2025-12-21
Horseshit
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From Gridlock to Grid Power: The Promise of Superconducting Cables
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Time Travel Is Possible: Math Proves Paradox-Free Time Travel
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Prediction markets barely make money; sportsbooks make money
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How Humankind's 10 million year love affair with booze might end
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DraftKings hopes to score big with new prediction markets app
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My Sparkling and Surreal Experience as a Water-Tasting Judge
Epstein
celebrity gossip
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How Venezuela's Machado Survived the Riskiest Leg of Her Escape
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Clinton Unloads on Trump's Plot to 'Scapegoat' Him for Epstein
Former President Bill Clinton has responded to the latest release of files associated with the notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein with a stern statement accusing the White House of using him as a scapegoat.
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Trove of Epstein Files Includes New Photos and Court Records
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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There is no silver lining to Female Genital Mutilation
Progressives are notoriously fond of renaming negatively-coded social practices to make them sound more palatable: “assisted dying” for euthanasia, or “sex work” for prostitution, for instance. The usual strategy is to take the most benign example of the practice possible, then make that the central paradigm. And so we get images of affluent middle-class people floating off to consensual oblivion at the hands of a doctor, rather than hungry, homeless depressives. We are told to think of students harmlessly supplementing their degrees with a bit of escort work, not drug-addicted mothers standing on street corners. Perpetually gloomy about human behaviour in other areas, when it comes to sex and death the mood becomes positively Pollyanna-ish. Similarly, the authors of the new FGM article are apparently looking for the silver lining. Some genital modifications enhance group identity, they say, and a sense of community belonging. And as with euthanasia and prostitution, they want us to ignore the inconvenient downsides. But at the same time, there is a philosophical component here mostly absent from parallel campaigns. It’s cultural relativism — which says that strictly speaking, there are no downsides, or indeed upsides, at all.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Micron's Blowout Results Are Bad News for Anyone Buying a New PC Next Year
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LG forced a Copilot web app onto its TVs but will let you delete it
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Android introduces $2-4 install fee and 10–20% cut for US external content links
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Motherboard flaws allows game cheats, Riot blocks players that don't update BIOS
- "anti-cheat" has gotten so ludicrous. These vendors need to be providing their own locked down hardware, custom consoles, and even then will not be able top provide the "security" they hope to advertise.
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James Bond Movies Set to Stream on Netflix in Deal with Amazon
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Big GPUs don't need big PCs | Jeff Geerling
The Pi can hold its own in many cases—it even wins on efficiency (often by a large margin) if you're okay with sacrificing just 2-5% of peak performance! The craziest part was, while I was finishing up this testing, GitHub user mpsparrow plugged four Nvidia RTX A5000 GPUs into a single Raspberry Pi. Running Llama 3 70b, the setup generated performance within 2% of his reference Intel server. On the Pi, it was generating responses at 11.83 tokens per second. On a modern server, using the exact same GPU setup, he got 12. That's less than a 2 percent difference.
How is this possible? Because—at least when using multiple Nvidia GPUs that are able to share memory access over the PCIe bus—the Pi doesn't have to be in the way. An external PCIe switch may allow cards to share memory over the bus at Gen 4 or Gen 5 speeds, instead of requiring trips 'north-south' through the Pi's PCIe Gen 3 lane.
After all that, which one is the winner? Well, the PC obviously, if you care about raw performance and easy setup. But for a very specific niche of users, the Pi is better, like if you're not maxed out all the time and have almost entirely GPU-driven workloads. The idle power on the Pi setup was always 20-30W lower. And other Arm SBCs using Rockchip or Qualcomm SoCs are even more efficient, and often have more I/O bandwidth.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Sam Altman's New Brain Venture, Merge Labs, Will Spin Out of a Nonprofit
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Google's boomerang year: 20% of AI engineers hired in 2025 were ex-employees
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We asked four AI coding agents to rebuild Minesweeper–the results were explosive
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School security AI flagged clarinet as a gun. Exec says it wasn't an error
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Four Ways AI Is Being Used to Strengthen Democracies Worldwide
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Man who lost key motion in Elon Musk suit alleges S.F. judge used faulty AI
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Data center deals hit record $61B in 2025 amid construction frenzy
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Blackstone leads investment in data-security firm Cyera at $9B valuation
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A 'recession' is arriving for people who want jobs in technology
- Having proclaimed Trump's terrible economy for a year and not had it materialize; we gotta redefine the words to meet the conditions.
