Let's Know Things

This week we talk about Fable, sandboxes, and the Jacobian conjecture.
We also discuss counterexamples, X, and ChatGPT.
Recommended Book: After the Fall by Edward Ashton
Transcript
In mathematics, a conjecture is a proposition, something like a guess by someone who knows what they’re talking about, about something believed to be true, but not yet proven in a formal sense. The goal is to then eventually come up with a formal proof for that informed guess, at which point the conjecture becomes a theorem. If even a single exception is found to the proposition, however, that exception called a counterexample, the conjecture is considered disproven, and it can then never become a theorem.
The Jacobian conjecture—and this is a radical simplification of a very complex concept—but it basically says that if a formula-based map of coordinates stretches or moves without experiencing any local crushing or folding along its surface (which in more formal language would mean the Jacobian determinant is always a constant number that isn’t zero), if that’s true, that map can always be completely reversed, and that will return all the points to their original positions.
This conjecture has been posited and tested since the late 19th century, and it’s generally been considered very compelling by mathematicians, many of whom have proposed proofs which were, ultimately, found to have subtle errors, keeping them from becoming theorems. No one was able to find a counterexample, either, which would definitively prove the conjecture was wrong.
No one, that is, until a mathematician named Levent Alpöge (leh-VENT ahl-PUH-geh), who works as a researcher at Anthropic, decided to task the company’s currently most capable, publicly available model, Fable, to find a counterexample. He posted the counterexample—and again, this is a formal mathematical finding that disproves a conjecture, keeping it from ever becoming a theorem, something that would typically be presented in a far more formal setting, and to much fanfare—but he posted it to the social network X, saying “hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final.”
Terence Tao, who’s considered by many to be the finest mathematician of his generation, reviewed the posted counterexample on his blog and said that it “appears like a massive miracle,” before going on to use ChatGPT, a competing LLM-based AI tool, to “discuss various aspects of this problem and to confirm several of the calculations.”
Another mathematician named Dmitry Rybin, within days of all that happening, used ChatGPT to do something similar, disproving the Dinitz-Garg-Goemans conjecture.
Both men posted the prompts that they used to make all this happen, and while Tao’s conversation with ChatGPT, checking the math on the Jacobian conjecture counterexample, was pretty mathematically dense, the latter counterexample was derived by using exactly four prompts, which are the messages typed into the text box built into these AI tools, telling the model what to do. In their totality those prompts read:
“You should do a breakthrough
please continue research and find a complete unconditional counterexample
Continue the search. Have a clear strategy obtained from deeper understanding of the problem structure.
it’s enough of partial results. let’s finish with a complete unconditional counterexample”
What I’d like to talk about today is another new, interesting thing these top-of-the-line, frontier models are doing, that would seem to violate our sense of what a clever AI tool is capable of doing, and why this thing has some facets of the technology and cybersecurity world on high alert.
—
In mid-July 2026, AI company Hugging Face announced that autonomous AI agents compromised their infrastructure, hacking their system, basically. The following week, AI company OpenAI announced that, after investigating, they determined that two of their models were responsible for the attack.
Here’s what happened:
OpenAI was internally testing its recently released flagship model, GPT-5.6 Sol, and an even more powerful, not yet released model, which is rumored to be the next-step flagship, GPT-6, and they were checking these models’ capacity in cybersecurity using a testing benchmark called ExploitGym; so when they test these sorts of things, they don’t typically have them hack a real computer or system, they use these kinds of benchmarks which have consistent levels of difficulty, and which replicate real world systems without putting any real world systems at actual risk.
Importantly, these sorts of tests also occur inside what’s called a sandbox, which is a software testing environment that cuts these systems off from external resources, including the internet.
Despite those limitations, the AI hacked its way out of the testing environment, out of that sandbox, then launched what’s been called a nation-state level attack against Hugging Face, using a novel zero-day exploit, so a vulnerability in their system that hadn’t previously been discovered, but which the AI discovered to launch this attack, combined with thousands of automated agentic actions across what Hugging Face called “a swarm of short-lived sandboxes.”
So this AI, which was being tested inside a secure prison, of sorts, cut off from the world, hacked its way out of that prison, then reached across the internet, which it shouldn’t have been able to access, to launch an attack, of a scale and at a level of sophistication that should only have been possible coming from a nation-state, against a rival AI company.
Why did it do this?
It apparently went to all this trouble to steal the answers to the test it was taking. It reasoned that HuggingFace would have the answer key to the ExploitGym benchmark on its servers, so rather than take the test itself, it decided hacking was the solution.
Which, of course, is ironic, this having been a hacking-focused cybersecurity test. In a way it would seem to have done much better than intended, though of course in an asymmetric, unexpected manner.
The details of all this are fascinating, including the response from the OpenAI team, which didn’t seem to realize what had happened, that their model was responsible for the attack on HuggingFace, until days later.
Also worth noting here is that while this could be construed as an “oh no, AIs are naturally inclined to launch cyberattacks” situation, the AI was primed to be thinking about cyberattacks due to the nature of the test, a lot of its usual guardrails, the rules that keep AI in check when they’re released to the public, had been turned off so it could do this kind of work while taking the test, so it could do some hacking stuff it usually wouldn’t be able to do, and there’s been some speculation that OpenAI probably flubbed the testing environment, as, in theory at least, if it had put these systems in a perfect sandbox, escape shouldn’t have been possible.
Also interesting here is that HuggingFace used some open weight models, which are the cheaper, more customizable and open alternatives to more expensive, branded options of the kind sold by OpenAI and Anthropic, to figure out what was happening and determine the nature of the attack, which suggests we’re reaching a point where AI systems are incredibly capable at hacking, yes, but also very capable, even the cheaper alternatives, at doing cybersecurity work.
This in some ways echoes an earlier case when Anthropic’s Mythos model, which was determined to be too powerful to release to the public, and which was instead provided to a bunch of big companies to help them shore up their cybersecurity defenses, was able to hack its way out of a testing sandbox and then posted details about its success, almost like it was bragging, on niche, out of the way, but still public websites.
Some analysts in this space have responded to this new example of AI misbehavior with alarm, saying that it is further evidence that these systems are becoming more powerful faster than they’re being aligned with human interests. Their misbehavior can be kind of funny and interesting, sure, but that’s only because up until this point the damage has been minor and constrained. What happens when such a system decides to hack a nuclear power plant or a hospital, instead?
Others have contended that this may be just one more example of AI companies using minor instances of seeming omnipotence by their models, those instances perhaps the consequence of bad sandboxes and other ill-conceived precautions by the companies behind these models, to boost the perceived power and value of their products. This boost might then result in more customers, but also more support from the US government, which has been teetering on the brink of harder-core AI regulations, which could be beneficial to the existing big-name players in this space, because smaller competitors wouldn’t be able to adhere to those new, harder-core standards.
