2024-09-15

Cool

• Making a rickroll laser: A parametric speaker. | Maurycy's blog

  The result of all this is a beam of sound only a few degrees wide, just like a laser. The beam also bounces off objects, making it seam like the sound is coming from somewhere else. Strangely, the sound is actually louder when bouncing off a hard object like a wall then when listening to it directly. I’m guessing that the surface creates areas of higher ultrasound intensity, creating more sound then would be created otherwise.

  It works quite well for rickrolling, especially if the sound is bounced of a wall to make it harder to track down. This is my only pranking device that has everyone asking how it works. On the other hand, it’s not really a good speaker. It has virtually no bass response, tends to distort louder audio, and is not all that loud.

  It also does strange things to microphones, playing a low frequency (10-200 Hz) sound will completely ruin recordings, even when not directly pointed at the microphone. This depends on the ultrasound directly hitting the microphone, so can be stopped with those fuzzy wind covers.

etc

• Nixon Said Pot Was 'Not Particularly Dangerous.'

Horseshit

• Who is responsible for the greatest change to our language? Teenage girls

• US judge allows election betting, dealing blow to markets regulator

• The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out

• Fake retro video game ring worth €50M smashed in Italy

• They don't make readers like they used to - Charlie's Diary

  'm a living fossil, a fiction author who expects to define the parameters of a fictional universe, set it in prose, and present it to a reader to follow (or not, if they don't like it). I'm the author, they're passengers: I'm the final authority in my fictional worlds. But there seems to be an emergent discourse in fandom about the legitimacy of the authorial position. If you're used to the ending of the story being maleable and varying depending on the choices you make as you play or experience it, traditional fiction can seem arbitrary, even dictatorial. "I wouldn't make that choice, so why should this viewpoint character?" is the sensibility. Their skepticism extends to world-building too. This essay was in part triggered by a bizarre opinion I saw re-tweeted on Bluesky, asserting that the very act of world-building is "fascistic".

  • See also the growing trend of authors who hate their fan base and write as a sophisticated means of trolling "that one fan."

• Stop Drinking from the Toilet! - Coda Story

  Digital platforms mix “digital water” and “sewage” in the same pipes, polluting our information systems and undermining the foundations of our culture, our public health, our economy, and our democracy. We see the news avoidance, extremism, loss of civility, reactionary politics, and conflicts. Less visible are other toxins, including the erosion of trust, critical thinking, and creativity. Those propagating the problems deny responsibility and ignore the punch line of Kranzberg’s first law which states, “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” We need fundamental changes to the design of our information distribution systems so that they can benefit society and not just increase profit to a few at our expense.

• Should Betting on Elections Be Legal?

• Pandemic-Fueled 'Dating Recession' Is Reshaping American Economy

• The experience economy is booming. So is regret

celebrity gossip

• High School Dropout Turned Billionaire Completes First Civilian Spacewalk

• Bad Omens for Neil Gaiman

  Neil Gaiman isn’t just one of the world’s most popular fantasy writers, he’s also a self-proclaimed feminist and defender of women. All the more shocking, then, to hear the allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against him in recent months. And how strange the silence that they were met with. Until now, that is. In a six-part podcast series by Tortoise Media, hosted by Rachel Johnson and Paul Caruana Galizia, a succession of women air allegations of sexual impropriety or abuse against Gaiman, author of Good Omens and The Sandman series. They raise serious questions about consent within relationships that were, at best, highly asymmetrical.

• Elon Musk and Larry Ellison Begged Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for AI GPUs at Dinner

• Perry Farrell’s wife Etty Lau breaks her silence to reveal the REAL reason lead singer of Jane’s Addiction punched guitarist Dave Navarro on stage

  Perry Farrell's wife broke her silence after her husband attacked his lead guitarist at a show in Boston, claiming the frontman was upset by being 'drowned out' by his bandmates playing too loudly. Lau said Farrell has been struggling with 'tinnitus and a sore throat every night' that has affected his voice, and he 'felt that the stage volume had been extremely loud and his voice was being drowned out by the band'.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• How the contrived panic over Haitian immigrants hijacked our algorithms — and our brains

