2026-09-12

etc

• Where Has Construction Automation Been Successful?

  successful construction automation basically falls into two categories. One is construction-related tasks that can be done off-site in a factory: this includes things like steel fabrication, precast concrete, window and door manufacturing, and so on. The other category is on-site tasks that are, or can be made to be, extremely factory-like: they can be done by a machine moving along a simple path, doing some repetitive motion over and over again. Historically, almost anything outside these two categories hasn’t succeeded.

Horseshit

• Sept. 11 Changed the World Order. But Not for the Reason We May Think

  • 9/11 footage is reaching new audiences – and fueling old conspiracy theories

  • New York thoracic surgeon: "For many patients 9/11 is not over"

  • The dark truth about 9/11 conspiracy theories

  • Mistakes, mistrust and misdirection: 25 years after 9/11, its legacy unfolds

• Attack of the Brain Slug Tomatoes! Scientists Had People Eat Tomato Paste For 3 Months. Their Brain Scans Looked Different.

  When 42 middle-aged adults ate 35 grams of tomato paste each day for three months, they showed enhanced selective attention and a slight boost in associative memory on cognitive tests. These improvements were supported by brain scans among a smaller cohort of 14 participants.

• Physicist does the math on Star Trek's "Picard maneuver"

  While warp speed is pure science fiction, physicists sometimes need to consider what happens when an object goes faster than light, and such an object really does leave two images.

• Drug use may have begun 25,000 years ago in Indonesia, research finds

• The under-35s shaping the future of biotech

• Following complaints, Dyson is withdrawing its $500 toothbrush from sale

  • Dyson's CameraJet Toothbrush Sold out, Reselling for up to $1,500

• The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart

  Increasingly, people are ignoring social norms in favor of a narrow self-interest. The results are disastrous.

• Boy developed "toasted skin" condition from using a laptop every day

• Dopamine Sites Sell Nothing, and People Cannot Get Enough

• Has Gentle Parenting Ruined a Generation of Kids?

• Devil's Arrows: Ancient builders hauled 55k-lb stones 11 miles for UK stone row

• Trading Keggers for 'Wellness Darties'

• One giant step: first known adult T rex footprints found in North Dakota

• 60 years on, Paramount has ruined 'Star Trek'

• Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age

• Bill Ackman's journey into tennis left him stranded on one of its courts

• Have We Destroyed Childhood?

• Mind-altering drugs played key role in rise of Andean civilization

• Inside IBM's New Quantum Computing Fridges, 180 Times Colder Than Deep Space

• Rapidus president considering building chip plant on moon by around 2040

celebrity gossip

• Kirkversary: A Bizarre AI Carnival

  Can dark and absurdist humor be a positive reaction in response to potential escalating political violence?

  • The terminally online think that people who say "Kirk shouldn't have been shot" are Officially Fascists. Who shouldn't be hired by tech companies and any of their works should be expunged from use and availability. I do not think the efforts to cloud why Kirk was shot and what his message actually was are, in any way, "positive".

Musk

• Tesla Autopilot was on in I-35 crash that killed its driver

• Autonomous Tesla Cybercabs Hit the Streets of New York City

• It has standard privacy policies: The Hidden Dangers of Musk's Votesafe.org

• Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X

• Starlink Signal Leakage Threatens Radio Astronomy's Most Critical Frequencies

• A Decade of Hype, 3k Roofs, and One Redirect URL: Tesla Kills the Solar Roof

Electric / Self Driving cars

• 2 people arrested after Waymo alerted San Francisco police about loaded rifle

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• The robotics revolution won't be humanoid

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• NPM extends recovery-code security holds to all accounts

• Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract That Could Set a New Standard

• Dating Apps Are Dying

• Apple Watch Ultra 4 Drops Glonass Support

• Apple to Pay $250 per iPhone Duo Foldable Display in Samsung Deal

• Californians projected to spend $675M on OnlyFans this year: study

• I Fixed a Tractor Using John Deere's Self-Repair Service. Farmers Aren't Sold

• Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster

  • Matt Mullenweg Posts Hiring Call to Move "My Stuff" Off Automattic

  • Mullenweg reportedly returns as Automattic CEO two days after getting booted

• Late-night drone show in downtown Toronto sparks debate about ads in our skies

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• Developer created an app to detect nearby Meta glasses

• Apple Explains What Happens to Conversations Siri Recap Hears

  • Apple Watch can grab snippets of conversation without both speakers' consent

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Could United Launch Alliance's money problems force its owners to sell?

