2026-03-03

Horseshit

• Why it's difficult to NOT snack, even after a meal

• Why mathematicians hate Good Will Hunting

• The Crossing Guard Making $14,000 a Month Mailing Out Her Musings from the Job

• Stone Age boy in Sweden was buried in deerskin and a woodpecker headdress

• Much training: Humans show bat-like skills using mouth-click echolocation

• Scientists Create "Smart Underwear" to Measure How Often We Fart

• 5 Takeaways on America's Boom in Billionaires

• Machine-made snow makes ski racing faster and riskier

• You Can Meditate in a Coffin in Japan. They'll Even Give You a Cute One

• Science shows curiosity is at the heart of great dates–and lasting love

celebrity gossip

• Zendaya and Tom Holland have married in secret, stylist Law Roach claims

• Shia LaBeouf says 'gay people are scary' in shock first interview since Mardi Gras arrest

  Shia LaBeouf blamed his Mardi Gras bar brawl arrest on his fear of gay people. “I’ll be honest with you, big gay people are scary to me,” the former child star boldly admitted in an interview with Andrew Callaghan’s Channel 5, which was posted on YouTube Saturday. “When I’m like standing by myself and three gays are next to me, touching my leg, I get scared. I’m sorry. If that’s homophobic, then I’m that. Yeah.” LaBeouf went on to divulge intimate details about his mental health issues, saying that he feels triggered to respond when his “masculinity” is “challenged.” “My dad was raped by his cousin. So, he was in my ear all the time,” he said, noting that the issue is something he’s potentially had for many years. “I’ve never had no problem with gay people. Never. I remember paying for people’s transition surgery when I was f—king around on the internet heavy. I’ve never been adversarial towards it,” LaBeouf doubled down.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Saturday Night Live criticised for 'hurtful' Tourette's sketch

Musk

• Elon Musk's makeshift AI power plant generates sound and fury in Mississippi

• X Is Drowning in Disinformation Following US and Israeli Attack on Iran

• A World Where All Is Free. That's Elon Musk's Theory of 'Sustainable Abundance.'

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo robotaxi blocks EMS responding to Austin mass shooting

  • After gunshots in entertainment district: Waymo taxi blocks ambulance in Austin

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• A priest helped her see her drinking problem. Talks with Jesus kept her sober

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Pokémon turns 30 – how the fictional pocket monsters shaped science

• When I lost my university email, my identity as scientist took an unexpected hit

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• AMD will bring its "Ryzen AI" processors to standard desktop PCs for first time

• Microsoft bans the word "Microslop" on its Discord, then locks the server

• Everett shuts down Flock camera network after judge rules footage public record

  • Flock license plate readers cost city big, deliver little

• $10K Bounty to Anyone Who Can Hack Ring Cameras to Stop Sharing Data with Amazon

• Oh great, here comes 6G

• Resist 'dangerous' age checks for social media, scientists warn

• Apple Ramps Up Work on Glasses, Pendant, and Camera AirPods

• HBO Max and Paramount+ to Combine into One Streaming Platform

• The world wants to ban children from social media with grave consequences

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• HN Jobs:

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

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

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Sam Altman: the deal with the Pentagon "was definitely rushed"

  • How Talks Between Anthropic and the Defense Dept. Fell Apart

  • Pentagon's Anthropic Designation Won't Survive First Contact with Legal System

  • The Pentagon strongarmed AI firms before Iran strikes

  • OpenAI's "compromise" with The Pentagon is what Anthropic feared

  • In The Pentagon Battle with Anthropic, We All Lose

  • Secretary of War Tweets That Anthropic is Now a Supply Chain Risk

  Anthropic would be fine without government business, and the government would mostly be fine without directly using Anthropic. Face was saved. I have sources that confirm that Trump’s announcement was wisely intended as an off-ramp and de-escalation of the situation, and that it was intended to be the end of it, or perhaps even a deal could have still been reached now that everyone could breathe. An hour after that, on his own, Pete Hegseth went rogue and blew the whole situation up, illegally declaring that ‘effective immediately’ he was declaring Anthropic a Supply Chain Risk, and that anyone who did business with the Department of War in any capacity could not use Anthropic’s products in any capacity. Even if it had not been issued via a Tweet, this is not how the law actually works. If this is implemented as stated, it will cause a market bloodbath and immense damage to our national security and supply chain. It would be attempted corporate murder with a global blast radius.

