A weekly roundup of stories you might have missed—from AI that works while you sleep to a Chicago fan’s four-decade secret recording archive.
1. Claude Code’s New ‘Routines’ Feature: Your AI Now Works While You Sleep
On April 14, Anthropic quietly rolled out one of the most practical AI updates in recent memory. Claude Code, the company’s developer-focused coding assistant, now has a feature called Routines.
Here’s what it does: you can package a prompt, a code repository, and some connectors into a template, and Claude will run it automatically—on a schedule, via API call, or when a GitHub event fires. The whole thing executes on Anthropic’s cloud, so your laptop can be closed and in your bag while Claude fixes bugs, reviews pull requests, or cleans up your backlog overnight.
Early users are already putting it to work. One common pattern: set a Routine to run at 2 a.m., pull the highest-priority bug from Linear, attempt a fix, and open a draft PR. You wake up to a ready-to-review fix. Another developer uses it to monitor a sensitive directory—”flag every PR that touches the auth module”—and post a summary to Slack.
The research preview is available now for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers, with daily limits ranging from 5 runs (Pro) to 25 (Team/Enterprise). As one Hacker News commenter put it: “Finally, I don’t have to leave my Mac on overnight just to let AI do my chores.”
2. A Chicago Fan‘s Secret Recordings of 10,000 Shows Are Now on the Internet Archive
In 1984, a teenager named Aadam Jacobs borrowed his grandmother’s dictation machine to record an AMM concert in Chicago. Forty years later, he has amassed more than 10,000 live recordings.
The collection is staggering. It includes a 22-year-old Kurt Cobain politely introducing Nirvana at a small Chicago club called Dreamerz in July 1989—more than two years before Nevermind changed everything. There‘s a previously uncirculated 1990 Phish performance opening for Alex Chilton. There are early-career sets from R.E.M., Sonic Youth, The Cure, and Tracy Chapman.
The Replacements were so impressed with his 1986 recording of one of their shows that they included it in an official 2023 live album box set.
Now, these analog tapes are facing the threat of disintegration. A global team of volunteers has stepped in to digitize the entire archive for the Internet Archive. Lead volunteer Brian Emerick retrieves boxes of tapes from Jacobs’ home, runs them in real-time on a wall of vintage, self-repaired tape decks, and sends the digital files to a decentralized network of audio engineers across the U.S., U.K., and Germany for cleanup and mastering.
About 2,500 recordings are already online and free to stream. They’ve racked up more than 130,000 plays. Jacobs has since retired from recording due to health issues, but his four-decade secret history of live music is now permanently preserved.
3. Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ Gets a Gigapixel Scan—and Sparks a Political Battle
One of the most famous anti-war paintings in history just got a massive digital upgrade. A new gigapixel scan of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica has been released, allowing viewers to zoom in on every brushstroke in stunning detail—from the weeping woman to the fallen horse to the hidden figures that scholars are still debating.
But the painting is also at the center of a political tug-of-war in Spain. The Basque regional government is requesting a temporary transfer of the 7.8-meter-wide canvas to the Guggenheim Bilbao, timed to the 90th anniversary of the Nazi bombing that inspired it. They call it “a symbolic and political reparation.”
The Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, where Guernica currently resides, strongly opposes the move. A recent technical report warns that transporting the fragile painting could cause irreversible damage, citing “a long life of travels and vicissitudes” that have already left their mark.
Then Madrid‘s regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, entered the fray, calling the Basque request “catetas”—roughly “hickish” or “provincial.” The comment sparked outrage from Basque leaders, while Spain’s central government says it will rely on “technical and professional criteria” to decide the painting’s fate.
For now, Guernica stays in Madrid—but you can explore it online in breathtaking detail from anywhere.
4. Orange Pi 6 Plus: A New Challenger in the SBC Market
A new single-board computer is making waves in the hobbyist community. The Orange Pi 6 Plus, built around CIX‘s CD8180/CD8160 SoC, packs a 12-core 64-bit processor, an NPU for AI workloads, integrated graphics, and support for up to 64GB of LPDDR5 RAM.
