2026-10-08

Horseshit

• Building a Better Working Dog

  The need for these animals is greater than ever. Millions of people with disabilities suffer in ways that could be alleviated by service dogs—a class of working canine that includes guide dogs and the types of pups Canine Companions trains, but not emotional support animals or military or police dogs. Yet there are only about 40,000 service dogs in the world, and the more than 200 organizations that breed and train them, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars per animal, struggle to keep up with demand. “Our pipeline is our greatest challenge,” Kennedy says. “We’ve sometimes had to close our waitlist because it’s too long.”

  • Look to F1 hybrids and mutts. Catahoula / Bluetick are incredibly smart and eager to please; Dane / Collie are long lived, and make wonderful attentive personal companion type dogs.

• We Asked Starbucks Why Their 'Sugar-Free' Drinks Have Sugar

• The art of defusing a second world war bomb

• My Husband Has Found a New "Helper" During His Solo Time. It's My Nemesis

  Around six weeks ago, I found my husband masturbating with bubble wrap. He puts lube on it, rolls it up, and uses it. I found it odd, but didn’t think much of it. Then the frequency of our lovemaking declined until it stopped altogether, while his use of bubble wrap escalated.

• Permanent Daylight Saving Time Could Harm Sleep and Mental Health, Canadian Analysis Says

  • Permanent daylight saving time could be a public health time bomb

• Record Field of Qualifiers Accepted to Boston Marathon

• Finfluencer study finds risk mention missing from 87% of popular finance TikToks

• Why were Victorian elites so effective?

  the elites of nineteenth-century Britain were, by their own lights, extremely successful. For much of the century, Britain was the richest country on Earth. Its companies dominated global commerce, industry and finance. Its huge navy reigned over the world’s oceans, and its tiny army won a long sequence of wars while keeping watch over an enormous empire. Britain progressed gradually toward democracy with none of the revolutions and civil wars that wracked continental Europe. There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.

• Advanced Stats and $500 Bats: Why Baseball for 6-Year-Olds Is Breaking the Bank

• The scariest thing about gray-market peptides is how little we know

• Neanderthals Were Adept Woodworkers Too

• Some People Are Peeling Their Apples Before Eating Them—Should You?

celebrity gossip

• Zuckerberg bought Waterford castle for more than €51M

Obit

• Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint dies aged 102

• Margaret Hamilton, who led software development for Apollo program, dies at 90

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Comedian John Cleese is in a free-speech furor over Islam comments

  I have recently felt a growing nostalgia for the days when words remained attached to their traditional definitions. Activists in positions of influence so habitually mangle the English language that even basic communication is often impeded. Words and phrases such as “far right,” “genocide,” “racist” and “hate” have become unmoored from their meanings, losing much of their utility. We cannot even be secure in our use of the word “terrorist” any longer, given that so many are determined to abuse it. How else to explain the fact that comedian John Cleese, of Monty Python and “Fawlty Towers” fame, has been reported to Prevent, the British government program designed to stop people from becoming terrorists? Are dead parrots, silly walks and disgruntled hoteliers now deemed early warning signs of radicalization?

• Will Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman movies make a dent on tech giant evangelism?

• Meta's Copyright System Is Being Weaponized Against Albanian Protesters

Musk

• Tesla is browbeating the EU to approve its 'Full Self-Driving'. It's working

• Germany backs EU approval of Tesla's driver-assistance software

• Starlink's plan to avoid orbital near-misses: Ephemeris sharing

• Elon Musk Says Quebec, Alberta and Saskatchewan Should Separate from Canada

• SpaceX credit risk jumps on worries over its borrowing spree

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Jaguar targets young Americans with Type 01 EV – it's too long for UK parking

• Lucid Misses Q3 Delivery Estimates, Production Drops 38%: Amid an operational overhaul, Lucid continues to see declines, causing it to miss average analyst estimates.

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• Boston Dynamics appoints former Amazon exec Rohit Prasad as new CEO

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai

  • Nobel Prize in Chemistry Is Awarded to Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai

• Student Lender Collapses as Immigrant Crackdown Roils Loan Book

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Googlebook "Better Together" phone features don't work with Samsung at launch

• Licensing costs driving 90 percent of VMware users to explore options: Survey

• Hackers obtain counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large services

• Are 60-Second Microdramas the Future of Hollywood, or the End?

• Xbox has secured exclusive GTA 6 streaming rights

• Alexa Can't Control the AUX Input on Amazon Echo Speakers Anymore

• Google Docs and Drive now support Markdown files natively

• FortiBleed still a bleeding nuisance as FBI confirms ongoing attacks

• Amazon's 'About You' section guesses oddly specific details about shoppers

• Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra Wants to Bring the Only Laptop You'll Ever Need

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• Federal Court Says Flock ALPR Database Searches Require a Warrant

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Rails originator roasted over Rust boosterism

  Last month at Rails World 2026, Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson gave a relentlessly optimistic keynote in which he suggested AI has all but eliminated the need for developers to manually write code.

