2025-07-10

etc

• Texas inspectors approved Camp Mystic's disaster plan 2 days before deadly flood

Horseshit

• A Shocking Amount of People Say Car Cupholders Are 'Difficult to Use'

  • They often are. Homer Simpson addressed this in his car design.

• Six traits that make someone cool, according to science

• The Map Rating Restaurants Based on How Hot the Customers Are

• Hertz AI Scanner Charges $350 for Tiny 'Dings' on Rental Car

• Horner to exit Red Bull with immediate effect with Mekies taking over as CEO

• British Museum secured chance to host Bayeux Tapestry's return to UK

• Why Jolly Ranchers Are Banned in the UK but Not the US

• I was nervous to ask for your socials: missed connection posts making a comeback

• The sex dolls are coming

  Selling or renting out silicone likenesses of women as literalised sexual objects is among the queasy horrors to which liberal feminism lacks an answer. After all, the arguments in favour of this industry are the same ones bleated in the case of that other caste of less-than-human women, the “sex workers” whom enlightened cultures expect to service the needs of undesirable, abusive, violent or awkward men. In both cases, the solution to antisocial male sexuality is never to simply compel men to pack it in: sex positivity is about advocating for erections, regardless of how they are achieved. Instead, entire industries — from “barely legal” OnlyFans accounts to “breath play” fetish clubs (for those variously interested in paedophilia and now-normalised strangulation respectively) have sprung up to square the circle of how dangerous paraphilias and ever more extreme porn-inflected demands can coexist with women’s safety; in the real world, they mostly cannot. But with a sex doll, one can be as depraved as he likes.

  • Artificial wimmins will never compete with goats; and goats' co-existence with humans for millennia suggests that the dangers of sex toys are not as dire as suggested.

• Science is debunking the myth of the 'alpha male'

• Polymarket Rules 'No' on $237M Controversial Bet Over Zelenskyy's Suit

  A high-profile Polymarket contract asking whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would wear a suit before July closed with a final resolution of “No” on Tuesday evening, despite widespread media coverage and images suggesting otherwise. The market, which attracted more than $237 million in trading volume, was among Polymarket’s most active this year. It asked whether Zelenskyy would be “photographed or videotaped wearing a suit” between March 22 and June 30. A decentralized oracle system operated by UMA was responsible for adjudicating the outcome, which relied on a “consensus of credible reporting.” On June 24, Zelenskyy appeared at a NATO event in the Netherlands wearing a black jacket, matching trousers, and a collared shirt, an outfit described by numerous media outlets as a suit. Yet on July 1, UMA’s oracle ruled that the reporting consensus had not been sufficiently established and finalized the outcome as “No.”

  The controversy even generated interest among punters across rival predictions markets, including Myriad Markets, to take a bet on whether Polymarket would resolve its Zelenskyy outcome to either "Yes" or "No."

• 'Tactless': Brewing Resentments over Bank of Mum and Dad

• Teachers urge parents not to buy children smartphones

• Taste Is the New Intelligence - by stepfanie tyler

  In an age where AI can generate anything, the question is no longer "can it be made?" but "is it worth making?" The frontier isn’t volume—it’s discernment. And in that shift, taste has become a survival skill. Not taste in the superficial sense—not trend-chasing, not aesthetic mimicry, not expensive minimalism for the sake of status. Real taste. The kind that signals coherence. Clarity. The ability to choose what matters in a world drowning in what doesn’t. Because when abundance is infinite, attention is everything. And what you give your attention to—what you consume, what you engage with, what you amplify—becomes a reflection of how you think. We used to associate intelligence with accumulation. The smartest people were the ones who knew the most. But that model doesn’t hold anymore. AI knows more than anyone. Wikipedia is free. The internet has flattened information access so thoroughly that hoarding knowledge is no longer impressive. What matters now is what you do with it. How you filter it. How you recognize signal in the noise. Curation is the new IQ test.

  • "information" != "knowledge"; and our individual ability to discern the difference determines our ability to thrive in the world. if that wasn't "intelligence" in your pantheon to begin with then perhaps the problem isn't with the modern world.

• Mattel unveils first Barbie doll with type 1 diabetes

  • Barbie launches first doll with Type 1 diabetes

• Did Shakespeare Write Hamlet While He Was Stoned?

