2024-04-28

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• Boy, 13, finds 'holy grail' Lego octopus piece from sea spillage in 1997

  Among the Lego pieces that fell into the sea were 352,000 pairs of flippers, 97,500 scuba tanks, and 92,400 swords - but octopuses are the most prized objects as only 4,200 were onboard. Liutauras, who found it on a beach in Marazion, regularly goes down to the local beaches with his parents and has amassed 789 Lego pieces over the course of two years, as well as numerous fossils.

  • Teenager finds ‘holy grail’ Lego octopus from 1997 spill off Cornwall coast

• Canon Is Finally Letting Sigma and Tamron Make RF Mount Lenses

Horseshit

• Texas Attracted California Techies. Now It's Losing Them

• The sad, stale state of in-flight vegetarian meals

• The Dark Heart of Individualism

  I’m so accustomed to our current broken democratic system that I forget we used to have a differently broken one, with much more power consolidated around wealthy landowners. (To be fair, wealthy landowners still control our current system, we just pretend that “allowing” most people to vote negates it). Back in the late 18th century, these elites were terrified of the word democracy: they hated monarchy, but they also didn’t think the future of the country should be handed to the general (white, male) public.

• Thinking Doesn't Have to Feel So Hard

• You Don’t Need to ‘Decant’ Your Groceries - Eater

  Pastas and grains are displayed in elegant clear containers. Oils and vinegars are decanted into matching bottles (with nothing so gauche as a brand name within sight). Pantries become apothecary shops, with everything ready to be scooped romantically from its matching bin. And it’s making me lose my goddamn mind. As you know by virtue of not being able to buy yogurt by the handful, most food is sold in containers. But for many people, these containers are not good enough. So they have built a whole online world dedicated to the purpose of showing you what other types of containers to put your groceries in. Which of course requires buying these containers, many of which are plastic, into which you can decant stuff that came in... other plastic containers.

• Gen Zers struggling to stay in work or school– and the parents who are at a loss

• A vegan cheese beat dairy in a big competition. Then the plot curdled (Archive)

  This week, the foundation quietly removed the Climax Blue from the list of finalists on its website but didn’t make public what had disqualified the cheese. It wasn’t the fact that it is plant-based, since those products are explicitly allowed. But it had never been an issue since a vegan cheese had never impressed the judges enough to be named a finalist. When asked by The Washington Post about its reasoning, Good Foods Foundation executive director Sarah Weiner at first declined to say, but she said something similar had happened only three times in the awards’ 14-year history. Someone — another entrant, perhaps, or someone else in the community — can alert the foundation that a contestant might not meet the requirements they attested to, which include such things as meeting animal-husbandry guidelines where applicable and offering employees fair wages and diversity training. Weiner also wouldn’t say who tipped off the foundation about Climax. “I think there were a lot more eyes on this particular entrant than there would be on one of the hundreds of other finalists,” she said. “Which made it more likely that someone with expertise would reach out.”

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Hertz is ditching even more electric cars

celebrity gossip

• First Prison Photo of Sam Bankman-Fried: Bearded, Thin, and 'Weird as Shit'

• Exposing Max Hardcore, the Father of Violent Abuse Porn

  The man who ushered in the widespread acceptance of the hardcore porn genre, Max Hardcore, passed away on Monday, March 27.

  What we discovered through our investigation of the porn industry, and our subsequent interviews and investigation into Max, is that he is a man with a deeply sociopathic desire to destroy women. As controversial as his content was, the porn industry acted as a welcoming outlet for his sadistic, violent, and deeply abusive cravings to be satisfied. His motto was, “We’re not happy until you’re not happy.” And he truly lived by that. In his interview for Beyond Fantasy, he told Director Benjamin Nolot, “If you stay cooperative through the whole scene, then we haven’t pushed you hard enough… I want you to tell me to stop.”

