2026-05-14

etc

• How ASML took over the world

  While ASML is now the sole supplier of these machines, and will be for some time to come, it started out as a laggard in the chipmaking industry. Overtaking its competition required many things rarely associated with European companies: close collaboration with the American government, selling large stakes to foreign competitors, and a huge gamble on an unproven technology.

  Since almost all of the parts in ASML’s machines are made by other companies, it has become master of a sprawling supply chain of over five thousand companies. It has diversified its suppliers over the years in a very deliberate way: 80 percent of its spending goes to companies across Europe and the Middle East (notably not the US, despite prior agreements), which reduces the risk of potential export restrictions, tariffs, and other geopolitical risks that may face critical suppliers based in the US or Asia. It also aims for its suppliers to make no more than 25 percent of their revenue from ASML, to force them not to become overreliant on the volatile semiconductor market.

  ASML sank billions of dollars into the development and commercialization of EUV technology, with no guarantee that it would ever work. As late as the 2010s, many semiconductor experts doubted that the technology could be successfully commercialized. Now it is the most important technology in the world.

• American Airlines flight from Miami lands in Chicago with two flat tires

Horseshit

• Why Is Latin America So Violent?

  if you’re a relatively poor country with few resources and little state capacity, granting protections to suspected and convicted criminals is a major hindrance to keeping order. Law enforcement and court officials can be intimidated or bribed, and their attention and resources are stretched thin. Gangs are able to control more territory, murderers are less likely to be punished, and deterrence breaks down.

• AI datacenters in space do not have a cooling problem

  estimates ~2500 square metres of radiation area would be needed to serve 1MW of datacenter energy (much less than what it’d need in solar panels). A serious AI datacenter is around 100MW3, so we’d need 250,000 square metres of radiation area. The largest current radiator in space is probably the ISS, at around a thousand square metres. Is scaling that up by 250x a lot? Yes, but it’s not necessarily ridiculous. We currently have zero industrial operations happening in space, so there’s been no need to push the boundaries here.

  • 250,000 m^2 is just under 62 acres. How high an orbit do we need to keep that from acting as a parachute? Leave aside "what do we make it of" and "how do we get it there and unfold it". Not to mention "and how do we keep it in shadow?"

• A plan to make drugs in orbit is going commercial

• Palantir's summary of CEO Alexander Karp's manifesto is generating buzz

• Math reveals the one game of chance you should always accept

• If America wants to increase birth rates, we need to mandate national paid maternity leave.

• Free Energy from the Vacuum? Warp Drive Pioneer Unveils Battery-Free ‘MicroSparc’ That Allegedly Draws Power from the Quantum Vacuum

• We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age

  The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age. Today, the planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare and transformative AI represents a rupture of comparable magnitude.

• What's with all the slide decks?

  News from the world of real jobs: Apparently, sometime between 10 and 20 years ago, it became standard for people to communicate by sending slide decks around. These slides are never presented. They aren’t intended to be presented. They’re born, they’re sent around, and they die.

• New Fathers Are Dying, and We Don't Know Why

• Health advice is all over social media. Here’s how to vet claims

• A desire for a loud car correlates with higher scores on psychopathy and sadism

• 59000-year-old Neanderthal tooth may be oldest evidence of dentistry

celebrity gossip

• London Rooftop Where Beatles Played Last Gig (1969) to Become Museum

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• How Weak Evidence Is Fueling a National Push to Ban Social Media for Youth

Musk

• Sam Altman Testifies That Elon Musk Wanted Control of OpenAI

  • In a trial pitting him against Elon Musk, nobody has more to lose than Altman

  • Sam Altman was winning on the stand, but it might not be enough

  • Altman takes the stand to fend off Musk's accusations he 'stole a charity'

