2025-03-26
Horseshit
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Space pirates have their sights set on the 'high seas' of Earth orbit
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Plans are underway to create "Freedom Cities" around the United States on large open tracts of protected federal lands, following in the footsteps of California Forever, Próspera, Yatai New City and other law and regulation free Special Economic Zone safe-havens for anarcho-capitalists, libertarians and criminals.
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The childhood friends behind the most audacious sports-memorabilia heists
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I once read some sort of diary or will written by the head of a Roman family in a besieged city that was about to fall, and it has always stuck with me. What struck me was how nonchalant the man was. He and his wife and kids were probably about to be butchered (and the wife raped), and his attitude was sort of… “this sucks, but oh well, these things happen. I hope the afterlife is better.” I genuinely believe that people in past generations just didn’t care about their own lives as much. There wasn’t as much good to live for in the present, so the loss of time or life wasn’t as big of a deal. Plus, more people believed in an afterlife, so the cost of death was significantly lower.
- Many modern people go to work every day at jobs they hate, to support families (or just habits) that bore them, because "that's what we do".
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You Can Make Amber Fossils in 24 Hours, Instead of Millions of Years
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Foie Gras That Skips the Force-Feeding Is Developed by Physicists
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United Airlines plane turns around after pilot forgets passport
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Toyota's 'Circular Factory' Idea Could Be a Great Alternative to Junk Yards
Obit
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Former CIA agent: The truth about manipulation - Big Think
Generally, we think people who manipulate us are bad guys, but people who motivate us are heroes, but the truth is far more complex, argues Bustamante. “The skills that go into both motivation and manipulation are almost the same skills. The same level of persuasion, the same level of influence, the same level of charisma and dynamic creative thinking drives us to both be manipulated and be motivated.”
- I would add 'Marketing" as well.
Musk
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Tesla's Europe sales drop nearly 45% amid row over Musk's Trump links
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Tesla's February market share in Europe drops despite EV pickup
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Tesla's all-time net income is still below Elon Musk's $55B compensation package
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X’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, has left the company
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FBI puts together Tesla task force as counter-protest violence ramps up
Electric / Self Driving cars
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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To Win Trust and Admiration, Fix Your Microphone | Scientific American
the colleague whom Scholl normally agreed with had been using a junky built-in microphone on an old laptop, whereas the one with whom he typically disagreed had called in from a professional-grade home-recording studio. Scholl began to suspect that it was the quality of their sound, rather than the content of their arguments, that had swayed his judgment.
- George Lucas demonstrated this to the world with his movies and "THX certified"; unfortunately the lessons were not understood and have been forgotten. sound is important.
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Napster pioneered music sharing over 25 years ago. It just got bought for $207M
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Cronenberg says Brutalist AI controversy was 'campaign against' film by rivals
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A Signal Update Fends Off a Phishing Technique Used in Russian Espionage
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Apple barred from Google antitrust trial, putting $20B search deal on the line
A new ruling from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals affirms that Apple cannot participate in Google's upcoming antitrust hearing, which could leave a multibillion-dollar hole in Apple's balance sheet. The judges in the case say Apple simply waited too long to get involved.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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VoWiFi with Asterisk - Open Source IMS Client - Open Source Mobile Communications
Using this IMS-enabled version of asterisk and a SIM card in a smart card reader, you can make and receive voice calls using a cell phone number/subscription - without using any cell phone, cell phone network or even VoWiFi whatsoever. The IMS-enabled asterisk will establish an IP connection to the ePDG (evolved packet data gateway) of the cellular operator via any form of wired or wireless Internet access.
