2025-02-01

PA plane crash, crisis opportunists, touch screen suck, Blue Man Group closing, FOSS and sanctions, Meta moving, Intel troubles, no pronouns, zizian sith vegan murders, "Trump covered up lab leak"

etc

• Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed

• Papyrus Found in Desert Tells of Roman Trial for Forgery and Tax Fraud

• Los Angeles Doesn't Have Enough Fire Trucks Thanks to Private Equity

• Drone pilot to plead guilty in collision that grounded aircraft

  • Man pleads guilty in drone crash with Quebec water bomber fighting L.A. fires

PA Crash

• Plane crashes in Philadelphia, igniting inferno near homes and mall | Fox News

  A Learjet 55 crashed around 6:30 p.m. after departing from Northeast Philadelphia Airport, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The FAA said two people were on board. The plane was en route to Springfield-Branson National Airport in Missouri. Crews are battling multiple house and car fires resulting from the crash, officials confirmed.

• Philadelphia plane crash causes fiery scene with multiple homes ablaze

• Small plane crashes in Philadelphia, causing explosion and fire

DC Crash

• Mid-Air Collision Shines Light on Doomsday Plans for Nation's Capital

• FAA data shows 30 near-misses at Reagan Airport

• Reagan National Airport Black Hawk-CRJ Crash

• Washington's Jam-Packed Airspace Has Prompted Warnings for Years

• Helicopters flying along Potomac River frequently pose dangers to passenger jets

• Trump Says DC Black Hawk "Was Flying Too High... By A Lot" | ZeroHedge

• US Air Traffic Control Facilities Are Understaffed

• Helicopter black box recovered from Washington DC plane crash site

Horseshit

• Amway: The ‘Exciting Business Opportunity’ That Ruined Our Lives - The Atlantic

• She Wrote a Racy Book. Now She's Worried Her Son Will Find It

• 'It's buzzing here': Detroit's revival takes shape after decades of decay

• S.F.'s workforce keeps moving farther away from their jobs

• Morro Bay moves to block new battery plants after fire

• When everything becomes a profit center…

  An unintended consequence of emergency information is that by its nature you share people's full home address to as many agencies as possible because it's an emergency and time is of the essence. But as Americans, we basically have no real rights to privacy, so my home address showed up in the PulsePoint logs and then a guy from Servpro read it and promptly arrived at my door hawking his services. There's probably a Salesforce plugin to do this for the Servpro rep every morning automatically.

• Older Adults Disproportionately Hindered by Touch Screen Interfaces

  The general assumption is that older adults struggle with touch screen devices because they are unfamiliar with the technology and that with practice, they will become proficient. This study provides evidential support of a probable physiological barrier contributing to some older adults’ touch screen difficulties. In our study, participants (7 older adults, 10 younger adults) had to press a touch screen button to get information while driving. Older adults disproportionately failed attempts to hit this button. Video analysis showed that even when older adults hit the target button correctly while driving with an appropriate amount of force and duration of touch, the screen sometimes failed to register their command. This suggests that a minimally documented but present age-related physiological reason likely contributes to older adults’ reduced ability to successfully interact with touch screens.

  • HN comments

  • I'd guess 15% or more of the population (tending to the older) cannot reliably interect with most touchscreens; the problem has been known for 25 years or more. It wouldn't enhance shareholder value to discuss it, so they don't.

• Most Men Would Marry Their AI Girlfriends If It Were Legal

celebrity gossip

• Blue Man Group’s 34-Year New York Run Comes to an End - The New York Times

  After 17,800 shows and 82,150 gallons of paint, Blue Man Group is hanging up its bald caps at the Astor Place Theater for good on Sunday. It arrived there in 1991, when George H.W. Bush was president, cellphones were rare and the World Wide Web was two years away. (The group’s first profile in The New York Times existed only on paper.) Blue Man Group, which has been owned by Cirque du Soleil since 2017, is not disappearing: long-running shows remain open in Boston, Las Vegas and Berlin, and a return gig is planned for Orlando, Fla. But closing the New York production, where it all began — along with another decades-old production in Chicago — is the end of a chapter.

• Former Barclays CEOs Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein Ran Deeper Than Disclosed

Obit

• Suzanne Massie, Reagan’s Russian whisperer in Cold War, dies at 94 - The Washington Post

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Chinese state-linked accounts hyped DeepSeek AI launch ahead of US stock rout

• Deutsche Bank has published a bunch of memes about DeepSeek

  We have absolutely no right to criticise anyone for oversimplifying financial trends and concepts with overused images. Ditto being too online. Everyone here at FT Alphaville acknowledges that glass houses can’t throw shade.

