2025-12-17
etc
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English prose has become much easier to read
What this should demonstrate is that shortness is the wrong dimension to investigate. We think we are looking at a language that got simpler; in fact we are looking at one that has created huge variation in what it can express and how, by adding new ways of writing. Lots of English writing has got simpler through use of the plain style, sticking to a logical shared syntax, especially the syntax of speech. But all the other ways of writing are still there, often showing up when we don’t expect them.
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Sawing a Dam in Half (on Purpose)
TVA decided to just give the concrete more room to grow. The solid rock abutments at each end of the dam had no room to give, so that space would have to be found in the dam itself. In 1976, they embarked on a fairly novel operation to cut a relief slot all the way through Fontana Dam and do it without draining the reservoir or causing any disruptions to the hydropower plant. The idea was pretty simple: instead of building up axial stress as the concrete expands, the dam can expand into the newly cut slots. Simple in theory; pretty challenging in practice. How do you saw a dam in half? Luckily, TVA has done this at two of its other dams in addition to Fontana, and shared some footage of that so you could see it happen.
Horseshit
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Experiment to train rats to play Doom reaches a new level: shooting enemies
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Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
Across the world, desperate parents of sick or dying children are being exploited by online scam campaigns, the BBC World Service has discovered. The public have given money to the campaigns, which claim to be fundraising for life-saving treatment. We have identified 15 families who say they got little to nothing of the funds raised and often had no idea the campaigns had even been published, despite undergoing harrowing filming. Nine families we spoke to - whose campaigns appear to be products of the same scam network - say they never received anything at all of the $4m (£2.9m) apparently raised in their names. We have identified a key player in the scam as an Israeli man living in Canada called Erez Hadari.
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8 Rare Vintage Tech Products Worth Thousands That Might Be Hiding in Your Attic
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It's still not OK, boomer: younger Americans are flailing – and mad as hell
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Few Farms Participate in a Program That Could Prevent Abuse of Farmworkers
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America's collapsing consumption is the disenshittification opportunity
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The $140,000 Question - by Zvi Mowshowitz
His actual claim in that post, which was what caught fire, was that the poverty line should be $140,000, and even that this number is him ‘being conservative.’ Michael Green’s calculation of an alternative poverty line does not make any sense, but he is correct that the official poverty line calculation also does not make any sense. The official poverty line of $32,000 for a family of four seems both totally arbitrary and obviously too low if you look at taxes and transfers, in the same way that the median income of $140,000, where Green wants to set that poverty line, is absurdly high. Neither number is saying a useful thing about whether people are barely able to stay afloat, or whether lives are getting better. My guess is the right number is ~$50,000. The point of a poverty line is not ‘what does it take to live as materially well as the median American.’
Green’s follow-up post might be the most smug and obnoxious ‘okay yes my original post was full of lies but I don’t care because it worked to get the discussion I wanted, so take that assholes who are in a grand conspiracy to keep us good folks down’ that I have ever seen. It somehow continues to fully equate the poverty line with median income, and to be arrogant about it, saying numbers shmumbers, they don’t matter. And then he turns around and says, how dare you respond to my ‘legitimate grievances’ by pointing out that my facts are wrong and my arguments are nonsense?
Epstein
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The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich - The New York Times
Tennenbaum soon became Epstein’s supervisor. “He was proving to be quite talented,” Tennenbaum told us. But in late 1976, he received a disconcerting phone call from the head of Bear Stearns’s personnel department. Employees had belatedly gotten around to checking Epstein’s résumé, which stated that he had received degrees from two California universities. “Are you sitting down?” the H.R. official asked Tennenbaum. “Neither school has heard of him.”
It was perhaps the first example of Epstein getting caught cheating — and then avoiding punishment thanks to his uncanny ability to take advantage of those in positions of power. This would become a lifelong pattern, one that largely explains Epstein’s remarkable success at amassing wealth and, eventually, orchestrating a vast sex-trafficking operation.
celebrity gossip
Obit
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MIT prof Nuno F. G. Loureiro fatally shot in his home
MIT professor Nuno Loureiro was killed in a shooting at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts Monday night, the school confirmed. Loureiro, a nuclear science and engineering professor from Portugal, was 47 years old. Last May, Loureiro was named director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. An article on the school's website described it as "one of MIT's largest labs"
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
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Bondi lie peddled by Grok chatbot shows future of AI-poisoned info ecosystem
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Tesla board made $3B via stock awards that dwarfed tech peers
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Elon Musk said he'd spend less on politics. Now he's donating again
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X updates terms, countersues to lay claim to the 'Twitter' trademark
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California threatens to ban Tesla sales for 30 days
Tesla has 90 days to fix claims in its advertising of self-driving and autopilot features that the state says are misleading, officials at the California Department of Motor Vehicles announced Tuesday. If the company does not remedy the situation, it stands to lose its license to sell vehicles in the state for 30 days.
