2024-02-01

Cool

• Why rope cleats are that shape

Worthy

• Always educational: The business of check cashing

  If you are banked in the United States, that means that a profit-maximizing institution looked at you and said “In expectation, almost all checks this person presents will be good, drawn legitimately on the accounts of individuals or firms who do not make a habit of bouncing checks. Of the tiny, tiny number of checks that this person deposits that will bounce, and honestly it will probably be zero over the lifetime of their account, we have high confidence that they will make us whole. They have credit here.”

  If you are reading this, you probably are relatively wealthy, are almost certainly of high socioeconomic status, and quite plausibly have never paid one red cent for check cashing in your entire life.

  • HN comments

etc

• Resistor Swap Gives Honda Insights More Power

  relatively simple modification to the first-generation Insight involves a shunt resistor, which lets the computer sense the amount of current being drawn from the hybrid battery and delivered to the electric motor. ... the only other change is to upgrade the 100 A fuse near the battery for a larger size.With these two modifications in place, the electric motor gets an additional 40% power boost, which is around five horsepower.

  • Had one of these. The electric motor elements are deep in the combustion engine, essentially irreparable if you burn something out. The transmissions were notoriously weak, and the stock configuration is already powerful enough (for the weight) to flip the car on a flat road with little effort.

Horseshit

• It's Time the Word "Oligarch" Lost Its Russian Veneer

• Microsleeps: The naps that may only last seconds

• Boeing was once known for safety, engineering. Emphasis on profits changed that

• Metro Transit reminds riders to not defecate on trains or sexually assault passengers.

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Why US drivers may be thinking about EVs all wrong

• "Plug In Hybrid Electric Vehicle" GM To Reintroduce PHEVs In North America.

• Lamborghini will make hybrid versions of all its cars to cut its CO2

• Mustang Mach-Es Are Piling Up on Dealer Lots, and Ford Wants Them Gone

• Ford Announces Free Tesla SuperCharger Adapters

• Aptiv to cut stake in robotaxi tech firm Motional, stop funding

• Buggy software is dogging the switch to electric cars

• Crash tests indicate guardrail system can't handle heavy electric vehicles

celebrity gossip

• ‘Ballerina Farm’ Gave Birth Two Weeks Ago. Now It’s Time For a Beauty Pageant. - The New York Times

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Days of Darkness: How one woman escaped the conspiracy theory trap that has ensnared millions | AP News

  “I have a lot of fear about what I can’t control,” Ramona, now 23, said of her vulnerable mindset as COVID-19 spread. Ramona agreed to tell her story to The Associated Press after she detailed her experiences on a forum for recovering conspiracy theorists. The AP is not fully identifying Ramona or her ex-boyfriend to protect her privacy and safety. “The stuff he was telling me, it made me feel like at least we understood. He had an explanation for what was going on. I didn’t realize what I was getting into.”

• Deepfakes, trolls and cybertroopers: how social media could sway 2024 elections

• Meta Adviser Says 2020 Election Interference Was 'Not Enough'

• William Shatner Levels Government Censors Trying to Ban Iconic 'Star Trek' Line

Musk

• Judge orders Tesla to undo Elon Musk's $56B pay package

  • Elon Musk's battle with Delaware is about more than a $55B pay package

  • Elon Musk Is Overpaid

  • HN comments

  I bet he once was your hero and you praised him. Until you realized he had opinions you didn't share so now it's your part time job to make sure everyone knows exactly how much you hate him. Am I close?

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Business Partners Of Fani Willis’ Alleged Lover Bankrolled Her Campaign. She Gave Them Lucrative Contracts.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Measles Cases Soaring Worldwide as WHO Reports Alarming 45-Fold Rise in Europe

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Techno-Optimism vs. Malthusianism

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• NYC Parents Pay $120k per Year for Ivy League Admissions Consultants

• Students 'Surprising' Rebound from Pandemic Closures. Some May Never Catch Up

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission

  • HN comments

• The Vision Pro is a computer for the age of walled gardens

• For Gen Z, anime is bigger than the NFL

• Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

  He thinks the way to flush enshittification is enforcing effective competition. "We need to have prohibition and regulation that prohibits the capital markets from funding predatory pricing," he explained. The frustrating part of this is that the laws needed to break up the big tech monopolies that allow enshittification, and encourage competition, are already on the books. Doctorow lamented those laws haven't been enforced. In the US, the Clayton Act, the Federal Trade Act, and the Sherman Act are all valid, but have either not been enforced or are being questioned in the courts.

• Zuckerberg says Apple and Google should manage parental consent, not Meta

• Universal Music, TikTok fail to reach new licensing agreement

• The Messenger to Close After Less Than a Year

  • News startup The Messenger shuts down after pricey launch

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Intel's Humbling | Hacker News

• Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for driver updates on German trains

• Not a severe vulnerability, I think; but an interesting deep bug: Out-of-bounds read and write in glibc's qsort()

  To be vulnerable, a program must call qsort() with a nontransitive comparison function and with a large number of attacker controlled elements (to cause a malloc() failure inside qsort()).

  All glibc versions from at least September 1992 (glibc 1.04) to the current release (glibc 2.38) are affected, but the glibc's developers have independently discovered and patched this memory corruption in the master branch (commit b9390ba) during a recent refactoring of qsort().

