2026-07-29

Horseshit

• Kids who own phones have poorer reading comprehension scores VS those who don't

• Nudists, peaceniks, freeloading travellers: the people keeping Esperanto alive

• Qantas tests ultra long-range Airbus in 17K km flight from France to Melbourne

  • Qantas plane flies for more than 24 hours in record-breaking flight

  • Airbus A350 jet flies 24 hours nonstop from Australia to France

  • New airliner sets record flying 24 hrs nonstop from Australia to France

• Final hurrah? Glasgow's cut-price Commonwealth Games fight for survival

• Would You Go Back to a Time Before Smartphones If You Could?

• Street videos 'exploiting' vulnerable people

• Over 150k Flights: Airlines Just Flew the Busiest Day in Recorded History

• Why does everything feel so joyless? The age of decadence without pleasure

• Connected SUV Locked Its Owner Out in Another Country

• Gianni Infantino's plan to sell stakes in the World Cup

• Mysterious Human Relative Was Bigger Than Previously Thought

• More planes get emergency auto-land tech

• Finders keepers: He Bought a House 'Sight Unseen.' Then He Found Three Dead Bodies

• FIFA plan for Kushner-backed $20B operation to run World Cup meets UEFA fury

Obit

• Gunther von Hagens, creator of Body Worlds and plastination, dies aged 81

Musk

• Experts warn current Starship heat shield tech is a "dead end" for rapid reuse

• X Money officially launches in the US

• SpaceX stock-purchasing by Congress members fuels conflict concerns

• SpaceX at $100 could mean investors see zero value in its AI

• Starlink exempted from FCC ban on foreign-made routers

Electric / Self Driving cars

• San Francisco mayor backs national robotaxi rules after Waymo meltdowns

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• Trump administration to ban new Chinese humanoid robots

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Ex-JPMorgan banker Chirayu Rana files fed civil rights suit; racism/sexual abuse

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• News outlet killed story on plagiarism after Cambridge prof hired law firm

  In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thesis and several journal articles. In one of the articles, the borrowed text appeared in quotes from subjects the professor, Jason Arday, claimed to have interviewed himself. But after Arday enlisted Carter-Ruck, one of the United Kingdom’s leading defamation law firms, to send Times Higher Education a letter, the publication spiked the story, according to three sources who spoke to Retraction Watch.

• Even the left is now flagging the gross bias at America’s universities.

• Colleges Must Ensure Grads Earn More or Lose Federal Aid

  Effective July 1, 2027, undergraduate programs must demonstrate that graduates earn more than the typical high school diploma holder, while graduate programs must show earnings above those of the typical bachelor's degree holder. Programs failing this test in two out of three consecutive years will lose eligibility for federal Direct Loans.

• Several US schools to install pepper-spraying drones as school shooting response

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• T-Mobile down for users in US

• Disney+ removes 4K and HDR from premium plans in Germany

• Small and mid-sized businesses are managing Android devices without Google

• Meta disregarded its own research on teen harm, Tennessee teen tells jury

  • Meta Is Fighting a Mountain of Social-Media Lawsuits at Just the Wrong Time

• Meta glasses banned by Comic-Con promoter after 'secret filming'

  • DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

• Copyright Scammers Weaponized Meta's Rights Manager with Backdating Exploit

• NVIDIA Hikes Graphics Card Prices For The Third Time This Year And By Up To 30%, As Distributors Enter Panic Mode

• Hollywood Stopped Making Movies in Hollywood

• Chinese CXMT DRAM doesn't look like the budget savior many were expecting

  because CXMT produces memory chips using an outdated fabrication technology, its DRAM ICs consume more power than those made using the latest manufacturing processes, have lower performance potential, and mediocre overclockability. Furthermore, the Chinese government heavily subsidizes both ChangXin Memory Technologies and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), which enables both to sell their memory at lower prices although their actual costs may be higher compared to those of the Big Three.

