2024-11-04

more IQ needed, violent words, was paypal this hard?, bulk battery boom, Not Satoshi, voter (dis)qualifications, social trust, FCC remembers "equal time", Iran talks teeth, Prozac sunsets, apocalypse envy

etc

• Please Publish and Share More

  Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

• The passive house trend is booming

• Did You Know That Apes Have Never Asked a Question?

• Touchscreens are out, and tactile controls are back (HN comments)

Horseshit

• Intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence

• Royal Navy successfully tests quantum-sensing technology

• Oasis and Ticketmaster Effigy Burned at Edenbridge Bonfire Night

• (Feb 2024) PETA’s Animal “Shelter” Continues as a Leader in Animal Death - Lexology

• Increasing the Supply of Very High-IQ Workers

  Calaway estimates that having a math mentor at a school, someone who runs a math club and organizes entry into top math competitions, increases the number of students earning PhDs and pursing careers as scientists and professors.

• Global gambling affects the vulnerable and is at almost epidemic levels

• 'She's still alive': First Sarco suicide pod user'found with strangulation marks

• Severe irritability in children and teens: A new understanding

• 4 in 5 Americans think 'words can be violence'

  Republicans, independents, and men were more likely to entirely reject the idea that “words can be violence,” with 27% of men, 28% of independents, and 27% of Republicans saying it does not describe their thoughts at all, compared to only 14% of women and 11% of Democrats.

• Energy-saving potato variety bidding to become Britain's ultimate roasting spud

• A 34-year-old from Indianapolis became first American world champion of conkers

• Not too big, not too small: Why modern humans are the ideal size for speed.

celebrity gossip

• Peanut the Squirrel was no match for the administrative state

Musk

• Musk Loses Bid to Dismiss Ex-Twitter CEO's Severance Claim

• Elon Musk’s X fails to become “everything app” after two years - The Verge (Archive)

  X isn’t something that is upsetting “the far right and the far left equally,” Instead, it has become Musk’s political weapon. In fact, he may be so preoccupied with trying to get Donald Trump elected that he has forgotten that X was supposed to be a bank by now. This time last year, Musk said in an internal X meeting that it “would blow my mind” if the service couldn’t handle “someone’s entire financial life” by the end of 2024. The first step toward this vision is a Venmo-like payment feature that’s still in development. X says it has secured money transmitter licenses to process payments in 38 states, including California, but has yet to get approval in key states like New York.

• SpaceX became too big to fail for US national security

• Elon Musk's X is losing users in the U.S., UK, and EU. X's own data proves it

• Elon's social posts have had a 'sudden boost' since July, new research reveals

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Why Elon Musk's Robotaxi Dreams Are Premature

• Fire erupts in southeast Missouri at one of world’s largest lithium-ion battery facilities • Missouri Independent

  Photos posted on Facebook by Madison County 911 show Critical Mineral Recovery, one of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery processing facilities, with a hole in its partially-collapsed roof. Smoke billowed from the charred building and a slight glow of remnant fire could be seen inside. According to the company’s website, the plant processes electric vehicle and consumer-grade lithium-ion batteries and retrieves valuable metals and minerals, including copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, manganese and aluminum. The recycled materials can be used to build new batteries. The fire erupted in spite of what the company’s website calls “likely the most sophisticated automated and remote supervised and controlled fire suppression systems in the world.”

• Tesla vehicles are more "Made in America" than any other brand

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• How Do We Know We're Not Living in a Computer Simulation?

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• iPod fans evade Apple's DRM to preserve 54 lost clickwheel-era games

• S. Korea testing "snack films" with lower ticket prices to shake up box office

• Why Bluesky not adding the federation systems

• Google is adding smart home integration to their Gemini chatbot

• More than 30% of PRs in public GitHub repos are from bots

• Hacker News Clones - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

  kinda love that there are still places on the web where people can explore creating alternative experiences without being shut down because they are outside the officially-sanctioned environment.

• Don't look now, but Macs are finally getting good for gaming

• Dystopika is a beautiful cyberpunk city builder without the ugly details - Ars Technica

  Dystopika does very little to explain how you should play it, because there's no optimal path for doing so. Your only job is to enjoy yourself, poking and prodding at a dark cyberpunk cityscape, making things that look interesting, pretty, grim, or however you like. It might seem restrictive, but it feels very freeing.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Security flaws found in all Nvidia GeForce GPUs. Update drivers ASAP | Hacker News

• in 1985: Commodore could have owned AOL - The Silicon Underground

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI overwhelmingly prefers white and male job candidates

• One in 20 new Wikipedia pages seem to be written with the help of AI

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• India plans lunar sample mission for 2028.