Electric / Self Driving cars
Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life. In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man—and then provided just that. “With every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And when you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder, and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you—in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”
- The fallacy that statistical categorizations mean something about an individual human is pernicious; promoted by those who do not like humans, individually or as a species.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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The Hottest Toy of the Year Is Made by a Tech Startup You've Never Heard Of
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SoundCloud confirms breach after member data stolen, VPN access disrupted
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Mozilla names insider Enzor-DeMeo as CEO, looks to add AI features to Firefox
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Dell preps price hikes up to 30% citing memory pricing 'out of our control'
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The Worst Thing About the RAM Shortage That Nobody's Talking About
Now the question is when consumers can expect to pay an acceptable price for RAM. One leaker on X, BullsLab (via Wccftech), screenshotted a reported internal analysis that suggested consumer DRAM would be “constrained” through 2028. If prices ever go down, that’s not deflation but merely “disinflation,” aka a drop in the inflation rate. It doesn’t impact the new normal.
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25,600 GB of storage ruined by 10 year old oblivious to global NAND crisis
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GitHub will begin charging for self-hosted action runners on March 2026
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Hacking group says it's extorting Pornhub after stealing users' viewing data
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Most US Teens Use YouTube and TikTok Daily–Some 'Almost Constantly,' Survey Says
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Windows 11 will ask consent before sharing personal files with AI after outrage
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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No Graphics API — Sebastian Aaltonen
The past decade has revealed the weaknesses of the modern APIs. The PSO permutation explosion is the biggest problem we need to solve. Vendors (Valve, Nvidia, etc) have massive cloud servers storing terabytes of PSOs for each different architecture/driver combination. User's local PSO cache size can exceed 100GB. No wonder the gamers are complaining that loading takes ages and stutter is all over the place.
My prototype API fits in one screen: 150 lines of code. The blog post is titled “No Graphics API”. That’s obviously an impossible goal today, but we got close enough. WebGPU has a smaller feature set and features a ~2700 line API (Emscripten C header). Vulkan header is ~20,000 lines, but it supports ray-tracing, and many other features our minimalistic API doesn’t yet support.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Murder-suicide case shows OpenAI selectively hides data after users die
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Senators Investigate Role of A.I. Data Centers in Rising Electricity Costs
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AI space datacenters are impossible
There’s talk of space datacenters lately again, which is an immensely stupid idea. It is stupid because it is a physics and thermodynamics problem, not an engineering challenge. In this post, I will prove why space datacenters will never happen. Not now, not in ten years, not in a hundred years. While we have gotten far in space exploration technology, further than anyone decades ago thought, and while we have had great success in some aspects, such as the International Space Station, people are not computers (shocking, I know), and computers represent an entirely different set of constraints and problems.
- If all the "computing in space" prophets spoke of their cooling solutions I'd be more inclined to listen; but as it is I have to conclude they're spouting stupid lies to raise money from the gullible, yet again.
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OpenAI's Chief Communications Officer Is Leaving the Company
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Linus Torvalds Advocates AI for Code Maintenance, but Rejects 'Revolution' Label
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A former tech executive killed his mother. Family says ChatGPT made her a target
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AI and Smart Advertisements Are About to Empty Madison Avenue
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Wall Street eyes AI bubble as skepticism grows over trillion-dollar bets
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CoreWeave's Staggering Fall from Market Grace Highlights AI Bubble Fears
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Vibe coding startup Lovable's latest funding round values it at $6.6B
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Nvidia's B200: Keeping the CUDA Juggernaut Rolling Ft. Verda
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Oracle shares slide as earnings fail to ease AI bubble fears
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U.S. economy adds 64,000 jobs in November, unemployment rate at 4-year high
Fed chair Jerome Powell told reporters that the labor market was likely weaker than official government indicators suggest, a result of a massive shift in population growth as the Trump administration cracks down on immigration. "We think there's an overstatement in these numbers," Powell said. "Surveys of households and businesses both show declining supply and demand for workers. The labor market has continued to cool gradually, maybe just a touch more gradually than we thought," he added.
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Blood Cancer biotech Geron down $1.7B in value, lays off a third of staff
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iRobot files for bankruptcy; Bought by its Chinese Manufacturer
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Wall Street banks prepare for round-the-clock stock trading, reluctantly
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Consumer goods firms cut CEO tenures short in push for growth
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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"Offensive To Decency": Supreme Court Won't Hear Free Speech Case Over Vanity Plate | ZeroHedge
In 2010, she applied to the state for a custom plate “69PWNDU,” a phrase that is “understandable to people who share her interests.” Gilliam says the “69” refers to the 1969 moon landing and “PWND” is a video gamers’ expression that means to be dominated or defeated.
