2025-11-25

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• On 10 Years of Writing a Blog Nobody Reads | flow2

  My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea. Everyone's interpretation of words is different, so using more precise language will just muddle your ideas. To use a metaphor from electronic communication—there's so much noise in the channel that modulating your signal doesn't provide any extra information.

Horseshit

• All your data belongs to us: the rise of Palantir

• Our blind goat is quite fond of Primus and Mozart: Music may soothe cats, dogs and other pets

• The dark truth behind supermarket tuna

• Booking.com cancels $4K hotel reservation, offers same rooms again for $17K

• Negative Mass

  Indeed in particle physics we never see masses, only squares of masses—so the sign of the mass never matters.

• Why night owls are more intelligent

• Black swans from the Red Planet–Could NASA bring back "mirror life" from Mars?

• America's Caregivers Are in Crisis

• Mind-reading devices can now predict preconscious thoughts: is it time to worry?

• Campbell’s Soup VP Mocks ‘Poor People’ Who Buy Its Food in Secret Recording - Newsweek

  The claims—centered on a secretly recorded tirade in which a senior vice president allegedly mocked the company’s products, its customers, and Indian employees—challenge the credibility of Campbell’s public values and highlight broader concerns about how corporations handle discrimination complaints. Campbell Soup Company told Newsweek that—if the recording was legitimate—the comments were unacceptable and did not reflect its values, adding that the executive was on leave while an investigation was carried out. ... "Keep in mind, the alleged comments are made by an IT person, who has nothing to do with how we make our food."

  Garza, who began working remotely for the company in September 2024, said he met Bally at a restaurant in late 2024 believing they would be discussing his salary. Instead, Garza alleges the executive delivered an hourlong tirade criticizing the company’s products, disparaging employees and customers, and making racially offensive remarks about Indian colleagues. Local 4 News in Detroit broadcast portions of the recording. In it, a speaker identified as Bally is heard saying, "We have shitt for fuxkking poor people. Who buys our shit? I don’t buy Campbell’s products barely anymore. It’s not healthy now that I know what the fxck‘s in it." He also referenced "bioengineered meat," saying, "I don’t wanna eat a piece of chicken that came from a 3D printer."

• Mind-altering 'brain weapons' no longer only science fiction, say researchers

  • Scientists issue ominous warning over mind-altering 'brain weapons'

• Should You Be Worried About a Tiny Black Hole Hitting Your Body?

• Republican Support and Economic Hardship: The Enduring Effects Of the Opioid Epidemic

  We estimate that from the mid-2000s to 2022, exposure to the opioid epidemic continuously increased the Republican vote share in House, presidential, and gubernatorial elections. By the 2022 House elections, a one-standard-deviation increase in our measure of exposure led to a 4.5 percentage point increase in the Republican vote share. From 2012 until 2022, this increase in the House vote share translated into Republicans winning additional seats.

celebrity gossip

• The Mysterious Death of Hamptons Fashion Star Martha Nolan

• Donald Glover reveals he suffered stroke, doctors found hole in heart

Obit

• Reggae legend Jimmy Cliff dies, aged 81

  • Jimmy Cliff, Jamaican reggae singer, actor and cultural icon, dies aged 81

• Henry Todd, LSD Kingpin Turned Everest Guide, Dies at 80

• Gramma, a Galápagos Tortoise at the San Diego Zoo, Dies at About 141

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Weaponised autism in online alt-right communities

  Gab is a social media platform which launched in 2016 and proclaims itself to be "a social network that champions free speech, individual liberty and the free flow of information online". Its virtual lack of content moderation makes Gab a safe haven for social media users who have been banned from mainstream platforms. The result is a platform that normal people would probably describe as “an alt-right cesspool with anti-left, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, racist, and xenophobic hate speech”.

Musk

• Starlink's direct-to-cell service launches in Ukraine in European first

• X Just Accidentally Exposed A Vast Covert Influence Network Targeting Americans

  • Just the MAGA stuff tho; none of the other fake "influencers" found to have been lying about their reports from war zones are worth mentioning.

• Elon Musk's Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Will technology provide a boost to truck drivers – or will it replace them?