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• SV's business model is incompatible with the moderation of online hatred

Musk

• Musk's xAI fundraising nears $6B

• Facebook co-founder claims Tesla FSD usage is declining

• Regulator reports 'critical safety gap' in Tesla Autopilot linked to crashes

  • US probes Tesla recall of 2M vehicles over Autopilot

• The demise of Twitter: how a 'utopian vision' became a 'toxic mess'

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• BLM activist who went to Capitol on Jan. 6 to ‘incite violence’ sentenced to 6 years in prison

• WaPo Runs 5,000 Word Profile Of Man Imprisoned For Threatening Marjorie Taylor Greene

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Undoc Latinx folks got Covid-19 vaccine at same rate as US citizens

• Bird flu virus has been spreading in US cows for months, RNA reveals

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Why Waking Up Early Is Rooted in White Supremacy

• Bodies found in Neolithic pit were likely victims of ritualistic murder

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Go to a State School

• Nearly Half Of Those Arrested At UT-Austin Pro-Palestinian Protest Had No Links To School

• Ontario to limit cellphone use in schools: sources

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Why is so much of the internet's infrastructure run by volunteers?

• Mastodon forms new U.S. non-profit

• The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

• Okta warns of "unprecedented" credential stuffing attacks on customers

• YouTube could roll out ads while videos are paused

• Microsoft "doubling down" on cybersecurity

• The 'boring phone': stressed-out Gen Z ditch smartphones for dumbphones

• Eken fixes 'terrible' video doorbell issue that could let someone spy on you

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

  there is an overwhelming force in the Rust community that when anyone mentions they're having problems with Rust the language on a fundamental level, the answer is "you just don't get it yet, I promise once you get good enough things will make sense". This is not just with Rust, if you try using ECS you're told the same thing. If you try to use Bevy you'll be told the same thing. If you try to make GUIs with whichever framework you choose (be it one of the reactive solutions or immediate mode), you'll be told the same thing. The problem you're having is only a problem because you haven't tried hard enough.

• Planes in 3D space

• MS-DOS 4.0 Source Code Fails to Compile

  Fun Side Note #2: That Vice President, Scott Hanselman, is the same Microsoft executive who has previously encouraged people to commit crimes against people based on their skin color and gender. Telling people to be ready to "go to jail" for those crimes. While that bit of information has absolutely nothing to do with the MS-DOS 4.0 source code release... it's nice to have background on the people in the story.

• Ask HN: Where have all the large monitors gone?

• Intel issues statement about CPU crashes, blames motherboard makers

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Looking for AI Use-Cases

• I Witnessed the Future of AI, and It's a Broken Toy

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Could humans alter the moon's orbit significantly with current technology?

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Google is officially a $2T company

• Planning on retiring at 65? Most Americans retire far earlier, and not by choice

• Intel used to dominate the U.S. chip industry, now struggling to stay relevant

• Surging auto insurance rates squeeze drivers, fuel inflation

• $20 Minimum Wage Backfires as Restaurants See Orders Plummet

• Ford looks to future EV breakthroughs– and smaller cars – to stanch the bleeding

• Google surges after buying back billions of dollars of its own stock

  • Google surpasses $2T market cap

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Don't confuse attention-seeking activists for "the youth vote"

  There’s no reason to expect the student loan issue to have outsized impact in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Instead, the share of the population that attended college is higher in blue states, not in swing states. Nor is there any reason to think student-loan holders are particularly likely to be swing voters. Instead, student-loan holders are mostly young-ish people who attended college, a strongly Democratic cohort.

  Speaking of which, as you can see from the poll, “Israel/Palestine” and even climate change also ranked as issues of relatively low importance to young voters. The Middle East may be the exception that proves the rule — even if relatively few people care about it, those who do are obviously extremely passionate about it, and I don’t think people are bluffing when they say it could swing their votes. However, the reporting often treats protests on elite college campuses, or social media posts from articulate activists, as though they’re a proxy for the youth vote overall. Young voters do differ from older ones on some issues, including Israel-Palestine and free speech. But they do not care about these issues nearly as much as they care about more basic stuff like the economy and health care.

• We Are Not Going to Have Another Civil War. What Happens Instead May Be Far Better. And Far Worse.

  This was a major concern of U.S. military senior officers especially toward the end of Trump’s term — that Trump would order the military to help him conduct a self-coup to keep him in office and/or to order the military to attack unarmed American protesters as if they were an advancing hostile foreign force. The debate among many senior U.S. military officers appeared to be not whether to fulfill any such order but over how to balk.

• Kristi Noem describes killing dog after bad hunting trip in new book

  “I hated that dog,” she wrote, adding that Cricket was untrainable, dangerous and worthless as a hunting dog. “At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.”