  • Anthropic to Department of Defense: Drop Dead

• Expert Beginners and Lone Wolves will dominate this early LLM era

• Politicians are being sold AI-powered 'digital fighters'

• DeepSeek to release long-awaited AI model in new challenge to US rivals

• Deflationary spiral if AI sparks unemployment and only benefits a small elite

• The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ

• AI Is Acing Math Exams Faster Than Scientists Write Them

• A robot arm with puppy dog eyes is just one of Lenovo's new desktop AI concepts

• Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of mining Claude

• SCOTUS declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• JPMorgan warns Stablecoins could put trillions in deposits at risk

• South Korea's tax office apologizes for leaking seed phrase to seized crypto

• Crypto's Richest Man Details His Secret Talks, Prison Time and Humbling Comedown

• Associated Press Announces It's Teaming Up with Kalshi Ahead of the Midterms

• Crypto Is Pointless. Not Even the White House Can Fix That.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The world is running out of silver – and AI is accelerating the squeeze

• Nvidia to invest $4 billion in two photonics companies

• Global economy on track for worst decade since 1960s, World Bank warns

• The average 50-something American is now worth $1.4M

• Charter gets FCC permission to buy Cox and become largest ISP in the US

• 'Equity punks' wiped out in BrewDog's £33M sale to cannabis company

• Marine Insurers Cancel War Risk Cover for Gulf | gCaptain

  Marine insurers are cancelling war risk coverage for vessels and oil shipping rates are set to surge further after the widening Iran conflict left at least three tankers damaged, a seafarer killed and 150 ships stranded around the Strait of Hormuz. Companies including Gard, Skuld, NorthStandard, the London P&I Club and the American Club said their cancellations would take effect from March 5, according to notices dated March 1 on their websites. War risk cover will be excluded in Iranian waters, as well as the Gulf and adjacent waters, according to the notices.

  • The cancellation of war risk coverage on ships isn’t the crisis. It’s the canary.

  the normal playbook for war risk is repricing, not cancellation. Canceling coverage entirely is a massive escalation in underwriting posture. It signals something beyond risk, it signals uncertainty so deep the underwriter can’t even price it. The question everyone should be asking: why? Why not just jack up premiums and make a fortune off the crisis like they did in the Black Sea off Ukraine?

  if London is suddenly flying blind it’s not just Lloyd’s policyholders at risk. It’s the entire global reinsurance chain.

  • Except Lloyd's wasn't one of the companies canceling...

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• We Didn’t Just Get Expensive Electricity. We Built a System That Makes It Inevitable

  The American electricity market is not guided by an “invisible hand” of supply and demand, but an accumulation of misaligned rules laid down over decades. Layer upon layer of regulation, subsidy, mandate, and accounting rules to a point where the system became fixed in an upward, inflationary tilt, impervious to efforts to change. There are at least a half-dozen federal environmental regulations that have more to do with rising electricity prices than tariffs or the data-center buildout

• America's Ranks of Immigrant Truckers Find a Roadblock: English Tests

Trump

• Trump tells CNN the ‘big wave’ is yet to come in war with Iran.

• "Today may be the most important day of the 21st Century so far."

Left Angst

• Monopoly Round-Up: The Epstein Class Launches a War

  Let’s start with the contours of the conflict itself, which is the second attack on Iran since last June. In that first conflict, Israel killed many people in the regime, and weakened the country significantly. But it was a largely choreographed response, with Iran sending a barrage of rockets repelled by defenses across the Middle East, and then the whole thing ended with a cease fire. Oil prices didn’t much move, and neither did stocks. This time, it could be different. So far, the U.S. and Israeli forces used air power to kill much of Iran’s leadership. The Iranians haven’t hit back with major missile barrage, but are using a “drip attack,” which is to say, firing small barrages of rockets and drones across Middle Eastern nations, from Israel to Bahrain to Iraq to Kuwait to Saudi Arabia to Jordan to the UAE. They have hit some military bases, but are aiming mostly at soft civilian targets and energy infrastructure, and even data centers. Israelis are in bomb shelters, and some U.S. bases have been hit. Three U.S. solders so far are dead.

  It’s not clear whether the Iranian approach is a result of weakness, the lack of a military command, or some sort of strategy. It’s possible their regime will falter, since it is domestically unpopular. Or they could be seeking to get their opponents to waste missile defense assets, and scaring Arab allies into pressing Trump for a cease fire. But Iran’s bad position doesn’t mean the situation is great for the U.S. and its allies. After the first day, which seemed to be a shocking win for the U.S. and Israel, some sort of fear or exhaustion has set in. The U.S. has used up years of production of high-tech weapons and may run out, while also testing cheap drone technology that it ironically copied from Iran. There is now panic across the wealthy cities of the Middle East, as the airports are closed and the luxury hotels are under sporadic siege by drones and rockets.

