2025-02-13

Titan audio, blissful ignorance, "gym culture is close to far-right ideology", social media sucks, Musk vs. Altman, JWST studies 2024YR4, enriched civil servants, bailout CA by selling it to Denmark

etc

• FAA Wants Permanent Helicopter Restrictions at Reagan Airport

• Half of French island in Indian Ocean burnt by wildfire

• US Coast Guard releases suspected audio recording of Titan submersible implosion

  • From 900 miles away, the US government recorded audio of the Titan sub implosion

• People have been dumping corpses into the Thames since Bronze Age, study finds

Horseshit

• Miyazaki's Right: Local Governments Boost Birthrates by Investing in Families

• The Sex Mushroom Hunters of Nepal

• War Robot Puts on Thirty Minute DJ Set in SF Nightclub

• Vanishing Culture: Punch Card Knitting

  • Cool stuff; but how large was it impact on culture?

• Ignorance bliss when you’re drowning in information • The Register

  Limiting my social posts to the performative site of Late Capitalism - LinkedIn - and restricting my news to a handful of the very best tech sites (including this one) creates space within me that I can share with friends when they come burdened by the latest outrages and horrors. It's all slapdash and imperfect - but at least now I feel as though I'm not deliberately trying to weight myself down in raging seas. This is no way to live.

• We Live Like Royalty and Don't Know It

• Money may have originated through long distance trade, new theory suggests

• Spanish 'running of the bulls' festival reveals crowd movements can be predicted

• A Sore Spot in L.A.'S Housing Crisis: Foreign-Owned Homes Sitting Empty

• The 'Huberman husbands' phenomenon sweeping the US

  From Huberman to “Huberman husbands,” defined by the sharp-witted Daily Beast website as “followers of a wellness protocol that requires them to immerse themselves in cold water, tape their mouths shut and try to convince their long-suffering wives of the benefits of it all.” If in the 1970s literature dropped the term “Stepford wife” to define a caring, beautiful partner, perfect in her exuberant and helpful femininity, following Ira Levin’s classic horror novel The Stepford Wives, today it is the internet that brings us its male equivalent: the “Huberman husband” now exercises more, eats healthier, and has more eccentricities than his wife.

  Erick Pescador Albiach, a sociologist, sexologist and specialist in the development of a culture of care, says that the gym culture is close to the far-right ideology because “the loss of power that so many men feel [with progressive and egalitarian policies] is mixed here with the need to return to ancestral power, which is the power of force and brutality.” Podlech Sandoval shares his personal experience with EL PAÍS. “For the last four months, I have been training three or four times a week to feel stronger. When the results started to show, I was surprised that the treatment and appreciation of other men towards me was different. Men have a relationship with their own and other people’s muscles that is not indifferent and represents values desired by many people, such as willpower, perseverance, concentration, and health,” he says. In a world in which women have been asking for decades that politics not be conducted with their bodies, there is a certain ideology within which men are more than willing to conduct politics with theirs. Muscles are now part of that conversation. Trump doesn’t need them, of course, but he already has what the gym bros and Huberman husbands crave: power.

• The Anti-SNARF Manifesto: Big tech destroyed the internet. What's next?

• The Super Bowl Has Never Seen Anything Like These Five Gigantic Humans

• Common factors link rise in pedestrian deaths–fixing them will be tough

celebrity gossip

• Not Swastikas: Shopify claims that the risk of fraud was the reason for the store's closure

• Elizabeth Holmes Breaks Her Silence in First Interview from Prison

• A hidden Picasso painting from the Blue Period is revealed by new technology

Musk

• Parents were injured in a Tesla crash. She ended up having to pay Tesla damages

• Tesla opens Shanghai battery "Megafactory", first Megapacks to Australia

• How Elon Musk and Sam Altman's feud is about a lot more than OpenAI

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Tesla sales dropped 60% in Germany

• Rivian Flexes Software Power: What VW Gets for $5.7B

• 82% of Waymo's autonomous miles in California were human supervised in 2024

• NYC is giving free e-bikes to delivery workers with shoddy or illegal e-bikes

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• How women are fighting back against the resurgence of 'bro culture

