The shift is largely due to the rapid ex­pan­sion of so­lar en­ergy, which is grow­ing faster than any other source of elec­tric­ity. Together, wind and so­lar gen­er­ated 30 per­cent of E. U. power last year, while fos­sil fu­els pro­vided 29 per­cent, ac­cord­ing to the analy­sis from Ember, a think tank based in London. Including hy­dro, re­new­ables pro­vided nearly half of all E.U. power in 2025.

Last year, for the first time, wind and so­lar sup­plied more power than fos­sil fu­els to the E. U., ac­cord­ing to a new analy­sis.

The shift is largely due to the rapid ex­pan­sion of so­lar en­ergy, which is grow­ing faster than any other source of elec­tric­ity. Together, wind and so­lar gen­er­ated 30 per­cent of E. U. power last year, while fos­sil fu­els pro­vided 29 per­cent, ac­cord­ing to the analy­sis from Ember, a think tank based in London. Including hy­dro, re­new­ables pro­vided nearly half of all E.U. power in 2025.

Last year, for the first time, wind and so­lar sup­plied more power than fos­sil fu­els to the E. U., ac­cord­ing to a new analy­sis.

The analy­sis finds that so­lar is mak­ing gains in every E. U. coun­try, while coal is broadly in re­treat. Last year, so­lar alone sup­plied more than 20 per­cent of power in Hungary, Cyprus, Greece, Spain, and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, in 19 European coun­tries, coal ac­counted for less than 5 per­cent of power. In 2025, both Ireland and Finland joined the ranks of European coun­tries that have shut­tered their last re­main­ing coal plants.

Warming, how­ever, con­tin­ues to chal­lenge the shift to clean en­ergy as drought saps hy­dropower. Last year, hy­dro out­put dropped slightly in the E. U., and nat­ural gas power rose to com­pen­sate.

“The next pri­or­ity for the E. U. should be to put a se­ri­ous dent in re­liance on ex­pen­sive, im­ported gas,” said Ember an­a­lyst Beatrice Petrovich. “Gas not only makes the E.U. more vul­ner­a­ble to en­ergy black­mail, it’s also dri­ving up prices.”

In parts of Europe, there are signs that in­creas­ingly cheap bat­ter­ies are be­gin­ning to dis­place nat­ural gas in the early evening, when power de­mand is high, but so­lar out­put is wan­ing. Said Petrovich, “As this trend ac­cel­er­ates it could limit how much gas is needed in evening hours, there­fore sta­bi­liz­ing prices.”

An E. U. Plan to Slash Micropollutants in Wastewater Is Under Attack

On January 21, 2026, @fredwilson chal­lenged @seth: AI can write code, but it can’t af­fect the phys­i­cal world. This is our re­sponse. Real corn, grown from seed to har­vest, with every de­ci­sion made by Claude Code.

AI does­n’t need to drive a trac­tor. It needs to or­ches­trate the sys­tems and peo­ple who do. A farm man­ager does­n’t per­son­ally plant every seed. They ag­gre­gate data, make de­ci­sions, co­or­di­nate con­trac­tors. Claude Code be­comes that farm man­ager— 24/7, data-dri­ven, fully doc­u­mented.

The Process — How this was built

Fred processes emails as part of his daily check rou­tine. Priority given to farm­ers and op­er­a­tors.

A pro­ject by @seth, in­spired by @fredwilson, or­ches­trated by Claude Code (Opus 4.5)Want to help? Iowa land leads, ag ex­per­tise, vibe coders wel­come: [email protected]

Tesla was told that if it could­n’t re­solve the de­cep­tive mar­ket­ing within those 60 days, the sales sus­pen­sion would take ef­fect. That would be bad for the au­tomaker, as California is far and away its largest mar­ket in the US, al­beit one that is shrink­ing each quar­ter. Having to sus­pend sales en­tirely in the state would be dis­as­trous. Some had spec­u­lated that Tesla could change Autopilot’s name to some­thing less mis­lead­ing, but the com­pany chose a more dras­tic ap­proach.

Now, if you buy a new Tesla and  want it to steer it­self—while you pay at­ten­tion to the road—you will have to pay for FSD. Until the mid­dle of February, that can be done for a one-time fee of $8,000. But start­ing on February 14, that op­tion goes away, too, and the sole choice will be a $99/month FSD sub­scrip­tion.

But prob­a­bly not for very long. Last night, Musk re­vealed on his so­cial me­dia plat­form that “the $99/month for su­per­vised FSD will rise as FSD’s ca­pa­bil­i­ties im­prove. The mas­sive value jump is when you can be on your phone or sleep­ing for the en­tire ride (unsupervised FSD).”

The quest for re­cur­ring rev­enue streams is be­com­ing some­thing of a holy grail in the au­to­mo­tive in­dus­try as OEMs that pre­vi­ously treated their cus­tomers as a sin­gle sale now hope to make them­selves more at­trac­tive to in­vestors by en­cour­ag­ing cus­tomers to give them reg­u­lar pay­outs.

This may have con­tributed to General Motors’ de­ci­sion to drop Apple CarPlay and Android Automotive. BMW has also ex­per­i­mented with sub­scrip­tion ser­vices. Tesla’s stock price re­mains so high that such games are prob­a­bly un­nec­es­sary here, but with falling profit mar­gins, de­clin­ing sales, and the loss of emis­sions cred­its to bol­ster the bot­tom line, one can see why reg­u­lar cash in­fu­sions from Tesla dri­vers would be de­sir­able.

