2025-01-06
unlimited willpower, censors by other names, business of history, Atari laptop pr0n, Swift-ian AI, IPOs hot again, un-named rare explosives, UK grooming gangs, Yoon's Youtubers, winter storms
etc
Horseshit
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The mindset that brings unlimited willpower
Until recently, the prevailing psychological theory proposed that willpower resembled a kind of battery. You might start the day with full strength, but each time you have to control your thoughts, feelings or behaviour, you zap that battery’s energy. Without the chance to rest and recharge, those resources run dangerously low, making it far harder to maintain your patience and concentration, and to resist temptation. aboratory tests appeared to provide evidence for this process; if participants were asked to resist eating cookies left temptingly on a table, for example, they subsequently showed less persistence when solving a mathematical problem, because their reserves of willpower had been exhausted.
The participants’ mindsets about willpower, it seemed, were self-fulfilling prophecies. If they believed that their willpower was easily depleted, then their ability to resist temptation and distraction quickly dissolved; but if they believed that “mental stamina fuels itself”, then that is what occurred.
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True crime stories are influencing the real-life justice system
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Which airlines fly on time most often according to an aviation data provider
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Who killed the rave? Late-night dancing falls into global decline
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Opinions on hard-to-discuss topics change more via old population replacement
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Help! Politics Blog Cloudflare Subpoena | Hacker News
I run an anonymous political blog in the UK calling out misinformation. I use Cloudflare. A former Councillor in the UK has taken issue with a factual story written about him. He has somehow managed to get a Subpoena against Cloudflare, they have not challenged it, and they intend to hand over my details. This will cause me and my family to be put in danger, as many people do not like being called out on the site.
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Biden admin ‘rebranding’ State Dept’s shuttered GEC under new name, with same staff: report
The Global Engagement Center (GEC), which has come under fire from several House Republicans who claim it pushed for the censorship of Americans, ostensibly ceased operations on Dec. 23 after congressional lawmakers refused to reauthorize the GEC in recent spending legislation. Senior Republican staffers who have reviewed the Biden administration’s plans in response to the closure of the GEC told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that it appears the agency is merely “rebranding,” and fear the new office will continue the same sort of censorship work that the GEC had previously been accused of conducting.
Musk
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Elon Musk Pushes for Britain's King Charles to Dissolve Parliament
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Musk says Farage 'doesn't have what it takes' to be Reform UK leader
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'Don't feed the troll': German chancellor responds to Elon Musk comments
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U-hauling Servers on Christmas: Extreme Straight-Line Engineering
Let me share a heavily condensed (but still entertaining) anecdote from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter/X. The company was spending a fortune on a data center in Sacramento. The internal estimate was that migrating 5,200 massive server racks to a cheaper data center in Portland would take months, because, of course, big data centers have all these security protocols, specialized moving equipment, etc. Musk, being Musk, decided that was too slow. So, in December—right around Christmas—he and a couple of family members literally hopped on a plane, diverted to Sacramento, rented a Toyota Corolla, and started pulling servers themselves. They pried up floor panels with a pocketknife, hired a motley crew from Yelp, and strapped these 2,000-pound racks onto trucks like college kids moving out of a dorm. In a matter of days, they moved hundreds of servers (something that normally would take weeks or even months). Of course, chaos ensued. Some servers still had user data. NTT, the company that owned the data center, wasn’t thrilled. X missed stable capacity for a bit, which caused meltdown moments—like that infamous Ron DeSantis Twitter Spaces fiasco. But from one angle, it was a 10x success: They slashed a task initially planned for months down to mere days. The cost savings were enormous, but the tradeoff in downtime, staff morale, and sleepless nights was real. So—both inspiring and cautionary.
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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ya sell this to the dentists, not their victims: Teezy – Dental History Tracker For Whole Family
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TikTok knew its livestreaming feature allowed child exploitation, allegedly
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1995's web is enough: Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you here
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United Airlines Moves Up Timeline for Free Starlink Wi-Fi Rollout
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Amund's note on home server security
he latest change I made was spinning up a postgres_alpine container in Docker right before the holidays. Spinning it up was done in a hurry, as I wanted to have it available remotely for a personal project while I was away from home. This also meant that it was exposed to the internet, with open ports in the router firewall and everything. Considering the process had been running for 8 days, this means that the infection occured just a day after creating the database. None of the database guides I followed had warned me about the dangers of exposing a docker containerized database to the internet.
