2025-09-02
Horseshit
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Stunning Discovery Deep in the Ocean Dwarfs the Famous 'Lost City'
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Mystery hominin skull discovered in 1960 dated to at least 286,000 years old
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Burning Man festival death investigated as homicide
A murder investigation has been launched at the Burning Man festival in the US state of Nevada after a man was found "lying in a pool of blood" on Saturday night, police say. A festival-goer stopped a police officer at around 21:14 (04:14 GMT) to alert him about the incident and the man was found "lying on the ground, obviously deceased" at a campsite, Nevada's Pershing County Sheriff's office said. The body was discovered as the Man - a towering structure which lends the festival its name - was beginning to burn. The victim's identity is not known. Burning Man Project said it was co-operating with law enforcement and urged those at the festival not to interfere with the investigation.
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I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption
that the Berkeley Lab report includes the effects of water evaporation from hydroelectric dam reservoirs in their water use calculations. Does it make sense to include this water evaporation in the share of water consumed by data centers? I think it’s debatable. On the one hand, a huge dam reservoir does increase the level of water evaporation relative to an undammed river by increasing the amount of water surface area. On the other hand, some of this loss will be offset by the fact that dams make more fresh water available for use by storing excess in rainy seasons for use in drier seasons (this was part of the rationale for constructing several of the huge dams on the Colorado River, such as the Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams). And a dam that creates a reservoir as a supply of fresh water will have evaporation whether or not it generates electric power.
If you simply take the Berkeley estimates directly, you get around 628 million gallons of water consumption per day for data centers, much higher than the 66-67 million gallons per day I originally stated. However, the methods used to produce these estimates are debatable, and seem to have been chosen to give the maximum possible value for data center water consumption. If you exclude the water “consumed” by hydroelectric plants via reservoir evaporation, you get something closer to perhaps 275 million gallons per day.
celebrity gossip
Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore'
Intel has patented a technology it calls 'Software Defined Supercore' (SDC) that enables software to fuse the capabilities of multiple cores to assemble a virtual ultra-wide 'supercore' capable of improving single-thread performance, provided that it has enough parallel work. If the technology works as it is designed to, then Intel's future CPUs could offer an single-thread performance in select applications that can use SDC. For now this is just a patent which may, or may not become a reality.
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The Return of the OG: Chinese Firm Wants to Androidify the BlackBerry Classic
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According to their competition: Substack just killed the creator economy
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Hackers demand Google fire 2 staff and halt probes, or they will leak databases
The post claiming to be from a hacking group called on the tech giant to fire Austin Larsen and Charles Carmakal, while also suspending Google Threat Intelligence Group investigations into the network. The group is claimed to be a network of hackers made up of members from other hacker communities, consisting of Scattered Spider, LapSus, and ShinyHunters. The group has branded itself Scattered LapSus Hunters in reference to this.
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Blogging service TypePad is shutting down and taking all blog content with it
TypePad announced that the service would be shutting down on September 30 and that everything hosted on it would also be going away on that date. That gives current and former users just over a month to export anything they want to save. TypePad had previously removed the ability to create new accounts at some point in 2020. It gave no specific rationale for the shutdown beyond calling it a "difficult decision." As recently as March of this year, TypePad representatives were telling users there were "no plans" to shut down the service.
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Apple Demands Suppliers Switch to Robotics for Manufacturing
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Liquid Cooling Exhibits at Hot Chips 2025
While liquid cooling hardware displayed at Hot Chips 2025 was very focused on the enterprise side and cooling AI-related chips, I hope some techniques will trickle down to consumer hardware in the years to come. Hotspotting is definitely an issue that spans consumer and enterprise segments. And zooming up, I would love a solution that lets me pre-heat water with my computer, and use less energy at the water heater.
- I think we're about to see the deployment of compressed refrigerants into this space. These power levels the heat pump takes up much more area as the compute. We need bigger levers, further away.
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Collective Shout Seeks Removal of Games, "Even When They Are Not Illegal"
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Why Did a $10B Startup Let Me Vibe-Code for Them–and Why Did I Love It?
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you can never go back | the singularity is nearer
To every fool preaching the end of history, evolution spits in your face. To every fool preaching the world government AI singleton, evolution spits in your face. I knew these things intellectually, but viscerally it’s just hard to live through. The world feels so small and I feel like I’m being stared at by the Eye of Sauron.
