2025-06-09

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• Panjandrum: The 'giant firework' built to break Hitler's Atlantic Wall

  "At first all went well. Panjandrum rolled into the sea and began to head for the shore, the brass hats watching through binoculars from the top of a pebble ridge [...] Then a clamp gave: first one, then two more rockets broke free: Panjandrum began to lurch ominously. It hit a line of small craters in the sand and began to turn to starboard, careering towards [photographer Louis] Klemantaski, who, viewing events through a telescopic lens, misjudged the distance and continued filming. Hearing the approaching roar he looked up from his viewfinder to see Panjandrum, shedding live rockets in all directions, heading straight for him.

  "As he ran for his life, he glimpsed the assembled admirals and generals diving for cover behind the pebble ridge into barbed-wire entanglements. Panjandrum was now heading back to the sea but crashed on to the sand where it disintegrated in violent explosions, rockets tearing across the beach at great speed."

  Panjandrum had failed for the final time, and the project was quietly scrapped.

Horseshit

• Astronomers thought Milky Way doomed to crash into Andromeda. Now not so sure

• FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

• The wild story of a Russian who hid for years under the California redwoods

• Million dollar flying car can reach speeds of 155 MPH

• Enhanced Games, where athletes can use banned substances, to start in 2026

• Old smartphones can have a new life as tiny data centers

• Meme Stocks Made Him a Fortune. Now He's Betting on Flying Taxis

• College Students Are Using 'No Contact Orders' to Block Each Other in Real Life

• Where will international students go if not the US?

• Archaeologists Find Tools Contradicting the Timeline of Civilization

• The life of a 24/7 streamer: 'What more do you want?'

celebrity gossip

• Luigi Mangione’s Chilling Diaries Revealed In Court: ‘Parasites Simply Had It Coming.’

Obit

• Bill Atkinson, Who Made Computers Easier to Use, Is Dead at 74

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Political emotions on the far right

  The Remarque Institute, based out of New York University, is an institute established for the study of contemporary Europe. The essays across the following pages were presented at a one-day conference on the emotional landscapes of the contemporary far right, from the AfD in Germany to Moms for Liberty in the US. Much liberal handwringing over the surging far right attempts to analyse its rationale, methods or motivations, but here these writers tackle its feelings.

• Former Wikimedia employee says abuse at the nonprofit is "organization wide"

  A trans software engineer fired by Wikipedia is speaking out after she filed a lawsuit against the nonprofit website claiming wrongful termination. Kayla Mae said that the “bigotry” described in her suit is “organization wide” and that most of her former colleagues “are as against the problems in leadership as I was.”

Musk

• Russia Offers Political Asylum to Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

• BYD's Five-Minute Charging Puts China in the Lead for EVs

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Shipping discourse

  Pro-shippers (also known as anti-antis), etymologically inverted from anti-shipper, believe that creating or consuming fiction which depicts harmful behavior does not itself function as an endorsement of such actions. Some pro-shippers believe that fictional works can affect societal attitudes towards sexuality when portrayed irresponsibly, but they align with the general movement's support of artistic free-expression and the continuation of adult content within fan spaces. Because most antis are teenagers, many pro-shippers consider the anti movement an attack on sexual content in general and an attempt to displace adult-oriented content from fan spaces. Both antis and pro-shippers are largely LGBT, reflecting the fanfiction community as a whole—a 2013 survey conducted by fans revealed that only 38% of AO3 users surveyed were heterosexual, with more nonbinary users than men. The two groups are demographically similar in terms of racial, gender, and sexual identities and report similar rates of neurodiversity and survivorship of sexual abuse. However, antis are generally younger than pro-shippers, with the largest contingent in their early-to-mid teens.

• The Wire That Transforms Much of Manhattan into One Big, Symbolic Home

• From Spain to Mecca on horseback: The men performing Hajj like medieval pilgrims

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• YouTuber claims to have received an offer to buy the Commodore brand

  • There's not much point in buying Commodore

  Better to let it rest in peace and stop encouraging these bloodsuckers to drain what life and goodwill remain in the Commodore name. The crap products that came before only benefited the licensor and just make the brand more tawdry. CC BV only gets to do what it does because it's allowed to. TheC64 systems sold without the Commodore trademark because it was obvious what they were and what they do; Mega 65s and Ultimate64s are in the same boat. Commodore enthusiasts like me know what these systems are. We'll buy them on their merits, or not, whether the Commodore name is on the label, or not (and they will likely be cheaper if they don't). CC BV reportedly has been trying to sell off the trademark for awhile, which seems to hint that they too recognize the futility. Don't fall into their trap.

