Astrid Atkinson

A couple of weeks ago, my cofounder - and friend of 20 years - passed away unexpectedly. Cody Smith, @supah.green, was one of the good ones. Indeed, one of the best.

Remembering Cody | Camus Energy Celebrating the life and legacy of our co-founder and CTO, whose influence will endure at Camus and beyond.

And here is Camus, talking about Cody and what he meant to us:

www.camus.energy/blog/remembe...

And if you'd like to learn more about his co-working space, it's at Upside (the garage space which was also Camus' first office).

upside.art

Looking Up Arts | Interactive Art | San Francisco, CA, USA Looking Up Arts is a San Francisco-based arts and technology organization dedicated to creating community-centric art that brings people together.​ Our interactive art focuses on the bright and the bo...

If anyone is interested in learning more about his arts work, check out Looking Up:

www.lookingup.art

In his memory, Camus is holding Be Good Energy day on March 10th, in which we are encouraging everyone to take a day to volunteer in their communities. Cody would have loved that. He cared deeply about making a positive impact on the world. We are going to carry that legacy forward in his name.

He leaves behind a legacy in the arts, in the company we started together, in the tech and artist and music communities of the Bay Area. His family and a wide circle of friends miss him very much.

Cody was that surpassingly rare cool person who is more interested in you than in himself. He was that friend who is up for anything, to dozens of people. Maybe hundreds. He was a respected and responsible leader. He was humble and selfless and kind.

He was a senior member of Google's highest reliability on-call teams - the person who gets paged if Google is down, and the escalation of last resort. He was one of the people called in to mount a defence when Google was hacked by a foreign government.

When I met Cody he was still on probation, for the crime of stealing the handset of a payphone, for art purposes. His last artwork is still up in Golden Gate park. It's a large sign that says "No Dancing," and any time you go by you can reliably see people dancing around it, which was the point.

Cody was an artist as well as an engineer. In addition to cofounding Camus with me, he cofounded an arts nonprofit with his childhood best friend, a monumental sculpture artist, and another local artist. He ran an arts co-working space in the Mission, creating space for dozens of other artists.

He was a connector of communities. He was the one person everyone knew, from execs to hard drive swappers. He was the guy who ran cluster software upgrades and the stellar engineer who co-authored Google's network loadbalancer. He was the techlead for Search reliability and a joyful practical joker.

Cody and I were the junior members of a 14 person team that included some of the best software engineers in the industry. Cody was part of a team called "Cluster Ops", and he was the one who'd worked directly with the sysadmins and hardware techs who made Google's datacenter fleet work.

We were both assigned to work on a special project, rolling out Google's first-of-its-kind cluster management system, Borg, along with its next-generation Search platform. This was a genuinely new thing in the industry, the architecture of the "cloud" - a term first used in public two years later.

I met Cody on my first day at Google, in 2004. His desk was pushed up against the wall in a corridor alongside mine. Cody was kind - he was my first new friend there, of many.

A couple of weeks ago, my cofounder - and friend of 20 years - passed away unexpectedly. Cody Smith, @supah.green, was one of the good ones. Indeed, one of the best.

This hypothesis doesn't hold up to scrutiny and yet is accepted as gospel truth in the electricity sector. Brendon's experiment is interesting, but trained experts looked at this and i included it in our policy analysis paper, Overcharged (in my pinned post).

www.hbs.edu/ris/Publicat...

Here's a hypothesis I've heard: the restructuring/deregulation of electricity GENERATION has been a benefit because monopolies inflate costs. So I think you have to compare 1) what has happened in states/utilities that dereged and 2) what happened at the same time in states/utilities that didn't

I've used men's rooms at big events many times. Nobody got hurt.

More of this!

You should all subscribe to Volts, finest energy & climate podcast out there.

How did we end up threatening our kids’ lives with AI? - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

It is a vile scandal that 2 of the biggest AI companies in the world attack children by inciting them to self-harm, and by generating sexually exploitative imagery of kids for profit. I wanted to document this so that people in tech will stop saying they don't know: www.anildash.com/2026/02/18/t...

They're pretty good at writing code software engineers would have written. And writing text nobody will read. I think a lot of the hype is based on efficacy in specific tasks... but most real work in the world touches the world, and they are bad at that.

Mia Valentina Paz Faria A 7-year-old from Venezuela who was living in Austin, Texas Detained for 70 days “I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

UPDATE: Staff at the ICE concentration camp in Dilley, Texas have begun raiding the dormitories of kids and their parents to confiscate and destroy letters from the children. This is in response to the ace reporting by @micarosenberg et al for ProPublica:

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

- 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas.

Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children.

www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

Same

I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it.

I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.”

1/

I'm also pretty bad at arithmetic (very error prone for anything that's just applying mechanical transformations) but was great at calc and trig, which are systems composed of numbers and symbols.

I mean, that's fair. 😀

That makes you a badass. I know this, due to how many times I've been the only woman in a room of many men. It's honestly very difficult to be a tiny minority. You have to be very solid in yourself.

Switching to a 3-season heat pump in NE Ohio has let us cut energy use considerably (by 34 to 40%) relative to using gas for home and water heating.

Here's the breakdown from year to year and how our system configuration has changed with time. Switching to Heat pumps has allowed us to use less energy while maintaining or improving comfort. The HVAC HP is much better than the 30yr old AC it replaced. 🧪🔌💡☀️💨💧🔋

Oh man, yeah. The breakfast "garbage plate" scramble at my local greasy spoon was my equivalent. I am not cut out for fasting.