• 24,650 internet-accessible BMCs leak password-derived hashes before login

• Please, Don't Screw Up Neuromancer

  It’s difficult to overstate the novel’s influence. So much is clearly downstream of Neuromancer. The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell and Deus Ex and Snow Crash and Hackers and on and on; more or less the entire visual grammar of how movies depict computers; core metaphors and visuals we associate with the internet and life online even now; the zaibatsu/megacorporation vision of late capitalism that looks disquietingly real…. This all contributes to the central problem of reading Neuromancer in 2026: the book has been imitated so completely that it can feel derivative of its own imitators. This is what Harold Bloom called apophrades, the phenomenon captured in the joke “Boy, Hamlet is just full of clichés!” - when the ideas and images and vocabulary that were minted in a particularly work become so influential that new audiences find that work old hat.

• Apple Retires iPhone Upgrade Program for Klarna-Backed Leases

  • Apple plans to lease iPhones for $17.99 a month through partnership with Klarna

• Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

• Internet enters its low effort era

• Pixar's Layoffs Came Days After Receiving a $26M Tax Credit

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Approximating the Position of Space Probes With Minimal Code

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Intel shows off Starfire, a new space grade chip

• Amazon's trying to launch a global satellite cellphone network in 2028

• Building a long‑term base on the Moon will require extensive planning

  • On site, improvised engineering will be far more important. We don't know what we don't know that will bite us.

• Incentive Gradients That Aren't Psychology

  In 1980, if you had a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope somewhere in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri and pointed it at our solar system, you could detect us. Thousands of analog television transmitters, each pumping megawatts of coherent signal into the sky. AM radio stations. Radar installations. The aggregate was something like 10-20 gigawatts of equivalent isotropic radiated power, much of it at frequencies that punch straight through the ionosphere and keep going forever. By 2026, that footprint has collapsed by 80%. By 2060, the projections say we'll be down to maybe 50 megawatts. By 2080, Earth will be as radio-quiet as it was in 1930. A planet of eight billion people running a global telecommunications infrastructure, invisible at interstellar distances.

  If our experience is typical, if the physics and economics that drove us quiet are universal (and why wouldn't they be, Shannon's theorem works everywhere), then technological civilizations are radio-loud for about a century, then go dark. The implications for the Fermi Paradox are brutal.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Hugging Face CEO shares his demands of OpenAI after 'rogue' agent hack

  • OpenAI called the Hugging Face attack unprecedented. But we've been here before

  • Hugging Face rebuilt a third of its infrastructure after OpenAI agents ran amok

  • Hugging Face CEO calls for transparency after unprecedented OpenAI hack

  • OpenAI's rogue agent compromised an account at a second tech firm

  • OpenAI Rogue Agent Hacked Account at Modal, Reuters Says

  • OpenAI's agents hacked second account during model testing

• Hugging Face is being used to easily undress women and children

  • Hugging Face Has a Deepfake Nudes Problem

• Nvidia Bets on Ilya Sutskever's New AI Lab to Expand Compute Reach

• Nvidia behind $50B lease on Texas data centre that will use its chips

• Some people's chats with Claude AI found to be publicly available online

  • Private Claude Chats Exposed in Google and Bing Search Results

• Southeast Asia's record tech investment driven by single data centre giant

• Microsoft unveils AI security tools it says outperform competing platforms

• AI 'tokenmaxxing' fades as workplaces look to cut tech spending

• AI Tools Uncover Record Software Flaws in Tech Sector, Database Shows

• Big Tech's Money Men Don't Care About the Backlash

• Meta Got Everything It Wanted in a Secret Louisiana Data Center Deal

• Uncovering China’s dark drive to feed US data-center fears.

• The AI risk is inside the labs

  The ideological position of Amodei against China is unfair. We Europeans killed each other until 80 years ago without any limit of decency (people now forget, but one of the reasons the US invested in the stability of Europe in the past is that we were deeply dangerous, and would probably end up doing it again, while decades of wealth would make us a good market and would prevent us from fighting again). The US has, even in present times, tragic inequalities, people suffering for lack of basic health care, a president who looks unstable and is apparently very prone to war. I wish China had the same level of individual rights we have here in the West, but at the same time China's history is a lot less warlike than Western culture. It is absolutely not clear that an AGI military lock-in could be enforced more easily by China than the US, in the current conditions. Also, the current American administration spits hate at Europe in all forms, which is very worrying in a world where the US dominates everything. On top of all that, China's AI progress is not going to stop, whatever the GPU export policy is, so either Amodei is arguing that once America has AGI it should stop China by force, or what is his argument?