The board also includes two M.2 Key-M interfaces for NVMe SSDs, plus SPI flash and TF card slots. Early specifications suggest it’s positioning itself as a direct competitor to the Raspberry Pi 5, with potentially better performance for AI and storage-heavy projects.
The device recently appeared in Linux kernel mailing list discussions as developers work to add proper device tree bindings for the new board. For hobbyists feeling the pinch of DRAM price hikes, a new option in the SBC space is welcome news.
5. ‘Fuck the Cloud’—A 17-Year-Old Rant That Still Stings
This week, a 2009 blog post titled “FUCK THE CLOUD” resurfaced on Hacker News and quickly climbed to the front page.
Written by archivist and historian Jason Scott, the post is a blistering takedown of the idea that we should trust our data to remote servers we don’t control. “It‘s a sucker’s game,” Scott wrote. “If you are playing it, you are a sucker.”
His arguments feel eerily prescient in 2026. He warned that companies offering “free” services will eventually disappear—and take your data with them. He urged readers to never store anything in the cloud that they don‘t have a personal copy of. He called out the “frothy” nature of platforms like YouTube and Google Video, noting that “these are not Services. These are parties. And parties are fun and parties are cool and you meet neat people at parties but parties are not a home.”
The post has aged remarkably well. In the 17 years since, we’ve watched Google Reader die, MySpace lose millions of songs, and countless startups vanish overnight. Scott‘s advice—“Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don‘t have a personal copy of”—remains as relevant as ever.
6. California Bill Would Require ‘Gun-Blocking’ Tech in 3D Printers
California lawmakers have introduced Assembly Bill 2047, a proposal that would effectively require every 3D printer sold in the state to include “firearm blocking technology”—software that detects and prevents the printing of known firearm blueprint designs.
The bill would also mandate that certified 3D printer manufacturers be listed on the California Department of Justice’s website. Starting March 1, 2029, it would become a criminal offense to knowingly disable, deactivate, or circumvent the blocking technology.
The NRA has come out strongly against the bill, arguing that it raises serious First and Second Amendment concerns. “By requiring manufacturers to embed and certify government-mandated filtering software in personal devices, AB 2047 inserts a state-mandated software gatekeeper between citizens and the exercise of their constitutional rights,” the organization wrote in a legislative alert.
The bill is still making its way through the legislature, but it has already sparked a fierce debate about the limits of government regulation in personal manufacturing.
7. The Artemis II Space Toilet That Broke (And Got Fixed)
Remember the Artemis II mission that launched on April 1? The one carrying four astronauts on the first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years? Hours into the flight, something unexpected happened: the toilet broke.
The “Universal Waste Management System”—NASA‘s formal name for the spacecraft’s toilet—experienced a controller issue that caused the urine collection fan to jam. Astronaut Christina Koch worked overnight with guidance from mission control to fix the lunar loo, and after several hours, she succeeded.
“Happy to report that toilet is go for use,” mission control radioed back.
The incident sparked a wave of jokes on social media, but it also highlighted a serious engineering challenge. Space toilets use airflow—not gravity—to pull waste away from the body. The Artemis II system is a major upgrade from the plastic bags Apollo astronauts used in the 1960s and 1970s, but it‘s also incredibly complex. A malfunction 240,000 miles from Earth is no laughing matter.
The good news: the fix held. The crew continued their journey toward the Moon, scheduled to return with a Pacific Ocean splashdown on April 10.
8. Also Happening This Week…
- Google removes ‘Doki Doki Literature Club’ from Google Play, citing policy violations. The popular indie game’s developer is reportedly appealing the decision.
- An interactive map of Tolkien’s Middle-earth went viral, letting fans explore the Shire, Mordor, and everywhere in between in stunning detail.
- A truck driver spent 20 years building a scale model of every building in NYC—using toothpicks, glue, and an obsessive attention to detail. The model is now on display at a small museum in Queens.
- Cambodia unveiled a statue honoring a landmine-sniffing rat that saved countless lives over its career. The rodent, named Magawa, cleared more than 100 landmines before retiring.
That‘s the week.
See you next week.