2026-09-15

Horseshit

• Airbnb Preventing the Use of BnB

• The Wild West of Commercial Surrogacy

• At Restaurants, Phones Are Becoming the New Cigarettes

• Most People Don't Think About Culverts. Their Failure Can Be Deadly

• The powerful millionaires hiding in plain sight

• Vandals Damage Charlie Kirk Statue in Arizona With Ghoulish Paint Job.

• Fossilized 10k-year-old Mastodon tooth found by California scientist

• Tech billionaires aren't juvenile science-fiction nerds, they just can't read

• Cats are better at word association than human babies are, study finds

celebrity gossip

• Unhinged fan drove 1,000 miles in hopes of marrying virgin OnlyFans star Sophie Rain — then tried to grab her.

Musk

• Tesla owners to get insurance discount if they use self-driving

• SpaceX sues to block release of tax-break records for its Texas Terafab project

• Musk Is Running a Fake Voter Registration Site Designed to Steal and Sell Data

• The New Tesla Roadster Is Finally Probably Maybe Coming on October 1

• Elon Musk threatens to sue over Gibney documentary's "space lasers" claim

  St. Clair described text messages Musk sent her before the November 2024 presidential election in which he said he was "feeling more optimistic" about Donald Trump winning because "tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix." When St. Clair asked for clarity, Musk said he planned on tapping "'Lasers' from space," adding that "I have over 10 thousand lasers in space right now." NPR has obtained and authenticated the texts between Musk and St. Clair, which were sent on Oct. 6, 2024.

Electric / Self Driving cars

• The Coming Robotaxi Revolution

• Australian insurer offers discount to self-driving car owners

• War over robotaxis in NYC heats up with retracted Waymo report, 'Autokill' novel

• Volkswagen Just Built an EV That Can Go Nearly 900 Miles on a Charge

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• New Carlo Rovelli book challenges science understanding of reality and universe

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Oslo bans smart glasses in schools

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Chess.com Leak Exposes 7.3M Users, Evidence Points to Scraping

• Roblox plan to grow their gaming empire even further

  • Roblox is making easier to build games with AI and play outside of it

• Streaming TV Prices Rising Faster Than Cable Ever Did

• Texas judge rules TikTok misled users on child safety feature

• Automattic's board is out after failed attempt to oust CEO Matt Mullenweg

• Blizzard Revives 'StarCraft' Franchise with Open-World Sci-Fi Shooter

• Apple Stores Said to Lose Video Walls, Regain Dedicated Genius Bars

• Steam Frame starts at $1059

  • The Steam Frame Is $1,059, and More Expensive Than It Was Supposed to Be

  • Steam Frame review: Another best-in-class VR headset by Valve

• Nvidia's RTX 5090 ($9,500) vanishes from online retail in the US

  • Nvidia Launches RTX 5500 Pro Blackwell Desktop Edition with 84GB GDDR7 RAM

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• Doctor Doom Shows Up to Support Seattle's Surveillance Network

• Mayor Livid When Even More Police Are Arrested for Using Flock Database Inappropriately

• Anderson Co. deputy resigns amid investigation into misuse of Flock cameras

• Adversarial Fashion Makes a Statement on AI Panopticon

• Cops Search Flock Cameras for Reasons of 'LMAO,' 'IDK,' and 'Asdfg'

  • The High Crime of "LMAO": How Cops Are Treating Mass Surveillance as a Joke

• San Jose officer used Flock to help relative track domestic violence victim

• Apple's Always-Listening Watch Features Test Eavesdropping Laws

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Rosy Retrocomputing | Hackaday

  Most of us are guilty of romanticizing the past. Do you long to be the captain of a tall ship? Just as long as you don’t mind weevils in your food, vitamin deficiencies, and death from an infection when there were no antibiotics. Want to be a medieval knight? Even worse. But surely, retrocomputing is as fun as we remember, right? Turn your computer on, and it comes up with BASIC! Ready for you to write your own programs. None of this GUI foolishness. Of course, this is just another example of rosy retrospection.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Rocket Lab protests NASA’s decision to award Blue Origin $700 million Mars orbiter contract.

