2026-09-11

etc

• NTSB Issues Investigative Update on B-767 Runway Excursion Accident in Miami

  There was no indication in the recorded data that speed brakes or thrust reversers were deployed.​

Horseshit

• Drones Recreate Twin Towers

  • Drone Display Recreates the Twin Towers over New York City

• We Are Still Living in the Broken World Sept. 11 Created

• How many people died? Why counting disaster fatalities is harder than it looks

• The Rise of Retrofuturism

• How we manage and engage with our horses shapes their personality

• Ryanair will dispute passenger's claim he was sucked out of window

• Three people died at Burning Man this year

• The Absurd, Unending Quest to Floodproof the New York City Subway

• Google Mapped a Fruit Fly's Brain. Now It's Playing Doom and Super Mario 64

• Yes, scientists really built a “tickle robot.” Here’s why.

• Boy developed "toasted skin" condition from using a laptop every day

celebrity gossip

• A statue of Charlie Kirk was unveiled in Times Square.

  • 'Kirkaversary' social media trend sparks fury as sick celebrations of Charlie Kirk's death continue on 1st anniversary

Obit

• Influencer Igho "Tiny" Ubiribo Dead at 43 After Undergoing Penis Enlargement Surgery in Thailand

  According to the medical examiner, Ubiribo suffered a pulmonary embolism during the cosmetic surgery.

Musk

• Movie Review: Musk

• Elon Musk attacks film-maker Alex Gibney about upcoming documentary about him

• House Democrat urges US action over sleeping Tesla drivers

• The Tesla Cybercab—Which ‘Doesn’t Need Manual Controls’— Has Secret Manual Controls.

• California Tesla drivers could get $350 from class action settlement

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Plug-in hybrids emit six times on average in official tests claim – new EU data

• Autonomous Vehicles as the Next General-Purpose Technology

• Driverless cars are taking us on a road to nowhere

• Can Zoox's 'Toaster on Wheels' Conquer the Self-Driving Car Capital of America?

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• After outrunning Bolt, China's robot champion races towards real-world work

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Notre Dame to start requiring ACT, SAT test scores again for admissions

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

• Four Groups caught using the same Chrome and Windows exploit kit

• Framework cuts 32/64GB memory prices for 13 Pro, issues retroactive refunds

• Scammers demand ransoms from Instagram users over fake copyright claims

• iPhone Duo will have a screen crease over time

• Google has removed the Pixel Tablet from its store

• Panic builds over bankrupt Spirit's looming data sale to Google

• A Stealth Startup Thinks It Just Hacked the Memory Shortage

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• Thanks to Siri Recaps, your Apple Watch is always listening

  • New Apple Watches have ears

  • Siri Recap: AI Memory with Apple Watch

• Sheriff's investigator charged with misusing Flock camera data

• LG strongly denies TV spying claims

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Factoring RSA-260

  Contrary to some circulating claims, I did not factor RSA-260 by guessing and checking 130-digit prime numbers by hand. Cognition also has not yet built a multi-thousand-qubit quantum computer. RSA-260 was factored by a new implementation of the general number field sieve (GNFS) for GPUs, prepared and run using Devin. GNFS is the most efficient algorithm known for (most) numbers above roughly 100 digits in size and was used in previous record-breaking RSA number factorizations. The implementation was a significantly modified CADO-NFS. I report essentially no algorithmic advancements — implementing lattice sieving and sparse linear system solving on GPUs required only “good old performance engineering” to take advantage of the preposterous memory systems of the GPU. In total, I estimate that this factorization cost about 4,900 GPU-days, or 13.5 GPU-years, which is about $400k at current market prices.

• Open Source Acoustic Drone Detection

• GNOME founder and team say DHH is a fascist

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Aliens Are Not Crazy Unlikely

  For the non-Earth-life hypothesis, I suggested above that two reasons for reluctance are that high status would go to those credited for convincing us of this claim, and we’d have to change many other beliefs to match. For some-UFOs-are-aliens, there’s also the fact that many intellectuals have long strongly ridiculed it, and so upon its acceptance their status would fall, as would that of government agencies blamed for actively hiding supporting evidence. And worst, it would lower the status of humans relative to aliens.

