2026-08-26

Horseshit

• Quantum battery upends the rules of charging

• Screen time at ages 1 and 6 may matter more than parents realize

• Graphene can be made using a kitchen blender, a mobile phone and a newspaper

• It's Been 20 Years Since Astronomers Decided Pluto Isn't a Planet

• The Global Birth Crash

• BMW Exec: Young People Prefer Voice and Screens over Buttons

• Buyer beware: Those mummified remains might carry toxic spores

• Study's Alarming Finding: At Least 1 in 4 NFL Players Gets Brain Disease

• A New Framework for How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy World

• Too much or too little sleep may make your body age faster

• ‘You’ll see lights on the moon’: Billionaire space executive predicts moon commutes in the 2030s.

• Ultra-slow messaging apps Carrier Pidge and Roost have taken off

• How to rebuild your broken attention span

celebrity gossip

• LeBron James Borrowed $300M from Insurers Arranged by Guggenheim

Obit

• One of the good ones: Dolly Parton, US country star, actor and philanthropist, dies aged 80

  • Dolly Parton, queen of country music and humanitarian hero, dead at 80

  • Dolly Parton Dies at 80

  • Dolly Parton Dead: Country Music Legend and Actress Was 80

  • Dolly Parton, Queen of Country Music, Dies at 80

  • A Message from the Family of Dolly Parton

  • Dolly Patron Has Died

  • Dolly Parton, Effervescent Queen of Country Music, Dies at 80

  • Dolly Parton has passed away

Musk

• Apparent Elon Musk Pep Talk to His Cursor Staff Paints Sad Picture

• The service XCancel is stopped until further notice

• X sends cease-and-desist to open-source project Nitter over alleged scraping

• Grokipedia Stopped Reviewing Edits in April. It Didn't Tell Anyone

• Why Starlink won't open Vietnam's censored internet

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo Is Coming to the EU

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• I spent a day at a robot "carnival" in Shanghai. Here's what I saw

• Beyond China's humanoid robots, a quieter machine revolution is unfolding

• Unitree's 45% post-IPO plunge raises concerns over China's robotics bubble

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The Mormon Church Is Quietly Expanding Its Real Estate Empire Across the US

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Are public schools unconstitutional? A Nebraska court will decide

  • I certainly can't see a basis for a Federal Dept. Of Education; nor any justification for compulsory schooling. States and communities may create voluntary educational associations even by local taxation via 10th amendment.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• National Police Union Blasts Flock CEO for Turning Against Police

  • Trump admin to review Flock cameras in wake of Atlanta protest

  • Man Charged with 3 Felonies for Breaking 3D-Printed 'Decoy' Flock Camera

• French spies used malware from GitHub to hack EncroChat cryptophone network

• Ads and tracking infiltrated TVs. Now they're coming for monitors

• Oura reportedly eyeing a September IPO that could value it at more than $16B

• Logging in Was Never Supposed to Be This Complicated

• Get yourself a password book.

• AliExpress uses Inaudible sounds to fingerprint browsers

• SK hynix runs out of replacement SSDs and defaults to original purchase price refunds — fine-print warranty clause shortchanges buyers as drive prices double

• Protesting PS5 players now plan permanent blackout

• Microsoft's latest masterpiece is a bug that breaks printing of WPF documents from Windows 11 if they are written using fonts with names starting with C .

• Quest VR Headset Becomes Unlocked Hardware

• Hot Chips 2026: Micron warns HBM wafer penalty is widening with every generation

• It's Tim Cook's last week on the job. Let's review his career

• EVE Online moves to Python 3

  The EVE codebase consists of 2.4 million lines of Python. A lot of it predates even Python 2.7, written to standards from the 2.3 and 2.5 era that Python 3 refuses to parse at all.

• Android is getting its own weird dots to cure car sickness

• Decades-long Linux ownership dispute dead after Xinuos appeal rejected

• Apple Releases New Polishing Cloth

• Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra for a big leap in performance and AI compute

• CISA slaps its tightest three-day patching deadline on perfect-10 Oracle flaw

  Successful attacks targeting CVE-2026-21962 can allow miscreants to create, delete, or modify access to critical data, and even gain “complete access” to all data stored on the affected systems. Oracle disclosed and provided patches for CVE-2026-21962 as part of its January 20, 2026, updates. At the time, it said versions 12.2.1.4.0, 14.1.1.0.0, and 14.1.2.0.0 were affected, and that the vulnerability could be exploited in low-complexity attacks. CISA added CVE-2026-21962 to its Known Exploited Vulnerability (KEV) catalog on August 24, giving federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agencies three days to protect themselves against attacks – the tightest deadline it is authorized to set.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• GNU radio switching to MIT licence

• 'Just a hobby, won't be big': Linus Torvalds introduced Linux 35 years ago

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA's New Space Telescope Is Poised to Discover Hidden Facets of the Universe

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Why Your Boss Wants to Make Sure AI Can Read Your Slack Messages

• Nvidia Has Become a Banker to the AI Boom, Putting It on Dangerous Ground

• Has AI Gone Rogue?

