2025-08-14

Horseshit

• Inside Silicon Valley's Growing Obsession with Having Smarter Babies

• IBM, Google claim breakthroughs in push for quantum computers

• Working after retirement associated with higher life satisfaction–esp. for men

• Stewie and Peter Griffin on Economic Epistemology

• Central Park Conservancy backs NYC horse carriage ban

• I started losing my digital privacy in 1974, aged 11 • The Register

  The nurse looked at the license and typed some of the info on it into a computer, then they looked up at me and asked: "Are you the same Mark Pesce who lived at...?" and then proceeded to recite an address that I resided at more than half a century ago. Dumbstruck, I said, "Yes...? And how did you know that? I haven't lived there in nearly 50 years. I've never been in here before - I've barely ever been in this town before. Where did that come from?" "Oh," they replied. "We share our patient data records with Massachusetts General Hospital. It's probably from them?" I remembered having a bit of minor surgery as an 11 year old, conducted at that facility. 51 years ago. That's the only time I'd ever been a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital. Somehow that had never been forgotten.

  • Neat. the records of my 2006 surgery had ceased to exist by 2018 when i needed them; and my retained copies were not official enough for the courts.

• The Birth of the Modern Moral Panic

  The drug seemed to prey on a certain type of person — down and out, low on opportunities, looking for an escape from the difficulties and disappointments of life. In a society with weakening social ties, where people had less access to family and fewer friends than before, too many people seemed to find solace in intoxication. Though the stuff caused plenty of heartbreak and even death, improbable stories swirled about its effects. It inspired people to stop eating! It rendered almost half the population insensate! It caused women to combust spontaneously! All this (well, not the spontaneous combustion stuff) was said about marijuana in midcentury, crack cocaine in the 1980s, and opiates and fentanyl today. But one of the earliest social panics about a drug took place over something that you may have in your liquor cabinet right now. The “gin craze” of the early 1700s captivated Britain and set a template for narratives about the impact of new drugs that is still influential today.

• The man who gets American football players examined for CTE after death

• Modern Cars Wreak Havoc on Radar Detectors

• How Silicon Valley can prove it is pro-family

• New evidence suggests Neolithic farmers cannibalized enemies

• Many Colorado teachers must spend more than 40% of their income on rent

• Who made these knotted records during the Inca Empire?

• Operator of $700-per-month sleeping pods in downtown S.F. faces eviction

celebrity gossip

• Mark Zuckerberg angers locals in Silicon Valley enclave over 11-home compound

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• The term 'NSFW' is problematic and overdue for retirement

Musk

• Tesla's Dojo supercomputer is DOA – now what?

• Sam Altman challenges Elon Musk with plans for Neuralink rival

  • Altman Backs brain chip startup. Strategic? Or to piss of Musk?

• Tesla Diner Drops Most Menu Options and Cuts Hours Just Weeks After Opening

• Elon Musk's xAI loses co-founder Igor Babuschkin, leaving to start venture firm

  • Co-founder of Elon Musk's xAI departs the company

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Dubai's robotaxi dreams are coming for human drivers

• Farmers want California to change its autonomous tractor ban

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Why are there so many rationalist cults? (HN comments)

• LinkedIn joins Meta and YouTube in abandoning policies to combat anti-trans hate

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Editorial: Back to school? Summer shouldn’t be over this early.

  It’s Aug. 11, and the weather’s finally been nice for a few weeks, minus the Canadian smog. But instead of enjoying these late-summer days, lots of Chicago-area kids are marching to school today, bulging backpacks perched on sweat-soaked backs. This week marks the start of a new school year for many students, believe it or not, and Labor Day is still three weeks away.

  • Our school district started last week; a month earlier than the rest of the area. They do a "fall break" and are generous with the time off through the year, it balances.

• Texas Private Schools Hire Relatives and Enrich Insiders

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B

  • Can Perplexity Afford to Fund the Web? The $34.5B-Dollar Question

  • AI startup Perplexity makes surprise bid for Google Chrome

  • Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome

  • AI search firm Perplexity makes $34.5B surprise bid for Google Chrome

  • Is Perplexity's $34B offer to buy Chrome real or a marketing stunt?

  • Why Perplexity is going after Google Chrome – and yes, it's serious

  • Perplexity makes bold $34.5B bid for Google's Chrome browser

  • Perplexity's Chrome Bid Is a $34.5B Publicity Stunt

• PayPal can now only be used on Steam in EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD, and USD.

  • Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world

• Unplugged – co-founded by Erik Prince – releases new "privacy-first" smartphone

• We found TeaOnHer spilling users' driver's licenses in less than 10 minutes

• Study: Social media probably can't be fixed

• Secure chat darling Matrix admits pair of 'high severity' flaws need fixes

• Troy Hunt: That 16 Billion Password Story (AKA "Data Troll")

  we had a chat about this trove, and the first thing he made clear was that this isn't a single source of exposure, but rather different infostealer data sets that have been publicly exposed this year. The headlines implying this was a massive breach are misleading; stealer logs are produced from individually compromised machines and occasionally bundled up and redistributed. Bob also pointed out that many of the data sets were no longer exposed, and he didn't have a copy of all of them.

  An intial cursory check against HIBP showed more than 90% of the email addresses were already in there, and of those that were in previous stealer logs, there was a high correlation of matching website domains. ... there's a lot of data we've seen before.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• djb is still trying: (PDF) Complaint regarding a declaration of consensus to adopt a non-hybrid draft

  This is a complaint to the “Internet Engineering Steering Group” (IESG) within the “Internet Engineering Task Force” (IETF). The complaint is that Joseph Salowey and Sean Turner, in their roles as chairs of an IETF “Working Group” (WG) named “Transport Layer Security” (TLS), erred—both procedurally and in their conclusion—when they declared that the WG had consensus to adopt a draft named “draft-connolly- tls-mlkem-key-agreement”. (The WG has a third chair, Deirdre Connolly, but the other chairs later said she was “recusing as she is an author”.)

• Tiny doodles etched in old electronics

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Americans Are Overworked. Could AI Change That?

• What If A.I. Doesn't Get Better Than This?

• AI chatbots accused of encouraging teen suicide as experts sound alarm

• The AI Takeover of Education Is Just Getting Started

• ChatGPT's model picker is back, and it's complicated

• Is the AI bubble about to burst?

• LLMs are not like you and me – and never will be

• Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

• Sam Altman now says AGI, or human-level AI, is 'not a super useful term'

• 'Inference whales' are breaching AI coding startup business models

• We built an AI to help renters and homeowners micro-save for housing payments

• GPT-5 is a joke. Will it matter?

• Claude can now process software projects in single request, Anthropic says

• Why it’s a mistake to ask chatbots about their mistakes - Ars Technica

  When something goes wrong with an AI assistant, our instinct is to ask it directly: "What happened?" or "Why did you do that?" It's a natural impulse—after all, if a human makes a mistake, we ask them to explain. But with AI models, this approach rarely works, and the urge to ask reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what these systems are and how they operate.

• Companies Are Pouring Billions into A.I., It Has yet to Pay Off

• OpenAI scores gold in one of the top programming competitions

• Researchers Made a Social Media Platform Where Every User Was AI

• His psychosis was a mystery–until doctors learned about ChatGPT's health advice

• I'm Worried It Might Get Really Bad

  These are people who've been making over $100-200K in tech or tech-adjacent for over a decade. And they can't find work. I mean they can barely get interviews. And when I say a ton, I mean multiple dozen that I either know or I'm one degree separated from. And again, these are not low-skill people. They're legit professionals that have never in their life had trouble finding or maintaining work.

  Hundreds or thousands of companies, and billions of dollars, are being spent on replacing human workers. Some don't think this is possible, but they think we need to invent some super smart model that's better than anything we've ever seen.

  • "Learn to coal"

• AI is already replacing thousands of jobs per month, report finds

• The 'godfather of AI' reveals the only way humanity can survive superintel AI

• Boston Public Library aims to increase access to a historic archive using AI

• New Study Suggests Using AI Made Doctors Less Skilled at Spotting Cancer

  • Doctors Were Worse at Spotting Cancer After Leaning on AI, Study Finds

• "Bullshit Index" Tracks AI Misinformation

• Man develops rare condition after ChatGPT query over stopping eating salt

• Chatbots aren't telling you their secrets

• Meta's superintelligence isn't here yet but its AI bets are already paying off

• Gemini rolling out personalization based on your chat history

• Illinois bans use of artificial intelligence for mental health therapy

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA mulls rescue rocket to boost Swift observatory's orbit

• Meteorite that punched through Georgia roof may be older than Earth itself

Crypto con games

• Monero Faces 51% Attack

• Crypto Firm "Bullish" Surges 143% in Debut After $1.1B IPO

• FTX to Start Next Round of Creditor Repayments on Sept. 30

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Palantir might be the most over-valued firm of all time

• Americans Are Getting Priced Out of Homeownership at Record Rates

• S&P 500, Nasdaq both notch record close as inflation report gives Fed green light to cut rates.

  • Inflation ticks higher as Trump’s tariffs kick in.