Crypto con games

• Hunt for Bitcoin's elusive creator Satoshi Nakamoto hits another dead-end

  ears pricked up across our newsroom - and the crypto world at large - when on Thursday a call went out that the mysterious creator of Bitcoin was to, finally, unmask himself at a press conference. A front row seat would be £100. It was another £50 if I wanted unlimited questions. Organiser Charles Anderson even encouraged me to spend £500 in exchange for the privilege of interviewing "Satoshi" on stage. I declined.

  Mr Anderson said I could come along any way but cautioned there might not be a seat for me, such was the level of anticipation. As it happened, seating wasn’t a problem.

  A man called Stephen Mollah, who had been sat silently on the side the whole time walked up and resolutely declared: “I am here to make a statement that yes: I am Satoshi Nakamoto and I created the Bitcoin on Blockchain technology.” Over the following hour, reporters went from amused to irritated as he failed to provide any of the promised evidence for his claims. Mr Mollah promised that he would make the Hail-Mary move of unlocking and interacting with the first-ever Bitcoins to be created - something that only Satoshi could do. But he didn't.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Intel might be too big to fail – policymakers discussing potential solutions

• Financial institutions told to get their house in order

• A new copyright rule lets McDonald's fix its own broken ice cream machines

• Fed Prepares Rate Cut Amid Economic Contradictions

• World’s largest transformer maker warns of supply crunch

  The world’s largest producer of transformers has warned its industry is “overwhelmed” and unable to meet exploding demand for grid equipment, threatening delays to vital infrastructure projects that would boost the share of renewable energy across the globe. Andreas Schierenbeck, chief executive of Hitachi Energy, a rapidly growing division at the heart of Japan’s third-most valuable public company, said transformer manufacturers would be hard-pressed to boost output quickly enough to meet demand to upgrade grids, with supplies strained by the growing needs of data centres used for generative artificial intelligence.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Halloween is over, but the election litigation is getting really scary

  The Supreme Court has already intervened to stop an effort by the Biden-Harris administration to force Virginia to put people back on the voting rolls who had identified themselves as non-citizens. It is a crime for non-citizens to vote. Although Virginia allows any mistaken information to be corrected (and also allows for challenged voters to file provisional ballots), lower courts ordered Virginia to enable people to vote who had said they were not citizens.

  Some challenges potentially involve a high number of votes in swing states. For example, in North Carolina, the Republican National Committee is suing the North Carolina State Board of Elections over 225,000 people who may not have been appropriately registered because that state failed to require a driver’s license or partial Social Security number. In Arizona, a judge had to order Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to release the names of roughly 218,000 voters who may have been allowed to register without the proof of citizenship required by state law.

• Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak (HN comments)

• High Trust Society | the singularity is nearer

  Despite what Western media might have you believe about how the people in China are lying cause they are scared or something, these stats reflect what I have seen. I trust the Chinese government more than I trust the US government. It’s obvious on the streets. These aren’t scared people obeying out of fear, these are people playing their role with pride to live in a nice society. I feel the American sneer just writing those words, but it doesn’t make it less true.

  GDP can be manipulated ten ways till Sunday, electricity and steel production are much harder to fake. A government delivering growth and better lives to people is one worth trusting. A government that kills squirrels that get too famous on social media, not as much. I’ll note that social issues are well handled in China too. When Americans are asked about this, they will defend some nebulous concept of freedom, and I ask, freedom to what? Vote? Freedom from what? People taking your stuff? Here’s a guy trying to steal a bike from the comma office last week.

  The answer may be nothing short of generational change or civil war. Regardless, it won’t be a quick process. As much as I might side with Elon and like what he is doing, most of the country won’t. Many of my friends are Kamala voters, and their answer to Trump voters is to perhaps to “accept their diminished place in a rapidly changing world.” The Trump voter answer to Kamala voters is something equally racist and sexist, maybe uhh, there’s sort of a reason the people who built everything are the people who built everything.

Harris / Democrats

• Bill Clinton Justifies The Mass Killings Of Palestinians In Racist Michigan Speech | HuffPost Latest News

  “What would you do if it was your family and you hadn’t done anything but support a homeland for the Palestinians? And one day they come for you and slaughter the people in your village?” Clinton said. However, this also describes what the Israeli military is currently doing to families in Gaza and the occupied West Bank

• Prominent white supremacist Richard Spencer endorses Kamala Harris.

• Kamala Harris campaign plane redirected to NYC for surprise Saturday Night Live cameo

• Nearly 6 in 10 Americans Aren’t Convinced Kamala Harris Worked at McDonald’s: Poll. The NYT dubbed claims that Harris never toiled under the Golden Arches ‘burgerism.’

