2026-01-08

etc

• Scientists Discover Oldest Poison, on 60k-Year-Old Arrows

Horseshit

• Polymarket refuses to pay bets that US would 'invade' Venezuela

• I lost my library in a fire

• NFL Again Towers Over U.S. Media in 2025 – NFL had 83 top broadcasts

• So Long, Nissan Versa: America's Cheapest New Car Is Dead

  • It was virtually impossible to get the base model from a dealer, anyway.

• Study: Higher female representation in parliaments boosts citizen trust

• San Francisco Battles Skateboarders over the City's Ugliest Fountain

celebrity gossip

• The Untold Story of Charlie Munger's Final Years

Obit

• Aldrich Ames, CIA agent who spied for Soviet Union and Russia, dies aged 84

• Bela Tarr, RIP

  • Filmmaker Béla Tarr Has Died

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Research identify two psychological traits that predict conspiracy theory belief

  he findings suggest that individuals who perceive the world as fundamentally unjust and those who struggle with uncertain or ambiguous situations are more likely to endorse conspiratorial narratives. Psychological research into conspiracy theories has expanded significantly in recent years. While many studies focus on specific beliefs, such as those regarding climate change or public health events, fewer have examined the broader mindset that makes someone prone to these ideas.

• What happens when seeing is no longer believing?

  These two trends frame a key sociotechnological challenge for the next decade: What do humans, as a society, do when political actors can create their own history and manufacture the so-called “documents” to back it up? While democratic processes themselves do not require widespread consensus on facts, accountability does. If members of a society cannot understand and agree upon core facts about their history—not to mention the current state of crime, the economy, foreign affairs, order, and public health—there is no basis for holding politicians responsible for their actions. And, as George Orwell noted decades ago in “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” terrible things follow when leaders can create their own facts (Orwell 1943).

• Where 'hate speech' censorship is worse than on U.S. campuses

Musk

• Grok's deepfake images investigated by Australia's online safety watchdog

• Grok Is Pushing AI 'Undressing' Mainstream

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo Has Come for the Kids

• EVs remain a niche choice in the US, according to survey

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Google Gemini Is Taking Control of Humanoid Robots on Auto Factory Floors

• We need to seize the means of robot production

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• "diversity" is great until it includes someone who disagrees with the Left: What Social Science Knows About the Value of Diversity

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• UK university degree no longer 'passport to social mobility', says King's VC

• A bit of glass and freedom is all you need

You want to innovate ? Don’t live in the world of ideas solely. Don’t be shy about mixing with commercial interest. And make sure to have a bit of freedom.

• Smartphone use cuts into school hours, with social media leading the way

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Contrast with the promises already being made for "smart glasses" etc: 'Autofocus' glasses can change their lenses in real time

• Dell announces 52-inch 6K display with Thunderbolt

• Rockstar still hasn't offered a convincing reason for firing over 30 developers

• Apple Reportedly Exploring Multispectral Imaging for Future iPhones

• Logitech caused its mice to freak out by not renewing a certificate

• Most successful information technology in history is the one we barely notice

• Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files

• Gnome dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

• AMD hints at open-sourcing FSR 4 in the wake of accidental release

• SanDisk terminates WD brands and introduces Optimus SSD range

• Australia's Social Media Ban: Age Limits Won't Fix What's Wrong with Platforms

• We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

• AMD Ryzen chief teases return of older Zen 3 chips to fight soaring RAM prices

• Nvidia could resurrect old GPUs to address shortages and high pricing

• Facial Age Checks Now Required to Chat on Roblox

• Man sues restaurant after promotional TikTok video exposes his secret affair

• Health care data breach affects over 600k patients, Illinois agency says

• LG TVs' unremovable Copilot shortcut is the least of smart TVs' AI problems

• Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

• The Inevitable Rise of the Art TV

• Bose open-sources its SoundTouch smart speakers ahead of end-of-life

• Court orders Samsung to stop "spying" on Texans through its TVs

• AI chip frenzy to wallop DRAM prices with 70% hike

• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to shut down and publish final edition in May

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Early Open Source history

  The next step was a subtle one; nethack. This seems to have been the first project for which the location of the FTP server was an accident. It wasn't tied to any particular institution or development group, and the developers were truly geographically distributed rather than being a relatively tight-knit group at one institution with occasional contributors from elsewhere. Nethack was, as far as I know, the first distributed development project about which it is not certain that any two of the developers ever met face to face - you just joined a mailing list.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• World 'may not have time' to prepare for AI safety risks

• The data center boom is concentrated in the U.S.

