2024-10-12

US stuff is br0k3d, Hot art, War on Hurricanes, Freeze Peach disaster, bots push booze, politics before progress, Archive.org vs Palestine, .io be OK, be acceptable for Obama, SEALS lacked training.

etc

• The digits of pi are not random | Hacker News

• the USA is dysfunctional in so many ways

  Everywhere you go, you run into little things that don't work. Half the escalators I saw were not working, soap was missing in the bathrooms, etc. Once you notice it, you see it everywhere in America.

• Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas approaches Earth Saturday, won't be back for 80000 years

  • Once-in-Humanity Comet Will Look Brighter Than Venus and Mercury on Saturday

• Trying Out A Far Infrared Heated Poster

  Far Infrared heaters come in various shapes and sizes, but do tend to be a large panel which may or may not fit in with the "feel" of the room. However, such heaters can usually be painted - with the result that some suppliers sell pre-made infra-red wall art (a picture that heats you, neat).

Hurricanes

• Hurricane Milton could cause as much as $175B in damage estimates

• US meteorologists face death threats as hurricane conspiracies surge

• Big Oil Must Pay for Storm Damage

• Helene and Milton reveal a new threat for first responders: EV fires

• Elon Musk is hampering hurricane relief efforts–and using X to do it

• Climate change boosted Milton's landfall strength from Category 2 to 3

• What if you can't afford to flee a hurricane?

Horseshit

• Breakdancers warned repetitive headspins could give them a 'cone-head'

  • Breakdancers at risk for "headspin hole," doctors warn

  • Man developed a 'headspin hole' after years of breakdancing, case report says

• Cold, ravenous and predatory, private equity is slouching towards the NFL

• Witch-hunting manual and social networks helped ignite Europe's witch craze

• Twenty years after its discovery, graphene is finally living up to the hype

• Texting while walking puts pedestrians in danger

• Hackers take control of robot vacuums in multiple cities, yell racial slurs

  • Hacked Robot Vacuums Across the U.S. Started Yelling Slurs

• Jack the Ripper's 'true identity' finally unveiled after DNA breakthrough

  Now, Edwards has written a book, Naming Jack the Ripper: The Definitive Reveal, in which he claims Kosminski is the most likely culprit.

• Aint gonna do him much good now: Everest climber's foot found after 100 years

  • More clues in 100-year-old Mount Everest mystery as climber's foot found

  • Human remains found on Everest might belong to climber who vanished 100 yrs ago

• Canadian carpenter became an options trader, made $300M, and went bust

• Mazda Annoys Owners by Making Remote Start a Subscription

• Student finds scorpion crawling inside Shein parcel

• Only in NYC from Sep 17 to 22 Pizza Hut Supports Your Job Search with a Pizza Box That Doubles as a Resume

  ResZAmes allows job applicants in the toughest job market, New York City, to stand out like never before by printing applicants’ resumes directly on a pizza box and hand-delivering these specially crafted boxes to corporate headquarters of customer’s choosing – all for free. Each ResZAme pizza box will arrive with a perfectly warm and deliciously cheesy medium-sized cheese pizza. This piping-hot resume will be almost impossible to ignore.

  • Pizza Hut Will Deliver Your Resume Printed on a Pizza Box to Potential Employers

• Monster storms Milton and Helene prove climate change is a national security issue | CNN Politics

  The impact of two catastrophic hurricanes in the last two weeks has underlined that rapid climate change is a threat that can do far more damage to American lives than traditional antagonists such as terrorists and authoritarian states. Treating climate change as a national security problem is not a liberal position but a hardheaded realist one. Indeed, the Pentagon has explicitly said it is and “elevated” it up the lists of threats facing the US. Three years ago, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin could not have been clearer, “We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.”

Obit

• Ethel Kennedy, widow of the assassinated Bobby Kennedy who stoically raised their 11 children alone

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• (Aug 2024) “Cyberpanics” and Global Disinformation Campaigns

  The widescale propagation of misinformation has become one of the greatest threats to humanity. It is, therefore, of utmost urgency for the technical community to work with stakeholders to take strong consensus actions to address the threat.

  On 30 October 1938, the CBS radio network in the United States broadcast a radio play based on H. G. Wells’s book The War of the Worlds. In the play, actor/writer/director Orson Welles used fictitious news flashes to simulate a worldwide Martian invasion. Scholars now disagree on the extent of the panic and fear spread by the broadcast, but this broadcast was effective enough that some people were convinced that the invasion was real, even taking defensive actions (fun fact: autho Phil’s mother, then 10, was “petrified with fear” of aliens breaking into the house and hid in a basement).

