2025-07-01

etc

• Fireball flies across the sky and causes sonic boom

• Melbourne man discovers extensive model train network underneath house

  Xu has since been in touch with the previous owner, who told them their father built the train network in the 1960s when they were a child. The set had likely not been used for some years, with the area full of spiderwebs when Xu first went beneath the house and found the dusty set.

Horseshit

• Can You Ever Really Know a Person? Biographers Keep Trying

• Scientist Says the Universe May Have a Memory of Its Own

• The whistleblowers were less sure that Boeing's 787 Dreamliner are the "safest"

• Former NTSB IG: Boeing 787 FADEC may have caused AirIndia crash

• Doctor Who Challenged Child Abuse Specialist Nancy Harper's Opinion Lost His Job

• The Birth-Rate Crisis Is Even Worse Than You've Heard - The Atlantic

  Humanity is set to start shrinking several decades ahead of schedule.

  By about 2084, according to the gold-standard United Nations “World Population Prospects,” the global population will officially begin its decline. Rich countries will all have become like Japan, stagnant and aging. And the rest of the world will have become old before it ever got the chance to become rich. Sorry, did I say “bad news”? That was actually the good news, based on estimates that turn out to be far too rosy. Every two years, the UN’s demographers revise their population projections, and for the past 10 years, they’ve always had to revise in the same direction: down. Next year, they’ll do so again. In reality, the worldwide population decline is set to begin decades ahead of their expectations. Because global fertility trends are much worse than they, and probably you, think.

  • they had a schedule for this?

• Inside a U.S. plan to use immigrants in Latin America as WWII bartering chips : NPR

• Inside LA's WeWork for Stoners

• Why Can't Americans Sleep?

• Scientists Launch Wild New Project to Build a Human Genome from Scratch

• Kei Cars: They're Tiny. They're Slow. and People Are Obsessed

• Hazzardous Stunt: General Lee Replica Soars Over City Fountain in Wild Video

  • Landing angle view

• Why are lefties more creative? Turns out, they're not

• 'smart toilet' started as a joke – now it's gaining momentum – The Hustle

  • Futurama "EyePhone" episode: 'goodbye, over complicated Japanese toilet! You know too much!"

• Brain rot isn't new – but now we're all talking about it

• Do Car Buyers Care Which Engine Is Under the Hood? A Ford Exec Doesn't Think So

• The Whole Country Is Starting to Look Like California

Obit

• Sir Francis Graham-Smith 'Towering figure' of British astronomy dies at 102

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Self-censorship and the ‘spiral of silence’: Why Americans are less likely to publicly voice their opinions on political issues

  Polarization undermines democracy by making the essential processes of democratic deliberation – discussion, negotiation, compromise and bargaining over public policies – difficult, if not impossible. Because polarization extends so broadly and deeply, some people have become unwilling to express their views until they’ve confirmed they’re speaking with someone who’s like-minded. I’m a political scientist, and I found that Americans were far less likely to publicly voice their opinions than even during the height of the McCarthy-era Red Scare.

  Since that survey, attacks on free speech have increased markedly, especially under the Trump administration. Issues such as the Israeli war in Gaza, activist campaigns against “wokeism,” and the ever-increasing attempts to penalize people for expressing certain ideas have made it more difficult for people to speak out. The breadth of self-censorship in the U.S. in recent times is not unprecedented or unique to the U.S. Indeed, research in Germany, Sweden and elsewhere have reported similar increases in self-censorship in the past several years.

  • Lab Leak, Biden Laptop, Biden corruption, Biden mental state, Biden economy... just when did the things we can't talk about begin to multiply? Who is it feels uncomfortable calling Trump a Nazi and calling for violence against him and anyone who supports him?

