2025-08-20

Cool

• IP-over -avian cannot be far away: Enthusiast converts PNG to bird-shaped waveform, teaches starling to recall file

etc

• Oscar Wilde and The Violence of Opinion - by Josh Nadeau

  You are not what you think - in the sense that you are not simply your ideas. You are much more than that. And being wrong is part of all of life and it’s the only path into growth and maturity.Part of your conception, as a person, should be a person who is after Truth. Which means ideas can come and go, be played with and assessed, and the goal is to cling to the ones that are True. It’s probably a pipe dream to imagine this is what the cultural conversation could be regenerated into - people decidedly against sensationalism and thought-crime - and people committed to the elegance and class of playing with ideas, the grace of understanding and chasing after truth.

  • "What is True" has no relation to "what others think"

• California’s Tallest Bridge Has Nothing Underneath — Practical Engineering

  At more than 700 feet or 200 meters above the canyon floor, it’s the fourth-tallest bridge in the United States. When it opened in 1973, crowds cheered for the impressive new structure. But if you take a closer look, it doesn’t really make any sense. his isn’t an interstate highway or even a major thoroughfare. The road sees only a few thousand vehicles a day, connecting Auburn, an exurb of Sacramento with a population just shy of 14,000, to scattered rural communities and recreation areas in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. And while the American River does occasionally flood, it doesn’t flood 700 feet. Before this, the crossing was basically a low-water bridge. structure of this magnitude just looks out of place. But it wasn’t just a boondoggle, at least not at the outset. It was built that way for a reason, and the story behind it is not only pretty wild, but it also sits at the hinge point of a major chapter in American infrastructure.

  • What prominent California politicians lived in that area at the time?

Horseshit

• We Stopped Caring About "Selling Out"

• Get to know the robot dog that can clean your house and serve you soda

• Otter is being trained to search for missing people

• The Family Fallout of DNA Surprises

• 'Work-Life Balance' Will Keep You Mediocre

• Big Tech Pledged Billions for Housing. The Results Aren't Living Up to the Hype

• The boy who saw some unclaimed land– and founded his own country

• What is wellness? How the health and lifestyle trend began

  • What is "wellness?" Anything they can sell you.

• Facts about global fertility trends

  several European countries spent more than 3.0% of GDP in 2021 on family programs such as child allowances, subsidized child care and tax breaks. For example, Poland spent around 3.6% of its GDP on family benefits, including 2.5% on child-related cash transfers. And Iceland spent around 3.8% of its GDP on this – the highest share in the OECD. The U.S. spent about 1.0% of its GDP on these types of benefits in 2021, with most of that going toward services and tax breaks.

• Young chatty workers disturbing older colleagues 'not age harassment'

• America has only one real city. We need a few more of them. How can we get them?

  We have New York City, and that’s about it. People from Chicago or Boston may protest that their own cities are also walkable, but transit use statistics show just how big the gap is

  • So there were no cities at all until the advent of public transit?

• The End of Handwriting

• Americans are moving at half the rate they used to – why?

• Giving people money helped less than I thought it would

• The Weaponized World Economy: Surviving the New Age of Economic Coercion

• Things That Are Hard - Freddie deBoer

  The shitlib world has found this reliable way to ward off any notion that there’s a conflict between their supposed status as allies for the disabled and their total refusal to extend the slightest accommodation to Kanye West: they say “mental illness doesn’t do that.” Mental illness doesn’t do that! Case closed. And they’re left in a space where their supposed respect for the disabled comes at zero cost to them, not even the vague emotional cost of having to advocate for someone they don’t like. Because mental illness doesn’t do that.

