2026-09-03

Horseshit

• So there's this $499 AI Dyson camera toothbrush

• Emily Wilson to retranslate the Odyssey from scratch

  • Emily Wilson is completely re-translating The Odyssey

• "Enshittification" Isn't Real

  The more interesting question, then, is not why platforms change, but why the language of platform decay has become so emotionally satisfying and so virally successful. A person can believe, all at once, that Instagram is worse, that using Instagram is embarrassing, that the platform is culturally corrosive, and that they personally are still using it more than ever. At the heart of the belief in platform decay is a form of cognitive dissonance. Many detractors of platforms are still very active users of the platforms they supposedly hate. Hypotheses like enshittification provide an absolution for the platform narcissists. It is safe to wager that the platform narcissist is still online, they’re still using the platforms, but they need terms like enshittification to encapsulate their feelings and explain why they are still on the platform. The enshittification narrative resolves the contradiction by relocating agency towards the platform.

  • A16Z Says You Love Social Media, Enshittification Isn't Real

• 'Idiocracy' Predicted All of This

  Twenty years later, Mike Judge’s prescient comedy is getting harder to laugh at.

• Poop-maxxing: How a 30-year-old chart became a hot gut health trend

• Rescue Trucks at LaGuardia and JFK Get Trackers After Fatal Crash

• SF's drug-addled Union Square gets a rebirth with $75M bet

• Aging Brains Blend Memories Together Instead of Just Forgetting Them

• Climber Recounts Rescue from 6-Inch Ledge Atop California Mountain

• About half of Americans say they spend too much time on their smartphone

• KFC Debuts An Oreo-Flavored Chicken Sandwich, And Fast Food Lovers Are Horrified

  Starting August 28, KFC locations in China will debut an Oreo-flavored chicken sandwich. The Oreo Original Recipe Chicken Burger starts with a breaded chicken thigh and lettuce…and devolves from there. Instead of the chain’s typical bread, this sandwich comes with Oreo-flavored buns that are tinted black and stamped with an image of the cookie. Inside the burger, KFC is adding a layer of mashed potatoes coated in crushed Oreo pieces.

• Meet the Antinatalists, Who Hope Humans Go Extinct

celebrity gossip

• Steve Ballmer banned by NBA over improper payment to basketball star

Musk

• Another Tesla on Autopilot Stopped on Freeway, Driver Died: Report

• Tesla Sets a Launch Date for the Cybercab

• Elon Musk Wants to Make Power-Turbine Components. It Won't Be Easy

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• World's biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle

  • Scientists Hunting Dark Matter Found Something Strange

  • The first signs of dark matter particles may have been spotted

• Thousands of University of Sydney staff on strike over AI and job security

• 'Insane data': Duke professor Dan Ariely accused of additional research fraud

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Lekuo SouthBridge Max Puts an AMD B650 Chipset onto a PCIe Card for More I/O

• Dropbox says about 5k accounts compromised in August hack

• Firefox's new native iOS ad blocker won't block all ads

• Sony is arguing in court that no reasonable customer would assume that they own what they bought.

• GTA 6 Lets You Throw Dog Poop at People

• BGP hijack infecting networks caused by a comedy of errors

• WhatsApp flaw lets anyone access private photos on your locked phone

• Norway considers ban on camera-enabled wearable 'pervert glasses'

• Can Evan Spiegel Sell the World on $2,195 Smart Glasses?

• Federal Judge Declines to Break Up Google's Ad Technology Business

  • Court rules Google will not have to sell ad exchange after losing antitrust case

  • Google escapes ad tech breakup in third Big Tech antitrust loss for US

• Cow Plays EVE Online and I Don't Know If She's Winning or Not

• Millions of Comcast WiFi Routers Can Now Tell When You’re Moving Around the House

  “An opt-in feature, WiFi Motion uses the WiFi signal from a customer’s Xfinity Gateway to sense movement in their home — no cameras needed or recordings captured,” the company wrote in a press release. Comcast says that WiFi Motion works by detecting changes in the radio frequency signals traveling between routers and WiFi-connected devices.

