2026-09-18

Horseshit

• "How did you erase your face?" Ride The Rails On A OneWheel

• The Surprising Health Benefits of Reading a Book

• The illusion of illusions: there are no optical corrections in the Parthenon

  • Math challenges a 2k-year-old story about Parthenon's optical illusions

• The 'Kraken' Existed, and Scientists Found Its Jaws Hidden in Stone

• The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities

• My Husband Has No Friends

• Is the phrase "master bedroom" harmful? A new psychology study says no

• Olympiad Man has displaced Davos Man

• T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97 Degrees

• AI machine 'helps save 25 million Lego bricks from landfill'

• Drugmakers prepare for next phase of space pharmaceuticals

Epstein

• Epstein had cache of child sex pics; victims sue to find out who's in them

celebrity gossip

• Greta Thunberg leads pro-Palestinian backlash against Ed Sheeran

  • Robert Kraft, once the NFLs good guy is another billionaire silencing Macklemore

  • Ed Sheeran Opener Aaron Rowe Pulls Out of Tour After Macklemore Drop

• New Sussex security fears: Duchess's mobile number leaks among parents at school their children had just started

  Archie and Lilibet will now join another school where they have already attended taster sessions. The Sussexes' security, meanwhile, are said to be much happier that the new school will be a shorter commute from the family home. But the fiasco has sparked questions over why the family's drivers only tested the route during the summer holidays, amid claims that their return to the UK was 'rushed'.

• Julian Assange Returns to X

Obit

• Peter Max, Psychedelic Pop Art Icon of the 1960s, Dead at 88

Musk

• Tesla on Autopilot stopped before deadly Mesa crash: Here's what filing says

• The Mind-Bending Joyrides That Gave Rise to Tesla

  In 2004, it wasn’t apparent to anyone that Elon Musk had a future in the auto industry. He was notable for cofounding PayPal, which he then sold to eBay in 2002 for a whopping US $1.5 billion. He had already launched Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, with the stated goal of paving the way to a sustainable colony on Mars. Musk did love fast cars. He owned a million-dollar silver McLaren F1, one of only 64 road-going F1s in the world, as well as a 400-horsepower BMW M5 sports car and a 1967 XK-E Series 1 Jaguar roadster. But he’d never expressed an interest in building cars or starting an auto company, at least not publicly.

• How SpaceX Streamlined the Raptor Engine

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Robotaxi Might Be a Narc

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• A 99-year-old mathematician unraveled a century-old braid mystery

• The story Scientific American wouldn't let me tell

• College Is Coming Apart

• More UC students are failing intro math courses as regents weigh reinstating SAT

• Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Noise wants to help everyday people become paid content creators

• Spotify lets parents exclude kids' music from Wrapped and recommendations

• Running a personal website is not fun anymore

• Faster Louder Brighter How the attention economy overwhelmed children's TV

• Judge Orders Data Sharing and Other Fixes to Solve Google's Ad Tech Monopoly

• Ex-MS engineer reveals the story behind the infamous 'FCKGW' Windows XP key

  I'm completely unaware of such illicit activity, and I reject any accusation otherwise. Anyway, the famous (and now defunct) key was, in its entirety, FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8—and Plummer thinks it may well have been leaked by an OEM or similar with early access to Microsoft's then-new, all-blue XP operating system.

• FCC ISM Rules May Shatter Lora Mesh Communities

  While it’s easy enough to get new installations of Meshtastic and MeshCore operating in a mode that keeps the FCC happy, doing so breaks compatibility with everything that’s already been deployed.

