2024-05-18

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• Mysterious origin of domesticated horses 'turned upside down' by DNA analysis (Archive)

  The horses which have long been considered ancestors of all modern domesticated steeds do in fact, belong to a totally different lineage, genetic analysis has revealed. DNA analysis from both modern and ancient horses has revealed the equines we are familiar with today only share around three per cent of their ancestry with Botai horses. Instead, the scientists were surprised to find that the Botai population actually gave rise to the Przewalksi’s horses of Mongolia. Przewalski's horses are thought of as the only truly wild horses left in the world, but the new analysis suggests this is not the case. Instead, this endangered population represents the last remnants of a feral population of Botai horses and the earliest descendents of domestic horses.

• NTSB Preliminary Report on Baltimore Bridge Collapse Released

• Boeing whistleblower John 'Mitch' Barnett died by suicide, coroner rules

• HP customer satisfaction correlated with distance from Saturn to the sun

  • As the distance from the Sun also correlates to distance from the Earth, the first explanation that comes to mind is comms delay. When the Earth based representatives at HP are suffering longer lag times in talking with their Saturnian controllers, they make poor decisions. Like hiring Carly.

Horseshit

• How do you pronounce "hockey"? US players say it with "fake Canadian" accent

• Long Beach man started a petition to ban Airbnb in his neighborhood – it worked

• India's butter chicken battle heats up with new court evidence

• The unexpected acolytes helping to keep ninja heritage alive

• Are tacos and burritos sandwiches? A judge in Indiana just ruled yes

• Woman says Atlantic City casino refuses to pay 7-figure jackpot

• Why the Internet Is Boring Now

• The Toilet Theory of the Internet

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Is the move to electric cars running out of power?

• Who Wants to Buy 30,000 Used Teslas From Hertz?

• Is the move to electric cars running out of power?

celebrity gossip

• Sir Paul McCartney first UK billionaire musician

• Mark Zuckerberg's Midlife Metamorphosis: Crafting or Crisis?

• The John Malkovich movie that will be released in 100 years

  • What can you say to people 100 years from now? "I was arrogant enough to assume you'd care about my opinions"

• ‘Doctor Who’ Actor Tells Viewers To ‘Turn Off The TV’ If They Don’t Like Him – Viewership Drops By 50%.

Obit

• Dabney Coleman, comic actor best known for villainous 9 to 5 and Tootsie roles, dead at 92

Musk

• Neuralink: Early Trial Risks and Implant Issues Revealed

  • Neuralink Knew Its Implant Likely to Malfunction in First Human Patient

• Twitter is officially X.com now

  • All core systems are now on X.com

  • Twitter Is Finally Dead

  • Ask HN: Should we stop posting X links on HN?

• For Elon Musk, Free Speech Is a Catchphrase, Not a Principle

• Tesla accused of union buster bluster at Buffalo factory

• Tesla cutting about 600 more jobs

• Class action lawsuit against Tesla over full self-driving cars can proceed

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife

  Pettitt didn’t use the term “trad wife,” but it didn’t take long for others to link her to what was, at this point, still a niche social-media meme. Her pronouncements, on marriage especially, provoked outrage among women, including newspaper columnists and viewers who waded online to air their responses. (It’s “like a frilly version of fascism,” one YouTube commenter said.) In the press, some made the link between the American trad wives and the alt-right or even white supremacists, who, Hadley Freeman wrote in the Guardian, “are extremely down with the message that white women should submit to their husband and focus on making as many white babies as possible.”

  The association with such content, whether by accident or design, is hard to escape. Ever since Pettitt’s first BBC interview, in 2020, she found herself having to convince radio hosts that she is neither homophobic nor racist. She became “very stressed about communicating quite strongly with news outlets” that she was not associated with the alt-right. More generally, she felt such discussions distracted from her point: “I’m there to talk about my role in the home and my marriage dynamic, not whether I’m anti-vax or pro-vax or who I vote for.”

  At the core of Pettitt’s frustration seemed to lie a belief that her values were apolitical. And yet politics exist in any space where there is more than one person, especially if those people share duties and money. As the author Phyllis Rose put it in her introduction to “Parallel Lives,” an account of five Victorian marriages, marriage is “the primary political experience in which most of us engage as adults.” Never mind your views on reproductive rights or financial independence: being a wife of any kind is a political act.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• It could soon be illegal to publicly wear a mask for health reasons in NC

• NIH Director tells Congress that Gain of Function research was funded at WIV

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Scottish Green Party Expels 13 Members for Saying ‘Sex Is a Biological Reality.’

• MLB incorporating Negro Leagues stats

• Blacks and Jews were excluded from Alameda County juries for decades, Feds say

• How the tech industry soured on employee activism

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• 'GTA VI' Sets Fall 2025 Release as Take-Two Posts $2.9B Quarterly Loss

• How the CIA Plans to Use Your Ad Tracking Data

• I upgraded my water heater and discovered how bad smart home security can be

  thought this was crazy until another GitHub user reached out and we started collaborating and came to the same conclusion. You could control any Rinnai water heater that was connected, as long as you knew the registered account's email address,” Barbour wrote me.