• How CU Boulder's student news site got taken over by AI slop

• Ralph Wiggum went from 'The Simpsons' to the biggest name in AI

• Teenager died of overdose 'after ChatGPT coached him on drug-taking'

• Renowned mathematician Joel David Hamkins says AI is useless for solving math

• Tech AI godfather says Meta's new 29-year-old AI boss is 'inexperienced'

• The Money People Still Won't Admit We're in an AI Bubble–and They Never Will

• Jobs 'At Risk from AI' Were Declining Before ChatGPT Launched

• Distinct AI Models Seem to Converge on How They Encode Reality

• LeCun says Meta's new 29-year-old AI boss 'inexperienced', warns of staff exodus

• Anthropic details how it measures Claude's wokeness

• Anthropic Raising $10B at $350B Value

  • Anthropic plans new $10B fundraise that would value AI firm at $350B

• California's AI Laws Are Setting the National Trend

• OpenAI Would Like You to Share Your Health Data with ChatGPT

Crypto con games

• Bitcoin Core sees development uptick, reversing multi-year decline

• Bitcoin still hasn't hit $100k when adjusted for inflation

Economicon / Business / Finance

• AI 'Fatigue' Leaves Investors Focused on S&P's Other 493 Stocks

• The Stock Market Is Doing Something It's Only Done Twice Since 1871

• Fund managers prepare for 'reckoning' in US tech sector

• Chat platform Discord files confidentially for US IPO

• Horseshit: The $160k Mechanic Job That Ford Can't Fill

• Warner Bros. Discovery once again rejects Paramount offer in favor of Netflix

• US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year

• German dentists' pension fund sues advisers after $1.77B loss

• Startup founder accused in winery rampage allowed to complete trade from jail

• The $14 Burrito: Why San Francisco Inflation Feels Higher Than 2.5%

• JPMorgan Cuts All Ties with Proxy Advisers in Industry First

  • JPMorgan is ditching proxy advisors and turning to AI for shareholder votes

• JPMorgan Chase Reaches a Deal to Take over the Apple Credit Card

• Blue Owl BDC Allows for 17% Redemptions as Investors Storm Exit

• Amazon must face price gouging lawsuit, US judge rules

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Larry Page officially moving out of California ahead of proposed billionaire tax

  • Larry Page officially moves business out of CA ahead of a proposed wealth tax

• New California law requires a working fridge in all apartments

• Bill to Eliminate H-1B Visa Program Introduced in Congress

• Former WA state auditor suggests review of DCYF child daycare funding has merit

• RFK Jr announces nutrition guidelines, with more protein and less processed food

  • RFK says eat more protein, less sugar in new dietary guidelines

• US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

  • Trump Moves to Ban Investors from Buying Single-Family Homes

• FAA signs radar deals to drag US air traffic control out of the 1980s

• Explosion of Silence: ATF Gets 150,000 eForm Submissions On First Day of Zero Dollar Tax Stamps.

Trump

• Trump withdraws US from international organizations, White House says

• Trump calls for record $1.5T defense budget, a 50 percent jump

• Trump pulls US out of 66 international bodies, including key UN climate treaty

Democrats

• On Jan. 6, Questions Emerge About Michael Byrd’s Taxpayer-Funded Maryland Daycare.

Left Angst

• How Trump gets Greenland in 4 easy steps – POLITICO

  Donald Trump wants the U.S. to own Greenland. The trouble is, Greenland already belongs to Denmark and most Greenlanders don't want to become part of the U.S. While swooping into Greenland's capital, Nuuk, and taking over Venezuela-style seems fanciful even if the military attack on Caracas seems to have provided a jolt to all sides about what the U.S. is capable of there's a definite pathway. And Trump already appears to be some way along it. Worryingly for the Europeans, the strategy looks an awful lot like Vladimir Putin’s expansionist playbook.

• The Guardian view on Trump's raid in Caracas: oil matters

• India's PM lobbied Trump to like his social media posts

• Man allegedly broke windows at JD Vance home due to mental health issues, not politics, lawyer says.