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Lawsuit Challenges Meta for Discrimination in Higher Education Advertising

• Thomson Reuters wins an early court battle over AI, copyright, and fair use

• What We're Fighting For

  It’s why your Facebook newsfeed doesn’t show you posts from friends and family, but is happy to bombard you with AI-generated images of weirdly shiny-faced old people celebrating their birthday alone, replete with a heartstring-tugging caption. It’s why whenever you search for something — not just on Google, but anywhere — the keywords you provide aren’t treated as an explicit instruction of something you want to see, but randomly disregarded with no rhyme or reason. We do not "use" the computer — we negotiate with it to try and make it do the things we want it to do, because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align with the user.

• Fox’s New Scorebug Graphic Design, and Our Innate Resistance to Change

  This new design, with bigger bolder type but less needless chrome, pulls off the remarkable feat of conveying key information with more clarity both on the biggest of big screens — TVs in public spaces like bars and restaurants, which are viewed from a distance — and the smallest of small screens, our phones. Different doesn’t always mean better. But better necessarily implies different.

• Shut Up, Siri. Why there will be no monoculture of human-computer interaction

• Ashlee Vance launches media startup Core Memory

• Ransomware isn't always about the money: Government spies have objectives, too

• Apple plans to learn more about your holistic health

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• 'Key kernel maintainers' still back Rust in the Linux kernel despite doubters

  • "Consensus over results" politics as applied to software development. It has done such wonders for Science, lets use it everywhere!

• skies-adsb: real-time 3D air traffic display.

• FSF to auction off original GNU drawings, awards, and historic tech

  • On one hand, kinda sad. On the other; perhaps individuals will be able to preserve these memories from the people determined to erases the FSF, RMS, and all memory of his work.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• I Paid $70 for an AI Boyfriend. It Was So Worth It

• People Are Calling for Christie's to Cancel Its AI Art Auction

• "We Have No Moat": Open-Source AI's Breakneck Innovation

• Launching the Artificial Intelligence Playbook for the UK Government

• Sam Altman is trying to sell OpenAI on the cheap to himself

  • How Elon Musk's bid for OpenAI could gum up Sam Altman's for-profit conversion.

• What DeepSeek's Success Says About China's Ability to Nurture Talent

• EU mobilizes $200B in AI race against US and China

  • EU to mobilize 200B Euros to invest in AI

• Hard to disagree, they've been hunting for a new God for a long time. They're willing to accept almost anything that isn't human, at this point. Mistral boss says tech CEOs' obsession with AGI is a very religious fascination

• Ex-Google chief warns west to focus on open-source AI in competition with China

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• The dream of offshore rocket launches is finally blasting off

• James Webb Space Telescope redirected to study asteroid 2024 YR4

  • Emergency decision:James Webb Telescope to study 'city-killer' asteroid 2024 YR4

  • Too bad we ain't got Arecibo anymore.

• ULA's Vulcan rocket still doesn't have the Space Force's seal of approval

Crypto con games

• Russian Bitcoin Exchange BTC-E Co-Founder to Be Freed by the U.S.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Tech layoffs reveal the unintended consequences of mass job cuts

• Meta's recent layoffs take an unexpected turn

• Inflation Stayed Sticky in January, Keeping Fed Rate Cuts at Bay - The New York Times

  Prices pressures are persisting at a time of extreme uncertainty about the outlook for the economy just weeks into President Trump’s second term in the White House. Tariffs, deportations, tax cuts and deregulation are expected to have an economic impact, but the final policy mix will determine whether economists and policymakers will pay more mind to the risk of resurgent inflation or an unexpected slowdown in growth. In a social media post on Wednesday, Mr. Trump called on interest rates to be lowered, saying it was “something which would go hand in hand with upcoming Tariffs!!!" But, the Fed has signaled little urgency to lower rates for the time being, setting up a potential clash with a president who showed in his first term a readiness to critique the central bank when it resisted his demands for cuts. After a percentage point worth of cuts in the final three months of last year, rates now hover between 4.25 percent and 4.5 percent.

