2024-05-30

etc

• Drawings depicting gladiators among latest discoveries at Pompeii

• Preliminary report findings on Singapore Airlines incident

• Longer freight trains have higher risk of derailment

  • It is more likely to have an accident among a pool of 10 cars, than in a pool of 1 car. Link them all together so that any car's accident becomes all cars' accident; and the conclusion seems to follow as a mathematical necessity.

• A rare 6-planet alignment will occur next month. Here's what to know.

• Person sucked into plane engine in front of passengers

  • KLM Cityhopper E190 at Amsterdam on May 29th 2024, person ingested into engine

Horseshit

• The Emerging AI Era Faces a Growing Threat from Directed Energy Weapons

  • Tomorrows fiction threatened by yesterday's fiction.

• The Ancient Art of Calligraphy Is Having a Revival - The New York Times

  Calligraphy, a centuries-old art form, is seeing a surge of interest, including among young people more familiar with coding than cursive. At Michael’s, the largest arts and crafts chain in North America, more than 10,000 customers signed up for lettering classes online between January 2023 and March 2024 — nearly three times more than in the same period a year ago, when about the same number of classes were offered.

• Ohio man dives to Titanic in sub to prove safety post-OceanGate

  • US billionaire plans submersible trip to Titanic wreck

• When Parents Overshare

• The Economics of Working 80+-Hour Weeks

  part of what banks, accounting firms, law firms, and consultants are optimizing for is maximizing the number of people who 1) have X thousand hours of directly relevant experience to rely on, and who 2) can take a red-eye flight across a continent and then hop into a cab to go directly to a meeting where they'll give a coherent presentation and be effective at answering questions. The only way to do this is to massively front-load that experience. The bank that's working its first-year associates to the bone is the bank that, years later, will have more VPs with the necessary experience to get a deal done.

• The Rise of the Disposable Car

• Smoking weed every day makes me less presentable and less productive. I love it

  • HN comments

• Relationship with your car radio will evolve in the future

• The Naughty Words the FAA Removed From the Sky

  New FOIA records from the FAA shed light on the frantic effort in 2015 to rename navigation waypoints related to Donald Trump and reveal the list of naughty waypoint names that were changed over the years.

• Nvidia insiders reveal how Jensen Huang wants emails to be written

• Baltic Sea Anomaly: A Crashed UFO Left By Advanced Alien Civilization 140,000 Years Ago?

Electric / Self Driving cars

• New BYD Hybrid Can Drive Non-Stop for More Than 2k Kilometers

• We’re Not Mining Enough Copper to Meet Upcoming EV Projections: Report. Researchers from Cornell University and the University of Michigan say that going all EV by 2035 is unrealistic.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Comedy can fight science misinformation

  Exposing the irrationality of their fear with such irreverence and getting a laugh seemed to be the only thing that calmed down anxious participants. Since those first interactions at my sperm lab, I’ve been employing humor as a way to cut through the noise in science communication to reach people more quickly and effectively—especially when emotions run high and misinformation flows freely.

  • Pointing out the absurdity of dogma is always a good way to deflate bullshit bubbles. Like, for example: asking how cow farts can affect our climate more than the Sun.

• Nearly two-thirds of Americans say social media is tearing us apart

• Once a Sheriff’s Deputy in Florida, Now a Source of Disinformation From Russia - The New York Times

  Those subterfuges in the United States, it turned out, were only a prelude to a more prominent and potentially more ominous campaign of deception he has been conducting from Russia. Mr. Dougan, 51, who received political asylum in Moscow, is now a key player in Russia’s disinformation operations against the West. Back in 2016, when the Kremlin interfered in the American presidential election, an army of computer trolls toiled for hours in an office building in St. Petersburg to try to fool Americans online. Today Mr. Dougan may be accomplishing much the same task largely by himself, according to American and European government officials and researchers from companies and organizations that have tracked his activities since August. The groups include NewsGuard, a company that reviews the reliability of news and information online; Recorded Future, a threat intelligence company; and Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub.

  • Russian disinformation sites linked to former Florida deputy Sheriff

• Masters of War, by Thomas Meaney

  I came to Munich to get a closer look at Europe’s “security culture” at its “transatlantic family meeting,” the largest backdoor diplomatic gathering in the world. There was a threefold crisis in global politics—Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan, each of which threatened to become a wider conflagration and fan flames toward the others. On the day before the conference began, the doors of dozens of Mercedes and BMWs slammed shut in front of the Hof as security teams surveyed the grounds. More than five thousand police officers were on duty in central Munich, five for each conference participant, which transformed the Old Town into a museum under martial law. There were police checkpoints on all the streets leading to the hotel, officers stationed on the tops of buildings, a helicopter overhead, and small groups of ordinary people at the cordons.

• Meta shuts down Israeli network pushing AI-generated propaganda in U.S.

