2025-10-01
Worthy
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By 2012, NSA's budget for its "SIGINT Enabling Project", part of its amusingly named "Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative", had reached a quarter billion dollars per year. In its budget request, NSA wrote that this project "actively engages the US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products' designs. These design changes make the systems in question exploitable ... To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact." Specific project activities listed by NSA were to "influence policies, standards and specification for commercial public key technologies", to "shape the worldwide commercial cryptography marketplace to make it more tractable to advanced cryptanalytic capabilities being developed by NSA/CSS", etc.
etc
Horseshit
celebrity gossip
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Two Years After Cormac McCarthy's Death, Rare Access to His Personal Library
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Financier tied to Soros Fund accused of luring women to NYC ‘sex dungeon’ | Fox News
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The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel's Antichrist Obsession | WIRED
Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They've been a roadmap for the billionaire ever since.
Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or horrifying that one of the world's most powerful men is obsessing over a figure from sermons and horror movies. But the ideas and influences behind these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the world—in politics, technology, and the fate of the species. And to really grasp Thiel’s katechon-and-Antichrist schtick, you need to go back to the first major lecture of his doomsday road show—which took place on an unusually hot day in Paris in 2023. No video cameras recorded the event, and no reporters wrote about it, but I’ve been able to reconstruct it by talking to people who were there.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
Electric / Self Driving cars
Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Viral app Neon goes dark after exposing users' call recordings, and transcripts
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Reddit Mods Sued by YouTuber Ethan Klein Fight Efforts to Unmask Them
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Man lands in hospital after Samsung smart ring battery swells and traps finger
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Open Printer is an open source inkjet printer with DRM-free ink
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Disqus Turned My Blog into an Ad Farm – So I Killed It
- They have their own moderation and shadowban system too; they groom your community to the proper Leftist standards for you, without you even ever ask.
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Google's dev registration plan 'will end the F-Droid project
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Cyber attacks: '80%' of ransomware victims pay up, insurer says
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Linus Torvalds Removes the Bcachefs Code from the Linux Kernel
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'Dumbphones' are getting smarter, more costly for disillusioned consumers
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Samsung Pilots Making Its Smart Fridges Billboards After People Bought Them
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Meta's Teen Accounts Are Sugar Pills for Parents, Not Safety for Kids
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Pop Checkmail on Gmail Web to be discontinued starting Jan 2026
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Ticketmaster refusing to sell Red Sox-Yankees playoff tickets to Mass. residents
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Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It
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OpenAI's new social video app will let you deepfake your friends
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'Reading Rainbow' returns after nearly 20 years with new host
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Why Heavy Codes of Conduct Are Unnecessary for Open Source Projects
DHH condemned detailed and strict CoC like the Contributor Covenant as a “trojan horse” that should be purged from projects. ESR went even further, asserting that CoC are nothing more than a “tool for troublemakers” and that the best course of action is to delete them entirely from projects. While both individuals are often seen as controversial figures in the community, their views on this matter align closely with my own. How did the CoC, once considered a tool to foster collaboration and maintain a healthy community, become the subject of such intense controversy?
- The entire point, from the beginning, was the exclusion of people from projects for non-technical reasons. The idea that an open source project could focus on code quality as reason to accept or reject submissions was showing too many people the merits of merit based judgments; thy had to advocate prejudice and hate back into the program.
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Codes of Conduct in Open Source
If you’ve ever tried to keep a project healthy at scale, you know behavior problems are latency spikes: rare, but disruptive enough to distort the whole system. Some developers resonate with Raymond’s “minimal interface” approach because it promises constant time moderation: quick ejects, low process overhead, and a bias toward making progress. Others argue that without some structure, you simply externalize costs onto newcomers and underrepresented contributors who leave long before they can demonstrate “merit.” Survey work (2021 DEI, pdf) and reporting from industry observers have repeatedly flagged that open source participation skews heavily and that negative interactions drive people away, which is the exact failure mode most CoCs aim to address. If you strip the rhetoric, you’re choosing between two operational models for social coordination in a codebase. A minimal policy treats social friction like a rare outage and optimizes for fast mitigation. A structured policy treats social friction like a recurring reliability concern and invests in process, documentation, and clear escalation paths. Neither model is free. The question is where you want to pay and how predictable you want the outcome to be.
