2025-10-02

etc

• Thank you for being annoying

  According to the cybernetic theory of psychology, the mind is a stack of control systems all trying to keep things copacetic. In this model, happiness comes not from the absence of error in these systems, but from the correction of error. That is, happiness isn’t a full belly, it’s a belly that’s being filled. So if you wanna feel good, you gotta let things get at least a little out of whack so you can whack them back into place again. The whacking is, in fact, the fun part. This is why rich folks do extreme sports, why childless retirees spend their days on make-work projects of pretend importance, and why lottery winners very rarely quit their jobs. Everyone has this dream of a frictionless existence; nobody seems to like it much when they get it. Infinity pools and bottomless margaritas are fine for a time, but eventually you start wishing the moles would pop back up again so you could hit ‘em with a mallet.

• NYC apartment building partially collapses, ripping massive hole in high rise

  Emergency personnel responded to the partial collapse of an apartment building in New York City on Wednesday morning. At 8:10 a.m. ET, an incinerator shaft collapsed at the public housing apartment building on Alexander Avenue in the Bronx, NYC Deputy Mayor Kaz Daughtry wrote on X. A preliminary investigation suggests some type of explosion triggered the collapse, Mayor Eric Adams said at a press conference Wednesday. “There were no fatalities and no injuries as we have learned that this happened in the boiler room,” Bronx Borough President Vanessa L. Gibson said at the press conference. "Investigation into the cause is ongoing," Daughtry said in an X post. "Residents in F & G apartments are being evacuated out of an abundance of caution and will be cared for at a nearby community center."

Horseshit

• South Bay Whole Foods reopens after rodent infestation

• A photographer traveled across North America's Chinatowns. Here's what he saw

• The bookies' odds for the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature

• In-Game Sports Betting Is Growing. So Are the Concerns

• The Broadway Musical Is in Trouble

• Prospect of life on Saturn's moons rises after discovery of organic substances

• The $400M Restaurant Man

• America's Most Dog-Friendly City Has Had Enough

• Birding Is a Booming Hobby–and a Big Business

• Larger families have less successful children

• Buy a vintage military airplane for $25

  The PublicSurplus.com auction is the culmination of a years-long legal and logistical headache for Thur and local officials. None of the 16 planes are intact, so interested buyers are basically bidding on the aircrafts’ fuselages, wings, and cockpit equipment. The auction is set to close on October 3 at 12 p.m. MDT. But regardless of how much the Arizona National Guard’s retired KC-97 ultimately fetches, its new owner will have 90 days to retrieve it using their own tools and equipment.

celebrity gossip

• "We need his name in the news before we renew contracts" Hunter S Thompson's death to be reviewed more than 20 years later

  The journalist and author was believed to have killed himself on 20 February 2005 at the age of 67 and while there isn’t any new evidence to suggest otherwise, his widow Anita Thompson has requested that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation conduct a review. Thompson died at his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. “We understand the profound impact Hunter S Thompson had on this community and beyond,” said the sheriff, Michael Buglione, in a press release. “By bringing in an outside agency for a fresh look, we hope to provide a definitive and transparent review that may offer peace of mind to his family and the public.”

  • Colorado investigators to review author Hunter S. Thompson's death

Obit

• 43, apparently a good run for an elephant: The Zoo Announces the Death of Elephant Ruth

• Jane Goodall Dies at 91

  • Jane Goodall, Eminent Primatologist Who Chronicled Lives of Chimps, Dies at 91

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Will the future of fact-checking flourish or flounder?

  • "Facts" are that which can be verified by anyone; and do not need to be preached on or believed in. Clerisy who exist to insist that the facts don't exist or mean something other than what people see doesn't seem something that society needs or wants.

• People want platforms, not governments, to be responsible for moderating content

• Wikipedia co-creator reveals how the CIA hijacked entries

Musk

• Starbase hires Cameron County to police its streets and jail its offenders

• Musk says xAI building "Grokipedia" after criticizing Wikipedia

• Anti-Defamation League takes down extremism research after Musk leads backlash

Electric / Self Driving cars

• The EV tax credit is dead – here's what happens next

  • Ford CEO expects EV sales to be cut in half after end of tax credits.

  • The taxpayers have been paying 1/3rd or so of the cost of "3rd cars" for families that didn't need help affording them for how long now?

