2026-02-03

Horseshit

• Toronto man fakes pilot badge to score free flights, officials say

• The physics of an unethical daycare model that uses illness to maximize profits

• LinkedIn and Toxic Positivity

• Propositions about the New Romanticism

• Huge fossil bonanza preserves 512-million-year-old ecosystem

• No One Knows How Many Deadly Air Bags Are on U.S. Roads

• What did the groundhog see? Punxsutawney Phil's winter prediction is in

  Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog weather icon, saw his shadow when he was plucked from his warm burrow and thrust out into the frigid air Monday morning. According to Phil, that means six more weeks of winter are ahead.

• Cat urine is a lingering scent: Hotels have an anti-cat bias

• The $500 Check That Helped Launch Apple Just Sold for Millions

Epstein

• Epstein claimed Bill Gates caught STD from ‘sex with Russian girls’

  • Bill Gates says accusations contained in Epstein files are 'absolutely absurd'

• The Government Published Nude Photos in the Epstein Files

• Microsoft's Sinofsky saw Surface fail coming – asked Epstein for advice on exit

  • Windows chief shared MS emails with Epstein regarding the Surface RT disaster

  • Former Windows 8 boss recruited Epstein to help negotiate his Microsoft exit

• "The more Jew you are the smarter you."

  • Partner at Day One Ventures ranks intelligence by how Jewish someone is

• Mandelson tried to change bankers' bonus policy at Epstein's request

  • How the depth of Peter Mandelson’s links to Jeffrey Epstein came to light

  Peter Mandelson has resigned from the Labour party over his links to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

• Jeffrey Epstein had a secret child 15 years ago, bombshell email from Sarah Ferguson claims

  Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein appears to have had a secret child 15 years ago, according to a bombshell email reportedly sent by Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson. Ferguson congratulated him in the note sent on Sept. 21, 2011, after he was already convicted of sex with an underage girl, according to the latest drop of Epstein files. “Don’t know if you’re still on this bbm but have heard from The Duke that you have had a baby boy,” Ferguson wrote, according to the released email.

• Epstein Files Release Exposes Names of at Least 43 Victims, WSJ Review Finds

• Jeffery Epstein Went to Defcon 26. Been Monitoring Since Defcon 21

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• A world without nuclear arms control begins on Thursday

  • Let the Arms Race Begin

Musk

• xAI Joins SpaceX

  • XAI Joins SpaceX

  • Tesla climbs as SpaceX merger talks fuel Musk empire consolidation hopes.

  • Elon Musk's SpaceX to Combine with XAI Ahead of Mega IPO

  • Elon Musk's Tesla to invest $2B in xAI as EV maker's revenue, profit slump

  • SpaceX acquires xAI, plans 1M satellite constellation to power it

  • Musk Mars Merger, Maybe

  • Elon Musk's SpaceX acquiring AI startup xAI ahead of potential IPO

  • Elon Musk Merges SpaceX with XAI

• Inside Musk’s bet to hook users that turned Grok into a porn generator

  • Grok is still undressing men

  • UK nudification app ban won't apply to Elon Musk's Grok

• The Karman Industries Heat Processing Unit uses SpaceX tech to cool data centers

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo Seeking About $16B Near $110B Valuation

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Starbucks bets on robots to brew a turnaround in customers

• Training four-legged robots as if they were dogs

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Minority births make up the majority in the US for the first time

• Jury Finds Doctors Liable for Malpractice in Gender Surgery Lawsuit | The Epoch Times

  Jurors on Jan. 30 found a psychologist and surgeon liable for malpractice after they supported and performed breast removal surgery on a 16-year-old girl who at the time identified as transgender. Jurors awarded Fox Varian, now 22 and no longer identifying as transgender, $2 million in damages, with $1.6 million for past and future pain and suffering, and another $400,000 for future medical expenses. The jurors found that in many respects the surgeon and psychologist had skipped important steps when evaluating if she should go forward with the surgery and had not adequately communicated with each other. These missteps were a “departure from the standard of care,” they decided.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• One Solution for Too Many A's? Harvard Considers Giving A+ Grades

• Why Boys Are Behind in Reading at Every Age

• At a clown school near Paris, failure is the lesson

• Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they're disabled. I'm one of them

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• My thousand dollar iPhone can't do math

• Japan's Kioxia extends memory chip JV with SanDisk, receiving $1B

• Wi-Fi advocates get win from FCC with vote to allow higher-power devices

• The telephoto is the only phone camera that matters

• Notepad++, a text editor used by every programmer in the world, got hijacked and used to install malware.

