2024-11-29

1983 wristwatch, Fallibilism, Bansky for sale, schools suck (money), Mega ISA, techbro debanking, Milei aint Trump, Oz bans teens from social media, sugar causes all ills, Gaia likes it rough

etc

• Gene behind orange fur in cats found at last

• Missing Canadian hiker emerges after weeks in wilderness

• Casio turns back time with reproduction of 1983 G-Shock that started it all

  It’s been 41 years since Casio debuted the very first G-Shock digital watch, and its latest timepiece is the brand’s most faithful recreation to date. The new G-Shock DW-5000R is visually near-identical to the original DW-5000C launched in 1983 — right down to the length, and dimple positioning on the watch strap. Some specifications have received a modern update, such as a new LED backlight and the use of “biomass plastic” on the bezel and band to reduce environmental impact. The G-Shock DW-5000R will be available in Japan on December 13th, priced at 33,000 yen (about $217).

• Underrated reasons to be thankful IV

  hot water

Horseshit

• In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

• Stowaway flew aboard Delta flight from New York to Paris

• A Washing Machine for Human Beings, from 1970

• Wrong 1 - by Neal Stephenson - Graphomane

  A lot of discourse on social media is devoted to staking out positions that are right and flaming people who are wrong. After watching that for a while it occurred to me that there’s a split even more fundamental than the one that gets all the attention, namely, left vs. right. It lies between people who implicitly assume that it’s even possible to arrive at abstract positions that are sturdy enough to act upon, vs. those who are at peace with the fact that the universe is very complicated; that we don't have all of the information we need to make sense of it; that a lot of the information we do have is questionable; and that our intellectual powers are limited. That we are, in short, wrong a lot. A word for this is Fallibilism. By default, Fallibilists tend to revert to middle-of-the-road positions in the political sphere.

  Anyone who has ever sincerely believed in something, only to look back on it later in the full awareness that they were wrong, is on the path to being a Fallibilist; and when they encounter an idea haver who is sure they’re right, they see a more naive version of themselves.

• Breakthrough Material Perfectly Absorbs 99% of Electromagnetic Waves

• Humans underestimate the movement range of their own hands

• Private chefs for Silicon Valley's elite spill the (precisely 70-degree) tea

celebrity gossip

• Fugees Founder Pras Michél Speaks Out: 'I Never Wanted to Be a Spy'

• Buy a building, get a Banksy. 'Well Hung Lover' Bristol property goes on sale

  “The purchaser will be required to accept a restrictive covenant in the lease ensuring that the image cannot be removed from the building,” explained the listing. While the future owner has to ensure the “Well Hung Lover” stays put, they have no obligation to maintain it.

• Putin's youngest daughter 'living in Paris under a pseudonym'

Bluesky

• Bluesky's open API means anyone can scrape your data for AI training

• Open-source champion Kelsey Hightower on the promise of Bluesky

• Real-Time Bluesky Post Counts by Language

• Bluesky Has a Verification Problem

Musk

• Musk says too many game studios are owned by giant corporations

• FCC approves Starlink plan for cellular phone service, with some limits

• Elon Musk Hides X Engagement Figures Amid User Exodus

• Tesla releases API pricing, dev says would cost $60M/year to run his app

Electric / Self Driving cars

• China's EV price war is so brutal that BYD is trying to pinch its suppliers

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Why identity, morality and faith splinter in the multiverse

• I don't have much money. Is it okay if I don't give to charity?

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• 50 years of rising educational attainment, no gain in actual skills

  over the past 50 years of rising educational attainment, there has been little to no gain in actual skills. If basic literacy and numeracy do not improve after years of extra schooling, more complex and harder to measure gains do not seem likely either. Math and reading scores on tests that have been surveyed over longer periods also show essentially zero improvement in the population average scores. The average score on the reading test in 1971 was 255 out of 500, in 2023 it was 256 and math scores went from 266 to 271. All this suggests that increases in educational attainment since the 70s have been almost entirely credential inflation. People go on to further degrees not because it increases your skills; it doesn't even teach you to read, but because a high school diploma is no longer a reliable signal of skill or conscientious.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Reddit overtakes X in popularity of social media platforms in UK

• Spotify cuts developer access to several of its recommendation features

• Microsoft faces wide-ranging U.S. antitrust probe

• 'The Endless Refrain' asks: Do we even want new music anymore?

