2026-06-16

Cool

• APOD: Triple Shockwave from Sun Crossing Rocket

  the rocket became supersonic before it crossed the disk of the distant Sun -- from the perspective of the well-placed photographer. The spacecraft's high speed caused bow-shaped compressed-air shockwaves to form across leading surfaces, with at least three visible even outside the Sun's disk because they refract sunlight. The trailing exhaust caused turbulence visible on the lower right.

etc

• What we know about the Tracy Medline warehouse fire

  Bradley said sprinklers were not operating and there was no water pressure for fire hydrants at the facility. He added that the failure of the private water system “significantly impacted” crews battling the fire. The sprinkler system was last tested in January. With the sprinklers not working, the large warehouse was “fully consumed” within 40 minutes. The South San Joaquin Fire Authority said Medline hired a third-party contractor to do the sprinkler inspection in January.

Horseshit

• Recycled phone clusters build low-cost data centers with strong core performance

• Over half of parents of 18-25 year-olds track adult children w smartphone apps

• Americans Aren't Money Savvy, and They're Only Getting Worse

• Pickle is the pumpkin spice of summer

  • I saw "pickle flavor lollipops" yesterday. I'm still processing the trauma

• Drinks breaks are the World Cup's biggest scandal

• Stolen fries are spicier than justice: How covert larceny enhances taste

• Pizza Hut franchisee revives classic dine-in decor decades later

• Why do Canadians say 'soccer' instead of 'football'?

• Buying Coffee Has Become Controversial? OK, You Can Now Buy Me Coffee

• Did a medieval flying monk spot Halley's comet, twice? It's complicated

• The Pissed-Off Spouses Who Try to Intervene in Their Partners' Jobs

• American Dads Rock: Fathers Are Doing More At Home Than Ever

• When Did White-Collar Work Start to Look So Bleak?

• You Can't Have Both Democracy and Billionaires

• The Myth of 'Mad' Genius

Obit

• Trailblazing investigative reporter Roger Cook dies

Musk

• OpenAI wins dismissal of trade secret lawsuit by Musk's xAI

• People Living Near xAI's Data Centers Are Right Pissed About the SpaceX IPO

• SpaceX is coming to your 401(k) – maybe

• Tesla presented misleading 'Full Self-Driving' safety data to European regulator

• SpaceX prepares to launch AST spacemobile bluebird satellites from Florida

• Tesla Cybercab Full Specs

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Washburn School teacher took tech out of the class. Students call it a success

• The Curious Case of Youngening Grad Students

• Dozens walk out as Google boss Pichai addresses Stanford graduates

  • Around 200 Stanford students walk out as Google CEO takes stage

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Xbox Game Studios boss Craig Duncan steps down

• Microsoft weighing up spinning off Xbox

• EA Advertising will let brands 'integrate' ads into games

• Fox Is Buying Roku

  • Fox Corporation to Acquire Roku, Inc

  • Fox to buy Roku

  • Fox to Acquire Roku in $22B Deal

  • Fox is buying Roku for $22B

  • Fox buying streaming platform Roku in cash-and-stock deal worth $22B

• Meta Tapped a Pentagon Supplier to Prototype Face Recognition for Its Glasses

• 'Are We Dating the Same Guy?' Facebook dating group faces lawsuit

• Users cry foul after AMD stripped memory crypto from its consumer CPUs

• How Apple Is Making Your Older iPhone Run Faster and Stay Alive Longer

  • They stopped sabotaging older phones with new updates?

• FBI disrupts AI-powered phishing service using a million URLs

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• RSA munitions T-shirt

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Russia appears set to address long-term, serious space station cracks

• Coming Soon: Humanity’s First Outpost in Deep Space

  Located 238,855 miles from Earth, Moon Base will serve as a center for scientific research and technological development. The mission’s initial all-robot crew could launch as soon as fall 2026.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Cyber leaders defend Anthropic's banned model

  • Anthropic's Safety Superpower

  • Anthropic flies staff to D.C. to clean up White House fight

  • Anthropic Dispatches Staff to D.C., Racing to Resolve AI Export Restrictions

  • Inside the 24 hours that led to pulling Fable 5

  • More on that Dario and the Wolf story.

  In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community. Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.

