2026-09-09

etc

• The little holes in your bread are telling you something

  consider the Italian ciabatta - that lovely rustic, white bread with big, attractive holes in the crumb. While it is sometimes marketed as the fruit of some ancient Italian tradition, it was actually invented in the early 1980s, making it a little bit younger than me. More to the point, the ciabatta depends for its production on modern breadmaking techniques, chief among them high-hydration doughs. And in order to pull off high hydration doughs you need “strong” modern flours with very high gluten and protein levels. And for the most part, even in Italy, those flours have to be imported. There is no making ciabattas - or many other types of modern breads - without wheat that often comes from the other side of the world.

• Kansas woman vaults car 250 feet over turnpike overpass, sticks the landing at Love’s Travel Stop

Horseshit

• Landmark study reveals century-long U.S. suicide rate cycles among youth

• “Cats seem to be associated with worse mental health measures for children, while other pets, including rabbits, reptiles, or amphibians, seem to have the opposite effect.”

• Why Gen Z Loves Brain Rot

• Slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence

• Working Apple-1 "Hatfield" up for sale

• Star Trek 60th Anniversary

  • Le Creuset Star Trek Collection

  • 60 years later, Star Trek continues to live long and prosper

  • The universal language of space is Star Trek? Mais oui

• Venus may have been temperate and potentially habitable for most of its history

• Do tech billionaires dream of shared abundance? We should probably just tax them

• Gen Z is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents

• Why night owls are more intelligent

• Mathematicians discover the worst way to hang a painting

• Photo of Road Runner Snagged by Coyote Shows That Cartoons Were a Lie

• A 9/11 Story Some Want Us to Forget.

  The Path to 9/11” aired exactly once, two decades ago. Then it vanished. ABC hasn’t shown it since. The network has refused to release it on a disc or as a download. No streaming service carries it. It’s almost like someone doesn’t want you to watch it.

  • Available on Youtube

• Mom found guilty of abuse for letting 5-year-old walk outside alone speaks out

• When Mothers Get Arrested for Mothering

• Are Teenagers Growing Dimmer?

• Three people have died during Burning Man Festival, Pershing County Sheriff says

• Danny McBride's Solution to the Masculinity Crisis

celebrity gossip

• Secret screening of Nathan Fielder's new Elizabeth Holmes documentary

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• I was helping moderate the breaking news IRC channels after 9/11. The "Let's Roll" story was complete that night and originated from people who made no effort to hide their NSA affiliations. They pushed it hard while insisting their names not be mentioned. I've never doubted it was propaganda.

  • American Heroes of 9/11: Todd Beamer and the Passengers of Flight 93.

  • On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, editor remembers the heroes of Flight 93

Musk

• Musk review – epic study of the world's richest and most banal man

• Elon Musk told ex-girlfriend he needed 'a legion of kids before the civil war'

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Carmakers Have A New Idea to Boost EV Range: Add a Gas Engine.

• The Growing Proof That Autonomous Cars Save Lives

• Why the 'Temu Range Rover' Is Such a Threat to Jaguar Land Rover

• EV batteries last longer than drivers feared

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• From dance floor to war: China readies humanoid robots for combat

• Agility Robotics reports $1.8M revenue ahead of humanoid SPAC

• Robots "protest" in Warsaw to demand regulation of AI and automation

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Pope's Top US Cardinals Visit Silicon Valley, Warn Millions Will Lose Jobs

• The Myth of Perfect Knowledge

  the Enlightenment also created a myth: that we can get to know the objective world completely, with total clarity, as if we were looking at it from the outside. This myth is challenged by the Enlightenment’s greatest legacy—modern science.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• US Reading Scores Plummet on Global Exam

• Global warning about children's knowledge

• Teen Reading Slumps to Worst This Century Due to Surge in Screen Time

• CERN LHCb upgrade under threat after UK pulls funds

• Time lords prepare to kick leap seconds into the next millennium

• Bombshell Great Pyramid of Giza Study Retracted.

  The retraction matters because the paper provided a scientific foundation for increasingly extraordinary claims about what may lie beneath one of the world’s most famous archaeological sites.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Saturday Evening Post Will Stop Printing After 205 Years

• Xiaomi Announces Foldable iPhone Rival

  • Chinese tech giants Huawei and Xiaomi launch new foldable phones ahead of Apple

• Streaming Is Raising Prices Faster Than Cable Ever Did

• Hollywood's Box Office Boom Comes with 248M Missing Tickets

• Windows 11 users are getting full-desktop ads as wallpapers from Microsoft

• Real photos of young girls were in nudify-app ads on Facebook, Instagram

  • Meta Failed to Catch Hundreds of AI Child Abuse Ads

• Introducing CUDA Rust: Two Tracks for Writing GPU Kernels

  • Oh boy! now we can have "compiling shaders" for 6+ hr before the game will start

• SEGA president says there's been a rise in "fans who don't play the games"

• Why this month's Microsoft patch release is a doozy

  • Microsoft Plugs Nearly 1000 Security Holes

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• Disconnect your LG television from the internet, now

  • LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby

  • LG accused of 'egregious invasion of privacy' over TV data collection

  • LG TV shown scanning LAN for third-party phones and other devices

• A Cop's Case for Flock

• Anti-Flock Activist Bingo Card

  Flock is arguably a reasonable trade off in helping apprehend criminals. But more importantly, it’s a stand against the general malaise that accepts criminality as a fact of life.