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Killing Mosquitoes With Freaking Drones, And Sonar
The angular resolution that you can resolve with a beam-forming array is limited by the distance between the microphone elements, and traditional ultrasonic devices like we use in cars are kinda bulky. So here comes a hack: the TDK T3902 MEMS microphones work just fine up into the ultrasound range, even though they’re designed for human hearing. Combining 380 of these in a very tightly packed array, and pushing all of their parallel data into an FPGA for computation, lead to the LeSonar2. Bigger transducers put out ultrasound pulses, the FPGA does some very intense filtering and combining of the output of each microphone, and the resulting 3D range data is sent out over USB.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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OpenAI reshuffles leadership as Sam Altman pivots to technical focus
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China's open-source embrace upends conventional wisdom around AI
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You can now download the source code that sparked the AI boom - Ars Technica
On Thursday, Google and the Computer History Museum (CHM) jointly released the source code for AlexNet, the convolutional neural network (CNN) that many credit with transforming the AI field in 2012 by proving that "deep learning" could achieve things conventional AI techniques could not. Deep learning, which uses multi-layered neural networks that can learn hierarchical representations directly from data without explicit programming, represented a significant departure from many earlier traditional AI approaches that relied on hand-crafted rules and features.
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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Mysterious Blue Spiral Lights Up Skies Over Sweden and Europe | Sweden Herald
What lies behind it is not yet known, but one explanation could be the launch of a new Space X rocket. A similar phenomenon with a blue spiral was seen over Alaska two years ago. The spiral was then said to have been caused by excess fuel from a Space X rocket that was launched.
Stargazers from as far north as Denmark and as far south as Milan in Italy noted the cloud-like spiral was visible for several minutes before fading. The Met Office explained in a post on X that the phenomenon was likely caused by frozen exhaust smoke from Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
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As preps continue, it's looking more likely NASA will fly the Artemis II mission
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The International Space Station Is Too Clean, and Astronauts Are Getting Sick
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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23andMe is filing for bankruptcy. Here's what it means for your genetic data
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Software maker SAP unseats Novo Nordisk as Europe's largest company
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Boeing seeks to withdraw guilty plea deal in deadly crashes of 737 MAX jets
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5 years after Covid, the return-to-office push is stronger than ever
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Want to Invest in a Private Company Like SpaceX? All It Takes Is $5k
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Producing wafers at TSMC Arizona is only 10% more expensive than in Taiwan
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Cerebras IPO further delayed as US national security review drags on
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931 Laid off at Block (Formerly Square) based on performance
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Delaware set to soften governance laws on threat of corporate exodus
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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With No Immigration, US Population Will Fall Over 30% by 2100 | RealClearPolitics
In the high case, which assumes approximately 1.5 million new immigrants each year, the population continues to grow for the remainder of the century, reaching 435 million by 2100. That represents an annual growth rate of approximately 0.033%. However, it is important to note that the growth rate gradually declines over that period and approaches zero by the end of the century. In the low case, which assumes about 500,000 new immigrants each year, the population peaks in 2043 at just under 346 million, representing a 2.8% increase from the current population. By the end of the century, the population will fall to 319 million, a 5% drop.
But the scenario that really caught my attention was the zero immigration projection. In this scenario, the U.S. population is projected to have already peaked and will decline by over 30% by 2100, reaching approximately 225 million. That is approximately the U.S. population in 1980. After 2040, the population is expected to decline by approximately 1 million residents annually. By the end of the century, the loss is estimated to be over 2 million annually.
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San Francisco folks are installing bus stops because the city failed to do it
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Speaker Johnson floats eliminating Fed courts as GOP ramps up attacks on judges
- Well, lessee; it was OK to publish their addresses and protest at their homes and follow their families around just a few months ago; so how much worse can the "attacks on judges" get really?