• It's Time to Bring Tiny EVs Like the Honda N-One E to the US

• The New Honda Prelude Doesn't Have a Transmission. Here's Why

  Honda calls the coupe’s drivetrain an “eCVT,” but really, the car doesn’t have a transmission at all, because it runs Honda’s two-motor electric hybrid powertrain. The In-Line Config is better packaged for smaller vehicles. With the Civic, and soon Prelude, there are also two electric motors, but one drives the wheels while the other is powered by the VTEC gas engine that drives, or essentially charges, the battery. Propulsion comes from a single-speed gearbox connected to the traction motor. Honda’s system doesn’t move the Civic using the gas engine and electric motor at the same time, but the gas engine provides power to the wheels through a clutch when it’s most efficient, like at highway cruising speeds. We expect the same in the Prelude.

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Unitree Humanoid Robot Exploit Looks Like A Bad One

  The biggest security issues involved in this vulnerability (summed up in a total of four CVEs) include:

  • Hardcoded cryptographic keys for encrypting and decrypting BLE control packets (allowing anyone with a key to send valid packets.)
  • Trivial handshake security (consists simply of checking for the string “unitree” as the secret.)
  • Unsanitized user data that gets concatenated into shell commands and passed to system().

  The complete attack sequence is a chain of events that leverages the above in order to ultimately send commands which run with root privileges.

• Blood-red bot stalks the burbs armed with groceries

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Study: Facebook is more habit-forming than TikTok

• High-resolution efficient image generation from WiFi Mapping

• The God Mode Vulnerability That Should Kill "Trust Microsoft"

• Apple Watch's High Blood Pressure Notifications Approved in Canada

• FCC to consider ending merger ban among US broadcast networks

• CISA warns of critical Linux Sudo flaw exploited in attacks

  “An attacker can leverage sudo’s -R (--chroot) option to run arbitrary commands as root, even if they are not listed in the sudoers file,” explains the security advisory.

• Qualcomm scores big win over Arm in contentious lawsuit

  • Qualcomm Defeats Arm in Legal Battle over Licensing Agreements

• Alexa's survival hinges on you buying more expensive Amazon devices

• Raspberry Pi Announces Price Increases Due to Rising Memory Demand

  • Raspberry Pi prices hiked as AI gobbles all the memory

• Technical Analysis of SAP Exploit Script Used in JLR, Harrods Hacks

  • Hackers strike Harrods in latest UK cyberattack

• Apple Shelves Vision Headset Revamp to Prioritize Meta-Like AI Glasses

• Apple, Google, Meta must face lawsuits over casino-style gambling apps

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Messy Mastering | OS/2 Museum

  All this made me quite unsure that I was looking at images of original disks. So I had to find the old box of floppies and then ran them through my Kryoflux. Lo and behold… the images were really made from true blue IBM disks. The Kryoflux tools can identify rewritten disk sectors but no, the disks were all clean mass-duplicated specimens. Whoever mastered these disks was either in a real hurry or didn’t have the right tools, and really just took a box of random floppies, deleted existing files, and copied the (updated) TCP/IP 2.0 Base Kit files onto the disks. And so we ended up with distribution disks that look really fishy, but are in fact completely intact originals.

• Torvalds: "If somebody really wants to create bad hardware in this day and age"

  If somebody really wants to create bad hardware in this day and age, please do make it big-endian, and also add the following very traditional features for sh*t-for-brains hardware:

  • only do aligned memory accesses. Bonus point for not even faulting, and just loading and storing garbage instead.

  • expose your pipeline details in the ISA: Delayed branch slots or explicit instruction grouping is a great way to show that you eat crayons for breakfast before you start designing your hardware platform

• The proximate cause of this fluff is "the guy" saying Charlie Kirk shouldn'ta got shot: RubyGems Threatens to Split

• Nix Steering Committee vote of no confidence

  Not so coincidentally John, Tom, and Robert are the three Steering Committee members that are also members of the Nix core team. The vote of no confidence made it pretty clear to me that the Nix team has consistently put the needs of their own team and members ahead of the needs of the broader community (which is why I felt compelled to speak out). It was probably a mistake to allow three Steering Committee members to all be members of the Nix team. There should be a constitutional amendment to consider shared membership on the Nix team to also count as a conflict of interest, which would create a soft limit of one of them on the team and a hard limit of two of them on the team.

