2025-07-16

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• Cats as Horror Movie Villains

• Guy Attached 21 Chef's Knives to a Robot Arm to Determine Which One Is Best

• The Secret to Better Airplane Navigation Could Be Inside the Earth's Crust

Horseshit

• Why America's Street Lights Are Turning Purple

• A new Finnish flavor of feline coat coloration, "salmiak"

• Brainwaves sync while watching live dance

• Literalism plaguing today’s movies

• Shoes found near Hadrian's Wall spark mystery around soldiers of ancient Rome

• Europe's Quantum Leap Challenges US Dominance

• Does tennis have a doping problem, or a truth problem?

• Half of homeless people have experienced traumatic brain injury: study

• Why was electricity slow to change manufacturing?

• Medieval medicine was smarter than you think – and similar to TikTok trends

• 'Not that into peace doves': The Apollo-Soyuz patch NASA rejected

celebrity gossip

• The Scoop on Jeffrey Epstein by Alan Dershowitz

  • The FBI's Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Had Nearly 3 Minutes Cut Out

Obit

• Mark Snow, Who Conjured the 'X-Files' Theme, Is Dead at 78

• World's 'oldest' marathon runner dies at 114 in hit-and-run

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Inside the funhouse mirror factory: How social media distorts perceptions of norms - ScienceDirect

  Online discussions are dominated by a surprisingly small, extremely vocal, and non-representative minority. Research on social media has found that, while only 3 % of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33 % of all content. Furthermore, 74 % of all online conflicts are started in just 1 % of communities, and 0.1 % of users shared 80 % of fake news. Not only does this extreme minority stir discontent, spread misinformation, and spark outrage online, they also bias the meta-perceptions of most users who passively “lurk” online. This can lead to false polarization and pluralistic ignorance, which are linked to a number of problems including drug and alcohol use, intergroup hostility, and support for authoritarian regimes.

• How incel language infected the mainstream internet | The Verge

  What foundational internet words have to do with 4chan.

Musk

• 'Bigger, longer and uncut' – Tesla unveils its new robotaxi geofence

• SpaceX expected to launch Starlink services in Vietnam

• Tesla Penis-shaped Robotaxi expansion illustrates how unserious the business is

• Doge Denizen Marko Elez Leaked API Key for XAI

• 'Elon Musk Gives Himself Another Handshake'

• Elon Musk's AI predictions should terrify us

  Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom – or at least that’s not how Musk wants us to think of what’s coming rapidly down the track. ‘You could look at it like the glass is 80 to 90 percent full. Meaning 80 percent likely we will have extreme prosperity for all,’ he told Cruz. Yes, an enormous number of people will very soon be made redundant, on the basis AI will do their jobs much faster and better, but according to Musk: ‘goods and services will become close to free, so it is not as though people will be wanting in terms of goods and services… you will have tens of billions of robots. They will make you anything, or provide you any service you want, for next to nothing. It is not that people will have a lower standard of living, they will have a much higher standard of living.’ Hmm. How exactly has that worked out for the indigenous populations of, say, Australia or the United States, displaced as they were rapidly by Whitey with his far superior education and technological capability? Not brilliantly, you’d have to say, on balance.

• Grok Rolls Out Pornographic Anime Companion, Lands Dept of Defense Contract

• It turns out Tesla Canada's shady $43M incentive grab was above-board after all

• I Tried Grok's Built-In Anime Companion and It Called Me a Twat

• Grok's new porn companion is rated for kids 12 and older in the App Store

Electric / Self Driving cars

• UK launches new EV grant with discount of up to £3750

• BYD has caught up with Tesla in the global EV race

• Google Maps Come to Rivian Vehicles

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• How Nazism ended centuries of Catholic-Protestant enmity

  the Catholic-Protestant truce in fact began long before the Second World War, in response to the Nazis’ call to end religious discord and to instead forge racial unity. Many Catholic and Protestant thinkers and leaders were deeply impressed by this revolutionary message. Even if they disliked some of Hitler’s ideas, they believed that inter-Christian cooperation opened exciting new possibilities. More than anything, they hoped that unity would allow them to build a European order that was based on inequality. Under the Nazis’ hegemony, Catholic and Protestant leaders hoped to protect the economic hierarchy between workers and employers, and the sexual disparity between men and women. In its origins, that is, the peace between Catholics and Protestants entailed not just new tolerance, but also protection of harsh exclusion. And after the Second World War, this fact turned out to be hugely consequential, when Catholics and Protestants came to power and helped build a deeply unequal Europe.

  • I think the Nazis fostering and support of Muslim forces that are still active today is more worthy of study. This is like yesterday's "The Republicans made the red tape" stories, blame shifting that a 5 year old would be embarrassed to be caught at.