• Colin Cummings, the greatest air hockey player of all time

• Steep population declines in most countries are expected to have negative impact

• Physics of badminton's new killer spin serve

• The global car reckoning is here, far too many auto companies don't have a plan

celebrity gossip

• (Jul 2025) New FBI case files reveal suspects, tips and hoaxes in DB Cooper plane hijacking

Obit

• French streamer Jean Pormanove dies during grueling multi-day marathon broadcast

Musk

• 'Crazy conspiracist' and 'unhinged comedian': Grok's AI persona prompts exposed

• Tesla drivers can pursue class action over self-driving claims, judge rules

• SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Shroud of Turin Study Debunk – A New Attack on the Shroud of Turin

• The Founders of This Housing Development Say You Must Be White to Live There

• The Americans Following in the Footsteps of the Knights Templar

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Post-Progressive Social Science: A Manifesto

  The conference was focused on two pillars of a new research programme: 1) forbidden topics or viewpoints (such as the negative economic effects of immigration, or whether differences in family structure help to explain racial inequality); and 2) ‘Critical Woke Studies’ – the analysis and conceptualization of cultural left ideology, which has achieved a position of institutional hegemony in western societies. Where next? To rebalance higher education we need government-led reform but must also construct a parallel infrastructure for countercultural scholarship and teaching in the social sciences and humanities. I am willing to work with those who abjure government involvement, like Steven Pinker or Greg Lukianoff, and those who advocate it, like Chris Rufo or myself. Post-progressivism is a big tent that must encompass old leftists, classical liberals and conservatives.

• Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6?

  In any case, if anyone ends up here after a web search, I can at least confirm that there isn't a new element Gr and the real compound is Cr2Ge2Te6, chromium germanium telluride.

• Microschool Movement Grows in U.S., Raising Quality Concerns

• Silencing Political Activism at CERN Before and During the Vietnam War

• "oops" The crown jewel of the Nudge literature finds its effect cut by 76%

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Porn censorship is going to destroy the internet

• Code suggests Apple is working on an M4 Ultra chip for new Mac Pro

• Why Did Hollywood Stop Making Comedies? A Statistical Analysis

• System Guide: Five sample PC builds, from $500 to $5k

• Apple has not destroyed Steve Jobs' vision for iPad

• Browser wars are back, predicts Palo Alto, thanks to AI

• Group accused of flooding Ticketmaster with fake accounts to buy 321K tickets

• Nexstar agrees to buy Tegna for $6.2B, a massive consolidation of local TV

• Datacenter vacancy rates near zero $1T of new deployment needed by 2030

• Tea's founder lured millions of women to spill their secrets, then exposed them

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• What Is the Luhn Algorithm? The Math Behind Credit Card Transactions

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The Guardian view on UK's AI strategy: risk it is dependency dressed up in hype

• OpenAI launches cheapest ChatGPT plan at $4.6, starting in India

  • OpenAI Rolls Out $5 ChatGPT Go Plan Exclusively for India

• AI Chatbots Are Evil

  It is obvious to me that it is immoral to speak with a chatbot—that you’d be doing a bad thing to type up a back and forth with Grok or Meta or ChatGPT or Truthly or Whoever, and that repeating this bad act of conversing with a fake person makes for a bad habit which will ultimately make you a bad person.

• America's AI boom is squeezing the rest of the economy

• GPT-5: The Reverse DeepSeek Moment

• It's too late to get a PhD to cash in on the AI hype

• Americans fear AI permanently displacing workers, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds

• Silicon Valley's AI deals are creating zombie startups

• US gov seeks AI procurement using 'full user context and data access' chatbots

• AI Is Holding Up the Sky. The Rest Fell Back to Earth

• Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again

  • Meta Restructures AI Group Again in Pursuit of Superintelligence

• AI Launches Across the Government

• OpenAI Employee Stock Sale Would Value ChatGPT Maker at $500B

• What is 'AI psychosis' and how can ChatGPT affect your mental health?

• The Chatbot Updated. Users Lost a Friend

• Eric Schmidt: Silicon Valley Needs to Stop Obsessing over Superhuman A.I

• Many Are Focused on the Wrong Questions When It Comes to AI

• Britain's AI strategy: the risk that it is dependency dressed up in digital hype

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Hubble telescope uncovers rare star born from cosmic collision

• Hijacked satellites orbiting weapons: 21st century, space is the new battlefield

• 3I/ATLAS in the context of Otautahi–Oxford interstellar object population model

• Avi Loeb: Is 3I/Atlas Our Turing Test by a Superior Alien Intelligence?

