2024-05-25

etc

• FAA reveals flaw in Boeing 777 that could result in fuel tank exploding

• Boeing sued for negligence by families of Marines killed in MV-22B Osprey crash

• USS Harder: Wreck of Famed US Navy World War II Sub Found Off the Philippines

• WW2: How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years

  • HN comments

• Long before Key Bridge collapse, Baltimore mariners warned of 'ship strikes'

Horseshit

• Climbing Gyms Are Unionizing. What Does That Mean for the Climbing Community?

• Universal Basic Income or Universal High Income?

  Because Elon Musk has decided to start talking about a concept he refers to as "universal high income" as being different and seemingly better than universal basic income, I feel the need to set the record straight here. Simply put, universal high income is a universal basic income that is high enough to be considered "high." Universal basic income is not a low universal income.

  why do I find it so important to inform everyone of this in response to Elon Musk deciding to contrast universal high income and universal basic income? It's because I believe Elon is responding to the misinformation that his loyal fans appear to be simmering in.

• Move Over, Tractor–The Farmer Wants a Crop-Spraying Drone

• The Two Paths To Inexpensive Housing

  As I have argued at length, subsidies cannot meaningfully scale, politically or economically. So the only other realistic path to inexpensive housing is low-quality housing. I refuse to accept that option for other people. Yet it gets a lot of credence.

  “Naturally occurring affordable housing” is typically run down garden apartments occupied by working-class families in an expensive metro area. Garden apartments are low-rise structures, usually no more than three or four stories, characterized by lots with considerable open space and greenery and trees.

• American Airlines says blaming 9-year-old in bathroom recording case was 'error'

• Sundar Pichai Tells Employees They Don't Need Money to Have Fun Amid Cost Cuts

Electric / Self Driving cars

• In Acton, rural serenity threatened by planned battery facilities

• GM Hopes a Clutch Pedal Is Enough to Make Enthusiasts Buy EVs

• Feds add nine more incidents to Waymo robotaxi investigation

celebrity gossip

• Sky voice actor says nobody ever compared her to ScarJo before OpenAI drama

Obit

• Kabosu, internet sensation dog that inspired meme and Dogecoin, has died

  • Kabosu, the dog behind the 'doge' internet meme, has died

  • Kabosu the Doge meme dog, has died at 18

  • Dogecoin dog Kabosu dies after 14 years as meme

  • Kabosu, Shiba Inu That Inspired the Doge Meme and Cryptocurrency, Died Age 18

• Morgan Spurlock Dead: 'Super Size Me' Director Was 53

  • Morgan Spurlock, Known for 'Super Size Me,' Dies at 53

  • Morgan Spurlock, filmmaker behind 'Super Size Me' documentary, dies from cancer

  • Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock dies at 53

  • Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock who skewered fast food industry dies at 53

  • Super Size Me documentary maker who ate only McDonald's for a month dies aged 53

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• The First Amendment Gives You the Right to Lie, Even with AI

• Distributor of the Hong Kong protest song will remove it from all platforms

• Exposing The CIA's Secret Effort To Seize Control Of Social Media | ZeroHedge

  While the CIA is strictly prohibited from spying on or running clandestine operations against American citizens on US soil, a bombshell new "Twitter Files" report reveals that a member of the Board of Trustees of InQtel - the CIA's mission-driving venture capital firm, along with "former" intelligence community (IC) and CIA analysts, were involved in a massive effort in 2021-2022 to take over Twitter's content management system, as Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag report over at Shellenberger's Public (subscribers can check out the extensive 6,800 word report here).

Musk

• Neuralink Compression Challenge

  Compression is essential: N1 implant generates ~200Mbps of eletrode data (1024 electrodes @ 20kHz, 10b resolution) and can transmit ~1Mbps wirelessly. So > 200x compression is needed. Compression must run in real time (< 1ms) at low power (< 10mW, including radio). Neuralink is looking for new approaches to this compression problem, and exceptional engineers to work on it.

  • Suspect they'll hafta delta code channels in groups and hop only a few light up at any given time.

