2024-12-12

debanking details, pretty star pix, emotional support expiry, Infowars not sold yet, FDIV diagnosed, 6GHz band opened, Wray to resign, security failures found, seductive wellness and weight loss drugs

Worthy

• Debanking (and Debunking?)

  “It’s not a conspiracy theory if people really are out to get you.” sums up part of my reaction to this, but only part. There exists some amount of conflation between what private actors are doing, what state actors have de facto or de jure commanded that they do, and which particular state and political actors have their fingers on the keyboard. These create a complex system; the threads are not entirely divorced from each other.

etc

• Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 winners

• No daylight saving time? See how early or late you would be in the dark

• Oregon city authorities are looking for the hero who’s been improving their modern art with googly eyes .

• Transformer Shortage Crisis: Can New Engineering Solve It?

Luigi

• Luigi Mangione's Dark Descent from Promising Student to Murder Suspect

• 'Ghost Gun' Linked to Luigi Mangione Shows How Far 3D-Printed Weapons Have Come

• Suspect in UnitedHealth Killing Was Ivy Leaguer with Anticapitalist Leanings

• Luigi Mangione Was Radicalized by Pain

• The Internet's Obsession with Luigi Mangione Signals a Major Shift

• Dystopian 'wanted' posters of top health CEOs appear in New York City

• Police Say Suspect's Notebook Described Rationale for CEO Killing

Horseshit

• Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds

• Spain's Scrabble title claimed by Kiwi who doesn't speak the language

• Early Americans Were Feeding Wolves and Coyotes, Study Suggests

• Google says it may have found parallel universes and stolen their computers.

  • Google says its new quantum chip indicates that multiple universes exist

• The latest in poker cheats: Tiny cameras that can see cards as they're dealt

• Homeowners have nearly 40x the wealth of renters. what's causing the wealth gap?

• Legal marijuana one of North America's greatest mistakes

celebrity gossip

• Paul Krugman changed the public face of economics

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Russian Hackers Leverage ElevenLabs for Multilingual AI Disinformation Campaigns

Bluesky

• Bluesky teases paid subscription, Bluesky+, in new mockup

Musk

• The revenge of the company town: Elon Musk, the new Baron of Bastrop

• Elon Musk's Net Worth Tops $400B, a Historic First

• Tesla shares climb to record, boosted by 64% pop since Trump election victory

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Rooftop system lets any EV harness the power of the sun

• The Rivian Joshua Tree EV charging station is how Rivian Joshua Tree EV charging stations should be.

• After buying an EV, less than 1% of drivers go back to gas cars

• Cruise robocabs parked forever as GM pulls the plug

• Electric Vehicle Battery Packs See Biggest Price Drop Since 2017

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• An OECD survey suggests a worrying decline in adults literacy

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Bankruptcy judge rejects The Onion's bid for Infowars

  • The Onion's Purchase of Alex Jones' Infowars Stopped by US Judge

  • Bankruptcy judge rejects The Onion's bid to buy Alex Jones' Infowars

  • Judge Refuses to Allow Sale of Infowars to The Onion

  • Judge Rejects The Onion's Purchase of Alex Jones's Infowars

  • The Onion Can't Buy Infowars Yet

  • Judge Rejects the Onion’s Purchase of Alex Jones’s Infowars in Bankruptcy Sale | The Epoch Times

  The Onion’s bid of $1.75 million with additional incentives for Infowars’ assets was backed by the families of the massacre victims. The bid won despite a higher $3.5 million cash offer from First United American Companies, which runs a website in Jones’ name and sells nutritional supplements. The Connecticut-based Sandy Hook families, who are Jones’ largest creditors, augmented the Onion’s bid by agreeing to forgo $750,000 of the proceeds from the sale in favor of other creditors, providing the creditors with more money than First United’s higher cash offer. That concession caused the bankruptcy trustee to value The Onion’s bid at $7 million overall.

  The judge said Christopher Murray, a court-appointed trustee who oversaw the auction made “a good-faith error” when he asked for final offers for Infowars instead of encouraging more back-and-forth bidding between The Onion and First United American Companies. “This should have been opened back up, and it should have been opened back up for everybody,” Lopez said. “It’s clear the trustee left the potential for a lot of money on the table.”