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Time for "8G" and everybody has to get a new phone? Americans Are Holding onto Devices Longer

• Valve makes almost $50M per employee

• Large-capacity microSD cards are now regularly out of stock in Japan as storage crunch claims another victim — high-capacity HDDs are also vanishing | Tom's Hardware

  We're currently traversing through one of the worst memory shortages in recent times, a situation that's expected to only get worse next year. Alongside DRAM, storage is also affected on an unprecedented scale, as data centers need every bit of flash they can get, leaving scraps for consumers to sift through.

• WINS removal: Moving forward with modern name resolution

• MediaWorld Accidentally Sold iPads for 15 Euros. Then It Asked for Them Back

• Animation Hasn't Been the Same Since 'Toy Story'

• Amazon Satellite Internet Service Begins Previews for Businesses

• $2B Counter-Strike 2 crash: Your digital investments aren't yours

• Developers still need the right to challenge junk patents

• Im much more eager to click a Substack link than "GQ": What I Meant When I Said Substack Isn't Cool

• Shai Hulud 2.0 Strikes Again: Malware Supply-Chain Attack Hits Zapier & ENS Domains

• A new Raspberry Pi Imager

  One extremely popular customisation the original Raspberry Pi Imager offered was the ability to configure, at the point of writing your SD card, your remote access credentials, giving you the chance to pre-program your SSH public keys. What if, however, you wanted to use the much simpler Raspberry Pi Connect? With Imager 2.0, you can do just that. Simply authenticate during the imaging process, and when your Raspberry Pi boots for the first time, it’ll already be connected to your Raspberry Pi Connect account — ready to offer screen sharing or remote shell access from the start.

• Google experts tell the US DOJ selling its ad tech business would be impossible

• Steam Next Fest's Most Unlikely Breakout Only Requires A Fraction Of Your Screen And Attention - Kotaku

  Desktop Defender is part of a recent wave of Steam games that mostly play themselves while you do other stuff on your desktop. Some, like Bongo Cat, are minimally interactive. Others, like Bao Bao’s Cozy Laundromat, can be more complex. While some are just fun distractions, others play off the satisfaction many people innately get from watching a fictional measure of progress continually tick upwards.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• RuBee

  One of the things that I love is weird little wireless networks. Long ago I wrote about ANT+, for example, a failed personal area network standard designed mostly around fitness applications. There's tons of these, and they have a lot of similarities---so it's fun to think about the protocols that went down a completely different path. It's even better, of course, if the protocol is obscure outside of an important niche. And a terrible website, too? What more could I ask for.

  In the near-field, the magnetic field created by the antenna is more significant than the electrical field. RuBee devices are intentionally designed to emit very little electrical RF signal. Communications within a RuBee network are achieved through magnetic, not electrical fields. That's the core of RuBee's magic.

• Open Source Has Too Many Parasocial Relationships

  The individuals giving away the fruits of their labour owe us nothing more. It is enough that we have received this tremendous boon, this vast array of high-quality software that is available free of charge. But if we want them to continue doing it, they will need to be supported in concrete, material ways. Or they might simply stop. In fact, I would encourage more unsupported maintainers to do just that. Stop rushing to fix bugs for people without a support contract. Patch security flaws at a more leisurely pace unless someone is willing to pay for greater urgency. Take your time and enjoy your hobby more, since that is what unpaid software maintenance is. Collaborate with other people only so much as it brings you joy. Businesses and governments need to get used to the idea that you are not part of their “software supply chain” unless they are a paying customer. Unless and until they are willing to make direct, material contributions to the software maintainers they rely on, it is long past time that maintainers stopped letting them take advantage of their good nature. They are free to solve the problem themselves, just as they always have been.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• One in four unconcerned by sexual deepfakes created without consent survey finds

• What OpenAI Did When ChatGPT Users Lost Touch with Reality: DAU Optimization

• AI Investors Want More Making It and Less Faking It

• Why concerns about an AI bubble are bigger

• Insurers retreat from AI cover as risk of multibillion-dollar claims mounts

• Google Leapfrogged Rivals with New Gemini Rollout

• OpenAI's House of Cards

• MIT Student Awed Top Economists with His AI Study Then It All Fell Apart

• Science-centric streaming service Curiosity Stream is an AI-licensing firm now

• "Go generate a bridge and jump off it": How video pros are navigating AI

• An A.I. Toy Bear Speaks of Sex, Knives and Pills, a Consumer Group Warns

• An Alarming Number of Teens Say They Turn to AI for Company, Study Finds

• Why the AI "megasystem problem" needs our attention

• Jony Ive and Sam Altman say they finally have an AI hardware prototype

• What OpenAI Did When ChatGPT Users Lost Touch with Reality

• ChatGPT told them they were special – their families say it led to tragedy

• CoreWeave Earnings Highlight Risks of Surge in AI Borrowing

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• President George HW Bush 'knew' of 1964 alien contact with humans in New Mexico: documentary | New York Post