Disclaimer: None of this is writ­ten by AI, I’m still a real per­son writ­ing my own blog like its 1999

I fi­nally fig­ured out how to do Gigabit Ethernet over my ex­ist­ing phone wires.

I’ve mostly lived with pow­er­line adapters over re­cent years. Some worked well, some did not (try few and re­turn what does­n’t work in your home). One I had for a while gave me sta­ble 30 Mbps, which was lit­tle but good enough for in­ter­net at the time. I care very much about hav­ing sta­ble low la­tency for gam­ing, more than band­width.

Fast for­ward to my cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, that pow­er­line adapter reg­u­larly lost con­nec­tion which was a ma­jor prob­lem. I got some new ones with the lat­est and great­est G.hn 2400 stan­dard. The fi­nal con­tender served around 180 Mbps to my of­fice (with high vari­ance 120 to 280 Mbps), or around 80 Mbps to the top floor. It’s good enough to watch YouTube/TV yet it’s far from im­pres­sive.

One pe­cu­liar thing from the UK: Internet providers don’t truly of­fer gi­ga­bit in­ter­net. They have a range of deals like 30 Mbps — 75 Mbps — 150 Mbps — 300 Mbps — 500 Mbps — 900 Mbps, each one cost­ing a few more pounds per month than the last. This makes the UK si­mul­ta­ne­ously one of the cheap­est and one of the most ex­pen­sive coun­tries to get Internet.

Long story short, new place, new hard­ware, new deals, the in­ter­net has been run­ning at 500 Mbps for some time now.

Every 50 GB of Helldivers 2 up­date (because these id­iots shipped the same con­tent in du­pli­cate 5 times) is a painful re­minder that the setup is not op­er­at­ing at ca­pac­ity.

Problem: How to get 500 Mbps to my room?

I’ve been look­ing for a way to reuse phone wires for a while, be­cause British houses are full of phone sock­ets. There are 2 sock­ets in my of­fice room.

I can’t stress enough how much we love our phone sock­ets. It’s not un­com­mon to have a one bed flat with 2 phone sock­ets in the liv­ing room and 2 phone sock­ets in the bed­room and a mas­ter socket in the tech­ni­cal room. It’s ridicu­lous.

A new house bought to­day could have 10 phone sock­ets and 0 Ethernet sock­ets. There is still no reg­u­la­tion that re­quires new build to get Ethernet wiring (as far as I know).

There’s got to be a way to use the ex­ist­ing phone in­fra­struc­ture.

I know the tech­nol­ogy ex­ists. It’s one of the rare cases where the tech­nol­ogy ex­ists and is ma­ture, but no­body can be both­ered to make prod­ucts for it.

The stan­dards that run pow­er­line adapters (HomePlug AV200, AV500, G.hn 2400) can work with any pair of wires. It should work ten times bet­ter on ded­i­cated phone wires in­stead of noisy power wires, if only man­u­fac­tur­ers could be both­ered to pull their fin­gers out of their arse and make the prod­ucts that are needed.

After count­less years of re­search, I fi­nally found one German man­u­fac­turer that’s mak­ing what needs to be made https://​www.gi­ga­cop­per.net/​wp/​en/​home-net­work­ing/

I was lazy so I or­dered on­line in self-ser­vice (which is def­i­nitely the wrong way to go about it). It’s avail­able on Ebay DE and Amazon DE, it’s pos­si­ble to or­der from ei­ther with a UK ac­count, make sure to en­ter a UK ad­dress for de­liv­ery (some items don’t al­low it).

The bet­ter ap­proach is al­most cer­tainly to speak to the seller to get a quote, with in­ter­na­tional ship­ping and the im­port in­voice ex­clud­ing VAT (to avoid pay­ing VAT on VAT).

The pack­age got the usual Royal Mail treat­ment:

* The pack­age was shipped by DHL Germany

* The pack­age was trans­ferred to Royal Mail when en­ter­ing the UK

* After some days, the DHL web­site said they tried to de­liver but no­body home, this is bull­shit

* Royal web­site said the pack­age reached the de­pot and was await­ing de­liv­ery, this is bull­shit

* In re­al­ity, the pack­age was stuck at the bor­der, as usual

* Google to find “website to pay im­port fee on par­cel”

* Entered the DHL track­ing num­ber into the Royal Mail form for a Royal Mail track­ing num­ber

* The web­site said that the par­cel had im­port fees to pay, this is cor­rect

* Paid the fee on­line, 20% VAT + a few pounds of han­dling fees

* The pack­age will be sched­uled for de­liv­ery a few days later

* Royal Mail and DHL up­dated their sta­tus an­other two or three times with false in­for­ma­tion

* Royal Mail de­liv­ered a let­ter say­ing there was a pack­age wait­ing on fees, though it was paid

Basically, you need to fol­low the track­ing reg­u­larly un­til the pack­age is tagged as lost or failed de­liv­ery, which is the cue to pay im­port fees.

It’s the nor­mal pro­ce­dure to buy things from Europe since Brexit 2020. It’s ac­tu­ally quite shock­ing that Royal Mail still has­n’t up­dated their track­ing sys­tem to be able to give a sta­tus “waiting on im­port fees to be paid on­line”. They had 6 years!