  • 1.75 + 0.75 = 7.5 ... "good faith error"

• Installing Windows 11 on devices that don't meet minimum system requirements

• Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic

  • Court orders Automattic to restore WP Engine's access to WordPress.org

  • Matt Mullenweg keeps digging his own grave

• California could become the first state to require social media warning labels

• Cable ISPs compare data caps to food menus: Don't make us offer unlimited soup

• Lobbying Firm Used by AT&T and Verizon Under Fire for Hacking Activist's Emails

• Google pulls bad McDonald's reviews after Luigi Mangione's arrest

• Researchers uncover Chinese spyware used to target Android devices

• Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

• YouTube is a hit on TVs – and is starting to act like it

• Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" listenership is slipping

• Do G-Rated Films Even Make Sense Anymore?

• Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are down

  • Meta apps experience global outage

• LG discontinues the manufacture of Blu-ray players

• New York Times and Tech Guild Reach Deal

• Washington Post Leverages 'AI' to Undermine History and Make Search Less Useful

  • The Washington Post burns its own archive

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Turning off Zen 4's Op Cache for Curiosity and Giggles

  Zen 4 of course takes a performance loss with the op cache off, but even so it’s a very high performing core. It’s a good reminder that frontend throughput and core width is only one part of a high performance CPU design. Workloads that stress those aspects, like high IPC code that fits within L1 caches, certainly take a hit from losing frontend bandwidth. But performance is often limited by other factors like backend memory latency. Thus even without its op cache, Zen 4 can continue to outperform a recent mobile core like Redwood Cove in the Core Ultra 7 155H.

• 30-year-old Pentium FDIV bug tracked down in the silicon

  For this to work, SRT required the presence of a 2,048-cell table on the die, listing values -2, -1, 0, 1, and 2 in a very compact 112 rows. The values are indicated by the presence or lack of transistors along grid points. This would have been a brilliant strategy, if not for one flaw: 5 entries on the table are missing their crucial transistors, set to 0 by default rather than the correct "2".

  • Ken Shirriff Tracks Down Intel's Infamous Pentium FDIV Bug in the Silicon Itself

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Google's biggest bet is AI for search

• Coconut from Meta lets language models think without words

• Researchers reduce bias in AI models while preserving or improving accuracy

• OnlyFans Models Are Using AI Impersonators to Keep Up with Their DMs

• What should we do if AI becomes conscious? Scientists say it's time for a plan

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Black swans from Mars? The real risks of sending alien samples home

• Geomagnetic storms cause "mass migrations" of satellites

• Clock ticking for Blue Origin's 2024 launch of New Glenn

• NASA believes it understands why Ingenuity crashed on Mars

• Dwingeloo telescope receives signals from Voyager 1

Crypto con games

• El Salvador to scale back bitcoin dreams to seal $1.3bn IMF deal

• The Hawk Tuah Memecoin Rug Pull Is the Apotheosis of Bag Culture

• Crypto Doesn't Deserve a Tax Exemption

• Tether is drawing heat from law enforcement. But it has a new friend in the White House

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Sycamore Partners Is in Talks to Acquire Walgreens

• Jury finds Cognizant discriminated against US workers

• Happy 400th birthday to the oldest bond

• Amazon Is a Car Dealership Now

• Judge Blocks Kroger-Albertsons Mega-Merger

  • Safeway owner breaks off merger with Kroger

  • Albertsons gives up on Kroger merger

• OPEC Makes Deepest Cut yet to 2024 World Oil Demand Forecast

• As rents across the country go up, Austin prices continue to fall

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Lawmakers Plot to Force Health Insurers to Sell Off Pharmacies

• A Decades-Old Loophole Lets Billionaires Avoid Medicare Taxes

• FCC Opens Entire 6 GHz Band to Low Power Device Operations

  The Report and Order permits the very low power (VLP) class of unlicensed devices to operate across 350 megahertz of spectrum in the U-NII-6 (6.425-6.525 GHz) and U-NII-8 (6.875-7.125 GHz) portions of the 6 GHz band at the same power levels and technical/operational protections as recently approved for the U-NII-5 (5.925-6.425 GHz) and U-NII-7 (6.525-6.875 GHz) bands while protecting incumbent licensed services that also operate in the band. These VLP devices will have no restriction on locations where they may operate and will not be required to operate under the control of an automatic frequency coordination system. To ensure the risk of interference remains insignificant, the devices will be required to employ a contention-based protocol and implement transmit power control while prohibited from operating as part of a fixed outdoor infrastructure.

• FTC Payments to Consumers Harmed by Vivint's Misuse of Consumer Credit Reports

• FTC Sends $72M in Refund Payments to Fortnite Consumers

• Never Trump Lincoln Project paid millions in 2024 to companies owned by its leaders.

• FBI Director Chris Wray Resigns | ZeroHedge

  Before President-elect Donald Trump could say "You're Fired!" - FBI Director Christopher Wray has resigned, and will leave his post at the end of President Joe Biden's term.

  • FBI Director Christopher Wray to step down before Trump takes office

Trump

• President-Elect Pledges to Speed Permits for Companies Investing over $1B

• Trump Assassination Attempt Task Force Determines ‘Failures’ with Secret Service Leadership › American Greatness

  On Tuesday, the Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump released its final official report, determining that there were “failures in the planning, execution, and leadership” of the United States Secret Service (USSS) leading up to both attempts on the President-elect’s life.

Left Angst

• The PayPal Mafia is taking over America’s government

  The festive good cheer did not extend to everyone; The Economist was made to feel most unwelcome. But not before being privy to a riotous celebration of how a clique of billionaires—the so-called PayPal Mafia—helped clinch Donald Trump’s election victory and has taken Washington by storm. The four venture capitalists that host All-In have a lot to feel smug about. In June two of them—David Sacks, a PayPal alumnus, and Chamath Palihapitiya—threw a fundraising event for Mr Trump when he visited San Francisco, which raked in $12m. On December 5th Mr Trump returned the favour by naming Mr Sacks his artificial-intelligence (AI) and crypto “tsar”. Mr Sacks accordingly wore a Russian fur hat to the event. Alongside Mr Trump, the All-In podcast counts Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, two other PayPal mafiosi, as friends. From the stage there was jubilation over Mr Musk’s influence on the president-elect (“Being Elon Musk is a pretty fucking sweet deal”) and Mr Thiel’s patronage of J.D. Vance, the incoming vice-president. “The PayPal Mafia’s takeover of the government is now complete, so good work on that,” quipped Aaron Levie, the founder of Box, a cloud-storage firm (and a Democratic donor decidedly out of place).

  • HN comments

• Musk pitches weight-loss drugs to lower health care spending

• RFK Jr. Is Seducing America With Wellness - The Atlantic

  The best way to defuse Kennedy’s power is not by litigating his beliefs, but by understanding why the promise of being well has such lasting appeal.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• San Francisco is on track to have lowest homicide rate in 60 years – KTVU FOX 2

• Home Depot tracked a crime ring and found an unusual suspect

• Two prominent real estate brokers and brother charged in sex trafficking case

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Mysterious drone night flights leave N.J. residents on edge

• Tough New U.S. Controls on China May Miss Target

• Chinese national arrested after 'drone flown over US air base'

  • Chinese citizen charged with flying drone over key US Military, NASA launch base

World

• EY worker's death spotlights India's unprotected white-collar labour

• Trespassing for the Common Good

• Criminal inquiry into Post Office has identified dozens of persons of interest

• U.K. Bans Puberty Blockers for Teens Indefinitely

• 'To cough was to risk death': the artist who mapped Syria's Sednaya prison

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine war: US gives $20B to Kyiv funded by seized Russian assets

China

• China's Solar Producers Follow OPEC Playbook to Curb Overcapacity

Health / Medicine

• Eli Lilly Zepbound causes more weight loss than Novo Nordisk Wegovy: Trial

• Overweight overtakes tobacco smoking as the leading disease risk factor in 2024

• Soccer heading may cause more damage to the brain than previously thought

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Investigation Launched into Queensland Virus Lab Breach

• Bird flu in California child related to virus in dairy cows, CDC says

• Congressional Republicans conclude SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab leak

• U.S. slashed CDC staff inside China prior to coronavirus outbreak

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Iceberg Hitchhikers: How Harbor Seals Choose Their Perfect Ride

• Heat disproportionately kills young people (study in Mexico)

• Footage of felled forests takes axe to IKEA's green credentials

• Whale makes epic migration, astonishing scientists

• Supercharged E. Coli: The Future of Eco-Friendly Chemical Production

• Atrazine, an endocrine-disrupting herbicide banned in EU,still widely used in US