2026-08-15

Worthy

• The Closure of the Internet

  Until 2015, an optimistic and liberal (in the best sense) ethos pervaded the Internet. Major Internet platforms were open and had little content policy beyond bans on real-life criminal activity (stalking, selling illegal goods, child pornography, etc). Aside from these narrow and reasonable explicit exceptions, anyone could go online and converse with interested people around the world about whatever they wanted in public. These platforms had no real means to control what people talked about on them even if they wanted to, which they didn’t; to the extent an organization can have views all believed in free1 and open online discourse, which promised to make censorship impossible and end the hegemony of 20th century broadcast media.

  But in just a few years, every single major platform had created strict, but incredibly vague and opaque, ideological content rules backed up by a colossal moderation/censorship apparatus with tens of thousands of human moderators and an entire new field of machine learning created from nothing. The Internet went from a space for people without institutional backing to get their views out to one with regular purges and demonetizations of heterodox figures and those associated with them, encouraged by those very same non-tech organizations that formerly championed Internet freedom. This was justified as a response to (massively overblown and mostly fictitious) Russian influence campaigns4, and as fighting nebulous “hate,” the definition of which could be shifted at will to cover whatever views or ideas the organizers classifying it wanted it too and to exclude those they didn’t, and “misinformation.”

  The closure of the Internet occurred in two distinct phases: 2015-2019 (associated with the 2015 migrant crisis, Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and the so-called alt-right) and 2020-2022 (associated with the lockdowns and the 2020 election). Almost all of the technical and organizational infrastructure and conceptual justifications were built out in the first phase, which successfully decapitated and destroyed the previously-independent, but by definition fringe, online ecosystem of ideas. In the second phase, the same weapons that previously targeted heterodox online discourse were turned against opposition to the COVID measures du joure and mainstream conservatives. The scale of censorship has no precedent; tens of millions of accounts suppressed or banned, billions of posts removed.

  These purges are usually framed as a direct response to particular events or atrocities. For example Amazon ostensibly removed all Confederate flag merchandise from their web store in response to Dylan Roof’s 2015 massacre of black churchgoers. This is a mistake. Atrocities without a propaganda campaign from the press and political pressure from an opaque network of governments and quasi-government NGOs lead to no changes. There were no mass purges after Audrey Hale’s 2023 murder of elementary schoolers in Nashville motivated by anti-white hatred or the 2016 murder of five Dallas police officers by an ex-marine motivated by the BLM movement. On the other hand, press campaigns not centered around an atrocity, such as the mass deplatformings of YouTube personalities, lead to the same types of purges as the atrocity-based ones. It is not the atrocity that causes the changes, but the media and behind-the-scenes pressure campaign.

Horseshit

• America's Loneliness Trap

• 10 Minutes of drawing can reset your nervous system

• A Driver's Fatal Spiral After a Police Officer's Typo

• Rings forged from meteorites may have been fashionable among ancient Greek elite

• Have the benefits of intermittent fasting been overhyped?

• Generational Emoji Wars Are Back

• A Space Expert Hoped to Use Eclipse as Science Class. The DJs Had Other Plans

• What caused man to be partially sucked out of Ryanair plane

• A Plane Ran Out of Fuel over the Atlantic. The Pilots Saved 306 Lives

• Can Boeing Be Forced to Let a Blind Machinist Build Planes? New Lawsuit Says Yes

• Silicon Valley Loves Jargon–and 'Hill-Climbing' Is Its Favorite New Phrase

• She Makes the Impossible Happen for Her Ultrarich Clients

• What's the Value of an Hour?

• The Dystopia of Modern Singlehood

• Humanity May Soon Have the Technology To Reach Other Star Systems.

• The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshit

  say, for example, that you wanted to set up this money machine in American professional sports. Your devious plan: shield leagues from antitrust law so owners can enjoy monopoly profits; use that market power to extract money from local governments; and rewrite the tax code to hand sports owners special advantages.

Epstein

• Dario's wife tried to raise money from Epstein for a porn studio

  • Even Claude Is in the Dark About Dario Amodei's Wife

  Cami Clark—who started what she called a ‘revolutionary porn company’ where she sought investment from Jeffrey Epstein—keeps a low profile but is a key adviser to the AI chief. Its coming IPO could raise trillions.

celebrity gossip

• Reed Hastings on life after Netflix and the coming 'creative destruction'

Obit

• Jason Arday Found Dead

  Arday, the former University of Cambridge professor, has been found dead. Mr Arday was found “unresponsive” at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday afternoon. He was later pronounced dead at the scene. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said officers were called by the London Ambulance Service at 3.12pm on Friday. He said: “Sadly, a 41-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene. His next-of-kin have been informed and are being supported by officers. “At this time his death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious. The case is being investigated by officers from the Met’s Central South Command Unit. A file will be prepared for the coroner.”