• Meta identifies networks pushing deceptive content likely generated by AI

Musk

• WhatsApp boss in online spat with Elon Musk

• Neuralink rival sets brain-chip record with 4,096 electrodes on human brain

• Starlink's Disruption of the Space Industry

• Halo Warthog Cybertruck Wrap

• Everyone Wants Elon Musk's Attention

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Can Trump Slam the Brakes on Electric Vehicles?

• Donald Trump is weighing an advisory role for Musk if he returns to White House

• JonathanTurley tweets from Trump trial

  Merchan just delivered the coup de grace instruction. He said that there is no need to agree on what occurred. They can disagree on what the crime was among the three choices. Thus, this means that they could split 4-4-4 and he will still treat them as unanimous...

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Farmers must kill 4.2M chickens after bird flu hits Iowa egg farm

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Manhunt Underway for Driver Who Left Tire Marks on a Pride Mural

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Harvard, criticized for war response, to avoid stances on public issues

• Three takes on the protests at Columbia University

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• What Happened to Our Ad-Free TV?

• Google Search document leak reveals inner workings of ranking algorithm

  • HN comments

• The Black Keys Cancel Arena Tour, Planning to Downsize Venues

• Intuit's TurboTax Lost 1M Free Users This Tax Season

• US sanctions operators of "free VPN" that routed crime traffic through user PCs

• Column: News business needs help in California. Is government the answer?

• Nvidia appears to be scraping web content

• A Content and Product Partnership with Vox Media

  • The Atlantic, Vox Media ink licensing, product deals with OpenAI

• Streaming Bundles Are Here, and You May Need a Ph.D. to Navigate the Options.

• After Furiosa flops, Hollywood could be facing a biblically disastrous summer

• How Facebook Killed Online Chat | Hackaday

  the need to log in and out helped create a healthy boundary between life online and off. Users balanced their online interactions with other responsibilities and activities. There was a clear distinction between online and offline life, allowing for more complete engagement in both. When you logged off, that was it. There was no way for your online friends to get a message to you in real time, so your focus was fully on what was going on in front of you.

• Apple Signals That It's Working on TV+ App for Android Phones

• Google accused of tracking drivers with disabilities

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Inside a vintage aerospace navigation computer of uncertain purpose

  The circuit boards are four-layer printed circuit boards, more advanced than the common two-layer boards of the time. The boards use a mixture of surface-mounted and through-hole components. The flat-pack ICs and the tiny round transistors are surface mounted, which was rare at the time. On the other hand, the resistors, capacitors, diodes, and larger transistors use standard through-hole components. At the time, most electronics used through-hole components, although aerospace systems often used surface-mounted components for higher density. It wasn't until the late 1980s that surface-mount technology became commonplace.

  I was able to find only a few announcements and datasheets for these chips. The only users of these chips that I could find were NASA projects from the late 1960s.

  The core memory stack is enclosed by two sheet metal boxes, which I removed for the photos. The stack also has two flexible ground planes attached to it. The designers clearly wanted to ensure that the memory was well shielded, to a degree that I haven't seen in other systems.

  The date codes on the integrated circuits range from 1966 to 1973, so the computer was probably manufactured in 1973. The seven-year range for date codes is a bit surprising, since integrated circuit technology changed a lot during these years. I suspect that the Signetics 400-series ICs had older date codes because this line didn't catch on so there was a lot of old stock rather than newly-manufactured parts. I also suspect that this system was designed around 1969, based on the multiple NASA systems using these chips then, suggesting that the design and manufacturing of this unit was a multi-year project.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Humane AI Pin review roundup: an undercooked flop that's way ahead of its time

• The next wave of AI hype will be geopolitical. You’re paying

  Private-sector AI cash burn is already sovereign-sized. The combined capex of Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft will be around $200bn this year, according to Bernstein Research. These sunk costs need to deliver some kind of return by the time the depreciation charges reach their income statements. A continued acceleration of capex growth depends on companies finding something that the public wants to buy. Their need for revenue may soon become urgent, and concepts so far have not been encouraging. But because political leaders care more about one-upmanship than ROIC, taxpayer-subsidised AI can continue to boom even if the corporate bubble bursts.

• Former OpenAI board member explains why they fired Sam Altman

  • HN comments

  • Toner interviewed about Altman's firing: "We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter."

• OpenAI training its next major AI model, forms new safety committee

• AI models have favorite numbers, because they think they're people

• The nonprofits leading the AI Revolution

• If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

• How A.I. Made Mark Zuckerberg Popular Again in Silicon Valley

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Chang'e-6 set for weekend landing attempt as sun rises over Apollo crater

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Real estate agents are fleeing the field. Is that good for homebuyers?

• JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon on 'Hard Landing' and 'Stagflation' Fears as Inflation Worries US Fed | IBTimes UK

  Dimon's worst fear for the US economy is "stagflation," where inflation continues to inch higher alongside rising unemployment and slowing economic growth, seen as worse than regular recessions. In a separate interview, Dimon said he was concerned that the US economy "looks more like the '70s than we've seen before." Recently, he reiterated that "after looking at the range of outcomes, again, the worst outcome for all of us is what you call stagflation, higher rates, and recession. That means corporate profits will go down, and we'll get through all that. I mean, the world has survived that, but I just think the odds have been higher than other people think."

• You can force employees back to the office, but not the good ones

  • HN comments

• So much for the inverted yield curve indicator

• Is Target selling its excess inventory on eBay and Poshmark?

• Food delivery apps rack up $20bn in losses in fierce battle for diners

  Leading online food delivery groups in Europe and the US have racked up more than $20bn in combined operating losses since they went public, after a fierce battle for market share. Shares in Deliveroo, Just Eat Takeaway, Delivery Hero and DoorDash — the four largest standalone, publicly listed food-delivery businesses in the US and Europe — are all trading well below their pandemic-era peaks, as investors scrutinise their business models.

• Intel's 1nm-class fabs in Germany delayed by black soil and EU subsidy approval

• Nvidia is about to pass Apple in market cap

• Salesforce shares plunge 16% on first revenue miss since 2006

• Orange juice crisis prompts search for alternative fruits

  Orange juice prices have soared to record highs, driven by bad weather and disease in Brazil, the world’s largest exporter, prompting manufacturers to explore whether they can use mandarins instead to make the drink. Orange juice futures — which allow industry players to hedge against swings in prices — have been on a tear since the end of 2022 when a hurricane, then a cold snap, devastated acres of orange groves in Florida, the main growing region in the US, the world’s second-biggest producer. But the rally has accelerated sharply this month as the prospect of a dismal harvest in Brazil has panicked the market.

• Home Insurance Is Clobbering Consumers. Yet It’s Barely Counted as Inflation. - The New York Times

  “It is the housing crisis that nobody is talking about,” Ms. Meyer Lucas said. The houses sold easily, but often to well-off cash buyers who could drop the insurance altogether because they did not have a mortgage that required them to carry it.

• Americans feeling better about economy for the first time in months

• Record Stock Market Is Riding on Questionable AI Assumptions

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The U.S. Passes an Internet Privacy Law for Rich Jet Owners

• The Democrats Are a Cornered Animal

• TikTok offered an extraordinary deal. The U.S. government took a pass

• Biden Administration Announces New Steps to Bolster Domestic Nuclear Industry

  To help drive reactor deployment while ensuring ratepayers and project stakeholders are better protected, theAdministration is announcing today the creation of a Nuclear Power Project Management and Delivery working group that will draw on leading experts from across the nuclear and megaproject construction industry to help identify opportunities to proactively mitigate sources of cost and schedule overrun risk. Working group members will be made up of federal government entities, including the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy, the White House Office of Clean Energy Innovation & Implementation, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Department of Energy. The working group will engage a range of stakeholders, including project developers, engineering, procurement and construction firms, utilities, investors, labor organizations, academics, and NGOs, which will each offer individual views on how to help further the Administration’s goal of delivering an efficient and cost-effective deployment of clean, reliable nuclear energy and ensuring that learnings translate to cost savings for future construction and deployment.

  • We're appointing a Blue Ribbon Commission to study the problem of burrocratic sclerosis as it applies to belated recognition of the dire need for more electrical generation.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Most Stolen Vehicles in America

  In 2023, the Hyundai Elantra, Hyundai Sonata, and Kia Optima topped the list of the most stolen cars in the U.S., breaking the years-long trend of full-size pickups topping the list. Security vulnerabilities in Asian models and social media trends highlighting how to steal these vehicles are some factors for the change.

• Cops sent teen to death row in 1983. DNA now says serial killers did the murder

• Kids sickened by police training may have ingested decades old chemical weapons

• Louisiana law will criminalize approaching police under certain circumstances

• Chinese national charged for operating world's largest botnet, which stole $5.9B

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• America's Military Is Not Prepared for War – Or Peace

• NATO has just 5% of air defences needed to protect eastern flank

World

• North Korean rocket carrying its 2nd spy satellite explodes shortly after launch

• North Korean trash balloons are dumping 'filth' on South Korea

• Germany faces years of near-stagnation as baby boomers retire, warns IMF

• Britain's 500-year-old Royal Mail is being bought by a Czech billionaire

• UK mother of boy who killed himself seeks right to access his social media

• Man accused of hitting TikToker charged with hate crimes

• More Ontario school boards join suit against social media giants

• NSA won't share? Canada wants the power to create backdoors in telecom networks for surveillance

Iran / Houthi

• Attacks in the Red Sea are driving up carbon emissions

Israel

• Israel Used U.S.-Made Bombs in Rafah Strike That Killed Dozens: Live Updates - The New York Times

  • Israeli airstrike killing dozens in Rafah carried out using bomb supplied by US

• Biden’s Gaza pier debacle is representative of his presidency - Washington Examiner

  Two of the vessels being used for the pier became unmoored and drifted away, washing up on the coast of Israel. The damage has caused a temporary suspension in aid, which sounds worse than it is because, according to the Pentagon last week, it wasn’t likely that any of the aid that arrived through the pier had even been distributed to civilians in the first place.