  • OpenAI Chief Sam Altman Makes Appearance in High-Stakes Court Bout v Elon Musk

  • Altman and Musk put AI trust on trial

  • Altman forced to confront claims at OpenAI trial that he's a prolific liar

• xAI Adds 19 New Gas Turbines Despite Ongoing Lawsuit

• How Elon Musk turned an online nobody into his biggest promoter

• SpaceX and Google Are in Talks to Launch Data Centers in Orbit

  • Google Is in Talks to Use SpaceX for AI Data Centers. That's Curious

  • Google reportedly in talks with SpaceX to launch its orbital data centers

• SpaceX targets May 19 for debut of Starship Version 3, Launch Pad 2

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo recalls 3.8k robotaxis, glitch allowed them to 'drive into standing water'

  • Waymos recalled after robotaxi swept into a creek

• New poll shows what San Francisco residents really think about Waymo cars

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• The Dark Side Of Unitree Robot Dogs

  Benn found that the original task that he’d envisioned for the robot, as in protecting his chickens from uninvited visitors, wouldn’t quite work as the robot is rather blind. The reason for this is the placement of the Lidar below the head, which obscures most of what’s behind and around the robot. Rather than risk trampled chickens and chicks, this plan was thus abandoned.

• Unitree will sell you a 'transformable mecha' for $650k

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Childhood and Education: Do The Math

  A large part of the reason math is hard, or boring, is that education studies, especially in math, are worse than you know. It goes beyond the studies failing both math and statistics forever and into what I’d basically call fraud. Various people are at war with math education, and will do what it takes to stop it in its tracks. We must fight back. You know that whole thing where the entire Bay Area school system stopped teaching kids Algebra? That was motivated by criminal levels of fraud. I want Jo Boaler in jail doing hard time for this if it is accurate.

• Princeton Changes Its 133-Year-Old Honor Code over AI Cheating Fears

• Why the Future of College Could Look Like OnlyFans

  Universities have become generic, one professor and former dean argues. In the A.I. era, students may demand something they can’t get elsewhere.

• US lawmakers demand answers from Instructure after Canvas data breaches

• Harvard Votes on Limiting "A" Grades

• Princeton mandates proctoring in-person exams, upending 133 years of precedent

  • How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq

• Meta loses court fight over compensation to Italian publishers

• Meta and Zuckerberg sued by publishers over 'massive' copyright infringement

• Smart glasses are 'an invasion of privacy' – Meta's are selling better

• First look at Googlebook: A premium Chromebook alternative for Android users

  • Google's Android-powered laptops are called Googlebooks, and coming this year

  • 'Googlebooks' have a premium focus, some Chromebooks can be upgraded

• Google introduces measure to stop doom scrolling

• Mojang adds Friends List and peer-to-peer multiplayer to Minecraft: Java Edition

• Car is spying on you, and it's only just the beginning

• The Apple Studio Display could have been more

• CUDA Proves Nvidia Is a Software Company

• Kickstarter Is Forced to Ban Adult Content by Payment Processors

• Valve snuck a Wilhelm scream Easter egg into the new Steam Controller

• Verisign to delete .name 3LDs and email addresses

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• ESR has been brainwashed by AI

  What sealed the deal is that code, even code in a language as rebarbative as Rust, is wet clay now. If, against all odds I get a bug report that says somebody wants to play greed on something that isn't an ANSI terminal emulator, reinstating full curses support will take a one-sentence prompt to my robot friend and mere minutes. I hadn't had to directly confront before the fact that the entire set of assumptions that made TERM and terminfo a thing are as obsolete as dial-up acoustic modems. Still, the moment when I tossed away one of the ancient laws of Unix coding felt a bit like the universe lurching sideways.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Could this be the moment that drug manufacturing takes off in orbit?