  • Jason Arday, ex-Cambridge professor at centre of plagiarism row, found dead

  • Jason Arday found dead

Musk

• Elon Musk is suing California over an AI law. Here's why transparency matters

• X testing shadowban test tool

• X opens its ranking algorithm and exposes shadowbans

• Hacking xAI for unreleased models and confidential documents

• SpaceX AI Data Center Will Be Rented by Microsoft for Hundreds of Billion Per Year.

• Alphabet's SpaceX bet grows 100-fold over a decade to $94B

• Cursor Is Joining SpaceX

• Tesla defeats Sweden's IF Metall union after 1,021-day strike

• MSCI Gave SpaceX an ESG Score Matching Wartime Russia

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• Robots That Walk and Talk Are Coming to Car Factories

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The Strange, Secret, Open Triumph of Race Science

  He’s too close to the data, and he obviously decided to study population differences, of all the things in the world he could study, because he thought the topic was interesting. Nobody gets into investigating the genetic basis of racial variation in cognitive and behavioral traits expecting to refute stereotypes. That’s why left-wing ideologues like Gould simply demanded that everyone cover their eyes and blatantly reject the idea that biology could have anything to do with important group differences. I don’t begrudge Reich for this. He realized that there was no way he’d be able to do his work if he gave any hint that his research might tell us something about, say, why some nations are richer than others. So he is left alone to advance science forward. People wanted to believe Stephen Jay Gould, and now they want to believe Reich when he says his research tells us nothing about whether “stereotypes” are true, but at least Reich is making groundbreaking contributions to science, while Gould was just pushing failed leftist dogma. Knowledge is valuable for its own sake. Reich pulls off quite the trick by saying that it was “Western Eurasians” who were selected for intelligence. Don’t you dare suspect that this has any relevance to stereotypes about whites and blacks! We’re talking Western Eurasians and sub-Saharan Africans, something completely different. It’s an interesting question why there are no longer Stephen Jay Goulds around to point out the logical implications of what Reich is saying.

  • The core problem is the human inability to distinguish a statistical trend from an individual example. Italians may well be shorter than Swedes, which tells you nothing useful about a given person from either place. This problem plagues all science.

• Fortunes from AI revive effective altruism after Sam Bankman-Fried turmoil

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Lots of detail on the continuing “Q collar” scandal and why we should probably be doing more coverage of that sort of science-adjacent medical scams and less on repulsively self-promoting but ultimately less harmful academic grifters.

  It’s junk science, but junk science with a purpose, in this case not so much to promote an ambitious social climber (as with Agus and Arday), it seems to be more about the money. And in that way it could be seen as a more typical (if less dramatic) example of a science scam. It doesn’t involve any plagiarized giraffes or implausible claims of ultra-marathoning, just the exploitation of people’s legitimate health concerns and the lure of the filthy lucre.

• The case for overhauling American science

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Flock will add privacy guardrails to camera systems amid backlash

  • Flock puts new 'guardrails' on license-plate cameras. Critics skeptical

  • Surveillance company Flock moves to increase oversight after police misuse

• Movie theatre employee goes viral after hand drawing Spider-Man poster

• Phoebe Gates' startup Phia faces cookie stuffing allegations

• 'Not acceptable': Judge orders Google to make rival app store installs easier

• Apple Wants to Charge Developers Up to 15% for Linking Outside the App Store

• Cisco thinks Mythos means instant death for unsupported networking kit

• Pokemon Bank shuts down, cutting off the only transfer path from older games

• Netflix to shut down two more game studios

• Apple proposes to take a 15% cut of purchases made outside the App Store

• R-rated director's cut of X-Files movie released

• Brands Suddenly Care About Reddit. Redditors Don't Return the Feeling.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA Swift Boost Spacecraft Prepares to Continue Mission

• The great silence: why haven't we found any aliens yet?

