2025-09-07

Horseshit

• Pros and Cons of Van Life

• We Hacked Burger King: How Auth Bypass Led to Drive-Thru Audio Surveillance

  • Used to be they used common GMRS frequencies and anyone could listen in with a scanner or "camping radio".. Don't recall any actual vulnerability ever being found. Who cares if you wanted fries with that?

• A hidden simplicity behind how people move: geography's role in relocation

• New Tech Can Change a City. New York Learned That the Hard Way with Uber

• Game theory shows that it often makes sense for judges to rule at random

• Stressed-Out Adults Are Turning to Adult Pacifiers

• Pocket Scion is a synth you play with plants

• Is the decline of writing making journalism dumber?

• How to study people who are drunk

celebrity gossip

• John Paulson Found in Epstein's 'Black Book'–Thomas Massie

  Republican Representative Thomas Massie has said billionaire John Paulson, a major donor to President Donald Trump's campaign, was in Jeffrey Epstein's "black book." Paulson was previously named as someone in Epstein's "little black book," a contact book that was seized during investigations. Massie has raised the issue amid the backlash plaguing the Trump administration over its handling of files related to Epstein's case.

• Zuckerberg Caught in Revealing Hot Mic Moment During White House Dinner

  • Zuckerberg on hot mic telling Trump he wasn't sure how much to spend on AI

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• What is Blueskyism?

  Demographics alone only go so far in explaining Blueskyism, however. It’s not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.

  Although Bluesky isn’t very influential today, what I call Blueskyism has a longer history — and predates the platform. It once had a lot of purchase on Twitter at a moment when Twitter was more influential than it is now and often served as the “assignment editor” for the mainstream media. Blueskyism’s peak actually came before Bluesky was a thing, in roughly 2019/2020. (You’ll notice that Blueskyists often have a lot of nostalgia for this period, the one and perhaps only time when they improbably became the prom king.) This timing coincided with the 2020 presidential primary, when there was a huge gap between the most prominent voices on Twitter and those of the actual Democratic base. The ultimate result was the rejection of various more “online” and left-wing candidates for the stodgy and more centrist Joe Biden, but choices made during period continued to cast a shadow on the 2024 campaign, particularly after Harris’s statements during that period were scrutinized once she took over for Biden. However, this isn’t the standard claim that Democrats should move to the center. I think the preponderance of evidence suggests that moderation wins more often than not, but it’s complicated, and there can be exceptions. What really matters in elections is simply being popular and winning over new converts. Blueskyism, with its intolerance for dissent, is the opposite of that.

• Study: Hashtags and humour are used to spread extreme content on social media

Musk

• Tesla Wants Out of the Car Business

• Musk's $1T pay package is full of watered-down takes on his own broken promises

  • Tesla offers pay package to CEO Elon Musk that could be worth up to $1T

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Qualcomm teams up with BMW for hands-free driving

• Waymo Is Coming to Denver and Seattle to Play in the Rain and Snow

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Humanoid robots were a sci-fi dream. Suddenly they're everywhere

• Boston Dynamics' robot dog Spot can now do backflips

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Scientific objectivity is a myth – culture and beliefs always influence science

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Silksong brings Steam to its knees,attracts more day1 players than BF6 open beta

• Google's plan to restrict sideloading on Android has a potential escape hatch

• Root cause for why Windows 11 is breaking or corrupting SSDs may have been found

• Silicon Valley's most powerful alliance just got stronger

• Google's Legal Problems Aren't Over. Here Are 3 Overlooked Antitrust Risks

• Spyware takes webcam pics of users watching porn

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Anthropic Agrees to Pay at Least $1.5B in Landmark Copyright Settlement

• Apple sued by authors over use of books in AI training

• Warner Bros Discovery sues Midjourney for generating copies of its characters

• Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

• Why Language Models Hallucinate

• OpenAI reorg at risk as Attorneys General push AI safety

• Popular chatbots are amplifying more misinformation, study finds

• OpenAI Says It Will Burn $115B Through 2029, $80B Higher Expected

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• (2016) Orientation of the Earth, Sun and Solar System in the Milky Way

Crypto con games

• Intel's Bitcoin-mining Blockscale chips return from the dead, given away free

  Remember Intel’s run at Bitcoin mining? In the span of a year that saw monkey JPEGs selling for six figures and Ethereum setting fire to GPUs, Intel quietly entered and exited the blockchain game. Its Blockcsale chips promised a clean, power-efficient future for Bitcoin mining. Then they vanished. Now, those same chips are back. On September 2, nonprofit hardware collective 256 Foundation tweeted that it had received a delivery of 256,000 Intel BZM2 ASICs from Proto, the mining arm of Jack Dorsey’s Block, Inc., which previously pledged to offload leftover chips from its partnership with Intel. Distribution is limited to four open-source hardware projects in the U.S., each receiving 54,000 chips.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Why Are More Millionaires Renting?