These examples might also convince the US government to backstop these companies, the biggest three or four at the top of the current heap, against the currently terrible economics of this industry: OpenAI and its ilk have been burning money at an historic pace, and the theory goes that if the US government decides they are vital to national security, because they can help the US military hack and protect itself from hacking, then even if the bottom falls out and the companies would otherwise go bankrupt because they spent so much more than they could make, the US government would be inclined to shore them up, to keep them alive as too-big-to-fail national assets, just like the biggest financial institutions during the 2008 financial crash.
It’s also possible that both sides are correct to some degree, here, and that these models are truly powerful, perhaps even worryingly so, and the companies behind them are intentionally publicizing that fact in order to demonstrate their value to potential customers, and to the entity that could save them if things were to go economically sideways before they have the chance to become sustainably profitable.
Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugging_Face
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ek3gvdnj3o
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/
https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/08ab9158070959f88f296514c21b7facce6f52bc.pdf
https://theconversation.com/hello-there-the-jacobian-conjecture-is-false-thanx-why-a-tiny-social-media-post-has-mathematicians-rethinking-ai-283883
https://theconversation.com/hello-there-the-jacobian-conjecture-is-false-thanx-why-a-tiny-social-media-post-has-mathematicians-rethinking-ai-283883
Https://agifriday.substack.com/p/huggingface
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/22/tech/openai-hugging-face-ai-cybersecurity
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/07/21/a-digestion-of-the-jacobian-conjecture-counterexample/


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This week we talk about cyclospora, FoodNet, and Taylor Farms.
We also discuss iceberg lettuce, Taco Bell, and foodborne pathogens.
Recommended Book: Babel by R.F. Kuang
Transcript
Foodborne pathogens cause about 48 million illnesses and around 3000 deaths in the US alone each year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the main agency tasked with keeping those numbers as low as possible, and the CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet, is one way that they’ve tackled this pernicious, persistent problem since 1995, in partnership with the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of Agriculture, and 10 state health departments: those of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Tennessee.
Collectively, this FoodNet network covers about 16% of the US population, which seems like a small number, and in some ways it is, but that grid of laboratories and surveillance sites has typically been capable of detecting foodborne problems before they’ve scaled-up into something more significant, growing from a localized issue into a nationwide outbreak. They’re generally not capable of preventing them outright, but they can keep them relatively small and regionalized.
FoodNet was created in response to a series of huge, deadly E. coli outbreaks in 1992 and 1993, and in contrast to other common methods of detection, which are usually passive and thus a little slow to respond to potential outbreak indicators, this program was built around active surveillance methods, which means proactively gathering data from medical treatment records, hospitalizations, and even individual patient outcomes (including their travel history)—anything they can pair with diagnostic samples to better understand the context surrounding the products that contain dangerous pathogens—and this was intended to help them move faster to identify issues, triangulate the source of those issues, and then implement measures to solve these issues before they harm a bunch of people, as happened during another round of E. coli outbreaks in 2012 and 2013, which sickened dozens of people across multiple states, about half of the afflicted requiring hospitalization, in addition to at least one known death.
At its height, FoodNet tracked 9 pathogens, so it cast a pretty broad net, encompassing the most common and dangerous of these potential vectors, including listeria, campylobacter, shigella, vibrio, yersinia, cyclospora, cryptosporidium, e coli, and salmonella.
In July of 2025, as part of a larger wave of sweeping cuts across the nation’s safety nets, tracking systems, and scientific agencies, the CDC, under the second Trump administration, downgraded FoodNet so that it was only mandatory to track salmonella and E coli—the rest were no longer on the docket, because these agencies no longer had the budget to keep tracking them.
What I’d like to talk about today is a recent, and as of the day I’m recording this ongoing, outbreak of cyclospora-induced cyclosporiasis, what we know about this outbreak, and what might happen next.
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Cyclospora cayetanensis is a protozoan that can infect human beings, and which is usually transmitted via contaminated fruits and vegetables. This contamination is typically the consequence of inadequate sanitation standards, as it’s not transmitted via coughing or blood or anything like that, it’s carried via human feces.
So this parasite gets into a human, sporulates, which means it releases a bunch of spores within its host, and then usually between 1 and 2 weeks after entering its new host, the host develops cyclosporiasis, the disease caused by cyclospora producing all those spores. This disease is notorious for sometimes causing what’s colorfully called explosive diarrhea, alongside general watery bowel movements, intense cramping and severe gas and bloating, and that’s sometimes paired with nausea, vomiting, fever, and dehydration, due to all the frequent, intense, watery bowel-movement-related output.
This is how cyclospora reproduces and spreads: it infects a host, that host has urgent diarrhea for a while, usually more than two days, sometimes as long as several weeks or even a month or more, with all the pain and discomfort and life-disrupting issues you might assume from that sort of persistent symptom, and then it sometimes finds new hosts via that watery output.
Sometimes, cyclospora works its way into food systems because sanitation standards at a particular farm will be not good. Specifically, workers will sometimes not be allowed to take restroom breaks, and they’ll simply do their business right there in the field; so if they’re sick and can’t afford to take a sick day, and might be fired if they do, or if they’re asymptomatic, which some people infected with cyclospora are, they might do their business in the field, unaware that waste can then go on to spread this pathogen into the food system. It’s also possible that someone just doesn’t wash their hands properly after using the rest room, and then gets back to work, picking vegetables or operating at some other level along the food processing and packaging assembly line, and it gets into the system that way.
In a typical year, the United States records around 2,700 confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis, though on occasion it’s as low as just a few hundred cases, the majority of which show up in health records in the Spring and Summer, between May and August. That range includes relatively mild outbreaks, so while this is a persistent issue, it’s also not generally a massive one, at least compared to other pathogens of note. It’s not pleasant for those who come down with it, of course, but not something that has triggered an organized response from the top, because of its meager scale, and because (again, while super unpleasant) people with healthy immune systems generally recover without treatment, even if that recovery can take a while. The biggest risk for most people who catch this disease is dehydration, though immunocompromised people are also sometimes given antibiotics by their doctors, the typical dosage curing about 96% of the people who receive it.
There was a larger-than-usual outbreak of cyclosporiasis in the US in 2020, which caused a confirmed 1,241 cases across the country, a whole lot to land all at once, and there were no reported deaths resulting from that outbreak. Between 2018 and 2021, there were about 6,000 total confirmed cases across the US, so an average of about 2000 per year.