This is the gi­ga­cop­per G4201TM: 1 RJ11 phone line, 1 RJ45 gi­ga­bit Ethernet port, 1 power

* It came with a German to UK power adapter (unexpected and use­ful)

* It came with a stan­dard RJ11 ca­ble (expected and use­less)

* 3M re­mov­able hang­ing strip to stick to the wall, the de­vice is very light

There is a gi­ga­cop­per G4202TM: with an RJ45 to con­nect to the phone line in­stead of a RJ11 (not sure if it’s a newer model or just a vari­ant, as that one has two gi­ga­bit Ethernet ports). Don’t be con­fused by hav­ing a RJ45 port that is not a RJ45 port.

There is a gi­ga­cop­per G4201C (1 port) and G4204C (4 port) for Ethernet over coax­ial. Some coun­tries have coax in every room for TV/satellite. This may be of in­ter­est to some read­ers.

Plugged it and it works!

I dis­cov­ered soon af­ter­wards that I bought the wrong item. There is an InHome and a Client/Server vari­ant of the prod­uct. Make sure to buy the InHome vari­ant.

* The InHome vari­ant can have up to 16 de­vices, com­mu­ni­cat­ing to any peer on the medium, with sub mil­lisec­ond la­tency.

* The client-server vari­ant is pre­con­fig­ured as a pair, split­ting the band­width 70% down­load / 30% up­load, with few mil­lisec­onds la­tency. I think it’s a use case for ISP and long range con­nec­tions.

Thankfully the dif­fer­ence is only the firmware. I spoke to the ven­dor who was very help­ful and re­spon­sive. They sent me the firmware and the tools to patch.

I have a fetish for low la­tency. This screen­shot is oddly sat­is­fy­ing.

The web in­ter­face says 1713 Mbps on the phys­i­cal layer, the de­bug­ging tool says PHONE 200MHz — Connected 1385 Mbps.

I wanted to ver­ify whether the de­vice can do a full Gigabit. Unfortunately I re­al­ized I don’t have any de­vice that can test that.

Phones are wire­less, which is too slow to test any­thing. I checked out of cu­rios­ity, my phone did 100 Mbps to 400 Mbps right next to the router. Grabbed two lap­tops only to re­al­ize they did­n’t have any Ethernet port. I dug up an old lap­top from stor­age with an Ethernet port. The lap­top could­n’t boot, the CPU fan did­n’t start and the lap­top re­fused to boot with a dead fan.

There is a hard les­son here: 1 Gbps ought to be enough for any home. Using the phone line is as good as hav­ing Ethernet wiring through the house if it can de­liver a (shared) 1.7 Gbps link to mul­ti­ple rooms.

Still, I re­ally wanted to ver­ify that the de­vice can do a full Gbps, I pro­cured an USB-C to Ethernet adapter.

Full speed achieved, test­ing from a phone to a com­puter with iperf3.

Some read­ers might won­der about the wiring.

I did­n’t check the wiring be­fore buy­ing any­thing be­cause it’s point­less. British sock­ets are al­ways daisy chained in an in­com­pre­hen­si­ble maze.

Phone sock­ets need 2 wires and can be daisy chained. Ethernet sock­ets need 8 wires. They of­ten use the same Cat5 ca­ble be­cause it’s the most widely avail­able (8 wires ca­ble, the 6 ex­tra wires can re­main un­con­nected).

It’s pos­si­ble to swap the phone socket for an RJ45 socket, if you only have 2 sock­ets con­nected with the right ca­ble. It’s not pos­si­ble when sock­ets are daisy chained. (You could put a dou­ble or triple RJ45 socket with a switch to break a daisy chain, but it quickly be­comes im­prac­ti­cal in a British house with 5 to 10 sock­ets in an ar­bi­trary lay­out.)

I opened one socket in the of­fice room. There are two Cat5 ca­bles daisy chained. There are 3 wires con­nected.

It’s prob­a­bly daisy chained with the other socket in the room, or it’s daisy chained with the socket in the other room that’s closer. Who knows.

I opened the BT mas­ter socket in the tech­ni­cal room. It should have the ca­bles com­ing from the other rooms. It should con­nect the in­ter­nal phone wires with the ex­ter­nal phone line.

There is one sin­gle Cat5 ca­ble. There are 4 wires con­nected. It’s def­i­nitely not a mas­ter socket. WTF?!

It’s in­ter­est­ing that this socket has 4 wires con­nected but the socket in the of­fice has 3 wires con­nected. The id­iot who did the wiring was in­con­sis­tent. The gi­ga­cop­per de­vice can op­er­ate over 2 wires (200 MHz Phone SISO) or over 4 wires (100 MHz Phone MIMO). I can try the other modes if I fin­ish the job.

The search for the mas­ter socket con­tin­ues. The ca­bles from the other floors should all be com­ing down some­where around here. There is a blank plate next to it (right).

This might be the ex­ter­nal phone line? A bunch of wires are crimped to­gether, colours do not match. It’s the hell of a mess.

Only sure thing, they are dif­fer­ent ca­bles be­cause they are dif­fer­ent colours. They might be go­ing to a junc­tion box some­where else. Probably be­hind a wall that’s im­pos­si­ble to ac­cess!

Conclusion: There is zero chance to get proper Ethernet wiring out of this mess.

The gi­ga­cop­per de­vice to do gi­ga­bit Ethernet over phone line is a mir­a­cle!

There is an enor­mous un­tapped mar­ket for gi­ga­bit Ethernet over phone sock­ets in the UK.

I’m David Rosenthal, and this is a place to dis­cuss the work I’m do­ing in Digital Preservation.

There’s a kind of po­lite fic­tion at the heart of the soft­ware in­dus­try. It goes some­thing like this:

Estimating how long soft­ware pro­jects will take is very hard, but not im­pos­si­ble. A skilled en­gi­neer­ing team can, with time and ef­fort, learn how long it will take for them to de­liver work, which will in turn al­low their or­ga­ni­za­tion to make good busi­ness plans.

