2025-05-22

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• Big Chemistry: Fuel Ethanol | Hackaday

  If legend is to be believed, three disparate social forces in early 20th-century America – the temperance movement, the rise of car culture, and the Scots-Irish culture of the South – collided with unexpected results. The temperance movement managed to get Prohibition written into the Constitution, which rankled the rebellious spirit of the descendants of the Scots-Irish who settled the South. In response, some of them took to the backwoods with stills and sacks of corn, creating moonshine by the barrel for personal use and profit. And to avoid the consequences of this, they used their mechanical ingenuity to modify their Fords, Chevrolets, and Dodges to provide the speed needed to outrun the law.

• Southwest will require passengers to keep chargers visible due to fire risk

Horseshit

• Amazon can now deliver iPhones, AirTags, and other Apple products by drone

• Jupiter was formerly twice its current size, had a much stronger magnetic field

• Chilavert, choripán and children: a night with Argentina's champions

• I was alone on shift when Newark air traffic control went dark

• Is Red Meat Bad for Your Heart? It May Depend on Who Funded the Study

• Magnus Carlsen forced into a draw by more than 143000 people playing against him

• A Secret Trove of Rare Guitars Heads to the Met

• Mice use chemical cues such as odours to sense social hierarchy

• A South Korean grand master on the art of the perfect soy sauce

• Passively Mapping Cyclist Safety Using Smart Handlebars for Near-Miss Detection

• 4th-generation resident of rent-stabilized Manhattan apartment fights eviction

  • Rent Seeking for Four Generations - Marginal REVOLUTION

  New York has outdone itself with a rent control system so dysfunctional it manages to achieve the worst of all worlds. Not only does it suffer from the usual problems of reducing the supply of housing and dulling incentives for maintenance, but it has transformed over time from a safety net into a hereditary entitlement. Thanks to succession rights, what was meant to help the poor now functions as a kind of family heirloom — a subsidized apartment passed down like grandma’s china set.

• Merito-Democracy: An AI-Driven Vision for Meritocratic Governance

• I spent a year figuring out the weirdest mistake in recent Hollywood history

  You see, there’s a scene in that movie that tormented me, that kept me up at night, and that lately has had me interrogating a wide variety of seemingly devoted, and certainly well-compensated, filmmaking professionals. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century. It took nearly a year. But eventually, I discovered why hundreds of people with a budget of nearly $100 million failed to accurately portray a single bird. The answer was most fowl.

• Elephants evolved to beat cancer, and how we could too

• How is Roman concrete still standing after 2k years?

• Low cost airlines will officially launch 'standing only seats' in 2026

• Team Penske fires senior leadership team in wake of cheating scandal

• Trump did it: Solving the mystery of a dinosaur mass grave at the 'River of Death'

• What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours

• Peppa Pig: New baby sister Evie arrives - BBC Newsround

  Peppa Pig's new baby sister has arrived, and her name is... Evie. The news was even announced live on ITV's Good Morning Britain breakfast news programme. Mummy Pig's pregnancy with Evie, including a gender-reveal party, has been a massive hit online with fans, old and new, enjoying the latest plot twists. According to the writers, the baby was even born at the same hospital as Prince William and Princess Catherine's royal children! Fans of the show will have to wait until the autumn to see the new piglet onscreen.

• Alex Danco on the culture of gift-giving that powers Silicon Valley

  This conversation starts with one of Alex's most insightful ideas: that a culture of gift-giving underpins technology, innovation, and creative work, and is the key to solving many of capitalism's coordination problems. We then talk about what businesses will look like in a world of abundance: AI agents, massive and accessible infrastructure, and where moats might actually lie. Alex shares why AI-enabled creativity may resemble musicians finding their sound and how and where we might find internet-native subcultures in 2025.

celebrity gossip

• The rise, fall and spectacular comeback of Sam Altman

• Michael Bay's Skibidi Toilet Movie Releases First Details as Production Starts

• 'Dilbert' Creator Scott Adams Announces He May Not Live Past Summer

  “I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has,” Adams said. “So, I also have prostate cancer, that has also spread to my bones. But I’ve had it longer than he’s had it ― well, longer than he’s admitted having it ― so my life expectancy is, maybe this summer. I expect to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer.”

