2025-01-17

stuff depletion, protocol churn, terrorgram sanctions, unreal ivory towers, expensive games, NY inter-not, remember Transmeta and UUCP, rockets go, bye Biden, smoke the FDA, watchband bloodletting

etc

• The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

LA Fires

• 'Passive house' survives fire in California

• Why doesn't California invest in 'Super Scooper' aircraft?

• Economic Toll of Los Angeles Fires Goes Far Beyond Destroyed Homes

• How California eco-bureaucrats halted a Pacific Palisades fire safety project to save an endangered shrub.

• What Makes Urban Wildfire Smoke So Toxic

• California's future depends on how leaders rebuild after the Los Angeles fires

Horseshit

• Australian Open resorts to animated caricatures to bypass broadcast restrictions

• A gate to stop overeager 'Sex and the City' fans from trespassing

• Fake Reviews Have Become the Internet's Perfect Crime

• After over 50 years, Boston area's only typewriter store is closing

• The Editors weaves Wikipedia’s volunteers into a global suspense tale - Ars Technica

• Stuff we already depleted • Carlos Roldán

  • as long as we define "depleted" such that it includes things that are not in fact hard to come by

• 'Titanic' artifact salvage efforts paused indefinitely

• Is humanity alone in the Universe? What scientists think

• Peloton should stop charging secondhand fees and undermining product ownership

• Genetics, not shared envs, drives parent-child similarities in intelligence

• What Will Congestion Pricing Do to Manhattan Dining?

• Flying cars could soon become a reality

• U.S. Military Service Is Strongest Predictor of Carrying Out Extremist Violence

Obit

• David Lynch, Visionary Director of 'Twin Peaks' and 'Blue Velvet,' Dies at 78

  • David Lynch, Twin Peaks and Muholland Drive director, dies aged 78

• Bob Uecker Has Died

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Protocol Churn

  These initiatives, just by existing, are evidence in letters of fire 500 miles high, evidence of people noticing something important: Corporately-owned town squares are irreversibly discredited. They haven’t worked in the past, they don’t work now, and they’ll never work. Something decentralized is the only way forward. Something not owned by anyone, defined by freely-available protocols. Something like email. Or like the Fediverse, which runs on the ActivityPub protocol. Or, maybe Bluesky, where by “Bluesky” I mean independent service providers federated via the AT Protocol, “ATProto” for short.

• Google won't add fact checks despite new EU law

• The coming battle between social media and the state

TikTok

• Trump considers executive order hoping to 'save TikTok' from ban or sale

  • Trump Is Said to Consider Executive Order to Circumvent TikTok Ban

• Fact-Check: Is Donald Trump Buying TikTok? What We Know as Ban Looms

• US TikTok users scramble, despair as ByteDance waves the 'white flag'

• Can MrBeast outwit a US ban His TikTok offer says yes

Musk

• SEC Sues Musk

• Elon Musk crackdown on researchers who revealed he isn't Adrian Dittmann

• City of Paris Quits X

• Tesla boycott is gaining momentum in Germany due to Musk's meddling in politics

• French group encourages mass departure from Elon Musk's X platform

• Gamers Suspect Elon Musk Is a Charlatan

• Ask HN: How can X suspend paid accounts without explanation?

  • The suspended me a month after i paid, just before the election. Other services removed me around then too.

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Nvidia: Autonomous cars 'not close' to production reality

• Tesla is offering Cybertruck discounts as EV market gets crowded

• EV, hybrid sales reached a record 20% of U.S. vehicle sales in 2024

• Sony and Honda's EV goes on sale this year, starts at $89,900

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• "LinkedIn Catfish" Created a Fake Profile to Expose Racial Inequity in Hiring

• Sanctioning of global white supremacist terrorism group rattles U.S. members

  The State Department has applied the “specially designated global terrorist” designation to the Terrorgram Collective in a groundbreaking move that for the first time sanctions a transnational white supremacist terrorist group with a significant presence in the United States.

• Objective Reality May Not Exist at All, Quantum Physicists Say

• The Death of DEI in Tech

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The ivory tower’s drift: how academia’s preference for theory over empiricism fuels scientific stagnation – Daniel Lemire's blog

  Almost all of academic science has moved away from actual (empirical) science. It is higher status to work on theories and models. I believe that it is closely related to well documented scientific stagnation as theory is often ultimately sterile. This tendency is quite natural in academia if there is no outside pressure… And is the main reason why academia should be ruthlessly judged by practitioners and users. As soon as academia can isolate itself in a bubble, it is bound to degrade.

