2024-10-17

Inside Palantir, Sweet Potato Poon, Cybercabs illegal, Science grows on horseshit, zombie Excel, "Kamala's Wins" is a Fed, Feds worry about Trump, FBI finds some more crime, parsing laws of war

etc

• Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. Qureshi

  During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. There were regular protests outside the office. Even among people who didn’t have a problem with it morally, the company was dismissed as a consulting company masquerading as software, or, at best, a sophisticated form of talent arbitrage.

• They dont need us. We Are in Need of Renaissance People

• gives a whole new meaning to growing cowpeas

• Vikings obtained walrus ivory from deep Arctic possibly interior Canadian Arctic

Horseshit

• Nut bans no help to allergic air passengers, experts say

• Nut pimping, stampsies anything goes: Peckham has rival to world conker contest

• They have always been cool: How did bookshops suddenly become cool?

• Dutch national soccer player moonlights as drug trafficker

• One possible housing crisis solution? Public housing for all income levels

• Talking Pet Collar Is Like a Chatbot for Your Dog

• Praxis Gets $525M in Commitments for Planned 'Heroic' City

• Standing desks may be bad for your health, study suggests

celebrity gossip

• Nima Momeni's trial kicks off over death of CashApp founder Bob Lee

• Al Roker's Sweet Potato Poon, a delicious dish with a side of mystery | AP News

  When Al Roker thinks about his mother and food, this recipe comes to mind. The poon is a bit of a mystery. While it graced his table for every holiday meal and on special Sunday dinners, no one in the family knows where this side dish came from or why on earth it’s called a poon.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Community Notes stopping a BLM hoax before it takes off

Musk

• We had about 20 active bots at all times

  walking through a packed crowd, dancing, taking selfies, or even pouring drinks and handing out snacks. While of course they were human assisted to some extent to help showcase our vision of an amazing future, they walked, balanced and danced on their own for ~4 hours straight, with only one single fall (someone's handbag caught a bot's hand). Making nice demo videos is not easy, but ensuring a safe live operation of many humanoids for hours in a public outdoor environment imposed a much higher bar. Through this push, we made significant improvement across full-body controls & locomotion, hardware stability, and infrastructure.

• the x engineers present and past were the best software engineers that mankind has even been graced by

• Commission concludes that X should not be designated under the DMA

  • X's depressing ad revenue helps Musk avoid EU's strictest antitrust law

• Tesla needs to come clean about HW3 before the word 'fraud' comes out

• Musk's SpaceX sues California panel, alleges political bias over rocket launches

• X dodges EU's DMA – platform isn't important enough for fairness controls

• Musk’s Vow to Make Lots of Tesla Cybercabs Conflicts With US Rules (TSLA) - Bloomberg

  Automakers must secure permission from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration before putting cars on the road that lack a steering wheel or other controls required by US auto safety rules. If Tesla were to overcome that hurdle — which is by no means guaranteed — it could only put a few thousand robotaxis on the road in a given year, effectively rendering its slick self-driving taxi little more than a niche product.

• Elon Musk could become first trillionaire

• Elon Musk Likely Violates Federal Prohibition on Vote Buying

  • Elon Musk Might've Broken the Law Against Bribing Voters

• Elon Musk Helped Fund the Most Cynical Super Pac of the 2024 Election

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Solid-state batteries hype is fading – auto giants to consider alternatives

• European Road Safety Orgs Are Terrified of the Cybertruck

• Tesla Cybertruck becomes third best-selling EV in US, overtaking Ford, GM

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The Guru Who Says He Can Get Your 11-Year-Old into Harvard

• Experts Reveal the 'Secret Engine' Behind Science's Endless Growth

  Since 1900, the number of published scientific articles has doubled about every 10 to 15 years; since 1980, about 8 percent to 9 percent annually. This acceleration reflects the immense and ever-growing scope of research across countless topics, from the farthest reaches of the cosmos to the intricacies of life on Earth and human nature. Yet, this extraordinary expansion was once thought to be unsustainable.

  Derek de Solla Price famously predicted limits to scientific growth. This explosion of scientific production made Price's prediction of collapse perhaps the most stunningly incorrect forecast in the study of science. Unfortunately, Price died in 1983, too early to realize his mistake.

  despite the impressive growth of scientific output, this brand of highly collaborative and transnational megascience does face challenges. On the one hand, birthrates in many countries that produce a lot of science are declining. On the other, many youth around the world, particularly those in low-income countries, have less access to higher education, although there is some recent progress in the Global South.

• Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

• Ireland's big school secret: how a year off-curriculum changes teenage lives

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• FCC Explores How Broadband Data Caps Impact Competition and Consumers

  • The FCC is looking into the impact of broadband data caps

  • FCC Republican opposes regulation of data caps with analogy to coffee refills

• YouTube takes a baby step towards labeling authentic video

• Millions of People Are Using Abusive AI ‘Nudify’ Bots on Telegram

• Amazon's new Kindle family includes the first color Kindle

  • The new Kindle was briefly on sale and it hasn't even been announced yet

  • The First Color Kindle Is Here

• Western Digital launches 32TB hard drive

• Digital River runs dry, hasn't paid developers for sales since July

• Meta must face US state lawsuits over teen social media addiction

• Mastodon has started selling toys

• Discord Rejects Role as 'Anti-Piracy' Partner; will no longer respond to DMCAs

• ArchiveBox is evolving: the future of self-hosted internet archives

• Why Microsoft Excel won’t die

  Excel was not the first spreadsheet for personal computers. That honour belongs to VisiCalc (short for visible calculator), built in 1979 by Dan Bricklin, then a student at Harvard Business School. By 1983 a rival program, Lotus 1-2-3, had taken the lead. When Microsoft released Excel in 1985, it brought a few clever twists. Instead of recalculating every cell when one changed, Excel updated only the affected cells. This made it much faster, especially on the limited hardware of early personal computers.

• Tinkerers Are Taking Old Redbox Kiosks Home and Reverse Engineering Them

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Intel spends more on R&D than Nvidia and AMD combined

• What Even is a 'Cinema' Lens, Anyway? | PetaPixel

• seen that gelatinous cube 3d printer?

• Vietnam plans to convert all of its networks to IPv6

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• NYT sends AI startup Perplexity 'cease and desist' notice over content use

  • New York Times to Bezos-Backed AI Startup: Stop Using Our Stuff

• AI Threats "Complete BS" Says Meta Researcher, Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Cat

• National Archives Pushes Google Gemini AI on Employees

• Amazon buys stake in nuclear energy developer in push to power data centres

• Anthropic's CEO thinks AI will lead to a utopia – he just needs $7 billion first

• Why Gavin Newsom vetoed an AI safety bill

Crypto con games

• Minneapolis Federal Reserve President: Never Met Anyone Who Bought Something With Bitcoin, Asserts The Cryptocurrency Is A "Terrible Inflation Hedge"

  Kashkari raised three major points against Bitcoin in a recent public talk. He asserts that he has never met anyone who had bought a common staple using Bitcoin, questioning the cryptocurrency's role as a medium of exchange. He then cites the example of the post-pandemic inflationary impulse, where Bitcoin tanked with the rest of the risky asset universe, to posit that the cryptocurrency remains a "terrible inflation hedge." Finally, Kashkari thinks Bitcoin is nothing but a vehicle for speculation.

• Gaza Is the Most Powerful Demonstration of Bitcoin Since WikiLeaks

• AI chatbots spawn shock meme cult, birth $258M crypto empire

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Intel Layoffs Reach Peak This Week

• American consumers are increasingly underwater on their car loans

• Low home turnover rate, charted

• Kroger Asked About Surge Pricing and Facial Recognition at Grocery Stores

• Robinhood launches desktop platform, adds futures and index options trading

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• FTC Announces "Click-to-Cancel" Rule Making It Easier to Cancel Subscriptions

• Crypto has become one of the biggest electoral players

Harris / Democrats

• Viral Account Pushing Pro-Kamala Misinformation Was Launched By Biden Admin Employee

  In July, the popular “Biden’s Wins” account rebranded itself to “Kamala’s Wins,” and now boasts that it’s the “largest online community supporting soon to be President Kamala Harris.” With over 765,000 followers, the account sits at the center of a Democratic influence operation, pushing false narratives to millions of potential voters. And its founder, a Biden-Harris administration staffer, may be violating federal law by running it. The Biden’s Wins account was launched in January 2022 by Ethan Wolf, a recent college graduate who was working as deputy political director for Illinois Democrat Brad Schneider’s reelection campaign. Wolf’s account quickly became “a favorite of White House staffers” such as Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, and in July 2022, his account was profiled by POLITICO.

• The United States Constitution is actually quite bad

  • The Supreme Court and the nightmare facing Democrats even if Kamala Harris wins | Vox

  If Harris wins, the Republican Party will almost certainly be able to veto anything she does, thanks to our broken Constitution.

