2025-08-18

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• Read Magic Considered Harmful

  The widespread adoption of Read Magic has fundamentally corrupted how magical texts are written. Modern scrolls are increasingly sloppy, compressed, and incomprehensible without magical assistance. Authors write for Read Magic, not for magic-users. I recently examined a Lightning Bolt scroll by a supposedly competent third-year apprentice. It was an unreadable mess of shorthand and compressed sigils with notation so dense it resembled a Dwarven cipher. When I pointed this out, the apprentice said, "Just cast Read Magic on it." We now have fifth-year students—FIFTH YEAR—creating magical texts they themselves cannot read without magical assistance. They have become utterly dependent on magical autocomplete.

Horseshit

• Still want to be a London cabbie?

• CIA's 'Kryptos' sculpture, unsolved for 35 years, is up for sale

  • Jim Sanborn has a secret – The sculptor of the CIA's 'Kryptos'

• Watch robot athletes compete in first humanoid games

• Hybrid-electric short takeoff and landing plane shows promise

• No, Conscientiousness Hasn't Collapsed Among Young People in Recent Years

  Last week the Financial Times (FT) released a report decrying “The troubling decline in conscientiousness”. The subtitle made the tone of the argument clear: “A critical life skill is fading out — and especially fast among young adults.” But is it? Or did the FT engage in some statistical sorcery to make a minor trend look more dramatic than it was? The thing about the Big5 personality variables is that they have a significant genetic component to them and are generally considered stable over long time frames. Some personality change can occur but, even over long intervals, these tend to be modest. I asked a couple of personality scientists, Robert McCrae and Brent Donnellan about the FT claims. Both were skeptical. To quote Dr. McCrae: “I am very skeptical.” Dr. McCrae passed my questions to Dr. Sutin who wrote “It would be nice to see the change replicated before making too much of it.”

• 10-year-old becomes youngest female chess player to defeat grandmaster

• Gamblers Now Bet on AI Models Like Racehorses

• Severe childhood trauma sometimes does that... Disney capitalized on it too. The adults still obsessed with Chuck E. Cheese

• The US-Canadian Road Safety Gap Is Getting Wider

• 'MMS' to 'aerobic oxygen,' drinking bleach has become a dangerous wellness trend

• Is It Fine to Look at Your Phone Before Bed?

• Despite confusion, NFL players can use own smelling salts

celebrity gossip

• Blackwater's Erik Prince Muscles Back into the Mercenary Business

• Wozniak pops up in a comment thread about his 'bad decision' to sell his stock

• Gabe Newell:difference between billionaires and the rest is 'a lot of luck'

Obit

• Terence Stamp, face of 60s British cinema, star of The Limey&Superman dies at 87

  • Actor Terence Stamp, who starred as Superman villain, dies aged 87

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Dining across the divide: Can breaking bread help bridge political differences?

  • Wasn't "shun your politically incorrect relatives" all the fashion last year? and the year before etc?

Musk

• Exposed TeslaMate Instances Leak Sensitive Tesla Data

• Ex-Tesla employees start EV charging company after Elon Musk fired everyone

• X-Ploitation: How X Became a Crossroads for Child Abuse and Influence Operations

• Car-carrier truck loaded with Teslas causes hazmat fire on 5 Freeway in Sylmar

  • Freeway lanes reopen after car hauler fire causes 7-hour shutdown

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• RushTok backlash: Why sororities aren't letting prospects post

• College Students Have Changed Forever

• Americans Are Ignoring Their Student Loan Bills (Archive)

  • After years of hearing about how student loans had been forgiven, hmmm...

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Hyundai wants loniq 5 customers to pay for cybersecurity patch in baffling move

• Microsoft's latest Windows 11 24H2 update breaks SSDs/HDDs, may corrupt data

• Samsung taking market share from Apple in U.S. as foldable phones gain momentum

• Celebrating 50 Years of the Rocky Horror Picture Show

• Disney's Marvel Abandons Georgia, Taking Livelihoods with It

• Call of Duty maker goes to war with parasitic cheat developers in federal court

• ArchiveTeam has finished archiving all goo.gl short links

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• EPSON MX-80 Fonts

  These fonts are called EPSON MX-80 Fonts, but they should be identical to the fonts in the following Epson MX series printers: Epson MX-70, Epson MX-80 (TYPE II), Epson MX-80 F/T (TYPE II), Epson MX-82, Epson MX-82 F/T, Epson MX-85, and the Epson MX-100.

• Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

• Network interfaces: Adventures in Linux bonding

• Here be dragons: Preventing static damage, latchup, and metastability in the 386

  Looking at the die shows that the pins with metastability protection are INTR, NMI, PEREQ, ERROR#, and BUSY#. The 80386 Hardware Reference Manual lists these same five pins as asynchronous—I like it when I spot something unusual on the die and then discover that it matches an obscure statement in the documentation. The interrupt pins INTR and NMI are asynchronous because they come from external sources that may not be using the 386's clock. But what about PEREQ, ERROR#, and BUSY#? These pins are part of the interface with an external math coprocessor (the 287 or 387 chip). In most cases, the coprocessor uses the 386's clock. However, the 387 supported a little-used asynchronous mode where the processor and the coprocessor could run at different speeds.

• Resurrecting the Most Useless Piece of Vintage Computing Technology: The Modem

  In order to get around a lack of a landline, one can use a telephone line simulator. These typically come in a box with two telephone jacks which can simulate a PSTN. While you can often find modems for really cheap or even free at the local electronics recycler, telephone line simulators are a bit more expensive. I have seen them go for around $125 but if you hunt around hard enough you might be able to find people practically giving them away. I used a Ring-It! Phoneline Simulator from Digital Products Company.

  • Some attention to init strings should let you use the "leased line" modes and you only need energize the line with 48vac, if that. They Hayes modems I used back when were happy with 24v over a half mile or more of cat3. no rings but you dont need it.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI could create the first one-person unicorn

• Is AI Hitting a Wall?

• Stop Talking about AI

• Sam Altman thinks we're in an AI bubble

• The free tier death cult - Arnon Shimoni

• Why GPT-4o's sudden shutdown left people grieving

• Kids need soft skills in the age of AI, but what does this mean for schools?

• CEO laid off nearly 80% because they refused to adopt AI fast enough

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA Probe Could Intercept Interstellar Comet, Scientists Say.

• Sharp Hubble Images Confirm 3I/Atlas as Comet

• 3D printing tackles titanium to create rocket parts

• Amazon tops 100 satellites after weather-delayed Kuiper launch

• Canada's first commercial spaceport is under construction

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Make your money work for you by 'laddering' bonds or CDs

• Citi Bike will implement age verification, NYC officials and Lyft say

• Big Tech Is Eating Itself in Talent War

• Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation

  • If we had spent half of the last administrations' "renewable energy grants" on gas turbines would this be a conversation?

• If You'll Pay $800 for a Credit Card, You're in Demand

• US hits highest layoffs since Covid

• US wholesale prices jump 3.3% as Trump tariffs hit economy

• The Stock Market Is Getting Scary. Here's What You Should Do

• Duolingo's stock down 38%, drops after OpenAI's GPT-5 language vibe coding demo

• Beyond Meat headed to Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Trump

• Folks In D.C. Already Feeling Safer, Praise Trump For Crime Crackdown.

• Trump-Putin documents left on hotel printer

Left Angst

• Taco Bell's new purple soda is a big 'screw you' to MAHA

  In Taco Bell restaurants across the nation, a new electric purple beverage is now available on tap. It’s called Mountain Dew Baja Midnight, and one sip would probably send a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) supporter into a cold faint.

  • nothing says "Idealistic Youthful Political Rebellion" like a cross brand license deal.

• Hypocrisy, thy name is Europe

  Trump changed the scheduled one-on-one meeting with Putin to a three-by-three chat, that included Lavrov and Ushakov on the Russian side, and Rubio and Witkoff on the American side. Why? Because Trump realized he could not handle Putin by himself.

