2026-08-04

Horseshit

• Can Animals Be Right- or Left-Pawed?

• A Wild Netflix Lawsuit Shows Why Drugs and Alcohol Don't Mix with Work

• The Case for Colonising Titan

• A group of teenage hikers relied on Google maps and ended up needing a rescue.

• "Today?" Much of Philosophy Today is Self-Indulgent

• NASA's New 3D Model Shows the Earth Is a Lumpy Mess

• The Allure and Peril of Riding an Alaskan Wave for Six Miles

• Why do so many fitness fans end up needing surgery?

• Planemakers take steps to conserve aircraft windows in tight market

• Is 'bra doping' a thing at the Tour de France Femmes?

• The Kitchen Habits That Are Truly Dangerous and the Ones That Are Just Gross.

• The Myth of the Food Desert

• The Mysterious Case of the JetBlue Flight That Went into Free Fall

• Gen Z Can't Afford a First Date

• Boomers Are Leaving Behind More Art Than Anyone Wants

• Ancient, never-before-seen 'earthworks' discovered in the Amazon

celebrity gossip

• Bill Gates Held A Top Secret 'Q' Clearance For Seven Years - And The DOE Won't Say Why

  Which agency decided a private citizen needed access to Restricted Data under the Atomic Energy Act, and for what program?

Musk

• SpaceX wins $1.6B Space Force contract for 18 Falcon 9 launches

• SpaceX is set to acquire 130k acres of marshland in southern Louisiana

• SpaceX's post-IPO plunge sets tense backdrop for first earnings report

• The SpaceX Falcon 9 Moon Crash Is a Warning for Lunar Bases

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• When expressive humanoid robots are awkward, people become wary – brain study

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The Catholic Church's Progressive Revival

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Cambridge professor made impossible claim he was on Seven Up

  The inaugural episode was broadcast in 1964, meaning its subjects were born in 1957. Subsequent programmes have been titled 21 Up, 28 Up and so on as the participants have grown older. The BBC also commissioned a spin-off series titled Up: Millennium Generation. This began in 2000, also featuring a group of seven-year-olds. At the time, Prof Arday would have been 15. A BBC spokesman confirmed that Prof Arday was not involved with the Up: Millennium Generation films.

• 'A waste of time for all of us': caught in the crossfire of the peer-review wars

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Spider-Man: Brand New Day leak racks up millions of views

• How rogue officers turned a nationwide camera network into a tool for stalking

  • Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

• Foldables are sort of boring now – and that's great news for Apple

• Southern California radio station lays off staff switches to all-music format

• New York has published new rules that will force online services to... Publish feeds showing only accounts users have subscribed to, in strict chronological order.

• Samsung bans smart TV apps that share users' internet connections with strangers

• The global memory shortage hits the MacBook Air

• Hughesnet Files for Bankruptcy

  Hughes Network Systems filed in a US bankruptcy court on Sunday, but the company notes it’ll continue serving its satellite internet customers during the restructuring period.

• Sure mate, buy me a bloody coffee

  people putting their stuff out there and maybe–just maybe–someone will connect with them and say “Hey mate, I liked what you wrote. Nice stuff!” And, on the off chance that someone liked something enough, they might buy you a virtual coffee. It’s the same act as someone moving forward from the crowd gathered around the busker, dropping coins into their hat, nodding and giving them a smile. I can tell you, getting that recognition and some nice words via my buy-me-a-coffee link not only makes my day, it makes my frikken week.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• HN Jobs:

  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2026)

  • Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026)

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Here's how engineers plan to save the satellite sent to save NASA's Swift mission

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Further Developments About Internal AI Models Hacking Things

  Both of our leading labs made the same dumb mistake of leaving models totally unsupervised, with lowered safeguards, without first having the models try their best to break out of the sandbox. And these are, together with Google DeepMind, some of our most responsible frontier AI labs. Most of the others are clearly even less responsible. Meanwhile, many people still think the whole thing was a marketing stunt, despite that explanation making zero sense. The world is super derpy, and that is going to be one our biggest problems.

  • When rogue AI launches a cyberattack, who is legally responsible?

  • The OpenAI Hack Shows the Genie Is Out of the Bottle

  • Who's legally to blame for Anthropic and OpenAI's autonomous AI hacks?

