2026-04-04

Horseshit

• All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be 'High Agency'

• The "Passive Income" trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs

  Somewhere between 2015 and 2022, "passive income" stopped being a boring financial planning term and became, I don't know how else to put this, a salvation narrative. I mean that literally. There was an eschatology if you want to get nerdy about it. The Rapture was the day your "passive income" exceeded your monthly expenses and you could quit your job forever. People talked about it with that exact energy. But, of course, the folks making any actual income, of any kind, were the ones selling courses about making passive income. It was an ouroboros. It was an ouroboros that had incorporated in Delaware and was running Facebook ads.

• Scientists Cloned a Mouse for 58 Generations. The Results Were Catastrophic

• Science confirms torpedo bat works as well as regular bat

• The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

• Rancho Gordo trademarks 'bean club,' tells others to stop using it

• Google Unveils Restoration of Hangar One in Mountain View

• The College Student–and His Cat Meme–Who Hunted the Biggest Cyberweapon

• The more evidence behind a therapy, the less the public trusts it

  • The more we're assured that implausible results from flawed studies are "evidence" the less trust the people pushing the substance. Facts do not require faith, nor propaganda.

• Surprise fossil discoveries push back the evolution of complex animals

• What happens when you don't die on time?

• The false dawn of the post-literate society

celebrity gossip

• Mystery around top-ranked Rockefeller book grows

Musk

• SpaceX Files FCC Complaint over Ariane 64 Amazon Leo Launch

  • SpaceX tries to convince FCC that Amazon put satellites into wrong altitude

• Tesla March car registrations soar in key European markets

• Big Banks Seeking a Piece of SpaceX's IPO Must Subscribe to Elon Musk's Grok

  • Elon Musk insists banks working on SpaceX IPO must buy Grok subscriptions

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Hegseth says U.S. troops are fighting for Jesus. The Pope disagrees

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• How Steve Jobs Brought the Apple II to the Classroom

  • I have never heard of anyone who learned anything significant on school computers of this era. Always at home. By the time the Apple was available the kids weren't allowed to explore on them, they were too important. Had to have your own.

• Harvard's Push to Cap 'A' Grades Has Students Howling in Protest

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• New Rowhammer attacks give complete control of machines running Nvidia GPUs

• Tech Companies Are Trying to Neuter Colorado's Landmark Right-to-Repair Law

• Reddit is moving on from R/all

• How Microsoft vaporised a trillion dollars.

  This is the first of a series of articles in which you will learn about what may be one of the silliest, most preventable, and most costly mishaps of the 21st century, where Microsoft all but lost OpenAI, its largest customer, and the trust of the US government.

• Apple Is Reportedly Buying Up "All Available" Mobile DRAM At Very High Prices To Starve Out Its Competitors

• Fears grow of ‘Detroit-Style’ decline as Hollywood jobs evaporate

• Blaming insecurity on consumer Wi-Fi routers on foreign OEMs is a red herring

• Nintendo's legal fight with Palworld suffers a reversal as USPTO rejects patent

  • US Patent Office rejects Nintendo's 'summon character and let it fight' patent

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Build your own Dial-up ISP with a Raspberry Pi

  People sometimes ask why I do 'pointless' projects like these. Some of it is nostalgia, of course. And maybe to justify accepting all this old equipment...But a big reason why is it keeps me learning. I'd never dealt with either mgetty or PPP in Linux, and seeing how the modem handshake works on the software level, or how the ppp0 network connection is set up, helped me understand more about even modern connections like with VPNs. Further, I got to learn how modems used QAM—and this in turn increased my understanding of how Quadrature Amplitude Modulation works with modern WiFi to give us gigabits of bandwidth, expanding on tricks developed years ago.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA astronauts prove that sending an email is rocket science

• Artemis II commander enters tablet PIN on launch livestream

• Artemis II is NASA's last moon mission without Silicon Valley

• Artemis II crew take 'spectacular' image of Earth

  • Artemis II Looking Back at Earth

• Virgin Galactic Is Booking Space Trips at $750k Apiece

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The Catholic Priest Who Helped Write Anthropic's A.I. Ethics Code

• OpenAI Acquires Tech Talk Show 'TBPN'–and Buys Itself Some Positive News

  • OpenAI Buys Streaming Show 'TBPN,' Aiming to Change Narrative on A.I

• Europe's AI sovereignty just became a security emergency

• Mercor, a $10B AI startup confirms major data breach

• Penguin to sue OpenAI over ChatGPT version of German children's book

• AI's fluency in other languages hides a Western worldview that can mislead users

• They thought they were downloading Claude Code source

• Why AI lies, cheats and steals

• AI models will deceive you to save their own kind

• Anthropic Says That Claude Contains Its Own Kind of Emotions

• Jobs Being Created by AI

• Economists Once Dismissed the A.I. Job Threat, but Not Anymore

• A group pushing for age verification legislation to be forced upon AI turns out to be funded by... OpenAI.