• Meta bricked the cameras on its AI glasses

• It sure looks like hackers breached a major ID card verification service

  • I rented a car, and within hours my driver's license was for sale

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA delays Crew-13 launch after leak found on SpaceX Dragon

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• $64B of data center projects have been blocked or delayed amid opposition

• California lawmakers pass bill governing lawyers' use of AI

• OpenAI delayed its new model's development after the Hugging Face hack

• The Singularity Is Not What It Seems: Whatever the AI Future Is, We're in It Now

• Mayor says 'large chunks' of Wellington council Deloitte report written by AI

• AI Billionaires Are Spending Millions to Change Your Mind About Data Centers

• AI plotted an interstellar journey to Alpha Centauri

• AI wealth is creating a 'mansion shortage' upending San Francisco housing market

• Cognition Set to Raise Around $1B at a $47B Valuation

• Anthropic pledges to try harder to keep models under control.

• You Know Who Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters

• Mistral now trains on user input by default, except on enterprise tier

• AI Slop Is Ruining Cute Animals on the Internet

• Anthropic changes data retention policy after pushback from customers

• Crooks Are Learning to Love AI Hallucinations

• A third of Perplexity's citations don't contain the number they're cited for

  We asked Perplexity’s two search models 310 factual questions about 210 technology companies, collected every source they cited, fetched all of them, and checked whether the page said the thing it was cited for. Of the 1,826 citations attached to a sentence stating a figure — the ones checkable without a second opinion — 34.7% pointed at a page that would not open to an ordinary reader, or opened and contained none of the numbers in the sentence they were attached to.

• Are We Thinking Correctly About AI Intelligence?

• New York City Public Schools banning AI use through middle school

• The Pentagon now has its own version of ChatGPT and Grok

• AI Efficiency Could Cost Us the Next Generation of Experts

• OpenAI's agents exploited a patched Linux bug in Hugging Face incident

• US Government backs OpenAI in New York Times copyright case

• The Singularity Is Not What It Seems

• Pangram Has Emerged as the Gold Standard of AI Detection

• Anthropic launches AI agent blueprints for retailers ahead of holiday shopping

• OpenAI Lawsuits Mount over Canadian School Shooting

  • Teachers, students file new lawsuits against OpenAI over Tumbler Ridge shooting

• Freelancers are getting buried with 'soulless' AI slop cleanup

• Missouri Voters Appear to Recall City Councilman over Data Center Support

• How a new kind of video business cashed in on America's divided politics

• Anthropic Has Some Alignment Problems

• Researchers Warn AI Could Be Changing Us in an Unexpected Way

• Mamdani imposes one-year ban on AI for most NYC students

  • Mamdani Bans AI in NYC Schools

• AI is changing religion and religions are trying to change AI

• Climbers rescued from Mount Shasta after relying on ChatGPT for trip planning

• Will AI save or ruin democracy?

• US Government worried that AI companies can't innovate without legal theft

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Ex-White House teleprompter operator ordered pay $172,000 for Trump speech bets

• Google Engineer Accused of Polymarket Insider Trading Says He Was Just Gambling

Economicon / Business / Finance

• FTC alleges Amazon illegally made $20B by rigging billions of ad auctions

• GoPro Is Being Bought for $285M and Pivoting to AI and Defense Optics

  • GoPro Says It's Moving into Data Centers as Part of a $285M Merger

• A Hedge-Fund Titan’s Divorce Is Putting Wall Street’s Staggering Wealth on Public View - WSJ

• Uber to Cut 3,300 Jobs in Company Overhaul to Reduce Management Layers

  • Uber is laying off 10% of its workforce

  • Uber to axe 10% of its workforce in biggest cuts since pandemic

  • Uber to cut 10% of workforce in bid to move 'simpler and faster'

• Global Bond Selloff Sends Yields to the Highest Level Since 2008

• Factory Job Openings Hit Three-Year Peak Amid Manufacturing Resurgence

• Diesel Cracks Hit Record Highs as Global Fuel Squeeze Deepens

• JPMorgan curbed lending to Jane Street as trading firm muscled into bond market

Trump

• Pentagon Will Own 35% Of Venezuela Oil Venture, White House Reveals.

• $1 coin with Trump's face and gold finish to go on sale

  The $1 coin designed to celebrate America’s 250th birthday and seemingly President Donald Trump, whose face gazes from one side of the gold finish, will go on sale Wednesday, according the U.S. Mint.

