2024-05-28

Horseshit

• Scientists Found a Paradox in Evolution; It May Become the Next Rule of Biology

• After the OceanGate Implosion, the Ultra Wealthy Still Can't Resist the Deep Sea

• Why We’re Turning Psychiatric Labels Into Identities | The New Yorker

  Yet there’s a broader issue here. People’s symptoms frequently evolve according to the labels they’ve been given. Following Layle’s visit to the psychiatrist, her mother observed, “You’ve been acting more and more autistic since we got the diagnosis.” Layle took the comment as a sign that her mom didn’t understand her—“I hate it when someone thinks I’m a liar,” she writes—but people everywhere encounter models of illness that they unconsciously embody.

• How to Trust Your Brain Online - The Atlantic

• Cycling's Silent Epidemic: Labial swelling and pain in women

• Bark Air, a New Airline for Dogs, Takes Flight

• Tackling 'wicked' problems calls for engineers with social responsibility

• EcoFlow’s $200 PowerStream is so clever, you might buy a $4,000 solar generator - The Verge

  Plug-in systems are built around a microinverter that feeds solar energy back into the home via a standard wall jack. The solar panels can be leaned up against a terrace wall, placed in a garden, or hung off a balcony railing. Any solar excess not used immediately by the home can be diverted into the solar generator’s big-ass battery for use later.

  • This is how automatic transfer switches get put into the building codes. $$$$

• Why technology has not transformed building

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Another Roadblock to the EV Transition: Personal Politics

• Why are EV sales slowing?

• How Many EV Charging Stations Does the US Need to Replace Gas Stations?

• Study: Copper needed to build EVs impossible for mining companies to produce

celebrity gossip

• Doug Ingle, frontman of rock band Iron Butterfly, dies aged 78

  • (Youtube) Full 17min In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida

Obit

• Bud Anderson, America’s last World War II ‘triple ace,’ dies at 102.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• AI deepfakes threaten to upend global elections. No one can stop them

  • What an Indian Deepfaker Tells Us About Global Election Security

  • Indian Voters Are Being Bombarded with Deepfakes. Candidates Approve

  • Fake news verification tools fail the test during elections in India

• Influence-for-hire distorts public discourse, threatens democracy

  hile most South Africans rely on traditional media to help them decide which political party to support on Wednesday, 29 May 2024, millions of users on the social media platform X, including journalists and policymakers, are influenced by trending topics without realising it. These users trust the content the influencers share, unaware that much of it is part of carefully crafted, paid campaigns.

  • Advertising is indeed a great evil. The more so when it is allowed to hide under the skirts of other indoctrination efforts. Just imagine what could happen if major media was taken over by a clique of religious Anti-Humanists. We'd be flooded with stories about how bad people are. It'd be worked into stories about every single subject. It'd become weird to read a news story that didn't mention "humans are bad"...

• Preventing LLMs from Spreading False Health Information

Musk

• XAI gets another $6B to spend on Nvidia chips

  • Elon Musk's XAI Raises $6B in Latest Fundraising Round

  • Musk's A.I. Firm Raises $6B in Race with Rivals

• Tesla 'self-driving' technology failed to detect a moving train ahead of a crash

  • HN comments

• Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless

  • HN comments

• What Living in a SpaceX Company Town Tells Us About Elon Musk - The New York Times

  Many people suspect that Donald Trump — though he denies it — ran for president in part because he was tired of being mocked so often. Jeff Bezos spent $42 million to build a mechanical clock under a West Texas mountain that is intended to last 10,000 years. Mr. Musk spent $44 billion of mostly other people’s money to buy Twitter, rebrand it as X and guarantee that he could continue to irritate people on a global scale.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• WHO chief Tedros 'confident' of eventual pandemic treaty deal

  • World Health Assembly hopes to reinforce pandemic preparedness after bold treaty project stalls

  • World Health Assembly Meets In Geneva After Pandemic Treaty Failure

• Tracing Bird Flu's Ground Zero on Texas Dairy Farms

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The Unreal Engine license requires programmers to use inclusive language in their code .

  First added to the engine’s official coding standards with the April 2022 release of the tool’s 5th version and recently brought to light courtesy of its April 2024 update, this new “Inclusive Word Choice” clause sees Epic Games “encourage” (a curious word choice given that they consider the following of said standards to be “mandatory”) users “to use respectful, inclusive, and professional language” when writing or documenting a given piece of code. “Word choice applies when you name classes, functions, data structures, types, variables, files and folders, [and] plugins,” explains Epic Games. “It applies when you write snippets of user-facing text for the UI, error messages, and notifications. It also applies when writing about code, such as in comments and changelist descriptions.”

• Is Autocorrect Racist?

• Nellie Bowles: ‘It’s not healthy to tell kids that being white is bad.’

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Implausible results in human nutrition research

• My Decision to Leave Academia: Their reality is so different from the rest of the world’s, and it has been for a long time.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• A jury hands Bungie a victory in a landmark anti-cheating decision

• My first MP3 player had everything I needed

• The End of ‘iPhone’ | WIRED

  Last week's launch of more powerful iPads shows that, for now—and for this line of products at least—Apple is sticking with its long-in-the-tooth “i” prefix. But how much time remains for this dotted relic of the Steve Jobs era, a lower-case vestigial tail with little modern relevance? Not much time at all, according to brand experts, and also Ken Segall: the creative who, 26 years ago, named the first i-prefixed Apple product.

