2025-12-24

etc

• Garmin Emergency Autoland Deployed for the first time

• The Renaissance book that heralded growth

  In the late 1500s, in other words, Europeans started to imagine progress. ‘The first history to be written in terms of progress is [Giorgio] Vasari’s history of Renaissance art, The Lives of the Artists (1550)’, observes historian of science David Wootton. ‘It was quickly followed by Francesco Barozzi’s 1560 translation of Proclus’s commentary on the first book of Euclid, which presented the history of mathematics in terms of a series of inventions or discoveries’. This was the environment in which two Florentines conceived Nova Reperta, whose Latin title is usually translated ‘new discoveries’. One of the earliest works promoting the new attitude – and definitely the most charming – the book is a collection of  19 engravings, each celebrating a discovery or process that was relatively new to Europeans. First published in 1588, Nova Reperta made the argument for progress by showing rather than telling.

• Why Pancakes Taste So Much Better From A Diner Than Homemade

  It's not just the volume of pancakes that matters, either. Restaurant kitchens have specialized tools for crafting pancakes. As Bechtle put it, "Unfortunately, a large griddle, a long spatula, and a pancake dispenser aren't going to be found in your home kitchen." By using commercial gadgets like giant, flat-top griddles with precise temperature controls, diners have access to precise measurements and evenly distributed heat.

Horseshit

• Could an electric blanket save you £4k this winter?

• Welcome to the Weird, Wonderful British Ritual of Panto Theater

• Runner laps Toronto's new $2.6B LRT train

• 'Never again,' says Windsor senior after embarrassment of empty gift cards

• Sundays Are the New Mondays

• Chinese Billionaire Admits He’s Never Met Some of His 100+ U.S.-Born Children. Los Angeles judge denies parental rights to billionaire with over 100 U.S.-born surrogacy children across multiple countries.

• Hate Brussels sprouts? You may be living in the past

• When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates

• Rise of the full nesters: what life is like with adult children

• An amateur codebreaker may have just solved the Black Dahlia and Zodiac killings

• Artist's Collection of Weird Google Street View Images Gets Major Exhibit

Epstein

• We Just Unredacted the Epstein Files

  1. Defendants also attempted to conceal their criminal sex trafficking and abuse conduct by paying large sums of money to participant-witnesses, including by paying for their attorneys’ fees and case costs in litigation related to this conduct.

  2. Epstein also threatened harm to victims and helped release damaging stories about them to damage their credibility when they tried to go public with their stories of being trafficked and sexually abused.

  3. Epstein also instructed one or more Epstein Enterprise participant-witnesses to destroy evidence relevant to ongoing court proceedings involving Defendants’ criminal sex trafficking and abuse conduct.

  • Some Epstein files can be unredacted

  • Some Epstein file redactions are being undone with hacks

• Is This the Rosetta Stone That Explains Epstein's Vast Wealth and Intelligence Ties?

  Mike Benz says this is the first time he has seen evidence that Bear Stearns, which collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis and was later acquired by JPMorgan Chase, was “actively clearing BCCI trades and laundering weapons payments during the very years Epstein worked there.” The BCCI was a notorious bank that operated as a global, clandestine banking system for international spy agencies. BCCI is reputed to have been involved in "some of the most sensitive intelligence operations of the Reagan-Bush years." The bank was closed in the early 1990s due to its shady connections.

celebrity gossip

• Biography aims to fill gaps in story of libertarian Telegram founder Pavel Durov

• How Willie Nelson Sees America

Obit

• Vince Zampella didn't just make hit games. He changed the medium

  • Call of Duty co-creator and Battlefield lead Vince Zampella dies in car crash

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Deplatforming Backfired

Musk

• Bill Ackman Proposes SpaceX IPO Through Sparc, Prioritizing Tesla Shareholders

• Tesla Doors: 15 People Have Died in Crashes Where it Wouldn't Open

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Uber and Lyft rolling Baidu robotaxis into London next year

• After Power Outage, SF Wonders: Can Robot Taxis Handle a Big Earthquake?