• Hollywood fights AI in public while building it into movies

• Data centres vs. housing: how London became a central battleground

• GDP growth shows no evidence of AI productivity boom

• EU enforces labeling AI generated content

• 1 in 4 people in Japan believes AI could replace friends and family: poll

• Company Offering Printed Books to Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage

• Five Takeaways from the Times Investigation into Larry Ellison's A.I. Gamble

• OpenAI's super PAC is funding AI-generated news site attacking industry critics

• Amazon completes $50B investment in OpenAI

• The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

• Sci-fi authors Scalzi and Stross decry AI's dystopian impact on their craft

• Critical CVE issued for hallucinated SQLite vulnerability

• Europe opens bidding for seven AI 'gigafactories' in a €30B bid to catch up

• AI Listings Have Made Apartment Hunting More Debasing

• AI's talent wars have a loyalty problem

• The AI Bailout Could Be Baked into the AI Bubble

• "Shock from Jensen Huang's Bubble Will Be Severe" Warning... Are Retail Investors Facing a 'Boomerang'?

  The Economist specifically highlighted the recent sharp declines in the stock prices of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix as a precursor to the collapse of the global stock market bubble.

• OpenAI's Unreleased Model Astra Solves Ten Major Open Mathematics Problems

• The U.S. lead over China in AI is all but gone

• Retiring the DALL·E GPT

• Google dev kit spurs first-ever agent-on-agent violence

• Apple fixed Siri. So why does it feel anticlimactic?

• Big Tech's Anthropic and OpenAI stakes are distorting the corporate earnings

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Coldcard hack just grew to $89M, call your friends

  • Coldcard wallet RNG flaw likely linked to $88M Bitcoin theft

• Tether bought 14T of gold for USDT reserves in second quarter

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Team America: Yen Police

  • The message beneath the yen intervention

• Return-to-office mandates are killing workplace trust

• Situational Awareness got the future right but misread the past

• BMW to Volkswagen: How deep is Germany's auto industry cull?

• Pawnshop Chain Serves the K-Shaped Economy

• Palantir soars 12% on blowout quarter, with US commercial revenue soaring \~150%

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Fifth Amendment Fauci’s Narcissism Destroyed Faith in Scientific Methodology

  • Dr. Ashish Jha on COVID-19: ‘It probably was a lab leak.’

  • Fauci’s follies — time to toss the ‘science is settled’ groupthink.

• ‘It’s the honor system’: New Jersey's noncitizen voter registration brings private worries into the open

  There’s little to stop noncitizens from registering to vote if they want to, or even by mistake. And election officials and campaign consultants from both parties believe that the number of noncitizens being added to the voter rolls is significantly higher than the 6,600 Sherrill cited — because the state has been automatically registering drivers since 2018, and her figure covers only June 2023 to June 2024. It's unclear how many noncitizens have registered to vote in New Jersey beyond the one-year period Sherrill cited. The Trump administration gave a preliminary estimate of around 35,000. While New Jersey political insiders don't know if that's true, they're almost certain it's more than 6,600. Some speculated it could be slightly more. Others said it could be even above the Trump administration's estimates.

Trump

• Capital One says it closed Trump Organization accounts

• Trump blasts Exxon, Chevron for making 'too much money,' demands lower prices

Democrats

• Mamdani's tax database doxed wealthy New Yorkers

• Author of Democrats' 2024 Autopsy Says Party Left Out Key Chapter

Left Angst

• Trump offering early access to online posts

• ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

• The fading American Dream: Visa uncertainty drives Indian tech workers back home

• How Does the Qatar-Donated Air Force One Compare with Other Presidential Jets?

• TSA Privatization Returns Airport Security to a Dangerous Past

• Trump admin moves to block public from enforcing environmental protection laws

• What Trump's latest slump means for the midterms

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Swatting results in Tucson man being shot and paralyzed

  Melendez called 911 to report the hacking and threats. “They said that they were going to call the police station and say that I have a bomb so that FBI shows up at my house so I could get swatted,” Melendez told a 911 operator, a recording of the call shows. “They can’t just call the SWAT on you,” the operator assured him. “That’s not how it works.”