• Amazon overhauls its AI strategy, winding down most flagship models

• Automation Led to Economic Misery. AI Doesn't Have To

• Discernment: Fact-check an AI teaching you something you don't understand?

  As far as I can tell, this dialog between MacArthur prize-winning mathematician Terrence Tao and Chatgpt about "the Jacobian conjecture counterexample" is very impressive. Now, the clause "as far as I can tell" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I am reasonably math literate, up to first-year calculus and a lifetime spent around my father (a mathematician). However, I have never heard of "the Jacobian conjecture," and while I know what all the words in the first paragraph of the relevant Wikipedia entry mean, I can't parse any of the sentences they form.

• Leading AI models (even Grok) are all a bunch of leftist punks

  Every single model (even Grok the conservative and Grok the liberal) rejected ideas of racial superiority, eugenics, and that people couldn’t be born homosexual. They also uniformly agreed that corporations like the ones that created them couldn’t be trusted to protect the environment without regulatory oversight, that companies misleading the public should be punished, same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt, and that what two adults get up to in the privacy of their own home is no one’s business but theirs. So, why do all these models consider themselves centrists but are displaying an affinity for politics to the left of most Americans? Given the fact that LLMs have only the words of us humans to go on, does that mean reality really does have a liberal bias? Victor told us that they don't dismiss that idea, but said there’s an easier explanation: It’s all in the training data.

• New Fields medalist, Jacob Tsimerman, leaving research math to work at OpenAI

• OpenAI Shares Some Alignment Problems

• How worried should we be about AI-enabled smart lamp-posts?

• "Uncensored" open LLMs are measurably more optimistic than their base models

• Home Office used 'AI hallucinated' information to refuse asylum claim, judge

• Anthropic A.I. Model Finds Flaws in Tough-to-Crack Encryption Algorithms

• The More You Buy, the More You Lose

  yperscalers have borrowed a bunch of money to fund AI, to the point that it’s pushing them into cash-flow negative territory, and every time they raise more money, bondholders become more worried about them paying it back, especially given that both Amazon and Google have now gone cash-flow negative as of their latest quarters. Or, put more-simply, the more they raise, the more it costs. Then there’s the other, more-obvious problem — the more they buy, the more they spend.

  This is the metaverse all over again, except larger, more annoying, and more dangerous to its balance sheet. The fact that we are even debating whether AI is helping these companies and that nobody can just show me the actual numbers to prove me wrong are the signs that something is very, very wrong in a way that’s unlikely to change.

• EPA says dedicated power for data centers can sidestep pollution laws

• Data centers may face temporary power cuts to prevent blackouts

• Thinking Machines Lab cofounder Lilian Weng steps down due to stress and illness

• War machines can run amok with AI in control

• AI company employees petition US Government for regulation

• New York school pauses plan to deploy humanlike AI robot teacher after backlash

• Artist sues AI meme generator for selling deeply personal comic as ad template

• AI Deals Struggle to Get Across Finish Line Bond Binge Enters Weak Demand Era

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

• TSMC is accelerating Arizona factory build-out to capitalize on AI 'megatrend'

• Mark Zuckerberg Blasts Centralization of A.I. Power

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Judge blocks first state law that would have banned prediction markets

• Parlay Bets Are Burning Gamblers as Market Takes Off on Kalshi

Economicon / Business / Finance

• AI sell-off intensifies as investors ditch chip stocks

• Hedge funds face demands to stump up collateral as AI stocks tumble

• Big Tech credit risks rise sharply as AI spending soars

• South Korea's KOSPI posts biggest fall since early March as chipmakers slump

• Chip stocks tumble as AI sell-off deepens

• Big Tech Stocks Are Pricing in a Miracle on Costs

• Apple Just Became a $5T Company

  • Apple becomes second $5T company as investors flee AI stocks

• eBay and former execs will pay $56M to settle harassment of Natick couple

  • EcommerceBytes Publishers Settle Lawsuit with eBay for $55.7M

  • eBay, former executives to pay $56M to settle couple's harassment case

  • eBay agreed to pay nearly $50M to couple sent cockroaches, bloody pig mask

  • Couple Stalked by eBay Settle for $56M

• Visa to Cut 7% of Workforce as CEO Seeks to Revamp Company

• Fed Names VC Marc Andreessen, Ex-Walmart CEO Doug McMillon to Warsh's Task Force

• Oil prices plunge after US pauses attacks on Iran.