  • Can't have the people doing the work as members of the governance committees, the fools might not understand that the work is less important than the political games!

• HN Jobs:

  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2025)

  • Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2025)

  • Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2025)

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Tilly Norwood

  • Hollywood celebrities outraged over new 'AI actor' Tilly Norwood

  • Hollywood is fuming over a new 'AI actress'

  • Hollywood performers union condemns AI-generated 'actress'

• Making it s much easier for "real scientists" to publish whatever they like: Fake microscopy images generated by AI are indistinguishable from the real thing

• Is European AI a Lost Cause? Not Necessarily

• AI and Europe's quest for a $1T company

• If You Let Your Kid Use Sora, You're a Bad Parent

• Tech Layoffs Hit 19,000 in September 2025 as AI Replaces Roles

• OpenAI will reportedly release a TikTok-like social app alongside Sora 2

• Critics slam OpenAI's parental controls while users rage, "Treat us like adults"

• Autonomous AI adoption stalls amid trust and governance crisis

• Meta plans to sell targeted ads based on data in your AI chats

  • Meta greenlights Facebook, Instagram ads based on your AI chats

  • Meta Will Begin Using AI Chatbot Conversations to Target Ads

• Why "Everyone Dies" Gets AGI All Wrong

• The King of Chicago Trading Wants to Build a GPU Market Bigger Than Oil

• Mira Murati's Stealth AI Lab Launches Its First Product

• Top A.I. Researchers Leave OpenAI, Google and Meta for New Startup

• OpenAI won't say whose content trained its video tool. We found some clues.

• Reddit stock falls as references to its content in ChatGPT responses plummet

• The Sludgy Rise of Workslop

Crypto con games

• Visa bets on stablecoins to speed up cross-border payments

• The Gaslit Asset Class

  The fascinating thing about cryptocurrency technology is the number of ways people have developed and how much they are willing to pay to avoid actually using it. What other transformative technology has had people desperate not to use it? The whole of TradFi has been erected on this much worse infrastructure, including exchanges, closed-end funds, ETFs, rehypothecation, and derivatives. Clearly, the only reason for doing so is to escape regulation and extract excess profits from what would otherwise be crimes.

• Blockchain just became an utterly mainstream part of the global financial system

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Cyberattack on Beer Giant Asahi Disrupts Production

• U.S. Lost 32,000 Private-Sector Jobs in September, Says Payroll Processor

• Google cuts more than 100 design-related roles in cloud unit

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• US Government takes 5% stakes in Lithium Americas and joint venture with GM

• Taiwan will not agree to 50-50 chip production deal with US, negotiator says

  • Taiwan rejects Trump's demand to shift 50% of chip manufacturing into US

• Supreme Court lets Fed Governor Cook keep job pending oral argument in January

Trump

• Trump's solution for high drug prices is a discount portal called TrumpRx

  • Yeah, good thing its not something undignified like "ObamaCare"

Left Angst

• US Government shutdown begins as partisan division rules Washington

  • US government shuts down after Democrats refuse to back Republican funding plan

  • US government shuts down after Senate fails to pass last-ditch funding plan

  • Government Shuts Down as Lawmakers Fail to Reach Deal on Funding Bill

  • Yes, Democrats Shut Down the Government to Give Illegals Free Healthcare – PJ Media

  • What a Government Shutdown Means: 750,000 Feds on Furlough

  • Wikipedia: 2025 United States federal government shutdown

  The shutdown is the twenty-first in modern U.S. history and the third under President Donald Trump. It furloughed roughly 900,000 federal employees and left another 700,000 working without pay. While essential services such as Medicare, Medicaid, the Transportation Security Administration, and Amtrak continued, many agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the WIC program, faced partial or full suspensions of operations.

  In a poll by NPR, 38% of respondents blamed the Republican Party for the shutdown, compared to 27% who blamed the Democratic Party, 31% who blamed both parties, and 1% who blamed neither.

  • And not a single "citation needed" neither (as of when I looked; sure to be a shitshow).

  • White House ballroom construction to continue through shutdown, official says

  • A Government Shutdown Isn’t Really a Shutdown. Most Federal Employees Are Still Working and Will Get Paid.

