2026-08-25

Cool

• How to Catch the 'Eclipse of the Century' Next Year

Horseshit

• 'Cookies' made from plastic may be on the menu for future astronauts

• Why Couples Therapists Are Sick of 'Therapy-Speak'

• Bluetooth Shock Collar Keeps Wearer on Task

• Neanderthal gene variant may increase muscle mass in people living today today

• How 'Stacks' Went from Bodybuilding and Computing to Describing Everything

• From iPods to wired headphones: Why more Gen Zers are picking retro tech

• Why older tech is sometimes safer from hackers

• The Pay-to-Play Model Has Broken Youth Sports

• Do Not Go Gentle into Silicon Valley's Dark Night

• Where Did All the Public Bathrooms Go?

• UK Government tells TikTok to remove dangerous wrong-way driving trend videos

  • 'They're thinking about likes': deadly TikTok motorway trend horrifies Ireland

• Laptop Fire Causes Midair Scare on American Airlines Flight

Musk

• Telecom Experts Say Elon Musk's Wireless Plan Is Historically Stupid

• SpaceX, Nvidia designed a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 (orbit launch in Q4)

• SpaceX Shares Sink on AI Spending Plans

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Amazon's Toaster-Shaped Robotaxis Are Hitting the Road

• EV-Maker Polestar Says Trump administration Strung It Along Before U.S. Ban

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• Humanoid robots smash Usain Bolt's 100-meter record

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The pressure mounts on U.S. universities

  Many Christians have felt that academic standards and viewpoint diversity have greatly diminished on secular campuses. Many have opted to attend or support Christian colleges, which have in large part resisted the most troubling trends in higher education. But now Christian colleges face the same challenges as all other universities coming from changing demographics. There are simply fewer 18-year-olds graduating from high school for the next 18 years than there were before, shrinking the pool of candidates for college.

  • Our local "Christian" college has contributed BLM marches and "No Kings" rallies (attended by a dozen or so) to its community. They are having much angst over their prizewinning Women's Softball Team because it has no trans players.

• College Applications Are Changing Again, Thanks to A.I. and Politics

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Surveillance company Flock is talking compromise.

  • Flock, Mass Surveillance, and the Collapse of Crime

• Inside The Fake Copyright Racket Silencing News Outlets

• Casio's Bluetooth F-B100W-1A with step-tracker sells out again

• Gigabyte RTX 3070 owner finds factory plastic on VRM pads after five years

  After using the GPU for almost five years, the owner of the GPU started noticing high temperatures on the VRMs. They also faced frequent black screens during higher loads, waking the PC from sleep, and cold boots. the owner of the graphics card eventually took the decision to disassemble the GPU for cleaning and repasting, upon which they found protective films on the VRM thermal pads.

• AliExpress Has Used WebAudio Fingerprinting to Track Users

  • AliExpress accused of fingerprinting shoppers with silent audio trick

• Micron says that things are only going to get worse on the memory front.

• Maxell brings back classic 1970s cassette tapes

• Pokémon's Battle System May Not Be Turn-Based for Much Longer

• Anna's Archive Owes $340 Million, Lost Several Domains, but It's Still Online

• IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

• Apple's Foldable iPhone Will Help Bring Some Magic Back

• Viral Chinese Cow Cartoon Becomes One of the Most Profitable Movies Ever Made

• MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Claude × retrocomputing: emulating a QIC-117 tape drive

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• FDA digital health leader promises generative AI regulatory guidance is coming

• Nvidia Is Spending $6B to Build a Powerful Open-Weight Alternative to Chinese AI

• Hugging Face exploring sale valuing it at $13B, Business Insider says

  • Hugging Face exploring sale at $13B valuation

  • Hugging Face has been fielding M&A interest for a deal worth at least $13B

• Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine Think A.I. Is Good for Music

  • Dr. Dre Says He Uses AI to Produce Songs

• An AI job boom? Here's what the tedious, temp work in data labelling is like

• Nvidia announces AI-related price hikes

• Texas Gov. says data centers deserve the backlash: 'They dug their own grave'

• Building trades unions come out in strong support of data-center build-out

• Twitch and Amazon hit with lawsuit for training AI with streamers' content

• Nvidia’s GB300-powered DGX Station desktop tower listed for nearly $100,000 online

• Wall Street Is Counting on Nvidia to Keep the AI Party Going

• Graduate job vacancies drop by almost 50% in a year, survey suggests

• We Went to Wall Street's Exclusive Wilderness Camp. Everyone Was Spooked by AI

• Ask ChatGPT to pick a number between 1 and 30. It'll always say 17 or 23

  • The Sacred Numbers of Discordians. Hail Eris!

