2025-08-11

Horseshit

• Dyson Sphere Could Bring Humans Back from the Dead

• A Cautionary Tale for Stupid Idiots Who Think They Can Lead with Integrity

  Integrity is expensive. It will cost you promotions. It will cost you popularity. It will often disturb the peace. It will put you in awkward conversations with folks in the C-suite who’ll wonder why on earth you voiced your opinion in that public Slack thread. Hell, you’ll probably leave bad jobs over it rather than—heaven forbid!—sticking around, nodding your head, and playing the game of climbing the ladder with the rest of those schmucks

• So You Bought a Fancy Vintage Car. Now Who's Going to Restore It?

• Quantum Computing Could Upend Bitcoin

• Entitlement reaches new heights: I'll pay you 100k to get me married

  or 300k to arrange an impregnation deal

  I’d like a man who’s fully committed to polyamory (~3% of the population) with space for a primary partner, and with ominous sexuality (~10% of men), who’s in a similar enough wealth tier to me that I don’t have to financially support him, who wants kids, and who’s fully self accepting. (Other things would be nice like similar intelligence levels, similar political values, similar ages, similar BMIs, but I’m already pushing my luck). I notice that I feel excitement about dates mostly when the guy is high status in some field, so while I in theory am open to guys who aren’t high status, in practice I seem to not actually go on dates with them. I want to need to try to impress someone. It doesn’t feel sexy to go on a date where he automatically views me as a catch. Or, you can find someone to pay me 10m (post tax) to impregnate me and have me raise his child, sole custody, single mother.

• The automated warehouse where robots are packing your groceries

• Big Coffee Boxer

  When a passion for technology, legendary design, and excellent coffee enjoyment come together, something very special is created. In collaboration with BMW Motorrad, ECM has developed an extraordinary espresso machine—in the shape of an original BMW boxer engine. The heart of this machine is an original BMW boxer engine, combined with the legendary E61 brew group, which we have further developed. Both components are icons in their own right – together they make an impressive statement. The design is more reminiscent of a sculpture than an espresso machine – a work of art that prepares excellent espresso.

• Botox and the Beast: Camel beauty enhancements are big business in Saudi Arabia

celebrity gossip

• Before Ghostbusters: How Asperger's Shaped Young Dan Aykroyd

• Gina Carano Achieves Complete Victory In Disney Lawsuit Settlement Over ‘Mandalorian’ Firing.

• What Happened When Mark Zuckerberg Moved in Next Door

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Reporting Partial Election Results Fuels Belief in Fraud

• Sex is getting scrubbed from the internet; billionaires can sell you AI nudes

  In the fascinating new reality of the internet, teen girls can’t learn about periods on Reddit and indie artists can’t sell smutty games on Itch.io, but a military contractor will make you nonconsensual deepfakes of Taylor Swift taking her top off for $30 a month.

• Myth versus memory–Nessie spotters are not influenced by media depictions

Musk

• Grok 4 is now free for all users worldwide

• Rubenerd: The day Twitter suspended me

  I had stopped using Apartheid Man’s site ages ago, but I guess now I don’t need to go through the formal process of deactivation now.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Wall Street and AI Startups Are Fighting over Entry-Level Quants

• Fraudulent research is 'destroying trust in science'

• The computer science dream has become a nightmare

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• The inside story of the Telemessage saga • The Register

  After "three minutes" of examination, he spotted that the app had hardcoded credentials stored for a WordPress API. Every message sent using the app was backed up to a SQLite database via HTTPS, and a fellow hacker also working on the TeleMessage app backtraced some messages and sent him a data dump from one of TeleMessage's customers, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), including 780 emails of CBP officers. It turns out the messages were very easy to find. By repeatedly looking on archive.telemessage.com/management/heapdump anyone could download Java heap dumps of messages, and running the command line tool strings showed a lot of JSON objects, many of which contained plain text messages. "TeleMessage advertises that it's end-to-end encrypted between the phone and their archive server, or wherever they're at the final archive destination," he explained. In fact, however, "it's just plain text messages going through their archive server. If you make a GET request to a specific URL, it hands you a memory dump of everything on the server, and the memory dump includes plain text chat messages."

• Why Paying for Spotify Mostly Pays Taylor Swift

  even if you only listen to indie artists, your money still mostly goes to the big names, because the payout is based on total listening across all users, not just you.

• Cheaters Spotted in Battlefield 6 Beta, Despite Secure Boot Requirement

• AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after its debut

  • AOL Announces It’s Discontinuing Dial-Up Internet on September 30

  • AOL closes its dial up internet service

• Adult sites are stashing exploit code inside racy .svg files

  • SVG includes javaskirpt; for some insane reasons.

