2026-07-25

Worthy

• From Institutions to Individuals: the White House Report on Revitalizing U.S. Scientific Leadership – Daniel Lemire's blog

  In 1945, Vannevar Bush published a report entitled Science: The Endless Frontier. His thesis was that prosperity follows from basic research. The report was highly influential in the United States and elsewhere. It led to the creation of an entirely new government bureaucracy.

  Even though Bush’s report has been viewed as a piece of genius that unlocked a golden era of scientific prosperity, I believe that the linear model of innovation is hopelessly naïve. I believe the thesis that a large bureaucracy delivering funding to other bureaucracies (such as universities) is how we get innovation is absurd. Except perhaps in the domain of computing (“bits”), we have been largely stagnant technologically since about the 1970s. So Bush’s model failed over time. To be clear, it might have worked for a while by encouraging more young people to study engineering and science. It may also have shone a favorable light on a few enterprising professors who got to promote useful ideas.

  The evidence is overwhelming that shoddy science is widespread. We have a severe reproducibility crisis: if you redo an experiment (even a highly cited one), you are likely to fail to reproduce the results. This affects psychology, medicine, and many other fields. The system does not particularly care because the incentives to get things right are not there. As long as the work is politically aligned, solidity of the results seems secondary.

Horseshit

• Nothing Works and Everyone Is Euphoric

• Exoplanets Around Barnard's Star Are Uninhabitable

• Supercooled kidneys have been transplanted into pigs in a "landmark achievement"

  Kidneys kept at subzero temperatures in pressure-controlled containers can be stored for days before transplantation, raising hopes for longer-term storage of donated human organs.

• A Dying Art: The last of the morticians

• Russian head of World Chess suspends activity over EU sanctions

• The $100M Market of Popcorn Buckets

• West Virginia paid digital nomads to move there during Covid. Many are staying

• Can This New Enzyme Turn Back the Clock in the Human Body?

• Four takeaways from our investigation into a hidden gene-editing death

• The Press Tried to Shame Elon. He Put the Entire Media Class on Trial

• Growing trend of hating men believed to backfire as anti-marriage culture leaves single women losing out

celebrity gossip

• Racy short story by Alan Turing offers glimpse of 'playful, funny, cheeky' side

Musk

• Grok muscles into Excel with an AI add-in of its own

• Tesla's door handles may spur new US safety rules

• Elon Musk Melts Down over Perfectly Normal Questions in Wild New Interview

• Tesla Sinks on Investor Angst over AI Spending, Profit Drop

• Earnings at Tesla fall as research spending cuts into profit from selling cars

• Elon Musk Says This Will Be Tesla's 'Biggest Product'

• Reality Bites Elon Musk and His Tesla, SpaceX Believers

• SpaceX Delays Major Flight Test Again in Post-IPO Spotlight

• SpaceX at $100 Would Imply Zero AI Value, Morgan Stanley Says

Electric / Self Driving cars

• The challenges companies face to launch robotaxis in Europe

• Waymo explores split with Uber as robotaxi tensions deepen

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• The Robots Cometh

• Robot snakes searched for Venezuela earthquake survivors in collapsed buildings

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Computer science enrollment fell for the first time in 20 years

• In a first, Chinese woman wins the prestigious Fields Medal

  • First Chinese mathematicians to win Fields Medals

  • For only third time ever, a woman wins Fields Medal

• Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project

• Children's books about scientists convey demotivating messages

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Flock cameras keep getting smashed, so now they're hiding inside speed signs

  • Police Keep Losing Their Jobs for Using Flock Cameras to Stalk People

• AI Overviews could push Reddit to end its $60M-a-year deal with Google

  • Reddit Defends Authority to Sue Perplexity over Data Scraping

• Amazon and Microsoft pivot cloud gaming strategies to target different players

• Treasury threatens sanctions, claims Moonshot distilled Anthropic's Fable

• Forgot your Google password? Now you can log in with a selfie

• The Collapse at Netflix Signals the End of Audience Capture

• India Orders GitHub to Take Down Jack Dorsey's Bitchat Amid Protests

• Oracle drops 1,449 security patches like it's the new normal

• The Creator Economy Has a New Middle Class

• Facebook considers giving up and becoming TikTok

• Qualcomm Plans to Increase Its Prices by Double Digits

• Lawsuit Against Meta over Social Media Addiction Is Dropped

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA Deep Space ground station in Spain evacuated due to wildfires

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The Hugging Face Incident

  The Hugging Face incident is a textbook-perfect example of an AI pursuing task-success-based goals in unintended ways. It was tasked with getting the answer to a cybersecurity problem, it was a little too success-oriented, and took actions its creators didn’t intend in order to succeed as hard as possible.

