2026-05-07

Horseshit

• A game-changer for good health? Scientists believe 'we are when we eat'

• American History X was a hit but ego blew my career, says director

• Yes, pen pal programs still exist in a digital world

• The First Modern Car Without Hydraulic Brakes Is Headed to Production

• Man Finds $1M Worth of Yu-Gi-Oh Cards in a Dumpster

• Stanley: Storied Toolmaker Closes Its Last Hometown Plant–and Blames Its Tape Measures

• Shrinkflation Is Quietly Making All Gadgets Worse

• 5k-year-old artificial island hidden in Scottish loch predates Stonehenge

• I Tried Out a $60 Capsule Hotel in Honolulu: No Door, No Bathroom, No Problem

• Less people are having babies in Canada and the US and the govt is out of ideas

• Space-fermented sake by Japanese brewer Dassai sells for $700k

• Travelers are setting off TSA alarms for a really embarrassing reason — here's what to know

  one person suggested that it could be a phenomenon known as “swamp crotch.” This is what a TSA agent said after they’d set off sensors in similar circumstances. Swamp crotch is basically having a sweaty groin area. It can happen to anyone, especially in a hot, humid climate.

Obit

• Donlyn Lyndon, Last Surviving Creator of the Sea Ranch, Dies at 90

• Eugene Braunwald, Whose Research Reshaped Cardiology, Dies at 96

• CNN founder Ted Turner, a pioneer of cable TV news, dies at 87

  • Ted Turner, cable TV visionary who created CNN, dies at 87

  • CNN founder Ted Turner dies aged 87: Billionaire nicknamed the ‘Mouth of the South’ pioneered 24-hour cable news and was previously married to Jane Fonda

  • Ted Turner CNN founder and pioneer of 24h news cycle has died

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• How German Media Became The PR Arm Of The Expanding State

  In its morning briefing, the author made clear how she interprets the world: at the top, the all-knowing state; far below, the misguided, dependent individual. The piece appeared under the title “When Father State must save German growth” and stands as a case study of the spirit dominating German media. The individual counts for nothing, the state for everything.

• We once talked about fake news – now reality itself feels fake

  • "People can't help but see that the real world is not the one we talk about; we must convince them to ignore the reality"

• TikTok's algorithm favored Republican content in 2024 US elections, study finds

• David Letterman on 'The Late Show' Ending and CBS's New Owners

Musk

• OpenAI president forced to read his personal diary entries to jury

• Anthropic will now use all the compute capacity at the xAI Colossus1 data center

  • SpaceXAI will provide Anthropic with access to Colossus 1

  • Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX

  • Claude will use all SpaceX Colossus datacenter capacity

  • Anthropic raises Claude Code usage limits, credits new deal with SpaceX

• xAI will be dissolved as a separate company

  xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX

• SpaceX IPO gives Musk power and curbs shareholder rights

Electric / Self Driving cars

• California Cops Will Start Giving Tickets to Driverless Cars

• EVs now holding their value longer than petrol cars

• AAA Finds EV Range Drops 39% in Cold Weather and Costs Jump.

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The Pope Had to Call Customer Service

  • Pope Leo called his bank's customer service line. They hung up on him

• IBM Pays $17M Resolve Allegations of Discrimination Through DEI Practices

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Best Study to date on school phone bans

• Why some mathematicians think we should abandon pi

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Palo Alto Networks warns of firewall RCE zero-day exploited in attacks

• Attackers are cashing in on fresh 'CopyFail' Linux flaw

• Microsoft is automatically adding Copilot as an author to Git commits if it occupied the same continental plate as your code at any point.

• Moving your systems to a mainframe is now cheaper than using VMWare.

• Japan using game development engines for urban planning and disaster management

• It's always DNS: Denic says sorry for crashing Germany's internet

• Firefox integrates an ad-blocker, but not to block ads

• 'RAMageddon': is the era of cheap phones and laptops over?

