2026-08-23

Horseshit

• Silicon Valley Executives Are Tech Fans. Just Not for Their Kids

• Próspera- libertarian utopia on Caribbean island off the coast of Honduras

• Early Humans Likely Ate Carbs and Sugary Foods

• It's Low-Calorie and Packed with Protein. Is It Healthy?

• The faces behind the feeds: Gen Z's private lives and public posts – in pictures

• Brand Hype Has Existed Since the Bronze Age, Scientists Discover

• You can't buy anything on these food delivery and shopping sites

• He Said He Was the Healthiest Man. Then Came a Diagnosis

• Are we cooked? Algorithms have rewired our language

• Multilingual people may have brains up to 13 years younger

• Jelqing: The latest in a long history of attempts to enlarge the male member

  Posts advise that stretching a semi-erect penis could add up to an inch in length and girth by exploiting the body’s repair mechanisms. Jelqing is just the latest in a long line of dubious penis enlargement techniques stretching (sorry) back millennia.

  The average male penis is between 5.1 and 5.5 inches in length, with a recent study showing the latter value is a 24% increase on three decades ago. The female vagina is on average 2.5 to 3.8 inches deep, but lengthens during sexual arousal to accommodate a penis longer than this.

• Dallas residents express relief after fire destroys longtime 'eyesore' house

• A Key Meat Protein Has Been Grown in Lettuce for the First Time

• Laptop catches fire on US flight, with passenger treated at airport

• Sick of Constant Pings, They're Sending Texts at the Speed of Carrier Pigeon

celebrity gossip

• Mark Zuckerberg Buys an Irish Castle

Musk

• Tesla's Solar Roof is Dead – Here's what went wrong

• Iain Banks: Niall Ferguson: Elon's Favorite Sci-Fi Prophet Was Wrong

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo doubles spending on lobbying in robotaxi battle with Uber

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• Robots running into walls go viral ahead of 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games

• China's robots rock, box and mix drinks. Can they outperform humans?

• Chinese robot runs 100M sprint quicker than Usain Bolt's world record

• Humanoid robots surpass human records in 100M, high jump

• Chinese humanoid robots smash human records in 100M sprint and high jump

• Chinese robot beats Usain Bolt's 100M world record at Beijing games

• How to Kill a Robot Dog

  Pass a bullet through the battery, and your robot dog will most likely incinerate itself right sharpish. You will find the battery on most robot dogs in a secure slot in the bottom or rear part of the torso. The battery assembly is fairly heavy, so it is usually stored low in the chassis to improve stability.

  • Less lethal options might include pit traps or snares.

• Robots Will Soon See the Real World Thanks to These Next-Gen AI Models

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Feminism didn't kill the male breadwinner model, the economy did

• People are more bothered by others' false beliefs than by differences in beliefs

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Arday Affair Erupts Into U.S.-Belgium Diplomatic Dispute

  Today, August 21, U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White personally intervened, urging Ghent University to ensure that Cofnas remains employed. The U.S. Embassy denounced the university’s treatment of Cofnas as “scapegoating mob behavior,” and warned that the university’s access to U.S. funding could be at risk.

  • Jason Arday Did a Lot of Harm

  long before everything else about this guy came out; the plagiarism, the marathons, the spurious claims of illness and harassment- I could have immediately clocked him for a liar. And Cambridge should have as well. But I get the sense that a lot of people still don’t quite understand the extent to which Jason Arday perpetuated a massive fraud. They think he was just caught plagiarizing a few lines in an essay, that the media simply delved through his CV and his stated accomplishments for shits and giggles, or simply to discredit a black man. Overlooked is the fact that Arday was being investigated from the beginning and not by Cofnas. That he sicced the police on the initial academics attempting to investigate him. That he hired a notorious law firm to quash reports of his plagiarism- reports that had they come out earlier, would likely have spared Arday a great deal of media scrutiny and allowed him to slink away quietly. And his 2015 thesis was not some typical citation error but heavily plagiarized, as were many of his other works. Most of the discourse around Arday has been entirely about racial politics, for very obvious reasons. But what’s been ignored, I think, is that Arday represents a much more serious indictment of the complete failure of institutions- both in advocacy and academia- to hold the line on the reality of what autism is.

