2026-10-04

Horseshit

• Why should I have to pay more for buses if I don't use a smartphone?

• Swedish travel agency caters specifically to introverts

• Why Adults Are Playing with Toys

• Should you be using a tongue-scraper?

• Palantir's fondness for French food led to 'forward-deployed engineers'

celebrity gossip

• Cronos, the black metal innovator who reignited rock's hellraising attitude

• The search for Amelia Earhart's plane begins

• Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes doc is a modern masterpiece of deceit

• Aaron Sorkin Surprised Jesse Eisenberg Wouldn't Want to Play Mark Zuckerberg

Obit

• Milt Windler, NASA flight director who helped save Apollo 13, dies at 94

• Kraftwerk founder Florian Schneider dies at 73

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Social media harms democracy by spreading rumors, survey shows

Musk

• Delta Is the Only Big Four Airline That Won't Use Starlink–Elon Musk Is Furious

• US appeals court blocks Minnesota law barring 'nudified' photos in xAI lawsuit

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Has the Autonomous Trucking Revolution Arrived?

• EV drivers love their cars, but some passengers feel sick – this could be why

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• A 'tsunami' of church closings is poised to remake America

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Do high school students have to work harder nowadays?

• Swiss scientist soils underpants, wins silly science prize

• Things that apparently cause cancer

  It would shock you to know that Costco, according to a new Harvard School of Public Health methodology, caused 120,687 cases of cancer mortality nationally every year, simply due to living in close proximity to their warehouses. Private colleges accounted for 83,782 more. Harvard itself is responsible for 5,842 cancer deaths. Living near a Major League Baseball field causes almost 19 times as many cancer deaths as living near a Major League Soccer pitch. These conclusions are obviously absurd, but they come from the exact same methodology that researchers at Harvard use to “prove” that nuclear power plants cause cancer in nearby communities. Earlier this year, Adam Stein and I called out a series of Harvard studies showing that nuclear power plants were associated with higher rates of cancer incidence and cancer mortality as nonsense. Now that we’ve spent the last few months replicating the analysis and expanding it, we are able to show that no matter what landmark you use, their methodology will show an increased cancer risk and mortality. The studies simply do not prove anything about cancer incidence.

  Sophisticated statistics can produce extremely precise nonsense when the design fails to identify the causal mechanism. Bad science like this is especially dangerous when applied to something culturally plausible that gets a positive result—it is easy to twist a result into a compelling narrative, especially if it confirms one’s biases. Nuclear power plants create energy through radiation, and radiation causes cancer; therefore, nuclear power plants cause cancer. It is especially telling that no matter what landmark we applied to the methodology, we have yet to get a negative result. There is, in fact, a real chance that you simply cannot get a negative result from this method.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Used Processor Leads to Game Ban

  • Buying used CPUs can expose users to existing bans from anti-cheat engines

• New Mexico wants Meta to pay $40B in penalties after data privacy trial

• Toshiba is planning to double its hard drive production next year.

• Meta VR Glasses are what the Vision Pro should have been

• AMD's cancelled Zen 3 gaming CPU had 128MB of game-boosting L3 cache

• Koreans Left with Spoiled Food Due to Borked Samsung Firmware Update for Fridges

• Comcast's NBCUniversal cuts streaming technology jobs

• The Work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on Improving Old AMD GPUs on Linux

• Apple Confirms iPhone 18 Pro Max AT&T Issues, Devices Require Replacement

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• Flock Cameras Lead Police to Identify Wrong Car in Road Rage Case

• Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• FSF sponsors GNU Boot, a libre, ethical replacement for the nonfree BIOS or UEFI

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Radio signal detected for first time from a planet outside our solar system

• Mars' North Polar Ice Is Much Cleaner Than Scientists Thought

• The risk of space debris falling to Earth and causing deaths and is growing, experts say.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Will America Spend 9% of Its GDP on AI? The Industry Is Counting on It

• AI 'godfather' LeCun has 'zero concerns' about human extinction

• OpenAI says hacking at scale is expensive to investigate

  • California Attorney General Serves Investigative Subpoena on OpenAI

  • OpenAI Fires Researchers for Allegedly Sharing Information with AI Safety Group

