2025-07-06

Cool

• Overthinking GIS | Scott Sexton

  • Mapping Tool Helps Identify Usable Land For Building

  seeing a lot of topographical lines close together tended to indicate steeper areas, but wasn’t sure on how to actually get the computer to parse this and spit out the information on steepness and grade that he wanted. Ultimately, he set about downloading USGS elevation data in three meter resolution. He then applied some calculus to determine the rate of change of the slope across areas of the data in order to mathematically find what he was looking for. Namely, flatter areas that would be more suitable for future construction. He then took the work even further, tweaking the output of his tools and automating until he could quickly and readily generate usability maps of areas of interest. He was even able to sanity check his work by seeing if it correctly identified roads as obvious flatter areas.

Horseshit

• Why do languages fade from us?

• Loneliness is our business: The industry of social isolation

• 100 years ago they predicted we'd live to 1000 years old. Average ifespan was 58

  • The same "they" who keep assuring us snow is over.

• NYC 'showtime' dancers adapt to modern subway trains

• Move Over, $100 Lobster Salad. In the Hamptons, These Melons Cost $400

• Inside a Utah desert facility preparing humans for life on Mars

• The curious rise of giant tablets on wheels

  • Legislate screens in cars and they wind up playing TV

• The biggest health transformation in US history might start at Dollar General?

  2036: I'm standing here with Marcus Chen, the store's "Nutrition Navigator", a job title that didn't exist when this was still a Dollar General. Behind him, a digital display shows real-time nutrient density scores for today's produce, traced back to the exact field where each item was grown. A bushel of sweet corn from the Hendricks farm twelve miles away glows with a golden "97" score. Next to it, imported corn from an industrial operation shows a dismal "31."

• Lab-grown sperm and eggs just a few years away

• Why Some New Cars Don't Include a Spare Tire Anymore

• Is the semicolon dying? People weigh in

Musk

• Musk confirms xAI is buying an overseas power plant and shipping it to the US

• xAI just dropped their official Python SDK

• Why Tesla’s cars keep crashing

• Autonomous driving experts to comment on Tesla's robotaxi launch errors

• US Air Force suspends SpaceX rocket project on Pacific atoll

  • Air Force Abandons Project with Musk's SpaceX

  The U.S. Air Force has abandoned plans to test hypersonic rocket cargo deliveries from a remote Pacific atoll using Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a U.S. military publication has reported. The decision was made after Reuters reported that experts were concerned the project, which would be based on the remote Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, would harm the seabirds that nest on the islands.

• Elon Musk Forms a New Political Party to Challenge Trump and the Republicans

  • Elon Musk launches new America Party

• Elon Musk's Favorite Drug Explained

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Rapid emergence of a maths gender gap in first grade

  Here, we report the results of a 4-year longitudinal assessment of language and mathematical performance of all French first and second graders (2,653,082 children). Boys and girls exhibited very similar maths scores upon school entry, but a gender gap in favour of boys became highly significant after 4 months of schooling and reached an effect size of about 0.20 after 1 year. These findings were repeated each year and varied only slightly across family, class or school type and socio-economic level.

• Cursive writing could become a requirement for students in Pa

• School Discipline Makes a Comeback

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Nvidia's legendary GeForce GTX 10-series cards might lose support soon

• Romero Games Reportedly Shut Down Following Xbox Layoffs

• Two years ago today, Meta launched Threads. Does the world need this app?

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Long-lost Chinese typewriter prototype from the 1940s that changed computing

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• How the U.S. Public and AI Experts View Artificial Intelligence

• AI could create a 'Mad Max' scenario where everyone's skills are worthless

  • The mechanics were highly valued there

• AI is making everyone on dating apps sound charming

• 'I'm being paid to fix issues caused by AI'

• AI job substitution is real, but narrow, per new study

• I'm Losing All Trust in the AI Industry

  f they truly believed we’re at most five years from world-transforming AI, they wouldn’t be switching jobs, no matter how large the pay bump (they’re already affluent). I say money, but I mean for whatever reason. I don’t want to imply they’re doing it out of greed; the point is that their actions don’t match their claims, regardless of the underlying motive. This is purely an observation: You only jump ship in the middle of a conquest if either all ships are arriving at the same time (unlikely) or neither is arriving at all. This means that no AI lab is close to AGI. Their stated AGI timelines are “at the latest, in a few years,” but their revealed timelines are “it’ll happen at some indefinite time in the future.”

• Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations

• The Velvet Sundown officially confirm they're AI

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• The New Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS is Smaller or Rarer Than it Looks

  I concluded that the radius and number density inferred by Seligman et al. (2025) for interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS cannot be both valid. The Galactic mass budget in rocky materials found in planetary systems argues that either: (i) the reflection of sunlight by 3I/ATLAS originates from its cometary plume whereas most of its mass is carried by a solid core with an effective surface area smaller by nearly three orders of magnitude than the value inferred by Seligman et al. (2025) (with radius R less than 0.4 kilometers); or (ii) 3I/ATLAS is a solid object with a radius of 10 kilometers but the number density of objects of its size or bigger is lower than 5x10^{-8} per cubic au. In both cases, at least one of these numbers is much smaller than the fiducial values inferred by Seligman et al. (2025).

Crypto con games

• 8B in BTC Moved from 14-year-old Wallet

• How Tether became money-launderers' dream currency

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The job juggler the tech world can't stop talking about speaks out

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• 'Whitey' case: Texan cites racial harassment at school. What did Supreme Court say?

  The Austin Independent School District said Warden failed to show the alleged hostility was based on race, rather than his political views.