  • I studied in Jason Arday’s department at Cambridge. Here’s the crap I was taught

  For one module, I wrote a lengthy essay about how cultural products like kids’ cartoons and jazz songs serve as instruments of capitalist oppression. I got a top mark on that paper (despite knowing at the time that I was essentially regurgitating complete crap). While studying for another paper I had a debate with the professor, an eminent anthropologist, because she insisted that native tribes could fly through the trees – not metaphorically, but that they could literally fly because they believed they could fly. After all, who are we to question ‘indigenous ways of knowing’…

  • 10 thoughts about Jason Arday, Cambridge, Nathan Cofnas, and the decline of Universities.

  Cambridge is the villain. The university picked a mentally-disturbed, serial fabulist, and told the world he was the most brilliant scholar. He did fabricate things which tricked Cambridge, yes, but they were outrageous and obvious lies. Cambridge was negligent in basic diligence. It would be like if I made up insane combine stats (I can bench 92 reps and run 40 yrds in 2 seconds), and the SF 49ers said that I am the greatest quarterback in human history, an unstoppable force, and then put me out on the field to watch me get obliterated on the first play. You should blame the coach, manager and team that didn’t catch the lie sooner. Yes, I would also deserve some blame, but not the lion-share.

  • Icarus in the Faculty Lounge

• Why the Closing of Harvard's Writing Center Matters

• This is one of the worst scientific papers I’ve ever seen

  I do think we should be bothered by broadcasts of unsupported scientific claims, whether they’re about volleyball, himmicanes, faith healing, air rage, governors’ lifespans, or anything else. It’s bad science and it’s part of our culture of B.S. Even if the authors of this particular paper are completely sincere in their efforts

• University of California Faculty Calls to Reinstate SAT

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Meta $1.4T threat could mean 'turning in the keys and walking away'

  • Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week

  • Meta's Big Reckoning Is Here

• People are vandalizing Flock surveillance cameras

• Apple lays off 200 people across Vision Pro and Siri teams

  • Apple Guts Vision Pro Gaming and Immersive Video Teams, Trims Siri Staff

  • Apple cutting jobs from Siri, Vision Pro teams

• TikTok to pay $400M to US in one of largest child privacy settlements

• The Trouble with Trying to Turn Viral Videos into Blockbusters

• Why Social Media's Ad Dominance Is a Billion-Dollar Measurement Illusion

• 'Seinfeld' Renews Netflix Streaming Deal for Next Five Years

• DDR5 scalper bots now outnumber shoppers 10 to 1

• Oura rings unable to measure any signals needed to assess sleep quality / stages

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Rocket Lab Announces Flatellite: A New Satellite Designed for Mass Manufacture

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Rights-infringing copies of "NEINhorn": Carlsen sues OpenAI

• Older Americans leaving workforce poses challenges for AI plans

• Anthropic's Opus 4.6 is a smut-machine

• Would a Hiroshima-scale AI disaster make humanity protect itself? I fear not

• Linus Torvalds Endures a Debug Session from Hell, "Enormously Helped" by AI

• Startup Founders Are Working Harder Than Ever to Keep Up with Their AI Agents

• Wasn't it supposed to be a trillion or more just a few days ago? Anthropic Could Aim to Raise $100B in Blockbuster IPO

  • Anthropic IPO filing will show AI backlash as a risk factor, sources say

• OpenAI cuts developer pricing for frontier GPT-5.6 Sol model by more than 20%

• Florida is seeking a court order to classify ChatGPT as a public nuisance.

• The AI boom: rational enthusiasm or the next dot-com bubble?

  • The hucksters and scams had been hunting for a new seed since "VR" blew out again, so there wasn't much enthusiasm required.

• Harvard's A.I. Clones Will Hear Your Startup Pitch Now

• Logging Back Into Facebook

  It’s not just that the book is AI-generated: all the posts leading up to it are AI-generated, the marketing collateral is AI-generated, and the woman has even AI-generated an image of herself and her late father with a lengthy, saccharine “We did it!” caption. All of this is, I guess, not that big of a deal, and really shouldn’t be given the other contents of this blog. My husband suggested that maybe it’s a grift to make money, even if a misguided one. All of this is maybe an afternoon’s worth of work, he says. But I don’t think it’s a grift! It’s far too messy and personal to be a grift. She seems far too invested. She made shirts. She has a community for her readers. She paid a PR service to submit a fake press release about her book to various local newspapers. The press release is AI-generated. She created or purchased a web of fake Goodreads accounts with AI-generated names and profile photos to give her book five-star reviews. The reviews are AI-generated. And then, the other day, just when I thought it couldn’t escalate any further, I saw that she’d posted photos of the notes for her book. You guessed it: the photos are AI-generated, as is the caption describing what they are.