Trump
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White House Reviewing Signal Use After War Plans Chat Leak
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'Pathetic European free-loading': What was said in Trump officials' group chat
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Trump administration accidentally texted secret bombing plans to a reporter
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Here's What the Media Won't Tell You About the Atlantic Hit Piece – PJ Media
“Well, sure. I mean, it’s a shocking thing, and you know, they’ve admitted that it was a mistake and admitted that it’s authentic, so they’re owning up to it,” Jennings said. “I think they’re still, based on what I’ve heard tonight, trying to figure out how it happened. I’m not sure that National Security Adviser Waltz even knows Goldberg. In fact, I don’t believe he knows him and has never met him.” Jennings then laid out critical facts that The Atlantic conveniently omitted. “I did learn a few things in some of my conversations, if you're interested. One is that the Signal program was preloaded on a number of devices and agency computers in this circuit when they got there. So, in their view, it was already in use.” That’s an interesting detail. Was this a setup by someone on the inside? In fact, it was Joe Biden who authorized the use of Signal for government communications, according to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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The Signal chats were set up after the "Salt Typhoon" news broke, no?
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How secure is Signal? Cyber experts weigh in on Trump admins use of the app
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A Pentagon-wide email recently went out warning about Signal's vulnerability
President Trump's Ukraine and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was in Moscow, where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, when he was included in a group chat with more than a dozen other top administration officials — and inadvertently, one journalist — on the messaging app Signal, a CBS News analysis of open-source flight information and Russian media reporting has revealed. Russia has repeatedly tried to compromise Signal, a popular commercial messaging platform that many were shocked to learn senior Trump administration officials had used to discuss sensitive military planning. Witkoff arrived in Moscow shortly after noon local time on March 13, according to data from the flight tracking website FlightRadar24, and Russian state media broadcast video of his motorcade leaving Vnukovo International Airport shortly after. About 12 hours later, he was added to the "Houthi PC small group" chat on Signal, along with other top Trump administration officials, to discuss an imminent military operation against the Houthis in Yemen, according to The Atlantic magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who was included on the chat for reasons that remain unclear.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), initiated a particularly contentious exchange with Gabbard over her supposed role in accidentally discussing war plans in a chat room that included The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. He asked whether classified materials were shared in the group chat. “There was no classified material that was shared in that chat,” Gabbard said before Warner cut her off to ask why she was not sharing the details of the discussions with the Senate.
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White House Says Gold Reserves May Be Used to Purchase Bitcoin
Democrats
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Biden's Perjury - by Techno Fog - The Reactionary
while this matter has concluded, and while Biden fades into obscurity (the Democrats don’t miss him), we thought his written responses deserved publication. It would have been nice to not have to deal with over a year of government delays - even with ongoing litigation - but this is the hand we’re dealt.
Left Angst
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(Jan 2025) Why Liberals Struggle to Cope With Epochal Change - The Atlantic
Living through such moments in history teaches one many things, but the most important is the sheer speed of change: People can totally alter their views and political identity overnight; what only yesterday was considered unthinkable seems self-evident today. The shift is so profound that people soon find their old assumptions and choices unfathomable. Translated to this moment: How, just six months ago, could any sane person have believed that an aging and unpopular Joe Biden could be reelected? Trump captured the public imagination not because he had a better plan for how to win the war in Ukraine or manage globalization, but because he understood that the world of yesterday could be no more. The United States’ postwar political identity has vanished into the abyss of the ballot box. This Trump administration may succeed or fail on its own terms, but the old world will not return. Even most liberals do not want it back. Few Americans today are comfortable with the notion of American exceptionalism.
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OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt etc., sues to save funding from Trump cuts
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Surrendering to Authoritarianism - The Chris Hedges Report
Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall headlong into authoritarianism. rmstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded throughout the Trump administration.
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Gird Yer Loins: Progs Schedule April 5 as Nationwide 'Day of Stompy Feet and Waah' – HotAir
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The Nadir of the Climate Change Movement
Despite billions spent for climate crisis agitprop, the backing of a compliant media, the surrender of much of big business (including many fossil fuel companies), and the endless braying of opportunist politicians, opinion surveys consistently find that the public does not buy the “climate crisis,” ranking it at the bottom or next to the bottom of their major issue concerns. owns predicted in his article—written less than a year after the first Earth Day launched the modern environmental activist movement—that the issue-attention cycle for environmental issues would be longer than for most other matters, which has certainly proved to be the case for climate change.
