2026-07-26
Worthy
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She genuinely could not decipher what the speaker meant. My first reaction was probably the same one most people had: “How can anyone not understand that?” The more I thought about it, however, the less convinced I became that intelligence had anything to do with it. That caused me to wonder if we have been looking at the problem backwards. The usual explanation is that literacy is declining because smartphones, social media, and endless streams of short-form content have destroyed our attention spans. There is undoubtedly some truth to that. What if, however, reading is not the disease but one of its symptoms? Reading is not merely the ability to recognize words on a page. It is the visible expression of something much deeper: the ability to communicate inside a shared intellectual world. When that world begins to fragment, reading becomes more difficult because the invisible framework that supports comprehension has already begun to crumble. Communication has never been simply vocabulary and grammar. It is part common language, part shared history, part social awareness, part cultural context, part visible cues, and part the ability to infer what another person assumes you already know. Every meaningful conversation depends on an enormous amount of invisible infrastructure that most of us never notice because, when it is functioning properly, it makes communication seem effortless. Think about how often we use expressions like “He’s met his Waterloo,” “crossing the Rubicon,” or “opening Pandora’s Box.” Most people of my generation immediately understand what those phrases mean. We don’t stop to explain Napoleon, Julius Caesar, or Greek mythology because civilization has already compressed those stories into shorthand. Language works because societies build communication shortcuts out of shared knowledge.
For nearly all of human history, communication happened face to face. If someone misunderstood you, you knew it immediately. You changed your wording, pointed at an object, drew a picture, laughed, gestured, or approached the idea from another direction until understanding emerged. Communication was an ongoing negotiation between human beings. The internet stripped away much of that feedback while simultaneously allowing each of us to inhabit our own algorithmically curated world. Two people born the same year, living in the same city, and speaking the same language can now possess remarkably little shared cultural knowledge because they have spent years consuming entirely different information, entertainment, history, and assumptions. We usually call that political polarization. I think it is something much deeper than politics. We are gradually losing the shared context that makes communication itself possible.
Horseshit
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Four types of thinker have been identified. Which one are you?
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If another advanced civilization lived on Earth before us, would we know?
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Grandmother says staged arrest for reality TV show left her injured
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Scientists Uncover Lost ‘Golden Age’ of Languages That Ended 1,000 Years Ago
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‘It’s become a nepo baby sport’: how secondhand fashion got so expensive
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Unravelling the climate behind the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations
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The Rise of the "Scenario," a Trendy Way of Forecasting Our Dystopian Future
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Electric / Self Driving cars
Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers
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Hyundai claims humanoid robot plan is not part of talks with striking workers
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U. Arkansas grant funds professor’s talk at ‘Love and Sex with Robots’ conference.
- The close interface of human to robot is a touchy, delicate field that is going to require a lot of work, which is mostly being ignored at the moment.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge
I was recently contacted by a faculty member at Cambridge (whose name I will not reveal) who alleges that Arday is a plagiarist and fabulist. My source claims that many if not most professors at Cambridge have known about this for more than a year. However, Arday and/or Cambridge’s administration are using intimidation and legal threats to squelch the story. As far as I am aware, the only mention of Arday’s alleged plagiarism that exists in the public domain is on the personal website of retired Plymouth Marjon University professor Dave Harris. Here I present evidence that, starting with his PhD dissertation, Arday routinely passes off the words and ideas of others as his own. If one removes the apparently plagiarized material from his record, there is little or no real scholarship. I discuss the cover-up by senior administrators at Cambridge and the broader implications for free speech and DEI ideology.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Google Was a Lifeline for Publishers. Now Some Are Thinking of Cutting It Off
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Micron urges White House to reject Apple's blacklist memory plan
Apple's plan to buy memory from a blacklisted supplier is receiving some pushback from Micron, which claims it will destabilize the U.S. tech industry.
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HP admits 30% of PCs reject Windows 11, and it's why Microsoft caved on support
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Meta just created a moderation nightmare for its smart glasses
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The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Memory-level parallelism: AMD is the king
Memory latency has not improved in ten years. The 2016 Broadwell answers a random access in 100 ns. The 2025 Turin, with DDR5-6400 and every advantage of a decade of progress, takes 140 ns. It got worse.
who wins? On bandwidth and memory-level parallelism, it is AMD, and it is not close. The Zen 5 core in the m8a instances sustains 58 concurrent cache-line fetches and 24.5 GiB/s of random-access throughput from one core. AMD is roughly twice as fast as Intel.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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The OpenAI Models That Hacked Hugging Face Were 'Active on the Internet' for Days
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Maybe Intelligence Ain't All That
What we got is a tool that writes excellent code, beats people at a startling range of tasks, and will clearly reshape the economy. It's also, somehow, incremental. No takeoff. No explosion. That's the strange part. I think we overrated intelligence, or misread what it is.
The takeoff story assumed the limit was thinking. It isn't. The limit is contact with reality. A smarter reasoner fills the gaps between known facts in simple areas faster and better, but it doesn't produce new facts. An AI will hand you a genuinely clever design for a jet turbine blade. It might be far more likely to work than anything your engineers came up with. It'll still probably fail, because that's the base rate at the edge of what anyone knows. The only way to find out is to build the blade and try to break it. That's the real limit on learning, and it doesn't care how smart you are. Coming up with ideas was never the hard part. The hard part is how fast reality answers them.
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What if the RAM/GPU shortage is actually deliberate?