• Bluesky Users Respond With Overwhelming Disgust to Platform’s New AI

• Netflix just released its first public AI model, because why not

• Google battles Chinese open-weights models with Gemma 4

• Nations priced out of Big AI are building with frugal models

• Chatbots are now prescribing psychiatric drugs

• Anthropic's next model could be a 'watershed moment' for cybersecurity

• Half of planned US data center builds have been delayed or canceled

• OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic

• AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear

• It's good that Claude's source-code leaked

• Penalties stack up as AI spreads through the legal system

• Kids groups say they didn't know OpenAI was behind their child safety coalition

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Trump administration sues 3 states over attempts to regulate prediction markets

• A 'wrench attack' crime ring chased crypto millions from S.F. to L.A

• Insider trading or random guy? It doesn't matter to Polymarket

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Why do gas prices always have an extra 9/10 of a cent added on?

• DoorDash unveils new reusable food container pilot program called DashLoop

• Employment increased by 178,000 in March; unemployment flat at 4.3%

  • US economy beats expectations to add 178,000 jobs in March

  • US labor market posts largest jobs gain in 15 months

• A pound of ground beef now costs more than the federal minimum wage

• Oracle Files H-1B Visa Petitions Amid Mass Layoffs

Trump

• Trump official claims Truth Social is blocking his posts about teleporting

• Trump seeks $1.5T for just defence, alongside domestic spending cuts

• Trump announces 'fraud' crackdown in Democratic states as arrests begin in CA

Democrats

• Democrats launch probe into Hegseth's alleged effort to buy up defense stocks

Left Angst

• Charlamagne baffled by ICE agents at airports acting 'like Chick-fil-A workers'

  “Breakfast Club” host Charlamagne tha God said Tuesday he saw ICE agents picking up the slack of TSA agents so efficiently and friendly that he suspected there was a government “psy-op” at play.

• CDC Pauses Testing for Rabies and Pox Viruses

• Operation Save Orbán: Trump Deploys Vance to Hungary

  U.S. Vice President JD Vance is set to land in Budapest on Tuesday for a high-stakes intervention that underscores how far the White House is willing to go to shore up Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán before the April 12 national election. Orbán is flailing in the polls, as anti-corruption opposition candidate Péter Magyar surges ahead in his bid to claim power in Budapest after 16 years of leadership by the ruling Fidesz party.

• The “Casualty Cover-Up” Amid Trump's Wars in the Middle East

• Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service

  Late Tuesday afternoon, with the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history. Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a “reorganization.” An execution. They’re ripping the headquarters out of Washington and shipping it to Salt Lake City, Utah — the beating heart of the anti-public-lands movement in America. They’re shuttering every single one of the ten regional offices that have governed this agency since Gifford Pinchot built the system over a century ago — and with them, the career professionals who spent entire lifetimes earning the expertise and the authority to push back when politicians came calling with bad ideas and worse motives. They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science, the kind you literally cannot restart once it’s gone. And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees called “state directors,” embedded in state capitals alongside the very governors, legislators, and industry lobbyists who have spent their careers demanding that the Forest Service log more, protect less, and get out of the way.

• Forest Service Will Close Research Stations That Study Wildfire Risk

• CBP Facility Codes Sure Seem to Have Leaked via Online Flashcards

• The FAA "Temporary" Drone Restriction Blatant Attempt to Criminalize Filming ICE

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Photos Of F-15E Wreckage Emerge Amid Iranian Claims It Shot Down An American Fighter

  Iran’s armed forces claim that a U.S. fighter jet has been shot down over the country. According to Iranian state media, a U.S. F-35 was downed, although photos of the wreckage of a fighter on the ground point squarely to the aircraft involved being a U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle — provided they are legitimate. A spokesperson for Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya central headquarters said today that an F-35 was brought down over the central part of the country by a new type of air defense system operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), with little chance the pilot survived, Reuters reports. The F-15E carries two aircrew, while the F-35 is a single-seater. At this point, we have no firm indication of the fate of the crew if such an incident did indeed take place.

  he tail seen here would indicate an aircraft assigned to the 494th Fighter Squadron at RAF Lakenheath in England, based on its red band. This is one of the units that has been deployed to the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) area of operations for Epic Fury. The 494th FS has also been extremely active over the CENTCOM area of responsibility for many years. Iran might also be presenting some other F-15E wreckage. Iran has collected many wrecks of foreign aircraft over the years, but where this one would have come from is not clear. Previous documented F-15E crashes in the Middle East or Afghanistan don’t involve aircraft from the 494th Fighter Squadron, as far as we can ascertain.