  • OpenAI's Hugging Face Hack Triggers 'AI Kill Switch' Bill in Congress

  • AI Kill Switch Act would let Trump admin order shutdown of rogue AI systems

  • The model didn't escape. OpenAI ran the attack

  • A Startling Glimpse at AI's Ruthless Efficiency

  • Why the OpenAI escape is the most worrying AI mishap yet

  • Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story

  • What happened in the Hugging Face breach

  • How the Futuristic Hack by Rogue OpenAI Models Unfolded

  • OpenAI did not notice Hugging Face hack for a week

• 'Igor, it's alive ' publicity stunts by the AI industry are becoming tedious

• Trump says nearly 200 firms signed pledge to protect from costs of datacenters

• Japanese AI Robots Used to Replicate Skilled Confectioners' Abilities

• AMD attacks the rack with Helios systems that rival Nvidia's

• AMD and Cerebras join forces against Nvidia's Groq LPUs

• The Sad Wives of AI

• Google's slump in AI race driven in part by low morale

• AI will not trigger employment collapse, staffing company Adecco Group says

• AI tool may help doctors, but sample size too small

• Should robots be considered as slaves?

  AI researcher and technology ethicist Joanna Bryson argued that future robotic agents should be considered slaves and denied rights. Giving rights to robots, she stressed, would come at the expense of humans.

• The cost of GPUs goes far beyond AI data centers

• 'Vibecoded' Apps Are Flooding the App Store. Is That Good for Apple?

• Indian court says OpenAI did not violate news agency ANI's copyright

• Meta's New Feel-Good AI Ad Uses a Song About the World Ending

• Google Ordered to Face AI Defamation Lawsuit

  A Delaware Superior Court judge let the conservative activist Robby Starbuck move forward with claims the tech giant’s Bard AI product — a predecessor of its current Gemini model — defamed him. The ruling could leave Google on the hook for Bard results that allegedly spread false sexual assault accusations, incorrectly linked Starbuck to the “notorious white supremacist” Richard Spencer, and offered arguments in favor of his execution.

• Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

• Political text messages could get more effective and annoying. Blame AI

• Meta faces higher borrowing costs in latest $12B data centre financing

• AI companies stripping universities of their best computer scientists

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Polymarket paid creators to stage fake winning bets to lure U.S. users

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Bucees gas station chain reveals managers can earn up to $275K without college degree.

• Global oil prices cross $100 a barrel as Iran war sends fuel prices surging

• Google reports first quarter of negative cash flow

  • Alphabet's Future Spending Commitments Soar to $811B

  • Alphabet's $205B AI spending plan spooks investors

• Oracle severed 21,000 employees during an AI spending spree

• Tech workers fear they're sinking fast

• Intel stock jumps as it rides AI boom to fastest revenue growth in almost 15 yrs

• Patreon Lays Off 20 Percent of Its Workforce

  • Patreon has laid off 20% of its workforce.

• The worlds' balance-sheet is out of kilter with its economy

• New Jersey bans grocery stores from using shoppers' personal data to set prices

• Welcome to the Era of Financial Candyfloss

• Walmart and Target are watching you. I saw the "lab" for myself

• Pixar lays off over 100 Bay Area workers using ElastiGirl letterhead

• Paramount agrees to pause $110B Warner Bros merger as case plays out

  • Paramount Agrees to Pause Its Warner Bros. Merger

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Rare documents signed by Lincoln removed from D.C. memorial after heat exposure

Trump

• The Full List of Trump's New Tariffs on 60 Economies

• Trump says US to launch EU probe over 'illegal' Google fine

  • Trump vows to investigate EU over fining of US tech companies

Democrats

• James Carville Says DSA Are ‘Paternalistic, Over-Educated Little White Turds’ Who ‘Think They Know Better Than You.’

Left Angst

• The world is crazy. Why are stocks up?

• The View Claims Trump Is Being Bribed By Saudis to Let Them Nuke U.S

• The assault on science funding continues

• Abolishing the Senate Might Be the DSA's Best Idea

• Book Review: Breakdown In Pakistan

  A couple of decades ago in Kabul, a fellow aid worker on his third beer came up with a vivid simile for what American money was doing to the Afghan organizations implementing USAID projects. “It’s like gluing a rabbit mouth-first to a fire hose. You blast its guts right out of its ass…but as long as the water keeps running, it looks like you’ve taught the rabbit to dance.” Oxford politics professor Masooda Bano uses less lurid language, but Breakdown in Pakistan addresses the same basic phenomenon: how Western aid donors and INGOs unintentionally eviscerate so many of the local institutions they try to “capacity-build.” The problem goes beyond the obvious mismatch of huge funds with small-scale organizations. Even low-to-moderate external funding can leave an organization hollowed out, bereft of local participants and the power it once had to motivate change on the ground.