• There Is a Sickness Eating Away at American Democracy

• Trump Crypto Venture World Liberty Applies for Bank Charter

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• ICE agents fatally shoot woman in Minneapolis

  • ICE agent fatally shoots woman in Minneapolis

  • ICE agent fatally shoots woman in Minneapolis amid immigration crackdown

  • Deadly Minneapolis Encounter Is the 9th ICE Shooting Since September

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• How 150 Minutes over Caracas Rewrote the Physics of Global Power

  Four thousand miles further east in Moscow, Deputy Security Council Chairman Dmitry Medvedev was composing what may prove to be the most consequential twenty-three words of the nuclear age: “The maximum reinforcement that guarantees that the country will be reliably protected is only the nuclear arsenal! Long live nuclear weapons!” The statement, delivered to RIA Novosti approximately sixteen hours after American forces extracted a sitting head of state from his fortified compound in a capital city defended by two billion dollars of Russian military hardware, was not the rant of a marginalized hawk. It was the inadvertent confession of a superpower that had just watched its deterrence architecture collapse in real time. Medvedev was not threatening the West. He was telling the truth.

• we got an unexpected audit of Venezuela's air defenses

  if you are a Chinese military planner contemplating how to get an invasion army across 100 miles of the Straits of Taiwan, you are shitting your pants right about now. Because you have just learned that if you had tried to bust that move yesterday, your nice shiny new invasion fleet would have gotten absolutely gacked by U.S. airpower and missiles that you wouldn't see coming BECAUSE YOUR FUCKING RADARS DON'T FUCKING WORK.

  Now I'm going to suggest that you juxtapose two phrases: "thermobaric bombs" and "Three Gorges Dam". A China that's naked from the air has the biggest glass jaw in human history. Now I think there's pretty good odds that the invasion of Taiwan will never happen at all.

• The 'Growler' Signal-Jamming Jet That Helped Capture Nicolás Maduro

• Venezuela strike marks a turning point for US cyber warfare

• US says it will discuss Greenland ownership with Denmark next week

• Russia sends submarine to escort tanker the US tried to seize off Venezuela

  • U.S. Forces Seize Fleeing Russian-Flagged Oil Tanker in North Atlantic

  • US seizes Russian tanker – are we all going to die?

  • US seizes Russian-flagged oil tanker in Atlantic after two-week pursuit

  • U.S. Forces Seize Fleeing Tanker Being Escorted by Russian Vessels

  • Seized by US: why so much interest in a rusty tanker in the Atlantic?

  • Trump’s capture of Russian oil tanker sets a perilous precedent

  • US seizes Russian-flagged tanker

World

• Bitchat Rises as Uganda Threatens Another Digital Blackout

• The mineral riches hiding under Greenland's ice

• Taiwan: Search for F-16 pilot continues as Air Force cannot confirm ejection

• Canada's Immigration Dept shelves visa program for entrepreneurs, citing misuse

• Palantir lands biggest ever UK defense deal

• Brussels bike ban plan for pedestrian zone 'dangerous and absurd'

• Wegmans grocery store uses biometric surveillance on shoppers

  • Fighting back against biometric surveillance at Wegmans

• Man jailed for selling chemicals online to help people kill themselves

• Japanese nuclear plant reopening postponed following data fabrication

• British businesses warned of 'cashflow contagion' as more firms set to collapse

• Berlin Outage: The Consequence of Ignoring Leftist Extremism

  The extremist ‘Volcano Group’ behind the attack claimed it was taking ‘action’ against the rich because of the damage they are doing to the environment and due to their alleged incitement of hatred against migrants, calling it “an act of self-defense and international solidarity with all those who protect the Earth and life.”

• Canada's armed forces are planning for threats from America

Venezuela

• Trump steals 50M barrels of oil from Venezuela

• Venezuela 'turning over' oil to US in move that could cut supply to China

• Trump suggests cyberattacks used to turn off lights in Venezuela during strikes

• Russia Once Offered U.S. Control of Venezuela for Free Rein in Ukraine

• Trump says Venezuela will purchase American products with revenue from oil deal

Israel

• UN accuses Israel of 'apartheid' in West Bank

China

• China seeks to enhance ties with Ireland to boost relations with EU

• China mandates 50% domestic equipment rule for chipmakers, sources say

• China asks tech firms to halt orders for Nvidia's H200 chips

• Japanese PM's Taiwan comments prompt China to ban certain exports to Japan

Health / Medicine

• Century-old tumours could reveal why more young people are getting bowel cancer

• FDA to limit regulation of health and fitness wearables

• The attrition is setting in: how Oregon's magic mushroom experiment lost its way

• Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD

• We are living through a golden age of vaccine development

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Aviation emissions could be halved without cutting journeys

• Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries

• Jellyfish sleep like humans – even though they don't have brains

• Coral reef fish recovery could boost sustainable seafood servings by up to 50%

• Why the Sudden Emergence of Sodium-Ion Batteries?

• Why California's milk cartons may lose their coveted recycling symbol