• Maintaining an Android app in Google Play Store is a lot of work

• Google Wins Copyright Claim Dismissal in Publishers' Textbook Piracy Lawsuit

• Linux or Landfill? End of Windows 10 Leaves PC Charities with Tough Choice

• Cybercriminals Are Hiding Malicious Web Traffic in Plain Sight

• Microsoft Needs a SteamOS Competitor, and It Needs It Yesterday

• Duolingo CEO on going AI-first: 'I did not expect the blowback

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• An update on the X11 GNOME Session Removal – Rust in Peace

  The most likely scenario is that all the X11 session code stays disabled by default for 49 with a planned removal for GNOME 50.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• A knockout blow for LLMs?

  On the one hand, it echoes and amplifies the training distribution argument that I have been making since 1998: neural networks of various kinds can generalize within a training distribution of data they are exposed to, but their generalizations tend to break down outside that distribution. That was the crux of my 1998 paper skewering multilayer perceptrons, the ancestors of current LLM, by showing out-of-distribution failures on simple math and sentence prediction tasks, and the crux in 2001 of my first book (The Algebraic Mind) which did the same, in a broader way, and central to my first Science paper (a 1999 experiment which demonstrated that seven-month-old infants could extrapolate in a way that then-standard neural networks could not). It was also the central motivation of my 2018 Deep Learning: Critical Appraisal, and my 2022 Deep Learning is Hitting a Wall. I singled it out here last year as the single most important — and important to understand — weakness in LLMs. (As you can see, I have been at this for a while.)

  On the other hand it also echoes and amplifies a bunch of arguments that Arizona State University computer scientist Subbarao (Rao) Kambhampati has been making for a few years about so-called “chain of thought” and “reasoning models” and their “reasoning traces” being less than they are cracked up to be. For those not familiar a “chain of thought” is (roughly) the stuff a system says it “reasons” its way to answer, in cases where the system takes multiple steps; “reasoning models” are the latest generation of attempts to rescue the inherent limitations of LLMs, by forcing them to “reason” over time, with a technique called “inference-time compute”. (Regular readers will remember that when Satya Nadella waved the flag of concession in November on pure pretraining scaling - the hypothesis that my deep learning is a hitting a wall paper critique addressed - he suggested we might find a new set of scaling laws for inference time compute.)

  Rao, as everyone calls him, has been having none of it, writing a clever series of papers that show, among other things that the chains of thoughts that LLMs produce don’t always correspond to what they actually do.

• Re: My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts

• Anthropic's AI is not writing it's own blog.

• What if We're Building too Much AI Infrastructure?

  We're spending tens of billions of capex dollars on vast datacenters but what if the AI future is more efficient and runs cooler?

• The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

  The obvious question at this point is which of these pelicans is best? I’ve got 30 pelicans now that I need to evaluate, and I’m lazy... so I turned to Claude and I got it to vibe code me up some stuff.

• Meta in talks for Scale AI investment that could top $10B

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• A Japanese lander crashed on the Moon after losing track of its location

• The race to find GPS alternatives

• NASA Pulls the Plug on Europa Lander, but Scientists Propose a Plan B

Crypto con games

• Bitcoin Family etches keys onto metal cards on 4 continents after kidnappings

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The Future Ain't What It Used to Be for These Funds

• Rents fall in most U.S. metros since 2023, demand struggles to match supply

• The SEC blamed day traders for hackers they couldn't catch

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• NYC Mayor orders Citi Bike e-bikes be limited to 15 MPH

Trump

• Trump deploys National Guard as LA protests against immigration agents continue

  • Trump deploys National Guard as Los Angeles protests against immigration agents

  • Trump deploys 2k National Guard members after Los Angeles immigration protests

  • Federal agents conduct immigration raids across LA. Trump orders National Guard response | LAist

  Federal agents conducted a series of immigration sweeps across Los Angeles on Friday, prompting anger and resistance from onlookers and immigrant rights groups that have braced for this type of action for months. By Saturday, tensions were rising between state and local authorities and Trump administration officials, who said they were calling up the National Guard in response to what they said were "violent mobs" attacking "ICE Officers and Federal Law Enforcement Agents carrying out basic deportation operations in Los Angeles." Gov. Gavin Newsom called the plan to take over deployment from the state "purposefully inflammatory" adding that it "will only escalate tensions." Newsom said he'd been in "close coordination with the city and county, and there is currently no unmet need."