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Using minicom, data could be transferred character by character over the lasers at 4800 baud. At 9600 baud only garbage was transfered. I was having trouble with the relay of IP data so I dropped it down to 2400 baud. There were some bugs in the code at that time so maybe it could be bumped back up to 4800. Either way, ping time isn't pretty and connecting using SSH takes... a minute or so.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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There is no way the trillions of dollars of valuation placed on AI companies can be backed by any amount of future profit. There are good use cases for machine learning, AI, etc. But sadly, the best ones are masked by the hype-train AI junk that is either useless or incredibly expensive in comparison to the amount of money being charged for it. And hardware capabilities seem to be decelerating just as things like model training need more, for every small percentage gain. The annoying thing is, I still have no idea of this bubble will pop this year, or in five years. I thought we were at a fever pitch in 2023... and in 2024...
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AI threatens white-collar work, more young Americans choose blue-collar careers
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OpenAI Is Preparing to Launch a Social App for AI-Generated Videos
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When AI is trained for treachery, it becomes the perfect agent
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Scientists once hoarded pre-nuclear steel; now we're hoarding pre-AI content
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Larry Ellison wants the U.S. to 'unify all the national data and then feed to AI
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OpenAI has announced an Instant Checkout feature for ChatGPT.
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How Wall Street's Big Bets on A.I. Are Driving Interest in Huge Parking Lots
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Amazon and Google tip off Jensen Huang before announcing their AI chips
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AI Actress Tilly Norwood Condemned by Sag-Aftra: Tilly 'Is Not an Actor '
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket explodes during preflight test.
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New research suggests interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is the largest of its kind
3I/ATLAS clearly has a coma and a tail, signs of active outgassing. If the material it sheds isn't noticeably affecting its motion, Loeb suggests the comet's nucleus must be especially heavy. His estimate puts its mass at more than 33 billion tons,
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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How Electronic Arts' $55B go-private deal could impact the video game industry
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Swift and top global banks working on blockchain-based overhaul
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The death spiral of the American working man
Something strange is happening in America’s job market. For the first time in living memory, young men with college degrees are struggling to find work, while women with the same qualifications are thriving. What once seemed fixed — the old order of men filling the top jobs and women fighting for entry — has been flipped. And the consequences could be severe. The numbers paint a disturbing picture. Men with college degrees are now more likely to be out of work than women with the same education. To compound matters, men’s pay has barely budged since 1979, whereas women’s earnings keep climbing. More worrying still, a growing number of men are no longer looking for work at all. They have simply checked out.
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Government to shut down after midnight barring last minute breakthrough
- Isn't it weird that we haven't had weeks of shrieking from the news about how recalcitrant Democrats are going to starve babies and destroy Social Security if they don't vote for a spending bill?
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FAA is granting Boeing “limited delegation” to certify airworthiness
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If New York wants to hand out CDLs to illegal immigrants with “No Name Given,” that’s on them. The moment they cross into Oklahoma, they answer to our laws. OHP performed an enforcement action along I-40 and apprehended 125 illegal immigrants. This is keeping Oklahomans safe.
Trump
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YouTube agrees to pay Trump $24M to settle lawsuit over Jan. 6 suspension
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After gov't-shutdown meeting with Dems, Trump posts AI video mocking Dem leaders
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Trump to announce 'TrumpRx' site for discounted drugs and deal with Pfizer
Democrats
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Comey Faces Indictment, but His Real Crimes Remain Untouched
He is not being investigated for improperly disclosing his newly reopened investigative case against Hillary Clinton on the eve of the 2016 election. Nor is he being investigated for predetermining that Hillary Clinton was innocent of the charges of unlawfully transmitting confidential material before his own FBI investigation was complete—and before Comey’s FBI had even interviewed her.