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Pro-Palestinian student and permanent US resident sues to halt deportation
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Elite US law firms brace for more retaliation from Donald Trump
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Long waits, waves of calls, web crashes: Social Security is breaking down
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Child labor protections could soon be rolled back in Florida. Why?
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Florida to consider relaxing child labour laws to fill vacant jobs
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Allowing teens to work real jobs sounds good to me.
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Plaintiffs Challenging Trump’s DEI Order Are Trying To Game The Judicial System.
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$3.55M in US Government funding for Mozilla's programs has been canceled
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Judge who blocked Trump deportations took junket to event with anti-Trump speakers, sponsor.
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The richest men in the country are in the final stages of a 40-year plan to kill America and crown themselves kings. It’s not a conspiracy anymore: they’re bragging about it. And they’re convinced they’ve got you too distracted to care.
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“Ludicrous” Situation: Jeffrey Epstein Case Redaction Takes Over FBI’s New York Office | Vanity Fair
multiple sources with knowledge of the matter say that one priority at the bureau’s New York field office is taking precedence over all others: the review and redaction of sensitive information in the Jeffrey Epstein case files, to prepare for possible publication. “It’s literally all hands on deck,” one source familiar with the matter tells me, adding that dozens and dozens of agents are working around the clock on the case, instead of on their regular duties. “I even saw an agent walking in with a pillow,” the source added. The New York field office is an epicenter for FBI counterintelligence, counterterrorism, public corruption, international drug trafficking, and financial crime investigations. The redeployment of agents to comb over the file of the notorious sex trafficker Epstein, who died nearly six years ago, is an indication of the Justice Department’s priorities in this second Trump administration. One FBI veteran calls it a “ludicrous” situation.
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Saying 'pandemic is over,' NIH institute starts cutting Covid-19 research
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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US rejects Colorado River water request from Mexico in first since 1944
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US visit to Greenland is unacceptable, Danish prime minister says
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The Army wants to get the load soldiers carry down to 55 pounds
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Secretive Chinese network tries to lure fired federal workers
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(PDF) Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community
Both state and nonstate actors pose multiple immediate threats to the Homeland and U.S. national interests. Terrorist and transnational criminal organizations are directly threatening our citizens. Cartels are largely responsible for the more than 52,000 U.S. deaths from synthetic opioids in the 12 months ending in October 2024 and helped facilitate the nearly three million illegal migrant arrivals in 2024, straining resources and putting U.S. communities at risk. A range of cyber and intelligence actors are targeting our wealth, critical infrastructure, telecom, and media. Nonstate groups are often enabled, both directly and indirectly, by state actors, such as China and India as sources of precursors and equipment for drug traffickers. State adversaries have weapons that can strike U.S. territory, or disable vital U.S. systems in space, for coercive aims or actual war. These threats reinforce each other, creating a vastly more complex and dangerous security environment.
Russia, China, Iran and North Korea—individually and collectively—are challenging U.S. interests in the world by attacking or threatening others in their regions, with both asymmetric and conventional hard power tactics, and promoting alternative systems to compete with the United States, primarily in trade, finance, and security. They seek to challenge the United States and other countries through deliberate campaigns to gain an advantage, while also trying to avoid direct war. Growing cooperation between and among these adversaries is increasing their fortitude against the United States, the potential for hostilities with any one of them to draw in another, and pressure on other global actors to choose sides.
World
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
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Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine | MIT Technology Review
Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman. Pluripotent stem cells, one of the earliest cell types to form during development, can give rise to every type of cell in the adult body. Recently, researchers have used these stem cells to create structures that seem to mimic the early development of actual human embryos. At the same time, artificial uterus technology is rapidly advancing, and other pathways may be opening to allow for the development of fetuses outside of the body. By integrating these different technologies and using established genetic techniques to inhibit brain development, it is possible to envision the creation of “bodyoids”— a potentially unlimited source of human bodies,
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Risk of Becoming Allergic to Meat After a Tick Bite May Be Higher Than Thought