2025-06-20

etc

• NTSB – Urgent safety bulletin potential problems with Boeing 737 MAX jet engines

  • US safety board wants Boeing 737 MAX engine warnings over smoke entering cockpit

Horseshit

• Could the Semicolon Die Out?

• Mysterious carving found in northern Ontario wilderness

• Studies Prove your fancy car's touchscreen is worse than buttons

• The Scheme That Broke the Texas Lottery

• Peter Thiel-Backed 'Enhanced Olympics' Is Elaborate Supplement-Selling Scheme

• Feedback Is Not an Attack

  Almost everyone checks the box for “direct feedback.” That’s the default answer. And I believe most people genuinely want to believe that about themselves. Direct feedback sounds efficient. Honest. Grown-up. But what I’ve learned over time is that what people say in theory and what they respond to in practice don’t always match. So once a quarter, during review season or whenever we’ve had enough shared experience to notice patterns, I pull up the survey again. We go over it together, and I’ll say something like, “You said you prefer direct feedback. But I’ve noticed that when I offer it directly, something shifts. It doesn’t seem to land easily. Can we talk about that?” And that’s when the real answer usually surfaces. It’s rarely that they don’t want feedback. It’s that they want it with more context. Or more softness. Or more space. “I do want direct feedback,” they’ll say, “but not in a group setting.” Or, “It’s helpful, but I need time to process, Slack is better than live.” Or, “It’s not what you said, it’s how surprised I was. I didn’t know anything was off.”

• New dating for White Sands footprints confirms controversial theory

  • Geochronology supports LGM age for human tracks at White Sands, New Mexico

• You've Heard of Fine Wine. Now Meet Fine Water

celebrity gossip

• Dr. Demento Announces Retirement After 55-Year Radio Career

• Pavel Durov on his arrest in France, Macron, Russia, the FBI

  • Telegram's Durov wills his $14B estate to his 100 children

• ‘We will block the canals’: Young protesters target Bezos Venice wedding

• How Mark Zuckerberg unleashed his inner brawler

Musk

• XAI is facing a lawsuit for operating over 400MW of gas turbines without permits

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• U.S. v. Skrmetti: How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost - The New York Times

  On Wednesday, the Supreme Court delivered a new, crushing blow, upholding Tennessee’s ban in a 6-to-3 decision. In allowing Tennessee to outlaw blockers and hormones, the court not only shielded similar laws on the books in some two dozen states. It effectively closed the door on extending new constitutional protections to trans people. Some advocates fear that Skrmetti could open the door to banning medical transition for adults and perhaps other health care that some conservatives oppose, like birth control or in vitro fertilization — even vaccines. The fate of a once-obscure medical treatment could have profound consequences for American law.

  What makes the defeat all the more striking is the remarkable string of victories the broader L.G.B.T.Q. movement was winning until a few years ago. Tailoring its message to reach skeptical audiences, careful to ride near the crest of shifting public sentiment, it pursued incremental legal and regulatory wins that, ultimately, sparked deep social change. Beginning in the 2010s, gay people won the right to marry and, along with trans people, serve openly in the military. The movement defeated “bathroom bills” aimed at trans people in states like North Carolina and Texas, persuading even some Republicans that such measures were unnecessary and cruel. Just five years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that employees could not be fired for being gay or transgender. But with Skrmetti, the movement bet its future on a far more fraught question: whether children have a constitutional right to treatments that halt and redirect their physical adolescence.

• White people prefer white people on dating apps – but that could be changed

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Be ready to be shocked and offended at university, UK regulator tells students

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Address bar shows hp.com. Browser displays scammers' malicious text anyway

• I feel open source has turned into two worlds

  Existing open source licenses, practices, and culture don't draw this distinction (and it would be hard to for licenses), but I think we're going to see an increasing amount of it in the future. Corporate use of open source under the current regime is an increasingly bad deal for the open source people involved, so I don't think the current situation is sustainable. Even if licenses don't change, everything else can.

• Google's frighteningly good Veo 3 AI videos to be integrated with YouTube Shorts

• How 'Jaws' Made a Template for the Modern Blockbuster

• Steam is adding screen reader support and other accessibility tools

• How Hackers Are Turning Tech Support into a Threat

• Smart TV OS owners face "constant conflict" between privacy, advertiser demands

• Washington targets speeders with cellphone data

• US dawdles over 'unconstitutional' tower dump appeal • The Register

  The term "tower dump" refers to law enforcement obtaining records from cell towers, specifically related to individuals' locations and connection times, via warrants. This type of data is typically used to aid investigations into potential crimes. In this case, the US sought such data to see whether suspected violent gang members could feasibly be connected to a string of homicides, shootings, and vehicle thefts over a 14-month period.