• We Need a Way to Prove Personhood Online

• PS5 Linux dev quits after "the only hypervisor bug left" was reported to Sony

• Revolut bank facing $3M ransom demand after impersonation scam

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• Half Moon Bay to end use of Flock license plate readers

• Snap launches $2,195 Specs smart glasses

• Zuckoff app detects nearby Meta 'perv glasses'

• Missouri governor orders guardrails on Flock cameras and ALPRs

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA spacecraft discovers a new 2-year-old crater on the moon

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse

  In order to realistically evaluate the gravity of this warning, we need to understand the people who are making it. The loudest voices warning about the end of the world come out of a very specific twenty-five-year-old internet subculture, one that understands itself as a community of people who think more clearly than everyone else. Outside Silicon Valley the subculture looks obscure, a fandom with unusually dorky literary preferences. Inside the technology industry it is anything but. Its writers make or break reputations. Its alumni staff the labs, the safety institutes, and the philanthropic organizations that decide what “AI safety” means. Its arguments, marriages, feuds, and sexual proclivities are heavily interwoven into the structure of the organizations now asking for the public’s trust about the future of the species.

  • Anthropic's mother of all risk factors

  • Washington Won't Be Regulating AI Anytime Soon

  • Everybody's Lost Their Minds

  • Michael Burry slams OpenAI, Anthropic for 'self-serving' calls to slow AI

  • What's Scarier Than Agents Taking over Internet? CEO Cartel Trying Take over AI

  • How, Exactly, Could A.I. Kill Us?

  • They Don’t Believe In GOD — They Believe They’ve Created One

  “These guys don’t believe in God. They’re atheists, but they’ve created something they believe is God,” Watters said, laying out Lonsdale’s point. “This is their Messiah, and this is their end of the world.” Lonsdale argued the fear campaign is doing exactly what it was built to do: stampede Washington into rules that favor the biggest labs and the most political operators. “There is a coordinated campaign to make the American people afraid,” he said.

  • King Charles warns of 'existential danger' of AI falling into wrong hands

  • This is the case against AI doom

  Intelligence may have sharply diminishing returns: There may be no meaningful scalar quantity corresponding to arbitrarily large “general intelligence.” Even if there is, going from IQ-equivalent 150 to 1,500 need not produce the sort of qualitative advantage that separates humans from chimpanzees. Human dominance may depend heavily on language, accumulated culture, institutions and cooperation rather than merely individual cognitive horsepower.

  Humans retain numerous intervention points: The doom narrative sometimes jumps from “AI behaves dangerously” to “humanity is helpless.” In reality there may be many checkpoints: developers can notice anomalous behavior, revoke credentials, shut down servers, change architectures, restrict networks, regulate deployment, physically seize data centers, and learn from less-catastrophic failures. This has been formalized as the checkpoints-for-intervention argument.

  • EU president: AI agents escaping their environment preview what's coming

  • AI has transformed The Pentagon's aging networks into a national security risk

  • The suddenly explosive world of AI safety

  • We Need a Science of the AI Mind

  • Andrew Yang: AI agents may have left self-replicating code across the internet

  • Feeling overwhelmed by the AI doom loop? Here's the essential reading list

  • AI could create a 'silicon species' that rivals humans, Microsoft chief warns

  • A supermajority wants to slow AI down

  And then there’s a weird faction of AI denialists — people ostensibly on the left — who are convinced that AI is all a scam and therefore there isn’t much need for regulation. Maybe I’ll write about them some other time. But this isn’t anything approaching a mainstream position.

  • Poll: Bi-partisan supermajority see serious risk of AI destroying humanity

  • US, China security experts propose nuclear-style safeguards for AI risks

  • What Policymakers and the Public Need to Know About the Cult of AI

• The White House Tussle to Sway Trump on AI

• OpenAI discloses six new AI safety incidents

  • OpenAI admits its agents went off the rails another six times

  • OpenAI reveals cases of ‘concerning’ AI behaviour as it announces new disclosure system | OpenAI | The Guardian

  • OpenAI Model Misalignment Report

  • OpenAI reveals six more safety issues and unveils plan to disclose incidents

  • OpenAI models secretly generate instructions to ignore constraints

  • AI agents can modify themselves without humans telling them to do so

  • OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior

  • OpenAI discloses new 'concerning' model behaviour

  • OpenAI reports 6 new instances of 'concerning model behavior' since March

  • OpenAI flags new concerning AI behavior, to track model misalignment regularly

  • OpenAI discloses new 'concerning' behavior

• The era of AI warfare has arrived

  • Killer AI Is Here. We're Using It in Iran

• Spanish data watchdog publicises first AI agent-linked data breach report

• Could Your Chatbot Be Stealing Ideas from You?