  • 'Dilbert' Creator Scott Adams Says He Will Die Soon From Same Cancer as Joe Biden

• Abraham Lincoln artifacts that were once in a museum are going up for auction

Obit

• Michael Ledeen, Reagan-era terrorism official, Cold War strategist, dies at 83

Musk

• Elon Musk says AI could run into power issues by middle of next year

• Elon Musk confirms Tesla plan for robotaxis on Austin roads in June

• Tesla's head of self-driving admits 'lagging a couple years' behind Waymo

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo says it reached 10M robotaxi trips, doubling in five months

• In Latest EV Pullback, Ford to Share Battery Plant with Nissan

  Automaker will let Nissan use part of its flagship Kentucky battery factory

• Honda Bucks Trend And Rolls Back EV Plans In Favor Of Hybrids.

• Waffle House Gets 400-KW DC Fast-Chargers So You Can Charge Your EV as You Brawl

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• AI's limited understanding of gender puts health equity at risk

• Reddit bans an anti-natalist group after Palm Springs explosion

  • Why the CA Fertility Clinic Bombing Is Out of the News Cycle. It’s Not Hard to Figure Out.

• We perceive faces from other racial groups differently

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Are groundbreaking science discoveries becoming harder to find?

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

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

  • Fortnite Returns to Apple App Store After Four-Year Battle

  • Fortnite returns to the Apple App Store after a 5-year hiatus

  • Fortnite Returns to the US App Store

  • Epic Games' Fortnite back up on Apple App Store in US after nearly 5 years

• A Major Newspaper Publishes a Summer Reading List–But the Books Don't Exist

  • Chicago Sun-Times confirms AI used to create reading list of nonexistent books

  • Chicago newspaper prints a summer reading list. The problem? Books don't exist

  • At Least Two Newspapers Syndicated AI Garbage

• The biggest unanswered questions about Xbox's next-gen consoles

• A Billion Streams and No Fans': Inside a $10M AI Music Fraud Case

• Zero-click searches: Google's AI tools are the culmination of its hubris

• Google is rolling out AI mode to everyone in the US. Whether you like it or not.

• RTX 5080 Super rumored with 24GB of memory

• Asus announced a 3000W power supply for computers because why not.

• AMD's $299 Radeon RX 9060 XT brings 8GB or 16GB of RAM to fight the RTX 5060

• Self-hosting is having a moment

• Bing Search APIs: Retiring on August 11, 2025

• Microsoft blames Apple for its delayed Xbox mobile store

• Adobe to automatically move subscribers to pricier, AI-focused tier in June

• Meta hypes AI friends as social media's future, but users want real connections

• AMD puts Intel far behind with Threadripper Pro 9000 high-end desktop chips

• Netflix Plans Major Overhaul of Homepage Design

• How "Andor" Injects Contemporary Politics into "Star Wars" I.P

• What if Making Cartoons Becomes 90% Cheaper?

• Into the Horrid Depths of Instagram Reels Music

• Xreal debuts first glasses to run Google's Android to take on Meta and Apple

• Apple Turntable

  I believe Apple is a broken record. In other words, it's too late. My thesis is relatively simple: Apple, as a publicly owned corporation, is incapable of selecting a CEO who can follow Siracusa's dictum, "Don’t try to make money. Try to make a dent in the universe." ... when Jobs died, everything that made Apple special eventually withered and died too. Without Jobs as a protector, Scott Forstall was soon ousted under the pretense of Apple Maps. Tim Cook asserted his control over the company, putting his own personnel in place, and now his authority is absolute. Even those few others who remain from the Jobs era, such as "Apple Fellow" Phil Schiller, are overridden by Cook, as we learned recently from the Epic Games v. Apple court case, which revealed that Schiller had argued internally for Apple to relent on its App Store revenue demands. Cook ignored Schiller's plea, and as the judge said, "Cook chose poorly." I would submit, though, that Cook chose exactly what the Apple stockholders wanted him to choose.

• Hacker who breached app used by Trump aide stole data from across US Government

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy • The Register

• Personal Computer Origins: The Datapoint 2200 - by Babbage

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Dark LLMs: The Growing Threat of Unaligned AI Models

• Will AI Be Alive?

• AI could keep us dependent on natural gas for decades to come

• AI can't replace devs until it understands office politics

• Ask HN: Given the progress in AI, should we decrease the world population?

