2025-05-11

Horseshit

• Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a 'Hoax'

• Dyson spheres could exist – but there's a catch

• The trends behind the historically low U.S. birth rate

• The Great Displacement Is Already Well Underway

  It’s a little weird living in a small trailer when I’m a homeowner, in fact I own three houses: A fixer-upper starter home in a rust belt upstate New York university city, and a patch of beautiful remote rural land with 2 pretty humble and simple cabins on it an hour from the city house.

• 'Scopes just went black again' as Newark air traffic hit by new outage

celebrity gossip

• Jony Ive's next product is driven by the 'unintended consequences' of the iPhone

• Warren Buffett versus American Capitalism

• The $200B Gamble: Bill Gates's Plan to Wind Down His Foundation

Musk

• Tesla Worker Knew His Anti-Musk Website Was a Risk. He Did It Anyway

• Even Tesla's Insurance Arm Is Getting Wrecked

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Pope Leo XIV: "AI poses new challenges re: human dignity, justice and labour"

  • Pope concerned of "artificial intelligence, robotics, human relationships"

  • Pope Leo XIV lays out his vision, identifies AI as a main challenge for humanity

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Apple hits back at US judge's 'extraordinary' contempt order

• Mexico sues Google over changing Gulf of Mexico's name for US users

• The Elite Microsoft Unit Constantly Working to Thwart Hackers

• SoundCloud faces backlash after adding an AI training clause in its user terms

• Texas secures $1.38B settlement with Google over data privacy

• Unity is threatening to revoke licenses of developers with flawed data

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• 5 steps to N-body simulation

  asic knowledge in Python and Calculus is assumed, everything is explained in detail so beginners should be able to follow along. After completing this tutorial, you would be able to write your own N-body simulation code in Python.

• Reverse engineering the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry

  I look at the 386's prefetch queue circuitry in detail. One interesting circuit is the incrementer, which adds 1 to a pointer to step through memory. This sounds easy enough, but the incrementer uses complicated circuitry for high performance. The prefetch queue uses a large network to shift bytes around so they are properly aligned. It also has a compact circuit to extend signed 8-bit and 16-bit numbers to 32 bits. There aren't any major discoveries in this post, but if you're interested in low-level circuits and dynamic logic, keep reading.

  Every time I look at an x86 circuit, I see the complexity required to support backward compatibility, and I gain more understanding of why RISC became popular. The prefetcher is no exception. Much of the complexity is due to the 386's support for unaligned memory accesses, requiring a byte shift network to move bytes into 32-bit alignment. Moreover, at the other end of the instruction bus is the complicated instruction decoder that decodes intricate x86 instructions. Decoding RISC instructions is much easier.

• Wonderful resource: Best Practices For FDM Printing

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Judge questions Meta AI training as fair use

• AI hallucinations are getting worse – and they're here to stay

• 'It cannot provide nuance': UK experts warn AI therapy chatbots are not safe

• Giants of Silicon Valley Are Having a Midlife Crisis over AI

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Failed Soviet Venus lander Kosmos 482 crashes to Earth after 53 years in orbit

  The Kosmos 482 probe crashed to Earth today (May 10) after circling our planet for more than five decades. Reentry occurred at 2:24 a.m. ET (0624 GMT or 9:24 a.m. Moscow time) over the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia, according to Russia's space agency Roscosmos. Kosmos 482 appears to have fallen harmlessly into the sea.

• The Sun May Be Entering an Era of Stronger 11-Year Cycles

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Elizabeth Holmes' partner raises millions for new biotech testing startup

  • Elizabeth Holmes's Partner Has a New Blood-Testing Startup

  • Elizabeth Holmes Partner Rakes in Millions for New Blood Testing Machine

• Chinese jacket maker is now the biggest company, according to Bloomberg

• Zero ships from China are bound for California's ports, not seen since pandemic

• 'We Currently Have No Container Ships,' Seattle Port Says

• There's a National Egg Crisis, and One Company Is Making a Lot of Money

• Monzo lines up bankers to spearhead blockbuster £6B float

  Monzo, the digital bank which counts one in five British adults among its customers, is closing in on the appointment of investment bankers to spearhead a stock market listing valuing it at more than £6bn.