• No cities on the Moon – there isn't enough water, scientists say

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The contagion of fear

  What 27-year-old Coxon is an expert on — if accidentally — is the contagion of fear. We cannot expect the public to understand the inner workings of all technology (that was the fallacy of my 18-year-old self!): technology is too broad, too deep, and too core to all of our lives to expect everyone to understand everything; we must — at some level — trust domain experts. When those domain experts sow fear, it is the fear that takes root, propagating much more readily than any evidence that may follow it. (As Jonathan Swift famously quipped over three centuries ago, "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it".) In this regard, Coxon is more vector than index case: it is indisputable that the fears of extinction risk are widespread and Coxon himself likely has these fears because he has heard them from someone else. Unfortunately, as the fear takes hold, the sheer number of frightened experts becomes its own kind of evidence, with contrary voices drowned out by the din of an apparent consensus.

  • We could all benefit from less trust in "domain experts" and less indulgence when someone shouts "booga booga!" at us.

  • Godfather of AI welcomes pause in development

  • OpenAI and Anthropic Hit the Brakes

  • Who Aligns the Aligners?

  • Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture

  • Sam Altman spells out why the AI industry wants to slow down

  • How the Clash Between Money and Safety Created a Monumental Crisis for AI

  • MPs and Lords call for new law to address AI threat to human rights

  • Sam Altman: Frontier AI labs need shared safety rules and responsible pacing

  • Bernie Sanders proposes 20 years in prison for developers pursuing ASI plans

  • Sanders proposes 20-year prison sentences for superintelligence AI developers

  • Could AI Kill Off Humans?

  • The ‘Anti-AI’ Panic Is Led by…AI Companies.

  Under the guise of being "responsible" citizens, these AI companies are asking the government to create a cartel, reduce their training costs (i.e., "pacing"), and ban the advance of open-source AI available to the masses. They aren't offering to sacrifice for humanity's good; they are begging for a bailout.

  • Microsoft says 'people matter more than AI' following safety concerns

  • AI Firms Must Face Liability for 'Dangerous, Unvetted Products,' Says Lina Khan

  • AI staff ‘genuinely frightened’ for humanity’s future, ex-Anthropic researcher tells BBC.

  • Niall Ferguson: AIpocalypse Now

  • Amodei's proposal would effectively outlaw competitive open weight models

  • AI 'kill switch' may need to be mandatory, Anthropic co-founder says

  • AI Doomer Hypeloop Suspiciously Serves to Support OpenAI and Anthropic's Agenda

  • California lawmakers urge criminal penalties emergency legislation to rein in AI

  • dario, please!

  This all reminds me of the 90s. USA classified strong encryption as munition, literally on the US Munitions List under the Arms Export Control Act, controlled like warheads. Open weight models are just this decade’s encryption and Dario wants them gone. There is no moat, as that one leaked Google memo put it. Increasingly, for the labs, gating seems to be a temporary moat. Claw back some of the money, survive a little longer, just till AGI, you know? I suppose Dario does not understand how un-American it is to gatekeep weapons-grade LLMs.

  • AI Doomsday Panic Is Completely Out of Control

  You'll notice that the last few weeks of AI extinction hyperventilation elbowed out stories about how these companies simply aren't profitable, the massive bipartisan backlash to data centers, how reckless over-spending and hype will result in an inevitable market correction, or that OpenAI's leaked balance sheets were such a bloodbath it had to cancel its IPO and may not survive 2027. We are very much are at risk, but this isn't really a story about Skynet, it's a story about corruption and ordinary human greed.

  • AI Is in Dangerous Hands

  This is a repetition of what we saw back in February when Matt Shumer’s abominable “Something Big Is Happening” essay spread like wildfire to every imaginable news outlet despite it being somewhere between nonsensical and utterly fictional, except this time the narrative got a little out of hand. While Coxon’s warnings are specious and, in many cases, not really about anything other than him saying “yeah I heard a lot of my colleagues say stuff like that,” but nevertheless have had the effect of making a lot of people really scared of AI, even if AI can’t really do the things he’s talking about.

