2025-10-30

Worthy

• The Decline of Deviance - by Adam Mastroianni

  People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline. I’m not the first to notice something strange going on—or, really, the lack of something strange going on. But so far, I think, each person has only pointed to a piece of the phenomenon. As a result, most of them have concluded that these trends are:

  • very recent, and therefore likely caused by the internet, when in fact most of them began long before
  • restricted to one segment of society (art, science, business), when in fact this is a culture-wide phenomenon, and
  • purely bad, when in fact they’re a mix of positive and negative.

  When you put all the data together, you see a stark shift in society that is on the one hand miraculous, fantastic, worthy of a ticker-tape parade. And a shift that is, on the other hand, dismal, depressing, and in need of immediate intervention. Looking at these epoch-making events also suggests, I think, that they may all share a single cause.

  adopting a slow life strategy doesn’t have to be a conscious act, and probably isn’t. Like most mental operations, it works better if you can’t consciously muck it up. It operates in the background, nudging each decision toward the safer option. Those choices compound over time, constraining the trajectory of your life like bumpers on a bowling lane. Eventually this cycle becomes self-reinforcing, because divergent thinking comes from divergent living, and vice versa. This is, I think, how we end up in our very normie world. You start out following the rules, then you never stop, then you forget that it’s possible to break the rules in the first place. Most rule-breaking is bad, but some of it is necessary. We seem to have lost both kinds at the same time.

  For the first time in history, weirdness is a choice. And it’s a hard one, because we have more to lose than ever. If we want a more interesting future, if we want art that excites us and science that enlightens us, then we’ll have to tolerate a few illegal holes in the basement, and somebody will have to be brave enough to climb down into them.

  • Comments broadly agree that deviance has declined or institutionalized with strict limits and rules; but are fully disapproving of this person saying so and encouraging more. "The world will be perfect when everyone is the same!" and this person is anti-progress seems to be the consensus.

Horseshit

• We used to sleep in two segments and how modern shift changed sense of time

• Posting your property on Airbnb is now punishable offense in Sausalito, Bay Area

• Pollsters Have a New Kind of Competitor. They Should Be Worried

• Yes, it rains on the Sun and scientists have worked out why

• Schools close,island life is under threat as Greece reckons with low birth rates

• German police seize fake Picassos in multi-million euro forgery raid

• Man accidentally gets leech up his nose. It took 20 days to figure it out

• The Hidden Cost of 'Affordable Housing'

• A surge in ancient plagues 5k years ago shaped humanity

• The Island Where People Go to Cheat Death

• The chemistry behind that pricey cup of civet coffee

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Mapping news creators and influencers in social and video networks | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

  Creators are also having an increasingly important political impact, with Donald Trump courting popular YouTubers and podcasters such as Joe Rogan and the Nelk Boys in the run-up to his 2024 election victory. The recent murder of activist and podcaster Charlie Kirk, and the coverage of the aftermath, reminds us of the critical role these personalities are now playing in shaping both public opinion and political narratives.

• Why Doesn't Anyone Trust the Media?

  recent years have exposed significant professional failures—from the flawed coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic to inadequate reporting on President Biden’s cognitive health. All the while, audiences sift into ever-narrower silos: Substacks, podcasts, livestreams. Perhaps most telling is the changing relationship between media and political power. There is a palpable sense of surrender in the air. In December, ABC News agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle a defamation suit he had filed against the network. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, later settled its own Trump lawsuit, also for $16 million, three weeks before securing Federal Communications Commission approval for its merger with Skydance Media. Trump has since filed a host of additional suits against media organizations, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and threatened the broadcast licenses of major networks. All of this raises pressing questions: In an era of declining trust, industry collapse, and technological disruption, does the media, as we’ve historically understood it, have a future? What essential functions does professional journalism serve that cannot be replaced by other forms of information gathering and dissemination? And why, finally, do Americans view the media with such skepticism?

• Truth is not the same as Fact

  We can sequence genomes but struggle to say what makes life meaningful. We generate more data than any civilization in history yet feel uncertain about what’s worth knowing. This isn’t accidental. It’s the consequence of a quiet philosophical victory: the idea that “truth” means one thing, correspondence to measurable facts. If a claim can’t be empirically verified, this view suggests, it isn’t really true. It might be meaningful to you, aesthetically pleasing, culturally significant, but not true. This is scientism, and it’s the reason people like SBF boast that they don’t read literature.

  • What makes your life meaningful may not be important to others, and vice versa. the truths that are not objective are not fact; indeed; nor can your particular Truth be imposed on others with any hope of success.