• We've flown a radiation-blocking vest to the Moon and back, and it worked

• Indian solar mission's new findings throw light on enduring Sun mysteries

• Satellite Will Breathe Air to Stay in Orbit

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Chatbots are doing the work of Congress with little oversight

• I burned $157,143 in tokens last month. I paid $400

• The Reason Data Center Gas Power Plants Are So Dirty

• Connecticut judge says plaintiff hid messages for AI in court filings

• Mistral AI wants to build 1 gigawatt of European compute by 2030

• OpenAI slows release of Astra model citing cyber capabilities

• AI Coding Has Erased the Supposed Advantage of Statically Typed Languages

• Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated

• The next frontier in AI governance isn't stronger guardrails. It's fire brigades

• Claude's new Scarlet Letter watermark is invisible–for now

• Tax Law Is Funding the AI Infrastructure Boom, Not Creating It

• DeepMind's Hassabis Pitched AI-Oversight Body Before Shake-Up

• Silicon Valley's AI boom is remaking American charity

• The Math Superstar Who's Terrified of AI–and Just Took a Job at OpenAI

• OpenAI annual revenue set to top $40B

• Anthropic Is Quietly Watermarking Every Claude AI Output

• Apple trained its own AI model for China with help from Alibaba

  • Apple trains its own AI model for China market with Alibaba's support, sources

• Why Japanese firms are being so slow to use AI?

• Canva slashes valuation by $10B as AI reality bites

• 'Masturbation Consultants' Were Hired to Pleasure Themselves with AI

• If the Markets Reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US Should Nationalize Them

• The Tax Code Wasn't Built for the Age of AI, Says Yale Budget Expert

• Hugging Face CEO says China is winning the AI race and dominating on open models

• Charisma, confidence and no fear of AI taking their jobs: The personality hires

• European publishers are getting hit harder by AI bot scraping, report finds

• Just how big is the hidden leverage of AI hyperscalers?

• People Are 'Marrying' Chatbots. These Lawmakers Want to Stop Them

• OpenAI talent exodus raises 'huge red flag' ahead of IPO

• Fmr OpenAI exec Fidji Simo discusses POTS battle and plan to cure it with AI

• US to tell partners they must pick sides in AI race with China

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Tether Clears First Full Audit from KPMG Without Publishing the Statements

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Apple Pay Chief Jennifer Bailey Retiring in October

• AI-driven surge in bond yields could be next risk for markets and growth

• The Jobless Boom Has Arrived

  The stock market thinks the economy is accelerating. Don’t expect jobs to follow.

• Robinhood's New Fund Lets Anyone Invest in Y Combinator Startups, with a Catch

• Morning Bid: Yen stuck in twilight zone

• Select Tech Borrowers Pull Off Debt Refinancing Despite SaaSpocalypse Fears

• Reddit surges on S&P 500 inclusion, set to replace AvalonBay

  • Reddit joining S&P 500 after months of speculation. Analysts have concerns

• Minerals Companies Are Changing Their Names to Sound More American

• Why Is No One Talking About the Manufacturing Boom?

  overseas capital now rushes to build and invest in the U.S. Last year, in 2025, international capital spent $232 billion in the U.S., a whopping 50% increase over the 2024 levels under Biden. This torrid pace shows no signs of slowing down, either. Looking to the future, the Financial Times reports that foreign capital commitments hit a new record high of $321.4 billion in 2025. Moreover, the U.S. earned a record 23.6% share of all such pledges globally. The days of simply managing the constant offshoring of American production are over, thank goodness!

• The Treasury market's toxic codependency

• Joshua Kushner's Thrive Capital Invests $215M in Amazon

• CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom just before Christmas wants his job back

• Jane Street has paid up large to avoid its numbers leaking out

  • Jane Street suffers $15B hit after meltdown at Situational Awareness

• U.S. retail sales unexpectedly post largest drop in more than a year

• Amazon reinstates binding arbitration, bars class-action lawsuits

Trump

• Doesn't appear to work as a map tho: The Fraud Ledger

  • White House launches Fraud Ledger tracking $230B in suspected fraud

• Administration to impose tariffs on drone imports, White House says

• Private security firms will soon be allowed to hack overseas cybercriminals

  • Trump order lets US firms hack overseas groups under certain conditions

  • Trump Admin Lets Loose the Cyber Pirates

  • Everybody gets a letter of marque and reprisal!

  • In a first, US will allow some private firms to carry out cyberattacks

Democrats

• MI Requires Deletion of Election Records One Week After Certification

Left Angst

• Kennedy Center Board Decides to Inscribe Trump's Name on Building

• US conducted mass spying campaign against leftwing and anti-ICE protesters

• Trump's vaccine plan requires individual shots last used decades ago

  • Life without vaccines: Americans need to understand what they save us from

• Evaluating the impact of USAID defunding on mortality up to 2030

• If you ignore the crime of "undocumented migration": Undocumented migration does not raise crime rates study finds

• Truth Without Reconciliation

  Why did Brazil’s democratic institutions hold firm while those in the United States so quickly wilted? Perhaps Merrick Garland, the former U.S. attorney general, singularly altered the course of history by slow-walking the prosecution against Trump and other conspirators. Another takes a wider angle, alleging that President Biden and the wider Democratic Party’s reluctance to go on offense against the Republicans opened the door for Trump’s later return.