• No More Offshore. Startups Look to Spend and Hire in US Due to Trump Tax Change

• Attorney General James Sues Company Behind Zelle for Enabling Widespread Fraud

  • NY sues Zelle, says security lapses led to $1B consumer fraud losses

  • New York Attorney General Picks Up Zelle Lawsuit Abandoned by Trump

• Amazon Launches Same-Day Fresh Grocery Delivery in 1k U.S. Cities

• Toyota Wants to Use Its New Gas Engines for Everything

• New York City Companies All but Stopped Hiring in First Half of the Year

• Iconic US film company Kodak warns it may go out of business

• Mothers are leaving the workforce, erasing pandemic gains

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• NYC mayor Adams uses free internet to expand police surveillance at NYCHA

• Help improve federal mass transit policy

  They want to develop a Transit Policy Playbook (modeled on the Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook they already published) full of memos providing specific, actionable policy ideas that can be implemented by congressional or executive branch action. What they want from you or someone you know is a very brief submission — a problem statement and a description of your proposed solution, with each component coming in at less than 400 words. If they pick your idea, you’ll get $2,000 and they’ll work with you to flesh it out into a 2,000-word memo. This is a great opportunity for people with deep knowledge of the transit space to work with people who have deep knowledge of the policymaking process to transform a compelling abstract concept into something that elected officials and political appointees can actually put into practice.

• US national debt reaches a record $37T, the Treasury Department reports

Trump

• I hate it when reality taps me on the shoulder and says "You haven't been paranoid enough"

  I dismissed the claims about Dominion electronic-voting machines being widely subverted as nuttery being pushed by demagogues and grifters. Not that I didn't think that could happen mind you. I know entirely too much about software engineering and networks to want anything other than paper ballots and mechanical tabulation - or, at the very least, an auditable paper backup for electronic tallying. But I wasn't convinced that those potential vulnerabilities had been actually exploited in 2020. Now the Director of National Intelligence says it happened.

• White House Announces Comprehensive Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions

• Trump opens door to sales of version of Nvidia's next-gen AI chips in China

Democrats

• Texas House Democrats to return home for second special session, ABC13 sources confirm - ABC13 Houston

  ABC13 has confirmed with multiple sources that House Democrats will return to Texas.Eyewitness News has not confirmed the date, but we do know that Democrats believe they've accomplished their mission by killing the first special session and by raising national awareness about the mid-decade redistricting effort. It is unclear which day they will be in Austin at the Capitol, but they stress that they will push for Hill Country flooding relief to be the priority.

Left Angst

• 4-Year-Old US Citizen Fighting Stage 4 Cancer Deported to Honduras

• Just how much has DOGE exaggerated its numbers? Now we have receipts

• Trump Has Made Himself Commander in Chief of the Chip Industry

• The number of ICE flights is skyrocketing – but the planes are harder to track

• Trump Wants to Destroy the Drug Cartels. He May Strengthen Them Instead

• How Big Tech is paying its way out of Trump's tariffs

• How Much Is Trump Profiting Off the Presidency?

• Trump Just Militarized the Capital – What Comes Next?

• Can You Gerrymander Your Party to Power?

• What Was Elon Musk Trying to Achieve with Doge?

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Exfiltrating Federal Court Files Continues

  A sweeping hack of the federal judiciary’s case filing system exploited unresolved security holes discovered five years ago — allowing hacking groups to steal reams of sensitive court data in the ongoing breach. POLITICO first reported last week that officials are concerned that multiple nation-state and criminal hacking groups exfiltrated sealed case data from at least a dozen district courts since at least July. The attack mirrored another significant breach into the court filing system in 2020 under the first Trump administration, though it was not clear until now how the hackers slipped inside the system and whether both incidents were connected.

  Despite the sensitive court data that was exposed, the ongoing cyber intrusion was not particularly sophisticated and took advantage of issues previously uncovered inside the federal court filing system, according to one person with direct knowledge of the hack and one senior U.S. law enforcement official. The system — called CM/ECF — enables legal professionals to upload and manage court documents. The latest intrusion is a “continuation of the same rudimentary security issues” that have been present since 2020, said the law enforcement official. This person, like others in this story, was granted anonymity due to the sensitive and ongoing nature of the incident.

  Though CM/ECF is overseen by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, individual federal courts run it on their own servers and have substantial autonomy over how they manage it. “There isn’t one CM/ECF, there are over 200 because local courts make local modifications,” said a former U.S. judge who helped manage the response to the 2020 hack.

  Instead of technical fixes, courts across the country are opting to record their most sensitive data using pen and paper. At least three district courts in the last three weeks have published orders that prohibit uploading sealed documents to PACER, including the Eastern District of Washington, the Eastern District of Virginia, and the Eastern District of New York. Other district courts are in the process of making those changes, POLITICO previously reported.

  • How much of this data is supposed to be public? I remember using stolen PACER logins myself; it never sat right with me that the "public record" wasn't really public.