• Almost half of everything orbiting Earth is space junk

• Blue Origin may need external funding to hit ambitious launch targets

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• OpenAI faces lawsuit claiming chatbot gave advice that led to fatal overdose

• AI has cut my pay as a memoir writer in half

• 7 in 10 Americans oppose data centers being built in their communities

• “I applied to be pope”: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

• Utah's 'hyperscale' data center could create heat island near Great Salt Lake

  • Residents furious as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan

• Execs admit AI makes them value human workers less

• How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition

• Only the real dipshits fall for its current lies? AI will soon be capable of telling convincing lies

• Google thwarts effort hacker group use AI 'mass exploitation event'

  Google’s Threat Intelligence Group said in a report on Monday that it thwarted an effort by hackers to use artificial intelligence models to “plan a mass vulnerability exploitation operation.” “The criminal threat actor planned to use it in a mass exploitation event but our proactive counter discovery may have prevented its use,” Google wrote in the post, without disclosing the name of the hacker group. Google said it does not believe that its homegrown Gemini model was used.

• Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

• The AI Backlash Could Get Ugly

• Was my $48K GPU server worth it?

• Meta AI introduces private confidential-compute backed Incognito Chats

• Anthropic Was Behind. Now It's the AI Boom's Front-Runner

• Anthropic, OpenAI tokens plunge as firms say pre-IPO share transfers are invalid

• One in seven prefer consulting AI chatbots to seeing a doctor, UK study shows

  • At least a human doctor knows its lying to you. Sometimes.

• AI can design viruses, toxins and other bioweapons. How worried should we be?

• The Tech Jobs That Are Safe from AI

• Most U.S. doctors are quietly using this AI tool

• Anthropic courts a new kind of customer: small business owners

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Perfect Timing, Big Payouts: Insider Trading Red Flags Emerge on Polymarket

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Nvidia Is Buying the Chip Supply Chain

• eBay rejects $56B GameStop bid as 'neither credible nor attractive'

• Zillow sues Compass, MRED over 'collusion' to hide listings

• Cerebras to raise IPO price range to $150-$160 as demand surges

• War and Data Centers Are Driving Up the Cost of Fiber Optic Cable

• LinkedIn planning to lay off 5% of staff in latest tech-sector cuts

  • Microsoft's LinkedIn Is Cutting Jobs in Latest Industry Cull

• Wholesale inflation jumps 6% in April

  • US producer prices surprise with largest increase in four years

• How the world has avoided an oil catastrophe so far

• How the U.S. Became the Greatest Energy Exporter

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Linguistic workaround allows Marco Rubio to travel to China

• FCC walks back router update ban before it bricks America's network security

• FAA adding transponders to all its airport vehicles after LaGuardia runway crash

• CIA spy blames Dr Fauci for covering up Covid lab leak

  An active CIA agent has accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of orchestrating a cover-up that derailed American spies from blaming the Covid pandemic on China. CIA officer James Erdman told senators on Capitol Hill that in August 2021, the intelligence community was on the verge of concluding the pandemic leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. But just days before the bombshell finding could be released, Fauci 'injected himself' into the probe and 'significantly influenced' intelligence officials to drop their conclusion. Fauci was then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

  'Dr. Fauci's role in the cover-up was intentional,' Erdman told the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday morning. 'Dr. Fauci influenced the analytical process and findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC [Intelligence Community] consulted with a conflicted list of curated subject matter experts, public health officials and scientists,' he said. Republican Senator Rand Paul asked Erdman, a career CIA special operations officer, whether Fauci played a 'significant' role in CIA scientists abandoning their consensus that the disease originated from a lab. 'It was significantly influenced,' Erdman replied before claiming that documentation shows the CIA was poised to declare Covid a lab leak on August 12, 2021. Just five days later, on August 17, that position had mysteriously flipped.

  Erdman also revealed at Wednesday's Senate hearing that the CIA 'illegally monitored' the phones and computers of federal analysts investigating the origins of the virus. 'The CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage of DIG [Director's Initiatives Group] personnel, their investigations, and contact with whistleblowers,' he added.

