2025-07-17

etc

• An 80-year-old man ran a 135-mile ultramarathon through Death Valley

  • Florida man, 80, becomes oldest to run 'world's toughest' race in Death Valley

• A Mile-Long Gateway to Hell Opens Up in Iceland

Horseshit

• These states are America's worst for quality of life in 2025

• New map reveals the most financially distressed states in the US

• Scientist Proved Paradox-Free Time Travel Is Possible

• The Scourge of 'Spot-Fixing' Is Coming for American Sports

• Fertility Needs a Scientific Revolution

• Trail Runner Stopped in Utah for Not Having a Hunting or Fishing License

• Upended by Meth, Some Communities Are Paying Users to Quit

• 'Too many old people': A rural Pa. town reckons with population loss

• The convicted ex-bike gang member playing at The Open

• Interbreeding with Neanderthals may be responsible for brain condition

• In 2000 a Man Claimed to Be from 2036. Some Predictions Have Been Coming True

• Why 7 hours of sleep feels different in Japan vs. America

• The Silicon Valley push to breed super-babies

• Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk

• Gen Z is spying on each other

celebrity gossip

• Metadata Reveals Epstein Security Video Was Edited, Wired Finds

  • Jeffrey Epstein 'raw' prison video had nearly 3 minutes cut out, report claims

• Abraham Lincoln Drew Poetry and Power from His Suicidal Depression

Obit

• Paranormal investigator dies on US tour with allegedly haunted doll Annabelle

Musk

• XAI's Grok 4 has no meaningful safety guardrails

• Elon is willing to pay up to $440k if you can make anime girl avatars

• Tesla's change in bylaws to limit shareholder lawsuits slammed by NY officials

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• San Diego County's Schools Have 27,000 Fewer Students Than a Decade Ago

• The Decimal Point Is 150 Years Older Than Historians Thought

• Young graduates are facing an employment crisis

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• When Google's slop meets webslop, search stops

• Curl creator mulls nixing bug bounty awards to stop AI slop

  • Death by a thousand slops.

• Need For Speed franchise 'shelved' by EA

• Some States Are Pushing Back on Library E-Book Licensing Fees

• How the 'Minecraft' Score Became Big Business for Its Composer

• VMware reboots its partner program again – it looks like smaller players are out

• People want someone to be responsible for software that fails

  people don't consider it (morally) acceptable when no one is held responsible for either negligence or worse, deliberate choices that cause harm. A field can only duck and evade their outrage for so long; sooner or later it stops being able to shrug and walk away. Software is now systematically important in the world, which means that its failings can do real harm, and people have noticed. (Which is to say that an increasing number of people have been harmed by software and didn't like it, and the number and frequency is only going to go up.)

• Facebook privacy practices the focus of $8B trial targeting Zuckerberg

• Rogers Launches Satellite-to-Mobile Service Across Canada

• Rough times for broadcast networks illustrate changing media landscape

• Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs

  On Steamworks the new rule is noted under the "What you shouldn’t publish on Steam" heading:

  Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.

  SteamDB noticed this, and also noted in a Bluesky thread how numerous incest games had been removed.

  • Aww damn, there goes my "Artificial Inseminator Simulator" idea. I coulda got investors to blow wads on it too. "Let's bring AI to games! Plus Ponies! cannot possibly lose!"

  • Steam bans games that violate the 'rules and standards' of payment processors

  • Valve change Steam rules to let banks and CCs prohibit certain adult content

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• delightfully evil object: 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Metronalmost Is Gunning For Last Place

  Unlike a real metronome that has to rely on worldly imperfections to potentially vary the lengths of its ticks, the metronoalmost leaves nothing to chance: it’s driven by a common hobby servo wired directly to a NodeMCU ESP-12E, carefully programmed so that the sweep will never take exactly one second.

• Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 Incident on July 14, 2025

• The Computers That Made the World

• 1990 Networking: LAN Manager 2.0 | OS/2 Museum

  Testers and OEMs, needless to say, did not immediately run into this problem because they installed LAN Manager 2.0 within the three months before the admin password expired. But the password had just about enough time to expire before copies got to any end users or even reviewers. A truly creative way to shoot oneself in the foot. The LM 2.0b update no longer suffers from the pre-expired password.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Rage against the machines: ignore the fury at Wimbledon, AI in sport works

• Another High-Profile OpenAI Researcher Departs for Meta

• Sexting with Gemini

• Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

• Why Are Computers Still So Dumb?

• Rise of the Machines: Inside Hollywood's AI Civil War

• Meta's New Superintelligence Lab Is Discussing Major A.I. Strategy Changes

• Zuckerberg says Meta will build a data center the size of Manhattan in AI push

• AI scientists warn: We're losing our only window into how AI thinks

• OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic: "We may be losing the ability to understand AI"

• Scale AI to Cut 14% of Staff Following Meta Investment

• Disney Moves AI Bar by Encouraging Droids to Emote Telling Them 'You Are Smart'

• Mark Cuban: Why AI Will Create More Jobs, Not Fewer

• Trump and the Energy Industry Are Eager to Power AI with Fossil Fuels

• AI computing power is splitting the world into haves and have-nots

• The CIA faces a new AI-powered spy game

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Private Ax-4 astronauts splash down aboard SpaceX capsule to conclude ISS mission: The nations of Hungary, India and Poland have officially wrapped their first crewed missions to the International Space Station.

