The Trump administration has renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, now calling it the National Laboratory of the Rockies, marking an identity shift for the Colorado institution that has been a global leader in wind, solar and other renewable energy research.

“The new name reflects the Trump administration’s broader vision for the lab’s applied energy research, which historically emphasized alternative and renewable sources of generation, and honors the natural splendor of the lab’s surroundings in Golden, Colorado,” said Jud Virden, laboratory director, in a statement.

He did not specify what this “broader vision” would mean for the lab’s programs or its staff of about 4,000.

The renaming is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to deemphasize or cut the parts of the federal government that support renewable energy, while also expanding federal support for fossil fuels.

Asked for details, the Department of Energy said in an email that the renaming  “reflects the Department’s renewed focus on ‘energy addition’ rather than the prioritization of specific energy resources.”

A lab spokesman had no additional information about whether there will be changes to programs or headcount at the lab.

Bill Ritter, a Democrat who was governor of Colorado from 2007 to 2011, said it’s reasonable to assume that the name change signals that the federal government is abandoning the lab’s status as a world leader in energy research.

“It’s an iconic research facility,” he said.

Underscoring this point, he recalled a trip to Israel while he was governor.

“The head of their renewable energy laboratory said, ‘I have nothing to tell you because you come from the place that has the best renewable energy laboratory in the world,’” Ritter said.

After leaving office, he founded the Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University, which specializes in energy policy research and is now a consultant on energy business and policy.

Based on this experience, he thinks that anything the Trump administration does to divert from the lab’s mission is harmful to the United States’ ability to remain a major player in the energy economy of the near future.

“We’ll no longer be competitive in renewables research with China or India or other countries that are still heading toward the renewable energy transition at a very fast pace,” he said.

People with close ties to the lab were not surprised by the name change, given the administration’s broader goals.

“In the early days of DOGE, people there were whispering about a name change to avoid the ire of MAGAs,” said Matt Henry, a Montana-based social scientist who worked at the lab from February 2024 to August 2025, in a post on Bluesky. “It pissed me off—prioritizing the preservation of the institution at the expense of its [stated] mission? So disappointing.”

He was referring to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which sought to cut federal spending in the early months of the Trump administration. The term MAGA refers to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan and movement.

Dustin Mulvaney, a San Jose State University environmental studies professor, said if the name change is a sign of a significant change in the lab’s work, it would be “like losing several major land grant research universities all at once.”

Mulvaney has done projects in partnership with people at the lab. An important part of the institution’s work, he said, is that its research is free and accessible to the public, helping businesses and universities that may not be able to afford the work of private research firms.

The lab’s mission has included consulting to help communities benefit from new energy technologies and ensure smooth transitions away from fossil fuels.

This work meant that the lab was out of step with an administration that has said it disagrees with the idea of a transition away from fossil fuels and has sought to impede funding and development of renewable energy.

The lab was established in 1974 as the Solar Energy Research Institute, part of a law signed by President Gerald Ford to facilitate alternatives to importing oil from the Middle East, according to a history on the lab’s website. The US was suffering through high gasoline prices amid tensions with oil-producing nations such as Saudi Arabia.

“The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” said Audrey Robertson, assistant secretary of energy, in a statement. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand.”

In 1977, the federal government selected Golden, Colorado, as the location for the lab. In 1991, the Solar Energy Research Institute became the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, part of a change by the administration of President George H. W. Bush that also elevated the institution to become part of the country’s national lab system.

But the lab’s history has also included budget cuts and periods when its work fell out of favor with presidential administrations, including layoffs and funding cuts under President Ronald Reagan. President Donald Trump proposed substantial cuts during his first term, but Congress retained much of the funding.

The Trump administration’s budget proposal, issued in May, calls for cuts across non-defense discretionary spending, including on energy research, but the budget process is still underway.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Read full article

Comments

Understand and improve on LLM-generated code

You’re about to commit a chunk of LLM-generated code into your product’s codebase. Before you do, however, pause to consider and act on these questions:

1. Does it work? A lot of generated code can ‘feel’ right but be either subtly or grossly incorrect. If you don’t already have an automated testing habit, it’s never too late. Vibes are not enough.
2. Do you understand the generated code? Could you explain it if asked? Don’t accept the code until you’ve learned from it and you know what it does. Don’t outsource your understanding.
3. What’s different between the generated code and what you might otherwise have done? Are the differences something you can learn from or something you should reject? Don’t accept code that is worse than what you would have written.
4. Can you think of at least one way to improve the generated code? Make it so.

