2025-07-27

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• Crew Members Are Hurt as Southwest Plane Plunges Abruptly After Takeoff

• In which moderns rediscover social bonding: The Whole Check

  In movies or TV shows about politics, savvy politicians often talk about “owing each other favors”. I’m sure this happens in real life, too. But I also think it’s a caricature of something more common: people in tight-knit groups doing each other low-grade favors constantly, in a way that establishes high trust. Nor is this the exclusive provenance of the rich and powerful: churchgoers are another great example. Parishioners are expected to do minor favors for each other without explicitly keeping score, with the further expectation that if one is in need, the whole will step up and provide.

  In fact, if you’re in a social group that you really care about or are excited by, doing a favor feels like an opportunity. Not because then you’ll be owed a specific favor in the future, but because it shows that you’re invested. Like, if I pick up the whole check in a gathering of several friends, that could mean one of a few things:

  • I want to show off that I can afford it;
  • I want to help my friends out of a sense of altruism;
  • I want to demonstrate the feeling that the value of these friendships to me is so much greater than the cost of a group dinner, that the question of who pays is of no consequence, and it might as well be me.

Horseshit

• Record divers pushing human limits and reshaping scientists' view of our species

• How Airline Miles Turned Into a Multibillion Dollar Currency

  How a fringe marketing idea became the backbone of airline profits—and a gateway to global luxury travel

• A pregnant surrogate for a defunct California company doesn’t know what will happen to the baby she’s carrying.

  Alexa Fasold thought she was a surrogate for a couple having fertility issues and was all set to give birth to a baby boy this fall, after carrying a transferred embryo since January. Then she learned that the agency she was working with was under investigation. A couple behind the Arcadia, California, agency has been accused by surrogates of running a potential scam in which multiple women across the country were unknowingly carrying embryos for the same couple at the same time. Fasold first realized that something was amiss when the agency, Mark Surrogacy Investment LLC, suddenly stopped responding to legal questions in May.

• SF may soon ban natural gas in homes and businesses undergoing major renovations

• Elderly cat suffers 'terror' from Blue Angels, feline's owner says in lawsuit

• Yearslong legal battle over SF homelessness ends quietly

celebrity gossip

• Astronomer Enlists Gwyneth Paltrow as 'Temporary Spokesperson'

  • I guess they want to snatch the spotlight away from the stink of sex left in the news

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Lying Increases Trust in Science

  This study begins by outlining the transparency paradox: that trust in science requires transparency, but being transparent about science, medicine and government reduces trust in science. A solution to the paradox is then advanced here: it is argued that, rather than just thinking in terms of transparency and opacity, it is important to think about what institutions are being transparent about. By attending to the particulars of transparency – especially with respect to whether good or bad news is disclosed – it is revealed that transparency about good news increases trust whereas transparency about bad news decreases it, thus explaining the apparent paradox. The apparent solution: to ensure that there is always only good news to report, which might require lying. This study concludes by emphasizing how problematic it is that, currently, the best way to increase public trust is to lie, suggesting that a better way forward (and the real solution to the transparency paradox) would be to resolve the problem of the public overidealizing science through science education and communication to eliminate the naïve view of science as infallible.

  • How did "the naïve view of science as infallible" arise? Oops we just stumbled into a century long propaganda campaign to replace religions with blind reverence for "institutions"?

Musk

• Tesla dumped 75% of its Bitcoin at one of the worst times, losing billions

  Tesla missed on the top and bottom lines in the second quarter, but another miss was buried in its investor deck. The company’s digital assets are currently valued at $1.24 billion. That’s up substantially from $722 million a year ago. But anyone who’s been following the crypto market knows that the figure represents a lost opportunity amounting to billions of dollars in missed gains for the electric vehicle maker. Bitcoin is trading near a record and is up 80% over the past year. Tesla sold 75% of its holdings in mid-2022, when the digital currency was trading at a fraction of its current price.

• Tesla to roll out human-driven chauffeur service in Bay Area, regulator says

• Tesla's new retro-futuristic Supercharger diner

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Widely panned arsenic life paper gets retracted–15 years after brouhaha

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Tea, a women only app, suffers massive data breach

  • Tea, an app for women to share the private data of men, was hacked - if you can use that term for an application that appears to have had no security whatsoever - and the personal information of all the users has been leaked online - if you can use that expression when all the personal information was already public if you knew to look.

• Grindr Won't Let Users Say 'No Zionists'

• Supply-chain attacks on open source software are getting out of hand

• 4 bands: Spotify exodus over arms industry link

  Australian psychedelic rock group announces it will pull its music from streaming service in protest against CEO Daniel Ek

• Blame a leak for Microsoft SharePoint attacks, researcher insists

• Jeff Bezos Reportedly Eyes Purchase of CNBC as Tech Billionaires Gobble Up Media

• Test Results for AMD Zen 5 by Agner Fog

  While the CPU performance in terms of instruction fetch rate, decoding, execution units, memory read/write, and branch throughput is improved to new levels, there are only minor improvements in cache sizes and associativity. This means that CPU throughput is rarely a bottleneck in Zen 5, and the programmer has to focus on optimizing memory access if you want to utilize the high computing power of the Zen 5. The Zen 5 can give a significant performance boost to computation-intensive programs, while programs that are limited mainly by memory and disk access will not benefit much.

