2025-08-24

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• Braided Magnetic Flux Ropes Are Found at Both Human and Light Year Scales

Horseshit

• Archaeologists Investigate Mosaic Depicting Sandals That Look Like Flip-Flops

• Philosophers must reckon with the meaning of thermodynamics

  Just as the full metaphysical implications of the Copernican revolution took centuries to unfold, we have yet to fully grasp the philosophical and existential consequences of entropic decay. We have yet to conceive of reality as it truly is. Instead, philosophers cling to an ancient idea of the Universe in which everything keeps growing and flourishing. According to this view, existence is good. Reality is good. But what would our metaphysics and ethics look like if we learned that reality was against us?

  • Everything that exits wants to consume us. It is our gift to be part of the fray and have the chance to return the favor.

• California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21

• 'It's back to the future': the 13th-century castle built by hand in France

• they have a paywall on this: Banned The 20 books they didn't want you to read

• What's the safest seat in a car? An auto expert weighs in

• Older adults are more psychologically resistant to cyberbullying

• Fears of grave-robbing amid rise in sale of human remains

• Sacked executive who slept in sauna wins disability claim over ADHD

• The Nigerian prom dresses that have the wow factor for US teenagers

• Struggling fusion power company General Fusion gets $22M lifeline from investors

• Ketchup was once a diarrhea cure.

• 60-Hour Dance Sessions, Simulated Sex, and Ketamine: The World of VR Ravers

• Teenagers no longer answer the phone: Is it a lack of manners or a new trend?

• Today's vehicles have bigger blind spots but not where you think

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Toxic politics and TikTok engagement in the 2024 U.S. election

• Julius Krein Left Wall Street to Build a Journal for America's Next Ideology

Musk

• Is it illegal to not buy ads on X? Experts explain the FTC's ad fight

• X Agrees to Settlements With Thousands of Former Employees

• Elon Musk Simulating Microsoft with "MacroHard"

• Tesla insiders have sold more than 50% of their shares in the last year

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Whatever Happened to the Self Driving Semi?

  Self-driving truck company Aurora raised around $820 million in new capital, with much of this being from Uber, which has been expanding into logistics with its $20 billion Uber Freight business. So there are active players with substantial funding, even as the field itself is narrowing and self-driving trucks haven’t yet seen their Waymo moment.

  One thing that you see over and over again in robotics is that there are no shortcuts. A lot of the people trying to do self-driving trucks seemed to think they could make the problem much easier than it really was. Locomation wanted to do convoying, having an autonomous truck follow a human-driven truck; but at the margin, this ends up being just as complicated as full autonomy, since the two vehicles can be separated in heavy traffic. Starsky had perhaps an even riskier plan in their remote teleoperation of semi trucks; teleoperation is hard enough for robots that aren’t moving 80,000 pounds of goods at 65mph down an interstate.

  • The "investment advisers" got their pile a few years ago when "self driving means kids wont need to learn to drive" was the cry; they no longer care to spew now. They're onto the next big bubble and "AI will do it" means any extant efforts are undercutting the current sales pitch.

• Toyota Is Recycling Old EV Batteries to Help Power Mazda's Production Line

• China EV Marketplace allows customers to order EVs directly from China

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Bill Ackman's New Pet Project Is a School That Embraces AI and Rejects DEI

• Will an astronomical anomaly challenge the idea of scientific revolutions?

• Student loan caps might worsen the national doctor shortage, critics say

• Too Rich for College Aid, Can't Afford Full Price: How One Family Made It Work

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Germany's Ecosia proposes stewardship to run Google Chrome

• OnlyFans owner paid $701M in dividends as platform readies for potential sale

• Apple sues former employee who allegedly stole Apple Watch secrets

• Two smart ring brands will no longer be available to US shoppers

• Digg's new app is basic, but a great start

• Developer sentenced to prison for activating “kill switch” to avenge his firing

• Singles Are Sick of Dating Apps. But There Are 2.5M on Raya's Waitlist

• Samsung's new $29,999 Micro RGB TV looks good

• Fans loved her new album. The thing was, she hadn't released one

  Last month, award-winning singer Emily Portman got a message from a fan praising her new album and saying "English folk music is in good hands". That would normally be a compliment, but the Sheffield-based artist was puzzled. So she followed a link the fan had posted and was taken to what appeared to be her latest release. "But I didn't recognise it because I hadn't released a new album," Portman says. "I clicked through and discovered an album online everywhere - on Spotify and iTunes and all the online platforms. "It was called Orca, and it was music that was evidently AI-generated, but it had been cleverly trained, I think, on me."