Trump / Right / Jan6

• Trump's coin sale misses early targets as crypto project's website crashes

• Federal employees are worried about a return of Donald Trump to the White House - POLITICO

  EPA employees are shuffling to “safer” agencies. An Interior Department worker is putting off buying a new car and poring over Project 2025. And civil servants across the government are worried they might soon get fired. Federal employees throughout the executive branch are panicking at the thought of another Trump administration. Former President Donald Trump has pledged to “demolish the deep state.” His running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, has said Trump ought to fire “every civil servant in the administrative state.” It’s not just campaign-trail bluster. In the waning days of his first administration, Trump sought to make it easier to fire federal employees — a move that was quickly reversed by the Biden administration. Workers in some agencies are particularly distraught about a possible Trump return. The former president and his allies have singled out certain agencies — including those that issue environmental rules — as prime targets, should he return to office in January.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• TD Bank's "Historic Fine": Drugs, Bribes, Human Trafficking: A Calculated Risk

• DOT Penalizes Lufthansa $4M for Violating Passengers' Civil Rights

  $4 million penalty against Lufthansa for discriminating against Jewish passengers who were traveling from New York City through Frankfurt to Budapest in May 2022. Based on the alleged misconduct of some passengers, Lufthansa prohibited 128 Jewish passengers – most of whom wore distinctive garb typically worn by Orthodox Jewish men – from boarding their connecting flight in Germany. Despite many of the passengers not knowing each other nor traveling together, passengers interviewed by DOT investigators stated that Lufthansa treated them all as if they were a single group and denied them boarding for the alleged misbehavior of a few. Today’s penalty is the largest ever issued by DOT against an airline for civil rights violations.

• FBI revises 2022 crime statistics – 4.5% increase, not 2.1% decrease

  When the FBI originally released the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1%. This quickly became, and remains, a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime. But the FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.

  • Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats Higher | ZeroHedge

• Why People Think It’s Okay to Steal - The Atlantic

  Big corporate retailers, mom-and-pop shops, cops, prosecutors, and lawmakers have tried everything to stop the thefts: get tough, be gentle, invest in new surveillance technology, turn pharmacies into fortresses. Nothing seems to work. At my Target in Washington, D.C., I counted 21 aisles of goods locked behind plastic, including toothpaste, body wash, underwear, earbuds, and air fresheners—all items that impulse thieves and organized criminals alike find desirable and easiest to resell, on the street or, more often these days, online. Who is taking all of this stuff? And why has this age-old nuisance crime become so prevalent?

• Former Las Vegas-area politician gets 28 years in prison for killing journalist

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• With new bullets, the Army wants to turn Apaches and Bradleys into drone killers

• Cyber criminals are increasingly helping Russia and China

World

• Argentina to Adopt Flexible Exchange Rate After Lifting Controls

• Zimbabwe to Pay over 400 Former White Farmers for Land Improvements

• Is Brazil's Supreme Court Saving Democracy or Threatening It?

Israel

• (Sep 2024) Exploding Pagers and the Law

  Two key questions now need to be considered. First, are these weapons, weapon systems or methods of warfare lawful? The weapon system in the present case will comprise the fake component including the explosive content, the detonator, the arming mechanism and the equipment that is used to generate and transmit the relevant signal. A method of warfare is a way of conducting hostilities. Second, do these attacks comply with targeting law? I consider these questions in turn.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia increasingly using cybercriminals to target adversaries, Microsoft says

• Russia suspected of planting device on plane that caused UK warehouse fire

China

• Taiwan and trade: how China sees its future with the US after the election

• Inside the underground lab in China tasked with solving a physics mystery

Health / Medicine

• Bursts of exercise boost cognitive function, neuroscientists find

• Drug firm accused of prioritising profits after halting insulin pen production

• UK women who suffer cardiac arrest in public less likely to get CPR, study finds

• Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

• Employer may start covering weight-loss drugs soon

• In Good Health: Weight Loss Drugs and the Falling Obesity Rate

• Scientist reveals how he beat terminal cancer thanks to new treatment

• NHS England warned about plans to extend Covid-era rules for patient data access

• 'It's social murder' – is Canada's assisted dying a model or a warning?

• High-potency cannabis use leaves a distinct mark on DNA

• Diet can change your immune system

• US invokes wartime powers to alleviate IV shortage after hurricane

  The Biden administration says it has invoked the wartime powers of the Defense Production Act to speed rebuilding of a major American factory of intravenous fluids that was wrecked by Hurricane Helene last month. Damage to the plant in North Carolina has worsened a nationwide shortage of IV fluids, and hospitals say they are still postponing some surgeries and other procedures as a result. Some 60% of the nation's IV supplies had relied on production from the plant, run by medical supplier Baxter, before it was damaged by the storm. "Ensuring people have medical supplies they need is a top priority of the Administration. It's exactly why we are working closely with Baxter to support cleanup and restoration of the facility, including invoking the Defense Production Act to help production resume as quickly as possible," an official with the Department of Health and Human Services told CBS News on Tuesday. A spokesperson for the federal Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response said the federal government had wielded the act's authorities to push Baxter to the front of the line for a contractor needed for construction in the plant. ASPR officials are now looking into other ways that the powers might be able to accelerate rebuilding or help other domestic manufacturers ramp up.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Long-Covid significant health crisis in China too, up to 30% have symptoms

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Since spring of 2023, the world has been warmer than climate models anticipated

• Scientists Started to Decode Birdsong

• Fungi could be given same status as flora and fauna under conservation plan