Chill Links

Europe’s Great Rivers Are Dying. The Continent Is In for a Shock.

Anthropic Explains Its Watermark System as Some Claude Users Loudly Revolt.

Why Big Tech’s AI Spending Is $3 Trillion Higher Than It Seems.

Electron apps use so much memory.

Italy’s mythic ‘month off’ in August was hard won. It would be good for us all.

Protein language models are overly constrained by covariation.

DOGE Broke America’s Weather Machine. Now Fishermen, Insurers And Farmers Are Paying For It. When the absolutely predictable occurs right on schedule.

Ghosts Of The Past & Devils Of The Present.

How to put 170 atoms in an atom.

Google wins bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines emails, chats, documents.

Columbia House Is Shutting Down.

Fail Up

Chill Evil

About the Arday situation and his death, the idiot leftists are blaming the people questioning his credentials for his suicide.

But if their racist asses hadn’t elevated an obvious fraud to that position as their personal pet black person, he never would’ve been subject to such (deserved) scrutiny in the first place. Their moronic woke project caused a man’s death.

And then they blame others for their own transparently racist failures.

Amazing.

Dismantle

Chill Evil

This demonstrates why academia is so very fucked. The question is, was the supposed “white supremacist” right or not? Was Arday a fraud?

And 100% of the available evidence points to the fact that Arday was an inveterate fabulist and fraudulent through and through.

It does not matter if Hitler himself claimed this — that would not change the truth content at all.

And academics wonder why trust in higher education is at an all time low and still falling. Probably best a lot of it just be dismantled.

Chill Links

Ukraine strikes major Russian rocket factory with cruise missiles.

Strong Gravitational Lensing and Microlensing of Supernovae.

The federal keyword lists that canceled billions in research funding.

Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose. And fake safety (really censorship) is getting far more pervasive.

The deep history behind the Road to Nowhere inside the Great Smoky Mountains.

The weekend is 100 years old.

Suicide rates among teen girls are rising in Australia, Canada, and the UK.

Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing. Wow, this is terrible; makes Claude unusable for most writing tasks.

Turntide

Chill Cool

I do think the tide is starting to turn on tattoos, especially on women. I overheard two young women at the hotel I am staying at now for a conference (they were maybe 18-19?) talking about how trashy tattoos looked and they were not planning on getting any even though they legally could now.

Good for them.

Chill Links

Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking.

Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin.

Putin threat pushes Germany to give spies major new powers.

Breakfast looks a lot more expensive under new EU pesticide plans.

Hunt For New Lower-Cost Strike Missile With 1,000-Kilometer Range Underway By U.S. Army.

So much solar: Digging into the list of every US power plant that went online this year.

Stock-Picking Funds Are Performing as Poorly as Ever.

Semaglutide attenuates a proteomics-based dementia risk signature in older adults with overweight or obesity and cardiovascular disease without diabetes: A post hoc analysis of the SELECT phase 3 trial.

OK With It

Chill Amusing

If I were as wealthy as Elon Musk, people would hate me far more because I’d be undertaking vastly more insane things, like opening the first pizzeria on the moon and building absurdly enormous nuclear reactors for desalination and then greening the entire desert Southwest.

I’d also be doing all kinds of highly controversial CRISPR crap in the middle of the ocean somewhere.

Yeah, I’d be utterly despised. And I’d be ok with that.

Chill Links

Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data.

By sky and sea, Ukraine’s drone strikes challenge Russia’s grip on Crimea.

TESS discovers a rare brown dwarf orbiting a massive, aging star.

Why Europe Is Struggling to Build Its Gas Stocks Before Winter.

The $20 Burrito Debate Is a Sign of Inflation Fatigue.

How the Toppling of An Auto Parts Maker Sapped U.S. Manufacturing.

You Are Not Entitled to Someone Else’s Mind.

PPI Inflation Is in the Revisions? Prior Month Services PPI & Core PPI Massively Revised Higher Today.

US wait times for cancer surgeries are getting longer and longer.

Laptop Makers Are Desperate to Sell You PCs With 8GB of RAM. Avoid at All Costs.

In Australia, a Home Battery Boom Has Helped Cut Wholesale Power Prices in Half.

The End of Google Search—and the Internet—as We Know It.

It could soon be harder to see the full price of a plane ticket. Here’s why.

See the Battlefield Innovations Reshaping the Russia-Ukraine War.

Your prescription drugs shouldn’t cost more than your mortgage. Inside the broken math that got us here.

The CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom just before Christmas wants his job back.

Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees.

Int Comp

Chill Annoying, Clowns

Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) / X

Correct. In almost all sporting events, women can wear whatever they like. Most choose to wear the least, both for performance reasons (it’s more aerodynamic) and because many are rightfully proud of their bodies and want to be seen.

And many of the broadcast execs are women, and would prefer that the women athletes not be seen. It’s that female intrasexual competition again….

Stuck Music

Chill Music

I think on average that music now is noticeably better than when I was 14-23 (the age most people seem to get stuck at musically). Production is easier and there are more people out there just trying things.

But it’s pretty clear that major label music was better in the 1986-1999-ish period because the record labels were at their peak financially and creatively. They had enough money to experiment creatively — and did so.

This is not any kind of point about, “All the music was better then!” I don’t think that, at all. Ninajirachi and Renee Christine (and many others) are just as good as anything released in that period. And mary in the junkyard is now one of my favorite bands though not a one of them was even alive in the 20th Century.

Change with the times because the times are gonna change whether or not you do. And there’s tons of good music out there. I find 11.6 new good songs a day, every day. You could do the same.

Chill Links

Are Men to Blame for the Birth-Rate Collapse? Whether dads do their fair share of the housework appears to have no effect on fertility. Duh.

Happy 45th birthday to the IBM PC and Model F/XT.

AI is removing the middle class of software engineering.

License Plate Reader Searches Should Require a Warrant.

Amazing High-Res Photo Shows a Butte Rising From Mars.

Economics 101 Explains Global Food Affordability Challenges.

College Grads Struggle to Find Jobs. Non-Grads Are Giving Up.

Don’t Buy Zuckerberg’s ‘Good Guy of AI’ Act.

Gen Z Is Moving Money From Stocks to Sports Betting in Wealth Plans.

Iranian F-5s Bombing U.S. Forces In Kuwait Should Be A Wake-Up Call: Ex-USAF General.

Weapons Maker Was Paid $533M in Taxpayer Funds to Produce Shells. It Made None.

Neuroscientists have vastly underestimated brain cells’ computing power.

Evidence of three massive black holes in a z ∼ 5 galaxy.

Poland’s Powerful New Frigate Marks Major Shift For Its Navy.

There are no guarantees in life is, far too frequently, being used to hand wave away people making legitimate objections to having done what there were told would lead to success and then that success does not come despite those people doing nothing wrong.

Flock is Trying to Find Out How Much of the Surveillance State You’ll Tolerate.

Ukrainian drones wipe out entire US tank brigade in live war game.