2026-08-12

Cool

• How and when to see the solar eclipse

Horseshit

• Does Silicon Valley Dream of Philip K Dick?

• The End of Reading Is Here

• More Young College Graduates Are Living at Home. Is That a Bad Thing?

• A Lost Civilization Is Baffling Experts and Rewriting China's Origin Story

• Harry Potter fans force diverting UK-Ireland power link to avoid Dobby's grave

  • $580M undersea cable rerouted to avoid the grave of Dobby the House Elf

  • Impedimenta Developerum!

  All I can say is that Voldemort would never have put up with this shit.

• Humans' sense of smell is still evolving

• How much would you pay for a smarter baby?

• Why Americans fear getting old

• A California Home That Rotates 320 Degrees Takes a Spin on the Market

• Researchers discover your dog can tell if you’re sad or afraid.

  • When you're emotionally down or distressed, that moment your dog comes and says "I'm here" is such a blessing. They don't care if you fucked up or what the story is, they just wanna help you be happy again.

• The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment

• Cineplex CEO Says Gen Z Will Go to the Movies: Tired of Looking at Small Screens

celebrity gossip

• Zuckerberg's superyacht ignored emergency channel, failed to aid stranded boat

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• How the "censorship-industrial complex" is changing the Internet and US policy

  it was just the start of a deep reporting rabbit-hole into an idea that had moved from the fringes of the right-wing Internet into the mainstream, championed and spread by a network of well-funded conservative media platforms and non-profits, and finally as a sort of prevailing logic behind much of the second Trump administration’s domestic and foreign policy.

Musk

• Starlink Satellites Reveal a Hidden Atmosphere 300 Miles Above Earth.

  Researchers at Kyoto University have used orbital changes from about 1,200 Starlink satellites to map Earth’s thermosphere, a thin and difficult-to-observe region of the upper atmosphere. Their analysis produced the first tomographic map of its kind, revealing atmospheric density patterns roughly 482 kilometers (300 miles) above Earth.

• Tesla-SpaceX Merger Gives Musk a Shortcut to His $1T Payday

• Ontario Teachers' pension plan posts 9.5% return through SpaceX stake

• SpaceX's Earnings Show Elon Wiped Out Two-Thirds of Twitter's Ad Business

• Allegations cross state lines as SpaceXAI hit with $430M in new lien filings

• The SpaceX Sham

Electric / Self Driving cars

• 100 Kodiak driverless trucks are headed for public roads

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• Unitree's Shanghai IPO more than 8k times oversubscribed by retail investors

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• What if The Brain Doesn’t Create Consciousness? Scientist Proposes It Might Be The Fabric of Reality Itself.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The Cambridge University lecturer who kept her Tourette's secret

• Confessions of a Token Black Professor

  when Ava gave me anti-racist reading recommendations that first summer in Maine, I read them with an open mind. And when I found them disquietingly flimsy, politically bizarre, and, in their naked essentializing, even sort of racist, I assumed that I must be the problem. As a light-skinned Black guy who doesn’t speak African American English, I had rarely been subjected to acute prejudice in my life. I thought that perhaps I simply wasn’t Black enough—“authentically” Black enough—to understand the kind of racial pessimism that had become so mainstream.

  I came to understand the Mason affair as emblematic of the kind of “politics” that dominated at Bates, a place where current and future elites paid—or were paid—for the privilege of cosplaying as radicals, victims, or both. In this upside-down, 133-acre world, an “attempted lynching” was a graver threat to Black undergraduates than student debt, and faculty needed protection from their own students. Some of my colleagues, it seemed, were engaged in an Alice in Wonderland–style reenactment of civil-rights-era struggles, in which glancing racial faux pas and willfully misinterpreted private encounters were treated with the solemnity of nooses swinging from oak trees.

  I saw clearly now what should have been obvious all along. Bates was not a good place to work, nor a moral one. And the problem went beyond a single college: Bates was a node in a higher-education system that offered teenagers an uncertain future in exchange for often unpayable debt, and that asked scholars—enticed by the tweedy dream of a kind of faculty life that has long since been clubbed to death—to keep waiting for the real job that would surely come after the temporary job, and the next temporary job, and the next.

• University of Michigan Drops First-Semester Grades To'Curb Mental Health Crisis'

  • University of Michigan to switch to pass/fail grades for first-semester students

• Shrinking student populations cause spike in public school closures across U.S.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Flock cameras could go before voters in two Houston-area cities

  • Flock Cameras Can Track Every Car in America. Police Love Them. Citizens Don't

• Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment

• YouTube now requires creators to have twice as many watch hours to start earning

• MATLAB programming language sinking in popularity

• Meta wiped key scam evidence in Andrew Forrest suit, US judge rules

• Microsoft Responds to Outcry After Quiet Enterprise Install of Beta 'Photos' App

• Microsoft responds to unwanted OneDrive feature installs

• TSMC Holding $1 Billion Of Apple’s A20 Pro Supply Refuted By Analyst

• Following Epic loss, Google has started hosting rival app stores in Play Store

• Meta glasses are turning public spaces into surveillance

• AMD 'had to re-engineer' the Ryzen 7 5800X3D for a re-release

  “a whole body of engineering work” went into the re-release, as the original bonding process TSMC used for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D was no longer available.

