2026-08-31

Horseshit

• What It Took to Dismantle the Most Powerful Company in the World

• An Early Guide to Orbital Data Centers

  the ODCs are not going to allay community/NIMBY concerns. Actually they’re arguably worse, since only a local community is affected by a terrestrial data center: ODCs would light up the sky for everyone on Earth if placed in certain orbits without strong brightness mitigation methods. Despite the benefits, almost every techno-economic model concludes ODCs are uneconomic in the near to mid term, and require significant drops in launch costs to break even (or launch prices, if you’re not building your own rockets).

  • doesn't address the pure physical constraints of cooling, which is still the biggest challenge as far as i can see.

• Dolphins and Other Lovers

  Dolphins were not simply people, she went on, they were bad people, shapeshifters. Her father had once warned her never to accept the advances of unknown men while bathing at the river. As handsome as they may seem, he had said, they may be dolphins in disguise. Those reckless enough to fall for their charms would soon grow feverish, drift into madness and hallucinations, and ultimately die. No cure would save them.

  • They're sexier as dolphins

• Airlink’s low flypast over Rugby match in Cape Town

  Just prior to the start of the second test in the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series between South Africa and New Zealand, a pair of Airlink aircraft performed a low flypast over DHL Stadium in Cape Town. Based on Flightradar24 data, the lead aircraft passed less than 50 feet above the top of the stadium.

• Silicon Valley's simulation idea is old and dull

  Perhaps it is no surprise the idea that the world could have been written by a programmer resonated with people who spent their days churning out code. It imbued well-capitalised nerds with godlike importance, putting a whole new spin on the “creator economy”. In any case, by the middle of the last decade “maybe this is a simulation” had become a thing to say to sound clever. Part of the appeal was that the people advancing it were so successful in other fields, so maybe they were right about this too. And partly it was that this seemed like an exciting new idea. In fact it’s a very old, rather dull one. Gorgias was already making similar arguments in the fifth century BC. His work is only known second-hand, through later references to it.

• She Popularized Economics. Then She Was Erased from History. Why?

  Maria Edgeworth sneaked economic theory into her best-selling novels. Two centuries later, a new book finally gives her the credit she deserves.

• How youth football is evolving due to CTE concerns

• Should we laugh more at ourselves? It's complicated

• Cross-class friendships are strong predictors of upward mobility

• How attention deficit hyperactivity disorder shapes sexual experiences

• Car Sunroofs Keep 'Spontaneously' Exploding–and the Problem Is Getting Worse

Epstein

• Ghislaine Maxwell has virtually run out of legal routes to overturn conviction

celebrity gossip

• He Was a Top Lawn Care Influencer on YouTube. Then Everything Went Haywire

  For men like Greg, with very few opportunities elsewhere, real money could be made by online influencing. According to data published by Goldman Sachs, only 4 percent of influencers make more than $100,000 a year, but with his invitation to YouTube school, Greg was being given a chance to join that high‑earning elite. And he was determined to master it, so he began with sharks. “Shark is a huge S.E.O. term,” he said. “So I got a toy shark, and I called him Sharky. I held him in front of the camera, and it was Point of View Sharky.” Greg has under his bed a stack of plaques from YouTube celebrating his viewer‑count milestones. One hundred million views here, one hundred million views there. And then there are the plaques from Tubefilter, a publication that covers YouTube, commemorating the months when he was the most-viewed creator on the entire platform. Between January 2016 and June 2017, his videos achieved a total of 13 billion views. I promised him I wouldn’t reveal how much money he made.

  “Dude, it looked bad,” Greg agreed. “I get why certain adults would be weirded out seeing a grown man with a binky in his mouth. But a million parents had thought it was funny and harmless too. And now there was a whole investigation going on.”

• Andrew Tate offered secret 'espionage' classes to exploit the dirty secrets of the wealthy

Musk

• Did your car witness a crime? Police may be coming for your Tesla

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• Faster, higher, funnier: what we learned from China's robot games

  • China's robots race ahead

• An 'old school' San Jose barber is now teaching robots to cut hair with AI

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Guide to Rock Licking

• MIT student claims to synthesize dangerous chemical, prompting hazmat response

• Does Computer Science Need Computers?

• MIT AI Report Calls for Alternative Grading, More Social Learning

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Do Flock Cameras Actually Work?

