2025-04-09
Cool
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Someone Made a 4x4 Honda Prelude by Adding a Second Engine
It’s sick, and I have so many questions. What’s it like to drive? Each engine makes 200 horsepower stock, so we’re looking at about 400 horsepower total excluding the modifications. The second engine adds weight while dramatically shifting the Prelude’s weight distribution, which is normally heavily front-biased, so odds are this is a truly special car to handle—especially with a pair of limited-slip differentials.
Horseshit
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The dire wolf has not been brought back from extinction
five of those 20 changes are based on mutations known to produce light coats in grey wolves, Shapiro told New Scientist. Only 15 are based on the dire wolf genome directly and are intended to alter the animals’ size, musculature and ear shape. It will be a year or so before it’s clear if those changes have had the intended effects on the genetically modified animals, says Shapiro.
It all comes down to how you define species, says Shapiro. "We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”
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Experts dispute claims dire wolf brought back from extinction
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"custom designed neo-species" is cool enough; but i think part of the heavy sales pitch is an attempt to sidestep the discussion about playing God. "see? these are 'de-extinct' not 'de-novo'". And of course a lot of it is just rank money grubbing.
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‘Vabbing’ and other unexpected ways to attract love | Toronto Sun
“Vabbing” is an unexpected way to use pheromones as perfume — with the trend showing how women are using their vaginal discharge, dabbed behind the ears and on their neck and wrists, as a way to attract mates. It has been around for years (it’s suspected the luring technique dates back centuries), but the term was first coined by sex expert Shan Boodram, who claimed she had been using the method to attract men for more than a decade.
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Kids with Smartphones Less Depressed, Anxious, Bullied Than Peers Without Them
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Sweet, sticky and sold out: why is there such a craze for Dubai chocolate?
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More Drowning Children - by Scott Alexander
these two descriptive theories - the Copenhagen hypothesis, and the declining marginal utility of moral goods - do a good job explaining our intuitions. But some people leap from there to saying they’re also the right prescriptive theories - they determine what morality really is, and what rules we should follow. I think this is a gigantic error, the worst thing you could possibly do in this situation. These are essentially rules for looking good to other people. To follow them is to say that you will always optimize for seeming cool, no matter how many people you have to kill in order to do it.
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An unused nuclear power plant became home to a world-class acoustics lab
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Titanic scan reveals ground-breaking details of ship's final hours
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Superfluous men with superfluous time rarely, if ever, conduce to social stability. That is why the Romans provided the urban citizenry with bread and circuses. It is why Protestant reformers took such pains to root out idleness, lest the poor fall prey to the Devil’s temptations. But material progress always creates the potential for excess free time. Writing in the early 1920s, the American philosopher Alfred H. Lloyd advised that “it is well to reflect that at least of equal importance with the great problem of work there is, pressing for a reckoning and obtrusively obvious to those who will open their eyes or do not insist on closing them, the problem of leisure”. Leisure can become a threat to social order if people are unable to channel it in healthy directions. That is why John Dewey believed that a “truly democratic society” in the modern industrial age must ensure that “all enjoy a worthy leisure”.
Yet conservative critics have always dismissed such ideals as delusional. “It is ridiculous to think that if people worked just 15 or 20 hours a week, they would use their leisure to cut marble or struggle with a musical score,” Richard Posner writes. “If they lacked consumer products and services to fill up their time they would brawl, steal, overeat, drink and sleep late.” Work, regardless of whether it serves any social purpose, is a necessary evil. Without such a reservoir for humanity’s unbridled passions and surplus energies, civilisation would soon fall to barbarism.
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Did a private equity fire truck manufacturer consolidation worsen the LA fires?