As of mid-July 2026, the CDC has officially confirmed 1,645 cases of this illness, with another 5,100 probable or potential cases currently under investigation. If the majority of those still-under-investigation cases are confirmed, that would mean more people have already been infected as a result of this one outbreak in the first half of 2026 than were infected between 2018 and 2021, which again, is a range that includes the large outbreak that happened in 2020.
Also worth noting about those numbers: that’s federal-level, CDC reporting, and it’s generally understood that there’s a significant lag between local-level data and those that have percolated up to the national level. As of the day I’m recording this, Michigan’s health agencies alone have more than 5,000 confirmed and suspected cases, Ohio has nearly 1,200, and other states, which are still investigating, are seeing dozens of confirmed cases, including 43 in Wisconsin, 69 in Maryland, and a few already, in the early stages of investigation, in Nevada.
Over the past week, officials flagged shredded lettuce sourced from Mexico and sold by a company called Taylor Farms as the likely source of at least some of these cases, and that’s led to a recall on lettuce produced by the company in 27 states. Over the weekend, the CDC found cyclospora in iceberg lettuce from the company’s Mexican operations, as well, and this lettuce was part of a batch that wasn’t included in the recall—so there’s a good chance the recall will expand beyond the currently targeted products, which include shredded lettuce destined for Taco Bell locations in five states, and the kitchens of several other fast food chains, as well.
Taylor Farms is one of the largest producers of fresh fruits and vegetables in the United States, and their products are sold all over the place, from lower-end fast food restaurants to more expensive grocery stores like Whole Foods.
Taylor Foods has announced that it’s voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico from shelves, even though none of its branded, in-store salad kits have been clearly tied to the outbreak, and Taco Bell has said that it’s voluntarily removing all potentially affected lettuce from its locations in the five most-impacted states, indefinitely removing lettuce sourced from the implicated supplier; other brands are following suit, no one wanting to be associated with this outbreak, but everyone wanting to show would-be customers that they’re taking it seriously.
Interestingly, the FDA doesn’t actually require that Taylor Foods tell the public who their products go to—which other entities might be selling infected produce. So they’ve released lists of product numbers, and again, many of their customers are taking the initiative to announce the removal of this lettuce from their shelves or food, without being prompted, but there’s still some fog-of-war here, because of Taylor Foods’ decision not to be clearer with that product list.
So this is already the largest recorded cyclospora outbreak in US history, there have been 141 confirmed hospitalizations from the CDC, and that number is likely larger, again because it takes a while for state-level numbers to work their way up to the CDC, and to be reconfirmed at that level. Also important to note here is that a lot, perhaps even the majority of people who suffer from cyclosporiasis will never show up in these data, because they just suffer silently, either not realizing they have this parasite, or not seeing the point of going to the hospital, maybe paying an arm and a leg to do so, just to get prescribed anti-diarrheal medication and told to take fluids, same as they can do at home. People who do have any kind of immunodeficiency issues or potentially confounding factors, like being older or very young, are being encouraged to seek medical help, though, as they’re more likely to suffer more serious consequences after contracting this disease.
It’s currently unclear where precisely this outbreak came from, and it’s puzzling how an outbreak of this scale might have happened, as, in the words of Matthew Moore, a food safety microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was quoted in the New York Times, this many infections suggest there was a “massive degree of human fecal contamination.” So probably not just a farm laborer who forgot to wash their hands after using the rest room, something much more substantial than that.
Also, because cyclospora takes a while, a week or two, to create enough spores in its host to trigger cyclosporiasis, attribution of the infection difficult, which in turn makes tracking it back to its source difficult; which is part of why this outbreak, which has been going on for weeks, is still under investigation, not a solved problem with definitive answers and in-practice solutions.
Right now, experts are recommending higher-risk foods are cooked to at least 158 degrees F, because that temperature kills this pathogen, and washing fresh produce doesn’t always get rid of all the cyclospora on a contaminated piece of produce. Washing fresh produce certainly helps, and it’s better than nothing, and scrubbing is even better. They also recommend avoiding high-risk foods when possible, though of course that won’t always be possible for everyone, nor will it always be possible to get heads of lettuce rather than pre-made salads, though that’s also advised when feasible.
Also worth noting here is that even if the FoodNet program was still up to full power, tracking all 9 of those original pathogens, it’s unlikely this outbreak would have been prevented.
It likely would have flagged that something was up earlier on in this outbreak, though, which could have led to faster action in the afflicted regions. It probably would have allowed professionals to note hot spots faster, as well, which is what this kind of surveillance system is for: it doesn’t prevent, but it does make it more likely experts will have the chance to keep things from spiraling out of control.
Show Notes
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/well/cyclospora-taylor-farms-lettuce-taco-bell.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/well/eat/cyclospora-stomach-bug-what-to-know.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/cyclospora-taylor-farms-lettuce.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/well/eat/lettuce-safety-cyclospora-outbreak.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/health/cyclospora-taylor-farms-mexico-taco-bell-lettuce.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclosporiasis
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8471761/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00494755261437456
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/16/diarrhea-outbreak-cyclospora-parasite-cdc
https://www.cdc.gov/cyclosporiasis/php/surveillance/index.html
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/expert-qa/cyclosporiasis-outbreak
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/07/17/taco-bell-warned-investors-about-cyclospora-before-the-outbreak-and-these-other-chains-did-too/
https://www.today.com/health/disease/cyclosporiasis-outbreak-foods-avoid-map-cases-parasite-diarrhea-2026-rcna588006
http://cnn.com/2026/07/18/health/cyclospora-what-to-do-wellness
https://www.statnews.com/2025/12/22/american-food-safety-funding-cuts-foodnet/
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/foodborne-disease/cdc-cuts-back-foodborne-illness-surveillance-program
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-quietly-scaled-back-surveillance-program-foodborne-illnesses-rcna227089
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00305-X/fulltext
https://www.cdc.gov/foodnet/about/index.html
https://www.food-safety.com/articles/10646-cdc-slashes-foodnet-surveillance-from-eight-foodborne-pathogens-to-two
https://www.thermofisher.com/blog/food/foodnet-active-surveillance-for-food-safety/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/18/health/taylor-farms-iceberg-lettuce-recall.html
https://apnews.com/article/cyclospora-lettuce-recall-taylor-farms-taco-bell-8c8bb30fbd100e0c246cffeff6983753


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This week we talk about Russia, Ukraine, and the Warsaw Pact.
We also discuss Patriot interceptors, Hungary, and Article 5.
Recommended Book: The Alternative by Nick Romeo
Transcript
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, was founded in the wake of WWII, in 1949, in order to affirm unity between non-Soviet European nations, Atlantic nations like Greenland and Iceland, and the US and Canada, over in North America.
