2024-09-12

Cool

• Creating an electromagnet and sound wave learning environment

etc

• Paleontologists discover fossil birds with teeth had seeds in their stomachs

Horseshit

• The Power of the Pirates

• World’s Biggest Construction Project Is a Magnet for Executives Behaving Badly

• Huawei's $2,800 trifold phone is a real thing it wants people to hold and use

• Neanderthals' social isolation may have sped up their extinction

• Oracle designes a data center that would be powered by 3 small nuclear reactors

• Adopted. Abused. Abandoned. How a Michigan boy's parents left him in Jamaica

• That Olympic Break Dancer Everyone Laughed At? She Just Became the World No. 1

• Astronomers have warned against colonial practices in the space industry

• Massachusetts man buys $395,000 house despite warnings it will 'fall into ocean'

celebrity gossip

• Mark Zuckerberg says he's done apologizing | TechCrunch

  Shortly after hopping onstage, Zuckerberg joked that he might need to schedule his next appearance in order to apologize for whatever he was about to say. After a beat, he added that he was just kidding and that, in fact, his days of apologizing are over. Zuckerberg has had something of a rebrand recently. He raises cattle in Hawaii now, has long bouncy curls and a gold chain, and commissions Roman-style statues of his wife. Onstage, the Facebook founder wore a boxy T-shirt he designed himself alongside fashion designer Mike Amiri that read “learning through suffering” in Greek letters.

Obit

• Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori dies at age 86

Musk

• Musk Threatens Taylor Swift After Harris Endorsement: 'I Will Give You a Child'

  • Elon Musk to Taylor Swift: “I will give you a child”

• The College Dropout Who Invested Billions to Cozy Up with Elon Musk

  Venture capitalist John Hering bet his career, time and money on Musk enterprises, seeking a favored seat beside the world’s richest man

• Conservative Billionaire Wants to 'Crush' Leftist Media | Headline USA

• FCC chair wants more competition to SpaceX's Starlink unit

• SpaceX calls out 'superfluous' regulatory delays holding up Starship flights

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Tesla Autopilot developers told to ignore road signs, mind their own business

• Tesla self-driving promises are getting weaker on new cars

• Human drivers are to blame for most serious Waymo collisions

  • Human drivers keep rear-ending Waymos

• When Self-Driving Cars Don’t Actually Drive Themselves - The New York Times

  I had spent years talking to people about hidden human assistance. But I had not seen it with my own eyes until I walked into the Zoox command center. For years, companies like Waymo (owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company) and Cruise (owned by General Motors) avoided any mention of the remote assistance they provided their self-driving cars. That is just how things work in Silicon Valley. By creating the illusion of complete autonomy, companies can fuel interest in their technology and raise the billions of dollars they need to build a viable robot taxi service.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Communities of scientists are emerging on Bluesky

• The PhD Paradox: A Journey into Academia’s Upside-Down World – Daniel Lemire's blog

  Imagine if we recruited professors not just for their academic credentials but for their real-world achievements. People who’ve actually built things that work, could revolutionize how we teach software engineering or entrepreneurship. But we’re not there yet. We’re still caught in a system that values form over function, prestige over practicality. Our love affair with academia might be making us less productive and more miserable. Maybe it’s time we rethought this whole PhD business, not as a rite of passage into an elite club, but as a tool for real-world impact. After all, isn’t education supposed to prepare us for life, not just for more education?

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• The future everyone wanted – in-car ads tailored to your journey and passengers

• I Wish I Didn't Miss the '90s-00s Internet

  • HN comments

• Why a ruling against the Internet Archive threatens the future of libraries

  • that lawsuit really smacked the Archive down

  • New Feature Alert: Access Archived Webpages Directly Through Google Search | Internet Archive Blogs

• Research suggests more than half of VMware customers are looking to move

• You paid the ransom, and now the decryptor doesn't work

• Now they can make an even bigger dent in the world: Cloudflare Partners with CrowdStrike

• Rage bait is all the rage on Threads – so I tried it

• Substack's Ticking Time Bomb

  Substack didn't just appear out of thin air, offering a neutral platform for all voices. They had a strategy. And that strategy involved deliberately courting and subsidizing some of the most controversial voices out there. We're talking about writers whose views would make your average editorial board break out in hives.

