2025-05-31

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• The decoding of ancient Roman scrolls is speeding up

• Nearly 3k-year-old Mayan complex discovered, featuring pyramids and canals

• Illinois man has spent 40 years rebuilding a WWII-era B-17 bomber in his barn

• Toyota CEO Says 'A Car Is Not a Car If It's Not Fun'

Horseshit

• Opinion | How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart - The New York Times

• Fake My Run Is Tricking Strava While Trying to Make a Larger Point

• A Scientist Says Humans Will Go Backwards in Time Within Just 4 Years

• 1978 rebuild: Famous NYC skyscraper was almost toppled by winds

• This Nuclear Outboard Motor Was a Really Terrible Idea

  In 1961, after spending nearly 15 years and $1 billion—$7.7 billion in today’s dollars—the feds killed off the nuclear-powered aircraft program. But GE wasted no time looking for other uses for its designs. The engine-maker ended up publishing a 21-volume report on the atomic motor work, and in the fullness of time these documents made their way onto the Internet. In the section entitled “APEX 910: Application Studies,” you can read for yourself GE’s wacky proposal to put its nuclear engine in a pod and bolt it onto a ship. It was aerospace historian Scott Lowther who labelled GE’s 601B Power Package the “nuclear outboard motor”—and that precisely captures its nature.

• Unraveling the Secrets of the Inca Empire

• Reconstructing the Antikythera Mechanism's Central Front Dial Parts

• Next gaming dice could be shaped like a dragon or armadillo

• What Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries Say About What Women Want Now

• I Fooled Millions into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss

• The Nobel Prize Winner Who Thinks We Have the Universe All Wrong

• The End of the Universe Could Begin with a Quantum Bubble

• 'He spent thousands': how a bank team tries to rescue scam victims

• Do You Have 'Oura Paranoia' from Having Too Much Information About Your Body?

• America needs to make its cities family-friendly again

• 'Welcome In.' The Two-Word Greeting That's Taking Over and Driving Shoppers Nuts

• Young Americans spend much more time alone than they did fifteen years ago

celebrity gossip

• Sydney Sweeney To Start Selling Soap With Her Own Bathwater Mixed In

Obit

• Robert Jarvik, who designed the first permanent artificial heart, dies

• Alf Clausen, Emmy-Winning 'Simpsons' Composer, Dies at 84

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Bluesky has caught on with many news influencers, but X remains popular

Musk

• SpaceX town residents may lose right to using their property for its current use

• SpaceX Update on Martian Colonization

• On The Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama

  • Elon Musk used cocktail of ketamine, ecstasy, shrooms, and Adderall while at WH

• Tesla Autopilot Flips Car over in Perfect Driving Conditions

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Woman fired by Wikipedia parent after harassment speaks out

  The woman, Kayla Mae (who also uses the name Kayla Morgan), said she still believes that the Wikimedia Foundation is “doing good, crucial even, things for the world,” but that the organization lacks clear direction and policies to deal with harassment and that her story is one of many quietly told by current and former workers who have faced similar abuse over the years. Mae was hired by the Wikimedia Foundation in November 2022 to work as a software engineer in a remote role. She was based in Texas; her direct supervisor, Dennis Mbuguru (who also goes by the name Dennis Muthuri), was based in Kenya. From the moment she was hired, Mae — a transgender woman who is neurodivergent — claims she faced abuse and harassment by Mbuguru, to the point that she filed complaints with Wikimedia Foundation’s human resources department.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The Surveilled Student

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Apple Executives Won't Be Appearing at This Year's WWDC "The Talk Show Live"

  • The Talk Show Live at WWDC with Gruber will not have any Apple execs this year

• More film and television to watch than ever before – good luck finding it

• Business Insider Lays Off 21% of Staff, Citing 'Traffic Sensitivity'

  • Business Insider Lays Off 21%

• Radeon Software for Linux Dropping AMD's Proprietary OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers

• Mark Zuckerberg Finally Found a Use for His Metaverse — War

• Man who stole 1,000 DVDs from employer strikes plea deal over movie leaks

• Mysterious Database of 184M Records Exposes Login Credentials

• When will M&S take online orders again?