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Bright Streak Appears Over US During Aurora Storm, Mystifying Skywatchers.

  the light was not actually STEVE, but a rocket stage dumping out methalox rocket fuel at an altitude of about 250 kilometers (155 miles), bang in the ionosphere, according to astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who tracks activity in Earth space. At 04:12 UTC, Beijing-based startup LandSpace Technology launched its new Zhuque-2E Y2 methane-fueled carrier rocket, bearing six satellites into Earth orbit. About an hour later, the bright stripe appeared in the sky – not far from midnight over much of the US. That stripe, according to McDowell, was the result of a fuel dump from the rocket's upper stage.

• A broken thruster jeopardized Voyager 1, but engineers executed a remote fix

Crypto con games

• Coinbase says its data breach affects at least 69k customers

• Forcing Bank Deposits to Subsidize Stablecoins: The Genius Act

• SEC Sues Crypto Startup Unicoin and Its Executives for Fraud

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Chipmaker TSMC is booming, but its factory near Portland is at a low point

• Wolfspeed prepares to file for bankruptcy within weeks

  • Wolfspeed Stock Dives 68% on Worries About the Chip Supplier's Financial Health

• Great News DIYers: Home Depot CFO Reveals No Tariff Price Hikes  | ZeroHedge

• Bloomberg terminal outage hits traders

  • Bloomberg Outage Hits Traders, Disrupts Government-Bond Auctions

• Private Equity Is Troubled, $1T Kuwait Fund's Boss Warns

• Meta targets more 'underperformers' in mid-year reviews

• Kroger's Shopper Profiles: Why You May Be Paying More Than Your Neighbors

• OpenAI to buy Jony Ive's io Products for $6.5B

  • OpenAI buys Jony Ive's design startup for $6.5B

• Lidar maker Luminar lays off more workers following CEO exit

• Is Polymarket Legal? How Shayne Coplan's Bet Is Paying Off

• Walmart Eliminates 1500 jobs on technology team

• Treasury Yields Soar as Ballooning U.S. Deficit Worries Wall Street

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• FCC Asked to Give Spectrum to Allow SpaceX Starlink to Make a Better GPS

• How 2 Hackers Erased Hundreds of FOIA Requests - Bloomberg

  FOIA requests at numerous federal agencies in February were “lost” by a government records contractor. It turns out, the “data failure” was linked to two convicted hackers who worked at the company.

  As I reported today, two Opexus employees, twin brothers Suhaib and Muneeb Akhter, compromised or deleted data from Opexus systems, according to an internal investigation and a separate probe by an independent cybersecurity firm. They worked for Opexus for about a year as engineers before being fired earlier this year. It turns out they’d been previously convicted of hacking into the US State Department and had been sentenced to two and three years in prison. Government agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service and General Services Administration, maintain databases on Opexus’ servers, which contain sensitive data and documents. At Opexus, engineers and support staff that work with the agencies can access the data if their jobs call for it. Opexus says that its platforms are certified through the GSA’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, which ensures contractors “have met specific security requirements, ensuring that their cloud services are secure and reliable for government use.” Opexus declined to comment for my story. Suhaib and Muneeb Akhter denied any wrongdoing in separate interviews with me.

• The US Treasury just shocked Americans with a $258B surplus

• Judge Finds U.S. Violated Court Order with Sudden Deportation Flight to Africa

Trump

• Hegseth announces accountability review of Afghanistan withdrawal.

• DOJ opens investigation into Andrew Cuomo over NY nursing home deaths testimony: report.

• Pentagon accepts luxury jet from Qatar to use as Air Force One

• As Ramaphosa Heads To White House, It's Now "Treason" For White Farmers To Leave South Africa | ZeroHedge

  • Trump played "Kill the Boer" video for Ramaphosa

  Ramaphosa, thoughtfully and quietly responded claiming that "this is not government policy," adding that "our democracy allows for free expression" and reaffirmed that "our government is completely against" what President Trump was describing.

Democrats

• Opinion | Was Biden too frail for the job? Voters should have been informed. - The Washington Post

  It now seems that, for a considerable time, Biden might have lacked the stamina and cognitive capacity the job demands — and that his family and closest aides concealed this from the public. Their apparent decision to put personal loyalties ahead of their duty to the country must be reckoned with. A legal mechanism should be considered to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. The people closest to Biden could hardly have avoided observing his infirmity — indeed, the actions they took to hide it indicate that they knew all too well. Early issues surfaced in the 2020 campaign, when he had memory lapses, including forgetting the name of one of his closest advisers and the opening lines to the Declaration of Independence. A Democrat interviewed by Tapper and Thompson who was involved in making Zoom videos of Biden speaking to constituents during the pandemic lockdown said that, after watching hours of mostly unusable footage, they concluded he was incapable of doing the job.