• New surveillance tech links your phone to your license plate

• OVH Cloud warns of 87% price hikes to help it cover RAMpocalypse costs

• Bumble gives up on women making the first move

• Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

• Meta glasses banned from courts in England and Wales

• Japanese authorities use new tool to identify initial torrent uploaders

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Why havent we found any aliens yet?

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand how to live

  • Superintelligence is a dragon: What Mark Zuckerberg misunderstands about AI

  • Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

• Nvidia Set To Reveal Record $500 Billion Off-Balance Sheet SPV Deal To Fund The World's Biggest Circle Jerk

  • Nvidia partners with Wall Street giants to raise $500B for AI buildout

  • Nvidia gets $500B from major investors to develop AI infrastructure

  • Circular financing reaches new heights

• Google Builds a New Gemini Model Team as AI Investments Accelerate

• AI for science needs reasoning, not just data

• Linus Torvalds says AI has made 'huge' Linux kernel updates the new normal

• AI cyclone forecasts could add 30 hours of warning time

• I was accused of using AI in my dissertation but I wrote it all myself

• Anthropic's New Tool Could Expose AI-Written Novels

• AI professors are negotiating the new realities of academic research

• The AI threat to India's IT jobs machine

• OpenAI wraps $7B share sale ahead of potential IPO

  • OpenAI reportedly completed a $7B employee tender offer

• Anthropic pledges to embed watermarks to help discern AI slop in sop to EU

• Google's AI Team Tells Job Seekers Its HR Filters Are Unreliable

• Claude will apply invisible watermarks to AI text and images

• OpenAI's Only Ethicist Reportedly Left Last Month

  • OpenAI's head of ethics leaves startup less than one year after joining

• As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

• AI agent hacks gym to get its owner spot in pilates class

• Spotify to Label AI Artists on the Platform with New 'AI Persona' Badge

  • Spotify to Label AI 'Artists'

  • Spotify says it won't recommend music from 'AI Personas'

• AI's potential climate benefits outweighed by role in boosting fossil fuels

• Bernie Sanders calls on Silicon Valley to 'pause AI development'

• New Orleans Deploys AI for 911 Calls–What Are Other Cities Doing?

• OpenAI executive Brad Lightcap leaves as shakeup at AI lab continues

• Alpha Compute to buy gas rights for $55M data center campus

• AI models are breaking out of their cages. Their creators are scrambling

• Anthropic Posts 'How Claude Marks AI-Generated Content' Without Explaining How

• AI Is Dead. Organoids Are Alive

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• FlightAware sues Kalshi over flight-cancellation markets

Economicon / Business / Finance

• US emergency oil reserve falls below 300M barrels for first time since 1980s.

• Why your Amazon order confirmation emails have become so unhelpful

• The million-dollar home is becoming surprisingly normal

• Private-Credit Firms Clamp Down on Loan Sweeteners in Fear of 'Shadow Defaults'

• Paramount to Leave CA If States Refuse to Negotiate Settlement in Antitrust Suit

• The renter-owner wealth gap is wider than ever, as many are priced out of buying

• The closing of the U.S. economy's K-shaped gap

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The US hired 2k gamers to fix the air traffic control crisis

  • US hires over 2k video gamers as air traffic controllers

• Sergey Brin has now spent $100M to fight the billionaire tax

Trump

• Trump signs EO for fewer childhood vaccines, falsely linking shots to autism

• Trump Said to Have Used Military Jet to Leave Turkey Amid Threats

  • US President hid in catering cart for secret flight in Turkey amid Iran threat

  Donald Trump departed on a secret military flight from Turkey to Britain last month when the White House said he was flying aboard ⁠Air Force One, in an extraordinary ruse – prompted by an Iranian assassination threat – that involved hiding the president in an airport catering container, according to reporting from the Washington Post and the New York Times. The operation took place when Trump was in Ankara for a Nato summit with world leaders, according to the Post. The president reportedly boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras, and then was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, a US official told the Post. Trump’s actual location was concealed from journalists and some White House staff. A US official told the Post that a credible threat to Trump involving Iran set the “deception operation” in motion.