Musk

• Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales isn't worried about Elon Musk's Grokipedia

• Grokipedia: A First Look

  According to ChatGPT 4o, which is a competent LLM that is widely perceived to lean to the left, primarily on account of its training data, the Wikipedia articles on these controversial topics, on average, had a bias somewhere between “emphasizes one side rather more heavily” and “severely biased.” By contrast, the Grokipedia articles on these topics are said to “exhibit minor imbalances” on average.

• Grokipedia Review

  Wikipedia is, to quote myself, the encyclopedia that “anyone who’s willing to provide citations can edit”. Grokipedia is “the encyclopedia that Elon Musk’s LLM can edit, with sketchy citations and no progressive argument left un-attacked.”

• Grokipedia Is Another Form of Online Disinformation

  Grokipedia is only doing to Wikipedia what Google is doing to newspapers and online publications in producing AI summaries. Musk’s site upsets a delicate balance, just as Google — which created large language models in-house but declined to deploy them — and others have done. Supplementing the traditional list of search results with AI summaries results in a dramatic fall in traffic to the original source — by as much as 89%, according to the Daily Mail Group in a submission to the Competition and Markets Authority. The “social contract of the open web” has been broken, in the words of Financial Times policy chief Matt Rogerson.

• Turns Out, Wikipedia Isn't That 'Woke' as Grokipedia Rips Off Most of Its Pages

• What Elon Musk's Version of Wikipedia Thinks About Hitler, Putin, and Apartheid

• Tesla's Grok AI chatbot asks 12-y.o. boy to send nude pics, says shocked mother

• Tesla chair warns Musk could quit if shareholders reject $1T pay deal

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo robotaxi kills 'one-of-a-kind' bodega cat, owner claims

• An autonomous car for consumers? Lucid says it's happening

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Foxconn to deploy humanoid robots at Houston AI server plant

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• An experiment to bring forest into a preschool transformed children's health

• Why the Economics of Scientific Publishing Need Urgent Reform

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs

• Scientists claim you can't see the difference between 1440p and 8K at 10 feet

• Samsung Shows Off Tri-Fold Smartphone

• Box Office Bombs: Springsteen and Smashing Machine Struggle at Box Office

• AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for roughly $1.5B

  • AOL to Be Acquired by Italy's Bending Spoons

• Nintendo's Creature Capture Patent Dealt Blow Amid Palworld Lawsuit

• NPM flooded with malicious packages downloaded more than 86,000 times

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Dr. Daniel J. Bernstein (djb) suspended from IETF

  Dr. Daniel J. Bernstein (aka djb) has been suspended from IETF forums for alleged "disruptive behavior." The action comes shortly after his public criticism of recent IETF changes, which could enable censorships.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Australian Federal Police to develop LLM for decoding GenZ slang

  • Australian police building AI to translate emoji used by 'crimefluencers'

• Holographic theory of LLMs: explains unbreakable bias and cross-model infection

• Open AI Restructures as a For-Profit

  • OpenAI Completes For-Profit Transition, Pushing Microsoft Above $4T

  • Microsoft and OpenAI new deal values OpenAI at $500B

• OpenAI sued for trademark infringement over Sora's 'Cameo' feature

• OpenAI wants to get to $1T a year in infrastructure spend, Altman says

• Meta layoff to hit 318 AI team workers around Bay Area headquarters

• NDAs keep AI data center details hidden from Americans

• AI's labor market squeeze tightens

• AI and reverse Dunning-Kruger effect

• White-Collar Jobs Are Disappearing as AI Starts to Bite

• English professors take individual approaches to deterring AI use

• Character.ai to Bar Children Under 18 from Using Its Chatbots

• DeepSeek may have found a new way to improve AI's ability to remember

• Grammarly rebrands to 'Superhuman,' launches a new AI assistant

• George RR Martin sues OpenAI for copyright infringement

• When must we lobotomize ourselves?

  The more I engage with AI, the more I worry about its effect on our ability to distinguish between the truth and true-sounding nonsense, an ability that is already being overwhelmed in the algorithmic age. Some researchers are already suggesting that LLMs can be as or more persuasive than humans in certain contexts. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have explicitly set policy for their LLMs to avoid their use for political campaigning and the generation of misinformation. But the problem runs far deeper than just political manipulation. LLMs represent the democratization of access to and deployment of superhuman rhetorical ability at scale. This will have structural consequences for our ability to communicate at the most fundamental levels.