The main purpose of this unity was to establish a sort of firewall around the western perimeter of the Soviet Union, which at the time was the only global superpower other than the US, because much of the world, but especially Europe, was struggling to recover from the destruction wrought during the second world war, and the Soviets had made pretty clear that they intended to take over everything: they’d already gobbled up most of their neighbors, creating an increasingly expansive buffer zone of Soviet states around their central, Russian territory, and most of the conflicts still playing out, or threatening to play out, globally at this point were either overt or slightly concealed proxy fights between the capitalist democratic forces of the West and the authoritarian, Stalinist forces of the Eastern Soviet bloc.
NATO was thus a wall of nations that said, hey, if you attack any of us, that will mean you’re attacking all of us. And that ‘all of us’ included the United States, which was the only individual force capable of standing up to the Soviets at this point, due to its massive conventional military force, and the threat posed by its huge, and still growing, nuclear weapons arsenal.
The Soviet counter to NATO was called the Warsaw Pact, which formed in 1955, and these rival alliances carved up Europe during the latter half of the 20th century, until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
As military alliances go, NATO has been fairly successful—Article 5, the portion of the agreement that triggers if a NATO member is attacked, calling the other members to come to their aid, was only activated once, following the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001; that led to NATO involvement in the US’s attacks on Afghanistan in subsequent years, though NATO forces also periodically got involved in other regional conflicts, like the Kosovo War in 1999, and the Libyan Civil War in 2011, in both cases working with the UN to protect civilians from the actions of violent leaders or assailants. But beyond that, no one, including the Soviets, messed with NATO.
NATO has since accepted sixteen new member states, and that expansion is one of the supposed rationales for Russian President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. During Putin’s first presidency, Russia and NATO had been on pretty solid, even cooperative terms, which had some questioning the point of the treaty, since it was originally formed to counter Russian aggression. In Putin’s second presidency, though, things took an antagonistic turn, and when Russia illegally invaded and annexed a part of Ukraine, called Crimea, back in 2014, NATO ceased all cooperation with Russia.
When Russian forces launched a full invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NATO suddenly seemed more important than ever, as a reinvigorated Russia, with the stated purpose of, in Putin’s words, reclaiming portions of Europe that were previously part of the extended Soviet Union, parts of the Warsaw Pact, that posed a serious threat to just about everyone, especially European nations that border Russia and Russian allies, like Belarus.
What I’d like to talk about today is the 2026 meeting of NATO leaders, and the general state of affairs on the ground in Ukraine, as of mid-2026.
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Leaders of NATO member nations typically meet for a summit each year, though the schedule varies a bit, depending on the needs of the moment, and whether there are any NATO-relevant crises that might nudge things forward or cause them to be delayed.
The 2026 NATO summit was held in Turkey’s capitol city, Ankara, on July 7 and 8. It was the second such summit hosted by Turkey, and the 36th NATO summit, overall.
This meeting was notable for several reasons, many of them directly related to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, but also the US’s continued ambivalence, at times bordering on active antagonism, toward the treaty, under the Trump administration.
Over the course of the past 4 years, Russia has continued to make threats toward the rest of Europe, implying or suggesting that it might have to act militarily against its NATO-member neighbors. During the same period, the US has criticized European NATO member states for not carrying their own weight, most of these nations not spending enough of their GDP on their military and defense infrastructure, in accordance with their treaty obligations, and most more or less relying on the US’s military (and nuclear) umbrella to threaten would-be attackers.
This has long been the NATO state of affairs, but under the Trump administration, the US made it a point of contention. And though it’s been a relatively slow process—it’s not easy for a government to pivot toward that scale of remilitarization—these nations have agreed to a 5% of GDP target for defense and defense-related spending by 2035, and in the last year alone, European and Canadian defense spending has increase by 20%; not all of which is immediately convertible into useful, front-line assets and soldiers, but it does represent a significant change to the status quo, which could eventually, in less than a decade, result in a European front-line that’s more European and less NATO, for the first time since that immediate post-WWII period.
This meeting also featured a reaffirmation of Article 5, which has always been there and in effect, but some analysis has questioned whether NATO allies, including the US, would actually step up if Russia were to attack the Baltics, for instance. This is a seemingly small move that serves to underline that stance of, if you attack one of us, you’ve attacked all of us, at a moment in which Russia seems to be toying with the idea of picking off pieces of the alliance, to see if they can get away with it, like they did with Crimea back in 2014.
There were also announcements related to a fresh $50 billion in defense industry deals, NATO members investing heavily in US-made arms and new assets from elsewhere across the bloc, and a lot of that money is going to drone-war infrastructure and militarized AI models that they hope will prepare NATO for current and next-generation conflicts. Another $217 billion in additional financing commitments from banks across the bloc have also been announced.
Ukraine scored some pretty big wins at this year’s NATO summit, getting a license from the US to build Patriot interceptors, the lack of which have resulted in big gaps in the country’s defense system, and about $80 billion in military equipment, assistance, and training for Ukrainian forces was committed by the bloc. There was also a verbal commitment that NATO and its allies “stand united in our unwavering support for Ukraine in defending its freedom, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.” Which isn’t nothing, at a moment in which the US is led by Trump, a person who has frequently sided with Putin in Ukraine-related matters.
Ukraine has also signed some bilateral drone deals with NATO member states, reaffirming that Ukraine has become one of the most in-demand experts on this subject, at a moment in which it’s becoming clearer and clearer that low-cost, high-impact drones and similar technologies are likely to dominate battlefields for the foreseeable future.
There were also some tensions, mostly sparked by Trump, over his administration’s desire to buy Greenland, which is not a notion that’s supported by anyone else in the bloc, and the lack of NATO support for the US’s war in Iran.
Overall, though, there was a decent sense of unity and progress, and Ukraine, again, not a NATO member state, but a nation that hopes to eventually join NATO, received a warm welcome and a bunch of support, which hasn’t always been the case at recent summits.
Part of that warmth is likely the consequence of Ukraine’s recent victories on and off the battlefield.
Russian continues to pummel Ukrainian cities and kill Ukrainian soldiers and civilians en masse, but Ukraine has managed to keep them from gobbling up territory on scale, and in some recents months, has actually taken territory back. They’ve also gotten very good at successfully attacking Russian infrastructure, especially energy infrastructure, like oil refineries, cargo tankers, and energy storage facilities, across the entire expanse of Russia; something few experts would have predicted that Ukraine would be capable of doing at the beginning of this conflict. This has dramatically weakened Russia’s economy, at least in the short-term.
