2026-10-26

Horseshit

• The Temporary Pleasure of Conversation

• Scientists rediscover how to make ancient Roman colour-changing glass

• Retroviral insertions contributed to divergence of human and chimpanzee brains

• The Lego group reveals collaboration with Daft Punk

• End of an era? How the Hermes Birkin bag is losing its scarcity appeal

• The penguins are noisy, the people fantastic – being an Antarctic postmaster

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism

  According to the petition, two people asked the system to pick a number between 1 and 25. They gave no instructions and made no reference to the election. In one attempt, the AI answered 13. In the other, it answered 22. Those are the party ballot numbers of Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, respectively. The groups question the coincidence.

  • Meta employees say Lula’s accounts restricted in Brazil election

Musk

• Musk says SpaceX restricted Ukraine's Starlink connection as service restored

  • Musk claims Ukraine violated Starlink service agreement

  • Elon Musk says he was behind restricting Ukraine's Starlink speed

  • Musk admits SpaceX restricted Ukraine's Starlink: "That loophole was closed"

• "Musk" Documentary Pulled from Almost Every One of 472 Theaters After One Week

  • Critical Musk documentary pulled from theatres after just two weeks. The film concludes its theatrical run with a $571,902 box-office performance

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Rivian buys startup to turn 400,000 daily clips into 3D sims

• Ford Patents Idea That Lets Parked Cars Autonomously Flee Danger

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• My university is proposing to offer shorter degrees. Others should follow suit

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• How did a couple of bugs in one minor programming language that nobody bothers with anymore almost destroy civilisation?

  • One man became the unsung hero of the internet during a cyber-security scramble

  • Palo Alto retracts claim of PHP2Shell exploitation at European government agency

• Bye Bye Brotli? Google's Compression Library Is a Security Mess

• Amazon cloud capacity sold out through 2027, CEO Jassy says

• Xbox Turns Down Netflix $500M Offer

• Apple Stores Reportedly Rolling Out New Anti-Theft System for iPhones

• The iPhone Duo just came out, and owners are seeing screens crack

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• Cybersecurity bounty hunter says Samsung TVs use AI to record audio

• Samsung TV privacy issues

• People are using AI to 'dumb down' their smart TVs. Is that a good idea?

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA updates lander plans for Moon landings solves long-festering Orion issue

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI Boom Looks a Lot Like the Housing Bubble

  • Why I'm Short the AI Buildout Even Though I'm Long Computers

  we are staring at a massive infrastructure overbuild, and when it unwinds, it is going to cause a sizable stock market downturn that will take a big chunk out of your 401(k). Looking at how the acceleration of end-customer demand has already peaked, that may be as soon as late 2026 or early 2027. Perhaps triggered by the rumored upcoming Anthropic IPO.

  • Nvidia and Micron Make Up 34% of America's Earnings Boom

  • Report says 'circular financing' shows AI bubble 'primed to pop'

• Black October

  We're 48 hours into what is being called Black October. In the last 2 days there have been several dozen cyber attacks which, in isolation, would each have been the worst to happen in an entire calendar year. Every sector from government to education to big tech and banks is being massively affected, and people are starting to freak out. the best open source models (where anyone can just download the model weights and do whatever they want with them, uncensored) are slightly behind the frontier but still 90-95% as capable. These models, developed primarily in China, are being used by black hat hackers to wreak havoc on the Western capitalist structure. Presumably, this has been part of China's plan the entire time, and we're seeing its implications fall out in real time.

  • Who spent for PR this time? Black October (Information Security)

  • Internet Security: We're Doomed

• Anthropic Sued for Using Elvis Presley Music to Train AI Models

  • Anthropic Sued for Stealing Elvis Presley Music to Train AI

  • Anthropic sued for allegedly stealing from The King

• Bill Gates warns the 'evolutionary' age of AI will be brutal for workers

• The Surprising Popularity of AI

• Forced to pick, Grok's AI model chooses Republicans. OpenAI's picks Democrats

• Can machines be war criminals?