  • Notepad++ update feature hijacked by Chinese state hackers for months

• Raspberry Pi raises prices by as much as 70% in response to RAM price increases

• Fake Samsung 990 Pro passes basic checks but runs slower than a USB 2.0 drive

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

  In fact, when the compiler (RPGC.EXE) compiles some RPG source code, it seems to copy the parallel port routine from itself into the compiled program. That’s right: the patched version of the compiler will produce executables with the same patched copy protection routine! Very convenient. I must say, this copy protection mechanism seems a bit… simplistic? A hardware dongle that just passes back a constant number? Defeatable with a four-byte patch? Is this really worthy of a patent? But who am I to pass judgment. It’s possible that I haven’t fully understood the logic, and the copy protection will somehow re-surface in another way. It’s also possible that the creators of the RPG compiler (Software West, Inc) didn’t take proper advantage of the hardware dongle, and used it in a way that is so easily bypassed.

  • Most of those places charged big for that crap and wanted royalties as well.

• HN Jobs:

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

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

• Converting data to hexadecimal outputs quickly

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• FAA Warns Airlines About Safety Risks from Rocket Launches

  The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a sharp warning that rocket launches could “significantly reduce safety” for airplanes, urging pilots to prepare for the possibility that “catastrophic failures” could create dangerous debris fields. The official notice, known as a safety alert for operators, was dated Jan. 8, the same day that ProPublica published an investigation showing how pilots scrambled to avoid debris after two SpaceX Starship megarockets exploded over busy airspace last year. The alert was an acknowledgment that travelers were at risk on those days, when the FAA hastily activated no-fly zones to help air traffic controllers steer planes away from falling rocket parts.

• NASA’s Moon Rocket Hits a Snag During Crucial Test Ahead of Launch.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The Dangers of "Vibe Reporting" About AI

• Why AI won't wipe out white-collar jobs

• Did A.I. Take Your Job? Or Was Your Employer 'A.I.-Washing'?

• 58% of Photographers Have Lost Work to Generative AI: Survey

• Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

• Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

• Anthropic 'destructively' scanned books to build Claude

• When AI Assumes We Know

• Moltbot Is Taking over Silicon Valley

• The Reasons Teens Say No to AI

• Rural Americans Are Trying to Hold Back the Tide of AI

• ‘We’re not in a bubble yet’ because only 3 out of 4 conditions are met, top economist says. Cue the OpenAI IPO.

  “Part of the reason I think there’s not a bubble is I don’t see the smart money as acting like there’s a bubble,” he told Fortune. “Maybe I should say there’s not a bubble yet.” In his view, the smoking gun for a bubble forming would be companies going public and selling equity. That would be a play for the dumb money, he added.

• 'Moltbook' social media site for AI agents had big security hole, cyber firm say

• Where Is A.I. Taking Us? Eight Leading Thinkers Share Their Visions

• AI is coming for rodeo, the last major U.S. sport untouched by analytics

• The Words AI Can't Find

• A Social Network for A.I. Bots Only. No Humans Allowed

• AI 'slop' is transforming social media – and a backlash is brewing

• Firefox is adding a switch to turn AI features off

• OpenAI is unsatisfied with some Nvidia chips and looking for alternatives

• How Porn stars can survive in the age of AI

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• The Wild Markets Behind Polymarket's 'Truth Machine'

• The price of Bitcoin has crashed back below $80,000.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Oracle to Raise Up to $50B in 2026 for Cloud Buildup

• Why software stocks are getting pummelled

• Peloton lays off 11 percent of staff just after launching its AI hardware

• Private Credit Defaults Would Hit 13% in UBS Worst Case for AI

• Global alcohol giants lose US$830B as drinking habits change

• TikTok's popular influencer sold company for $975M to company doing $6M revenue

  A financial statements printing company is paying $975m for a company that owns the likeliness of TikTok’s most popular influencer. What’s even stranger is the fact that this company barely has made any revenue anywhere close to the consideration that they’re paying Khaby Lame for this company. The company only raked in just $5.88m in revenue the previous year, yet somehow this company is able to acquire a company for just shy of a billion dollars?

