2025-08-25

Horseshit

• What our shelves of unread books teach us about ourselves

• IRL Brain Rot and the Lure of the Labubu

• Are we heading for a world where no one ever needs talk to another human being?

• The race to stop mirror organisms

• There's something very interesting about boring: Martin Parr's life in pictures

• Tennis isn't a lucrative profession for most? who knew? Why a professional tennis player turned to OnlyFans to help fund her career

• Malthus, whose name is synonymous with doom and gloom, has lessons for today

• Some people are non-belonging

  In my 40-plus years as a practising physician and psychiatrist, I have worked with world leaders, performing artists and professionals at the top of their fields. It often emerges that they have gone through life feeling just as A described. These are people who always prefer to have dinner with a friend one-on-one rather than attend a dinner party. When they have to attend large gatherings, they are the figure standing off to the side, deep in conversation with another person, rather than “working the room”. They would rather do work assignments individually than in a group, despise playing team sports, and find the shared traditions or rituals of communal life – office parties, graduation ceremonies, even religious holidays – difficult and even baffling. They are soloists who cannot play in an orchestra. And I count myself as one of them. The vast majority of these people have no psychiatric diagnosis. They aren’t socially maladjusted or even socially anxious. After many years spent observing and researching these characteristics, I have come to understand that they are rooted in a trait present in people of every ethnicity, culture and gender: one distinguished by the lack of a communal impulse – in other words, non-belonging.

• Nick Clegg: If the people who ran FB were monsters, I wouldn't have worked there

• Dodge Waits to 'Jailbreak' Its Hot Sellers for a Reason

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Russia is quietly churning out fake content posing as US news

Musk

• Elon Musk's X Agrees to Settlements with Former Employees

• Time is running out for SpaceX to make a splash with second-gen Starship

• How the U.S. space industry became dependent on SpaceX

Electric / Self Driving cars

• California EV drivers could lose their carpool lane privileges in September

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• High priests: why scientists gave magic mushrooms to the clergy

• Anglican Diocese of North Queensland, Australia Enters Receivership

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Changing Times for Scientific Illustration

• Pennsylvania school cuts costs by using 3D printers to create violins

• How to Save the American University

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• We Are Tech Privacy Reporters. Our Music Habits Got Doxxed

• Who Killed the Narrative Podcast?

• Retailers slash prices of AMD and Intel latest EPYC and Xeon CPUs by up to 50%

• Gemini for Home: Your household's new, more helpful assistant

• Fans across the country raise their voices at 'KPop Demon Hunters' singalongs

• AR Glasses Need Ultrasound UI for Broad Adoption

• Apple Watch's blood oxygen restoration may get killed by ITC

• Apple to Kick Off Three-Year Plan to Reinvent iPhone

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Acronis True Image Costs Performance When Not Used

  Acronis True Image is iterating through a list of running processes many times – sometimes thousands of times – whenever my monitor is plugged or unplugged. It probably does this same wasteful iteration in other situations as well. This iterating wastes dozens of seconds of CPU time, wasting battery life and making my computer sluggish while this is happening. That’s the bug.

  • HN comments

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• YouTube used AI to edit videos without telling users

• China is quietly upstaging America with its open models

• Researchers use machine learning to improve the taste of Belgian beers

• The Incompleteness of Ethics

• Lovable raises $200M and partners with Hangout for vibe coding with music

• Restaurant asks patrons to not use Google AI

• Elite Performers Have Always Loved War Rooms, Now They're Using AI to Build Them

• Unauthorized OpenAI Equity Transactions

• AI's Big Leaps Are Slowing. That Could Be a Good Thing

• NVIDIA outlines plans for using light for communication between AI GPUs

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• SpaceX launches Space Force spaceplane X-37B.

• Getting to the Moon or Mars? Musk and Bezos and Space Travel's Refueling Problem

Crypto con games

• Coinbase Mandates In-Person Orientation to Stop North Korean Hackers

• South Korean man arrested in Thailand in $50M crypto scam

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The biggest chipmaker needs to move beyond Taiwan

• Tech stocks are sending a warning

• Walmart Fires VP for Taking Daily Kickbacks Starting from $30K

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• ID.me (IRS, SSA, VA) No Longer Supports Google / Facebook Login