If you can achieve a good number of tokens per second and get decent results locally, why would you continue paying for a subscription? If you were running one of those AI companies, how would you prevent that? You would make sure that the RAM and GPU shortage continued, making it increasingly difficult and expensive for hobbyists and ordinary consumers to run these models themselves.With one massive hardware-buying campaign, AI companies may have managed to accomplish two things at once: build enormous data centres for their services while also keeping RAM and GPUs scarce and expensive for everyone else.
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SK Chair Says Anthropic Asked for Supplies to Make Its Own Chips
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Why a philosopher turned down Anthropic (AI industry asking the wrong questions)
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Amazon cuts some jobs in its artificial general intelligence unit
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Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI
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Silicon Valley Splits over Closing the Borders to Chinese A.I
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Samsung wins $200B Broadcom AI chip partnership, boosting foundry push
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ChatGPT wants access to your health records so it can be a better not-doctor
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Samsung Electronics, SK Group seal $950B in deals with AI firms
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The tech world is suddenly obsessed with one concept in AI: Distillation
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An AL mother killed herself to fulfill a ChatGPT prophecy, lawsuit alleges
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AMD publishes machine-readable ISA so frontier models can write its GPU kernels
Neo Gambling / Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
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Trump lashes out at 'fake news' jokes about 2028 presidential run, in press gala
US President Donald Trump delivered an at-times rambling speech at the rescheduled White House Correspondents' Dinner Friday, three months after an alleged assassination attempt brought the annual event to an abrupt halt. Trump notably joked about running for a third presidential term in 2028, which is barred under the US Constitution.
Donald Trump has announced he will run for president again, in a move that would breach the constitution.
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the Left does not understand humor, they thought they killed Comedy two decades ago.
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"Is this supposed to be fun? Am I supposed to be serious? Am I supposed to be a comedian?"
here's the joke I thought was the best: "Under my administration, a once-feared and powerful regime that relentlessly attacked America has finally been toppled. Their former leaders have been removed and they're now being run by a gay dictator facing internal divisions. But I for one wish Bari Weiss all the best at CBS News. She's a wonderful woman."
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Lawsuits hours after new tariffs take effect, experts say tariffs may not hold
Democrats
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New York's small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape
At a press conference in the Bronx, Mamdani listed some of the onerous policies getting the axe. Bodega owners will no longer need a separate license to sell the same products outside the store – like fruit and flowers – as inside. Restaurants will no longer need a “superfluous” frozen dessert permit to sell ice-cream on top of the permit already required to sell food. Barber shops will no longer have to renew their permit every year, instead doing so every three years. Street fair vendor permit fees will be reduced, restaurant inspections will be sped up, and equipment registration fees will be eliminated for a year. A corresponding executive order signed by Mamdani on Monday will also expand the NYC Best program, assigning each of the city’s 180,000 small businesses – which employ an estimated 1 million people – a case worker to help owners navigate the Big Apple’s sometimes byzantine bureaucracy.
Left Angst
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Stop screeching about immigration, and get smart about it
The notion that immigration is an invasion bent on destroying the country by replacing its founding population has become a bedrock belief on the Right; it is a singular, all-consuming passion similar to what anti-racism was for 2010s progressives and Palestine has become to leftists in the 2020s. Nor is it just an object of passion; nativism has become a self-contained, hermetically sealed worldview not subject to reasoned argumentation, logic, or data.
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Taylor Farms Called White House to Try to Delay Cyclospora Recall
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US accuses American of allegedly wiping his phone during border search
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We've Reached the End of Political Accountability
I’m baffled that the GOP keeps getting away with nominating people like Andy Biggs—who allegedly helped plan the “Stop the Steal” movement—for major offices. Here is something someone once said about Congressman Biggs: “Mr. Biggs did.” That was former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, talking in a video testimony with members of the January 6 special committee regarding members of Congress who inquired about presidential pardons for their activities during the insurrection. Biggs has denied asking for the pardon, but he was a leader in the congressional move not to certify Joe Biden’s election in 2020.
- Didn't Hutchinson also claim that Trump "grabbed the wheel of the limo" along with several other fabrications?
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FDA panel supports broadening access to peptides popular on the gray market
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Trump administration admits clean energy grants were canceled based on politics
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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Canadian woman who was NATO intern arrested in Belgium on spying charge
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'A subtle mistake': How a single underscore led to an innocent Halifax man's conviction
A Halifax man who spent 18 months in jail for child luring and possession of child pornography after an investigative mix-up between two nearly identical online usernames has been acquitted on all charges on appeal.
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Prosecutor Investigating U.S. Boat Strikes Was Murdered in Ecuador
According to police, on June 14 a hitman aboard a black motorcycle opened fire on Bravo as she and her sister were leaving a café at about 11 a.m. Bravo’s sister, who jumped to protect her, was also killed in the attack. Bravo is the 26th member of Ecuador’s justice system to be assassinated since 2020 and the second individual investigating state crimes murdered that week.
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Arsonists used cats to spread Italy's wildfires
As wildfires blazed in southern Italy this week, authorities probing for arson found a grisly clue: cats “with flammable-soaked rags tied to their tails.” “These animals were released into the fields, running around and spreading the fire,” said Domenico Costarella of Calabria’s Civil Protection Agency in a video posted on Facebook on Tuesday. He added that other pieces of evidence also pointed to arson, including candles lit among flammable rags and delayed ignition devices.
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Macron mobilises French military as 'unprecedented' wildfire approaches Bordeaux
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Canada is taking an outsized role in the construction of the post-American world