  • "They screwed us": Personality clashes sent Anthropic's models offline

  • White House's export limits on Anthropic linked to concerns about Chinese access

  • Anthropic to meet with Trump administration over Mythos dispute

  • US clampdown on Anthropic models sends EU sovereignty surge into overdrive

  • Donald Trump's blocking of Anthropic is capricious and chaotic

  • See Anthropic Orchestrate the Narrative

  I think Anthropic is scare mongering in order to kill their biggest competitor - free and open source ML. These companies, including Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Apple, have invested untold billions into their own little ML ecosystems, as a loss leader, to get people and organizations emotionally dependent on this new technology, and eventually they are going to want ROI for that. The most likely obstacle to that is free and open models.

  • Anthropic shuts down Fable, Mythos models

  • The Fable takedown: what happened when, what we know, what comes next

  • Feds freaked over Fable 5 after simple 'fix this code' prompt, not jailbreak

• Derbyshire officer investigated for using AI to create evidence in cases

• The AI layoff wave is becoming a powder keg

• Google sues alleged operators of an AI-powered phishing kit

• Surge in scams as fraudsters use AI to target people

• Anthropic Sued over Limits on Its $200-a-Month AI Plans

• Companies are scrambling to curtail soaring AI costs

• People around the world see a winner on AI – and it's not the US

• India, UAE partner on AI sovereignty to bypass Google, Microsoft

• A year after Meta tapped Wang to build a new AI model, Zuckerberg has to sell it

• How AI is revealing the secret lives of animals from hummingbirds to pumas

• The AI Price War Is Here, Piling Pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic

• Utah uses AI to find 25,000 more storm drains in fight against mosquitoes

• AI-referred US shoppers browse longer, spend more per visit

• German court holds Google liable for fake AI answers

• Nineteen thoughts on AI and Europe

  Champions of a European AI model should ask themselves if a European effort would be more effective than Meta, which this year will spend more on chips ($125 billion) than Germany spends on defense ($114 billion) and offer salaries of over $100 million to attract the best researchers, and is still failing to catch up. Elon Musk tried and failed to build a good AI model.

• Meta Employees Hate Zuckerberg's Plan for a Companywide AI Hackathon

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• You Can Make Free Money on Polymarket. If You Know Math

• Bitcoin is down to just $64,000 after peaking over $110,000 in the past year.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Tech's Next IPO Wave Promises a Charitable Windfall

• Kevin Warsh Wants the Fed to Stop Explaining Everything

• Oil prices fall on US-Iran agreement

  • Tired of chaos, investors retreat from oil market at record pace

  • people are deeply upset that Trump has "stolen" all that money they put into July and August oil futures.

• Dow jumps 600 points, hits fresh record on potential Iran deal; SpaceX rises

• The FTC Cracked Down on 'Hidden' Car Dealer Fees. They're Still Happening

• Microsoft sued by shareholders over expenses, cloud business, AI

• US connected-car rule prompts Ford to seek licenses for China-built models

• Justice Department Decision to Allow Paramount Deal Surprised Investigators

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Inside tech elites’ madcap war against the California billionaire tax

• Sen. Mitch McConnell hospitalized with undisclosed condition, spokesperson says

• San Francisco Weighs PG&E Takeover Amid Soaring Utility Costs

Trump

• Tulsi Gabbard: Yes, There Were US Funded Biolabs in Ukraine.

• Trump aides fear Haberman and Swan obtained Situation Room tapes for "Regime Change"

  Top White House officials believe New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their forthcoming book, "Regime Change." Such a taped leak would be a shocking breach of one of the most secure settings on Earth. Independent recording devices in the Situation Room are forbidden. "We're afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded," an administration source told us. "And we have no idea which ones." Verbatim accounts of several Situation Room meetings were included in excerpts about the Iran war and the Epstein files that The Times posted ahead of the book's June 23 publication.

Democrats

• Meet Dean Logan, the dean of LA County election snafus

  Before coming to LA, Logan was infamously known for his role in discovering previously unknown ballots several times when he was Registrar of Voters in King County, Washington during the 2004 race for governor between Democrat Christine Gregoire and Republican Dina Rossi. Gregoire won by 133 votes out of 2.9 million cast after several suspicious recounts. Logan came under special scrutiny because, unlike most career election officials, he’d been a longtime Democratic activist and partisan election official in Kitsap County. His work in Seattle was so tarnished that Bob Ferguson, a Seattle City Council member who is now the state’s Democratic governor, called it “public and embarrassing.”

• Obama Presidential Center’s $470M safety net under scrutiny as subcontractors say they’re owed millions.

