2025-07-14
Horseshit
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If we assume conservatively that a bee’s life is 10% as unpleasant as chicken life, and then downweight it by the relative intensity of their suffering, then consuming a kg of honey is over 500 times worse than consuming a kg of chicken! And these estimates were fairly conservative. I think it’s more plausible that eating honey is thousands of times worse than eating comparable amounts of chicken, which is itself over a dozen times worse than eating comparable amounts of beef. If we assume very very very conservatively that a day of honey bee life is as unpleasant as a day spent attending a boring lecture, and then multiply by .15 to take into account the fact bees are probably less sentient than people, eating a kg of honey causes about as much suffering as forcing a person to attend boring lectures continuously for 30,000 days. That’s about an entire lifetime of a human, spent entirely on drudgery. That’s like being forced to read an entire Curtis Yarvin article from start to finish. And that is wildly conservative.
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What’s Happening to Reading? | The New Yorker
Today, the nature of reading has shifted. Plenty of people still enjoy traditional books and periodicals, and there are even readers for whom the networked age has enabled a kind of hyper-literacy; for them, a smartphone is a library in their pocket. For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become almost anachronistic. These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration. Or they might forgo books entirely, spending evenings browsing Apple News and Substack before drifting down Reddit’s lazy river. There’s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we’ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop. This shift has taken decades, and it’s been driven by technologies that have been disproportionately adopted by the young.
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Can Pittsburgh's Old Steel Mills Be Turned into Data Centers?
- Are we so sure we don't want to use them to make steel?
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Finding good bets in the lottery, and why you shouldn't take them
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The Goal Is to Think as Little as Possible (without Ever Being Wrong)
Thinking is an exhausting activity that you should maximally avoid. It eats up your energy and your time. There is a relevant precept in computing that can be stated like this: if you could get the result without running the program, then you never had to run the program in the first place. You apply forms of this rule throughout your life each day. Like if you've eaten some plant before, you don't need to test yourself to see if you're allergic to it before you eat it again. Or if a friend has shown you that you can trust them, you don't need to hook them up to a polygraph before you tell them your latest secret. It's smart to navigate the world in this way, using shortcuts based on what you choose to assume you're right about. Imagine if each time you wanted to turn on a lamp in your home, you first insisted on hiring an electrician to check all your wiring. Nothing would ever get done! But when does this heuristic-craft break down?
become an expert at knowing when it's necessary to think. Failing that, err on the side of sometimes thinking even when it's unnecessary.
- "Thinking is hard and should be avoided" is a common attitude that mystifies me completely. Its like saying "Vision is often disturbing and therefore you should keep your eyes closed." With the critical difference that our brains operate all the time, and we cannot blink them shut. we can pretend we have but then we worry about the integrity of the seals and etc.
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Princeton study maps 200k years of Human–Neanderthal interbreeding
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Opera: La Scala Warns Opera Patrons: No Flip-Flops or Tank Tops Allowed
Musk
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A Deep Dive into X's Community Notes
Though Community Notes has become a flagship model for decentralized content moderation, the approach itself is hotly debated. Supporters call community-driven content moderation a democratic alternative to opaque, top-down decision-making. Critics argue this type of system shifts too much responsibility onto the users and is too slow and unbalanced to meet the scale and speed of today’s information crises.
As governments and tech companies debate how best to balance free expression, civic trust, and curbing online harms, Community Notes can no longer be seen as an X experiment. Like it or not, this model has become a global prototype serving as a benchmark for other companies. Understanding how Community Notes works – who the program serves, where it falls short, and what can be improved – is critical. Future analyses will look at the content of Community Notes and the posts that receive such notes to the extent possible. Both worlds are limited for analysis by X’s infrastructure of data sharing.
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Elon Musk's X investigated in France for alleged data tampering and fraud
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Musks xAI pressed employees to install surveillance software on personal laptops
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Where are the right-wing scientists? Everyone’s on the left like me
Trust in science has been eroded because the field is so dominated by left-wing academics, a leading evolutionary biologist has warned. Ella Al-Shamahi, presenter of the BBC’s science series Human, which starts tomorrow night, said people who lean towards the right, or have strong religious beliefs, feel alienated by mainstream science. “We do have to be a little bit honest and say that, to many, it seems like left-leaning atheists have a monopoly on science,” she said. The dominance of a single school of political thought in science is an important context to President Trump’s withdrawal of funding from universities in America, she said. “If you can’t demonstrate that scientists and research labs don’t belong to just one tribe, then suddenly it doesn’t become a priority to fund them.”
Her comments echo those of the Wellcome Trust chief executive, John-Arne Rottingen, who warned this month that scientists had a “responsibility” to demonstrate why research matters across the political spectrum. In most countries the “research community overall is more on the progressive/left-wing side”, he told the Research Professional News website. “That has an impact on what research questions are being addressed.” Al-Shamahi, 41, who describes her politics as “wokey-progressive — definitely left-wing”, said scientists who do not fit the political mould increasingly keep their heads down for fear of the response. “A lot of them feel that they have to hide their thoughts and their opinions.”