• US Supreme Court allows NIH to cut $2B in research grants

Trump

• US Government announces 10% stake in chipmaker Intel

  • The big Intel investment comes from already awarded grants

  • Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock

• Trump mobilizing up to 1,700 National Guard troops in 19 states

Left Angst

• US halts work on almost finished wind farm because national security

• 4Chan, Gab and Kiwi Farms want Trump’s help to dodge the Online Safety Act | The Verge

  After the United Kingdom began enforcing its sweeping Online Safety Act in April, British regulator Ofcom served violation notices to three notorious sites: 4chan, Gab, and Kiwi Farms, each of which risked multimillion-dollar fines. Late last week, Preston Byrne, a First Amendment lawyer representing them, struck back. Byrne announced he would sue Ofcom in US federal court and added an unusual request. He called on the Trump administration “to invoke all diplomatic and legal levers available to the United States” to protect his clients from the OSA’s reach. Byrne’s request could put a trio of sites known as hotbeds of violence, harassment, and extremism at the vanguard of the Trump administration’s sweeping new diplomatic mandate: stop foreign countries from using their laws to stifle American speech — especially hate speech — on the internet.

• Scientists Are Caught in a Political Trap

• ICE Uses Celebrity Loophole to Hide Deportation Flights

• The US tourism slump that never happened

  Despite fears of a sharp downturn amid foreign visitor boycotts, the sector has had a decent summer. But some predict the problems have only been delayed

• Trump's new chief design officer aims to make federal websites 'satisfying'

  • New Trump design chief aims to improve US Government websites

• US attack on renewables will lead to power crunch that spikes electricity prices

  • Without the government increasing costs and delays; gas turbines should be deployable quickly almost anywhere. We 8have* energy we have merely been listening to those who say we should use more expensive and less convenient options instead.

• Fundraiser launched for Utah violinist detained by ICE

• What the philosophy of Burning Man can teach us about this challenging time

• 'Sneakflation': how tariffs are gradually raising costs for American consumers

• Doge Targeted Him on Social Media. Then the Taliban Took His Family

World

• Man arrested after sharing Facebook posts backing Palestine Action

• A German ISP tampered with their DNS - specifically to sabotage my website - lina's blog

• Germany's Copyright Clearing House now requires courts for website blocks

• Delhi High Court Orders Sci-Hub, Libgen to Be Blocked in India

  • Sci-Hub Now Blocked in India

• Large Interpol Cybercrime Crackdown Africa Leads the Arrest of 1,200+ Suspects

• 4chan refuses to pay UK Online Safety Act fines, asks Trump admin to intervene

  • Is 4chan the perfect Pirate Bay poster child to justify wider UK site-blocking?

• Who Owns Canada's Labour Data? (Hint: Not Canada)

• Why 'rocks as big as cars' are flying down the Dolomites

Israel

• Declaration of famine in Gaza lays bare Israel's disregard for humanitarian duty

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Pentagon Has Blocked Ukraine's Long-Range Missile Strikes on Russia

• Why Ukrainian cruise missiles are pink

China

• A growing number of young Chinese looking for low-maintenance companionship are turning their attention to jars of activated yeast that only need flour and water.

• Chinese astronauts make rocket fuel and oxygen in space

Health / Medicine

• Gardening Boosts Brain Health

• Put it back in the soda: Lithium May Be the Key to Stopping Alzheimer's

• Paracetamol disrupts early embryogenesis by cell cycle inhibition

  • Using acetaminophen during pregnancy may increase childrens autism and ADHD risk

• Determining optimal protein intake from data, not dogmatism

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Scientists found the missing nutrients bees need – Colonies grew 15-fold

• EU wildfires worst on record as burning season continues

• Hong Kong scientist fights to save endangered cockatoos

• Welcome to Fairbourne, the Welsh town that could one day be swallowed by the sea

• Rapid loss of Antarctic ice may be climate tipping point

• You shouldn't salt a leech that's sucking your blood

• Exceptional Nordic heatwave stumps tourists seeking shade

• Surprising Pushback as Community Fights to Undo Damage from Invasive Plants.

  Despite drought conditions and battles over water resources, a significant portion of California's water supply is allocated to maintaining non-native and invasive species. According to Alta, less than 3% of Los Angeles' street trees are native.

• Can Solar Farms Save the Bees?

• Colorado's subalpine wetlands may be producing a toxic form of mercury

• Genomics can help insect farmers avoid pitfalls of domestication

• Burkina Faso rejects Bill Gates' plan to create mosquito species

• Warming the atmosphere: Clear waters emit more methane than turbid waters

• Global Energy Demand Outpaces Renewable Expansion