Musk

• 'Lidar is lame': why Elon Musk's vision for a self-driving Tesla taxi faltered

• Accounts peddling CSAM content flood some X hashtags as safety partner cuts ties

• Musk said to bet on Tesla delivering Robotaxi in June, those who did lost big

• Starlink may be lying about speed

• Elon Musk says he'll form the 'America Party' if 'insane' spending bill passes

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Volvo delivers 5,000th electric semi with little fanfare

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Study challenges assumptions of racial attitudes and political identity in U.S.

  Nearly 40% of U.S. cities analyzed in a study in NPJ Complexity diverge from the common narrative that Republican-dominated areas have high levels of implicit racial bias while Democratic strongholds are more tolerant. Cities like Knoxville, Tennessee, and Spokane, Washington, voted Republican but showed lower-than-expected levels of implicit racial bias, once factors like diversity, segregation, and city population were accounted for. In contrast, Chicago, Illinois, Albany, New York, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, all Democratic strongholds, exhibited higher-than-expected bias levels.

• The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine - The Atlantic

  How the left ended up disbelieving the science

  The same idea—that the choice is transition or death—appeared in the arguments made by Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s solicitor general, before the Supreme Court last year. Tennessee’s law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat minors with gender dysphoria would, she said, “increase the risk of suicide.” But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates. At first, Strangio dodged the question, saying that research shows that blockers and hormones reduce “depression, anxiety, and suicidality”—that is, suicidal thoughts. (Even that is debatable, according to reviews of the research literature.) But when Alito referenced a systematic review conducted for the Cass report in England, Strangio conceded the point. “There is no evidence in some—in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide,” he said. “And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare, and we’re talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don’t necessarily have completed suicides within them.”

• The Georgist Roots of American Libertarianism

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• About that bogus claim that "chess grandmasters" burn 6000 calories per day

  that’s the sort of behavior that gets you esteemed, it’s what gets you on NPR, Ted etc! Big claims with no evidence. Sure, big claims with evidence would be even better, but, in the absence of evidence, big claims with made-up evidence will do just fine. Sapolsky also seems very genial, so nothing ends up being his fault.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Apple Planning to Launch Low-Cost MacBook Powered by iPhone Chip

• That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose

• The F1 movie is a cinema smash hit, on track to outperform previous Apple films

• Microsoft rolls out Windows security changes to prevent another CrowdStrike

• Signal President Meredith Whittaker Took on Signal-Gate

• Amazon Lost Right to Sell Nintendo Switch 2 Amid Sales Dispute

• Fedora proposal to drop 32-bit support has been withdrawn

  • Fedora 44 Will Not Pursue the Idea of Ending 32-Bit x86 Software Packages

• Ars reflects on Apollo 13 turning 30 - Ars Technica

  This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13, director Ron Howard's masterful love letter to NASA's Apollo program in general and the eponymous space mission in particular. So we're taking the opportunity to revisit this riveting homage to American science, ingenuity, and daring.

• Why Matt Mullenweg went to war over WordPress

• Tumblr's move to WordPress and Fediverse integration is 'on hold'

• USPS just issued a warning to customers of new ‘brushing’ scam — urges Americans to start treating personal info ‘like cash.’ Here’s what you need to know now.

• Supreme Court to decide whether ISPs must disconnect users accused of piracy

• NASA will start livestreaming content on Netflix later this summer

  • NASA's next frontier: A Netflix streaming deal

  • NASA plans to stream rocket launches on Netflix this summer

  • NASA plans to stream rocket launches on Netflix starting this summer

• Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

  Once the feature is activated, you can see motion sensing activity within the Home tab of the Xfinity app. Select the status to view more details and see current motion activity. Selecting the WiFi Motion event on this screen will take you to an activity feed of all WiFi Motion events.

