Why do software developers love complexity? And why do they always try to foist their shit complexity onto sysadmin types and attempt to turn us into terrible developers?

‘You just can’t recreate that glow’: The people who hunt old TVs.

Microsoft to force install the Microsoft 365 Copilot app in October. Fuck that.

It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes.

Offline means unavailable? What a country!

Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline.’

The AI Raj: How tech giants are recolonizing power.

Tonight’s Dinner Fell Off the Sysco Truck.

The White House Vowed a Vast Crackdown on Liberal Groups.

‘Ozempic Effect’: Weight-loss drug boom has reached apparel store rack as America resizes. Nice.

Active Measures: How the Kremlin Penetrated Fox News and Right-Wing Media.

The 70-Year-Old Beloved Boxed Mix Grandmas Won’t Be Buying Anymore.

Which colours dominate movie posters and why?

Americans Crushed By Auto Loans As Defaults And Repossessions Surge.

The AI-Scraping Free-for-All Is Coming to an End.

Pediatric Brain Cancer Group to Lose Federal Funding.

Spider uses trapped fireflies as glowing bait to attract more prey.

RFK Jr. is bad for your health.

Butlerian Jihad Now.

How the boomers crippled France.

Outrage entrepreneurship.

An Unresponsive Public Is Undermining Government Economic Data.

The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes.

Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion. That’s the most depressing thing I’ve read in ages; we are so screwed.

The Lost Art Of Thinking Historically.

“Love doesn’t thrive on ledgers”: Keeping score in relationships foreshadows decline, study finds.

Dinosaur egg dated directly for the first time.

Trump administration launches trial program to fast-track electric air taxis. Good.

OpenAI Realizes It Made a Terrible Mistake.

California lawmakers pass SB 79, housing bill that brings dense housing to transit hubs.

Corporations are trying, and now failing, to hide job openings from US citizens.

CPI Inflation Dishes Up another Nasty Surprise, as it Tends to Do.

An Annual Blast of Pacific Cold Water Did Not Occur, Alarming Scientists.

As Sabotage in Europe Mounts, So Do Calls to Retaliate Against Russia.

A Note on Online Political Subcultures.

Myocardial infarction may be an infectious disease.

AI Will Not Make You Rich.

Orange rivers signal toxic shift in Arctic wilderness.

New pathway engineered into plants lets them suck up more CO₂.

Bosses admit they’re using return-to-office mandates to trim down teams—without needing to announce layoffs. Told ya.

Insurance in the Polycrisis.

We Already Know a Way to Save a Bunch of Lives. Thanks to insurance companies, we’re not doing it.

Charlie Kirk’s Murder Illustrates How the Second Amendment Is Swallowing the First.

Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVc: Rent and Extraction.

EU Court Rules Nuclear Energy is Clean Energy. Correct.

Seoul says US must fix its visa system if it wants Korea’s investments.

The Scam Called “You Don’t Have to Remember Anything.”

TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning.

USAF’s Quicksink Ship-Killing Smart Bomb Seen In Detail Like Never Before.

COVID-19 no longer a top 10 killer as US death rate returns to normal. So much for “civilization-ending.”

Free Will is Not Just a Verbal Dispute.

The Era of Step-on-a-Rake Capitalism. Trumponomics isn’t about economics. It’s about creating pain and demanding tribute.

Russia Tested NATO in Poland. NATO Flunked.

US warns Chinese hidden radios may be embedded in solar-powered highway infrastructure.

The Clue to Unlocking Parkinson’s May Be All Around Us.

California considers allowing doctors to prescribe abortion drugs anonymously. Good.

AI agents are coming for your privacy, warns Meredith Whittaker. Correct.

NASA discovers ‘clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars.’

The Kremlin’s plot to kill NATO’s credibility.

Chinese trade is thriving despite America’s attacks.

Court rejects Verizon claim that selling location data without consent is legal.

Where Did the Smurfs Get Their Hats? I don’t smurfin’ know!

The Job Market Is Hell. Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired.

Microsoft joins World Nuclear Association as it doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy.

What’s Happening to the Economy Is Obvious to Anyone Paying Attention. This is the road to stagflation.

US Added Nearly A Million Fewer Jobs Than Reported.

Gen Z are dipping into their retirements, skipping meals and selling their belongings just to get by, new reports find.

Here’s what happens when private equity buys homes in your neighborhood.

The U.S. economy actually grew by nearly a million fewer jobs than previously thought, and it shows ‘AI is automating away tech jobs,’ economist says. They were denying it for a long time, but of course it’s happening.

New SNAP rules could result in 2.4 million people losing benefits each month.

How to make metals from Martian dirt.

How the Slavic migration reshaped Central and Eastern Europe.

Shine dulls. Elegance changes shape and fades away. My mother dies and takes her hopes with her.

A liberal arts education stopped being a goal in itself, a means to self improvement, long ago. Instead it was forced to present itself as a career path, then branded a con.

Paging FDR: Democrats need to embrace New Deal-style politics. I’ve said this since Obama’s first term.

How the Democrats Became the Party That Brings Pencils to a Knife Fight.

On Not Surrendering in Advance (Or At Any Point Thereafter).

IT Unemployment Fell in August. But the Tech Jobs Market Is Still Shrinking.

Unbundle the University.

Trump Is a Weak and Failing President, and It’s Time to Say So. Mostly agreed. Her hired utter incompetents and it shows.

Liberté, égalité, radioactivité. France built 40 nuclear reactors in a decade. Here’s how they did it, and how the world can follow their lead today.

How the Math of Shuffling Cards Almost Brought Down an Online Poker Empire.

In Every Tree, a Trillion Tiny Lives.

AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time.

The Pursuit of Life Where It Seems Unimaginable.

Astrophysicists Find No ‘Hair’ on Black Holes.

Powell Will Hang Separately: The Federal Reserve Has Already Failed its Duty to Lisa Cook and the Constitution.

How Deeply Trump Has Cut Federal Health Agencies. Evil, evil stuff.

The Unusual Asymmetry Of The C-17 Globemaster III.

The ‘Marry the House, Date the Rate’ Strategy Is Backfiring on 2025 Homebuyers. Highly risky strategy with a terrible downside.

The typical homeowner now has a net worth that’s 43 times greater than that of the average renter.

The myths that made Putin’s war.

Scams And Bribery Are Becoming the Foundation of Our Economy. I said this years ago.

A Guide to the New World Disorder.

What is Blueskyism? And why is it so toxic for political persuasion?

Bessent Blast’s the Fed for QE, its “Perverse Incentives” for Fiscal “Irresponsibility,” “Wealth Effect” Policies, “Class and Generational Disparities,” Failure on Inflation… Oh I So Agree.

Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton: ‘AI will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.’ Agreed.

Liberalism Without Illusions. We must free ourselves from the delusion that history is progressive and accept that the dark side of our nature is here to stay.

IDN homograph attack.

Americans are getting the economy they voted for.

The World No Longer Takes Trump Seriously.

America Surrenders in the Global Information Wars.

Under Trump, the Federal Trade Commission is abandoning its ban on noncompetes. Extremely bad for the economy and workers.

I worked at a company that used “predictive assessment tools” to secretly profile employees.

Navy Carrier-Based ‘Loyal Wingman’ Drone Development Suddenly Pushes Forward.

The Last Mainstream American Sedan Has Been Discontinued. Insanity.

Wikipedia is one of the few platforms online where tremendous computing power isn’t being deployed in the service of telling you exactly what you want to hear.

Hundreds of undocumented immigrants apprehended in massive ICE raid at Hyundai plant in Georgia.

We have no shortage of people who have decided, when faced with mystery, not to learn from the knowledgeable, nor even to investigate the answer, but to rummage into their pocket, take out the same device that could inform them in an instant, and use it to broadcast the message I don’t understand this, so it follows that nobody else does either.

The search for Earth’s most mysterious creatures is turning up extraordinary results.

John Deere, a U.S. Icon, Is Undermined by Tariffs and Struggling Farmers.

Trump’s tariffs were supposed to revive U.S. manufacturing. They’re wrecking it.

The Universe within 12.5 Light Years.

Eels.

5 forecasts early climate models got right – the evidence is all around you.

What Can Democrats Do to Get Rid of the Scarlet L for Loser? Maybe not act like giant fucking losers 24/7?

Why the world’s biggest movie bombed in America.

Office CMBS Delinquency Rate Spikes to Record 11.7%, Much Worse than Financial Crisis Peak. Multifamily Delinquencies also Spike.

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants. Damn nature, you scary.

Oregon, Washington, California form health care alliance to protect vaccine access. We made the right decision to move to California. Anti-vaxxers can live in their death-riddled shitholes.

The Simple Mathematics of Chinese Innovation.

Houston’s ConocoPhillips to lay off up to 25% of global workforce.

China’s Military in 10 Charts.

Go to a place where the managerial class killed manufacturing, like Detroit or Flint or Gary, and remember that in the living memory of Boomers and older GenX, those were GOOD towns

China’s New DF-61 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Breaks Cover.

The staff ate it later.

AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content.

Choosing ‘Daddy’ Over Democracy.

It is difficult to overstate the disaster that is Canadian immigration policy.

The US Population Could Shrink in 2025, For the First Time Ever.

Confirmed: America is in a serious jobs slump.

AI-Powered Drone Swarms Have Now Entered the Battlefield.

Forced Drug Treatment Isn’t Horrific. It’s a Relief.

1.2 million immigrants are gone from the US labor force under Trump, preliminary data shows.

The day Return became Enter.

The Ice Cream Truck’s Surprising History.

Age verification legislation is tanking traffic to sites that comply, and rewarding those that don’t. Well, that was the point of it, right?

China’s navy is expanding at breakneck speed – and catching up with the US.

Why these hairy caterpillars swarm every decade – then vanish without a trace.

The Future that Never Was.

Childhood trauma linked to mental health problems and chronic pain in later life.

What China’s spies are doing in the U.S., and what happens when they’re caught.

US Manufacturing Activity Contracted in August for a Sixth Month.

Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds.

Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class. Ain’t no meal anywhere worth $1,200. Nope.

Salesforce CEO confirms 4,000 layoffs ‘because I need less heads’ with AI.