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The radical 1960s experiment that left thousands of children unable to spell
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Tim Cook Isn't Going Anywhere Soon, but an Apple Shake-Up Looms
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For Algorithms, Memory Is a Far More Powerful Resource Than Time
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Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us?
- comments are of the flavor "The problem with the internet is there's no central authority to delete posts" .. my how things have changed.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Audio, Video, and Webcams in Python
one chapter that was left on the cutting room floor was "Working with Audio, Video, and Webcams". I present the 26-page rough draft chapter in this blog, where you can learn how to write Python code that records and plays multimedia content.
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Easy dynamic dispatch using GLIBC Hardware Capabilities | Christian Kastner
TL;DR With GLIBC 2.33+, you can build a shared library multiple times targeting various optimization levels, and the dynamic linker/loader will pick the highest version supported by the current CPU.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
Democrats
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How New York Dems Lit $100 Million On Fire Buying Lights | The Daily Caller
At least $108 million was spent on Cuomo’s “Harbor of Lights” project, which was supposed to install specialty LED lighting on several New York State bridges. The project was pitched as a way to boost tourism, but the lights ended up sitting unused in a warehouse for more than seven years until they were recently auctioned off for less than half a percent of the project’s overall cost.
Ultimately, after years of collecting dust in storage, the lights were auctioned off in late June for just $383,000, or 0.35% of the project price tag, according to WRGB. Among the bidders was Zohran Mamdani — who recently defeated Cuomo in the Democratic New York City mayoral primary — and reportedly offered around $50 for the lights, Politico reported.
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Times pushed ahead to avoid being scooped on Mamdani Columbia story | Semafor
Zohran Mamdani’s application to Columbia University in 2009, in which the paper reported that the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor then identified his race on a form as both “Asian” and “Black or African American.” Mamdani is of South Asian ethnicity and was born in Uganda. The story, published late last week, came as the result of the release of hacked Columbia University records that were then shared with the Times. The paper believed it had reason to push the story out quickly: It did not want to be scooped by the independent journalist Christopher Rufo. Two people familiar with the reporting process told Semafor that the paper was aware that other journalists were working on the admissions story, including Rufo, a conservative best known for his crusade against critical race theory. In a message, Rufo confirmed to Semafor that he had been reporting out the piece before the Times published its version of the story. Rufo said that he would be publishing additional details about the incident on his Substack in the coming days.
Left Angst
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The US gov is failing on vax policy. Vaccine Integrity Project is here to help
The Vaccine Integrity Project, launched in April by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, anticipated this trajectory and the risks posed to the widely shared goal of protecting people from vaccine-preventable diseases. Its mission is simple and urgent: to ensure that vaccine use in the United States remains grounded in the best available evidence and focused squarely on protecting the public. Over the past several months, the project has engaged more than 80 stakeholders, including clinicians, academics, public health officials, insurers, and industry leaders, to assess how nongovernmental actors can defend vaccine science and use at a time when official public health channels are under stress.
- See? The propaganda people didn't need tax money after all. Vaccines that help prevent diseases are great; but they want everyone required to take a host of "injected therapies" for less visible benefit to anyone but those doing the injecting.
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The Trump Administration Is Planning to Use AI to Deny Medicare Authorizations
- As opposed to the previous administration's use of voting records as a determining factor...
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Rural Americans may be more susceptible to MAGA than most people, but I doubt it. College graduates are supposedly inoculated, but it is an arbitrary assumption. I know lots of PhD holders who are born MAGAs and many others who would don the red hat tomorrow morning in response to some perceived slight. There are people who have repudiated their own principles in order to become “Honorary Patriots”; there are lifelong Democrats who have enthusiastically entered Trump’s orbit. MAGA has nothing inherently to do with geography, education, or even stated political beliefs. It appeals to a certain type of mind. It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation that grew up online, that learned to mistake engagement for truth, that confused being heard with being right. This is as true of suburban millennials as it is of rural boomers. It is the disease of the algorithmically poisoned.
- the Early Internet was full of Rightist propaganda and the poor kids were programmed to think of nothing but Patriotism and Freedom... oh wait; its been the other way around and "WorldNetDaily" is as "right" as anyone is allowed to be on the internet.
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Media accounts on the raid are rubbish with Reuters, the New York Times, NBC and the rest of the monkeys saying a farmworker died in the raid. While fleeing, he fell 30 feet and broke his neck but thanks to ICE, he lives. NYT reported, “Farmworker Dies After Fleeing a Federal Raid in Southern California.” Nope. Not true. Only after NYT gave the union’s side (which wrongly said he was dead) did NYT bother telling what really happened:
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said he had not been in federal custody and denied that the agents involved in the raid were the reason he climbed the greenhouse. “Although he was not being pursued by law enforcement, this individual climbed up to the roof of a greenhouse and fell 30 feet,” she said in a statement. Agents called for help, she added, “to get him care as quickly as possible.”