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(2014) Reflections on U.S. Government Outreach to Think Tanks
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More than 100 rally against data centers at Michigan Capitol
Trump
Democrats
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Democrats need to stop telling Americans how to be and what to feel and believe. Instead, we need to listen. Then we need to solve the problems they’ve shared with us. In the last few years, it’s not just our message that was wrong—it was some of our policies, too. People didn’t recognize the impacts of the bills we wrote and the votes we took. That’s why Americans don’t believe us when we preach at them from auditorium stages, cable news desks, and social media posts. We have to get back to the values and ideas that draw people to be Democrats to begin with.
- "You can keep your slaves" wasn't it?
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Pelosi Long Resisted Stock-Trading Ban for Congress, Fueling Suspicion - The New York Times
The former speaker failed to appreciate the groundswell of support for banning the practice, refusing to give an inch amid G.O.P. accusations that she was corrupt.
people close to the former speaker, who insisted on anonymity to discuss her handling of the issue, concede that it was among the only issues that reflected poorly on Ms. Pelosi during her tenure, placing an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise remarkable legacy. Her main reason for resisting the idea, the people close to her said, was that Republicans targeted Ms. Pelosi personally in their efforts to address the matter, and she did not want to cede any ground to attacks that implied she was corrupt.
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For Today’s Democrats, Fraud Is A Feature, Not A Bug
We’re not just talking about Democrats ripping off government programs for their personal benefit – examples of which are legion – but the opportunities for fraud built into the programs they create. Obamacare is a “Mecca for fraud,” as the Wall Street Journal put it after a recent Government Accountability Office report showed how easy it is to rip off the program. But, instead of targeting Obamacare fraud to lower the program’s costs, Democrats want to pump more than $80 billion in additional tax credits into Obamacare – money that will only fuel more fraud. Democrats are even blocking efforts to catch criminals who defrauded two COVID-19 programs that handed out $43 billion meant to protect small restaurants and live-entertainment venues.
Left Angst
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'A hostile climate for workers': US labor movement struggles under Trump
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(Apr 2025) Thomas Piketty: 'The reality is the US is losing control of the world'
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COVID Jawboning Lawsuit Dismissed (For Now)-Dressen v. Flaherty
the court seems to be saying that because the current MAGA government is now run by anti-vaxxers, COVID vaccine skeptics have nothing to worry about any more. However, jawboning concerns shouldn’t swing with changes in administrations. In his Murthy dissent, Justice Alito suggested that government threats don’t have an expiration date. It could just swing now to the government pressuring removal of pro-vax content instead of anti-vax content, but the threat to speech is the same regardless of the partisan priorities.
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Susie Wiles Acknowledges Trump’s ‘Score Settling’ Behind Prosecutions - The New York Times
In interviews with Vanity Fair, Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” called JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist” and concluded that Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the early handling of the Epstein files. Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told an interviewer that she forged a “loose agreement” with Mr. Trump to stop focusing after three months on punishing antagonists, an effort that evidently did not succeed. While she insisted that Mr. Trump is not constantly thinking about retribution, she said that “when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.” Ms. Wiles made the comments in a series of extraordinarily unguarded interviews over the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term with the author Chris Whipple that are being published Tuesday by Vanity Fair. Not only did she confirm that Mr. Trump is using criminal prosecution to retaliate against adversaries, she also acknowledged that he was not telling the truth when he accused former President Bill Clinton of visiting the private island of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
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US gov't launches 'Tech Force' to replace IT staff DOGE fired
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Amazon shareholders call for report on AWS use in Gaza and by US ICE
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Trump Overtime Tax Break More a Political Tagline Than Tax Relief
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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EU yields to pressure from automakers as it rethinks 2035 combustion car ban
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Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams
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Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years
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Volkswagen to End Production at German Plant, a First in Company History
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Australia's social media ban carries health warning for Big Tech investors
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New citizenship rules for Canadians born or adopted abroad are now in effect
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A man who rushed in to help disarm one of the terrorists who fired at a crowd celebrating Hanukkah in Australia’s famous Bondi Beach was mistakenly shot by police and tackled by bystanders, according to a new report. The heroic civilian, who was only described as a Middle Eastern refugee living with his Australian wife and kids, was in Bondi Beach when Naveed Akram, 24, and his father Sajid, 50, allegedly opened fire at a crowd of Jewish revelers.
China
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Giant sea monsters lived in rivers at the end of the dinosaur age
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Scientists Have Discovered an Organism That Breaks Biology's Golden Rule
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Why mistletoe is thriving, even as its traditional orchards are lost
There have been reports of mistletoe spreading quickly in places such as Essex and Cambridge. Blackcaps, a key disperser of mistletoe seeds, have only recently started overwintering in Britain. Warmer winters have altered their migration, increasing the time they spend in the UK and therefore the time they have to spread mistletoe seeds. Changes in bird behaviour linked to climate change may therefore be affecting the distribution of one of Britain’s most familiar plants.