  As it stands, a slowdown is deeply impractical due to the massive commitments. As OpenAI and Anthropic make up the vast majority of AI compute demand, any contraction of that demand would mean material restatements of revenue (and the $748 billion in revenue backlogs) across every hyperscaler, along with the neoclouds and any other counterparty. The AI industry’s entire pitch to investors has been that all of these GPUs would be used and then some and that we needed to build all this capacity to reach the heights of AI breakthroughs, and while it was already questionable whether or not we needed that capacity, we certainly don’t if we’re “slowing down.” And I must be clear, AI cannot “slow down” without creating some kind of serious financial crisis within the tech industry. Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of hyperscaler revenues and data center capacity is tied up in the idea that demand for it actually exists, and if the two companies with the most demand suddenly need to slow their roll, it’s hard to see how the capacity gets used.

• Tech stocks fall after calls for AI development to slow down

  • Global AI stocks fall as industry chiefs call for slowing development

• OpenAI Pauses IPO Plans Amid AI Safety Worries

  • Just stop the Anthropic IPO already

• China criticises idea it is in 'malicious competition' over AI

  • China says AI CEOs' call for a slowdown is 'fear mongering'

  • China state newspaper blasts Anthropic's calls to slow AI as 'Cold War' tactic

  • Beijing hits back at Anthropic CEO's call to curb China's AI development

  • China Rejects AI 'Fearmongering' After Amodei Urges Slowdown

  • China's Top Spy Chief Warns A.I. Is a Threat to Party Rule

• Trump downplays warnings of AI risks, citing rivalry with China

  • Trump resists AI slowdown citing Chinese competition

  • An AI deal with China could get Donald Trump his Nobel Prize

  • Trump attacks 'sick conspiracy' against AI as tech stocks slide

  • Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tells Trump we're not going to let an AI slowdown happen

• Palantir, Nvidia curb AI model use over data fears

• Anthropic Disrupts Bioweapons Efforts, Russian Hacking, Chinese Claude Misuse

• AI Robots – When will they be in our homes

• Latham and Watkins buys Nvidia servers to set up in-house AI systems

• The "Nonexistent" Research on AI's Benefits for Education

• AI Firms Are Reportedly Buying Nvidia RTX 5090 GPUs in Bulk for Server Use

• 'Tidal wave' of PFAS being launched to satisfy AI industry

• Anthropic tells investors it will be profitable for second straight quarter

  • Anthropic tells investors it will be profitable for second straight quarter

• Open-Weight Diplomacy: How China's AI Models Are Rerunning the Digital Silk Road

• A.I. Slopware Is Everywhere Now. Nobody Is Using It

• Bruce Schneier: No, AI doesn't mean the end of mathematics – at least not yet

• AI Data Centers Are on Track to Fuel 'Explosive' Growth in Captive Insurance

• Article wasn't written by an AI. So what if it had been

• Goldman CIO: Don't rule out open models

• DoD poised to move all classified workloads off Anthropic

• Jensen Huang Became AI's Taylor Swift

• Oracle tries to appease Stargate data center opponents with renewables push

• More Money Than They Ever Imagined–and No Clue How to Spend It

• Bland new world: is AI making us all think the same?

• Anthropic targets financial advisers with new Claude tool

• OpenAI Buys Startup Developing Smartphone Camera

• U.S. Health Officials Move Quickly to Deploy Medical A.I. Despite Concerns

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout

• Airbnb Sets Up $250M Fund to Invest in Housing Construction

• US wholesale prices rise as oil prices continue to climb

• Why Mortgage Bonds Are at Risk If Rates Rise–and If They Fall

• Costco Is Rationing Oil and Doubling Its Price as Supply Dwindles

• Oracle's Cold 6AM Layoff Emails Hit Staff Amid New Wave of Cuts

• AirBaltic files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as Iran war costs bite

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Battleground GOP Candidate Survives Overnight Plane Crash Over Lake

  “God was watching over us tonight.” That’s how Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Tiffany described surviving a plane crash Saturday night that ended with him swimming out of a sinking aircraft in Lake Wausau.

• National Security Agency launches historic restructuring

  Rudd’s initiative calls for the creation at NSA’s Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of five new organizations inside the agency, in artificial intelligence, China, cybersecurity, combat support or warfighting, and global intelligence. Each will be led by a newly elevated “mission director,” according to former officials.

