2023-11-29

Worthy

• My $500M Mars rover mistake

  • HN comments

etc

• FDA agrees Loyal's data supports effectiveness for large dog lifespan extension

  • HN comments

• Nikola, not Elon Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe Damaged by Serious Fire

• Consider Writing Documentation for Your House

  • HN comments

• It's OK to Never 'Get over' Your Grief

• $20K stash of smuggled fireworks secreted in 92-year-old woman's garage

• Iowa Demolishes Its First 3D Printed House

• The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster | Hacker News

• Naked man arrested at Disneyland wandering around It’s a Small World

Horseshit

• Death of boy, 16, at sawmill highlights rise of child labour in US

• Terror on Repeat – A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings

• Women warn restaurants are luring them in via dating apps

• How porn breeds paedophiles: child sex abuse has become normalised online

• The dead children we must see

  • HN comments

• Life Is Better Without the Internet

• GM Slashes Spending on Robotaxi Unit Cruise, in Setback for Driverless Cars

  Can "remote control cars" be an idea now, please? We can have video gamers provide the missing cognition compnent in these "self driving" cars, and fulfill many of the the promises that were used to hype the technology and investments in them. The problems of latency and fidelity are real, but much much smaller than "full self driving" has turned out to be.

• Is America's EV Revolution Stalling?

• (Jun 2023) Language and Poverty | SIL International

  • HN comments

• Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2023 – "Authentic"

• It-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named - by Shima Abdelfatah

  So bored. No water... Perhaps dig a new well? Walk two hours to get signal and listen to a song... Perhaps learn to download songs?

celebrity gossip

• I won the National Spelling Bee. This is what it takes to master spelling

Obit

• Charlie Munger has died

  • Berkshire Hathaway's Charlie Munger dies aged 99

  • Charlie Munger Has Died

  • Charlie Munger Dead

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• US and UK Military Contractors Created Plan for Global Censorship in 2018

  CTIL’s approach to “disinformation” went far beyond censorship. The documents show that the group engaged in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote “counter-messaging,” co-opt hashtags, dilute disfavored messaging, create sock puppet accounts, and infiltrate private invite-only groups.

  In every incident mentioned, the victims of misinformation were on the political Left, and they included Barack Obama, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and Emmanuel Macron. The report was open about the fact that its motivation for counter-misinformation were the twin political earthquakes of 2016: Brexit and the election of Trump.

  When asked whether Terp or other CTIL leaders discussed their potential violation of the First Amendment, the whistleblower said, “They did not… The ethos was that if we get away with it, it’s legal, and there were no First Amendment concerns because we have a ‘public-private partnership’ — that’s the word they used to disguise those concerns. ‘Private people can do things public servants can’t do, and public servants can provide the leadership and coordination.’”

Musk

• Cybertruck Deliveries Start on Thursday

• The Cybertruck made a mark but missed its moment

• Elon Musk wants to be a world leader. His own behavior is holding him back

• 'Guess we're not dead yet' – Elon Musk after X surpassed Instagram, Facebook

• Elon Musk has boosted 'pizzagate' conspiracy theory 5 times in the last 2 weeks

• How Elon Became an ‘Antisemite’ - WSJ

  The perplexing issue is the noun. A user @breakingbaht expressed a lack of sympathy for “Jewish communities” (emphasis added) that allegedly encouraged “the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them” while supporting immigration of “hordes of minorities.”

  After Mr. Musk responded “You have said the actual truth,” the New York Times cited equally undefined “Jewish groups” as detecting in the original tweet a common antisemitic trope. In one Times account, the phrase “Jewish communities” was transmuted into “Jewish people.” By the end of the week, without any new information being added, the Washington Post was reporting with unqualified confidence that Mr. Musk had given his “endorsement of comments alluding to the great replacement theory—a conspiracy theory espoused by neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville in 2017 and the gunmen who killed people inside synagogues in Pittsburgh in 2018 and Poway, Calif., in 2019.”

  That’s 37 words of interpolation for a six-word tweet. Mr. Musk and the original tweeter heatedly denied antisemitic intent. The Journal examined the context and suggested Mr. Musk was really exercised about a specific Jewish group, the Anti-Defamation League, which has largely adopted the identitarian and censorship agendas of the progressive left.

