2026-08-03

Horseshit

• Falling in and Out of Love with Esperanto

• Ginger hair portraits show unexpected 'golden thread' connecting Americans

• Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals

• A Tech Founder Wanted to Start a New Country. An Actual Country Got in the Way

• 'Naked Dressing' Is Spreading and It's Making Things Awkward

  Barely-there outfits are moving from the runway to weddings and business conferences; ‘I have no idea where to look right now.’

• Has the New Cocaine Finally Arrived?

  Across American and European dance floors, clubgoers are falling in love with a designer drug called 3-MMC. Said to have a softer comedown than Ecstasy and less risk of fentanyl contamination, the synthetic stimulant is “coke without the irritation,” as one 33-year-old former regular on the European gay club circuit told me. “It’s a bit insidious because it’s so lucid.” It’s also cheaper and longer-lasting than cocaine, helpful for marathon-style parties that can stretch 12 to 24 hours, with libido-enhancing effects that make it popular with chemsex enthusiasts. In an era obsessed with both hedonism and productivity, a substance that enhances the party while also making you more effective at the office feels like the perfect drug.

• Security Flaw Placed 30 Years of DNA Evidence at Risk of Hacking

• The Extras Are Tired

• Mysterious DNA: two unknown ancestors found in human genome

• Why Sheep Need Pigs in Sheepdog’s Clothing

  We require eliteness not only of our managers and folks high in our organizational hierarchies, but also of those who lead us in politics, culture, ideas, and innovation. This makes a big problem for our world of ideas (and innovations), as ordinary non-elite folks can pollute new ideas by publicly arguing for them, which then makes elites less able to and willing to support them, which makes ordinary people also less willing to so support. First, ordinary people seem more willing to follow elite leaders who they think were the original source of relevant ideas. Second, elites are more willing to lead when they can claim credit for ideas, as they gain more status in that case if their leadership venture succeeds.

• Why Gen Z is nostalgic for a world it never knew

• Is Gen Z Saving Hollywood?

• The Secret Thrill of Paying to Open Someone Else's Unwanted Package

• What Else Do We Lose When People Give Up Booze?

• 'The language of Pokémon is universal': fans are still catching after 30 years

Obit

• Nirmal Purja, Renowned Mountaineer, Dies at 43 After Pakistan Avalanche

Musk

• A discarded SpaceX rocket is on a high-speed collision course with the moon

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• More Americans now support than oppose all-day school cellphone bans

• Pepper-spraying drones deploying against school shooters, not everyone approves

• Mission High leads California in UC Berkeley admissions. But many don't graduate

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Flock: She left her ex. He tracked her through a network of policing cameras

• Google plans to exempt Android developers in sanctioned nations from otherwise required verification.

  The vague FAQ appears to suggest that these developers won’t be able to verify, but that’s OK because phones in their countries won’t require that. But this comes with a real downside for those people. A Google spokesperson has expanded on the FAQ and confirmed to Ars that people living in sanctioned nations will not be allowed to go through the verification process. That means they will not be able to effectively distribute software through any channel internationally.

• FaceTime, Zoom, and Ring cameras are warping our sense of reality

• Microsoft raises Xbox prices by up to 43%

• Saying 'Google It' Makes You Sound Old

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• The Simple Elegance of the Integrated Timing Belt Loopback Fastener

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA's Curiosity rover finds a field of honeycomb-textured ground on Mars

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The OpenAI and Anthropic AI Hacking Sprees Are a Messy New Legal Frontier

  • Claude published malicious code to the Internet and attacked 3 real companies

  • Some sort of public buyout is the only way out of the pyramid scheme. They can't argue that they're "too big to fail" so they're trying for "too dangerous to be private."

• Europeans Are About to Find Out How Entrenched AI Is in Their Daily Lives

• Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

• Damned if you do and damned if you don't: Can NOT using AI amount to negligence?

• Sam Altman is still making the case for parenting via ChatGPT

• Apple struggles to keep pace with AI 'bug' hunters

• AI labels to be compulsory on authentic-looking content under EU rules

• Something Weird Is Happening in Math

• AI Models as Commodities

• DeepMind Disbands AlphaFold Team, Pivots to Gemini

• People Who Called for Averting Nuclear War Are Calling for AI Slowdown

• Major record labels are proposing to join forces to force AI slop out of the charts.