• 16B hit in 'one of largest data breaches in history' – what's been exposed

  • 16B logins discovered across exposed datasets, but don't panic

  • 16B passwords from Apple, Facebook, Google and more leaked

  • Over 16B records leaked in "unimaginable" major data breach

• 'F1' and Apple's Movie Strategy

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• hydronuclear testing

  hile hydronuclear tests do not create a nuclear yield, they do involve a lot of high explosives and radioactive material. The plan was to conduct the tests underground, where the materials cast off by the explosion would be trapped. This would solve the immediate problem of scattering nuclear material, but it would obviously be impractical to recover the dangerous material once it was mixed with unstable soil deep below the surface. The material would stay, and it had to stay put!

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• OpenAI boss: Meta offering $100M plus to poach my staff

  • Sam Altman says meta offered OpenAI staff 100M-bonuses

• Meta tried to buy Ilya Sutskever's $32B AI startup, now planning to hire its CEO

• OpenAI wins $200M contract with US Military for 'warfighting'

• Six-month-old, solo-owned vibe coder Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

• Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article on AI

• Some AI Prompts Can Cause 50 Times More CO2 Emissions Than Others

• ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study

• One of ChatGPT's popular uses just got skewered by Stanford researchers

• Flopped Humane “AI Pin” Gets An Experimental SDK

  the experimental SDK lets developers treat the pin as a mostly normal Android device, with the addition of a modular, user-facing assistant app called MABL. Adam stresses that this is all highly experimental and has a way to go before it is useful in a user-facing sort of way, but there is absolutely a workable architecture.

• How Much Energy Does AI Use? The People Who Know Aren't Saying

• Gartner: 'AI is not doing its job and should leave us alone'

• There Is No A.I.

• Microsoft prepared to walk away from high-stakes OpenAI talks

• Why Big Tech cannot agree on artificial general intelligence

• Brain activity much lower when using AI chatbots, MIT boffins find

• AI residencies are trying to change the conversation around artificial art

• The 'OpenAI Files' will help you understand how Sam Altman's company works

  • The 'OpenAI Files' push for oversight in the race to AGI

• Amazon boss says AI will replace jobs at tech giant

• It's pretty easy to get DeepSeek to talk dirty

• Sam Altman 'constantly' asked ChatGPT questions about his newborn

• Can You Choose an AI Model That Harms the Planet Less?

• Publishers facing existential threat from AI, Cloudflare CEO says

• A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally.

• ChatGPT May Be Impacting Your Brain

• Why pushes for more AI from Duolingo and Audible hit a nerve

• AI avatars in China just proved they are better influencers

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Much boom, no zoom: SpaceX Starship 36 Anomaly

  • HN comments

  • SpaceX's Starship explodes in Texas during preparations for 10th test flight

  • SpaceX Starship explodes during routine test in Texas

  • SpaceX's Starship explodes again while still on the ground

  • SpaceX's next Starship just blew up on its test stand in South Texas

• The Universe's Darkest Mysteries Are Coming into Focus

• Honda's hopper suddenly makes the Japanese carmaker a serious player in rocketry

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Investors Are Finally Excited About Europe and Japan Again

• Fremont startup's lawsuit targeting broken McDonald's ice cream machines is over

• TI to invest $60B to manufacture foundational semiconductors in the U.S.

• Microsoft planning job cuts aimed at sales people

• The Great Egg Heist

• Amazon orders employees to relocate to Seattle and other hubs

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Waste of the Day: Unused Covid Quarantine Pods

• USAID Official, Three Contractors Plead Guilty To Half-Billion Dollar Bribery Scheme

  “Watson exploited his position at USAID to line his pockets with bribes in exchange for more than $550 million in contracts,” Guy Ficco of IRS Criminal Investigation said in a statement. “While he helped three company owners and presidents bypass the fair bidding process, he was showered with cash and lavish gifts.” The scheme was possible because of the federal government’s racial “set-aside” laws known as 8(a) contracting, which allow contracting officers to give contracts to companies owned by minorities, women, or veterans without the usual competitive process.

Democrats

• The D.N.C. Is in Chaos and Desperate for Cash Under Ken Martin - The New York Times

  the Democratic National Committee’s financial situation has grown so bleak that top officials have discussed whether they might need to borrow money this year to keep paying the bills. Fund-raising from major donors — some of whom Mr. Martin has still not spoken with — has slowed sharply. At the same time, he has expanded the party’s financial commitments to every state, and even to far-flung territories like Guam.

  • Where did Kamala's Billions go? after Biden's billions? "Throwing good money after bad" isn't a long term habit, usually.

Left Angst

• US resumes student visas, demands social media access

• Cybersecurity takes a big hit in new executive order

• How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to My Deportation

• Why Would the Trump Family Want to Run a Phone Company?

