2024-04-19

Worthy

• Saving the world and “passion” is bullshit | Locklin on science

  There was no business case for “Better Place.” There was no physical or economic need for this complex and ridiculous scheme. This wouldn’t have helped the environment at all: it is impossible for this hare-brained scheme to do so for simple thermodynamics reasons. But it was something that caught the imagination of people who wanted to make the world a better place. You could have made the world a better place working at SpaceX or even Google. If you like electric cars, Tesla made numerous real breakthroughs, and was relentless about making money (IMO their cars suck). You could also have made the world a better place by piling up giant heaps of money and donating it to worthy causes. Or if you’re incapable of this, you could volunteer at the soup kitchen, or help bums kick their drug habits: that is actually helping, rather than nerd fantasies about saving the planet like Mr. Spock. Nebulous pieties and bullshit do not make the world a better place. Get your nebulous pieties from religion like a normal human being; your personal vision of “making the world a better place” is almost certainly false because you’re a dumb monkey more susceptible to mass media programming with obvious falsehoods than in any other era of human history.

etc

• FAA Clears Boom for XB-1 Supersonic Tests

• Feds expand investigation into Honda's automatic emergency braking system

Horseshit

• Too many cubicles, too few homes spur incentives to convert offices to housing

• What is screen time doing to children?

• 9.5GB of overseas data: T-Mobile USA $143,000 Phone Bill

Boeing

• Boeing whistleblower said the company threatened him and other engineers

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Nissan Thinks It Can Beat Toyota to Solid-State EV Batteries

Musk

• Tesla risks losing its lead without an inexpensive EV

• Hyundai pauses X ads over pro-Nazi content on the platform

• Elon Musk's Grok keeps making up fake news based on X users' jokes

• Elon Musk vs. Mainstream Media

• US releases sealed Brazil orders to X, shedding light on account suspensions

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Trump Media shares fall, Truth Social will launch TV platform

• Opinion | Donald Trump and American Justice - The New York Times

  In the weeks leading up to the start of this trial, Mr. Trump has argued, dishonestly, that the judge and the prosecutor have treated him unfairly, and that it will be impossible for him to get a fair trial in Manhattan because New Yorkers are biased against him. But the opening days of the trial, devoted to jury selection, have already demonstrated the great care and respect with which everyone involved in the trial, except for Mr. Trump, has treated the process. Joshua Steinglass, a member of the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, told potential jurors on Tuesday that the case “has nothing to do with personal politics.”

  If anything, Justice Merchan has exhibited an extra degree of tolerance for Mr. Trump’s strategy of systematically attacking the legitimacy of the courts and court officials through repeated verbal outbursts and countless legal motions and other attempts to delay his trials.

  The fact that he was able to have each of these motions fully considered is evidence of the justice system operating as it should, with deliberation and due process. Especially in criminal prosecutions, courts take the legal rights of litigants very seriously, to ensure that defendants receive fair trials. An appeals court is still considering Mr. Trump’s request to throw out a gag order that prevents him from verbally attacking witnesses, prosecutors or the judge’s family, but it will not delay the trial before the ruling. (Mr. Trump is not prevented from publicly criticizing the judge.) In the other criminal cases against him, Mr. Trump has also been able to take full advantage of every legal protection available to him as a defendant.

  While a Manhattan jury weighs the evidence of Mr. Trump’s alleged crimes, it’s the American people who will weigh the evidence of Mr. Trump’s actions. His party has allowed him to act with impunity, but Americans voters still have the power to deliver accountability. They should consider not only the facts presented during the trial — the details about his judgment, his character and the way he conducted his life and his business — but also his disregard for the rule of law and his willingness to demean American justice when it suits his interests. Those actions render him manifestly unfit for office and would pose unique dangers to the United States during a second term. The greatest of those dangers, and the one that Americans should be most attuned to, is the damage that a second Trump presidency would inflict on the rule of law.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• W.H.O. Broadens Definition of Airborne Diseases - The New York Times

  In the early days of the Covid pandemic, a team of scientists called on the World Health Organization to acknowledge that the disease could spread through the air. Initially, the agency rebuffed them, despite growing evidence that coronavirus-laden droplets stuck around in the air, making indoor spaces hotbeds of infection. The researchers responded with a public campaign, which helped persuade the World Health Organization to finally acknowledge, in late 2021, that Covid was airborne.