  Motion is detected based on the amount of signal disruption taking place between the Xfinity Gateway and your selected WiFi-connected devices, so motion from small pets (around 40 pounds or less) can be filtered out while keeping you notified of large movements more likely to be caused by humans. You must turn on High motion sensitivity in order to turn on the Exclude Small Pets feature, because we need lots of information to best differentiate between pet and human motion. If you’re still receiving unwanted notifications with small pets excluded, you can try turning off Exclude Small Pets and switching to Medium or Low sensitivity instead. Since there's no visual information associated with WiFi Motion, it cannot always differentiate pet motion from human motion, particularly for children that may also be around 40 pounds or less. Pets larger than 40 pounds or more may continue to cause motion notifications. Be sure to take this into account when choosing whether you want to turn on this feature.

• Proton joins suit against Apple for predatory practices

• Apple Loses Bid to Dismiss US Smartphone Monopoly Case

• AMC theaters now warning of 25-30 mins of previews after show time

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Monkeys, Typewriters, and Busy Beavers

• Bulk Lots of DB-19s for Sale! | Big Mess o' Wires

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Anthropic's Claude AI became a terrible business owner in an experiment

• AI Systems Are Now Learning to Deceive, Scheme, and Threaten Humans

• Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT

  • Number of new UK entry-level jobs has dived since ChatGPT launch

• What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?

• Gartner Predicts over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027

• A bumbling game of robot soccer was a breakthrough for embodied AI

• Mark Zuckerberg's list of top AI talent

• Why AI will eat McKinsey's lunch – but not today

• New details emerge on Meta's $14.3B deal for Scale

• The Case for Apple Buying OpenAI for $500B

• Apple Weighs Using Anthropic or OpenAI to Power Siri in Major Reversal

• Jony Ive's AI gadget might be a pen

• Zuckerberg Announces Meta 'Superintelligence' Effort, More Hires

  • Everyone Mark Zuckerberg Has Hired So Far for Meta's 'Superintelligence' Team

• Make Fun Of Them

  While I think Pichai is likely a little smarter than Altman, in the same way that Satya Nadella is a little smarter than Pichai, and in the same way that a golden retriever is smarter than a chihuahua. That said, none of these men are superintelligences, nor, when pressed, do they ever seem to have any actual answers.

  I sound pretty ornery, I get accused of being a hater or missing the grand mystery of this bullshit every few minutes by somebody with an AI avatar of a guy who looks like he’s banned from multiple branches of Best Buy, I understand there’s things that people do with Large Language Models, I am aware, but none of it matters because the way they’re being discussed is like we’re two steps from digitally replacing hundreds of millions of people.

  The reality is far simpler: we have an industry that has spent nearly half a trillion dollars between its capital expenditures and venture capital funding to create another industry with the combined revenue of the fucking smartwatch industry. What I’m writing isn’t inflammatory — in fact, it’s far more deeply rooted in reality than those claiming that OpenAI is building the future.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Blue Origin launches third New Shepard mission within three months.

  • Blue Origin successfully completes 13th crewed suborbital flight

• First Indian Astronaut to Arrive Soon on NASA's International Space Station

• NASA Mars Orbiter Learns New Moves After Nearly 20 Years in Space

• Space Elevators Could Work–If Earth Days Were Much Shorter

• Satellites are fueling a space-based internet gold rush

Crypto con games

• The billionaire betting on crypto – and the skeptic betting against him

  • Why We Should Care About This War over the Future of Money

  A legendary short seller who took down Enron is in open combat with the CEO who has staked his entire company on Bitcoin. Their fight is about more than just one stock; it’s a high-stakes war over the future of money itself.

  • HN comments

  Strategy (previously MicroStrategy) has been taking advantage of the fact that owning 1 BitCoin has caused the market to increase the value of their company by more than one BitCoin's worth, which they then issue stock against. It doesn't matter if BitCoin is the future, this is still going to end in tears.