• Instagram responds after users panic over location-sharing update

• Intel's confusing 'Series 2' CPU brand is a step backwards

• (Jul 2025) Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead

  you must have noticed that over the last 5 years, a huge number of vibrant brands died. Basically every country in Europe and many states in the USA had a couple of their own machines and the industry was very very creative in that regard. Somebody brought an innovation, others adopted it and shared it back. But around the year 2020 we registered the first mention of 3D printing as a strategic industry by the Chinese government. We know that now, after a few years of research. We first realized something is off when the price of the parts is higher than the sale price of a complete machine in some cases. That is what sparked our interest and research into the subsidies. They exist, and are very efficient https://rhg.com/research/far-from-normal-an-augmented-assessment-of-chinas-state-support/. Our industry, desktop 3D printing, faces a bleak future. Comparable to the automotive sector as if only one high volume car brand, say Audi, remained outside of China. That’s it. An inch away from complete dependency on China in an vital piece of tech, the one absolutely critical for creation of new IP.

• Conversations remotely detected from cell phone vibrations, researchers report

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• The History of Acer

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• After User Backlash, OpenAI Is Bringing Back Older ChatGPT Models

• Digital resurrection: fascination and fear over the rise of the deathbot

• A Single Poisoned Document Could Leak 'Secret' Data via ChatGPT

• High costs and thin margins threatening AI coding startups

• We're Losing Our Love of Learning and AI Is to Blame

• AI is creating new billionaires at a record pace

• The Enshittification of Generative AI

• Roblox rolls out Sentinel AI to protect kids against predators

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

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

• Meteorite that hit home is older than Earth, scientists say

• Yes, a Moon Base

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Goodbye, Six-Figure Tech Jobs. Young Coders Seek Work at Fast-Food Joints

• How Kentucky bourbon went from boom to bust

  as the world recovered from the 2008 recession, drinkers seemed to rediscover this classic spirit, for a few different reasons. Then, in 2013, a law was passed in Kentucky that made it easier for companies to purchase and resell vintage bottles, opening up a high-end collectible market. Add to that the rise in mid-century nostalgia fuelled by shows like Mad Men, and bourbon was due for a full-blown Renaissance.Sales of bourbon grew by 7% worldwide between 2011-2020, which is more than three times the growth of the decade prior, according to industry data company ISWR. like most market bubbles, this one was bound to burst. The pandemic's lockdowns tanked bar sales, and inflation has made many would-be bourbon drinkers choose less expensive options - or forgo drinking all together. Amongst Gen-Z, many 20-somethings are drinking less than their older siblings and parents did at their age. Those factors have contributed to declining alcohol sales, with bourbon sales specifically slowing down to just 2% between 2021-2024, according to ISWR data.

  • Not mentioned: the explosion of new "distillers" making blended cocktails of industrial ethanol and various other slop. Some of These folks couldn't even sell their mash off to pig farmers it was so nasty.

• The rise of America’s intangible economy

  Fifty years ago, the assets held by S&P 500 companies were predominantly physical — factories, equipment, inventory et cetera. But today, it is estimated that around 90 per cent of their assets are intangible, ranging from intellectual property, brand value and networks, to code, content, talent and knowledge. This week I argue that this transformation helps to explain four prevailing themes in the US stock market: high concentration, exceptionalism, volatility and bubble-like valuations. In the US, spending on intangible assets surpassed tangible investments as a share of GDP in the late 1990s, and the gap has widened ever since, according to data from the World Intellectual Property Organization. For all intents and purposes, the US is an intangibles-driven economy. Crucially, disembodied assets have very different economic properties to physical ones.

  • Instead of making real things we have gone to trading "rights" with the assumption that there will be a government to enforce the rituals around them and prop up their value.

• Cattle prods are very motivational: What to Do When Your Manager Doesn't Work

• Traders Are Fleeing Stocks Feared to Be Under Threat from AI

• What Happens When Politicians Meddle with Economic Data: Argentina's Example

• Freight demand on shaky footing as import bookings drop

• Lawyers Are Earning $30M and Billing Rates Are Soaring

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Several million US-born teenagers have just appeared out of nowhere

  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey, America’s native-born population aged 16 and over has increased by 3mn in the last seven months. Overall population growth in the same period was 1.1mn. This doesn’t make a whole heap of sense. Any increase in the 16-plus native-born population this year would imply either a higher US birth rate in 2009 or a sudden increase in Boomer longevity. But US birth rates have been trending steadily lower since 2006 while post-pandemic deaths are back on the long-term trend.

  That leaves three possible explanations: millions of American teenagers have been appearing fully formed from thin air; Americans previously thought to be dead have been rising from their graves to answer a government survey; or the data’s wrong.