Crypto con games

• (Jul 2025) I sat down with the new SEC Crypto Task Force, they are legit

  The SEC Crypto Task Force was announced hours after his inauguration on January 20, 2025, led by Commissioner Hester M. Peirce, first announced 2025-01-25. My personal experience with them gives me real hope: this could be the inflection point where US policy catches up, fostering collaborative, common-sense regulation that to help the US catch pace.

• Tether Taps Ex-White House Crypto Advisor Hines for US Expansion

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Why Credit Card Defaults Are Surging – From Poor to Rich

  it’s not just lower-income households feeling the squeeze. Wealthier ZIP codes, traditionally insulated from such issues, have seen dramatic proportional increases in delinquent debt. Between the second quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2025, the share of credit card debt 30 days or more past due in the highest-income 10% of ZIP codes surged from 4.8% to 8.3%—a striking 73% relative increase. By comparison, the lowest-income 10% of ZIP codes experienced a rise from 14.9% to 22.8%, marking a 53% relative increase. This trend is even sharper for serious delinquencies (90 days or more overdue), where rates in the highest-income ZIP codes jumped from 4.1% to 7.3%, an 80% relative increase, compared to a 59% rise in the lowest-income areas. Between mid-2022 and early 2025, delinquent balances in the highest-income ZIP codes surged by a staggering 73%, an increase even sharper than in lower-income areas.

  Some high-income individuals are engaging in "doom spending," increased expenditures as a coping mechanism against economic uncertainty, further eroding their financial stability.

• Intel shares jump as SoftBank to buy $2B stake

  • SoftBank Agrees to Invest $2B in Intel as Part of US Push

  • Intel will receive a $2B lifeline from SoftBank

  • SoftBank Group and Intel Corporation Sign $2B Investment Agreement

  • SoftBank bets $2B on Intel having a future

  • SoftBank held talks with Intel on buying contract chipmaking business

  • Intel's $25B Rally Sends Valuation to Dot-Com Levels

• Nvidia's $4.5T valuation now tops the Russell 2000 Index by $1.5T

• U.K. 30-Year Yield Tops U.S. as Pressure Mounts on Government Borrowing

• Home-Building Climbed Unexpectedly in July

• CEO pay at top US companies accelerates at fastest pace in 4 years

• Air Canada strike: Flight attendants reach tentative agreement

• US Copper Firms Hike Prices Even After Trump Tariff Reprieve

• 'SPAC King' Palihapitiya makes a comeback with new blank-check IPO

• Delta, United sued for selling windowless 'window seats'

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Direct File died. Meet the creators planning for its second life

• Away from Capitol Hill, a Kentucky lawmaker lives off the grid

Trump

• Newsmax to pay $67M to settle defamation lawsuit from voting machine company

• White House launches official TikTok account

Democrats

• Texas Democrat locked in House chamber after refusing GOP law enforcement escort

• Silicon Valley Is Panicking About Zohran Mamdani. NYC's Tech Scene Is Not

• Obama's 'obscene monument to his ego' dramatically backfires as $850M vanity project sparks outrage | Daily Mail Online

  His $850 million presidential center in Chicago - due to open in April - has come under fire from residents, community leaders and even onetime supporters who now warn that the massive 19.3-acre facility in Jackson Park is gentrifying the neighborhood, increasing rent and forcing families out. Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor, who represents much of the area where the center is being built, told the Daily Mail she is a fan of Obama and believes in the project but has fought aspects of it to protect her constituents. Her efforts have had mixed results.

  • waffle in waffle out

Left Angst

• China Is Enjoying Trump 2.0

• Trump Tariffs Seen Fostering New China-Global South Trade Order

• From .com to .gov: The internet's inevitable nationalist turn

• White House has a preferred alternative to PBS. It may be in classrooms

• The Playbook Used to 'Prove' Vaccines Cause Autism

  • "The Science is Settled(TM)!"

• Google President Praised MAGA Speech Slamming 'Climate Extremist Agenda'

• Why Are Some Stats Too 'Girly' for the BLS?

• The Race to Rescue PBS and NPR Stations

• Trump wants NASA to burn a crucial satellite, killing climate change research

• By taking over DC, Trump may have outflanked the Democrats — again.

• How Should TV Depict the U.S.' Real-Life Descent into Fascism?

  As Fascism Takes Hold in the U.S., How Will — and Should — the TV Landscape Depict Our Real-Life Horrors?