• Flock worker calls police on investigator filming public camera installation

• US police fear Meta smart glasses could be used to secretly record them

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

• Forges Shouldn't Have Opinions About Your Code

  "But it's their infra, their software, their service, so they ban whatever they want from it, idiot!", said an idiot to me. Sure. Nobody's disputing that they can, now that they've done it. The question is whether you should trust a "GitHub alternative" whose actual definition of what it hosts keeps moving underneath you, one vibe-vote at a time, with zero advance warning and zero acknowledgment that it happened before.

  • These people are very forward in their opinions about those who shouldn't be allowed to share code or opinions anywhere. No matter that the internet was built on that code and the open attitudes of those that wrote it.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Satellites get a new type of armour

• With another infusion of cash, Stoke Space goes even bigger

• Britain reboots its space strategy with £7.8B on the launchpad

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Losing control of AI is the plan

  There simply isn’t enough human attention available to monitor the number of AIs the companies hope to put to work on independent AI research. As a result, we’ll be reliant on the AIs to understand what is happening inside fully automated data centers where more and more powerful AIs are developed. This isn’t some pessimistic projection of what might go wrong — it’s actually the plan. Not the plan for the distant future; it’s the plan for next spring. I think that the public does not know that this is the plan. They are imagining the next 10 years — the next two years, even — very, very differently from how the decision-makers at OpenAI and Anthropic are imagining them. If they had any idea what these people are doing, I’m convinced that they would try to stop them. And so I am going to attempt to describe what is being done.

  • OpenAI and the Wiki Incident

• AI Has Solved One of Math's $1M Millennium Prize Problems

  On the morning of Tuesday, September 8, mathematicians at OpenAI announced that a group of 10,000 autonomous AI agents under their direction, running on an advanced model not available to the public, had found a “singularity” in the Navier-Stokes equations in three dimensions — thus resolving one of the six remaining (opens a new tab) Millennium Prize Problems posed in 2000 by the Clay Mathematics Institute, each of which carries a $1 million prize. Their result has been formally checked in the programming language Lean, giving mathematicians confidence that it is indeed correct.

  • OpenAI stole mathematicians' private research from their own Codex chats

  • Controversy over OpenAI's Maths Breakthrough

  • OpenAI's historic math solution overshadowed by credit controversy

  OpenAI says its AI has solved the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem, a potentially historic breakthrough shadowed by questions over unpublished research by outside mathematicians. NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge had been working on closely related fluid-dynamics research. Buckmaster has publicly questioned whether OpenAI raced down a research direction it learned about from their work and raised concerns about whether private Codex material could have played a role.

  • OpenAI Just Claimed a Math Discovery. Some Academics Are Crying Foul

  • On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

  • and Hacker News thread

  • OpenAI Says It Has Cracked One of Math's 'Millennium Problems'

  • OpenAI Says It Has Solved a Millennium Prize Problem–A Holy Grail of Math

  • OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

  • OpenAI claims maths breakthrough on a famed 'Millennium Problem'

  • Finite time blowup with smooth forcing term for the incompressible porous medium, Boussinesq, and incompressible Euler equation

  As one may expect nowadays, the arguments here are heavily AI-assisted, but the authors have been working over the last few weeks to simplify and rewrite the proofs from what they literally call “the worst writeup we had ever seen in the history of mathematics” into something far more readable and of professional quality. This is still a work in progress: unfortunately, they were forced to release their preliminary preprints before they were completely digested and polished, due to external events

• OpenAI's Egregious Pattern of Misconduct

  In their lawsuit with Elon Musk, OpenAI was saved from further judgment by a statute of limitations. But the testimony — from all the diverse people who called Sam Altman a liar, from former employees like Murati and Sutskever to the former board members — was damning. So was OpenAI President Greg Brockman’s own diary. Nobody should be surprised by now that they play fast and loose. I would not expect to see this much (apparent) foul play at a used car dealership; or least not at one that expected to stay open for long. In a company that could “cause significant harm to the world”, in Sam Altman’s own words, it is unacceptable. I have said it before and will say it again: OpenAI should be shut down until there are changes at the top; both Altman and Brockman should go.

