2024-08-04

Worthy

• (video) A giant xylophone in Kyushu playing Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" with a wooden ball rolling down its keys.

etc

• How To Stay Sane in a World Gone Mad - by Jamie Paul

  Being principled ultimately means that your loyalty to principles has to supersede your political or tribal loyalties. Something you hate when “they” do it has to be just as distasteful when “we” do it. Humans are not born with these habits of mind. They require cultivation, and the very picosecond you begin making that effort, you instantly vault ahead of 90 percent of humanity who make no such attempt. Every time you feel a strong opinion form in your mind about some issue, press pause and ask yourself “Does this jibe with my principles? Does it contradict other things I believe?” Become interested, even fascinated, with the question “Am I a hypocrite?” I reflexively ask myself this easily a dozen times a day. The answer is still yes, but I’m definitely less of a hypocrite than I used to be because of it. At bottom, it begins, as all worthwhile things do, with giving a shit.

• Moderate geomagnetic storm could bring northern lights as far south as New York

• The hauling rig is worth the click to see: 1.5 Million-Pound Trailers Haul Transformers To… | Cowboy State Daily

Horseshit

• The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community

  • HN comments

• Bike lanes and narrowed streets don't slow emergency vehicles

• Selfishness & Therapy Culture - Freddie deBoer

• Is the dream of nuclear fusion dead?

celebrity gossip

• Microsoft reportedly had to ban Bill Gates from being alone with interns

Musk

• Cybertruck has frame shear off when pulling out F150

• Elon Musk's Pro-Trump Website Accused of Shady Data Collection

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Mercedes obtains approval for Level 4 automated driving testing in Beijing

• Hacked Tesla FSD computers disclose alarming raw data on deadly accidents

• In fuel-guzzling Saudi Arabia, electric cars pique interest

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• He Skipped College to Become a Repairman. He's on His Way to $175,000 a Year

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Aerosmith retires from touring, citing permanent damage to Steven Tyler’s voice last year

• Game Informer shutting down after 33 years

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Reverse engineering the 59-pound printer onboard the Space Shuttle

  This printer is known as the Space Shuttle Interim Teleprinter System. As the name "Interim" suggests, this printer was intended as a stop-gap measure, operating for a few flights until a better printer was operational. However, the teleprinter proved to be more reliable than its replacement, so it remained in use as a backup for over 50 flights, often printing thousands of lines per flight. This didn't come cheap: with a Shuttle flight costing $27,000 per pound, putting the 59-pound teleprinter in space cost over $1.5 million per flight.

  I had to reverse engineer three of the boards inside the printer to determine the data format the printer accepted: serial data encoded into audio. But after analyzing the printer and performing a lot of maintenance, we succeeded in getting the printer to print.

  the teleprinter implements a word processor, allowing messages to be composed and edited offline. Of course, since the Shuttle's teleprinter is only used to receive data, and doesn't even have a keyboard, the word processor feature is entirely useless. ... According to the manual, the printer operates fine without this card, except without the word processor. Since the word processor was irrelevant to the Shuttle, I wonder why this card wasn't removed to reduce weight.

  The hammers have an unusual constant-current power supply. When the printer is active, this power supply generates +18 V. However, the power supply is designed to use a constant current of 600 mA regardless of the hammer activity. A capacitor provides a reservoir of power that is filled by the constant current. If the hammers are using less current, the excess current is bled off through a resistor. The purpose of this is "to mask printing intelligence during periods of message traffic." In other words, if you used a teleprinter in the embassy in Moscow, for instance, spies could monitor power transients to see when hammers are firing, and perhaps figure out what is being printed. By keeping the current constant, this source of intelligence is blocked. Of course, this feature is useless on the Space Shuttle and only wastes power.

  At first, I thought that the Shuttle's Interim Teleprinter was a terrible design. It's absurdly heavy and was in danger of overheating. Although the design started with an existing product, much of it required redesign: the front section, the new drum, the interface, and even the frame. The design inherited features it couldn't use, such as the built-in word processor. And the constant-current feature was pointless for the Shuttle and just wasted power.

  When I learned that the design had to be completed in just seven months, my opinion of the teleprinter improved. Moreover, the design had many constraints, such as toxicity and flammability restrictions, that limited the potential approaches. In the end, the teleprinter was used on over 50 flights, acting as a reliable backup to the somewhat flaky Text and Graphics System (TAGS).16 Despite its name, the Interim Teleprinter turned out to be a long-lasting solution, not interim at all. So I have to conclude that the teleprinter was a good design, working much better and much longer than intended.

• Converting ASCII strings to lower case at crazy speeds with AVX-512

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Sam Altman has been accused of being shady about OpenAI's safety efforts.

• Big Tech Fails to Convince Wall Street That AI Is Paying Off

• Sam Altman is becoming one of the most powerful people on Earth. Be afraid

• Why the collapse of the Generative AI bubble may be imminent

  I just wrote a hard-hitting essay for WIRED predicting that the AI bubble will collapse in 2025 — and now I wish I hadn’t. Clearly, I got the year wrong. It’s going to be days or weeks from now, not months.