• Musk opposes US tariffs on Chinese electric cars

• Tesla's once-stellar reputation is running out of juice

• Tesla owner says car's self-driving mode didn't see train before crash

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• AG Garland denounces Trump claim ‘deadly force’ approved in Mar-a-Lago raid: ‘False and extremely dangerous’.

• How the Republican Party could win the Black vote for a generation.

  It is time for Republicans to say something, and I think Donald Trump may be the messenger who could break through Republican norms to say something this daring and counterintuitive: Let’s give the descendants of slavery a radical Republican version of reparations.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• After mice drink raw H5N1 milk, bird flu virus riddles their organs

• Research reveals that more people died from hot or cold weather conditions than COVID-19 in parts of UK.

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• "Patron Saint of Programmers" Carlo Acutis to Be Canonized

  • Italian Teenager to Become the First Millennial Saint

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Scientific Research and Fraud: Mass Retraction of Papers Highlights Crisis

• Almost 30% of Americans Say College Not Worth It in Pew Poll

  • HN comments

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Apple's Wi-Fi Positioning System can be abused to track people around the globe

• TV Networks Embrace Their Aging Audience with a New Mantra: Age Doesn't Matter

• Bing outage shows just how little competition Google search has

• The Washington Post Tells Staff It's Pivoting to AI

• The end of teen TV shows

• Internet Taxes to Bail Out Media Won't Solve Fundamental Media Business Problems

• ICQ will stop working from June 26

  • HN comments

  • ICQ messenger shuts down after almost 28 years

• Nintendo is opening its second US store in San Francisco

• After you die, your Steam games will be stuck in legal limbo

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• 2D Rigid Body Collision Resolution

  • HN comments

• The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder | LANCE EWING

  Rather than being filled with the 0xF6 byte, it is instead filled with something that looks like C source code. This strongly suggests that the master disk was used for some other purpose prior to being the SQ2 Disk 1 master disk. The files were then deleted, but the disk was not properly formatted afterwards.

  It turns out that this Space Quest 2 game disk contains about 70% of the source code of Sierra On-Line’s AGI interpreter, complete with comments and change history.

  • HN comments

• (2012) PHP: a fractal of bad design / fuzzy notepad

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Noise-canceling headphones use AI to let a single voice through

  • They've invented a digital version of the Flappers from Gulliver's Travel's.

• Today's AI Isn't Sentient

• Google promised better search - now it's telling us to put glue on pizza.

  • Google AI search tool reportedly tells users to jump off a bridge and eat rocks

  • Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination

  • Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

• Next up in Google's dramatic overhaul of search: AI Overview ads

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Botched SpaceX Engine Test Results in Fireball

• Amazon's Project Kuiper begins to deorbit prototype broadband satellites

• Boeing says its spacecraft leaking but still safe to launch astronauts next week

• There Is Too Much Trash in Space

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Calif.-based Cue Health, once worth $2.3B lays off every remaining worker

• The Rise of the Disposable Car: More Cars Are Being Totaled as Repair Costs Bite

• Margin Between Prime Rate and Avg CreditCard InterestRate in US at Historic High

• Nearly 80% of Americans Say Fast Food Is Now a Luxury

• Janet Yellen says many Americans still struggling with inflation

  They see it when they shop for food. They see it in terms of rentals. With higher mortgage rates, it’s tough for young people who would like to buy a house to enter the market,” Yellen said in an interview with the Financial Times on Thursday. “Although wages have gone up significantly, and, at least on average, more than prices have gone up, there are substantial increases in prices that are important to people — and it’s substantial increases in a relatively short period of time that are very noticeable to people,” she said.

• I sell my plasma for money. It's not the worst gig I've ever had

• Number of 401(k) Millionaires Hits New Record

• Wall Street braces for faster trade settlement

• America's $38T Retirement Pool Is Nowhere Near Enough

• How private equity rolled Red Lobster

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Exclusive: Feds secretly knew for years Joe Biden met with son’s Chinese partners on official trip | Just The News

• IRS announces extension of Free File program through 2029

• $3B secret program undermining Biden's tech policy

  A backroom Washington deal brokered two years ago is undercutting a key part of President Joe Biden’s policy to grow the national high-tech manufacturing base — pushing more than $3 billion into a secretive national-security project promoted by chipmaker Intel. But quietly, in a March spending bill, appropriators in Congress shifted $3.5 billion that the Commerce Department was hoping to use for those grants and pushed it into a separate Pentagon program called Secure Enclave, which is not mentioned in the original law.