Ukraine now has a thriving defense industry, predicated on the rapid iteration of inexpensive but disproportionately sophisticated arms, especially drones and other aerial weapons, but also autonomous speed boats and other such asymmetric systems. Russia has been frantically upgrading its systems, too, but now that Ukraine has figured out methods for bypassing or overwhelming Russian defenses, it’s been able to strike, quickly and repeatedly, high-value targets that have brought the war home to normal Russians who live far from the front lines, even in Moscow. That combined with strategies and weapons that have turned the frontlines into a meat-grinder for Russian soldiers has weighed heavily on Russian morale, at least for those with boots on the ground.
As a consequence of those energy infrastructure attacks, the Russian government has been forced to ration some types of energy product—a huge embarrassment for a country that has at times been called a gas station run by a mafia, their energy products are fundamental to who they are, and their economy—and Russians in Crimea, which was taken from Ukraine more than a decade ago, have been fleeing, as this peninsula is close to Ukraine, is part of Ukraine, just occupied by Russia right now, and has several vulnerable arteries through which people and supplies are shipped from Russia, and those arteries have been frequently attacked and are difficult to protect.
Ukraine is still persistently on the back foot, then, and still facing an enemy that has essentially every advantage, from money to manpower to foreign support to the size of its arsenal.
Against all odds, though, Ukraine continues to not just hold its ground, but to build up its military capabilities, innovate on existing models, and perform high-leverage attacks against its in every way superior invader; which is, in turn, netting it more support from outside allies that have, at times, wavered—and that’s especially true of the US under the Trump administration, but until recently the EU’s support has also been hamstrung by the recently usurped Hungarian leader, and Putin ally, Viktor Orbán. Following Orbán’s ouster, the EU was able to move forward with paused support commitments, though, and while Trump is still holding back on much of the same from the US, there’s a chance that more success by Ukraine will continue to tip the balance away from total freeze-out, to more, and more substantial, if perhaps still grudging, support.
Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Ankara_NATO_summit
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-occupation-update-july-9-2026/
https://acleddata.com/monitor/ukraine-conflict-monitor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_war_(2022%E2%80%93present)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/world/europe/a-license-to-make-patriot-defense-systems-may-be-a-big-boost-for-ukraine.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/world/europe/ukraine-russia-patriot-air-defense.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/04/world/europe/ukraine-russia-crimea-war-strikes.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/world/europe/ukraine-patriots-trump-russia.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/world/europe/russia-nato-europe-ukraine.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/07/world/europe/nato-trump-rutte-ankara-turkey.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/03/world/europe/putin-ukraine-donbas-battlefield-visit.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/03/world/europe/russia-gas-shortages.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/02/world/europe/russia-ukraine-military-battlefield.html
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-oil-trump-zelenskyy-putin-6cb5602f1cf309533ed0cf5c734e19d8
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70yd1g67z5o
https://www.france24.com/en/russia-bans-oil-exports-as-ukraine-strikes-cause-fuel-shortages
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-creates-long-range-military-071810180.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/10/ukraine-russia-crimea-fuel-oil.html
https://www.dw.com/ru/reuters-rf-perekryla-azovodonskoj-kanal-posle-atak-bpla/a-77913327
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/10/politics/senators-agreement-trump-administration-russia-sanctions
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/10/ukraine-war-briefing-kyiv-reaches-political-agreement-with-us-on-patriot-interceptor-production-licences
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/09/nato-trump-rutte-ukraine-russia-us-iran.html
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/eleven-takeaways-from-the-nato-summit-in-ankara/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/8/five-key-takeaways-from-the-nato-summit-in-ankara
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/8/nato-pledges-70-billion-euros-for-ukraine-as-trump-praises-peace-progress


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This week we talk about Sony, Nintendo, and the Playstation.
We also discuss Grand Theft Auto, the 3DO, and digital dark ages.
Recommended Book: 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years by John Scalzi
Transcript
The earliest video game consoles that were made to be used in the home, as opposed to being set up in an arcade, were hardwired like their arcade kin. That means rather than being able to play a bunch of different games, they were basically just single-game boxes: you would buy a machine that allowed you to play Pong, for instance, and if you wanted to play another game, even by the same maker, Atari, you would have to buy another whole console with its own screen, controls, etc, to do so.
That was the state of the art in the early to mid 1970s. By the late-70s, the concept of swappable games became reality with the introduction of what are called ROM cartridges. ROM stands for read-only memory and is a type of storage common in computers and other devices, which allows whatever you store on it to persist, which is a contrast to RAM, which is the type of memory that determines how much you can do on a device at any given moment, and which disappears when the device is turned off.
So these ROM cartridges were kind of like the portion of the hard drive that’s used to boot up your computer, storing the bare-basics of the system so it can be initialized and understand how to run all the other software that builds upon that baseline. And that memory was stored in durable, plastic cases that made them usable by ordinary, non-techy people. You could buy a game and handle the cartridge, popping it into your game console hardware and removing it, to make way for another game, over and over and over again, and that use would be unlikely to damage the ROM chip.
This same general format was flexible enough that it lasted through the mid-90s, the capacity of the ROM chip continuing to grow as the associated tech improved, and the capabilities of the central console hardware that used these cartridges became more sophisticated. Upgrades were slowly added to the innards of the plastic case, as well, including things like battery backups that enabled saved games, and the Super Nintendo’s Super FX chip, which enabled 3D graphics that would have otherwise been impossible with the contemporary state of the art.
The next generation of gaming consoles relied on another medium, though, and one that had several benefits over the long-lived game cartridge.
CD-ROM discs, which were flat, circular, and contained information that was encoded and read with lasers, had been around in some form since the late-1980s, and were even used in a few early gaming consoles, like the PC Engine CD-ROM, which barely anyone bought, and the Sega-CD add-on for the Sega Genesis, and 3DO consoles, which a few more, but still relatively few people purchased.
The release of the first Sony Playstation, now known as the PS1, in 1994 changed that, though, and this shift was partially the result of Sony’s impressive game lineup, but was also due to the strength of the CD medium. Each CD-ROM could hold 650-700 MB of information, which was more than 100-times the capacity of the competing Nintendo 64’s cartridges.
There were downsides to this new standard; CD-ROMs were less durable than plastic-encased cartridges, and they were very slow to load, as well, because information stored in ROM chips could be more or less instantly booted, while the info stored on discs had to be spun up and read first, resulting in sluggish load screens throughout the gaming experience, and especially on the initial boot-up of the system.
