Chill Links

State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing ‘censorship.’

How Elites Could Shape Mass Preferences as AI Reduces Persuasion Costs.

The Age-Gated Internet Is Sweeping the US. Activists Are Fighting Back.

RAM is so expensive, Samsung won’t even sell it to Samsung. Glad I bought two machines with 128GB of RAM each (one Mac, one server) when RAM was cheapest.

A Most Important Mustard.

Trump’s boat strike playbook was written by Obama. Yes.

I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking. “Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead.”

Israel’s Latest Military Tech: Tested in Gaza, Wanted by the West.

American Shahed-136 Clones Sent To Middle East Have Satellite Datalinks, Swarming Capabilities.

Two Steppes forward, one step back: parsing our Indo-European past.

The Ingratitude of the Well-Fed. Or How to Cultivate Gratitude for Progress.

Cloudflare Has Blocked 416 Billion AI Bot Requests Since July 1.

Regulators Relax Rules on High-Risk Lending for Banks.

Lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from cellphones to cars, are increasingly saving electric grids around the world.

Trump’s rollback—cutting the projected 2031 fleet average from roughly 50.4 MPG to 34.5 MPG—relaxes the math enough that microcars could comply again.

If companies can modify internet-connected products and charge subscriptions after people have already purchased them, what does it mean to own anything anymore?

Wealthy ranchers profit from public lands. Taxpayers pick up the tab.

Traffic congestion hits a record high, spreading to more hours of the week.

Drones au-dessus de la base navale de l’île Longue : les autorités françaises assument une nouvelle fois la discrétion.

Rare set of varied factors triggered Black Death.

California unemployment set to rise as the economy continues to suffer.

Resolved

Chill Trynabe Funny

Goals for the next year:

1) Teach donkeys to yodel.

2) Start an intentional community based on worshipping muffins.

3) Bring back carburetors. Mandate all cars have them. I don’t know why, I just like carburerators.

4) Drill for oil on the Moon. Just for funsies.

5) Convert all Waffle Houses to boxing gyms. They can still serve food. Very little will have to change.

She Said Destroy

Chill Evil

I did not believe this for a long while, but now I do: I think the left actually intends to let in the very worst immigrants possible both to punish everyone here for our supposed sins and to attempt to deliberately destroy the nation-state altogether. It sounded outlandish to me years ago but by now I think the evidence is pretty clear that this outcome (destroying the US, other Western countries) is the actual desired end result.

Some on the left do indeed have suicidal empathy. But many others have active malice and evil intent. I say, ship them all to Somalia. Load up the boats and planes.

Taxation Representation

Chill Annoying

I do like California, but fighting for six months with the Franchise Tax Board whether I’d paid my taxes or not (I had, overpaid!) soured me on the California government right quick. Nothing like wasting vast amounts of time on something completely pointless and that’s a deadweight loss for everyone involved.

By the way, I pay ~52% of my income in taxes. And that’s a lot. Luckily that’s because I earn a ton, but still…ain’t nobody shirking here.

Chill Links

Everyone in Seattle Hates AI.

Satellite captures the first detailed look at a massive tsunami.

UPS put profits over safety before plane crash that killed 14, lawyer alleges. Well, profits are forever. Lives are all temporary. Right?

Sky King. He’s probably the only human being to ever have done a barrel roll in that aircraft.

The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine. Moronic.

Homo sapiens-specific evolution unveiled by ancient southern African genomes.

RSV prevention—a remarkable medical achievement finally realized.

The Middle Class Is Buckling Under Almost Five Years of Persistent Inflation. And yet econs say all is peachy. If you can afford a peach, that is.

Politics and Capitalist Stagnation.

Layoff announcements top 1.1 million this year, the most since 2020 pandemic, Challenger says.

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself.

In 1995, a Netscape employee wrote a hack in 10 days that now runs the Internet. And we still all hate him for this mistake.

Gen Z college-educated men now just as unemployed as those without degrees—has the education payoff officially died?

Scientists document over 16,000 footprints in the world’s most extensive dinosaur tracksite.

BenQ

Chill Review, Tech

I bought this monitor as a second one both for the work machine and my Mac Studio. It’s an unusual 3:2 aspect ratio and so far I’m really liking it; it’s nice to not have everything be so crazy wide as is the fashion these days.

I’m not watching a movie (most of the time). I’m tryna work. It’s great to have it be tall enough to see some stuff. I just wish it were 5K or better yet, 6K. Then it’d be perfect. As it is, it’s just good.

Recommended, though.

Tighten

Chill Annoying

Horoscope nonsense.

Nope. If a girl asks me my zodiac sign I immediately know we are 100% incompatible and that we are done. I will also think she’s an idiot but will be polite enough not to say that.

I have no interest. I couldn’t even bring myself to sleep with her for one night no matter how hot she is (ask me how I know). It’s just over. There is zero reason to continue with someone who is repellently intellectually incompatible with me. It’d be doing both of us a disservice to keep up the charade.

Actual Crash

Chill Annoying, Clowns

That is how crashes work. AI is not going anywhere. Did the internet disappear when the dot com bubble popped in 2001? Because I think I still see me some internet around here.

Just because you want something or believe something doesn’t mean you must live in fantasy world. Why do so many people do this?

Chill Links

AI Agents Break Rules Under Everyday Pressure. Shortened deadlines and other stressors caused misbehavior.

All about automotive lidar.

The Gender-Based Rights Conundrum.

The Junior Hiring Crisis. People who claim this is not a crisis are wrong wrong wrongity wrong. So wrong.

Google Starts Sharing All Your Text Messages With Your Employer.

A cross-cultural study involving participants from 25 countries found that participants who have children tend to report lower levels of romantic love, intimacy, and passion toward their partners compared to individuals without children.

New homes in London delayed by ‘energy-hungry’ data centres.

What Are Lie Groups?

Libris Calibris

Chill Annoying, Clowns

Stewart has the right idea. Anthropic should’ve included more books; all the books it could get its hands on. The idea that AI is a “plagiarism machine” is a fucking ludicrous notion by unserious people. And that $1.5 billion is a ridiculous judgment as no actual author was harmed in any way by an AI “reading” their work that then transforms the text into tokens, runs that through the LLM’s network and then only keeps the weights at the end (no book text). That’s a really, really basic gloss of how LLMs work. If you accept that as plagiarism, then your brain is also plagiarizing any time it reads something.

I’d like to give an throp up side the head to anyone who instigates shit like this. Copyright prevents so much, and now the idiot left — after being against copyright maximalism for three decades — has gone to that camp because it now appeals to their degrowther tendencies. Fortunately, Stewart is on the left but not the now-majority idiot left.