2024-10-20

no Holy Grail, shadow bans are real, WordPress drama, "smart" monitors, legalize it (pinkie swear), fundraisin foolery, Trump's Trojan horse, hunter-gather mentality, Cuba blackouts, wasted beef

etc

• 'A little hyped up': experts downplay claims over Petra archaeological find

• the bad news is that they broke into my rental car

  The good news is they gave up as soon as they figured out they were stealing AOL CDs

Horseshit

• Electric Motors Are About to Get a Major Upgrade Thanks to Benjamin Franklin

• Eerie Discovery on Mars Looks Exactly Like a Human Face.

• UK experts warn against buying 'XL bully cats'

• GPS Tracking of Teens 24/7 Impacts Parent-Child Relationships

• UK firm strikes deal to make space-based solar power a reality

celebrity gossip

• The Oblivion Mod Terry Pratchett Worked On

Obit

• Philip Zimbardo, psychologist who led Stanford prison experiment, dies at 91

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Everything we know about 'shadowbans' on social media (Archive)

  TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitch, for instance, limit the reach of content they deem inappropriate for children. Some of these rules are clear: no showing firearms or illegal substances. Others are muddy: On TikTok, for instance, people of any age can turn on “Restricted Mode,” which limits videos that show “threatening imagery” or “complex themes.” The company did not respond to The Post’s questions about what falls into these categories.

  • No mention of what the Feds can ask for in terms of "de-emphasis", oddly.

Musk

• EU considers calculating X fines by including revenue from Musk's other firms

• Tesla's reputation in Australia is tanking, some buyers turned off by Elon Musk

• Musk-Backed PAC Micro-Targets Muslim and Jewish Voters with Opposite Messages

  • How a Elon Musk-Funded Pac Is Microtargeting Muslims,Jews with Opposing Messages

• Bluesky gains 1.2M in 2 days, 12M total after X disables blocking

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Only 2.5% of Cybertruck Reservation Holders Decided to Buy the Truck

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Ride-hailing technology mitigates effects of driver racial discrimination

• this is what they call it here when a native American gets lost. Ebony Alert when a black person gets lost

  • Feather Alert issued as Southern California teen goes missing | KTLA

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?

• One goal of this "study" is to use qualitative methods to "facilitate sexual healing"

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Wordpress.org: Expanding Our Code of Conduct to Protect Private Conversations

  By explicitly addressing the publication of private messages without consent, we are reinforcing an existing unacceptable behavior in our Community Code of Conduct: Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting. Sharing private communications without permission is a clear violation of professional integrity. This new addition ensures that private messages receive the same level of protection as personal information and that sensitive communications shared in confidence will not be disclosed without prior consent.

  Did Automattic commit open source theft?

• Writeup: The COD remote perma ban exploit

• Epic judge lets Google keep its Android app store closed to competitors

• Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff

• Man Arrested for Using AI Songs and a Bot Army to Scam Spotify for Millions

• Amazon discontinues the last Kindle with physical buttons

• love being interrupted when my monitor asks me to accept user agreements (HN comments)

• John Grisham poached material for new book, media outlets say

• The Truth Is Out There, Part 4: The Downside of Belief

• 'We leave viewers smarter': fears over plans to close 'most highbrow' TV

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• People Are Asking AI for Child Pornography - The Atlantic

• Meta releases AI model that can check other AI models' work

• Microsoft could end up with substantial equity in the restructured OpenAI

• X to allow third parties to train their AI models with social media users' data

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• SpaceX prevails over ULA, wins military launch contracts worth $733M

• Three decades later, first brown dwarf ever found offers a surprise

Crypto con games

• Alleged Bitcoin hacker searched 'signs the FBI is after you'

Economicon / Business / Finance

• 'They refused to let me go': Japanese turn to resignation agencies to quit jobs

• Uranium Energy Corp. To Increase Wyoming Production Capacity 8.1M Pounds

• Boeing, Union reach wage deal to end strike

• US Interest Burden Hits 28-Year High

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Parking meter deal violation could cost Chicago over $100M

• This is what government does: Pedestrian Head Protection

• KY TikTok suit says company considered using Ky. creators to sway Sen. McConnell

Harris / Democrats

• Kamala Harris promises full marijuana legalization

  Kamala Harris announced on Monday that if elected president, she would fully legalize adult recreational cannabis on the federal level – the first time a presidential nominee has taken such an unambiguous stance on ending cannabis prohibition. As part of her pledge, she said she would take steps to ensure that Black men, disproportionately incarcerated and disenfranchised by the war on drugs, would stand to profit from the industry.

• Kamala Harris Mocks Audience Members for Proclaiming 'Jesus Is Lord,' Says 'You're at the Wrong Rally'

• Elon Musk's Fake Sites and Fake Texts Impersonating the Harris Campaign

• A Total Mural Failure: Kamala Harris’s Campaign Hits a Brick Wall in Philly

Trump / Right / Jan6

• $30M Is All It Took to Shift the Odds in Trump's Favor on Polymarket

  • Burst of trades gives Trump a winning edge in election prediction markets

  However, four anonymous traders have had a noticeably large influence on Trump’s Polymarket odds. These accounts, the largest of which goes by the handle Fredi9999, have since the start of September collectively bought more than $30mn in shares predicting a Trump victory and hold the four largest stakes in the market.