  • What a succinct way to show they aim to cure misinformation by ensuring "stakeholders" stories are the only stories, true or not.

• Americans Blame Politicians for Misinformation

  Americans' top concern around misinformation right now — more than foreign government interference or AI — is politicians spreading it to manipulate their supporters, according to a new Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll. "In past elections, there was always fear of misinformation and election interference coming from abroad. But here we see the most likely source of concern is America's own politicians spreading misinformation. "It used to be, we were worried about China or Russia, fake ads or Facebook. Now, no, it's coming from the campaigns."

• I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is - The Atlantic

  Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

  • “Free speech” was, and is, an unmitigated disaster

  I know it sounds inflammatory, but every piece of evidence points to the fact that we need really aggressive government regulation of speech platforms. The free market doesn’t work and it never will.

  • They can't stand not having total control over the narrative

  You can only view free speech as an "unmitigated disaster" if your belief system cannot withstand scrutiny. If you insist that your beliefs be shielded from criticism and projected onto the masses, then you're not promoting a political party—you're promoting a religion and attempting to create a theocracy.

Musk

• Elon Musk unveils Tesla Cybercab self-driving robotaxi

  • Tesla's Robotaxi day was a total Snoozefest

  • Tesla Cybercab Announced

  • Tesla Robotaxi to Cost Under $30k: Elon Musk

  • Musk Shows Tesla Cybercab, Sees Sub-$30k Cost and 2026 Production

  • Tesla Robotaxi (HN comments)

• Tesla's Optimus bot makes a scene at the robotaxi event

• Tesla's Beer-Serving Optimus Robot Was Controlled by a Human the Whole Time

• Tesla shares drop 6% in premarket as Cybercab robotaxi reveal fails to impress

  • Tesla's value drops $60B after investors fail to hail self-driving 'Cybercab'

• Elon Musk makes bold claims about Tesla robotaxi

• Elon Musk's China dream stalls as hybrids rush past Tesla

• California officials cite Elon Musk's politics in rejecting SpaceX launches (Archive)

  Elon Musk’s tweets about the presidential election and spreading falsehoods about Hurricane Helene are endangering his ability to launch rockets off California’s central coast. The California Coastal Commission on Thursday rejected the Air Force’s plan to give SpaceX permission to launch up to 50 rockets a year from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County. “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” Commissioner Gretchen Newsom said at the meeting in San Diego.

  • California officials reject SpaceX rocket launches, citing Musk's X posts

• SpaceX wants to go to Mars. To do so, environmentalists say it's trashing Texas

• How SpaceX became the MyPillow of government contractors - The Verge

  I have never accused Musk of being anything other than self-interested. As I see it, his only real politics are: Elon Musk should get to do whatever he wants, forever. And his latest political outbursts strike me as being clearly connected to his money. He’s come to the same conclusion as Donald Trump, which is that it’s particularly easy to grift Republican voters, and there are lots of rewards and very few consequences for doing so. Donny, these men are nihilists. On the face of it, it might look stupid for a businessman to alienate one of the major US political parties. Musk has a long history of taking subsidies from local, state, and federal governments. His business SpaceX is built essentially on agency contracts in the heavily regulated aerospace industry. But I’m guessing Musk has figured out he can leverage the culture wars to his advantage.

Electric / Self Driving cars

• 'Nearly unusable': Calif. police majorly push back on Tesla cop cars

• Tesla Cybertruck 'too big and sharp' for European roads, say campaigners

• Why Tesla's EV Charging System Won the Race to Become America's Standard

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• I love meritocracy, but all the recent anti-DEI rhetoric is bad

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Nobel Prize: Why Rosalind Lee Wasn't Recognized Alongside Her Husband

• Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 - Nobel Peace Prize

  Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 to the Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo. This grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is receiving the Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.

  • Japanese atomic bomb survivors win Nobel Peace Prize

• The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It

• Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?

  White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in. White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value. Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• States probed TikTok for years. The documents the app tried to keep secret

• Can the Nobel Prize Save Publishing from Itself?

• $2 H100s: How the GPU Rental Bubble Burst (HN comments)

• Hacktivists Claim Responsibility for Taking Down the Internet Archive

  A pro-Palestenian hacktivist group called SN_BLACKMETA has taken responsibility for the hack on X and Telegram. “They are under attack because the archive belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of ‘Israel,’” the group said on X when someone asked them why they’d gone after the Archive.

