2025-02-11
decades of the Apple cult, Musk bids for OpenAI, lies we tell students, Valve bans ingame ads, French AI spend, defending deploring debanking, Levine on memecoins, Trump ends cents, inside Earth
Horseshit
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How Good Is Scrabble's Goat? He Wins in Languages He Can't Speak
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America Doesn't Just Have a Housing Crisis. It Has a Moving Crisis
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How the quick high of 'fast-food gambling' ensnared young men
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(2004) A story about USB floppy drives - The Old New Thing
“Why are there separate PC and Mac versions? The specification is very careful to make sure that the same floppy drive works on both systems. You shouldn’t need to make two versions.” So one of the members asked the obvious question. “Why do you have two versions? What’s the difference? If there’s a flaw in our specification, let us know and we can fix it.” The company representative answered, “Oh, the two floppy drives are completely the same electronically. The only difference is that the Mac version comes in translucent blue plastic and costs more.”
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Cockatoos show appetite for dips when eating bland food, find scientists
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Values matter The UC Berkeley Job Market Meltdown–What No One Wants to Admit | Hacker News
For years, Berkeley’s Computer Science program was a direct pipeline to top-tier tech jobs. Didn’t matter if you were just "above average"—if you made it through, you'd land a solid job with a great salary. But now? I’m watching some of the most brilliant students, the ones with perfect 4.0 GPAs, prestigious internships, and research experience, graduate with nothing. No offers. No interviews. Just radio silence. The harsh reality is that a UC Berkeley CS degree is no longer a ticket to job security. The system that promised students a clear path to success is breaking down, and the people in charge are too scared to admit it.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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FBI raids and a rare SNES cheat device: The Game Wizard's mysterious history
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Why the 'spirit' of open source means much more than a license
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RTX 4090 liquid cooled with 12,000 BTU air conditioner – GPU runs at 20C
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US news org still struggling to print papers a week after 'cybersecurity event'
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AMD posts a less-than-convincing argument as to why AI PCs are better
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CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Bank CEO: Retract your debanking piece? Me: No. | Kalzumeus Software
McCauley fails to identify an incorrect allegation of fact made by Debanking. Viewing his statements in a light most favorable to him, he disagrees with our analysis. He is welcome to articulate his point of view in his own spaces, the bank’s spaces, or the halls of the Senate. He is not entitled to a retraction. To the extent McCauley believes that any respectable publication would retract over this, he is greatly miscalibrated. We could end the inquiry here, because his next two bullet points do not even purport to allege inaccuracies, but we will continue.
Far from “missing the point” of what crypto advocates mean by “debanking”, Debanking points out that crypto advocates are engaged in strategic conflation of different issues. We could not have, at the time of publishing the following, known that McCauley would request a retraction using this strategic conflation, pretending (a word we do not choose lightly) that advocates do not really care about bank supervision, and only want business checking accounts.
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Reclassification is making US tech job losses look worse than they are
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Tech layoffs reveal the unintended consequences of mass job cuts
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Memecoin Pumps Are Just for Fun - Bloomberg
COME ON, WHY ARE YOU BUYING MEMECOINS? What on earth do you think is happening here? Is Dave Portnoy going to go activist on the Josh Allen MVP coin and turn around its business? Did he talk to the CEO of Josh Allen MVP coin and learn that Josh Allen MVP coin has struck a deal to build artificial intelligence products for Apple? There is nothing here! This is a purely social trading token, a pure game of hot potato; the only thing that could happen with it is pumping and dumping. The point of memecoins is for people to go on social media and say “I’m buying this coin” so it goes up so they can sell it at profit. Portnoy used the memecoins for exactly their intended purpose.
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Hedge Funds Are Pocketing Much of Their Clients' Gains with 'No Limit' Fees
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Global scandal of USAID exposed! – Author Carlo Carrasco
Going back to the USAID scandal, it is one thing for America to come up with taxpayer-funded overseas projects to help foreigners, it is completely another thing to have projects that emphasized the Satanic Leftist ideologies. Seriously, does the $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru and the $70,000 for a DEI musical production in Ireland have anything relevant with USAID’s traditional purposes of disaster relief, poverty relief, bilateral interests and socioeconomic development. USAID was also abused by the Democrats to fund Leftist news media outlets as well.
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Deep State May Emerge as Greatest Financial Ripoff in World History
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FBI finds secret JFK assassination records after Trump order
Trump
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Trump Orders Secret Service to Provide ‘Every Bit of Information’ on the Would-Be Assassins.
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CJ Pearson is taking legal action against New York Magazine after its "despicable" cover story that he feels falsely painted pro-Trump conservatives as racist. New York Magazine writer Brock Colyar warned that a new generation of "casually cruel Trumpers" are "conquering Washington" in a cover story headlined, "The Cruel Kids’ Table." The glossy feature has since come under fire for cropping Black attendees out of the cover image while quoting an attendee who complained "the entire room is White." Pearson has not yet filed a lawsuit but provided a formal notice to the magazine that he plans to sue.
