multi-player games, team productivity apps and AI agents. Cloudflare uses Durable Objects for its serverless SQL service and AI Gateway. One YouTube tutorialist explained that using Durable Objects allowed him to eliminate an entire stack of tools (Amazon API Gateway, Apache Kafka, Redis, AWS Lambda and EventBridge, Apache Airflow and Spark all get name-dropped) because Durable Objects can handle all these functionalities “at a smaller scale.” Giving Durable Objects an open source home Dahl is one of the world’s foremost experts at JavaScript I/O, having created Node.js, a JavaScript runtime that runs the world’s fastest Web applications (and inadvertently introduced the JavaScript world to “callback hell,” where the language's asynchronous operations forced coders to pass functions as nested callbacks, resulting in ungainly and unintuitive messes of code). Dahl later went on to refine his ideas of asynchronous JavaScript with a second-generation JavaScript runtime called Deno. Celld does away with the Cloudflare backend, and instead uses the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) or equivalent as the storage engine. It also uses the Tokio Rust asynchronous runtime. As with Durable Objects, each celld object gets its own copy of SQLite. Dahl promises this open source backend will be “orders of magnitude cheaper at scale” than Durable Objects. Dahl estimated that 100 resident Durable Object cells cost $415 a month on Cloudflare, whereas the celld implementation would run only about $49 a month, built on a DigitalOcean S3-compatible bucket on an 8 GB droplet. Further savings should ensue as the workload scales, he argued. Cloudflare disputed Dahl’s numbers, stipulating that $415 a month would be the cost if all the objects were continuously active. If left to slumber, the Durable Objects would cost only $20.65 to house on Cloudflare, a spokesperson told The Register. Whatever its putative thriftiness, the model itself seems to have gained interest on its own merits. “So happy to see support for running durable objects outside of one provider. Upvoted,” one Hacker News reader enthused, noting the concept of a durable object is a valuable abstraction. Indeed, other parties are cooking their own schemes to move the data closer to the computation. For instance, Postgres service provider Neon just introduced its own Neon Functions, which can also co-locate data and compute for long-running workloads. Written in Rust and JavaScript, celld is available under an Apache 2 license. It can ingest JavaScript and TypeScript code. In theory, Rust, C/C++, Go, or Zig code can also be executed through the magic of WebAssembly, which V8 supports with slight modification. But while celld is open source, AI contributions are verboten. “Coding agents make it too easy to send a large, low-context change that costs maintainers more time than it saves,” the GitHub page notes. Human contributions are still welcome, though you should understand what your code does before you submit it. ®

"If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in," Twitch CPO Mike Minton said on a livestream responding to user feedback. "That's honestly the answer."

President Donald Trump has just been sued for trying to sell early access to his Truth Social posts. 

The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Wednesday, calling Trump’s plan “extraordinary, corrupt and unconstitutional.” 

Truth Social is part of Trump’s company, Trump Media & Technology, which announced the plan last month. Under a new product, known as Trump API, it seeks to get Wall Street companies to pay between $60,000 and $100,000 per month for preferred access to Trump’s posts so their traders can have an advantage on market reactions to them. 

Trump API would provide 24/7 access, along with Trump’s archived posts going back to 2022, including ones that were deleted or altered. Trump Media’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn says that the company intends “to create a lot of friction for those folks that aren’t coming to us directly.”   

This seems a lot like insider trading, which is a federal crime prosecuted by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the lawsuit directly takes aim at the ethical issues behind selling access to market-moving information from the president of the United States. 

“This scheme is profoundly corrupt. The President stands to gain financially by giving ‘market-moving’ government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company,” the plaintiffs write. “There is no legitimate interest, let alone a significant one, in permitting President Trump to profit from selling government information.” 

According to the lawsuit, Trump Media disclosed on Monday that it already has more than 10 subscribers to the service, including financial news outlets and high-frequency trading firms. The president stands to personally profit from those companies having access to privileged information generated by his position. 

With any other politician, this would be a massive ethical violation possibly coming with legal penalties, but for Trump, it’s only the latest in a series of schemes that have allowed him to profit off of his presidency. For now, this lawsuit is the only attempt to end his insider trading venture. 

Newly-confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche seems to want to resurrect President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization” Slush fund by another name.

Blanche claimed that the fund was dead, while at the same time insinuating that the administration would look for other ways to offer payouts to insurrectionists and allies during his introductory press conference on Wednesday.

“The president has never gone as far as you have to say that the Anti-Weaponization fund is dead. Now that you’ve been confirmed narrowly, arguably because of that Anti-Weaponization fund ... is it dead, and is it ever gonna come back?” a reporter asked.

Blanche offered a verbose, noncommittal answer.

Blanche: The president feels very strongly, as do I, that there were people who were victims of a DOJ that was absolutely weaponized. He feels very strongly he would want to make them whole, as do I. But it will not be through the anti weaponization fund. pic.twitter.com/1DMWSMP9Uo

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 12, 2026

“I quibble with that, because the president said in the cabinet meeting that it’s dead. He’s also said that he likes it. But he has also said it’s dead,” Blanche said. “As for me ... I have testified under oath that it’s dead. I have testified in front of the House when I wasn’t under oath where I said it was dead. I have answered questions after my hearing where I said that it was dead. I rescinded the order that set up the weaponization fund, which means that it does not exist ... I’m not sure how I can further say that the Anti-Weaponization Fund does not exist.”

“We also have said ... that if Congress would like to make it a law, that we would support that,” Blanche continued, changing tack. “The president feels very strongly, as do I, that there were people who were victims of a Department Of Justice that was absolutely weaponized, and he feels very strongly he would want to make them whole, as do I. But it will not be through the Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

Within Blanche’s answer is a strong desire to gift reparations to Trump’s aggrieved supporters and friends through whatever means accessible to them—an alarming answer given that it was one of the issues that his confirmation apparently hinged on.