• Could Torontonians soon ride self-driving taxis? That's Waymo's plan

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• NYC Spends $200 Million on Cell Service for School Chromebooks

• Why Southern States Are Outperforming Others in Education.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Bitchat: Jack Dorsey's Bluetooth Messaging Experiment

• Amazon to offer DRM-free ePub and PDF downloads for Kindle titles in January

• Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks

  The format credited with making books more accessible via low prices and widespread availability will all but vanish from the publishing scene in a few weeks. The decision made this winter by ReaderLink to stop distributing mass market paperback books at the end of 2025 was the latest blow to a format that has seen its popularity decline for years. According to Circana BookScan, mass market unit sales plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84%, and sales this year through October were about 15 million units. But for many years, the mass market paperback was “the most popular reading format,”

• Anna's Archive Backed Up Spotify, Plans to Release 300TB Music Archive

  • Pirate group scrapes Spotify's 300TB library, posts torrents for 86M tracks

• Microsoft plans to replace all of its C/C++ code with Rust by 2030.

  • Microsoft has set a goal to "eliminate every line of C and C++ from MS by 2030."

  One million lines of code, per engineer, per month. Pure insanity. This kind of decision making is common among those with a deeply held, delusional faith in the Cult of Rust. Take battle tested code, and re-write it (without a clear benefit to the end user) at a recklessly rapid rate. Then force others to adopt that rewritten code before it is ready or properly tested. All while holding a delusional belief that your new Rust code is superior in all ways, and is inherently bug free thanks to the divine nature of Rust.

• Xerox and Stack Overflow partnered to preserve knowledge and power innovation

• Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

• Japanese shops halt desktop PC orders until 2026 as memory shortage intensifies

• Apple Clings to Samsung as RAM Prices Soar

• Wax Figure of Idris Elba Unlocks Face ID

• Nvidia Puts 100-Hour Monthly Limit on All GeForce Now Subscriptions

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Fabrice Bellard: Micro QuickJS: a JavaScript engine for microcontroller

• DACs and ADCs, or there and back again

• In Which My Situation is Discussed

  This past year, I acquired a persistent stalker, harmless but ambiently entertaining, and, in a plot twist, an entirely different person attempted to get multiple family members and myself killed. They were, ultimately, unsuccessful.

• Libxml2 Narrowly Avoids Becoming Unmaintained

• Compilers is really smart: Switching it up a bit

• The IPv4 address swamp: The new normal

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The AI History That Explains Fears of a Bubble

• AI Data Center Gold Rush Driven by 1000's of Newcomers

• Your chatbot keeps a file on you

• NYT reporter sues Google, xAI, OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement

• Teenagers Are Running Their Own AI Companies

• ByteDance plans $23B AI spending spree to keep pace with US rivals

• She Fell in Love with ChatGPT. Then She Ghosted It

• She thought a predator was grooming her daughter. It was an AI chatbot

• Alphabet to buy data center infrastructure firm Intersect in $4.75B deal

• Social media encourages the worst of AI boosterism

• Fiddler has show cancelled over Google AI-generated misinformation

• Nebula Awards Yelled at Until They Ban Use of AI by Nominees

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• The essential guide to proving we've found alien life

• First Alien Signal May Be a Civilization's Final Cry

• In a surprise announcement, Tory Bruno is out as CEO of United Launch Alliance

• "Giga" Satellites

Crypto con games

• A $309B Bet Fuels 24/7 Dollar Banking Without Borders

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The LinkedIn job scam is global. The hook is local

• Amazon blocks 1,800 job applications from suspected North Korean agents

• What happens to a small Nebraska town when 3,200 workers lose their jobs

• Gunpowder shortage leads Lexington ammo manufacturer to close, lay off workers.

• Recessions have become ultra-rare. That is storing up trouble

• Once Wall Street's High Flyer, Private Equity Loses Its Luster

• Market-rate housing will make your city cheaper

• U.S. Economic Growth Surged in Third Quarter of 2025

  • Boom! US Economy Grows By Big 4.3% In Third Quarter

  • Jason Furman on the new economic data

• Jim Beam pauses production at main distillery as bourbon inventories rise

• Car Payments Now Average More Than $750 a Month. Enter the 100-Month Car Loan

• Citadel to return $5B in profit to investors, source says

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Top lawmaker asks White House to address open-source software risks

• Nearly 1 in 4 Americans think they have a personal social security account

  An overwhelming majority of nonretired adults (79%) do not believe they will receive their full scheduled Social Security benefits when they retire. About one in ten (13%) go even further, saying they expect to receive nothing at all.