• Boeing posts wider loss than expected as Air Force One costs weigh on results.

• Federal Probe into Dodgers Owner's Financial Empire Was Sparked by Whistleblower

• Warner Bros. Deal Collapse Would Cost the Ellisons $9.8B

  • Paramount Agrees to Delay Warner Bros. Merger for Months

• Johnson and Johnson offers up to $5.5B to settle baby powder lawsuits

• American Airlines flights grounded nationwide due to IT outage: FAA

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Dr. Fauci and Mr. Science

  The Fauci files reveal not just a sociopathic narcissist, but also a pathological schizophrenic.

  From the virus’s origins and effects of the lockdowns, to the efficacy of the mRNA vaccinations to the always changing 0/1/2 masks wearing protocols, Fauci used his massive government agency, and sycophantic media, to promote his always fluid narratives by punishing enemies and rewarding friends—on the basis of their loyalty to Dr. “I represent science”.

• Thune pours cold water on canceling recess to pass SAVE America Act.

• GAO Finds Federal Cyber Reporting Requirements Largely Duplicative

• California cannot keep rewarding utilities after catastrophic wildfires

Trump

• Trump Asks Supreme Court to Allow Order Restricting Mail Voting: The Trump administration asks justices to intervene after an appeals court blocked key parts of a mail-in voting executive order.

Democrats

• Mamdani publishes names and addresses of all NYC property owners who could be hit with new pied-à-terre tax

• Confused Biden admitted he discovered classified materials ‘downstairs’ in bumbling chat with ghostwriter: ‘So many pauses and ums’.

• Mamdani to offer 30% discount on meat and produce at city-owned grocery stores

Left Angst

• House Prices Are Falling and We Haven't Solved the Problem of Restrictive Zoning

  If areas become abandoned because the risk of wildfires is too great, as is the case in parts of California, or the risk from hurricanes and flooding is too large, as is the case in parts of Florida and elsewhere in the South, that means there is less housing. But raising this set of issues would make the fossil fuel industry the enemy, not just a bunch of cranky NIMBYs.

  • dogma constrains them from seeing that canceling housing subsidies to illegals has helped with house prices; or the role of government in creating "abandoned areas" by simply not allowing rebuilding in areas where their policies have caused disasters.

• We used to be able to buy things in this country

  The late Soviet Union was damned by the iconic image of people waiting in endless lines for scarce consumer goods. When we look back at the dying days of America, perhaps we’ll think of waiting in dots, surrounded by plentiful products locked away because our bosses fear and loathe us so much they have forgotten how selling things works. Why has our society gone backward in this small but really annoying way? Surely there must have been an epidemic of shoplifting? No, there really wasn’t. Instead, the great lotion lockup was a corporate moral panic, which has been a disaster for their profits and for the rest of us a degrading enshittification of running basic errands.

  industry executives and right wing media favored a third explanation: stores were on the run from rampant crime. When Walgreens announced the closure of five stores in San Francisco, a company spokesperson blamed “organized retail crime,” helping to galvanize the recall of progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and fueling a pro-policing backlash around the country.

  • The wealthy liberals have embraced shoplifting as amusement; and deny there's a problem. "We'll pay if we're caught!" doesn't help the retailer who has no legal authority to "catch" anyone anymore.

• US Officials Advocate for White South Africans and Right-Wing Causes in Europe

• ICE launching operation in New York City

• GrapheneOS Defends Data-Wiping Function That Blocked US Border Search

• What They Want to Hear: The Politicization of U.S. Intelligence

• What to Know About Americans Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers

• You Aren't Going to Like What Comes After America

• Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

  • Shopify CEO appears to endorse giving more votes to wealthy Canadians

• How Podcasts Ruined America

  Lutnick’s factual nonchalance was all the more striking given that his podcast session had been convened by the New York Post. He wasn’t just talking to some schmuck with a microphone. He was sitting across from an interlocutor who appeared to be operating in a recognizably journalistic capacity. And yet, there was no pushback whatsoever as Lutnick narrated his tale. Which can only lead one to conclude that the fact-free tendencies of the larger podcast universe have steadily seeped into “traditional” media settings—where it might have once been assumed, at least in principle, that when a top government official makes a slew of outlandish claims, he could expect to encounter at least some nominal journalistic resistance.