• Death Isn't the Final Off Switch. There's a 'Third State' Tween Life and Decay

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Low-quality papers based on public health data are flood scientific literature

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Nextdoor reboots app to power daily life

• Unreleased Beyonce Music Stolen from Car

• Gmail's new 'Manage subscriptions' tool will help declutter your inbox

• Apple CEO Tim Cook Should Be Replaced, Research Firm Says

  • Tim Cook was hand-picked to lead Apple. Some say it's time for him to go

• "Not second screen enough" – Netflix dumbing down TV for phone usage

• Security Vulnerability on US Freight Trains Left Unfixed for 13 Years

• Old Tricks, New Tech: How Legacy Media Capture Fuels Digital Authoritarianism

• Patent Trolls Account for 1 in Every 4 US Patent Cases: 2024 data says

• Google exec: 'We're going to be combining ChromeOS and Android'

  • Chrome OS is "combining" with Android, but what does that mean?

• FCC Approves Transactions for T-Mobile, MetroNet, Intelsat and UScelullar

• Nearly 3 out of 4 Oracle Java users say they've been audited in the past 3 years

• Seagate 30TB HAMR drives now widely available

  • Seagate gets its long-awaited HAMR tech into $600 30TB HDDs you can buy

• KDE's official Android TV alternative is back from the dead

• Fyre Festival sells troubled brand for just $245K on eBay

• Meta trial becomes test of board culpability over corporate scandals

• Meta shareholders look to haul CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg to court

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• The Rushed Development of MiniDisc

• NIST Ion Clock Sets New Record for Most Accurate Clock in the World

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Trial Court Decides Case Based on AI-Hallucinated Caselaw

• Cognition AI just bought Windsurf for $NAN.

• Apple is facing calls to focus on AI after losing $640 billion in market value because it's not doing retarded shit.

• Pennsylvania led America's industrial rise – now it will lead the AI revolution

• Paul Smith to Join Anthropic as Chief Commercial Officer

• Former Google DeepMind engineer says other AI agents are doing it wrong

• The sound of inevitability

  I’m not convinced that LLMs are the future. I’m certainly not convinced that they’re the future I want. But what I’m most certain of is that we have choices about what our future should look like, and how we choose to use machines to build it. Don’t let inevitabilism frame the argument and take away your choice. Think about the future you want, and fight for it.

• Meta's new Superintelligence lab is discussing training a closed model

• The CEO of Nvidia Admits What Everybody Is Afraid of About AI

• AI is the latest in a sequence of inventions that have made humanity dumber

• Anatomy of a Collapse: The Wild Takeover Saga of Windsurf

• Meta announces new data centers, gobble up millions of gallons of water per day

• Billionaires Convince Themselves Chatbots Close to Making Scientific Discoveries

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Astronauts splashdown on SpaceX capsule to end private Ax-4 mission

  • NASA retiree and crewmates splash down in Pacific after private ISS mission

• A Handshake in Orbit 50 Years Ago Transformed the Space Race

• A Look Inside the Making of ‘The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch’

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Microsoft is laying off 9,100 employees, Xbox division hit hard

• Nvidia Says U.S. Has Lifted Restrictions on A.I. Chip Sales to China

  • Nvidia to Resume H20 AI Chip Sales to China in US Reversal

  • Nvidia Wins OK to Resume Sales of AI Chip to China After CEO Meets Trump

  • Nvidia to resume H20 sales to China, announces new compliant GPU for China

  • After meeting with Trump, Nvidia CEO says the sale of AI chip is OK in China

• Nvidia and AMD Soar as Chip Trade Curbs Fall

• US consumer prices pick up in June

  U.S. consumer prices increased by the most in five months in June amid higher costs for some goods, suggesting tariffs were starting to have an impact on inflation and potentially keeping the Federal Reserve on the sidelines until September. Despite the pick-up in the Consumer Price Index reported by the Labor Department on Tuesday, underlying inflation remained moderate last month, with prices for new and used motor vehicles lower relative to May. The CPI increased 0.3% last month after edging up 0.1% in May, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics said. That gain was the largest since January, and also reflected higher rental costs. Gasoline prices rebounded 1.0% after four straight monthly declines.

  • US inflation rises as tariffs drive up prices

• Fed Chair Contender Is Now in Favor of Cutting Rates

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• 134 Lifeguards Cost Los Angeles Taxpayers $70M a Year

• How California's beer tax compares to other states

• Polymarket Probe Ended by DOJ

  • Polymarket Investigations Dropped by Justice Department, CFTC

  • Trump administration ends Polymarket investigations without charges

• Americans' new tax rates depend on who they are and what they do

Trump

• Pam Bondi Fires Senior DOJ Ethics Official.

