2025-08-30

etc

• Ways Hurricane Forecasts Have Changed Since Katrina

• Lessons 'unlearned': 20 years after Katrina, disaster readiness lags in the US

Horseshit

• Trash Pickup's Future: Self-Driving Bins and Quieter Trucks

• Block-Stacking Problem Has a Preposterous Solution You Need to See to Believe

• Crocodile Relative Was One of Dinosaurs' Most Fearsome Predators

• At Japan's biggest toy fair, grown-ups are the target

• Progressives should care about falling birth rates

  • Not enough of a victory for them, they wanted humans all dead now, while they could see it.

• The middle-aged are no longer the most miserable

• Their Beach Home Is a Driveway

• How wild horses became rideable, according to ancient DNA

• Sweden's 'secondhand only' shopping mall is changing retail

• The Surprising Truth About Precognition and Time

• I visited the happiest country. I wish I could unlearn its secret

• Then Gogh somewhere else: Van Gogh Museum in Fight with Dutch State That Threatens Its Future

• Spouses tend to share psychiatric disorders, massive study finds

• Contra Scott Alexander on Missing Heritability

• Bank apologises for firing staff with accidental email

• LaserWeeder packs two dozen Nvidia GPUs and lasers to zap your weed problem

celebrity gossip

• Everybody Imitates Hypnotoad (History of and Recreating the Hypnotoad Sound)

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• The New Yorker's Vaunted Fact-Checking Department

Musk

• The Memphis Chamber of Commerce's Push for Elon Musk's XAI Data Center

• Burning Man's Online Now. Thank (Or Blame) Starlink

• Tesla said it didn't have key data in a fatal crash. Then a hacker found it

  • Tesla denied having fatal crash data until a hacker found it

• Tesla sales plunge 40% in Europe as Chinese EV rival BYD's triple

• 35% of buyers less likely to buy car with FSD

• Tell HN: Crazy sloppiness in X.com Content Security Policy | Hacker News

• GitHub engineer claims team was 'coerced' to put Grok into Copilot

• Musk's xAI sues engineer for allegedly taking secrets to OpenAI

• Tesla challenges $243M verdict in Autopilot death trial

• Tesla's change in bylaws to limit shareholder lawsuits slammed by NY officials

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Tesla & Waymo's radically different robotaxi approaches will shape the industry

• Ford Says It Will Deliver the Dream of Modular Skateboard EVs

• Stellantis shelves Level 3 driver-assistance program as it downscales

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• India is still working on sewer robots

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The Tiny Church Where Psychedelics Are Legal

• Florida Deploys Police at Crosswalks, Stop Them from Being Painted Rainbow

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• America Educates the Best and Brightest–Then Shows Them the Door

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Twitch denies viewership "free fall" and rumors of viewbot update rollback

• Unpacking Passkeys Pwned: Possibly the most specious research in decades

• Meta might be secretly scanning your phone's camera roll

• The Internet Revolutionized Porn. Age Verification Could Upend Everything

• Microsoft says recent Windows update didn't kill your SSD

• A review of 19B passwords reveals people are still bad at them

• WhatsApp fixes 'zero-click' bug used to hack Apple users with spyware

• Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws

• Bluesky CEO: I turned a Twitter research project into a rival company

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

  • Linus Torvalds Marks Bcachefs as Now "Externally Maintained"

• Btrfs Dev Josef Bacik Leaving Meta and Stepping Back from Kernel Development

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Will AI Replace Human Thinking? The Case for Writing and Coding Manually

• AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

• The A.I. Spending Frenzy Is Propping Up the Real Economy, Too

• Taco Bell Rethinks Future of Voice AI at the Drive-Through

  • Taco Bell Says 'No Más' to AI Drive-Thru Experiment

  • Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters

• Oh goody, the 'first known AI-powered ransomware' has been discovered

• Are A.I. Tools Making Doctors Worse at Their Jobs?

• AI is opening up nature's treasure chest

• Zuckerberg's AI hires disrupt Meta with Swift exits and threats to leave

• Researchers Are Already Leaving Meta's New Superintelligence Lab

• What's happening with the hires at Meta Superintelligence Labs

• OpenAI lost the plot on 'boring' LLM use-cases

• A Troubled Man, His Chatbot and a Murder-Suicide in Old Greenwich

• Discount AI Brings Premium Risks to Public Procurement

• Why AI Isn't Ready to Be a Real Coder

• AI crawlers are destroying websites in neverending hunt for any and all content

  • one of the joys of being politically incorrect: they don't really bother me...