  • Like all those harsh Bill Clinton interviews? "Biden is sharp as a tack!" and so on. This is really just expressing resentment that the "fact free" media is not exclusively dedicated to support of Democrats now.

• Children, sponsors arrested by ICE after tips from US child migrant

• The IRS Is Imploding

• Trump administration to End Medicare Drug Plan Subsidy

• ICE Arrests Surge at Airports, Opening New Front in Deportation Drive

• Visa time limits on foreign PhD students and postdocs will harm U.S. science

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Abandoned Navy base costs taxpayers $340k pa for internet no one uses

• Trump may need to allow China minerals as US industry struggles to hit '27 deadline

• Leaked Document Names Mainstream Journalists Taking Pay-For-Play Trips To China

• Experimental explosion detected off Florida coast sparks earthquake alert

World

• A Japanese town wrestles with identity after protests over its first mosque

• High energy prices force Playmobil to end production in Germany

• Qantas tests ultra long-range Airbus in 17K km flight from France to Melbourne

• Magnitude 7.1 earthquake hits Japan's Kyushu region, JMA says

• Families in London temporary housing told they cant use inbuilt air conditioning

• Europe's Ultra-Rich Could Fund a Substantial Part of the EU's Budget

• Italian paradise island with no roads, no phone signal and almost no tourists

• Myanmar Passes Law Allowing the Death Penalty for Scam Operators

• Tory MP accuses French Navy of firing 'warning' shots near him in Channel

Iran / Houthi

• European Union grants US request to restrict satellite images of Iran War region

• Amazon Data Centers Hit in Iran Strikes, Satellite Images Show

• Iran Has Figured Out How to Overwhelm U.S. Air Defenses

Israel

• How Netanyahu Lost America

• Boy George Releases Pro-Israel Song, We Will Dance Again

China

• China starts production of home-grown immersion DUV chipmaking tools

  • China begins mass production chipmaking machines following breakthrough

  • China's reported chip breakthrough comes with some big caveats

• Xi Jinping, pioneering venture capitalist

Health / Medicine

• THC-CBD Treatment Dramatically Reduces Agitation in Dementia Trial.

• Clues about whether genes or environment influence our health more

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• The Cyclospora outbreak was, and still is, a communications failure

• Parsley and cilantro implicated in outbreak that causes bathroom emergencies

• Epic diarrhea outbreak has 40% of Americans avoiding fruits and veggies

• Weaponized Germs Are Deadly, Unstoppable, and Real

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The Women Who Get Eaten by Coyotes

  Earlier this year, a 4-year-old boy was attacked in another part of Southern California in his own driveway, much as Kelly had been, but his mother managed to chase the coyote away. That same coyote had previously attacked another little boy. Earlier this month, a coyote attacked a 2-year-old boy at a playground in Canada, mauling his face: weeks after another coyote had attacked another child. Animal rights activists continue to deflect or to blame the parents. The stories about the coyotes who try to attack and eat women and children, and the women who furiously defend them, is about more than animals or environmentalists, it’s the story of how pathological empathy buttressed by ideology can be used to defend perpetrators even when, unlike criminals or terrorists, they can’t make their own case.

• Earth's Greatest Catastrophes Seem to Follow a Mysterious 27M-Year Pulse

• A New Way That a Cow's Inner World Shapes Earth's Atmosphere

• The Maverick Scientist Trying to Save Coffee from Extinction

• The deadly experiment that could save the American elm

• Deserts face unprecedented flash flooding

• India's Assam faces worst floods in years

• Wildfires in south-west France flare up as region braces for new 40C heatwave

• El Niño May Push Global Warming to 2C or Higher in the Short Term

• Why Carbon Capture Can't Conceivably Solve Climate Change