• Dominion voting machines in key states changing votes to Democrat candidates

• Donald Trump's sudden, wild popularity among young Canadians | National Post

  A new poll finds that Donald Trump isn’t just more popular among Canadians than their own prime minister, but he’s one of Canada’s favourite Republican presidential candidates ever. A survey published Monday by the Environics Institute found that if Canadians were allowed to decide the U.S. presidential election, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris would win by 60 per cent. Canadians always favour the Democrat in these types of polls, but Trump’s 21 per cent makes him more popular among Canadians than any other Republican presidential candidate of the last two decades, easily besting more moderate contenders such as Mitt Romney and John McCain.

• Elon Musk and other billionaires invest staggering sums into electing Trump, plus other takeaways from third-quarter filings | CNN Politics

  Some of the world’s wealthiest figures – led by conservative donor Miriam Adelson and tech billionaire Elon Musk – have funneled tens of millions of dollars into political groups in recent months to boost Donald Trump’s White House bid, new reports filed Tuesday with federal regulators show. Musk, the world’s richest person, gave nearly $75 million to a pro-Trump super PAC that he helped form over the summer – a massive cash infusion aimed at helping turn out voters in key battleground states. Adelson, a staunch Trump backer and heir to a casino fortune, gave even more, plowing $95 million into another outside group backing the former president, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission covering the three months ended September 30. Altogether, just three billionaires – Musk, Adelson and Midwestern packaging magnate Richard Uihlein – donated roughly $220 million in a three-month period to groups backing the Republican’s candidacy.

  • Harris campaign was bragging about raising over a Billion (with a B) in a month...

• Republicans, young adults trust social media about as much as news

• Donald Trump Is Elon Musk's Trojan Horse - The Atlantic

  The Tesla and X mogul has long dreamed of redesigning the world in his own authoritarian image. Electing Trump would make that a reality.

  Many other titans of Silicon Valley have tethered themselves to Trump. But Musk is the one poised to live out the ultimate techno-authoritarian fantasy. With his influence, he stands to capture the state, not just to enrich himself. His entanglement with Trump will be an Ayn Rand novel sprung to life, because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state—and therefore American life—in his own image.

  Musk’s pursuit of this dream clearly transcends billionaire hobbyism. Consider the personal attention and financial resources that he is pouring into the former president’s campaign. According to The New York Times, Musk has relocated to Pennsylvania to oversee Trump’s ground game there. That is, he’s running the infrastructure that will bring voters to the polls. In service of this cause, he’s imported top talent from his companies, and he reportedly plans on spending $500 million on it. That doesn’t begin to account for the value of Musk’s celebrity shilling, and the way he has turned X into an informal organ of the campaign.

• Biden's tariffs are of course not mentioned: Economists warn that Trump's tariffs could cause tech prices to skyrocket

• Leftists have a hunter-gatherer mentality.

  The left's failure with white men is not about messaging at all. The messaging is just a side effect. The left's failure with white men is fundamental to its hunter-gatherer mentality.

  The left doesn't hate white men because they are white men. The left hates white men because they are the only net taxpayers. The hatred, the racism, the dehumanizing propaganda, was invented for the purpose of the robbery.

• Understanding the Tech Right

• Pro-Trump dark money network tied to Musk behind fake pro-Harris campaign scheme

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• California cops cuff suspect in deadly drone-assisted drug deal

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US suspects TSMC helped Huawei skirt export controls, report says

• Reviving the Reagan-era 'Star Wars' missile defense program

• DJI Sues the US Department of Defense for Labeling It a Chinese Military Company

World

• A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed NSO Group's hacking

• Cuba's grid goes offline with blackout after a major power plant fails

  • The lights are out in Cuba.

  • Island-wide blackout sweeps Cuba after power plant failure

  • Cuba's electrical grid collapses for second time

• Tokyo's new urban spaces want you to spend time, not just money

Israel

• The 'pact of silence' between Israelis and their media

• Leaked Documents Show US Intel on Israel's Plan to Attack Iran, Sources Say

  • Pro-Iranian account leaks alleged U.S. Intel on Israel's attack plans

China

• Hmm. Was Starlink signals last report: China's "Groundbreaking Radar" Detects F-22 Stealth Fighters Using BeiDou Signal

Health / Medicine

• Strep A kills half a million per year; why don't we have a vaccine?

• Senate report: How private equity ‘gutted’ dozens of U.S. hospitals

• Growing Cannabis and Opium Poppies May Be Key to U.S. Supply Chains

• Flesh-eating bacteria cases rise in Florida after hurricanes Helene and Milton

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Cows dead from bird flu rot in California as heat bakes dairy farms

  Cows in California are dying at much higher rates from bird flu than in other affected states, industry and veterinary experts said, and some carcasses have been left rotting in the sun as rendering plants struggle to process all the dead animals. Carcasses left in the open and picked over by scavengers could facilitate the spread of bird flu to other birds and wild animals or degrade the carcasses such that they cannot be processed for rendering, experts told Reuters.

  Infected herds in California are seeing mortality rates as high as 15% or 20%, compared to 2% in other states, said Keith Poulsen, a veterinarian and director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory who has researched bird flu.

  • Last I heard the impact was "up to 25% reduction in milk output for up to two weeks"

• California Bird Flu Dashboard

• CDC Contact Tracing for International Flights: Still Necessary?

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Anti-fossil fuel comic that went viral in France arrives in UK

• Rethinking Our Attitude to Wildlife Means Attitude to Food Needs Rethinking

• System that moves water around Earth offbalance for first time in human history

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

• Town has no cell service, so the 'electrosensitive' have made it home

• Droughts drive Spanish boom in pistachio farming

• It all adds up: Study finds forever chemicals are more toxic as mixtures

• Sacred river in India covered in toxic foam