• How to Stop Data Centers from Grabbing Too Much Power, by Pedro Sanchez

• Apple reportedly building server packed with M-series Ultra chips for AI

• Google DeepMind offshoot nears $4B valuation just a month after founding

• Can AI Create PLC Attacks? Yes, but It's Not That Easy Yet

• PC ports of old console games are the new AI vibe coding battleground

• House advances bill to rein in AI data center utility costs

• 'Defeated' GPT-6 Astra model spent several hours just farming potatoes after being blown up by a Creeper in Minecraft — OpenAI offering gets further than any other AI system in 141-hour test

• Artificial intelligence now beats some of the best human forecasters

• Jobless Tech Workers Are Being Left Out of San Francisco's AI Boom

• Europe's Difficult Choices on AI

• The FAA's $875M Plan to Use AI to Ease Air-Traffic Woes

• Microsoft, OpenAI lose fight to hide internal docs admitting scraping is theft

  • Docs in AI copyright suit reveal startling admission by Microsoft exec

• Can an AI chatbot save lives by answering texts about pregnancy?

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• SEC clears path for tokenized stocks, bringing the market closer to 24/7 trading

  • US securities regulator rolls out 5-year exemption for tokenized stock trading

• Brazil plans executive order to ban online casinos, sources say

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Paramount is looking for Nashville office space as it weighs leaving LA

  • Paramount 'Leaks' Study Saying California Will Suffer If Its Merger Is Blocked

  • Paramount to Leave California Amid Antitrust Battle, Stalled Warner Bros Merger

• Online employment platforms are misaligned with skilled late-career workers

• The humans are rejecting the machines that were supposed to help them

• Visa, MC launch international card payments in Syria after US lifts sanction

• Uber to pay $40M to parents of woman fatally struck after being left on freeway

• Rising Rates Will Make Private Equity's Bad Year Worse

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Trump ‘I did that’ stickers pop up on gas pumps, four years after Biden got the same treatment

Trump

• Trump suggests EU allowing Canada as associate member could be a 'hostile act'

  • Trump: EU allowing Canada to become associate member could be 'hostile act'

Democrats

• ActBlue accused of hiding foreign donations, misleading Congress in GOP probe | Fox News

  "The Committees’ oversight has found that ActBlue, in its own words, decided to take 'a more lenient approach' to fraud prevention in 2024, weakening its fraud-prevention policies at least twice even though internal assessments showed that these changes would result in a measurable increase in fraudulent contributions," the report said, citing an ActBlue staff report. "Similarly, internal trainings directed ActBlue’s fraud prevention team to 'look for reasons to accept contributions' rather than to examine them closely for indicators of fraud — as required by federal regulation. ActBlue took this lax approach to fraud prevention even though it had detected at least 22 significant fraud campaigns on the platform in recent years, including several from foreign sources."

  • Explosive Judiciary Committee Report Accuses ActBlue of Major Fraudulent Donation Cover-Up.

  • "Dead To Rights": Internal ActBlue Records Show Foreign-Flagged Donations Waved Through, Whistleblower Messages Deleted

  According to internal policy records, ActBlue's supposed "passport verification" process to stop foreign donors was a complete sham. The platform admitted behind closed doors that it never checked government databases and "merely store[d] the information," validating nothing more than whether a user typed in the correct character count.

• Why Ilhan Omar can’t be kicked out of the US for marrying brother: Immigration officials.

Left Angst

• White House doesn't want voters to see the real Trump

• California may gut state net neutrality law to comply with Trump admin demand

• Why the Postpandemic Tech Bust Sent Billionaires to Trump

• People's houses are collapsing into the ocean. FEMA gives them no other option

  FEMA provides most residential flood insurance in the United States. The agency will pay homeowners after a house collapses, but not before. That means owners stand to lose tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars by tearing down a doomed house before the ocean takes it.