• Biden DOJ targeted parents at school board meetings despite FBI, sheriffs' objections, memos show

Left Angst

• Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule

  The rule explicitly states that peer review recommendations “remain advisory and are not ministerially ratified, routinely deferred to, or otherwise treated as de facto binding.” This directly dismantles the post-WWII system used by NIH, NSF, DOE, NASA, and nearly every science agency, in which independent expert peer review was the primary measure of scientific merit. Under this rule, a political appointee can simply override the scientific community’s judgment with no finding of cause.

• UFC to pay White House fighters in crypto issued by Trump company

  • I'm starting to think the White House UFC fight was all just a weird crypto scam

• Remember, during today’s literal cage match on the White House grounds: No matter what, it’s not his house. It’s our house.

• Ocean monitoring network of 900 sensors meant for 20 years is being dismantled

• Democrats press Trump administration over "pay-to-play" pardons

• US Government Reportedly Allowing Federal Data Center Rules to Expire

  Citing unnamed sources, Wired reports that the U.S. government is set to allow the Federal Data Center Enhancement Act (FDCEA) to expire without any clear plan to renew or replace it. The FDCEA was passed in 2023, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, before the current AI data center boom really took off. The law set standards for subjects like cybersecurity and sustainability for federally operated (and some contractor-operated) data centers. In compliance with the law, the Office of Management and Business (OMB) currently requires agencies planning new data centers or major upgrades to arrange an assessment by certified data center energy-efficiency specialists and consider energy and water use in their designs.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Potential Mass Shooting in Georgia Stopped by Armed Citizens.

  The person who lives at the home also said that she called the Lee County Sheriff’s Office after Kinzer left. But about five minutes later, Kinzer and the driver returned. This time, Kinzer was reportedly wearing body armor and carrying an AR-15-style rifle.

  Witnesses reported that Jeffrey Tyler Kinzer had been involved in a verbal confrontation with individuals attending a large gathering in the area. Witnesses further reported that Kinzer later returned on foot carrying an AR-style rifle and wearing body armor. Witnesses stated that Kinzer fired toward the gathering, and multiple individuals returned fire toward his location.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Beijing blasts Pentagon’s latest Chinese military company list.

• PRC-linked spies hid inside medical and military networks for more than a year

• US Air Force B-52 bomber crashes after takeoff, Edwards Air Force Base says

  • Air Force bomber crashed on takoff at California base

  • B-52 bomber crashes shortly after takeoff at California's Edwards Air Force Base

  • B-52 bomber crashes after takeoff at Edwards Air Force Base in California

World

• Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at 10M

• UK to ban social media for under-16s, following Australia's model

  • guess which app is magically exempt? Bluesky

  • Keir Starmer confirms social media ban for all children under 16

  • UK Brings in Full Social Media Ban for Under-16s

  • Britain announces social media ban for under-16s

  • UK to ban under 16s on Social Media

  • Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces

  • Starmer to announce 'Australia plus' ban on social media for under-16s in UK

  • UK may ban social media for children under 16

  • UK unveils social media ban for users under 16

  • Britain Announces Social Media Ban for Children

  • UK Bans Under-16s from Using Social Media Apps Including TikTok and YouTube

  • Starmer, the Under-16s Are Smarter Than You

  • UK to ban social media for under-16s to 'give kids their childhood back'

  • How the UK social media ban could affect you

  • Britain will ban under-16s from social media apps, including TikTok and YouTube

  • Will Keir Starmer’s under-16 social media ban actually work?

• A spy in your pocket? How the UK's on-device nude image blocking could work

• Belfast Is Burning, and the Media Won’t Say Why.

• Republic of Ireland (China) fact of the day

  In the most recent census (2022), 1,017,437 people in Ireland were born abroad. Even if you classify people from Taiwan as “foreigners”, there are 845,697 + 157,886 = 1,003,583 immigrants to China. There are now more foreigners in Ireland than in China in absolute terms, despite having a population that is 260 times smaller.

• How shadowy unit of government 'thought police' set up by ex-MI6 agent is trying to keep a lid on Britain's simmering racial tensions

  The 22-strong unit was established in 2007 by the late Charles Farr, a former MI6 officer, as part of the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy. Modelled on the Information Research Department (IRD), a propaganda unit established by the Attlee government in 1948 to blacken the names of communists and other political opponents, RICU operates out of the Home Office's Westminster headquarters. While its original purpose was to monitor and challenge the spread of Al Qaeda propaganda and to vet the language used by public officials when describing terrorism, its tentacles now stretch far across Whitehall – to the extent that critics say it risks strangling free speech. When the mobs took to the streets of Northern Ireland last week following the stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie, allegedly by Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese asylum-seeker, RICU swung into action to advise the police in the province on how to 'control the narrative'.

