2025-08-10

etc

• It's beginning to feel like the 80s in America again

  We need earnest values and virtues. We need sincere stories that are not afraid of grand narratives. That don't constantly have to deconstruct "but what is good really?", and dare embrace a solid defense of "some ways of being really are better." We also need to have fun! We need to throw away these shit-tinted glasses that see everything in the world as a problematic example of some injustice or oppression. We a bit of gratitude for technology and progress! That's what the Sweeney campaign is doing. That's what Brad Pitt is racing for in F1: The Movie. That's what I'm here for! Because as much as I love the croissants of the Old World, I find myself craving that uniquely American brand of optimism, enthusiasm, and determination more whenever I've been back in Europe for too long. Give me some Weird Science! Give me some Sabrina at the pool! Give me some American 80s vibes!

  • Comments declare this an example of Nazi hate speech

• Textile scientist on unshrinking clothes that's shrunk in the wash

• Jen Pawol becomes first woman to umpire a Major League Baseball game

Horseshit

• Giving Pledge after 15 years: Only 9 billionaires gave away half their wealth

• 'Like a master Tetris player': Scientists invent quantum virtual machines

• My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes

• Edison's plan to pay Eaton fire victims could mean less litigation, compensation

• An ancient archaeological site meets conspiracy theories – and Joe Rogan

  Klaus Schmidt, the German archaeologist who led the site's first major excavations in the 1990s, called Gobekli Tepe "the world's oldest temple," theorizing that it brought together nomadic hunter-gatherers from across the Middle East. Today, that view has shifted. Some now interpret it as a ceremonial gathering site, while others suggest it functioned as a social hub where rituals helped bind together early communities. Emilie Salvesen, a tour operator visiting the site, says the question of whether there was a spiritual component to the site still fascinates her.

  In November 2024, another Gobekli Tepe conspiracy theorist, Jimmy Corsetti, a YouTuber and self-described "ancient history investigator," appeared on Rogan's podcast, bringing with him a slew of speculations and wild theories about the site. Among them, Corsetti accused archaeologists of intentionally dragging their feet and hiding key discoveries about the site. Corsetti accused archaeologists of moving slowly on purpose, perhaps to preserve the mystery and keep the curious tourists coming. Only a small percentage of the site has been dug up since excavations began in the mid-1990s. And with Rogan's platform behind them, theorists like Corsetti have helped turn that slow progress into a source of global suspicion.

  • (Feb 2025) Last I heard the "conspiracies" involved shutting down work at the site and planting olive trees there: Gobeklitepe moves olive trees to safeguard ancient artifacts

• Our Age of Zombie Culture

• Tracing the Origins of Fisher-Price Little People

• Spacecraft could carry up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri

• Retiring and relocating? Take a holistic approach

• The new American shopping mall is less Macy's, more church, bowling, bookstore

• People with a Home by the Ocean Live Longer and We Don't Know Why

• Did Shakespeare Write Hamlet While He Was Stoned?

• Alarming New Study Finds Smartphones Ruining Our Brains at Unprecedented Speed

• 1M year old stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi

• Study: Teens 12+ see OnlyFans as an appealing alternative to traditional work

• Why good houseguests don't 'make themselves at home'

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• A journalist uses AI to interview a dead child, what are the boundaries?

  • I made an AI clone of my dead son – and let a journalist interview him

• Not Just a Technical Problem: Why Fighting Disinformation Needs Resilient Infrastructure

  the central theme: disinformation. It spreads most easily where infrastructure is brittle, trust is low, and identity signals are weak or absent. That’s why the work of IAM professionals and standards developers matters—not just for security or compliance, but for defending the conditions in which truth can survive. Trust isn’t just about whether users believe your system is secure. It’s about whether they believe the Internet is still a place where truth can be found and relied upon. That belief erodes when digital systems exclude marginalized, underserved, and underrepresented users, whose experiences and threat models are often left out of design decisions. And that erosion creates fertile ground for disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation to take root.

• 'Toothless' compulsory voting can increase voter turnout

Musk

• Tesla used car prices keep plumetting, dips below average used car

• Tesla gets rideshare license in Texas for robotaxi service

• Why X (Twitter) is still not breaking years after firing people?

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Formula E wraps up season 11–where does the all-EV series go next?

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Masculinity is crippling society. Could trans men be the key to changing that?

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Harvard had more money in BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF than Google shares

• The Rise and Fall of Bayesian Statistics

  Bayesian statistics hasn’t fallen, but the hype around Bayesian statistics has fallen. The utility of Bayesian statistics has improved as the theory and its software tools have matured. In fact, it has matured to the point that people don’t emphasize that it’s Bayesian.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• AOL Dial-up Internet to be discontinued

  AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued.