The media is spreading bad stories—and not just about the weed raid. The media described a Salvadoran MS-13 gang member as a Maryland Man being separated from his loving wife and children. It turned out his wife had received a temporary protective order against him in 2021.
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Federal Reserve responds to administration attacks over renovation
As the Trump administration escalates its criticisms of the Federal Reserve and Chairman Jerome Powell, the central bank is quietly pushing back with a new “Frequently Asked Questions” page on its website defending the central bank’s $2.5 billion renovation project. The page, last updated on Friday, directly responds to some of the administration’s criticisms of the renovation project of the Fed’s headquarters, which came under attack this week from Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. Vought on Thursday claimed that Powell “has grossly mismanaged the Fed” and took aim at what he called “an ostentatious overhaul” of the Fed’s renovations, which seeks to modernize the campus for the Federal Reserve, including by renovating three buildings overlooking the National Mall. “It involves a complete overhaul and modernization that preserves two historic buildings that have not been comprehensively renovated since their construction in the 1930s,” according to the Fed’s website.
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How Trump's crackdown on universities is affecting the world
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Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?
Shunning as a form of accountability goes back millenniums. In ancient Athens, a citizen deemed a threat to state stability could be “ostracized” — cast out of society for a decade. For much of history, banishment was considered so severe that it substituted for capital punishment. The whole point of Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter was to show she had violated norms — and to discourage others from doing so. But that was before social media. We live in a world of online fandoms, choose-your-own-adventure information and parasocial relationships. Few people who lost friends over the vaccine changed their minds. They just got new friends. Those exiled from one version of society were quickly welcomed by another — an alternate universe full of grievance peddlers and conspiracy theorists who thrived on stories of victimized conservatives.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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Hundreds form human chain to help Melbourne's oldest bookshop relocate
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UK graduates share their job-hunting woes amid the AI fallout
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Nearly two-thirds of UK workers turning to drink because of job pressures
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Japan and EU envision satellite network to cut reliance on US, SpaceX
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73.5% of Argentinians support Milei's program and reject going back to the past
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Efforts to Reconstruct Edo Castle Tower Keep Enter 18th Year
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NK's fake tech workers targeting European employers with help from UK operatives
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Plane Crashes at Southend Airport
An aircraft has crashed at London Southend Airport. Essex Police said it was alerted to a 12-metre plane on fire at the site in Southend-on-Sea shortly before 16:00 BST on Sunday. John Johnson, 40, from Billericay, Essex, was watching planes with his wife and children when he saw a "huge fireball". The airport confirmed there had been a "serious incident" and the four flights scheduled to leave on Sunday had been cancelled.
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Macron calls on EU to 'defend European interests resolutely' from Trump
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Hungary's oldest library is fighting to save books from beetle infestation
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
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Gaming Cancer: How Citizen Science Games Could Help Cure Disease
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So Your Doctor Is a DO. Does That Matter? - The New York Times
The number of osteopathic doctors has increased dramatically. People still don’t know what they are. More than a quarter of all medical students in the United States are training to become D.O.s, thanks in part to limited slots in traditional medical schools and ever-growing openings at osteopathic schools (14 campuses have opened in the last five years). And in recent years, the field has gained prestige as its doctors have risen to the highest medical posts in the country: leading top medical systems, overseeing NASA’s medical team, running the most followed medical page on social media and, during the last three administrations, overseeing the medical care of the president of the United States.
The difference between a D.O. and M.D. used to be far more obvious. In 1874, when a disillusioned Civil War physician, Dr. Andrew Still, invented osteopathy, it was meant to exist in sharp contrast to the harsh mainstream medical practices of the time, which included bloodletting and prescribing toxic doses of mercury. His philosophy asserted that most ailments were a result of misalignment, mainly in the spine, that he could heal by physically adjusting the bones and joints rather than prescribing medications. His methods quickly gained popularity as word spread of Dr. Still’s “miraculous” healing abilities. Today, the distinction between D.O.s and M.D.s is much fuzzier. D.O.s still attend separate medical schools, but their curriculum covers much of the same ground, and many take the same board exams.
- Like Methodists vs Baptists; the only real difference is who is supposed to feel guilty about buying the beer.
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Researchers Identify Four Autism Subtypes with Distinct Genes and Traits
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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I’m less interested in blame than in the useful reminder that not all politics is American politics. Vaccination rates have dipped worldwide and not in response to U.S. politics or RFK Jr. In fact, despite RFK Jr. the U.S. is doing better than some of its North American and European peers. Outbreaks here may be triggered by cross-border exposure, not failures in U.S. public health alone. Not all politics is American—and not all American outcomes are made in America.
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The US is having its worst year for measles in more than three decades