  • The 12-day life of Biden’s $320 million pier

  • Busted Gaza Pier Has All the Markings of a Joe Biden Op

• Israel's massacres in Gaza most horrific genocide since Hitler

• Israel expects Gaza war to continue for rest of 2024 – adviser

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia mulling charging companies to use foreign software

• Life on Ukraine's front line: Short of ammo, 'worse than hell'

• Researchers track Russian missile launchers in Ukraine using satellite data

• Don't we have a "Tax the Rich" movement quacking loudly lately? Russia Raises Income Tax on Rich to Pay for Ukraine War

• Pressure Grows on U.S. to Allow Attacks on Russian Territory

China

• China's military shows off rifle-toting robot dogs

  • China deploys robot dogs during military exercise with Cambodia

• China is banning 'wealth-flaunting' behavior on social media

Health / Medicine

• A myopia epidemic is sweeping the globe

• Dengue fever, once confined to the tropics, now threatens the U.S.

• No, All That Sugar Won’t Make Your Kid Hyperactive. Even if They Have ADHD.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• California lawmakers vote to ban 'reusable' plastic bags from grocery stores

  California lawmakers have voted to do away with reusable plastic bags after the elimination of single-use plastic bags failed to reduce plastic pollution. "California’s original ban on plastic bags hasn’t worked out as planned, and sadly, the state’s plastic bag waste has increased dramatically since it went into effect," said Sen. Catherine Blakespear, the bill’s author, in a statement. "California must do its part to eliminate this scourge that is contaminating our environment." On Tuesday, California lawmakers in the State Senate and the State Assembly voted to approve two identical bills which would restrict grocery stores and retailers from offering thicker, "reusable" bags made out of plastic film to customers.

• Airplane turbulence is getting worse. Scientists explain why

• Improved refrigeration could save half of the 1.3B tons of food wasted

  A new University of Michigan study concludes that nearly half of the food waste, about 620 million metric tons, could be eliminated by fully refrigerated food supply chains worldwide. At the same time, fully refrigerated supply chains, or "cold chains," could cut food waste-related emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases by 41% globally, according to the study published in Environmental Research Letters.

  • Pity we banned all the safe, efficient refrigerant chemicals.

  • Improved refrigeration could save nearly half of the 1.3 billion tons of food wasted each year globally

• High Schooler Wins $10,000 for Discovery Solution to Mysterious Outbreak Killing Sea Turtles in His Hawaii Hometown

  Maddux Springer lives on Oahu and spent most of his free time during the pandemic free diving among the reefs in Kāneʻohe Bay. Down among the quiet and peaceful corals, he couldn’t stop noticing that practically every green sea turtle he saw was covered in cauliflower-like tumors. Whether young or old, the whole population seemed to be infected and slowly dying, prompting Springer to start what would become a 2.5-year research program. It might have gone faster if wildlife authorities had agreed to allow him to perform a biopsy on one of the tumors, and without this direct evidence, he had to find other ways to collect data. His starting point took just a few minutes, as a Google search turned up that tumors on green sea turtles are likely a symptom of fibropapilomatosis, or FB for short, caused by a herpes-type virus that affects 97% of all sea turtles.

  Establishing probable cause, Springer’s breakthrough came when he found that the species they were eating absorbs 11 times more arginine than native species. He connected this to the fact that coastal pollution from cesspools, or uncontained septic pits dug underneath Hawaiian homes, are a large problem for sea life on the archipelago.

  • Did a Google search, discovered 97% of the turtles have a virus causing their tumors ... tied it to human activity anyhow, wins prize. Science has become Spin.

• A CBS News Report From Over 40 Years Ago Proves Global Warming Is the Ultimate Hoax

• Indian capital breaks alltime heat record, as authorities impose water rationing

  • Delhi temperature hits 50.5C as India's capital records hottest day

• In one of the US's hottest deserts, utilities push gas rather than solar

• Tree rings show that last northern summer was the warmest since year 1

• Why Do Orca Killer Whales Target and Sink Yachts?

• US to modernize electrical grid – for clean energy and fewer outages

• AI can lift climate research out of the lab and into the real world

• The hail in Texas was so big Tuesday that it required a new description

• EPA accused of 'egregious' misconduct in PFAS testing of pesticides