  • Flock's CEO Is Lying to Cops About 404 Media's Reporting on Abortion Case

• Memo to Ridley Scott: no one needs more Alien: Covenant movies

• California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

• Positive reception of the Grand Theft Auto VI preview suggests positive reception of Grand Theft Auto VI, say analysts.

• A massive cache of Valve data has reportedly leaked online, appearing to include Portal 2's elusive beta build

  The leak purportedly includes files that date between 2003 and 2013.

  • 12TB Steam leak reveals unseen Half-Life 2: Episode 3 builds

• AWS mumbles about its cost-busting networking tech when it should be shouting

• Chrome Web Store extensions caught stealing crypto, browser data

• Mark Zuckerberg's Social Reckoning

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Cores in space: The core memory module from a 1980 Spacelab computer

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• 2 Gen Z aerospace engineers to conduct first microgravity menstrual flow studies

• NASA's Roman Space Telescope Launches on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The Internet Archive's Vintage AI Collection

• China is fueling America's data center rage

• Nvidia's AI advantage is moving beyond the GPU

• Workers in their 40s, 50s and 60s are the most positive about AI

• Anthropic Says Its Market Is $30T, Same as US GDP

• Anthropic tells investors annualized revenue run rate climbed to $65B in July

• Google's Dreambeans, weirdest-named AI tool, will turn your life to a cartoon

• The Cybersecurity Apocalypse Is Coming in 'Months,' AI Giants Warn

• The viral leftist teens of Campaign 2020 work for OpenAI now

• Meta Project OT plan to replace employees with AI agents

• They confided in ChatGPT. Their secrets ended up in court.

• Xcena and Samsung's Near Memory Compute CXL Device

• Fair Work Commission condemns 'plain wrong' AI legal advice

• Some Scientists Have 'Magic Hands' in the Lab. This A.I. Is Learning Why.

• A Society of Cheats

• Dario Amodei says Anthropic is 'not interested in destroying anyone'

• METR and Redwood Offer Postmortem Of The HuggingFace Hack

  The METR report is different. Holy shit. If we had posted this as a story on LessWrong, it would have been dismissed as too on the nose, the humans too blind and stupid, the AIs too idealized and doing strange decision-theoretic and absurd-maximizing things we didn’t train them to do. This is even more ‘exactly what has been predicted,’ on more levels at once, than I was even considering that it might be. It is straight up rationalist fiction, except it is real.

• Collapse in Support for AI Data Centers Captured in New Poll

• Meta's push to put robots to work in data centers

• Fears of AI-induced armageddon are overdone

• Could AI revive the socialist dream?

• We tested how AI chatbots would handle foreign propaganda

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Employers Are Making Job Candidates Jump Through Hoops to Prove They're Real

• Wealthy Americans Find Another Tax-Free Way to Invest

• America's next grocery shock is brewing

• When skilled immigrants are overqualified, employers pay a price too

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Judge rule AI-generated child sex abuse material is protected by First Amendment

• Wyoming governor requests investigation into activity of DOJ election monitors

  Wyoming's attorney general is investigating how two U.S. Department of Justice officials monitored poll workers and observed voters in the state's most populous county during the Aug. 18 primary, a spokesperson for Republican Gov. Mark Gordon said Friday. Gordon called the monitors' behavior “a bit aggressive” and “irregular" in an otherwise routine meeting to confirm the election results in the mostly rural and Republican state.

  The monitors arrived soon after polls opened at 7 a.m. on primary day and said they intended to interview voters while assessing compliance with federal civil rights and voting rights laws, Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee said in a statement. Lee said her office didn't allow interviews to be conducted in polling places and denied the monitors permission to do so. The monitors questioned local officials about “the nature, length and timing of poll worker training," Lee said. “Monitors requested training guides, asked how our new election equipment was acquired and wanted to examine our tabulators,” Lee said. Wyoming law allows only election observation by certified poll watchers who monitor registration and turnout, Lee said. “This was a poorly managed exercise and one that showed complete disregard for our state laws and administration of our elections,” Lee said in the statement.

  • They dared to ask questions... Totally unacceptable!