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AI Tool Flags Predatory Journals, Building a Firewall for Science
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Cutting-Edge AI Was Supposed to Get Cheaper. It's More Expensive
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ChatGPT fed a man's delusion his mother was spying on him. Then he killed her
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Builder.ai went from a value of $1.5B to zero in a few months
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Every AI system embeds someone's values, enforces someone's definition of normal, and amplifies someone's biases - all while its creators genuinely believe they've built something objective. The question isn't whether this is happening. It's whose values are winning. You're caught on both sides. When you deploy an AI system - whether you built it or just call an API - its biases become your business decisions. A hiring tool's discrimination becomes your discrimination. A chatbot's worldview becomes your company's voice. But when you apply for a job, a loan, or insurance, you're on the receiving end of someone else's embedded values. The AI Act makes companies liable for discriminatory outcomes, but that's cold comfort when you're the one being sorted into the wrong category by someone else's definition of normal.
What should keep your legal team up at night: When political winds shift - and they always do - companies that built "anti-DEI" policies will have created perfect evidence of intentional bias. You'll have to explain to a jury why your 90% male team in a 50% female world was "purely merit-based." The discovery process will be brutal. Every email dismissing diversity concerns. Every dataset showing demographic skews. Every AI model trained on your biased hiring data. All evidence that you knew and chose hierarchy anyway. Imagine explaining to a jury in 2030 why your 2025 'merit-based' hiring produced 80% male teams.
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OpenAI plans India data center with at least 1 gigawatt capacity
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AI policy allowed LLMs to argue "Black people are dumber than white people"
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Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war. This internal document reveals why
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Anguilla: The Caribbean island making millions from the AI boom
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
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Rudy Giuliani Injured in Crash After Assisting Crime Victim – PJ Media
Ragusa’s full statement explained the details surrounding the crash: “On the evening of August 30, 2025, in New Hampshire, Mayor Giuliani was involved in a motor vehicle accident. Prior to the incident, he was flagged down by a woman who was the victim of a domestic violence incident. Mayor Giuliani immediately rendered assistance and contacted 911. He remained on scene until responding officers arrived to ensure her safety.”
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Trump says he’s awarding former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani the Presidential Medal of Freedom
Left Angst
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1.2 million immigrants are gone from the US labor force, data shows
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We were assured the American economy was going to be nothing but a smoking crater by now because of tariffs: Lego Will No Longer Ship Individual Pieces Thanks to Trump Tariffs
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We Ran the CDC: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American's Health
We are worried about the wide-ranging impact that all these decisions will have on America's health security. Residents of rural communities and people with disabilities will have even more limited access to health care. Families with low incomes who rely most heavily on community health clinics and support from state and local health departments will have fewer resources available to them. Children risk losing access to lifesaving vaccines because of the cost. This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings.
- "Obamacare" destroyed rural access to healthcare, and made it too expensive for the poor even where available. "Vaccines" are no longer the life saving, disease preventing preventative treatments they once were; and ensuring that all children have been given "vaccines" under the new definition of the term is not a goal I can support. Characterizing the COVID vaccines as "highly safe and effective" marks this as a catechism of the faithful, not an earnest attempt to persuade the neutral.
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CDC spiraled into chaos this week. Here’s where things stand.
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Trump's Commerce Secretary Loves Tariffs. His Bank Is Taking Bets Against Them
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Trump saying 600k Chinese students could come to the US draws MAGA backlash
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Trump Orders Have Stripped Nearly Half a Million Federal Workers of Union Rights
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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His search for the Titanic concealed a top-secret military operation
The experience, along with the need for live imagery, convinced Ballard that remotely operated underwater vehicles that could stream video back to the exploration vessel were a better way forward, but he struggled to find funding for his vision. Ultimately, the US Navy supported the development of Ballard’s technology, a deep-sea imaging system nicknamed the Argo. The Navy was interested in using it to determine why two nuclear submarines, the USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion, had sunk in the Atlantic in the 1960s, as well as for broader Cold War intelligence-gathering purposes. Ballard convinced Navy officials to build in some time to search for the Titanic during the expedition to survey the submarines, a ploy that ultimately acted as a cover story for the Navy’s secret mission. “What people didn’t know at the time, at least a lot of the people, was that the Titanic (search) was cover for a top-secret military operation I was doing as a naval intelligence officer,” Ballard said. “We didn’t want the Soviets to know where the submarine was.”
World
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More than 800 dead after powerful earthquake rocks Afghanistan
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Austria's privacy watchdog tells YouTube to give users access to their data
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UK age check law causing up to 2x times traffic to porn sites that ignored it
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'Scan your face' laws for the web are having unexpected consequences
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What's in the Suitcase: Extra-Strength Cannabis from California to Britain