2025-12-29

etc

• Snow-capped Mount Etna erupts as skiers glide down slopes

Horseshit

• Why Active Rest Is Important During the Holidays

• Faux Cyrillic is a load of old crдp

• The Masculine Mystique: Sex and monstrosity at the movies

• Nick Kyrgios defeats Anna Sabalenka to win 'Battle of the Sexes' tennis match

Obit

• Brigitte Bardot, legendary French actress and animal rights activist dies age 91

  • Brigitte Bardot, French screen legend, dies aged 91

  • International Sex Symbol Dies at 91

• Gary Graffman, Piano Virtuoso and Renowned Teacher, Dies at 97

Musk

• Tesla's Dangerous Doors

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• World's smallest autonomous robots could one day save your life

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Is There a Religious Revival Among Young US Adults?

• A Decline in Churchgoing Led to a Rise in 'Deaths of Despair'

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The Hottest High Schools in Massachusetts Are Trade Schools

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Rainbow Six Siege breach gives players billions of credits

  • Rainbow Six Siege hack forces Ubisoft to shut down servers

• GitHub Takes Down Rockchip MPP Repository After FFmpeg Copyright Claim

• Google allowing users to change their Gmail address, per official Google support

• Leaked documents show Instagram's plan to win back teens

• Sergey Brin thought he had his Steve Jobs moment with failed Google Glass

• Why Are Cars Getting Rid of Android Auto?

• There's No Happy Ending for Movie Theaters, No Matter Who Wins Warner

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Parsing IP addresses quickly (portably, without SIMD magic)

  What if you want high speed without too much work or a specialized library? You can try to roll your own. But since I am civilized programmer, I just asked my favorite AI to write it for me.

• PySDR: A Guide to SDR and DSP Using Python

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can't find a job

• Tim Cook Posts AI Slop in Christmas Message on Twitter

• A new research shows that 21-33% of YouTube's feed may consist of AI slop

• Racist AI fakes are now a business – and a political tool

• Sam Altman is hiring someone to worry about the dangers of AI

• An AI pioneer says the technology is 'limited' and won't replace humans soon

• AI skeptic DeSantis: 'We have to reject that with every fiber of our being'

• Nvidia deal a big win for Groq employees and investors

• Suicide warnings and 243 mentions of hanging: What ChatGPT said to suicidal teen

• When A.I. Took My Job, I Bought a Chain Saw

• 'PromptQuest' is the worst game of 2025 (trying to make chatbots work)

• Michael Burry Bets He Isn't Too Early to Go Against the AI Juggernaut

• Data centers are West Virginia's new strip mines

• As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Surging satellite numbers threaten to dazzle even space telescopes

• Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS reveals weird wobbling jets in rare sun-facing tail

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Would You Kill for a Job?

• Companies Are Outlining Plans for 2026. Hiring Isn't One of Them

• From grain to gigs: How corn exchanges are finding a new future

• How Walmart's Financial Services Became a Fraud Magnet

• The Boss Who Gave His Employees a $240M Gift

• Amazon halts plans for drone delivery in Italy

• As Warren Buffett retires, uncertainty looms for Berkshire Hathaway

Trump

• Trump to Meet With Ukraine’s Zelenskyy at Mar-a-Lago

Democrats

• RE: Fraud in Minnesota

  I’m not sure that most Americans understand that in large swathes of humanity, there is no actual concept of “fraud,” particularly fraud against the government. Instead, there is a belief in the virtue of getting away with what you can to help yourself and your tribe.

Left Angst

• The “Breton affair” and its questionable timing – radiobruxelleslibera

  Just as Washington chooses to target Thierry Breton, Europe is opening regulatory pipelines that could become far more inconvenient for American Big Tech than the former French commissioner’s tweets and letters. The US action therefore risks becoming a resounding political own goal, as well as appearing as a belated and poorly calibrated gesture compared to the real centers of regulatory power in Brussels.

• Is the US Media Captured?

  Schiffrin points to a range of examples—the fifteen-million-dollar payout by Disney, which chose to settle (and pay an extra million in legal fees) rather than litigate a libel claim brought by Donald Trump against ABC News; the decision by Jeff Bezos, in his capacity as the owner of the Washington Post, to spike an endorsement of Kamala Harris and subsequently pare back and revamp the entire Post opinion section; the similar decision made by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, whose main business interest is in biotech, an industry heavily dependent on government approval and regulation. The most recent and for many most troubling example, however, involves CBS, whose parent company, Paramount, agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by Trump alleging that a 60 Minutes interview with Harris was misleadingly edited.

• Who are the real ocean outlaws: Trump’s regime or the Houthis?

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• $400k worth of lobster stolen en route to Costco wholesale stores in US

  The lobsters, which were not alive, were being transported by Rexing Companies to stores in Illinois and Minnesota, Sky News' US partner NBC reported. The shipment was reportedly picked up in Taunton, Massachusetts, but never reached its destination. Dylan Rexing, Rexing's president and chief executive, said in a statement that he believes the seafood was stolen by a driver impersonating a legitimate carrier. "This theft wasn't random," he said. "It followed a pattern we're seeing more and more, where criminals impersonate legitimate carriers using spoofed emails and burner phones to hijack high-value freight while it's in transit."

  • How does one sell off huge lots of rare goods like this? This is not the kind of stuff "the average fence" would have been able to handle when i had some insight into that world. Have things changed that much? Or is this still the kind of job that would have been commissioned by one of a few people that could use the product?

• A Police Drone Might Be Behind Your Next Ticket

World

• Apple seeks to appeal against £1.5B ruling it overcharged UK customers

• The window artists beautifying our high streets

• Post Office had deal with Fujitsu to fix Horizon errors 19 years ago

• Italians celebrate village's first baby in 30 years

• Jewish group warned police of terror plot at Hanukkah event before Bondi Beach attack.

• Munich's surfers foiled again as authorities remove access to famous river wave

  • Debate over surfing in German park after city removes wave-creating device

• The 'decolonised' essay alternatives dumbing down Britain's universities

Israel

• Somalia condemns Israel’s recognition of Somaliland as ‘naked invasion’

China

• China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles over Safety Concerns

• China Issues Draft Rules to Govern Use of Human-Like AI Systems

Health / Medicine

• “Medicinal cannabis is increasingly used to treat a variety of conditions, but a comprehensive new review suggests that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support its effectiveness in many cases.”

• How to boost your calorie-crunching brown fat in the cold winter months

• Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA

• Your brain doesn't suddenly 'fully develop' at 25 – what the neuroscience shows

  • it pops into shape with a "foomp" noise, like a pool float. Then it begins to gradually lose shape and sag sadly; like a pool float.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Scientists uncover why mRNA Covid vaccines can trigger heart inflammation

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The case of Africa's 'vanishing' carbon deals

• Nature and Climate Wins in 2025

• Breakthrough of the Year: The unstoppable rise of renewable energy

• Flat-headed cat not seen in Thailand for almost 30 years is rediscovered

• The Well Watchers

• People Who Drink Bottled Water Daily Get 90k More Microplastic Particles a Year

• Brazil's first arid zone is a stark warning for the whole country

• The hidden way the big, bad wolf protects us

• Ghost resorts: as 100s of ski slopes lie abandoned will nature reclaim the Alps?

• Loss of moist broadleaf forest in Africa has turned a carbon sink into source