• The Gerstnerisation of Microsoft: Seventh Wave of Microsoft Layoffs

• BlackRock orders managing directors back to office five days a week

• Powell may have a hard time avoiding Trump's 'Too Late' label even as Fed chief does the right thing

  central bank leaders have a long history of being too reluctant to raise or lower interest rates.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• US lawmakers slam UK encryption backdoor order to Apple

Left Angst

• Why Are Americans So Obsessed With Protein? Blame MAGA. | Vanity Fair

  From the Liver King to the podcast bros to RFK Jr.’s MAHA constituents, America’s infatuation with protein has reached a fever pitch—and it’s undeniably gendered.

• US Government considering suspending habeas corpus

  Donald Trump's administration is "actively looking at" suspending habeas corpus - the right of a person to challenge their detention in court - one of the US president's top aides has said. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, told reporters on Friday that the US Constitution allowed for the legal liberty to be suspended in times of "rebellion or invasion". His comments come as judges have sought to challenge some recent detentions made by the Trump administration in an effort to combat illegal immigration, as well as remove dissenting foreign students.

• Rules-based world order in retreat and violence on the rise. Has WW3 begun?

  The implosion of Pax Americana, the interconnectedness of conflicts, the new willingness to resort to unbridled state-sponsored violence and the irrelevance of the institutions of the rules-based order have all been on brutal display this week. From Kashmir to Khan Younis, Hodeidah, Port Sudan and Kursk, the only sound is of explosions, and the only lesson is that the old rules no longer apply. Indeed Fiona Hill, the policy analyst and adviser to the UK government on its imminent strategic defence review, argues the third world war has already started, if only we would recognise it.

  • Brace for disorder as the great power shifts begin

  As we pass the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war in Europe, every day brings further evidence that a remarkably long-lived US-led international order is over. Everyone is now scrambling to work out what might succeed it. A new multi-polar order? Spheres of influence? A worldwide version of the 19th-century Concert of Europe? By far the most plausible answer, however, is a prolonged and dangerous period of global disorder. Of course there never was a golden age of universal liberal international order. But across large areas of the world, in Europe, Asia and Oceania, there was a security and economic order led by the “liberal leviathan”, as the Princeton scholar John Ikenberry dubbed the post-1945 US. This order, which reached its zenith at the beginning of this century, has been declining for some time, partly because of the “rise of the rest”, itself facilitated by US-led globalisation, and partly due to America’s own hubristic self-harming. President Donald Trump is now tearing down what remains of the edifice with unparalleled speed and recklessness.

• Airlines Are Collecting Your Data and Selling It to ICE

• Could Apple Exist Without Its Ties to China? Probably Not.

• US govt's science foundation purges 37 divisions, equity unit among casualties

• Worker cuts leave woodland firefighting crews short-staffed

• Industry groups are not happy about the imminent demise of Energy Star

• mRNA vaccine makers are scrambling to navigate an 'existential threat'

• Tech oligarchs are gambling our future on a fantasy

• ‘No one is above the law.’ Six Words We Won’t Be Hearing from Democrats Over the Next Four Years – Twitchy

• Tony Hsieh and the Emptiness of the Tech-Mogul Myth

• US administration proposes to cancel Mars Sample Return mission

• Trump's New Surgeon General Pick Wants to "Raise the Vibration of Humanity"

• Trump Declares Biden’s Digital Equity Act ‘Racist’ and ‘Unconstitutional’ - The New York Times

  President Trump on Thursday attacked a law signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. aimed at expanding high-speed internet access, calling the effort “racist” and “totally unconstitutional” and threatening to end it “immediately.” Mr. Trump’s statement was one of the starkest examples yet of his slash-and-burn approach to dismantling the legacy of his immediate predecessor in this term in office. The Digital Equity Act, a little-known effort to improve high-speed internet access in communities with poor access, was tucked into the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Mr. Biden signed into law early in his presidency. The act was written to help many different groups, including veterans, older people and disabled and rural communities. But Mr. Trump, using the incendiary language that has been a trademark of his political career, denounced the law on Thursday for also seeking to improve internet access for ethnic and racial minorities, raging in a social media post that it amounted to providing “woke handouts based on race.”

