2026-10-19

Horseshit

• Mini organs launching to space may help future astronauts stay healthy

• Dogs Seem to Agree with Humans That 'Bouba' Is Round and 'Kiki' Is Spiky

• Squeeze into those skinny jeans: millennial culture is back

• The One Question I Can't Stand at Restaurants ("What's your phone number?")

• Diego Poncelet sets downhill skateboarding world record at 151.83 km/h

• Can't bear to say goodbye to your pet? Biotech's got you covered

• The Renaissance woman who was the first female painter of erotic nudes

• Gen Z Is the First Generation Dumber Than Their Parents

• Italy's guiltiest food ritual went public

• Colorful Sexual Enhancement Pills at Gas Stations May Contain Drugs Not Listed on Labels.

• Many Cultures Find Women's Faces to Be More Attractive Than Men's, a New Study

• The Deadly 1.5-Mile Corridor That Shows the Fatal Flaw in America's Road Design

celebrity gossip

• How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving

  • Theranos-Style Fraud Has Become the Norm

• O.J. Simpson, a Secret Informant and a Decades-Old Mystery

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Zuckerberg's Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day

• Meta is accused of meddling with Brazilian election

• Kids are outsmarting social media bans. That's not a problem we need to solve

  • Young People and the Future of Free Expression

  New Knight Foundation-Ipsos research among young adults and high school students points to a generation that strongly values free speech as a democratic principle, but is less confident about exercising it without consequences. Across all groups, spaces designed for open exchange, such as classrooms and workplaces, are where they feel least free, while the spaces that are personal and private, like home and increasingly AI chatbots, are where they feel the most free. Fewer than four in 10 college students say freedom of speech is secure — the lowest level measured in a decade of Knight Foundation-Ipsos surveys.

  • Campus deplatformings hit record high

Musk

• Tesla 'Cannot Guarantee' Roadster Reservation Holders Will Ever Get a Car

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Most Polite Trucker in America Is Driverless 18-Wheeler on Texas Interstate

• Waymo is coming to Toronto. Will its self-driving cars be winter-ready?

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• A Princeton PhD Applied to 2,300 Jobs. He Still Can't Get One

• Hackers have stolen the personal data of millions of California students, dating back up to 20 years.

• It's time to shut down business schools

• It's time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life

• I Teach at a Business School. It's Time to Shut Them Down

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• NY announces game ownership bill requiring ownership rather than licensing

  • US Rep proposes bill to give video game buyers "ownership," not "a license"

• Cinemas have been getting away with lies. Films should begin on time

• Wing Commander 3 is getting a remaster

• Threads and Bluesky have quarantined some of the worst people on the Internet

• Nvidia totally isn't cancelling Nvidia's RTX 5090 says Nvidia, as 5090 prices climb into the ionosphere.

  • Quad 8-pin mod protects the $8,500 RTX 5090 you can’t replace from melting

  • The RTX 5090 has disappeared from Nvidia's own store.

• Mark Gurman: Apple Made 'Major Mistake' with iPhone Duo Pre-Orders

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• Metas smart glasses record conversations without the wake phrase, company admits

• British Airways: Filming Crew With Meta Glasses Could Get Your Tickets Cancelled

• Flock camera locations revealed on MapQuest's new Surveillance Layer

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• The flowcharts are exciting: Inside the Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction

  Most people don't give much thought to computer operations such as addition or subtraction. But there are interesting algorithms and special cases behind the scenes, and these features are embodied in clever silicon circuits. The intricate rules to handle positive and negative zeros, positive and negative infinities, and Not-a-Number are part of modern computers, since the 8087 led to the IEEE-754 floating-point standard used today. The 8087 went a bit overboard with special cases, however. Some 8087 features, such as projective infinity, unnormals, and pseudo-zero were dropped from the standard becauses they weren't worth the effort.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Japan to launch world-first mission to collect samples from Martian moon

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• America's $10T AI infrastructure boom is starting to fray

  • Why CoreWeave is in the crosshairs of the AI scare

  • Weak Links Start to Show in A.I. Borrowing

• Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1B in damages

  • Leaked Anthropic Draft AI Regulatory Bill Is Unacceptable and Troubling

  I find it unacceptable that Anthropic is actively shopping exactly the type of bill I have warned we will need to fight against during the lame duck session. They are trying to use this last time with a Republican Congress to pass preemption of exactly the important state laws, and get some transparency but not much enforcement in exchange.

• OpenAI Saudi national bugging case shows threat to U.S. leadership in AI

• Legal experts warn Meta's new terms still grant broad scraping permissions

  • Meta updates data scraping policy following criticism

• Will it be a golden age or a dark age for mathematics (and science)?

  • Citizen Science Groups Grapple with the Rise of A.I. Slop

  • OpenAI's blockbuster math proof isn't what you think it is

• Blocking AI-bot can be a double-edged Sword

• Data centers are now the largest financial bet in US history

• Deezer Will Let Listeners Filter Out AI Music

• Anthropic turns to lawyers to help AI agents strike deals

• Anthropic says is workforce has stopped doing actual work and is spending more time in meetings.