• US judge blocks Trump's newest order limiting birthright citizenship

Left Angst

• Apple Maps Changes Lake Ontario to Lake America After Trump Order

  • Apple Joins Google in Renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America"

  • Apple Maps Follows Google, Changes Name of Lake Ontario to 'Lake America'

  • Apple changes Lake Ontario name to 'Lake America' for US users of its Maps

• How Trump Plans to Steal the Midterm Elections, According to a Whistleblower

  President Donald Trump is implementing a largely secret plan to cheat during the 2026 midterm elections in November, according to an explosive whistleblower report released Tuesday. And the plan is much worse than you probably imagined. Roughly 30% of voters in the U.S. cast their ballot by mail, and the U.S. Postal Service is working on a program that would refuse to deliver ballots to people deemed ineligible to vote by the federal government. according to a whistleblower report from an anonymous government employee, is that the digital system they’re working on to reject ballots would toss out every ballot mailed in large batches through USPS, even if just one ballot was ruled invalid. The new system requires states to hand over voter names and address information to the federal government in order for USPS to deliver that person a ballot, effectively giving the Trump regime veto power over who gets to vote.

  • Whistleblower warns about USPS plan for Trump mail voting order

  • USPS Built an Untested, Undocumented Ballot-Blocking System Despite Injunction

• US may ask parents to prove citizenship to get passports for their children

• Illegal aliens are stripping Connecticut beaches clean of crabs and clams, but woke officials are ignoring it.

• Leftists Will Never Self-Reflect, And They Will Never Apologize

  There will be no mass conversion event when all the trans activists, corrupt bureaucrats, and Antifa thugs suddenly snap out of it and rejoin the more sane ranks of American society. That’s not how pathological leftism works, and to believe that it does is a dangerous fantasy. Concepts like remorse and atonement do not exist in the leftist mindset. For themselves, at least. Remorse and atonement are instead reserved for the real oppressors, namely straight white men and the capitalist system they propagate. In reality, leftists possess an entire toolbox of methods to avoid any sort of reckoning. They’ll aggressively downplay previous abuses and assure the public that, though previous iterations of wokeness may have gotten a bit out of hand, they merely want “health care” and spout some version of “real socialism has never been tried.”

  The hard truth is that many leftists are too far gone. They’ll never awake from the madness that has possessed them. They’ll lie, equivocate, and simply ignore all the relevant facts rather than own up to their own disastrous mistakes. They have to be crushed and driven out of public life, and their poisonous ideology must be quarantined from the general populace. Because leftism is a disease, of the mind and the heart.

• Milo Yiannopoulos was 'terrified' by the 'brutality' of his ICE deportation

• The Truth About American Food Safety

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Tyler Robinson enters pleas in Charlie Kirk assassination case after judge clears way for death penalty and orders alleged killer to stand trial

  A Utah judge ruled that alleged Charlie Kirk killer Tyler Robinson will face trial and prosecutors could potentially seek the death penalty in the high-profile case. Robinson, 23, is accused of firing a single shot into Kirk's neck, killing the 31-year-old father-of-two during a Turning Point USA event at Utah Valley University nearly a year ago. He pleaded not guilty on Tuesday after a judge decided Utah County prosecutors had presented enough evidence to support an aggravated murder charge and send him to trial.

• Judge orders Lindsay Clancy jury to deliberate further after they fail to reach verdict

• This North Carolina County Is Taking Mug Shots Offline. Not Everyone Agrees

• Woman Who Exposed FBI Official for Working with Russian Oligarch Found Dead

  Allison Guerriero, a security researcher whose information helped expose the criminal conduct of former FBI counterintelligence official Charles McGonigal, has been found dead at her home in Boynton Beach, Florida. Hours before her death, Guerriero posted a series of messages on X, formerly Twitter, criticizing Representative Jim Jordan, the FBI and McGonigal. McGonigal was arrested in 2023 and was sentenced to 50 months in prison and then was later sentenced in a separate case to 28 months in prison in 2024. He pleaded guilty to secretly colluding with a Russian oligarch and also admitted to receiving $225,000 in cash from someone with ties to the Albanian government.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US Mysteriously Waives Sanctions Against Iran’s Bloodthirsty State Broadcaster, Again, Even as Network Puts Bounties on Trump Family’s Heads.