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Did Deutsche Bank Just Destroy New York AG's Case Against Trump? | ZeroHedge

• We Spied on Trump's 'Southern White House' from Our Couches

• DOJ Ordered Sweep of Trump’s Twitter Data for Everyone Who ‘Liked, Followed or Retweeted’ Trump - The Politics Brief

  Special Counsel Jack Smith sought, and appears to have gotten, information on all users Trump followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked, as well as all users who followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked Trump. Smith also requested that Twitter provide information on “all lists of Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by [Trump], as well as all tweets that include the username associated with the account (i.e., ‘mentions’ or ‘replies’).”

• The Red State Brain Drain Isn’t Coming. It’s Happening Right Now. | The New Republic

  As conservative states wage total culture war, college-educated workers—physicians, teachers, professors, and more—are packing their bags.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• When should you come out of Covid isolation? Experts weigh in.

• The Big Fail

  It decries the way the bien pensant, the self-righteously conventional, were able to sideline, suppress and belittle other voices as unscientific, fraudulent purveyors of misinformation. The Big Fail gives the other voices their hearing— Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya and Emily Oster are recast not as villains but as heroes; as is Ron DeSantis who is given credit for bucking the conventional during the pandemic.

• New CDC life expectancy data shows painfully slow rebound from Covid

• Everything You Need to Know About China's Child Pneumonia Outbreak

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• In Continued Defense of Effective Altruism

• Facebook Approved Israeli Ad Calling for Assassination of Pro-Palestine Activist

• LA Times: Derek Chauvin stabbing is an indictment of U.S. prison system

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Harvard University faces federal civil rights investigation for antisemitism amid Israel-Hamas war.

• Compact accelerator technology achieves major energy milestone

• Historians and the Public

  • Being a public historian

Entertainment / ShowBiz / Advertising

• FCC Moves Slowly to Update Definition of Broadband to Something Still Pathetic

• The Disney 10k Annual Report Reveals Disney May Be VERY Worried About Their Place in the Culture War.

• Spotify Wrapped 2023 is so popular, it's crashing

• Euro MPs want regulation of music streaming to 'protect diversity'

• Jezebel to Be Resurrected by Paste Magazine

• Robert De Niro accuses Apple of censoring awards speech

  • Apple censors Robert De Niro's Gotham awards speech

  was gearing up to slam Donald Trump at Monday’s Gotham Awards, but when he took the stage he discovered that the speech he planned to give had been altered at the behest of Apple, the film’s producer. The company was responding to feedback from the filmmaking team that wanted the actor’s remarks to be centered on the movie, according to a source.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• OwnCloud vulnerability, CVSS Score 10

• Apple to Discontinue Custom 5G Modem Development, Claim Reports

• Rust std fs slower than Python? No, it's hardware

  'FSRM', short for 'Fast Short REP MOV', is an innovation originally by Intel, recently incorporated into AMD as well, to enhance the speed of 'rep movsb' and 'rep movsd'. It's designed to boost the efficiency of copying large amounts of memory. CPUs that declare support for it will use FSRM as a default in glibc.

  @ryncsn has conducted further research and discovered that it's not related to L1 prefetches.

  It seems that rep movsb performance poorly when DATA IS PAGE ALIGNED, and perform better when DATA IS NOT PAGE ALIGNED, this is very funny...

  • HN comments

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Amazon Introduces Q, an A.I. Chatbot for Companies | Hacker News

• Helen Toner, the effective altruist who sparked the Open AI coup

• Why AI Will Save the World

• Why Won't OpenAI Say What the Q* Algorithm Is?

• Why it's important to remember that AI isn't human

• AI minister likens risk of AI over-regulation to historical printing press ban

• Fake babies, real horror: Deepfakes from the Gaza war increase fears about AI’s power to mislead.

  While most of the false claims circulating online about the war didn’t require AI to create and came from more conventional sources, technological advances are coming with increasing frequency and little oversight.

• AI threatens to automate away the clergy

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Why are key Republicans resisting transparency on UFOs?