  • I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken

  • OpenAI safety leader David Robinson resigns

  • Florida AG seeks injunction to hamper OpenAI development

  • OpenAI safety leader quits, warning AI company's culture is 'broken'

• The Mulleted, Meme-Loving Billionaire Behind Meta's Hit AI App

  • Muse Creates Detailed Profiles of All Your Friends and Family

• An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why

  • AI bots are flooding researchers with requests for money and time

• Some topics are off limits inside popular Chinese-made free AI, researchers find

• AI Experts Want to Do High-Stakes Research Out in the Open

• Apple changes full-disk access permissions to curb abuse from AI agents

• French supercomputer maker Bull doubles output to boost Europe's AI ambitions

• How to stay smart in the age of AI: the science of critical thinking

• ArXiv imposes rate limit on paper submissions to stem the AI slop tide

• Anthropic claims popular Chinese AI model has Mythos-class hacking abilities

• Israeli man used AI, ChatGPT in covert tasks while spying for Iran

• US killer's sentence quashed because of AI video of victim shown in court

• Will A.I. Make Your Brain Lazy? Here's What the New Research Shows

• Anthropic's super bug-hunting model Mythos is hardcore good at math

• Georgia holds emergency meeting on AI exposing voters' secret ballots

• Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being

• Don't Write with AI, Say People Who Write with AI

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Crypto thieves attack man in home

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Legal sector outpaced US jobs growth in September

• G7 nations will release 100M barrels of oil and diesel fuel

Trump

• Trump Accounts have auto-enrolled more than 60M children, Treasury says

Left Angst

• U.S. may have overthrown Venezuela due to chat with Grok

• 'Elon is my prophet': how Musk's DOGE team took a wrecking ball to Washington

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• 911 call reveals concerns about well-being of 2 children found dead from starvation at home.

  Emory Deacon, 2, and Harlow Deacon, 15 months old, died of starvation and dehydration due to neglect, Charleston County coroner Bobbi Jo O’Neal said. Justine May, the children’s mother and described as their primary caregiver, has been charged in the case with two counts of homicide by child abuse. According to affidavits, after being read her Miranda rights, May told detectives that she had spent the previous two weeks in a “blur,” saying she could not remember the last time she fed Emory and Harlow or gave them anything to drink. Authorities said May told detectives that she believed her children were dead because they did not eat. She reportedly told deputies that she knew that not feeding her children was neglectful and confirmed she had been the only one present at home and was the sole caregiver for the girls over the last few weeks.

• Hacks of 2 federal agencies in a month have spilled a bonanza of sensitive data

  • ShinyHunters hacker in FBI data theft detained in Jordan

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Former SR-71 Engineer Talks NASA's Blackbird Revival Program

• Hackers Breached Propulsion System of US-Bound Oil Tanker

• Military AI: France challenges US dominance over NATO's classified networks

World

• BT accused of 'bullying' customers by pausing broadband in digital landline push

• Canada, EU plan to link next-gen payment systems, easing transactions

• Half of UK wants to rejoin EU and backing it could drive up Labour vote

• House prices across Europe: where they're rising fastest and why

• UAE threatens Burnham over Man City: We'll pull billions out of UK

• Ford CEO Says Europe Is Lost to Chinese Electric Vehicles

• Scotland turns humble oats into world-class oatmeal porridge

• A grim winter ahead? EU states asked to prepare gas and electricity savings

Israel

• Co-pilot on Flydubai flight was banned from flying by Oman for extremist views

• How A Boeing 737 MAX Survived a Nosedive Traveling at the Speed of Sound

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine rolls out drone-stopping razor fence to thwart attacks

Health / Medicine

• Hair Loss Was Just the Start. Ozempic Users Are Also Reporting Nail Trouble

• One in eight cancers globally caused by infections

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Patient-zero drill put health facilities to the test–40% of them failed

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Earth Tipped on Its Side During the Age of Dinosaurs–and Not Just Once

• Woman laid to rest in coffin made from mushrooms in Australian first

• Our Solar System Is Terminally Unstable and Will Be Completely Destroyed

• Hawaii's centuries-old sea arch collapses into Pacific after rough storms