School smartphone bans seen as โ€˜punitiveโ€™ by young people, study says.

Gabe Newell: "Piracy is not a pricing issue. Itโ€™s a service issue" โ€” Sony just proved why digital storefronts are broken.

RAM prices expected to rise another 40-50% in Q3 2026, and then 30% more in Q4 as AI demand outpaces supply.

We Were Way Off About How Many Insect Species Live on Earth.

US renewable boom passes key milestone in April.

Is America becoming a gerontocracy?

The AI boom and geopolitics are rewiring Asiaโ€™s oceans.

Donald Trump is kicking out Chinese firms and keeping their tech.

Some 60-year-old Americans canโ€™t retire because they still have student loan debt.

Trump cut off support for Ukrainian defense. It didnโ€™t work out for Russia.

NASA may send a backup, nuclear-powered Mars rover to the Moon.

Gripen E Fighters Officially Ordered By Ukraine.

Chinaโ€™s Truck-Mounted Electromagnetic Aircraft Catapult Seen In Action For The First Time.

Where Are The Aircraft Carriers: June 29, 2026.

Dis Respect Dat Respect

(1) matargashti-pilled ๐Ÿ‡ต๐Ÿ‡ธ on X: "I'm so tired of lateness being viewed as a moral failing. I've been shamed for it my whole life because it's framed as "disrespect" (and no, it hasn't helped me be more punctual) and if I lost out on a major life opportunity because of it I don't think I could have ever recovered" / X

Fuck this clown-ass nonsense.

Being consistently late is a moral failing and it is disrespectful. You are implicitly telling me that your time is more valuable than mine. One of the reasons I am almost never late is that I do not presume to believe my time is more valuable than anyone else’s. And I am one arrogant mofo so if I value your time just as much as my own, you can show me that courtesy as well.

I just stop dealing with people who are consistently late. It is literally not worth my time.

Ukraineโ€™s vibe shift is bad news for Russiaโ€™s economy.

Crimeaโ€™s big cities in total blackout after Ukrainian drone strikes.

NASA races to save Swift telescope from falling back to Earth with daring rescue mission.

NASAโ€™s X-59 โ€œfrankenjetโ€ tests supersonic flight without the sonic boom.

Supreme Court allows firing of FTC commissioners, ends agency independence. Ugh.

European ISPs Want Rightsholders Held Accountable for Overblocking Damage.

South Korean tech giants commit over $550B to ease โ€˜ RAMageddonโ€™.

Stubborn 6.5% mortgage rates cause stunning housing market change. High mortgage payments and elevated home prices fuel a massive generational shift.

Britons ordered to remove air conditioning from homes in 40C heat under Net Zero crackdown.

Then, you have the moderates. They often distinguish themselves by insisting on "statistics" and hard facts and refusing to accept common sense arguments and "what is before their eyes". The "just anecdotes" dismissal treats empirical observations as epistemically worthless unless accompanied by a regression table.

Is political polarization dangerous? Study provides clearer answers.

The Politics of Cooling.

Scientists Think Uranus and Neptune May Not Be the Ice Giants We Imagined.

The AI jobs debate just got messier.

Graphic

Why, Microsoft. Why must you be like this. Who hurt you.

Why, Microsoft. Why must you be like this. Who hurt you. : sysadmin

The thing is, though Graph is terrible, I am sure its replacement will be far worse.

Graph is very developer-y in that is extremely, absurdly verbose and also ridiculously complex. I’ve had similar experiences to the above. What used to be single-line commands are now 30-50 lines.

I was forced by MSOL deprecation to rewrite a Powershell script that I used rather commonly. It was around 100 lines long. It’s now 2,000 lines of Graph slop. And it’s not even as functional as the old one as actual capabilities were removed.

I do not understand why insane complexity is so appealing to dev types and I guess I never will.

It’s a Pathy Alright

(1) Natalia Antonova ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ (@NataliaAntonova) / X

I saw someone who was worried that people didn’t have enough empathy for Decarlos Brown after he brutally murdered Iryna Zarutska. I mean, idiot leftists are gonna idiot leftist. But still. That’s the kind of evil that’s hard to even think about.

Decarlos Brown deserves one thing, and that is to be executed humanely, quietly, but quickly. That’s all. It won’t bring Iryna back. But it’ll mean there are no future Irynas.

These people talk about “empathy” when they just want chaos and destruction.

China Has Matched Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Resetting AI Race. Clampdown on top U.S. artificial intelligence is fueling concern that Washington is handing Beijing a cyberwarfare advantage.

How Europe Became the World Champion of Heat Deaths.

AI coding token costs are on track to rival human payroll.

Renewables just hit 30% of US electricity generation.

The Internet Is Drowning in Secret Ads.

Europe's heatwave linked to 1,300 deaths, WHO says, as Germany hits record 41.7C.

Google, AI, Oligarchy and the End of the โ€˜Open Webโ€™.

The Rise of the AI Censors.

The Hidden Value In The Human-AI Arrangement.

Millions dropped ObamaCare plans after subsidies ended.

US Layoffs Skyrocket to Highest Level Since Pandemic as Tech Giants Blame AI for 40% of Cuts.

The growing alienation between men and women is, to my mind, one of the biggest stories of our time.

As the Tide Turns Against Putin, Beware the Drowning Man.

One Million Passports Leaked Online.

The โ€˜Almost Homelessโ€™ Subreddit Is a Stark Glimpse at Soaring Wealth Inequality.

Age verification is just a precursor to attribution of speech. Oh, for sure. That is the goal.

Stalling Beauty

mcc (@mcc@mastodon.social) - the Timeloop Cafรฉ

To those who are in control now — MBA types, incompetent “designers,” and useless developers — anything that is whimsical, informative or attractive is verboten. Giving the user pertinent information, a good experience, or even a little bit of fun is something against their highest credo, which is: Engagement is all that matters.

The user experience has been abraded till only that one one metric remains. There is no concern with delight, nor understanding, nor the small pleasure of a tool that does exactly what you hoped it would. Just engagement as the sole MBA focus, a number on a dashboard and a quarterly line that must go up. Everything else is seen as friction that must be eradicated since there is no way to A/B test beauty, or delight, or satisfaction in using a well-designed tool competently.

Anything that can be taken from a user will be as the entire corporate structure around software and the web is now only concerned with how much they can extract from you while providing the bare minimum themselves.

And so we get sludge world. No whimsy. No beauty. Just an infinitely-extended hospital cafeteria, a deserted mall the size of a galaxy as we are all condemned to the backrooms — an inescapable hell of fluorescent lights that always flicker but never go dark, a voice that whispers of freedom just below intelligibility, a non-place where waking and sleeping take the same shape and even nightmares seem pleasant in the face of unbounded inexhaustible insipidity.