2025-12-01
etc
-
Canadian mathematician becomes two-time World Champion in Scrabble
- Unfortunately they dont do Strip scrabble at the tournaments.
Horseshit
-
Adolescence lasts into 30s – new study shows four pivotal ages for your brain
-
Tell HN: Regrets. Think carefully about how you spend your time
Ten years later, I'm still stuck thinking about this. Am I the kind of person who does shitty things? I was. Am I still? How would I even know? I don't believe that faith is an out, or that you can apologize or donate your way out of past behaviors. You will always be the person who has done what you have done.
-
They Found Relatives on 23andMe–and Asked for a Cut of the Inheritance
-
Now, with nearly 20 years of price data behind them, Feeding America is considering whether to evolve the system again. If prices are this stable and predictable, does the network even need an auction? Should they move to something more like a supermarket model, where prices are posted and food banks buy what they want directly, without bidding? It would be faster, simpler, and more intuitive. But the auction has safeguards that a posted-price system wouldn’t. Right now bids are sealed and only accepted twice a day, which prevents large, well-staffed food banks from hovering over the system and “sniping” high-value loads at the last minute. Share budgets were originally set according to need, so the highest-need food banks entered the market with more purchasing power.
What stands out most, though, is how impactful the original choice system turned out to be. It took a sector defined by goodwill, volunteerism, and moral urgency and gave it a structure that made those virtues effective. It replaced guesswork with information, rivalry with trust, and improvisation with planning.
-
Max Verstappen beats Piastri to take F1 title race to Abu Dhabi GP
Musk
Electric / Self Driving cars
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
-
Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away
-
Who paid for this I wonder: Revisiting Jill of the Jungle, the last game Tim Sweeney designed
Boy, was 1992 a different time for computer games. Epic MegaGames’ Jill of the Jungle illustrates that as well as any other title from the era. Designed and programmed by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, the game was meant to prove that console-style games of the original Nintendo era could work just as well on PCs. (Later, the onus of proof would often be in the reverse direction.) Also, it had a female protagonist, which Sweeney saw as a notable differentiator at the time. As wacky as it is to remember that the idea of a female character was seen as exceptional at any point (and with the acknowledgement that this game was nonetheless not the first to do that), it’s still neat to see how forward-thinking Sweeney was in many respects—and not just in terms of cultural norms in gaming.
-
Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it
-
The Steam Machine's HDMI Port Has a Built-In Identity Crisis
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
-
AI Can Generate Code. Is That a Threat to Computer Science Education?
-
UC San Diego launches global consortium to reshape CS education in the AI era
-
EvilAI Operators Use AI-Generated Code and Fake Apps for Far-Reaching Attacks
-
Why ChatGPT Still Has a Winning Edge over Google's Smarter AI
-
OpenAI's lead under pressure as rivals start to close the gap
-
Qwen3-VL can scan two-hour videos and pinpoint nearly every detail
-
A rebuttal to Michael Burry: Why Nvidia isn't the Cisco of the dot-com era
-
AI doubted a female developer's work until she switched profile to a white man
-
Microsoft CEO taps advisor to 'rethink' the company's business for the AI era
-
Antifragile Programming and Why AI Won't Steal Your Job
You can add code quickly, but the more you add, the bigger your problems become. That’s the crux of the matter. Writing code was never the hard part—I could write code at 12, and countless 12-year-olds today can write simple games and apps. In the same way, a 12-year-old can build a doghouse with a hammer, nails, and wood. Getting 80% of the way has always been easy. Scaling complexity without everything collapsing—that’s the hard part.
-
ChatGPT-5 offers dangerous advice to mentally ill people, psychologists warn
-
ChatGPT 3 turned 3 today. It still hasn't come close to meeting expectations
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
-
UFOs appear to be intelligently-guided artificial physical craft with tech abilities far exceeding those of any known human society. They usually appear near the edge of visibility, and by now there have been >100K documented UFO reports. Reflecting on recent events (eg, glints, film) has pushed me over this line: I now put < 20% probability weight on all UFOs being explained as illusions, delusions, or mistakes. So >80% of my weight must go to the two non-mistake hypotheses:
- A) Some UFOs are what they appear to be.
- B) A powerful conspiracy has worked for 75+ years to con folks into thinking (A).
Hard to say which of these is more likely. I put >2/3 probability weight on this dramatic claim:
- C = A1 or B1) US War Depts have been working hard for 75+ years to either hide that some UFOs are what they seem, or to mislead many into thinking so. Even most US presidents aren’t in on the con.
A more complex version of A, call it A2, adds that their craft hold biosquishy passengers, and that these craft have crashed many times on Earth. I’m not yet convinced I need to believe A2, but if I did I’d likely explain the biosquisy part as either a local construction to make them seem more relatable to us, or as due to another rule of theirs preserving the dominance of biosquishy versions of themselves. To explain the craft crashing so often, I’d postulate that their civilization has long been rotting, and so they’ve lost many of their original capacities. Either version of A seems bad news for humanity’s long term future. We wanted to leave the farm when we grew up, to seek adventure elsewhere. But no, big brother says we must stay and work the farm til we die. Aliens are real, but have not helped us, and never will help. Not killing us is the best we can get from them. Maybe we will get to spread into our Solar System, or maybe not, we don’t yet know.
