2026-04-24

Worthy

• Netflix Was Held Together with Duct Tape

  The companies you admire were held together with duct tape on day one. All of them. Amazon was Bezos packing books in a garage. Airbnb was two guys renting out air mattresses because they couldn’t make rent. The polished, professional, inevitable-looking version of those companies didn’t exist yet. It got built later, slowly, by people who were embarrassed by what they had but shipped it anyway. The reason this matters... founders today are comparing their messy, unfinished, embarrassing day-one company to other companies’ day-3,000 versions. And then wondering why they feel like frauds. Stop doing that.

  Netflix didn’t become Netflix because we had a vision. We became Netflix because we shipped a deeply imperfect thing on April 14th, 1998, and then spent the next 28 years finding out what it was.

etc

• Assassination Culture

  the attempt on Sam’s life, while apparently colored or shaped to some degree by the broader AI conversation, is not unique to the technology industry. American culture, which has grown more deliriously in favor of violence for years, has finally arrived at the point where that word, “violence,” is no longer sufficient. What we’re really talking about, specifically, is assassination, as the figure of the “‘good guy”’ killer is now very much ascendant, and our country, shaped by the psychotic contours of the internet, is now very much inside a new assassination culture. There’s frankly nothing we can do about this at the moment, and my intention here is not to solve the problem. But I do hope we can get a good majority of my fellow professional talking assholes on the internet to face the truth, which is that every single public figure in the country, including every one of us, is in legitimately mortal danger.

  • It seems just months ago that people were being removed from projects they had founded and led for decades because of their insensitive language... Where did the turn happen?

• The Declining Driver's License: Good, Bad, or Both?

  In 1983, nearly half of all 16-year-old Americans had a driver’s license. By 2022, that share had fallen in half to ~25%. Even at 18 years old the rate dropped from roughly 80% to 60% over the same period. This trend is real, decades-long, and expected to continue. I want to tell you this is good news, and I think it mostly is. But fewer licenses doesn’t mean more kids on bikes — it may just mean teenagers spending more time on screens and not going anywhere at all.

  The current causes driving the rate down are well-known: insurance costs are punishing. A 16-year-old on a standalone insurance policy runs $6,000–$6,700/year before all other vehicle costs, The GDL requirements are big hurdles even if teens don’t cite them as the main barrier, and the cultural meaning of the license has eroded. A driver’s license used to mean you could finally go somewhere without asking your parents. That’s a weaker sell when everything comes to you (Uber, DoorDash, etc.).

• Preliminary Report on the LaGuardia Crash

  • LaGuardia firefighter heard 'stop' before crash but didn't know who it was for

Horseshit

• My family tried to eat fewer ultra-processed foods

• Young Adult Bowel Cancer Deaths Concentrated in One Group, Study Finds.

  over the last 30 years, the rise in colorectal cancer deaths in young adults occurred almost entirely among people without a four-year college degree. Of course, getting a college degree doesn't protect you from getting colon cancer. Rather, experts say it's a marker for other issues: People without degrees tend to earn less money, have poorer diets, exercise less and get less medical care.

• Boston marathon's good Samaritan loses race time but wins plaudits

• For $700 a Month, Sleeping Pods Make SF More Affordable

• Marathon training: Why hot baths might help you run faster

• Banter is the last thing I want from a coffee machine. Yet here we are

• 'Perfect Japan' posts spark Gen Z social media backlash

• Creating Baby Geniuses to Thwart the AI Threat?

• John Maynard Keynes saved capitalism from itself

• Archaeologists find copy of Homer's Iliad inside ancient Egyptian mummy

  • Egyptian mummy discovered stuffed with excerpt from 'The Iliad'

• Welsh castle's hidden cave was once home to ancient hippo

• The $150 Train to a $2k Seat: The World Cup of Price Shock

• An Existential Crisis in the Crossword Community

• A McDonald's cheeseburger is a better deal today than it was in 1948

celebrity gossip

• They Made D4vd a Star. Now They Want Him Convicted of Murder

• Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman's 'unconstrained' relationship with the truth

Obit

• Ruth Slenczynska, last surviving pupil of Rachmaninoff, dies aged 101

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• 'Staggering' number of people believe unproven claims about vaccines, raw milk