• We're seeing views of China's entire space station for the first time

• Moon's scientifically important sites could be 'lost forever' in mining rush

• A Star with Six Planets That Orbit Perfectly in Sync

• The U.S. Government UFO Cover-Up Is Real–But It's Not What You Think

Crypto con games

• Bitcoin mining could supercharge transition to renewables, study claims

• Christopher Harborne: Tether's Agent?

• Every Bitcoin payment 'uses a swimming pool of water'

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Nashville, TN apartment concessions at highest level in over 2 years 

• Corporate America Has Dodged the Damage of High Rates. For Now

• Home prices hit another record high in September despite higher mortgage rates

• Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

  • Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

  • HN comments

• Uber Isn't Profitable yet but Is Getting Closer; the Antitrust Case

• Housing Costs Are So High That Divorced Couples Are Still Living Together

• Why Is Everyone So Unhappy at Work?

• "Veev" Once a Bay Area 'unicorn,' well-funded company to fold with few houses built

  • Proptech Graveyard

• London's iconic black cabs to appear on Uber app, after years of resistance

• Apple is trying to unwind its Goldman Sachs credit card partnership

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Hunter Biden Demands To Testify Publicly Vs. Closed-Door Deposition | ZeroHedge

• Car dealers say they can't sell EVs, tell Biden to slow their rollout

• CA Senate Bill 54 brings venture capital into progressive political compliance

• 'Stop the price gouging': Biden hits corporations over high consumer costs

• A Civil Rights Firestorm Erupts Around a Looming Surveillance Power Grab

• Chicago Mayor Blames 'Right-Wing Extremists' for City's Problems

  “What we’ve seen is a very raggedy form of right-wing extremism”‘ the mayor said. “Everyone knows that the right-wing extremism in this country has targeted democratically run cities, and quite frankly, they have been quite intentional about going after democratically ran cities that are led by people of color.” The mayor even said that such “right-wing extremists” aim to create “division and chaos because that is what that particular political party has been about.”

• Washington Post reporter says ‘sources’ fret public’s lack of credit for Biden 'successes' | Washington Examiner

  “My sources are saying President Biden doesn’t get a lot of credit, not only on this, but on a whole host of things,” she said in addressing the hostage releases over the weekend. But maybe there's hope, she added, that Biden will get the credit she says he deserves if his team just sells it better. "They have a lot of work to do to once again, like I said, try to get credit for the successes that he’s had over the past two years which he keeps on getting blamed for everything bad that’s happened."

• White House in Disarray As TikTok Turns Against Biden

• Federal Law Requires a Choice: Marijuana or a Gun?

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Washington warily eyes the death of the Chinese economic 'juggernaut'

• The Secret History of Plasma Weapons

• US Attorney Charges Indian National with Plot to Assassinate US Citizen in NYC

  • US charges Indian man in alleged assassination plot

• At Least One Dead as U.S. Osprey Crashes in Japan with 6 Onboard

World

• India to investigate US allegations of foiled Sikh assassination plot

• Chinese Social Platforms Now Require Top Influencers to Display Real Name Online

• Nihon University to disband American football club over drug scandal

• Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act

• Ireland DOJ to grant sweeping powers as Garda 'need to see private social media'

Israel

• Hamas founder's son calls on Israel to threaten to kill his father - The Jerusalem Post

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia's Powerful Invisible Defenses Around Sevastopol Rendered Visible

Health / Medicine

• Millions of Kids in U.S. Have Inadequate Health Care Coverage

• Cyberattack diverts ambulances from emergency rooms in multiple states

• Pregnancy remodels the brain: Stem cells shape the sense of smell in mothers

• U.S. Suicides Reached a Record High Last Year

  • HN comments

• US$280 in China, US$8,892 in the US: new Chinese cancer drug gets FDA approval

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Plans to present meat as 'sustainable nutrition' at Cop28 revealed

• Italy bans cultivated meat products

• Honeybees Suffer in Human Made Hives

• Plastic pollution from cigarette butts likely costs US$26B/year

• Aligning climate scenarios to emissions inventories shifts global benchmarks

• Rolls-Royce calls off bets on electric planes, says low-carbon fuel is future

• Why Norway – the poster child for electric cars – is having second thoughts

• Revealed: The climate impact of the middle classes