• Have All the Planets Ever Aligned? The Closest We'll Get Is May 6, 2492

• 5 facts about how the world’s population is expected to change by 2100

celebrity gossip

• Jeffrey Epstein didn’t have a ‘client list,’ committed suicide, DOJ, FBI reveal in findings that debunk conspiracy theories

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Disinformation around a "weather weapon" and cloud seeding is being promoted

• Conservative and Liberal Brains Might Have Some Real Differences

• Meme Maker’s Conviction Thrown Out in Free Speech Win.

  Mackey was convicted in 2023 of election interference in the 2016 election because he shared a satirical meme to his nearly 60,000 followers, saying “Avoid the line. Vote from home. Text ‘Hillary’ to …” with a fake number.

  On appeal, Mackey argues, inter alia, that the evidence was insufficient to prove that he knowingly agreed to join the charged conspiracy. We agree.

Musk

• Elon Musk's AI chatbot is suddenly posting antisemitic tropes

  • Grok, Elon Musk's AI Chatbot, Shares Antisemitic Posts on X

  • Elon Musk's Grok Chatbot Goes Full Nazi, Calls Itself 'MechaHitler'

  • Stumping Nazi Grok

  • Grok Is Spewing Antisemitic Garbage on X

  • Musk disables Grok's text generation after 'anti-woke' chatbot praises Hitler

  • Turkish court orders ban on Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok for offensive content

  • Musk's AI firm deletes posts after chatbot praises Hitler

  • Musk's AI firm forced to delete posts praising Hitler from Grok chatbot

  • Elon Musk's Grok Is Calling for a New Holocaust

  • XAI's Hitler Praising Grok Update

  • Zvi: No, Grok, No

  • Analyzing Grok's Latest Meltdown Through Public xAI System Prompts

  • Grok Goes Full Hitler

  • X removes posts by Musk chatbot Grok after antisemitism complaints

• I’ve decided to step down as CEO of X

  • Linda Yaccarino departs as boss of Musk's X

  • Linda Yaccarino resigns as CEO of X (Twitter)

  • Linda Yaccarino is out as CEO of X

  • Linda Yaccarino steps down as CEO of Elon Musk's X

  • Linda Yaccarino to step down as CEO of X

  • X Chief Says She Is Leaving the Social Media Platform

  • X CEO Linda Yaccarino to step down

  • Linda Yaccarino quits X without saying why, one day after Grok praised Hitler

  • Who is Linda Yaccarino? Elon Musk's X CEO, who helped stop advertiser exodus after Twitter acquisition, resigns - The Economic Times

• What Happened to Tesla's Annual Shareholders Meeting?

  • why should they have one? There a judge in Delaware that has more to say about how the company runs than the shareholders do...

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Pope Leo Signed a Popplio 'Pokémon' Card

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• NIH to crack down on excessive publisher fees for publicly funded research

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• HBO Max Name Returns After Two Years as Max

• Browser hijacking campaign infects 2.3M Chrome, Edge users

• PC demand in US plummets on tariff fears

• Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots

  • Hugging Face just launched a $299 robot that could disrupt the robotics industry

• IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes

• Why I Deleted My Steam Account After 20 Years · GitHub

  A game with zero online features is subject to internet-based DRM and constantly increasing system requirements when the store self-updates and irreversibly patches the software in your library. There is some value to having a store automatically update your software, there is literally no value to a store that forces patches and offers users no path back to the working version of the software they initially paid for.

  • they may be right; but Valve has won the game industry by sucking less than every other alternative.

  • HN comments

• Knowing Steam players are hoarders explains why you give Valve that 30%

• Apple Readies First Upgrade to Its Struggling Vision Pro Headset

• Jack Dorsey says his 'secure' new Bitchat app has not been tested for security

• Apple Now Wants to Buy Streaming Rights for Formula 1 Racing

• TV episodes have become way too long

• TikTok prepares US app with its own algorithm and user data

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

  The year is 2013 and I am hopping mad. systemd is replacing my plaintext logs with a binary format and pumping steroids into init and it is laughing at me. The unix philosophy cries out: is this the end of Linux (or, as many are calling it, GNU plus Linux)?

  The year is 2025 and I’m here to repent. Not only is systemd a worthy successor to traditional init, but I think that it deserves a defense for what it’s done for the landscape – especially given the hostile reception it initially received (and somehow continues to receive? for some reason?). No software is perfect – except for TempleOS – but I think that systemd has largely been a success story and proven many dire forecasts wrong (including my own). I was wrong!

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Altman: "I don't like smart glasses."

• AI translation service launched for publishers prompts dismay among translators

• Microsoft is working on AI-powered dynamic desktop backgrounds in Windows 11

• What is AGI?