• Holding Cellphone while driving is illegal, California court rules

Trump

• OBBB signed: reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

  • Congress passes budget reconciliation bill with $10B for NASA

Left Angst

• How We'll Personally Feel the Loss of Federal Workers

• Ousted US copyright chief lost job after report on GenAI fair use limits release

  The former head of the US Copyright Office has pushed back against arguments from President Donald Trump's team that her dismissal was lawful. Shira Perlmutter was ousted after the US Copyright Office released a report challenging the limits of the "fair use" defense used by AI companies to justify training their models on copyrighted material.

• Judge: You can't ban DEI grants without bothering to define DEI

• The Trump administration appears to be planning its own chatbot

• US makes deadly decision to withdraw funding for Gavi

  As Gavi met yesterday for its replenishment pledging summit to determine funding for its next five years of work, it did not reach its funding target of $11.9 billion and faces a shortfall, in part due to the US government’s decision to withdraw its funding pledge. The US was previously one of the biggest funders of Gavi, contributing about 13 percent of the organization’s budget. With over 50 years of experience vaccinating children who live in some of the world’s hardest-to-reach and most neglected settings, MSF is keenly aware of the barriers and challenges that make access to and the delivery of vaccines in humanitarian settings particularly complex and expensive. While MSF does not accept US government or Gavi funding and will not be directly affected by cuts to the program, more than half of the vaccines MSF uses in its projects come from ministries of health and are procured through Gavi.

• The Government's Astonishing Constitutional Claims on TikTok

• America's Great Realignment Toward Putin - The Atlantic

  Putin sees what everyone else sees: Slowly, the U.S. is switching sides. True, Trump occasionally berates Putin, or makes sympathetic noises toward Ukrainians, as he did last week when he seemed to express interest in a Ukrainian journalist who said that her husband was in the military. Trump also appeared to enjoy being flattered at the NATO summit, where European leaders made a decision, hailed as historic, to further raise defense spending. But thanks to quieter decisions by members of his own administration, people whom he has appointed, the American realignment with Russia and against Ukraine and Europe is gathering pace—not merely in rhetoric but in reality.

• Goodbye to All That

  The specifics of my experience may be unique—details often are—but the broad strokes of the story have become unfortunately common in recent months, as more and more special agents are driven out of the Bureau on mere suspicion of political unreliability. These developments should be concerning to all Americans. In the past six months, the FBI—and, for that matter, the Department of Justice and intelligence community as a whole—has been forcing out a wide range of experienced personnel needed to protect our nation. Under Patel and Bongino, subject matter expertise and operational competence are readily sacrificed for ideological purity and the ceaseless politicization of the workforce. At a time of simultaneous wars across the globe and a return to great power competition, this makes us all less safe.

• Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill' Will Make China Great Again

• RFK's proposal to let bird flu spread through poultry

• Disdain of Genius Is a Problem for the West

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• How U.S. Tourists Are Dealing with a New Animosity Overseas

  • 80 years of being "The World's Policeman" and who likes policemen?

World

• How Kyoto, Japan Became the World's Loveliest Tourist-Trap

• Drunk Tourist Damages Kyoto Temple Tied to Samurai Legend

• European Commission presents Roadmap for lawful access to data

• EU and Germany Push for a New World Trade Organization

• Denmark's ambitious plan to boost plant-based foods

• Czech Republic hit by major power outage triggered by fallen cable

• Why is TfL's boss attacking me for cleaning up his filthy trains?

• EU says it will continue rolling out AI legislation on schedule

• Financial 'stretch' for UK to join Europe's Starlink rival, says minister

• Regulators warned Air India Express about forging records

• Seine reopens to Paris swimmers after century-long ban

• India bars Jane Street from securities market, citing stock index manipulation

• A new law in Sweden makes it illegal to buy custom adult content

Israel

• BCG modelled plan to 'relocate' Palestinians from Gaza

• The tears of Gaza's men are an act of rebellion

China

• China tells EU it can't accept Russia losing its war against Ukraine

• China Has Paid a High Price for Its Dominance in Rare Earths

• China is building an entire empire on data

• China pours money into brain chips that give paralysed people more control

• WSJ: 'Xi Has Spent Decades Preparing for a Cold War with the U.S.'

• China relaxes visa rules to show off rich history and cyberpunk cool

• China helped Pakistan with 'live inputs' in conflict with India

• Xi Jinping's two-week absence sparks speculation of power shift within CCP

Health / Medicine

• Ozempic-Like Drugs Could Treat Chronic Migraines, Trial Finds.

• Proof That Adult Brains Make New Neurons Settles Scientific Controversy

• The body parts evolution still can't explain

• Weird 'harmless' microbes may play a pivotal role in colorectal cancer

• The Reality My Medicaid Patients Face

• Heart attacks aren't as fatal as they used to be

• Cheese may give you nightmares

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Coral transplants could help save Miami's iconic reefs from climate change

• Italy chemical plant execs jailed for pollution

• Flint, Michigan finally replaced its lead pipes

• Biosphere 2 experiment changed our understanding of the Earth

• Deep Earth pulses beneath Africa are tearing the continent apart

• New synthetic polymer is light, hard and kills viruses

• Loggers close in on uncontacted people in Peruvian Amazon

• Cod Have Been Shrinking for Decades, Scientists Say They've Solved Mystery

• Video captured during Alberta storm could be rare ball lightning event

  • 'Never seen this before': Mysterious orb of light filmed in Alberta

• Britain is already a hot country. It should act like it