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97% of drivers want in-car payment system for tolls, parking, charging
Musk
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Samsung trumps USA's tariffs by making displays in Mexico, elsewhere if needed
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Nintendo boss Doug Bowser explains the $80 price for 'Mario Kart World'
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Apple Customers Dash to Stores to Buy iPhones Ahead of Tariffs
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A begrudging defense of Nintendo's "Game-Key cards" for the Switch 2
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Under 16 no longer allowed to livestream on Instagram without parental consent
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Why I Killed My Beloved Electron Beam Project
The number one reason this project was killed was actually because of powder handling is a nightmare. titanium, aluminum, inconel powders are all highly combustible, and all health hazards if inhaled. they’re respirable, toxic, and capable of igniting from static discharge or friction
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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The AI Race Has Gotten Crowded–and China Is Closing in on the US
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the part about the Meta VP of AI resigning checks out. Joelle Pineau, just abruptly quit Meta. I have known her for years to be someone who cares about the integrity of machine learning research; I often point to a wonderful piece of work of hers (done at McGill before she joined Meta) called the AI Replicability Checklist. Her leaving fits awfully well with the reddit report. What is rumored to have happened would be an absolute violation of Pineau’s values.
If the juicing of benchmarks and “blending” of test data is the primary scandal, there is a secondary scandal too: a bunch of well-paid pundits, such as Roose, Newton, and Cowen, are failing to reckon with the repeated failures of massive companies to build GPT-5. The reality, reported or otherwise, is that large language models are no longer living up to expectations, and its purveyors appear to be making dodgy choices to keep that fact from becoming obvious.
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Sam Altman says AI will make coders 10x more productive, not replace them
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P&G finds AI could make Pringles tastier, spice up Old Spice, sharpen Gillette
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A16Z seeks to raise $20B megafund amid global interest in US AI startups
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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China’s megaconstellation launches could litter orbit for more than a century, analysts warn.
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This is the dumbest argument against private space flight yet
Blue Origin has a number of successful flights and has made a lot of press by including celebrities like William Shatner. Now, they’re planning one with an all-female crew, including pop singer Katy Perry. Yes, it’s a blatant PR move, as evidenced by the fact that every member is a woman and includes a celebrity. I’m not a huge fan of PR stunts. However, I can see this and recognize it for what it is, namely, a way to excite people about space again.
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I Used to Work at NASA. I Have Some Insights About Sex in Space
“I don’t have authority to disclose that information,” she said with a smirk. Then she turned away and began giggling like a maniac. She’d said it without saying it: Yes, sex happens. Yes, NASA can hear them. And no, they’ll never admit it.
But at NASA, withholding information was the norm. I saw cover-ups firsthand when, in 2017, I presented at South by Southwest, the high-profile technology and media conference. NASA HQ sent me a list of talking points that included instructions to “Pivot away from the subject of the question to give the reporter a related NASA positive.” A week later, when Donald Trump proposed funding cuts for three NASA Earth Science missions as well as NASA’s Education Office, HQ responded with, “Don’t say anything or respond to any emails. Celebrate funding for Mars and solar system instead.”
If NASA wasn’t so uptight, I could provide more specifics. But as an insider, I’m now convinced it’s true: They do have sex on the Space Station. Just don’t expect NASA to ever admit it.
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A military satellite waiting to launch with ULA will now fly with SpaceX
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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A false X post about pausing tariffs led to multi-trillion-dollar market swings
DeItaone later deleted his post but replied to followers that the headline came from the Reuters news agency. Reuters moved the following "flash" on its wire, which was published online at 10:27 a.m. ET: "Wall Street's main indexes reversed course and moved sharply higher after White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said in an interview that President Donald Trump was considering a 90-day tariff pause on all countries expect China." It was not immediately clear if the Reuters report was based on a separate misreading of the Hassett interview. There's no real accountability in these situations," CNN media analyst Brian Stelter said afterwards. "When a random user on social media says something people want to hear, it can drive the market. I think what it tells us is that investors are on a hair-trigger alert."
- Is the existence of the Twitter post relevant to the discussion? The "respected news agencies" may have issued an incorrect story before, or after they heard something on Twitter... but they all issued the story. Demonstrating on of the more important reasons we need free speech: Everybody is wrong sometimes.