  • Russian government hackers said to be behind US federal court filing system hack

• Overall Foreign-Born Population Down 2.2 Million January to July.

  Analysis of the CPS data shows the total foreign-born population of all ages, both in and out of the labor force, declined an unprecedented 2.2 million from January to July – the largest six-month decline ever within the same year. Non-citizens accounted for all of the falloff in the total foreign-born; the naturalized U.S. citizen population has actually increased some since January.

• How the Right-Wing Outrage Machine Invents Liberal Fury — and Sells It Back to You

  Last week, millions of Americans were told that liberals were furious about a pair of jeans. The supposed scandal involved actress Sydney Sweeney’s ad for American Eagle denim jeans, which used the slogan: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” According to right-wing commentators, liberals perceived this ad as more than just a cheeky pun — they heard it as a reference to fascist eugenics. Conservative influencers claimed that “the left” was having a melt down, saying they believed the ad was glorifying white supremacy and pushing a racist agenda.

  Except … none of it was real. There was no viral liberal backlash. No trending or widespread outrage. No organized boycott. At least, not until after right-wing media invented the controversy — and then baited liberals into making it real.

  • I saw people talking about "the newest endorsement of Nazism by Corporate America" for at least a day before I caught the context from the conservative sites. The liberals just assumed their audience knew what the day's Hate was about.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US embeds trackers in AI chip shipments to catch diversions to China

  • US placing trackers in AI chip shipments to prevent diversion to China

• US says UK human rights have worsened in past year

• Unprecedented Chinese Icebreaker Deployment Off Alaska Being Monitored by U.S.

• Coyote Loitering Drone Interceptors Have Arrived on U.S. Navy Destroyers

• Trump team pushes for ouster of top IEA official

• The US-China Fight over Panama's Canal Has an Unexpected Winner

World

• Running from catcallers! LBC joins undercover female police officers in crackdown on people harassing women joggers

• Perrier scandal bubbles up as French parliament slams cover-up

• "Skyrocketing" Scale of UK Police's Secret Facial Recognition Searches

• Microsoft wares may be UK public sector's only viable option

• Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across the UK

  • UK expands police facial recognition rollout with 10 new facial recognition vans

• Switzerland Asks Whether Its Famed Neutrality Is Fit for the Modern World

• Porn site traffic plummets as UK age verification rules enforced

• McDonald's Japan cancels Pokémon card promotion as resellers throw away food

Iran / Houthi

• Is Iran's water crisis fueled by military-backed illegal wells?

• The Houthis want to punish Israel. Filipino seafarers are bearing the cost

Israel

• Toronto film fest nixes Oct 7 doc screening, cites Hamas ownership of clips

  • Tiff pulls documentary on 2023 Hamas attack, citing footage rights issue

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine's Once Nimble Army Is Mired in Soviet Decision-Making

• US and Russia 'propose West Bank-style occupation of Ukraine'

• Russian hackers took control of Norwegian dam, police chief says

China

• Global 'mining mafia' feeds China's appetite for gold, investigation shows

• How the Osama Bin Laden Raid Gave China Its New Stealth Helicopter

• Why China is becoming the first electrostate

• China's Lead in Open-Source AI Jolts Washington and Silicon Valley

Health / Medicine

• Why more women are switching to reusable menstrual products.

• Lithium and Its Potential Protection from Alzheimer's Disease

• Cats develop dementia in a similar way to humans

• Seeing Growing Exodus, State Organ Donor Registries Urge 'Perspective'

• Knee implant used by NHS in thousands of operations known for years to be faulty

• Guess who was funding the "keep weed illegal" efforts? U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds

• What Happened When Canada Gave Citizens the Right to Die

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• NYC office visits hit pre-pandemic levels

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Temperature records broken as extreme heat grips parts of Europe

• Seven Nonnative Ticks Hitched Very Long Rides to Connecticut

• Thousands evacuated in Spain as deadly heatwave fans Mediterranean wildfires

• California Central Valley keeps sinking and it's taking home values down with it

• 'Superefficient' weaver ants show remarkable strength in numbers

• The Lightning Strike That Stretched a Record 515 Miles Across the Great Plains

• How bad will climate change get? The only way to know is to fund basic research

  • All the funding they've had so far has assured us that the world will be ending soon, starting in the 1970s and earlier. I think we can probably guess what the next few billion dollars of funding would have predicted, by now.

• Decoding sweet potato DNA: New research reveals surprising ancestry

  they created the first complete genetic makeup of "Tanzania"—a sweet potato variety prized in Africa for its disease resistance and high dry matter content. The central challenge was to untangle the plant's 90 chromosomes and organize them into their six original sets, called haplotypes. The team succeeded in fully separating ("phasing") this complex genetic puzzle, something that had never been achieved before.