He is not being investigated for tasking Peter Strzok to alter his own original condemnation of Clinton’s conduct by replacing the initial and correct term “gross negligence,” a phrase that denotes a federal crime, with “extreme carelessness,” which involves no criminal liability.
He is not being investigated for, nor charged with, birthing the entire governmental role in the Russian collusion hoax that warped the 2016 presidential election and transition by his use of the discredited Christopher Steele as an FBI confidant/source.
He is not being investigated for using the fraudulent Steele dossier as a “central and essential” document to obtain a FISA court writ to improperly surveil Carter Page—an act that even he later admitted was wrong.
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How a Government Agency You've Never Heard of Censored Everyday Americans
The agency had received an email from the Washington secretary of state's communications director, Kylee Zabel, flagging the post as "potential misinformation." CISA had solicited such communication, and within 20 minutes, the agency had forwarded the complaint to Twitter. By 8 a.m. the next day, Twitter had taken the tweet down. The incident, which has not been previously reported, is one of the many examples of government jawboning discussed in a new report on CISA by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
As early as 2018, the report reveals, CISA was holding meetings with social media companies about alleged misinformation—both foreign and domestic—on their platforms. And in 2020, CISA directed state election officials to report false or misleading posts to the agency so that it could forward those reports to social media companies, a practice known as switchboarding. CISA never identified a statutory basis for these practices, according to the report. The most forthright defense of the agency's actions came from former CISA director Jen Easterly, who said in 2021 that "the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure."
"Our report shows that the Biden administration used CISA to strong arm social media companies into taking action against speech protected by the First Amendment," said Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), the chairman of the Senate commerce committee, who this month blasted the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, for threatening to revoke ABC's broadcast license over the comments Jimmy Kimmel made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. "For the past decade, I've led the fight against government censorship, whether it's CISA or the FCC or the Biden White House. Inevitably, these tactics have been and will be disproportionately used to silence conservatives." The report shows how the Biden administration used the levers of federal power to stifle dissent—without a murmur of concern from political allies.
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DHS flagged 19 Americans to Transportation Security Administration watchlists between Sept. 30, 2021, and Oct. 25, 2021, more than half of whom received the most severe no-fly designation and were prevented from boarding domestic flights as a result. At least 11 of those Americans were kept on the watchlists until April 2022, when a federal court ruling forced the Biden administration to end its mask mandate.
Left Angst
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Garry Kasparov: The Fraught Role of the Military in a Weakening Democracy
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Trump visa curbs push US firms to consider shifting more work to India
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Trump Administration Opens New Front to Strip Harvard of Federal Funding
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Politicians and Pundits Embrace Demonization
We are seeing the result of rage rhetoric all around us. That includes the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the sniper attack on ICE agents in Texas this week, in addition to violent protests around the country. Rage allows you to deny the humanity of those you disagree with. Recently, two sisters were caught on video destroying a memorial to Kirk. Kerri and Kaylee Rollo were later arrested. However, they immediately opened a GoFundMe site to call for donations for “fighting fascism” and Kaylee wrote “my sibling was fired from their job.” Hundreds of donors gave the sisters thousands of dollars as a reward for the latest such attack on a Kirk memorial.
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US set for largest mass resignation in history as Trump continues deep cuts
The Trump administration is set to oversee the largest mass resignation in US history on Tuesday, with more than 100,000 federal workers set to formally quit as part of the latest wave of its deferred resignation program.
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Hundreds of Iranians held on US immigration charges will be deported to Iran
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Senators try to halt shuttle move, saying "little evidence" of public demand
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Trump Makes It Clear They Will Turn TikTok into a Right Wing Propaganda Machine
- the Left has "safe spaces", the right has "echo chambers", and only the latter is bad.