• (PDF) Supreme Court Blocks National Guard Deployment to Chicago Area

• Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge

Trump

• President Trump Announces New Trump Class Battleship

  • Trump announces new class of U.S. battleships named after himself

• Unverified Rumor Trump Admin in Talks with Edward Snowden for a Full Pardon

Left Angst

• Administration suspends 5 wind projects off East Coast, cites security concerns

  • Trump suspends all large offshore wind farms under construction

• Trump Isn't Building a Ballroom

  When Trump announced a $300 million ballroom at the White House, something went off in my brain. The pattern recognition part started tingling. Ninety thousand square feet, $300 million, underground construction at a secure government facility. I had heard about something like this before. Something with those exact specifications, that scale, that price point. It took me a minute to place it, but then I remembered: Oracle’s underground data centers in Jerusalem. Built in 2021 for Israeli military intelligence. Nine stories into bedrock, designed to survive missile strikes, built to house AI systems that make life-and-death decisions in real time. Ninety thousand square feet. $319 million. Nearly identical specs to what Trump just announced.

• Archivists Posted the 60 Minutes Cecot Segment Bari Weiss Killed

  • The 60 Minutes report that Bari Weiss censored is now internet contraband

  • 60 Minutes segment cancelled by CBS was available on Global TV website

  • Pulled 60 Minutes segment on CECOT

  • Postponed '60 Minutes' segment on Salvadoran prison is streamed by Canadian news

  • Banned '60 Minutes' Episode Leaked Online: Watch Here

• Bari Weiss's Audience of One

• The Military's Social Media Purge

  Nieman’s story illustrates an emerging trend of the military’s policing of social media. Normally, military members enjoy broad First Amendment rights to share their views, limited only when the speech conflicts with military duties. But the past few months have seen a “Kirk Purge” in which those standards have been abandoned for newer decrees that seek to punish military members for their viewpoints. These new standards inject uncertainty about which viewpoints are disfavored, which tends to broadly chill otherwise protected expression.

  • It was fine when people got bounced for asking about vaccines or diaries...

• How Did Doge Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little?

• December Was Deadliest Month in Deadliest Year in ICE Custody Deaths

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• FCC Bans All Foreign and DJI Drones: America Just Made Itself Weaker, Not Safer

  • The FCC's foreign drone ban is here

• The Pentagon and A.I. Giants Have a Weakness. Both Need China's Batteries, Badly

• Trump says US will keep or sell oil seized from Venezuela

• U.S. Takes a Step Toward Approving Seabed Mining in International Waters

• US denies visas to ex-EU commissioner and others over social media rules

  • U.S. Bars 5 European Tech Regulators and Researchers

  • US bars 5 Europeans it says pressured tech firms to censor American viewpoints

World

• Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs

• National Portrait Gallery buys rare photographs of Ada Lovelace for the nation

• Data centres coming for what's left of Australia's green export superpower dream

• Government Minister Steps in to Defend Met Office as Fake Temperature Scandal Escalates

  Step forward Lord Patrick Vallance, the former Government Chief Scientific Adviser at the heart of the Covid lockdown panic but now an unelected Science Minister in the Labour Administration. “There has been a growing online narrative in some online and social media spaces attempting to undermine Met Office observations and data,” he observes. Vallance’s conspiracy claims echo similar comments made earlier in the year by the Met Office. The investigative efforts of a small number of people were said by the state meteorologist to be an “attempt to undermine decades of robust science around the world ‘s changing climate”.

• Evri driver arrested after 120 parcels stolen before Christmas

• Apple hit with $115M fine for "burdensome" App Store privacy policy

• South Korea will require face scans to buy a SIM

• Germany's far-right AfD accused of gathering information for the Kremlin

• Captive Scam Workers in Cambodia Couldn't Flee as Bombs Fell

• Ireland plans to make a $1,500 a month basic income for artists permanent

• 597-Foot Photo Elevator in Bali Torn Down After Outcry From Locals | PetaPixel

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Intelligence agencies suspect Russia is developing anti-satellite weapon

• Russia's new anti-satellite weapon project would target Starlink with shrapnel

China

• China Delays Plans for Mass Production of Self-Driving Cars After Accident

• Why Chinese Energy Projects Are Facing a Backlash in the Balkans

• China just carried out its second reusable launch attempt in three weeks

Health / Medicine

• FDA Approves Pill Version of Wegovy

  • US regulator approves pill form of Wegovy weight-loss drug

  • FDA approves first GLP-1 weight loss pill

  • US regulators approve Wegovy pill, first oral medication to treat obesity

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Toilet Rats: Rare, but There

• Illicit economies, organized crime worsen Amazon deforestation in 2025