• US jobs market weakens further in August

• Stock buybacks are stock swindles

• Broadcom stock soars with AI chips as 'leading alternative' to Nvidia

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas

• Senate seeks to rein in stock tokenization in latest crypto bill draft

• Postal traffic to US sank 80% after low-value parcels exemption ended

Trump

• Trump admin ditches plan to make airlines pay compensation for flight disruption

• Trump threatens new tariffs over EU's $3.5B antitrust fine against Google

• Trump may block US IT outsourcing to India

Left Angst

• Two Valuable Satellites Are in 'Perfect Health.' They May Be Scrapped

  • GOP may succeed in unrelenting quest to kill two NASA climate satellites

• AI and the Rise of Techno-Fascism in the United States

• At least 475 workers detained in major ICE raid at US Hyundai factory

  • Raid at Georgia battery plant points to conflicts in Trump's growth plans

• The Atlantic has some updates on reality for us today:

  • America Surrenders in the Global Information Wars - The Atlantic

  Right now, all of America’s foreign broadcasters, which also include Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and a handful of others, are in grave danger. At the end of February, President Donald Trump appointed Kari Lake as senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees them. Lake is an ideologue and former local-TV anchor who failed to be elected governor of Arizona, and then failed to be elected as a senator from Arizona. With no experience in international broadcasting or foreign policy, she put the entire staff of VOA on administrative leave and announced plans to cut the funding of all of the organizations under the USAGM umbrella; she did so with venomous relish, hypocritically accusing chronically underfunded broadcasters of wastefulness, tarring journalists as foreign agents. She began firing contract employees, in some cases giving visa holders who had worked for years on behalf of the U.S. government 30 days to leave the country. All of the organizations contend that Lake’s actions are illegal, and all of them are now engaged in extensive lawsuits, even as they are already cutting budgets, programs, and journalists.

  • official State Propaganda is "Free Speech"...

• The Mass Shooters Are Performing for One Another - The Atlantic

  As incoherent, unhinged, or even cringey as the Minneapolis shooter’s videos might seem, they are part of a familiar template of terroristic behavior—one that continues to spread in online communities dedicated to mass shootings and other forms of brutality. In these morbid spaces, killers are viewed as martyrs, and they’re dubbed “saints.” Really, they’re influencers. These disaffected communities live on social networks, message boards, and private Discords. They are populated by trolls, gore addicts, and, of course, aspiring shooters, who study, debate, and praise mass-shooting tactics and manifestos. Frequently, these groups adopt the aesthetics of neo-Nazis and white supremacists—sometimes because they are earnestly neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and sometimes because it’s the look and language that they’re cribbing from elsewhere.

  • all the trans shooters have been White Supremacist Nazis!

  • I aint bothering to read more from them today: Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children

• How to Blow Up a Planet

• GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work

• Tylenol-maker shares hit after report RFK Jr will suggest autism link

  • The reaction to this is fun: it feels like this has been "everybody knows we don't talk about this" and now the uncivilized rightist wreckers are saying the quiet part out loud.

  • Upcoming HHS report will link autism to common pain reliever, folate deficiency

• China Gets More Airtime Around the World as Voice of America Signs Off

• Defense Department Scrambles to Pretend It’s Called the War Department

• When the Threat Is Inside the White House

• Under Trump, the Federal Trade Commission is abandoning its ban on noncompetes

• "Let's Go Brandon" U.S. Open Orders Broadcasters to Censor Reactions to Trump

• 'Unhinged and Anti-American': Critics Erupt over Trump's AI-Generated Threat

• FCC plans to kill Wi-Fi on school buses, hotspots for library patrons

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• FCC taking steps that would allow prisons to jam cellphone signals

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• F-35s Deploying to Caribbean Amid Growing Tensions with Venezuela

• Rand Paul Slams Trump For Unilateral Strike On Suspected Drug Vessel: 'Where Does It End?'

World

• The sunscreen scandal shocking Australia - the world's skin cancer capital

• Intrigue on the Slopes of Bardonecchia

• Last pub in UK will call time in 2050 at today's closure rates

• Britain Moves to Ban Sale of Energy Drinks to Children Under 16

• Princeton Consumer Research lab tested eight sunscreens that failed SPF claims

• Japan's Prince Hisahito is the first male royal to reach adulthood in 40 years

• Microsoft confirms multiple subsea fiber cuts in the Red Sea

Israel

• I filmed what it takes to make a family meal in Gaza

• AP reporting calls into question why and how Israel attacked a Gaza hospital

• More than 7k under-fives in Gaza put in malnutrition recovery in two-week period

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia targets WhatsApp and pushes new 'super-app' as internet blackouts grow

  • Russia lists local apps that will survive its internet blackouts

• Surzhyk: Ukrainians are increasingly speaking a hybrid language

• It is a war of drones now: the evolving tech dominating the frontline in Ukraine

China

• What Xi hosting Modi and Putin reveals about China's plans for a new world orde

• China's carmakers are heading for a crash

  • Why China Is Trying to Tame Its Electric Car Frenzy

• Chinese Regulators May Ban Hidden, Pop-Out Door Handles

• China battles mosquito-borne virus with Covid-era methods, U.S. travel warning

Health / Medicine

• Do Hangover Supplements Work?

• How Often Do Health Insurers Say No to Patients? No One Knows

• Less pressure than a drinking fountain, should be the limit. Save the firehose for advanced play. Bidet Toilet Use May Cause Anal Symptoms and Nosocomial Infection

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Gates-Backed Study: Flu Shots Linked to 27% Higher Heart Injury Risk

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• New Study: 'CO2 Does Not Precede Temperature, nor Does It Control Temperature'

• The Doctor Fighting Medicine's Addiction to Plastic Waste

• The high cost of reusing plastics

• A Constructed Closure of the Bering Strait Can Prevent an AMOC Tipping

• Big honking mountains got nothing to do with it... Climate models: human activity may lock the Southwest into permanent drought

• Chemical pollution a threat comparable to climate change, scientists warn

• A California seashore says goodbye to dairy farms – and hopes to heal

• Ghost sharks grow forehead teeth to help them have sex

• To fight hail damage, Alberta insurers take to the skies

• A 'Roomba for the forest' could be SoCal's next wildfire weapon