• Taylor Swift buys back the rights to her master recordings

  • Taylor Swift Buys Back Rights to Her First 6 Albums

• Filmmakers Used 20 iPhones at Once to Shoot '28 Years Later'

• The Gmail app will now create AI summaries whether you want them or not

  • Gemini summary cards now available in the Gmail app

• Amazon Fire Sticks enable "billions of dollars" worth of streaming piracy

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• A limited-time flavor: Blue Raspberry Pi | Jeff Geerling

  This blue version is one of 1000 blue Pis that were made to celebrate Raspberry Pi's first anniversary, 12 years ago. What's crazy is this original Pi (well technically the 2nd revision of the original Pi...)? It's still supported. Apple usually stops supporting their Macs after 5-7 years. And Microsoft, well, it's complicated, but generally you're gonna get 8 to 10 years, if you're lucky and picked the right hardware. But my goal today is to learn a little more about this blue Pi, and see if I can boot it up with modern Linux, and maybe actually do something useful with a 12 year old computer.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Grammarly secures $1B from General Catalyst to build AI productivity platform

• Stack Overflow's New Plan to Fight AI-Induced Death Spiral

• What to Expect Now That Trump Has Scrapped Biden's Crippling AI Regulations

• OpenAI Can Stop Pretending

• The 'white-collar bloodbath' is all part of the AI hype machine

• For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Be Here

• Anthropic CEO frets about 20% unemployment from AI, but economists are doubtful

• Behind the Curtain: The Great Fusing

• “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”

  For decades, Eliezer has been warning the world that an AI might soon exceed human abilities, and proceed to kill everyone on earth, in pursuit of whatever strange goal it ended up with. It would, Eliezer said, be something like what humans did to the earlier hominids. Back around 2008, I followed the lead of most of my computer science colleagues, who considered these worries, even if possible in theory, comically premature given the primitive state of AI at the time, and all the other severe crises facing the world. Now, of course, not even two decades later, we live on a planet that’s being transformed by some of the signs and wonders that Eliezer foretold.

• Anthropic annual revenue hits $3B

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Scientists Have Clear Evidence of Martian Atmosphere 'Sputtering'

• Europe's Proba-3 mission will create an 'eclipse' to the study sun's corona

• Blue Origin boss: Government should forget launch and focus on "exotic" missions

Crypto con games

• Coinbase Returns to SF: A Tech Boomerang Story

• SEC Dropping Enforcement Case Against Binance Crypto Exchange

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The U.S. Housing Market Has Nearly 500k More Sellers Than Buyers

• Rise in Recurring Jobless Claims Signals Higher US Unemployment

• US Economy Shrinks 0.2% on Weaker Spending, Larger Trade Impact

• The Billionaire Odd Couple Whose Hedge Fund Is Killing It

• Credit default swaps are back in fashion — even if the panic might be overblown.

• Microsoft's ZeniMax Reaches Contract Deal, Union Says

• Amazon Pledges to Continue Aggressive Data Center Expansion

• U.S. Imports Drop 19.8% in April (Yes, That's a Record)

• Falling Houses Prices Aren't Just a Texas or Florida Story

• United Chief Dismisses Budget Airline Model as 'Dead' and 'Crappy'

• Kalshi Pushes Sports Betting as Trump, Deregulation Boosts Prediction Market

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Oregon Bill to Block Private-Equity Medical Deals Heads to Governor's Desk

• DOE Announces New Supercomputer Powered by Dell and Nvidia

• IRS Just Open-Sourced Direct File

• Nebraska to adopt law aimed at curbing kids' time online

• PBS sues Trump administration over funding cuts

• Governor Tina Kotek signs legislation to end child marriage in Oregon

  Oregon today joined Washington and a growing list of other states in making eighteen the minimum age for both parties to get a marriage license with Governor Tina Kotek’s approval of Senate Bill 548, bipartisan legislation sponsored by Democratic Senator Janeen Sollman and Republican Senator David Brock Smith.

Trump

• New Visa Policies Put America First, Not China

• Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service

• Trump says 'Elon is not really leaving' as Musk's White House contract ends

Left Angst

• White House MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI

  • US Government report cited non-existent sources, academics say

  • RFK Jr's 'Maha' report found to contain citations to nonexistent studies

  • White House releases health report written by LLM, with hallucinated citations

  • White House MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI, experts say

  • RFK Jr.'s 'Make America Healthy Again' report seems riddled with AI slop

• Trump's visa clampdown plunges 275,000 Chinese students into uncertainty

  • US says it will start revoking visas for Chinese students

• To boost nuclear power, controversial rewrite of radiation safety rules

• The U.S. Can't Afford to Lose the Biotech Race with China

• American finance, always unique, is now uniquely dangerous

  The financial revolution is now encountering the MAGA revolution. Mr Trump is hastening the next financial crisis by playing havoc with trade, upending America’s global commitments and, most of all, by prolonging the government’s borrowing binge. America’s financial system has long been dominant, but the world has never been as exposed to it. Everyone should worry about its fragility.