• Texas Senate hopeful Talarico teams with Mark Cuban to breakup healthcare

Trump

• President Trump Signs Executive Order to Create US Space Academy

  • Establishing the United States Space Academy – The White House

Left Angst

• America beat measles once. RFK Jr. is making it harder to do so again

• Google: Lake Ontario/Lake America name change in the U.S. will appear in Maps

  • Google Maps Faces Fury for Caving to Trump

  • Google Bows to Trump, Renames 'Lake Ontario' to 'Lake America' in Google Maps

  • Google's Obedience to Trump's "Lake America" Order Follows a Depressing Pattern

  • Google Maps Now Shows 'Lake America' Instead of Lake Ontario

  • Google Maps Will Show 'Lake America' in US, Not 'Lake Ontario'

  • Google Maps changed to show Lake Ontario as Lake America

  • Google quickly bows to Trump order and renames Lake Ontario 'Lake America'

• 'They shot all their weapons; they trashed their ships; they ran out of money'

• West Point prof fired for continuing to teach human causes of climate change

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• 40k Pounds of Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer Reported Stolen in California

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The U.S. Munitions Crisis

  The Trump administration has variously denied that the United States faces a shortage of critical munitions, said that the shortages developed because President Joe Biden gave too many weapons to Ukraine to fight Russia, and argued that weapons manufacturers will soon speed up production. The stakes in the debate over the state of the U.S. arsenal are high. Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has warned that the United States now faces a “dangerous moment” because rivals may doubt it can deter their aggression. Which raises a question: how did the Pentagon find itself in a position in which military operations against a middle power could impair the U.S. ability to counter challenges from great powers?

• US Threatens Britain over Falklands

• DOJ blames China for string of hacks targeting federal agencies and hospitals

• Cheap GPS Jammers Are Filling the World with Navigation Dead Zones

World

• Exeter University approves deal with Saudi Arabia to train military officers

• Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

• Iceland rejects reopening talks on EU entry

  • Iceland starts counting EU talks referendum; 'no' moves ahead in close contest

  • Iceland votes 'No' to reopening EU accession talks

  • Iceland votes against restarting talks on joining EU

  • Icelanders say no to restarting talks to join the EU

  • Icelanders vote 'no' to talks aimed at joining the EU in close referendum

• UK Households can save as plug-in solar panels come to market

• Berlin is being blackmailed by hackers

• Migrant ambush that targeted military vehicles in Ceuta was pre-planned, claims National Police

  police investigators at the scene discovered an abnormal accumulation of heavy stones that did not match the natural geology of the terrain. Police believe the projectiles were intentionally stockpiled at the location in advance, setting a trap for a vehicle or convoy passing through the area. The ambush occurred while troops from the 54th Regular Group of Ceuta were conducting routine patrol duties. Dozens of illegal immigrants ambushed the patrol vehicle with a heavy barrage of rocks. The sudden intensity of the assault severely damaged the vehicle, shattering its windows and trapping the occupants inside.

• Devastation from the Nepal-China Floods in 30 photos

Iran / Houthi

• Iran's Unit 4000 and the new architecture of outsourced terrorism

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian Strike on Kyiv-Area Ammunition Depot Triggers Blast, Killing 37

China

• In Chile's Atacama Desert, the biggest telescope ever built is taking shape

Health / Medicine

• Ditch the 40-Ounce Water Bottle: You're Probably Hydrated Enough

• 70% of new drugs approved by FDA in 2024 were based on a single study

• Is It Safe to Eat Green Potatoes? A Food Scientist Explains.

  A small green patch on an otherwise firm potato is not automatically dangerous, and in most cases the potato is still usable. The key is removal: peel off the green skin generously and trim off any green-tinged flesh underneath as well. The USDA reassures the remaining potato is safe to cook and eat. That said, there are limits. If more than a small portion is green, or the potato smells off, feels soft, or tastes bitter after cooking, discard it.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Substantial under-detection of human rabies cases in the United States

  Based on multiple instances of human-to-human rabies transmission via organ or tissue transplantation from initially undiagnosed rabies-infected donors, we estimate 856 (213–2220) human rabies deaths in the United States (US) from 2000 to 2024, meaning that only around 7% of human rabies deaths in the US were confirmed during this period.

• USDA cyclospora research projects shelved amid funding cuts and relocations

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Scientists Discover a Mysterious New Snake Species Hiding in New Guinea.

• Switzerland sees hottest and driest summer on record

• Australia usually hosts the biggest cuttlefish mating event – not this year

• Lamb Grazing in Solar Farms

• Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat

• Solar Has Crossed a Critical Economic Tipping Point

• Painting one of three wind-turbine blades black reduces bird fatalities by 72%

• El Niño Will Be Unlike Any in the Past Eight Decades