  “I'm milking this thing as long as I can,” he jokes, speaking from his Los Angeles home. “That I came up with the 'i' in the original iMac makes people interested in what I say.” Interestingly, however, Segall wants to kill his branding baby. He doesn't think Apple should keep the prefix.

• Social media bosses are 'the largest dictators', says Nobel peace prize winner

• Kickstarter now lets you pledge after a campaign closes

• Box office struggles: Memorial Day weekend sales hit lowest since 1995

• Facebook account takeovers are turning friendship into fraud

• Who has time to watch a 4-hour YouTube video? Millions of us, it turns out.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• GvR pulling back from Python further: Withdraw most of my ownership in favor of Mark | Hacker News

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Meredith Whittaker on the power of AI and the toxic surveillance business model

• FTC chair: AI models could violate antitrust laws

• The generative world order: AI, geopolitics, and power

• Microsoft Build 2024 looks like it's more about AI fluff than developer stuff

• Today's AI Isn't Sentient

• I am the Golden Gate Bridge - by Zvi Mowshowitz

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Scientists are devising ways to gaze past Earth's radio haze

• A Mystery Object from Space Crashes Down in North Carolina but What Is It?

  It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a piece of space junk! A piece of space debris believed to be from a recent SpaceX mission was found in rural North Carolina. An employee of The Glamping Collective, a company that operates cabins and other facilities on a mountaintop about 20 miles west of Asheville, North Carolina discovered the unexpected debris.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Wall Street is about to see its biggest trading change in years

• Memorial Day cookouts are hit by sticker shock as inflation makes family holiday more expensive than ever.

• Burger King to Launch $5 Value Meal to Hit Back at McDonald's

• I was laid off at 57. I've been rejected from hundreds of jobs

• Businesses in D.C. Blame the Government for the District's Empty Offices

• The Rise and Retreat of Ghost Kitchens

  Moreover, the quality of food delivered by ghost kitchens often fell short of expectations. For instance, MrBeast’s burgers received thousands of negative reviews, ultimately leading to a legal battle between MrBeast and Virtual Dining Concepts. Operational inefficiencies further exacerbated the situation. Many ghost kitchens struggled to maintain consistent quality and timely deliveries. Uber Eats removed 8,000 ghost kitchens from its platform due to complaints about poor quality and lack of transparency, as customers often felt “catfished” when they discovered their food came from an unbranded, virtual kitchen rather than a reputable restaurant.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• California Senate passes bill to add 'speed governors' to all new cars

• The Radicals Getting Your Tax Money - WSJ

  In December the EPA awarded $50 million to Climate Justice Alliance, a network of nearly 90 affiliates, which plans to use the money to “resource community-based organizations (CBOs) to address past, current, and future environmental health and justice challenges.” What else does Climate Justice Alliance do? Last November it helped to coordinate a “March on Washington,” where protesters waved the banner “Free Palestine Is a Climate Justice Issue.” Other slogans included “Our Government Funds Palestinian Genocide” and “Only Socialist Revolution Can Stop World War III.”

• 'Mises Caucus Just Exploded': Libertarian Party Nominates Left-Winger Chase Oliver | ZeroHedge

  After seven rounds of balloting stretching over seven hours -- and coming close to nominating nobody -- the Libertarian Party gave its presidential nomination to the decidedly left-leaning Chase Oliver on Sunday night in Washington DC. The result was a devastating upset loss for the Mises Caucus. The Rothbardian, self-described "radical libertarian" group seized control of the party in 2020, but failed to push its favored but flawed candidate -- Michael Rectenwald -- across the goal line.

  • Libertarians pick Chase Oliver as presidential nominee - POLITICO

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• 'General Hospital' actor Johnny Wactor, 37, shot dead in downtown LA

  Wactor, 37, was fatally shot when he and a colleague saw three suspects allegedly attempting to swipe a catalytic converter from his car around 3:30 a.m. downtown, TMZ reported, citing Wactor’s mother and police. Grieving mom Scarlett Wactor said she was told by authorities that while her son didn’t put up a fight, the suspects still fired at him and then fled in a vehicle, according to the outlet.

  • Actor shot dead during Los Angeles car theft

• 81year old serial slingshot shooter arrested terrorising neighbours for a decade

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• America's military leads in space. China and Russia race to disrupt it

• "Utility work", no ID, 8pm? Fort Liberty soldier investigated in Carthage, NC fatal shooting

  A Fort Liberty special operations soldier is under investigation in Moore County after officials say he shot and killed a utility worker who was taking photographs on his property May 3, according to the Moore County Sheriff’s Office. Ramzan Daraev, 35, of Chicago, died in the shooting reported about 8:15 p.m. outside a home on Dowd Road in Carthage. The soldier’s name was not released. The Sheriff’s Department said Daraev was in the area working as a subcontractor for Utilities One.