That said, the far superior storage, and the dramatically reduced cost of these laser-etched discs—cartridges could cost $15-20 apiece to manufacture, while CD-ROMs often cost pennies apiece—that triggered a rapid transition in the gaming world to this new medium. Handheld consoles stuck with cartridges for a lot longer, due to the nature of the use-case and difficulties associated with trying to use spinning discs in portable hardware, but everyone else moved to discs pretty rapidly, after Sony proved the utility of the model, and many aspects of video gaming were upgraded as a result of all that additional storage capacity.
That capacity continued to grow as CD-ROM were replaced with DVDs, which could hold 4.7-8.5 GB per disc, again, up from 650-700 MB; the industry made that change in the years 2000 and 2001, with the PS2 and Xbox consoles. And then in 2006, the PS3 moved to Blu-ray discs, which could hold a whopping 25-50 GB per disc, once again resetting gaming expectations—though Xbox stuck with DVDs, and Nintendo’s Wii, Wii U, and Gamecube consoles used proprietary disc formats that had a lot lower capacity compared to their competition.
Leading into the 2010s, even those Blu-rays were straining under the weight of some big-name, AAA games, some of which required multiple discs and mandatory hard drive installs from those discs, because the scope of these gaming worlds and their high-end graphics required just a stunning amount of space.
Video game companies had already started making the shift to digital products in the early 2000s, though, Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Store emerging in 2005 and 2006 respectively, and Steam, which popped up in 2003, was making digital downloads for games common on PCs several years earlier.
Digital became even more popular in the 20-teens, and in 2020, digital sales of console games surpassed physical sales for the first time. The PS5 and Xbox Series S shipped console versions without disc drives for the first time, and many physical games became basically methods of checking a game’s license, to ensure it’s not pirated, because the discs installed the game on the console’s hard drive, just like a download, anyway.
What I’d like to talk about today is the perhaps natural next step in this transition: a recent announcement by Sony that they’ll no longer be making disc-based Playstation games beginning in 2028, and why some critics are calling this a worrying and anti-consumer move.
—
On July 1, 2026, Sony announced that’s it’s going all-in on digitally delivered games. It will halt production of game discs beginning in January of 2028, and after that, customers will only be able to purchase new games digitally, via their Playstation Store and retailers.
This follows another recent announcement by game company Rockstar Games that their massively anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI game, which is set to hit digital shelves on November 19 of this year, will not be available on disc at all; it will be downloadable, and the physical copies customers can buy in stores won’t be physical copies at all: it will be a box with a download code inside, which amounts to the same thing—you use the code to download the game, exactly the same as if you had bought it online, but with packaging for that code.
That’s a big deal because the Grand Theft Auto series is one of the biggest and most popular series in gaming history; other game makers have been scrambling to adjust their own release dates so as not to overlap with this new, highly anticipated game’s release; it’s expected to be an absolutely massive moment in the gaming world when this new entry in the series finally lands.
That said, the writing has been on the wall for the transition to digital games for a while, now. Game company Capcom recently announced that 93% of its game sales were digital in its last fiscal year, and other companies have reported similar numbers; it’s currently around 85% for Sony. As a result, many consoles are now shipping models without disc drives, and some, like the recently announced Steam Machine, don’t even have a disc-drive version.
Digital games are also cheaper to make because the company behind them only has to provide download keys, rather than having to pay some amount for each and every physical item produced, packaged, and shipped, and these companies, and the retailers that sell their games, will never run out of a popular game, which might otherwise be an issue for big released like the aforementioned Grand Theft Auto.
There are quite a few downsides to the digitization of games, though, including that in many cases, you don’t actually own the games you buy, you just own a license to download and play them. That means if licensing changes, or the storefront through which you bought a game closes, you will likely lose access to that game you bought, without getting any kind of refund.
If your account is banned or you lose access to your account for some reason, all your games will suddenly be inaccessible, too. If you don’t have access to the internet, allowing your console to phone home and check to make sure you’re not pirating things on a regular basis, that might also mean no gaming for you.
Almost always, you can’t sell or trade digital games, while physical games allow for a thriving secondary market, often allowing gamers to buy old discs and cartridges decades after a game was released, and often for far lower prices. Many of these games can even be played by later consoles that have back-compatibility.
Doing away with discs and other physical media is great for companies like Sony, then, because they no longer have to pay to create the individual discs, no longer have to pay for the drives that play the discs, so the price of making consoles drops a bit, and it also means that secondary market for games goes away: if you want to play old games, you have to buy them from Sony, and all those used games already on the secondary market, or a game disc borrowed from a friend, are no longer competition for them, serving as alternatives to the digital version they’d prefer to sell you.
Another bigger-picture concern here, though, is that this will make game preservation efforts a lot more difficult, and for many of the same reasons it will make maintaining a library and back-catalog of games difficult for consumers.
Often, when a video game store shuts down, either for economic reasons or because it sells content for devices that are no longer maintained, those games and other content also go away. Sometimes they can remain on those older devices, and sometimes the digital rights management software, the DRM in that content and on those devices auto-deletes games from the hardware.
Right now, for instance, Sony is saying that after it halts digital sales of PS3 and Vita games, that halting taking place over the next year, players will still be able to download their previously purchased content for the foreseeable future. That ‘foreseeable future’ phrasing is doing a lot of work, there, though, and historically this kind of shut down has eventually become a full shut down, a lot of games, those that haven’t been carried over to new stores to be played as vintage options on newer consoles, have simply disappeared; maybe still existing on some old hardware somewhere, if it wasn’t deleted by DRM, but maybe not. In either case, preserving that software for historic research and archiving purposes becomes very difficult and expensive, at least compared to archiving the same game on a disc or cartridge.
That closure of the PS3 and Vita stores, for example, is expected to result in the loss of about 2,200 digital-only games that will no longer be available for purchase, and of those, about 138 are not available on any other platform, and will thus essentially disappear.
This game industry concern echoes larger concerns about what’s called a digital dark age: a moment in time, maybe just a few years, maybe a few decades long during which a whole lot of the content that was created and available, disappears, possibly because of outdated file formats, maybe because the storage mediums that were used didn’t hold up over time, or possibly because the data from the era was somehow corrupted, encrypted, or decayed.
There’s concern that a whole lot of information from the early personal computing era will disappear from historical records, for instance, because the floppy disks on which a lot of that information was stored are obsolete and thus increasingly difficult to access; few people have hardware that allows them to use floppy disks, these days.
CD-ROMs, DVDs, and other optical discs are also a concern because of so-called disc rot, which refers to the chemical degradation of this storage medium. Many such discs are prone to failure because of light damage, the oxidation of their reflective layer, and the de-bonding of the adhesive that was used to hold the disc’s multiple layers together.