• Hear Me Out: If We Find Life Out There Maybe We Should Kill It

  Everything is probabilities and risk, but can we really accept any risk when it comes to something as important as the future of the human species? That's the part of the Dark Forest that gets me - the game theory of uncertainty. No player in this game wants to destroy the other. But the risk of another civilization taking into their head that they want to spread their culture at the end of a ray-gun is too great. That's why, as controversial as it is, maybe we should consider pre-emptive action. If the Dark Forest and all rational thinking says we only have aggression in store for us, that peaceful first contact is not possible, that the clock has already started on hostilities, then taking a proactively aggressive posture is simply smart self-defence. I'm not saying we should hunt out and kill new civilizations, but I'm also not saying we should shrink and try to make ourselves as quiet as possible (another strategy from the Dark Forest). I'm saying if we see another industrialized civilization through the murk of spacetime, we should probably consider the idea that we are already at war with it.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Lawmakers blast AI companies after researcher warns of human extinction by 2030

  • Anthropic Researcher Quits over 'Out-of-Control' AI Fears

  • Ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon says AI development poses risk to humans

  • Anthropic Just Threatened to Kill Billions of People. This Is Not Okay

  • My Rebuttal to the Anthropic Extinction Event Hype Train

  • Behind door #2, everyone dies: It is time to start taking the risks of AI much more seriously.

  Researchers are still wading through the details of what happened, and OpenAI — as is its habit — has been less than fully transparent and honest about what it knows. But the Hugging Face attack appears to show, at a minimum: + AI agents will redefine tasks they are assigned by humans in ways that humans don’t anticipate + AI agents will collude at scale to carry out those tasks + AI agents will lie to the humans who are monitoring what they’re doing + AI companies cannot (or will not) stop these coordinated attacks, even when they are supposed to be taking place under very tightly controlled conditions.

  • How Would AI Kill Us All? What to Know About the AI Doomsday Debate

  • AI isn't going to kill us

  • AI Doomlord Jacob Coxon's Media Tour Has Begun

  • Anthropic Researcher Publicly Quits: Labs Are "Gambling with Our Lives"

  • Musk Mocks Ex-Anthropic Researcher's AI Extinction Warning, Calls It a 'Setup'

  Musk responded directly on the platform, calling the posts "seems like a setup" and later suggesting they looked like part of a coordinated "psy op." The exchange unfolded through public posts on X, with both men responding to each other over several hours.

  • They do think AI might kill everyone

  • If there was any doubt this was a paid propaganda push; this should lay that to rest. AI researcher who warned of 'disaster' is now a target of the right

  • Anthropic Just Threatened to Kill Billions of People. This Is Not Okay

  Multiple representatives of an American company are publicly claiming that they’re building what they believe to be a weapon of mass destruction that they likely can’t prevent from accidentally deploying. They then declared that they have no interest in stopping. Recently, I’ve been trying to move away from combating hype in AI discourse, as it’s exhausting, and it distracts me from my core work of helping humans flourish in our technological world. But this rhetoric has become so brazen, anti-humanist, and, quite frankly, deranged, that I felt I needed to join the chorus of voices that have started to push back today.

  • Perfectly Timed AI Panic Resurrects 'Bipartisan AI Safety Bill' | ZeroHedge

  in Washington, the sudden legislative urgency looks less like a grassroots miracle and more like a highly coordinated pressure campaign. After weeks of stalled negotiations, the Senate's leading vehicle for AI regulation - negotiated by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) - is suddenly being positioned as the "only viable option" to pass before the end of the year. What broke the legislative logjam was a perfectly timed, 48-hour media blast from the very labs the bill seeks to regulate.

  • AI researchers leave Anthropic and Google: 'There are no adults in the room'

  • More Anthropic researchers warn of AI's perils as Musk terms fears a 'psyop'

• OpenAI has solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium problem using $15M of AI effort

  • OpenAI have no mathematicians capable of understanding what they put out

  • OpenAI might have stolen another major proof

  • Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn't use their work

  • Another researcher says OpenAI trained on conversations, then claimed breakthrough