  When the U.S. launched the attack, I assumed that the decision was a result of some sort of combination of Donald Trump’s rashness, domestic hawk pressure and Israeli interests, all going against world opinion. But as it turns out, much of the elite Western and Middle Eastern world was pressing for this conflict or was fine with it once it started. Rachel Maddow, not exactly a dove, pointed fingers at “the Gulf Arab states who want Iran removed as their regional rival.” Unsurprisingly, both the Israelis and the Saudis lobbied for the war. But when Trump went ahead, he got support from Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, as well as Germany and France and much of the Arab world. In other words, Trump, far from a unilateralist, is operating within an orthodox foreign policy consensus about the need to topple the Iranian regime. And I found that puzzling.

  • 40 years of "death to America" is not something that can be acknowledged by the terminally Liberal class; the people who thought Iran and Jimmy Carter had the right idea for America's future.

• How Trump Decided to Go to War With Iran - The New York Times

  President Trump’s embrace of military action in Iran was spurred by an Israeli leader determined to end diplomatic negotiations. Few of the president’s advisers voiced opposition.

  Asked by reporters if he wanted regime change in Iran, Mr. Trump said it “seems like that would be the best thing that could happen.” Two weeks later, the president took the United States to war. He authorized a vast military bombardment in conjunction with Israel that swiftly killed the country’s supreme leader, pummeled Iranian civilian buildings and military nuclear sites, thrust the country into chaos and triggered violence across the region, leading to the deaths so far of four U.S. troops and scores of Iranian civilians. Mr. Trump has said more American casualties are likely as the United States digs in for an assault that could last weeks.

  This reconstruction of Mr. Trump’s decision to launch a sustained attack against Iran is based on the accounts of people with direct knowledge of the deliberations, as well as those on all sides of the debate, including diplomats from the region, Israeli and American administration officials, the president’s advisers, congressional lawmakers and defense and intelligence officials. Almost all spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions and operational details. The U.S. decision to strike Iran was a victory for Mr. Netanyahu, who had been pushing Mr. Trump for months on the need to hit what he argued was a weakened regime.

  It was Saturday morning, the beginning of the workweek in Iran, when children were at school and people headed to work. Those who attended the meeting of the Supreme National Security Council felt no urgency to meet in underground bunkers or other secret locations that might be unknown to American or Israeli spies. Ayatollah Khamenei told a close circle that, in the event of a war, he preferred to stay in place and become a martyr rather than be judged by history as a leader who had gone into hiding, according to the officials. He was in his office in another part of the compound as senior leaders gathered for their meeting. He asked to get a briefing when it concluded. The missiles struck soon after it began.

• Does the war on Iran prove it's time to quit oil for good?

• Trump's Childhood Savings Accounts – A Flawed Policy

• The Pentagon's Favorite Tech Guy Is This Hawaiian Shirt-Wearing Founder

• A U.S. scholarship thrills a teacher in India. Then came soul-crushing questions

• Robert F Kennedy Jr: 1 year of failure

• U.S. science agency moves to restrict foreign scientists from its labs

• White House stalls release of approved US science budgets

• Netflix's wake-up in Trump's Washington

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Austin mass shooter Ndiaga Diagne became citizen despite string of busts

  The gunman behind Austin’s possible terror-related mass shooting entered the US and cemented his legal immigration status under Democratic administrations — despite a growing criminal record. Senegalese national Ndiaga Diagne, 53, arrived in America on March 13, 2000, on a B-2 tourist visa during the Clinton administration, a source familiar with his immigration history told The Post on Sunday. Diagne — who killed two people and wounded 14 more during his rampage outside a Texas bar early Sunday — then became a lawful permanent resident on an IR-6 visa in June 2006 when he married a US citizen, the source said.

  He then went on to lodge a string of other arrests in the Big Apple between 2008 and 2016 — but that didn’t keep him becoming a naturalized US citizen on April 5, 2013, around the start of former President Barack Obama’s second term, sources said. Those three arrests are sealed, sources said. Diagne also was arrested in Texas at some point on undisclosed charges, sources said. He was a known emotionally disturbed person in both states, too, sources said.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Saturday's attack was The Pentagon's first use of one-way "kamikaze" drones

• US F-15E Strike Eagles Shot Down in Apparent Friendly Fire Incident in Kuwait

  • Three U.S. F-15s Involved in Friendly Fire Incident in Kuwait; Pilots Safe

  • Three US fighter jets shot down in 'friendly fire' in Kuwait

World

• My mission to avoid breaking the Official Secrets Act

  How can they require that staff lie to friends and family about what they do while allowing former officers like me to publish stories that draw, however tangentially, on their professional exploits?