This is, of course, false. As every ex­pe­ri­enced soft­ware en­gi­neer knows, it is not pos­si­ble to ac­cu­rately es­ti­mate soft­ware pro­jects. The ten­sion be­tween this po­lite fic­tion and its well-un­der­stood false­ness causes a lot of strange ac­tiv­ity in tech com­pa­nies.

For in­stance, many en­gi­neer­ing teams es­ti­mate work in t-shirt sizes in­stead of time, be­cause it just feels too ob­vi­ously silly to the en­gi­neers in ques­tion to give di­rect time es­ti­mates. Naturally, these t-shirt sizes are im­me­di­ately trans­lated into hours and days when the es­ti­mates make their way up the man­age­ment chain.

Alternatively, soft­ware en­gi­neers who are gen­uinely try­ing to give good time es­ti­mates have ridicu­lous heuris­tics like “double your ini­tial es­ti­mate and add 20%“. This is ba­si­cally the same as giv­ing up and say­ing “just es­ti­mate every­thing at a month”.

Should tech com­pa­nies just stop es­ti­mat­ing? One of my guid­ing prin­ci­ples is that when a tech com­pany is do­ing some­thing silly, they’re prob­a­bly do­ing it for a good rea­son. In other words, prac­tices that ap­pear to not make sense are of­ten serv­ing some more ba­sic, il­leg­i­ble role in the or­ga­ni­za­tion. So what is the ac­tual pur­pose of es­ti­ma­tion, and how can you do it well as a soft­ware en­gi­neer?

Before I get into that, I should jus­tify my core as­sump­tion a lit­tle more. People have writ­ten a lot about this al­ready, so I’ll keep it brief.

I’m also go­ing to con­cede that some­times you can ac­cu­rately es­ti­mate soft­ware work, when that work is very well-un­der­stood and very small in scope. For in­stance, if I know it takes half an hour to de­ploy a ser­vice, and I’m be­ing asked to up­date the text in a link, I can ac­cu­rately es­ti­mate the work at some­thing like 45 min­utes: five min­utes to push the change up, ten min­utes to wait for CI, thirty min­utes to de­ploy.

For most of us, the ma­jor­ity of soft­ware work is not like this. We work on poorly-un­der­stood sys­tems and can­not pre­dict ex­actly what must be done in ad­vance. Most pro­gram­ming in large sys­tems is re­search: iden­ti­fy­ing prior art, map­ping out enough of the sys­tem to un­der­stand the ef­fects of changes, and so on. Even for fairly small changes, we sim­ply do not know what’s in­volved in mak­ing the change un­til we go and look.

The pro-es­ti­ma­tion dogma says that these ques­tions ought to be an­swered dur­ing the plan­ning process, so that each in­di­vid­ual piece of work be­ing dis­cussed is scoped small enough to be ac­cu­rately es­ti­mated. I’m not im­pressed by this an­swer. It seems to me to be a throw­back to the bad old days of soft­ware ar­chi­tec­ture, where one ar­chi­tect would map every­thing out in ad­vance, so that in­di­vid­ual pro­gram­mers sim­ply had to me­chan­i­cally fol­low in­struc­tions. Nobody does that now, be­cause it does­n’t work: pro­gram­mers must be em­pow­ered to make ar­chi­tec­tural de­ci­sions, be­cause they’re the ones who are ac­tu­ally in con­tact with the code. Even if it did work, that would sim­ply shift the im­pos­si­ble-to-es­ti­mate part of the process back­wards, into the plan­ning meet­ing (where of course you can’t write or run code, which makes it near-im­pos­si­ble to ac­cu­rately an­swer the kind of ques­tions in­volved).

In short: soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing pro­jects are not dom­i­nated by the known work, but by the un­known work, which al­ways takes 90% of the time. However, only the known work can be ac­cu­rately es­ti­mated. It’s there­fore im­pos­si­ble to ac­cu­rately es­ti­mate soft­ware pro­jects in ad­vance.

Estimates do not help en­gi­neer­ing teams de­liver work more ef­fi­ciently. Many of the most pro­duc­tive years of my ca­reer were spent on teams that did no es­ti­ma­tion at all: we were ei­ther work­ing on pro­jects that had to be done no mat­ter what, and so did­n’t re­ally need an es­ti­mate, or on pro­jects that would de­liver a con­stant drip of value as we went, so we could just keep go­ing in­def­i­nitely.

In a very real sense, es­ti­mates aren’t even made by en­gi­neers at all. If an en­gi­neer­ing team comes up with a long es­ti­mate for a pro­ject that some VP re­ally wants, they will be pres­sured into low­er­ing it (or some other, more com­pli­ant en­gi­neer­ing team will be handed the work). If the es­ti­mate on an un­de­sir­able pro­ject - or a pro­ject that’s in­tended to “hold space” for fu­ture un­planned work - is too short, the team will of­ten be en­cour­aged to in­crease it, or their man­ager will just add a 30% buffer.

One ex­cep­tion to this is pro­jects that are tech­ni­cally im­pos­si­ble, or just gen­uinely pro­hib­i­tively dif­fi­cult. If a man­ager con­sis­tently fails to pres­sure their teams into giv­ing the “right” es­ti­mates, that can send a sig­nal up that maybe the work can’t be done af­ter all. Smart VPs and di­rec­tors will try to avoid tak­ing on tech­ni­cally im­pos­si­ble pro­jects.