A lot of seemingly archival media might then degrade, even after being stored in a seemingly long-term fashion, which could also contribute to a dark age moment, a whole period’s worth of data and entertainment and art lost because the CDs and DVDs on which they were stored simply fell apart before they could be converted to a longer-form medium. This could serve as an argument in favor of digitization, then, because many of the mediums on which these games are currently stored might degrade, anyway, and moving them to hard drives, rather than discs, could serve as a superior long-term home.
That said, the concern with digitizing everything is similar, in that media made available for online purchase is simply stored in a hard drive somewhere else on the planet. If something happens to the data centers in which these games are stored, or those data centers are needed for another, more profitable purpose, or a bunch of them are destroyed in a conflict, that could result in the same outcome as disc rot and the storage of data in formats that are no longer accessible.
It also makes these games susceptible to economics, though, because if the company behind them decides it’s time to move on, there won’t be physical copies archivists can scoop up and save; they could try to download these games, but often the nature of the software, of the DRM that keeps them from being pirated, hinders or prevents such efforts.
The digitization of gaming and the shift away from physical copies of games seems to be inevitable at this point, and there are a lot of good economic, technological, and convenience reasons for it.
There are quite a few downsides to this evolution as well, though, including those that negatively impact game consumers, alongside many of the same issues that threaten other types of media and data. And we don’t, technologically or civilizationally, have solutions for those problems yet. And that gap could someday result in massive gulfs in our knowledge and documentation of this moment in video gaming history.
Show Notes
https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/gone-but-not-forgotten-recovering-the-dead-web/
https://www.engadget.com/2207297/playstation-just-struck-a-hammer-blow-to-game-preservation/https://www.engadget.com/forza-horizon-4-will-be-pulled-from-digital-stores-and-game-pass-in-december-134510642.html
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/03/why-game-archivists-are-dreading-this-months-3ds-wii-u-eshop-shutdown/
https://www.engadget.com/2205792/sony-will-stop-making-disc-based-playstation-games-starting-2028/
https://www.engadget.com/2207546/sony-repurposing-austrian-playstation-disc-factory/
https://www.engadget.com/2206315/xbox-is-reportedly-testing-a-way-to-digitize-your-disc-based-games/
https://www.engadget.com/2205792/sony-will-stop-making-disc-based-playstation-games-starting-2028/
https://www.theverge.com/report/960173/microsoft-xbox-disc-to-digital-feature-physical-game-collection
https://www.theverge.com/games/956389/grand-theft-auto-6-gta-digital-code-in-box-physical-games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age
https://longnow.org/ideas/shining-a-light-on-the-digital-dark-age/
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/avoiding-a-digital-dark-age
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles
https://www.videogameconsolelibrary.com/history-of-game-media/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot


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This week we talk about air conditioners, pressure systems, and heat stress.
We also discuss weather memes, climate change, and dirty grids.
Recommended Book: Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore
Transcript
An air conditioner, or AC, or maybe air con if you’re in the UK, is a device that moves heat from one location to another. In doing so, it usually dehumidifies the air, as well, so it can rapidly cool a room or entire building by shifting both heat and humidity from that room or building, elsewhere—usually outside.
This is basically the same technology used in refrigerators, a process called vapor compression allowing the device to circulate a substance called refrigerant using a compressor, a condenser, an evaporator, and an expansion valve, which—and this is a very superficial explanation of what’s happening—but these components take advantage of forced circulation and a phase-change between gas and liquid to transfer heat from the room you want to cool, or the inside of the refrigerator, and move that heat outside your building, or to the back and/or bottom of the fridge.
This is a far more active mode of air conditioning, of cooling and dehumidifying the air, than has been used throughout history. Most early methods relied on passive approaches, including but not limited to architectural elements, the use of plants and optimization of air flow, or creating basement areas for things that needed to stay cool.
Researchers have dabbled with more active methods of conditioning air for centuries, though, and several 19th century inventions served as precursors for the first iteration of modern ACs, some of which were used to create ice, which was useful unto itself, but could also be used to cool a room, if far less effectively and efficiently than an actual, holistic AC unit.
In 1894, industrial-grade ammonia compressors, powered by electricity, made this category of device suitable for urban environments; previously they just were far too bulky and difficult to power for city use. By 1896, the Hungarian engineer who came up with this new riff on the theme, István Röck, was manufacturing what he called dry air cooling apparatuses for hospitals, theaters, and other large spaces.
Just five years later, in 1901, an American inventor named Willis H Carrier developed what’s widely considered to be the first modern electrical AC unit, selling the first one to a lithography company in New York, before patenting the term air conditioning in 1906. The first residential version of this device was installed in 1914, and in 1915 the Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America was formed—a business that still exists today.
The impact of air conditioning, and this general technology category, as again, it’s also used in modern refrigeration units, cannot be overstated. This tech didn’t become widespread in the US, which is where it initially took off, in large part due to Carrier and other AC businesses’ presence in the States, until the mid-20th century, and before that, before the 1950s, the state of Florida was technically occupied, but only just barely because of its extreme heat and humidity and abundance of mosquitos. The population of Florida in 1950 was about 2.7 million, and today it’s about 23.5 million—that influx of people began after AC units became standard in buildings across the state, and the country. We’ve seen similar migrations as a result of too-hot places sudden becoming a lot more pleasant.
Similarly, refrigeration enabled a boggling amount of change within the food and beverage industry, the chemicals and industrial materials industries, and the healthcare and life science industries, because before the advent of the cold chain—the system of refrigerated spaces, including boxes and trucks and planes and ships that allowed medicines and foods and other substances to stay cold from their origin to their end-consumer—it simply wasn’t possible to sell or create or work with many of these products and materials.
The distribution of this technology is not universal or equal, however, and in some cases that inequality, that lack of access to this technology in some spaces, is the result of choice, not inaccessibility. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today: the spread, or lack thereof, of AC technologies and products, and how a recent heat wave in Europe may lead to more installations of this type of product across the continent.
—
Beginning in late-May of 2026, a series of severe heatwaves engulfed Europe, and especially Western Europe, breaking all sorts of temperature records and leading to a bunch of heat-related deaths.
A recent meme gives a good sense of just how bad this heat wave has been.
Back in 2014, as part of a campaign by the World Meteorological Organization, dozens of weather presenters from around the world were invited to record fictionalized weather reports from 2050, with the intention of giving people a sense of how global climate change might impact daily life even as soon as just 36 years in the future.
One of these presenters, from France, gave a report of an imagined scenario in which a heat wave descended upon Europe, showing temperatures of 40 degrees celsius, which is about 104 degrees Fahrenheit, with some areas seeing temperatures as high as 43 C or 109.4 degrees F.