  The new report divides transmission routes into ones that involve contact, and others that involve the air. The group agreed to call the second route “through the air transmission.” Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech and a member of the advisory group, found that phrase more awkward than a simpler term like airborne transmission. “I find it very clunky,” she said. “But we were looking for the lowest common denominator terminology that everyone could live with.”

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Dissent is not hatred

  By playing a victimhood card he had no good reason to play, Neeves deliberately obscured the point. He pretended that Rowling was just spewing out hatred, whereas in fact she was merely disagreeing, asserting a reasonable belief, and making a bold protest in the cause of free speech.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Canadian science gets biggest boost to PhD and postdoc pay in 20 years

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• EU tells Meta it can't paywall privacy

• How do Nintendo's Mario developers bridge a widening generation gap?

• Nature officially becomes a musician, earning royalties for environmental causes

• TikTok’s Origin Story: Court Files Show Role of GOP Megadonor Jeff Yass - The New York Times

  In 2009, long before Jeff Yass became a Republican megadonor, his firm, Susquehanna International Group, invested in a Chinese real estate start-up that boasted a sophisticated search algorithm. The company, 99Fang, promised to help buyers find their perfect homes. Behind the scenes, employees of a Chinese subsidiary of Mr. Yass’s firm were so deeply involved, records show, that they conceived the idea for the company and handpicked its chief executive. They said in one email that he was not the company’s “real founder.”

  • TikTok Testing its Instagram Competitor TikTok Notes in Canada and Australia

• Working at Google has been utterly depressing for over a year

• Netflix profits surge as service adds 9.3M subscribers in latest quarter

  • Netflix blows past estimates as subscribers jump 16%

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Unraveling The Secrets Of Apple’s Mysterious Fisheye Format

• AWS kills Snowmobile data transfer truck | Hacker News

• Dnsmasq wins the first BlueHats Prize

  BlueHats prizes is an initiative by the French Interministerial Digital Directorate. They are awarded to maintainers of critical free and open source projects. In 2024 four prizes of € 10 000 each will be given out. We are happy to announce the winner of the first 2024 BlueHats prize is Simon Kelley, maintainer of the dnsmasq project. Dnsmasq provides network addressing for small networks: DNS, DHCP, router advertisement and network boot.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• A.I. Tools Could Change India's Elections

• How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English

• AI was supposed to make police bodycams better. What happened?

• What are human values, and how do we align AI to them?

• AI startup Stability lays off 10% of staff after controversial CEO's exit

• Verbal lie detection using Large Language Models

• Meta Releases Llama 3

  • HN comments

• Artificial intelligence is being used to create child abuse material

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Proposals for New US Power Plants Jump 90% on Surging Demand

• New-home construction posts biggest drop in four years, despite America facing a housing shortage.

• Employers feel the side effects of drugmaker control over Wegovy, Ozempic costs

• 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki Plans to Take Company Private

• All-cash offers, wealthy buyers push Southern California home prices to a record

• A Number of Homeowners Have Mortgage Rates Too Good to Give Up

• Researchers say 'loss avoidance' is all the rage in private equity

• California Sees Two More Property Insurers Withdraw from Market

• Rents Are the Fed's 'Biggest Stumbling Block' in Taming US Inflation

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Biden suggests uncle eaten by ‘cannibals’ in New Guinea — but military says his WWII plane lost at sea.

  Biden told the story while attacking former President Donald Trump for allegedly skipping a 2018 visit to a military cemetery outside of Paris during his term of office after calling fallen US troops buried there “suckers” and “losers.” “Suckers and losers? The man doesn’t deserve to have been the commander in chief of my son,” Biden said in Pittsburgh, after saying in Scranton that Trump “refused to go up to the memorial for veterans in Paris.” The disputed account was featured in an article by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that said Trump “blamed rain for the last-minute decision [not to visit the cemetery], saying that ‘the helicopter couldn’t fly’ and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.”