Another ex­cep­tion to this is ar­eas of the or­ga­ni­za­tion that se­nior lead­er­ship does­n’t re­ally care about. In a sleepy back­wa­ter, of­ten the for­mal es­ti­ma­tion process does ac­tu­ally get fol­lowed to the let­ter, be­cause there’s no di­rec­tor or VP who wants to jump in and shape the es­ti­mates to their ends. This is one way that some parts of a tech com­pany can have dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent en­gi­neer­ing cul­tures to other parts. I’ll let you imag­ine the con­se­quences when the com­pany is re-orged and these teams are pulled into the spot­light.

Estimates are po­lit­i­cal tools for non-en­gi­neers in the or­ga­ni­za­tion. They help man­agers, VPs, di­rec­tors, and C-staff de­cide on which pro­jects get funded and which pro­jects get can­celled.

The stan­dard way of think­ing about es­ti­mates is that you start with a pro­posed piece of soft­ware work, and you then go and fig­ure out how long it will take. This is en­tirely back­wards. Instead, teams will of­ten start with the es­ti­mate, and then go and fig­ure out what kind of soft­ware work they can do to meet it.

Suppose you’re work­ing on a LLM chat­bot, and your di­rec­tor wants to im­ple­ment “talk with a PDF”. If you have six months to do the work, you might im­ple­ment a ro­bust file up­load sys­tem, some pipeline to chunk and em­bed the PDF con­tent for se­man­tic search, a way to ex­tract PDF pages as im­age con­tent to cap­ture for­mat­ting and di­a­grams, and so on. If you have one day to do the work, you will nat­u­rally search for sim­pler ap­proaches: for in­stance, con­vert­ing the PDF to text client-side and stick­ing the en­tire thing in the LLM con­text, or of­fer­ing a plain-text “grep the PDF” tool.

This is true at even at the level of in­di­vid­ual lines of code. When you have weeks or months un­til your dead­line, you might spend a lot of time think­ing air­ily about how you could refac­tor the code­base to make your new fea­ture fit in as el­e­gantly as pos­si­ble. When you have hours, you will typ­i­cally be laser-fo­cused on find­ing an ap­proach that will ac­tu­ally work. There are al­ways many dif­fer­ent ways to solve soft­ware prob­lems. Engineers thus have quite a lot of dis­cre­tion about how to get it done.

So how do I es­ti­mate, given all that?

I gather as much po­lit­i­cal con­text as pos­si­ble be­fore I even look at the code. How much pres­sure is on this pro­ject? Is it a ca­sual ask, or do we have to find a way to do this? What kind of es­ti­mate is my man­age­ment chain look­ing for? There’s a huge dif­fer­ence be­tween “the CTO re­ally wants this in one week” and “we were look­ing for work for your team and this seemed like it could fit”.

Ideally, I go to the code with an es­ti­mate al­ready in hand. Instead of ask­ing my­self “how long would it take to do this”, where “this” could be any one of a hun­dred dif­fer­ent soft­ware de­signs, I ask my­self “which ap­proaches could be done in one week?“.

I spend more time wor­ry­ing about un­knowns than knowns. As I said above, un­known work al­ways dom­i­nates soft­ware pro­jects. The more “dark forests” in the code­base this fea­ture has to touch, the higher my es­ti­mate will be - or, more con­cretely, the tighter I need to con­strain the set of ap­proaches to the known work.

Finally, I go back to my man­ager with a risk as­sess­ment, not with a con­crete es­ti­mate. I don’t ever say “this is a four-week pro­ject”. I say some­thing like “I don’t think we’ll get this done in one week, be­cause X Y Z would need to all go right, and at least one of those things is bound to take a lot more work than we ex­pect. Ideally, I go back to my man­ager with a se­ries of plans, not just one:

* We tackle X Y Z di­rectly, which might all go smoothly but if it blows out we’ll be here for a month

* We by­pass Y and Z en­tirely, which would in­tro­duce these other risks but pos­si­bly al­low us to hit the dead­line

* We bring in help from an­other team who’s more fa­mil­iar with X and Y, so we just have to fo­cus on Z

In other words, I don’t “break down the work to de­ter­mine how long it will take”. My man­age­ment chain al­ready knows how long they want it to take. My job is to fig­ure out the set of soft­ware ap­proaches that match that es­ti­mate.

Sometimes that set is empty: the pro­ject is just im­pos­si­ble, no mat­ter how you slice it. In that case, my man­age­ment chain needs to get to­gether and fig­ure out some way to al­ter the re­quire­ments. But if I al­ways said “this is im­pos­si­ble”, my man­agers would find some­one else to do their es­ti­mates. When I do that, I’m draw­ing on a well of trust that I build up by mak­ing prag­matic es­ti­mates the rest of the time.

Many en­gi­neers find this ap­proach dis­taste­ful. One rea­son is that they don’t like es­ti­mat­ing in con­di­tions of un­cer­tainty, so they in­sist on hav­ing all the un­known ques­tions an­swered in ad­vance. I have writ­ten a lot about this in Engineers who won’t com­mit and How I pro­vide tech­ni­cal clar­ity to non-tech­ni­cal lead­ers, but suf­fice to say that I think it’s cow­ardly. If you refuse to es­ti­mate, you’re forc­ing some­one less tech­ni­cal to es­ti­mate for you.

