2025-08-01

etc

• Turbulence forces Delta plane to make emergency landing, 25 passengers injured

  • We used to let pilots fly around this stuff. They're not allowed to do that now. And we get to blame "climate change" instead of persons insisting we step on ourselves.

Horseshit

• (jun 2025) An aging population can be positive for the economy

• Vintage base ball: the charm of a sport where the 1860s never ended

• The 1912 War on Fake Photos

• Dine and dash mental health toll on restaurant staff

• New Hidden State of Matter Could Make Computers 1,000x Faster

• What screen time does to children's brains is more complicated than it seems

• The upstart company that wants to build the largest aircraft

• (1982) Striking It Rich: A new breed of risk takers is betting on the high-technology future | TIME

  During the past 18 months, hundreds of people became millionaires or multimillionaires when shares in their new companies were sold to the public for the first time. Among the stock winners: Bill Saxon, 53, of Saxon Oil Co. ($212 million); Philip Knight, 43, of Nike athletic shoes ($178 million); Herbert Boyer, 45, and Robert Swanson, 34, of Genentech ($32 million each). Some of these successful new capitalists are tinkering innovators in blue jeans, while others are button-down bankers with M.B.A.s. Some are immigrants or the sons of blue-collar workers, while others are from old established families. Most are still little known outside their own fields. Frederick W. Smith, 37, is just another guy named, well, Smith. Yet his company, Federal Express Corp., has become a $600 million firm by delivering packages that “absolutely, positively have to be there overnight,” as its ads claim. Nolan K. Bushnell, 39, invented Pong, the first video game, in 1972. He then sold his company, Atari, to Warner Communications in 1976 for $28 million. Steven Jobs, 26, the co-founder of five-year-old Apple Computer, practically singlehanded created the personal computer industry. This college dropout is now worth $149 million.

• Buddy Guy is keeping the blues alive. It hasn't been easy.

• The Rise of ARFID (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder)

• 'Kick Door Challenge' on TikTok dangerous, Atlanta police warn parents

Musk

• Elon Musk's Boring Co. Is Turning into a $900M Flop

• Small businesses helped build Musk's empire. Unpaid bills add up to millions

• Tesla Launches Ride Hailing Service in the Bay Area

• Tesla's 'robotaxi' rides in San Francisco have a human at the wheel

  • Robotaxis are powered by human drivers as it launches ride-hailing in Bay Area

• Tesla hits a speed bump in its California 'Robotaxi' rollout: Permits

• Tesla starts sort-of Robotaxi service in San Francisco by invite only

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Big 3 under fire for not paying tower contractors enough

• Oracle VirtualBox licensing tweak lies in wait for the unwary

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

• Pi-hole – Compromised Donor Emails: A post-mortem

• Warner Bros. Lays Off 10% of Motion Picture Group

• YouTube to gauge US users' ages with AI after UK and Australia add age checks

• A single packet can paralyze smartphones

• The Future is NOT Self-Hosted

  Self-hosting is steeped in a vision of an internet that's personalizable, private, and individualistic. A kind of internet suburbia where everyone keeps a server in their garage right next to their lawn mower and their car. But just like the suburbs, this vision is incredibly inefficient and detrimental to creating vibrant, interconnected communities. It necessitates mass amounts of duplicate, unused infrastructure and requires each household to be individually responsible for maintaining that infrastructure. It silos us and makes it harder to share resources. And what do we get in return? A worse experience than cloud-based services. Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations. I'm talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.

• Despite Its Recent "Rebirth", All Is Not Well in The World of Commodore

• In search of riches, hackers plant 4G-enabled Raspberry Pi in bank network

• The Stratosphere Will Be Telecom's Next Frontier

  • Google had a "lofted cell" thing and bragged about using it in disaster response in Puerto Rico; but it never made money. Loon LLC - Wikipedia

• Paying the SOC2 Screenshot Tax

• Silk Typhoon spun a web of patents for offensive cyber tools, report says

• Apple Is Selling iPad Repair Parts for Astronomical Prices

• Javaskirpt, and only in Chrome: Make any website load faster with 6 lines of HTML

  For Firefox and Safari users, we created a short script to preload pages on hover so that they can be cached by the browser and reused once the hovered link is clicked. This also allows for near-instant navigation on browsers that do not support the Speculation Rules API. Heavy pages like the API might take a bit longer to load comparing to Chrome due to the lack of a pre-rendering mechanism natively supported by other browsers.