• Imagine the antitrust nutcracker if they didn't. SpaceX launches Amazon's Starlink-rival satellites

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The FICO Monopoly Is Living on Borrowed Time

• Texan rare earth producer makes a play to end China's dominance

• DoorDash overcharges Bay Area family bakery for 8 years, shorts them over $100K

• ASML shares tumble as US tariff turmoil rattles investors

• Apple Agrees To $500M Deal To Buy Rare Earths From American Company, Reduce China Dependence.

• US importers sued for 'greenwashing' Mexican avocados

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

• Congressional Republicans To Unveil Bill Stripping National Education Association’s Federal Charter.

• What Will Become of the CIA?

• US senators exempt HIV/Aids funding from planned spending cuts

Trump

• Trump unveils $70B AI and energy plan at summit with oil and tech bigwigs

• 'It's just better ' Trump says Coca-Cola to change key US ingredient

• Trump sues Corporation for Public Broadcasting directors who refused to be fired

• Attorney General Bailey Fights to Expose Big Tech Censorship of President Trump

Left Angst

• Paula Kerger is used to fighting for PBS. Now the stakes are higher

• ICE may deport to 'third countries' without assurances they won't be tortured

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

• How Elon Musk's X is fueling the MAGA-Trump split

• America's Anti-Immigrant Fever Is Starting to Break

• A refugee deported to Bhutan by the U.S. finds himself stranded and stateless

• RFK Jr. and other Trump officials embrace psychedelics after FDA setback

• Security Experts Are 'Losing Their Minds' over an FAA Proposal

• Chinese-made iPhones could be banned in US over theft of trade secrets.

• DHS Faces New Pressure over DNA Taken from Immigrant Children

• US deports immigrants from Jamaica, Cuba to African kingdom of Eswatini

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Minnesota Assassin's Confession Letter Released Following Federal Indictment – RedState

• FBI Warns Parents Across America of Sinister Group Targeting Minors

  The bureau said that members of the group—referred to as "764" for the Texas ZIP code where it reportedly originated—befriend minors online via video games, social media and online forums, then coerce them into self-harm and creating explicit material. The FBI told Newsweek: "The FBI is determined to identify and stop those who target the most vulnerable members of our society, our children."

World

• The London Tube 'Feels Like Hell.' Efforts to Cool It Just Make It Hotter

• EU Parliament threatens wider ban on lobbyists as Amazon spat deepens

• Let's free ourselves of the U.S. and forge closer ties with China

• Superman's Big Kiss Was Cut by the Censors in India

• Boeing fuel switches safe, regulator says after Air India crash

• What Jane Street did was plain old-fashioned manipulation

• Colombia Seizes First Unmanned Narco-Sub Equipped with Starlink Connection

• UK F-35 fleet poorly supported, can't use vital weapons

• Britain must learn from Greece and cut spending

• Spain awards Huawei contracts to manage intelligence agency wiretaps

• Hungary's oldest library is fighting to save books from a beetle infestation

• UK Royal Navy builds esports suite loaded with gaming PCs on its newest warship

• How will age verification for porn work and what about privacy?

Iran / Houthi

• Houthi-linked dealers sell arms on X and WhatsApp, report says

Israel

• UN report lists companies complicit in Gaza's genocide

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• US-founded terrorist group says it was involved in killing of officer in Kyiv

China

• China Is Spending Billions to Become an A.I. Superpower

• China's new digital ID system raises surveillance, censorship concerns

• Beneath China's resilient economy, a life of pay cuts and side hustles

• Chinese authorities are using a new tool to hack seized phones and extract data

Health / Medicine

• Health officials see nicotine poisoning spike in young kids.

• Inhaled tuberculosis vaccine effective against deadliest infectious disease

• Obesity more likely caused by high calorie diet than lack of exercise

  • What causes obesity? A major new study is upending common wisdom

• America's Protein Obsession Is Transforming the Dairy Industry

• Doctors Discover a Woman with Her Own Unique Blood Type

• Babies made using three people's DNA are born free of mitochondrial disease

  • A third parent's DNA can prevent an inherited disease

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Where Did Bird Flu Go?

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• China's success in cleaning up air pollution may have accelerated global warming

• Most warming this century may be due to air pollution cuts

• How Heat Hurts Teamwork

• 'The game has been called': China vs. the US on the race for clean energy

• 'It's just a weird, weird bird': Why we got the dodo so wrong

• Stellantis abandons hydrogen fuel cell development

• Why climate change alarmism failed

• Tsunami warning issued in Southern Alaska after 7.3 magnitude earthquake

• Agricultural liming in the US is a large CO₂ sink, say researchers