• More and more wealthy Californians seek 'golden visa' residency outside the US

• 'The Nerd Reich' tracks the 'unmasking of Silicon Valley's true politics'

  Journalist Gil Durán argues that a small circle of Silicon Valley billionaires and venture capitalists have concluded that democracy is in their way — and that they should be governing in its place.

• Gerrymandering won. It's time to change the rules

• Wall Street's Nonprofits Use Selective, Opaque Logic to Defund Charities

• Trump administration cancels Biden-era power line construction efforts

• What eating like RFK Jr. does to your colon, according to a gastro doctor

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Pay for SF uniformed police and Sheriff deputies is approaching $900k per year

• US courts will start publishing how often the government uses spyware

• Luigi Mangione pleads guilty to federal charges, admits killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Thompson

  Mangione, 28, was not charged with murder in the federal case, which accused him only of stalking Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. He still faces a murder charge in state court, which is scheduled to go to trial next month. Mangione addressed the court, describing the attack as resulting from years of severe pain from a back injury he experienced. He said he tracked down the location of the company's annual conference, posing as an investor to solicit information from the company. He said he shot Thompson using a gun he printed from a 3-D printer.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Sailor went overboard on USS Lincoln; report of worsening mental health for crew

• Covert CIA program said to be behind mysterious attacks on Galápagos boats

• Trump orders Navy to return to old system launching jets off aircraft carriers

  • White House Memo Calls for Foreign-Built Warships, Return to Steam Catapults

  • Trump orders redesign of US aircraft carrier to use steam catapults for jets

• USS John F. Kennedy Begins Sea Trials in High-Stakes Test of US Naval Power

World

• NHS bans pagers due to lack of encryption

• NATO Scrambles Eurofighters, F-16s After Drone Enters Latvian Airspace

• France's Constitutional Council strikes down social media ban for under-15s

  • France's constitutional authority strikes down social media ban for under-15s

  • France blocks social media ban because it would require adults to prove age

  • French court blocks Macron's social media ban for under-15s

  • France's Top Court Strikes Down Ban on Social Media for Children

• Chery didn't exist in the UK last year but just outsold Honda and Mazda combined

• Nigel Farage beats slate of fringe candidates in election

  • Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election

• In South Korea, some savour last season of legal dog meat

• Millions sent wildfire emergency phone alert

  • Emergency alerts sent to millions across England over threat of wildfires

Iran / Houthi

• Major oil slick washes up on Iran coast after Hormuz ship strike

  Iran did not acknowledge being responsible, but shipping analysts have said it was likely to have been behind the Minoan Pioneer attack on 3 August.

  • Two slicks appear in Gulf as oil spill off Oman threatens disaster

• US loses one-fourth of drone fleet as Iran war drains its arsenal

Israel

• Israeli forces force families from homes amid settler terror campaign West Bank

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Female assassin kills Ukraine submarine commander who defected to Russia

• Ukraine's Strikes Wipe Out Wildberries' Major Warehouses as Losses Near $12B

China

• China-linked hackers hit Taiwan in 'autonomous' AI cyber attack

• There Aren't Enough Ships to Handle China's Booming Car Exports

Health / Medicine

• FDA Finds Bacteria in a Third of ‘Sterile’ Tattoo Inks, And That’s a Problem.

• Users of psychedelics narratively turn bad trips into valuable experiences

• Definium says LSD-based pill reduces anxiety in late-stage study

• Why Our Memory Slips After Age 50

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Taylor Farms' connections to Trump admin spurs probe into Cyclospora response

  • Taylor Farms faces recalls, six lawsuits, and a congressional inquiry

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Fish are facing a summer of death in UK's poisoned rivers

• Contiguous US breaks its record for hottest month ever, NOAA says

• Spain extends Almaraz nuclear plant operations through 2030

• Fossils show carbon emissions harm forests, not 'green the planet'

• A hurricane has never crossed the equator. Here's why

• Swarms of tiny robots remove microplastics from soil and water

• From Europe to Asia, floods to heatwaves, world experiences weather shocks

• Solar helps 'stabilise' Europe's grids as heatwaves spike power demand

• Monkeys sometimes have 'pets' like humans