• 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

• Digging the grave of my skills: Hollywood creatives training AI to do their jobs

• The war on data centres is a bit fake

• Retailers Want AI to Solve Online Shopping's Biggest Problem

• Nvidia Customers Notified About AI-Related Price Hikes Above 15%

• Twitch content has trained Amazon AI for years, but users can opt out now

• The importance of teaching students what AI can't do

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Hidden Zillow listings created fake supply shock, raising NYC rents, lawsuit

• $40T Debt, 6.7% Mortgages and $5 Diesel

• Walmart launching Apple Pay support next week

• Volkswagen needs deep cuts to remain competitive, CEO says ahead of crunch talks

• Boeing engineers, tech workers reject contract offer

• FTC Targets Personalized Pricing, Stops Short of Ban

• U.S. bond intervention is like 'paying your mortgage with your credit card,'

• Nearly 25% of U.S. workers are functionally unemployed, economic analysis finds

  The economic research firm's "True Rate of Unemployment" (TRU) seeks to capture the share of workers that the group defines as "functionally unemployed." This includes not only people who are unemployed and looking for a job, but also those who are involuntarily working part-time and who are earning poverty-level wages, or less than $26,000 annually before taxes.

• Mysterious Astroturf Group Popped Up to Defend the Paramount Merger

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Inside the police investigation into how Rep. Max Miller’s daughter got hurt

• America's Gerontocracy Needs a Public Physician

Left Angst

• Donald Trump's bullying of Canada is endless

• Dismantling the Roadless Rule threatens to disrupt wildlife and water in US

• Portland area leaders are dismantling a third of the homeless shelter system

• Palantir Billionaire's Passion Project Is Criminalizing Homelessness

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Canada suspends trade negotiations with USA and match tariffs dollar for dollar

  • New U.S. tariffs in effect after trade talks fail

  • Canada vows to match Trump's 50% tariffs after trade deal talks fail

  • Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down

  • New U.S. tariffs to take effect after midnight, Canada plans to match levies

• CRTs and other ewaste can no longer be exported from the USA

World

• 5 years on, Afghan girls still barred from education under Taliban

• Dutch regulator fines Uber €825M for letting AI deactivate driver accounts

  • Netherlands Fines Uber a Record Amount

  • Uber fined nearly $1B by Dutch regulators

• Waterloo's student rocketry team breaks a world record

• ISRO will not make any launch vehicle, all tech to be handed to private sector

• South Korea's Child-Hating Society Locks Playgrounds, Silences Children

• France issues warning over substandard condoms

• Delivery drivers will get minimum wage in Australia's 'world-first' deal

• Belgian car salesman becomes prince after DNA test proves royal parentage

• Magnitude 5.9 earthquake rattles Tokyo and eastern Kanto region

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Slovakia discovers Russian backdoors in 279 new traffic cameras

• Fighter jets help destroy Russian drone boat near European offshore gas platform

• Nord Stream sabotage suspect arrested on set of film about the sabotage

China

• A.I. is everywhere in China. See for yourself

• Tesla Recalls 3M EVs in China over Door Handle Safety

  • Chinese regulators tell Tesla: fix 3M cars

• CXMT planned to use stolen Samsung IP to develop its DRAM, court hears

• China Axing Microsoft Windows from State Agencies Ahead of Plan

Health / Medicine

• ADHD diagnoses and prescriptions have increased globally across all age groups

• Her Brain Was Broken. It Was Fixed with Sound–Not a Scalpel

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• This company’s plans to deploy space mirrors could jeopardize the night sky for many | MIT Technology Review

• These animals can predict volcanic eruptions, storms and more

• At the moment: 472 gas-fired power plants are under development in the US

• More evidence that Washington State is encouraging forest fires, rather than preventing them

• Wildfires across Europe detonate forgotten World War bombs

• What the Newest Research on Wildfire Smoke Tells Us

• ‘Very Aggressive’ Carp Are Creeping Closer to the Great Lakes, Potentially Disrupting the $7 Billion Fishing Industry.

• The Fight to Save a 300-Year-Old Tree That Survived a Revolutionary War Battle

• Dry Danube River threatens nuclear power in Romania, Hungary

• Three quarters of Indo-Pacific coral reefs could drown as sea levels rise