• He Thought an Employee Stole Crypto. The FBI Says It Was a North Korean Scammer

Economicon / Business / Finance

• What the rise of Klarna and similar services tells us about the economy | Vox

  BNPL in itself isn’t evil, especially if you can pay it all off without having to face those high interest rates. Credit cards themselves aren’t evil. But it’s really about the system that encourages these sorts of products to be created. Real wages were stagnant for a really long time. The entry-level labor force has really deteriorated. It’s very tough to get a job right now. If you’re graduating from college and the college wage premium has eroded quite a bit, rent is high because we don’t build enough housing. Groceries are up. People are looking at the very high prices, the impossibility of ever buying a house, the struggles that they might be facing in the labor force. It’s like, Well, sure, it might be irresponsible to use BNPL to get a moisturizer from Sephora, but what else am I going to do? I don’t see a solution before me. And so I think that’s been the big thing with debt — we’ve used it as a tool in order to navigate some of the hairier parts about being in the United States right now.

• Intel will shut down its automotive business

• Smelters say they are losing power battle with Big Tech

• Microsoft plans major job cuts at Xbox

  • They've just ceded the gaming world to Valve, so they don't need these folks anymore

• DOJ clears HPE to buy Juniper if it sells Instant On WiFi and licenses some code

• Oracle signed $30B per year cloud deal with mystery customer

• Honda Recalls More Than 259,000 Cars in the US Due to Brake Pedal Issue

• The Zillow Blacklist is officially here

• The Dollar Has Its Worst Start to a Year Since 1973

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Key Senators Strike Deal to Pause State AI Laws for Five Years

  • Congress might block state AI laws for a decade

• Supreme Court rebuffs bid to protect Coinbase user data from IRS

• California Democrats Agree to Roll Back Landmark Environmental Law

Trump

• Where’s Tulsi Gabbard? Intelligence director missing from key moments as insiders call her ‘wrong on the big stuff.’

• Harvard Violated Students' Civil Rights, Trump Administration Finds

Left Angst

• The Trump administration is building a national citizenship data system

• After decades in the US, Iranians arrested in Trump's deportation drive

  Russell Milne, Kashanian’s husband, said his wife is not a threat. Her appeal for asylum was complicated because of “events in her early life,” he explained. A court found an earlier marriage of hers to be fraudulent. But over four decades, Kashanian, 64, built a life in Louisiana. The couple met when she was bartending as a student in the late 1980s. They married and had a daughter. She volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, filmed Persian cooking tutorials on YouTube and was a grandmother figure to the children next door. The fear of deportation always hung over the family, Milne said, but he said his wife did everything that was being asked of her. “She’s meeting her obligations,” Milne said. “She’s retirement age. She’s not a threat. Who picks up a grandmother?” While Iranians have been crossing the border illegally for years, especially since 2021, they have faced little risk of being deported to their home countries due to severed diplomatic relations with the U.S. That seems to no longer be the case.

• Investors flock to Europe as bloc's stability contrasts with concerns over US

• A rare asteroid flyby will happen soon, but NASA may be left on the sidelines

• GOP Bill Adds Surprise Tax That Could Cripple Wind and Solar Power

• Peter Thiel's Palantir poses a grave threat to Americans

• The Worst Bill in History - Robert Reich

  Trump’s giant budget-busting, Medicaid-shattering, shafting-the-poor-and-working-class, making-the-rich-even richer bill is a travesty.

• Trump Vowed to Dismantle MS-13. His Deal with Bukele Threatens That Effort

• Senate GOP budget bill has little-noticed provision that could hurt your Wi-Fi

  Cruz's proposal revives a years-old controversy over whether the entire 6 GHz band should be devoted to Wi-Fi, which can use the large spectrum band for faster speeds than networks that rely solely on the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Congress is on the verge of passing legislation that would require spectrum to be auctioned off for full-power, commercially licensed use, and the question is where that spectrum will come from. When the House of Representatives passed its so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill," it excluded all of the frequencies between 5.925 and 7.125 gigahertz from the planned spectrum auctions. But Cruz's version of the budget reconciliation bill, which is moving quickly toward a final vote, removed the 6 GHz band's protection from spectrum auctions. The Cruz bill is also controversial because it would penalize states that regulate artificial intelligence.