• The Housing Market Is Swinging Toward Buyers

• Renting is cheaper than owning in every major U.S. metro

• Nvidia shares are down after report that its OpenAI investment stalled

• Top central banks forge ahead with closely watched cross-border payments testing

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Mike Johnson ‘confident’ gov’t shutdown will end Tuesday – as he shoots down Dem demands.

• Jobs report postponed due to Govt shutdown

• 18% of THE WHOLE COUNTRY’S home health care billing is coming out of Los Angeles County

Trump

• Trump plans to close Kennedy Center for two years for reconstruction work

  • Kennedy Center will halt entertainment operations for two years, Trump says

• U.S. Will Cut Tariffs on India to 18% in Trade Deal, Trump Says

  • US and India reach trade deal, Trump says after Modi call

  • US to cut tariffs on India to 18%, India agrees to end Russian oil purchases

• Trump says Republicans should 'nationalize' elections

  • Trump urges Republicans to 'take over' and 'nationalize' voting

Democrats

• How Bernie Sanders built a device to give himself 'cosmos-shattering orgasms'

  According to the upcoming book 'Bernie for Burlington', Sanders saw Reich's teaching as the 'answer' to his own hardscrabble childhood. Such was his devotion to Reich that he even built his own orgone orgasm device, a 5ft-long prayer mat made of copper wire with spikes on it that he slept on to channel the 'energy' into his body, author Dan Chiasson claims. The book charts Sanders's ideological development as a democratic socialist and says that he was 'deeply influenced' by Reich, who 'connected political liberation with the successful cultivation of cosmos-shattering orgasms'.

  • damn, I had been hoping for Electroejaculation. It would explain a lot.

Left Angst

• At NIH, a power struggle over institute directorships deepens

• 'Melania' promises to take us behind the scenes. There's nothing to see

• Trump helped Harvard: 5 'Crimson' leadership lessons

• 'Fell the enemies:' Illini Republicans support ICE amid Minnesota killings

• The Troubling Trend of Combat-Uniform Creep

  Over the years, I have uneasily watched the increasing adoption of combat uniforms by law enforcement. This includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and their leaders, who in Minnesota and other regions go around dressed like Marines about to invade Fallujah.

• US committee is reconsidering all vaccine recommendations

• ICE protester says her Global Entry was revoked after agent scanned her face

• DHS AI Surveillance Arsenal Grows as Agency Defies Courts

• ICE halts "all movement" at Texas detention facility due to measles infections

• We dunno, but we've been told: The Georgia voter data is clean

• The New Federal Reserve Chair and His Conflicting Ideals

  • How Mohamed El-Erian Views Kevin Warsh for Fed Chair

  • Kevin Warsh: you have to make a bet

• Classified Whistleblower Complaint About Tulsi Gabbard Stalls Within Her Agency

• Fourth wind farm blocked by Trump is allowed to resume construction

  • Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

• Hey Gavin Newsom! Investigating TikTok's Moderation Is Unconstitutional

• Conservative group blasts LinkedIn for removing pro-ICE post, labeling it ‘hateful.’

• Don't discount American democracy's resilience

  In the process of doing a lot of thinking lately about how it’s going in America, I’ve found myself not really vibing with some of the pessimism I see elsewhere, the constant proclamations that the U.S. has crossed the Rubicon into authoritarianism. To cut right to the chase, my critique is not so much that these pessimistic accounts overstate the threat to American democracy. Rather, it’s that they underrate the capacity of the world’s longest-standing democracy to play defense. Or if you prefer, they underrate the resistance. Both the capital-R “Resistance” in the form of things like the protests in Minneapolis, as well as Trump’s broader unpopularity.