• Internet Archive Fails to Dismiss Record Labels' Copyright Lawsuit

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• (PDF) FCC Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Reporting on BGP Risk Mitigation

• Computer doused in exotic chemicals produced super-problems • The Register

  The Register finds that profoundly disappointing. Everything we've been taught about late night institutional accidents involving unknown chemicals, big machines, and electricity suggests that this incident should not have ended with a dead computer. Adam should have entered the room and been struck by an eldritch spark that fused his consciousness with the computer's newly sentient circuitry, raised to miraculous life by the drip of chemicals. The resulting hybrid organism would then devise miracle cures for the plucky and deserving patients of the hospital. Or perhaps it would commit mayhem that put unfortunate patients in the hospital. Whatever it got up to, the Adam/DEC entity would endlessly struggle to reconcile its human passions and machine constraints.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• OpenAI's Long-Term AI Risk Team Has Disbanded

  • OpenAI Dissolves High-Profile Safety Team After Chief Scientist Sutskever's Exit

  • OpenAI dissolves team focused on long-term AI risks

  • "I lost trust": Why the OpenAI team in charge of safeguarding humanity imploded

  • OpenAI researcher resigns, claiming safety has taken 'a backseat'

  • Ex-OpenAI staff must sign lifetime no-criticism contract or forfeit all equity | Hacker News

  • OpenAI put 'shiny products' over safety, departing top researcher says

• AI Eats the Web

• Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Omnispace reports interference from Starlink direct-to-device payloads

  During a panel at the International Telecoms Week conference here May 16, George Giagtzoglou, vice president of strategy at Omnispace, said his company now had “empirical evidence” of increased noise in S-band from Starlink satellites that have payloads operating on similar frequencies. “We’ve talked in the past about there being academic evidence, engineering studies. What we are actually seeing now with those satellites in operation is empirical evidence,” he said. “You see the noise floor on our satellites increase to the degree that services cannot be provided.”

Crypto con games

• Two former MIT students charged with stealing $25M of crypto in 12 seconds

• Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2B of Crypto

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Rents are rising faster than wages across the country

• Walmart gains high-income shoppers as elevated prices persist.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• McConnell opposes bill to ban use of deceptive AI to influence elections

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• 52,529 guns once owned by police departments have been later used in crimes

• David DePape Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Attacking Nancy Pelosi’s Husband

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• 2 people in ICE custody after attempting to breach Virginia Marine base

  “When asked, the operator of the truck informed the military police officers they worked for a company subcontracted by Amazon and were making a delivery to the U.S. Post Office located in the Town of Quantico,” Curtis said in the statement. Because the two had no affiliation with the Marine base and no credentials to enter it, military police officers directed them to go to a holding area to undergo standard vetting procedures, according to Curtis. But the driver blew past the holding area and attempted to drive onto the base.

  Potomac Local News, which first reported the attempted breach, reported hearing from multiple unnamed sources that one of the truck’s occupants was a Jordanian national who had recently crossed the southern border into the United States and that one occupant was on the U.S. government’s terrorist watch list.

• New Star Wars Plan: Pentagon Rushes to Counter Threats in Orbit

World

• France admits it's lost control of parts of New Caledonia, a producer of nickel

  • France blocks TikTok in New Caledonia, making EU's first TikTok ban

• Intelligence chief warns Canadians that China can use TikTok to spy on them

• DNA confirms there IS a big cat roaming the British countryside

• Hope for divorced parents as Japan to allow joint child custody

• Brexit is (maybe) the ruin of Irish whiskey

• Beekeeper Steven Brown furious over destruction of $2m honey crop | RNZ News

  Honey producer Springbank Honey of North Canterbury was ordered to burn more than 10,000 of its beehives and beekeeping equipment after American Foulbrood (AFB) was identified through spore testing. Brown said it would cost around $2 million to replace it all, made more difficult by the fact that there was no compensation or insurance available for beekeepers. Burning the hives was more painful when other countries used tools like vaccines, antibiotics and sterilisation - measures prohibited in New Zealand and in some export markets.

• Geert Wilders finally has a government of his own. But what does it actually plan to do?

  There will be a temporary Asylum Crisis Act lasting up to two years. During that period, the processing of asylum applications will be suspended and the reception of people who apply for asylum here will be 'greatly reduced'. There will be stricter rules governing prayer calls from mosques. here will be no “forced expropriation” of farms and efforts to shrink the livestock population will end. Fuel taxes paid by farmers will be cut.

• Can Europe's economy ever hope to rival the US again?

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian Courts Seize €463M from Italian Bank

China

• China Home Prices Fall at Faster Pace Despite Revival Efforts

• China Builds First Dedicated Drone Carrier

• America's last Pandas expected to leave for China

Health / Medicine

• The Medicare Bubble Has Burst

• A Trial HIV Vaccine Triggered Elusive and Essential Antibodies in Humans

• High levels of glyphosate found in more than half of sperm samples, study finds

• "Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Exxon Mobil is suing its shareholders to silence them about global warming

• California condors are rare, but 10% of them are trashing this woman's house

• Texas Grid Issues Alert for Potential Power Emergency

• Ancient trees reveal last summer hottest in 2k years

• The Hole in the Sky That We Fixed

• The Cicadas are Here | Jeff Geerling

  n fact, it's hard now to go outside and not feel a giant "crunch" underfoot, whether you just stepped in a pile of shells and discarded insect parts, or a couple of giant cicadas just kind of drunkenly walking around. At the beginning of the week, it came and went, peaking around 65 dBa in my backyard. Today it's up to 76 dBa (as measured unscientifically by my watch), and it will likely get a bit louder.

• The role of forests in Earth's climate goes far beyond carbon storage