• These Middle Eastern News Sites Are U.S. Government Propaganda Operations

Musk

• Microsoft looked at buying Cursor before SpaceX deal

• SpaceX and Cursor have explored a team-up with Mistral to take on AI rivals

• Elon Musk's court battle with Sam Altman exposes Silicon Valley secrets

• Elon Musk admits that Tesla vehicles won't get unsupervised FSD

• The unflattering secrets revealed so far in Elon Musk's latest legal feud

• Tesla's $25B spending plan tests investor faith in unproven AI bets

• SpaceX IPO filing shows Elon Musk can retain board control

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• A robot is beating human pros at table tennis

• America Cannot Lose the Robotics Race

• Proposed Chinese Robot Ban Is Latest U.S. Tech Sovereignty Move

• The Actuator Race

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Modern cults are replacing leaders with 'life coaches'

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Trade-school graduates often enter the workforce with significant debt

  • see also: ITT Technical Institute

• The For-Profit Education Company Scooping Up Welfare Dollars

• Muon Experiment Eliminates Fifth Force, Confirms Standard Model

• Law grad employment hit record high again in 2025, ABA data shows

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Enthusiast builds his own RAM in garden shed cleanroom

• Linux may get a hall pass from one state age bill, Congress plays hall monitor

• Oshkosh council rescinds Flock camera contract after 'false statements'

• The Subnautica 2 legal dispute is far from over

• Tim Cook Calls Apple Maps Launch His 'First Big Mistake' as CEO

• Coyote vs. Acme is finally getting released

• Surveillance vendors caught abusing access to telcos to track people's locations

• NCSC's first gadget blocks malware transfer over HDMI cables

  SilentGlass is the NCSC's first branded device to hit the market. Announced publicly on Wednesday, the HDMI and DisplayPort-compatible device has already been deployed across "government estates," for several years and is capable of protecting "most high-threat environments." we are reliably informed that beyond the information included in the NCSC's blog, these devices are equipped with hardware that identifies malicious traffic in the data channel, blocking the transfer between computer and display. We're also told that the SilentGlass gizmos are threat-agnostic, meaning they are capable of detecting any kind of nastiness and preventing it from reaching and ultimately altering or manipulating a display. Anything potentially malicious that travels between HDMI or DisplayPort connections and a monitor is blocked. You might be thinking "it's not every day we hear about monitors being pwned via HDMI," and you'd be right. You wouldn't be alone either. Since the NCSC announced SilentGlass, infoseccers have taken to social media to question the need for this device.

• YouTuber 'invisible' to America's army of cameras with anti-surveillance device

• Microsoft launches 'vibe working' in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

• Microsoft brings Xbox back, scraps Microsoft Gaming

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• IP networking in deep space

  from the Moon and the asteroid belt to other planets. In these environments, delay isn’t just an inconvenience. It fundamentally affects how networks behave. Long round‑trip times have serious consequences for protocols like TCP, which rely on a steady stream of acknowledgements (ACKs) to manage sending rates, estimate delay, and trigger retransmissions. Marc has been working on simulating the effects of extremely long delays using Earth‑based virtual hosts and software. His approach uses the Linux TUN device, TC‑NETEM, and code developed by his team. This setup allows them to programmatically define experiments that introduce delay, loss, and packet reordering, with packet‑in‑flight times that can span hours. It also makes it possible to study how switches, routers, and other intermediate elements behave in an end‑to‑end IP exchange.

  • Self-sync, bursting type protocols will be required I think. Consideration of just what kinds of exchanges can happen at these distances is needed too: We're not gonna see a lot of web crawling happening over them. Design for what can be done, not what we do elsewhere.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• What Have We Dumped on the Moon?