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Trump Suggests Musk Found ‘Irregularities’ in US Treasuries - Bloomberg
President Donald Trump suggested that Elon Musk’s government efficiency team has found irregularities while examining data at the US Treasury Department, and intimated that may lead the US to disregard some payments. “There could be a problem, you’ve been reading about that, with Treasuries,” Trump told reporters Sunday on Air Force One en route to the Super Bowl. It wasn’t immediately clear whether he was talking about US government debt, or payments processed through the Treasury Department. “That could be an interesting problem because it could be that a lot of those things don’t count,” he said. “Therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought of.” Trump didn’t elaborate on what problems Musk found. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has sought access to Treasury Department payments data, but Musk’s statements on social media have largely concerned payments to contractors and grant recipients, not bondholders.
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Trump to pause enforcement of law banning bribery of foreign officials
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Trump says Palestinians will have no right of return to Gaza under his plan
Left Angst
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How close is Elon Musk to controlling a nuclear weapon?
Short of Musk or his employees entering a silo, climbing onto a stealth bomber, or getting into a submarine, it's not going to happen.
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Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com' | Hacker News
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Trump cuts aid to South Africa over 'racial discrimination' against Afrikaners
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DOGE's meddling at Treasury could have catastrophic consequences for US economy
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Vance Says 'Judges Aren't Allowed to Control' Trump's 'Legitimate Power'
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Russ Vought Orders Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to Stop Work
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Tech Firms Want to Upend Pentagon. Old Defense Guard Has Some Lessons for Them
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Stanford, Harvard Warn of 'Deep Impacts' from Trump Funding Cuts
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Musk DOGE Pick Led Cybersecurity Cuts at Citrix. Hacks Followed
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The NSA's "Big Delete" - by Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby
Today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a "Big Delete" of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including "privilege," "bias," and "inclusion." The "Big Delete," according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences. Although the websites and other content are purportedly being deleted to comply with President Trump's executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or "DEI," the dragnet is taking down "mission-related" work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is "very chaotic," but is plowing ahead anyway.
- The first Trump Administration featured many instances of Federal refusal to obey Presidential orders. This time there's much less of that, at least being heralded in the media. They're playing it like they never heard the word "resist" this time.
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The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway • The Register
Microcode is the regulator of the state of the machinery with infinite disruptive power. To see the other and infinitely alarming hack going on right now, just rearrange those first few words. Regulators are the microcode of the machinery of state, with infinite disruptive power. That's why Musk and DOGE are working so hard at taking over, closing down, and ignoring regulators. Once those are turned off, the machinery of state will be unprotected and institutionally corrupt. You don't want Trump to have access to the data that the state has about you? How about the mechanisms of money by which the Treasury works? All the interlocking components of the state, carefully designed to follow rules to protect that data, will be open to abuse.
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NSF Budget Cuts Would Put the Future of U.S. Innovation and Security at Risk
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'Women' is a banned word: Trump uses trans panic to strip rights from all women
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Five Former Treasury Secretaries: Our Democracy Is Under Siege
A gaggle of former Secretaries of the Treasury — Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew and Janet Yellen — warn in the New York Times today that the President of the United States is interfering with the operations of the executive branch. No, really. It remains entirely true that warnings about the threat to “Our Democracy” are, in fact, warnings about the threat to Our Bureaucracy.
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Trump admin freezes EV charging program that gave Tesla millions
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The FCC in Authoritarian Times
It wasn’t just the high-profile decision, one of Carr’s first on taking office, to reopen the investigation into ABC, CBS and NBC over allegations that they misleadingly edited interviews and asked biased questions during 2024 election debates. It wasn’t just the way that Fox, which was also the subject of a bias complaint during the previous term, was left out of the reopening of those investigations. It was unfortunate, but not unexpected, to see CBS comply with the Commission by turning over unedited footage of the Kamala Harris interview in question – usually a huge journalistic no-no. If you’ve studied broadcasting and regulatory history, you’ve seen some of this before: in the 1950s, when authoritarianism was similarly on the rise in Washington, the sordid history of the McCarthy-era blacklists found broadcast owners similarly caving under pressure from the government instead of standing up for the principles they claimed to protect.
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His todo list includes working with Boeing to speed up delivery of Air Force One
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Elon Musk and PayPal Broligarchy are attempting to make Apartheid great again
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Steve Davis: The Musk Deputy Running DOGE's Cost-Cutting Drive
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Revelations of Israeli spyware abuse raise fears over possible use by Trump
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Trump's suspension of USAID has caused loss of 35,000 jobs in Jordan
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DOGE's war on "waste" looks suspiciously like a war on science
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
- am I bid 3 cents? Danes launch bid to 'buy California' after Trump's Greenland threats