2025-06-01

etc

• Millions of bees escape, start stinging after crash

  • Millions of Bees escape after lorry overturns in US

• Consider Knitting – journal.stuffwithstuff.com

  note that when I say “knitting”, you can read that as any of the various fiber arts, including crochet, weaving, macramé, cross-stitch, etc. I talk about knitting here because that’s the one closest to my heart and I strive to speak from the heart. You can make stuff out of string however you want. We are all fiber friends.

  regardless of how good the object itself is, it is an inarguable testament to the fact that I chose to spend dozens of quiet hours making stitch after stitch, all the while thinking about her and how much she means to me. A fraction of my life’s wick that I burned for her and no one else. In a world where so many seem to want to get more and more out of less and less, to automate and AI-ify everything until an infinite content firehose is blasting into every orifice of every consumer, hand knitting to me is the antidote. An acknowledgement that all we really have is time and thus there is no gift more precious than spending it on someone. Also, once you finish a project, you get to buy more yarn. Because, if I’m honest, a little consumption feels kinda nice too.

• Ford is recalling a million vehicles over a software fault where the infotainment system can crash and disable the rearview camera, potentially leading to a more serious crash.

• Can We Afford Large-Scale Solar PV?

  Is it feasible for solar power to meet most of our electricity demand? In the essay Understanding Solar Energy, we used some simple simulations of solar power to understand how much electricity demand solar PV can supply under different conditions. We found that due to solar’s intermittency, supplying large fractions of electricity demand requires a fair degree of “overbuilding” (solar panel capacity well in excess of total electricity demand), as well as a fair amount of storage. For a single family home where power demand never exceeds 10 kilowatts (and most of the time is below 2 kilowatts), supplying 80% of annual electricity consumption requires at least 13.7 kilowatts of solar panels, and 40 kilowatt-hours of storage. And supplying even higher fractions of electricity demand — 90%, 95%, 99% — the infrastructure requirements gets even more burdensome. Going from 80 to 90% of electricity supplied requires nearly doubling solar panel capacity.

• Before OBD-II, mechanics had to think

Horseshit

• The 'beige Amazon influencer' lawsuit is headed for dismissal

• Why am I filled with nostalgia for a pre-internet age I never knew?

• LA28's plan for a car-free Olympics now includes air taxis the price of an Uber

• Why incels take the "Blackpill"–and why we should care

  The online incel ("involuntary celibate") subculture is mostly known for its extreme rhetoric, primarily against women, sometimes erupting into violence. But a growing number of self-identified incels are using their ideology as an excuse for not working or studying. This could constitute a kind of coping mechanism to make sense of their failures—not just in romantic relationships but also in education and employment, according to a paper published in the journal Gender, Work, & Organization.

  Contrary to how it's often portrayed, the "manosphere," as it is often called, is not a monolith. Those who embrace the "Redpill" ideology, for example, might insist that women control the "sexual marketplace" and are only interested in ultramasculine "Chads." They champion self-improvement as a means to make themselves more masculine and successful, and hence (they believe) more attractive to women—or at least better able to manipulate women. By contrast, the "Blackpilled" incel contingent is generally more nihilistic. These individuals reject the Redpill notion of alpha-male masculinity and the accompanying focus on self-improvement. They believe that dating and social success are entirely determined by one's looks and/or genetics. Since there is nothing they can do to improve their chances with women or their lot in life, why even bother?

  • I think there's more people studying "incels" than identify that way.

• Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning

• Men are shaving off their eyelashes on TikTok – that might be a bad idea

• Are there billions more people on Earth than we thought? If so, its no bad thing

  According to the UN, the world’s population stands at just over 8.2 billion. However, a recent study suggests the figure could be hundreds of millions or even billions higher. This news might sound terrifying, but it is important to remember that anxieties about overpopulation are rarely just about the numbers. They reflect power struggles over which lives matter, who is a burden or a threat and ultimately what the future should look like.

• The Rise of the Japanese Toilet

• What on Earth Is What3words

• Many digital natives would not give their kids smartphones

• The Terrible Truth About Sherita, Brooklyn’s Beloved Billboard Dinosaur

  The trickery often involved classic deed theft maneuvers — phony notarizations and forged documents that have been used across the city. But the key scams occurred in buildings like Sherita’s, where a seemingly friendly man with a heating oil company rented an empty store and wound up taking over the whole building from its stunned owners. In each case, he’d put a billboard above the store offering cheap fuel, almost like a sly clue to his designs on the building.