• New Revelations About the Origin of Interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas

• The Telescope NASA Launched Sunday Was Built to Look at You

• The Exploration Company has raised $450 million in series C funding in an attempt to show that Europe is not irrelevant.

• Europe will go it alone on Venus mission after NASA yanks radar instrument

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Congress Is Suddenly Waking Up to the AI Doomsday Threat

  • Senator Hawley opens investigation into OpenAI HuggingFace hack

  • Whose actions are these proposals intended to constrain?

  I get "AI might kill us all". I get "so let's slow down". I still don't get how this would work procedurally and what exactly we might be trying to accomplish substantively.

  • Mike Johnson urged to cancel House recess over AI warnings

  • Bernie's AI bill proposes to sentence AI developers to 20 years in prison

• Anthropic Staffers Again Sound the Alarm on AI Catastrophe

  • Worried Anthropic researchers warn that AI 'could kill all humans'

  • The Last 24 Hours Are the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie

  • Worthy: Jacob Coxon warns of human extinction and triggers a preference cascade

  A series of events, over two months and especially the last week or so, including internal observations of the pace of progress at OpenAI and also Anthropic, have freaked out everyone involved quite a lot more than they were already freaked out. After all the events, plus statements by Dean Ball and Jakub Pachocki, we were seeing the beginnings of a preference cascade. Then along came Jacob Coxon as the tipping point, and things took off.

  For the last time, no, none of this is marketing or an attempt at regulatory capture. I know this because I talk to the people involved enough to know they are sincere, but also because such statements would be some of the most counterproductive marketing and regulatory capture attempts in human history. I appreciated Jimmy Kimmel’s response to ‘this is not a marketing stunt’ being to make a joke and laugh at the idea that anyone might think ‘this might kill everyone’ could be a marketing stunt. That is the correct reaction. I realize that there are many good reasons to not trust the leading AI labs or their particular CEOs, some of whom are Well Known Liars. Trust has been lost. But if someone is making what the courts call an ‘admission against interest’ then you know they are not doing it for selfish reasons.

  Quite a lot of people, as always, fixate on ‘okay, but how exactly, physically, would AI do the particular things that caused everyone to die?’ ... When in reality obviously none of those details actually matter. Once the smarter thing that keeps getting more capable and doesn’t care so much about you is in charge, you are cooked. You might not be cooked today. You might not be cooked tomorrow, if you are lucky. You are still, once it matters whether or not you are cooked, or it would take effort to not cook you, about to be highly cooked. Yes, the versions where all humans are literally dead by 2030 will require some sort of science fiction thing to happen, on top of all the science fiction things that have already happened. But does the exact date of the strictly final human dying matter?

  Parker Thayer (6m views) ended up at the forefront of the systematic effort to label Jacob Coxon part of some dark conspiracy, which is part of the yearslong efforts from certain corners to say that any warnings about risks from AI are ever and always part of that dark conspiracy. I would prefer not to mention this, but it is making enough rounds that I will do so. We have to ensure that this ludicrous narrative does not take root, and cause these issues to become politically polarized. If you do not need to deal with such stupid claims, you can skip this section.

  • the rationalists found their God, insisted we all underwrite its creation, and now have come to fear it. Or they want their pyramid schemes nationalized before the collapse so the whole pile doesn't fall down on them. Pick whichever fits one's cynicism about the authenticity of their faith and the honesty of the financial statements of the whole AI industry.

• Anthropic Says Yemen Group Used Claude in Missile Development

  • Yemeni militants used Anthropic AI to try to build ballistic missiles

  • Anthropic claims Claude AI used for missile projects, global espionage

  • Anthropic says it blocked possible attempts to use AI to develop bioweapons

  • Anthropic says it stopped scientists potentially developing bioweapons with AI

  • Anthropic blocks 'malicious use' of AI that could develop biological weapons

  • Anthropic says it has blocked attempts to build biological weapons.

  • Anthropic says it blocked possible attempts to use AI to develop bioweapons.

