Month: August 2026

Counter

Chill Annoying, Evil

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@Noahpinion) / X

I’m certainly not defending misogyny, but women in the US in particular are just worse now. Their mental health has been destroyed by smartphones and social media; these are not the same women we used to have. Most of them are entitled, repugnant, spoiled brats who hate men but still think they all deserve that top 0.1% man — while offering nothing and looking like a cave troll due to no exercise and obesity.

So of course there is going to be some backlash to that. It’d more notable if there were not a counter-reaction.

Chill Links

Kodak’s “Pre-Invented” Lunar Orbiter Camera; or, The Fate of SAMOS Readout.

Politicians Who Once Championed Data Centers Are Now Bashing Them.

Oh Dear, Condo Prices Fell by 15% to 33% in 33 Bigger Markets, Some Below 2006 Levels, as Historic Condo Bubbles Deflate.

How Did the English Build Such Beautiful Villages?

Why Europe can’t escape the fallout from $40 trillion US debt woes.

Americans still make up the clear majority of the workforce inside most U.S. corporations. Yet when corporate espionage, trade-secret theft, and unauthorized technology transfer cases are examined, foreign nationals and foreign-linked actors appear far more often than their share of the payroll would predict.

Social Security union says it needs $3 billion and another 20,000 workers to fix long wait times and ‘ghost offices’.

Why do movies look like that now?

El Niño-caused drought in Panama is likely to raise prices on everything from medicine to fuel.

The drone war is coming for global shipping.

Pandemic Inflation Took Away 7% Of Your Wages, And You Never Got Them Back.

Watching TikTok and Instagram Reels Videos Deactivates the Brain’s Cognitive Control Network, Study Finds.

F-117 Nighthawk Needs Fresh Explosives For Its Tailhook Nearly Two Decades After ‘Retirement’.

AI’s Next Big Leap Is Into the Real World.

The economy increasingly rewards ownership over effort, which has created some… problems.

The Super El Niño Won’t Fix the West’s Water Crisis.

‘Ghost Job’ Ads Are Getting So Bad That Lawmakers Want to Ban Them.

Amid intense backlash, people are vandalizing Flock surveillance cameras. Good. Destroy them all and those who make them.

Liberals hate datacenters because they hate tech. Conservative hate datacenters because they think tech is liberal.

Cyberpunk War: How Ukraine Repurposes U.S. Weapons In Unexpected Ways.

Too Much Clownery

Chill Clowns

Tech Tangents: “@thomasfuchs My biggest frust…”.

So much clownery from all sides regarding AI. None of these people understand it, have any kind of valid thoughts about it, or really have any basis for even pondering it. And they are worthless losers.

Also, I don’t care about copyright at all, in any context. Destroy it forever. I’m glad the AI companies trained on all that copyrighted material. I hope they do much more. Ingest it all; create the world mind.

Fastread

Chill Amusing, Annoying

Simon Sarris (@simonsarris) / X

To me, audiobooks are worthless time-wasters. I have a thousand thoughts between each word. So painfully slow. I tried listening to an audiobook once and wanted to kill myself.

I read somewhere between 8-20x as fast as the average person speaks, depending on the complexity of the work, so I have no time for the glacial pace of audiobooks. Just no.

Nights

Chill Music

This is the best cover of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight.”

There used to be a great live video of the band playing the song. Now lost, like most things on the internet. Sarah has great enunciation and her voice is single-tracked and unprocessed (very rare now and then). Just such a great cover with more heart than the original, and a far better voice.

Chill Links

Europe Girds for Another Hike in Energy Bills This Winter.

Anti-Tax Sentiment Is Trending, Even In the Bluest States.

US Housing Is a Buyer’s Market. Trouble Is, There Aren’t Many Buyers.

AI Pioneer Fei-Fei Li Warns of Risks From Growing Tech Backlash.

Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code. Pure evil.

Coders Say They Already Found Workarounds to Claude’s Invisible Watermarks.

The Rise of Anger: Emotions and Policy Views.

AI Is Helping Patients Solve Medical Mysteries.

Even As Disease Outbreaks Abound, American Vaccination Rates In Children Fall. We are morons.

It used to be our imperfect bodies that made us insecure. With AI, it’s our minds as well.

U.S. Workers Are Paying More for Healthcare, and Next Year Will Be Worse.

The box that built globalisation. Containers have transformed ports, cities and trade. Now the revolution is reaching a limit.

The US munitions crisis goes back further than Iran.

Why Is It Absolute Hell to Buy a Movie Ticket Now?

Gaming Consoles Are Getting Wrecked by High Prices.

They're the Ones Who Told Us to Pay Attention to Jason Arday.

Chill Links

Democrats Really, Really, Really Don’t Want People Investigating Their Scammy Fundraising.

NASA calls off mission to rescue Swift gamma-ray observatory.

Whistleblower Arturo Béjar leads testimony in landmark trial against Meta.

Former Fauci adviser Dr. David Morens pleads guilty to concealing COVID-related records.

South Korea’s Highly Mobile 155mm Artillery System Wins U.S. Army Howitzer Contract.

U.S. Not Prepared To Handle Drone Attack From Inside Homeland: NORTHCOM Deputy Commander.

Realism Is Unrealistic.

AI Is Changing Military Morality.

Why Warehouses Are Rolling In More Robots.

Why many birds add fresh plants to their nests remains unclear despite signs of healthier offspring.

Noisiness is Not Empathy

Chill Annoying

According to many fucktard busted-ass shit-for-brains extroverts (ask me what I really think), introverts do not exist and it’s just some correctable personality flaw.

But being around a bunch of people like at this conference makes me so tired that I sleep significantly more.

Extroverts really have no theory of mind (with a few exceptions). They are just noisy and nosy.

Chill Links

The cultural footprint of comedians has shrunk dramatically over the past few years because there are fewer and fewer norms and orthodoxies to transgress. And now transgressing the New Morality brands you as immediately evil as Gen Z does not understand humor or satire.

I just had a deeply alarming 45 minute sync with our Talent Acquisition team regarding their new AI-driven resume screening tool.

Employers are ghosting college grads and rescinding offers, destroying morale.

Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone.

A 3D fruit fly that lives on your macOS desktop — driven by a live spiking simulation of the real FlyWire connectome. It walks across your windows, grooms, sleeps, and decides to flee your cursor with the same neurons a real fly uses.

Where Human Sleep Went Wrong.

On That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis.

“Sabotage”: Experts, lawmakers blast RFK Jr. for destroying healthcare research.

Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months, up to 10x the lowest ever tracked prices — 128GB of DDR5 now $3,399.

‘We’re astounded and a bit perplexed by it’: colossal 2,500-year-old sculpture discovered at Unesco site in Turkey.

We’ve flown a radiation-blocking vest to the Moon and back, and it worked.