• Concentration Risk

  These companies are treating everybody like they’re stupid, in large part because everybody, including the largest media outlets in the world, appears to fall for just about anything. Neither NVIDIA nor Crusoe have actually done anything — we have not reached “AGI,” nor has “the birthplace of AGI” been completed, nor does anybody seem to bring up these facts in any of the pieces I’ve read outside of saying “hmm, well AGI isn’t really well-defined,” humouring what these companies are saying without a single thought entering their minds. If anything, the far-more-interesting way to look at this is why all of these people are suddenly jerking their shit from first principles over a term that is meant to mean “an artificial intelligence that can handle tasks beyond its original training” but now means basically anything the companies want it to, and how that times with the rush for both Anthropic and OpenAI to go public.

• Anthropic AI 'formalizes' proof of Fermat's last theorem in just 11 days

• Türk urges action before AI becomes an 'existential risk to humanity'

• AI keeps stubbornly refusing to take our jobs

• Sen. Kennedy rails against AI developers as 'high IQ stupid people'

  “The people who have developed AI are very, very smart, but they’re high IQ, stupid people,” Kennedy said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “They’re terrible marketers.” Kennedy also criticized the appearance of data centers, and urged the AI industry to “devise buildings that are slightly aesthetic.” “I mean, the buildings they build now — they look like a broken arm with the bones sticking out,” Kennedy told host Kristen Welker.

• AI cancer cures slowed by chip shortage, says Arm boss

• Anthropic Said to Walk Away from $6B Decart Acquisition

  • What made Anthropic walk away from the $6B Decart deal?

  • Anthropic Said to Walk Away from $6B Decart Purchase

• Sanders’ Bill Threatens US AI Developers With ‘Corporate Death Penalty,’ Prison Time.

• Early Data Indicates an A.I.-Generated Drug Could Slow Aging

• St Louis restaurants are generating AI images of their food Foodies are repulsed

• A.I. Models Built a Computer Worm That Could Rapidly Hack WeChat Accounts

• Gen AI Tools Are Now Being Used to Push 'Slop Jihad'

• OpenAI hires Chuck Schumer's daughter as lead lobbyist during regulatory talks

  • OpenAI hires Chuck Schumer's daughter as Big Tech cozies up to Democrats

• AI Giants Work Hand-in-Hand with The Pentagon, Contracts Reveal

• AI may have just solved a million-dollar math problem

• Mistral bags €3B to build Europe's sovereign AI champion

  • Samsung leads Mistral's €3B round, pushing valuation to €21B

• ByteDance entering the world models race

• A.I. Listings Are So Widespread Even Zillow Is Concerned

• Meta Introduces Muse, an AI Agent That Can Send Your Emails and Book Your Travel

• Anthropic faces different government responses as Pentagon battle continues

• China-Based AI Companies Using Distillation at Scale Against US AI Companies

• OpenAI says GPT-6 Astra can find zero-days, but is also harder to monitor

• The DOJ's AI Fair Use Brief Is Correct, but from a DOJ That Has No Credibility

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Robinhood Strikes Deal with Crypto.com in Latest Prediction-Markets Push

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The firms turning recruitment into X Factor-style competitions

• Unemployment Rate Among Non-College Grads Reaches One of Lowest Points in Past 23 Years

  • Americans Without College Degrees Are Having One of the Best Job Markets in Years

• ASML to work with major chipmakers to use latest tools for larger chips

  • ASML breaks ground on new manufacturing facilities in major expansion

• Aschenbrenner claimed to know the future of AI. His investors lost billions

• How corporate America built a better Roach Motel

• Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group to Drum Up Fake Support for Merger

• Corporate America Is Axing the 'Micro-Team' Boss

• Major Food Companies Allege US Sugar Producers Colluded on Price

• Yen makes dash across ¥153, raising possibility that trend has turned

• Block Applies to Establish Builders Bank and Trust

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Mainstream TV vague about airing first-ever GOP midterm convention — as NFL serves up big competition.

• Supreme Court favors GOP on FCC guidance on political parties' TV ad rates

  The Supreme Court on Friday lifted a ruling that prevented party committees from accessing cheaper advertising rates in the lead-up to November’s elections, siding with Republicans, for now, in an emergency case that drew staunch Democratic opposition. Federal law mandates that broadcast stations offer their lowest available rate in the 60 days preceding a general election. Everyone agrees candidates get the discount, but whether political parties and joint fundraising committees can, too, has come under question.

