2026-08-05

etc

• Spain to see first total solar eclipse in more than a century

Horseshit

• Porn addicts tried to rescue teen camgirls they worshipped from webcam pimp

• Headlights got brighter, whiter, and more blinding after dark

• Bartłomiej Kubkowski swims for 56 hours across the Baltic Sea

• Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

• I Traded Coffee for Energy Drinks–and Nearly Lost My Mind

• Being a Luddite Is Fun Again

• Have We Been Playing Monopoly Wrong All Along?

• Pinochet's Brutal Rule: A Look Inside His Regime

• ‘Gym penis’ is real, says nurse — why it happens and when to see a professional.

  “Many men experience some degree of temporary retraction while working out, but the amount varies dramatically,” Bustamante said. “Some barely notice it. Others may feel like they are turtling, where the penis retracts closer to the body.” This shrinkage is only temporary, though, as it’s a result of redirected blood flow to the muscles, heart, lungs and skin during a workout.

  • "size doesn't matter" 99.9% of the time. As the joke goes, you only have enough blood to operate the brain or the penis, not both.

• Marmots got money troubles: Cuts to UCLA research lead scientists to OnlyFans

• People are paying for assisted stretching

• One Man's Cure for Loneliness Started a Movement

• Kilometer-high Saudi tower inches closer to tallest record

• TikTok Withheld a Safety Feature from Millions. One Died by Suicide

Epstein

• 60 Minutes Ended Story About Epstein's Shady Bank Transactions

  Deutsche Bank AG failed to promptly notify authorities of more than $250 million in questionable transfers tied to Epstein, according to Wyden’s report. Those included cash amounts to pay women in Russia and Eastern Europe—of which the bank retroactively informed U.S. officials after Epstein was arrested on sex-trafficking charges in July 2019. Bank of America Corp. reported $170 million in Epstein-related transactions tied to billionaire Leon Black. The bank, according to Wyden’s report, noted years later that the transactions had “no apparent economic, business, or lawful purpose.” JPMorgan Chase, as previously reported, processed more than $1 billion for Epstein, despite internal concerns at the bank.

Obit

• Charity cyclist Bob Montgomery,82, dies one day after last heroic ride 3300 mile

Musk

• SpaceX's satellite ambitions squeeze out rivals reliant on its rockets

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

• X latest to block Saudi dissident accounts inside kingdom

• What will happen when a SpaceX rocket collides with the Moon?

• SpaceX's staggered lock-up release prolongs the pain

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Used EV Prices Are Now Going Up in America

• Lyft and Baidu enter London's robotaxi battleground as testing begins

• Uber's Autonomous Vehicle Strategy: Slow Their Adoption

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Fraud Squad at Caltech Will Catch You If You Lie on Your Application

• Federal loan support cut for degree programs that lead to low wages

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Apple says MacBook Neo is pulling schools away from Windows and Chromebooks

• Apple's New CEO Taps Retired Hardware Executive for Management Team

• Inside the grey market for online accounts

• Telegram says app restored on Apple's App Store

• Lego deploys Hubble Space Telescope as detailed desktop model

• Gmail will end send-as support from third-party email addresses

• Which Screen Is the 'Good Screen' Now?

• Spotify just hit 300M Premium subscribers

• Is It Possible to Make Smart Glasses That Aren't Creepy?

• BMW's in-car Spider-Man ad is villain behavior

• EA Is Now a Private Company

• I wonder who is subsidizing the "anti-Flock" thing and how it will pay off. It's fun watching them dance around why all the other surveillance is jsut fine but this former darling of the tech world is now bad.

  • How Cops Are Trying to Hide Their Use of Flock

  • All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

  • Flock cameras violate highway safety standards

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• The Lua community needs to learn to move on

  Ever since the Lua/LuaJIT split around 5.2 (gosh, that was… 15 years ago!?), the community has gotten in this paralyzing tendency of supporting old versions forever, even when upstream doesn’t support them anymore. People making Lua libraries keep testing their packages against Lua 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 and now 5.5; then LuaJIT 2.1, sometimes the OpenResty variant as well, and now 3.0. I understand that Lua is an embeddable language and if you make a decision in a point in time to bundle, say Lua 5.2 in your app and you build a plugin ecosystem around it, then you’re married to it forever. But then that’s your app’s ecosystem to take care.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Webb telescope finds signs of ancient disaster for Neptune's moons

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AGs have instructed OpenAI to keep everything related to the Hugging Face hack

  • (PDF) Letter from 15 Attorneys General to OpenAI

• China gets better bang for its buck than America in AI

  • China's AI Blitz Creates 'Death Zone' for Rival US Model Makers

  • China turns up the heat with open model blitz as US model makers panic

• AI's Manifesto War

• The A.I. Revolt Is Here

• Apple seeks preliminary injunction against OpenAI in trade secrets case

• LinkedIn says it won't be spending big on AI hardware this year

• Google's $200B finance machine for Anthropic

• AI-assisted staging draws boos at the Richard Wagner festival in Germany

  • AI-assisted staging draws boos at the Richard Wagner festival in Germany

• The AI Boom Is Transforming the American Economy Beyond Recognition

• I Helped Run Lululemon. Companies Need to Stop Kidding Themselves About A.I

• US company's AI lets Ukraine's cheap kamikaze drones track targets on their own

• Google's $200B Wall Street finance machine for Anthropic

• At least 37 people arrested in 2026 so far for protesting against data centers

• AI's talent wars have a loyalty problem

• The AI Demand Bubble

  when you remove Anthropic and OpenAI’s compute spend, I am not confident that Google, Microsoft and Amazon have much of an AI business.

• Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

• US plans to ban Chinese parts from AI data centers

• A Mass Shooter's Harrowing History with ChatGPT

• Data Centers Broke American Politics

• SoftBank's AI funding plans to face reckoning at earnings

• Microsoft Tells Engineers 'Tokenmaxxing Is Not What We Are Optimizing For

• AI data-centre race builds $1T lease burden for Big Tech

• AI Detection of Poker Player Bluffing

• White House plans to keep AI framework under wraps

  • White House excludes open models from framework to test advanced AI capabilities

• 'Not healthy' LLM use is more common than you think

• German court rules AI music firm Suno broke copyright rules

• Employees Like Their A.I. Boss. Its Shop Is Kind of a Disaster

• The 'dean of valuation' says pain is headed for more AI companies soon

• Resistance grows nationwide against AI data center boom

• OpenAI pays $3.2M in US probe over hiring foreign workers

  • Settlement with OpenAI for Discriminating Against U.S. Workers

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Bitcoin owners rocked by $116M hack: What we know about the Coldcard exploit

  • Hackers Hit Bitcoin's Safest Hiding Place in Ongoing Attack

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

• The Tungsten Market Is Warning of an Upcoming War

• The tax strategy used by the rich to pay 0% income tax

• High-Powered Real-Estate Fund Is Run by College Students

• Korean stock market crash threatening to upset tech boom

• Billion-dollar property collapse highlights private credit danger

• Palantir Shares Jump on 'Otherworldly' Sales, Improved Forecast

• Jeff Bezos just filed to sell $4B in Amazon

• FCC Commissioners Face Ethics Complaints for Taking Luxury Gifts from Paramount

• The restaurant business is changing beyond recognition

• Diamond industry misjudged threat of lab-grown gems, says Anglo American CEO

• Zillow to lay off 500 staff in restructuring

• 'Difficult' to be hopeful: How people survive under inflation

• America's 'weird' and 'unwise' intervention in the Japanese yen

  • US yen intervention signals perfect storm rising in FX and bond markets

• NJ files antitrust lawsuit against Amazon over delivery contractor control

• Uber's Strategy for Fighting Sexual Assault Suits: 'What Were You Wearing?'

• The Buffett Indicator Keeps Flashing Red. Is It Broken?

• US diesel prices overtake Biden-era average

• Asia Hedge Funds Suffer Widespread Losses in July Market Rout

• AI stock sell-off slams hedge funds as Whale Rock loses 21.7% in July

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• House Panel Finds Lawmaker Likely Violated Rules on Sexual Harassment

  • You know its a Republican: it's being reported by the NYT.

• Utah lawmakers decided to tax large tech companies

• KY Sen. Rand Paul calls for Fauci to be held in contempt of Congress

• Missouri election chief rejects bid to hold vote on congressional districts

• Missouri Is Latest State to Vote on Abolishing Income Tax

Trump

• Trump accounts were closed in 2021 due to concerns over possible money laundering, Capital One says.

• JD Vance Announces Task Force Has Uncovered $230 Billion in Fraud.

  “Just since the beginning of the Fraud Task Force that I started under the president’s leadership and direction, we have identified $230 billion of fraud that’s being perpetrated against the American people, and we have halted already $56 billion of that,” Vance told the gathered Cabinet, according to multiple accounts of the meeting.

• Trump's D.C. troop deployment will continue through 2029

Democrats

• New York City's Second-Home Tax Is Good Policy with a Data Issue

• Zohran Mamdani announced grocery store rationing, ID requirement

  Zohran Mamdani’s administration announced the final details of its city-owned grocery store plan last week, and confirmed that shoppers will need to present identification to access the goodssold at the government-run stores.

Left Angst

• Big Stupid Has Infiltrated the State Department

• The Book That Predicted Pete Hegseth's Failures

• Trump's AI protectionism has come for robotics

• RFK Jr. accuses Dana Bash of COVID-era media malpractice on CNN

  "You were part of the problem. There was absolute press malpractice. Your job — your job — is a fierce skepticism toward authority, and you weren’t doing that," Kennedy said on "State of the Union." "You were beating up on people who were dissenting," the HHS secretary added. Kennedy leveled the attack after Bash asked how HHS would prepare for another pandemic and tried to move him away from re-litigating the prior federal response.

  • RFK Jr. tells CNN host that constitutional rights take priority over public health

  Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. clashed with CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday, launching attacks against Anthony Fauci and arguing that protecting constitutional rights must take priority during future public health crises. During an appearance on “State of the Union” that Bash herself described as “contentious,” Kennedy argued that Fauci, who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the Covid-19 pandemic, was to blame for the millions of Americans who were sickened or killed by the respiratory virus.