• DOJ announces plans to prioritize cases to revoke citizenship

• Trump officials create searchable national citizenship database

• Accounting maneuver hides $3.8T in red ink from Trump's 'big, beautiful bill'

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Sinaloa cartel hacked security cameras to track and kill FBI informants, US says

• Egyptian man who kicked CBP beagle ‘off the ground’ is deported after dog sniffed out 100 pounds of illegal food at DC airport.

• Terrifying new details emerge from Idaho shooting ambush after sniper-wielding gunman lit 'blaze as bait' | Daily Mail Online

  A killer sniper's body was recovered after he deliberately started a brush fire to bring firefighters to a mountain before shooting two of them dead. The unidentified ambush killer was found dead near his gun on Canfield Mountain outside of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho on Sunday evening. His cellphone signal was used to pinpoint his whereabouts and law enforcement exchanged gunfire with the suspect. He was later found dead close to his gun, but Kootenai County Sheriff Robert Norris says it's still unclear if the sniper was killed by a cop's bullet - or if he took his own life on realizing there was no way out. The sniper's body was pulled away from the scene just as the blaze the sniper started began to spread across Canfield Mountain.

• Operation Gold Rush, largest health care fraud bust in U.S. history

• US Government takes down major North Korean 'remote IT workers' operation

• Bryan Kohberger to plead guilty to all counts in Idaho college murders case

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• State Department Looks To Revoke Visa For British Rappers Who Chanted ‘Death To The IDF.’

World

• Thousands in Norway told they had won life-changing sums in lottery error

• Canada rescinds digital services tax to advance trade negotiations with the US

  • Canada Drops Digital Tax That Infuriated Trump to Restart Trade Talks

  • Canada rescinds Digital Services Tax to restart trade talks with US

• Louvre shuts down with staff sounding the alarm on mass tourism

• British F-35 jet stranded at Indian airport, concerns over classified tech

• German police launch nationwide house raids against 170 citizens over 'hate speech' and 'insults' against politicians

• Apple to Delay Some Feature Rollouts in EU, Citing Regulatory Hurdles

• 'Generali' sign atop insurer's skyscraper offices collapses in Milan

• Price of rice in Japan falls below ¥4k per 5 kilograms

• Taiwan provides a model for digital defense of democracy

Israel

• GHF discloses 12 of its staff members murdered by Hamas, others tortured in Gaza

• 'Bloodiest 21st century war': New study finds Gaza's real death toll nears 100k

• Iran Threatens to Flog Elon Musk's Starlink Users

  • We had folks threatening to kill Tesla drivers...

China

• There's a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away

Health / Medicine

• Can Sunlight Cure Disease?

  • That would explain why doctors have been telling us to avoid it

• Marijuana dramatically increases risk of dying from heart attacks and stroke

  • Heart attacks and strokes have shot up since legalization, then? Did they control for confounders like COVID vaccines?

• Babies experience pain before they can comprehend it

• Obesity drugs made in China could power next wave of treatments

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Seagull hitches ride on a garbage truck for 80 miles to find food

• Officials celebrate sale of worlds largest solar-powered steel mill in Pueblo

• Comments point out the author's association with Musk and how this makes him a Nazi too: Depopulation Won’t Change the World for the Better - The New York Times

  Depopulation might seem welcome. It is true that people caused today’s environmental problems. And it is right to prioritize the challenges of climate change, global poverty and inequality. In our careers, we’ve worked for aggressive decarbonization, reproductive freedom, caste and gender equity and better public health and health care. But falling birthrates are not the answer to our world’s problems. Confronting climate change requires that billions of people live differently. It does not require that billions of future people never live.

• The World Is Warming Up. and It's Happening Faster

• New discoveries of how crops make clouds may drastically improve climate

• Inside a plan to use AI to amplify doubts about the dangers of pollutants

• Underestimated Methane Emissions from Non-Producing Oil and Gas Wells in Canada

• Climate change anxiety: A meta-analysis