• More than half of top mental health TikToks contain misinformation

Obit

• Loretta Swit, who played Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan on TV’s M*A*S*H, dead at 87

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Attempts at a Technological Solution to Disinformation Will Do More Harm Than Good

  The different varieties of these schemes for content authentication share similar flaws. One is that such schemes may amount to a technically-enforced oligopoly on journalistic media. In a world where these technologies are standard and expected, any media lacking such a credential would be flagged as “untrusted.” These schemes establish a set of cryptographic authorities that get to decide what is “trustworthy” or “authentic.” Imagine that you are a media consumer or newspaper editor in such a world. You receive a piece of media that has been digitally signed by an upstart image editing program that a creative kid wrote at home. How do you know whether you can trust that kid’s signature — that they’ll only use it to sign authentic media, and that they’ll keep their private signing key secret so that others can’t digitally sign fake media with it? The result is that you only end up trusting tightly controlled legacy platforms operated by the big vendors like Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple. If this scheme works, you’ll only get the badge of authentic journalist authority if you use Microsoft or Adobe. Furthermore, if “trusted” editing is only doable on cloud apps, or on devices under the full control of a group like Adobe, what happens to the privacy of the photographer or editor?

Musk

• Tesla took back leased cars for use as 'robotaxis,' but sold them instead

• General Motors Is Now Canada's Best-Selling EV Maker as Tesla Sales Crater

• Yep, X was down again

• X hits pause on its encrypted DMs feature

• Tesla's robotaxi rollout is alarming the public, new report shows

• SpaceX town warns residents they may lose right to use property

Electric / Self Driving cars

• It's Waymo's World. We're All Just Riding in It

• Australians are buying hybrid cars because they don't trust public chargers

• New Jersey Turnpike Authority Removing All Superchargers from Turnpike

• Most new cars in Norway are EVs. How a freezing country beat range anxiety

• Dodge Confirms Electric Charger Daytona R/T Is Dead as Unsold Cars Pile Up

• Can this self-driving electric bus make Riverside the new Detroit?

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Don’t throw in the towel on women’s sports

  Women’s organisations have looked to the IOC and World Boxing to eliminate this unfairness in women’s boxing, calling for policy change and the implementation of a cheek swab test, a simple and non-invasive way of establishing that male and female boxers are placed in the correct bouts according to their sex. In a surprising move last night World Boxing announced that they would be introducing “sex testing” across all of their events and pointed to the “reactions” to his inclusion in the programme of the Eindhoven Box Cup.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Silencing the Witches in Georgia High School "Crucible"

  it seems that the play about witch hunts, about the persecution of people out of hysteria, despite being an acknowledge American classic widely taught in high school classrooms and performed frequently on high school stages, had provoked the same moral persecution it portrayed as unjust. The students and parents rapidly tried to see about offering the second performance at another local venue, but while there were offers on the table, concerns grew that it wasn’t permissible, because the license for the show was specific to the high school and that moving the performance might violate the contract.

• MIT bans class president from graduation commencement after pro-Palestine speech

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Text Formatting in Notepad begin rolling out to Windows Insiders

  • Microsoft releases a bold new update for Notepad

• Taylor Swift Buys Back and Will Reissue First Six Albums

• Losing the War for the Free Internet

• The End of Big Data

• Sealed ZOTAC RTX 5090 box contained backpacks, not GPU — MicroCenter reportedly finds 31 more cases

• AI didn't kill Stack Overflow

• Google admits it 'incorrectly removed' Kirkland business from its search engine

• Google, DOJ tussle over how AI will remake the web in antitrust closing argument

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Beware of Fast-Math

  I've joked on Twitter that "friends don't let friends use fast-math", but with the luxury of a longer format, I will concede that it has valid use cases, and can actually give valuable performance improvements; as SIMD lanes get wider and instructions get fancier, the value of these optimizations will only increase. At the very least, it can provide a useful reference for what performance is left on the table. So when and how can it be safely used?