  Society must demand actual results. We must reject work that is said ‘to improve our understanding’ or ‘to lay a foundation for further work’. We must demand cheaper rockets, cures for cancer, software that is efficient. As long as academic researchers are left to their own devices, they will continue to fill the minds of the young with unnecessary models. They must be held accountable.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Mullenweg's Grip on WordPress Challenged in New Court Filing

• Apple's interoperability efforts aren't meeting spirit or letter of EU law

• Microsoft ends support for Office apps on Windows 10 in October

• That Sports News Story You Clicked on Could Be AI Slop

• They stopped making hardware in this space 2yr ago: Intel's Tofino P4 Software Is Now Open Source

• When the bullshit is shoveled away, Nvidia's 5070 Ti and 5070 will be 20% faster than the old 4070 Ti and 4070.

• some say more of a cult than a game: Billion-dollar video game: is this the most expensive piece of entertainment ever made? | Games | The Guardian

  ne of the bestselling franchises, Call of Duty, saw costs balloon to $700m (£573m), a number only revealed recently when a reporter dug into court filings. There is, however, one game with a budget that is anything but secret. The sprawling multiplayer space simulator Star Citizen publishes its funds on its website and they are updated in real-time. Currently, they stand at $777,145,107 (a figure that will be out of date as soon as this article is published). Soon it’ll surpass $800m and, possibly in a year or so, breach the ceiling to become the world’s first billion-dollar video game.

• The Nintendo Switch 2 has officially been announced

  • Nintendo Reveals Its Next-Gen Console, Confirms Switch 2 Name

• After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation legal

• Intel and Nvidia drivers holding back a public SteamOS release, Valve not trying

• What Spotify took from us by giving us everything

• As Americans flock to RedNote, privacy advocates warn about surveillance

  • RedNote may wall off "TikTok refugees" to prevent US influence on Chinese users

• AT&T kills home Internet service in NY over law requiring $15 or $20 plans

• Sony Cancels Two More Playstation Projects

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• The Extremely Unprofitable Transmeta

  From the start on the 3rd of March in 1995, the company was incredibly secretive. NDAs were the rule of the day, and the company was so secretive that some of the faculty at Stanford referred to it as the cult, a perception not helped by the enthusiasm and excitement of the company’s employees. Part of this secrecy was likely due to where their first funding came from. While Ditzel aimed for a VLIW chip that would do dynamic binary translation from x86 to his new architecture, DARPA provided money for research into cryogenic electronics. While this early work was unrelated to the products that Transmeta eventually made, I cannot help but think that this early work may have led to the low-power consumption and great thermals that Transmeta later achieved. The provable reason for secrecy was an abundance of caution. Transmeta’s first patent was filed in 1996, and it wasn’t approved until 2000. Only after that did the company’s products launch.

• from 1975. beats anyone i ever heard of. First business card with an email address?

• Forgotten Internet: UUCP | Hackaday

  In 2012, a Dutch Internet provider stopped offering UUCP to the 13 users it had left on the service. They claimed that they were likely the last surviving part of the UUCP world at that time.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Amazon races to transplant Alexa's 'brain' with generative AI

• OpenAI's reasoning model thinks in Chinese sometimes and no one knows why

• Elon Musk says all human data for AI training 'exhausted'

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Blue Origin's New Glenn Reaches Orbit

  • Blue Origin reaches orbit on first flight of its titanic New Glenn rocket

• SpaceX Starship Flight 7 launch

  • SpaceX catches Starship booster a second time, loses ship to an 'anomaly'

• India's ISRO carries out successful space docking mission

  • India achieves first space docking, becoming fourth country to achieve milestone

• Solar Orbiter Unveils the Sun in Unprecedented Detail

Crypto con games

• With Bitcoin near $100k, even pension funds are buying cryptocurrency

• Nasdaq files 19B-4 form for Canary Litecoin ETF, starting the clock on the SEC

Economicon / Business / Finance

• FTC sues Deere, alleging equipment repair 'monopoly' raises costs for farmers

• Walgreens says locking up products to prevent shoplifting hurts sales

• Does the tech industry need so many workers on H-1B visas?

• Even Harvard MBAs Are Struggling to Land Jobs

  • Why elite MBA graduates are struggling to find jobs

• Intel Capital to Become Standalone Investment Fund

• DOT Sues Southwest Airlines for Chronically Delayed Flights

• Amazon to buy BNPL startup Axio for over $150M

• Remote Workers Likely to Quit If WFH Ends

• Hino Motors, a Toyota Subsidiary, to Pay $1.6B to Resolve Emissions Fraud Scheme

• Walgreens replaced fridge doors with smart screens. It's now a $200M fiasco (Archive)

  Walgreens had already tried to pull out of the deal and get rid of the doors, blaming what it says was glitchy hardware and software. But Cooler Screens had temporarily prevented their removal the prior June by suing Walgreens for breach of contract, seeking $200 million and demanding its screens stay in place. Unreported until now is that over the ensuing months of legal battling, during which Walgreens had countersued for monetary damages, Cooler Screens Chief Executive Officer Arsen Avakian decided to try a different form of pushback. On Dec. 14, Avakian’s team secretly cut the data feeds to more than 100 Walgreens stores in the Chicago area. The dozen or so smart doors affected in each of these stores either glazed over with white pixels or blacked out altogether. Customers could no longer see where the Coke and Red Bull and Hot Pockets and Heineken sat, and either assumed the fridges were out of order or found themselves rummaging through one by one.