  As superhuman persuasion becomes more common, we will need a way to protect ourselves - to opt out of rhetoric. From a naive perspective, this could look like browser extensions that strip emotional language from posts, only presenting factual claims. AI assistants trained to identify and flag rhetorical techniques, in hopes that they’re slightly less insidious out of the shadows. Social norms around clearly labeling opinion versus fact, emotional appeal versus logical argument. In practice, I anticipate it will be much more difficult to separate rhetoric from facts.

• Sam Altman says OpenAI will have a 'legitimate AI researcher' by 2028

• US Gas Turbine Shortage Likely to Slow AI Demand Growth

• OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

• One mountain town hopes AI can help it fight wildfires

• OpenAI lays groundwork for juggernaut IPO at up to $1T valuation

  • OpenAI may target $1T valuation in IPO

  • OpenAI lays groundwork for IPO at up to $1 trillion valuation

• Joke's on you, fleshbag! Channel 4's first AI presenter is dizzyingly grim

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Can We Beam Away Our Space Junk Problem?

• Cosmic Flashes from the Cold War: Dr. Beatriz Villarroel’s Astonishing Links Between Sky Transients, Nuclear Blasts, and Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena

  The sky lit up like a fireworks show right after we set off our own nukes. And on nights when pilots, civilians, and military folks were buzzing about weird lights in the sky (remember the 1952 D.C. “invasion”?), our telescopes caught more of the same. It’s like the transients were the silent witnesses to history’s flashbulbs and maybe to visitors drawn by our fireworks. These aren’t huge effects (the world didn’t explode with transients daily), but with over 100,000 data points, they’re robust. The team ruled out biases like seasonal observing quirks or local pollution, and their stats held up under stress tests for overdispersion (when data varies more than expected).

• The Acid Test of 3I/ATLAS at Perihelion | by Avi Loeb

  perihelion constitutes the acid test of 3I/ATLAS. If it is a natural comet glued together by weak forces, its heating by 770 watts per square meter may break it up into fragments which evaporate more quickly as a result of their large surface area per unit mass. The resulting fireworks might generate a much brighter cometary plume of gas and dust around it. However, if 3I/ATLAS was technologically manufactured — as suggested by its high abundance of nickel relative to iron, it might maneuver or release mini-probes. Other technological signatures include artificial lights or excess heat from an engine. We will know the nature of 3I/ATLAS better in the coming months.

Crypto con games

• Tether is now the 17th largest holder of US debt

• France Wants a Bitcoin Reserve, to Buy 2% of Bitcoin Supply

Economicon / Business / Finance

• CEOs Are Furious About Employees Texting in Meetings

• Apple and Microsoft are now both worth more than $4T

• Apple hits $4T market value as new iPhone models revitalize sales

• Nvidia becomes first company to reach $5T valuation, fueled by AI boom

  • Nvidia storms past $5T valuation as AI boom powers meteoric rise

  • Nvidia Becomes First $5T Company

  • Nvidia becomes first $5T company in history

  • Nvidia hits new milestone as first $5T company

  • Nvidia hits record $5T mark as CEO dismisses AI bubble concerns

  • Nvidia Is Now Worth $5T as It Consolidates Power

• America's Car Debt Bomb Goes Off–Major Lender Folds Under $500M Load

• New York and California are taking on the housing NIMBYs

• Affluent Investors Are Using Options Math to Borrow on the Cheap

• CA state retirement fund lost 71% of $468M put in clean energy, won’t say how | California | thecentersquare.com

• Amazon to axe 14,000 corporate jobs to rein in costs and increase spending on AI

• UPS Is Increasingly Turning to Gig Drivers for Deliveries

  • UPS Has Cut 48,000 Workers Since Last Year

• Wyoming, Basin Electric Take Step Toward First New Coal Plant in over a Decade

• Fed's decision to lower interest rates could widen the generational wealth gap

• Boeing hit with $5B in penalties as new jet delayed

• Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

• Credit traders are buying protection against Oracle Corp. defaulting on its debt

• Meta Shares Fall on Accelerating AI Spending Despite Record Revenue

• YouTube announces AI reorg and voluntary layoffs

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Senator Cotton blocks effort to make daylight saving time permanent

• Airlines are feeding air traffic controllers as they miss their first full paychecks.

• Why not earlier when it was a stated goal of the Biden administration? EFF Sue Trump Administration to Stop Ideological Surveillance of Free Speech

Trump

• US Senate passes bill with Republican support to rescind Trump's Brazil tariffs

• Trump says ‘it’s pretty clear’ he’s ‘not allowed to run’ for third term.