• Red, blue and purple states are all passing laws to restrict teens online

Musk

• Amazon Cranks Up Ad Spending on X After Cutting Investments over Hate Speech

  • Amazon Raises Its Ad Spending on Elon Musk's X, in Major Reversal

• What Elon Musk Should Learn from Larry Ellison

• Tesla Reported Zero Federal Income Tax on $2B of U.S. Income in 2024

• Embarrassed by Elon Musk? There's a Bumper Sticker for That

• Elon Musk Tells Friends He's Sleeping at the Doge Offices in DC

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Ford made a NASCAR Mach-E, but it's not sure what to do with it yet

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Meta staffers revolt over tampon removal from men's rooms

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Not up to us to teach children how to use books, say almost half of parents

  • If you cannot share your joys with your children you are not ready to be a parent.

• 'Stamp out paper mills' – science sleuths on how to fight fake research

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• New Law Would Create an 'Internet Kill Switch' to Fight Movie Piracy Sites

• Navigating Global Regulations and Open Source: US OFAC Sanctions

  The OFAC sanctions rules are “strict liability”, which means it does not matter whether you know about them or not. Violating these rules can lead to serious penalties, so it's important to understand how they might affect your open source work. Many OFAC sanctions restrictions generally do not care if software or technology is public or published (although US export controls generally do)

• Lawsuit accuses Amazon of tracking consumers through cellphones

• Archivists Work to Save the Datasets Disappearing from Data.gov

• Apple has more than 2.35B active devices, up 550M since 2022

• Discord’s advertising push continues

• r/Duolingo Will No Longer Be Duolingo’s Unpaid Customer Support or Data Mine

• Fiber ring could quell Alaska's Arctic internet outages

• Conscripting the App Stores Doesn't Solve the Problems with Age Verification

• Books written by humans are getting their own certification

• Warning to iPhone users as Apple turns on 'dangerous' feature

• Court Rejects Musi's Bid to Force Apple to Reinstate Its Music App

• Instagram tests Reels pause feature as TikTok remains in limbo

• Apple's emergency motion to intervene in Chrome antitrust remedy

• Meta in Talks to Reincorporate in Texas or Another State, Exit Delaware

  • Meta in talks to reincorporate in Texas or another state, WSJ reports

• Google Installed A.I. To My Workspace. Getting Rid of It Was Creepy

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• (2021) Malloc() vs. MMAP(MAP_SHARED) in Multithreaded Programs

• Why are quaternions more popular than tessarines despite being non-commutative?

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• DeepSeek Debates: Chinese Leadership on Cost, Closed Model Margin Impacts

• Copyright Office suggests AI copyright debate was settled in 1965

• LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman, the Only Way to Deal with Info Overload Is AI

• Google Sees Iran and China, Russia, North Korea Phishing, Scripting with Gemini

• DeepSeek just insisted it's ChatGPT, and I think that's all the proof I need

• Reid Hoffman raises $25M to take on cancer with AI

• Oh, I'm sorry, tech bros – did DeepSeek copy your work?

• DeepSeek's hardware spend as high as $500M

• Sam Altman's Stargate is science fiction

• Tech tycoons have got the economics of AI wrong

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Safety panel reports progress in Starliner investigation

• Starship explosion: Turks and Caicos residents find beaches littered with debris

• 'Abandoned' astro takes recordbreaking ninth spacewalk

  • NASA's 2 stuck astronauts take their first spacewalk together

Crypto con games

• Hedge fund warns White House is inflating crypto bubble that could wreak havoc

• Sam Bankman-Fried's Parents Explore Seeking Trump Pardon for Son

• Stablecoin Issuer Tether Says Profit Was $13B Last Year

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Intel won't bring its Falcon Shores AI chip to market

  • Intel $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

  • Intel Decides Against Bringing Falcon Shores to Market, Instead an Internal Chip

• Intel Reports Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year 2024 Financial Results

• Dell is making everyone return to office, too

• Barclays Bank goes down on payday

  • Barclays bank hit by major IT outage on tax deadline day

• Is Wall Street ready to stay up all night?

• CFPB Orders Wise to Pay $2.5M for Illegal Remittance Practices

• Texas Stock Exchange Startup Asks SEC to Clear 2026 Launch

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Am Radio for All Vehicles legislation reintroduced, making AM mandatory

• Ninth Circuit temporarily blocks California law aimed at protecting minors

  The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday issued a temporary injunction blocking a California law requiring social media platforms to provide a chronological feed – in lieu of an algorithmic feed – to minor users and limiting notifications to those users during school hours and overnight.

• Legal Weed Didn't Deliver on Its Promises

• Trump Antitrust Division Challenges Major Tech Merger

• Interim U.S. attorney fires more than two dozen Jan. 6 prosecutors in D.C

• All CDC data is no longer visible to comply with executive orders

Trump

• Trump’s 5-D Chess: How Mass Firings Are Freezing the Deep State - Flopping Aces

  “The prospect of getting dragged into court,” an alarmed Times observed, “may be exactly what Mr. Trump’s lawyers are hoping for.” What terrified and dismayed the far-left Times and its progressive allies was the ghastly prospect that “any rulings in the president’s favor would establish precedents that would expand presidential power to control the federal government.” In other words: Trump is hoping that they’ll sue him.

