2026-10-21

etc

• Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes?

  The only real advantage is that they didn’t take away from the expensive interior floorspace, but that just wasn’t enough of a benefit anymore. When New York City updated their building codes in 1968, exterior exits were officially prohibited for new construction. Many other large cities across the country had either already banned them or would follow soon after. What took their place? The exact thing the Franklin Institute proposed in 1881, nearly a century earlier. I have to read this quote because of how prescient it was:

  “As a general rule, applicable to all buildings, the main reliance should be placed upon stairways in daily use, for the obvious reason that the occupants of a building instinctively seek such an escape in case of fire, that they are familiar with it, and that, being in daily use, it is reasonably certain to be unobstructed and to have the approaches to it clear.”

  Even more than that, they suggested that stairways be enclosed in brick, built of incombustible materials, and have self-closing doors to keep out smoke. And that’s practically a perfect description of the modern tower stairway used in tall buildings today. And you might not even notice it.

Horseshit

• How Do Airports Prepare for Disaster? With Fake Screams and Cloth Dummies

• Owners who spend more time close to their cats tend to have more positive moods

• How Did Life Arise? Three Turning Points in Early Evolution

• Ancient DNA discovery adjusts timeline of first North American humans: new study

• Why Washing Machines Took Decades to Catch On

• The New Science of Stuttering

• Health Dept. bribes eat the profits: Home-based coffee shops provide unique perks for owners and customers

• A photo of a patient's face could predict whether they'll survive cancer

• Wash your hands. There’s probably poop on them. They may look clean, but not from a microbial perspective.

• They don't make instant coffee like they used to. It's getting gourmet now

• The Obituary Cocktail: The 'deadly' drink that symbolises New Orleans

• At least $963,000 in trading cards stolen from FedEx truck in California

• 2,200-Year-Old Fingerprints Reveal Who Built China's Mysterious Terracotta Army

celebrity gossip

• Robert Downey Jr. Joins Specs as Chief Customer Experience Officer

Obit

• Mary Helen Branswell, Reporter Who Saw Covid Coming, Has Died

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• The dangers of letting tech billionaires shape our world

• Iran, China, and Cuba are directing protests inside America.

Musk

• Elon Musk becomes biggest donor of US midterms cycle with $366M spent

• Whoops: Grok Bot Spills Tech CEO's Bank Data in Public Slack

• Hey Elon, Where's My $25,000 EV?

• Musk's Fake Flying Car And 'CEO Said A Thing!' Journalism

  There is absolutely no evidence that Tesla has solved any of the engineering, physics, regulatory, safety, or design hurdles of strapping rockets to the back of extremely heavy electric vehicles. Many people assume mainstream editors and reporters are just naive or clumsy in the way they repeatedly prop up the lies of terrible rich men. But ultimately, the evidence suggests the only honest conclusion you can draw is that the American press is actively and enthusiastically complicit in selling the con.

• Elon Musk says he’s giving SpaceX stock to every kid in America.

• SpaceX's data centre deals boost revenue by 161%

• Musk Ordered Starlink Slowdown That Blindsided Ukraine

• Musk says Tesla and SpaceX formed special committees to discuss merger

  • Tesla and SpaceX have set up committees to explore a merger

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Americans Are Spending More Money to Drive Worse Cars

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Six probability and statistics journals pause new submissions

• UC Berkeley math community left at crossroads in wake of Navier-Stokes proof

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• PS5 console jailbreak on latest 14.10 firmware shared before GTA 6 release date

• Smartphone shipments plummet as memory crisis pumps up prices

• Google outage hits websites and apps as some bank customers report issues

  • Google cloud outage takes down banks

  • Google cloud outage knocks out Revolut and others

• ICANN testing tech to let law enforcement access non-public WHOIS info

• Elizabeth Holmes doc 'You Can See Everything' Nets $15M in opening weekend

• Is Cellebrite sitting on an iPhone radio 0day?

• Games with loot boxes re-rated PEGI 16

• Brewster Kahle: Why the Internet Needs a Memory

• The Netherlands is building its own Linux OS to break free from Microsoft

• The Internet goes on high alert after discovery of 8 compromised TLS certs

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Japan launches mission to bring home a piece of the Martian moon Phobos

• Assessment of the Mass Loss and Radius Change of 3I/Atlas

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI debt worries spark surge in default insurance trading

  • AWS CFO joked about the financial toll of AI. An internal recording reveals why

  • Investors temper Anthropic IPO valuation expectations over growth slowdown

  • Yes, the Fed Can Kill the AI Boom

  • AI firm Elice plunges 32% in market debut as investors dump data centre stocks

  • Data center stocks slide as Korea IPO plunges 30%, pressuring tech sentiment

  • AI Debutant's Flameout Stokes Fears the Boom Is Ending

  • Ahead of IPOs, AI companies are sketching plans to share their wealth

  • Anthropic S-1 Shows Red-Hot Growth, Risks and Computing Costs

  • Anthropic logged net loss of over $80B in first half of 2026

  • Is CoreWeave the Silicon Valley Bank of 2026?

  • AI Had Better Work Out

  The theoreticals and hypotheticals of this industry are so powerful that they’ve created one of the (if not the) largest equities bubbles in modern history, all heavily-centralized around the valuations of a handful of names related to the so-called AI trade, which translates to “buying or selling stuff to do with AI GPUs.” This has led to the single-highest inflow of foreign investments into US equities in history — larger than the Dot-Com Bubble, the leadup to the Great Financial Crisis, and even the dying gasps of the Zero Interest Free Era in 2021. However you might hand-wave away the AI bubble’s economic issues by saying it’s “just like the Dot-Com Bubble” — when the NASDAQ 100 fell 77% from its peak — the consequences are now global, at a scale unseen in history, flowing into both direct stocks and indices.

• China's DeepSeek deep-sixed at all US federal civilian agencies

  • US banning Chinese AI DeepSeek from government agency IT systems

  • China defends DeepSeek after US ban of its AI from government systems.

  • US bans DeepSeek from federal agencies, prompting angry response from China

• Accused OpenAI spy had folder called "Saudi Gov Docs," FBI says

  • Accused OpenAI spy had folder called "Saudi Gov Docs," FBI says

• Anthropic has pledged to give 5% of its shared to a public benefit fund.

• Anthropic Does Not Understand Why Its Draft Bill Was Unacceptable and Troubling

• Meta Muse exposes users' personal and business secrets in shared conversations

• Judge Orders Meta to Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting

  • Meta tries to scapegoat staff who downloaded torrents to spare execs

• Bill Gross's AI Tool Could Supercharge the Number of Startups

• Making the internet better for AI agents might make it worse for everyone else

• AI experts to school Congress wanted

• Gemini Argon shatters 59-year-old nuclear fusion conjecture in just a few hours

• Documents Reveal Military Plan for Agentic AI That Hacks U.S. Adversaries

• JustEat apologises for AI-generated slop

• Startup Claims to Treat a Patient with A.I.-Created Viruses

• Anthropic sued by major Canadian news publishers

• Women increasingly see AI for what it is: mansplaining on a global scale

• 'Reverse-Engineer Anything' Is the New Wild West of AI

• Developers Are Using AI to Strip Ads and Tracking from Smart TVs

• The Army Wants to Sic AI Agents on Its Enemies. What Could Go Wrong?

• Germany Wants to Lead the World in Industrial AI: How Nvidia Will Help

• Linux Foundation Estimates 25% of New Pull Requests to Be Low-Quality AI Slop

• AI's power boom is giving the transformer a high-tech makeover

• Throuples are turning to ‘AI-poly’ chatbots — but experts warn it could cause psychosis.

• How one hacker used AI agents and a few thousand dollars to break into scores of sites.

• Can a Million AI Agents Create Superintelligence?

• Linus Torvalds posts his first AI-assisted patch to the Linux kernel

• AI that was supposed to save us time is doing just the opposite

• Nvidia's big bet on physical AI aims for safer robotaxis, humanoid robots

• Meta drops the word "train" from its commercial TOS after AI backlash

• Four Direct, Reasonable, and Important AI Questions (Which the AI People Will Ignore)

  Two recent useful pieces on AI were published recently. Not useful in the sense that the people who wrote or featured in them are right, but useful in showing the reality distortion field that the media has erected around this topic. First, of course, is Ezra Klein. His recent column is valuable because it’s such a stark statement of a decision that he made (subconsciously, probably) long ago: to insist that the only possible outcomes are AI doom or AI utopia, that the only possibilities are maximalist in one direction or another. He refuses to really entertain the possibility that, in fact, life will not be radically ruptured, that LLMs could prove to be significant and consequential software but ultimately just software, normal technology.

  And this Kevin Roose interview with New York really epitomizes a certain AI Guy approach to defending the outlandish claims made about the technology, a lot of patronizing answers based on speculation and unfulfilled promises that Roose insists are simply going to be fulfilled. He and interviewer Benjamin Hart both exhibit a lot of condescension, suggesting that every skeptic is just a sad denialist who can’t accept the changes coming. That affect has become inescapable among the AI maximalists: put-upon, impatient, a countenance more in sorrow than in anger, paternal, forever theatrically sighing. It amounts to an assertion that skeptics have a fundamentally emotional relationship to AI… which is rich coming from guys who refuse to confront their own emotional relationship to the technology.

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Utah sues Kalshi, saying it's 'the manager of a back-alley gambling den'

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Andreessen Horowitz lays off majority of portfolio recruiting team

• New Skydance Worth Less Than Half of Warner Brothers, Paramount Combined

• Legendary Revives Lionsgate Takeover Talks, Submits Offer

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Supreme Court agrees to review ban on distilling spirits in private homes

  • U.S. Supreme Court to review 1868 federal ban on home distilling of liquor

• CA Billionaire Tax Act collect roughly $30B. Net Present Value: negative $39B

• SCOTUS couldn't take up a copyright case because four justices have book deals

Left Angst

• Trump Appointees Asked a Federal Cybersecurity Agency to Hack a Voting Machine

• U.S. Political Money Funnels to Indian Bots to Lure Voters

• America's new era of private science

• Elissa Slotkin's threats to prosecute conservatives moves America closer to civil war

  On Sunday, former President Barack Obama denounced the Trump administration’s investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar for immigration fraud as un-American. In America, we don’t go after our political opponents, he said. This from the man who sent his Internal Revenue Service after Tea Party protesters, and whose running mate, after he became president, treated traditional Catholics, COVID-vaccine skeptics and parents who spoke out at school board meetings as potential terrorists. Not to mention raiding Donald Trump’s home and sending FBI agents to rifle through Melania’s underwear. Now Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), speaking at the University of Chicago, is calling for targeted prosecutions of Trump staffers.

• All 47 Senate Democrats Begged Lee Zeldin Not to Test Your Tap Water.

• The New Food Movement

• Trump Accounts' Fraud Vulnerability Calls for Strong Safeguards

• How Corruption Got This Bad

• Kash Patel's FBI stats are bolstered by arrests made by state and local agencies

• Bessent says a Democrat-led Congress could do little to stop Trump agenda

• Order signed creating NIH division, task force for women's health

• Cops raid office of RFK Jr. allies planning unethical vaccine trial on babies

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Feds Suspect Ransom Negotiator Ran ShinyHunters Extortion Site

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US trial begins for Rwandan-American accused of role in genocide

• Trump Envoy Tells Nervous Gulf Allies U.S. Can't Guarantee Security Forever

• Trump administration holds up Patriot missile transfers for Ukraine

• U-2 spy plane makes rare appearance in Bay Area flyover

World

• France protests over living costs and school conditions spark riots

  French President Emmanuel Macron had called for "calm and respect" ahead of Saturday’s demonstrations, saying the right to protest must be exercised with respect for people and property. But as violence escalated, the French president and his wife, Brigitte, were spotted at a Celine Dion concert in Nanterre, west of Paris, according to French media reports. The couple reportedly arrived and left discreetly and joined roughly 35,000 spectators at the Plenitude Arena. Macron had spent Thursday and Friday in Brussels for a European Council meeting.

  • French CDS may be flashing a 'Frexit' warning

  • Letter from Paris – A status check on the French and American left

• Saudi Arabia Created the Yemen It Fears

  • Everything is going wrong for Muhammad bin Salman

• Hackers steal 421,000 emails belonging to members of Germany's far-right AfD

  • AfD Leak: What 421,179 Hacked Emails Show about the German Far Right

  In email after email, party supporters use racist slurs and share antisemitic theories of Jewish world domination; there are jokes about turning refugees into handbags and boots, discussions of whether refugees should be shot at the border, a Christmas card sent with a swastika and “Heil Hitler”, and an email thread signed off with “Heil und Sieg”.

  • The AfD leak site's emails shows nazism from party members

  • Germany news: Hackers release AfD party emails

• Alberta votes to remain in Canada with 70% voting remain

  • Albertans have rejected referendum on independence

  • Alberta referendum: Province awaits results after delays on voting day

• UK Defence Startups Are Being Denied Banking Services Under ESG Rules

• Australia Set to Sue Facebook, TikTok in Child-Safety Push

• Europe has lots of pleasant cities but too few that matter

• Africa's Explosive Growth in Cities

• More than 4 in 10 UK teenagers want more work experience opportunities at school

• Swiss army rejected US tech firm Palantir on five occasions

• NK publishes photos of Kim Jong Un why do rumours of his death keep coming back?

• UK wages grew by annual 3.7% in three months to August, ONS says

• EU lawmakers reach deal to weaken car CO2 targets

• Strategic maple syrup reserve close to empty, producers say

• 'How hard could it be?': candidate with viral signs gets elected

Iran / Houthi

• UK to deploy jets to defend Saudi Arabia from Houthi attacks

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian Satellite Makes a Menacing Approach to Another Craft in Orbit

  • A Russian satellite is stalking a U.S. spacecraft in orbit

• Russians Snap Up Chinese EVs as Ukrainian Attacks Make Fuel Scarce

• Ukrainian drone flies wounded soldier from front line

• Zelensky prepares for Oslo talk with US envoys as Rubio denies withholding Intel

Health / Medicine

• Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly Report GLP-1 Signals of Slowed Biological Aging at ARDD

• Nurses Are in High Demand–But They're Quitting in Droves

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Pennsylvania issues alert on congenital measles–something unseen for decades

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• How to study a swiftly melting climate disaster

• For centuries, bird migration was a mystery – a tech revolution is changing that

• Tiny possum and glider thought extinct for 6000 years found in remote West Papua

• Two Firefighters Died in Yosemite–For What?

• The CO2-absorbing building made of old sinks, windscreens and toilets

• Genetic analysis of giant tortoise show good genes and lack of stress

• Giant 'heat storms' are scorching the Earth

• The Overlapping Plagues Devastating American Forests

• Salmon Farmers Deploy Lasers, Robots to Meet Booming Demand

• Sixteen Years After Deepwater Horizon, Deep Sea Life Shows Few Signs of Recovery