2025-04-26

Horseshit

• Historians dispute Bayeux tapestry tally after lengthy debate

• Andy Warhol artwork may have been thrown out in Dutch town hall revamp

• The Vietnam war made American culture bolder and more varied

• FIDE launches first digital museum dedicated to chess history

• Developing Digital Disgust

  Our world treats information like it’s always good. More data, more content, more inputs — we want it all without thinking twice. To say that the last twenty-five years of culture have centered around info-maximalism wouldn’t be an exaggeration. I hope we’re coming to the end of that phase. More than ever before, it feels like we have to — that we just can’t go on like this. But the solution cannot come from within; it won’t be a better tool or even better information to get us out of this mess. It will be us, feeling and acting differently. Think about this comparison: Information is to wisdom what pornography is to real intimacy.

  As I ask these questions I’m really looking for where individuals like you and me have leverage. If our attention is our currency, then leverage will come with the capacity to not pay it. To not look, to not listen, to not react, to not share. And as has always been true of us human beings, actions are feelings echoed outside the body. We must learn not just to withhold our attention but to feel disgust at ceaseless claims to it.

• Doubling Up: How 'Sinners' and Other Movies Multiply One Actor

• Can This $860 Helmet Fix Your Hair Loss?

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Bot farms invade social media to hijack popular sentiment

Musk

• Elon Musk's xAI accused of pollution over Memphis supercomputer

• What Elon Musk Didn't Budget For: Firing Workers Costs Money, Too

• A Side Hustle for Elon Musk’s Friends: Selling Access to Stakes in His Private Companies - WSJ

  The documents, along with interviews with investors, lawyers and bankers, offer a window into the opaque market for shares of Musk’s private companies—particularly SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink and the Boring Company—which are some of the most sought-after private investments. Access to the shares is controlled by a tightknit coterie of Musk associates, who have quietly built businesses doling them out through shell companies, racking up huge fees and profits in the process. The sale by Gracias comes amid a big jump in the valuation for SpaceX shares, helped in part by the company’s prospects for lucrative contracts under the Trump administration. In the second half of 2024, the company’s valuation grew 67%. Overall, the company’s shares have increased nearly 30-fold between 2015—when SpaceX was valued at $12 billion—and last December, when its valuation hit $350 billion, putting it on par with the likes of Oracle and Coca-Cola.

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Driverless Trucks Are Here

• Alphabet CEO raises possibility of personal ownership of Waymo robotaxis

  • Alphabet CEO exploring private sales of self driving cars

• Heavy PR spend: Slate EV Is a Bare-Bones Truck with Crank Windows and No Paint

  In the most surprising automotive debut in decades, Slate — a company funded in part by Jeff Bezos — just showed a brand new pickup truck that comes standard with unpainted plastic body panels, crank windows, no heated seats, no radio, no infotainment screen, and steel wheels. It is a cheap, bare-bones “blank slate” that comes as either a pickup truck, a fastback SUV, or a squareback SUV. Here’s everything you need to know about this completely outside-the-box concept that may end up being America’s only sub-$20,000 EV. The caveat on “sub-$20,000” is that it depends on the EV tax credit, which may or may not go away soon.

  • A $20k electric truck with manual windows and no screens? Meet Slate Auto

  • Bezos-backed Slate Auto debuts analog EV pickup truck

  • The $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

  • The Engineering Behind Jeff Bezos' $20K Slate EV

  • Bezos-backed Slate Auto unveils affordable EV truck

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Curbing the Power of the Popes | History Today

  Despite past negotiations with fascist powers, the papacy continues to possess a moral authority that leads political leaders to call upon popes for approval and verbal intervention. Yet as rulers of a state too small to trouble political actors, popes are spared the burdens that long undermined the religious authority at the heart of their office.

• The Papal Conclave Is A Battle Not Just For The Catholic Church But For Western Civilization

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Why American Men Think It's Not Worth Going to College Anymore

• The Zuckerbergs Founded Two Bay Area Schools. Now They're Closing

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Facebook cracks down on spammy content by cutting reach and monetization

• Assassin's Creed dev faces GDPR complaint for forcing single-player game online

• Apple aims to source all US iPhones from India in pivot away from China

  • Apple's trying to build more iPhones in India, but China isn't cooperating

  • Apple aims to source all US iPhones from India in pivot away from China

• Bluesky is back up after a major outage

• Perplexity wants to collect data on everything you do online for targeted ads

• A quarter into the year, CES 2025 has already aged like milk

  The biggest example of poorly aged proclamations in the room is, of course, the claim of the RTX 5070 matching the RTX 5090 in performance - but it's quite astounding that the claim was even made to start with. It might have been the case that Jensen wanted to follow through with the biggest leaps of previous generations, like the RTX 3070 matching the RTX 2080 Ti before it, but this time it should've been clear from the outset that such a claim wasn't going to hold water.