  Bush told him that three spaceships were seen approaching the base and that an interstellar being emerged from one ship and had a face-to-face encounter with military and CIA officials, Davis said during an interview in “The Age of Disclosure,” a documentary by filmmaker Dan Farah that went live on Amazon Prime on Friday. “One of them landed on the tarmac and a non-human entity deboarded the craft that landed and interacted with uniformed Air Force and civilian CIA personnel,” Davis claimed. “And when [Bush] asked for more details he was told that he did not have a need-to-know,” he relayed. Bush, a former decorated Naval aviator and director of the CIA, was allegedly informed of the encounter after his term as president, according to Davis, who said the two spoke in a series of private conversations in 2003.

• Blue Origin to Build a "Super Heavy" Rocket to Compete with Starship

• NASA confirms that Starliner's next mission will be cargo only

Crypto con games

• Fake S.F. delivery person steals $11M in cryptocurrency, phone and laptop

• Why Crypto's Slide Is Rattling Wall Street

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Marriott's Disastrous Bet on Short-Term Rental Company Sonder

• Flood of AI Bonds Adds to Pressure on Markets

• Wealthiest 10% of Americans make up 50% of purchases and consumer spendings

• US Leveraged Loans Under Strain as Buyers Yank Cash from Funds

• More Americans are getting their power shut off, as unpaid bills pile up

• Harley-Davidson Dealerships Are Shutting Down Across America

• Amazon's X-energy gets backing from Jane Street as investors bet big on nuclear

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Twitter location data shows US Homeland Security account in Israel

• A Stand Against Coal Could Push Oakland Toward Bankruptcy

Trump

• Trump Weighing Advanced Nvidia Chip Sales to China, Lutnick Says

• President Xi Jinping Speaks with U.S. President Donald J. Trump on the Phone

Democrats

• Nancy Pelosi posted up a staggering 16,930% return, beat the market by 581%

• Pentagon investigating Sen Mark Kelly for urging troops to defy 'illegal orders'

  It is extraordinary for the Pentagon, which until the second Trump term has usually gone out of its way to act and appear apolitical, to directly threaten a sitting member of Congress with investigation. In its statement, the Pentagon suggested that Kelly’s statements in the video interfered with the “loyalty, morale, or good order and discipline of the armed forces” by citing the federal law that prohibits such actions.

  • We only just now found out how long and deep the Biden "investigation" into Republican Senators ran; but that's not a problem. This tho is authoritarian overreach, right?

Left Angst

• Has Doge Been Disbanded?

• The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine

  The indictment claims Sanchez was transporting those materials to conceal them because they incriminated his wife. I don’t know why Sanchez allegedly moved the box of documents, but if it was because he (apparently correctly) feared prosecutors would try to use them against his wife, that’s a commentary on prosecutors’ lawlessness, not Sanchez’s.

  • Attempting to destroy or hide evidence is still a thing, even if you're a Democrat. At least, if you're not a Biden. If you are the FBI will do the work for you.

• My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America

  This week, while trying to understand why the American middle class feels poorer each year despite healthy GDP growth and low unemployment, I came across a sentence buried in a research paper:

  “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”

  But everything changed between 1963 and 2024. If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three. It becomes sixteen. Which means if you measured income inadequacy today the way Orshansky measured it in 1963, the threshold for a family of four wouldn’t be $31,200. It would be somewhere between $130,000 and $150,000.

• Pabst, Pamphlets and a Petition: A Harvard-Yale Tailgate in the Trump Era

• 'Nobody wants to come': What if the U.S. can no longer attract immigrant doctors

• Trade Chaos Causes Businesses to Rethink Their Relationship with the U.S.