  • The National Guard in Los Angeles

  • Los Angeles Braces For Another Day Of Chaos As Newsom Pits Marxist Color Revolution Against Trump Admin | ZeroHedge

Left Angst

• Trivia and 'Jeopardy ' Could Save Our Republic

• The AI Tool Used by Doge to Review Veterans Affairs Contracts

• WH Asked Joint Chiefs Chairman for Candidates to Lead NASA, Worrying Experts

• A Comprehensive Accounting of Trump’s Culture of Corruption - The New York Times

  At the gala dinner President Trump held last month for those who bought the most Trump cryptocurrency, the champion spender was the entrepreneur Justin Sun, who had put down more than $40 million on $Trump coins. Mr. Sun had a good reason to hope that this investment would pay off. He previously invested $75 million in a different Trump crypto venture — and shortly after the Trump administration took office in January, the Securities and Exchange Commission paused its lawsuit against him on charges of cryptocurrency fraud. The message seemed obvious enough: People who make Mr. Trump richer regularly receive favorable treatment from the government he runs.

  • Do we have a comprehensive accounting of the Biden Brand's take in the last 4 years? Ain't it fun to watch the liberals try to find new ways of expressing "it's only bad when Trump does it".

• US budget cuts could derail global science collaborations

• Stop bending the knee to Trump: it's time for anticipatory noncompliance

• A historical guide to surviving and thriving in the court of Trump

• Congress is poised to increase energy bills by hundreds of dollars per household

• Eight US states seek to outlaw chemtrails – even though they aren't real

• America's infatuation with boy geniuses and 'Great Men' is ruining us

• Palantir's Collection of Disease Data at CDC Stirs Privacy Concerns

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• CEO of Health Care Software Company Convicted of $1B Fraud Conspiracy

• A DNA Technique Is Finding Women Who Left Their Babies for Dead

• What is nihilism? Teen in shooting plot, car bomber subscribed to same ideology

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• China's tech invasion is a national emergency

• U.S. military trims access to its critical sea ice measurements

• If you thought the first nuclear weapons age was scary, buckle up

World

• BC mountain search-and-rescue groups warn about relying too much on AI and apps

• Germany plans rapid bunker expansion amid fears of Russian attack

• British woman charged over death of Australian in e-scooter crash

• Conservative Colombian Presidential Candidate Uribe Shot In The Head In Bogota Event | ZeroHedge

  Conservative Colombian senator Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot in the head on Saturday in an apparent assassination attempt. There was no immediate confirmation from the authorities on the status of his condition.

• A nostalgic look inside Ibiza's club scene

• Rat breaches bank ATM in India, eats $18,000 worth of cash

Israel

• Israel is accused of the gravest war crimes – how govts respond could haunt them

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Putin's WeChat Wager

  Moscow is betting on a super-app strategy to sideline foreign platforms and control digital communications

• Russian Intelligence Says It Collects WeChat Data. What Does That Mean?

• French carmaker to produce military drones in Ukraine alongside defence firm

Health / Medicine

• How a mysterious epidemic of kidney disease is killing young men

• We’re secretly winning the war on cancer

• It's OK not to be fat

  Over the past year, I lost about 45 pounds — about 20% of my maximum body weight. This didn’t seem like a particularly epic weight loss journey — certainly a lot less than the 70 pounds that Matt Yglesias lost a few years back. And unlike Matt, I didn’t have bariatric surgery to shrink my stomach. In fact, I didn’t even use Ozempic, Mounjaro, or any other weight-loss drug at all. All I did was eat less and exercise a little bit more. This seems like the kind of boring, everyday story that doesn’t really merit a blog post. But I think the way that I lost weight actually does have some interesting implications for how, as a society, we should think about weight loss — and about other personal struggles like addiction.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Flying Now Puts You at Risk of Measles Exposure, CDC Says

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Black paint on wind turbines sharply reduces bird death but there are issues

• The nine-armed octopus and the oddities of the cephalopod nervous system

• Student discovers long-awaited mystery fungus sought by LSD's inventor

  Morning glory plants live in symbiosis with fungi that produce the same ergot alkaloids the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann modified when he invented LSD in the late 1930s. Hofmann hypothesized that a fungus in morning glories produced alkaloids similar to those in LSD, but the species remained a mystery until Hazel and Panaccione's discovery. They published their findings in Mycologia.

• Oceans Awash in Plastic Waste

• The Dogs of Chernobyl Are Experiencing Rapid Evolution, Study Suggests

• Coral reefs face an uncertain recovery from the 4th global mass bleaching event

• Water cremation and human composting could be offered over traditional funerals

• Is it better to neglect your garden?

• Crocs divert blood to avoid busting a gut