  • Remember when Biden said "report it right" and the media repeated liberal lies about the state of the economy for 4 years? Anyone think they've suddenly snapped back to "honest"? Or are they still reporting the story in the way they think is most favorable to their faith?

• Uline turned to Mexico to staff warehouses, paid them a fraction of US workers

• How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed

• The CEO Mindset That Brought Xerox Back to Life

• Chevron Plans to Cut Up to 20% of Workers in Efficiency Push

  • Chevron to Lay Off Up to 20% of Staff

• Redfin to cut 450 jobs after entering rental content license with Zillow

• US companies get more latitude to bar shareholder resolutions from their ballots

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Federal judge upholds Massachusetts automotive right-to-repair law

• Inside FEMA’s sickening history of misspending billions of taxpayers’ dollars — and going largely unchecked

• DOGE Investigating Feds Whose Net Worths Have Exploded After Samantha Power Bombshell | ZeroHedge

  The announcement comes after a bombshell report that Samantha Power, former head of USAID, saw her net worth exploded to $30 million despite an annual salary under $250,000.

• FBI uncovers new JFK docs

• Coincidence? ABA Blasts Cuts to USAID. Also, ABA Gets Millions From USAID.

• California FAIR plan needs to $1B bailout after LA fires

  • California's insurer for people without private coverage needs $1B more

• The need for more nickels, which costs even more money to make

Trump

• Implementing the President's "DOGE" Workforce Optimization Initiative

• Musk appears at White House defending DOGE's work but acknowledging mistakes

• Trump administration declares 'most powerful' AI chips will be built in America

• JD Vance Remarks at Paris AI Summit

• ‘Black men love Trump’ dooms Democrats with 42% support.

• Tulsi Gabbard has been confirmed as National Intelligence Director

• Donald Trump's Economic Masterplan

• South Africans clamor for US resettlement after Trump order

Democrats

• Former Dem Donor Drops More Damning Allegations About the Biden Presidency

  Ms. Li said that after Joe Biden’s disastrous CNN debate that June, Hunter Biden commandeered the White House and sat in on sensitive meetings without a security clearance. “That's who was basically running the show. So, Hunter basically batten down the hatches after the debate to make sure his father would only receive intel he pre-approved,” she told Shawn Ryan.

• Former DNC Official Lindy Li: The Past Four Years Were "Obama's Third Term"

  "We were told that President Biden got some sort of injection or whatever before he went on stage in North Carolina" the day after his debate with Trump, she said. "He would be like PeeWee Herman in one moment and then be like Mahatma Gandhi the next. It would just be night and day." This information suggests the next question from Shawn Ryan: "So who was running the presidency for the last four years?" "It was for sure Obama’s third term," Lindy Li said. "I don’t think that’s even a question."

Left Angst

• Let's Buy California from Trump – Denmark's Next Big Adventure

  • Thousands of Danes sign petition to buy California from U.S.

  • E-petition urges Denmark to buy California from Trump

• White House bars AP reporter from Oval Office because of policy on Gulf name

  • Associated Press statement on Oval Office access

  Today we were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office. This afternoon AP’s reporter was blocked from attending an executive order signing. It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism. Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.

  • "Report the Economy right" for Biden? No problem. Use Trump's sill names? "No, this is a Free Speech issue!" ... Almost like they don't expect Trump to punish them via extra-legal means for such independence, but knew the Biden administration would not accept any posture but full support.

• How the roots of the 'PayPal mafia' extend to apartheid South Africa

• The List of Trump's Forbidden Words That Will Get Your Paper Flagged at NSF

  • Would they be happier if "lab leak" was still on the list and they weren't allowed to publish it?

• No longer posting to Pinboard

  Folks on HN are accusing you of hating because he voted Democrat. It would be convenient for you to forget that since it would make you look like you're on the Trump retribution train. Care to explain yourself?

• DOGE's Cyberattack Against America

• Dark Money Groups Want the Government to Bet Big on Crypto

• DOGE slashes millions from Education Department research.