• Dutch lawyer fined €2,300 for using AI-hallucinated citation

• 'Never seen this level of objection': Scotland pushes back against datacentres

• All AI Data Centers Under Construction Could Emit as Much CO₂ as 24M Cars

• 'Don't ask me to print your ChatGPT birthday card': Hitting back at AI 'slop'

• Nvidia Is Spending $6B to Build a Powerful U.S. Alternative to Chinese AI

• Is there a pending AI 'debt bomb' crisis? No. This isn't Enron 2.0

• Sellers on Shopee, TikTok call out auto-generated AI ads that mislead customers

• Thomson Reuters Launches Its Own Frontier Model

• 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

• Nvidia says Groq racks will be online this year following $20B purchase

• OpenAI is building agents for everything. Will anyone use them? No.

• GenAI prompting Dutch secondary schools to rethink how they assign homework

• The data center era that's reshaping America

• Hugging Face reportedly in talks to be acquired for $13B

• AI chatbots are becoming experts at changing people's minds. What's their edge?

• Signs of AI Authorship in Federal Appellate Opinions

• Two planned datacentres will have higher UK carbon emissions than ExxonMobil

• Anthropic tells staff to work from home due to possible security team strike

• EPA aims to exempt datacenters from disclosing air pollution, advocates warn

• AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

• OpenAI restores 5-hour Codex and Work limits for ChatGPT Plus users

• OpenAI's upcoming JalapeñO chip looks like it'll be an inference beast

  • OpenAI Claims Its New Chips Can Outperform Nvidia Processors in Tests

• Australia's music industry bans AI songs from charts

• Anthropic Sees over $30T in Potential Revenue

  • Anthropic expected to tell investors it sees over $30T in potential revenue

  • They expect every person on earth to pay them $3,500? Really?

• Alabama Coming for OpenAI

• AI Firms Debate Putting Cyber Tests Online After Model Hacks

• Software Firms Deploy Bluster and Buybacks to Counter AI Fears

• Disrupting a new covert influence campaign from Russia

• OpenAI's Head of Data Centers Has Left the Company

• AI is supercharging hacks of everyday utilities

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Why some US restaurants are banning tips

• SEC Subpoenas Wall Street Banks over Situational Awareness

• How Shein Came Crashing Down

• Younger, lower-income entrepreneurs driving an increasing share of new ventures

  • Proles getting uppity again. Let them borrow heavy then jack up interest rates and teach them their proper place.

• Walmart Waves the White Flag to Apple Pay

• Let the Bond Market Speak

• The Craziest Stock Market Has Turned into a Fright Ride

• Private Credit's Chills Draw Bargain Hunters Offering Cash to Trapped Investors

• US grain farmers face worst crisis in decades as Iran war sends costs spiralling

• 'Governments defending prices against fundamentals always lose'

• Treasury bonds are becoming less special

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Florida moves to become first state to restrict cash assistance on non-essentials.

  Under the state’s proposed policy change, Florida Department of Children and Families, or DCF, benefits distributed through Electronic Benefit Transfer, or EBT cards, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF grants will no longer be eligible for purchases involving tobacco and vaping products, alcohol, adult material, video games, theme park tickets, tattoos, tanning beds, or fortune-telling services.

• Lies, Damned Lies, And A $40 Tril. Debt

• Dan Sullivan Endorses Dan Sullivan to Beat Dan Sullivan in Alaska Senate Race

  The Republican former mayor of Anchorage, Dan A. Sullivan, endorsed GOP Sen. Dan S. Sullivan for re-election over retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan and Democratic former Rep. Mary Peltola on Tuesday. “As the OG Dan Sullivan, I urge Alaskans to vote for Sen. Dan S. Sullivan. He’s been great for Alaska,” the former mayor wrote on Facebook.

Left Angst

• Supreme Court's order doesn't change elections yet. But it could bring 'chaos'

  That new rule requires specific formatting for envelopes containing mail ballots — which may force some jurisdictions to completely revise theirs — and makes states use an electronic system to identify to the Postal Service who is voting by mail. If states don’t comply with the rule, their mail ballots won’t get sent.