• Goldman Sachs CEO says Apple card partnership may end before 2030

• Why are interest rates rising when the Fed has been cutting them?

• AmEx to Pay $108.7M for Deceptive Marketing and "Dummy" Account Information

• How Can a Major Bank Like Capital One Be Offline for 24 Hours?

• U.S. Drillers Start Out the New Year with a Wimper

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• First US congestion pricing scheme brings dramatic drop in NY traffic

• CISA Director posts call to action about cyber threats

• NYT: We're Sharing the Data Behind Our Detailed 2024 Election Map

Trump

• Apple's Tim Cook Plans to Join Tech CEOs at Trump's Inauguration

• Denmark Opens Back Channel to Trump to Discuss Greenland

• Policy Proposal for Trump's Bitcoin Stockpile Leaks

Democrats / Biden Inc

• Biden divides EU with new AI chip export controls

• Full Transcript of President Biden’s Farewell Address - The New York Times

  • Biden warns 'dangerous' oligarchy taking shape in farewell address

  • Biden warns of rising democracy-threatening 'oligarchy' in grim farewell speech

  • Biden warns of rise of tech industrial complex while outlining threats

  • Joe Biden says 'oligarchy' emerging in US in final White House address

• Biden's Billion-Dollar Broadband Boondoggle

• A New Jam-Packed Biden Executive Order Tackles Cybersecurity, AI, and More

  • White House Executive Order on Cybersecurity

  • Biden makes last big move to protect US networks from hackers from China

Left Angst

• What Trump 2.0 means for science: the likely winners and losers

• I knew one day I'd have to watch powerful men burn the world down

• The Washington Post kills off its "Democracy Dies In Darkness" slogan

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• What China's Next Generation Stealth Jet Reveal Means

• US imposing new export controls on biotech equipment over China concerns

World

• Germany testing 4 day work week

• TikTok, AliExpress, SHEIN surrender Europeans' data to authoritarian China

  • TikTok, 5 other Chinese firms hit by EU privacy complaints

• Italy seeks to protect restaurants and hotels from fake and paid-for reviews

• Governments call for spyware regulations in UN Security Council meeting

• Age verification mandatory for porn sites in the UK starting July

  • Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

• UK Officials Consider Banning Ransomware Payments from Public Entities

• Netherlands releases list of 425,000 suspected Nazi collaborators online

• The Capitalist Revolution That Africa Needs

• Australian influencer charged with poisoning baby for money

• Italy's birth rate crisis is 'irreversible', say experts

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• North Koreans Fighting in Russia: Diary Reveals Grim Battlefield Tactics

• Belarusian democratic forces plan alternative passports against current regime

China

• China plans to build enormous solar array in space

• Chinese venture capitalists force failed founders on to debtor blacklist

• American Sellers Lost Amazon to China

• China's Bad, No Good Trillion-Dollar Trade Surplus

Health / Medicine

• Price-fixing-as-a-service: The claim against healthcare cost-cruncher MultiPlan

• FDA to Revoke Authorization for the Use of Red No. 3 in Food

  • FDA bans Red No. 3, artificial coloring used in beverages, candy and other foods

  • U.S. to ban the long-used Red No. 3 dye in food products by 2028.

• FDA moves to slash nicotine in cigarettes

  • America Just Kinda, Sorta Banned Cigarettes - The Atlantic

  Without nicotine, a cigarette is just smoldering leaves wrapped in some fancy paper. But if the Biden administration gets its way, that’s essentially all cigarettes will be. Today, regulators at the FDA announced that they are pushing forward with a rule that would dramatically limit how much nicotine can go in a cigarette. The average cigarette nowadays is estimated to have roughly 17 milligrams of the drug. Under the new regulation, that would fall to less than one milligram. If enacted—still a big if—it would decimate the demand for cigarettes more effectively than any public-service announcement ever could.

• Why is breast cancer incidence rising among young women ?

• (Apr 2023) Could Ice Cream Possibly Be Good for You? - The Atlantic

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Bloodletting recommended for Jersey residents after PFAS contamination

• Smartwatch bands can contain 'major' levels of toxic PFAS, study finds

• Google strikes largest biochar carbon removal deal with Indian startup Varaha

• Physicists Pinpoint the Quantum Origin of the Greenhouse Effect

• The largest vacuum to suck climate pollution out of the air just opened

• Colossal raises $200M to "de-extinct" the woolly mammoth, thylacine and dodo

• Sweden starts building 100k year storage site for spent nuclear fuel

• The utterly plausible case that climate change makes London much colder

• AI datacenters putting zero emissions promises out of reach

• In the Northeast, 50% of Adult Ticks Carry Lyme Disease

• Early human ancestors didn't regularly eat meat