Dana and Lawrence popped up live on a Monday morning (Indigenous Peoples’ Day, for those of us who still have to go to work) armed with PG Tips, vanilla, and the best news either of us has heard in months. Over four days, Ukrainian drones hit three data centers belonging to Yandex, which is basically Russia’s Google, the platform running search, taxis, payments, and a whole lot more. The targets were Sasovo, Kaluga, and, we are not making this up, Vladimir, where Yandex says operations are completely offline. Then Cloudflare’s data showed automated traffic from Yandex’s network falling off a cliff, and people all over Twitter noticed their mentions had gotten suspiciously polite. Researchers rightly warn that the chart measures web crawlers, not propaganda, and that bot farms can move to other servers. But tens of thousands of servers are now molten slag, Russia is under sanctions, American AI labs are buying every chip on the planet, and the midterms are three weeks away. We’re allowed one nice thing.
Lawrence also walked through his new piece on the developer who used Claude to build clean-room clones of seven Adobe apps in about a week, and the Microsoft Office clones that showed up while he was still writing his prediction that they’d arrive by Christmas. Software just had its Napster moment. Dana brought the story that made her lose it on Facebook this weekend: measles, a disease Gen X was handed already defeated, has topped 4,000 U.S. cases this year; Pennsylvania’s outbreak is tied to five deaths, two of them babies too young for the shot; and kindergarten MMR coverage has slid below the 95 percent that herd immunity needs. Then the news kept breaking on us. Federal agents searched Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home this morning, and we ran out of morning before we ran out of outrage.
Mentioned in this episode
• Lawrence Winnerman, “The Götterdämmerung of Software”, Blue Amp Media
• Dana DuBois, measles article, published this morning
• Lawrence Winnerman, the Seattle flag piece, published this morning
• Ukraine’s Strikes on Yandex Data Centers, Explained, The Moscow Times
• Did Ukrainian Strikes on Yandex Data Centres Cause Russian Bot Activity to Plummet?, Euronews
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