• Nvidia CEO to Meet with Trump Today at White House

• Steep Tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China Will Take Effect Saturday

• Ex-Acting FAA administrator: Trump made 'excellent choice' with Christopher Rocheleau

• Federal employees told to remove pronouns from email signatures by end of day

  • Trump Administration Orders Federal Employees to Remove Pronouns from Email Signatures

• ‘Prolific Anti-Trump FBI Agent’ Broke Protocol To Spearhead Election Lawfare.

• Trump Media Gives Stock Awards to Two of President's Nominees

Left Angst

• NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with executive orders

• A Flag on Mars? Maybe Not So Soon

• Samoa's prime minister criticises RFK Jr's vaccine views after measles outbreak

• The American science funding catastrophe

  If you voted for Trump, because you wanted to take a hammer to the woke deep state or whatever, then please understand: you may or may not have realized you were voting for this, exactly, but this is what you’ve gotten. In place of professionals who you dislike and who are sometimes systematically wrong, the American spaceship is now being piloted by drunken baboons, mashing the controls to see what happens. I hope you like the result.

• Executive Order to the State Department Sideswipes Freedom Tools

• Government Tech Workers Forced to Defend Projects to Random Elon Musk Bros

• The US spent millions on STD prevention in Gaza. But it was a province in Mozambique | Middle East Eye

  The claim from the Trump administration drew widespread confusion and scepticism until, on Thursday, an account on X found there was a US grant worth $83m that was directed towards the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases in Gaza. However, the Gaza referenced in the grant description wasn't in the occupied Palestinian territories. It was referring to a province in Mozambique. Gaza is a rural province in the African nation and is the country's least populated, with an estimated population of just over one million people.

• Astronauts Were ‘Stranded’ Until Trump Asks Elon to Rescue Them

• Senior U.S. official to exit after rift with Musk allies over payment system

• Trump's Tech Donors Have Big Plans for Greenland

• Nowhere to Hide from Trump's Tariffs

• FCC Chair Orders Investigation into NPR and PBS Sponsorships

• Trump threatens a global trade war. Europe must unleash an alternative

• Musk aides lock government workers out of computer systems at US agency

• Trump's tariffs, cuts may well put tech in a chokehold, say analysts

• The CDC Is Altering Data to Follow Trump’s DEI Order - The Atlantic

  Last night, scientists began to hear cryptic and foreboding warnings from colleagues: Go to the CDC website, and download your data now. They were all telling one another the same thing: Data on the website were about to disappear, or be altered, to comply with the Trump administration’s ongoing attempt to scrub federal agencies of any mention of gender, DEI, and accessibility. “I was up until 2 a.m.,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan who relies on the CDC’s data to track viral outbreaks, told me. She archived whatever she could.

  What they feared quickly came to pass. Already, content from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which includes data from a national survey, has disappeared; so have parts of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s Social Vulnerability Index and the Environmental Justice Index. The CDC’s landing page for HIV data has also vanished. And the agency’s AtlasPlus tool, which contains nearly 20 years of CDC surveillance data on HIV, hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections, and tuberculosis, is down. Several scientists I talked with told me they had heard directly from contacts at the CDC that the agency has directed employees to scrub any mention of “gender” from its site and the data that it shares there, replacing it with “sex.”

  • after they just put all that effort into changing mentions of "women" to "persons with a front hole".

• Elon Musk Is Trying to Get Control of Key Payment System–At Any Cost

• Trump putting 'pause' on most US Government websites, source says

• USDA ordered to scrub climate change from websites

• LA Times Flips Anti-RFK Jr. Op-Ed into Pro-Kennedy Propaganda

• Trump Admin Emails Air Traffic Controllers: Quit Your Jobs

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Leader of alleged 'death cult' faked own death in San Francisco Bay

  A recent Open Vallejo investigation identified Zizian as Jack LaSota, a former tenant at a property on Third Street in Vallejo, where a samurai sword attack in 2022 left tenant Emma Borhanian, 31, dead and landlord Curtis Lind without an eye. Lind was stabbed to death at the property earlier this month before he could testify in the trial related to the 2022 attack. According to Friedman, he received a phone call in August 2022 from LaSota’s defense attorney in a separate criminal case. That attorney told Friedman that LaSota fell from a boat in San Francisco Bay and was likely dead. When Friedman reached out to LaSota’s mother, she also “confirmed that Jack LaSota died.” Less than three months later, Friedman said he was forwarded an email from the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office. “I just wanted to reach out and let you know that Jack Lasota was contacted by police in Vallejo this weekend,” it read. “Lasota was on scene, alive and well.”