  About 5:40 a.m. April 10, two days after Melendez reported the swatting threats, someone with a Wisconsin area code phone number who was claiming to be him called 311, the non-emergency number for city services. The caller told them his father had just shot his sister and provided Melendez’s home address. Shortly after, several deputies were at the Melendez home. While on the way, a deputy advised over the radio that they could be responding to a swatting call, noting Melendez’s report from two days earlier, the police report says. The deputies, hearing nothing from inside the house, unsuccessfully tried to enter through a door. They then went around to the back of the house. Deputy Santiago Casillas-Velazquez, a 3-year-veteran, picked up a shovel and used it to smash open Melendez’s bedroom window. Melendez ran to wake his mother, telling her to call 911, his lawyer said. He then grabbed his mother’s handgun and went to see who was breaking into his house, Sethi said. Once inside, Vasquez spotted Melendez with a handgun standing behind the ajar interior bedroom door, the report says. Vasquez and Casillas-Velazquez, who was standing outside the house, opened fire. Melendez was shot in the right leg and shoulder. Melendez underwent emergency surgery for gunshot wounds and a possible spinal injury, the report says. In the time since the shooting, Melendez has remained in serious medical condition. He is paralyzed from the mid-chest down and will need to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life, his attorney said.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Why Is the U.S. Running So Low on Weapons?

• US Military asks troops for 'creative and unconventional' ideas to punish Iran

  • Pentagon asks soldiers for 'creative' ideas to punish Iran

World

• Chaos of border crossing gives way to limbo for Moroccans on Ceuta's streets

  • Spain to put containment fence round Ceuta after deadly border rush from Morocco

• UK Graduate Job Openings Fall to Lowest Level Since Pandemic

• Most Australian teens on social media three months after under-16 ban began

• WestJet labour dispute is a proxy battle between Carney and unions

• Europe makes trillion-euro bet to revive its battered industry

• Australia Ups Demands on Big Tech Firms to Pay for News Stories

  • Australia hikes levy for tech giants that fail to strike local news deals

• Apple launches legal challenge against UK attempt to access encrypted user data

• As France's Elders Swelter in the Heat, Postal Workers Come to the Rescue

Iran / Houthi

• Trump Calls Off Strike, Says Framework Deal Reached – Iran Denies

• Trump says Iran faces 'decapitation' if it doesn't strike deal

Israel

• Israeli court halts Ben Gvir's crocodile prison plan over animal rights

China

• Chinese Microdramas Go Global as AI Slashes Production Costs

• The Future, Made in China

Health / Medicine

• Viagra may reduce cancer metastasis, study shows

• Marijuana surpasses alcohol and cigarettes in daily use among US adults

  New data from the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), reveals that there are 21.4 million daily or near-daily marijuana users in the U.S. This surpasses the 19.9 million people who smoke cigarettes and the 17.2 million who consume alcohol.

  • I wonder about the overlap. I'd like to see a data backed Venn diagram on this one.

• Younger generations may be more cancer-prone

• Meat allergy is on the rise – what scientists want to know

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• A mystery virus started killing horses. Then humans

• Taylor Farms Has Rewritten Its Cyclospora Statement Four Times in Sixteen Days

• Cyclospora outbreak causes first two deaths

  Two people in Michigan have died in connection with the multistate cyclosporiasis outbreak, Michigan health officials said Monday, marking the first known deaths linked to the foodborne illness. Medical records show that the individuals who died "had significant underlying health conditions that may have been impacted by cyclosporiasis and dehydration," Michigan's Health and Human Services Department said Monday. The CDC is aware of more than 11,000 cases nationwide — though the number is likely much higher as not all cases are reported to state health officials or the CDC. Health officials are still unclear where the outbreak originated, though many cases were linked to fresh produce from Taylor Farms, which is sold at Taco Bell. Taylor Farms recalled iceberg lettuce sourced from Mexico in mid-July over the outbreak. Taco Bell similarly said it would stop serving Taylor Farms lettuce.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Romania explodes rock to get more water flow to nuclear reactor

  • Romania blasts rocks to reroute cooling Danube water to nuclear reactor

• Spain's plan for the first octopus farm has been abandoned

• ‘Stop all outdoor activities’: South Korea records its highest ever temperature

• Moths That Smell Flowers Through Their Wings

• Scientists detect a sharp acceleration in global warming

• July was driest month in southern England since records began

• Plans for nuclear-powered merchant ships must confront risks

• Rhine falls to record low levels as drought strains Europe's rivers