  • The Rust fans want nothing to do with him because of his religious heresies.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA Releases Artemis II Lunar Science Data

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• South Korea says AI agents appear to have been used to hack the country's banks

  • Hackers Use Chinese AI Tool to Hit South Korean Banks

• 'This Is Nuts.' An OpenAI Insider Explains Why He Quit

• Sharing AI Progress in Mathematics

  • OpenAI just dropped 700 preprints of mathematical proofs and counterexamples

  • OpenAI unleashes hundreds more math results upon a field in shock

  • AI Solved One Math Problem and Everyone Freaked Out. It Just Cracked 100s More

  • OpenAI Releases Findings on 377 Math Problems, Further Roiling Field

  • The Mathocalypse

  Last night my 9-year-old son was taunting my wife, complexity theorist Dana Moshkovitz, as follows: “mommy, I heard you got cooked! I heard that a robot solved the math problem you worked on for your whole career! OOF!” While my son was being a brat, he also wasn’t wrong. Whether you’re thrilled, depressed, angry, or whatever else about it, yesterday was surely one of the biggest days in mathematical history. And yes, among the 372 huge results released yesterday by OpenAI, on the recommendation of its advisory group of Timothy Gowers, Edward Witten, and other distinguished mathematicians, was a proof of Subhash Khot’s Unique Games Conjecture (UGC), a statement that my wife has worked toward proving for the entire time I’ve known her.

  I’ve been glad to see the CS theory community rising to the occasion. At the Simons Institute in Berkeley, here at UT Austin, and elsewhere, I’ve hearing stories of researchers rushing to pore over the manuscripts and make sense of them and explain them—because what else do we do? How else do we continue the craft to which we’ve devoted much of our lives? If you want some sense of what things feel like now in math, imagine a hunter-gatherer who’s spent his entire life learning to survive deep in an unforgiving rainforest, then a giant resort hotel springs up right next to him with a helipad and heated pools and AirBnBs, and without missing a beat, the hunter-gatherer says: “alright fine, so now my new job is to run wilderness retreats for the tourists, or something.”

• Silicon Valley thinks AI will kill jobs. Economists are not convinced

• High Interest Rates Aren't Slowing AI Boom

• San Francisco hits pause on data centers

• Musician sent to prison for $10M streaming fraud using AI bots

  • A.I. Music Fraudster Who Drew Millions in Royalties Is Sentenced to 18 Months

  • Fraudster jailed for using 10K bots and AI songs to outstream Taylor Swift

• Woman Arrested After Conversation with Claude That Allegedly Included 'Threats'

• How to Defend Against AI-Designed Viruses

• Creating Fake People Is a Terrible Idea

  This is a terrible development. The consequences for society are likely to be disastrous—perhaps even worse than the havoc wrought by social media. People will be scammed out of their savings, mental illness will explode, loneliness will be exploited. Collectively we’ll become less able to tell reality from fantasy, tearing at the fabric of a society already under considerable stress. Many more horrors will likely follow that we can’t even conceive of yet.

• McDonald's sued for allegedly using AI tool to determine pricing for franchises

  • McDonald's sued over AI tool that recommends prices to US franchisees

• Stop Asking Whether AI Wrote It

• Mumsnet denies using AI for content after prompt appears on message board

• Anthropic to invest $100M to train AI engineer talent

• Canada launches national council to advise on artificial intelligence

• OpenAI says teens use ChatGPT for under 15 minutes a day

• AI agents are flooding public services with new requests

• Man took his own life after 'sextortion' blackmail involving AI-generated woman

• AI companies say rivals are distilling their models and why it's so hard to stop

• Anthropic will be 'most ridiculous IPO' of year, analyst says

Economicon / Business / Finance

• US stocks rise to a record on expectations companies will make even fatter profits

  • The S&P 500 Hits a New Record High, Powered by Tech–and Not Much Else

• Paramount Skydance has completed its $111B merger with Warner Bros. Discovery

  • Paramount, Warner Bros Formally Merge, Form Giant Mountain of Disastrous Debt

  • Skydance Sets Leadership Across Games, Experiences, Consumer Products and HR

• Micron's Taiwan union wins strike vote with 99% support

• FICO cuts workforce by 15% in AI-driven restructuring

• HSBC plans job cuts across UK wealth business in AI push

• The world has nearly burned through its oil stockpile buffer

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The Nixon Tapes, Unlocked

  Niall Ferguson and Luke Nichter are using AI to decipher 3,400 hours of Nixon’s secretly recorded conversations. Finally, we can hear the controversial presidency as it actually happened.