Trump

• Gas tax holiday momentum grows with Trump support

  Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has been similarly skeptical. “I don’t know that the federal gas tax is going to lower [gas prices] by a lot,” Thune said earlier this year. But momentum appears to be shifting in favor of the idea. The question is whether pressure from the White House will be enough to convince lawmakers to join the push. “We’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time, and when gas goes down, we’ll let it phase back in,” President Donald Trump told CBS News on Monday.

• Elon Musk and Jensen Huang Among CEOs Joining Trump on China Trip

Democrats

• How Mamdani and Hochul Are Solving New York City's Budget Crisis

Left Angst

• Thomas Massie Allegations, Reportedly From His Ex-GF, Making the Rounds on X

• Andreessen Horowitz Is Spending on Politics Like No Other

  • Soros, Ted Turner, etc; were never a problem because they spent their money on proper Leftist directions.

• The companies making billions from the Iran war

• Tennessee Democrats removed from House committees following special session disruptions

  Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton removed Democratic lawmakers from House standing committees and subcommittees on Tuesday following disruptions during the recent special session on congressional redistricting. In a letter addressed to House Democratic Leader Karen Camper dated May 12, Sexton accused members of the Democratic caucus of actions aimed at “disrupting the democratic and legislative processes and creating disorder on the House Floor.”

  The move follows a contentious special session at the Capitol, where lawmakers debated and ultimately approved new congressional district maps. Demonstrations inside and outside committee rooms led to repeated disruptions throughout the week. Speaker Sexton has constitutional authority to set that into motion; this will stay in place until he says otherwise.

  • Tennessee Democrats stripped of House committee seats over redistricting protests

• The billionaires' club at the center of America's public lands fight

• "Call A Republican" San Francisco public phone lets you call a Texas Republican

• Trump Backs Tobacco Firms in Vape Dispute, Prompting FDA Chief's Resignation

  • "We think its bad for you" does not actually give the government a right to ban a thing.

• The Latest News in Vaccine Obstruction

  The Times got a comment from HHS on this: “The studies were withdrawn because the authors drew broad conclusions that were not supported by the underlying data. The F.D.A. acted to protect the integrity of its scientific process and ensure that any work associated with the agency meets its high standards” And that is exactly the sort of bullshit that I would have expected. The higher-ups at HHS have been cloaking a lot of these decisions as issues of scientific integrity, reproducibility, and so on, when what’s really going on is obvious to any outside observer.

  • contrast with the Fauci actions...

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• California mayor resigns, admitting to being an agent for China

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Chewing tobacco counts, right? US Army goes green-ish, wants soldiers munching on plant proteins

• China criticizes US chip equipment bill in run-up to Beijing talks

World

• Britain's hiring culture has become absurd

• The EU is cracking down on TikTok and Instagram because they are... Popular.

• "They protect the law while breaking it": Inside Europol's Shadow IT System

• Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent

• Gunshots fired in standoff at Philippine Senate over ICC suspect

Iran / Houthi

• Some Japanese snack packages are turning black and white as war depletes ink

• U.S. Intelligence Shows Iran Retains Substantial Missile Capabilities

• UAE Building 'Cope Cages' to Protect Energy Facilities from Drone Attack

Israel

• “The End of Our Illusions,”

  That is part of the reason for the pained reaction to Nick Kristof’s opinion column yesterday, in which he claimed (without evidence, obviously) that Israel has instituted a state policy of militaristized bestiality. Today, a meticulous, harrowing report was released on Hamas’s systematic rape and sexual violence toward Israelis on and after October 7. The commission that undertook this investigation “has examined over 10,000 photographs and videos of the attack totaling more than 1,800 hours of visual analysis.” We want to believe that Nick Kristof and all the people who defended and shared his article are just like us—believers in honesty, men and women of integrity, a community of truth-seekers with a baseline sense of human decency. We want to believe this in part because of that very sense of human decency. But we are making a massive error. Kristof’s named sources not only provided no evidence for his lurid bestiality fantasies but themselves were also people with massive credibility deficits.