  • from the people who assured us that any concerns that got voiced were the ravings of treasonous Republicans spreading Russian disinformation. epic chutzpah

Left Angst

• Tariffs Threaten Double Blow to Small US Banks

• Trump tanks EU business travel to America

• NASA says long-running budget shortfalls may lead to ISS crew and research cuts

• "No longer able to purchase reagents using NIH grants at Harvard Medical School"

• Blue Land of Enchantment lures unhappy Texans

  SANTA FE, N.M. — The sun is sinking behind the Jemez Mountains as a group of Texas expats gathers with their pint glasses inside a Santa Fe brewpub to consider the state they abandoned, and the state they now call home. "I was very proud to be a Texan and never really thought we'd leave, but the political climate became so conservative it felt oppressive to me," says Nancy Fuka, a certified quilt judge. Her husband, Kent, a retired venture capitalist, adds, "You couldn't pay us enough to move back to Texas at this point. The emphasis of fundamental religion just grew and grew."

• Trump admin tells Supreme Court: DOGE needs to do its work in secret

• Diseases are spreading. The CDC isn't warning the public like it was months ago

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Teens Almost Got Away with Murder. Then Police Found Their Google Searches

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The US test-fired its most powerful laser

  • The US has a new most powerful laser hitting 2 petawatts

• Canada in talks with US to join Golden Dome defence system

• China Demands US Scrap Golden Dome Missile Defense System As It Will 'Turn Space Into A Battlefield' | ZeroHedge

  "This highly offensive system violates the principle of peaceful use of outer space," the Chinese foreign ministry had also added in the fresh comments.

World

• EU startups fail because their press refuses to hype them up

• Europe's capital markets remain fragmented and inefficient

• Spain clamps down on Airbnb as tourism backlash returns for summer

  • Spain blocks more than 65,000 Airbnb holiday rental listings

• Is the judiciary the weakest link in South Korea's democracy?

• Microsoft-backed UK tech unicorn Builder.ai collapses into insolvency

• GDPR is cracking: Brussels rewrites its prized privacy law

• UK 'dependent' on US for space security

• British soldiers make Everest history using new method

• Greater Manchester says its NHS analytics stack is years ahead of Palantir wares

• Israel's Eurovision result prompts questions over voting

• Canada Post is in trouble. Here are the facts

• Bell users experience widespread outage across Ontario, Quebec

• Quebec to impose French-language quotas on streaming giants

• Russian GRU Targeting Western Logistics Entities and Technology Companies

• Nuclear moratoriums crumble around the world

Israel

• Yemen adds Haifa port to target list in response to Israeli escalation in Gaza

• UN says 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in next 48 hours under Israeli blockade

  • The UN's claim about babies dying in Gaza is unravelling | The Spectator

  then the claim unravelled. Belatedly the BBC offered some clarification. The UN has now said, it reported, that it’s possible there will be 14,100 ‘severe cases of malnutrition’ among Gazan kids ‘aged six to 59 months’ over the next year if more aid does not get through. We need to get aid in ASAP, the UN said – ‘ideally within the next 48 hours’. In short, there is no calamitous prospect of 14,000 babies starving in the next two days – thank God. Rather, the UN is concerned that there might be that number of acute cases of hunger among very young kids if nothing changes, aid wise, over the next year. This is a wholly different claim to the one that whipped up such a storm of frothing anti-Israel animus.

• NBC News Is Quietly Rewriting Its Own Reporting on the Gaza War to Vilify Israel.

  The most recent example came buried in a news report that casually claimed Israel had unilaterally broken a ceasefire with Hamas — a striking departure from what the same outlet had previously reported. This is part of NBC’s increasingly disturbing trend: a pattern in which its journalists appear to be reshaping the facts in Gaza — not because new evidence has emerged, but because the old facts no longer serve the narrative. And these aren’t obscure details NBC somehow missed. These are facts the news outlet had already acknowledged. Now, they’re being walked back — replaced with a storyline that casts Israel as the aggressor and Hamas as the victim, resulting in some of the most distorted coverage of the conflict in recent months.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Nearly 50k emails leaked from org linked to Russian intelligence

China

• Nvidia's Chief Says U.S. Chip Controls on China Have Backfired

  • US chip export controls a failure they spur Chinese development Nvidia boss says

• China's 'Stolen iPhone Building'

• Karaoke in cars heralds the triumph of Chinese firms

• How we made it: will China be the first electrostate?