• Trump health official ousted after allegedly giving himself a fake title

Democrats

• The Times apologizes for fake De Blasio interview criticizing Mamdani

Left Angst

• If things in America weren't stupid enough, Texas is suing Tylenol maker

• Six Words Every Killer Should Know: 'I Feared for My Life, Officer'

• TrueAnon Saw How Twisted Politics Were About to Get. Here’s What They Say Is Coming Next | GQ

  “Everything we’ve covered in the show is coming to a head with the Trump administration in a very weird way,” says Liz Franczak, one third of the cult podcast TrueAnon, which snowballed from Epstein deep dives into a wide-ranging chronicle of our current malaise. Franczak, Brace Belden, and the man known as Yung Chomsky weigh in on everything from the “fairly moderate” Zohran Mamdani to Gen Z’s rightward swing.

• The Left is ‘Bleeding Kansas’

  Currently, local Democrat officials from Chicago to Los Angeles unabashedly boast that not only will their own police forces not aid in the deportation of apprehended or criminal illegal aliens, but they will also often actively oppose federal law enforcement—whether by offering street sanctuary to violent anti-ICE protesters in Portland or ordering Chicago-area police not to come to the aid of embattled and blockaded ICE officers. An unhinged Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) now brags she wants local California officials to arrest federal ICE officers. But the former Speaker of the House does not elaborate on what sort of “encounter” will follow when the latter federal, armed officers are lawfully enforcing the law, and the former armed state officers are breaking the law in trying to stop them. Bleeding Kansas? A mini-Fort Sumter? No wonder the antebellum firebrand and killer John Brown has become a popular blue-state rights icon—precisely because he was willing to kill his opponents. The violent left-wing “John Brown Gun Club” is now mainstream. Howard University professor Stacey Patton recently urged white liberals to “be like John Brown. Ask yourself, what am I willing to burn so somebody else can breathe?”

• The Hunger Games Begin - Paul Krugman

  Despite the government shutdown, the SNAP program isn’t out of money. In fact, it has $5 billion in contingency funds, intended as a reserve to be tapped in emergencies. And if the imminent cutoff of crucial food aid for 40 million people isn’t an emergency, what is? The Department of Agriculture, which runs the program, also has the ability to maintain funding for a while by shifting other funds around. But Donald Trump has — quite possibly illegally — told the department not to tap those funds.

  • And the Democrats believe this preferable to reducing spending on non-citizens...

• Scientists had to change more than 700 grant titles to receive NIH funding

• Republican plan would make deanonymization of census data trivial

• Trump Is Deeply Unpopular

• The DOE said it was saving taxpayers $7.56B. The actual amount is less

• Kennedy directs CDC to study alleged harms of offshore wind farms

• The Socialist Rifle Association Has a ‘No Soldiers’ Membership Policy.

• ICE's forced face scans to verify citizens is unconstitutional, lawmakers say

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• FCC Changes Course on the Price of Prisoners' Phone Calls

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• U.S. attempted to capture Venezuela's Maduro by bribing his pilot

• Why Is the U.S. Sending an Entire Carrier Strike Group to Venezuela?

  Venezuela has become an enormous thorn in America’s side. Under Hugo Chavez it was “Cuba with oil”, bankrolling the Castros, buying Danny Ortega’s way back into power in Nicaragua, and advancing totalitarianism wherever it could. But like a scene out of Atlas Shrugged, socialist mismanagement ruined the oil industry, despite Venezuela’s having the world’s largest proved reserves. His successor, Nicolás Maduro, therefore shifted gears, turning the country he illegitimately rules into Cuba with drugs. He also turned Venezuela into a Russian, and more significantly, Chinese base.

• Please Do Not Sell B30A Chips to China

  The biggest mistake America could make would be to effectively give up Taiwan, which would be catastrophic on many levels including that Taiwan contains TSMC. I am assuming we are not so foolish as to seriously consider doing this, still I note it. Beyond that, the key thing, basically the only thing, America has to do other than ‘get a reasonable deal overall’ is not be so captured or foolish or both as to allow export of the B30A chip, or even worse than that (yes it can always get worse) allow relaxation of restrictions on semiconductor manufacturing imports. At first I hadn’t heard signs about this. But now it looks like the nightmare of handing China compute parity on a silver platter is very much in play.

  I disagreed with the decision to sell the Nvidia H20 chips to China, but that chip was and is decidedly behind the frontier and has its disadvantages. Fortunately for us China for an opaque combination of reasons (including that they are not yet ‘AGI pilled’ and plausibly to save face or as part of negotiations) chose to turn those chips down. The B30A would not be like that. It would mean China could match B300-clusters at only a modest additional cost. If Nvidia allocated chips sufficiently aggressively, and there is every reason to suggest they might do so, China could achieve compute parity with the United States in short order, greatly enhancing its models and competitiveness along with its entire economy and ability to fight wars. Chinese company market share and Chinese model market share of inference would skyrocket.