  • HN comments

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Transformers are almost adversarially designed for computer memory hierarchy

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI labs' all-or-nothing race leaves no time to fuss about safety

• All the children shall be above average, by decree: White House to require gov AI models to be truthful and ideologically neutral

• Mistral's new "environmental audit" shows how much AI is hurting the planet

• Congress to outlaw AI that jacks up prices based on what it knows about you

• The human brain doesn't learn, think or recall like AI. Embrace the difference

• The New Chips Designed to Solve AI's Energy Problem

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• The asteroid that will spare Earth might hit the moon instead

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The Problem with Rewards Credit Cards

• Home sales are down. So why are prices at an all-time high?

• The natural diamond industry is getting rocked. Thank the lab-grown variety

• Intel Confirms Mass Layoffs, over 24,000 Jobs to Be Cut This Year

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Donate to the Treasury to help pay down the $36.7T public debt

• Feds probe flight risks at NYPD's Aviation Unit after safety failures

Left Angst

• NPR crisis worsens as top editor quits days after radio station lost $500m federal cash for being too woke | Daily Mail Online

  Edith Chapin, who serves as editor-in-chief and acting chief content officer at National Public Radio, announced her departure on Tuesday. Chapin told an NPR reporter she quit rather than being fired and that she was not leaving due to the funding cuts.

• Trump's order to block woke AI in government encourages tech to censor chatbots

• NASA Says Thousands of Employees Set to Resign from Space Agency

• Trump Administration Plans Changes to Skilled Worker Visas and Citizenship Tests

• The Worst ICE Agents Are Coming

  To keep pace with the administration’s unquenchable thirst for arrests, deportations, and cruelty, ICE is using its billions of new dollars to go on a hiring spree—and, to borrow a phrase, they’re unlikely to send their best. Trump wants to hire 10,000 new ICE agents, the equivalent of roughly 50 percent of the current total manpower of the agency, along with 3,000 new border patrol agents. And he wants to do it fast, the better to help reach Stephen Miller’s arbitrary and increasingly unrealistic goal of one million deportations in 2025.

• Doge builds AI tool to cut 50 percent of federal regulations

• US Health Officials, Tech Executives to Launch Data-Sharing Plan

• To Trust ICEBlock's Anonymity, You Have to Trust Apple

• these would be the ones that apply only to one company? Environment protection rules for rocket launches targeted by Trump cabinet

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• 'Chuck E. Cheese' handcuffed and arrested in Florida

World

• Dying for gold: who killed the miners of Buffelsfontein?

• Is Europe Just Not Good at Innovating?

• UK condemns Hong Kong cash offer for help in arresting activists

• A colonial hangover or a leg-up? India grapples with the appeal of English

• Thailand's F-16s and Gripens jointly bomb Cambodian indirect fire positions

  • Thais and Cambodians slug it out on social media

  • What’s Thailand’s Endgame If Its Conflict With Cambodia Escalates Into War?

  Thailand’s military dwarfs Cambodia’s by all metrics so it could easily sweep into Phnom Penh to depose Hun Sen and his son unless something goes wrong or Vietnam intervenes

• Dutch Industry Buckles Under Energy Transition and Global Pressure

• VPN signups from UK surge 1400% after Online Safety Act goes into effect

• Around 6k porn sites start checking ages in UK

• For the first time in modern history a capital city is on the verge of running dry

  Kabul is inching toward catastrophe. It could soon become the first modern capital in the world to run completely dry according to a recent report by Mercy Corps, a non-government organization that warns the crisis could lead to economic collapse. Population growth, the climate crisis, and relentless over-extraction have depleted groundwater levels, experts say, and nearly half the city’s boreholes have already gone dry.

• Queen Victoria Became the Biggest Drug Dealer of All Time

Israel

• Israels food points are not just death traps –theyre an alibi for the starvation

• Gaza aid site offered a 'women only' day. It didn't stop the killing

China

• Chinese kindergartens in crisis as enrolments plunge 25% in 4 years

• China proposes new global AI cooperation organisation

  • China proposes global body to govern artificial intelligence

  • China releases AI action plan days after the U.S. as global tech race heats up

Health / Medicine

• 'My dad started spying on my mum' – the drugs causing sexual urges

• Engineers transform dental floss into needle-free vaccine

• Neuroscience study shows the brain emits light through the skull

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• As cage eggs are phased out around the world, how can producers lower the risks?

• Earth Has Tilted 31.5 Inches. That Shouldn't Happen

  Can we fix it back? Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: When humans pump groundwater, it has a substantial impact on the tilt of Earth’s rotation. Additionally, a study documents just how much of an influence groundwater pumping has on climate change.

  • Imagine the impact evaporation has!

• Hundreds of Weather Records Could Be Broken Next Week

• Facebook is considered the worst in terms of online harassment

• Early Hawaiian petroglyphs on a beach are visible again