• Top pediatricians buck RFK Jr.'s anti-vaccine meddling on Covid shot guidance

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Texas ICE shooting suspects tied to secretive far-left anarchist group formed during violent 2020 BLM protests.

• CBS settlement. Going to court would have been better: Why Did Shari Redstone Do It?

• Gangs are using increasingly sophisticated kit to steal cars

  • Cars are using increasingly sophisticated kit to protect them from being used by anyone...

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Trump's Tariffs Stymie India's Bid to Steal Manufacturing from China

• Army Falls Short of 155mm Production Goal.

World

• Mozilla warns Germany could soon declare ad blockers illegal

• 'Ad Blocking Is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned by Top German Court

• Germany rejects US free speech criticism amid social media arrests

• UK backs down in Apple privacy row

  • UK has agreed to drop demand for access to Apple user data, says US

  • US spy chief Gabbard says UK agreed to drop 'backdoor' mandate for Apple

  • Britain Drops Request That Apple Create a Back Door

  • UK Drops Mandate for Apple 'Backdoor' on Americans

  • The UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a "back door"

  • UK drops demand for backdoor into Apple encryption

  • Britain caves in to Trump demands on iPhone security

• "Stop children using VPNs to watch porn", UK politicians told

  • Government must stop children using VPNs to dodge age checks on porn sites

• Runner, 97, breaks European Parkrun record with 250th event

• H-1B crisis: Indian workers face green card denials amid PERM 'sabotage' blitz

• Fair Isle: UK's most remote inhabited island seeks new nurse

• Brazil's top court rules US laws do not apply to its territory

• Modi Hails 'Friend' Putin and Boosts China Ties in Tilt from US

• Teenager breaks unofficial record with ocean adventure on electric hydrofoil

• End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

• We was told it was NAFTA but OK: Mexico's welfare policies helped 13.4M people out of poverty

• Mexican city with one of the highest homicide rates fired most police

Israel

• Hamas says it accepts proposal for Gaza ceasefire and release of hostages

• Hamas rejects Israel's Gaza relocation plan

• BBC witnesses settlers attack on Palestinian farm in West Bank

• 100% of foreign agriculture workers were sexually assaulted, expert says

  Out of 654 Thai foreign workers questioned, all of them said they had been exposed to sexual assault.

• Microsoft Workers Protesting Israel Ties Say They Have Occupied HQ

China

• Beijing accuses Canberra of lying about spy threats

• In another AI push, China holds the first sports event for humanoid robots

• China eyes Saturn's icy moon Enceladus in the hunt for habitability

Health / Medicine

• Americans Got Hooked on Supplements

• Drug 100 times stronger than fentanyl responsible for Riverside overdose

• We Thought DNA Ran Our Lives Until We Discovered RNA Is in Charge

• Are Marathons and Extreme Running Linked to Colon Cancer?

• Many people using OTC birth control pills previously used nothing, study finds.

• The Link Between Cannabis and Schizophrenia

• FDA issues warning over possible radioactive shrimp

• Fed up with U.S. health care costs, these Americans moved abroad

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Covid-19 seems to age blood vessels – but only among women

  • Even mild Covid may leave blood vessels five years older

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• In India, a Young Poacher Evolves into a Committed Conservationist

• The world regulated sulfur in ship fuels − and the lightning stopped

• Are we on our way to the sixth major mass extinction?

• Japan opens osmotic power plant

• Wildfire Fighters, Unmasked in Toxic Smoke, Are Getting Sick and Dying

• How to destroy harmful 'forever chemicals'

• Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Informed?

• Some New York Dems Starting To Realize Climate Targets Are Too Extreme.

• Animal Cultures, Under Rising Threat, Are Key to Species Survival

• The Indian cafes where you can pay in rubbish

• African grassland carbon uptake rises with rainfall, unlike forests and savannas

• An extinct volcano in Arkansas hosts the only public diamond mine on Earth

• Remains of British researcher lost in 1959 recovered from Antarctic glacier

• As Alaska's salmon plummet, scientists home in on the killer

• The Rainforests Being Cleared to Build Your R.V

• An Unbiased and Objective Climate Science Report