I'd default to assuming the hardware itself is compromised somehow
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The Business of History Is Booming (Archive)
In 2023, people in the UK and Ireland spent more on history books than at any point since Nielsen BookData’s records began in 1998. Ancient history sales rose 67% from 2013 to 2023, while books focusing on “specific subjects” — individual stories of lives, events or movements — climbed 70% over the same period. In the US, where the overall book market is flat, history has grown by 6% in the past year alone, according to Circana. For the first time in an election year, history as a category outsold politics (by two to one).
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Hacker gains access to the RP2350 OTP secret by glitching the RISC-V cores
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Old Vintage Computing Research: Refurb weekend: Atari Stacy
Stacys are horrible machines to work on. Nobody likes being inside of one. The daughterboards don't have keyed connectors (including the power supply!) and are constantly attempting to come free, the display "cable" is actually a Medusa's wig of wires that like to short (!), the top case is a huge bulky sheet of increasingly fragile plastic that somehow has to fit around the floppy drive yet down on the keyboard simultaneously, and the entire laptop is an uneasy sandwich held together by a small set of screws in plastic races that all strip quicker than at a Hugh Hefner birthday party.
based on the amount of apoplexy and late-night screaming that Stacy caused over the past couple months' weekends, my wife has told me in no uncertain terms that if I'm ever going to crack this laptop open again, I need to have a good long talk with her about it first.
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The real reason OS/2 flopped shaped modern software • The Register
IBM made a promise, and IBM kept its promises. It shipped the PS/2 range with 286s front and center, promising OS/2 compatibility to its customers – a promise IBM wouldn't break. So it vetoed Microsoft's plan of pivoting the new OS to the 386, even if that plan was solid and motivated by the correct reasoning. If OS/2 1.0 had been an 80386 OS, and had been able to multitask DOS apps, we think it would have been a big hit. On the back of that hypothetical success, IBM could have individually couriered a replacement 80386 "planar" ("motherboard" to lesser vendors) to every customer who bought an 80286 PS/2 and wanted OS/2. IBM would still have made more money in the long run. But backtracking on its promise that all PS/2 machines would run OS/2 would mean IBM admitted that it had made a mistake. That could not be. IBM did not make mistakes.
Windows 3 beat OS/2 because IBM insisted that OS/2 ran on the 80286, which crippled the new OS. IBM's determination to serve its customers with 80286 PS/2s, and keep a promise, resulted in OS/2 being a failure. That is what allowed Windows to gain the upper hand.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Jonathan Swift (sort of) predicts Large Language Models in 1726
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AI's next leap requires intimate access to your digital life
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Mature-Node Foundries Face Overcapacity from China
- after the "legacy chips shortage" lasted so long, too. hm.
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The Amazon counterfeit product scandal is way worse than I thought
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US set for IPO comeback as private equity firms seek to offload holdings
- Why invest in "Companies" when the crypto world makes immense wealth from nothing at all?
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A year after Boeing's door plug accident, aircraft giant faces a steep recovery
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Bezos-Backed Farm Startup in Talks for More Than 90% Value Cut
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Unemployed Office Workers Are Having a Harder Time Finding New Jobs
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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FCC net neutrality rules dead again as appeals court sides with Big Telco
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New York becomes first US city with congestion charge
- Wonder how much lobbyist money they put into making the fees happen: Navigating the new NYC congestion fee with Lyft: We've got your back
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US Treasury dept sanctions Chinese cybersecurity company for multiple intrusions
Democrats / Biden Inc
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Antony Blinken Insists He and Biden Made the Right Calls - The New York Times
Four years ago, after the tumultuous first Trump administration, President Biden came into office promising to rebuild old alliances and defend democracy. The man tasked with doing that on the world stage was Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a longtime diplomat who had worked with Biden for two decades. The message to America’s allies and enemies alike was that a new era of stability was at hand. Instead, Blinken was beset by an escalating series of international crises almost from the beginning. The self-imposed wounds of the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal were quickly followed by the generational challenge of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Hamas’s savage attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent scorched-earth war in Gaza plunged the region into crisis and destabilized the political climate in America.