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Billionaires Seek to Take Companies Private Amid Market Mayhem
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Infineon Technologies to buy Marvell's auto Ethernet business for $2.5B
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US is in a recession, most CEOs tell BlackRock boss Larry Fink
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Dual-class stock gives US company owners same power as ByteDance has over TikTok
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
Democrats
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The Democratic Party owns Joe Biden’s policy fails - Roll Call
Democrats’ vendetta against Tesla, once the darling of the green movement, isn’t just ineffective as political theater. It’s damaging to the Democratic brand. The irony of protesters targeting Tesla owners, most of whom are probably supporters of both climate programs and the Democratic Party, shouldn’t be underestimated. Violence directed at people, businesses and property based on political differences is the antithesis of democracy. The silence from many elected Democrats in terms of this violence has very disconcerting. Charting the direction of the country is done through elections, not using violence against fellow citizens.
Left Angst
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Why are Japan streets devoid of US cars? It's no mystery, theyre not good enough
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Trump's port fees on Chinese ships threaten US maritime industry, say executives
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EU offered 'zero-for-zero' deal to US weeks before tariff announcement
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Social Security Website Crashes Blamed on Doge Software Update
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India Seeks US Trade Talks, Signaling No Retaliatory Tariffs
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Did Tariffs Make American Manufacturing Great? New Evidence from the Gilded Age
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Micron to impose tariff-related surcharge on some products from April 9
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Musk's Doge Using AI to Snoop on U.S. Federal Workers, Sources Say
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Shortly before he was forced to resign, the nation’s top vaccine regulator says he refused to grant Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s team unrestricted access to a tightly held vaccine safety database, fearing that the information might be manipulated or even deleted. Marks agreed to give Kennedy’s associates the ability to read thousands of reports of potential vaccine-related issues sent to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. But he would not allow them to directly edit the data. “Why wouldn’t we? Because frankly we don’t trust (them),” he said, using a profanity. “They’d write over it or erase the whole database.”
Marks spoke to the AP on Sunday, after officials in Texas confirmed the nation’s second measles-related death in an unvaccinated child this year. Marks attributed the death to the tepid response from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which again encouraged the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine on Sunday but has also promoted claims about vitamin A supplements.
- Worried about edits? Then publish a copy and let the world see what changes.
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After pro-Palestinian students, now foreign students being targeted by Trump
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Tech C.E.O.s Spent Millions Courting Trump. It Has yet to Pay Off
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As Social Security services are cut back, seniors face long drives
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President Trump, the Income Tax Wasn't a Mistake. But It Was an Accident
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Trump Team Mulls Exporter Tax Credit as Tariff Counterweight
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It was unclear if any official reason was given for Chatfield's dismissal, or if it was related to any U.S. policy direction on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. One source said the motive for Chatfield's removal may have been related to the Pentagon's crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Officials in Hegseth's office did not immediately confirm the move or offer a statement on why Chatfield was relieved or by whom -- something that would normally be expected and widely shared for the firing of such a high-ranking officer.
Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield refused to put up POTUS & SECDEF pictures in NATO HQ. Also held an “all hands” where she said “we will wait them out 4 years”
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Net Neutrality's Fate Signalled the End of Federal Consumer Protection
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Trump's Tariffs Are Already Reducing Car Imports and Idling Factories
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Does US science have a future in Antarctica? Trump cuts threaten fieldwork
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Trump, Doge Are Trying to Get Around Privacy Laws to Gather Your Personal Info
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Migrants who used Biden-era app told to leave US 'immediately'
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Social Security website keeps crashing, as DOGE demands cuts to IT staff
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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She chose the Covenant School as a target because she was afraid of being overpowered during an attack and felt that young kids would be safe targets, police revealed in their report last week. Hale also attended the school as a child and had some of the happiest memories of her life there – one of her most twisted motivations for targeting the school.
