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.

Lucky Strike

I am extremely lucky in that using AI effectively requires one to be intelligent in exactly the ways that I am most perspicacious and effective (understanding large-scale data quickly, holding a lot in mind at once), while AI does not require or even penalizes the ways that I am not (math, complex syntax).

Got lucky, I guess. Other people in related fields are not gonna have that great a time, though. That is already quite clear.

Software is becoming marketing.

When Did Having Fun Get So Expensive? The Summer When โ€˜Funflationโ€™ Went Wild.

Ford hired AI and sacked humans. It backfired badly.

Ancient Clay Tablets Show Markets Worked 4,000 Years Before Economists Explained Them.

Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo. That Should Terrify You.

Old vs. New Chevy Blazer Crash Test Shows How Much Safety Has Improved Since the โ€™90s.

The Case for Physical Media Ownership.

They quit the West for Russia's traditional values, but it wasn't what they expected.

Inflation in โ€œCore Servicesโ€ Surges, plus AIโ€™s Impact on Electricity & Goods: Inflation beyond Gasoline.

What Ozempic Does to the Gut-Brain Axis.

The eerie interface of man and machine (Life Magazine, October 1967).

โ€˜Chock full of incredible animalsโ€™: marine expedition uncovers 31 new species in two weeks.

The U.S. government is set to take an awful lot of control over which AI models get released.

Antibiotic โ€œmegaclusterโ€ discovery provides new strategy to fight superbugs.

Ukraineโ€™s Growing Drone Armada Is Overwhelming Russiaโ€™s Air Defenses.

No Air Conditioning, Please, Weโ€™re French.

Core inflation rate hit 3.4% in May, highest since October 2023, Fedโ€™s preferred gauge shows.

Astronomers find 2 gigantic planets lighter than cotton candy: "Comparable to a nice blob of shaving foam."

Inside a secretive Ukrainian team launching deep drone strikes at Russia.

Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed?

Foreign Funds Help Make Housing Unaffordable.

PlayStation Is Deleting 551 Movies From Customersโ€™ Accounts, Reminding Us Nothing Digital Is Ever Truly Ours.