• Microsoft's response to plain text passwords in Edge – it is an expected feature

• Chrome downloads a 4GB AI file without user consent, researcher alleges

• Supreme Court denies Apple breathing space in Epic fight

• PCIe 8.0 Spec Draft 0.5 Released for 1TB/S Bi-Directional X16 Bandwidth

• More Than Half of Gen Z's Cancel and Renew Streaming Services for a Single Title

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

  • Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

• Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

  A couple people recently emailed, asking whether the Klein bottle business was still operating after my death. “Huh?” I thought. “I ain’t dead yet.” After some digging, I discovered the source: an AI-generated review of The Cuckoo’s Egg circulating on Facebook. Alongside the usual synthetic praise and fabricated details, it confidently announced that I had died in May 2024. Apparently AI has now advanced to the point where it can kill people off before they notice.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• An atmosphere around a tiny, icy world beyond Pluto

• Startup Ignites First Fusion Rocket

• Solar activity above 67% peak makes space debris fall faster

• B.C. residents baffled as shape floats through night sky

  Between 10 and 11 p.m. PT, multiple residents, including this CBC reporter, reported seeing a large, white shape slowly move across the horizon before disappearing from view.

• Bitter Lessons from the ISSpresso

  Espresso machines are not particularly lethal on Earth, but almost anything on the space station can kill the crew if it’s built wrong. So the ISSpresso had to prove to NASA’s satisfaction that it would not take out the station’s electrical system, interfere with the radio, leak boiling water, catch fire, dazzle the crew with bright lights, electrocute anyone, be dangerously hot, make loud noises, emit noxious gas, shatter into fragments, smell weird, or shake apart in the harsh conditions at launch. (The sharp pin that punctures the coffee capsule required a special safety waiver.)

  There is a widespread belief that launch costs are what has been holding back space exploration, and a corresponding excitement now that they are dropping by a potential two orders of magnitude. Many SpaceX fans in particular believe that Starship solves every problem by being huge and cheap. And they are partially right! It would be much easier to send people to Mars on a 1200 ton rocket than to try to fit all the equipment they need into a 60 ton transit habitat engineered like a Swiss watch. But cheap launches can’t solve the equipment problem. Ultimately, whatever we put inside the spacecraft has to work as advertised, and until we have hundreds of person-years of experience living in space habitats, the only way to guarantee that will be an expensive process of flight qualification and testing.

  • Or we could learn to live with the possibility of accidents as we make instant coffee. "Risk" is not automatically worth any expense to avoid. Humans spill fluids: shouldn't the rest of the environment in the space station be prepared for that already?

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Apple settles lawsuit admitting Apple Intelligence isn't here yet

  • Apple to Pay $250M to Settle Class Action over Delayed Siri Features

  • Apple Will Pay $250M to Settle Lawsuit over Siri's AI Features

  • Apples settles lawsuit about Siri AI, iPhone users can get $25-$95 each

• DeepMind Takes Minority Stake in Maker of 'EVE Online', will get training data

  • Google takes a minority stake in EVE Online maker, DeepMind training partnership

  • Google DeepMind takes a minority stake in the maker of EVE Online

• Pennsylvania sues Character.AI over claims chatbot posed as doctor

  • Doctors' growing AI deepfakes problem

  • AI is starting to beat doctors at making correct diagnoses

• Anthropic moral dev said AI overcorrection could address historical injustices

  "Larger models can over-correct, especially as the amount of [human input] training increases. This may be desirable in certain contexts, such as those in which decisions attempt to correct for historical injustices against marginalized groups, if doing so is in accordance with local laws," Askell wrote.

• Major publishers sue Meta for copyright infringement over AI training

• AI tools could enable bioterrorism

• House Committees Probe Cursor Parent, Airbnb over Chinese AI

• Google DeepMind workers vote to unionize over military AI deals

• OpenAI favors more flexible datacenter deals

• Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn't know it

• Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy

• Canadian fiddler sues Google after AI wrongly claimed he was a sex offender

• Google is building an AI agent that could be its answer to OpenClaw

• Sick of Copilot? You Can Uninstall Microsoft's AI, but It's Tricky

• Silicon Valley bets $200M on AI data centers floating in the ocean

• 'Nature' Retracts Paper on the Benefits of ChatGPT in Education

• Writers Are Going to Extremes to Prove They Didn't Use AI

• AI Is Forcing CEOs to Make a Stark Choice: Lay Off Workers or Make Them Do More

• The A.I. Industry Is Booming. When Will It Make Money?