• Why So Much of Silicon Valley Is Mum About Minneapolis

• Trump, ICE set to be handed access to Australians' biometric data, ID documents

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Fla. woman charged with posing as teen to molest five middle-school-age boys is ‘the real victim’: her dad

  The dad of a Florida woman charged with posing as a teen to molest five middle-school-age boys has bizarrely claimed to The Post his daughter is “mentally defective” and the real victim of the sex crimes. Before Alyssa Ann Zinger, 25, was arrested for allegedly having sex with underage boys, the accused pedophile grew up in a “good Christian home” in suburban Tampa — but dealt with a myriad of mental disorders, including ADHD, ADD, OCD, Tourette’s syndrome and anorexia, according to her father, Josh Zinger. “She had a lot of problems growing up. Our daughter has been to 10 to 12 psychologists and psychiatrists throughout her life,” the 55-year-old dad said, adding that Zinger once scored a 72 on an intelligence quotient test — well below the assessment’s 100-point average.

• NNSA conducts aerial radiation surveys over San Francisco ahead of Super Bowl

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Palmer Luckey told you so

World

• Denmark unveils legal reform to allow the worst foreign criminals to be deported.

• Moroccan sardine prices to stabilise via new measures: officials

• EU must become a 'genuine federation' to avoid deindustrialisation and decline

• The iPhone Triple Zero Meltdown

• EU launches government satcom program in sovereignty push

• Danish Students Face Legal Action and Fines over Textbook Piracy

• Japan says it found rare earth in sediment retrieved on deep-sea mission

• Leaked Chats Expose the Daily Life of a Scam Compound's Enslaved Workforce

• Irish farmers protest against EU-Mercosur trade deal

• Saudi gigaproject opens with largest and fastest roller coaster

• Greenland tensions harden Europe's push for energy independence

• EU wants defence data secured without US tech

• 13 Year old boy swims for hours to save his family at sea in Western Australia

• 24-year-old Frenchman shows up at hospital with WW1 shell lodged in his rectum

  A 24-year-old man reported to the emergency room complaining of severe rectal pain. When questioned about the cause of his discomfort, he admitted to inserting an object, without specifying what it was. The pain was too intense to ignore. But he failed to provide some crucial details. The medical staff proceeded to operate, as is standard procedure in similar cases where some kind of sexual activity leads to such an unpredictable situation. The problem arose when they began removing the unidentified object: they discovered it was a relatively small World War I shell, measuring about 20 centimeters long and just over three centimeters in diameter. Medical staff had to halt the procedure, fearing a possible explosion. The hospital, unfamiliar with such protocols, immediately alerted the authorities, and around 1:40 a.m., police arrived and activated the bomb squad. The team established a security perimeter to neutralize the device so surgery could continue, though no one knew at that stage if the entire operation could blow up at any moment. Initial checks, however, concluded that the shell dated from 1918, the final year of World War I, and posed no risk.

  • shoulda gone to Bad Dragon

Iran / Houthi

• Iran presidency releases names of those killed in anti-government protests

  Iran’s presidential office on Sunday released a report listing the names of 2,986 people killed during anti-government protests that erupted in late 2025, out of a total of 3,117 deaths recorded during the unrest, Anadolu reports.

• 'We don't need a new war': EU's Kallas urges US against bombing Iran

• Shedding Light on Iran's Longest Internet Blackout

Israel

• Google AI helped IDF drones with targeting in 2024 breaching its own policies

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Questioning Putin: Steve Rosenberg on Tightrope of Reporting from Russia

• These nets used to catch fish. Now they're catching Russian drones

• Inside Russia’s Secret Campaign of Sabotage in Europe

China

• 32-Year-Old Programmer in China Allegedly Dies from Overwork While in Hospital

• China Bans Hidden Car Door Handles

• China Is Losing More Than Just Two Ports in Panama

Health / Medicine

• Custom machine kept man alive without lungs for 48 hours

• Brain cooling collar trial for head injury patients

• New Research Connects Heart Attacks to Brain, Nervous and Immune Systems

• Common bacteria (Chlamydia) discovered in the eye linked to cognitive decline

• A cup of coffee for depression treatment has better results than microdosing

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Climate Activists Storm Synagogue With Diapers And Kneepads To Harass Democrat Who Defied Party.

• Geologists may have solved mystery of Green River's 'uphill' route

• Cigarette filters are an underestimated source of microplastic pollution

• Sand heat storage with circulating sand reduces energy costs and CO2 emissions

• Greenwashing creates 'false stability' for companies

• Tree bark microbes also clean the air by removing greenhouse and toxic gases

• Myrtle Beach Polar Plunge canceled due to winter weather.