• As DOGE targets FEMA, the aid agency is accused of illegally destroying records - Washington Examiner

  The national security watchdog group is pressing for an investigation into whether employees at FEMA violated federal law when they apparently deleted an LGBT “pride” chat on the Microsoft Teams software just as President Donald Trump took office in January.

  • They've admitted to "don't help folks with Trump signs" disaster response, spending money on illegal immigrants in preference to disaster victims, etc... What's so heinous they'll try to hide it?

• Stuart Buck argues the indirect cost rates at the NIH are protected by current law

  In several appropriations bills (including the most recent one from 2024), Congress specifically banned NIH from doing anything to change how indirect costs are determined. That is, the federal rules on indirect costs apply to NIH as determined in mid-2017 (you might remember that mid-2017 is exactly the time when the previous Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to limit indirect costs to 10%). Moreover, no funds given to HHS can “develop or implement a modified approach to such provisions.”

  federal reimbursement of indirect costs was seen as a way to get universities to accept federal funding at all, since at the time many universities “had no interest” in federal funding “owing to fears about government intrusion in curricula, research topics, and governance.” My, how the world has changed . . .

• Elon Musk claims that there is a permanent shortage in the US

• Agencies with investigations into Musk's companies with staffing cuts

• Is This What Cancel Culture Achieved? - The Atlantic

  When Ro Khanna, the Indian American representative from California, inquired of Vance—whose wife and children are of Indian descent—whether, “for the sake of both of our kids,” he would ask Elez for an apology, Vance became apoplectic. Toward Khanna. “For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up,” he fumed on X. “Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don’t threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes. A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children.”

  After a decade and a half of progressive dominance over America’s agenda-setting institutions—corporations, universities, media, museums—during which everyone was on the lookout for the scantest evidence of racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, and every other interpersonal and systemic ill, it is not at all frivolous to ask what has been achieved. What, to put it bluntly, was all that cancel culture for? If the genuine but ill-conceived goal was to create a kinder, friendlier, more inclusive and equitable world for all (often paradoxically by means of shaming, coercion, and intimidation), the real-world effect has been an abysmal rightward overcorrection in which norms of decency have been gleefully obliterated. We have not merely been delivered back to the pre-woke era of the early 2000s. Nor is what we’re seeing some insubstantial vibe shift in manners and aesthetics, confined to the internet.

• State Department official repeatedly called for sterilization of low-IQ trash

• The Path to American Authoritarianism

• Trump’s taskforce order is latest in efforts to boost Christian nationalism

  Addressing supporters at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Trump announced a far-reaching directive that empowers Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, to lead an effort to “fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism” in government institutions.

• Trump thrives on division. Bondi gives him the right AG | Opinion

• ‘We Have To F— Trump,’ Congresswoman Says As Democrats Struggle To Form Focused Message

• Judge orders Trump admin. to restore CDC and FDA webpages by midnight

• Treasury officials: Musk ally 'mistakenly' had power to alter payments system

• Christian aid groups weigh life-threatening choices after USAID funding pause

• Former Palantir and Elon Musk Associates Are Taking over Key Government IT Roles

• DOGE Is Hacking America - Schneier on Security

  In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national security are profound.

• Trump Advisers Look to Shift US Foreign Aid to Wall Street Ally

• With Attack on Consumer Bureau, Musk Removes Obstacle to His 'X Money' Vision

• DOGE targeting GSA IT project managers

• Elon Musk and the Right Are Trying to Recast Reporting as 'Doxxing'

• Trump is the most lawless president in American history

• Federal paperwork mine in DOGE's crosshairs

• Why Silicon Valley Lost Its Patriotism - The Atlantic

  Other nations, including many of our geopolitical adversaries, understand the power of affirming shared cultural traditions, mythologies, and values in organizing the efforts of a people. They are far less shy than we are about acknowledging the human need for communal experience. The cultivation of an overly muscular and unthoughtful nationalism has risks. But the rejection of any form of life in common does as well. The reconstruction of a technological republic, in the United States and elsewhere, will require a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together. The technologies we are building, including the novel forms of AI that may challenge our present monopoly on creative control in this world, are themselves the product of a culture whose maintenance and development we now, more than ever, cannot afford to abandon. It might have been just and necessary to dismantle the old order. We should now build something together in its place.