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Trump defends use of the U.S. military against the 'enemy within'
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Donald Trump says US cities should be used as military 'training grounds'
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Leonardo DiCaprio’s ‘One Battle After Another’: An Antifa Rally Cry for a Mad America
Impeccably crafted and intensely timely, Anderson’s action-oriented drama is a propulsive and visceral tale of revolution, family, and the means by which autocracies attempt to corrupt from within, energized by a frantic Leonardo DiCaprio and a sadistic Sean Penn. As with his stoner detective odyssey, the auteur’s latest, in theaters Sept. 26, is heavier on commotion than character, “craziness” than outright comedy. However, electrified by virtuoso filmmaking, its enraged message comes through loud and clear.
Bob and Perfidia are a couple dedicated to attacking the “imperialist state of this fascist regime,” and during their siege of an immigrant detention center to free inmates, Perfidia neutralizes Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) by making him stimulate an erection before zip-tying his hands and stealing his hat, stating on her way out that this is “a declaration of war.”
Box office experts are mixed on what to make of those initial results. A low $20 million debut is disappointing for a film that cost above $130 million to produce and another $70 million to market. And “One Battle After Another” certainly requires a huge turnout — roughly $300 million globally — to break even theatrically.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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“This administration has done a great deal from day one to remove the social justice, politically correct, and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department, to rip out the politics,” Hegseth said. “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction, or gender delusions, no more debris, said before, and we'll say again, we are done with that sh*t.”
World
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South Korea raises cyber threat level after datacentre fire – hacking fears
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The UK constitution is more vulnerable than the US constitution
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Taliban shuts down internet across Afghanistan in latest crackdown
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At E.U. airports, passport stamps are out and fingerprint scans are in
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(Jan 2025) Tony Blair: Bring in digital IDs to get tough on populism
Blair says the public mood has changed since he tried to introduce physical ID cards in 2006 — a plan that was later shelved by the coalition government following a backlash from civil liberties campaigners. “There will be a big debate coming down the line — and this is the political argument people should have — which is: how much privacy are you prepared to trade for efficiency? That’s the real question around technology and public services. My view is that people are actually prepared to trade quite a lot.”
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Afghan women lose their 'last hope' as Taliban shuts down internet
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Australian journalist arrested in Thailand at Malaysia's request
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
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Alert issued after common spice found contaminated with radiation at Calif. port
In a news release, the FDA said U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the Port of Long Beach detected Cesium-137 in a shipping container earlier this month. The agency said follow-up testing confirmed the isotope’s presence in one sample of cloves. The FDA said the contaminated products were detected at the ports before being sent to stores. “No product that has tested positive or alerted for Cs-137 has entered U.S. commerce,” the agency said. The levels of the contaminant detected in the spice were not high enough to officially trigger a safety concern
- just like the "radioactive shrimp". They do not appear, to me, to have any legal basis for seizing shipments that do not actually violate any rules, but generating scary headlines is more important than following laws...
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- the "Low/No Fat" diet craze was an effort to reduce human intelligence. They knew.
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Not so sweet: Some sugar substitutes linked to faster cognitive decline
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Ketamine deaths have increased 20-fold since 2015 with mixing drugs on the rise, UK analysis finds.
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What researchers suspect may be fueling cancer among millennials
he trend began with younger members of Generation X but is now most visible among millennials, who are being diagnosed in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s — decades earlier than past generations. Medications taken during pregnancy, the spread of ultra-processed foods, disruptions to circadian rhythms — caused by late-night work, global travel and omnipresent screens — and the proliferation of synthetic chemicals are all under scrutiny.
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Microplastics Could Be Weakening Your Bones, Research Suggests
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As Floods Worsen, Pakistan Is the Epicenter of Climate Change
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First mushroom-powered toilet could replace stinky porta-potties
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Arctic sea ice extent has remained steady for almost 2 decades
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Replacing forests with solar a net positive, but neighbors bear the burden
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Scientists unlock secret to Venus flytrap's hair-trigger response
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It's a start: 400 feet of coastal bluff in California plummets toward the ocean