• Doctors and Lawyers Are Joining AI's $400-an-Hour Gig Economy

• Websites are closing their doors to AI agents

• World Bank says 'small AI' could transform developing countries

• Microsoft drops AI datacentre project in Essex over power supply concerns

• Data Centers Are Turning Trump Voters into Democrats

• Men Can't Stop Faking How Much They Know About AI

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Polymarket saw $600M in election trades after the elections were over

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Feel Like You're Overpaying for Hotels? Blame Expedia, a New Lawsuit Says

• Securities Class Action Filed Against Duolingo, Inc

  • How the Fed Is Quietly Inflating the AI Bubble While Hiking Your Electric Bill

  When the Fed raises the price of money, it hikes electric bills, property taxes, mortgage and auto costs, and the price of working capital. It’s time to drop our illusions about the central bank.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• In Age of Online Ads, Supreme Court Weighs Videotape-Era Privacy Law

Trump

• Trump blames France violence on immigration

  In a Truth Social Post, Mr Trump said: “France is burning! The immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country. “Close your Borders and take control, before it is too late!” Earlier, JD Vance, the US vice-president, wrote on X: “Western liberals imported the Third World into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion. They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility.”

  Emmanuel Macron, the French president, will deliver an emergency address to the nation at 7pm UK time after meeting with his ministers. He is yet to respond to Mr Trump. With six months of Mr Macron’s presidency left, the unrest threatens to further tarnish his legacy and splinter France. On Saturday, peaceful protests against the rising cost of living, the state of public high schools and the erosion of public services in France descended into violence, chaos and mass looting as gangs ransacked luxury shops. Windows were smashed and debris littered the streets of the capital after hooded and masked rioters hijacked the political protest to target groceries, tech stores and luxury boutiques.

  Ariel Weil, mayor of Paris Centre, described the violence as an “unprecedented situation in down-town Paris – one we had never experienced even during the Yellow Vests protests”.

Left Angst

• Trump says Google kisses his ass

  Trump bragged at a rally that ‘Google wouldn’t have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass.‘

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Russia and US are discussing joint deals including on data centres

• The Internet's undersea backbone is slipping into the danger zone

• US threatens Europe over Starlink restrictions

• Are we sleepwalking into World War III?

World

• Limoges Town Hall, Which Survived Two World Wars, Is Destroyed in France Riots

  • Buildings set ablaze as police clash with protesters across France

  • French government in crisis talks after 'colossal failure of the state'

  • France's Appetite for 'Magic Money' Has Turned into a Debt Bomb

  • France is on the brink, days away from make-or-break moment in debt crisis

  • Euronews’ crew assaulted by masked individuals while covering protests in Paris

• Why are people protesting across Europe

• Albanian Protests Escalating

• Dutch cloud services concerned after U.S. request leads to server seizure

• A 'Ludicrously Ugly' Bridge Is Exhibit a That Britain Has Lost Its Mojo

• Thieves steal 30k bottles of Italy's most prized wines in Tuscany heist

• Home sellers cut asking prices on 3k properties a day

Israel

• Gaza changed Europe, exposing cracks that grow bigger by the week

• Millions exposed to spyware operation through online ads, researchers say

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Zelensky says Musk-owned satellite system still restricted in Ukraine

• Starlink Gateway Station Serving Ukraine Targeted in Arson Attempt in Lithuania

• Ukraine targets "Russia's Google" as the internet becomes a new front line

• Drones Strike VKontakte Data Center and Oil Terminal in Russia Leningrad Region

• KOSMOS 2612 and ICEYE-X36: a worrisome cat-and-mouse-game in Space

  If ICEYE-X36 is indeed used by Ukraine, this means that a satellite from one country (Russia) is closely approaching a satellite of another country (Ukraine) with which it is at war. So I wonder and worry whether we are perhaps watching a first actual on-orbit ASAT attack in the making here... The next few days and hours should learn us more.

  • Could Russia Be Poised to Use an On-Orbit Weapon Against a Commercial Satellite?

China

• China proposes export controls on its advanced AI models and chip designs

• China startup demoes prototype EUV light source, still years away from viability

• Chinese Automakers Are Building American-Style Cars–Just Not for Americans

Health / Medicine

• Study shows cannabis is not associated with better sleep quality

• Brown Fat Can Be Beneficial and Blood Pressure Meds Could Activate It

• Hospitals' next lucrative bet: longevity clinics

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• 'What the hell did this?': The orca brothers preying on great white sharks

• Bleached corals thrive within days when touching healthy neighbour

• Southern ground hornbill gets 3D printed beak prostheses at Artis Zoo

• EPA backtracks on claims US has phased out toxic PFAS compounds

• A California town's beaches are washing away. Can its residents turn the tide?