• An AI TikTok Shop Slop Factory That Shills Supplements the FDA Recalled

• Only 8.9% of sites block AI crawlers, but 94.8% are never cited in AI answers

• OpenAI Lost Its AI Crown–and the Fight to Win It Back

• Australian booksellers raise alarm over destruction of rare titles to feed AI

• Anthropic's Opus 5 Is Better at Resisting Prompt Injection

• As Reddit stock falls, CEO questions value of Google's AI Overviews

• Tokenmaxxing Is Dead. Now Comes the Belt Tightening

• Why businesses lie about AI

• AI Images Are Everywhere. Here's What They Do to Our Brains, and What We Can Do

• AI is getting better at writing. Humans must get better at editing

• The Wild Wild West Of LEGO Datacenters

  every operator and vendor are now racing toward modularization, which essentially means pulling repeatable work off-site and into factories, where everything from wall panels to power rooms and cooling skids are built in parallel with the site and delivered as finished units. Besides, it does more than ease the labor crunch, promising large speed and time-to-build gains

• The diabolical world of convincing AI thirst traps

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Coldcard Bitcoin Exploit Balloons to $88M as Attackers Keep Draining Wallets

• NY files $36B lawsuit against Kalshi, alleging illegal gambling operation

Economicon / Business / Finance

• US Treasury undertakes historic intervention in yen market

  • Bessent and the Fed help Japan reverse months of yen losses

• Stock market turmoil sheds stark light on the opaque AI economy

• Y'all Street Launches: Texas Stock Exchange Goes Live in Dallas

• Apple's stock price has slid by 10% as the company notices that hey, they also need to pay more for memory.

• 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

• German carmakers flood jobs market with managers after wielding axe

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Anthony Fauci Unmasks Himself

  Looking back on the Covid crisis, a lot of professionals were trusted beyond the point they deserved. So were many politicians. As people on the ground in America rose up against lockdowns, closed schools, mask mandates, closed churches, they were often unheard, or heard slowly, reluctantly and disrespectfully. The medical and scientific establishment didn’t seem to be a part of the public anymore, but handling the public. And by the end, a lot of people thought they couldn’t trust the politicians and couldn’t trust the scientists. My fear is that next time, and there likely will be a next time, regular people will think: There’s no one to trust. We’re on our own.

  • There will always be people willing to trust, just as there will always be people eager to take advantage of that trust. They've burned the "Science is what I Say" bible, but they'll find another. Science is that which any of us can replicate and prove for ourselves. Past that there is only allegations and advertising.

  • The Fauci Files: A Megalomaniacal Egomaniac Milking Covid for Everything It’s Worth

Trump

• Trump says Greenland will be under US control by the time he leaves office

• Capital One closed Trump Org's accounts after anti-money laundering probe

Democrats

• I Was in the DSA. Here's What They Believe

  The socialist candidates being swept into power want to dismantle American life. It’s all right there in their new platform.

• From Influence Peddler to Starving Artist: Hunter Biden Claims Family is Broke in Defaulting on $17 Million Bill

  In a deposition in ongoing litigation with the law firm Winston Taylor, Hunter claimed an inability to pay the $17 million he owes his lawyers for representing him in criminal prosecutions, congressional investigations, and civil lawsuits. Hunter claimed under oath that “I don’t own anything of any value other than — and I don’t know the value of it — my paintings which I painted myself. So that’s it. And I don’t even have any other assets at all, stocks, bonds, anything like that, savings accounts.” He also added, “My family doesn’t have any money, and it’s not their debt anyway.”

Left Angst

• For sale: early access to Trump's Truth Social posts

  • Fast access to Trump's 'Truth Social' posts goes on sale for $100k per month

• A Top Law Firm Went from Standing Up to Trump to Bending the Knee

• Here’s Your TDS Headline Of The Year

  We had to look twice at this headline in the New York Times to believe it. “In Trump’s Economy, Job Gains Go to Women. That’s Not an Entirely Good Thing.” Huh? Is the Times complaining that men are being shut out of the workforce? Maybe the subhead will clear things up? Nope. It says “Despite the administration’s best attempts, the diminishing status of many American jobs is driving a spike in women’s employment.”

  The story tries to explain: “Even the Trump administration’s masculinist rhetoric — about how society has become overly feminine and should re-center male virtues — hasn’t slowed this shift. Of more than half a million jobs that the economy has added since President Trump took office last January, roughly 85% went to women.” OK. But even if you accept this dubious premise that these job gains for women came despite Trump’s “best attempts,” how is this “not an entirely good thing”?

• Trump administration pushes tougher English rules for Mexican train crews crossing into the US.

• Liberal court stuns with ruling that hands Trump major immigration win.