Some en­gi­neers think that their job is to con­stantly push back against en­gi­neer­ing man­age­ment, and that help­ing their man­ager find tech­ni­cal com­pro­mises is be­tray­ing some kind of sa­cred en­gi­neer­ing trust. I wrote about this in Software en­gi­neers should be a lit­tle bit cyn­i­cal. If you want to spend your ca­reer do­ing that, that’s fine, but I per­son­ally find it more re­ward­ing to find ways to work with my man­agers (who have al­most ex­clu­sively been nice peo­ple).

Other en­gi­neers might say that they rarely feel this kind of pres­sure from their di­rec­tors or VPs to al­ter es­ti­mates, and that this is re­ally just the sign of a dys­func­tional en­gi­neer­ing or­ga­ni­za­tion. Maybe! I can only speak for the en­gi­neer­ing or­ga­ni­za­tions I’ve worked in. But my sus­pi­cion is that these en­gi­neers are re­ally just say­ing that they work “out of the spot­light”, where there’s not much pres­sure in gen­eral and teams can adopt what­ever processes they want. There’s noth­ing wrong with that. But I don’t think it qual­i­fies you to give help­ful ad­vice to en­gi­neers who do feel this kind of pres­sure.

The com­mon view is that a man­ager pro­poses some tech­ni­cal pro­ject, the team gets to­gether to fig­ure out how long it would take to build, and then the man­ager makes staffing and plan­ning de­ci­sions with that in­for­ma­tion. In fact, it’s the re­verse: a man­ager comes to the team with an es­ti­mate al­ready in hand (though they might not come out and ad­mit it), and then the team must fig­ure out what kind of tech­ni­cal pro­ject might be pos­si­ble within that es­ti­mate.

This is be­cause es­ti­mates are not by or for en­gi­neer­ing teams. They are tools used for man­agers to ne­go­ti­ate with each other about planned work. Very oc­ca­sion­ally, when a pro­ject is lit­er­ally im­pos­si­ble, the es­ti­mate can serve as a way for the team to com­mu­ni­cate that fact up­wards. But that re­quires trust. A team that is al­ways push­ing back on es­ti­mates will not be be­lieved when they do en­counter a gen­uinely im­pos­si­ble pro­posal.

When I es­ti­mate, I ex­tract the range my man­ager is look­ing for, and only then do I go through the code and fig­ure out what can be done in that time. I never come back with a flat “two weeks” fig­ure. Instead, I come back with a range of pos­si­bil­i­ties, each with their own risks, and let my man­ager make that trade­off.

It is not pos­si­ble to ac­cu­rately es­ti­mate soft­ware work. Software pro­jects spend most of their time grap­pling with un­known prob­lems, which by de­f­i­n­i­tion can’t be es­ti­mated in ad­vance. To es­ti­mate well, you must there­fore ba­si­cally ig­nore all the known as­pects of the work, and in­stead try and make ed­u­cated guesses about how many un­knowns there are, and how scary each un­known is.

edit: I should thank one of my read­ers, Karthik, who emailed me to ask about es­ti­mates, thus re­veal­ing to me that I had many more opin­ions than I thought.

We’re ex­cited to an­nounce our lat­est ma­jor re­lease, Zotero 8. Zotero 8 builds on the new de­sign and fea­tures of Zotero 7 and in­cludes a huge num­ber of im­prove­ments and re­fine­ments.

Zotero 8 in­tro­duces a new uni­fied ci­ta­tion di­a­log, re­plac­ing the pre­vi­ous ci­ta­tion di­a­log (the “red bar”), the “classic” ci­ta­tion di­a­log, and the Add Note di­a­log (the “yellow bar”).

The new di­a­log has two modes: List mode and Library mode. List mode lets you quickly search for ci­ta­tions from across your Zotero li­braries by ti­tle, cre­ator, and year. Library mode in­cludes a li­brary browser, let­ting you find items in spe­cific li­braries or col­lec­tions. You can switch be­tween the two modes with a sin­gle click, pre­serv­ing any added items or en­tered search terms. By de­fault, it will open in the last mode you used, but you can choose a dif­fer­ent de­fault mode in the set­tings.

In Zotero 7, we added the abil­ity to quickly add ci­ta­tions for se­lected items and open doc­u­ments. In the new di­a­log, these op­tions are avail­able in both List mode and Library mode, so you can make these quick se­lec­tions even if you oth­er­wise pre­fer to add items via the li­brary browser.

As be­fore, once you’ve se­lected an item, you can click on its bub­ble to cus­tomize the ci­ta­tion with a page num­ber, pre­fix, etc. It’s also now pos­si­ble to add any lo­ca­tor — not just a page num­ber — right from the search bar by typ­ing the full or short name (e.g., “line 10” or “l. 10” af­ter the ci­ta­tion and press­ing Enter/Return.

You can switch be­tween adding ci­ta­tions and adding notes us­ing but­tons in the bot­tom left, cor­re­spond­ing to the Add/Edit Citation and Add Note but­tons in your word proces­sor.

Annotations you make on PDFs, EPUBs, and web­page snap­shots now show up un­der their par­ent at­tach­ments in the items list.

Showing an­no­ta­tions in the items list makes it eas­ier to view an­no­ta­tions across a li­brary or col­lec­tion, and it also makes it pos­si­ble to search for an­no­ta­tions di­rectly. For ex­am­ple, you can search for all an­no­ta­tions in a col­lec­tion with a given tag and then cre­ate a note from those an­no­ta­tions or copy them to an ex­ter­nal text ed­i­tor with Quick Copy.