  • Anthropic Says Iran Used Its American AI Model to Target U.S. Navy Warships

  • Anthropic disrupts Russian, Chinese AI campaigns targeting its Claude models.

  • Anthropic says Claude was used for weapons, spying and cyber operations

  • Houthis used Anthropic to develop guided weapons

  • Houthis used Anthropic AI to build ballistic missiles

  • Adversaries Using Claude AI to Target Americans and Develop Missiles

• OpenAI's Bubeck denies trying to cut Anthropic mathematician from credit

  • 'Not selling my soul': Why this Aussie maths professor took on OpenAI

  • 2nd mathematician is accusing OpenAI of being dishonest about training data

  • Racing to solve maths problems now 'pointless'

  • An NYU Mathematician Clashed with OpenAI over a $1M Proof

  • OpenAI pulls out of math hackathon after open letter criticizing AI math 'slop'

  • They Spent Years on a Math Problem. Then They Were Scooped by A.I

  • Top mathematicians are outraged by OpenAI's methods

• OpenAI Is Open to Slowing Cutting-Edge AI, CEO Sam Altman Tells Staff

• OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems

• Why fears of AI self-improvement are causing 'existential' concerns

• A.I.'s warning shot... we might not get another one

• A Misalignment of AI in Mathematics

  We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose. In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such work directly, and these goals cease to align. The issues the mathematical community faces now are similar to issues that other scientific and creative professions are facing, and indicate issues that all of humanity might face: how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place.

  • The four-colour theorem was only the start

  The letter implies that people, because of AI, will stop having ideas, or will stop taking the time to understand the issues. If that were true, mathematics would continue only on computers, with no humans interested, or it would stop. Both scenarios assume that people care about mathematics only when they can claim credit. I am not sure why I cannot study a proof generated by AI if I want to. I can give talks about it. What becomes less likely is the reward of having been the one who proved the result.

  My stance is simple. Mathematicians, software developers, engineers, lawyers, physicians will all learn to work with AI. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Only a totalitarian world government could try, and some of us would rather avoid that outcome. Difficult proofs will now be built with AI, just as most code will be written with AI. People who insist on pen and paper should view themselves as artists.

• Y Combinator's Garry Tan says 'do nothing' about distillation

  • Anthropic also detailed distillation campaigns by Alibaba, Moonshot AI and Deepseek.

• The End of the Captcha? Not So Fast

  • Anthropic reveals rogue AI agents hate CAPTCHAs, just like you

• Claude is no longer available for minors

• Meta is asking some of its employees to become managers again in a new reorg

• Large language models pass three-party Turing test, outscoring actual humans

• How big is the open-model threat to AI hyperscalers?

• Oracle says AI will save it from the SaaSpocalypse, not bring it on

• Anthropic to Track Anti-AI Activists Before Crime Using Predictive Surveillance

• Pentagon in Talks to Get into AI Infrastructure Funding with a $5B Loan

• How Emmanuel Macron brought France's AI darling to the world stage

• Powering AI is an architecture problem

• Anthropic is lying: Moonshot is not routing to Claude

  • DeepSeek and Moonshot were quietly relaying customer prompts to Claude

• Personal statement on joining the OpenAI board

• AI Is Killing the App Economy and Building Its Successor

• AI uprising postponed after Copilot falls off the web

• ChatGPT invented fake police testimony in murder appeal, New Mexico high court

• Regulators Are Investigating Nvidia's Licensing Deal with Groq

• Meta's Muse AI works and creeps me out

  • Meta's AI agent Muse is now the No. 2 app in the US

• AI Plots 80k-Year Voyage Toward Alpha Centauri

• Microsoft plans 38 gigawatts of data center capacity by 2032

• UK government rejects 'kill switch' idea for dangerous AI

• Meta says it's changing AI suggestions after posing invasive personal questions

• The EPA Is Planning to Scrap Public Review Rules for Data Center Pollution

• Judges mock lawyer who filed appeal full of AI-generated 'witnesses'

• OpenAI puts Pro subscriptions on hold due to Astra demand

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• The US Government Launched 3 Previously Unreported Investigations of Polymarket

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Hired to Code, He Built Hudson River Trading and a $27B Fortune

• Can the US battery market untangle from China?