• China's Superstition Boom in a Godless State

• Roof of historic Ming Dynasty tower collapses in China

• China to donate $500M to WHO, stepping into gap left by U.S.

Health / Medicine

• Why exercise drops off sharply at age 49

  The study used data from nearly 600 people in and around Cambridge, U.K., so the findings may not apply broadly. The brain could be partly to blame for a drop in exercise, Morris said. When you age, the part of the brain that helps control impulses — the "salience network" — changes. So at a certain point, your brain won't naturally "inhibit that desire to sit on the sofa," Morris says.

• Are ultra-processed foods as addictive as cigarettes?

• 'World-first' gonorrhoea vaccine to be rolled out in England

• Fat 'remembering' past obesity drives yo-yo diet effect, say experts

• Understanding How Violet Light Can Stop Myopia Progression

• The effects of far-red light on medicinal Cannabis

• How much extra weight is lost with Zepbound over Wegovy

• Common Gut Fungus May Protect Against Fatty Liver Disease

• Too much sitting increases risk of future health problems in chest pain patients

• America's Johnson and Johnson Problem

• An Expensive Alzheimer's Lifestyle Plan Offers False Hope, Experts Say

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• New policy limits access to Covid vaccines

  • FDA says Covid vaccines likely not available for healthy this fall

  • FDA Poised to Restrict Access to Covid Vaccines

• The Other COVID Reckoning - by Scott Alexander

  The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths.

  That’s 1.2 million American deaths. Globally it’s officially 7 million, unofficially 20 - 30 million. But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. It’s more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%. All these lives seem to have fallen into oblivion too quietly to be heard over the noise of Lab Leak Debate No. 35960381. Maybe it’s because they were mostly old people? Old people have already lived a long life, nobody can get too surprised about them dying. But although only a small fraction of COVID deaths were young people, a small fraction of a large number can still be large: the pandemic killed 250,000 <65-year-old Americans, wiping out enough non-seniors to populate Salt Lake City. More military-age young men died in COVID than in Iraq/Afghanistan. Even the old people were somebody’s spouse or parent or grandparent; many should have had a good 5 - 10 years left. Usually I’m the one arguing that we have to do cost-benefit analysis, that it’s impractical and incoherent to value every life at infinity billion dollars. And indeed, most lockdown-type measures look marginal on a purely economic analysis, and utterly fail one that includes hedonic costs. Rejecting some safety measures even though they saved lives was probably the right call. Still, I didn’t want to win this hard. People are saying things like “COVID taught us that scientists will always exaggerate how bad things will be.” I think if we’d known at the beginning of COVID that it would kill 1.2 million Americans, people would have thought that whatever warnings they were getting, or panicky responses were being proposed, were - if anything - understated.

  • No matter how often the official statistics are proven to have been lies; the Left maintains the faith. Was it 1.2 million died of COVID or with COVID? What was the actual number of fatalities caused by the disease and how many were caused by the responses? How many were totally unrelated but counted as "COVID deaths" because of political expedience?

• Therapeutic video game shows promise for post-Covid cognitive recovery

  The study included 98 participants with a confirmed history of COVID-19 and evidence of executive function impairment. Participants were recruited through physician referrals and post-COVID care programs.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Real-world geoengineering experiments revealed by UK agency

• Warming of 1.5 °C is too high for polar ice sheets

  • Sea level will rise fast even if we limit global warming to 1.5°C

  • Paris Agreement target won't protect polar ice sheets, scientists warn

• Just 100 corporations responsible for 20% of the extractive conflicts

• A Honduran reef stumps conservationists with its unlikely resilience

• An Illinois Building Was a Bird Killer. A Simple Change Made All the Difference

• As streamflow forecast shrinks, white water river runners in CO need to act fast

• Groundwater dominates snowmelt runoff in the western United States

• Bird feeders have caused a dramatic evolution of California hummingbirds

• Brembo's new brakes cut particulate emissions by 90 percent

• Who will benefit from melting glaciers?

• The EPA Isn't Killing Diesel–Tuners Are Killing Their Own Credibility

• Big US cities are sinking. Which city is sinking fastest?