  Even with all the buzz, all the subscriptions, all the newsletter empires being built, the numbers just don't add up. The revenues generated by Substack's top writers, impressive as they may be, can't possibly justify the astronomical valuations that VCs have poured into the company. So, what happens when the venture capital well runs dry? When the investors start demanding returns on their investment? That's when the other shoe drops.

  Substack has always been more than just a newsletter tool. It's a closed social media service in disguise. And as the pressure to monetize intensifies, we're going to see the mask slip. Ads will start creeping in, prices will go up, and suddenly, that email list you've been building? It might not be as portable as you thought. Before you know it, you're not an independent writer anymore – you're a content creator trapped in yet another digital ecosystem.

• Steam Families officially launches today

  All games are automatically shared between family members

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Peril looms as almost the entire Internet queries the wrong WHOIS server

• The GNOME Foundation is looking for a new Executive Director

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Time 100 Most Influential in AI 2024

• Sergey Brin says he's working on AI at Google 'pretty much every day'

• Facebook uses Australian adults public photos/posts to train AI, without opt-out

• Mainframes aren't dead, they're just learning AI tricks

• Apple's new AI is magically mediocre

  • iPhone 16's Hardware Ready, AI Still Missing

• The LLM honeymoon phase is about to end

• Senators Believe AI Summaries May Be an Antitrust Violation

• OpenAI Fundraising Set to Vault Startup's Value to $150B

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA okays mission to search for life on Jupiter's moon Europa

Crypto con games

• The Biggest Bitcoin Mine Is Rattling This Texas Oil Town

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Samsung Electronics plans global job cuts of up to 30% in some divisions

• Nothing is requiring employees to be in the office five days a week

• CPI for all items rises 2.5%; shelter up

  the smallest 12-month increase since February 2021.

• Volkswagen scraps decades-old job guarantees, paving way for lay-offs

• Goldman's Credit-Card Exit Hampered by Lax Lending Standards

• Infosec vacancies abound, but hiring is flat

• Just Miles from Kroger's Court Battle, a Food Desert Shows What's at Stake

• OpenWeb announces new CEO, but founding CEO refuses to step down

• How A Private-Equity Payday Drained a Hospital Chain of Cash

• Potential port strike has retailers, manufacturers scrambling.

• Hertz Bankruptcy Was Too Good for Shareholders

• PwC Laying Off 1,800 Employees in First Formal Cuts Since 2009

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• NHTSA's Pedestrian Crash Safety Rules Could Change American Car Design Forever

• Utah law restricting youth social media use blocked by judge

• Can we trust the polls this year?

• Debate in nuclear-armed former colony fails to reassure global community

  Efforts to restore democracy to the United States, a troubled, oil-rich former British colony with a history of political violence, may have suffered a serious setback this week after yet another chaotic presidential debate, some Americanists say.

  However, it got off to a less than stellar start. The three moderate candidates in the race – Jill Stein, Cornel West and Chase Oliver – were barred from participating. Instead, the contest pitted the two frontrunners: former President Donald Trump, the candidate of the far-white Republican Party, widely thought to be the political wing of white-Christianist militias, and Kamala Harris, the current vice president, who led a palace coup two months ago that forced the ageing, unpopular incumbent, President Joe Biden, to abandon his quest for re-election.

  During the debate, moderators drawn from the US media, once considered one of the most vibrant in the region, struggled to get Trump and Harris to answer questions about their views and policies, and the session at times degenerated into name-calling, fearmongering and outright lying. The two candidates traded insults, incited anti-China sentiment, differed over women’s rights and whether the country is facing an invasion by hordes of violent, pet-eating criminal immigrants, and agreed on backing the genocidal regime in Israel. There was little articulation by either candidate of a coherent vision for the country.

• US Postal Service delays threaten to disrupt election voting, officials say

  State and local election officials from across the country on Wednesday warned that problems with the nation’s mail delivery system threaten to disenfranchise voters in the upcoming presidential election, telling the head of the US Postal Service (USPS) that it hasn’t fixed persistent deficiencies. The officials said in a letter that over the past year, including the just-concluded primary season, mailed ballots that were postmarked on time were received by local election offices days after the deadline to be counted. They also noted that properly addressed election mail was being returned to them as undeliverable. Repeated outreach to USPS to resolve the issues had failed, the officials added.