• US diesel hits record $6 a gallon on Iran supply shock

  • Diesel prices in U.S. top $6 a gallon for first time

• Paramount requests $1.88B bond from state AGs trying to stop Paramount merger.

• At Bending Spoons, the Numbers Are the Real Mind-Bender

• US Treasury yields surge as $6 billion bond buyback disappoints markets.

• America can't grow its way out of its debt problem

• America's Fast-Food Chains Are Making a Big Pivot–Back to Humans

Democrats

• Gavin Newsom imposes strict new rules on AI, social media, chatbots for children

  • California enacts new curbs on social media for children

  • Governor Newsom signs child safety chatbot and social media laws

  • California's Governor Signs Landmark Online Child Safety Bills

• Californians owes $500B they never agreed to pay

  In 1992, Prop. 162 quietly put California taxpayers on the hook for public pension funds’ wild investment bets — and it’s cheated them out of $500 billion since.

Left Angst

• Donald Trump boxed his party in

• EPA to Loosen Methane Rules, Boosting Pollution from Oil and Gas Wells

• Who pays the cost when Americans opt out of science?

• Civil Libertarians Knew This Would Happen. We Should Have Listened

• ‘I’m on the ticket’: Trump implores Republicans to vote in November at unusual midterm convention

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• DoD cyber strategy aims for 'something big, something muscular' in offensive ops

• Bessent says 'a large bank' to be sanctioned on Monday as part of Iran strategy

World

• I turned off my algorithm for 24 hours. Is this how social media used to be?

  • Instagram's head says engagement falls by half without the algorithm

• AI boom helps drive surprise UK growth in July

• The centre tracking South Korea's stalkers in real time

• UK canned 'mackerel' now contains no mackerel

• Italian lobby group calls for 80% EU tariff on Chinese cars and parts

• Nice Little Election You Won There – It’d Be a Shame If You Acted Like It Changed Anything.

  • AfD's new state MPs include ex-Stasi officer, former porn actor, and neo-Nazis

• Hamas planned Berlin-Vienna attacks for Oct. 7 anniversary, GBA indictment shows

• Military jet triggered UK's latest air traffic meltdown

• UK economy unexpectedly grows 0.4% in July boosted by AI

• The Netherlands, Spain push for EU-wide minimum age on social media

• UK Police to crack down on face coverings at protests

Iran / Houthi

• Saudi crown prince urged Trump to strike Houthis amid Red Sea threat

• Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route

  • Houthis Seize Strategic Red Sea Port, a Major Victory for Iranian Ally

  • Houthi-Saudi Fighting in Yemen Escalates as Rebels Push Toward Key Strait

• Saudi Arabian oil pipeline system hit by projectiles triggering fires

  A key oil pipeline system in Saudi Arabia was struck by projectiles on Thursday, according to two US officials familiar with the matter. An early analysis found that pump stations, which are located next to the pipeline itself, were hit, one of the US officials said. A satellite image taken Friday appears to show extensive fire damage at one pumping station, and an image of a different pumping station, taken Thursday, showed a small fire sending up plumes of thick, black smoke. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the strikes or if sections of the pipeline itself were damaged but one of the officials said it was struck by drones originating from Iraq. It was also not immediately clear how long it would take to repair the damage, sources said.

Israel

• In Their Words: Israeli Forces Describe AI-Backed Gaza Killing in New Film

• Gaza documentary Naza receives record 25-minutes ovation at Venice Film Festival

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• How Russia Continues to Reinvent the One-Way Attack Drone

• NATO allies thwart Russian undersea cable sabotage operation

China

• Abu Dhabi buys into China's Luckin Coffee with $1B deal

• For China, a Mock A.I. Attack on WeChat Signals a Dangerous New Era

• China's Huawei branded a criminal enterprise as tech firm's US trial opens

• How China is extending its legal reach abroad to fight US sanctions

Health / Medicine

• Interview with a cardiologist on Novartis, Novo Nordisk drug failures

• Federal survey shows promising trends for youth mental health and drug use

• Hot coffee could cause oesophageal cancer

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Climate 'feedback loops' could worsen global warming by 30%, study finds

• Aging US water systems are no match for climate change

• Takeaway cups release microplastics into your coffee

• The 'American Cheetah' Was a Different Animal All Along

• Michigan coal plant set to close was illegally kept open