• A brazen attack on air safety is underway — here’s what’s at stake | The Verge

  he government regulators responsible for air safety have become hesitant to enforce those rules, especially when it means standing up to industry demands for more flights and lower costs. Instead of fixing the regulatory state’s institutional cowardice, however, the Trump administration is moving to undermine it even further. The crisis in aviation safety has finally come to a head at precisely the moment when the wrong people are in charge of it.

• My GitHub subscription gets cheaper every month thanks to US dollar devaluation

• Leftist lawmakers gather to answer a question: How to beat the global right?

• Nabiha Syed Remakes Mozilla Foundation in the Era of Trump and AI

• What Corruption Looks Like - by George Dillard

  • A century and a half of Leftist propaganda

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Former Intel engineer sentenced for stealing trade secrets for Microsoft

• San Francisco Has Embraced a New Tool to Clear Homeless Camps

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• U.S. authorities embedded secret GPS trackers in shipments of advanced AI chips

• China's military wants to target US undersea sensor network: Analysis

World

• Campaigners targeting UK councils in push for four-day week

• Wait we've gone from "we don't need an army" to conscription in 6months? Pressure mounts on Germany's Merz to restore military conscription

• Top British Army Officer Predicts Civil War as ‘Rabbit in Headlights’ Leaders Incapable of Political Solutions.

• UK Authorities Deploy Undercover Police To Catch Men Who "Catcall" | ZeroHedge

  this experiment is being operated in neighborhoods that are up to 90% majority white, native residents. It's highly unlikely that UK officials would allow a similar trap to be run in areas populated by migrants. This, of course, is a common double standard in European countries today. Native citizens are heavily scrutinized for misbehavior while police and politician ignore the violence, rape, grooming gangs and murder common within migrant enclaves. Police admit that there are no specific laws against these behaviors, but UK politicians and authorities have been using color-of-law enforcement since before the pandemic mandates. In other words, it doesn't matter what laws are written down, if they decide they don't like something you're doing they might threaten you or potentially arrest you regardless.

• UK Ofcom fines 4chan £20k per day

  • Investigation into 4chan and its compliance with duties to protect its users

• Dozens of women murdered after police use 'deeply flawed' domestic violence tool

Israel

• Israeli gov. official arrested in Nevada internet crimes against children sting

• US state department stops issuing visas for Gaza’s children to get medical care

China

• Former pro-democracy Hong Kong politician Ted Hui granted asylum in Australia

• China Is Winning the Cyberwar

Health / Medicine

• Now seen as barbaric, lobotomies won him a Nobel Prize in 1949

• Men paying thousands to get their legs broken – and lengthened

• Amid growing 'scandal' of elder homelessness, health care groups aim to help

• Gait Retraining Could Significantly Reduce Knee Pain – Study

• Ontario doctors don't get paid when they treat uninsured patients

• Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Covid is rising. New vaccines may not be ready until mid-September

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The shutdown of ocean currents could freeze Europe

• $3.1B annual cost estimated for fossil fuel plants DOE won't allow to retire

• The criminal enterprise run by monkeys

• A First-Of-Its-Kind Lawsuit Seeks Wrongful Death Climate Damages From Oil Companies. Sealed Court Docs Show a Rockefeller-Funded Green Group Is Steering It.

• California is sunsetting oil refineries without a plan for what's next

  Faced with a looming fuel crunch, some worry the state will push aside its efforts to combat climate change to keep gasoline flowing.

• Mystery of former crater lakes in the highest mountain range of the Sahara

  Through this new combination of proxy data, remote sensing, water balance estimates, and high-resolution paleoclimate simulations, they were able to show that, about 7,000 years ago, the Tibesti Mountains received at least one order of magnitude more precipitation than the surrounding plains. The findings came as something of a surprise, the researchers noted, because they indicate that this was due to the moist air masses brought in by northeasterly winds from the Mediterranean region—and not, as previously assumed, by the then-stronger West African monsoon from the south. These air masses also produced precipitation that fed the crater lakes as a result of the strong orographic uplift caused by the Tibesti Mountains.

• Lake Powell continues drop as Colorado River experiences unprecedented drought

• Plastics treaty talks collapse without a deal after "chaotic" negotiations

• How can England possibly be running out of water?

• Terrifying 'zombie squirrels' with oozing flesh pods on their bodies invade US