• DOGE Is Bringing Back a Deadly Disease

  Silicosis is typically caused by years of breathing in silica dust at work, and can worsen even after work exposures stop. In recent years, after decades of inaction, the federal government finally took several important steps to reduce the incidence of this ancient and debilitating disease. Under the Trump administration, all that progress is going away, in but one example of the widespread destruction now taking place across the federal government.

• Trump used pencils to sell tariffs. This factory in 'Pencil City' is split

• White House Orders Federal Agencies to Stop Considering 'Social Cost of Carbon'

• Trump Officials Seek to Bring White Afrikaners to U.S. as Refugees

World

• Pakistan/India accuse each other of striking military bases in major escalation

• Pakistan and India have agreed 'full and immediate ceasefire'

  • Trump Says India And Pakistan Agreed To "Full & Immediate Ceasefire" | ZeroHedge

• Warning signs hinted at Spain's unprecedented power outage

• UK Ministry of Defence is spending less with US biz, and more with Europeans

• Toxic chlorine cloud near Barcelona confines more than 160k indoors

• UK plans to end 'failed free market experiment' in immigration

  The British government outlined plans on Sunday to end what it called the "failed free market experiment" in mass immigration by restricting skilled worker visas to graduate-level jobs and forcing businesses to increase training for local workers. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is under pressure to cut net migration after the success of Nigel Farage's right-wing, anti-immigration Reform UK party in local elections this month.

Israel

• How many people have died in Gaza? | The Economist

  Since the war in Gaza began in October 2023 the death toll has been hotly contested. Counting deaths in any war that is still raging is very hard. But experts are still trying to keep track. And new research suggests the reported numbers are too low. The precise daily counts from Gaza are unusual. No such tally emerges from Ukraine. But during this war, as in past ones, Gaza’s authorities, run by Hamas, have issued details of how many Palestinians have been killed. Doubts about such figures are reasonable. Hamas, presumably, has an incentive to inflate civilian losses. When previous conflicts ended, however, estimates from Israel and the UN of the numbers killed have roughly matched those released during the fighting. This war has been far more extensive and lasted longer than any in the past. Many of the institutions that count deaths, such as hospitals, have been destroyed.

  The researchers found that the overlap was so small that the true number of deaths was probably 46-107% higher than the official ministry total. If you assume that the ratio has stayed the same since last June (and not fallen, as systems caught up during the ceasefire, say) and apply them to the current tally, it would suggest that between 77,000 and 109,000 Gazans have been killed, 4-5% of the territory’s pre-war population.

  • Why so restrained? some of these people have "died" dozens of times now; surely the statistics could be jinked to show the entire population of Earth has been killed in this war.

• Israel committing genocide in Gaza, says EU's former top diplomat

China

• China Built More Clean Energy Than Coal–But Can't Use Half of It

Health / Medicine

• Autism diagnoses are on the rise – but autism itself may not be

• CT scans show cigarettes are harder on the lungs than marijuana

• Continuous glucose monitors reveal variable glucose responses to the same meals

• 'A very exciting day': Canadian design may revolutionize the way ALS is treated

• Folks are fond of amphetamines: Why Are ADHD Rates So Much Higher in the U.S.?

• Weight-loss jabs may be good for mental health, research shows

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• The US has 1,001 measles cases and 11 states with active outbreaks

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• How to reduce conflict between people and grizzly bears in rural communities

• Cameras mounted on nets show the destructiveness of bottom trawling

• Countries could use forests to 'mask' needed emission cuts: Report

• Floating kelp forests have limited protection despite intensifying heat threats

• Hoofprint Biome boosts cow nutrition while slashing methane burps

• Record Wind Energy Installations Not Enough to Meet Renewables Goals

• Chimpanzee drumming shares the building blocks of human musicality

• Chile develops a rice variety that doesn't need to be drowned

• Could an army of young conservationists fill a firefighting gap in Colorado?

• 33.8M People in the United States Live on Sinking Land

• Concrete spheres for energy storage; California plans a 9-meter diameter sphere