But these A consequences wouldn’t bite for a while. Not for centuries, if my guess that our civ will decline soon is right. So in fact, convincing the world of A will be mostly a nothing-burger for a long while. Some elites may have to accept a big lowering of their status, compared to aliens. But most everyone else just won’t much care. Even religions have shown themselves to be pretty flexible about such things.
- What if the rot in our civilizations is influenced from outside? What if their civilization has as many factions and is even more fucked up than ours? Long chains of reason from little actual data; what we do know merely helps define the vastness of the areas we do not know.
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
-
Shopify lays off staff to keep team 'fast, sharp and focused'
-
Norway wealth fund to vote for human rights report at Microsoft, against Nadella
-
The $260B Mom-and-Pop Funds Distorting the Credit Market
- Beg pardon i thought it was the billions in "wink wink, nudge nudge" level fraud that was beginning to have the foreskins peeled back.
Trump
Left Angst
-
Silicon Valley's Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends
-
'Deeply demoralizing': how Trump derailed coal country's clean-energy revival
-
Women's Rights Have Achieved Overlooked Global Victories Despite Right-Wing Trends
You’ve seen the headlines: Genocide. Famine. War. Climate catastrophe. Inflation. The far right ascendant. Democracy in decline. For women in particular, things look particularly grim: Abortion rights have been overturned, with contraception next in the crosshairs; the workforce is hemorrhaging Black women; women still lag in political leadership; and social media influencers encourage young women to throw in the towel and put on an apron, tradwife style. And it’s not just the United States. In even the most progressive countries, the status of women is in jeopardy. Sweden recently renounced its trademark feminist foreign policy. In Argentina, President Javier Milei came riding into power on a chainsaw, which he first used to cut down the country’s ministry for gender equality and, with it, 100 percent of the country’s support for combating domestic violence and sexual assault. And in the Netherlands, traditionally one of the world’s most generous supporters of women’s rights, a new right-wing government pledged last year to eliminate billions of euros in development funding, including everything earmarked for gender equality programs.
- "Gender Equality" == "Men in women's sports, bathrooms, prisons" right?
-
Liberal towns backtrack on license plate trackers amid concerns about privacy
-
New report examines how David Sacks might profit from Trump administration role
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
-
Four dead, 10 injured after a mass shooting at children’s birthday party
The San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office said it received reports of a shooting in the 1900 block of Lucile Avenue around 6 p.m., the office said. Stockton Vice Mayor Jason Lee said, on a social media post, a children’s birthday party was the site of a mass shooting, adding that an “ice cream shop should never be a place where families fear for their lives.” However, the Associated Press reported that the shooting occurred at a banquet hall, and that the victims were both children and adults. The sheriff’s office said there are indications that the shooting could have been a targeted attack.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
-
Pentagon's social media rules can't keep up with viral military influencers
-
A Real Ukraine Peace Plan - The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity
From the Orange Revolution in the early 2000s to the Maidan revolution in 2014, the US and its NATO partners have been interfering in Ukraine’s internal affairs in attempt to manipulate the country into a hostile position toward its much larger and more powerful neighbor, Russia. We must remember how directly coordinated the 2014 coup was by the United States. US Senators, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham, were on the main square of a foreign capital demanding that the people overthrow their duly elected government. Victoria Nuland was caught on a telephone call planning who would run the post-coup government. Outside intervention led us to the terrible situation of today. This peace deal is another chapter in that same intervention, with the US and its partners desperately trying to manage and solve a problem that they created in the first place. Can you solve a problem created by outside intervention with more intervention?
-
White House gives Maduro ultimatum as U.S. moves toward land operations
World
-
Man behind in-flight Evil Twin WiFi attacks gets 7 years in prison
A 44-year-old man was sentenced to seven years and four months in prison for operating an “evil twin” WiFi network to steal the data of unsuspecting travelers during flights and at various airports across Australia.
-
Italy's Competition Watchdog Broadens WhatsApp AI Policy Probe
-
Norway may break up with Europe's power grid over soaring energy prices
-
What happens when you kick millions of teens off social media?
-
Hereford man jailed over extreme right-wing music
Norbert Gyurcsik, from Kestrel Road, Hereford, was arrested in May last year over albums in which lyrics breached terrorism legislation and intended to incite racial hatred. He pleaded guilty in October to one count of distributing and two of possessing such material. At Worcester Crown Court on Thursday, the 48-year-old was sentenced to 40 months in prison for each offence, with the terms to to be served concurrently
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
-
The 30-foot sea cow quickly hunted to extinction because of its tasty meat
-
Even late to the scene, I believe I have something relevant to add that is missing from the tinned fish furor––disapproval. Rather than reveling in the vintage charm of the cans or in ideating gourmet recipes, I want to talk about the dark and slippery underbelly of the world of tinned fish, a world of waste, apathy, and wanton cruelty to animals.
-
Law changes could soon bring balcony solar to millions across US