• How Elon Musk's DOGE Took over the Education Department, one office at a time

• US State Department has budget line for 'Armored Teslas' worth $400M

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Venezuelan Migrant Sent to Guantánamo Bay Is 'Not a Criminal'

• Crimelords and spies for rogue states are working together, says Google

• FCC Investigates Radio Station over Coverage of Immigration Raid

• Arizona laptop farmer pleads guilty for funneling $17M to Kim Jong Un

• Serial swatter behind 375 violent hoaxes targeted own home to look like a victim

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Microsoft gives up on AR-for-Army gig, passes it to Anduril

• Augmented Reality – Turning Soldiers into Superheroes

• Packages from USAID found in Hezbollah safe house by IDF

  Asher told The Post that he found sniper rifles, anti-tank missiles and explosives alongside the care packages marked “USAID” while on patrol in an undisclosed village in Lebanon where the Iran-backed Hezbollah had a stronghold.

• Sniper weapons can cause irreversible brain injuries

  Both Dan and Max have been diagnosed with brain injuries. The only apparent cause: their exposure to shock waves caused by the high-powered rifles they fired during their years of sniper training. In the rush to push Iraqi soldiers through their training, some current and former Australian Army snipers were exposed to extremely high levels of damaging blast overpressure that have caused long-term damage.

• To Win the Global Money Game, America Has to Play

• US, Australia, and UK Sanction Infrastructure That Enables Ransomware Attacks

• US to swap Marc Fogel for Russian cybercrime kingpin

World

• High electricity price despite expansion in renewables in Germany

• Which left-wing NGOs does Brussels fund in Hungary with taxpayer money to go after Orbán?

• MI5 lied to courts to protect violent neo-Nazi spy

• Gov.uk insiders: AI datacenters may be pricey white elephant

• Japanese food makers step in to preserve sake breweries' legacy

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia Claims New Plasma-Based Engine Could Cut Mars Travel to Just 30 Days

• Russians Erect Mesh Net Tunnel over a Mile Long to Counter Ukrainian FPV Drones

China

• China builds space alliances in Africa as Trump cuts foreign aid

• BYD Partners with DeepSeek

• Teens across Asia migrate to Taiwan for promises of semiconductor jobs

• Chinese car journos told not to be neg. on Tesla as it sues customers and media

Health / Medicine

• Ophthalmic Complications Associated with the Drugs Semaglutide and Tirzepatide

• New obesity drugs are coming: these are the ones to watch

• Ozempic shows promise in reducing cravings for alcohol, heavy drinking

• Turmeric and Green Tea Among 6 Potentially Hepatotoxic Botanicals in US Adults

• Cancer-fighting compound shows immense potential to eradicate HIV

• The secret behind sharp vision: the benefits of tiny eye movements

• Big Ass Fans slapped with fat fine for false claims about their clean air products

• Discrepancy Between Self-Reported and Actual Caloric Intake in Obese Subjects

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• New Documentary Details Ventilator Development Efforts During COVID

  In the end, building tens of thousands of ventilators locally wasn’t required. But [John] felt that the whole experience was a pretty unique situation and a remarkable engineering challenge for him, his team, and many others.

  • After a few months, there was (quiet) admission that the ventilators were killing people who would likely have survived without them. I have yet to see anyone talk about "did we really need to spend that money on them" or "was it a bad idea to dictate an unproven treatment".

• Etiological connections between initial Covid-19 and 2 rare infectious diseases

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• My no-plastic life: I tried to cut out single-use items for a month

• California loves Dungeness crab. But whale safety concerns put industry in peril

• 500-year-old Transylvanian diaries show how the Little Ice Age changed life

• How Many More Ridiculous Green Energy Projects Will Fail?

• Effects of leachate from plastic takeout containers on cardiovascular system

  • Eating from plastic takeout containers can increase heart failure risk

• 'What would you have us do?': The plastic credits problem

• Farmers at the Forefront of Conservation