• Trump vows ‘billions of dollars’ in weapons for Ukraine, 100% ‘secondary tariffs’ on Russia if no peace in 50 days.

Left Angst

• The Trump Administration Is About to Incinerate 500 Tons of Emergency Food- The Atlantic

  Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash. (The sources I spoke with for this story requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.) Sometime near the end of the Biden administration, USAID spent about $800,000 on the high-energy biscuits, one current and one former employee at the agency told me.

  In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told representatives on the House Appropriations Committee that he would ensure that food aid would reach its intended recipients before spoiling. But by then, the order to incinerate the biscuits (which I later reviewed) had already been sent. Rubio has insisted that the administration embraces America’s responsibility to continue saving foreign lives, including through food aid. But in April, according to NPR, the U.S. government eliminated all humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and Yemen, where, the State Department said at the time, providing food risks benefiting terrorists. (The State Department has offered no similar justification for pulling aid to Pakistan.)

  • So the stuff "bought near the end of the Biden administration" is already expired? Is it normal for us to buy stuff with such short shelf life, in such large amounts? What was the usual purchase lot size and dwell time when this program was running normally?

• Stefanie Stantcheva: To understand America today, study the zero-sum mindset

• Trump administration says it won't publish climate change report on NASA website

• 'Tremendous uncertainty' for cancer research as US gov target mRNA vaccines

• The Secret Police Are Here

  The pearl-clutching is audible from here. The same people who’ve spent years wringing their hands about “norms” and “institutions” while watching them systematically dismantled have found their voice at last. Not to denounce the construction of a police state funded like a small nation’s military. Not to sound alarms about the deployment of Marines for domestic law enforcement. Not to express concern about the disappearance of legal immigrants into foreign prisons without due process. No, they’ve discovered moral urgency in whether Zohran Mamdani accurately filled out demographic boxes on a college application years ago. This isn’t political disagreement. This is moral invertebrate behavior so complete, so shameless, that it would make a Vichy collaborator blush. These people have revealed themselves to be exactly what they are: enablers of authoritarianism who worry more about municipal rent control than federal police state construction.

• Power prices are expected to soar under new tax cut and spending law

• The IRS Is Building a System to Share Taxpayers' Data with ICE

• Is Weather Control Possible? Marjorie Taylor Greene Thinks So

• Secret changes to major U.S. health datasets raise alarms

• Top U.S. cyber agency keeps shrinking under Trump 2.0

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The US government announces a Grok contract worth 200M dollars

• Windows? A Little-Known Microsoft Program Could Expose the Defense Department to Hackers

• US court gives Argentina three more days to surrender its YPF shares

World

• Britain's billion-pound F-35s not quite ready for, well, anything

• Reddit's UK users must now prove they're 18 to view adult content

  • Reddit starts verifying ages of users in the UK

• Digital Nomads Are Getting Caught in the War on Tourism

• About 1,500 tarantulas found hidden in cake boxes at German airport

• Thousands offered UK asylum in secret scheme after personal data of Afghans

  • Data breach that put up to 100k lives at risk revealed

• It is an "invasive species", after all: Two men behind 'senseless' felling of Sycamore Gap tree jailed for four years

Israel

• The Israeli Plot to Extinguish the Journalists Documenting Genocide

• UN report lists companies complicit in Israel's 'genocide'

• I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It

• Israel and Iran Usher in New Era of Psychological Warfare

• Guardian view on the children of Gaza: when 17,000 die, its more than a mistake

China

• China's Baidu to bring its driverless cars to Uber globally

• China Puts New Restrictions on E.V. Battery Manufacturing Technology

• We Warned About the First China Shock. The Next One Will Be Worse.

Health / Medicine

• Scientists reverse Parkinson's symptoms in mice – Could humans be next?

• Micronutrient deficiency linked to chronic pain in new study

• Why Women Face Higher Alzheimer's Risk

• Large study squashes anti-vaccine talking points about aluminum

• Cancer rates are rising for generation X and millennials

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Biomass satellite returns striking first images of forests and more

• The woman who changed our view of chimps – and human beings

• Animal revenge: Can tigers, orcas, and other animals get back at their enemies?

• GMO crops fundamentally alter the underground ecosystem

• Drop in Air Pollution Drove a Surge in Warming, Study Finds

• Ghost factories are a warning sign for green manufacturing's future

• Southwest U.S. Drought Relief Unlikely, Study Finds

• Some Australian dolphins use sponges to hunt fish, but it's harder than it looks