2025-05-29

Horseshit

• How to disappear– Inside the world of extreme-privacy consultants

• Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites from Their Wasted Lives

• Neolithic 'sun stones' sacrificed in Denmark revives sun after volcanic eruption

• Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral

• Air Canada pilot slams air traffic controller shortage to passengers on flight

• Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?

• Are museums 'guilt tripping' their visitors? No, they aren't doing enough

• My Sister Was Found Dead. Then I Discovered Her Search History

  It’s a phrase she learned only recently. “Until we lost Aimee, I didn’t know what ‘online harm’ meant,” she says. She first heard the term from Ian Russell, father of Molly, and campaigner for online safety. Molly Russell was 14 when she took her life after viewing images and videos of self-harm, and, unusually, the coroner reported that online activity had “contributed to her death in a more than minimal way”. Walton hopes that the coroner investigating Aimee’s death will take a similar view, because she believes the word “suicide” alone heaps disproportionate responsibility on to Aimee, while leaving the digital world unaccountable and unregulated.

Obit

• Rick Derringer, who had a hit with ‘Hang On Sloopy’ and produced ‘Weird Al,’ dies at 77

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Partisan Corporate Speech

  the volume of partisan corporate speech has risen sharply between 2012 and 2022. Second, this increase has been disproportionately driven by companies adopting more Democratic leaning language, a trend that is widespread across industries, geographies, and CEO political affiliations. Third, partisan corporate statements are followed by negative abnormal stock returns, with significant heterogeneity by shareholders’ degree of alignment with the statement.

Musk

• Elon Musk Tried to Block Sam Altman's Big AI Deal in the Middle East

• Unsold Tesla Cybertrucks are piling up at Detroit parking lot

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Driverless Semi Trucks Are Here, with Little Regulation and Big Promises

• Electric Vehicles Died a Century Ago. Could That Happen Again?

• Tesla Rival BYD Tumbles After Launching China EV Price War. Several Rivals Fire Back.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Texas' annual reading test adjusted difficulty yearly, masking improvement

• Reactions and follow up to College English Majors Can't Read

  The people have spoken, and they speak in a single clear voice: they want to hear about how dumb college kids are. They want to bathe in delicious schadenfreude. They want all the embarrassing and gory details about how Suzie in Kansas couldn’t figure out what a megalosaurus is, how heavily she breathed during the 16 seconds she tapped Google searches into her phone before giving up. And their bloodlust will be slaked one way or another.

• San Francisco Public Schools Convert F's to C's, B's to A's in Equity Push

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Microsoft wants Windows Update to handle all apps

  • No more separate app updates? Microsoft wants Windows Update to handle it all

  • Microsoft wants Windows to update all software on your PC

• India's iPhone exports to the U.S. soared an estimated 76%

• Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

• Intel versus AMD is currently an emotional decision

  I am tired of all sorts of aspects of Intel. I'm tired of their relentless CPU product micro-segmentation across desktops and servers, with things like ECC allowed in some but not all models. I'm tired of their whole dance of P-cores and E-cores, and also of having to carefully read spec sheets to understand the P-core and E-core tradeoffs for a particular model. I'm tired of Intel just generally being behind AMD and repeatedly falling on its face with desperate warmed over CPU refreshes that try to make up for its process node failings. I'm tired of Intel's hardware design failure with their 13th and 14th generation CPUs (see eg here). I'm sure AMD Ryzens have CPU errata too that would horrify me if I knew, but they're not getting rubbed in my face the way the Intel issue is.

• Meta's Pattern of Failed Big Bets: From Metaverse Meltdown to AI Brain Drain

• Nothing's Carl Pei says your smartphone's OS will replace all of its apps

• Google to pay $1.38B over privacy violations

• Texas governor signs online safety law in blow to Apple and Google

  • Texas Requires Apple and Google to Verify Ages for App Downloads

• Journalism Dreams

  the outrage cycle on this story has already lowered to a simmer, though the damage remains and, hopefully, some lessons are being learned. But Institutionalized Not Caring remains the coin of the realm, an easy path to profits and power, from the Oval Office on down. Will anyone remember this sordid business in a month? Does it matter if they don’t? My suspicion is that it will go the way of Signalgate, just one more absurd fuck-up in a culture increasingly inured to them.

  • The Who Cares Era

  Earlier this week, it was discovered that the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer had both published an externally-produced "special supplement" that contained facts, experts, and book titles entirely made up by an AI chatbot. the thing that is most disheartening to me is how at every step along the way, nobody cared. The writer didn't care. The supplement's editors didn't care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn't care. The production people didn't care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn't care either. It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.