• New Parking Meter Deal Gives Chicago Share of Profits for First Time Since 2008

Left Angst

• 'Complete devastation': How NSF gutted its social sciences research

• US: Trump administration Rejects External Election Observers

• Trump Mobile customers' data dumped – and some never even received their device

• Trade group crunches numbers on Trump's impossible push for 100% US-made tech

• Online nativists are exploiting middle-class economic worries to stir hate

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• What's missing from the lethal injection conversation

  A review of executions carried out between 1890 and 2010 indicated that three out of every hundred executions were botched – and that lethal injection executions, which began in 1982, have a more frequent incidence of complications than any other method.

  • Christa Pike's lawyers hold press conference after she regains consciousness

• Is Criminal Forensics Bullshit?

  Sara Gordon, a law professor from the University of British Columbia, recently published a trio of deep dives into a few common techniques—which often go unquestioned by judges—and found them quite lacking.

• Couple was swatted 55 times in 2 years over a post about Norm Macdonald

  Tomlinson and Robinson were swatted 55 times, despite repeatedly explaining their situation to the Milwaukee Police Department. They sued, and have been awarded a $575,000 US settlement from the City of Milwaukee.

• Ex-CIA Officer Who Stashed Gold Bars Admits to Far Larger $145M Scam

• Our Reporter Emailed the FBI Hackers. They Wrote Back.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey's new Pentagon roles raise ethics worries

• UPS Worker Missed Security Email, Letting China Get F-35 Parts

World

• "protesting" With fire: French Youth Take the Streets Against a Bleak Future

Iran / Houthi

• Saudi airport attacks injure 3 as conflict with Yemen's Houthis reignites

• Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey move to activate collective defense pact

  Arab News said that “Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey on Monday agreed to immediately implement collective-defense commitments under the previously agreed Mecca Defense Alliance, including the swift deployment of agreed forces and other military capabilities to the Kingdom amid ongoing threats.”

• 'Preparing to Fire': Hear the Radio Commands Enforcing the U.S. Blockade of Iran

• Ship Captains Paid $100k a Month to Transit Strait of Hormuz

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukrainian drones swarmed Moscow last night

• Drones sink ships near NATO countries in “unacceptable” attacks, EU says.

China

• China's LinkedIn Espionage Is Only Getting More Advanced

Health / Medicine

• Generation raised on sugar rations – what their health reveals 70 years later

• Cancer Rates Rising More Quickly Among Younger People

• Dogs, devils, clams and catfish: When cancer is contagious

• What Parents Need to Know About GLP-1 Medications for Kids.

• Millions may face prescription drug price surge on Oct. 22

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Russia plays down plague fears and denies lab accident, says scientist died of "pneumonia of unknown origin"

  The agency said some people had tested positive for colds or COVID, but that no pathogens causing dangerous infections were found. It also said there had been no accident at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, and it attributed the scientist's death to "pneumonia of unknown origin." A WHO spokesperson said that based on the unofficial information available, the public health risk to the general public appears to be low.

  • Why you don’t need to worry about the Russian plague accident (if in fact there was a Russian plague accident)

  On Sunday, a X post hyping a “plague outbreak” in Siberia went viral. Almost 6 million people have now seen it. “5 hospitals now under QUARANTINE,” the post warned, throwing in siren and biohazard emojis to pump the drama further. You will be shocked - shocked! - to hear the post came from Annie Jacobsen, a Pulitzer-winning reporter whose new book, “Biological War,” tells the story of “a lab accident, a bio-attack, a global pandemic, and the collapse of human society.” Just like The Stand. Only Annie’s a reporter, see? This is serious business and very real. Thus the siren emojis! Good news, though. Biological War is currently #76 on Amazon.

  • WHO Says Plague Risk Low After Russian Lab Death.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Powerful solar eruption could supercharge the northern lights this week.

• DIY Algae Biodiesel Is Harder Than You Think

• Sulfate cooling the Earth is cheap, doable, and coming soon

• Chernobyl particles reveal unexpectedly stable nuclear fuel after 40 years

• Sierra Club sues San Francisco, claims city is fabricating its water needs

• Germany and California Make Up an Environmental Superpower

• A New Crop of Solar Panels Is the U.S.'s Best Hope of Catching China

• Largest penguin colony suffers 'enormous population crash'

• One of America's Last Chestnut Groves Is About to Be Destroyed for a Data Center

• The solar boom is rapidly transforming emerging economies