• Adam Dorr on how robots will take our jobs

• Two years of computers drawing unicorns

• America's largest power grid is struggling to meet demand from AI

• The AI Industry Is Radicalizing - The Atlantic

  Yet AI’s radicalizing effects go beyond the technology’s proponents. To match Silicon Valley’s escalating rhetoric, AI skeptics have ramped up their own, like atheists heckling from the pews at Mass. They dismiss AI as overhyped and practically useless, and pronounce the technology’s certain collapse. One of the industry’s chief opponents, the computational linguist Emily Bender, recently co-authored a book titled The AI Con and encourages referring to chatbots as “a racist pile of linear algebra”—a reference to well-documented algorithmic biases against people of color—or “stochastic parrots.” Gary Marcus, another prominent critic of the AI industry and a cognitive scientist at NYU, recently summed up one of his major points to me. Are chatbots intelligent? “I mean, you could say your calculator thinks, depending on how you define the word thinking,” he said. The two camps are more and more frequently coming into direct conflict. A few days before we spoke, Marcus had triggered his latest online spat with the AI industry after posting an edited image showing Altman’s face plastered over a photograph of the infamous Elizabeth Holmes. “True performance art,” Altman quipped in response. Ed Zitron, a prominent AI critic, recently wrote a nearly 7,000-word essay insisting that he is “sick and tired of everybody pretending that generative AI is the next big thing,” which the political analyst Nate Silver described as “old man yells at cloud vibes” and “detached from reality.” This war has transcended reality, and perhaps evidence, to become a contest between cosmologies. There are now two parallel AI universes, and most of us are left to occupy the gap in between them.

• Sweet or sour? AI powered device achieves human-like sense of taste

• That white guy who can't get a job at Tim Hortons? He's AI

• The AI Scraping Fight That Could Change the Future of the Web

• Microsoft Touts $500M in AI Savings While Slashing Jobs

• Shiny object syndrome spells doom for many AI projects, warns EPA CIO

• OpenAI Closes $6.5B Deal to Buy Jony Ive's Device Startup

• A.I. Is Making Sure You Pay for That Ding on Your Rental Car

• OpenAI's open language model is imminent

• Now I Won That AI Bet

  In June 2022, I bet a commenter $100 that AI would master image compositionality by June 2025.

  It’s probably bad form to write a whole blog post gloating that you won a bet. I’m doing it anyway, because we’re still having the same debate - whether AI is a “stochastic parrot” that will never be able to go beyond “mere pattern-matching” into the realm of “real understanding”. My position has always been that there’s no fundamental difference: you just move from matching shallow patterns to deeper patterns, and when the patterns are as deep as the ones humans can match, we call that “real understanding”. This isn’t quite right - there’s a certain form of mental agency that humans still do much better than AIs - but again, it’s a (large) difference in degree rather than in kind.

• Meta Poached Apple's Pang with Pay Package over $200M

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Jeff Bezos-backed satellite costing him $100M lost in space

  • Bezos-funded climate satellite is lost in space

• It still tastes of snozberries: 'Space Ice' is less like water than we thought

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Goldman Demands an Oath from Junior Bankers to Fend Off Private Equity Poaching

• 'It's been hell': Amazon packages mistakenly sent to SJ woman's home

• Nvidia becomes first company to reach $4T in market value

  • Nvidia becomes first company to be worth $4T

• Nvidia insiders dump more than $1 billion in stock, according to report

• Amazon asks corporate workers to 'volunteer' help with grocery deliveries

• Jeff Bezos sells $666M in Amazon stock, part of plan to unload 25 million shares

• Five Things to Know About Record Copper Prices

• We're Leaving Delaware, and We Think You Should Consider Leaving Too

• Hedge funds to blame for coffee price surge, says Lavazza boss

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• US court strikes down 'click-to-cancel' rule designed to make unsubscribing easy

• Justice Department's Antitrust Division Announces Whistleblower Rewards Program

• Florida is letting companies make it harder for highly paid workers to swap jobs