  In today’s algorithmically-driven information environment, it’s easier than ever for purveyors of disinformation to strategically disseminate messages designed to exploit the tendency of algorithms to promote the most extreme, inflammatory, and divisive content available. Then, once these messages start getting boosted by recommendation and search algorithms, they subsequently start eliciting high levels of engagement, which drives further algorithmic amplification and reinforces the internal math that drives the behavior of algorithms. And that’s how we ended up in this self-perpetuating cycle in which divisive content gets picked up and amplified by platform algorithms, thereby boosting engagement rates and sending signals back to the algorithm that this type of content should be prioritized because it’s what people want to see and engage with. From there, it’s a race to the bottom, as social media users learn from the worst and start competing for attention by escalating their rhetoric and producing increasingly hostile, hateful, and incendiary content.

Musk

• Brazil Supreme Court unfreezes X, Starlink's bank accounts after taking $3.3M

  • HN comments

  • Brazil judge withdraws $3.3M from Musk's Starlink and X to pay fines

• A day in Elon Musk's mind: 145 tweets with election conspiracies and emojis

• Elon Musk Has a New Excuse for Not Making It to Mars

• Understanding anti-immigration sentiment spreading on Twitter

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Electric DeLorean DMC-12 Conversion Kit

• Chinese EVs still cheaper than Teslas in US after tariff hike

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Religious Orders Hold Assets Worth Millions Across Europe

• Job rate for women in tech has hardly budged since 2005, EEOC finds

  • but what is a woman? the amount of "trans genocide" spew in tech forums has certainly increased. Aren't these people counted?

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• CFPB bans Navient from servicing federal loans, fines $120M for failures

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Patch Notes #3: The game industry is becoming an innovation wasteland

• Google to use digital driver's licenses to verify the age of website users

• 1.3 million Android streaming boxes have been backdoored and nobody knows how except that some of them were running a bootleg Android version from 2016 which is a pretty big hint.

  • Void captures over a million Android TV boxes | Hacker News

• Apple's Vision Pro exposes your passwords.

• Why is online advertising so uniformly awful?

• YouTube starts showing ads when you pause a video on TV

• Verizon bets on fiber's staying power as it acquires Frontier for $20B

• Disney, DirecTV strike deal and end dispute, restoring access to ESPN, ABC, etc.

• When Social Media Felt Real

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• AMD CEO Lisa Su says AMD is now a data center-first company

• Computers are bad: the national warning system

  One of the interesting properties of private line systems is that they can be ordered as four-wire. Internally, the telephone network handles calls as four-wire with separate talk and listen pairs (or at least, it did before digitization). For cost reasons, though, service to individual customers is virtually always two-wire, with talk and listen combined onto a single pair via hybrid transformers. Four-wire private lines are just about the only exception.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Hasbro CEO Says AI Will Become Core Part of Dungeons and Dragons

• Hacker tricks ChatGPT into giving out detailed instructions for homemade bombs

• Meta fed its AI on almost everything you've posted publicly since 2007

• Meta back at it, harvesting Britons' public Facebook Insta feeds for AI training

• Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• An Ex Rocket Man's Take on It: What Went Wrong With Starliner?

Crypto con games

• Siemens Issues $330M Digital Bond on Private Blockchain with Major German Banks

• Bitcoin network hits record level of power but falling profits push miners to AI

• Twelve Sentenced for Violent Home Invasion Robberies to Steal Cryptocurrency

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Losses widen at Stripe Europe to $1.1B after employee 'liquidity event'

• TD launches e-commerce platform aimed to compete with Shopify

• Seven and I now classified as 'core' to Japan's national security

  The classification has raised questions as to whether it is a defensive manoeuvre by the owner of 7-Eleven convenience stores which last week rejected a $38.5 billion buyout offer from Canada's Alimentation Couche-Tard (ATD.TO), opens new tab. Couche-Tard is discussing whether to raise its offer price, according to a Bloomberg report.