• AMD Discontinues B650 Chipset

• Google will throttle your Pixel 10's battery, and there's nothing you can do

• Jack Dorsey launches White Noise, his next decentralized chat app after Bitchat

• The Sega Dreamcast Was the 'What If?' Console

• Addressing Questions on Moderation Limits: Reddit moves to limit "power mods"

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• RFC 9839 and Bad Unicode

  This issue keeps coming up, so Paul Hoffman and I put together an individual-submission draft to the IETF and now (where by “now” I mean “two years later”) it’s been published as RFC 9839. It explains which characters are bad, and why, then offers three plausible less-bad subsets that you might want to use.

• Charles Petzold: Twenty Years of Blog Posts

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Inside Pantheon, the Cult Cartoon That's Blowing Minds in the AI Industry

• Google shares rise on report of Apple using Gemini for Siri

• Measuring the environmental impact of AI inference

• Commonwealth Bank backtracks on AI job cuts, apologises for 'error'

• Google games numbers to make AI look less thirsty

• Hank Green's 'Focus Friend' Unseated ChatGPT on the App Store

• Meta's AI Companion Policy Is Outrageous

• Political Pollsters Are Trying to Save Money by Polling AI

• 8 Women, 4 Bedrooms and 1 Cause: Breaking A.I.'s Glass Ceiling

• The 1970s Gave Us Industrial Decline. A.I. Could Bring Something Worse.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Detecting Alien Civilizations That Employ an Earth-Level Deep Space Network

• Mystery object lights up night skies across western Japan

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Personalized pricing can backfire on companies, says study

• UK employers cut back on bonuses and hiring as slowdown hits jobs market

• Wall Street Leaning Harder on Private Data After BLS Spat

• Fed Chair Warns the Economy Is Worse Than We Realized

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy says the agency will ‘move aside’ from climate sciences to focus on exploring moon and Mars.

• Homelessness is finally dipping across California

• DHS admits it no longer preserves text message data for top officials

• Minnesota Attorney General sues TikTok for 'preying on Minnesota young people'

• FTC Chair warns tech firms not to weaken data privacy to comply with EU, UK laws

Trump

• The US government has signed a deal with Intel to convert $8.9 billion in planned but as yet unpaid grants under the CHIPS act into a 9.9% stake in the company.

  • In addition, if Intel decides to sell off a majority of its chip foundry division, the government will have the option to buy another 5% of Intel common shares at the same price of $20.

  • The administration's big Intel investment comes from already awarded grants

• Improving Our Nation Through Better Design

Democrats

• US Senator Bernie Sanders backs Trump plan for government stake in Intel

Left Angst

• Trump Administration Orders Work Halted on Wind Farm That Is Nearly Built

• Trump Halts Orsted Wind Project in Another Blow to Industry

• Nick Clegg: Silicon Valley is full of wealthy men who think they're victims

• Experts explain your rights – as an immigrant or as a bystander

• Tarrifs hurt board and card game biz

• Trump's New "Apple Store"

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Parts of Europe are suspending postal shipments to the US

  • Postal services in India, Europe. U.K. to suspend shipment of packages to U.S.

• Continental vs. Maritime Power, the Fight for a New World Order

• Lost historic Pearl Harbor logbook is recovered by National Archives

• Colombian Black Hawk Downed by Drone Is a Glimpse of What's to Come

• The F-35 is losing the trade war

World

• Denmark scraps book tax to fight 'reading crisis'

• Meta receives 48 hour warning over illicit gambling ads in Brazil

• Two laptops, six plugs:The South Korean cafes grappling students who dont leave

• Europe Is Losing

• Afghan women turn to online courses as Taliban bans education

• How Do You Move a Hundred-Year-Old Church? On Wheels, Very Slowly.

• Mexico, Belize and Guatemala create a trinational culture and nature corridor

• Japan seeks to ditch rice output curbs after price surges

Israel

• My life in Gaza: 'Do you know the series Squid Game?'

• The Problem with Israel Is So Much Bigger Than Netanyahu

• Global firms including Palantir 'profiting from genocide' in Gaza: UN rapporteur

China

• Nvidia halts China-focused H20 AI chip after Beijing flags security risks

Health / Medicine

• The Glories of Mexican Dentistry

• What body odour reveals about your health

• Are Saunas Good for You?

• An inner-speech decoder reveals some mental privacy issues

• People Who Live to 100 Have a Unique Relationship with Disease

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Four giraffe species officially recognized in conservation reclassification

  • Thus, more "endangered" species. Farm the critters. Then there will be thousands: and millions if you can make them tasty.

• Why wind farms attract so much misinformation and conspiracy theory

• Birds are singing an average of 50 minutes longer per day

• US mines are throwing away critical minerals

• UK housing is dangerously unprepared for impact of climate crisis

• Lobster found 250 miles from where it was tagged