  Documentation emerged in 2020 debunking Goldberg’s account by showing that the Navy made a bad-weather call that prevented the cemetery trip from being made by helicopter.

  • Joe Biden suggests his uncle was eaten by ‘CANNIBALS’ after his plane was shot down over Papua New Guinea during World War Two

• Impeachment ‘Whistleblower’ Was in the Loop of Biden-Ukraine Affairs That Trump Wanted Probed | RealClearInvestigations

  The emails show Ciaramella expressed shock – “Yikes” is what he wrote – at Biden’s move to withhold the $1 billion in aid from Kyiv, which represented a sudden shift in U.S. policy. They also show he was drawn into White House communications over how to control adverse publicity from Hunter taking a lucrative seat on Burisma’s board. Yet there is no evidence Ciaramella raised alarms about the questionable Biden business activities he witnessed firsthand, which is in sharp contrast to 2019. In that instance, he was galvanized into action after being told by White House colleague Alexander Vindman of an “improper” phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. During the call, Trump solicited Zelensky’s help in investigating Burisma and Hunter Biden’s role in the company.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules

• Startup pitches a paintball-armed, AI-powered home security camera: PaintCam Eve also offers a teargas pellet upgrade.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US Air Force says AI-controlled F-16 has been dogfighting with humans

World

• Mexico, facing US pressure, will halt incentives to Chinese EV makers

• Europe gives TikTok 24 hours to explain 'addictive and toxic' new app

• How Sweden’s stock market became the envy of Europe

• Post Office urged by external lawyers to 'suppress' key document, inquiry hears

• South African users of Starlink will be cut off at the end of the month

Israel

• Israel has sped up settlement-building in East Jerusalem since Gaza war began

• Israeli missiles hit a site in Iran

• Explosions Heard in Iran, Syria, Iraq

  An Israeli missile strike targeted a site in Iran early Friday morning, according to ABC News. The report came shortly after local sources reported explosions in Isfahan in central Iran, in the As-Suwayda Governorate of southern Syria, and in the Baghdad area and Babil Governorate of Iraq early Friday morning. Videos reportedly from Isfahan appeared to show Iranian air defenses activated in the skies over the area.

• Futures Tumble, Oil And Gold Soar On Reports Of "Huge Explosions" In Central Iran, Israeli Airstrikes In Iraq And Syria

  Moments ago futures dumped, oil prices spiked, and treasury yields slumped amid social media reports and Reuters headlines that there have been three "huge explosions" near the central Iran cities of Natanz (location of an Iranian nuclear power plant) and Isfahan (location of the Iranian Nuclear Technology Center which is suspected of being the center of Iran's nuclear weapons program), as well as simultaneous explosions in Iraq and Syria, where the Israel air force appears to be targeting pro-Iranian militias.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia jails hypersonics scientist for seven years in treason case

• 'Turtle Tank' Appears in Ukraine

• UK insurers refuse to pay Nord Stream because blasts were 'government' backed

• Why Ukraine Is Losing the War

China

• Water extraction and weight of buildings see half of China's cities sink

Health / Medicine

• Low-carb diets work. Why does the American Diabetes Assoc push insulin instead?

• Thoughts on Seed Oil

  can’t emphasize this enough: There is no clear “best” argument for why seed oils are supposed to be bad. This stuff is coming from internet randos who differ both in what they think is true, and why they think it. But we can examine some common arguments.

• Persistent shortage of growth hormone frustrates parents and clinicians

• Nestlé adds sugar to infant milk sold in poorer countries, report finds

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Specious Species: Coywolves & Coydogs.

• Is a watchdog for corporate climate commitments caving to industry?

• How Clean Energy Is Boosting Economic Growth

• California cracks down on water pumping: 'The ground is collapsing'

• 'When it's this hot, time stands still': surviving west Africa's heat

• Number of dead sawfish soars to 40 as reports of spinning fish continue

• 'Water is more valuable than oil': the corp cashing in on America's drought