  The group elaborated on its reasoning in a now-deleted post on X. Jason Scott, an archivist at the Archive, screenshotted it and shared it. “Everyone calls this organization ‘non-profit’, but if its roots are truly in the United States, as we believe, then every ‘free’ service they offer bleeds millions of lives. Foreign nations are not carrying their values beyond their borders. Many petty children are crying in the comments and most of those comments are from a group of Zionist bots and fake accounts,” the post said.

• There's a vulnerability in 64 different Qualcomm chipsets.

• Automattic is doing open source dirty

  Automattic can change their license away from the GPL any time they wish. The new license will only apply to new code, though, and WP Engine, or anyone else, are eligible to fork the project. That's what happened with Redis after Redis Labs dropped their BSD license and went with a commercial source-available alternative. Valkey was forked from the last free Redis version, and now that's where anyone interested in an open-source Redis implementation is likely to go. But I suspect Automattic wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to retain WordPress' shine of open source, but also be able to extract their pound of flesh from any competitor that might appear, whenever they see fit. Screw that.

• Steam now tells gamers up front that they're buying a license, not a game

  • Valve says Steam users don't own a thing, GOG says its games can't be taken away

  • Steam now says the 'game' you're buying is just a license

  • Steam adds the harsh truth that you're buying "a license," not the game itself

• Xbox will sell games directly in the Android app next month

• The Fight That Nearly Destroyed the Letterboxd Community

• Mozilla has issued an emergency security update for Firefox

• ByteDance's TikTok cuts jobs in shift towards AI content moderation

• 'Chicken Run' Studio Aardman Cuts Jobs After $720K Loss Amid Market "Challenges"

• The .io domain isn't going anywhere anytime soon amid treaty

• Publishers try skinnier books to save money and emissions

• Bluesky joins Threads to court users frustrated by Meta's moderation issues

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Is AI really creative?

• The AI Nobel Prizes Could Change the Focus of Research

• AI Winter Is Coming

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• International Space Station Leak Is Getting Worse–and Keeping NASA Up at Night

• UFO announcement 'could happen within weeks' as legit expert says 'we found it'

  • Alien announcement 'could happen within weeks'

• New Hubble images show Jupiter's Great Red Spot wiggles like gelatin

• Starship might fly on Sunday

Crypto con games

• FBI created a crypto token so it could watch it being abused

  • FBI creates its own crypto token to nab suspects in alleged fraud scheme

• Bitcoin Faces Significant Selling Pressure as Prices Decline

• Former FTX exec starts prison sentence with LinkedIn post about a 'new position'

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Is a repeat of the 2019 repo crisis brewing?

• TD Bank hit with record $3B fine over drug cartel money laundering

• Boeing to Cut 10% of Workers, Delay New Plane

  • Boeing Will Cut 17,000 Jobs in Bid to Slash Costs

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• (July 2024) Patronage vs. Constituent Parties

  We still see this story play out on the left today. Though the contest for clout has shifted out of the convention halls and out onto social media, when you look at the trajectory of leftist movements over the 2010s—such as the Black Lives Matter movement—you find a similar pattern. Protests that closed with policy defeat, changing nothing but media coverage, did not lead to the marginalization of protest leaders or their moment. Quite the opposite: with each defeat the influence these movements held over the Democratic establishment grew. Why does this happen? Freeman argues that peculiar features of Democratic Party organization and political culture allow activists to profit from defeat.

  This is why the feminist maneuvers in the 1980 convention made sense: whether the feminists won the floor fight was less important than demonstrating that the women’s groups were a constituency capable of forcing a floor fight in the first place. The activists lost their battle, but successfully proved that their army could be mustered, and that its soldiers looked to them for marching orders. They demonstrated that they deserved a larger spot at the negotiating table—and during the next convention they were given one.

  The Republicans are different. In the ‘70s and ‘80s Republican feminists refused to bring losing battles to the floor. Where most Democratic activists view their constituency identity as primary and their party identity as secondary, most of the Republican feminists Freeman worked with saw themselves as Republicans first. Many were the wives of sitting Republican officials. They were not outsiders clamoring for clout but insiders maneuvering for influence. Their party worked in a very different way from the Democrats:

  • Taking a "cause" to defaet in service of the Party's agenda is service worth beign rewarded. The Right doesn't reward people for leading causes they don't brelieve in, succeed or fail.

• The Danger of Politicizing ‘Freedom’ - The Atlantic

  Freedom in the United States is a word that has had more than one meaning. It has meant freedom for some people and the repression of others. In a democracy, freedom also means the right to take part in politics. So how can that freedom best be secured?

• Crackdown on dishwashers dealt blow by appeals court in the U.S.

Harris / Democrats

• 92% were at 3 or more Kamala rallies.

