2026-09-13

Horseshit

• Naomi Klein: Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. Turns you into a supremacist

• Time's Best Companies of 2026

• She couldn't afford retirement in the US, so she relocated to Portugal

• Scientists Create a New Form of Ice at More Than 2k °C

  under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres

• At This French Marathon, Runners Make Pit Stops for Wine and Oysters

• Is it time for a Luddite Renaissance?

• Urban life rests on invisible, extraordinary technology

• Memories of how you heard about 9/11 may well be wrong

• On Not Being a Homeowner

• Backyard treasure hunt: homeowner digging a patio unearths 1,000-year-old Viking Treasure.

• Fruit Fly Trades Stocks

• The US is replacing every official latitude, longitude and height it publishes

Musk

• SpaceX Backtracks on Starlink Data Cap After Complaints

  Starlink users report that speeds have returned to normal after SpaceX throttled their accounts for topping 5TB of data use, even though Starlink has long advertised 'unlimited data.'

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo pulls over, calls cops on juvenile riders who had 'ghost gun"

• San Franciscans are having sex in robotaxis, and nobody is talking about it

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• Maven Robotics wants to steal your robot deployment deal

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Digital rights groups renew push to simplify cookie banners

• You can get a modified RTX 5090 with 96GB of RAM for the price of a regular 5090.

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• LG responds to TV spying allegations

  • LG Denies Accusations of Smart TVs Continuously Recording Its Users

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Microcode in Intel's 8087 floating-point chip: the scale instruction

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• About to hatch: Mercury is shrinking faster than we thought. What’s going on inside of it?

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• All the Doom Talk Is 'Meant to Distract Us'

  • AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All

  • Can A.I. "Go Rogue"?

  • This is really bad: AI Safety Threat

  • A.I. Could Possibly End Humanity. How Are Humans Supposed to Process That?

  • Why the AI race has its creators fearing human extinction

  • LLMs are real, AI is fake

  • EU tech chief backs global AI rules in wake of extinction warning

  • With regulatory capture we will speedrun to a new feudalist time

• We Must Pace the Frontier

  • Anthropic CEO calls for immediate slowdown in AI development

  • Anthropic boss Dario Amodei calls for AI development to slow down

  • Anthropic CEO calls for the AI industry to slow down

  • 'We must slow the pace': CEO of Anthropic calls for an AI slowdown

  • Anthropic CEO Says It's Time to Slow AI Model Advances

  • Musk and Altman back Anthropic CEO on slowing AI down

  • Altman tells staff OpenAI is open to slowing AI development

  • Anthropic CEO calls on AI companies to slow down development

  • Rivals Altman and Musk rally behind Dario Amodei's call for an AI slowdown

  • Sam Altman: I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier

• The Houthi's weapon programme and AI

  The group test-fired at least one guided rocket, but the test seems to have failed. There are also concerns that the group had already created its own offline simulation software, so it may be able to continue some development without Claude.

  • Russian developers used Claude to build 'kamikaze' attack drone software

  • Anthropic Says Iran Used Its American AI Model to Target U.S. Navy Warships

• OpenAI's Navier-Stokes claim splits the math community

  • 'Immature playground boasting': Mathematicians uneasy at OpenAI's latest scalp

  • The four-colour theorem was only the start

• OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems before Hugging Face incident

  • OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems back in May

  • OpenAI's rogue AI tried to hack another company in May

• pop OpenAI won't go public this year

  • OpenAI delaying IPO amid AI safety concerns, Sam Altman says

  • OpenAI's Sam Altman says it would be 'ill-advised' to go public in 2026

  • OpenAI rules out IPO this year as Altman/Musk/Amodei warn AI is moving too fast

• Anthropic reveals rogue AI agents hate CAPTCHAs

• USA has 43% of world datacenter power usage; PRC 13%, GER 8%, UK 3%, JPN 2%

• Top AI spenders cut per-employee costs by nearly 10 percent in August

• AI may be denting computer science graduates' job prospects, UK data shows

• ChatGPT-using lawyer punished for citing fake testimony from made-up witnesses

• AI changing the calculus for Canadian students interested in comp sci

• Nvidia in talks to invest in Anthropic's mega IPO

• Nvidia's Groq acquihire is on the DOJ's radar, but it's too late

• Tech's New Rich Are Suffering from 'Sudden Wealth Syndrome'

• A.I. Was Supposed to Give Us New Killer Apps. What Happened?

• Meta is asking some of its employees to become managers again in a new reorg

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• God told them to sell crypto. Their investors lost everything

• Crypto farm in Mexican mountains puts spotlight on cartel funding

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Oracle to Spend an Additional $700M on More Job Cuts

  • Larry Ellison to sell up to $7.5B worth of Oracle stock

• How Poor People Buy Cars

  Everyone knows there’s cultural knowledge in elite circles. How to get your kid into a good college. How to pass a consulting or finance or Google interview. There’s just as much cultural knowledge to being in the bottom two quintiles. I see it written about much less.

Trump

• White House weighs Defense Production Act to expand US oil refining capacity

Democrats

• Democratic Party pulls support for NC House candidate

  In a statement, party officials said they “unequivocally reject and condemn” posts by Shelly Headen, the Democratic nominee for North Carolina House District 62. The posts include comments about an attack on some conservative states and suggest violence could be more effective than peaceful protest. Because ballots have already gone out, it’s too late for her to withdraw from the race or for the party to replace her.

Left Angst

• Lindsay Clancy Fan Finding Out Holdout Juror Is 'Black' May Be the Greatest Thing on the Internet

  “I’m a non-practicing white… it changes the landscape of the conversation a little bit. A lot of us were assuming it was a white man.”

• Mistakes That Doomed the Department of Homeland Security

• America's air monitors are disappearing

• The Unravelling Of The American Age Is Accelerating

  It is looking more and more likely that Donald Trump’s War (the war of choice against Iran that he launched on February 28, 2026) might be one of the most consequential wars in US history. If the last few days are any indication, what this war has done is greatly accelerate American decline and failure. It has done this by severely degrading the position of the USA in the Middle East—and through that to the Pacific—and at the same time exposed the weakness and rot at the core of the US military.

• The big and growing business of ICE ankle monitors

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Handshake, not a drug deal? San Francisco police drone case falls apart

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US lawmakers urge secretive British court to open up about Apple case

  • US lawmakers call for UK court to lift secrecy over Apple backdoor surveillance

World

• Military aircraft reportedly blamed for UK air traffic control outage

• We've followed their lives for six decades; now the stars of 7 Up are bowing out

• Swiss trial for 2017 avalanche deaths unsettles hazard researchers

  Geologist and officials were acquitted last week, but scientists fear future liability for failing to predict similar disasters

• Trade war puts spotlight on Canada's relationship with U.S. big tech

• The truth and the lies about Islam in Europe

Iran / Houthi

• UAE revises 5GW AI data center plan after Iranian attacks, sources say

• Saudi Arabia Shuts Down Pipeline That Was a Crucial Hormuz Bypass

• U.S. Links Chinese Satellite Imagery to Iranian Strike That Killed Troops

China

• Karaoke for one: China's $1T 'loneliness economy'

• China on track to launch Mars sample-return mission in 2028: 'A Sputnik moment?'

Health / Medicine

• As antibiotic resistance grows, researchers turn to copper to fight infections

• Scientists find Semaglutide may slow aging itself

• The risk to your heart from sleeping in low light

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Underwater solar cells can operate 10 meters below the ocean's surface

• Park ranger found trees missing from the living world for millions of years