• Google offered millions to ally itself with trade body fighting Microsoft

• Zoom offers a further $18M for lying to users about video encryption

• French court blocks popular porn site... subdomain | TechCrunch

  As l’Informé reports, the nonprofits went after Iciporno, Mrsexe, Tukif and xHamster. Their complaints listed the web addresses of the sites — but for xHamster they put “fr.xhamster.com“, pointing to the site’s French subdomain. As a result, the court ordered blocking of “fr.xhamster.com” — including the “fr.” prefix. This means internet service providers have complied with the order and blocked xHamster at the DNS level — but only with the “fr.” prefix… So xHamster remains accessible in France… until regulator, Arcom, finds a way to close this embarrassing loophole.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Researchers discover first UEFI bootkit malware for Linux

• Using 8-bit ISA graphics card with Arduino Mega

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• OpenAI is at war with its own Sora video testers following brief public leak

• Nvidia and the AI boom face a scaling problem

• Biased AI in health care faces crackdown in sweeping Biden admin proposals

• Amazon's Moonshot Plan to Rival Nvidia in AI Chips

• ChatGPT's artificial empathy is a language trick

• AI ambition is pushing copper to its breaking point

• US regulator says AI scanner 'deceived' users after BBC story

Crypto con games

• Tornado Cash Sanctions Found Illegal, in Legal Win for Crypto

• The delusions behind a Bitcoin strategic reserve

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Uber Faces FTC Consumer Protection Probe over Subscriptions

• Intel gets $11B CHIPS Act grant as Biden administration winds down

• Ten years under Dr Su: How AMD went from budget alternative to x86 contender

• Glassdoor CEO: I refuse to work late or on weekends in front of my kids

• Nvidia and Intel suppliers reassess Mexico plans amid Trump tariff threat

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Brian Armstrong's response to the debanking of tech founders

  Can confirm this is true. It was one of the most unethical and un-American things that happened in the Biden administration, and my guess is we'll find Elizabeth Warren's fingerprints all over it (Biden himself was probably unaware). We're still collecting documents via FOIA requests, so hopefully the full story emerges of who was involved and whether they broke any laws.

Trump

• Elon Musk publicized the names of government employees he wants to cut

• Mark Zuckerberg Meets with Trump at Mar-a-Lago

  • Mark Zuckerberg Had Dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago

  • Mark Zuckerberg Dines with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago

Left Angst

• Buy American to avoid Trump trade war, says Christine Lagarde

  Trump’s victory has raised concerns among national governments and officials in Brussels, who fear tariffs would wipe out the EU’s large trade surplus with the US and spur the region’s manufacturers to shift production there. Lagarde said that Europe should deal with a second Trump term with a “cheque-book strategy” in which it offered “to buy certain things from the United States”, such as liquefied natural gas and defence equipment. “This is a better scenario than a pure retaliation strategy, which can lead to a tit-for-tat process where no one is really a winner,” the ECB president said.

• Trump's Administration Will Impact AI, Energy, Crypto and More

• The drone rangers: Trump world declares war on fighter pilots - POLITICO

  Several high-profile billionaires and backers of President-elect Donald Trump are waging a public battle against crewed aircraft and tanks, arguing that drones can do the job better, and more cheaply. Recent public comments from tech investors with interests in uncrewed technologies — who also have Trump’s ear and helped fund his campaign — could point to a major new effort in Trump’s Pentagon in which several expensive weapons programs could face the ax in favor of pilotless planes and driverless vehicles. The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, who is co-leading an advisory group aimed at cutting government waste, is emerging as one of the loudest voices promoting the use of drones to replace high-dollar, and often troubled, crewed fighter jets.

• Brendan Carr Makes It Clear That He's Eager to Be America's Top Censor

  However, this is all projection, as with so much in the upcoming Trump administration. In reality, Brendan Carr may be the biggest threat to free speech in our government in a long while. And he’s not being shy about it. Carr is abusing the power of his position to pressure companies to censor speech he disagrees with, all while cloaking it in the language of “free speech.” As an FCC commissioner, he has significant regulatory authority over broadcasters, and he’s wielding that power to push his preferred political agenda. He has no real authority over internet companies, but he’s pretending he does. He’s threatening broadcasters and social media companies alike, telling them there will be consequences if they don’t toe his line.

• Tell the Senate: Don't Weaponize the Treasury Department Against Nonprofits

• Threats to Climate-Related US Agencies | Azimuth

  This revives fears that US climate change policies will be rolled back. Reporters are interviewing me again about the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project—because we’re again facing the possibility that a Trump administration could get rid of the US government’s climate data. From 2016 to 2018, our team backed up up 30 terabytes of US government databases on climate change and the environment, saving it from the threat of a government run by climate change deniers. 627 people contributed a total of $20,427 to our project on Kickstarter to pay for storage space and a server.

• Opinion | Meet Wolfgang Streeck, the Maverick German Thinker Explaining Our World - The New York Times

  Who could have seen Donald Trump’s resounding victory coming? Ask the question of an American intellectual these days and you may meet with embittered silence. Ask a European intellectual and you will likely hear the name of Wolfgang Streeck, a German sociologist and theorist of capitalism. In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity. Mr. Streeck may be best known for his essays in The New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable — the more so in its present “neoliberal” form. His latest book, “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism,” published this month, asks whether the global economy as it is now set up is compatible with democracy. He has his doubts.