  • Killing of border patrol agent appears linked to ‘Zizian’ radical leftist trans cult

  • I Told You: Chaos is Coming - Freddie deBoer

  I acknowledge upfront that the “Zizians” and the grimy-but-fascinating story of their alleged violence is not a big deal, in any real sense. They’re a group of former computer scientists and financial market types who appear to have latched onto the effective altruism/rationalist movement and taken the AI risk, veganism, and animal rights parts to a certain extreme; the group has been implicated in at least eight murders. But there appears to be only a handful of them, and they’re a fringe of a fringe. I don’t have any interest in implicating the rest of the rationalist sphere in this, though I do think David Z. Morris is fundamentally correct that the culture of “existential AI risk” obviously has the potential to inspire violence and extremism.

  The Trump shooter’s utter lack of motivation, his blank and pathetic face, his relentlessly vapid existence are the 21st century. Maybe he had a political end in mind, when he incompetently squeezed off those rounds. Maybe the Zizians are true believers. The point is not that ideology, or the will to ideology, is absent. It’s that ideology itself has become a joke even among those who want to believe, just another object of nostalgic fascination in a culture where all deep meaning has been confined to the past. Conservatism and liberalism, libertarianism and socialism, ecoterrorism and fascism, these are all both said and heard now with imagined quotation marks; they are real, they change the world, people believe in them, and yet there is a generation of humans who cannot comprehend them as anything other than a mask to put on, as an emoji flag in a dating profile.

  • Is there a murder gang of Sith vegans?

• NYPD records longest no-shooting streak in 30 Years

• Cracked and Nulled Marketplaces Disrupted in International Cyber Operation

• Ex Federal Reserve advisor charged with economic espionage to benefit China

World

• India's Shiny New Metros Are Costly White Elephants

• Italy's regulator blocks Chinese AI app DeepSeek on data protection

• Basel has to buy domain name in the Bahamas after mishap

  • Swiss tax authority forced to buy Bahamas domain name after URL typo

• 3 Are Arrested in Theft of Gold Helmet from Dutch Museum

• What's in von der Leyen's plan to save the EU economy?

• How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work? We asked the law's enforcer

China

• China builds wartime military command centre in Beijing

  • China building 'doomsday' command 10 times bigger than The Pentagon

Health / Medicine

• FDA approves first new type of pain medication in 25 years

  • the Sackler's dope pushing adventure has been wrung dry, time for someone else to step up and get the next generation hooked on something. With a fresh patent.

  • FDA Approves Novel Non-Opioid Treatment for Moderate to Acute Pain

• Ransomware attack at NY blood provider – donors turned away during shortage

• NorthBay Health Data Breach Impacts 569,000 Individuals

• Backdoor found in two healthcare patient monitors, linked to IP in China

• 'A neural fossil': human ears try to move when listening

• Ozempic is causing trouble on Savile Row

• Ventilation in hospitals could cause viruses to spread further, study suggests.

  • "Let's put all the sick people in the same place" has some really obvious drawbacks that somehow never convinced anyone it was a bad idea.

• Physical Strength Linked with Sexual Success in Men and Women

• Boy, 5, dies in hyperbaric chamber explosion at medical facility

• Adults diagnosed with ADHD have shorter life expectancy

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Seymour Hersh in a new report on Covid origins

  I learned this week that a US intelligence asset at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, where the Covid virus was first observed, is safe and out of danger. The asset, highly regarded within the CIA, was recruited while in graduate school in the United States and provided early warning of a laboratory accident at Wuhan that led to a series of infections that was quickly spreading and initially seemed immune to treatment. As is the case today, many senior US officials were reluctant to tell the president what he did not want to hear. But early studies dealing with how to mitigate the oncoming plague, based on information from the Chinese health ministry about the lethal new virus, were completed late in 2019 by experts from America’s National Institutes of Health and other research agencies. Despite their warnings, a series of preventative actions were not taken until the United States was flooded with cases of the virus. All of these studies, I have been told, have been expunged from the official internal records in Washington, including any mention of the CIA's source inside the Chinese laboratory. It was a cover-up to protect a president who did not do the right thing.

  • ummm, yes, 'cuz of course Trump was a servant of China at the time and no one was accusing him of waging a trade war or anything like that

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Colossal Squid: The Eerie Ambassador from the Abyss

• Largest iceberg is on a collision course with vital penguin sanctuary

• Alternative Protein Sources and Their Application in Food Products

• Antarctic Ice Sheet May Be Less Vulnerable Than Previously Thought

• Nuclear Explosions for Large Scale Carbon Sequestration

• New pollution rules come into effect for cleaner air by 2030

• Oil giant Shell walks away from major New Jersey offshore wind farm

• Invasive Crabs Have Taken over New England. One Solution? Eat Them