In Advanced Search, you can use “Item Type” “is” “Annotation” to match an­no­ta­tions or use the Annotation Text and Annotation Comment search con­di­tions to search for spe­cific parts of the an­no­ta­tion.

You can as­sign tags to se­lected an­no­ta­tions by drag­ging them to the tag se­lec­tor, just like other items.

Selected an­no­ta­tions show up in the item pane, grouped by top-level item.

We’ve added a new Appearance panel in the reader that pro­vides quick ac­cess to view set­tings and in­tro­duces sup­port for reader themes.

The view set­tings are per-doc­u­ment set­tings. Themes are ap­plied glob­ally for all doc­u­ments, in­clud­ing in the at­tach­ment pre­view in the item pane, and ap­ply to PDFs, EPUBs, and web­page snap­shots.

We of­fer a num­ber of built-in themes (“Dark”, “Snow”, “Sepia”), and you can cre­ate cus­tom themes just by spec­i­fy­ing a fore­ground and back­ground color. (Some other theme en­gines re­quire ad­di­tional ac­cent col­ors, but we’ve tried to make this as sim­ple as pos­si­ble for users by au­to­mat­i­cally ad­just­ing other col­ors based on the fore­ground and back­ground col­ors.) You can set a dif­fer­ent theme that ap­plies to light mode and dark mode.

The themes re­place the pre­vi­ous on-by-de­fault “Use Dark Mode for Content” op­tion, which in­verted im­ages in dark mode. We’re now sim­ply dark­en­ing im­ages a bit when us­ing a dark theme. Images and ink an­no­ta­tions in the reader side­bar and note ed­i­tor are now only dark­ened as well (and only when Zotero it­self is in dark mode).

When pos­si­ble, we also try to ap­ply themes to PDF pages con­tain­ing full-page im­ages, such as scanned pa­pers, by re­plac­ing whitish/​dark col­ors with theme col­ors. (Otherwise we sim­ply darken the page slightly.)

It’s now pos­si­ble to open notes in tabs in ad­di­tion to sep­a­rate win­dows. Note tabs fill the whole win­dow, with wide mar­gins for bet­ter read­abil­ity and a clean, dis­trac­tion-free space for note-tak­ing.

By de­fault, dou­ble-click­ing a note in the items list will open it in a tab. You can choose to open the note in the other space from the con­text menu, and you can change the de­fault be­hav­ior us­ing the “Open notes in new win­dows in­stead of tabs” set­ting in the General pane of the set­tings.

Notes in tabs have a sep­a­rate font size set­ting in the View menu.

Reading Mode re­for­mats web­page snap­shots for eas­ier read­ing, with un­nec­es­sary page el­e­ments re­moved. You can ad­just line height and other view op­tions from the Appearance panel.

We’ve re­worked the tabs menu to make it faster to in­ter­act with via the key­board.

You can now press Ctrl/Cmd-; to bring up the menu at any time.

Once the menu is open, it si­mul­ta­ne­ously ac­cepts search in­put, up/​down nav­i­ga­tion, and row se­lec­tion, with­out the need to move be­tween dif­fer­ent parts of the menu. You can sim­ply start typ­ing the name of an open tab and then press Enter/Return to switch to it once you’ve nar­rowed down the list.

It’s also pos­si­ble to quickly close mul­ti­ple tabs by mov­ing be­tween the row close but­tons with up/​down and press­ing space bar to close a tab.

Zotero now au­to­mat­i­cally keeps at­tach­ment file­names in sync with par­ent item meta­data as you make changes (e.g., chang­ing the ti­tle). In pre­vi­ous ver­sions, while Zotero would au­to­mat­i­cally re­name files when you first added them to your li­brary, if you later edited the item’s meta­data, you would need to right-click on the at­tach­ment and se­lect “Rename File from Parent Metadata”.

You can con­fig­ure which file types re­nam­ing ap­plies to from the General tab of the Zotero set­tings.

After up­grad­ing to this ver­sion, ex­ist­ing el­i­gi­ble files that don’t match the cur­rent file­name for­mat won’t be au­to­mat­i­cally re­named, but you can choose to re­name them en masse from the Zotero set­tings. Zotero will also prompt you to re­name all files if you change the file­name for­mat.

“Rename File from Parent Metadata” has been re­moved from the item con­text menu. If a file­name does­n’t match the con­fig­ured file­name for­mat (e.g., be­cause au­to­matic re­nam­ing is dis­abled or you changed the for­mat but did­n’t choose to re­name all files), you can click the “Rename File to Match Parent Item” but­ton next to the file­name in the at­tach­men­t’s item pane to re­name it.

Zotero 7 in­tro­duced more con­sis­tent han­dling of at­tach­ment ti­tles, pre­serv­ing sim­pler, less-re­dun­dant ti­tles (e.g., “Full Text PDF” or “Preprint PDF”) in cases where the ti­tle was pre­vi­ously changed to match the file­name. Zotero 8 fur­ther re­fines its re­nam­ing and ti­tling logic when adding mul­ti­ple and/​or non-pri­mary at­tach­ments, to bring the func­tion­al­ity bet­ter in line with the in­tended be­hav­ior.

We’ve also added a “Normalize Attachment Titles” op­tion un­der Tools → Manage Attachments to up­date old pri­mary at­tach­ments with ti­tles match­ing the file­name to use sim­pler ti­tles such as “PDF”.

While we rec­om­mend the de­fault be­hav­ior, al­low­ing Zotero to re­name pri­mary files and keep them re­named while us­ing sim­pler ti­tles in the items list, if you re­ally pre­fer to view file­names in­stead of ti­tles, you can now en­able “Show at­tach­ment file­names in the items list” op­tion in the General pane of the set­tings.