  • Saw comments saying we shouldn't go back until we have cleaned all that up and "restored the pristine Lunar environment"

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Meta tracking employee keystrokes on Google, LinkedIn, Wikipedia for AI training

  • Meta will record employees' keystrokes and use it to train its AI models

• Mythos is shaping up to be a nothingburger

• A Boy That Cried Mythos: Verification Is Collapsing Trust in Anthropic

• House lawmakers get a chilling demo of 'jailbroken' AI

• Congressman Introduces Bill to Ban AI Chatbots in Children's Toys

• Anthropic has surged to a trillion-dollar valuation on secondary markets

• 'Intelligence may be scalable, but accountability is not'

• Anthropic: No "kill switch" for AI in classified settings

• Google says 75% of the company's new code is AI-generated

• AI discriminates by age: study finds bias in 5 popular chatbots

• The Billionaire Math Geek Who Turned AI into a Money-Printing Machine

• Anthropic's growing pains mount ahead of OpenAI showdown

• AI galaxy hunters are adding to the global GPU crunch

• Google exec says almost every big studio uses AI, but not all disclose it

• What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools?

• Anthropic has surged to a trillion-dollar valuation, overtaking OpenAI

• White House warns of 'industrial-scale' efforts in China to rip off U.S. AI tech

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• A hair dryer broke Polymarket and made someone $34000 richer

  • A hair dryer at a Paris airport broke Polymarket weather markets

  • French weather service alerts police after suspicious Polymarket bets

  • Freak Heat Spikes Pay Big on Polymarket, Rousing Weather Nerds' Suspicion

  • 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win $34,000 Polymarket bet

  • France probes suspected weather sensor tampering after Polymarket bets

  • French police probe suspected weather device tampering after odd Polymarket bet

• DOJ arrests soldier who made $400k betting on Maduro's removal

  • US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid

  • DOJ: Soldier Used Classified Info to Profit from Prediction Market Bets

  • US Soldier in Maduro Raid Is Charged with Making Bets on Former Leader's Ouster

  • US Special Forces Soldier Arrested for Polymarket Bets on Maduro Raid

  • Soldier Used Classified Information to Bet on Maduro's Ouster

• Why prediction markets are a sure sign that our civilisation is in decay

  Prediction markets route around normative argument without destroying it; they provide a parallel answer, priced and continuous, that makes the unpriced conversation feel slow and unserious by comparison. Why listen to a journalist reason about whether the ceasefire will hold when you can see that it's trading at 34 cents? Prediction markets render deliberation as probability, and once rendered, public questions are managed as probability, and the deliberation that produced the question vanishes - the argument for why the question matters vanishes too.

• NY sues Coinbase and Gemini to halt unlicensed prediction market businesses

• The U.S. Military Is Running a Bitcoin Node, Admiral Says

Economicon / Business / Finance

• When oil prices spike, where does the money go?

• Meta layoff wave impacting 8000 jobs

  • Meta Tells Staff It Will Cut 10% of Jobs in Push for Efficiency

  • Meta to cut 10% of jobs, or 8k employees

  • Meta to Lay Off 10% of Employees in May

  • Meta to cut 10% of jobs to 'offset' Mark Zuckerberg's AI spending

  • Meta to Lay Off 10 Percent of Work Force in A.I. Push

• Starbucks expansion in Nashville brews bitterness in Seattle

• Why Gasoline Is So Much Cheaper in the U.S. Than Overseas

• Netflix authorizes $25B stock buyback after shares slumped

• The Factor Behind Your Home Insurance Cost: Your Credit History

• Tim Cook: Great for Apple Investors Not Great for America.

• TSMC Delays Use of ASML's High-NA EUV Machines over Cost Concerns

• Microsoft Offers Voluntary Retirement to About 7% of US Workers

  • Microsoft plans first voluntary employee buyout in company's 51-year history

  • Microsoft freezes hiring in major cloud, sales groups

  • Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 7% of Workforce

• Finra Adopts New Standards to Replace the Day Trading Margin Requirements

• 'CAR' crash: Avis Budget stock plunge reminding some on Wall Street of GameStop

  • The Unusual Short Squeeze Behind Avis's Wild Rally

  • Billion-dollar losses after 'short squeeze' at car rental group Avis Budget

• Intel's soars 15% as results top estimates

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Congress pushes new semiconductor export control law

• How the Charlottesville rally and SPLC birthed an entire billion-dollar-plus "democracy" ecosystem

• SF sets $3.4B price tag for public takeover of PG&E

• Supreme Court arguments make it clear that FCC fines are "nonbinding"

• House Republicans roll out landmark data privacy push

• Sean Duffy Wants $10B for AI Air Traffic Control Software

Trump

• Trump administration reclassifies cannabis as less dangerous

  Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Thursday changed the classifications of products containing marijuana that are covered by the Food and Drug Administration or that have received a state medical-marijuana licence. They will move from a Schedule I narcotic like heroin to a Schedule III drug - on par with Tylenol with codeine. He also called a hearing to consider reclassifying all marijuana.