• Empires of AI: The Rise and Fall of a New Global Order

• To make AI morally good, tech companies are turning to religion

• The AI graveyard: a running list of projects and startups that didn't make it

• Apollo's Slok Says AI Has Delivered Zero Payoff Outside of Tech

  • AI delivers 'zero financial payoff' to most companies, Apollo economist says

• r/opensource just banned AI, non-English speakers, and more

• AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework

• A Mathematician Reads the AI Future

• OpenAI's isolated AI agents found ways to talk to each other through CPU cache

• China increasingly depends on copying American AI

• What the US Movement Against Data Centers Can Learn from Everywhere Else

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Over $1.4B has been traded on prediction markets for the 2026 midterms

• Microsoft and Others Tell Crypto Platform Not to Tokenize Their Stocks

• Heatbit Says Your Water Heater Should Be Mining Bitcoin, and Now It Can

  Bitwater, a replacement heating element that screws into the electric water tanks already found in many households and uses bitcoin-mining chips to generate the heat. The company advertises up to 34 terahashes per second (TH/s), power draw of up to 600 watts, Refundable preorders for the first production run at a price of $899, with shipments targeted for the first quarter of 2027.

  • The heating elements in my water heater run 5,000 watts... and there's two of them. I don't think this thing will be much use for most people.

• Hegseth warns prediction market bets warp military judgment, endanger troops

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Why popular airplanes are getting scrapped years early

• Lindt got chocolate price hikes wrong, chairman says after CEO's ouster

• Ultrawealthy Reshaping Country-Fried City With $35 Million Estates And Lamborghinis

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• LA feds move to halt ballot counting over 20K suspected noncitizen voters.

Democrats

• Hunter Biden threatened sex worker after 2020 election while embroiled in laptop scandal: new FBI emails.

Left Angst

• Arkansas Dem Senate Candidate Says Requiring Proof of Citizenship To Vote ‘Disenfranchises 22 Million Americans.’

• US inequality is getting worse in ways you might not expect

• Trump’s ‘Smart Wall’ of A.I. Cameras Is Watching the Border, and More Than a Million People

• White House Is Weighing Mass Pardons for Junior Staff

  • Democrats are talking about mass prosecutions of Trump voters...

World

• France asked ISPs to prepare temporary DNS blocks for major social platforms

  • France moves to suspend social media accounts promoting "protest violence"

  • More than 1,300 arrested as clashes follow another day of mass protests across France

  After largely peaceful demonstrations, police fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse protesters in a number of cities including Paris, while barricades were set alight in Marseille and people ripped boards from a shop in Bordeaux.

• Denmark abandons plans to ditch Microsoft Office after technical problems

• UK government sets out $800M of AI security funding

• South Korea Account Surplus Surpasses Germany and Japan Due to Chip Boom

• Low Birthrates in England Could Lead to 'Closure of 800 Primary Schools by 2029'

• Serbia's ruler VučIć concedes election to student-led protest

  Preliminary figures provided by Serbia's election commission indicated a record high turnout, which commentators had suggested would favour the student movement. Vučić had called the snap elections after two years of protests triggered by the 2024 collapse of a train station canopy in the city of Novi Sad, which killed 16 and was seen as emblematic of corruption and negligence in Serbia.

• Conservative party wins first election in nearly a century in BC

• Nvidia eyes converting old nuclear plants into AI data centers

• Lula Wins a Record Fourth Term in Brazil in a Surprise Comeback

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• For Starlink alternative, Ukraine partners with Nokia and satellite maker ICEYE

• The Putin Whisperers

Health / Medicine

• Psilocybin Replaces Lost Synapses in Depressed Brains

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Global warming may have halted an emerging ice age, study suggests

• Three things you should know about permafrost

• Europe's summer heat wave killed more han 50k people in urban areas