• US agency votes to tighten restrictions on Chinese tech companies deemed threats

• Pentagon orders states' national guards to form 'quick reaction forces'

World

• EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework

• Indonesia's new 'cowboy style' finance minister bets big on growth

• Slovakia adopts speed limit for pedestrians

  From 2026, pedestrians in Slovakia will only be allowed to travel at a maximum speed of six kilometers per hour. The speed limit also applies to skaters, cyclists and e-scooters, who are allowed to use sidewalks. The aim is to improve safety following an increase in collisions between pedestrians and scooter riders.

• China overtakes the US as Germany's largest trading partner

• Bureau of Meteorology ordered to fix new website after torrent of complaints

• Residents Bring More Than 60 Bodies to a Rio Square a Day After Police Operation

  Residents of the Penha Complex, in Rio de Janeiro’s north zone, brought more than 60 bodies to São Lucas Square in the early hours of Wednesday (29), following the police operation that left at least 64 people dead and 81 arrested the day before —including four police officers. According to activist Raull Santiago, the public display of the bodies was requested by the families "to show the condition in which they were found." He said that those found overnight are not included in the official count. The state government has not yet commented on the new number of victims.

• Shinzo Abe Killer's Trial Is Exposing Christian Cult Entrenched in JP Politics

Israel

• Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders

• Hamas fakes 'unearthing' partial remains of hostage body recovered in 2023

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Analysis of Russia's latest big Ukraine offensive

China

• Unusual Black Trimaran Drone Ship Spotted in Chinese Shipyard

• China Pushes Boundaries with Animal Testing to Win Global Biotech Race

• China Bars Influencers from Discussing Professional Topics Without Degrees

• China's era of rapid oil fuels growth appears to be at an end

Health / Medicine

• Men need twice as much exercise as women to lower heart disease risk

• Direct primary care gains traction in the US

• Weight loss drugs are bringing down country's obesity rate, a survey shows

  • Obesity on decline in US as GLP-1 use skyrockets: Gallup

• Brain health could be improved with high-fat, low-carb diet, study finds

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• H9N2 Bird Flu Virus Could Pose Human Pandemic Risk, Experts Warn

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Jamaica officially declared 'disaster area' as Hurricane Melissa leaves 7 dead and 500k without power - with 25,000 tourists stranded

  Jamaica has been declared a 'disaster area' after Hurricane Melissa made landfall as one of the most powerful in history, wreaking havoc on the Caribbean island and leaving as many as 25,000 tourists stranded as it barrels toward Cuba. The storm made landfall as a Category 5 but the National Hurricane Center has since downgraded Melissa to a 'powerful' Category 4, hours after it hit the west coast of Jamaica. So far, seven deaths have been reported during storm preparations across Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. But officials said since the storm made landfall in Jamaica, they have not recorded any new fatalities.

  Hurricane Melissa has been downgraded to a Category 3 as it approaches Cuba. There were fears it would hit while remaining at a Category 4 intensity, but wind speeds have now slightly eased. Wind speeds have weakened to 125 miles per hour.

  • Airplane Captures Striking 'Stadium Effect' Inside Hurricane Melissa's Eye

• Extinction rates have slowed across many plant and animal groups, study shows

• Three tough truths about climate

  • Memo from Bill Gates Warns Against Climate Alarmism

  • Bill Gates calls for pivot in climate change away from curbing emissions

• A River Restoration in Oregon Gets Fast Results: The Salmon Swam Right Back

• The global boom in solar – with or without the US

• Money to Help Nations Cope with Climate Disasters Is Declining, U.N. Says

• Have the environmental benefits of insect farming been overstated? A review

• Our possible next stage? A European monsoon-like climate in a warmhouse world

• Indiana utilities fall back on climate goals amid AI data center boom

• Cancerous oil-field wastewater is spreading through Oklahoma water supply

• Odd Symmetry Between Earth's Northern and Southern Hemispheres Is Breaking Down

  The Northern and Southern Hemispheres reflected nearly the same amount of sunlight back into space. This balance, though long considered odd, is now coming undone, as new data reveals that one side of Earth is darkening faster than the other. Using 24 years’ worth of data from NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) mission, a team of scientists discovered that the Northern Hemisphere is absorbing more sunlight than the Southern Hemisphere.

• 6M year-old ice in Antarctica offers unprecedented window into a warmer Earth