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The Climate Justice Alliance has yet to receive any of the promised funds from the EPA.
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Biden Bans Scores of Natural Gas Water Heaters, Driving Up Prices With Lame-Duck Regulations
Overall, under the regulations, roughly 40 percent of the new tankless water heaters available in the United States today will be taken off the market by 2029. Experts and industry officials say that will force consumers to purchase either more expensive or less efficient water heater models.
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Biden to Dole Out 19 Medals of Freedom, and One Unmistakable Message - The New York Times
With a recipient list stocked with old-guard icons and political backers, the president is signaling support for the establishment his successor wants to tear down.
Left Angst
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Since 2010, liberal adolescents tend to get more depressed than conservatives
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Washington Post cartoonist resigns after cartoon satirising Jeff Bezos rejected
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Memo to Trump US telecoms is vulnerable to hackers. Please hang up and try again
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Why the Left needs to watch Star Trek
The question is: despite the fun that some of us get from watching Star Trek, do its almost 1,000 episodes have anything substantial to offer today’s moribund Left in our uphill struggle to remain relevant as we negotiate a sensible path through a maze of threats? I think so. Star Trek’s main lesson for today’s Left is that we need to avoid both a conservative technophobia and the liberal techno-optimists’ failure to appreciate the importance of property rights and the political struggles surrounding them.
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Amazon licenses Melania Trump documentary, as Bezos cozies up to president-elect
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The climate agenda is in rapid retreat as right-wing parties rise everywhere
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Bourbon Street Terrorist's Bombs Made With Extremely Rare Explosive, Officials Say | ZeroHedge
The officials who told NBC News about the rare explosive apparently stopped short of naming it, but emphasized that it was the first time it had been used in the United States, and had likewise never been used by terrorists anywhere in Europe. Investigators are now trying to determine how Jabbar learned about the extraordinary compound and how he was able to manufacture it.
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New Orleans' planned new Bourbon Street barriers only crash-rated to 10 MPH
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New Orleans terror suspect wore "Meta Glasses" to case Bourbon Street
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New Orleans attacker filmed visits to city weeks earlier, wore Meta smart glasses during attack
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The FBI Account of the Las Vegas Bomber Story Does Not Make Sense
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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UK faces 'significant risk' from procurement collusion, CMA warns
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Britain’s Long-Overdue Reckoning With ‘Grooming Gangs’ - The American Conservative
political correctness was not the only contributing factor. Indeed, the basest forms of classism and misogyny seem to have motivated police indifference. The victims, according to one witness in Rotherham, were seen as “undesirables”—teens from care homes or otherwise troubled backgrounds. “Police weren’t arsed with us, really,” said one victim from Rochdale, “They don’t give a fuck when you’re not from a wealthy [home].” Thus, teenage girls faced consistent victim-blaming, with one of them even being arrested on charges of being “drunk and disorderly” after neighbors had heard her screams, and another being dismissed from a police station right into the arms of rapists. News outlets also demonstrated a bizarre willingness to ignore the true nature of grooming and rape. When Azhar Ali Mehmood, 26, burned Lucy Lowe, 16, to death, the BBC described him as her “boyfriend”.
The great strides on racial integration that have been made over the past 50 years — in many ways the most uplifting story of my lifetime — are under threat. They are under threat from two equal and opposite forces that are feeding off each other, gaining momentum from each other, a sinister synergy that — if you were a conspiracy theorist, which I hope you are not — might lead you to believe they were in cahoots, such is their shared and intimate potency. Nowhere do we see this symbiosis more vividly than in the child rape scandal (let’s not use the term “grooming” for such heinous crimes), perhaps the defining national tragedy of our time. Please let us not indulge in the craven euphemisms that have characterised the scandal for far too long. This was not a “community” problem or a problem of particular “towns”; it was ethnic violence of a shocking and sustained kind: predominantly Pakistani men targeting predominantly white girls. Children were drugged, trafficked, gang-raped and tortured, a scandal that shakes one to the core. And all this took place in plain sight, in no small part because of the capture of our institutions by the virus of ultraprogressivism, the fear that to investigate these crimes might “undermine community cohesion” or — worst of all — appear racist. Ann Cryer, the Labour MP who sounded warnings as early as 2003, was turned on so viciously that police installed an alarm in her home, a pattern of intimidation that applied to Andrew Norfolk of The Times and Charlie Peters of GB News, now leading the investigative crusade.
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Labour blocks grooming gang inquiry into Starmer’s conduct as CPS head.
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The establishment is still denying justice to the victims of grooming gangs.
One implication is that ethnic enclaves sometimes are a big mistake, and that suburban sprawl is underrated. Note that Pakistanis in the United States have median income above the U.S. average, and comparable to other Asians.
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'It makes you feel like a kid again': snowed in at Britain's highest pub
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Why French winemakers are buying up swaths of land in Southern England
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South Korean Unrest Conspiracy Theories Are Spread by Social Media - The New York Times
Right-wing YouTubers helped President Yoon Suk Yeol win his election. They are now his allies in the wake of his botched imposition of martial law.
f President-elect Donald J. Trump has a “Make America Great Again” movement behind him, Mr. Yoon has the “taegeukgi budae” (literally, “national-flag brigade”). It consists of mostly older, churchgoing South Koreans who enliven their rallies with patriotic songs, a wave of South Korean and American flags in support of their country’s alliance with Washington, and vitriolic attacks on the nation’s left-wing politicians, who they fear would hand their country over to China and North Korea.
With public surveys showing a majority of South Koreans wanting him ousted, Mr. Yoon’s strongest defenders are his flag-waving supporters and the right-wing YouTubers, who glorify him as a champion of promoting the alliance with Washington. These YouTubers, some with around a million subscribers, demand Mr. Yoon’s reinstatement and livestream pro-Yoon rallies, where speakers call the efforts to remove him a “coup d’état” at North Korea’s behest. They also reinforce political polarization by channeling conspiracy theories against Mr. Yoon’s progressive enemies. Right-wing YouTubers have long boasted of their friendship with Mr. Yoon, after dozens of them were invited to his inauguration in 2022. In the wake of his botched martial law, Mr. Yoon left little doubt that he was a big fan.
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Brazil eliminated daylight saving time. It's having second thoughts
China
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Taiwan asks South Korea for help over Chinese ship after subsea cable damaged
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The Chinese youth movement ditching big cities for the coast
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China aiming for more export curbs after bans on US defence contractors
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Chinese Hackers Graduated from Clumsy Corporate Thieves to Military Weapons (Archive)
China’s hackers were once thought to be interested chiefly in business secrets and huge sets of private consumer data. But the latest hacks make clear they are now soldiers on the front lines of potential geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and China, in which cyberwarfare tools are expected to be powerful weapons.
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Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China
Effective June 30, 2026, all China CDN services will reach their decommission date. After this date, any remaining content requests will be automatically served from neighboring countries, unless a country-specific partner solution is activated.
Health / Medicine
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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UK electricity cleanest ever in 2024, with record 58% from low-carbon sources
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Winter storm: 62 million people under threat with most significant storm yet
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Orca That Carried Dead Calf for Weeks Appears to Be in Mourning Again
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Climate anger can lead to action – or curdle into despair. We found out why
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How a wildfire monitoring app became essential in the US west
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Regulators battle Oregon and Washington farmers over limits to farm pollution
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‘Mystery volcano’ that erupted and cooled Earth in 1831 has finally been identified.
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The Caribbean has been unusually warm. That's not a good thing
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Trees have an extra climate benefit thanks to methane-eating microbes
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How Much Formaldehyde Is in Your Car, Your Kitchen or Your Furniture?