Democrats

• Amy Acton’s ‘Assassination Attempt’ Narrative Is Falling Apart

  Acton was never touched, never injured, and never threatened. An armed man pushed through a crowd at the Canfield Fair on Sunday, knocking down two elderly fairgoers before deputies tackled him and placed him under arrest. Within hours, her campaign and a sympathetic press corps turned an arrest for disorderly conduct into an assassination attempt. The campaign lied.

  Yet, the New York Times, of all outlets, couldn't even back up the Acton campaign's version of events. "An armed man was arrested Sunday after forcing his way through a crowd toward Dr. Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor, the authorities said," the paper reported. "Dr. Acton was giving a speech at the Mahoning County Democratic Party tent at a fair in Canfield, in the northeastern part of the state, when a man pushed through the crowd, knocking over two elderly audience members, according to the county sheriff, Jerry Greene, and two witnesses. The man did not draw his weapons, according to Sheriff Greene and the witnesses. Dr. Acton was not injured."

• Democrats Are Plotting Government Efficiency in a Post-DOGE World

Left Angst

• US attacks UK plans to boost traditional media on social platforms

• Why Did Trump Order Up 660M Pounds of Mystery Meat?

• A Doctor Sued 700 Patients for Debts; 81 Were Arrested. Now He's a Senator

  The doctor who sued the couple was Roger Marshall, now a senator from Kansas. Mr. Marshall, a Republican who is seeking re-election this fall, filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, according to a New York Times analysis of Kansas court records.

• DHS 'Predictive Policing' Unit Is Analyzing Americans' Financial Habits

• Young Americans have never witnessed a functioning foreign policy

• DOJ Blocked ICE Agent Shooting Charge over Federal Prosecutor's Objections

• The White House pulls its racist Tetris clone

• 'Lake America' makes one thing clear: We can't trust U.S. tech companies

• Trey Parker and Matt Stone Are Changing the Name of South Park to South America

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Classified as terrorists by the US government: Hacker collective A/I gives up

• Canada's counter-tariffs take effect on various US goods

• Iceland summons US ambassador over Trump's Stars and Stripes map

  • Iceland Summons U.S. Ambassador over Provocative Trump Map

World

• Britain loses third-highest taxpayer to Greece

• Singapore: Highest paid world leader Lawrence Wong to get salary increase of $1M

  • Singapore raises PM Lawrence Wong's pay by $1M

• England's teens outperform peers in most countries in maths, reading and science

• Why Taiwan's Silicon Shield Is Failing

• 'Global reckoning for big tech': Australia to force opt-out of social algs

  • Australia to opt out of social media algorithms, Albanese confirms

• Canada holds first defense talks with China in more than 8 years

• TikTok's owner fined nearly $30M in Brazil over safety of minors

• Raids, shutdowns, warning labels – India's unprecedented food safety push

• Grindr pays £26M to settle UK privacy class action

• Britain's grid operator gave Palantir contract without inviting rival bids

• Google warns of lower quality as it revamps Europe search results to avoid fines

• The far right's win in Germany is sending a chill through Europe's establishment

• EU and Canada Plan Far-Reaching Alliance to Strengthen Partnership

• 100s of flights cancelled at UK airports due to ATC issue

Iran / Houthi

• Underwater Drone Captured by Iran Matches American Anduril Model

Israel

• Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Days Before Oct. 7

  • Netanyahu was warned of 7 October Hamas attacks, book claims

• Defeating Antisemitism Through Zionism

• UK announces sanctions on West Bank settlements

  • 12 countries including France, UK announce sanctions on Israeli settlements in West Bank

China

• Nepal-Tibet disaster becomes latest victim of China's 'Clean Internet' campaign

• Two children died from gene therapies in China: where the field goes next

• China Planted 78 Billion New Trees—and Seriously Messed Up Its Water Cycle

• China says it will pump $54 billion into banks and insurers — but their stocks still fell.

Health / Medicine

• Why getting your hands dirty is good for you

• How India Eradicated Polio

• "Everything's a Challenge" ADHD Individuals in the Midst of Rx Shortages

• On the Origins of Peanut Allergy. Before 1980, peanut allergy was so rare that the idea of someone dying from it was preposterous. So what changed?

• Loss of salt iodization harmed child survival/academic achievement in Ethiopia

• Insilico's Co-CEO Has Big Hopes That Fibrosis Drug Can Reverse Aging Too

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Europe's largest carbon capture facility opens in the Netherlands

• After 9/11, Documents Suggest New Yorkers Were Misled About Air Quality

  • Mayor Mamdani releases 9/11 records showing officials misled about air quality

  • NYC opens 9-11 records portal, revealing new information about toxic conditions

  • Mamdani: Officials 'lied' to New Yorkers about still-toxic after 9/11

• The Rich Climate Distraction

• What's Creating These Mysterious Seafloor Hexagons?

• Nepal disaster is a wake-up call to take compound climate risks seriously