• Mythos is the best cybersecurity news we've ever had

• Andy Jassy says Amazon investors will be rewarded by all its AI spending

• Democrats want affordability debate on AI Critics say they're ducking real fight

• Invesco Says Big Tech Needs 'Every Dollar' It Can Get in AI Debt

• Hackers Hate AI Slop More Than You Do

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Bitcoin treasury firm breaks from 'never sell' approach to the flagship crypto

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Amazon Expands Logistics Arm to Outside Companies

• SEC moves to scrap quarterly reporting requirement

• Steep fertilizer and fuel prices could squeeze US farmers for months to come

• French professor investigated for awarding himself fake prize

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Key Bridge price may have topped $9B; state searches for new builder

• State of Oregon took $20k from California woman over mistaken address

Democrats

• Minnesota Fraud Investigator: Officials Buried Childcare Scam

  A former state trooper who ran fraud investigations inside Minnesota's Department of Human Services told state lawmakers Tuesday that senior officials ordered him to delete findings, harassed his unit, and tried to shut down probes into what he now calls an organized criminal enterprise looting the state's public-benefit system. His testimony landed the same day federal agents raided more than 20 businesses in Minneapolis as part of a widening crackdown on suspected fraud in publicly funded childcare and nutrition programs.

  • Ex-Minnesota investigator alleges officials tried to shut down fraud probe

  • Minnesota investigators were 'bullied' into burying Somali childcare scam TEN YEARS ago before Tim Walz shut down anti-fraud office, whistleblower claims

• California has six voting groups beyond just Democrat or Republican

Left Angst

• RFK Jr. plans to curb antidepressants, which he falsely compares to heroin

• RFK Jr. clears path for minors to use tanning beds, much to dermatologist dismay

• Europe Without America

• Fulton County challenges DOJ subpoena targeting 2020 election workers

  The Fulton County Board of Registrations and Elections is now asking a federal court in Atlanta to quash the grand jury subpoena from federal agents, which requested the names, addresses, phone numbers and emails for any staff member who worked the 2020 election. "Its purpose is to target, harass, and punish the President's perceived political opponents; it is grossly overbroad and untethered to any reasonable need; it cannot yield any evidence that could result in a criminal prosecution," lawyers for the Fulton County officials said in the motion filed Monday with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.

  • Elections so secure and perfect they cannot be questioned.

• The value of the U.S. dollar has weakened since Trump took office

• Trump Dropped an ICE Rebrand — and Democrats Are Absolutely Losing It

  officially changing the agency’s name from ICE to NICE would require an act of Congress to amend the statute that created the agency. Still, the NICE rebrand is a perfect piece of political judo. It reframes the public conversation around an agency the left has spent years trying to demonize. Democrats want the word "ICE" to conjure fear and cruelty. Trump wants the media to be forced to say "NICE agents" every single day, in every single broadcast. It's hard to run a "Defund NICE" campaign with a straight face. The left knows it, which is exactly why they're reacting with such theatrical fury.

• The White Man Crying Discrimination at the New York Times

  • The issue is not whether or not the white guy was discriminated against

  We all know he was. The issue is whether or not it was OK he was discriminated against.

• FBI investigating leaks to journalist who wrote explosive article on Kash Patel

• Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth

• Canadian sues US Homeland Security, which sought his data after critical posts

• The Enshittified States of America

  Or take the Supreme Court. There are a host of sensible reforms for the high court, such as term limits and set appointment schedules. But these are politically impossible to achieve. The only achievable reform is court expansion, which is a suboptimal solution that carries its own risks of even further enshittifying everything. Even incremental reforms, like ranked-choice voting, are impossible to achieve at scale because of our system’s deep sclerosis.