• JPMorgan Restricts Employees from Using ChatGPT

• Apple Restricts Employee Use of ChatGPT, Joining Other Companies Wary of Leaks

• GenAI Misinformation, Trust, & News Consumption-Evidence from a Field Experiment

• Meta changes teen AI chatbot as Senate begins probe into romantic conversations

• With new in-house models, Microsoft lays groundwork for independence from OpenAI

Crypto con games

• Crypto ATMs fueling criminal activity, Treasury warns

Economicon / Business / Finance

• S.F. apartment rents surge again in August to highest level since April 2020

• Gambling or investing? In America, the line is increasingly blurred

• ETF Slop: How Wall Street Flooded the Market with Gimmick Funds

• The market for startup shares is getting even weirder

• A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise

• US Economy Beats Expectations: Q2 GDP Revised Up.

• Core inflation rose to 2.9% in July, highest since February

• The Boss Has Had It with All the Office Activists

• TSMC to market system to manage trade secrets, its lawyer says

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Amtrak Debuts New High-Speed Acela Trains After Years of Delays

  • Amtrak's New Acela Trains Are Here. They're Moving Slower Than the Old Ones

  • With all the fuss about Intel ownership; lets have a look at the storied success of Amtrak, a previous attempt at nationalizing important national services...

• Ernst Exposes Bureaucrats Using Their Jobs for Illegal Money-Making Operations

  “Why are government employee unions fighting so hard, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, to block [DOGE] from accessing the information necessary to stop fraud and abuse? The answer is obvious. The deep state doesn’t want those meddling whiz kids at DOGE exposing the Washington corruption that’s been hiding in plain sight for way too long. Unscrupulous bureaucrats have been ripping off public assistance programs intended to help the needy, disabled, hungry, out-of-work folks, veterans, small businesses, and even children who lost a parent,” according to the Ernst DOGE Caucus report. The research cites multiple examples, including this one from the Department of Agriculture, where an anti-fraud investigator used her insider access to steal $36 million in federal food assistance benefits: “A U.S. Department of Agriculture employee who worked in the office responsible for identifying food stamp fraud, for example, was ‘selling confidential government information to the very criminals she was supposed to catch.’ She enriched herself by abusing her ‘privileged access to confidential government databases’ to enable the theft of $36 million in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds meant to help low-income families put food on the table.” In another example cited by the report, this one at the Social Security Administration (SSA), employees used fictitious children’s names to obtain illegal survivor benefits of actual dead adults.

• We’re All Going to Miss the CDC’s BDSM Scientist Who Just Quit in Disgust.

• Private Equity Snaps Up Disability Services, Challenging Regulators

• FTC chair accuses Google of treating GOP's emails as spam

  • FTC claims Gmail filtering Republican emails threatens "American freedoms"

• didn't Biden promise to do this? Trump's Plan to Reschedule Marijuana Comes with Legal Perils

• Most Trump tariffs are not legal, US appeals court rules

  • Most Trump tariffs ruled illegal in blow to White House trade policy

• Bipartisan Proposal Would Ban Stock Trading by Lawmakers

Trump

• End of US low-value package tariff exemption is permanent, Trump officials say

• Trump Nixes Patent Office, Weather Service, NASA Unions

Democrats

• A Dark Money Group Is Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers

Left Angst

• MAGA Puts Wikipedia in Its Crosshairs

  • House Republicans want to dox Wikipedia editors over 'bias' complaints

• Elon Musk's billionaire Doge lieutenant took over the US's biggest MDMA company

• The White House Apparently Ordered Federal Workers to Roll Out Grok 'ASAP'

• America's New 'Patriotic' Capitalism

• 2020 Election denier named top official for 'Election Integrity'

• Trump administration cancels $679M for offshore wind projects

• Trump Tariffs Cause Chaos on eBay as Every Hobby Becomes Logistical Minefield

• Lego Pick a Brick program no longer available in US due to Trump tariffs

• Accusing Someone of "Supporting Neo-Nazi Causes" May Be Libelous

• Dental care is increasingly under threat in the U.S.

• End of de minimis shipping could be Trump's biggest tariff of all

• AI is ummasking ICE officers. Can Washington do anything about it?