  While this loop was still running (and not crashing), we started to read the glibc's qsort() implementation; to our great surprise, we discovered that the glibc's qsort() is not, in fact, a quick sort by default, but a merge sort (in stdlib/msort.c).

• DNS over HTTPS is not what I thought

  There is in fact an RFC 8427 titled "Representing DNS Messages in JSON", but this is not the format that CloudFlare / Google's servers are using. It is more closely aligned to provide a mapping from the binary format to a JSON representation. I'll probably stick to using the JSON api, rather than the actual DNS over HTTPS protocol, but it's good to know there is a difference.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• It's true, LLMs are better than people – at creating convincing misinformation

• Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

  • HN comments

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• The U.S. and China Want the Same Landing Spot for Upcoming Moon Missions

• It turns out NASA’s Mars helicopter was much more revolutionary than we knew.

  all of these commercially bought, off-the-shelf components worked. Radiation didn’t fry the Qualcomm computer. The brutal thermal cycles didn’t destroy the battery’s storage capacity. Likewise, the avionics, sensors, and cameras all survived despite not being procured with spaceflight-rated mandates.

• The sun's poles are about to flip

Crypto con games

• FTX says it will pay back customers..customers will 'eventually be paid in full'

  • FTX Expects to Repay Customers in Full, Drops Exchange Relaunch

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Alphabet stock slips after missing expectations on Google ad revenue

• Google spent billions of dollars to lay people off

• Amazon left Roomba with a huge mess to clean up

• We can still make a "good" economy much better

  Even low-income Americans are seeing some of the best labor market conditions in decades, with the rollback of an estimated 40 percent of the wage inequality that built up over the last 40 years. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon the main question raised by the mysterious “vibecession”: Why weren’t people happy about the economy?

• The Fed will cut rates fewer times and start them later than market hopes, according to CNBC Fed Survey.

• The U.S. Is Spoiled by Cheap Canadian Oil. That's About to Change

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• History rhymes: Mariel boatlift - Wikipedia

  On May 6, Carter declared a state of emergency in the areas of Florida most "severely affected" by the exodus, and an open arms policy in which all refugees fleeing Cuba would receive temporary status. On June 20 the Cuban-Haitian Entrant Program was established, and Haitians would be given the same legal status as Cuban refugees in the United States during the Mariel boatlift. Around 25,000 Haitians would enter the United States during the boatlift. In response, Carter then called for a blockade on the flotilla by the US Coast Guard. At least 1,400 boats would be seized, but many slipped by, and over 100,000 more Cuban and Haitian refugees continued to pour into Florida over the next five months.

• Why Both Nikki Haley and Donald Trump Could Win in Nevada - POLITICO

  On Feb. 6, the state will hold a primary in which GOP voters will go to their usual precincts but there will be only one serious contender, Nikki Haley, on the ballot. Then, two days later, the Republican Party will host a caucus in which GOP voters will go to school gyms and church basements where they can express their support for only one credible candidate, Donald Trump.

• KOSA isn't designed to help kids. - by danah boyd

  The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) continues to march through the halls of Congress as though it’s the best thing since sliced bread, even though one of the co-creators of this bill clearly stated that her intention is to protect children from “the transgender” and to prevent “indoctrination” from the LGBT community. I’m flabbergasted by how many Democrats shrug their shoulders and say that it’s still worth it to align with hateful politicians because it’ll help more kids. The thing is: it won’t.

  • Sen Wyden Reintroduces Legislation That Would Actually Help Be Kids Safer Online

  • Elon Musk's X comes out in favor of pro-censorship law

  • Accusations, tears and rants: 5 takeaways from today's tech CEO hearing

  • Silicon Valley Battles States Over New Online Safety Laws for Children - The New York Times

  • Stop KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act)

  • Senate hearing with five social media CEOs was a missed opportunity.

• Lawmakers Seeking to Outlaw Rent Price Fixing Reported by Propublica

• (video) James O'Keefe: "Biden is definitely slowing down"

• Disney Loses Florida Lawsuit

• House passes $78B tax bill in rare bipartisan vote

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• The Pentagon Tried to Hide That It Bought Americans' Data Without a Warrant

• FBI director warns that Chinese hackers are preparing to 'wreak havoc' on US

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• State Department reviewing options for recognition of Palestinian state

• Directed energy: The focus on laser weapons intensifies

World

• UK considering recognizing Palestinian state, says David Cameron – POLITICO

China

• China's Censorship Dragnet Targets Critics of the Economy

Health / Medicine

• Rest in Peace Dad – Dan Quach Blog

  as a society we don’t talk enough about end of life and what is a good way to die? When a parent isn’t able to take care of themselves, what do we do? How much do we pay? Who is going to take care of the person? What kind of hardships would be spread amongst family? Do you want to be there to witness last moments? It seems cruel to equate finances in context of one’s life, but it is an important topic to broach.

• Novo Nordisk Gradually Increasing Supply of Blockbuster Weight-Loss Drug Wegovy

• Amid Recall Crisis, Philips Agrees to Stop Selling Sleep Apnea Machines in USA

• Biogen Abandons Its Controversial Alzheimer's Drug Aduhelm

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The global greening continues despite droughts

• First Bird Flu Deaths Reported in Antarctic Penguins

• Climate change will require more cooling for Honolulu multifamily buildings

• Global climate spending reached $1.3T per year in '21/'22, nearly double '19/'20

• Environmental Impacts of Natural Gas

• Tampa Electric Manatee Viewing Center sets new record | kvue.com