2025-06-07

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• Open Source Distilling

• Day of the Pili-pili Gas - by Spearman Burke

  After surveying the carnage, we opened a large side door to the building and began decontamination of the first floor. In this case decon consisted of throwing the chair and flak jacket outside and sweeping and swabbing the deck. As a side note, readers may find it interesting in the world of chemical, biological, and nuclear incident response, hot soapy water and bleach are the number one decontaminating agents for most situations. Radioactive alpha and beta particles? Hot soapy water over here please! We swept the CS powder out of the side hatch in great billowing clouds. Being Africa, most folks leave their windows open for fresh air. We cleared the national bank out in a matter of minutes. A local military commander later called our RSO and remarked, “I hear the Americans are attacking the bank!”

• Resolve Marine Mobilizes Salvage Team to Combat Fire on Car Carrier Off Alaska

• Colorado kayakers rescue a dog that tumbled over 60-foot waterfall in Mexico

Horseshit

• America's skies may soon open up to supersonic travel

• Lonely man talking to AI 'girlfriend' on subway stuns internet: 'It's concerning

• 'No more floppy disks': Air traffic control overhaul faces daunting obstacles

• Silicon Valley wants to help me make a superbaby. Should I let it?

• The Automaker Wars No One Talks About

• Food and beer are common perks in hospitality – but are they masking unfairness?

• Want to reduce crime? Science says: build more libraries

• Nuclear fusion record smashed as German scientists take significant step forward

• Find in Michigan shows the extent of ancient Native American agriculture

• Walmart plans to expand drone deliveries to three more states

• Horse Bits, Used for Thousands of Years. Now Being Reconsidered

celebrity gossip

• Spafford Named Distinguished Professor of Computer Science

Obit

• Marina von Neumann Whitman, Who Carved Path for Women in Economics, Dies at 90

Musk

• We still know almost nothing about Tesla's robotaxi service

• X names Polymarket as its official prediction market partner

• The 4chan-Coded Ideology Behind Elon Musk's War on Normies

• He's a Master of Outrage on X. The Pay Isn't Great

• Use of X's Community Notes has plummeted in 2025, data shows

• Tesla seeks to block city of Austin from releasing records on robotaxi trial

• The Trump-Musk feud has been great for X, which jumped up the App Store charts

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• AI reveals hidden language patterns and likely authorship in the Bible

  • Who wrote the Bible? A pioneering new algorithm may shatter scholarly certitude

• Race, ethnicity don't match genetic ancestry, according to a large U.S. study

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• University of Michigan using undercover investigators to surveil Gaza protestors

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• More than a hundred backdoored malware repos traced to single GitHub user

• Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

• Discord CTO says he's "constantly bringing up enshittification" during meetings

• Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

• According to Nielsen, No One Is Watching Anime

• Google's nightmare: How a search spinoff could remake the web

• VMware record revenue, margins, as most big customers sign private cloud bundles

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Inside the collapse of Microsoft-backed UK tech unicorn Builder.ai

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI is ready for entry-level jobs

• Gemini Live rolling out captions for quiet conversations

• Anthropic C.E.O.: Don’t Let A.I. Companies off the Hook

  • Pixy: "Anthropic is upset that the AI industry is not being targeted with an impenetrable swamp of state-level regulations that only a multi-billion-dollar can afford to navigate, because it is a multi-billion-dollar company and can afford to navigate it."

• What Happens When Teachers Are Replaced with AI?

  • Texas private school's use of new 'AI tutor' rockets scores to country top 2%

• It turns out you can train AI models without copyrighted material

• OpenAI is retaining all ChatGPT logs "indefinitely." Here's who's affected

• Anthropic researchers predict a 'pretty terrible decade' for white collar jobs

• Big Mouth Billy Bass now talks back with AI

• The AI lobby plants its flag in Washington

• AI can now stalk you with just a single vacation photo

• Have LLMs Mastered Geolocation?

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Second ispace craft has probably crash-landed on Moon

  • Japan's iSpace Spacecraft Crashes On Moon, Shares Crater Back On Earth | ZeroHedge

  • Private lunar lander from Japan crashes into moon in failed mission

  • Japan's ispace fails again: Resilience lander crashes on moon

  • Second ispace lunar lander presumed lost.

• ESA's new asteroid hunter opens its eye to the sky

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Freight rail fueled a new luxury overnight train startup

• Maker of 'Most Complex Machine Humans Ever Created' Is Navigating Trade Fights

• Intel wants a 50% gross margin on all new products.

  Holthaus explained Intel's new risk-averse policy as "something that we probably should have had before, but we have it now so that product doesn’t move forward; you actually don’t get engineers assigned to it if it’s not 50% or higher gross margins moving forward."

• More Federal Workers Are Flooding the Job Market, with Worsening Prospects

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• FL Woman Fined $165K for Trivial Code Violations Takes Case to FL Supreme Court

• Supreme Court Rules 1964 Civil Rights Act Also Protects Whites

  One of the craziest things about America since the 1960s is that until today, nobody knew for sure if whites, men, and heterosexuals enjoyed equal rights under civil rights law or not. Federal appeals courts had ruled differently on the question. Thus, in five-twelfths of the country, whites, men, and heterosexuals were — until this morning — official legal Untermenschen when it came to the right to sue over discrimination.