  • Alternate title: "Waste enormous amounts of your readers' bandwidth and battery silently in the background"

• Epic just won its antitrust lawsuit against Google again

  • Epic Games Win over Google in Fortnite Fight Upheld on Appeal

  • Google loses app store antitrust appeal

  • Google loses US appeal over app store reforms in Epic Games case

• Apple slams DOJ lawsuit: 'threatens the principles that set iPhone apart'

• When Your Power Meter Becomes a Tool of Mass Surveillance

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• 32-bit float audio recording is not a panacea

• Interpolating a Bezier Curve

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Google could be reading your ChatGPT conversations

• Amazon has invested in an AI startup that lets people make TV episodes

• Delta's AI-based price-gouging

• Meta brought AI to rural Colombia. Now students are failing exams

• Wall Street delighted with Microsoft as it spends $100B on AI

• AI Overviews now surface in 25 % of Google searches

• Mira Murati former CTO of open AI reject $1B offer from META

• Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of almost right AI code

• The two people shaping the future of OpenAI's research

• Zuckerberg claims AI systems "improving themselves"

• Crews and filmmakers built Hollywood. What happens to them as AI expands?

• Meta to spend up to $72B on AI infrastructure in 2025

• We Will Sign the EU AI Code of Practice

• The AI Company Capitalizing on Our Obsession with Excel

• Microsoft's Azure AI Speech needs just seconds to spit out a convincing deepfake

• OpenAI hits $12B in annualized revenue, The Information reports

• A.I. Researchers Are Negotiating $250M Pay Packages. Just Like NBA Stars

• (1997) How Long Before Superintelligence?

• Tech CEOs don't seem to realise just how anti-human their AI fanaticism is

• Fed Judge Pulls Opinion Full of AI-Slop, No One Will Say It Was Written by AI

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• India and US launch 'first-of-its-kind' satellite

• NASA Locked Them Up for a Year to Simulate Life on Mars. Today, They Reveal What They Did With Their Time: A Lot of PS4 Gaming.

Crypto con games

• Money by Vile Means | Compact

  In the years since, the speculative frenzy around cryptocurrencies has only continued to gather steam, to the benefit of private actors who have reaped massive profits from the industry’s growth and are exercising a growing influence over the state. In the process, Bitcoin’s founding goal of fighting unconstrained government spending has been inverted, as crypto is increasingly serving as a means of enabling more deficit spending, an agenda the Trump administration has all but explicitly embraced. Today, crypto is merely the latest ruse to persuade the public to surrender democratic freedom and financial sovereignty to oligarchs.

• JPMorgan-Coinbase partnership to facilitate crypto trading

• You Can Insider Trade NFTs Now

• SEC debuts 'Project Crypto' to bring U.S. financial markets 'on chain'

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Arm to explore designing its own chips, CEO says

• Figma more than triples in NYSE debut after selling shares at $33

  • Figma Poised to Open Trading at More Than Triple Its IPO Price

• NYC Shooting Horror Rocks Rudin's Century-Old Property Dynasty

• Microsoft ends tradition of naming competitors in regulatory filings

• Amazon's cloud business records 18% growth in second quarter

• Walmart Still Doesn't Accept Apple Pay in U.S. Despite Daily Complaints

• Apple Reports 3Q 2025 Results: $23.4B Profit on $94B Revenue

• The era of ghosting job candidates is slowly ending

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• GOP’s Josh Hawley and Democrats vote to advance congressional stock trading ban

• IRS Heads Of Large Business And Professional Responsibility Units Placed On Leave Pending Investigation Of Their Conduct Against Republicans.

  Holly Paz, the commissioner of Large Business and International Division, and Elizabeth Kastenberg, acting director of the Office of Professional Responsibility, were put on leave while the IRS investigates their conduct against Republicans, the source said, adding that the leave doesn’t mean they are fired. It hasn’t been decided who will replace them, the source said.

  • Actions have consequences

• Federal judges detail rise in threats, 'pizza doxings'

Trump

• US ends tariff exemption for all low-value packages

  • Suspending Duty-Free De Minimis Treatment for All Countries

  • Trump suspends trade loophole for cheap online retailers globally

• How Bob Woodward Could Have Saved the ‘Washington Post’ from Russiagate Humiliation

• Treasury Secretary Says Trump Accounts Could Pave Way to Privatizing Social Security - The New York Times

  Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday that the so-called Trump accounts Republicans created for children in their tax and spending bill are a “backdoor for privatizing Social Security.” In making the comments, Mr. Bessent ventured into what many consider the third rail of politics by suggesting that the accounts could be a step toward withdrawing the government’s role in funding the safety net program for retirees, which faces a longstanding financing shortfall.