  • RFKJr. targets Fauci and pushes medical misinformation in fiery CNN interview

• Gavin Newsom Makes an Ass of Himself on Antitrust, Paramount Merger

• The Vances added a chicken coop to the vice president’s residence. We had questions.

  The coop was designed to mirror the Queen Anne-style architecture of the vice president's residence at Number One Observatory Circle. As such, the henhouse is not cheap: It cost between $100,000 and $120,000, according to the owner of the North Carolina company that built the structure. But U.S. taxpayers didn't foot the bill. The coop was donated by the company. So who exactly will be raising the hens? And why are the Vances taking on this project? For eggs? For educational purposes? For feathered pets? A spokesman for Vance did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment. The Washington Post turned to former and current backyard chicken keepers to gather insights on what may be going on at Number One Observatory Circle. We also talked to the guy who built the pricey coop. We even checked with a city official to discuss whether the Vances are following the proper protocols to raise hens in Washington.

• 'This is insider trading by definition': Trump sells $100k monthly subscription

  • If Trump is supposed to use traditional media only, is their refusal to publish what he says some sort of malpractice? Remember "no one is obligated to publish" and "make your own platform?"

• The Loch Ness Monster Was Real

  In 1998 Altemeyer reported that the left-wing authoritarian had been “as scarce as hens’ teeth in my samples,” and by his lights, and his measures, it had been. His scale, the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) measure, drafted in 1981 and still the workhorse of the subfield, captured submission to authority, aggression toward sanctioned targets, deference to convention. It found those things on the right, over and over, across samples and decades. On the left, well, it came up mostly empty. So the field drew a conclusion about human nature, that authoritarianism was a right-wing trait. But “our instrument finds it on the right” and “it exists only on the right” are different sentences, and political psychology slid from the first to the second and stayed there. Nobody built a second net, one shaped for whatever authoritarianism might look like on the left. So, for four decades the discipline cast one net, hauled up one kind of fish, and announced the sea contained only that fish.

  None of this proves the left is more authoritarian than the right, and I’m not arguing so. Costello’s team is careful; the profiles overlap at the core but differ at the edges; prevalence is genuinely contested, and Costello himself has suggested that right-wing authoritarians outnumber left-wing ones in the United States by something like three to one. The LWA researchers never claimed parity. Neither do I. And some of the field’s early caution was earned, because the first attempts at measuring left authoritarianism really were bad.

• The Screen Act Is a Christian Nationalist Nightmare

• Trump forced to reinstate broadband grants, court lets US scrap race criteria

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Did Iran hack water systems in seven US states?

  • New York awards $9M to protect water systems after cyberattacks in other states

• U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war

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

• A Civilian Plane Crashed in New Mexico. Was the Military's Tech to Blame?

World

• Runaway online rumors sparked frantic rush by migrants to Ceuta

  • EU calls for stronger borders after Ceuta migrant crossings

• Europe Wants to Break Free from American and Chinese Technology. But How?

• Apple challenges the UK's second attempt to gain access to iCloud data

  • Apple launches legal challenge against UK government demand to access data

• Cyberattack hits Liechtenstein's anti-money laundering data register

• TikTok creator who documented her life with young-onset Alzheimer's dies by MAID

• France wildfires reveal hundreds of WW2 shells in village

• Why Estonians invite strangers into their back gardens each summer

• Travel Chaos Follows E.U.'S New Passport Controls

• Driverless subways collide during a shunting maneuver

• Young South Korean investors are finding company in collective misery

• More than 80% of kids still using social media despite ban

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian drone chasing Ukrainian street vendor

China

• China has changed its legal definition of semiconductors

• China's CXMT Eyes Second Beijing Fab to Fight Memory Shortage

Health / Medicine

• Less Protein, Not More, May Lead to Healthier Aging

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Could the world survive biological war?

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• 'Nobody cares' Turkish farmers bearing the burden of UK's plastic waste problem

• Three lions die at Tokyo's Tama Zoo amid heat wave

  Three lions have died at a Tokyo zoo and several more have fallen ill, most likely due to extreme heat, following several weeks of record-breaking temperatures across Japan. The park’s lion exhibit had been suspended since July 23 after several of the big cats showed signs of sickness, such as loss of appetite, fatigue and decreased activity, in mid-July, Tokyo’s Tama Zoo said in a statement Monday.

  • It never gets hot where lions live normally, right? They can't say "COVID' tho cuz that's no longer the narrative.

• Snakes aren't simple tubes. Their bodies have 5 regions, including a short neck

• How the 'fecal revolution' changed Earth's ecosystems

• The jellyfish that has cracked the secret of immortality

• New species discovered on expedition to Channel Islands National Park

• Scientists find clearing cholesterol from blood also removes forever chemicals

• Jet Fuel Made from Tropical Fruit Gets $3B Backing

• Invasive Aedes mosquitoes are colonizing US cities that were too cold for them

• Southern California Edison equipment blamed for 2025 Eaton fire in Los Angeles