2025-08-05
Horseshit
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
-
Tesla's brand loyalty collapsed after Musk backed Trump, data shows
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
-
Dark clouds ahead: hyperscalers can't safeguard one nation's data from another
-
Comcast Is Shutting Down Its Email Service, Moving Email Accounts to Yahoo Mail
-
You see the results throughout all the Disney renaissance films. Take The Lion King. Where Disney’s cel artists once worked by hand from tubs of paint, this team swapped freely between 69 billion colors. A staffer noted that it was possible to have “one [color] palette per scene,” up from maybe nine for an entire movie. Depth-of-field tricks and special effects (shadows, dust, smoke) are everywhere in Lion King. Plus, there are hundreds of multiplane camera shots — compared to the three or five used in The Little Mermaid. Before, that technique involved stacking cels on different glass sheets below a camera. Computers got the same effect seamlessly
-
The reason behind Samsung's bootloader unlock ban is an EU law
-
Ready or not, age verification is rolling out across the internet
-
Tim Cook: Apple Continues to Be "Very Focused" on VisionOS
- "We didnt flush billions on 'VR' only to forget it and pivot to flushing billions on 'AI', really..."
-
Touch Mapper – open-source 3D printed tactile maps for the visually impaired
-
Mozilla Firefox's extension store being flooded with malware
-
Instagram public accounts with less than 1k followers can no longer go live
-
Start the presses! New York Post will expand to LA with launch of The California Post
TechSuck / Geek Bait
-
In 1984, Tandy moved the PC market forward in a major way with the Tandy 1000. A PC compatible had been created that was better than a PC, cheaper than a PC, and more compatible with IBM products than were IBM’s products themselves. While this kept Tandy in the computer business, it did not help the company recover its lost market share. Tandy held on to just shy of 10% of the home computer market by the end of the year.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
-
Humanity May Reach Singularity Within Just 5 Years, Trend Shows
-
$250M top AI salaries dwarf those of the Manhattan Project and Space Race
-
Apple Hiring for 'Answers' Team Working on 'ChatGPT-Like Search'
-
Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade no-crawl directives
-
Perplexity Plagiarized Our Story About How Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine
-
Silicon Valley’s AI Spend Goes Berserk as Microsoft Starts Cashing In.
-
Anthropic CEO brags that Zuck couldn't poach his staff despite $100M offers
-
OpenAI's ChatGPT to hit 700M weekly users, up 4x from last year
-
The Rage of the AI Guy - Freddie deBoer
I just want to call your attention to the incredible disparity in evidence and analysis when comparing the rest of the piece to this tossed-off supposition that human life will be fundamentally changed within the author’s lifetime, in a way that might spare him from the great fear that has haunted humans since we became sentient. (That is to say, the fear of death.) Just consider the wide gulf between the analytical tools he brings to bear on the topic at hand and his breezy hand-waving insistence that AI is going to obsolete the entire field of medicine. I am just fascinated by this, by both that juxtaposition and Alexander’s seeming failure to parse it, his apparent lack of understanding that he’s just stepped from an admirable standard of rigor and precision to engaging in an unjustifiable fantasy. And I’m profoundly dismayed at how this kind of abandonment of even the most minimal evidentiary standards has become normalized in a few short years. Something is genuinely lost when a guy like Alexander can fall into this rank irrationalism without realizing he’s done it.
Attending it all is this conspicuous anger. Alexander has taken a few weird swipes at me in the past year thanks to my gentle suggestion that perhaps the impulse to believe that we live in the most important time in human history is one to distrust; he appears to be growing impatient with disagreement in this space in general. Still, he’s far more composed than the armies of rabid AI fans online who sit around on Reddit muttering darkly about the imminent AI rupture that, they believe, will devastate the people they don’t like and enrich themselves. This general belief, that we live on the edge of the great fissure in human history that will sweep away all of the terrible mundane burdens we live under, is a relentlessly repetitive one in the story of our species; millenarianism is an constant in human life, across eras and social systems. Of course, many respond to this observation by suggesting that, where every other human being to predict the end times has been wrong, they are right, because they are smarter than everyone else who has come before - which of course is also what everyone else who has come before thought too.