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Hackers Spied on 100 US Bank Regulators' Emails for over a Year
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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Brussels police arrest Rubio security detail supervisor
A Diplomatic Security Service shift supervisor assigned to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s protective detail was arrested by Belgian police at a Brussels hotel last Monday after arguing with hotel staff and fighting with responding police officers. Later that week, Rubio stayed in the same place, Hotel Amigo, while attending NATO’s foreign ministers meeting. Speaking on condition of anonymity, two sources with direct knowledge of the situation told the Washington Examiner that the agent in question was behaving erratically and became irate when hotel staff refused to reopen the bar beyond its normal hours. When staff, including the night manager, attempted to persuade the agent to return to his room, the agent became physically aggressive. Police were then called. The agent engaged in an altercation with numerous police officers, leading to his arrest. The agent was released from police custody later that day after intervention by the U.S. Embassy.
World
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Brit universities told to keep up the world-class research with less cash
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American academic faces years in jail after charged with insulting Thai monarchy
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How MrBeast is Keeping Africa Poor - by Magatte Wade
As someone who has built manufacturing businesses in Senegal and fought against suffocating regulations across Africa, I've seen firsthand how this "helping hand" often becomes a barrier to real prosperity. Since 1961, USAID has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on projects in Africa: building schools, clinics, wells, and roads. The result? Well, Africa is still the poorest region of the world TODAY.
When MrBeast or foreign NGOs step in to provide services that could be delivered by local entrepreneurs and businesses, they unintentionally distort the incentive structure of a healthy market economy. Why build a business solving real problems when foreign actors offer those solutions for free? Why invest in infrastructure when someone else is giving it away? And worse, why should governments bother creating a business-friendly environments when these saviors are already trying to meet people’s basic needs? It gives them every reason to sit back, stay inefficient, and let outsiders do the heavy lifting. It creates dependency and crowds out local initiative, which obviously weakens self-reliance instead of encouraging it.
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suspend sentence? German text: Because of meme: Head of "Deutschland-Kurier" sentenced to seven months
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French far right floats toppling government in wake of Le Pen verdict.
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UK creating 'murder prediction' tool to identify people most likely to kill
Israel
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
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China Can't Win a Trade War Against the U.S. for One Simple Reason
Xi, despite best advice from around the world, has continually rejected consumption as the basis of the Chinese economy. In fact, his economic system is geared to depressing consumer sentiment. For instance, deposit interest rates at banks have been kept artificially low to support state lending to, among other things, factories. That, of course, undermines consumer spending. Xi Jinping certainly does not believe in empowering citizens. Moreover, as Zongyuan Zoe Liu writing in Foreign Affairs notes, the Communist Party leadership also abhors consumer spending, believing "consumption is an individualistic distraction that threatens to divert resources away from China's core economic strength: its industrial base." By bolstering manufacturing, China's leader is pleasing core Communist Party constituencies, helping struggling state banks, and building China's war machine. Xi Jinping's policies are currently aggravating the overcapacity problem, not mitigating it.
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Citi cuts China GDP growth forecast to 4.2% from 4.7% for 2025
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Singled out by Trump, China has the 'leverage to retaliate' and nothing to lose
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China vows 'fight to the end' after Trump threatens extra 50% tariff
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iPhone sales drop in China over nationalism, newer technology
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China's BGI Genomics loses access to Microsoft's office software
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China Mulling Ban on Hollywood Film Releases in Response to Trump Tariffs
Health / Medicine
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Record global temperatures in March illustrate threat to climate goals
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Hedging our bet on forest permanence for the viability of climate targets
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Gobal greening continues despite increased drought stress since 2000
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An underwater volcano just released a million giant eggs—scientists stunned - Glass Almanac
the true marvel came when the scientists spotted white skate rays (Bathyraja spinosissima) laying eggs in droves across the summit of the volcano—1.5 kilometers below the surface. While deep-sea rays aren’t new to marine biologists, what stunned the team was the sheer scale of this reproductive gathering. Based on initial counts and image surveys, experts believe the site could be home to hundreds of thousands, possibly over a million eggs—a number that has never before been documented for this species. What’s even more astounding is the size of the eggs themselves. These rays produce egg cases nearly 50 centimeters in length,