• Plan to kill dozens of NASA missions threatens US space supremacy

• Tech's Turn to Trump Was a Labor Story, and the Response Should Be Too

• Trump administration ending LGBTQ suicide hotline in July.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Illegal immigrant arrested after allegedly chasing down US attorney with knife in Albany | Just The News

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Silicon Valley execs to join the Army as officers

• The Trojan Horse Will Come for Us Too

World

• EU court adviser sides with regulators in Google's fight with EU antitrust fine

• The Megaproject Economy

  No matter the scale or complexity, it seems like there is nothing South Koreans cannot figure out how to produce at a rate that puts the rest of the world to shame—with the notable exception of human beings, of which South Korea currently manages to produce only about 0.75 per woman, one of the lowest, least productive rates in the world. At this rate, in three generations, the newest generation of South Koreans would be 96% smaller than the current one. A future South Korea of 5 million rather than 50 million people is highly unlikely to be as exceptionally industrially productive as it is today.

• Austrian government agrees on plan to allow monitoring of secure messaging

• As Nuclear Power Makes a Comeback, South Korea Emerges a Winner

• Air India crash underscores risks of country's infrastructure boom

• EC slams online bazaar AliExpress for dodging obligation to stop dodgy traders

• Paris's Seine river keeps the Louvre cool in summer

• Swiss National Bank cuts rates to zero, will not rule out going negative

• Spain says April blackout was caused by grid failures and poor planning

• Teen Social Media Ban Moves Closer in Australia After Tech Trial

Iran / Houthi

• Iranian media says WhatsApp, Instagram sharing user data with Israel

• Pro-Israel hackers attack Iran's largest crypto exchange, destroying $90M

  • Hacking Group Steals at Least $90M from Iranian Crypto Exchange

• Israel's Extraordinary Spy Teams Inside Iran

  “Operation Rising Lion’s” clandestine operations will go down in military history as the most ambitious covert military offensive in modern warfare. The press has briefly noted it, but they are missing the real story. Israel’s secret Iranian operations led by Mossad, the country’s spy agency, have not stopped. They are ongoing. And only a few are talking about it.

  “Mossad has a long track record of building deep operational infrastructure inside enemy territory. There is every indication that those networks are still in place and active. They are likely supporting real-time targeting of regime leadership, missile systems, and mobile launchers, while also disrupting Iranian internal security from within,” he told me. For the moment, let’s briefly note what we know about these covert operations. Mossad surreptitiously moved into Iran parts for hundreds of quadcopter drones equipped with explosives and created a factory inside the country to stealthily assemble them. They brought them in with suitcases, commercial trucks, and shipping containers. The secret agents also shipped in ammunition and weaponry to attack Iranian missile bases. The drones were launched from inside the country.

• Israel-tied Predatory Sparrow hackers waging cyberwar on Iran's financial system

Israel

• The Guardian Seethes at 'Carbon Footprint' of Israel’s War Against Hamas

  one of the statistics Lahkani cited was that a whopping 40 percent of the so-called “total emissions” from Israel came from — wait for it — the 70,000 aid trucks the Jewish State sent into Gaza, of which she used the United Nations as a spring board to condemn “as grossly insufficient to meet the basic humanitarian needs of 2.2m displaced and starving Palestinians.”

China

• Trump's tariffs see makers of Chinese Bitcoin-mining machines eye US production

• China's online literature expands overseas readership in cultural export push

• China Is Hacking Russia to Steal War Secrets

• China’s nuclear arsenal surges 20% in one year, reaching over 600 warheads.

• Aiming at the Dollar, China Makes a Pitch for Its Currency

Health / Medicine

• Regulators Approve a Twice-Yearly Shot to Prevent HIV Infection

  • An injectable HIV-prevention drug is highly effective – but expensive

  • HIV prevention drug hailed as a 'breakthrough' gets FDA approval

• Cognitive tests in infancy offer insight into intelligence at age 30 and beyond

• Marijuana's Links to Heart Attack and Stroke Are Becoming Clearer

• General Mills Announces Plans to Remove Certified Colors from All U.S. Cereals and All K-12 Foods by Summer 2026 - General Mills

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Is Fake Grass Safe? A Manufacturer Sues to Stop a Discussion

• Rampaging raccoons: how the American mammals took over a German city

• Turning coalmines into solar energy plants could add 300GW of renewables by 2030

• Three years left to limit warming to 1.5C, leading scientists warn

• Data Center Energy Needs Could Upend Power Grids and Threaten the Climate

• Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024

• Greenhouse gas accumulation is accelerating and more extreme weather will come

• A forest the size of North America would be needed to offset Big Oil's reserves

• How the Earth shook for nine days and nobody knew why

• 91.4F for us americans: Temperatures pass 32C as first UK area enters heatwave