September 16, 2026

ICYMI:

Posted at 7:19 pm by Stephen Green

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: TMZ reports: L.A. and State Officials Say Paramount Leaving California.

UPDATE: American Idol leaves L.A. for Georgia amid Hollywood flight.

MORE: Paramount is looking for Nashville office space as it weighs leaving LA. “Paramount Skydance is actively looking for office space in Nashville — a sign the company is seriously considering moving at least some operations from Los Angeles amid the legal fight over its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, according to two people familiar with the search who were granted anonymity to discuss it.”

Posted at 6:46 pm by Ed Driscoll

HMM: Stealth Startup Kepler Computing Says It Cracked the AI Memory Shortage.

Kepler Computing has come out of stealth with the kind of claim the AI industry badly wants to believe. The San Jose startup says its ferroelectric memory approach can raise SRAM density, lower operating voltage and make high-bandwidth memory easier to build with existing semiconductor equipment. If it works, you get relief in a market where AI server demand is already pulling memory and storage supply away from almost everyone else.

That’s a large if.

According to Wired’s report on Kepler, the company was founded in 2018 by CEO Debo Olaosebikan and CTO Sasi Manipatruni, and the team went through 35 versions of its composite material before settling on the class it now plans to take into production. Manipatruni told Wired, “We came up with a material innovation that helps with the amount of memory you can have between chips.” The line is technical, but the business point is plain enough: Kepler is trying to put more memory closer to compute without asking the industry to build an entirely new kind of fab.

Material science breakthroughs are common in slide decks. They are rarer in fabs.

But: “Kepler’s pitch is stronger than the usual lab-result story because GlobalFoundries is already involved. Wired reported that Kepler and GlobalFoundries converted a fab line to next-generation status in eight months, compared with about 24 months for a typical conversion.”

I’ve had the upgrade itch for a while now, but RAM prices have kept me from scratching it. A little price relief would be welcome all around, provided they can pull this off.

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green

HOW DARE YOU SHARE MY PUBLIC CELEBRATION OF A MURDER:

Posted at 4:36 pm by Stephen Green

INDEED:

If the proles can’t be trusted with something by today’s elites, that’s all the more reason they should have it.

Posted at 4:05 pm by Stephen Green

MOOD INDIGO: Getting used to tyranny.

Just now, in the California gulag, a law was enacted to forbid the watering of “decorative” grasses, regardless of drought conditions. But it’s okay. We’ve become sort of used to it.

My sense of self-worth, however, resents being told what to do with my water. Sometimes I think of sustaining other non-essential plants…and even taking a shower or washing dishes. But the self-anointed geniuses have already enacted a statute that limits household daily water consumption to 55 gallons per resident for “internal” use, not including landscape irrigation. Since nobody knows how many residents are at any particular address, let alone what water is used indoors versus in the garden, the same “rulers” put the burden of enforcement on the local water districts. Thus far, such authorities have looked the other way.

All this has been done in order to compensate for avoiding the most obvious way of dealing with this issue: increasing reservoir storage capacity and building coastal desalination plants next to nuclear power generating facilities, as has been done near Carlsbad.

Why are we being governed by such stupid jerks? Answer: because we allow it.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 3:50 pm by Stephen Green

HMM:

As an old internet acquaintance asked, “Maybe Gavin is on commission?”

Posted at 3:34 pm by Stephen Green

THAT CERTAINLY SEEMS EXCESSIVE: A $95,000 Fine for Transporting a 6-Pack of Beer Defies the Eighth Amendment, a Supreme Court Brief Argues. “State troopers discovered the beer before the plane took off, and Jouppi was convicted of a misdemeanor. The trial court, which concluded that Jouppi had been ‘willfully blind’ to the six-pack, sentenced him to three days in jail and a $1,500 fine. But state law mandated another punishment that was 63 times as severe: forfeiture of Jouppi’s $95,000 airplane. Although that penalty seemed grossly disproportionate, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that it did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines.”

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS TEACHING REMEDIAL ALGEBRA:

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

CORN, POPPED:

Posted at 1:58 pm by Stephen Green

SOMEHOW, THIS FAILED TO GET MUCH COVERAGE LAST WEEK: RFK Jr. Indicts Modern Democrat Party. “So I’m 72 years old, and for 70 years of my life, I would have bet any amount of money that I would not be addressing a Republican convention. The irony of my presence here is inescapable.”

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

THE NOT-SO-FINAL COUNTDOWN:

Wait, I thought Florida was going to be gone by the mid-1990s:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll