2025-01-08

not because it is easy, Tibet earthquake, Zuckerberg gives up censorship, Musk doesn't, utility LTE, USB history, Trump's crypto crash, credit reports unhealthy, rejected commutations, bird flu death

Worthy

• ‘Give yourself a break’ is bad advice: Do difficult things!

  I envision kids watching the The Little Engine That Couldn't on their phones: "I think I can't. I think I can't. It's too hard. Climbing mountains is a vestige of white patriarchy! Look how brave I am for being able to say that I can't! I thought I couldn't!" American culture treats "successful people like they somehow cheated to get there and poor people as if they’re noble by virtue of being poor," writes John Hawkins, in another response to Vivek Ramaswamy's "culture of mediocrity" critique.

etc

• Powerful earthquake kills nearly 100 in Tibet, rattles Nepal

  • Quake shakes Tibet: 53 dead, hundreds flee in panic

  • China earthquake: Scores dead as tremor strikes Tibet

• This Strange Comet-Asteroid Hybrid Is Like Nothing Else in The Solar System.

• The Hidden Engineering Behind Texas's Top Tourist Attraction — Practical Engineering

  pretty soon this old dam had two new gates, plus a bypass, ready to serve the city for the next several decades. If you visited the River Walk during construction, you wouldn’t have even known it was happening, and that was the entire goal of the project: revitalize a critical part of the city’s flood control infrastructure without causing any negative impacts on one of its crown jewels.

Horseshit

• How Western Dreams Became Demographic Nightmares

  Development begins (explicitly, as Thornton shows) as a paradigm for explaining why Africans and indigenous peoples should be considered childlike, not mature, undeveloped, needing Western stewardship, instruction, leadership, domination. Over time the developmental paradigm mutates; by the mid-20th century, it is a story about the potential for uplift: if countries can “modernize,” adopt “modern institutions,” then they will “develop” (i.e. become healthier, wealthier, more prosperous). We’ll discuss that mutation later. But think about how this story works. The West did not have data showing that any linear-like developmental progress existed. Most of Europe was barely removed in terms of civilizational scale and sophistication from the Roman period; much of Europe remained smaller scale and poorer than they had been in the classical epoch

• The opportunity cost of animal based diets exceeds all food losses

• Alcohol-free booze is becoming big business

• In search of a new 20th-century canon - New Statesman

• Delusional dreams of excess freedom

  What beautiful irony: That the prize for catching the carrot is the realization that chasing it was more fun.

• Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds

  • Lead pollution likely caused IQ declines in the Roman Empire

  • Roman Empire's Air Pollution May Have Lowered the IQ of Europe

• Drug Company to Share Revenues with Indigenous People Who Donated Their Genes

• You can't optimize your way to being a good person

• Surgeon General Urges Americans to 'Rethink Our Lives' in Closing Letter

• Clubbing has changed dramatically: Is the party over, or just getting started?

celebrity gossip

• Leibniz Was a Genius for the Ages. Can We Give Him a Break?

• When Picasso Was Arrested for Stealing the 'Mona Lisa'

Obit

• Hermit guardian of Budelli dies after three decades on paradise island

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Lobste.rs considers geoblocking UK due to Online Safety Act

• A study found that Chinese propaganda network TikTok is a vehicle for Chinese propaganda.

• Zuckerberg: "It's time to get back to our roots around free expression"

  • More Speech and Fewer Mistakes

  • Starting in the US, we are ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model.
  • We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.
  • We will take a more personalized approach to political content, so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can.

  • Meta drops fact-checking and loosens its content moderation rules

  • Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content

  • Meta gets rid of fact checkers and says it will reduce 'censorship'

  • Mark Zuckerberg: Fact-Checking on Meta Is Too "Politically Biased"

  • Meta platforms ditching third party fact-checking

  • Meta replaces fact-checking with X-style community notes

  • Meta is ending fact-checking program in favor of community notes similar to X

  • Meta Cuts Fact Checkers, Says Content Moderation Went 'Too Far'

  • Zuckerberg's Gamble: Meta Ditches Fact-Checkers for Free Speech Chaos

  • Facebook to remove fact checking from posts, replace with "community notes"

  • Guy Who Said Facebook Was Not Suppressing Free Speech Announces Facebook Will Stop Suppressing Free Speech

  • 'Fact-Checkers Too Politically-Biased' - Zuckerberg Abandons Facebook Censorship For X-Like Community Notes | ZeroHedge

  • Calling women 'household objects' now permitted on Facebook under new guidelines

  • Meta Now Lets Users Say Gay and Trans People Have 'Mental Illness'

Musk

• Pressure mounts on EU to use legal weapons against Musk's interference

  • Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

  • Europe leaders criticise Musk attacks

  • U.K. leader Starmer slams 'lies and misinformation' after Musk attacks

• Elon Musk's 'disinformation' endangering me, says UK Minister Jess Phillips

• Elon's European Invasion Is Pissing Off World Leaders

• X suspends journalist after debunking theory Musk fan account was Musk himself

  A journalist said Sunday her X account was suspended and links to a recent article of hers were blocked on the platform after she published a piece debunking online theories that an Elon Musk fan account was actually the billionaire himself. The journalist, Jacqueline Sweet, wrote a piece for the UK magazine The Spectator, laying out how and why an X account belonging to a man who apparently lives in Fiji is not actually Musk.

  Following the interaction, Sweet said her account was suspended. The Swiss hacker and Fae said the same. And as of Monday afternoon, links to The Spectator article as well as the Swiss hacker and Fae’s blog post could not be posted on X or sent via the platform’s direct message feature. The reasons given for such a block make it sound like technical issues.

• Elon Musk announces 'algorithm tweak' to tamp down 'negativity' on X

Electric / Self Driving cars

• A Waymo robotaxi got stuck in a roundabout loop

• Sony and Honda's Afeela electric car will start at $89,900

• May Mobility reveals electric autonomous minibus at CES 2025

• As EV Sales Stall, Plug-In Hybrids Get a Reboot

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• ‘Free, free Palestine’ chants break out at historian conference as group passes anti-Israel resolution | The College Fix

  The American Historical Association passed a resolution condemning Israel and proceeded to break out in chants of “free, free Palestine” over the weekend.

• McDonald’s is ending some of its DEI practices.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The Dome: A Simple Violation of Determinism in Newtonian Mechanics

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Disney makes antitrust problem go away by buying majority stake in Fubo

  • Disney to Merge Hulu and Live TV with Fubo, Ending Venu Lawsuit

• Meta taps Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White to join its board

• First time a Blender-made production has won the Golden Globe

• The Audience Matters | Shubham Jain

  Sure, you can ignore the audience and create only for yourself. There are enough success stories to make free-spirited creativity sound like a tempting idea. However, there are just as many failures. The basic fact can’t be ignored: to have a shot at making money, you need to build something people are willing to pay for. You need to care about the audience.

• You can now disable comments on GitHub gists

• Microsoft is using Bing to trick people into thinking they're on Google

  • Google Slams Microsoft's Bing for 'Spoofing' Google Search

• Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge

  • Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge

• Cloudflare Welching on $250k Startup Credits

• The Strangest Carrier: Southern Linc

  Southern Company isn't the only electrical utility company operating a private LTE network; Xcel Energy operates such a network across 8 states by leasing spectrum owned by Anterix. 7 But Southern Company is the only utility that I am aware of which operates a wireless carrier selling to external customers on its own network.

• Activision spent almost $1.8B developing three Call of Duty titles

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• AMD Announces Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen AI Max, Previews AMD RDNA 4 Graphics

• Nvidia announces next-gen RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs

• HTML Is a Programming Language. Fight Me

• A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions

  • HN comments

• usb on the go

  That's a bit of a look into what happens when you plug two USB hosts into each other. Are you confused? Yeah, I'm a little confused too. The details vary, and a lot more based on the capabilities of the individual devices rather than the USB version in use. This has been the malaise of USB for a solid decade now, at least: the specification has become so expansive, with so many non-mandatory features, that it's a crapshoot what capabilities any given USB port actually has. The fact that USB-C supports a bevy of alternate modes like Thunderbolt and HDMI only adds further confusion.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Nvidia announces $3k personal AI supercomputer called Digits

• Nvidia releases its own brand of world models

  • Nvidia Cosmos

• Apple says it will update AI feature after BBC complaint

• British AI startup with government ties is developing tech for military drones

• Buterin proposes a "pause button" to cut AI computing power by 99% for 1 year

• Unleashing the power of generative AI in industry

• How LLMs are reshaping the code of tomorrow, and what to do about it

• Google is building its own 'world modeling' AI team for games and robot training

• Sam Altman says "we are now confident we know how to build AGI"

• Political Bias in Large Language Models: Insights Across Topic Polarization

• What America's top economists are saying about AI and inequality

Crypto con games

• The Great Crypto Crash - The Atlantic

  “My vision is for an America that dominates the future,” Donald Trump told a bitcoin conference in July. “I'm laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.” Financial experts expect something different. First, a boom. A big boom, maybe, with the price of bitcoin, ether, and other cryptocurrencies climbing; financial firms raking in profits; and American investors awash in newfound wealth. Second, a bust. A big bust, maybe, with firms collapsing, the government being called in to steady the markets, and plenty of Americans suffering from foreclosures and bankruptcies. Having written about bitcoin for more than a decade—and having covered the last financial crisis and its long hangover—I have some sense of what might cause that boom and bust. Crypto assets tend to be exceedingly volatile, much more so than real estate, commodities, stocks, and bonds. Egged on by Washington, more Americans will invest in crypto. Prices will go up as cash floods in. Individuals and institutions will get wiped out when prices drop, as they inevitably will.

• A Missing Piece of the SBF Puzzle Elm Partners

  It seems like SBF was essentially telling anyone who was listening that he’d either wind up with all the money in the world, which he’d then redistribute according to his Effective Altruist principles – or, much more likely, he’d die trying.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Remittance flows to low/middle-income countries larger than FDI and ODA combined

• Shares of Tencent fall over 5% after US designates it a Chinese military company

  • Pentagon Adds Chinese Social Media Giant to Military Blacklist

  • US adds web and gaming giant Tencent to list of Chinese military companies

  • Tencent and CATL consider legal action over inclusion on Pentagon blacklist

• The Lone Star Lithium Boom

• McDonald's faces new abuse claims despite promises of change

• CFPB Finalizes Rule to Remove Medical Bills from Credit Reports

  • Medical debt banned from credit reports by new Biden administration rule

  • Biden Administration Moves to Ban Medical Debt from Credit Reports

• Can Boeing Be Fixed? Aerospace Leaders Offer a Repair Manual

  • Outgoing US transport chief says Boeing has more to do after 737 MAX incident

  • Boeing engineer shares what 30 years at the beleaguered plane company was like

• US Job Openings Rise to Six-Month High on Business Services

• Silicon Valley Tech Investor Orchestrated Takedown Plot of Startup Toptal

• A hedge fund exodus reshaped global cocoa markets

• DOJ Sues Six Large Landlords for Algorithmic Pricing Scheme That Harms Millions

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Some Postal Service workers stealing mail: Inspector general report.

• Privatize the USPS? Not in an Era of Crony Capitalism - Bloomberg

  The lesson here is that talk of “privatization” per se is meaningless without elucidating which kind of privatization is under consideration. One class of privatizations, such as in Poland, is close to an unalloyed good, and economists are right to tout it. But in a large number of other cases, which are frequent in modern Western democracies, privatization works only when judiciously applied.Given those categories, what about the USPS? Under a 2018 plan, a privatized postal service would save money by delivering the mail fewer days per week and sending it to more centralized locations, rather than to people’s doorsteps. Not everyone, including many members of Congress, finds that desirable. I have questions of a different sort: Namely, how good would a newly involved private company be at manipulating the federal government to get extra delivery subsidies, entry barriers and price privileges? Maybe postal privatization can work, but it is unlikely to succeed in an environment of crony capitalism. And at least so far, that seems to be what is on tap from the Trump administration.

Trump

• Mike Pence's Role in J6 - by Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke

  At 12:53, just minutes before a joint session of Congress was to elect a president – and while Trump was still giving his speech – Pence’s office released a letter to members of Congress stating his position on electoral certification for the first time publicly, saying, “I do not believe that the Founders of our country intended to invest the Vice President with unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted during the Joint Session of Congress.” Pence’s position that he lacked unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted was not an overtly unreasonable position. But Pence’s unexplained failure to clarify his position until Trump was near the end of his speech on Jan 6th was an issue. A big one.

  Pence’s statement to Congress was first released at 12:53 p.m. Four minutes later, individuals began jumping fencing located at 1st Street and at 12:58 p.m. a crowd broke “through fencing near the Peace Monument.'' To make matters potentially more inflammatory, Pence also sent his statement out broadly in a tweet at 1:02 EST - exactly 10 minutes before Trump wrapped up his speech before a huge crowd of tens of thousands of people. At the exact moment of Pence's tweet, fencing on the Capitol steps was breached. At 1:06 pm the joint session of Congress convened to count the electoral votes. At 1:12 pm Trump finished his speech at The Ellipse.

  At 2:24, Trump sent a tweet stating that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” Two minutes later, at 2:26 pm, the Senate called a recess over an objection to the electoral votes from Arizona.

• FBI Is Still Hiding Details of Russiagate, Newly Released Document Shows | RealClearInvestigations

  While the declassified document records the FBI’s theory that then-President Trump might be involved in illegal – and potentially treasonous – behavior, the “articulable factual basis” for this suspicion is redacted. Only a few paragraphs of the six-page document have not been withheld.

• Trump announces Dubai company will invest $20B in US data centers

• Trump declines to rule out using military to control Greenland, Panama Canal

  • Trump suggests he could use military force to acquire Panama Canal and Greenland

  • Trump refuses to rule out using military force to take Greenland, Panama Canal

  • Push to Gain Control of Greenland, Panama and Rename Gulf of Mexico Ratchets Up

  • Trump wants to change Gulf of Mexico's name to "Gulf of America"

• Appeals Court Judge Refuses to Halt Trump's Sentencing in Hush-Money Case

Democrats / Biden Inc

• Two death row inmates reject Biden's commutation of their life sentences

  Two prisoners who are among the 37 federal inmates whose death sentences were commuted last month by President Joe Biden — a move that spares them from the death chamber — have taken an unusual stance: They're refusing to sign paperwork accepting his clemency action. Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis, both inmates at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, filed emergency motions in federal court in the state's southern district on Dec. 30 seeking an injunction to block having their death sentences commuted to life in prison without parole. The men believe that having their sentences commuted would put them at a legal disadvantage as they seek to appeal their cases based on claims of innocence.

• Biden sets a conservation record, adding 2 national monuments in California

Left Angst

• Tech Companies and CEOs' Donations to Trump, Biden Inaugurations Compared

  Trump, who returns to the White House after January 20's inauguration, has raked in substantially more money from tech companies than Biden did for his 2021 inauguration. Apple donated $43,200 to Biden's 2021 inauguration, according to a Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing that shows a list of individuals and companies that donated to his inaugural fund. Cook is not the only tech CEO who has donated to Trump's inauguration. Amazon, Meta and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have also contributed $1 million, the Associated Press reported in December. Meta and OpenAI did not donate to Biden's inauguration, while Amazon gave $276,000, according to the FEC filing. Two companies that donated to Biden's inauguration have not confirmed any donations to Trump's 2025 inauguration. Google donated $337,500 and Microsoft gave $500,000 to Biden's inauguration, but they have not donated to Trump's this month.

  • Now do campaign contributions... not even the "in kind" stuff like suppression of Trump support; just the plain FEC reported amounts.

• FTC Chair Khan hopes Amazon, Meta won't get 'sweetheart deal' in antitrust cases

  Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan said Tuesday she hopes the incoming Trump administration will not let Amazon and Facebook parent Meta off the hook from pending antitrust lawsuits by her agency with a “sweetheart deal.” But, “I can’t predict what future people in my position are going to do,” Khan said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” Khan’s comments come as Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have made apparent efforts to curry favor with President-elect Donald Trump. Those efforts have included $1 million donations to Trump’s inauguration fund, and Bezos and Zuckerberg separately visiting the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home.

• MAGA’s war on talent frightens CEOs—and angers Elon Musk

  Most parts of the Trumpian coalition view illegal immigrants as bad, with the possible exception of some pro-Trump farmers, builders, restaurateurs and hoteliers, who employ them by the millions. Many believe that they should be deported. Nativists accuse them of stealing American jobs. The techno-Trumpists led by Mr Musk, the president-elect’s biggest donor and first buddy, worry that they are Democrats at heart who, if granted citizenship, would turn swing states a woke shade of blue. Either way, both groups arrive at the same conclusion. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses? No, thank you.

  Opinions begin to diverge when it comes to your trained, your pros, your hoodied maths aces. Yes, please, say Mr Musk and his Silicon Valley pals, who regard such clever clogs as the key to the innovation that keeps America First in perpetuity. Nuh-uh, retort the nativists, who would prefer to see this well-paying work go to real Americans, which is to say those who got there first. The dispute turned ugly just in time for Christmas, and also arcane. Ugly, because one side took to bashing Indians, overrepresented among techies, while the other blamed American culture for venerating “mediocrity over excellence”, in the comparatively mild words of Vivek Ramaswamy, a venture capitalist whom Mr Trump has tasked alongside Mr Musk with cutting government waste (and whose parents came from India). Arcane, for it touched on the fine print of immigration policy: “H-1B”, a category of visa for skilled workers, trended on X, Mr Musk’s social-media mouthpiece.

  • Indians slam MAGA 'war' over H-1B skilled-worker visas as 'racist'

• Opinion | Hawaii Governor: Robert F. Kennedy Is Unfit to Be HHS Secretary - The New York Times

  when vaccination rates fall, preventable diseases can regain a foothold and pose a new danger. And that’s precisely what happened in Samoa, after misinformation spread by anti-vaccine activists eroded trust in vaccines and led to the 2019 outbreak. Thousands of preventable cases of measles sprung up, leading to the deaths of 83 people, mostly children. One of the most prominent voices behind the anti-vaccine campaign was Robert Kennedy Jr.

• Heritage Foundation plans to 'identify and target' Wikipedia editors

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Left’s Narrative Crumbles After Voter Record Shows Cybertruck Bomber Wasn’t MAGA.

  • Man who exploded Cybertruck in Las Vegas used ChatGPT in planning, police say

World

• UK Government crackdown on explicit deepfakes

• UK phasing out the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030

• Microsoft to pump $3B into cloud and AI push in India

• Indonesia joins BRICS group of emerging economies

• YouTube populists are driving South Korea's political instability

China

• Chinese VCs go after personal assets of failed founders

Health / Medicine

• Collection: More Doctors Smoke Camels

• No, Moderate Drinking Won’t Give You Cancer: As with his other work, the surgeon general’s report is light on facts, heavy on expanding government.

• Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?

• Could psychedelic drugs improve the mental health of autistic people?

• Are Some Ultra-Processed Foods OK? New Study Has Answers

  • Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake, Weight Gain, Inpatient Trial

• The Health Monitoring Boom Only Gets Weirder from Here

• San Francisco Curbs Syphilis with Cheap 'Morning-After' Pill

• Herpes virus and repeated head trauma linked to Alzheimer's protein and plaques

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• First Bird Flu Death in U.S. Reported in Louisiana

  • US reports first human death related to bird flu

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Texas officials warn of "maneater" screwworm that burrows into humans and animal

• Stone selection by wild chimpanzees shares patterns with Oldowan hominins

• Recombinant venom proteins in insect seminal fluid reduce female lifespan

• Climate fight needs fundamental reform, UN expert: States not good faith actors

• Ocean sand is in demand, but mining it comes at a cost

• Earthquakes and blowouts undermine case for carbon storage in Texas