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
-
Never deal with any entity that knows your name: How to Avoid Personalized Pricing
-
Everyone Pays Higher Electricity Bills Because of Data Centers
- And lack of capacity brought on by decades of nihilist green obstruction
-
Microsoft tops $4T in valuation: Great news for MSFT, not so great for workers
-
IT firing spree: Shrinking job market looks worse after BLS revisions
-
London Stock Exchange considers 24-hour trading to stimulate market
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
-
"This is not just rigging the system in Texas, it's about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come," said Pritzker, a vocal Trump critic who last month hosted Texas state legislators in a strong show of support in the redistricting fight. Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin in a Sunday statement posted to his social media accounts said the DNC would "fight alongside" the Texas Democrats "to stop this anti-democratic assault."
-
US links $1.9B in state disaster funds to Israel boycott stance
- ISTR people bitching about the politicization of tax dollars when the drinking age and speed limits were being tied to highway funding...
Left Angst
-
NASA satellite that scientists and farmers rely on may be destroyed on purpose
The Trump administration has asked NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellite missions, according to current and former NASA staffers. If the plans are carried out, one of the missions would be permanently terminated, because the satellite would burn up in the atmosphere. Both missions, known as the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, measure carbon dioxide and plant growth around the globe. They use identical measurement devices, but one device is attached to a stand-alone satellite while the other is attached to the International Space Station. The standalone satellite would burn up in the atmosphere, if NASA pursued plans to terminate the mission.
-
Works fine for Democrats Trump's rewriting of reality on jobs numbers is chilling, but it could backfire
-
Are you an American looking to buy a used camera from overseas? Do it quick
-
Brendan Carr declares victory over the First Amendment | The Verge
On Monday, the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed a complaint against Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr. The filing, sent to the Office of Disciplinary Counsel at the DC Court of Appeals, alleges that Carr had repeatedly broken basic principles of conduct as a licensed attorney, including by leveraging his power to control media outlets’ speech. As a legal complaint it’s a long shot — but as a document, it sums up months of Carr’s escalating war on free speech.
- Performative NGO dances when called on.
-
Palantir Is Extending Its Reach Even Further into Government
-
Idaho has become the wild frontier of vaccination policy and public health
PHD board meetings tend to be sparsely attended. This one was standing-room only — the start of a monthslong debate over vaccine safety and the question of what, exactly, it means to provide informed consent. Versions of that debate are playing out across the United States in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, which many Americans believe was badly mismanaged. The backlash has upended longstanding norms in public health: The nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., publicly questions the value of common vaccines. Prominent vaccine skeptics now sit on a key advisory committee that shapes immunization practices nationwide. Polls suggest that trust in health authorities is politically polarized — and perhaps historically low. Immunization rates are dropping across the country. And many advocates are promoting a vision of public health that’s less dependent on mandates and appeals to authority, and more deferent to individuals’ beliefs.
-
BLS and Our Age of Choose-Your-Own-Reality Governance
On Friday, Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for reporting that the US economy is adding fewer jobs than the president would like. The BLS is widely regarded as the most trustworthy source of economic data in the United States. Its surveys provide the official unemployment rate, along with job growth figures, wage growth, inflation, productivity, and other critical economic data. To politicize the BLS is to destroy the public’s trust in the government to tell basic truths about the economy. The history of firing bureaucrats for reporting inconvenient statistics is a long and troubling one. Mao Zedong castigated his general Peng Dehuai in 1959, after Dehuai wrote a private letter pointing out that Mao’s Great Leap Forward was causing one of the worst famines of the 20th century. For the sin of stating the obvious to a thin-skinned dictator, Dehuai was fired, relocated, and stripped of his military honors.
-
Crucial mutant corn stocks threatened under 2026 USDA budget
-
Manhattan Shooting and the Rise of Luigism
There’s some evidence that her killer was targeting the National Football League, which shares an office building with Blackstone. But within hours, it was clear that his motive was irrelevant to the hordes now celebrating LePatner’s execution online. Across Reddit, Facebook, X, and other social media platforms, users—many anonymous, and some displaying transgender or Palestinian flag emojis—seized on the executive’s death as symbolic retribution. Her position at the investment firm became a license for cruelty. Commenters mocked her success, dismissed her philanthropy as sinister, and portrayed her employer as an unmitigated force for evil. The message was unmistakable: her death was something to relish. This grotesque display is part of a broader trend of class rage and Internet nihilism that justifies violence by turning innocent victims into scapegoats for moral fury. The permission structure for such ghoulishness is now fully operational. What were once the disturbing mutterings of the fringe are now public, performative, and proudly cruel. A political movement is testing its power. Call it Luigism.