• Chip Factories Are Unions' Next Target in Test for Biden

• The Growing Menace of the 'Non-Profit' Sector | The Pipeline

  A key point is: all of the recent protest frenzy has had little effect on public opinion. Despite some erosion, repeated surveys show strong public support for Israel over Hamas. But public opinion is not the target audience for leftist protest; elite opinion is. And it is elite opinion, formed chiefly in universities and slavishly followed by, for example, the State Department, that drives policy.

• Biden's New Import Rules Will Hit Ebike Batteries Too (Archive)

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Crooks plant backdoor in software used by courtrooms around the world

• New Footage of the Scottie Scheffler Incident Tells a Different Story Than the Police Report – PJ Media

• County sheriffs wield lethal power, face little accountability

• Uvalde families sue makers of AR-15, 'Call of Duty,' Meta over mass shooting

• How the FBI built its own smartphone company to hack the criminal underworld

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• U.S. Defense Industrial Base Is Not Prepared for a Possible Conflict with China

• First batch of Ukrainian pilots graduated from F-16 training in Arizona

• House Panel Approves Measure To Rehire Troops Fired For Refusing COVID-19 Vaccine

World

• Paula Vennells names five executives she blames over Post Office scandal

• A Taliban revenge killing prompts questions, removal of an acclaimed documentary

Iran / Houthi

• Houthis Claim Israeli-Linked Ship Attacked In Mediterranean Sea, Two Others In Red & Arabian Seas

Israel

• Three US troops on Gaza pier mission sustain non-combat injuries

  • US service member critically injured, airlifted to Israel while working on Gaza aid pier.

• Watch: US Deploys Anti-Air Defense System On Gaza Aid Pier | ZeroHedge

  The pier has seen the first aid trucks roll off in the last several days, but the whole operation has been off to a chaotic start. As of Tuesday there had not been any deliveries confirmed even though several trucks had departed with aid. "Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Tuesday that the issues have arisen once the aid was loaded onto nongovernmental organization trucks, departed the marshaling area and headed toward distribution warehouses in Gaza," Navy Times reported. Some of the trucks had reportedly been taken over by desperate Palestinians before making it to their destination.

• ICJ orders Israel to stop military operation in Rafah

  • Israel ordered to halt Rafah offensive by top U.N. court

  • Top UN court orders Israel to stop Rafah offensive

  • ICJ orders Israel to halt Rafah operation in Gaza Strip

  • Israel Ordered by UN Court to Halt Rafah Military Operations

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Declassified U.S. satellite photos show Belarus has new nuclear weapons sites

• Estonia Says Russia Removed Border Markers

• Russia's removal of border markers 'unacceptable' – EU

• Ukraine Enforces Desperate Conscription Laws As Russian Troops Close In On Kharkiv | ZeroHedge

• Let Ukraine Defend Itself Properly

• Russian jamming leaves some high-tech U.S. weapons ineffective in Ukraine

• Russia Is Increasingly Blocking Ukraine's Starlink Service

China

• Yellen Calls for United Front on Chinese Industrial Overcapacity

• Nvidia cuts China prices in Huawei chip fight

• China says military drills encircling Taiwan test its ability to 'seize power'

Health / Medicine

• Anger Does a Lot More Damage to Your Body Than You Realize

• Ozempic cuts risk of chronic kidney disease

  • Ozempic Slows Kidney Disease, Novo Nordisk Study Finds

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• European utilities cut renewable targets as high costs and low power prices bite

• The not-so-quiet panic from climate scientists

• Homes on billionaire hot spot Nantucket fall into the ocean – wealthy still buy

• Nine Takeaways from Our Investigation into 3M's Forever Chemicals

• First planet-wide analysis shows conservation is making a measurable difference

• California mom fined $88K after kids accidentally broke the law at the beach

• Once celebrated, an inventor's breakthroughs are now viewed as disasters

• NOAA predicts above-normal 2024 Atlantic hurricane season

• US EPA sets health advisory limits for PFAS from 70 ppt to .02 ppt