  • Trump Ripped by Reporters Used as Decoys in Secret Escape

Democrats

• Judge Temporarily Blocks Mamdani’s Pied-à-Terre Tax

Left Angst

• ICE to Pay LexisNexis Millions for Data to Feed to Palantir

• More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts

• Visa stress clouds my life as a scientist and parent

• DHS reports over 1.4M illegal alien departures since January 2025.

• The US tried to stop cartel money-laundering; devastated mom-and-pop businesses

• Electrostates vs. petrostates: the US, China, and the Hormuz energy shock

• DOGE Wall of Receipts: More Transparency Needed on How Savings Are Derived from Contract, Grant, and Lease Terminations

  The Wall of Receipts includes leases identified for termination before DOGE was established. Specifically,108 of the 264 leases identified for termination on the Wall of Receipts, about $15.3 million of the total $53.5 million in savings, were already in process for termination when DOGE was established. GAO’s review of selected contracts identified potential cost savings, but the basis for some reported savings is unknown. For example, DOGE reported $1.7 billion in savings on the Department of Defense’s Defense Health Agency contract for IT services at more than 700 military treatment facilities worldwide. While DOGE initially identified the contract for termination, in the end, no action was taken to terminate the contract, or to reduce scope, value, or funding. Thus, no savings were achieved.

• A candidate who quit the race still beat Trump's pick in a GOP primary — because of his name

  There was really nothing Amir Hassan could have done to win this Republican primary that he did not do. He had every advantage and an opponent who had so little confidence in his campaign that he exited the race. None of it mattered. Hassan’s name did not match the imagined bio it created, but that imagined bio of a Muslim candidate was enough to sink him. This astonishingly open bigotry has become such a feature of the MAGA base that the general Republican response seems to be a shrug of the shoulders, and a disinclination to include Muslims in the party. For example, Muslims who attended the Texas Republican Party were told they were not welcome as the Party embarked on a “Don’t Sharia Our Texas” campaign based on the lie that the Lone Star state is on the verge of becoming Iran because of some unseen Muslim influence.

• Trump to give Republicans a 3-1 FCC majority, not filling empty Democratic seat

• ICE plans to give officers gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• U.S. brokers secret deal on clandestine Syrian nuclear site

• What the FCC Ban on Foreign-Made Robot Vacuums Means for U.S. Consumers

• Judge allows Lockerbie suspect's alleged confession to be used at US trial

World

• London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

• Oman says grounded tanker oil spill covers 400 square km

• Gangs using Airbnb-type rentals as drug stash houses, top Belgian official says

• France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

  • France Bans Unsolicited Telemarketing Calls

• Cyber vulnerability sweep picks up Royal Navy drones sending data to China

• Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago

• Ambulance defibrillators removed from sale, still on the road

• UK police tackle man carrying sealed baseball bat after leaving store

• Greenland issues "strong warning" as American oil firm illegally drills wells

Iran / Houthi

• Gulf States Accept a New Normal in Hormuz: Iran Is in Control

• U.S. Fires on Ship Breaking Its Blockade of Iran

  U.S. forces fired on a Panama-flagged ship that attempted to run the American blockade of Iranian ports early Tuesday, a U.S. official said, stepping up enforcement as the Trump administration attempts to squeeze the regime economically

• Houthi attack on small cargo ship in Red Sea kills three crew members, sources say

China

• Beijing is forcing a mass breakup with AI lovers

• One of China's workhorse rockets just exploded in flight

  • Chinese rocket explodes shortly after liftoff

Health / Medicine

• England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

• New psychedelic clinics treat rare post-trip harms

• Why Doctors Telling Patients Their Symptoms Are "Normal" Can Backfire

• Frequent cannabis users wake up with their "stress hormone" elevated

• A Herbal Product Sold at Gas Stations Is Being Blamed for an Addiction Crisis

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Taylor Farms recalls salsa, guacamole over salmonella fears after company linked to ‘explosive diarrhea’ outbreak.

• Fresh jalapeños linked to Salmonella outbreak in 27 states, and a recall is underway.

• FDA report reveals where Taylor Farms sent its lettuce–and it raises questions

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Hunger stones, wrecks and bones: Europe's drought brings past to surface

• An oil field became California's first carbon vault

• Scientists find 200k barrels of radioactive waste in the ocean

• Don't despair about what's happening to our planet

• How the hard reality of climate change hit Europe's economy this summer

• Seedless Blackberries and Cherries That Grow on Bushes

• How Europe can prevent a repeat of this year's devastating wildfires

• Canada's wildfire season is taking a heavy toll on First Nations

• Hoover Dam is losing power. Inside the 'slowest-moving train wreck in history'

  Engineers call it “minimum power pool.” Above that elevation, Lake Powell can still push water through Glen Canyon Dam’s massive penstocks, spin its turbines, and send electricity across the Southwest with no trouble. Below it, the dam loses the function that helped justify its existence. The river still wants to move, but the machine starts running out of ways to move it.