• US, China arm for space warfare: hunter satellites and orbital weapons

• The Logistics Nightmare Facing U.S. Warships

• USA Army just used a 20-kilowatt laser to take out three drones

• Chinese Cars Could Be Huge in U.S., and That's the Problem, Officials Say

World

• Sweden pauses Denmark power cable over EU grid rules

• Swiss E-ID: Justice Minister Jans prevents secret Amazon deal

• Syria was building a nuclear reactor under Assad, UN reports

• Fake 10 Downing Street listing exposes 'unfit' Booking.com, says consumer group

• Brazilian scientist wins $500K for growing food with fewer chemicals

• Dutch central bank moves share of gold from U.S., Canada to London

  • The Netherlands moves 86 tonnes of gold out of US due to 'geopolitical unrest'

  • Netherlands moves billions in gold to London in 'crisis preparedness' move

• Shein and Temu items could face €20 fee in France crackdown on ultrafast fashion

• Hungary Plans Wealth Tax on Assets Exceeding $3.1M

• Report: Raúl Castro Is on His Deathbed

• Satellite images before Nepal disaster showed warning signs

• U.K. Supreme Court Opens Door for Spyware Victims to Sue Foreign States

• NATO's next nightmare: The French presidential election

• EU accelerates plans to break up diplomatic service

• German industry pushes to restore 40-hour working week without extra pay

• Foreign business owners leave Japan in droves under tighter visa rules

• Uber shuts operations in Nigeria and Uganda with immediate effect

Iran / Houthi

• IRGC Reports Ballistic Missile Strike on U.S. Marine Base in Jordan

  According to the IRGC, the strike destroyed multiple military installations and attack helicopters, inflicting heavy casualties on U.S. forces. The operation was executed as the second wave of retaliatory actions under the code name “Ya Rasul Allah.” The IRGC stated that the action was carried out in retaliation for a U.S. strike on a residential home during a wedding ceremony in Sirik, which resulted in nearly 50 civilians killed or injured, including children.

Israel

• Israel 'seeking Trump's support for plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza'

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia helping Iran develop supersonic cruise missiles

• Russian Sanctions Are Fueling a Canadian Car Theft Epidemic

• All 16 New Russian Starlink-Rival Satellites Short of Target Orbit

  • Is Russia's rival to Starlink failing?

China

• Chinese court freezes $300M of Nexperia assets in Wingtech case

• Taiwan's six-year hunt for China's undercover chip labs

• Chinese Shipper Cosco Collects Intel for Beijing with Concealed Equipment

  China’s state-owned shipping giant COSCO uses concealed equipment on board its ships to spy on military communications near the coastlines of target nations including the U.S., two senior Trump administration officials said. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the U.S. assessment of the Chinese program, said COSCO has a decades-long intelligence-collection partnership with Beijing. The arrangement allows China to collect communication signals from vessels and aircraft operating across Europe, North America and Asia, they said.

• Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong pleads guilty in second national security case

Health / Medicine

• Smartwatch is lying to you about how many calories you burned, Study finds

• A Hidden Pattern in Your Saliva Can Predict Risk of Colorectal Cancer

• People Who Live Past 100 Have an Abundance of Cancer-Killing Immune Cells

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Politicians need to stop holding press conferences every time someone dies of measles

  nobody has asked the most crucial question of all: Why did the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, hold a press conference to announce these deaths? To put it another way: Why is every measles death now national news? Using a press conference to alert a population of a measles outbreak makes sense. Residents should know if they’ve been exposed, especially if they’re unvaccinated. Announcing individual measles deaths is pure political and public health (to the extent those ideas can even be separated) theater.

• Top US doctors offer flu, Covid vaccine recommendations to ease confusion

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• This Metallic Green Beetle Is Quietly Killing Ash Trees Across Texas.

• UN admits global warming will shoot past 1.5 ºC climate limit

  • Global heating will hit at least 1.8C UN warns, and there are 'no good outcomes'

• Study reveals substantial misdirection in EU automotive regulation

  Drawing on 19 studies with 47 modeled scenarios, the white paper documents substantial misdirection of EU climate policy in the automotive sector, both economically and environmentally.

• Mapping global methane emissions from space with Deep Learning

• New Jersey eases restrictions on residential solar panels

• B.C. boaters warned to avoid mysterious floating island

• On 5 July 2024, Earth completed a rotation 1.66 milliseconds short of 86,400 seconds, the shortest day measured in the atomic-clock era, breaking the previous record set in June 2022

• Mount Everest Base Camp Is Melting. Human Urine Is a Contributor.

• Why Do Male Chimpanzees Throw Rocks at the Same Trees for More Than a Decade?

• Climate crisis is creating hellish conditions for waste pickers at Nairobi dump

• China's solar expansion policy reduces bird diversity

• El Niño is now stronger than at any point in the last 1k years

• "Sava's Titanic" emerges in Serbia as Europe's rivers run dry

• The greenest building is the one still standing after a disaster