• SSA whistleblower's resignation email mysteriously disappeared from inboxes

• Pentagon Docs: US Wants to "Suppress Dissenting Arguments" Using AI Propaganda

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Minneapolis school shooter Robin Westman confessed he was 'tired of being trans'

  Transgender mass shooter Robin Westman confessed that he “was tired of being trans” and wished he “never brain-washed” himself in a manifesto posted online before he slaughtered two children and wounded 18 more at a Minneapolis church. In a twisted handwritten journal he shared on YouTube before the massacre — much of which is encrypted in a homespun code of Russian Cyrillic script and English words — Westman groaned about his long hair and his decision to transition. “I only keep [the long hair] because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself,” he wrote, according to a translation by The Post. “I can’t cut my hair now as it would be an embarrassing defeat, and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported. It just always gets in my way. I will probably chop it on the day of the attack.”

• Mystery surrounds $1.2B Army contract to build detention camp in Texa

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Microsoft Failed to Disclose Use of China-Based Engineers in U.S. Defense Work

  • Pentagon Halts Chinese Coders Affecting DoD Cloud Systems

• Texas restricts Chinese owning and renting property

• U.S. customs searches of electronic devices rise at borders

• When mailing a letter to the US becomes a global headache

• Google readying to 'hack back' as US considers moving from defense to offense

• Gun Maker Sig Sauer Citing National Security to Keep Documents from Public

• US to stop Palestinians attending UN meeting in New York

• Uncle Sam doesn't want Samsung, SK Hynix making memories in China

World

• UK sought broad access to Apple customers' data, court filing shows

• YouTube Ordered to Grant Austria Users Access to Their Data

• Egypt rounds up teenaged TikTokkers in crackdown on social media

• German Economist fined €16,100 for sarcastic X posts

• France and Germany reject Trump's threats on EU tech legislation

• Were B.C. teen's remains missed because coroner attended site virtually?

Israel

• The New Hamas Insurgency

• Microsoft terminates 2 employees after protesters breach executive office

• US soldiers could be liable for war crimes in Gaza. Will they be prosecuted?

• UN staff pressure rights chief to call Gaza a genocide, letter shows

  • UN human rights staff urge leadership to declare Israel's war in Gaza a genocide

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian Drones Are Flying over U.S. Weapons Routes in Germany, Officials Say

China

• Alibaba creates AI chip to help China fill Nvidia void

• The former NASA scientist who became China's semiconductor trump card

• Xi Prepares Meeting of Security Bloc to Rival US-Led World Order

• Xi Unleashes China's Biggest Purge of Military Leaders Since Mao

• Life Has Gotten Surreal in China.

  The Chinese people are content, the state’s propaganda organs insist, as they feed the public good news and suppress discussion of the country’s many economic and social problems. The result is a surreal environment, where public discourse is ever more detached from everyday life, and the government is ever less responsive to the concerns and difficulties of its people. At the same time, the state intrudes more and more into daily life. My wife and I have experienced this directly. Over the past year, teams of police have made regular visits to our Beijing apartment—four of them just this month. Officers check our passports and visas while recording the interaction with small video cameras. We have already provided this information to the police, as required by local regulations; these repetitive visits are likely meant simply to intimidate.

• The Myths of Chinese Exceptionalism

Health / Medicine

• Apple Health lies to you about your six months sleep average

  • If they generate real data by observing you with their products, they're not going to sell it to you; they have far more lucrative offers

• The Rabbit Hole of Health Care Admin Costs

• Potassium-rich diet may cut risk of heart failure by 24%, study suggests

• Wealthy enclave's sewage reveals higher than average cocaine levels in the water

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• A common throat infection can rewire children's brains

• CVS Holds Off on Offering Covid Vaccines in 16 States

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Why some climate policies are more popular than others: A psychologist explains

• What will happen to the legal status of sinking nations when their land is gone?

• Fake grass is greener but is it worse for the environment?

• Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low-likelihood, study finds

• When bison have room to roam, they reawaken the Yellowstone ecosystem

• Doubling CO2 to 840 ppm will increase the food supply by 40%

• Why auroras are so much brighter and more easily visible recently

• Mitsubishi-led groups to withdraw from three offshore wind projects in Japan

• British Summers Are Getting Hotter. So Are Houses

• Rats 100k acres of almond orchards across Central California are infested