  The prospect of such a potential sweeping overhaul in mere days boggled critics’ minds. In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the decision “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, agreed, saying the majority “seemed to create complete chaos leading up to the midterm elections” and it’d be “impossible” for states to comply with the new rules at this late date.

• Trump's tariffs risk higher prices for AI, video games, cellphones: experts

• "Lake America": Trump Turns Canada Feud Toward Lake Ontario

  • Trump considers renaming Lake Ontario to 'Lake America' as trade war escalates

• Physicians Sue U.S. Government over New Dietary Guidelines

• Do I buy that Texas could turn blue?

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• NYC's 911 System Had an Outage. Officials Kept Quiet About It

• America's Murder Rate Is at a 70 Year Low

• shit happened in 1988, no rush: US judge postpones Lockerbie bombing trial over new evidence

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• U.S. Rescinds Syria's Designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism

• Canada to announce retaliatory tariffs as Trump tells leaders to 'fall in line'

  • Canadian content on streaming platforms became a trade issue with the U.S.

• US Military Transport Plane Lands in Moscow After Flight from Riga

World

• Arson attack jolts Italy’s bid to host the Einstein Telescope

• The Threats to 'Swiss Made'

• Japan enlists 1,800 people to drag 360-tonne castle keep using ropes and rollers

• Japanese farmers go nocturnal as extreme heat makes the day too dangerous

• French firms & Rheinmetall AG targeted by Chinese export controls

• Bulgaria neutralizes GPS jammer that suppressed Sofia Airport signals

• Facial recognition mandatory in New South Wales gaming rooms under proposal

• Morocco: Now That We've Sent Criminals to Invade Your Country, We Are Prepared to Negotiate Your Surrender of the Conquered Territory

• Third drone and suspected military explosives found near Leipzig airport

• British man charged in Singapore two years after alleged theft at airport

• State-backed hackers targeted EU officials on WhatsApp, document shows

Iran / Houthi

• Bessent unveils ‘Operation Economic Outcast’ sanctions targeting Iranian regime

  These new measures are designed to ramp up pressure on Iran’s "enablers," which Bessent has called out for purchasing Iran’s petroleum products, allowing their financial systems and banks to facilitate transfers of Iranian funds, and allowing Iran’s shadow fleet to transfer oil products in their territorial waters. Bessent and President Donald Trump indicated last week that the United States planned to shift to a comprehensive economic blockade of the Islamic Republic, hoping to strangle the regime by cutting off its economic lifelines.

• Somali Pirates Hijack Sanctioned Oil Tanker Off Yemen.

Israel

• Gaza children grew up flying kites,now Israel say they will be treated as drones

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• VK is suing Apple for blocking its apps – and wants $696,000 a day

• Ukraine hands Britain 'goldmine' of secret battlefield intelligence

• Minicomputers Made by Nvidia Are Powering Moscow's A.I. Drones

China

• China's Oil Demand 'Likely' Peaked Last Year, Sinopec Says

Health / Medicine

• The dementia vaccine some of us are taking without realising

• FDA approves first Alzheimer's blood test for Americans as young as 40

• FDA Authorizes First Wearable Device That Monitors Ketone and Glucose Levels

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Some trees are worsening urban air quality as climate warms

• "buy my book!" Not a natural calamity: it is being done to us knowingly

• Exxon turns to automated drilling in the Permian in push for higher oil output

• Fewer, smaller eggs are the double effect of France's scorching summer

• Paradise, California, leader says utility group 'duped' him into wildfire ad

• Key takeaways from investigation into Edison's role in the deadly Eaton fire

• Trees 'giving up': climate change hammers historic English gardens

• U.S. Water Utilities Have Varied Ability to Absorb Colorado River Water Cuts

• Bomb Fishing Is Wreaking Havoc on Indonesia's Coral Reefs

• Who’s Paying for Climate Reporting in the Mainstream Media?

  The AP insists, of course, that it is editorially independent and “solely responsible for all content” of its climate stories. But consider this – the Walton Foundation’s original two-year $785,000 grant in 2021 funded three AP reporters (and, presumably, related expenses), according to the foundation. Just two years later, the grant had grown to a three-year commitment totaling $2.5 million.

• Why are there suddenly so many devastating earthquakes?

  "There's nothing I'm seeing here that is unusual, this is all within the typical variations in earthquake rates that we see," Zachary Ross, a professor of geophysics at Caltech, said.

• Polyamorous bird of prey 'single-handedly' reviving species

• The Super El Niño Won't Fix the West's Water Crisis