2025-05-20

etc

• Ugly infrastructure: Why can't we have nice things?

Horseshit

• The Role My Parents Never Expected: Raising My Sister's Kids

• 'About as close to aliens as we'll ever get.' Can AI crack animal language?

  • Can't people? Why trust a machine over someone who spends time with the animals?

• The Inequality Myth – Western Societies Are Growing More Equal, Not Less

• The Pill That Promises to Cure Grief

• The first US solar storm emergency drill did not go well

• This article won't change your mind. Here's why

• A Scientist Fighting Nuclear Armageddon Hid a 50-Year Secret

• UK study: Almost half of young people would prefer a world without internet

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Profiling Misinformation Susceptibility

• The amplification of epidemic spread by individuals exposed to misinformation

Musk

• Grok's white genocide responses show AI chatbots can be tampered with 'at will'

• XAI posts Grok's behind-the-scenes prompts

• Grok says its 'skeptical' about Holocaust death toll, blames 'programming error'

• Musk's AI bot Grok blames 'programming error' for its Holocaust denial

• Tesla Regret Syndrome

• Musk brought ' biggest supercomputer'. Residents choking on pollution

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• This Is Your Priest on Drugs | The New Yorker

  Dozens of religious leaders experienced magic mushrooms in a university study. Many are now evangelists for psychedelics.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• A New Headache for Honest Students: Proving They Didn't Use A.I

• America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

• Students Are Humanizing Their Writing–By Putting It Through AI

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• The one change that worked: I've ditched streaming for CDs

• Dogma 25 announced at Cannes, as directors launch ‘cultural uprising’ | Cannes film festival | The Guardian

  A group of Danish and Swedish film-makers have relaunched the notorious avant garde Dogme 95 movement with a manifesto updated for the internet age, vowing to make five films between them in a year, from handwritten scripts and without using the internet or any emails in the creative process. “In a world where film is based on algorithms and artificial visual expressions are gaining traction, it’s our mission to stand up for the flawed, distinct and human imprint,” said the five film-makers in a statement read at the Cannes film festival on Saturday.

• Signal Knockoff App Telemessage Got Hacked in 20 Minutes

• What we in the open world are messing up in trying to compete with big tech

  There’s no point in offering free software to a (local) government or large organization — most places can’t do anything with it anymore. They don’t use software anymore, they use services. Everything you make must also, perhaps by someone else, be PROMINENTLY delivered “as a service,” ready to use. As-a-service is not a side show, it IS the show. And of course, it’s great if your software is also available standalone so that (large) organizations can run it themselves if they want. But you shouldn’t give the impression that the service version is just a fallback for the poor souls who aren’t smart enough to self-host. Service first! And not only must the service be available online, there also have to be people who help with onboarding, training, migrations, possible customization, coaching.

• Not All Vision Pro Owners Feel Total Regret

• Microsoft may be testing Steam integration inside its Store, according to leak

• Intel Announces Arc Pro B-Series, "Project Battlematrix" Linux Improvements

  • Intel Announces Arc Pro B60 24GB, Dual B60 48GB

• From Risky Bet to Retail Giant: Apple Store Turns 24 Today

• The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

• Instagram's Algorithm Recommended Minors to Putative Pedophiles

• 'Sesame Street' moves in with Netflix, but will stay on PBS

  • Sesame Street Is Coming to Netflix

• Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet

• Judge calls out 'Apple official who is personally responsible' in Fortnite order

• Apple's $100B-a-Year App Store Will Never Be the Same

• Have I Been Pwned 2.0 is Now Live

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Building my childhood dream PC

  During the winter of 2024 I went back in time and gave that 14-year-old the means to acquire his dream PC. This is the story of how I restored an IBM PS/1 2168 and maxed out DOOM.

• Helping Noisy Data Centers Fit into Residential Neighborhoods

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Duolingo CEO says there may still be schools in our AI future

• Research: Gen AI Makes People More Productive–and Less Motivated

• Anthropic blames ClaudeAI for embarrassing unintentional mistake in legal filing

• Why we're unlikely to get artificial general intelligence anytime soon

• Saudi Arabia Launches New AI Firm Ahead of Donald Trump's Visit

• Inside the story that enraged OpenAI

• xAI's Grok 3 comes to Microsoft Azure

  • Musk's Grok AI Comes to Azure. Why Am I Not Surprised?

• Microsoft's plan to fix the web: letting every website run AI search for cheap

• Heartland Gen Zers Feel Unprepared to Use AI at Work

• ChatGPT shown to be more persuasive than people in online debates

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Streaked slopes on Mars probably not signs of water flow, study finds

• How many satellites orbit Earth?

• Space Force official: Commercial satellites can do a lot more than we thought

Crypto con games

• Cryptocurrency ATMs target the "unbanked" in Colorado. So do scammers

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Xiaomi Aims to Spend $7B on Building Own Chip This Decade

• Small banks fuel revival in blank-cheque SPAC deals

• AI job interview: Job hunting was already hard. Then came glitching HR robots

• Klarna doubles losses in first quarter as IPO remains on hold

• The 'Stealthy Wealthy' Who Make Their Money the Boring Way

• Regeneron agrees to buy 23andMe, promises ethical use of customers' DNA data

  • 23andMe Sells Gene-Testing Business to DNA Drug Maker Regeneron

• So why did U.S. wages stagnate for 20 years?