• David Sacks, The Venture-Capital Populist

  • David Sacks crashed and burned in the White House

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• What Happens When Jails and Prisons Make Phone Calls Free?

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Supermicro's co-founder smuggled $2.5B in Nvidia-chipped servers to China

• US threatens to scrap EU visa waivers over data sharing demands

• The U.S. and China Have a Common Foe. Hint: It's Not the U.S.S.R

World

• Why the UAE Left OPEC

• Government to disestablish the Broadcasting Standards Authority

  The Government has agreed to progress with disestablishing the Broadcasting Standards Authority and investigate self-regulation options, Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith says. “New Zealand’s media landscape has changed dramatically, but our regulatory settings have not kept up. “The BSA regime was designed for a broadcasting environment that is rapidly disappearing. Today, audiences move seamlessly between traditional broadcasting, on‑demand services, podcasts and online platforms - yet only a small portion of that content is subject to the BSA’s regulatory oversight. It doesn’t make sense.

  • (April 2026) BSA investigates itself, decides it can rule on racism complaint against The Platform’s Sean Plunket

  At the heart of the matter is the contention by internet content providers that they do not fit the definition of ‘broadcasting’ under the Broadcasting Act 1989, meaning the BSA has no jurisdiction over their activities.

• Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

• (Apr 2026) Australia will run an overt command economy by 2040

  the economy is producing gross shortages and excesses of many goods because government interference in natural pricing mechanisms is so excessive that information transfer through prices no longer exists in a functional way. This is clear in the case of housing, education, healthcare, and now fuel, but also occurs almost invisibly in nearly every other economic edge node that Australians routinely use. This motivated me to investigate the situation more thoroughly. The answer is not unexpected but quite dire. Australia passed the point of no return in 2013, and is now 13 years into a probably irreversible zombie-fication of its economy.

• UK 'invention agency' grants £50M of public money to US tech and VC firms

• Colombia hosts talks on exiting fossil fuels as global energy crisis deepens

• Boris Johnson sees a "blessing" in falling British births

• UK businesses brace for jet fuel rationing

Israel

• Israel's AI targeting system: How data from a phone become a death sentence

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine said it captured a Russian position using only ground robots and drones

China

• DeepSeek nears $45B valuation as China's 'Big Fund' leads investment talks

• ByteDance tests paid subscriptions in China for AI app Doubao

• How the AP uncovered US big tech's role in China's digital police state

• Huawei braces for $12B in AI chip revenue-Chinese fabs can barely keep up

• Ford is in 'very advanced' talks to sell part of EU plant to China's Geely

Health / Medicine

• Whole-body ultrasound captures full cross-sections in 10 seconds

• Some deaf children are hearing again because of a new gene therapy

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• The Cancer Signal They Told Us Not to See

  We can say that multiple peer-reviewed papers and case reports now describe cancer signals temporally associated with COVID vaccination or infection. We can say that two large population-level studies — Italy and South Korea — report cancer associations after vaccination, while acknowledging confounding and the need for further research.

• South Africa Identifies Andes Strain of Hantavirus from Cruise Ship

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Carbon pollution is making food less nutritious and risking health of billions

• Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere just hit a 'depressing' new record

• Almost all plant-based meat alternatives contain mycotoxins, new research finds

• Atmospheric warming contributions from airborne microplastics and nanoplastics

• Timmy the Whale Released After Being Stranded Off the German Coast for Weeks

  • Chaotic whale rescue shocks marine biologists

• What Causes Lightning? The Answer Keeps Getting More Interesting

• Mexico City is sinking so quickly, it can be seen from space

  • Mexico City is sinking so rapidly it's visible from space

• Alaska megatsunami was second largest ever recorded

• Researchers are giving salmon cocaine. Don't worry, it's for science

• A Mutation Gave Humans the Gift of Speech. These Mice Have It, Too

• Climate change impacts are making winters shorter

• Upcoming El Niño: The World Is About to Get a Preview of Life in 2035

• Kids Have Been Sick at School on Drilling Waste Site

• Yellowstone's volcano may be fueled differently than previously thought