• Elon Musk Threatening 'Consequences' Sparks Backlash

• Silicon Valley billionaires remain in thrall to the cult of the geek

  The default assumption of successful founders seems to be that their expertise in building tech companies gives them equally valuable insights into the US federal budget deficit, pandemic responses, or the war in Ukraine. For them, fresh information plucked from unfamiliar fields sometimes resembles God-given revelation even if it is commonplace knowledge to everyone outside their bubble. One young American tech billionaire, a college dropout who had just returned from a trip to Paris, once asked me with wide-eyed wonder whether I had heard about the French Revolution. It was incredible, apparently. Inevitably, this leads to questions about the fungibility of Elon Musk’s IQ given his omnipresence in the US economy and now politics. The South African-born entrepreneur is blessed with an exceptional form of intelligence and clarity of vision that commands respect, even from his fiercest competitors. “I think he’s a fucking legend,” the chief executive of one rival electric vehicle company told me, even though he was personally appalled by the ways in which Musk had used his social media company X as a propaganda tool.

• White House reporters already ‘exhausted’ by second Trump administration

• Leftists ditch Thanksgiving with conservative relatives.

• Javier Milei: “My contempt for the state is infinite”

  Many people in America hope that the new Trump administration will take an axe to a bloated and overbearing government, cutting spending and rolling back regulation. Whether this goal is even plausible any more is a crucial question for America and the world, after two decades in which government debt globally has risen relentlessly, fuelled by the financial crisis of 2007-09 and the pandemic. For an answer, and a case study of taming an out-of-control Leviathan, head 5,000 miles south from Washington, where an extraordinary experiment is under way. Javier Milei has been president of Argentina for a year. He campaigned wielding a chainsaw, but his economic programme is serious and one of the most radical doses of free-market medicine since Thatcherism. It comes with risks, if only because of Argentina’s history of instability and Mr Milei’s explosive personality. But the lessons are striking, too. The left detests him and the Trumpian right embraces him, but he truly belongs to neither group. He has shown that the continual expansion of the state is not inevitable. And he is a principled rebuke to opportunistic populism, of the sort practised by Donald Trump. Mr Milei believes in free trade and free markets, not protectionism; fiscal discipline, not reckless borrowing; and, instead of spinning popular fantasies, brutal public truth-telling.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Interpol arrests 5,500 across 5 continents for cybercrime, seizes over $400M

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Salt Typhoon's surge extends far beyond US telcos

World

• Baltic sea at risk of Internet cable sabotage

• Sweden seeks clarity from China about suspected sabotage of undersea cables

• Chinese Ship's Crew Suspected of Deliberately Dragging Anchor to Cut Cables

  • E.U. Vessels Surround Anchored Chinese Ship After Baltic Sea Cables Are Severed

• TikTok CEO summoned to European Parliament over role in shock Romania election

• Surprise solar surge in Pakistan shocks experts and grid

• Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws

  • Australia passes law banning under-16s from social media

  • Australian Senate approves social media ban on under-16s

  • A social media ban for under-16s passes the Australian Senate

• The cult of the 'Spoons': Inside the Spartan, cavernous pubs that divide Britain

• A Corruption Case That Spilled Across Latin America Is Coming Undone

• UK net migration figures missed out 166,000 people, ONS admits

• Denmark suffers major telecoms service outage after failed update

  • Widespread disruption in Denmark after mobile network outage

• Britain's assisted-suicide bill should raise doubts everywhere

Israel

• An Iranian Ballistic Missile Hit Israel. We Got a Peek Inside Its 'Brain'

• Displaced Lebanese return home as ceasefire begins

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine has become a breeding ground for lethal drug-resistant bacteria

China

• 'Supergiant' gold deposit discovered in China worth more than $80B

• The Clandestine Oil Shipping Hub Funneling Iranian Crude to China

Health / Medicine

• Doctors hail first breakthrough in asthma and COPD treatment in 50 years

• Man suffers chemical burn that lasted months after squeezing limes - Ars Technica

• Exercising to lose weight? Science says it rarely works.

• A Study Says Gray Hair May Be Reversible

• Too much sugar may be common cause behind many chronic diseases, new study finds.

  That high level of sugar in the bloodstream causes cells to produce too much oxygen inside of them, which actually causes burning. "If you get very very high levels of oxygen inside cells, it damages the equipment," Young said. It's been known for decades that people with chronic diseases produce too much of these so-called reactive oxygen species inside cells. Older people naturally have more reactive oxygen species, which is why chronic diseases tend to be more common with age.

• Women less likely to receive CPR. Training on manikins with breasts could help

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The U.S. Is Building an Early Warning System to Detect Geoengineering

• The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?

• The New Climate Math on Hurricanes

• Planetary Perturbations May Strengthen Gaia

  Some experts have noted that large-scale planetary perturbations such as climate change and an overuse of resources can wipe out the progress of any world, which could suggest that life worsens conditions for itself or is even inherently self-destructive, in contrast to the Gaia hypothesis. But a new study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, uses computer modeling experiments to make a different argument: that large-scale perturbations are actually a mechanism by which Gaian systems increase in complexity (the number of connections existing in a network of species). The findings could eventually help planetary scientists narrow their search for life beyond Earth, according to the authors.

• Orcas have begun wearing salmon hats again – and we may soon know why

• Seoul blanketed by heaviest November snow on record

• Exxon lobbyist investigated over hack-and-leak of environmentalist emails

• Gamma radiation converts methane into complex organic molecules

• Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment