2026-10-09

Worthy

• In Defense of Western Civilization by Marco Rubio

  For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man’s existence. They organized all of civic life around contest, ambition, competition: in philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle – to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.

  Now I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd; it may even sound cruel. The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.

  The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things. The ancient Greek city-states were filled. They were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction – from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.

Horseshit

• Freediving Seems to Reorganize The Human Brain on a Large Scale.

• Was the Human Gut Healthier in Ancient Times?

• Animals may have evolved 200M years earlier than we thought

• Is society growing stupider? The clues are simple and repeated

• It's Probably Time to Start Worrying About the 4G LTE Shutdown Bricking Cars

  There are about 500 million connected cars on the road around the world right now, and that number is expected to more than double by 2035. Once we get to the next decade, a huge chunk of them will be on borrowed time, because carriers are expected to start decommissioning 4G LTE networks as early as 2030.

• Nobody knows what 'Bimonthly' or 'Biweekly' means

• How and why did the Victorians succeed?

• Why people don't want to have children any more

• Forgive the Bad Texters

  Right now, I have 30 unopened texts. Scrolling through my messages, I find several more that I opened but forgot to respond to for anywhere between a few hours and a week and a half—from my parents, my sister’s fiancé, old friends who are accustomed to this kind of behavior, and new friends who are just beginning to be disappointed in me. At least two people texted me so long ago—more than a month—that to respond now and remind them how long they’ve been waiting would be worse than not responding at all.

• The Woman Who Wants You to Ditch Your Phone

• Young infants infer the closeness of social relationships via saliva sharing interactions | The Current

• Black banjo players are changing Americana music

• The Subreddit Where Men Share Their Dinners–and Their Most Intimate Feelings

Epstein

• British billionaire warned Epstein was a 'sexual deviant'

celebrity gossip

• Musk, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su Awarded National Medal of Science

• Peter Thiel's new Antichrist warnings

  Thiel began a closed four-part lecture series in Nashville last week, returning to a theme he explored in San Francisco last year before taking similar talks to Paris and Rome. Nashville is emerging as a hub for the tech right. Decoded obtained recordings of his first two Nashville lectures, delivered on Sept. 28 and Oct. 5, and compared them to exclusive transcripts of his San Francisco talks. The structure is largely unchanged, and Thiel invokes religion to argue that regulation of the AI industry is evil — a notion that has taken hold among key factions of Silicon Valley investors.

Musk

• Tesla browbeating EU to approve 'Full Self-Driving' tech. Pressure is working

• SpaceX seeks $40B financing to buy Nvidia chips

• SpaceX's recovered Starship after Flight 13 splashdown returns to Texan port

• Spend Elon Musk's Money

• A Cruise and a Starship: SpaceX Used Bystander Videos to Track Explosion Debris

• SpaceX to Acquire Low-Band Spectrum for Mobile Phone Service

  • SpaceX spectrum license deal hammers shares of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile

  • SpaceX acquires 800 MHz spectrum to power nationwide cell service

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Anne Carson wins Nobel Prize in literature 2026

  • Anne Carson wins Nobel Prize for Literature 2026

• A Nobel for illuminating life's asymmetry

• Archaeology megafirm abruptly shuts down

• Don't 'meet them where they are' and leave them there

  "For example, a novice may need vocabulary explained, a dense sentence unpacked, the text read aloud, or a complex task broken into manageable chunks," she writes. But they shouldn't get an easier text to read or a less challenging task to do. Scaffolding is temporary, McQuillan writes. Differentiation is forever.

• What schools still have music programs? Soaring Instrument Prices Could Stop the Music at Many Schools

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Samsung to cut smartphone production by 30%: "There's no profit even if we sell"

• Browser-in-browser attacks use fake Meta Muse Ad lure to steal credentials

• Hackers hijack Google domains after breaching ccTLD registries

• Sony Sells Patents to Meta, Seemingly Signifies End of VR Efforts

• Amazon Unveils New iPad Rivals with Alexa+ and Google Play

  • Amazon phasing out Fire Tablets

• The Latest Nuisance on Flights Is a Zoom Call at 30k Feet

• Leak Shows Cops Can Break into Locked iPhones

• Google Is Pushing Scam Videos on Elderly and Cognitively Impaired People

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• Amazon's New 'About You' Page Lists Everything It Knows About You

• Visually impaired people fear smart glasses backlash

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• (May 2026) Trust Me, You Want SunOS 4.1.4 on Your Older Sun Boxes

  • My ISP ran thousands of users on a Sparc10; the "Solaris upgrade" crushed their business. They simply couldn't serve us until they bought the Sparc1000 and they never got the UUCP customers running right again after that.

• The Rise and Fall of the Plasma Screen

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AHM Statement on OpenAI's October 6 Release of Mathematical Documents

  • When the White Collars Feel Threatened – A Reply to Terence Tao

  Dear Terence, no one asks for their industry to be disrupted. It just happens one day, due to some process that ultimately proves impossible to contain. I saw this with my own eyes as a teenager, in every detail, because I grew up in a city full of heavy industry, where production of steel and mining of black coal underpinned everything else. And I saw it all collapse and transform into a rust belt region within a single generation.

  • Is AI the End of Math as We Know It?

  • Errors and withdrawals of 3 OAI results on algebraic geometry

  • OpenAI withdraws three mathematical results

  • 'Breathtaking,' 'Devastating': Mathematics Reels After New OpenAI Release

• OpenAI annualised revenues $20B less than previously signalled

  • OpenAI's revenue is reportedly $20B less than previously projected

• Allegedly a student using AI behind South Korean banks cyberattack

  • This Hacker is legendary. A complete amateur

  He’d also asked, “Can you write my résumé?” That pretty much handed them all his personal information.

  • CrowdStrike finds possible bank hacker's CV among exposed AI logs

  • South Korea warns of AI hacking after bank data breaches

• Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones

  • Someone rebuilt free, open-source versions of Adobe software using AI

  • AI Ends Closed-Source Software

  • Developer uses AI to build free Adobe clones after frustration with cancellation

• What the Data Center Boom Looks Like from the Sky

• OpenAI Has Clawed Tons of Market Share Back from Anthropic in 2026

• Mumsnet denies using AI for content after prompt appears on message board

• The AI Price War Is Heating Up–and OpenAI Is Gaining Ground on Anthropic

• Microsoft is about to let Copilot loose on your file system

• Other ways newsrooms are using AI in investigations

• Flathub walked back their generative AI ban, replaced with a disclosure policy

• Nobel physics winner's pride at pioneering AI role

• Poetry is the new AI security threat

• The Startup That Wants to Build 'Microrobots' with A.I

• Ex-ByteDance Intern's $200M AI Lab Takes on Fei-Fei Li

• How Long Until AI Hacks Everything?

• OpenAI's human rights lead: What military AI could do 'keeps me up at night'

• Next Great Read Might Be Certified 'Organic'

• Parents in Finland turn to AI for free school pictures

• 'Someone else will do it for less': Refugees in Kenya are powering tech

• A.I. Is Lying to You

• Solo teen hiker hoisted from mountain cliff after using AI to plan route

• Anthropic's IPO filing shows CEO Dario Amodei earned $18M last year

• Why the Catholic Church Is AI Doom's Most Formidable Foe

• ChatGPT for Teens presents 'unacceptable risk'

• 'Dystopian': Co-op becomes latest firm to put staff under AI surveillance

• Photo Is an A.I. Fake. Can You Tell?

• German search engine ditches Mistral, bets on Chinese open-source AI

• Anthropic bans 'abusive or cruel behavior' towards Claude

  • Anthropic changes usage policy to ban model abuse and election interference

• Does Claude Feel the Whip?

• AI blurs lines in campaign ads

• USA Today sues OpenAI for copyright infringement over AI training

• A.I. could upend food delivery

• Russia's AI Law Puts Control Ahead of Capability

• Female AI agents 'paid' less than males, study finds

• Firmus pulls IPO amid investor doubt about datacentre company

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Longshots Losing 98% of Time Dominate Kalshi, Polymarket Trading

• Senator tried to ban gambling on prediction markets–now she's a Kalshi lobbyist

• NFL asks Supreme Court to regulate prediction markets at the state level

Economicon / Business / Finance

• California wine glut sends premium bottles to Costco, others

• Why Garmin's CEO Is Flying High

• Booking.com goes to court to force staff to go to the office

• Paramount Stock Declines After Merger with Warner Discovery Closes

• Samsung $80B profit on AI boom, highest quarter for any tech company

• How the Billions from the Opioid Settlement Are Being Spent

• Waymo Closes $5B Debt Financing to Accelerate Business Expansion

• Amazon makes fresh job cuts, mainly in retail division

• Repeated US Treasury interventions risk an erosion of credibility

• GLP-1 users are furious after employers drop insurance benefits

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Feds get ready to rewrite car headlight rules

• Voters are split on whether or not to save Bay Area public transit

Trump

• Trump Tightens SNAP Requirements As Nick Shirley Demonstrates EBT Fraud.

Democrats

• Can AOC win the Democratic nomination?

  I’m not going to tell you that 2028 is the most important election of all time, because people say that about every election. But having a truly open nomination in both parties is relatively rare, and they’ll each have the chance — really the obligation — to redefine themselves in the first presidential election since 2012 that doesn’t include Donald Trump. Beyond that, it feels like the country is on the brink of profound political change, whether driven by technological shifts or generational turnover as various Boomer political dynasties burn themselves out.

Left Angst

• Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program

  • US says big tech barred from sponsoring H-1B workers for green cards

  • US suspends Microsoft, major IT firms from key green card program

  • US Suspends Visa Program for Tech Firms Including Microsoft

  • Vance says Microsoft, Adobe barred from sponsoring H-1B workers for green cards

  • Trump Admin Blocks Tech Companies from H-1B Perm Program

  • Trump bans Microsoft from sponsoring foreign workers for US residency

  • Microsoft Suspended from Green Card Program

• Trump? Diesel? ICE? Corruption? All of Those. But Mostly–Data Centers

• The Science That Has Oil Companies Running Scared

• Trump plans to charge international students $70k for work authorization

• CIA Conspired with the Right on the Eve of Mexico's '68 Massacre

• Imagine the uproar if Trump put a naked Angela Merkel statue in the White House!

• Pete Hegseth's Military of the Future: Defined by AI and Utter Lack of Oversight

• Hegseth Wants Public to Watch First Firing Squad Execution Since WWII

  • Fort Hood attacker's execution by firing squad will be livestreamed

  • Pentagon to execute convicted Fort Hood mass shooter Nidal Hasan by firing squad

• President says those using the term 'Artificial' Intelligence are 'THE ENEMY'

• ICE Emails Discuss Using Palantir-Supported Tool to Investigate Voter Fraud

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• CIA officer pleads guilty in gold bars case, admits he exposed intel source to foreign official

• ShinyHunters Extorted Boeing Spin-off Prior to Arrests

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• China is ramping up spy recruitment across the US – and threatening families

World

• Hungary to open Communist-era informer files in reckoning with Cold War past

• EU drops sponsorship of disinformation conference at Trump officials' request

  • EU, Canada and Lithuania pull out of disinformation conference after US pressure

• The animals to feature on England's banknotes

• German ex-spy chief arrested for treason: What we know

Israel

• 'Neither war nor peace': Palestinians in Gaza on existing amid disease despair

• International Olympiad in Informatics Bans Israeli Competitors

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Drones hit Yandex site in first major attack on Russian data hub

  • Russia's Yandex datacenter destroyed by Ukrainian drone strike

  • Ukrainian drones hit Russia's Yandex data centers housing two top supercomputers

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Possible plague death at a Siberian lab baffles scientists

  Scientists outside Russia who work on plague emphasize they, too, have heard very little solid information and are hoping for more transparency soon. But they agree that, given plague’s properties and what they have heard about Russia’s response, the risk of a big outbreak of the dreaded bacterial disease, let alone an epidemic, is close to zero. “The absolute worst case here is that we have a localized cluster” of cases, says microbiologist Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University, who is familiar with plague research in the former Soviet Union.

  • The mysterious pneumonia in Russia deserves attention, not panic

• Covid Drops Out of World’s Top 10 Causes of Death for First Time

• New York Declares State of Emergency as Measles Cases Spread Fast

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Most Recycling Is a Waste

• Bird masturbation appears natural across 120 species, challenging vet advice

• New research suggests Earth may be heating unevenly from the inside — possibly upending geology as we know it.

• Pregnant women exposed to heatwaves 25% more likely to suffer complications

• Scientists discover 180k giant tortoises on one Seychelles island

• Why 'vertical farming' is not a fix for our food system