• Colleges must give up federal funding to achieve true intellectual freedom

  restoring the pre-Trump status quo, as Harvard and many academics demand, will not safeguard intellectual freedom. Why not? Because the administration’s actions are only a vile escalation of the infringement on intellectual freedom inherent in any system of federal funding. Both are destructive, and both must go. Start with the Trump administration. Under the pretext of combatting the real problem of antisemitism on campus — this from a president who dines with antisemites — the administration is demanding intellectual control over Harvard’s faculty and student body.

  • Not because intellectual freedom is good, just "Trump Bad".

• The MAGA revolution threatens Boston, America's most innovative place

• Opinion | Silicon Valley Is at an Inflection Point - The New York Times

  This language is as far-fetched as it sounds, and Silicon Valley has a long history of making promises that never materialize. Yet the narrative that A.G.I. is just around the corner and will usher in “massive prosperity,” as Mr. Altman has written, is already leading companies to accrue vast amounts of capital, lay claim to data and electricity, and build enormous data centers that are accelerating the climate crisis. These gains will fortify tech companies’ power and erode human rights long after the shine of the industry’s promises wears off.

• The VC industry needs a geopolitical reboot

• U.S. foreign tax bill sends jitters across Wall Street

• Elon Musk's Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death

• Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans

  • Trump Taps Palantir to Create Master Database on Every American

  • Data firm is building 'detailed portraits of Americans' on Trump's order

• Musk bragged of 'deleted' group when DOGE shut it down – now they're appealing

• Smartphone Sales Growth Hit by Tariff 'Whirlwind of Uncertainty

• Fallout from U.S. Aid Withdrawal Hits the Most Fragile Locations

• Max Planck Society sees flood of US job applicants amid Trump swoop on universities

• US crushes study abroad dreams, Asian countries rush to pick up the pieces

• Curtis Yarvin wants to replace American democracy with a monarchy led by a 'CEO'

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US Government sanctions tech company involved in cyber scams

  • U.S. sanctions cloud provider 'Funnull' as top source of 'pig butchering' scams

• US suspends engine sales to Chinese planemaker COMAC

• 'Golden Dome' plan has a major obstacle: Physics

• America Let Its Military-Industrial Might Wither. China's Is Booming

World

• Argentine court declares a mistrial in the death of soccer star Maradona

• Germany eyes 10% digital tax on global tech groups

  • Germany weighs 10% tax on online platforms like Google

• The UK wants you to sign up for £1B cyber defense force

• Man skateboarding to Africa has belongings stolen

• Spread of sexual deepfake images created by generative AI growing in Japan

• A Swiss Village Destroyed by a Landslide

• Chaos on German autobahns as Google Maps wrongly says they are closed

• Japan's govt launches Minecraft map to educate about flood disaster prevention

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia's Cybercriminals and Spies Are Officially in Cahoots

China

• The U.S. Deported This Chinese Scientist, a Decision That Changed World History

• Chinese paraglider survives accidental 8k-metre-high flight above the clouds

• China's economy runs on Uyghur forced labour

• China is quietly preparing to build a gigantic telescope

• China launches landmark mission to retrieve pristine asteroid samples

• The lessons from China's dominance in manufacturing

Health / Medicine

• The DSM is not medical science – it's a social control manual

• First new antibiotic in 50 years to tackle superbug

• High vitamin B6 doses over a long period could cause irreversible nerve damage

• Sleep on it: A pilot study exploring impact of sexual activity on sleep outcomes

• Association of Endothelial Dysfunction with THC-Edible Use

  • Smoking weed and consuming THC-laced edibles linked to early heart disease, study finds.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• U.S. Woman Dies from Mad Cow-Like Brain Disease That Lay Dormant for 50 Years

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The dying art of milking molluscs

• Limits to Growth was right about collapse

• How America became meat stick nation

• Oil companies face a wrongful death suit tied to climate change

• Cicada invasion begins as Brood XIV swarms parts of U.S.

• Climate scientists hosting a 100-hour livestream in response to funding cuts