• The insane growth of America's millionaire class

• Capital One Completes Acquisition of Discover

• Bay Area biotech company Synthego, raised $392M, forced into bankruptcy

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• House orders Pentagon to review if it exposed Americans to weaponised ticks 2019

• House bill advances from Budget Committee with state AI regulation ban included

Trump

• FBI Director Patel says unreleased Russia probe documents will soon be made public.

• Trump to sign bill criminalizing revenge porn and explicit deepfakes

  • Trump Signs the Take It Down Act into Law

  • Trump signs law combating deepfakes and revenge porn

Democrats

• “For Posterity’s Sake”: Why the Biden-Hur Tapes is a Virtual Racketeering Indictment – JONATHAN TURLEY

• Sen. Chris Murphy: ‘It was a mistake’ for Democrats to let Biden stay in the race.

• Dr. Siegel Questions Why Biden’s Cancer Wasn’t Found Earlier - Laura Ingraham

• 2022 clip of Biden saying he had cancer

  “And guess what—the first frost, you know what was happening?" said Biden. "You'd have to put on your windshield wipers to get, literally, the oil slick off the window.,” he said during a speech about climate change in Somerset, Massachusetts. “That's why I, and so damn many other people I grew up with, have cancer. And why, for the longest time, Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation.”

Left Angst

• In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant.

• Musk Strikes Starlink Deal with Saudi Arabia During Trump Visit

• Social Security drops controversial antifraud review amid growing claims backlog

• Schumer bizarrely claims DOGE could have been partly to blame for Mexican ship's deadly Brooklyn Bridge mishap

  “We know there has been meddling by the Trump administration into USCG staffing, and we need to know how this might have impacted the events of last night — from a command, communication and local coordination level,” the embattled Dem said in a press release.

• The White House, LLC

• The secretive US factory that lays bare the contradiction in America First plan

• Admin slashed weather agencies. Will it affect Florida hurricane forecasts?

• Attack of the Sadistic Zombies - Paul Krugman

  Republicans in Congress, taking their marching orders from Donald Trump, are on track to enact a hugely regressive budget — big tax giveaways to the wealthy combined with cruel cuts in programs that serve lower-income Americans. True, the legislation suffered a setback last week, initially failing to make it out of committee. But that was largely because some right-wing Republicans didn’t think the benefit cuts were vicious enough. OK, news at 11. Isn’t this what Republicans always do? But this reconciliation bill — that is, legislation structured in such a way that it can’t be filibustered and may well pass with no Democratic votes — is different in both degree and kind from what we’ve seen before: Its cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards. Furthermore, the way that cruelty will be implemented is notable for its reliance on claims we know aren’t true and policies we know won’t work — what some of us call zombie ideas. And it’s hard to avoid the sense that the counterproductive viciousness is actually the point. Think of what we’re seeing as the attack of the sadistic zombies.

• In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant

• Trump's Retreat Still Leaves Tariffs at 90-Year Highs

• The U.S. Under Trump: Alone in Its Climate Denial

• Tariffs and Manufacturing Jobs: Three Big Problems

• They All Signed the “Harper’s” Letter. Where Are They Now? | The Nation

  Many of those who were loudest in denouncing cancel culture then are now curiously silent in the face of Donald Trump’s assaults on free speech.

• The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement

• FCC Chair Brendan Carr is letting ISPs merge–as long as they end DEI programs

• NASA celebrated employee's story of resilience, tried to scrub it, and fired her

• Trump administration cuts funding for the Strong Museum of Play

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Oregon spent funds meant for addiction services on prosecutors, police gadgets

• Police monitored New Orleans with facial recognition cameras

• We 3D-Printed Luigi Mangione's Ghost Gun. It Was Legal

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• South Korea to Replace F-35Bs with Drones on Future Aircraft Carriers

World

• AI skills shortage more than doubles for UK tech leaders

• Germany drops opposition to nuclear power in rapprochement with France

  • Berlin, Paris overcome rift over nuclear energy, French official says

• Significant amount of personal data accessed in Legal Aid Agency data breach

  • 'Significant amount' of private data stolen in UK Legal Aid hack

• Thailand to recriminalise cannabis as PM vows to get tough on drugs

• Apple boosts India's factory hopes – but a US-China deal could derail plans

• OpenAI's planned data center in Abu Dhabi would be bigger than Monaco

• Six Remote Fijian Schools Get High-Speed Internet

• Romania elects two-time International Math Olympiad gold medalist as president

• Canada needs more homes. Prefabricated houses could fill the void

• Microsoft's email block a wake-up call for digital sovereignty

  • Microsoft's ICC blockade: digital dependence comes at a cost

• Universiti Malaya opens public access to Asia's most unique medical collections

• A council held to ransom in cyber-attack

• Taiwan to Ramp Up Gas Imports After Shuttering Last Nuclear Plant

• European Investment Bank to inject €70B in European tech

• Spain Orders Airbnb to Take Down 66,000 Rental Listings

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine can move beyond its Soviet architectural legacy

• Starlinks on Shaheds Guide Russian Missile Strikes in Ukraine

• Russia bans "undesirable" Amnesty International

China

• China begins assembling its supercomputer in space

• Nvidia to ship new AI chip for China next quarter, modified Blackwell later

• How China Captured Apple

• How Xi sparked China's electricity revolution

• China says U.S. undermined trade talks with Huawei chip warning

Health / Medicine

• Natural short sleepers have a genetic mutation

• Protein for strength training? Vegan diet matches meat for muscle gains

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Seagate claims spinning disks beat SSDs on carbon footprint

• (2021) What we've learned about digital gaming's climate impact

• Is It Time to Unlock the Great Lakes' Wind Power Potential?

• The Coyotes of San Francisco