  • (PDF) DEA Final Order Rescheduling Marijuana to Schedule III

• White House accuses China of 'industrial scale' theft of AI technology

Democrats

• Ilhan Omar explodes at reporter for asking about multimillion-dollar disclosure discrepancy: ‘You’re stupid for asking me anything’.

Left Angst

• RFK Jr. Defends Trump's Mathematically Impossible Drug Discount Claims

• US health officials Nix publication of a study on Covid vaccine effectiveness

• America's descent into state capitalism is exaggerated

• Palantir manifesto described as 'ramblings of a supervillain'

  • Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder If They're the Bad Guys

• AI Model and 'MAGA' Influencer Emily Hart Unmasked as Indian Man

• Anti-capitalist New Yorker writer brags she stole from Whole Foods 'on several occasions' in NYT podcast

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Secretary of the Navy resigns

  Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan is departing the administration, effective immediately. Undersecretary Hung Cao will become Acting Secretary of the Navy.

• Pentagon wants $54B for drones, more than most nations' military budgets

World

• Denmark chooses Europe's Patriot rival for air defence system

• Healthy mother to end life in Swiss clinic after grief at losing son

• High Street mini-marts selling cocaine, cannabis and prescription drugs

• Medical data of half a million Britons listed for sale on Chinese website

  • Private health records of half a million Britons for sale on Chinese website

  • UK Biobank health data listed for sale in China, government confirms

• Japanese Man Jailed for Posting 'Godzilla' Spoilers Online

• Germany unveils strategy for becoming Europe's strongest military by 2039

• Millions of Americans may now also be considered Canadian under new law

• Iran war revives European rooftop solar demand to cut energy bills

• Europe regulated itself into American vassalage

• Mastodon receives 614,000€ of public money for public code from German agency

• Cyber agencies share fresh advice to defend against China-linked covert networks

• Bikes keep Honda afloat, yet even that business is under pressure

• France confirms data breach at government agency that manages citizens' IDs

• France Keeps Breaking the Internet to Stop Piracy, Even Though It's Not Working

• India to tackle global obesity with cheap fat-loss jabs

• Girl, 10, finds rare Mexican axolotl under Welsh bridge

• Some Interrail travellers told to cancel passports as hacked data posted online

• Slovenia to air films about Palestine instead of Eurovision song contest

Iran / Houthi

• Mines, Iran's invisible weapon that has put the most powerful Navy in check

• Iran's IRGC warns it may cut undersea internet cables in Persian Gulf

• Why Iran Metabolizes the Pressure That Broke Venezuela

• Iran claims US used backdoors to knock out networking equipment during war

• Crypto scam lures ships into Strait of Hormuz

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• US Space Command: Russia is now operationalizing orbital anti-satellite weapons

Health / Medicine

• Patients getting stuck in the emergency department waiting for inpatient ward

• Habitual coffee intake modifies host physiology and cognition

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• High-Dose Flu Vaccine Linked to Lower Dementia Risk

  • Now if they could just make it consistently link to a lower flu risk

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Texas launches $750M plant, targets growing New World screwworm threat

• ON “EARTH DAY:” Oysters With STDs, Witch Executions, and How More and Fewer Clouds Are Good and Bad News

• 98% of all recent environmental claims can be categorized as "greenwashing"

  • 98% of meat and dairy sustainability pledges are greenwashing

• Why drawing eyes on food packaging could stop seagulls stealing your chips

• Oldest known recording of a whale song could unlock mysteries of the ocean

• The end of oil? As fuel shocks cascade, 53 nations plan a fossil fuel phaseout

• A catastrophic climate event is upon us

• The no-go zone paradox: Chornobyl's wildlife thrives amid pro-nuclear shift