• AI-Made Bioweapons Are Washington's Latest Security Obsession

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Boeing's Starliner proves better at torching cash than reaching orbit

Economicon / Business / Finance

• What is going wrong for Intel?

  • How has it all gone so wrong for Intel?

  • Intel took billions from the CHIPS Act, and gave nothing back

• Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Sold Nearly Half Its Stake in Apple

  • Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Slashes Apple Stake

  • Berkshire Cuts Apple Stake by Almost Half in Selling Spree

• Lousy Jobs Report Forces Fed to Reckon with Hard Landing

• Workers Are Getting Ghosted. Here's Why (Archive](https://archive.is/MGYBW))

• A $1T Time Bomb Is Ticking in the Housing Market

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Is the United States in self-destruct mode? The crisis is in the Constitution

Harris / TBA 2024 / Democrats Demonstrate "Our Democracy"

• Kamala Harris accused of ‘weaponizing’ California AG’s office for mega-sponsor Planned Parenthood.

• Most of the attendees received a $150 incentive bonus and left halfway into her speech

• Tech luminaries and VCs go all-in on Kamala Harris campaign

  Tech billionaires and Silicon Valley insiders have been lining up to support Harris in her bid for president. She has long ties to the powerful California industry. But this London speech, along with countless others, gives a glimpse into her stance on Big Tech: she won’t necessarily go easy.

  Some tech insiders say that during this election, Harris’ stance on tech isn’t the top issue at hand. That’s why the industry is still coalescing around her. “It’s because they don’t want Donald Trump to be president,” says Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist who’s worked in politics and the tech industry. “I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.” Tusk says he was a “six-figure donor” to President Joe Biden in 2020 but wasn’t planning to donate in 2024 because he didn’t think it could help Biden win. Now, with Harris as the nominee, he’s pledging six figures again.

• Jimmy Carter Says He’s Hanging On to Vote for Kamala Harris

• Democrats Pushing Harris Campaign for 'Reset' on Crypto Stance, House Rep Says

Biden Inc

• Biden boards empty plane

• Biden's love for Amtrak can't save it from a cruel summer

Trump / Right / Jan6

• Secret Service’s Tech Errors Helped Gunman at Trump Rally Slip By - The New York Times

  The Secret Service, for instance, turned down offers to use a surveillance drone at the Butler Farm Show rally site. The agency also did not bring a system to boost the agents’ device signals in an area with poor cellular service. And some of the equipment the agency did bring, including a system to detect drone use by others, did not work when it was most needed. The result was that a 20-year-old gunman had a technological advantage over a $3 billion federal agency. The acting Secret Service director, Ronald Rowe Jr., told Senate lawmakers in a hearing this week that the agency had the tools that could have spotted Mr. Crooks and allowed agents to interrogate him before the shooting, but failed to properly use them.

  Mr. Trump was injured in the shooting, as were three rally attendees, one fatally, in one of the biggest failures of the Secret Service in decades. Mr. Rowe, in his testimony, said that he could not understand why the Secret Service chose to exclude the warehouse Mr. Crooks used, about 450 feet from Mr. Trump’s lectern, from its secure perimeter and why no countersniper was assigned to its roof.

• Rittenhouse: My comments made last night were ill-informed and unproductive. I'm 100% behind Donald Trump

• Trump to debate Harris on Sep 4th

  I have agreed with FoxNews to debate Kamala Harris on Wednesday, September 4th. The Debate was previously scheduled against Sleepy Joe Biden on ABC, but has been terminated in that Biden will no longer be a participant, and I am in litigation against ABC Network and George Slopadopoulos, thereby creating a conflict of interest. The FoxNews Debate will be held in the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, at a site in an area to be determined. The Moderators of the Debate will be Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, and the Rules will be similar to the Rules of my Debate with Sleepy Joe, who has been treated horribly by his Party – BUT WITH A FULL ARENA AUDIENCE!….

• Donald Trump says Mark Zuckerberg keeps calling him on the phone

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Pizza meter is off the charts and the "bars" in DC are empty near The Pentagon

  While this is mildly humorous, this is a real world open source intelligence metric that is about 100% accurate to predict something huge happening.

• US sending aircraft carrier, warships and fighter squadron to Middle East as region braces for Iranian retaliation

• US urges citizens to leave Lebanon on 'any available ticket'

  • Russia has called on its citizens to immediately leave Lebanon.

World

• More Germans left without jobs this summer as economy contracts

• Exxon Almost Walked Away from Its $1T Oil Discovery

Israel

• Israeli hacktivist group brags it took down Iran's internet

China

• Taiwan is behind schedule in preparations to fend off Chinese invasion

Health / Medicine

• FDA sued for ignoring evidence that anti-depressants numb genitals permanently

  • Antidepressants sexual side-effects, SSRI sexual dysfunction, serotonin syndrome

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• The Indomitable Covid Virus: A major wave is occurring now

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Recycling Animal and Human Dung Is the Key to Sustainable Farming

• To Supreme Court: Clean Air Act targeted CO2 as climate pollutant, study says

• 'This is climate change': Scottish beach eroding by 7 metres a year

• Nitrogen fertilizer conundrum: Yield a poor determinant of crop fertilizer needs

• Australia experiences coldest June and July in 30 years