• Intel's AI PC chips aren't selling well — instead, old Raptor Lake chips boom | Tom's Hardware

  Intel says its customers are buying less expensive previous-generation Raptor Lake chips instead of the new, and significantly more expensive, AI PC models like the Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake chips for laptops. During the earnings call, Intel announced that it currently faces a shortage of production capacity for its 'Intel 7' process node, and the company expects this shortage to "persist for the foreseeable future." That's an unexpected shortage to have, as Intel's current-gen chips use newer process nodes from TSMC instead of Intel's older 'Intel 7' node.

• Meta's Threads is using 'Threads.com' domain name

• Digital divas: Can Japan's virtual YouTuber craze crack America?

• Lego block: Dutch court rules mould maker can't use toy trademark - Digital Journal

  Judges agreed with the Danish-based toy giant that Betonblock was “taking unfair advantage of the distinctive character and reputation of the Lego sign.” The Dutch company frequently referred to it when advertising its products, including on one webpage where the word “Lego” appeared 26 times. Betonblock said in its submission the visible use of the word Lego was intended to help its website to appear as high as possible in search results. The company said last year more than 13 percent of all clicks on its website came from searches in which the word “Lego” was combined with concrete-related terms, which generated an estimated turnover of 429,000 euros ($487,000).

• Marks and Spencer pauses online orders as firm struggles with cyber-attack

• Netflix introduces a new kind of subtitles for the non-hearing impaired

• New Jersey Sues Discord for Allegedly Failing to Protect Children

• Government censorship comes to Bluesky, but not its third-party apps yet

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Linus Torvalds Expresses His Hatred for Case-Insensitive File-Systems

  Case-insensitive names are horribly wrong, and you shouldn't have done them at all. The problem wasn't the lack of testing, the problem was implementing it in the first place. The problem is then compounded by "trying to do it right", and in the process doing it horrible wrong indeed, because "right" doesn't exist, but trying to will make random bytes have very magical meaning.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• O'Reilly book: Vibe Coding: The Future of Programming

• OpenAI takes its pitch to Hollywood creatives

• If A.I. Systems Become Conscious, Should They Have Rights?

• Virgin Atlantic is piloting an OpenAI agent in to help with 'customer journey'

• Baidu founder highlights 'shrinking' demand for DeepSeek's text-based AI

• Ziff Davis sues OpenAI for copyright infringement

• An AI-generated radio host in Australia went unnoticed for months

• Microsoft made an ad with generative AI and nobody noticed

• AI helped write bar exam questions, California state bar admits

• Saying 'Thank You' to ChatGPT Is Costly. But Maybe It's Worth the Price

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Reusable rockets are here, so why is NASA paying more to launch stuff to space?

• Signs of alien life on exoplanet K2-18B may just be statistical noise

  • New analysis casts doubt on 'biosignatures' found on planet K2-18B

• ESA fires up beefier booster for Ariane 6 and Vega-C

Crypto con games

• Indicted ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ Pays Roger Stone $600,000 to Lobby for Him - The New York Times

  Roger J. Stone Jr., the longtime associate of President Trump’s, has been lobbying for a pioneering cryptocurrency investor known as “Bitcoin Jesus” who is facing federal fraud and criminal tax charges, according to congressional filings. Mr. Stone filed paperwork last month indicating that he had been retained by Roger Ver, an early Bitcoin investor who was charged last year and accused of shielding his cryptocurrency holdings from $48 million in taxes.

  • The name would have fit SBF better

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Google admits depreciation costs are soaring amid furious bit barn build

• Freelancers now represent more than one in four US workers

• Alphabet's Profit Gets $8B Boost from SpaceX Investment

• No IPO, no problem: How tech millionaires get cash to buy Bay Area mansions

• Intel says employees must return to the office 4 days a week

• Capital Group, KKR Get SEC Approval to Sell Retail Credit Funds

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Feds accidentally publish secret plan to kill NYC congestion pricing

• Judge blocks Trump administration from requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote - ABC News

  In a 120-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly blocked the Trump administration from requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and ordering that election officials “assess” the citizenship of anyone who receives public assistance before allowing them to register. She also barred the Election Assistance Commission from withholding federal funding from states that did not comply with the order. “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States—not the President—with the authority to regulate federal elections,” she wrote. “No statutory delegation of authority to the Executive Branch permits the President to short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process by executive order.”

• California Proposal to Tax Social Media Gathers Momentum

Trump

• Chaos at The Pentagon Threatens Hegseth's Tenure

  • Hegseth's Personal Phone Use Created Vulnerabilities

  • "But her Emails!"

• Trump team turned a dinner invite into a crypto boon worth millions

• Trump Moves to Ramp Up Deep-Sea Mining for Critical Minerals

• Congress Republicans seek $27 billion for Golden Dome in Trump tax bill

• Trump to sign executive order targeting ActBlue foreign donation, fraud allegations.