• How Trump is trying to remake American culture

  CNN staff now worry that if their company is sold to Paramount, his friend Larry Ellison may fire two of the network’s most prominent women: Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar. Somewhat less attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which Trump wants to shape popular culture outside news and late night comedy. The onetime wannabe Broadway producer brought his particular style of late 20th century over-the-top macho taste to political events, elevating professional wrestling to the Republican National Convention and inviting the 1980s icons Sylvester Stallone and Mike Tyson to the White House. Trump appears to want to revive the raucous comedies and action movies of the late 1980s to late 1990s.

• Kennedy sharpens vaccine attacks, without scientific backing

• Illegal Alien Stole a Man's Identity and Made His Life Hell; New York Times Calls The Illegal a Victim – HotAir

  we learn from the Times that Vincent is a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, so really, is it so bad that he stole somebody else's identity, cost him tens of thousands of dollars he couldn't afford—Dan often made less than Vincent—and landed him with other debts and a lawsuit for killing somebody. Obviously, Vincent is the victim. The whole community, which has never met his victims, rallies around Vincent. Because they are kind.

• DOGE “cut muscle, not fat”; 26K experts rehired after brutal cuts - Ars Technica

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• ACLU and EFF Sue San Jose for Blanketing with Flock Surveillance Cameras

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• ASML allegedly offered to spy on China for the US

• US issues security NOTAM for Venezuelan airspace

• Ukraine survives another crisis with Donald Trump

World

• Norway's wealth tax trades millionaires for equality

• Dutch military opens fire at drones over Volkel Air Base

• Japan's gamble to turn island of Hokkaido into global chip hub

• An anti-migrant group in South Africa is blocking foreigners from health clinics | AP News

  She and fellow members of South Africa’s anti-immigrant group Operation Dudula — which means “to get rid of by force” — are dressed in military-style fatigues as they block the entrance and demand to see patients’ identity documents. Mothers carrying children and others who are sick are turned away and told to go to private hospitals, which unlike public ones aren’t free. Similar scenes have played out at government-run clinics across South Africa’s most populous province, Gauteng, as healthcare becomes the new battleground in the country’s long and painful debate over immigration. The Johannesburg High Court has ordered Operation Dudula to stop harassing migrants. The group says it will appeal.

• Contract signed for laser that can take out drones

• Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

• Malaysia to Bar Children Under 16 from Social Media

• Britain is one of the richest countries. So why do children live in poverty?

• Belgium's 15-year-old prodigy earns PhD in quantum physics

• Italian police raid Amazon offices over customs and tax fraud in Chinese imports

• NATO taps Google for air-gapped sovereign cloud

• Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

• Two UK clinical trials to assess impact of puberty blockers in young people

• Amid GPS and Ride-Hailing, the Allure of London's Black Cab Endures

• 'Hassle' and 'humiliation': What it's like traveling with a weak passport

• 1,700-year-old Roman sarcophagus is unearthed in Budapest

Israel

• New X location tool exposes fake Gaza accounts taking advantage of war by seeking donations | New York Post

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine Is Jamming Russia's 'Superweapon' with a Song

China

• US is biggest recipient of Chinese loans, study shows

• Banned Chinese Bond Tactic That Turns 8% Yields into 16% Is Roaring Back

Health / Medicine

• The Rise of the 'Just in Case' MRI

• Novo's Ozempic Pill Fails to Slow Alzheimer's in Large Trials

• Americans Are Microdosing Obesity Drugs, Driven by 'Thin Is in' Marketing Blitz

• First New Malaria Drug in Years Performs Strongly in Late-Stage Testing

• One in two people in the US is affected by a neurological disease or disorder

• "resonate" ... its social too: Experts unpack the common myth of menstruating women's cycles synchronizing

• No copays for asthma inhalers in New York under new law

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• 'Stone-cold killers': New Zealand to eradicate feral cats by 2050

• Solar Superstorm Gannon crushed Earth's plasmasphere to a record low

  • Earth just got hit by a stealth solar storm no one saw coming

• Efficient solar cooking that stores heat in sand

• A Continent Steps Away from Hydrogen Transport. Spain Doubles Down

• Cooperative mammals show lower cancer rates than solitary, competitive species

• Chimpanzees in Uganda use flying insects to tend their wounds, study reveals

• Ethiopian volcano erupts for first time in 12,000 years

• Lethal smog is back in the most polluted capital

• EPA just approved new 'forever chemical' pesticides for use on food

• Fighting for 'The Right to Night' Under Starry, Rural Skies