• Can Europe break free of Visa and Mastercard? MEPs stall digital euro

• European users can now run a disconnected Azure Local service

• The world wants social media ban for children, but consequences will be for all

• UK launches consultation asking for views on under-16s social media ban

• Macron to boost nuclear arsenal, involve European allies in doctrine change

• Poland Plans Social Media Ban for Kids in Challenge to US Tech

• France to boost nuclear arsenal and extend deterrence to European allies

• British Columbia to end time changes, adopt year-round daylight time

Iran / Houthi

• Iran all but vanishes from the global internet amid US-Israel strikes

• Iranian VP takes over during wartime, raising questions about Pezeshkian’s status.

• The western media has an issue with reporting that Iran is shooting back: They must praise Iran's mighty weapons but cannot associate Iran with any damage done.

• AWS Middle East disrupted after 'objects struck datacenter' amid Iran war

  • One of Amazon's data centers in the UAE caught fire after being hit by 'objects'

  • Amazon Fire in UAE: The End of the Gulf’s Safe AI Promise?

  For years, Gulf leaders made a simple promise to Silicon Valley: Bring your data, your models, and your chips, and we will give you stability. On Sunday, that promise ended in flames, after Iran’s retaliatory strikes in response to U.S.-Israeli assault set an Amazon data center in the United Arab Emirates on fire. In a statement released following the incident, Amazon said “objects” struck the building, creating sparks and flames, declining to link the incident to Iran’s missile and drone attacks. Fire crews cut power to the entire site, and more than 24 hours later the facility remains offline, with the disruption spreading to other parts of Amazon’s UAE operation.

  “The security frameworks behind the U.S.-UAE AI partnership were built for supply chain control and political alignment, not for protecting buildings during a military attack,” Ali Bakir, an assistant professor of international affairs, security, and defense at Qatar University, told Rest of World. “The physical security of strategic digital infrastructure may have been assumed to fall under broader national defense without ever being treated as a distinct vulnerability.”

  “It is cheaper to attack than to defend,” Bakir said. Iran’s assault has underscored that asymmetry. The UAE military intercepted 165 ballistic missiles, two cruise missiles, and 541 drones over two days. Thirty-five drones and five projectiles still got through, striking airports, Jebel Ali Port, and the facade of the Burj Al Arab hotel. Three migrant workers were killed.

• Iran attacks RAF base in Cyprus, an EU country

• Gulf States Say They’ve Shot Down More Than 1,500 Iranian Missiles, Drones | The Epoch Times

• Gas prices soar as QatarEnergy halts LNG production after Iran attacks

• Iran War Widens as Iran Attacks Saudi Oil Infrastructure

Israel

• Israel spent years hacking Tehran’s traffic cameras and monitoring bodyguards

China

• Photos show China's low-cost lifestyle in semiabandoned housing complexes

• As China's economy slows, some young people buy cheap apartments to 'retire'

• China's Parents Are Outsourcing the Homework Grind to A.I

Health / Medicine

• The Boom in ADHD Coaching Has Few Rules

• The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements

• Novartis settles with Henrietta Lacks' estate over use of her cells

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status Because Few Nurses Speak Low German

  Here are some articles about the the fact that we have lost our measles elimination status: CBC, BBC, New York Times, Toronto Life. You can see some chatter on Reddit about it if you're interested here. None of the above texts seemed to me to be focused on the actual thing that caused Canada to lose its measles elimination status, which is the rampant spread of measles among old-order religious communities, particularly the Mennonites.

• US set to lose measles elimination status after cases soar

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Is the passion for taxonomy in danger of dying out?

• Global emissions from digital technologies were largely obscured

• New Plastic is made from milk and it vanishes in 13 weeks

• An entrepreneur started an urban flower farm in neighbors' yards

• Accidental Climate Engineering With Disintegrating Satellites

  • (2017) Mass accumulation of earth from interplanetary dust, meteoroids, asteroids and comets - ScienceDirect

  The interplanetary material that enters the Earth atmosphere per day is in the range of 30 - 180 tons with a best guess value of 54 tons per day.