2025-09-28

etc

• Why Did Car Manufacturers Switch from Generators to Alternators?

Horseshit

• At 66, I Decided to Pay Back a Lifetime of Sleep Debt

• AI analysis finds £71,000 painting dismissed as copy is a Caravaggio

• A 75-year-old powerlifter headed to the world championships

• Perplexing diamonds from South Africa mine contain 'almost impossible' chemistry

• Human Head Transplants: Where Science Stands and Why Ethics Are So Complicated

• What would Thomas Malthus think of today’s antinatalism and pronatalism?

• More parents are choosing 'one and done.'

• The male inequality problem is getting worse

• Polish climber makes history skiing down Everest without bottled oxygen

• Bananas? Taiwan entrepreneur wants to make clothes out of plant material

celebrity gossip

• Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon among names in new Epstein documents

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say

• How to recognize and tame your cognitive distortions

Musk

• SpaceX Seeks Approval for 15,000 Satellites to Use MSS Spectrum

• Tesla Is Urging Drowsy Drivers to Use 'Full Self-Driving'. That Could Go Wrong

• Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

• SpaceX Dragon huffs, puffs and fizzles out as NASA aborts ISS boost

  Following a successful demonstration on September 3, NASA and SpaceX were trying for a 19-minute, 22-second burn using the Draco thrusters located in the trunk of SpaceX's CRS-33 Dragon cargo spacecraft. However, at three minutes and 45 seconds, controllers saw something they didn't like and commanded a manual abort.

• Xiaomi bought 3 Tesla Model Y and ripped them apart to see what they could learn

Electric / Self Driving cars

• China won the electric car race. Up next: freight trucks

• The Fastest-Selling Cars in America Are Used EVs

• Used EVs have never been cheaper. But are they a good deal?

• When this EV maker collapsed, its customers became the car company

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The myth of the Jewish high IQ

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• 'Our Educational System Failed': U.S. Employers Grapple with Unprepared Workers

• The End of Credentialism? - Cremieux Recueil

  Credentialism, like so much rot, has precedent in academia. Consider peer review. Peer review ostensibly improves the credibility of scientific works and helps to prevent fraud while keeping the standards of published research in different fields appropriately high. But it does no such thing; it amounts to little more than an expensive attempt to make the status and opinions of academics sacrosanct.

• America's Elite Colleges Breed High-Status Careers–and Misery

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• LG's $1,800 TV for seniors makes misguided assumptions

• Wikipedia Can Save the Internet with Advertising

• Harrods says customers' data stolen in IT breach

• Kido nursery hackers threaten to publish more children's profiles

• The Amazon Kindle War Against Piracy

• Samsung now owns Denon, Bowers and Wilkins, Marantz, Polk, and more audio brands

• Hollow Knight: Silksong Achievement Hints at a Much Bigger Game

• iPhone 17 chip becomes the fastest single-core CPU in the world on PassMark

• People use dating apps for more than just love or hookups, study finds

• TV's USB port has hidden superpowers

• Reports: EA set to be sold to private investors for up to $50B

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• pairs not taken

  So we all know about twisted-pair ethernet, huh? I get a little frustrated with a lot of histories of the topic, like the recent neil breen wserial port video, because they often fail to address some obvious questions about the origin of twisted-pair network cabling. Well, I will fail to answer these as well, because the reality is that these answers have proven very difficult to track down.

• NixOS moderation team resigns in protest of Steering Committee interference

• Eric S. Raymond to the OSS community on codes of conduct: Refuse to have one

  After ten years of drama and idiocy, lots of people other than me are now willing to say in public that "Codes of Conduct" have been a disaster - a kind of infectious social insanity producing lots of drama and politics and backbiting, and negative useful work.

  • They would agree if it hadn't been him saying it: HN comments

• Words Can Hurt: A Plea to the Ruby Community

  Needless to say I agree with David that an argument or disagreement can never serve as an excuse for physical violence. But I cannot agree that words cannot be violent, they can, and unfortunately violent speech is becoming more and more present in public discourse.

• Enthusiasts bond twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up record: 668kbps

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI investment bubble inflated by trio of dilemmas

• Anthropic to triple international workforce in global AI push

• Why AI systems may never be secure, and what to do about it

• OpenAI Needs a Trillion Dollars in the Next Four Years

• Ed Zitron is mad as hell

• AI Investment Is Starting to Look Like a Slush Fund

• Walmart CEO Issues Wake-Up Call: 'AI Is Going to Change Every Job'

• When "no" means "yes": Why AI chatbots can't process Persian social etiquette

• Alibaba unveils $53B global AI plan – but it will need GPUs to back it up

• Morgan Stanley warns AI could sink 42-year-old software giant

• OpenAI's historic week has redefined the AI arms race for investors

• How Badly Is AI Cutting Early-Career Employment?

• AI bubble is the only thing keeping the US economy together, Deutsche Bank warns

  • The grifter economy, perhaps. Real people are building and setting up factories and hiring people to make real things, as far as I see.

• AI Needs a Lot of Computing Power. Is a Market for 'Compute' the Next Big Thing?

• U.S. Military Struggling to Deploy AI Weapons

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• A tiny Apollo 17 moon rock is unlocking a secret lunar history

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme

• Whither The Chip Shortage?