  It has also been claimed that the unit intervenes to write statements by the families of victims of potentially racially linked incidents to stop them from inflaming tensions further with their remarks. The source said: 'You can see their fingerprints all over the statements released by the families of victims in these volatile situations -- they usually have a similar tone.'

• How Brexit has made Britain poorer – in charts

• Britain's return to the EU is only a matter of time

• Philippines now China's 2nd biggest market for solar panels

• Bank of Estonia recommends keeping cash reserve at home

• German Air Force chief names Russian targets NATO would hit in a war

• EU Air travellers to enjoy free cabin luggage and keep delay compensation

• Amateur saboteurs: the young men carrying out attacks for gangs, Russia and Iran

• Sweden passes 'good behaviour' law to kick out misbehaving immigrants

  • Swedish parliament abolishes permanent residence visas for migrants

Iran / Houthi

• Is This the End of Political Islam?

• US and Iran reach cease fire agreement

• U.S. and Iran agree on peace deal to end the war, Trump and Pakistan say

• Iran’s Remaining Forces: On French Radio, Hamas and Hezbollah Are Characterized as “Delocalized Iranian Armies”.

• What the US and Iran say is in the memorandum to end the war

• Iran, US agree to halt war and reopen Hormuz, sending oil prices tumbling

• Vance says 'a lot' of Iran deal details to figure out, U.S. has 'all the cards'

• US says Trump, Vance and Iran's parliament speaker have signed deal to end war

• Iran Offers 60-Day Toll-Free Hormuz Transit As 100s Of Ships Await Reopening

• Trump’s Iran Deal: The Islamic Republic Isn’t Getting a Penny, Except Billions in ‘Humanitarian Aid’ | Frontpage Mag

  Trump’s deal will be far, far worse than the Obama deal that a younger Trump so devastatingly and correctly derided. Our only hope is that the Iranian leadership, in its arrogance and fanaticism, will reject this deal, or that this report is false. Lending it credibility, however, is the fact that Vance recently said that Iran wouldn’t receive any money, and then in practically the same breath, started talking about economic benefits it would receive

  • JD Vance Confirms Iran Will Get Jaw-Dropping Sum Under Trump Deal

  Vice President JD Vance all but confirmed a detail being floated as part of the tentative U.S.-Iran peace deal: Iranian access to $300 billion in reconstruction funds. Vance was asked by CBS’s Ed O’Keefe Monday morning about whether the rumored detail was true, and he said that it could be possible if Iran adheres to the agreement. “That’s the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation,” Vance said. He noted that Iranian officials and media would be emphasizing the benefits they receive from the deal as opposed to what they concede.

  • It ain't what happens, it's who's doing it that determines the response: (2015) Lifting Sanctions Will Release $100 Billion To Iran

Israel

• IDF says it killed Hezbollah commander tied to 2007 murder of US soldiers.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine's Zelenskiy discusses peace talks in call with Trump

• British forces intercept Russian shadow fleet tanker in the Channel

  • The UK Joins the Pirates

  I was genuinely surprised by the Starmer regime’s refusal to state that the Israeli boarding of the Global Sumud flotilla on the High Seas was illegal. I did not realise it was because the UK was planning to undertake similar illegal seizure itself. The Gaza Flotilla seizure was illegal: while for obvious reasons freedom of navigation had been the undisputed basis of UK maritime policy for centuries. The UK is a set of islands whose population is dependent on food imports to stay alive. Freedom of navigation is a core strategic interest of the UK. The relevant provisions of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea were very heavily UK driven, including on passage through straits. Abandoning the primacy of freedom of navigation is absolutely a radical policy departure for the UK – driven, like so many other changes to traditional British legal positions, by the Starmer regime’s extreme support for Israel.

• Russia was behind arson attacks targeting the UK's Prime Minister, BBC reveals

• Ukraine targets specialized components to keep Russian refineries shut longer

China

• China bans sales of Germany's Infineon GAN chips

• A Chinese rocket breaks apart dangerously close to the Starlink constellation

• China is innovative. Its economy is a mess. Which matters more?

Health / Medicine

• Blood Tests Can Now Detect Alzheimer's. Should You Get One?

• Covid vaccination cut risk of adverse heart events, large study finds

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• New solid-state ACs promise a cool future. Scientists aren't so sure

• Deep-sea metals may have helped early life use phosphate

• Mangroves comeback is a rare climate success story

• This 1976 University Experiment Spun Up the U.S. Wind Industry

• Alberta Eradicated Rats