In software development, one of the (non-swear) words we use to describe things we don’t understand or feel empowered to improve is legacy. We should be careful both to avoid ‘optimising’ and accelerating the creation of legacy code and to mistake such pessimisation as productivity — especially if we’re doing so at the expense of joy, time and skill.

In using Gen AI, many developers have unintentionally taken a back seat with both their knowledge and their destiny. By skimming past the friction necessary for learning, the pursuit of convenience ends up deskilling them rather than enhancing their skills. Many have confused meaningful productivity with the movement of a single metric or a subjective feeling.

It is easy — and common — to conflate progress through Jira tickets with actual progress in software development, or lines of code with needed functionality, or fixing defects with adding value to a product. Busyness is not the same as business. Getting better at getting through issues is not a benefit if you are creating disproportionately more issues over time, playing Whac-A-Mole with failure demand.

Use AI as augmentation. Treat AI as a power tool, not a replacement for craftsmanship.

— Russ Miles

AI coding assistants offer many opportunities for improvement of both our codebases and our knowledge. But just because the offer exists doesn’t mean it will be taken up. Without conscious effort and engagement not only is this opportunity lost, but the outcome could be worse in the long run. Being the human in the loop needs to be understood as an active not a passive role.

Don’t just turn the handle; listen to the music. Understand it. Feel it. Join in. It’s yours.

A person infectious with measles traveled through Denver International Airport earlier this month, a reminder to holiday travelers to be aware of the risk of infection as they journey to and fro.

The traveler, who lives out of state, landed at DIA at 7:24 p.m. on Dec. 12 at gate B45. The traveler departed from gate B84 at 9:41 p.m. the same night, state and local health officials say.

Authorities did not identify where those flights originated or where they were headed and said passengers who shared a flight with the infected person will be notified directly. But other travelers or workers who were at the airport from when the traveler arrived until about midnight that night should monitor themselves for symptoms of measles and call ahead before seeking medical attention if they believe they have been infected.

People exposed could come down with symptoms up until Jan. 2. However, authorities said the infected traveler was fully vaccinated against measles and had mild symptoms, meaning the risk of the traveler spreading the disease to others is lower.

Colorado has seen 36 cases of measles so far this year, the second most in a year since cases started being tracked in 1993, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment has said. But other states have been hit far harder.

There are currently two large outbreaks in the United States, one in South Carolina and another along the Utah-Arizona border. Both outbreaks have seen well over 100 cases reported.

Following the widespread introduction of vaccines, measles was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000. But the country will likely lose that status early next year. Facing even higher infection numbers, Canada lost its elimination status last month.

CBS cannot contain the online spread of a "60 Minutes" segment that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, tried to block from airing.

The episode, "Inside CECOT," featured testimonies from US deportees who were tortured or suffered physical or sexual abuse at a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. "Welcome to hell," one former inmate was told upon arriving, the segment reported, while also highlighting a clip of Donald Trump praising CECOT and its leadership for “great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games."

Weiss controversially pulled the segment on Monday, claiming it could not air in the US because it lacked critical voices, as no Trump officials were interviewed. She claimed that the segment "did not advance the ball" and merely echoed others' reporting, NBC News reported. Her plan was to air the segment when it was "ready," insisting that holding stories "for whatever reason" happens "every day in every newsroom."

But Weiss apparently did not realize that the "Inside CECOT" would still stream in Canada, giving the public a chance to view the segment as reporters had intended.

Critics accusing CBS of censoring the story quickly shared the segment online Monday after discovering that it was available on the Global TV app. Using a VPN to connect to the app with a Canadian IP address was all it took to override Weiss' block in the US, as 404 Media reported the segment was uploaded to "to a variety of file sharing sites and services, including iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent," including on the recently revived file-sharing service LimeWire. It's currently also available to stream on the Internet Archive, where one reviewer largely summed up the public's response so far, writing, "cannot believe this was pulled, not a dang thing wrong with this segment except it shows truth."

CBS did not immediately respond to Ars' request to comment. The network faces criticism from both outside and within its studios, as reporters and CBS viewers question the integrity of Weiss' decision now that the segment has aired. Recently appointed CBS editor-in-chief, Weiss' prior experience as a contrarian opinion writer helming her own right-leaning platform, The Free Press, prompted early concerns that she might water down CBS's critical coverage of the Trump administration. And the seeming censorship of the "60 Minutes" episode was perceived by some as a canary in a coal mine, confirming critics' fears.

CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who anchored the segment, noted that the Trump administration had repeatedly declined to comment as the story came together. By delaying the segment solely because of Trump officials' silence, Weiss appeared to be giving the Trump administration a "kill switch" to block any story they don't want aired, Alfonsi suggested.

"Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices," Alfonsi wrote in a note to CBS colleagues that was widely shared online. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Tim Richardson, journalism and disinformation program director at PEN America, told NBC News that Weiss risked damaging CBS's credibility by making a seemingly hasty decision to postpone a report that may have upset the Trump administration.

"CBS journalists, among the best in this country, appropriately made an outreach effort to get the government to weigh in on a deeply reported story out of El Salvador," Richardson said. "Pulling it back at the last minute because the government chose not to respond is an insult not only to the integrity of the journalists but to core principles of independent news gathering."

Early 2000s tool LimeWire used to pirate episode

As Americans scrambled to share the "Inside CECOT" story, assuming that CBS would be working in the background to pull down uploads, a once-blacklisted tool from the early 2000s became a reliable way to keep the broadcast online.

On Reddit, users shared links to a LimeWire torrent, prompting chuckles from people surprised to see the peer-to-peer service best known for infecting parents' computers with viruses in the 2000s suddenly revived in 2025 to skirt feared US government censorship.

"Yo what," one user joked, highlighting only the word "LimeWire." Another user, ironically using the LimeWire logo as a profile picture, responded, "man, who knew my nostalgia prof pic would become relevant again, WTF."

LimeWire was created in 2000 and quickly became one of the Internet's favorite services for pirating music until record labels won a 2010 injunction that blocked all file-sharing functionality. As the Reddit thread noted, some LimeWire users were personally targeted in lawsuits.

For a while after the injunction, a fraction of users kept the service alive by running older versions of the software that weren't immediately disabled. New owners took over LimeWire in 2022, officially relaunching the service. The service's about page currently notes that "millions of individuals and businesses" use the global file-sharing service today, but for some early Internet users, the name remains a blast from the past.

"Bringing back LimeWire to illegally rip copies of reporting suppressed by the government is definitely some cyberpunk shit," a Bluesky user wrote.

"We need a champion against the darkness," a Reddit commenter echoed. "I side with LimeWire."

Read full article

Comments

So: I've had surgery on one eye, and have new glasses to tide me over while the cataract in my other eye worsens enough to require surgery (I'm on the low priority waiting list in the meantime). And I'm about to head off for a fortnight of vacation time, mostly in Germany (which has the best Christmas markets) before coming home in mid-December and getting down to work on the final draft of Starter Pack.

Starter Pack is a book I wrote on spec--without a contracted publisher--this summer when Ghost Engine just got a bit too much. It's a spin-off of Ghost Engine, which started out as a joke mashup of two genres: "what if ... The Stainless Steel Rat got Isekai'd?" Nobody's writing the Rat these days, which I feel is a Mistake, so I decided to remedy it. This is my own take on the ideas, not a copy of Harry Harrison's late 1950s original, so it's a bit different, but it's mostly there now and it works as its own thing. Meanwhile, my agent read it and made some really good suggestions for how to make it more commercial, and "more commercial" is what pays the bills so I'm all on board with that. Especially as it's not sold yet.

Ghost Engine is still in progress: I hit a wall and needed to rethink the ending, again. But at least I am writing: having working binocular vision is a sadly underrated luxury--at least, it's underrated until you have to do without it for a few months. Along the way, Ghost Engine required me to come up with a new story setting in which there is no general AI, no superintelligent AI, no mind uploading to non-biological substrates, and above all no singularity--but our descendants have gone interstellar in a big way thanks to that One Neat Magictech Trick I trialed in my novella Palimpsest back in 2009. (Yes, Ghost Engine and Starter Pack are both set very loosely in the same continuum as Palimpsest. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that Palimpsest is to these new novels what A Colder War was to the Laundry Files.) So I finally got back to writing far future wide screen space opera, even if you aren't going to be able to read any of it for at least a year.

Why do this, though?