• Americans Are Using PTO to Sleep, Not for Vacation–Report

• UK government underwriting £1.5B loan to Jaguar Land Rover after cyber-attack

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Murdoch's TikTok? Trump offers allies another lever of media control

  • Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become "100% MAGA"

• Texas, New York locked in legal dispute over abortion pill

Trump

• Trump Orders US Troops to Portland, Authorizes 'Full Force'

  • Troops to takeover 'war ravaged' city to handle 'domestic terrorists'

• Justice Department Seeks Information on Georgia D.A. Who Prosecuted Trump

Left Angst

• The US National Parks Up Are Being Setup to Fail

• Supreme Court allows Trump officials to freeze billions in foreign aid

• The left is waging a sustained domestic-terror campaign against the Trump presidency.

• NPR asks judge to stop CPB from taking money for satellite system away from NPR

• Making Capitalism Bad Again

  It’s common in the US for right-wingers to use the term ‘liberal’ to refer to anyone with any vague tendency towards anything that could be considered leftist, from hardcore Marxists who call for the overthrow of capitalism, to softcore entrepreneurs who call for gender-neutral bathrooms. Actual liberalism, however, is a philosophy with multiple sides, because it originally just referred to a belief in the priority of the individual over the collective - otherwise known as ‘individual rights’ - along with an appeal to enlightened rationality.

• Justice Clarence Thomas says legal precedents are not 'the gospel'

• Bernie Sanders demands Nexstar air Jimmy Kimmel while denouncing 'political pressure' on TV stations

• Laid-Off Tech Workers Say H-1B Crackdown Won't Help Them Get a Job

• Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism “Indicators”

  With the mainstream media distracted by the made-for-TV drama of James Comey’s indictment, Trump has signed a little-noticed national security directive identifying “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” views as indicators of radical left violence. Called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, it’s being referred to as “NSPM-7” by administration insiders. To the extent that the major media noticed the directive at all, they (even C-SPAN!) incorrectly labeled it an “executive order,” like this week’s designation of “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization. NSPM-7 directs a new national strategy to “disrupt” any individual or groups “that foment political violence,” including “before they result in violent political acts.” In other words, they’re targeting pre-crime, to reference Minority Report.

  • When the crimes were "pro-life" protests; they were just fine with this...

• Ian Roberts: Superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa detained by ICE, district says | CNN

• The Tax on Being a Girl

• Meta Is Removing Abortion Advocates' Accounts Without Warning

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Interpol Says 260 Suspects in Online Romance Scams Have Been Arrested in Africa

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• FAQ for Senior Military Officers at Hegseth's Quantico Meeting

• Pentagon can call DJI a Chinese Military Company, court rules

• US War Department weighs possible strikes in Venezuela

• US to retire its only icebreaker, stranding polar research

World

• How HR took over British business and got in the way of actual work

• Americans traveling to Europe will have fingerprints scanned under new rule

• Germany's Helsing unveils 'Europa' combat drone

• Drones seen over Danish military bases in latest air disruption

• UK Households hit with higher bills that sees wind farms paid to turn off power

• Explosive battery blaze in South Korea 'paralyzes' vital government services

Israel

• Israel's Ecocide in Gaza

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• The 'hybrid war' Europe faces is a gift for Putin

• Police break up ring trafficking Kenyans to fight for Russia in Ukraine

• Why Ukraine is winning the war

China

• China completes monumental task using declassified US documents

• A cut-throat price war at home could kill off many of China's EV brands

• Chinese hackers breach US software and law firms amid trade fight, experts say

Health / Medicine

• After shrimp recalls, the FDA finds radioactive contamination in spices

• Get Ready for Higher Health Insurance Premiums Next Year

• The Spinal Surgeries That Didn't Need to Happen

• Mediterranean diet leads to 75% symptom reduction in patients with mild to moderate psoriasis.

  A new study has found that following a Mediterranean diet—rich in plant-based foods, extra-virgin olive oil, and a moderate amount of fish, and poultry—could provide relief to psoriasis symptoms. In a randomized clinical trial involving 38 adults with mild to moderate psoriasis, nearly half of the participants who followed the Mediterranean diet for 16 weeks experienced at least a 75% improvement in their symptoms, whereas no such effect was observed in the control group. Previous studies have often linked improvement in psoriasis to significant weight loss alone. The researchers of this study suggest a different mechanism at work. The beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet appear to stem from its inherent anti-inflammatory and cardiometabolic properties. These properties may directly target the biological processes that drive psoriasis symptoms, rather than relying solely on calorie restriction.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Four vaccines linked to a lower risk of dementia

• Ebola outbreak in DR Congo rages, with 61% death rate and funding running dry

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Copenhagen gave cyclists a green wave

• Kitchen Is Full of Microplastics

• You can be exposed to PFAS through food, water, even swimming in lakes

• Unprecedented role of Amazon fires in the record atmospheric CO₂ growth in 2024

• Was This 18,000-Year-Old Siberian Puppy a Dog or a Wolf?

• Meat is a leading emissions source–but few outlets report on it, analysis finds

  • Nope, never heard "mat is bad" from the media...

• aka "farming"? Provisions from pond water? Researchers use biomanufacturing to produce food

• £500M Thames Water desalination plant has provided seven days' water in 15 years