2025-03-03

age vs youth, Tesla protests, Mozilla fan fluff, how Pentiums multiplied by 3, Firefly sticks lunar landing, Trump's crypto reserve, "US out of the UN", 50 years of white men's complaints, friendly fire

etc

• Passing the Buck: The story of the 2022 Wings Over Dallas air show collision

• 'Your showerhead is lying to you'

• SC governor declares state of emergency as wildfires prompt mass evacuations

• The 'Time Lords' racing to tackle the threat of GPS jamming

Horseshit

• Turning car and helicopter exhaust into thermoelectric energy

• AI Will Upend a Basic Assumption About How Companies Are Organized

• We've figured out the basics of a shape-shifting, T-1000-style material

• I'm a neuroscientist. Here's the surprising truth about TikTok 'brain rot'

• Gen Z are the hardest to work with – even Gen Z managers say

• 'I want him to be prepared': Parents are teaching their gen Alpha kids to use AI

• Young adults increasingly struggling offline turn to ASMR videos, report finds

• The Millennial virtue economy is dead

Musk

• Tesla Takedown: Sell Your Teslas

  • Tesla owners offload cars after Musk's fascist-style salutes

• Tesla store gets taken over by Musk protesters, 9 people arrested

  • Protesters gather outside Tesla showrooms to rally against Musk's role with DOGE

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Is philosophy too Western for its own good?

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Cornell Announces a Hiring Pause

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after reneging on promises to not sell their data

  • What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

  • Trust in Firefox and Mozilla Is Gone – Let's Talk Alternatives

• Microsoft global outage left thousands unable to access email

• More than 30 Apex Legends voice actors refuse to sign agreement

• The UK will neither confirm nor deny that it's killing encryption

• Google shares details on its plan to ditch SMS codes

• Nvidia Is Finding Great Success with Vulkan Machine Learning

• Gurman: Future Apple cellular modems likely to be integrated with main chipset

• Blender made movie Flow takes Oscar

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• (2022) The very weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option – Interesting things

  When ordering a HP machine with FreeDOS what you are getting is the following: + A Linux installation on the “bare metal” which boots a VM + This VM boots either an old version of FreeDOS or + An old version of Linux in a kiosk mode

• The Pentium contains a complicated circuit to multiply by three

  this multiplier is a small part of the Pentium's floating-point multiplier circuit. In particular, the Pentium multiplies two 64-bit numbers using base-8 multiplication, which is faster than binary multiplication. However, multiplying by 3 needs to be handled as a special case. Moreover, since the rest of the multiplication process can't start until the multiplication by 3 finishes, this circuit must be very fast. If you've studied digital design, you may have heard of techniques such as carry lookahead, Kogge-Stone addition, and carry-select addition. I'll explain how the ×3 circuit combines all these techniques to maximize performance.

  The downside to radix-8 multiplication is that multiplying by a number from 0 to 7 is much more complicated than multiplying by 0 or 1, which is almost trivial. Fortunately, there are some shortcuts. Note that multiplying by 2 is the same as shifting the number to the left by 1 bit position, which is very easy in hardware—you wire each bit one position to the left. Similarly, to multiply by 4, shift the multiplicand two bit positions to the left. Multiplying by 7 seems inconvenient, but there is a trick, known as Booth's multiplication algorithm. Instead of multiplying by 7, you add 8 times the number and subtract the number, ending up with 7 times the number. You might think this requires two steps, but the trick is to multiply by one more in the digit to the left, so you get the factor of 8 without an additional step. (A base-10 analogy is that if you want to multiply by 19, you can multiply by 20 and subtract the multiplicand.) Thus, you can get the ×7 by subtracting. Similarly, for a ×6 term, you can subtract a ×2 multiple and add ×8 in the next digit. Thus, the only difficult multiple is ×3. (What about ×5? If you can compute ×3, you can subtract that from ×8 to get ×5.) To summarize, the Pentium's radix-8 Booth's algorithm is a fast way to multiply, but it requires a special circuit to produce the ×3 multiple of the multiplicand.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• China's DeepSeek claims theoretical cost-profit ratio of 545% per day

• The Humane AI Pin Has Been Brought Back to Life

• China's Honor promises a 10B dollar investment in AI

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Firefly Aerospace Successfully Lands on the Moon

  • Firefly's Blue Ghost becomes second private spacecraft with moon landing

  • Private lunar lander Blue Ghost touches down on the moon

  • Firefly 'Blue Ghost' lunar lander touches down on the moon

  • US firm Firefly scores its first moon landing with Blue Ghost spacecraft

• An small microbial ecosystem has formed on the International Space Station

Crypto con games

• Trump – America's "first crypto president" – to host summit on the currency

• Trump calls for creation of 'crypto strategic reserve'

  • Trump announces strategic crypto reserve including Bitcoin, Solana, XRP and more

  • Trump announces US crypto reserve

• Donald Trump supporters lose $12B after his meme coin collapses

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Sergey Brin says 60 hours a week is the 'sweet spot'

• Examining the Economic Crisis in Farm Country

• Hudson River Trading has built a $8B global powerhouse

• The lost boys: how a generation of young men fell behind women on pay

• Is America Losing the Ability to Grow Its Own Food?