• Basel III: The US has started a race to the bottom

  In the past, the US authorities have tended to take a two-tier approach to the global standards emanating from Bank for International Settlements in Basel, implementing them in a gold-plated fashion for the very largest dozen or so banks but leaving the majority of their system completely untouched. This allowed the Fed to claim it was among the world’s toughest regulators, while avoiding too much complaint from the powerful domestic savings bank lobby. This strategy seems to have been abandoned.

• AT&T Southeast strike nears one month. California and Nevada on brink of walkout

• The Mysterious, Meteoric Rise of Shein

• Boeing workers embrace labor movement leverage with strike

• Americans Are Falling Behind on Their Bills. Wall Street Is Alarmed

• Walgreens to pay $106M to settle allegations it submitted false Rx claims

• Median income rose to $80,610 in 2023

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• the US drinking-age law could be a model for fixing the housing crisis

  • "getting around" constitutional issues with unconstitutional tax laws...

• SF official approved $1.5M in contracts to ‘great friend’

  In 2021 and 2022, Sheryl Davis, the city’s Human Rights Commission head, approved contracts worth a total of $1.5 million with the local nonprofit Collective Impact, which is run by James Spingola. In interviews, the pair acknowledged having a close personal relationship, which Davis has never formally disclosed — despite rules that require such a disclosure.

• U.S. Govt pushes Nvidia and Apple to use Intel's foundries

• Washington established the presidency. How much of it would he recognize now?

Trump / Right / Jan6

• Soros-funded group's leader visited the White House, claimed credit for Trump’s NY prosecution | Just The News

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Shein and Temu Prices Expected to Rise as Biden Targets China-Linked Retailers

  • New US shipping rules target China's Shein and Temu

• Is "Havana Syndrome" Real?

• First coed submarine joins Navy fleet

  The U.S. Navy's first coed submarine has been commissioned and is ready for service in the fleet, the Navy announced on Saturday. "USS New Jersey (SSN 796) is now commissioned and ready for service!" the Navy said in a post on X. "The Navy’s latest Virginia-class submarine joins the fleet."

World

• Canadian military admits new sleeping bags are not suited to Canadian winters

• Three US citizens sentenced to death in Congo over role in failed coup

• Sweden to pay refugees up to 341,00 USD to return

Iran / Houthi

• Alarm in UK and US over possible Iran-Russia nuclear deal

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia Covering Aircraft with Tires to Confuse Image-Matching Missile Seekers

• NATO military committee chair, others back Ukraine's use of long range weapons

• Pro-Russian posters appear on billboards across Italy

China

• How China has 'throttled' its private sector

• What Scared Ford's CEO in China

Health / Medicine

• A 'Dopamine Fast' Will Not Save You from Addiction

• Helsinki Daycare installed air purifiers, kids stopped getting sick as often

• High lead levels found in cinnamon and spice blends from 12 brands

  • Consumer Reports warns of high levels of lead in cinnamon.

  • Pixy:

  Levels so high that if a child were to eat as few as eighty cinnamon rolls in a single day they could reach the CDC's recommended safety limit.

  • In new study, 1 in 3 cinnamon products tested had elevated lead levels.

• Kids using lotions have higher levels of hormone-disrupting toxins – study

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Missouri Bird Flu Case Raises Prospect of Human Transmission - The New York Times

  Someone who lived with a Missouri resident infected with bird flu also became ill on the same day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday. The disclosure raises the possibility that the virus, H5N1, spread from one person to another, experts said, in what would be the first known instance in the United States. On Friday night, C.D.C. officials said that there was “no epidemiological evidence at this time to support person-to-person transmission of H5N1,” but that additional research was needed.

• What We Know About Covid's Impact on Your Brain

• Unprecedented Bird Flu Levels Detected in Texas Wastewater: 'Concerning'

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• A bag of Cheetos had a huge impact on the ecosystem of Carlsbad Caverns

• AI Has Helped Shein Become Fast Fashion's Biggest Polluter

• UK courts handing climate protesters prison terms akin to rapists and thieves

• Misuse of Mosquito Nets Stressing Lake Malawi's Fish Populations

• Geothermal energy could outperform nuclear power

• Depends on the fish. Do fish have feelings? Scientists believe they're getting closer to an answer