Harris / Democrats

• Listen to CNN’s Erin Burnett as she finds out live that Kamala has argued for taxpayer-funded gender surgeries for illegal immigrants | Not the Bee

• Trump’s Improv Stood No Chance Against Harris’ Coached Attacks - POLITICO

  Harris’ strategy in her first debate as a presidential nominee was custom-tailored for one specific moment and one specific opponent. She plainly used her long days of debate prep in a Pittsburgh hotel to compile a rich anthology of taunts, putdowns and derisive one-liners against former President Donald Trump. The rehearsal was enough to commit dozens of them to memory — not enough to avoid sometimes sounding a bit stagy in delivery. At times, one could almost see the candidate flipping through a stack of neatly organized 3-by-5 index cards in her mind. Harris’ strategy worked because Trump arrived at the National Constitution Center without much of a strategy — or at least not with one that could survive past the first 15 minutes or so of the encounter.

• Donald Trump’s Campaign Is Stuck After the Debate | TIME (Archive)

  Correction, Sept. 11: The original version of this story mischaracterized as false Donald Trump's statement accusing Kamala Harris of supporting “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison” As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris filled out a questionnaire saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender transition treatment for detained immigrants.

• Taylor Swift Responds to Trump's AI Remarks with an Endorsement

  Less than a month after Trump’s AI nonsense, and immediately after the debate between Trump and Harris, Taylor Swift took to social media herself both to address what Trump did and to endorse Harris.

Trump / Right / Jan6

• MSNBC Host Says the Quiet Part Out Loud About the ABC News Debate

  despite my disappointment in Trump’s performance, where he had multiple opportunities to turn Harris inside out as a total clown who is unqualified and unprepared to be president, the vice president was assisted mightily by ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. It was the Democrat media complex at work, and they arguably were debating with Trump during this circus last night. MSNBC's Nicole Wallace and Tim Walz both said the quiet part out loud: the moderators rigged the debate.

• Debate Post-Mortem: Trump Was Trump, Harris Held Up, And Moderators Played Partisan Tricks | ZeroHedge

• Trump Fans Spread Conspiracy About Microphone Earrings After Debate | WIRED

  In the wake of a debate performance that has been widely panned as disastrous, former president Donald Trump and his supporters have tried to explain the evening away by posting conspiracies about a “rigged” event, deeply misogynistic attacks on vice president Kamala Harris, and wild claims about the vice president’s earrings. Within minutes of the debate ending, a brand new conspiracy emerged on X, focusing not on the content of what was said but on the earrings that Harris was wearing.

  • 'Audio earrings' Kamala Harris didn't wear during the debate barely even exist

  The earrings are said to have directional sound that remains audible only to the wearer. Per their Kickstarter page, they "are placed on the earlobes and project the sound from inside the pearl straight into your ear canal." Sure, they look a little like the pearl earrings Harris wore on stage but they're not the same. Style bloggers have already identified the pair of Tiffany earrings Harris wore to the debate and at previous events (as well as noting that she has worn a chain from the same collection).

  The main trouble is that the Nova H1 Audio Earrings barely exist. As Newsweek pointed out, the device was part of a Kickstarter project that faded into the ether. The earrings aren’t available to buy anywhere online and never have been. Nova Products, the company behind the campaign, hasn’t logged into Kickstarter since May 2023, and backers have posted on the page asking for a status update on the earrings they were supposed to receive in exchange for their pledge.

• Redditor Who Took Pic Of Man With Goose Responds to JD Vance

  An Ohio-based Reddit user who recently photographed a Black man holding a goose is desperately pushing back on claims being spread by the country’s biggest conservatives. On the morning of Sunday, July 28, the redditor isitmeyourelooking4x came across an individual holding what appeared to be a dead goose near the corner of Cleveland Avenue and Taymouth Road in the city of Columbus. (he) shared the photo to the group’s more than 200,000 users that same day, totally unaware that the image would later become central to misinformation regarding Ohio’s Haitian community.