Bluntly: I needed to change course. After the US election outcome of November 2024 it was pretty clear that we were in for a very bumpy ride over the next few years. The lunatics have taken over the asylum and the economy is teetering on the edge of a very steep precipice. It's not just the over-hyped AI bubble that's propping up the US tech sector and global stock markets--that would be bad enough, but macro policy is being set by feces-hurling baboons and it really looks as if Trump is willing to invade Central America as a distraction gambit. All the world's a Reality TV show right now, and Reality TV is all about indulging our worst collective instincts.

It's too depressing to contemplate writing more Laundry Files stories; I get email from people who read the New Management as a happy, escapist fantasy these days because we've got a bunch of competent people battling to hold the centre together, under the aegis of a horrific ancient evil who is nevertheless a competent ancient evil. Unfortunately the ancient evil wins, and that's just not something I want to explore further right now.

I'm a popular entertainer and it seems to me that in bad times people want entertainments that take them out of their current quagmire and offers them escape, or at least gratuitous adventures with a side-order of humour. I'm not much of an optimist about our short-term future (I don't expect to survive long enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel) so I can't really write solarpunk or hopepunk utopias, but I can write space operas in which absolutely horrible people are viciously mocked and my new protagonists can at least hope for a happy ending.

Upcoming Events

In the new year, I've got three SF conventions planned already: Iridescence (Eastercon 2026), Birmingham UK, 3-6 April: Satellite 9, Glasgow, 22-24 May: and Metropol con Berlin (Eurocon 2026), Berlin, 2-5 July. I'm also going to try and set up a reading/signing/book launch for The Regicide Report in Edinburgh; more here if I manage it.

As during previous Republican presidencies in the USA it does not feel safe to visit that country, so I won't be attending the 2026 worldcon. However the 2027 world science fiction convention will almost certainly take place in Montreal, which is in North America but not part of Trumpistan, so (health and budget permitting) I'll try to make it there.

(Assuming we've still got a habitable planet and a working economy, which kind of presupposes the POTUS isn't biting the heads off live chickens or rogering a plush sofa in the Oval Office, of course, neither of which can be taken for granted this century.)

I was just watching a panel on observability, with a handful of industry executives and experts who shall remain nameless and hopefully duly obscured—their identities are not the point, the point is that this is a mainstream view among engineering executives and my head is exploding.

Scene: the moderator asked a fairly banal moderator-esque question about how happy and/or disappointed each exec has been with their observability investments.

One executive said that as far as traditional observability tools are concerned (“are there faults in our systems?”), that stuff “generally works well.”

However, what they really care about is observing the quality of their product from the customer’s perspective. EACH customer’s perspective.

“Did you know,” he mused, “that there are LOTS of things that can interrupt service or damage customer experience that won’t impact your nines of availability?”

(I begin screaming helplessly into my monitor.)

“You could have a dependency hiccup,” he continued, oblivious to my distress. “There could be an issue with rendering latency in your mobile app. All kinds of things.”

(I look down and realize that I am literally wearing this shirt.)

He finishes with,“And that is why we have invested in our own custom solution to measure key workflows through startup payment and success.”

(I have exploded. Pieces of my head now litter this office while my headless corpse types on and on.)

It’s twenty fucking twenty five. How have we come to this point?

Observability is now a billion dollar market for a meaningless term

My friends, I have failed you.

It is hard not to register this as a colossal fucking failure on a personal level when a group of modern, high performing tech execs and experts can all sit around a table nodding their heads at the idea that “traditional observability” is about whether your systems are UP👆 or DOWN👇, and that the idea of observing the quality of service from each customer’s perspective remains unsolved! unexplored! a problem any modern company needs to write custom tooling from scratch to solve. 

This guy is literally describing the original definition of observability, and he doesn’t even know it. He doesn’t know it so hard that he went and built his own thing.

You guys know this, right? When he says “traditional observability tools”, he means monitoring tools. He means the whole three fucking pillars model: metrics, logging, and tracing, all separate things. As he notes, these traditional tools are entirely capable of delivering on basic operational outcomes (are we up, down, happy, sad?). They can DO this. They are VERY GOOD tools if that is your goal.

But they are not capable of solving the problem he wants to solve, because that would require combining app, business, and system telemetry in a unified way. Data that is traceable, but not just tracing. With the ability to slice and dice by any customer ID, site location, device ID, blah blah. Whatever shall we call THAT technological innovation, when someone invents it? Schmobservability, perhaps?

