Today’s harvest of anything tagged “artificial intelligence” includes: a Catholic diocese asking what a 17th-century Doctor of the Church can teach us about it, a chemistry professor writing songs about it to help students memorize reaction mechanisms, a state senator’s virtual town hall on it and the future of work, and a group of Nobel laureates signing a declaration that puts it next to nuclear weapons on the list of things civilization needs to get right. Not one of these describes something that happened. They’re all just reaching for the phrase, the way you’d reach for “quantum” in 2019 or “blockchain” in 2021, because it signals seriousness regardless of what follows it. I read this search every morning, and most days there’s an actual story hiding in the pile. Today the keyword just floated free of any news at all, doing the work of a hashtag.

Meanwhile the software story I actually wanted to read was sitting on Hacker News under a name that sounds like a joke: Homescale. Someone spent a few nights rebuilding PlanetScale’s whole trick, separating storage from compute so you can branch a database the way you’d branch a git repo, without copying the actual files, as a hobby project running on their own machine. No funding round, no watchdog, just someone who remembered a failed idea from an old job and wanted to know if it still held up.

There’s a nice inversion in that: the storage trick that raised a few hundred million dollars in Silicon Valley is now a weekend project with a self-deprecating name. Give it a few years, and I suspect today’s frontier training runs end up somebody’s homelab too.

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