  Police in Springfield also released a statement regarding the Facebook post, noting that there “have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” As previously stated, the picture taken by isitmeyourelooking4x was captured not in Springfield but in Columbus, nearly 50 miles away. The Haitians in Springfield were also granted temporary protected status, meaning they are not in the country illegally.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• since I work in the Ohio city that is presently all over the news, I suppose a few words are in order

  two local Catholic charities have contracted with the federal government to relocate "refugees." (I use quotes, because the local Haitians themselves are telling folks they were recruited for work.) This is publicly disputed, but the evidence is overwhelming. Regardless, at present, 20k Haitians now live in an Ohio town of 60k residents. And, yes, the stories about Haitians killing and eating neighborhood cats and ducks from local parks is true.

• Ex-CIA Officer Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison for Espionage on Behalf of China

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Military GPS modernization way behind schedule, audit finds

• Saudi Officials May Have Deliberately Assisted 9/11 Hijackers: New Evidence

  23 years after the attacks, new evidence has emerged to suggest more strongly than ever that at least two Saudi officials deliberately assisted the first Qaida hijackers when they arrived in the United States in January 2000. Whether the Saudis knew the men were terrorists remains unclear. But the new information shows that both officials worked with Saudi and other religious figures who had ties to al-Qaida and other extremist groups.

World

• Google and Apple lose their court fights against the EU and owe billions

• Study shows most Amazon beef and soy demand comes from Brazil – not exports

• Uber drivers in Kenya are ignoring the app and charging their own rates

• Swiss BMW Driver Slammed with $116,000 Tailgating Fine Because He's Rich

• Australia plans to ban children from social media

• Kuwait Is Awash in Oil Money. But It Can't Keep the Power On.

• Federal government to outlaw doxxing, impose up to seven years' jail

Israel

• Israel Offers To End War: Hamas Leader Sinwar To Be Given Safe Passage If All Hostages Returned | ZeroHedge (Archive)

  Israel's top official who is overseeing the (so far) failed truce talks with Hamas has said Israel is ready to offer Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar safe passage if all the hostages are returned. Upon that condition, the war in Gaza war can come to an end, the senior official said. This came direct from Israeli hostage envoy Gal Hirsch during an interview with Bloomberg published Tuesday. "I’m ready to provide safe passage to Sinwar, his family, whoever wants to join him," Hirsch said.

  • Israel Offers Hamas Leader Safe Exit From Gaza in Bid to End War - Bloomberg

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia to spend $660 million dollars to bolster internet censorship system

• Russian ship suspected of delivering Iranian ballistic seen at Caspian Sea port

• West's missile go-ahead to Ukraine would hold no shortage of risks

China

• In China, Retiring as Early as 50 Has Been the Norm. That Is About to Change.

• China trains 1000s for overseas law enforcement to make 'more fair' world order

• Chinese children were most likely infected by a lab leaked poliovirus in 2014

Health / Medicine

• An asthma drug that also seems to be a food-allergy fix

• Boar's Head plant posed an 'imminent threat' years before listeria outbreak

• Antibiotics damage the colonic mucus barrier in a microbiota-independent manner

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• There is now very little doubt that Covid leaked from a lab - spiked

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Wildfires Create Rain and Change the Weather

• Hurricane Francine Heads Toward Louisiana, Ending Atlantic Hurricane Lull

• Robot enters Fukushima's nuclear core to retrieve melted-down remains

• Drought-hit Danube River reveals scuttled German World War II ships

• The Golden Age of Offbeat Arctic Research

• The Brutal Economics of Reaching Net Zero

• Methane emissions have reached record highs

• Gas companies, cruise lines threaten to sue Unicode over "greenwashing" symbol

• ‘Ecocide’ did not kill remote Pacific islanders, DNA analysis finds

  DNA analysis of human remains suggests the population of the remote volcanic outcrop also known as Easter Island kept growing until the mid-19th century rather than succumbing to environmental pressures during the preceding centuries. The findings further undermine the “ecocide” theory popularised by US biophysicist and geographer Jared Diamond, which has become emblematic of the self-harming impact of human environmental destruction. “The ecocide idea is still quite ingrained, even in pop culture,” said José Víctor Moreno Mayar, author of the research and assistant professor at Copenhagen university. “We hope our genomic evidence combines with existing archaeological and anthropological evidence to get the story right.”

• Self-medicating gorillas may hold clues to new drugs

• Can eating less beef and dairy help save the Colorado River?