So anyway, “traditional observability” is now part of the mainstream vernacular. Fuck. What are we going to do about it? What CAN be done about it?

From cloudwashing to o11ywashing

I learned a new term yesterday: cloudwashing. I learned this from Rick Clark, who tells a hilarious story about the time IBM got so wound up in the enthusiasm for cloud computing that they reclassified their Z series mainframe as “cloud” back in 2008. 

(Even more hilarious: asking Google about the precipitating event, and following the LLM down a decade-long wormhole of incredibly defensive posturing from the IBM marketing department and their paid foot soldiers in tech media about how this always gets held up as an example of peak cloudwashing but it was NOT AT ALL cloudwashing due to being an extension of the Z/Series Mainframe rather than a REPLACEMENT of the Z/Series Mainframe, and did you know that Mainframes are bigger business and more relevant today than ever before?)

(Sorry, but I lost a whole afternoon to this nonsense, I had to bring you along for the ride.)

Rick says the same thing is happening right now with observability. And of course it is. It’s too big of a problem, with too big a budget: an irresistible target. It’s not just the legacy behemoths anymore. Any vendor that does anything remotely connected to telemetry is busy painting on a fresh coat of o11ywashing. From a marketing perspective, It would be irresponsible not to.

How to push back on *-washing

Anyway, here are the key takeaways from my weekend research into cloudwashing.

1. This o11ywashing problem isn’t going away. It is only going to get bigger, because the problem keeps getting bigger, because the traditional vendors aren’t solving it, because they can’t solve it.

2. The Gartners of the world will help users sort this out someday, maybe, but only after we win. We can’t expect them to alienate multibillion dollar companies in the pursuit of technical truth, justice and the American Way. If we ever want to see “Industry Experts” pitching in to help users spot o11ywashing, as they eventually did with cloudwashing (see exhibit A), we first need to win in the market.

   

3. And (this is the only one that really matters.) we have to do a better job of telling this story to engineering executives, not just engineers. Results and outcomes, not data structures and algorithms.
   
   (I don’t want to make this sound like an epiphany we JUST had…we’ve been working hard on this for a couple years now, and it’s starting to pay off. But it was a powerful confirmation.)

Talking to execs is different than talking to engineers

When Christine and I started Honeycomb, nearly ten years ago, we were innocent, doe-eyed engineers who truly believed on some level that if we just explained the technical details of cardinality and dimensionality clearly and patiently enough to the world, enough times, the consequences to the business would become obvious to everyone involved.

It has now been ten years since I was a hands-on engineer every day (say it again, like pressing on a bruise makes it hurt less), and I would say I’ve been a decently functioning exec for about the last three or four of those years. 

What I’ve learned in that time has actually given me a lot of empathy for the different stresses and pressures that execs are under. 

I wouldn’t say it’s less or more than the stresses of being an SRE on call for some of the world’s biggest databases, but it is a deeply and utterly different kind of stress, the kind of stress less expiable via fine whiskey and poor life choices. (You just wake up in the morning with a hangover, and the existential awareness of your responsibilities looming larger than ever.)

This is a systems problem, not an operational one

There is a lot of noise in the field, and executives are trying to make good decisions that satisfy all parties and constraints amidst the unprecedented stress-panic-opportunity-terror of AI changing everything. That takes storytelling skills and sales discipline on our part, in addition to technical excellence.

Companies are dumping more and more and more money into their so-called observability tools, and not getting any closer to a solution. Nor will they, so long as they keep thinking about observability in terms of operational outcomes (and buying operational tools). Observability is a systems problem. It’s the most powerful lever in your arsenal when it comes to disrupting software doom spirals and turning them into positive feedback loops. Or it should be.

As Fred Hebert might say, it’s great you’re so good at firefighting, but maybe it’s time to go read the city fire codes.

Execs don’t know what they don’t know, because we haven’t been speaking to them. But we’re starting to.

What will be the next term that gets invented and coopted in the search to solve this problem?

Where to start, with a project so big? Google’s AI says that “experts suggest looking for specific features to identify true cloud observability solutions versus cloudwashed o11ywashed ones.”

I guess this is a good place to start as any: If your “observability” tooling doesn’t help you understand the quality of your product from the customer’s perspective, EACH customer’s perspective, it isn’t fucking observability. 

It’s just monitoring dressed up in marketing dollars.

Call it o11ywashing.