• Canada tariff to 35% as US announces new levies for dozens of countries

Left Angst

• Math Is Quietly in Crisis over NSF Funding Cuts

• Woman Who Died of Heart Disease in ICE Custody Wasn't Allowed to See Doctor

• Trump Announces Plan T Launch Private Health Tracking System with Big Tech Firms

• Louisiana Built Trump's Busiest Deportation Hub

• Trump's Fight with the Fed Won't End with Rate Cuts

• Army Secretary forces West Point to rescind appointment given to Easterly

  The United States Military Academy abruptly ended the appointment of Jen Easterly to a high-profile academic position in West Point’s Department of Social Sciences, according to a memorandum issued Wednesday by the Secretary of the Army. After the announcement, far-right activist Laura Loomer suggested on X that Easterly should not be named to the position, due to her work under the Biden administration, allegedly with Nina Jankowicz, who served as the executive director of the Disinformation Governance Board of the United States. (Jankowicz later Wednesday posted on BlueSky that she had never worked with Easterly.) On Wednesday, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll announced in a post on X that the position would be rescinded, and a full review of the academy’s hiring practices would be conducted.

  • West Point to Pull Appointment of Former Biden Cybersecurity Director

  • Nine was a fan of the practice of "cognitive hygiene" and ideological purity, if this offends her tell her to imagine these people doubted Biden's mental health...

• History's lessons on tariffs, the myth of protectionism, and Trump's trade war

• How Scientific Empires End

• Anticommandeering doctrine stands in the way of Trump's immigration crackdown

• Interviews with 16 Former Detainees of El Salvador Terrorism Confinement Center

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• U.S. targets Brazilian digital payment platform Pix amid trade spat

• US imposes sanctions on Brazilian judge who charged Bolsonaro with plotting coup

World

• Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

• Lethal Cambodia-Thailand border clash linked to cyber-scam slave camps

• We Need a European Sovereign Tech Fund

• Air traffic chaos 'caused by software error'

• UK Users Must Now Verify Age to Access Certain Content on Spotify

• NHS disability equipment provider on brink of collapse a year after cyberattack

• People Have Disappeared in Mexico. Scientists Are Using Dead Pigs to Find Them

  The Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel is behind the murder and disappearance of thousands of victims who are often never found. Over one hundred thousand people have disappeared under mysterious circumstances linked to the crime syndicate since 2006—About 15,500 were reported missing in March of this year alone. Efforts to find the remains of loved ones have often been futile. Members of the Guerreros Buscadores collective, who tirelessly try to locate the missing, have found hundreds of items of clothing on the property, along with charred human remains that were almost impossible to identify.

  • Odd how no one is screaming "genocide!" innit. This is just one of several such groups operating with such vicious disregard for life there. This instance of ungoverned territory and thuggery, unlike some others, is largely ignored except for the occasional "human interest" bait like this.

• UK Government Warns Promoting the Use of VPNs Could Attract Fines

• Big firms could be fined by the UK for paying suppliers late

• Misinformation and hateful rhetoric spread rapidly after the Southport stabbings

Israel

• Arab states call on Hamas to disarm and relinquish power in unprecedented move

• A World of Misery, from 200 Miles Up

• The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza

• Canada plans to recognize a Palestinian state, the prime minister says

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia-backed Nayara taps Indian IT firm after Microsoft suspends service

• Kremlin caught abusing ISPs to spy on Moscow-based diplomats, Microsoft says

China

• Xi Jinping is the main thing holding China back

• China claims Nvidia built backdoor into H20 chip designed for Chinese market

  • China summons Nvidia over backdoor security concerns with AI chips

Health / Medicine

• Scientists May Have Found Humanity's Sixth Sense–In Our Gut

• Why Today's Young Adults Are 4 Times More Likely to Have Rectal Cancer

• Using a fan can make older adults hotter in a dry heat

• Recall warns some Celsius energy drink cans accidentally contain alcohol.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Unprecedented continental drying, shrinking freshwater availability

• Supersized stick insect discovered in high-altitude trees in Australia

• Startup wants to use the Earth as a battery

• A submersible finds sea creatures thriving in the deepest parts of the ocean

• DOE economic impacts of climate change overblown

• Reclaiming ‘Environmentalism’ From the Climate Extremists | RealClearWire

  it’s time to move environmentalism out of the realm of the culture wars. Americans across the political spectrum love the environment and understand the need to protect it. Led by the president’s “Make America Beautiful Again” commission, the day is here when we can once again declare in unison that we are all environmentalists.

• The Shadow Economy of Critical Mineral Exports

• 'Communities' of extreme life seen for first time in deep ocean

• WMO certifies megaflash lightning record in USA

  The megaflash occurred in October 2017, during a major thunderstorm complex. It extended from eastern Texas to near Kansas City

  • A 515-Mile Lightning Flash Is Longest on Record

  • New Single Megaflash Lightning Record Distance: 829 Km

  • A record: Lightning bolt stretched 515 miles, crossed three states

  • US lightning flash was longest on record at 515 miles, scientists say

• Wind farm developers are worried about neighbours stealing their wind

• Biology 'This wasn't obvious': the potato evolved from a tomato ancestor

  • Surprise in the plant family: The potato is the daughter of the tomato

• Real milk proteins, no cows: Engineered bacteria for vegan cheese and yogurt

• The Colorado River is officially contaminated with invasive zebra mussels