• FCC Commissioner: Kamala’s SNL Appearance A ‘Blatant Effort To Evade’ Equal Time Rule

  FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said the appearance on the network’s flagship sketch comedy show was a “clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.” Carr made his point in a post on X, noting that the timing and Harris’ appearance — not announced until the day it was happening and took place just three days prior to the November 5 general election — effectively eliminated any possibility for her competitor, former President Donald Trump, to receive the federally-mandated “equal time.” “This is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule. The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct — a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election. Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns,” Carr pointed out.

Trump / Right / Jan6

• Leftists Predict Hysterical Dystopian Future Ruled By JD Vance And An Immortal Elon Musk | ZeroHedge

  JD Vance as dictator for life? Conservatives banning contraception? Elon Musk as an immortal techno god who spies on the masses using X and AI? Global warming destroying the planet and creating a Mad Max future in which the homeless are forced into concentration camps? The only thing missing is the forced birthing ceremonies from The Handmaid's Tale.

• More "Bezos Bad". Amazing how fast they fall from grace. The Billionaire Is The Threat, not the Solution

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Lawsuit Argues Warrantless Use of Flock Surveillance Cameras Is Unconstitutional

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US sanctions China and India suppliers of Russia's war machine in Ukraine

World

• Volkswagen labour chief sounds alarm on mass layoffs and 3 German plant closures

• Angry crowds throw mud at Spain's king in flood-hit Valencia

• Why flooding in Spain has been so deadly – and why it could happen again

• Japan plans automated cargo transport system to relieve shortage of drivers

• IKEA opens first Swedish restaurant selling iconic meatballs on UK high street

Iran / Houthi

• Iran claims it can build nukes, threatens Israel and US with ‘tooth-breaking’ retaliation.

  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke with students ahead of the anniversary of the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran. “The enemies, whether the Zionist regime or the United States of America, will definitely receive a tooth-breaking response to what they are doing to Iran and the Iranian nation and to the resistance front,” Khamenei, 85, said in a video released by the state media, referring to Tehran-backed terror group like Hamas and Hezbollah.

• Iranian press review: China and Russia criticised over response to Israeli strikes | Middle East Eye

Israel

• Wikipedia in Arabic: A hotbed for bigotry, misinformation, and bias

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• China Faces a Dilemma with North Korean Troops Pouring into Russia

• Zelenskyy urges allies to act before North Korean troops reach the front

China

• Why Chinese spies are sending a chill through Silicon Valley

Health / Medicine

• DNA-testing site 23andMe fights for survival

• Scientists found a clear link between red meat and cancer

• The Prozac Era. What Next? - Dr. David Healy

  Last week Focus Taiwan carried a Society page article saying that Lilly was withdrawing Prozac – globally. Taiwanese regulators, doctors and generic companies had been told of this in June and that supplies of Prozac (branded fluoxetine – fluoxetine would continue) would stop in November taking availability up to the end of the year. But supplies stopped in September and doctors have been told to stop prescribing it. No time to organize a leaving do. Just in Taiwan? It may not be the same elsewhere. The Asian market was much smaller. It would be good to hear from anyone anywhere getting fluoxetine as a Prozac branded generic.

• Costco hearing aids as loss leader

• 'Children are suffering' as Calgary's 60 year fluoride debate drags on

• Should I be concerned about arsenic in my rice?

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Plant CO2 uptake rises by nearly one third in new global estimates

• 'Shocking' microplastic research prompts review

• Large meltwater accumulation revealed inside Greenland Ice Sheet

• Fungi may not think, but they can communicate

• Rocket launch and re-entry air pollutant and CO2 emissions

• Politicians not ambitious enough to save nature, say scientists

  Scientists say there has been an alarming lack of progress in saving nature as the UN biodiversity summit, COP 16, draws to a close. The scale of political ambition has not risen to the challenge of reducing the destruction of nature that costs the economy billions, said one leading expert. Representatives of 196 countries have been meeting in Cali, Colombia, to agree on how to halt nature decline by 2030. We are stuck in a "vicious cycle where economic woes reduce political focus on the environment" while the destruction of nature costs the economy billions, said Tom Oliver, professor of biodiversity at the University of Reading. "Until we have world leaders with the wisdom and courage to put nature as a top political priority then nature-related risks will continue to escalate,” he told BBC News.

  • they are jealous they do not get an equal share of totalitarianism as the climate cult. "we're the same team!"

• If Iceland Can Tap Volcano for Energy, Would That Work in Yellowstone?

• Restoring rivers' natural curves can prevent flooding

• Jeff VanderMeer painted a grotesque picture of climate change

• African Sahara 'greening' can alter Northern Hemisphere climate, study finds