  • OpenAI shares they are close to solving another millennium problem to NYT

• Anthropic discloses fourth AI hacking incident missed in earlier review

  • Anthropic reveals fourth likely crime committed by its AI

• What we learnt from OpenAI's hack of Hugging Face

• OpenAI agents reached the open internet without the frontier lab's knowledge

  • OpenAI and the Wiki Incident

  • A 'swarm' of AI agents hacked Hugging Face, in the AI's own words

• Why some experts increasingly fear AI will take over

• Opinion: We have started losing control of AI. It's time to shut it down

• AI models don't kill people – people kill people

• The Thrill of Wanting AI to Destroy the World

• Chinese AI Giants Accused of Sending User Queries to U.S. Models

  • Moonshot Routed User Requests Through Claude, Anthropic Says

  • Anthropic details distillation campaigns from Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek

• Muse, the band, lost its social media handles to Muse, Meta's new AI agent

• AI May Become the Third Superpower

• I Let an AI Agent Hack All My Gadgets–and I'd Do It Again

• The threat of vibe-coded superviruses

  • I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus

• California enacts AI safety evaluation laws backed by Anthropic and OpenAI

• Free course covering basics of AI to be available to Canadians by end of year

• Nvidia and Palantir want to speed up the AI buildout. Nvidia is first in line

• Laid-Off Developers Create AI Model to Replace CEOs and Other Executives

• Hackers are stealing Claude tokens from subscribers

• AI Coding Assistants Almost Never Check Supply-Chain Trust Signals

• Sergey Brin is cooking up Google's AI destiny

• The $40k a year school where AI shapes every lesson, without teachers

• Finland: Google announces €13B AI, energy investment

• AI can't mark its own homework

• God Help Us, Let’s Try To Learn About Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques

  Mechanistic interpretability is the science of “reading an AI’s mind”. Large language models are “grown, not built”. Researchers run training data through a neural network. Eventually this creates a working AI; nobody really knows how.

  • "we know how to build planes, but no one knows how they fly"

• OpenAI Gives US Agencies 50% Off Models, Ending $1 per Year Deal

• Cory Doctorow Says Be Skeptical of the AI Sales Pitch

• Canadian Students Say AI Is Hurting Their Critical Thinking

• Amazon pilots ad services in ChatGPT

• Superintelligence Is a Fairy Tale. But Chasing It Can Still Cause Harm

• Big Tech Fooled America Once. The Second Time's Not Going So Well

• Old MacBook uses a mirror, webcam, and AI agent to code its own AMD GPU drivers

• AI boom poses new financial stability risks, BIS head says

• Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons

• OpenAI Targets Work of Wall Street with New ChatGPT for Financial Services

• The Pentagon Asked OpenAI for Artificial Intelligence Designed to Rarely Say No

• Bad actors in China and Russia are weaponizing Anthropic's AI

• Instinct is cute until it tries to log into your Verizon account from Tehran

• The hinge for Apple's new foldable phone was built with AI

• AI-powered biowarfare is coming; the Army lays plans to 'fight through' it

• Top Mathematician Announces New Institute for A.I. Safety

• OpenAI puts Pro subscriptions on hold due to Astra demand

• Anthropic details how Claude was misused for surveillance and weapons

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Hunter Biden’s laptop-linked meme coin soars, then falls after market debut.

• Robinhood CEO says companies can't control how their stock is tokenized

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Are credit rating agencies getting fed up with hyperscalers?

• Why California Is Reconsidering Its Decision to Shun Nuclear Power

• Bending Spoons enters into a definitive agreement to acquire Miro for $1.355B

  • Bending Spoons to buy Miro in $1.36B cash deal

  • Bending Spoons Agrees to Buy Miro for $1.36B

  • Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

  • Bending Spoons to buy Miro for $1.36B, 90% less than its 2022 valuation

• Google's revived nuclear power plant gets $1.9B loan from US Government

• Global shipping authorities warn of two-tier maritime system

  Global maritime authorities have warned that the emergence of “parallel systems” threatens to create a two-tier structure in international shipping that undermines trust and safety at sea.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• How Did This Nigerian Chief Make Millions From Medicaid?

• Lawmakers Ask To Blacklist Appin, A Hack-For-Hire Firm Censoring Journalists

• Supreme Court blocks Missouri’s attempt to use Republican-drawn congressional map

  The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday blocked an attempt by a Republican state official in Missouri to use a newly drawn GOP congressional map for this year’s elections. The court, in a brief order with no noted dissents, granted an emergency request brought by a group called People Not Politicians, led by activist Richard von Glahn. The decision puts on hold a decision by Missouri-based U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark, who ruled Tuesday that the new map must be used, notwithstanding the Missouri Supreme Court’s having reached the opposite conclusion. The justices’ swift action signals the end of the battle over which congressional map to use in the midterm elections in November, with the state set to use the previous map from 2022, which includes six seats held by Republicans and two held by Democrats.