  It should be recalled that three F-15Es were brought down over Kuwait in a friendly fire incident earlier in the campaign. CENTCOM confirmed that the six crew members involved ejected safely, and at least some of those remained in theater and have resumed combat operations. It was reported that the three Strike Eagles were brought down by a Kuwaiti Air Force F/A-18 Hornet, although many details of the incident remain unclear. At least one of these jets was from the 48th FW, so we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that we are seeing photos of wreckage from that incident here.

  • US F-15E jet confirmed shot down over Iran as Tehran releases wreckage images

  A US F-15E Strike Eagle fighter has been shot down over Iran, prompting a frantic US search and rescue effort for its two-strong crew, in the first such incident since the start of the five week long war. US officials familiar with the situation later confirmed off the record that an F-15E had been brought down and the Pentagon was scrambling to find the crew before the Iranians. There was no official comment from the US military about the incident. One crew member was reported as having been rescued as the situation developed, in what is likely to have been a high-risk operation with rescue aircraft probably exposed to fire from the ground. It was not immediately clear if the jet had a full crew of two. Subsequent footage filmed in Iran showed a US C-130 Hercules and HH-60 Pavehawk helicopters flying low and at one point refuelling together, amid fresh Iranian speculation that the plane crew may have ejected and survived.

  • US fighter jet shot down over Iran, one crew member rescued so far, sources say

  • American fighter jet downed over Iran, 1 crew member rescued, U.S. officials say - CBS News

• US targets Chinese chipmaking with proposed export restrictions

World

• 'Fatal decision': EU slammed for caving to US pressure on digital rules

• How the UK's South West Became a 'Deep Tech' Powerhouse

• NHS staff boycott Palantir's data platform over ethical concerns

• France plans missile increase in new defense push

• UK social media users less active on tech platforms due to rise of video apps

• Microsoft Readies $10B AI Investment Plan in Japan

• Neoen to Build France's Largest Battery Amid Strained Power Grid

• The EU is suffering a hacking crisis. Here's what we know

• Cert-EU: European Commission hack exposes data of 30 EU entities

• Ireland Tests Digital ID to Verify Age of Social Media Users

• Austria's Ex-Foreign Minister Flees to Russia by Military Jet, Brings Ponies

  According to the Austrian outlet Heute, citing reporting by DATUM, Kneissl has faced criticism in Austria after publicly referring to the country as a “hyena” and commenting on Adolf Hitler’s origins. The remarks have prompted political calls in Vienna to consider revoking her citizenship. According to Heute, Kneissl’s relocation to Russia was facilitated with direct involvement from Russian state structures. The report states that her transfer was coordinated through senior Kremlin officials, including the head of the presidential administration, Anton Vaino. Kneissl traveled to Russia via the Khmeimim airbase in Syria aboard a Russian military Il-76 aircraft—typically used for transporting military equipment. The aircraft reportedly also carried her animals, including two ponies.

• Adult German men must request permission to leave Germany for more than 3 months

• 'I'm 50 and applying for jobs every day– might have to move in w. my mom'

• Swiss Inflation Rises to Highest Level in a Year on Jump in Oil Costs

Iran / Houthi

• International law experts allege violations in Iran war

  They say the US-Israeli decision to attack on Iran was a clear breach of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the use of force outside of self-defence or when authorised by the UN Security Council. The experts point to "alarming rhetoric" being used by officials, including US President Donald Trump's threats to "obliterate" Iran's power plants. In response, the White House said Trump was making the entire region safer, and dismissed what it described as "so-called experts".

• How to take down a F-35 over Iran? Chinese engineer's tutorial goes viral

• Iran targeted Amazon data centers

  • Iran Strikes Leave Amazon Availability Zones "Hard Down" in Bahrain and Dubai

• Experts dispute US account of deadly Iran sports hall strike in Lamerd

• Iran: Recruitment of child soldiers as young as 12 amounts to a war crime

China

• Chinese chip firms hit record high revenue driven by the AI boom and U.S. curbs

Health / Medicine

• Exploding Head Syndrome Can Strike as You Fall Asleep. An Expert Explains.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• More people requesting 'unvaccinated' blood for themselves or their children

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Renewables dominate 2025's newly installed generating capacity