  • ‘It’s Hamas Propaganda:’ New York Times Writer Nicholas Kristof’s ‘Sexual Violence’ Column Caps a Career of Corrections, Retractions and Apologies Going Back 25 Years

  • No more NYT cooperation: my dog-rape red line

  I’ve also visited the NYT office and helped NYT reporters with numerous stories about quantum computing and beyond. In the wake of Cade Metz’s hatchet job against the rationalist community, I resolved no longer to talk to Metz, but it never even occurred to me to extend that to a broader ban against the NYT itself. After all, it’s the friggin’ NYT! This week, however, Nicholas Kristof—a man who I praised fulsomely in a blog post 20 years ago, for his coverage of the genocide in Darfur—has used the NYT to broadcast the oldest, crudest form of antisemitic libel, accusing the Jews of garishly preposterous crimes (poisoning wells, baking blood into matzo, or in this case, training dogs to rape prisoners). As countless others have since pointed out, the sole source for this ludicrous accusation was a Hamas-linked organization called “Euro-Med” that praised the October 7 “martyrs.” Kristof’s piece came out the same day an Israeli human rights organization released a major report meticulously documenting Hamas’s mass rapes on October 7–something that did happen—and was apparently designed to neutralize the impact of that.

  While the debunking of Kristof came fast, it wasn’t fast enough: now that antisemitic blood libel (dog libel?) has the Gray Lady’s imprimatur, I expect it to ignite violence against Jews all over the world, and I expect my kids to be less safe. So I hereby announce:

  I, Scott Aaronson, member of the National Academy of Sciences, will no longer cooperate with anyone from NYT on anything—neither quantum computing stories nor anything else—until NYT, at minimum, formally retracts its dog-rape libel and fires Kristof.

  • Will he consider that they may have been lying to him about other things, all this time? Even having had numerous examples of similarly thinly sourced libels that he liked because they did match his prejudices? ... ain't holding my breath.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• A Russian ship sank in mysterious circumstances. It may have been carrying submarine nuclear reactors to North Korea.

China

• China is going dark to develop its own Mythos

• The Chinese whiz kids of Silicon Valley

• China Edges Past U.S. in Global Approval Ratings

• Xi Is Planning for China's Final Victory over the U.S.

• Alibaba's core profit plunges 84% even as AI and cloud growth accelerate

• Chinese EVs take the world by storm

Health / Medicine

• The Ozempic plateau may be caused by the drug starving the gut bacteria

• Phage Therapy Gains Momentum in Antibiotic Resistance

• Alzheimer's drugs offer little benefit, major review finds

• New Research Suggests Moderate Egg Consumption Is Linked to a Longer Life, Doctor Breaks It Down.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Parents who refused to let their three children go outside their house for FOUR YEARS due to Covid fears, leaving them with extreme mental and physical conditions, are sentenced to prison

  The parents of three children rescued from a four-year Covid 'lockdown' in a so-called Spanish 'House of Horrors' have been jailed for nearly three years. German freelance tech recruiter Christian Steffen, 53, and his American-born wife Melissa Ann Steffen, 48, were today handed their sentences following a behind-closed-doors trial in the northern Spanish city of Oviedo, where they lived. There, the couple kept their three young children - a then-ten-year-old and twins aged eight at the time - inside a squalid home for nearly four years between December 2021 when they arrived in Spain and April 28, 2025, claiming the kids needed to be protected from the Covid-19 pandemic.

• A New Viral Outbreak. The Same Mistakes All over Again

• The Race to Develop a Test for the Rare Andes Hantavirus

• Hantavirus Update–25-Year-Old on Plane with Infected Passenger Has Symptoms

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Facebook is a hub for illegal wildlife trade, and that's by design, report says

• Bone-crushing hyenas are cleaning up city streets in Ethiopia

• Why are some people mosquito magnets? Clues are emerging

• The Carbon Market Is Set for a Major Shake-Up

• Scientists find insects may feel pain after crickets nurse sore antenna