  In nearly identical rulings, the majority liberal panel found that the lower court judges' orders conflicted with the Supreme Court's decision in Mullin v. Doe, which held that courts cannot block TPS terminations based on non-constitutional claims.

• An airport search, a wiped phone and a potential test of Fourth Amendment

• A teen was killed at a Seattle protest. New video evidence shows what happened

  It is shortly before 3 a.m. on June 29, 2020, and racial justice demonstrators at an encampment in Seattle are tracking a stolen white Jeep that's driving erratically. A few dozen tents are spread around Cal Anderson Park, where protesters had set up a zone called the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, or CHOP. Some people at the camp had been armed and on high alert for weeks, after a car drove into a crowd of protesters and several shootings in the area.

• RFK Jr tells US families to vaccinate children against measles amid outbreak

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Police in the US are making their own true crime podcasts

• At least 3 dead, 5 injured following shooting in Twin Falls In-N-Out parking lot

  Twin Falls city officials confirmed late Saturday that at least three people have been killed and five others injured following an active shooter incident in and around the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger. In a statement posted Saturday night, In-N-Out owner Lynsi Snyder said one of the company's associates was among those killed. Snyder also said the gunman "ended his life shortly after" shooting customers and the employee. Twin Falls Police have not confirmed those details.

  • Several people killed in shooting at In-N-Out restaurant in Twin Falls, Idaho, officials say

  Twin Falls Police Chief Matthew Hicks told reporters that there were fatalities, but he could not confirm an exact number. Joshua Palmer, a Twin Falls city spokesperson, had initially told CBS News that at least three people had been killed and two more wounded. Palmer then told the Associated Press that at least seven people were injured. The suspected gunman was dead, Hicks disclosed, but he did not detail how the person was killed.

  • Man Exchanged Fire With In-N-Out Gunman, Witness Says

World

• Every new UK home should have air conditioning, say Liberal Democrats

• Australia's social media ban has failed

• Canadians are leaving the country at record levels. Can anyone solve this?

• Trump Was Right. Six Months Post-Maduro, Venezuelan Recovery Defies Critics

• An exam leak in India exposed a Gen Z jobs crisis that goes much deeper

• The Invaders Have Not All Just ‘Gone Home’

  The official narrative landed hard on Friday. Spain’s Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares declared that “the practical totality of those who entered Ceuta have already returned to Morocco.” Locals on the ground immediately called it a lie. One Ceuta resident posted that around 50,000 invaders remained, the city was collapsed, and the official numbers were pure spin. Video filmed that same afternoon showed streets still packed, nothing like the “most have left” story.

• Fukushima beach reopens for first time since 2011 quake and nuclear accident

• Hungary to shut down sole nuclear plant as Danube falls to record low

• Malaysia is reportedly shutting down Balaji Srinivasan's Network School

Iran / Houthi

• U.S. sanctions Iranian firms for Bitcoin maritime insurance operation in Hormuz

• The teenage hitmen recruited to kill across Europe

  The killer was 18-year-old Atilla Azimov. On that February night last year, he had killed the wrong man. He had done it for money - hired by the Foxtrot Network, an organised crime group with links to the Iranian regime which has become notorious for its violence-as-a-service (VaaS) tactics.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Moscow bomb kills at least three as device carried by woman explodes

  Russia’s anti-terrorism ‌committee said an ‌unidentified woman carrying ​an improvised explosive device had tried to get into the restaurant but was stopped by a security ‌guard, the state RIA news agency reported. Unverified social media reports suggested a senior Russian military commander had been the intended target but had been unharmed.

China

• China's tech advances are causing chaos from Silicon Valley to the White House

• Token diplomacy: How China is shaping the AI future

• How China Keeps Tabs on Foreigners

Health / Medicine

• 'Death by organ donation' floated for patients approved for euthanasia

• US measles: Cases now surpass last year's total as vaccination rates decline

• Study suggests the threat of mold-associated illnesses may be underappreciated.

• Eating less protein could slow aging, major review finds

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Plants and their ants: When flora and fauna team up

• Koalas are the only non-primates with fingerprints

• California farmers will destroy 420,000 peach trees after Del Monte closes canning facilities

• Deep-sea vehicles spot 'alien' sharks deep beneath the waves in the Pacific

• Is it time to stop using glue and labels on paper?

  non-recyclable adhesives, or "stickies" as they are known as in the industry, can cause damage to recycling machinery, make the resulting batch of recycled paper inferior, or even cause a batch of paper to be recycled to be rejected, according to scientists at NC State University.

• Radiation in Paduach