2025-03-02
stirrup fantasies, distrusted journalists, intrinsic Bayesianism, kinkier porn, inherited economy, GSA 18F axed, Trump is the Antichrist (statistically), troops to Mexican border, heralding hot plates
Horseshit
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What is vibe coding? How creators are building software with no coding knowledge
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Sex 20 times a week? New study identifies four types of romantic lover
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Stirrup nonsense sadly gets repeated a lot, but even cursory knowledge of military history indicates that it is nonsense. But, and this is what really gets me, even cursory knowledge is not apparently sufficiently prevalent. Scholarly folk—including full-grown Professors—read cavalry ineffectual before stirrups but apparently don’t stop to ask hmmm, were there shock cavalry before stirrups? Even if you had never heard of the Assyrians (what, no Bible reading?), Parthians, Sassanids or Palmyrans, surely Alexander the Great and Hannibal should be within one’s (Western) historical consciousness.
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They lost 30k lbs of honey to the LA fires and will struggle to rebuild hives
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Archaeologists Found Ancient Tools That Contradict the Timeline of Civilization
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The End of Children: Birth rates are crashing around the world
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‘Active shooter’ report prompts evacuation at National Cheerleading Association 2025 in Dallas
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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The Press Falls to Another Record Low in Public Trust
the latest survey from Gallup shows that the media hit another all-time low. What is most impressive is that plummeting readers, revenues, and layoffs have done little to convince the mainstream media that the problem is not the public but themselves. The only institution with a lower level of public trust is Congress, and that says a lot. It is like beating Ebola as the preferred communicable disease.Some 69 percent of Americans now say that they have no or little trust in the media. Only 31 percent say that they have a great deal or fair amount of trust.
Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll decried how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Stanford journalism professor Ted Glasser insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.” Thus, “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.” The Washington Post’s former executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward released the results of their interviews with over 75 media leaders and concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.”
For the moment, it seems like journalists are content to write for each other and about 30 percent of the public. The echo chamber is getting smaller and smaller. So are the staffs on the outlets. Without public trust, the media is just talking to itself as the public turns to citizen journalists and new media on blogs and social media. As someone who has worked for three networks and written as a columnist for three decades, the decline of American media has been painful to watch. The industry has operated like a ship of fools with no regard for their viewers or readers. However, we need the media. The press plays a central role in our democracy as reflected in the press protections afforded under the First Amendment.
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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People make fun of techie/rationalist/effective-altruist types for many weird obsessions, like stimulants or meditation or polyamory or psychedelics or seed oils or air quality or re-deriving all of philosophy from scratch. Some of these seem fair to me, or at least understandable. But the single most common point of mockery is surely the obsession with “Bayesian” reasoning. Many people seem to see this as some screwy hipster fad, some alternate mode of logic that all these weirdos have decided to trust instead of normal human thinking. This drives me crazy. Because everyone uses Bayesian reasoning all the time, even if they don’t think of it that way. Arguably, we’re born Bayesian and do it instinctively. It’s normal and natural and—I daresay—almost boring. “Bayesian reasoning” is just a slight formalization of everyday thought. It’s not a trend. It’s forever. But it’s forever like arithmetic is forever: Strange to be obsessed with it, but really strange to make fun of someone for using it.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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How fast can you open 1000 files? – Daniel Lemire's blog
On my macBook, I cannot open much more than 12,000 files per second. My Linux server scales up to 40,000 files per second. In some cases, opening thousands of files could become a hard bottleneck. Throwing more threads at the problem might not work.
- Linux has tunable kernel parameters that can speed that way up. "create new" is more expensive than "open existing" as well.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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The first quarter is on track for negative GDP growth, Atlanta Fed says
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Dynasty behind US egg giant looks to cash in as profits soar amid bird flu
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Citigroup Customer the Richest Person in History with $81T Transfer
- The money never actually existed, but this is modern media, fun is more important than accurate.
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Nonprofit under investigation after DOGE spotlight, millions in waste
this contract cancellation is just the latest chapter in scrutiny surrounding Family Endeavors. A review of the partnership between HHS, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the nonprofit reveals years of controversy, including investigations into the misuse of taxpayer funds. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) inspector general concluded in 2022 that millions of dollars were wasted due to the government contracts awarded to Family Endeavors.
Trump
Democrats
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Problems with a huge database of voter information that effectively functions as the central nervous system of the Democratic Party grew so worrisome last summer that top Democrats staged an extraordinary intervention to keep it running through the November election, according to multiple people involved. Had it collapsed, the party’s entire get-out-the-vote operation could have been temporarily crippled, forcing canvassers to work with pen and paper instead of smartphones, and leaving campaigns effectively blind — unaware of which doors to knock on and which phones to call. To avoid such a catastrophe, a handful of engineers from the Democratic National Committee and the Kamala Harris campaign scrubbed in, spending months to ensure the database stayed afloat, the people said. The private company that runs the database warned some Democratic groups that it could not handle the large volume of data being uploaded and downloaded. An outside entity raced to install a workaround, while a wealthy Democratic financier, Allen Blue, was asked to fund an emergency engineering operation to keep data flowing.
Left Angst
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Bezos-Owned Washington Post Gives Readers a Guide on How To Boycott Bezos-Owned Amazon
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Gutting NIH: Cutting senior scientists, summer internships cancelled
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Coastal Economies Rely on NOAA, from Maine to Florida, Texas and Alaska
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"The General Services Administration deleted 18F, a government tech consultancy that helps other agencies with their technology, early Saturday morning.
18F has consistently saved other agencies money, and is seen as an example of modern government that other agencies (and governments) should learn from. It's an insane agency to dismantle. But the way 18F worked - human-centered, in the open, with a real eye for inclusive change that saved real resources - is antithetical to Musk's mindset of believing yourself to be the smartest person in the room and forcing people to use your systems based on your own values.
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Musk ally is moving to close office behind free tax filing program at IRS
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How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy
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Federal employees begin to receive second work accomplishment email
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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The key here isn’t just that Trump is holding the cards and that Zelensky needs him — not the other way around — it’s that Trump is negotiating from a fortified position of “America first.” Everything at the table is subject to that one point, and if anything drifts away from that, then Trump pushes back and pushes back until he’s all the way gone from the table. Zelensky acted like a petulant child who showed no respect to the country that had given him the money for his war while trying to secure more, and Trump saw no value, not in the war, and not in Zelensky’s disrespect.
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Pentagon orders up to 3k troops, Stryker combat vehicles to Mexico border
World
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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New stove that plugs into a normal wall outlet could be major gain for health
Yaker was all in when he learned of a California startup called Copper that was manufacturing an electric stove and oven that could simply be plugged into a regular outlet. The sleek, standard four-burner electric induction stove runs on 120 volts, meaning there is no need to pay a licensed electrician thousands of dollars to rewire to 240 volts, which many electric stoves require. “In terms of, ‘Is this the way to go?’ It’s a no brainer,” Yaker said, demonstrating a quart of water that boiled in about two minutes. His apartment is full of books, many on energy and climate change, and the energy efficiency was a motivation, too.
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What forecasters know so far about the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season
- It'll be "the worst ever" until it isn't. Regardless, the cause will be a lack of human guilt.
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Ageing nuclear plant in Florida at risk from climate crisis, advocates warn