  • Trump executive action targets ActBlue, the main Democratic fundraising platform

  • Dem Fundraising Platform in Turmoil as Top Officials Resign, Lawyer Alleges Retaliation.

• Trump Administration Reverses Course on Student Visa Cancellations

Left Angst

• RFK Jr. Set to Launch Disease Registry Tracking Autistic People

• Top US Scientists Eye German Universities as Trump Policies Bite

• The World Seems to Be Surrendering to Climate Change

• Donald Trump Revealed Jeff Bezos' True Self

• Trump updates Biden’s robo-car crash reporting rule to benefit Tesla

  • "We're in a race with China"–DOT eases autonomous car rules

• Trump's attacks on BMW threatens South Carolina manufacturing plant

• Congressional Republicans will Set Off the Debt Bomb

• USDA withdraws a plan to limit salmonella levels in raw poultry

  • USDA Withdraws Proposed Salmonella Framework for Raw Poultry Products

  • USDA withdraws a plan to limit salmonella levels in raw poultry

• Sweeping tariffs could threaten the US manufacturing rebound

• George Mason University calls cops on student for article criticizing Trump

• If you're a scientist in the US you should think about leaving

• 'Things Have Ground to a Halt': Tariff Uncertainty Paralyzes Businesses

• DOGE is building a master database for immigration enforcement, sources say

• 'Vaguely Threatening': Federal Prosecutor Queries Leading Medical Journal

• Judges Worry Trump Could Tell U.S. Marshals to Stop Protecting Them

• Musk Allies Made FAA Staff Sign NDAs to Keep New Project Secret

• Wikipedia's nonprofit status threatened by DC U.S. Attorney Ed Martin

• Law students organize to give Trump-caving firms a recruitment problem

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• FBI arrests Wisconsin judge on charges of obstructing immigrant arrest

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Son of CIA deputy director was killed while fighting for Russia, report says

World

• VCs in Southeast Asia get cold feet as they switch bets

• Network Rail painting tracks white to beat the summer heat

• Post Office paid £600M to continue using Horizon

• It Will Take 700 Years to Replace UK Water Grid at Current Pace

• TikTok astrologer arrested for predicting new Myanmar quake

• Top Goldman Sachs banker joins UK exodus in wake of tax raid

• Singapore's CDL Power Struggle: Inside the Kwek Family's Succession

• How India’s Threat to Block Rivers Could Devastate Pakistan - The New York Times

  India on Wednesday said it would suspend its participation in a crucial water-sharing agreement with Pakistan, a punitive measure that could wreak havoc on the country’s agriculture and economy. The move came a day after militants killed 26 civilians who were visiting a scenic location in the part of Kashmir controlled by India. Both countries lay claim to and control parts of the strife-torn region. Although India did not blame Pakistan outright, it said there were “cross-border linkages” with the attackers. India has threatened before, in other moments of rising tensions, to pull out of the Indus Waters Treaty, which both countries signed in 1960. If India follows through this time, it could restrict the flow of water that is used for most of Pakistan’s crop irrigation and human consumption. Agriculture represents one-fourth of the country’s economy.

• India, Pakistan Trade Gunfire & Build-Up Militaries After Kashmir Terror Attack | ZeroHedge

  Indian officials have confirmed Friday that Indian and Pakistani soldiers briefly exchanged fire along their highly militarized frontier in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, according to The Associated Press.

Israel

• Israel's A.I. Experiments in Gaza War Raise Ethical Concerns

China

• China said to waive retaliatory tariffs on some US chip imports

  • China May Exempt Some US Goods from Tariffs as Costs Rise

  • China quietly exempts some U.S.-made semiconductors from tariffs

• Chinese factories slow production and send workers home as US tariffs bite

• Gauging the Strength of China's Economy in Uncertain Times

• No alternative but to disband Hong Kong's Democratic Party, leader says

• Revealed: How China is fuelling Putin's war

• China, Russia may build nuclear plant on moon to power lunar station

Health / Medicine

• The Australians hardwired to be up through the night

• FDA OKs trial of pig livers as dialysis-like treatment for liver failure

• Regular chicken consumption linked to higher risk of early death from cancers

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Orcas start wearing dead salmon hats again after ditching the trend for 37 years

• Magma cap discovered at Yellowstone National Park

• Coffins made from invasive vine a sustainable alternative to wood

• Marathon runners' urine to be made into fertiliser

• Desert reservoirs capture and store organic carbon, according to research

• Air pollution still plagues nearly half of Americans

• Decades of bias: Fancy birds steal spotlight, leave drab species understudied

• A carnivorous 'bone collector' caterpillar dresses in the remains of its prey

• Hydrotreated vegetable oil isn't an emission-free swap for diesel in datacenters

• Dolphins Communicate with 'Fountains of Pee'

• It's the only real way to give them belly scritches: Why the Right Way to Fly a Rhino Is Upside Down