-
NASA won't publish key climate change report online
- All the folks whining about NASA and its budget oughtta consider maybe having it focus on going into space and doing shit there instead of creating propaganda. There's tons of people creating propaganda, and all of them can support the public dissemination of raw data from government sponsored space instruments. The government need not take sides on what the data means.
-
Brennan Center for Justice Report: The Campaign to Undermine the Next Election
-
New Hegseth Leak Reveals Secret Plan for Years of Troops on U.S. Streets
The Department of Homeland Security is looking to boost its deployment of the military on the streets of the U.S. in order to help carry out Donald Trump’s immigration policies, according to a leaked memo written by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s brother. The document, obtained by The New Republic, details plans for how the Trump administration could use the military to assist with domestic law enforcement as part of its mass deportation agenda for “years” to come. The letter from Phil Hegseth, the younger brother of the defense secretary, pushed for the move despite admitting the deployment of thousands of National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles amid the anti-ICE protests was not “perfect.”
- My brother's sister's great grandma wrote a letter to her Congress critter demanding Free Love and Free Dope; but i don't recall anyone reporting on that...
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
-
Millions of age checks performed as UK Online Safey Act gets rolling
-
Somalia's camel milk revolution is improving nutrition and creating jobs
-
India to still buy oil from Russia despite Trump threats, say officials.
-
Police warn of inflammatory online posts over clashes outside Essex asylum hotel
Five people have been arrested after more than 1,000 demonstrators gathered outside a hotel in Essex believed to be housing asylum seekers, police said. Demonstrators, some of whom appeared to be drinking alcohol, chanted “send them home” and “save our kids” as bottles and smoke flares were thrown towards police vans blocking the entrance to the Bell hotel in Epping on Sunday evening. Far-right activists associated with groups including Britain First were among those in a crowd that gathered outside the Bell hotel on Thursday, where local people including women and children were protesting peacefully. Clashes with police broke out as groups of men, some of them masked, tried to reach a small anti-racism march that started at Epping station and went through the town before it was hemmed in. In an apparent response to allegations that the police had taken a “two-tier” approach that favoured the counter-demonstration, Ch Supt Simon Anslow said: “Unfortunately, across social media we are seeing inflammatory comments which suggest we were supporting and enabling certain protesters.
-
Denmark zoo asks people to donate their small pets as food for captive predators
-
Swimming in urban waterways across the world should be a right, say campaigners
Israel
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
-
China Is Choking Supply of Critical Minerals to Western Defense Companies
-
Chinese national charged under foreign interference laws
The Australian Federal Police have charged a woman with foreign interference, for the third time since new laws were introduced in 2018. The woman, a Chinese national and Australian permanent resident, faced the ACT Magistrates Court today accused of covertly gathering information about the Canberra branch of Buddhist association Guan Yin Citta Dharma Door.
-
Microsoft Used China-Based Engineers to Support Product Recently Hacked by China
Health / Medicine
-
Breakthroughs behind the drastic fall of cardiovascular death rates
-
Once a Death Sentence, This Heart Condition Is Finally Treatable
-
Eating ultra-processed foods could make it harder to lose weight
-
But we have pills for that now so it no longer matters, right?
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
-
Plastics a 'grave' danger to health, scientists warn before UN talks
-
World in $1.5T 'plastics crisis' hitting health from infancy to old age
-
Indoor air contains microplastics small enough to penetrate lungs
-
In an Age of Climate Change, How Do We Cope with Floods?
- We could rebuild all the damns, levees, and other flood control structures we've let dissolve or taken down in the last 40 years, as a first step. But then there'd be fewer floods to blame on climate change.
-
Mysterious boost to Earth's spin makes Aug 5 one of the shortest days on record
-
Four radioactive wasp nests found on South Carolina nuclear facility
-
Wildfire Evacuation from Berkeley Hills Could Take over 4 Hours, Study Finds
-
The impact of climate change on state and local governments' fiscal health
-
Canada wildfires cause poor air quality in the Midwest and northeast U.S.