  “Identification was not found on Daraev; however, his identity was later confirmed through family members and an international identification located in his vehicle,” the news release said. Daraev was reportedly working as a subcontractor for Utilities One, a company based in New Jersey,the Sheriff's Office said. According to the company's website, their contractors work on infrastructure for telecommunications providers, electric and gas utilities and wireless carriers.

  “Investigators are still working to verify his official employment status. At the time of the incident, Daraev was not in possession of any utility equipment, utility clothing, or identification,” the release said, noting the shooting was reported to the U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

• America Is Getting Ready for Space Warfare

World

• France looks to elusive EU capital market to fix startup funding

• Spying Arrests Send Chill Through Britain's Thriving Hong Kong Community

• Mallorca sees 10,000 demonstrators against Tourism

• Dutch right-wing coalition to cut research, innovation, environmental protection

• Schools in UK send police to homes of absent pupils

• Sunak unveils £2.4B pensioner tax cut

• Sweden’s NATO Membership Unlocks the Baltic Sea for Alliance, Ends 200 Years of Neutrality.

Israel

• Egypt Soldier Killed in Clash with Israel Forces at Rafah Border (Archive)

  An Egyptian soldier was killed in a clash with Israeli forces at the Rafah border crossing, a potentially major escalation in tensions between the two nations. Egypt’s military confirmed a border guard died on Monday. The Israel Defense Forces said “a shooting incident occurred on the Egyptian border,” without giving any more detail. “The incident is under review and discussions are being held with the Egyptians.”

• "Nowhere Is Safe": Israel Bombs Tent Camp in Rafah, Killing 45 Palestinians

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Every day, Russia produces 12,320 artillery shells

China

• China made so many solar panels its own grid can't support all the energy

• China’s secretive spaceplane releases object into orbit.

• China sets up third fund with $47.5B to boost semiconductor sector

• Are These Drones Too Chinese to Pass U.S. Muster in an Anti-China Moment?

Health / Medicine

• ADHD cases are up. 7 million U.S. kids have gotten a diagnosis, study finds : Shots - Health News : NPR

  Dr. Max Wiznitzer, a professor of pediatric neurology at Case Western Reserve University, says he suspects some parents may be reluctant to put their kids on ADHD medication out of misguided concerns. "There's the myth that it's addictive, which it's not." He says studies have shown people treated with ADHD have no increased risk of drug abuse.

• Understanding why autism symptoms sometimes improve amid fever

• Mysterious Viral DNA in Human Genome Linked with Psychiatric Disorders

• C-Section Rates Are Way Too High

• Family infected with parasitic worms in US after eating bear meat, CDC says

  • Black bear kebabs make family sick with parasitic worms

• Tattoos as a risk factor for malignant lymphoma: a population-based study

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Smartphone might be linked to crocodile attacks in Indonesia

  Smartphones need tin, which is often mined illegally in Indonesia. When illegal tin mines are abandoned, they fill with water. Crocodiles enter from nearby waterways, looking for food, as fishing and other human pressures have made prey short. Croc attacks increase.

• ESA two-part Proba-3 spacecraft is meant to create artificial solar eclipses

• Alaska's Pristine Waterways Are Turning Orange

• Alarmed by Climate Change, Astronomers Train Their Sights on Earth

• Red, blue, and green plastic turn into microplastics faster than plainer colours

• The Problem With the Darling 58 Chestnut Tree

  More than a few saplings died. So did the hope of rescuing the American chestnut tree from the point of near extinction, at least for now. A breakthrough in genetic engineering was intended to bring them back and transform the science of species restoration while potentially netting its inventors millions of dollars and wide acclaim. Instead, a mix-up in the lab has sparked a veritable civil war in the niche conservation community. For the chestnut evangelists who’ve devoted years to restoration efforts, the fight to save the tree has always been personal. Now this fight is, too, amid accusations that the scientists who invented the GMO tree covered up the mistake as they sought federal approval and pursued potentially lucrative deals to sell their creation.

  Tree world, says Andy Newhouse, director of the lab that invented the promised savior of the chestnut tree, “is definitely a little, little bubble. And inside that bubble, there’s a lot going on.”

  The scientists at the foundation raised their concerns with Newhouse and ESF and pushed for the lab’s newest research about the performance of Darling 58. What information they received felt incomplete, and some began to wonder if ESF was hiding something. “We have weekly science calls they’ve been on since 2019,” says Sarah Fern Fitzsimmons, the foundation’s chief conservation officer. “There’s a history of not being transparent with data. I look back through the reports they compiled for us for the grants we gave them, and everything’s awesome: It’s cherry-picking the good and not letting on that anything was amiss at all.”

  Eventually, Tan found the trees’ OxO gene on chromosome four — the insertion point for an earlier transgenic iteration called Darling 54. For the past decade, the many scientists trying to save the chestnut had been working with the wrong tree. Functionally, Darling 58, the tree touted as the great hope of the chestnut and the next frontier in species restoration, did not exist.

• Mexico City could run out of water in a month unless it rains

• Amid roadkill epidemic, California builds largest wildlife bridge

• There are more than 1k varieties of banana, and we eat one of them