  • AOL discontinues dial-up Internet service

  • A tribute: Remember the Modem Wars

• Battlefield 6 Forces Enabling Secure Boot, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Is Next

• TeaOnHer, a rival Tea app for men, is leaking users' personal data, licenses

• Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery

• Disney Scraps Deepfake Dwayne Johnson After Lawyers Panic About Public Domain

• Sail the seas of cheese: Physical Media Is Cool Again. Streaming Services Have Themselves to Blame

• Debian 13 "Trixie"

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• (2008) A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering

• Additional Intel Linux Kernel Drivers Left Orphaned and Maintainers Let Go

• Constant-traffic padded and encrypted network tunnel

  Send fixed-length encrypted UDP packets at fixed, predetermined timestamps. Tunnelled traffic is transmitted by changing the encrypted content of the packets. An attacker monitoring your network learns nothing about the tunneled traffic other than the maximum bandwidth.

  • I suspect there's still some data to be derived from observing the stream, but its a good start.

• A CT scanner reveals surprises inside the 386 processor's ceramic package

  What surprised me most about the scans was seeing wires that stick out to the sides of the package. These wires are used during manufacturing when the pins are electroplated with gold.5 In order to electroplate the pins, each pin must be connected to a negative voltage so it can function as a cathode. This is accomplished by giving each pin a separate wire that goes to the edge of the package.

  Seven of the eight No Connect pads are almost connected: the package has a spot for a bond wire in the die cavity and the package has internal wiring to a No Connect pin. The only thing missing is the bond wire between the pad and the die cavity. Thus, by adding bond wires, Intel could easily create special chips with these pins connected, perhaps for debugging the test process itself. The surprising thing is that one of the No Connect pads does have the bond wire in place, completing the connection to the external pin. (I marked this pin in green in the pinout diagram earlier.) From the circuitry on the die, this pin appears to be an output. If someone with a 386 chip hooks this pin to an oscilloscope, maybe they will see something interesting.

• Why do we even need SIMD instructions?

  Given our current CPU designs, I believe the SIMD instructions are effectively a requirement to achieve decent performance (i.e., process data faster than it can be read from a disk) on common tasks like a character search.

• Today Linus Torvalds told a Google engineer that his code is garbage

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• xkcd: Disclaimer

• ChatGPT is bringing back 4o as an option because people missed it

  • ChatGPT Plus Users Can Keep Using GPT-4o After Complaints About GPT-5

• Zuckerberg's boring, bleak AI bet

• Chatbots Can Go into a Delusional Spiral

• Major Japan newspaper sues 'free-riding' AI firm Perplexity

• AI Is Here, and a Quiet Havoc Has Begun

• OpenAI priced GPT-5 so low, it may spark a price war

• The dead need right to delete their data so they can't be AI-ified, lawyer says

• AI Doesn't Just Lie – It Can Make You Believe It

• As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame

  • How could anyone have known we should have been building more power generation capacity for the last 30 years....

• The End of Mutual Assured Destruction?

• Alexa Got an A.I. Brain Transplant. How Smart Is It Now?

• Wikipedia editors fight AI-generated mistakes

  • As good as they are at filtering dissent, you'd think they could patrol for AI slop...

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• James Webb Space Telescope revisits a classic Hubble image of over 2.5k galaxies

Crypto con games

• Flattery, Lobbyists and Business: Crypto's Richest Man Campaigns for a Pardon

Economicon / Business / Finance

• How Intel's CEO Helped Create China's Chip Industry

• Nahh, all those places shut down cuz of COVID: Did California's Fast Food Minimum Wage Reduce Employment?

• Substack Raised Another $100M

• Reuters reports that the entry-level software eng job market has collapsed

• Restaurant chains feel the pinch as US consumers tighten their belts

  • Prices are up, quality is down, and the Leftist Saints will unload on you for daring to eat without a mask.. or whatever other sin they feel you are guilty of today.

• Apple has its best week since July 2020 after White House visit

• Nvidia is dominating the S&P 500 more than any company in at least 44 years

  • Their shit stinks. They haven't had major advances in years and their stale designs don't actually do that much besides enabling the current AI bubble. "super computing" without the I/O to feed it has few applications.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Gerrymandering by Both Parties Is Deepening America's Divide

  • The more people who eel un-represented and resentful of government, the better; for those who do not believe democratic government is a good idea.

Trump

• Regulators have abused their power to cut off political opponents

• Three Years Later, the American People Deserve the Truth About MAL Raid

  No photo other than his mugshot is more representative of the unprecedented lawfare against Donald Trump than the photo of alleged classified documents discovered during the nine-hour armed raid of Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022. On one hand, Democrats, the news media, and even some NeverTrumpers (clears throat, side-eyes National Review) believed the iconic picture proved Trump had absconded with secret government records and carelessly left them around his Palm Beach mansion, endangering national security. Trump supporters, on the other hand, viewed the photo with disgust, a reminder of just how far the Biden regime and his FBI would go to finally put Trump in handcuffs.