Trump

• Trump Suggests Taking over New York City and Washington

• Trump announces 50% tariff on Brazil for Bolsonaro trial, trade deficit

Left Angst

• Alligator Alcatraz detainees allege inhumane conditions at detention center

• ICE leaves cars abandoned, lawn mowers running when it arrests workers

• The Sequoia Investor Whose Anti-Mamdani Posts Set Off a Silicon Valley Storm

• How The New York Times is (still) getting gamed by the right | The Verge

  Lately, it has been difficult to ignore a tendency at The New York Times to make astonishingly bad news judgments. The paper’s obsession with a view from nowhere is long-standing, but as Republicans increasingly circulate insane conspiracy theories and racist nonsense, the cult of centrism has taken a self-destructive turn. The most recent — and perhaps most egregious — way this has surfaced is a story about New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s application to Columbia University in 2009, when he was a high school senior. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and is of South Asian descent, identified himself as “Asian” and “Black or African American” on the checklist provided by the application. “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” Mamdani told the Times. It is an odd story. (Mamdani didn’t even go to Columbia, for one.) You can imagine a different way of framing the story — a thumbsucker about identity with the headline “What does it mean to be a Ugandan Indian?” But the Times’ racist framing, which implies Mamdani was trying to game the admissions system, is one that plays better with the increasingly racist right-wing ecosystem.

  • Agreeing with "the Right" is to betray "the Left"; and they do not forgive.

• Corey DeAngelis SPILLS THE BEANS on the National Education Association's Radical New 'Resolutions' – Twitchy

• NYT's Flip On Illegal Alien Takeovers Proves They're Propagandists

  Weisman begrudgingly acknowledged the viral video showing Tren de Aragua gang members parading around the complex with weapons drawn but only long enough to couch it by arguing “documentation was scarce.” But don’t worry, nothing to see here! And what you were seeing from Trump was nearly “fear-mongering, exaggerations, and outright lies …” according to Weisman. Fast forward ten months, and the NYT’s Ted Conover is spreading those same “outright lies.” He points out that “Democratic politicians and activists” tried to erase the “gang activity in the city as a right-wing hallucination.” But it wasn’t just Democrats who denied the problem — it was The New York Times itself. Nor is the truth “complicated” — the media’s cover-up was.

  When Democrats needed a narrative that made the realities of their open-border agenda look harmless, The Times was quick to call the reality “false” and mocked Trump for daring to do what The Times wouldn’t — highlight a major story. With the facts unchanged but the election over, The Times is pretending to bravely uncover a “complicated” story while hoping the reader forgets who helped cover up the truth in the first place.

• U.S. Steel Tariffs Add Uncertainty to Global Economy

• What Trump's Big Beautiful Bill means for Wi-Fi 6E and 7 users: It's not pretty

• Symbolic 'science fair' showcases research cut by Trump team

• Recipients of a U.S. Climate Science Fellowship Are Put on Unpaid Leave

• Federal Agents March Through L.A. Park, Spurring Local Outrage

• The Tariff Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

• RFK Jr. barred registered Democrats from being vaccine advisors, lawsuit says

• Over 2000 senior staff set to leave NASA under agency push

• Trump appointees stand to benefit from privatizing weather forecasts

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US Army will end most of its horse programs and adopt out the animals

• Army tests robotic coyotes to defend fighter jets from wildlife

• Army will study how blasts of rifles, anti-armor and artillery impact brain

World

• UK post office scandal led to 13 suspected suicides, says report

• Air India crash investigation focuses on engine fuel control switches

• UK government's deal with Google 'dangerously naive', say campaigners

• A Syrian Death Factory Gives Up Its Secrets

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia allegedly field-testing deadly AI drone powered by Nvidia Jetson Orin

• Russia ‘Ready to Assist Tehran in Refilling’ Uranium Stockpiles, Foreign Minister Says.

China

• State Secrets for Sale: More Leaks from the Chinese Hack-for-Hire Industry

• The latest threat from the rise of Chinese manufacturing

• Clean energy has caused China’s emissions to drop for the first time

• US buyers of critical minerals bypass China's export ban

Health / Medicine

• Psilocybin treatment extends cellular lifespan, improves survival of aged mice

• After quitting antidepressants, some people suffer lingering symptoms

• 'Harmless' virus might trigger Parkinson's disease, researchers say

• Has anyone else had issues with the new low calorie sweeteners?

• Shockingly: Animal diseases leapt to humans when we started keeping livestock

• OCD's Origins Might Not Lie in the Brain Like We Thought

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• U.S. measles cases are the highest in 33 years, the CDC reports

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Voracious honey bees threaten the food supply of native pollinators

• Earth's rotation is speeding up for 3 days this summer – starting July 9

• How to stop a bear in big city: Japan issues shoot-to-kill guide

• Comparing the Climate and Productivity Impacts of a Shrinking Population

• 4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment

• Nuclear Explosions for Large Scale Carbon Sequestration

• Pandemic-era slump in ivory and pangolin scale trafficking persists

• California achieved significant groundwater recharge last year

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