• Political Violence From the Left Is Surging

  fter studying several recent incidents of left-wing terrorism, I want to articulate some initial thoughts about what I call the “left-wing terror memeplex.” This system, in which left-wing narratives inspire decentralized acts of violence, has four elements: prestige narratives, radicalized memespaces, copycat models, and disturbed individuals. The memeplex is not organized like the older model of left-wing political terrorism, which relied on organized groups (such as the Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army), decentralized cells, ideological formation, and meticulous planning. By contrast, the memeplex is decentralized, mediated through the Internet, and, on the surface, appears unorganized. Left-wing media and political figures peddle narratives through the digital sphere; an individual commits an act of terrorism inspired by those narratives; and the media and political figures pretend that the two are unrelated and that the terrorist was a “lone wolf.” But if you dig beneath the surface, it becomes apparent that these dots are often connected and that the memeplex, though decentralized, is designed to radicalize disturbed individuals and generate bloodshed—with plausible deniability for political actors. In other words, the progressives who seed the memeplex are fomenting precisely the “stochastic terrorism” that they previously decried.

• The mainstream media is catastrophically failing to meet the moment

  Earlier today we wrote about Trump’s extraordinary admission that he was basing military deployment decisions on old Fox News footage and lies from his advisors. But there’s an even more damning story here: how that revelation almost never saw the light of day because of journalistic cowardice. The smoking gun quote came from Trump’s phone interview with NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor:

  “I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”

  This is an absolutely nuclear quote.

• Trump's $100k Visa Upends Lives: 'My Dreams Were Shattered'

• We in the Economics Profession Need to Look Ourselves in the Mirror

  The consensus has been wrong since January. The forecast for the past nine months has been that the US economy would slow down. But the reality is that it has simply not happened, see chart below. GDP growth in the second quarter was 3.8%, and the Atlanta Fed predicts that GDP in the third quarter will be 3.9%. Yes, job growth is slowing, but this is the result of slowing immigration. The bottom line is that the US economy remains remarkably resilient, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to argue that we are still waiting for the delayed negative effects of what happened six months ago on Liberation Day in April.

  • Political expedience isn't the polestar of academic economics? "What did you want the answer to be?"

• The Normalization of Book Banning

  National and local groups touting extreme conservative views have played on parents’ fears and anxieties to exert ideological control over public education across the United States using consistent and coordinated tactics. These groups’ efforts have catalyzed censorial trends and a full-blown attack on public schools and democracy.

• Trump's War on the USA

  In other words, he assembled most of the hierarchy of US forces in one place to tell them that his mainstream political opponents - for whom many of those military personnel might vote - were the enemy within and that they must be ready for deployment on the streets of US cities to fight these people who have been (within the constraints of the US systrem of democracy) elected to office to serve the communities that they represent. Trump did, in effect, declare war on democracy in the USA. Although there was little actual sign of any significant polotical difference between the Republicans and the Democrats in the USA before he arrived on the scene, the Single Transferable Party having effectively ruled the roost until then, he is now saying that US troops must fight Democrats on the streets of US cities because they are - despite their corporate backing and marked reluctance to back any candidate looking to do anything to shake the status quo - the enemy within.

  • I believe Bill Clinton first called "far Right Americans" the enemy within just after Ruby Ridge. Where "far Right" meant 'anyone who disagrees with us in any particular"

• AI slop drops right from the top, as Trump posts vulgar deepfake of opponents

• Bulging Biceps Don't Win Modern Wars – Paul Krugman

  • From a source that doesn't believe in "winning" wars

• FCC chairman leads "cruel" vote to take Wi-Fi access away from school kids

• How the Silicon Valley 'warlord' Steven Simoni got The Pentagon's attention

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Minneapolis immigration raid targets 1,000 cases, finds 275 fraud instances | Fox News

  Under a mission known as Operation Twin Shield, officers targeted 1,000 cases, knocking on doors at more than 900 sites to conduct interviews and review immigration criteria. Coordinating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FBI, they found fraud, non-compliance, or public safety and national security concerns in 275 cases. In 44 of those cases, the immigrants were referred to ICE or given a notice to appear (NTA) in court. Two were detained on-site. The rest are still being investigated.