• Supreme Court Rejects Trump's Restrictions on Mail Voting

  The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a Trump administration plan to dramatically change how Americans vote by mail in the lead-up to the midterm elections, a major loss for President Trump, who has long claimed without evidence that fraud is rampant in mail voting. The ruling was a resounding win for Democratic-led states and voting rights groups, which had argued that the plan was unconstitutional and an existential threat to the democratic process.

Left Angst

• The Final Battle for America's Democracy

• Mary Beard: 'There is a deeply far-right appropriation of the classics'

• EPA Expected to Erase Limits on Climate Pollution from Power Plants

  • Trump's EPA eliminating rule that limits emissions from power plants | AP News

• New $100K H-1B Visa Fee Pushes Tech Jobs Offshore

• Trump Jr.'S Wedding Was Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to Putin

• Remember Parler? Autistici/Inventati Is Debanked, Hacked, and Has Its Domain Shut Down

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Inmates with Contraband Phones Are Scamming Families Across America

• SCOTUSblog writer sentenced to six years in prison for tax evasion

  Goldstein, 56, of Chevy Chase, Maryland, co-founded SCOTUSblog and argued over 40 cases before the Supreme Court before retiring in 2023 at age 52. He was a member of Democrat Al Gore's legal team in the Supreme Court litigation over the 2000 election ultimately won by Republican President George W. Bush. Many friends and colleagues didn’t know the extent of Goldstein’s gambling until his January 2025 indictment, which sent shock waves through the legal community in Washington, D.C. A jury found Goldstein guilty of 12 of 16 counts, including eight felonies, after a six-week trial that ended in February. Jurors convicted him of one count of tax evasion, four counts of aiding and assisting in the preparation of false tax returns, four counts of willfully failing to pay taxes and three counts of mortgage fraud.

World

• South Africa's weigh-and-pay shops are tackling 'poverty tax' head on

• Three Reasons Europe learned to distrust Big Tech before America did

• Why big tech will hate the Australian tax office's latest ruling

• Ukrainian operatives are in Mali, embedded within the FLA militants in the North

• Turkish authorities launch crackdown on LGBTQ+ and HIV support groups

  • Turkish police detain dozens in raids on gay bars and homes of LGBTQ+ activists.

• Canada's oil windfall may yet wipe out its losses from tariffs

• Canada seeks Ukraine loan role to deepen EU ties

• Digital divorce? Trade war spotlights Canada's reliance on U.S. big tech giants

• Adult diapers outsell children's diapers in Quebec as population ages

• Oil Industry Moves to Weaken Proposed Fossil Fuel Advertising Ban in France

• Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales leaders to meet tomorrow to plan breakup of UK.

  • Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland now all have nationalist first ministers

• EU to limit access to social media before age of 15

Iran / Houthi

• Saudi Arabia's security and territorial integrity are inviolable, Prince Faisal declares at BRICS Summit

• Satellite images show extent of damage to major Saudi pipeline

  • Saudi pipeline outage threatens loss of 4% of global oil supply

• Saudi Arabia Faces 'Worst-Case Scenario' After Being Rebuffed by Trump

• Iranian banks' SSL certificates are being revoked due to OFAC sanctions

Israel

• Israel accused of eliminating living conditions for Palestinians in West Bank

• NAZA: Israeli minister threatens to strip Israeli film-makers of citizenship

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian Navy paints ships to resemble homes to deceive AI drones

China

• BYD has apparently canceled this year's profit bonus

• In Ulanqab, China buildout of data centers 1000x size of Colossus

• China's Regulators Take Aim at "AI Boyfriends"

Health / Medicine

• Can Geneticists Fight Disease by Targeting 'Nurture' Instead of 'Nature'?

• Americans spend more than 2.5 hours in the ER

• Patients Who Fight Health Insurance Denials Often Win

• Flushing toilet releases 'plume' of breathable pathogens – closing lid helps

• Carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke may explain reduced Parkinson's incidence

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Airborne algae: Scientists near Lake Erie study health impacts on people

• Drought and demand pushed the Colorado River toward crisis

• 'Offensively cheap': solar power is looking up

• Why Do These Fossil Shells Flip Their Spirals Every Few Millennia?

• Iceland, One of Three Countries That Still Hunts Whales, Considers Ban

• How is climate change affecting conifers and their ability to sequester carbon?

• Where have all the insects gone?

• Wild dogs record 2,500-mile trek across Zambia in search of a mate