  But nearly two years later, the same Department of Justice that added the picture to a 2022 court filing for the sole purpose of ginning up media coverage, which worked like a charm, finally admitted the photo was staged. The stunt was revealed during court proceedings last year in southern Florida in the so-called documents case. (How is it only a year ago?) In response to Trump’s accusations the FBI mishandled items taken from his home that infamous day, the DOJ—in the hands of Special Counsel Jack Smith by then—confessed FBI agents brought the colorful classified cover sheets to Mar-a-Lago. At first, Smith said the FBI used the sheets only as “placeholders” indicating where the alleged illegal files had been found. But he finally had to fess up: “As part of the processing of seized documents marked classified, the [evidence response team] photographed the documents (with appropriate cover sheets added by FBI personnel) next to the box in which they were located,” Smith wrote in a June 2024 brief. But nowhere did the cover sheets indicate the attached files were evidence. In other words, the photo not only misrepresented the condition in which “classified documents” were found but proved that agents had tampered with the president’s belongings—consisting of evidence in the case—in preparation for a publicity stunt.

Left Angst

• Why I Keep Writing About Substack

  I’m not cynical. I’m skeptical. I’ve seen enough cycles to know that no platform saves us. I’ve seen that hustle culture and blaming individuals for their lack of stability makes things worse for all of us. Our social safety net is dissolving and everyone reading this is one viral Trump Truth Social Post away from lookingforwork and giving up the little luxuries like being able to cover dinner for friends, sick days, and regular dentist visits.

  • "Hate spew that is vaguely aimed in that direction gets clicks!"

• Net neutrality advocates won't appeal loss, say they don't trust Supreme Court

  Advocacy groups that tried to defend federal net neutrality rules in court won't file an appeal, saying they don't trust the Supreme Court to rule fairly on the issue. While the FCC is now run by Republicans who oppose net neutrality rules, advocacy groups that were involved in the litigation could appeal the ruling. But they won't, saying in a press release that there isn't much point because of the conservative majorities at both the FCC and Supreme Court. Even if the Supreme Court overturned the appeals court ruling, the current FCC would almost certainly eliminate the rules again.

• "Continuity of Government" is a Joke. Here's Why.

  • "I can't imagine anyone taking their jobs more seriously than I do." ... Don't get me wrong, I love "Dr Strangelove," too; but I don't think it is an accurate portrayal of Government.

• Trump's Tariff May Cut India GDP by 1%, Analysts Say

• Doge-Pilled

• So, About Those Big Trade Deals

  Trump did prove the doubters wrong in one important way. When the president originally announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, other countries threatened to respond in kind, leading many economists and journalists (myself included) to conclude that the tariffs would lead to a spiral of retaliation. With a few exceptions (notably China and Canada), that didn’t happen. Instead, Trump has gotten key trading partners to back down.

• JD Vance's team had water level of Ohio river raised for family's boating trip

• Presidential order might upend a long-standing tradition of grant peer-review

• Trump's Bullying of India Is Straight from Xi's Playbook

  • As opposed to Biden's polices, which were straight from Xi's checkbook.

• Then they should love him, no? Trump Is a Degrowther

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Cartels may be able to target witnesses after major court hack

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Mexico to US Livestock Trade halted due to Screwworm spread

  • We used to have them held at the Darien Gap, with a long standing program... that was shut down during COVID and now the wall is broke and can't be erected again.

• US licenses Nvidia to export chips to China, official says

  • US licenses Nvidia to export chips to China after CEO meets Trump

World

• How Europe is vying for rare earth independence from China

• The unintended consequences of the Online Safety Act

• Courts service 'covered up' IT bug that caused evidence to go missing

• Europe’s “Great Power” Dream is in Tatters: Don’t fear the “rising European superpower”. It never was, and never will be.

• Private Welsh island with 19th century fort goes on the market

• UK unveils plans to 'transform' the consumer smart meter experience

• Palantir is well on its way to conquering Europe

Israel

• Though tiny, pathogens could become Israel's deadliest weapon in Gaza

• 'A deadly scheme': Palestinians face indiscriminate gunfire at food sites

• Microsoft investigates Israeli military's use of Azure cloud storage

China

• Why Concerns About a Collapse in China's Demand Are Overblown

Health / Medicine

• A Routine Vaccine May Lower Dementia Risk by as Much as 20%

• The Day Novartis Chose Discovery

• Man-eating' screw worm turns hospital into horror show

• Smartwatches offer little insight into stress levels, researchers find

• Disrupted sleep damages blood vessels in brain and may increase dementia risk

• Daily actions shape how righties, lefties process visual input

• Snail Can Regrow Its Eyes–Understanding How May One Day Help Humans W Injuries

• Musicians do not demonstrate long-believed advantage in processing sound

  • Depends on how you define things. expanded range, sensitivity, and precision of hearing is a handicap or a help depending on if you can make use of it. "Good Music" is about joy and communication much more than precision.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Why have blue whales stopped singing? The mystery worrying scientists

• As California burns, new research shows smoke is wildfire's silent killer

• Mushroom's Bitter Taste Is New to Science

• Long-term exposure to outdoor air pollution linked to increased risk of dementia

• How California energy policy is holding back a game changing climate technology

• UN: Booming solar, wind and green energy hits global tipping point for low cost

• Human connection to nature has declined 60% in 200 years, study finds