  • Bombshell ICE sweep in Minneapolis-St. Paul finds 50% of immigrants had committed immigration fraud after massive arrival uptick from Somalia

• Prison guard, shot six times, hails FCC push to allow cell jamming behind bars

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Drones have transformed the nature of war

• Secretary Hegseth Delivers a Speech That Could Have Been Given by General Patton

  I will add one final note with great reluctance. President Trump followed Secretary Hegseth and gave a lengthy, unfocused, and rambling talk to the assembled generals and admirals. It sounded more like one of his customary stump speeches. He bashed, former presidents Biden and Obama by name in a way that was simply inappropriate, especially when Secretary Hegseth had just given a speech aimed at the depoliticizing the military. Among other things, Trump could not resist speaking of the “stolen election,” lauding his own tariff policy, Biden’s use of the autopen, how he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize, and the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. Even if you believe that the 2020 election was stolen and support all these points 100%, these were not suitable topics for this audience. And I am confident that many (most? all?) of the flag officers present were not impressed by his undisciplined remarks. Trump’s undisciplined and inappropriate comments, unfortunately detract from the power of Hegseth’s presentation. And it was the wrong message for the wrong audience.

  • The only positive result of Trump's contribution i can see is the media hate bait: they aren't making up silly shit about the rest of the message 'cuz Trump gave them so much tastier chum.

• US, France step up joint military satellite moves to counter China in space

• Pentagon plans widespread random polygraphs, NDAs to stanch leaks

World

• Lithuania to give children drone training to counter Russia threat

• Night Trains, Beloved Throwbacks Tying Paris to Berlin and Vienna, Will End

• South Korean government services offline following data center fire

• UN calls on authorities to urgently restore internet access in Afghanistan

• Scottish Police Arrest Serial Speaker: Elderly Woman Charged After Holding Sign Offering to Discuss Abortion

• Post Office Horizon accounts are still a mess and replacement system is years away

• UK makes new attempt to access Apple cloud data

  • UK government resumes row with Apple by demanding access to British users' data

• Australia sunscreen scandal grows as more products pulled off shelves

• LG Electronics aims to make India a manufacturing hub with local unit's IPO

• Internet Is Restored in Afghanistan After a Two-Day Blackout

• Taxis for women only: Mexico City drivers rebel against brutal violence

• What Is Europe's 'Drone Wall'?

Israel

• Developers drop Vercel, call for boycott after CEO posts selfie with Netanyahu

• Once again, Netanyahu has outplayed Trump

  • Trump's peace plan is everything Israelis dreamed of. But it's a fantasy

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Germany seeks to extradite Ukrainian diver over Nord Stream gas pipeline attack

• French military boards Russia-linked oil tanker suspected of launching drones

China

• China Appears to Be Shutting Down Purchases of U.S. Soybeans

• China Goes on Offense: Beijing's Plans to Exploit American Retreat

• China launches visa to attract foreign tech talent

  • China's K-visa plans spark worries of a talent flood

• Tourists Flocking to Chongqing, Chinese Megacity That's Straight Out of Sci-Fi

• AI is reshaping childhood in China

• China Is Leaving America in the Dust on Clean Energy

• A Tech Expo Shows What China Can Make, but Not Who'll Buy It All

Health / Medicine

• Drug made from marijuana reduces back pain in new study

  • Cannabis extract found to be effective for lower back pain

  A clinical trial has found that VER-01, a drug derived from cannabis, eases chronic lower back pain without serious side effects or signs of addiction. The experimental drug VER-01 is an extract from the cannabis plant containing 5 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the principal active ingredient.

• Colon cancer is on the rise among young people

• ALS Breakthrough Shows Fatal Disease Is Driven by Immune Attack

• Walmart U.S. moves to eliminate synthetic dyes across all private brand foods

• Robots are learning to make human babies. Twenty have already been born.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• "Nightmare bacteria" are rapidly spreading

• New Covid variants Nimbus and Stratus are soaring and there are unusual symptoms

  patients were complaining of 'severe pain, as if their throat is covered with razor blades'. He added: 'While not specific to Covid-19, this expression has been used to describe sore throat symptoms in some patients with the most recent Covid-19 variant.'

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Geothermal is too expensive, but Dig Energy's small drill rig might fix that

• Boosting timber harvesting while cutting oversight won't solve wildfire problem

• The personal climate actions that work

• Wild chimps consume the equivalent of two glasses of wine a day: The ‘drunken monkey hypothesis’ could explain why humans like alcohol so much.