2024-05-19

etc

• More Northern Lights soon as Sun storms strengthen

  • Northern Lights could be visible in the UK again in a matter of weeks

• The first Mexican taco stand to get a Michelin star

• The beauty of concrete - Works in Progress

  The naive explanation for the decline of ornament is that the people commissioning and designing buildings stopped wanting it, influenced by modernist ideas in art and design. In the language of economists, this is a demand-side explanation: it has to do with how buyers and designers want buildings to be. The demand-side explanation comes in many variants and with many different emotional overlays. But some version of it is what most people, both pro-ornament and anti-ornament, naturally assume.

  However, there is also a sophisticated explanation. The sophisticated explanation says that ornament declined because of the rising cost of labor. Ornament, it is said, is labor-intensive: it is made up of small, fiddly things that require far more bespoke attention than other architectural elements do. Until the nineteenth century, this was not a problem, because labor was cheap. But in the twentieth century, technology transformed this situation. Technology did not make us worse at, say, hand-carving stone ornament, but it made us much better at other things, including virtually all kinds of manufacturing and many kinds of services. So the opportunity cost of hand-carving ornament rose. This effect was famously described by the economist William J Baumol in the 1960s, and in economics it is known as Baumol’s cost disease.

  In other words, something like the naive demand-side theory has been true all along: to exaggerate a little, it really did happen that every government and every corporation on Earth was persuaded by the wild architectural theory of a Swiss clockmaker and a clique of German socialists, so that they started wanting something different from what they had wanted in all previous ages. It may well be said that this is mysterious. But the mystery is real, and if we want to understand reality, it is what we must face.

• Boeing 747-400 catches fire, forced to land on Indonesia to Saudi Arabia flight

Horseshit

• How the war on drunk driving was won

• War on cars? Why San Francisco drivers say they feel under siege

• We'll need universal basic income – Geoffrey Hinton

• California pays meth users up to $599 a year to get sober

• Show HN: Peanut Butter Spinner | Hacker News

Electric / Self Driving cars

• The EV industry can't shake its human rights abuse problem

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• EU fears as Russian propaganda ads on Facebook target Euro elections

Musk

• RIP Twitter Dot Com: Elon Musk Moves Social Network to X Web Address

• Woman Stuck in Tesla for 40 Mins During Vehicle Update

• SpaceX satellites threaten to hide asteroids that pose danger to humanity

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Stormy Daniels's American Dream

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• NIH Deputy Director acknowledged NIH funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan

• We now know the likely truth about COVID, and how scientists lied.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• A Teacher Did All He Could to Keep Kids Off Phones. He's Quitting in Frustration

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Why Sonos' biggest fans turned against it

• 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later

  • HN comments

• Apple's 27% App Store Fee Trying to Comply with Law, Exec Says

• Decoding US Government Plans to Shift the Software Security Burden

• Reddit brings back its old award system

• An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads

• The Mac vs. PC war is back on

• 2023 Was the Worst Year for Internet Shutdowns, Report Finds

• Sports Illustrated fails to deliver May issue after breakup with publisher: sources

• Librarians Are Waging a Quiet War Against International "Data Cartels"

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Intel's new Falcon Shores processor uses 1500W.

• Fixing the iterative damping interpolation in video games

  there we have it, the perfect formula, frame rate agnostic, deterministic and resilient to overshooting. If you've quickly skimmed through the maths, here is what you need to know: a = lerp(a, B, delta * RATE)

  Should be changed to: a = lerp(a, B, 1.0 - exp(-delta * RATE2))

  With the precomputed RATE2 = -FPS * log(1 - RATE/FPS) (where log is the natural logarithm), or simply using RATE2 = RATE as a rough equivalent. Also, any existing overshooting clamping can safely be dropped.

• DBASE Classic

  based on the original dBASE™ V for DOS product released by Borland back in 1994.

  • dBASE III was popular; dBASE IV killed Ashton-Tate. Per wikipedia: "whose design and stability were so lacking that many users switched to other products."

  • dBase - Wikipedia

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• OpenAI putting 'shiny products' above safety, says departing researcher

• Sam Altman says he can't go out to eat in public anymore in SF

• Think AI Can Perceive Emotion? Think Again

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Boeing Starliner's debut crewed flight delayed again to check helium leak

Crypto con games

• Conviction of Tornado Cash programmer: Privacy is not a crime

• Crypto lender Genesis to return $3B to customers in bankruptcy wind-down

Economicon / Business / Finance

• CitiGroup announced 20k layoffs in January despite $9.2B in annual profit

• Boeing shareholders approve departing CEO's pay package

• Larry Fink, Top BlackRock Executives' Pay Draws Proxy Advisor Pushback

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• (Dec 2023) The 118th U.S. Congress one of the most unproductive in modern history

• Why You’re Going to Be Hearing More about Hunter Biden Soon

• Proposal would have motorists pay by miles driven instead of per-gallon gas tax

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• DOJ: Man sentenced to 14 years for posession of deepfake CSAM

  • HN comments

• Macy's Union Square workers say rampant shoplifting to blame for closure

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Heckler and Koch Eyes Adapting Its Rifles to Fire Soviet-Designed Ammo

• Russian Rocket, Not Russian Military, Prompts Airspace Warning Off California

World

• India's spike in trade with Russia not a 'temporary phenomenon', minister says

• Why a New Yorker Story on a Notorious Murder Case Is Blocked in Britain

  • New Yorker geo-blocks Lucy Letby story in collision with British courts

  • this article: A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?

• Is black the new green for Japan's flagging tea farmers?

• French post office releases scratch-and-sniff baguette stamp

• Japan OKs hunting whales as whale meat vending machines grow more popular

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine blackouts caused by malware warn against threats to physical world

• Why Russian Tanks Explode When Hit

China

• How China is using AI news anchors to deliver its propaganda

• China Says It Will Start Buying Apartments as Housing Slump Worsens

• Why is China producing so many export goods, anyway?

Health / Medicine

• I Couldn't Escape Poison Oak. So I Started Eating It

• Adverse Effects of Contact Lenses

• Japan: The Land That Doesn't Need Ozempic

• Sony's new microsurgery robot stitches up a corn kernel

• Psychedelics could treat some of the worst chronic pain in the world

• Signs of Alzheimer's were everywhere. Then his brain improved

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Catholic Podcaster and Jordan Peterson Flunk Climate Science 101

• Six charts help to explain 2024's freakish temperatures

• Scientists Warn Brain Diseases Are Getting Worse as Climate Change Intensifies

• Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought

• Scientists are mapping Earth's rivers from Space

• Global warming and heat extremes to enhance inflationary pressures

• Ways to mitigate the environmental toxicity of ubiquitous silver nanoparticles

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