• California county accused of using drones to spy on residents

• IRS open-sources Direct File tax software amid political and industry pushback

• Publicly funded homes for the poor cost $1.2M each to build

• Supreme Court Gives Doge Access to Social Security Data

  • Supreme Court allows DOGE to access social security data

  • Justices Grant Doge Access to Social Security Data

Trump

• Silicon Valley Is Starting to Pick Sides in Musk and Trump's Breakup

• Musk says SpaceX will retire Dragon spacecraft amid bitter Trump dispute

• Elon Musk says SpaceX will decommission Dragon spacecraft after Trump threat

• Silicon Valley aghast at the Musk-Trump divorce

  As Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s “bromance” broke apart on Thursday, tech industry figures who had backed both men raced to contain the fallout. "Elon isn’t taking calls from anyone,” complained one Silicon Valley financier and major donor to Republican candidates. “Not from people who have billions invested in his companies . . . The Valley is losing their shit.” At stake was an alliance between the tech world and the populist right that not only helped return Trump to office but also one that founders and investors had hoped would herald an era of tax cuts and deregulation, as well as an open door to crypto and artificial intelligence.

• Trump Planning to Extend TikTok Deadline–Again

• Trump says it may be better to let Ukraine and Russia 'fight for a while'

Democrats

• Biden pushes back on DOJ probe into his admin: ‘I made the decisions during my presidency.’

Left Angst

• The AI Prompts Doge Used to "Munch" Contracts Related to Veterans' Health

• While America's Front Doors Are Closing to China, Back Doors Are Opening

• MAHA Has a Pizza Problem - The Atlantic

  The days of school Domino’s—and school pizza in general—are numbered. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his supporters are on a mission to overhaul school lunch. Late last month, the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again Commission released a highly anticipated report on children’s health that pointed to school meals as one venue where ultra-processed foods are offered to kids unabated, contributing to obesity and other kinds of chronic disease. Unless cafeteria workers make school pizza from scratch, nearly every kind contains industrial ingredients that qualify the meal as an ultra-processed food. In effect, ridding school lunch of ultra-processed foods means the end of pizza day as we know it. Many of the food reforms pushed by RFK Jr.’s movement are popular. Doing away with artificial food dyes, for example, is far more sensible than Kennedy’s conspiracist views about vaccines. But in the case of banning most school pizza, RFK Jr. could be facing a tougher sell. MAHA’s vision for food is about to run headfirst into a bunch of hungry kids in a school cafeteria. Even though Domino’s school pizza is delivered by Domino’s drivers carrying Domino’s pizza boxes, the company’s Smart Slice is different from what would arrive at your door should you order a pie for dinner tonight. Cafeteria pizza has to abide by nutrition standards for school meals that the Obama administration spearheaded in 2010. The overly cheesy rectangular pizza with a cracker-like crust that you might have eaten in school no longer cuts it.

• Harvard Wins Reprieve from Trump's Foreign Student Ban

• Jared Isaacman reveals how space agency might have looked under his watch

• DOGE layoffs may have compromised the accuracy of government data.

• Trump races to fix a big mistake: DOGE fired too many people

• GOP intensifies war against EVs and efficient cars

• Trump preparing large-scale cancellation of grants and funding for California

• How the Trump Administration Banished Eight Men to Legal Limbo in Africa

• Retrofitting Qatari jet as Air Force One will cost hundreds of millions

• Buyer with Ties to Chinese Communist Party Got VIP Treatment at Crypto Dinner

• Palantir is nuts. When's the crash?

• 'Trump Flipped on Us': MAGA Reacts to Potential National Citizen Database

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• How US and Israel Could Destroy Iran's Nuke Program

World

• Just 15 buyers are in charge of £14B in UK central government tech spending

• Pornhub pulls out of France over age verification law

• A maths proof that is only true in Japan

• Australian Navy ship accidentally blocks WiFi across parts of New Zealand

• The Bitcoin scandal shaking Czech politics

• Analysis of the Spyware That Helped to Compromise a Syrian Army from Within

• M&S hackers sent abuse and ransom demand directly to CEO

• Balloons and Human Strength: How North Korea Righted a Toppled Warship

• Rare Viking Gold Arm-Ring Discovered on Isle of Man

• Australians may soon be able to download iPhone apps from outside Apple App Store

• Some 30 telecommunications masts have been sabotaged along the E22 on east coast

• More than 40 'narco-boat' drug smugglers arrested in major police sting

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian billionaire: SAP replacement is expensive but essential

• Orbital Ambush? Russian Satellites Move Like Predators Around U.S. Target

China

• The People's Republic of iPhone

  Trump’s discomfort with Americans using Chinese phones is not without foundation. What Apple has achieved in China is a spectacular example of industrial strategy. Apple’s investment in China for a single year, 2015, was $55bn – greater than the combined research and development spending of every business in the UK. Around the same time, Apple’s engineers were working in 1,600 Chinese factories. “We were unwittingly tooling them up,” a former Apple executive told McGee, “with… incredible know-how and experience.”

• The 'China Shock'

Health / Medicine

• Chasing Big Money with the Health-Care Hustlers of South Florida

• Doctors Were Preparing to Remove Their Organs. Then They Woke Up.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The Human and Ecological Costs of Perfume

• We should protect the high seas from all extraction, forever

  As world ocean specialists and policymakers convene this week at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France, we make a case for permanent protection of all international ocean waters from fishing, sea-bed mining, and oil and gas exploitation.

• True significant trends in global greening

• Miami's Drinking Water Is Threatened by a Florida Nuclear Plant

• Frequent wildfires are turning forests from carbon sinks into super‑emitters

• 'Tastes like water': how a US facility is recycling sewage to drink

• How many trees are there in the North American boreal forest?

• Food additive titanium dioxide likely has more toxic effects than thought

• Michigan triples waters with 'Do Not Eat' warning for PFAS in fish