• Who were those men?

• Barack Obama calls on more black men to vote for Kamala Harris

  Barack Obama has urged black men to back Kamala Harris in the US election, saying reports of low support for the vice president in the community are "not acceptable".

  He went on to suggest some men "just aren't feeling the idea of having a woman as president", and added: "You're coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses. I've got a problem with that." He then said: "You're thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that's a sign of strength, because that's what being a man is? "Putting women down? That's not acceptable."

Trump / Right / Jan6

• Opinion | Founder Mode Helps Explain Why Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen Are Backing Donald Trump - The New York Times

  ’m talking about founder mode. A recently coined management style being celebrated by some venture capitalists, it embraces the notion that a company’s founder must make decisions unilaterally rather than partner with direct reports or frontline employees. All too often the extension of founder mode is to resist not only internal checks and balances but also those from the government. I see founder mode as another expression of a creeping attraction to one-man rule in some corners of tech. (I use “man” intentionally, as only 3 percent of venture capital funding goes to solo female founders.) This neo-authoritarianism is nothing short of a rejection of the historical values that made Silicon Valley what it is today. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a handful of the wealthiest and most powerful venture capitalists there are throwing their resources behind the re-election of Donald Trump.

• Some Democrats won't commit to certifying a Trump victory

  Raskin, the House Oversight Committee ranking member and former Jan. 6 committee member who objected to Trump electors in 2017, told Axios in an interview that if Trump "won a free, fair and honest election, then we would obviously accept it." However, Raskin said he "definitely" doesn't assume that Trump would use free, fair and honest means to secure a victory. Trump "is doing whatever he can to try to interfere with the process, whether we're talking about manipulating electoral college counts in Nebraska or manipulating the vote count in Georgia or imposing other kinds of impediments," Raskin said. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a senior chief deputy whip who voted to object to George W. Bush electors in 2005, said of Trump, "I don't know what kind of shenanigans he is planning," adding: "We would have to, in any election ... make sure that all the rules have been followed."

• Elon Musk Is Going All In to Elect Donald Trump - The New York Times

  In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the richest man in the world has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history. Elon Musk, seen over the weekend jumping for joy alongside former President Donald J. Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa., is now talking to the Republican candidate multiple times a week. He has effectively moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania, the place that he has recently told confidants he believes is the linchpin to Mr. Trump’s re-election. He has relentlessly promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy to his 201 million followers on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought for $44 billion and has used to spread conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and to insult its candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.

• The Law School Dean Who Worked to Overturn the Election

• Trump campaign asks for military aircraft with antimissile capabilities

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• U.S. officials racing to understand scope of China-linked hack of US broadband

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The drownings of 2 Navy SEALs were preventable, military investigation finds

  Two U.S. Navy SEALs drowned as they tried to climb aboard a ship carrying illicit Iranian-made weapons to Yemen because of glaring training failures and a lack of understanding about what to do after falling into deep, turbulent waters, according to a military investigation into the January deaths. The review concluded that the drownings of Chief Special Warfare Operator Christopher J. Chambers and Navy Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Nathan Gage Ingram could have been prevented. But both sank quickly in the high seas off the coast of Somalia, weighed down by heavy equipment they were carrying and not knowing or disregarding concerns that their flotation devices could not compensate for the additional weight. Both were lost at sea.

  • This is smells like rancid bullshit. "SEALS aren't adequately trained?" Really? Bext you'll tell me the rest of the Navy has been allowed to rust into uselessness...

China

• China to hit cognac in response to European tariffs on electric cars

Health / Medicine

• CDC stats reveals startling number of people with ADHD in US

• How Long TIL We're All on Ozempic?

• Patients scramble for treatments as hospitals conserve IV fluids after storms

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Tell HN: Covidtests.gov shipping old, expired tests | Hacker News

  They mention this when you order them from the site: “Expiration Dates Extended Tests may show “expired” dates on the box, but FDA has extended those dates”

• Cardiac Crisis: Covid-19 Doubles Risk of Heart Attacks, Strokes, and Death

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Overshooting 1.5C risks ‘irreversible’ climate impact - World - DAWN.COM

• High CO2 levels are greening the drylands, but it's not good news

• Westward range shifts in European forest plants link to nitrogen deposition

• The Weeds Are Winning

• Temporarily overshooting climate targets could be more damaging than predicted

  • Overconfidence in Climate Overshoot

• 'That's a bloodbath': How a federal program kills wildlife for private interests

• Dramatic images show the first floods in the Sahara in half a century

• They're eating the bugs the many-legged moral horror-show of insect farming