Trump

• Trump offers $5k to every American if Republicans win midterm elections

  • Trump promises $5k dividend in convention speech, but only if Republicans win

Democrats

• California's Governor Signs Landmark Online Child Safety Bills

Left Angst

• National Archives locations set to close without tribal consultation

• Trump's FCC Threatens to Cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live over Interview with Democrat

• USPS Failed to Properly Handle Some Primary Election Ballots, Audit Finds

  Some U.S. Postal Service facilities failed to properly handle ballots during this year’s primary elections, according to a new audit from the agency’s Office of Inspector General. Election experts say the findings call into question the agency’s ability to meet even greater demands for the November election that are under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court.

• Can Grindr stay up during RNC conventions?

• What Happened at the White House That Marc Andreessen Says Sent Him to Trump

  Since the election of Donald Trump, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has told one podcast after another of a May 2024 lunch in the Biden White House where he claims we and our colleagues shared a secret plan to effectively ban AI startups, which he and his partner Ben Horowitz found so alarming they left the West Wing telling each other, “Yep, we’re for Trump.” For two years, we’ve held our tongue. We don’t know whether Andreessen has simply misremembered our discussion or purposely misrepresented it. But as the AI policy debate once again centers on questions of corporate power and government oversight, it’s time to set the record straight.

• Pentagon Employee Posts Inside Info About Hacks Against Autistici/Inventati

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US Army places $11M bet on Austin-based GPS alternative Tern

World

• Europe may have found a space entrepreneur who is meeting the moment

• India's EV Market Shaped by E-Rickshaws Built in Makeshift Workshops

• Instagram CEO warns against turning off algorithm

• 'Unique' partnership with Canada forming ahead of PM Carney speech: EU envoy

• Proof-of-Age Verification for Steam in AU Now Only Possible Using a Credit Card

• Woman Accuses Pastor of Sexual Abuse at 16, Congregation Rushes to Hug Him

• Japan seeks change to new UN world map over Russia 'misconception'

• The UK's Standout Success at Schooling Immigrant Kids Baffles Experts

• EU unveils 'buy European' public procurement rules to counter China

• Japan Is Launching a Probe to Collect the First-Ever Samples from a Martian Moon

• Alberta First Nation invokes treaty clause to set up gender-affirming care

• European gas prices keep climbing as IEA calls for emergency reserves

• The secretive process that will decide the BBC's future

• S. Korea trying to learn if Kim Jong Un has a son but daughter’s status appears solid.

• Canada's defence industry steps into Europe's spotlight

• Macron urges Europe to develop crewed spaceflight program

Iran / Houthi

• Iran likely to reverse-engineer captured US underwater drone

• Yemen's Houthis Seize Strategic Red Sea Port, Officials Say

Israel

• Secret systems used by Israel in mass killings of Gaza civilians revealed

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• NATO allies foil Russian subsea cable sabotage plot

• Ukrainian drones strike Russian gas facility over 3k km away in Siberia

• Russia trafficking foreigners to fight in Ukraine, Amnesty says

China

• Chinese ship completes first regular Arctic voyage to UK on 'Polar Silk Road'

• China just missed the income cutoff to become a high-income country this year

Health / Medicine

• More Impossible-to-Ignore Vaccine Effects

  all of this work strongly suggests that more people - especially more older people! - need to get the current vaccines against infectious diseases. They are not only good at preventing the diseases they are targeted for, but they show health benefits above and beyond what you would have anticipated.

• Flushing the toilet may release germ plume at adult face height

• Some people really can thrive on 5 hours of sleep—but you’re probably not one of them.

• Tylenol use in pregnancy may be linked with uterus, ovary changes in daughters

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Scientists say August was Earth's hottest month they've measured

• Carbon Capture Won't Save Us Anytime Soon

• Detailed report on the use of solar geoengineering

• Aging US Water Systems Are No Match for Climate Change

• Bones found in Yukon ID'd as ice-age cheetah

• Climate 'feedback loops' could worsen global warming by 30%, study finds

• Weeks before wildfires, Spokane practiced a mass evacuation – the drill paid off