An obituary topped the day: Bob Cringely, who told the personal-computer story to a general audience, has died. The rest of the issue splits AI’s two faces — running large models on a home PC and reining in runaway bills — alongside resurrected old hardware, a war-time energy case, and arguments about trades work.

Cheaper, more usable frontier models met everyday questions of cost and trust: from compressed inference and native-vs-cross-platform bets to streaming bills, storefront promises, and tools that let anyone see relativity or lost murals.

From the hidden compute tax AI crawlers impose on kernel.org to a California carve-out for open-source OSes and a Texas camera network built from a $1 fee, today weighs what openness and convenience really cost — alongside a sweeping new space telescope, Europe’s drying rivers, and the geometry of Earth’s longest straight lines.