• Nvidia, AMD Agree to Pay US 15% of China Chip Sale Revenue

  • U.S. Government to Take Cut of Nvidia and AMD A.I. Chip Sales to China

Left Angst

• Trump administration threatens to strip Harvard University of lucrative patents

  • Trump Administration to Investigate Harvard's Patents

• HHS cites scientific justification for canceling mRNA vaccine work

  The list appears to advance research that has been disputed by other scientists

• War Has Changed: Foreign Influence Networks and the Art of Strategic Deflection

  MAGA is not structurally a cult of personality. The Trump cult exists and has real power, but it operates within—and is constrained by—an underlying coalition of aligned interests that would persist without him. This coalition includes distinct infrastructure components: the Policy Engine (Heritage Foundation/Project 2025), Technolibertarian Capital (Musk/Thiel ecosystem), Foreign Influence channels, and Alt-Media networks. These create the connective tissue that holds otherwise disparate groups together through shared logistics: funding pipelines, narrative amplification systems, and policy coordination mechanisms that align elite interests across multiple sectors.

• Peter Thiel Manifest

• Sunday at the garden party for Curtis Yarvin and the new, new right

• ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Do They Do Now?

• Can Arizona's 99-Cent Iced Tea Survive Trump's Tariffs?

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Bullets in the windows

  The perpetrator was shooting at public health workers—the people who devote their careers to keeping communities safe. The ones who work to stop the spread of disease and reduce gun violence. And in this case, targeted because of their work on the Covid-19 vaccine. We’ve endured doxxing, hacking, strangers at our homes, death threats in our inboxes, croissants thrown at us in coffee shops. Installing a new security system just because we volunteer for something or show up on TV. Wearing heart monitors because our cortisol levels have started impacting our organs. Deciding not to put our kids in daycare at the CDC campus because it may be targeted. Then firings. Defunding. Politically charged and targeted rhetoric. And now a shooting happened. It could have been much worse if it weren’t for a police officer—who left behind three kids of his own—making the ultimate sacrifice. This doesn’t make it any less scary.

  • Who is upset enough now to shoot people? The people no longer being told "take this shot or lose your job"? Or the ones who have had their free ride funding and "can do no wrong" status threatened?

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Rubio orders US diplomats to launch lobbying blitz against Europe's tech law

• Mexico’s President Says U.S. Forces Are Unwelcome in Her Country - The New York Times

  President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico rejected the use of U.S. military forces in her country on Friday, responding to news that President Trump had directed the Pentagon to target drug cartels that the United States considers terrorist organizations. “The United States is not going to come to Mexico with the military. We cooperate, we collaborate, but there is not going to be an invasion. That is ruled out, absolutely ruled out,” she said, adding that she would read the order. “It is not part of any agreement, far from it. When it has been brought up, we have always said no.”

• Swiss Politicians Push to Cancel F-35 Fighter-Jet Deal After US Tariffs

World

• Mars rock found in Niger sells for millions in NY, now the country wants answers

• This Is What the End of the Liberal World Order Looks Like - The Atlantic

  Sudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed.

  nor was Donald Trump’s State Department especially interested in the Sudanese democratic revolution of 2019. Instead of promoting a government that offered the first real possibility for peace and reconciliation in decades, Trump’s team was mostly interested in persuading Sudan to sign the Abraham Accords and recognize Israel, which the civilian government agreed to do, in January 2021, in exchange for the removal of Sudan from a list of countries that promote terrorism. Eight months after Trump’s reelection, the Trump administration had not appointed a replacement envoy, nor indeed any senior officials with deep experience in Africa at all.

  • Going for years without a peep from the left, presumably because most of the victims have been Christians.

• Half-naked man in mental health crisis beaten by London Underground passengers

• Italy OKs $15.5B project to build suspension bridge from mainland to Sicily

• South Korea's military has shrunk by 20% in six years as male population drops

Israel

• Hamas Pulls Israel Deeper into Gaza

• Aid drops over Gaza criticized for being dangerous as starvation mounts under Israel offensive

  On Saturday, a 14-year-old boy named Muhannad Eid died after being struck by an aid package from one of the several airdrops over Gaza, his brother, Muhammad Eid, said. “This is an aerial humiliation, not aid,” Eid said. “We need protection. We want international protection.”

• Israel says it killed five Al Jazeera staff in Gaza

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Behind attacks on Ukrainian cities, Russia is building a drone empire

• Just as Russia's Most-Famous Dissident Seemed Set to Go Free, Tragedy Struck

China

• China sets its first renewable standards for steel, cement and polysilicon

• Chinese state media says Nvidia H20 chips not safe for China

Health / Medicine

• Does eating a diverse array of flavonoids prevent chronic disease?

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Covid levels rising in much of U.S., with highest in West, CDC says

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• A simple experiment revealed the complex 'thoughts' of fungi

• Perfect pesticide? RNA kills crop-destroying beetles with unprecedented accuracy

• Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill Gates

  • Startup turns CO₂ into edible butter with backing from Bill Gates

• Venomous Lionfish invading the Mediterranean. Best control may be to eat it

• But they give a piquant flavor to the meat: You Are Contaminated: Measuring your body's exposure to pollutants

• Sunlight-activated material turns PFAS in water into harmless fluoride

• Groundwater is drying out, heating up, and causing sea level rise