• Justice Department Lawyers Reportedly Afraid to Put Things in Writing

• The Resistance Liberal Lawyers Helping Trump Take over the Media

  To give you a sense of how illegal this deal is, in Trump’s first term, his agencies did not allow Nexstar to buy what it wanted, and this deal is much much bigger. Yet in February, just a few months after these companies did Trump the favor of getting Kimmel temporarily pulled, Trump supported their combination.

• White House offers its science blueprint: More AI, less life sciences

• US accuses American of wiping phone using a duress password during border search

• Judge rebuffs Trump admin demand for phone records from NYT reporters

• RFK Jr.'s hand-picked committee approves manufacture of peptides he uses

  • The FDA Could Clear These Peptides. Here's What the Research on Them Shows

• Uncle Sam tells overseas cybercrooks their visas are canceled

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• NYC attacker yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he randomly stabbed two men near Central Park, according to victim, witnesses: commish.

World

• Google Hit with $1B Fine for Abusing Its Power in Europe

  • EU hits Google with $1B fine over its Play app store and search

  • EU fines Alphabet $1B US for Google Play, search infractions

• Huawei ban to cost the EU up to €40B, says industry

• Dismissing Europe as a museum is glib. Think of it as a theme park

• Australia's ban on social media for under-16s has jolted EU into belated action

• Indian police cracked down on 'cockroach' protesters. They made memes about it

  • Gen Z protests in India demanding resignation of Education Minister

• German battery maker Varta files insolvency applications

• Volkswagen CFO addresses plant closures, job losses as profits sink

• European researchers want to study social media's harms but can't get the data

• Police told not to arrest violent BLM rioters for fear it would "trigger" them, leaked document reveals

  An internal police risk assessment published during the Black Lives Matter protests of June 2020 warned officers of potential “trigger points” that might cause crowds to riot. One trigger point was “police arresting individuals (such as for assault on police or criminal damage)”.

• Sweden eases mining permits to cut China minerals reliance

• ICC chief prosecutor removed from post over sexual misconduct allegations

Iran / Houthi

• IRGC Claims It Destroyed Amazon's Bahrain Data Center

• Tehran targets US bases across Middle East - as UK 'ready to defend itself' after Iran threat

  Iran said it has targeted multiple US bases across the Middle East, after the US launched its 13th consecutive night of strikes.

• Eight Newly Produced MQ-9 Reaper Drones Destroyed in Iranian Strike

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia's businesses under strain from Ukraine's attacks on Wildberries

China

• China's All-Out Push to Catch Up with American AI Chips

• China's Electric Trucks, Diesel's Peak, and What Western Planners Still Dont See

• China to boost wind and solar generation by more than 50% in five years

• China Wields Its Rare Earth Leverage over Europe with New Export Controls

Health / Medicine

• Women Are More Likely to Get a Job and Find a Partner While on GLP1s, New Study Suggests.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Grocery Shopping in the Age of Explosive Diarrhea

• Outbreak of diarrhea-causing parasite expands to 4 more states

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The Aral Sea Has Been Drying Up For 60 Years. New Research Shows It’s Also Releasing Massive Amounts of Carbon.

• Rare contagious cancer found in fish from Quebec and U.S. lakes

  • Deep in a Vermont Lake, a Contagious Cancer Is Spreading

• Snake fossil sheds light on why lizards lost their limbs and started slithering

• Scientists find the secret of birdsong's 'spectacular diversity

• In the 1950s, a Soviet engineer proposed damming the Bering Strait

• 2026 western US snow drought was about 4x more likely due to climate change

• Asthma Control Before and After Changing Gas Stoves to Electric Stoves

  • Replacing gas stove can help asthmatics as much as some drugs

• Plasma Tunnels Reveal How Dying Satellites Fall to Earth

• First wave power plant receives DNV certification

• Orcas filmed ramming sunfish so hard it explodes in cloud of scraps

• Risk of Parkinson's disease may increase with prolonged exposure to road noise

• 80k people flee as wildfires spread in France and Spain

• Greenland's Ice Sheet Was Supposed to Be Rapidly Melting Away. It Hasn't Been