• Anthropic candidates face blunt money question

• Mind is more than language: Kids outlearn AI–and we still don't know why

• Why police have been told to pause their use of AI in court cases

• Goldman partner warns of 'huge danger' in letting AI replace bankers' skills

• The $17,000 Domain That Could Be Worth $70M Became a AI Chatbot Instead

• US widens AI-driven investment gap with Europe

• Data centers' 'oh shit' moment

• AI's Next Big Leap Is into the Real World

• Anthropic Could Aim to Raise $100B in Blockbuster IPO, Valuing It at $2T

• Alabama Investigates OpenAI on HuggingFace Hacking Incident

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• 150+ Polymarket wallets may have traded on military secrets

• Former OC actor Ben McKenzie on crusade to take down 'stupid' cryptocurrency

• Prediction Markets Are a National Security Risk

• Bitcoin is great (for systemic theft of aid money)

• Coinbase-backed crypto advocacy group endorses 32 US midterm candidates

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The treasury bond mess: is this the demise of the US as a safe haven?

  • Why all the fuss about bond yields is happening now

  • Bessent could tap $1T Treasury General Account to fund bond buybacks

• 5% of venture capitalists have generated roughly 90% of the industry's profits

• Why is it so hard to build a transformer?

• Will the DOJ's investigation into A16Z spook other VCs?

• India's TCS to buy Porsche's IT unit, bags 5-year deal worth $1.46B

  • Porsche Inks $1.5B AI Deal with India's Tata Consultancy

• Attorney General Cancels Settlement Talks over $111B Warner Bros. Discovery Deal

• Shein's $100B Dream Unravelled

  • Shein aims for almost $27B valuation in stock market debut

• Amazon hikes hardware prices by 60 percent, blaming memory shortage

• Life Policies Shouldn't Be Funding the Boss's Trophy Assets

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Push for Online Gun Sales Meets a Surprising Opponent: Small Gun Dealers

• Trump’s bill prompts steep SNAP enrollment decline — including over 50% in one state.

• In LA this Ordinance means you can never make them leave

  if you let someone stay for free in a place you own, they acquire the same rights as paying tenants with a lease. In many circumstances, the Just Cause Ordinance means you can never make them leave.

• Supreme Court Allows Trump Plan to Restrict Mail-In Voting, for Now

• State investigation requested following prolonged northwest Indiana outages

Trump

• Trump signs new national space policy to enable 1,000 US rocket launches per year.

Democrats

• Newsom makes last-minute push to help California utilities facing wildfire bills

  • Gavin Newsom Has an $18B Plan to Shore Up California's Utilities

• California has officially signed the “Stop Nick Shirley Act” (AB 2624) into law

  This bill was created by the Attorney General’s wife and co-sponsored by CHIRLA, a nonprofit that has received over $80,000,000 in taxpayer dollars for “immigrant support services.” Do you understand how this works yet? When the fraud is exposed, they create new laws to protect the fraudsters and penalize those who expose it.

Left Angst

• We're in a new era of class warfare. Is change still possible?

• Andreessen Horowitz is investing billions into a bleak future

• The Hubris of Donald Trump

• Neurologist with antivaccine views to lead NIH's child health institute

• Americans bought 12% less soda under new SNAP restrictions

• Why is the far right so obsessed with knights?

  the imagery of the Templar knights, a medieval Catholic military order, has been increasingly co-opted by the contemporary far right. References to its symbolism have become increasingly common in far-right spaces on platforms like Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and 4chan. Some of this content is innocent: reels by historians discussing the history of the knights. But on the extreme end are social media accounts that wrap white supremacist and anti-Muslim politics in the romanticised imagery of holy war, medieval chivalry and Christian martyrdom.

• Trump administration moves to impose more than $100k fee for H-1B visas

  • Trump administration proposes $103,000 fee for H-1B visas after legal setback

  • Trump Admin Moves to Impose More Than $100K Fee for H-1B Worker Visas

• ICE officers with electric-shock gloves

• Trump Media CEO defends selling faster access to president's Truth Social posts

• The Government Report That Made Me Stop Trusting Our Statistical Agencies

  Why do I think the analysis is inaccurate (beyond the obvious signs denoted so far)? Because I, and more importantly, statistical matching experts, do not believe that the process employed by whomever wrote this report could reliably match voter records with Census records of noncitizens. That is, the “analysts” did not have a single database that recorded both noncitizen status and whether you voted. It had separate lists that it merged, a notoriously challenging process that depends on reliable linkage information that allows analysts to be certain they’re linking the records of the same person.