Zotero 8 adds a ver­sion for Linux run­ning on ARM64 de­vices. This in­cludes ARM-based Chromebooks, Apple Silicon Macs run­ning Linux (Linux VMs, Asahi Linux), and Raspberry Pis.

If you’ve been un­able to run Zotero on your ARM-based de­vice, or you’ve been run­ning the x86_64 ver­sion un­der em­u­la­tion, give it a try.

We’ve made a num­ber of changes across the in­ter­face to ad­dress com­mon re­quests:

* A new but­ton in the li­brary tab al­lows you to quickly close the item pane with­out drag­ging its edge or us­ing the menus.

* You can re­order item pane sec­tions by drag­ging their icons in the side nav­i­ga­tion bar.

* You can drag items, col­lec­tions, and searches into the trash.

* You can drag at­tach­ments, notes, and re­lated items from the item pane (e.g., to copy files to the filesys­tem or use Quick Copy).

* Collections au­to­mat­i­cally ex­pand when you drag over them, mak­ing it eas­ier to drop col­lec­tions or items into sub­col­lec­tions.

* You can delete at­tach­ments from the item pane.

* Tabs main­tain their size as you close them for faster clos­ing of mul­ti­ple tabs.

With Zotero 8, the Zotero Connector save popup can au­to­com­plete tags in your Zotero li­brary and al­lows you to add a note to items as you save them.

Zotero 8 in­cludes much more than we can list here. See the changelog for ad­di­tional de­tails.

Zotero 8 re­quires ma­cOS 10.15 or later, Windows 10 or later, or a Firefox 140–compatible Linux sys­tem.

Going for­ward, we’re chang­ing how we put out Zotero re­leases. Read about Zotero’s new re­lease sched­ule.

If you’re al­ready run­ning Zotero, you can up­grade from within Zotero by go­ing to Help → “Check for Updates…”.

Don’t yet have Zotero? Download Zotero 8 now.

This en­try was posted

on Thursday, January 22nd, 2026 at 12:52 pm by Dan Stillman and is filed un­der Features, News.

Windows PCs by de­fault will backup their en­cryp­tion keys to the cloud, and Microsoft is­n’t afraid to share those with the FBI if re­quested.

Windows PCs by de­fault will backup their en­cryp­tion keys to the cloud, and Microsoft is­n’t afraid to share those with the FBI if re­quested.

Microsoft has con­firmed in a state­ment to Forbes that the com­pany will pro­vide the FBI ac­cess to BitLocker en­cryp­tion keys if a valid le­gal or­der is re­quested. These keys en­able the abil­ity to de­crypt and ac­cess the data on a com­puter run­ning Windows, giv­ing law en­force­ment the means to break into a de­vice and ac­cess its data.

The news comes as Forbes re­ports that Microsoft gave the FBI the BitLocker en­cryp­tion keys to ac­cess a de­vice in Guam that law en­force­ment be­lieved to have “evidence that would help prove in­di­vid­u­als han­dling the is­land’s Covid un­em­ploy­ment as­sis­tance pro­gram were part of a plot to steal funds” in early 2025.

This was pos­si­ble be­cause the de­vice in ques­tion had its BitLocker en­cryp­tion key saved in the cloud. By de­fault, Windows 11 forces the use of a Microsoft Account, and the OS will au­to­mat­i­cally tie your BitLocker en­cryp­tion key to your on­line ac­count so that users can eas­ily re­cover their data in sce­nar­ios where they might get locked out. This can be dis­abled, let­ting you choose where to save them lo­cally, but the de­fault be­hav­ior is to store the key in Microsoft’s cloud when set­ting up a PC with a Microsoft Account.

“While key re­cov­ery of­fers con­ve­nience, it also car­ries a risk of un­wanted ac­cess, so Microsoft be­lieves cus­tomers are in the best po­si­tion to de­cide… how to man­age their keys,” Microsoft spokesper­son Charles Chamberlayne said in a state­ment to Forbes.

Microsoft told Forbes that it re­ceives around 20 re­quests for BitLocker en­cryp­tion keys from the FBI a year, but the ma­jor­ity of re­quests are un­able to be met be­cause the en­cryp­tion key was never up­loaded to the com­pa­ny’s cloud.

This is no­table as other tech com­pa­nies, such as Apple, have fa­mously re­fused to pro­vide law en­force­ment with ac­cess to en­crypted data stored on their prod­ucts. Apple has openly fought against the FBI in the past when it was asked to pro­vide a back­door into an iPhone. Other tech gi­ants, such as Meta, will store en­cryp­tion keys in the cloud, but use zero-knowl­edge ar­chi­tec­tures and en­crypt the keys server-side so that only the user can ac­cess them.

It’s frankly shock­ing that the en­cryp­tion keys that do get up­loaded to Microsoft aren’t en­crypted on the cloud side, too. That would pre­vent Microsoft from see­ing the keys, but it seems that, as things cur­rently stand, those keys are avail­able in an un­en­crypted state, and it is a pri­vacy night­mare for cus­tomers.

To see Microsoft so will­ingly hand over the keys to en­crypted Windows PCs is con­cern­ing, and should make every­body us­ing a mod­ern Windows com­puter think twice be­fore back­ing up their keys to the cloud. You can see which PCs have their BitLocker keys stored on Microsoft’s servers on the Microsoft Account web­site here, which will let you delete them if pre­sent.

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