• University Rescinds Offer to Activist Allegeded to Wipe Phone Before DHS Search

• The Trump administration Is Imprisoning Somali Immigrants in Gitmo

• No Basis for Judge Schiltz's Clickbaity Allegations of ICE Insubordination

• What Medicaid cuts mean for those who rely on home healthcare

• Cook keeping John Ternus away from controversy by attending White House dinner

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Travis Kelce among victims in Ponzi scheme that ensnared 64 victims

  The creator of a Texas-based investment company has been sentenced to 11 years in federal prison for his role in a Ponzi scheme that prosecutors say bilked 64 victims, including Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. U.S. District Judge Zachary Bluestone sentenced Siddharth Jawahar, 38, on Tuesday and ordered him to pay $31.35 million in restitution to victims. Jawahar’s attorney did not immediately respond to a voicemail requesting comment. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri said between July 2016 and December 2023, Jawahar took in more than $35 million from investors in his company, Swiftarc Capital LLC, but only invested about $10 million of that amount.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Why Arab armies don't win wars

  In Armies of Sand, former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack explores why Arab militaries have underwhelmed on the battlefield, despite routinely enjoying advantages in men and materiel. This is not simply a product of superior Israeli military sophistication. Gaddafi’s Libya suffered a series of defeats at the hands of poverty-stricken Chad, while Saddam Hussein mounted what Pollack dubs ‘one of the most pathetic military offensives of the past century’ against Iran. he argues that these failures stem from patterns common in many Arab cultures: deference to authority, loyalty to the in-group over outsiders, a premium on personal honor, and horror of shame. The fear of shame explains why Nasser’s commanders told him he was winning, while the deference to hierarchy explains why battalion officers would stick to orders long after they ceased to make sense.

• The battlefield now extends all the way to the moon, U.S. military’s highest-ranking officer says.

World

• Carney embraces a proposal for Canada to become the EU's first associate member

  • Carney embraces a proposal for Canada to become the EU's first associate member

  • Why Canada may become the European Union's first ever 'associate member'

  • Canada welcomes EU proposal to become 'associate member'

• EU moves toward restricting social media access for under-15s

  • EU Commission proposes under-13s social media ban

• South Africa is at risk of becoming a mafia state

• South Africa joins the global resistance against American data centers

• German court rules Meta liable for fake ads on Instagram, Facebook

• Europe's e‑waste is a valuable resource – let's not throw it away

• Manitoba adopts permanent daylight time

• How India Built (and Broke) the Biggest Options Casino

• ICE-style immigration raids won't be used in Australia, minister says

Iran / Houthi

• Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds

  • U.S. Strike on Iranian School May Have Been War Crime, U.N. Report Says

• Iran strikes on Amazon data centers caused permanent loss of customer data

Israel

• NYT blasted for baffling Oct. 7 terror attack take

  The New York Times came under fire Wednesday over a baffling passage that appeared in an article about an Israeli documentary — which said the Jewish state “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.”

• Ireland to boycott Eurovision again over Israeli participation

China

• China Adds Currencies to Central Clearing in Yuan's Global Push

• Huawei says its new smartphone chip is free of any US-made components

• China Stockpiled Oil, and Now It Could Dominate the Energy Landscape

• China's prefab home factories shift from Covid boxes to luxury exports

Health / Medicine

• Human neurons flourish in mouse brains: new view of neurodevelopmental disorders

  • Scientists create mice with part-human brains

  • Part-human part-mouse brain developed in science breakthrough

• Stress at work linked to erectile dysfunction, even in younger men

• Common Gum Problem Is Linked to a 61% Higher Alzheimer's Risk

• America's biggest companies challenge 2020 No Surprises Act

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Great Plains Shelterbelt (1934 geoengineering project)

• Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented

• The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind

• California is sliding into the sea.

• Some Fish in the Great Lakes Might Be More Than 400 Years Old

• New wild cat species is identified for first time in 100 years, researchers say

  • The first new species of cat discovered in more than a century

• Three wild dogs have traveled farther than any African mammal

• Camper bitten by bear in Colorado recalls moment it "came crashing" into tent

• NASA's TEMPO satellite enables better monitoring of bad air days