• How Canada can help Americans and defeat America

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• He Was Wrongly Convicted of Attempted Rape. He's Suing the DNA Analysts

• Pennsylvania court case declared mistrial because none of the jurors would own up to smoking a doobie in the jury room.

• Georgia police launch manhunt over $30 a man picked up from floor of a Walmart

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US Navy Carrier's Problems Are Tied to Attacks on U.S. Base Early in War

World

• Woman stranded in Spain after UK's eVisa system mistakes her for twin sister

• New Zealand to introduce bill banning social media for children under 16

  • New Zealand to introduce Bill banning social media for children under 16

• 53k Fukushima nuclear plant workers receive high radiation doses

• Uber faces fine of nearly $1B over automated driver suspensions

• How Saudi Arabia's Neom Megacity Dream Collapsed

• Majority of Britons say free speech has deteriorated under Labour

  • Which is likely an arrest-able offense, if said in public.

• African nations ramp up their space programmes a bid to reduce reliance the West

• UK will use Ukraine battlefield data to train AI and use it againsts protesters

• France readies high school phone ban for new term

  • Macron confirms school mobile phone ban effective from new term

Iran / Houthi

• UK energy companies on alert after Iran-linked hackers shut down power facility

• Slain Ayatollah Khamenei wanted to end conflict with US through peace talks, Iranian president claims.

• Iran Cracks Down on One Luxury Left to Its Youth: Coffee Shops

• Barron Trump Iran Bounty: What We Know About the $10 Million Claim

  Iranian state television aired a video focusing on Barron and making a series of claims about his movements, security arrangements and personal activities. The broadcast also alleged that a $10 million reward had been placed for his death. The claim has attracted widespread attention, but there is an important distinction between what was broadcast and what has been independently established. The alleged bounty has not been independently verified.

• Iran Is Using Foreign Criminals to Attack Its Critics Overseas

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Some of Russia's A.I. Drones Are Powered by Nvidia

• Ukraine’s dismissed defence minister calls for wartime presidential election

• A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided by A.I

  • A Drone Guided by A.I. Killed Three Ukrainians

  • Nvidia Jetson Orin drone kills 3 in July Russia attack on Ukraine gas station

China

• Fast-fashion giant Shein aims for $27B valuation in Hong Kong market debut

• Nearly 3M Teslas recalled in China over hidden door handles

• Bad weather delays launch of China’s historic Chang’e 7 mission to moon’s south pole.

• China will struggle to make money from humanoid robots

• China's property crisis grinds on after Evergrande sentencing

• China probes use of formaldehyde to keep cabbages fresh

• Nvidia senior manager linked to Supermicro scheme smuggling AI servers to China

  • Taiwan Indicts Nvidia Manager Following Chip Smuggling Probe

  • Nine Indicted by Taiwan over Illegal Export of Nvidia B300 GPUs to China

• One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed

Health / Medicine

• A For-Profit Hospital Slashed Costs. Then a Patient Froze to Death on Its Roof

• FDA Authorizes First-of-Its-Kind Robotic Blood Draw Device

• FDA clears blood test to aid evaluation for Alzheimer's disease

• FDA places clinical hold on Regenxbio's gene therapy for Hunter Syndrome

• New daily diabetes pill that helps with weight loss launches in UK pharmacies

• Smart probiotics can sense high blood sugar and release GLP-1 on demand

• Cardiovascular Risk Declines with Heated Tobacco Uptake

• Ohio mom ‘devastated’ after son killed in car crash had his organs removed without her approval.

• Where does fat go when you lose weight? In your breath and your sweat

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Over 5,200 Ebola cases recorded in Congo

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• ING helped fossil fuel firms raise over $900M despite climate pledge

• El Niño may peak at the worst time for the Amazon – and it should worry us all

• America's Desert Metropolis Is on the Short List to Lose Water

• Battery fires at recycling centres are costing UK £1B a year

• Using thunderquakes to X-ray Earth – a new study shows urban seismology in action

• The purple fabric that could beat the scorching heat

• Londoners Find 'Horrendous' Cracks in Their Homes After Successive Heat Waves

• The ocean just broke a temperature record that may have stood for millennia

  • Oceans hit highest temperature on record

• How bad is the UK drought and how long will it continue?

• Best Coffee Will Be Harder to Get as Downpours Hit Brazil's Trees

• Roman Climate Optimum in Europe was beneficial for Roman expansion

• Malaysia, Indonesia to Synchronise Cloud Seeding as Monsoon and El Niño Converge

• Moldy Peanuts Can Be Deadly. The Solution Is More Mold

• Wildfires Are Turning Forests in the American West into Shrubland

• Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation

• Mission impossible? Quantifying military emissions