• Telegram and Grok Partnership

  • XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

  • Telegram announces partnership with Musk's xAI

• We Made a Film with AI. You'll Be Blown Away–and Freaked Out

• Threat of Meta breakup looms as FTC's monopoly trial ends

• Getty Images spending millions to battle a 'world of rhetoric' in AI suit

• Apple to Rebrand Its Device Operating Systems to Mark Major Overhaul

  • Apple is reportedly going to rename all of its operating systems

• Capcom reveals its PC game sales overshadow console, and it's only growing

• EA Cancels Black Panther Game, Closes Cliffhanger Games

• Asus routers are being hit with stealthy, persistent backdoor

  The company researchers went on to say that the activity they observed was part of a larger campaign reported last week by fellow security company Sekoia. Researchers at Sekoia said that Internet scanning by network intelligence firm Censys suggested as many as 9,500 Asus routers may have been compromised ViciousTrap, the name used to track the unknown threat actor.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• The First Smart Homes

  That gets us to the tension between residential lighting and architectural lighting control systems. In higher-end commercial buildings, and in environments like conference rooms and lecture halls, there's a well established industry building digital lighting control systems. Today, DALI is a common standard for the actual lighting control, but if you look at a range of existing buildings you will find everything from completely proprietary digital distributed dimming to 0-10v analog dimming to central dimmer racks (similar to traditional theatrical lighting).

  Maybe that conveys what most frustrates me about the "home automation" industry: it is constantly reinventing the wheel, an oligopoly of tech companies trying to drag people's homes into their "ecosystem." They do so by leveraging the buzzword of the moment, IoT to voice assistants to, I guess now AI?, to solve a basic set of problems that were pretty well solved at least as early as 1948.

• Long live American Science and Surplus (which needs your help)

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI Weather Models Have Shown Promise This Hurricane Season

• Voiceover artist urging ScotRail to remove her voice from new AI announcements

• When AI-generated art enters the market, consumers win – and artists lose

• The US AI love affair with the UAE isn't just about access it's about dominance

• Microsoft Is Spying on Users of Its AI Tools

• Europe's top AI researcher raise a $13M seed to crack the 'holy grail' of models

• Everyone living in Dubai will soon get free ChatGPT Plus subscription

• OnePlus is the latest smartphone maker to go all-in with AI

• Behind the Curtain: A white-collar bloodbath

• Google's co-founder: AI works better when you threaten it with physical violence

• Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings joins Anthropic's board of directors

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Hermes-PF's 6 CubeSats Watch the Entire Sky for High-Energy Bursts

• SpaceX's ninth Starship flight test ends in another explosion

• SpaceX may have solved one problem, only to find more on latest Starship flight

Crypto con games

• They Stole a Quarter-Billion in Crypto

• Meme retailer GameStop buys first Bitcoin batch, scooping up $500M

• Why 'wrench attacks' on wealthy crypto holders are on the rise

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Southwest Airlines Sets Baggage Fees

• GM Invests in V-8 Engines as It Backpedals on EVs

• North Korea Infiltrates U.S. Remote Jobs–With the Help of Everyday Americans

• Consumer confidence for May was much stronger than expected on optimism for trade deals.

• Circle IPO has peculiar Facebook-like characteristic

• Most Americans don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living, analysis finds

• Nvidia's gaming business just had its best quarter ever

  • Nvidia beats earnings expectations but takes hit from chip export restrictions

  • Nvidia beats on earnings and revenue as data center sales jump 73%

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Proposal to Ban Flame Retardants to Meet CA's Furniture Flammability Standard

• U.S. Mint Moves Forward with Plans to Kill the Penny

• US to ban foreign officials over 'flagrant censorship' on social media

• US court blocks Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariffs

  • Court says Trump doesn't have the authority to set tariffs

  • US Trade Court Finds Trump Tariffs Illegal

  • Trade Court Strikes Down Trump's 'Liberation Day' Tariffs

Trump

• Trump orders US chip designers to stop selling to China

• White House plans — at last — to send some DOGE cuts to Hill - POLITICO

  The planned transmission of the “rescissions” bill, confirmed by two Republicans granted anonymity to describe the plans, comes after a long internal battle over how to formalize the cuts that have been made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative. Two senior administration officials also confirmed the plan Wednesday. The $9.4 billion package set to land on Capitol Hill reflects only a fraction of the DOGE cuts, which have already fallen far short of Musk’s multitrillion-dollar aspirations. The two Republicans said it will target NPR and PBS, as well as foreign aid agencies that have already been gutted by President Donald Trump’s administration.

• Fannie and Freddie Are Now Explicitly Guarantied

  With this tweet, I am not sure that it is possible for Fannie/Freddie to come off the federal balance sheet even if privatized because of the now "explicit" guaranty. (Or as a fallback, there's a promissory estoppel argument.) As far as I can tell, because of an over-eagerness to tweet, Fannie and Freddie's obligations now bear the eagle.