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The Trump administration may exclude government spending from GDP

• Big Consulting Bosses Meet with Trump Officials to Save Contracts

Trump

• Designating English as the Official Language of the United States

Left Angst

• Elon Musk publicly supports call for US to exit NATO and the UN

  • Elon Musk backs US withdrawal from NATO alliance

  • Elon Musk publicly supports call for US to exit NATO, UN

  • Elon Musk Pushes for U.S. Withdrawal from the UN and NATO with Blunt Remark

• Two senators question Air Force nominee's SpaceX connections

• America says there are 'extraordinary' economic opportunities in Russia. Huh?

• Doge plans to fire nearly all CFPB staff

• In news deserts, Trump won in a landslide

• The NIH is being slashed and burned, not "reformed"

• Women are not more Leftist, per se. Rather, the specific variety of Leftism that is currently riding high is extremely well suited to feminine preferences

• Mark Cuban offers to fund 18f

• Understanding Doge as Procurement Capture

• FAA Officials Ordered Staff to Find Funding for Elon Musk's Starlink

• Welcome to the Zero Sum Era. Now How Do We Get Out?

• How DOGE detonated a crisis at NNSA

• 'America is going down': China can capitalise on damage caused by admin

• Kremlin says US foreign policy pivot 'largely coincides with our vision'

• What Game Is Jeff Bezos Playing?

• Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining? - WSJ

  For 50 years, we’ve been hearing from men who feel threatened by the gains of women and minorities. Now that the manosphere is in charge, the victim mentality has to go.

  Racism and sexism are as old as time. But the “oppressed white man” trope is a relatively modern invention, with roots in the civil-rights and women’s-rights victories of the 1960s. Protests and lawsuits followed, with aggrieved white men turning the language of civil rights on its head. “Talk about rights; we’ve got no rights!” a crowd of white Detroit police officers chanted in 1975, protesting a court ruling in favor of the department’s relatively few Black and female officers. The TV character Archie Bunker, the oppressed white guy’s avatar, captured that spirit in a 1974 “All in the Family” episode, when he complained about a female colleague whose pay was equal to his: “What’s the point of a man working hard all his life, trying to get someplace, if all he’s gonna do is wind up equal?!”

• Trump Is Rootin' for Putin

• Doge presses to check federal benefits payments against IRS tax records

• Warren Buffett calls Trump's tariffs a tax on goods

• Pentagon guts national security program that harnessed social science

• Stripping Trump of a key weapon – the English language

• A Guide to China's Role in the Fentanyl Crisis as Trump Targets Beijing

• The Putinization of America

• America faces a Trumpian economic slowdown

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• German tourist held indefinitely in San Diego area immigrant detention facility

• Will Cutting the BAC Limit to .05 Really Make Our Roads Safer? Utah’s experiment with stricter drunk driving laws has led to more fatalities, not fewer. The push for lower BAC limits is missing the real problem.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• U.S. halts offensive cyber operations against Moscow

  • Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Offensive Cyberoperations Against Russia

  • Russia is not a significant cyber threat to the U.S. anymore

• A CIA informant stopped Taiwan from developing nuclear weapons

• The Fall of the USS Gettysburg | RealClearDefense

  At around 0300, on Sunday, 22 December, the Aegis cruiser USS Gettysburg (CG 64) shot down an F/A-18F preparing to land on USS Harry S Truman (CVN 75) while operating in the Red Sea. The Carrier Strike Group to which each of these units was assigned was an element of the U.S.-led Operation Prosperity Guardian, assigned to protect Red Sea merchant traffic from Yemen-based Houthi attacks. First, we all need to understand that there is only one man who knows what happened on that day, and that is the commanding officer of Gettysburg. Apart from the F/A-18F crew, which possesses a very small but critical piece of the puzzle, everyone else is just an observer, a post-exercise armchair quarterback.

  By the time that the Navy, writ large, understands all the errors and failures that contributed to this particular chain of events, a standard strategy may well have been enacted, i.e., “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.” You see, the Navy doesn’t like to discuss “family business” with taxpayers, who may ask awkward, and potentially embarrassing, questions. It is much easier to pin the tail on one specific, commanding officer donkey.

• Mexico sends 29 drug cartel figures to the US

World

• Countries compete to keep skilled young workers

• Two Small Adversaries of Russia and China Are Swapping Notes to Survive

• Brazilians hail strength of democracy as Bolsonaro is called to account

• Ban pornography depicting strangulation, review urges UK ministers

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• The Budapest Memorandum and the Ukraine War

• Statement by Weimar+ on the Support to Ukraine

• EU to help Ukraine replace Musk's Starlink

Health / Medicine

• Scientists describe new type of fat in human bellies

• Concerning links between HPV infection and male infertility

• Stanford doctor explains how cannabis addiction can destroy lives

• Changes in brain's 'sugar shield' could be key to understanding effects of aging

• She's a Foot Soldier in America's Losing War with Chronic Disease

• Doctors warn against 'measles parties' to intentionally expose children

  • Amid Texas's measles outbreak, vaccine resistance hardens in Seminole

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• The Next Pandemic Could Be Engineered. A New Program Aims to Stop It

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Six cyclones swirl simultaneously in southern hemisphere

• UK's food system is broken. A green new deal for agriculture could be revolutionary

• The release of beavers into English waterways is to be allowed for the first time in centuries, the Guardian can reveal.

• Deep Groundwater Might Be a Sustainable Solution to the Water Crisis

• Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet

  • "They delved too deep, and woke that which they could not then put down"

• America's avocado obsession is destroying Mexico's forests. Is there a fix?

• Why Vermont farmers are using urine on their crops

• Palm phytoliths in subarctic Canada imply ice-free winters 48M years ago