• Realtek eyes SSDs with new PCIe 5.0 x4 DRAM-less controller

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

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

• AI jobs danger: Sleepwalking into a white-collar bloodbath

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

• Meta plans to replace humans with AI to assess privacy and societal risks

• Google's New AI Puts Breasts on Minors–and J. D. Vance

• AI Responses May Include Mistakes | OS/2 Museum

  Unfortunately the correct answer comes up maybe 10% of the time when repeating the query, if at all. In the vast majority of attempts, the AI simply makes stuff up. I do not consider made up, hallucinated answers useful, in fact they are worse than useless. This minor misadventure might provide a good window into AI-powered Internet search. To a non-expert, the made up answers will seem highly convincing, because there is a lot of detail and overall the answer does not look like junk.

• OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be a 'super assistant' for every part of your life

• Anthropic hits $3B in annualized revenue

• What 2000 years of Chinese history reveals re: AI panic and future inequality

• It's not your imagination: AI is speeding up the pace of change

• Teaching AI Like a Kindergartner Could Make It Smarter

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Satellite mega-swarms are blinding us to the cosmos

  • Put sensors on the satellites and broadcast that data.

Crypto con games

• Julia Garner and Anthony Boyle to Portray Caroline Ellison and SBF in New Series

• Is every memecoin just a scam?

  • Yes. Why has the Left been perfectly happy for that to be the case until Trump made one?

Economicon / Business / Finance

• L.A. council backs $30 minimum wage for tourism workers, despite warnings

• Volkswagen to make 'massive' investment in US in bid to avoid tariffs

• Apple Savings cuts its interest rate again, this time to 3.65%

• Paid maternity leave policies could be costing women tech jobs

• Nissan's Fire Sale of Its HQ Marks the End of Carlos Ghosn's Shattered Legacy

• Change for the wurst: VW puts best-selling sausage in supermarkets

• Service costs aren't exploding anymore

  the trend of increasing service costs defined many of our economic debates for a decade. There was just one small problem — by the time we started talking about how to address this trend, the trend had changed.

• Flight deal experts spot a surprise upcharge: Flying solo

• Apple's Reliance on China Is About Far More Than Labor Costs

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Federal Authorities Probe Effort to Impersonate White House Chief of Staff

• Why would the US government ever refuse the US dollar?

Trump

• Jared Isaacman told his nomination as NASA administrator will be withdrawn

  • White House Planning to Replace Musk's NASA Administrator Nominee

  • Trump pulls Isaacman nomination for space

  • White House to pull NASA nominee Isaacman

  • Looks Like Jared Isaacman Is Out of the Running for NASA Admin

Democrats

• Report: Biden May Not Have Even Known About Detrimental Climate Policies of his Own Administration - Power The Future

Left Angst

• NPR sues Trump admin over executive order to cut federal funding

• Doge cuts to USAid blamed for 300k deaths – most of them children

• Rewriting the Californian Ideology

  If Silicon Valley is poised to make its mark on our institutions in the next four years and beyond, it’s worth revisiting our prevailing assumptions about what drives its behavior. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron called tech’s core values the “Californian Ideology” in a landmark 1992 essay of the same name. They described it as “a fatalistic vision of the natural and inevitable triumph of the hi-tech free market,” whose politics appeared to be “impeccably libertarian.” More than thirty years later, echoes of these phrases still reverberate through cultural commentary on Silicon Valley, like a halo of hornets it can’t shake off. But for those of us who identify with tech, this ideology feels increasingly out of step with the world we live in. Tech is not the libertarian bastion it was once imagined to be, if it ever was.

• I Worked to Cure ALS. Then Washington Shut Down the Project

• The Planetary Society reissues call to reject budget proposal for NASA

• World Scientists Look Elsewhere as U.S. Labs Stagger Under Trump Cuts

• Rich Kids

  This week, House Republicans sent the Senate a budget that adds $3.8 trillion to the deficit. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” pairs unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy with a combined $1.1 trillion reduction in spending on programs including Medicaid and SNAP. The math isn’t mathing: Older/wealthier Americans are running up younger/poorer Americans’ credit cards to maintain their lifestyle. One especially offensive provision: a permanent increase in the estate tax exemption to an inflation-indexed $15 million, per person — letting couples pass $30 million to their heirs tax-free while slashing food stamps.