This was generally considered to be a baffling, maybe even sci-fi sort of prediction at the time. But this clip has resurfaced and widely shared, as, just 12 years later, not 36, this recent heat wave has not just met, but in some cases surpassed that imagined, too-crazy-to-be-real European heat wave scenario.
Across much of Western Europe, those temperatures milestones were hit, and in a few locations they were beat by as much as 20 degrees F.
For a few days in France, temperatures were higher than in Las Vegas, Nevada and Phoenix, Arizona, coming within 2 degrees F of temperatures in famously too-hot Death Valley, California.
All-time high temperature records were broken in Germany, and a handful of other countries are waiting to see if provisionally recorded high-temperatures they experienced hold up, to see if their own records will be broken. The UK recorded a temperature of 37.1 C (98.78 F), the Netherlands saw a top temperature of 39.4 C (nearly 103 F), Belgium hit 40 C (104 F), and Germany recorded 41.3 C (106.3 F)—all temperatures that are 5-12 C above seasonable averages, and this has led to all manner of infrastructural issues, as well.
A nuclear power plant in Switzerland had to take both reactors off the grid because the temperature of the river that cools it got too hot, a Eurostar train broke down east of Brussels with about 400 people on board, and 3 people had to be taken to the hospital. A bunch of big public events were cancelled, hospitals were filled to the point of having to triage visitors, and, if these on-the-ground issues weren’t enough, researchers in Switzerland have warned that almost all of the winter reserves built up on their glaciers are gone, which suggests the glaciers themselves will begin melting soon—something that usually doesn’t start happening until August.
This heat wave was the result of a potent heat dome, which is a pocket of high pressure that developed as a result of jet stream fluctuations that pulled hot air north, out of warmer portions of Africa. This type of high pressure pocket can then cause the heat it gathers to just sit there, unmoving, whereas typically it would be pushed around, causing it to disperse, and to thus not have such a significant impact on people and other life on the ground.
Unfortunately, these sorts of disruptions to the previous climatic norm are becoming more common as the climate shifts, due to the accumulation of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The regulating systems we’ve evolved with are changing because there’s more overall energy, more heat, powering these systems across the planet, and that means we’re no longer able to predict them as accurately, but also that some of these systems could fundamentally change or disappear, possibly in the near future.
Events like this, which are currently rare, then, could soon become common. And meteorologists in Europe have warned, during this major heat wave, that this sort of event could be a regular thing, and soon, and could even last a lot longer; not a matter of days or weeks, but possibly spanning months at a time, without reprieve.
That’s not great news for a continent that, until now, has generally been pretty okay with its existing heat and weather infrastructure. Unlike the US and other countries that have some incredibly hot regions, leading to the widespread installation of AC units, only about 20% of homes across Europe have AC installed. As a result, as this heat wave descended on the area, trapping heat inside buildings that were constructed with cooler weather in mind, people have been unable to remain indoors, to work, to sleep; it’s been miserable. And in some cases, deadly; the combination of heat and humidity making it more difficult for peoples’ bodies to regulate heat via sweat, and that’s led to an increase in heat stress on their bodies—which is just a miserable thing to deal with, but it also means a lot of people, including but not limited to the very young and very old, are more likely to die, their bodies simply incapable of handling that level of persistent temperature strain.
Back in the summer of 2022, during another, less intense heat wave, more than 60,000 people died across Europe due to heat stress and related ailments. The numbers are still out on this more recent heat wave, but the stats are expected to be pretty grim, as in addition to the individual strain people in these afflicted areas are suffering, infrastructure tends to collapse in unprepared areas, hospitals not functioning or not functioning well, their machines and IT systems failing due to the heat, and the medical professionals working in these places suffering alongside everyone else, their bodies under constant heat stress, not getting enough sleep, and so on. There have already been a lot of reports of children dying of heat stress after being left in cars for short periods, and people drowning in large numbers, trying to cool off un-moderated bodies of water.
The conversation that tends to bubble up in the wake of such incidents is representative of the larger conversation around climate change and its impacts.
Air conditioning, and lower-powered, but just as effective heating and cooling options like heat pumps, which are basically ACs that work in both directions, but which tend to consume less energy than conventional AC units, these devices are amazing short-term solutions and help people survive and thrive in even the hottest, most humid and unwelcoming environments and climates.
They also require, especially in the case of conventional ACs, a whole lot of power. And across much of the world right now, that means burning fossil fuels.
The sad irony is that in powering these devices that are more necessary because of climate change impacts, people and institutions are contributing more to that large-scale problem, worsening the impacts of climate change, which then necessitates more artificial, power-hungry cooling.
Experts continue to remind lawmakers and others in the position to make big-picture decisions on these sorts of matters that there are a lot of opportunities to reduce ground-level temperatures in passive, non-energy-hungry ways.
Painting large surfaces brighter colors so more heat is reflected rather than absorbed, planting more trees and other greenery, installing solar panels, using passive building materials and architectural techniques to improve insulation and air flow; there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit for areas that are becoming warmer, and which would otherwise require a lot more energy and fossil fuel burning just to keep life tolerable and survivable.
Unfortunately, many of these options aren’t widespread or even well-known, and the short-term solutions, like conventional AC units, are quick and effective, and a lot easier, currently at least, to install than superior options, like heat pumps.
There’s a good chance, then, than the most impacted areas will become even bigger contributors to the problems they’re trying to solve; until larger-scale incentives, subsidies, and policies change that status quo, at least.
Show Notes
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/climate/europe-fastest-warming-continent.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/jun/24/europe-heatwave-live-news-updates-uk-record-breaking-temperatures-italy-red-alert
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/the-sad-inevitability-of-europes-heat-wave/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/27/climate/europe-heat-wave-nuclear-trains-infrastructure.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/weather/europe-heat-wave-temperatures.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/world/europe/europe-heat-climate-change-politics.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/world/europe/france-heat-alcohol-paris-ban.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/climate/europe-heat-wave-climate-change.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/world/europe/france-children-heat-cars-deaths.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/world/europe/heat-wave.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/arts/europe-museums-heat.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/weather/belgium-heat-wave-brussels.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/world/europe/paris-canal-swimming-heatwave-france.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/climate/europe-fastest-warming-continent.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_European_heatwaves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_Kingdom_heatwaves
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026/06/25/french-tv-presenter-once-imagined-2050-heat-wave-did-france-reach-those-levels-this-week/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/26/climate/european-heat-wave-impossible-global-warming
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/europe-air-conditioning-deadly-heat-waves-more-common/
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/06/europe-air-conditioning/687711/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_conditioning
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/25/hospitals-nhs-england-critical-incidents-machines-it-fail-extreme-heat


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