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Why homeownership in California isn't nearly the financial slam dunk it once was
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Intel's new Arizona fab, where the chipmaker's fate hangs in the balance
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Retailers are pushing store brands. Why wings and macarons are big money makers
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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The Deviancy Signal: Having “Nothing to Hide” is a Threat to Us All
There's a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, "I have nothing to hide." It's not the gentle pity you'd have for the naive. It's the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people aren't just surrendering their own liberty. They're instead actively forging the chains for the rest of us. They are a threat, and I think it's time they were told so.
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Wisconsin town will use accessible voting machines after federal lawsuit
Trump
Democrats
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US Attorney's Office: 'Half or more' of $18B billed through state programs tied to fraud
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson on Thursday said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) pulled claims for 14 programs identified by Minnesota officials as being particularly vulnerable to fraud and found $18 billion in Medicaid billing since 2018. While not all of those payments were illegitimate, Thompson estimated “half or more” of the $18 billion was received through fraudulent means, though he said prosecutors are still working to find the exact number.
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Labor Department sending unemployment insurance 'strike team' to investigate Minnesota fraud
Left Angst
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Sequoia partner spreads debunked Brown shooting theory, testing new leadership
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Trump admin says White House ballroom construction is national security matter
The Trump administration said in a court filing Monday that the president’s White House ballroom construction project must continue for unexplained national security reasons and because a preservationists’ organization that wants it stopped has no standing to sue. The filing was in response to a lawsuit filed last Friday by the National Trust for Historic Preservation asking a federal judge to halt President Donald Trump’s project until it goes through multiple independent reviews and a public comment period and wins approval from Congress.
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It's time to accept the US Supreme Court is illegitimate and must be replaced
In Donald Trump’s second term, the supreme court’s conservative supermajority has seized the opportunity to empower the nation’s chief executive. In response, public approval of the court has collapsed. The question is what it means for liberals to catch up to this new reality of a court that willingly tanks its own legitimacy. Eager to realize cherished goals of assigning power to the president and arrogating as much for itself, the conservative justices seemingly no longer care what the public or the legal community think of the court’s actions. Too often, though, liberals are responding with nostalgia for a court that cares about its high standing. There is a much better option: to grasp the opportunity to set right the supreme court’s role in US democracy.
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U.S. to drop childhood vaccine recommendations as it looks to Denmark
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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Is North Korea's 'princess' walking a path toward succession?
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Australia to Crack Down on Hate Speech After Bondi Beach Attack - The New York Times
Mr. Albanese said at a news conference that his government would draft legislation to combat hate speech and those who spread hate, including measures to target preachers who promote violence and to list organizations whose leaders promote violence or racial hatred. It also would increase penalties for hate speech. The home affairs minister would be also given new powers to cancel or reject visas of people who are deemed likely to spread hate and division in Australia, he said. Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, Australia has seen an increase in antisemitism and attacks on its Jewish community, Mr. Albanese said. “It is clear we need to do more to combat this evil scourge. Much more,” he said.
It is not clear what behaviors and speech will be captured under the new legislation, and the government did not provide examples. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said at the news conference that the new legislation would capture two kinds of instances where people or organizations have “gone right to the limits of the law but have managed to stay on the legal side of it.” For individuals who used language that was “clearly dehumanizing, unacceptable, having no place in Australia, but have not quite crossed the threshold to violence,” the new legislation would lower that threshold, Mr. Burke said. The same standard would apply to organizations that exhibited divisive behavior and philosophy, he added.
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EU drops 2035 combustion engine ban as global EV shift faces reset
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Freedom University: The right-wing group rallying youth in South Korea
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
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Artificial sweetener found in Diet Coke and gum could trigger heart brain damage
Aspartame – found Diet Coke, Pepsi Max and Sprite, as well as products like Extra chewing gum – has long been linked to health concerns including cancer, high blood pressure and stroke.