• Final NSF budget proposal 57% cut to agency would drop grant success rates to 7%

• Dozens of active and planned NASA spacecraft killed in Trump budget request

• Key takeaways from the MAHA commission report

• Scott Alexander replies

  When it comes to overhead (rather than aid), the substantive point in question is whether the affiliated NGOs, and also the various government aid bureaucracies, have significant excess overhead, and there is a hefty body of theory and evidence from public choice economics suggesting that is the case. Scott seems unwilling to just flat out acknowledge this, instead insisting there is no magic path to much lower overhead. Cutting overhead expenditures is that magic path, and plenty of institutions both private and public have done it, especially when forced to. Scott also holds the unusual view that overhead as measured on a 990 is a relevant metric. Typically not. A lot of the actual noxious overhead shows up as program expenditures. A large number of wasteful, poorly run non-profits can get their 990 numbers down to normal levels without engaging in outright lying.

  On rhetoric, call me old-fashioned, but if you publicly refer to a class of people as scum, and express a hope that they burn in hell, you should retract those words and also think through why you might have been led to that point. I am not persuaded by Scott’s sundry observations to the contrary, such as noting that the president is (sort of) protected by the Secret Service. Scott cites my use of the term “supervillains,” but in fact (as Cremiaux repeatedly retweets) that was part of a desire not to cancel people with differing views, not a desire that they burn in hell.

• Trump Administration Ends Program Critical to Search for an HIV Vaccine

  • HIV's Most Promising Breakthrough Has Taken a Hit

• Trump Championed Rulings That Are Now Being Used to Check His Power

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• USDA Employee Charged in Multimillion-Dollar Food Stamp Fraud and Bribery Scheme

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The Air Force's pause on separation and retirement orders isn't 'stop loss'

• There is an "imminent" threat to Taiwan, America warns

• The U.S. Plan to Hobble China Tech Isn't Working

  • 30 years' damage isn't undone in 4 months.

World

• US tourist takes wrong boat, ends up Southend fan

• The Swiss village wiped off the map by a glacier

• France will ban smoking in beaches, parks and near schools from July 1

• North Korean phone has both censorship and accountability in the user interface

• Google Maps can't explain why it falsely labeled German autobahns as closed

Israel

• Carbon footprint of Israel's war on Gaza exceeds that of many entire countries

China

• China’s Astronstone raises early funding for stainless steel rocket with “chopstick” recovery.

• China's Startups Race to Dominate the Coming AI Robot Boom

• China surrounded Xi aide with seasoned experts to seal U.S. deal

• China Plans Major Nuclear Expansion with 10 New Reactors

Health / Medicine

• Psychedelics myth: 'People tell tourists stories they think are interesting'

• Why some countries don't fluoridate their water

  Concerns around excessive fluoride intake are one reason why some countries have chosen not to artificially fluoridate their water supplies – but only because their drinking water already has naturally high levels of fluoride.

  • Places where it's required do not often concern themselves with the native levels.

+Gene-edited pig kidneys moving long-stymied field of xenotransplantation forward

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Excess US Deaths Before, During, and After the Covid-19 Pandemic

  • "excess deaths" is a synthetic statistical measure that, while not meaningless; requires enough calculation and interpretation that it is effectively "make numbers support my argument" at best.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The circular economy: How Holobionts conjure magnificence from nothing

• Amazon rainforest adjusts to long-term experimental drought

• UK Carbon Price Soars 8% as London Agrees to Link Emissions Trading with EU

• Wolves Wreak Havoc On Cattle Herds In California | ZeroHedge

  One wolf pack, known as the Whaleback Pack, near her ranch doesn’t seem inclined to hunt elk or deer, she said. Since November 2021, wolves have killed at least 44 head of cattle at the Martin family’s ranch in Siskiyou County, Gliatto told The Epoch Times. Of those confirmed wolf kills, three were adult cows, and the rest were calves. “There’s a handful of people and ranches like us that have been hit really hard,” she said. “I’ve had so much carnage.”

• Investment Risk Is Highest for Nuclear Power Plants, Lowest for Solar

• Insect-eating Venus flytraps thrive in the Carolinas

• How Does Cloud Emissivity Feedback Affect Present and Future Arctic Warming?

• Landslides Leave Big Sur's Beloved Landmarks Fighting for Survival

• US electric power sector's use of water continued its downward trend in 2020

• 'Wind theft': The mysterious effect plaguing wind farms

• Dolphins ‘deliberately get high’ on puffer fish nerve toxins by carefully chewing and passing them around

• With no mention of previous "normal" to copmpare to: More hurricanes are slamming the Gulf Coast. Is this the new normal?

• NOAA's 2025 hurricane forecast warns of a busy season

• Trees May Be Able to Warn Us When a Volcano Is About to Erupt