  • After Learning She Killed Her Puppy, Dr. Fauci Endorses Kristi Noem

• Claiming high user satisfaction, IRS will decide on renewing free tax site

• TikTok will not be sold, Chinese parent tells US

• RFK to File Lawsuit Against TikTok Ban

• Biden Calls for Record-High Tax Rate

  • Biden is right that we need to raise taxes

• Will heavy-handed U.S. intelligence spooks re-elect Trump? Will the New York Times help?

  We sometimes lose sight of how downright weird so much news reporting has become. Imagine you’re the New York Times. Donald Trump might return to the presidency so you report, as the paper did on April 12, on the “distrust” that exists between him and the U.S. intelligence agencies. But you leave out the part about top Obama intelligence officers going on national TV to call Mr. Trump a Russian agent. You leave out the part about FBI counterintelligence leaders knowingly trafficking in fabricated evidence about him. You leave out the part about 51 former intelligence officials lying to voters to influence an election and help his opponent.

• Anti-Israel protesters drape massive Palestinian flag over side of DC Hilton hosting White House Correspondents Dinner

  Anti-Israel protesters ran amok outside of the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, draping a massive Palestinian flag over the side of the venue and shouting at President Biden’s motorcade and guests as they headed inside.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• SF parking officers don't want to give out more tickets, object to new plan

• FTC says Amazon executives destroyed potential evidence using apps like Signal

• Adam Schiff's bags stolen from parked car in San Francisco

• Louisiana man sentenced to 50 year in prison,physical castration for raping teen

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Joint Statement of Intent Between the United States of America and CERN

  Should the CERN Member States determine the FCC-ee is likely to be CERN’s next world-leading research facility following the high-luminosity Large Hadron Collider, the United States intends to collaborate on its construction and physics exploitation, subject to appropriate domestic approvals. Consistent with the closing statement of the 2023 Summit on Accelerating the Adoption of Open Science, the United States and CERN affirm their collective mission to take swift strategic action that leads to accelerating widespread adoption of equitable open research, science, and scholarship throughout the world.

World

• Long lines form as Cuba runs short of cash

• Hungary opens up to Chinese tech despite protests

• The ghosts of India's TikTok: What happens when a social media app is banned

Israel

• UN Closes Cases Involving UNRWA Employees Link To Oct. 7 Attack - I24NEWS

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Hacktivist group claims it infiltrated Belarus security agency

• Ukraine War: M1 tanks withdrawn, they're not a strategic fit

• What Putin's No. 2 Believes About the West

China

• Suddenly, Chinese Spies Seem to Be Popping Up All Over Europe - The New York Times

  In all, six people in three separate cases have been charged this week in Europe with spying for China: two in Britain and four in Germany.

• MI5 warns UK universities China is targeting its sensitive research

Health / Medicine

• Many mental-health conditions have bodily triggers

  THE TICS started when Jessica Huitson was only 12 years old. Over time her condition worsened until she was having whole-body fits and being rushed to hospital. But her local hospital, in Durham, England, was dismissive, suggesting she had anxiety, a mental-health condition, and that she was probably spending too much time watching videos on TikTok. Her mother describes the experience as “belittling”. In fact, Jessica had an autoimmune condition brought on by a bacterial infection with Streptococcus. The condition is known as Paediatric Autoimmune-Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus (PANDAS). When the infection was identified and treated, her symptoms finally began to improve.

• Independent analysis of clinical studies of MDMA-assisted therapy raised doubts

• U.S. food recalls rise to highest level since 2020.

• Vaping is now more common than cigarette smoking among young people

• IVF and egg freezing: Numbers jumped in 2022

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Greenhouse gas emissions might have already peaked

• Why Antarctic wildlife is being 'sunburnt'

  A hole in the ozone layer - the protective barrier of gas in the upper atmosphere - now lingers over the frozen continent for more of the year. A major cause of ozone loss is believed to be the amount of smoke from unprecedented Australian wildfires, which were fuelled by climate change. Climate change biologist Prof Sharon Robinson told BBC News: "When I tell people I work on the ozone hole, they go: 'oh, isn't that better now?'"

• US's power grid continues to lower emissions–everything else, not so much

• Researchers: Animals should be included in global carbon cycle models

• Beavers are helping fight climate change, satellite data shows

• Glass bottles recycled to beach sand, to fight erosion

• They turned cattle ranches into tropical forest – then climate change hit

• As solar capacity grows, some of America's most productive farmland is at risk

• The Meltdown at the Sierra Club