• U.S. to begin revoking visas for Chinese students

  • The U.S. will begin revoking visas of Chinese students

Left Angst

• US halts student visa appointments and plans expanded social media vetting

  • Trump administration orders US embassies to stop student visa interviews

• RFK Jr drops Covid-19 boosters for kids and pregnant women from CDC list

• RFK Jr threatens ban on federal scientists publishing in top journals

• Trump administration seeks to pull estimated $100M in Harvard funding

• DOGE Days

  On March 17 2025, I joined DOGE as a software engineer working for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). In 2016, I canvassed for Bernie Sanders. I spent my first day in Nevada walking door-to-door in the desert heat with a dying phone battery and a stack of printed papers delineating potential voters, thinking "there really should be an app for this." There, I ended up writing some Google Apps code for caucus result reporting. his was a chance to do something bigger.

  In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the 'fall guy' for unpopular decisions.

  I reached out to someone who wrote about Gumroad's recent transition to open source. During the interview, which was then published in Fast Company, I was asked about my experience working at DOGE, which had been revealed publicly as part of a WIRED article. oon after publication, my access was revoked without warning.

• White House scraps plan to block data brokers from selling Americans' data

• Trump Bristles at 'Taco Trade' That Bets on Him Backing Down

  • The TACO trade is the new Trump trade

• Trump admin tells SCOTUS: ISPs shouldn't be forced to boot alleged pirates

• HHS cancels –$600M contract with Moderna on vaccines for flu pandemics

World

• Tesco shoppers mock 'VAR'-style cameras at self-checkout

• German court parks four Volkswagen execs in jail over Dieselgate scandal

  • German court convicts 4 ex-Volkswagen managers of fraud in emissions scandal

• Spain’s blackout story is disintegrating

  Sources in Brussels have told The Telegraph that the authorities were conducting an experiment before the system crashed, probing how far they could push reliance on renewables in preparation for Spain’s rushed phase-out of nuclear reactors from 2027. The government seems to have pushed the pace recklessly, before making the necessary investments in a sophisticated 21st-century smart grid capable of handling it.

• Operators of Another 'Spoiler Website' Arrested in Japan

• Fake discounts on Shein 'breach law', EU says

• Germany’s AfD Party Blocked From Exercising Rights Again

  The dossier also contained statements “implying,” as a scandalized Reuters put it, that “immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals.” Actually, those AfD statements didn’t “imply” that immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals; they asserted that fact outright, because that is what government crime statistics overwhelmingly show. After Faeser’s announcement, the AfD accused the outgoing government of orchestrating the release to inflict maximum damage on the party in the next Parliament. The AfD’s charge then seemed speculative. Now, it looks prescient. Before the “right-wing extremist” designation had come out, a high-ranking member of the Christian Democratic Union had suggested that the AfD should be treated “in parliamentary procedures and processes like any other opposition party.” Now, however, CDU chancellor Friedrich Merz says that it would be “unthinkable” to allow the AfD any of its parliamentary rights in light of the secret dossier, because, you know, democracy.

• Experts "deeply concerned" by the EU plan to weaken encryption

• Monks Behaving Badly: Explaining Buddhist Violence in Asia

• Glacier collapses burying large parts of Swiss village Blatten

  • Glacier collapse partly destroys Swiss village, one person missing

• Carney says he wants Canada to join major European defence plan by July first

• 'Are the Bricks Evil?' In a Village Built for Nazis, Darkness Lingers

Iran / Houthi

• Israeli strikes destroy last plane at Yemen rebels' airport

Israel

• US Group Suspends Gaza Operations After All Hell Broke Loose At Aid Site | ZeroHedge

• Netanyahu says Israel killed elusive Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Putin says foreign IT firms still in Russia should be 'strangled'

China

• The lessons from China's dominance in manufacturing

• Auto Shanghai 2025 Wasn't Just a Car Show. It Was a Warning to the West

• China is now the biggest debt collector in the developing world

• Chinese rocket Zhuque-2E creates light streak in US night sky

Health / Medicine

• Creatine: The bodybuilding supplement that boosts brainpower

• Decaf coffee can mimic caffeine's effects in habitual drinkers

• Could Plasma Exchange Therapy Help You Live Longer?

• 'laughing gas' became a deadly – but legal – American addiction

• Brain drugs can now cross the once impenetrable blood–brain barrier

• Sleep hours fall as income rises

• Want to live to a healthy old age? Here's what a top doctor does

• Drinking your sugar is more problematic for health than eating it

  • Sugar consumed through soda, fruit juice consistently linked to higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• 'Ocean darkening' a cause for concern – scientists

• Dieselgate pollution killed 16,000 people in UK, study estimates

• Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%

• The Colorado River is running low. The picture looks even worse underground

  • Groundwater rapidly declining in the Colorado River Basin, satellite data show

• The 'Man-Eater' Screwworm Is Coming

• Global temperature expected to remain at or near record levels in coming 5 years

• The 'Green' Aviation Fuel That Would Increase Carbon Emissions

• Fossils show puzzling lack of evolution during last Ice Age peak

• Explorers of Ukrainian caves may have brought deadly bat fungus to U.S.

• Two large Saharan dust clouds are headed west from Africa to the United States

• New eco-hotel at Everglades national park built for age of super hurricanes