Tootfinder

First, let’s talk about “grokking”.
In 2022, OpenAI published a paper showing that if you train a model on a simple dataset
(for instance, a simple mathematical operation like division),
and keep training it long after the training looks like it’s stalled out,
the model will suddenly make a massive jump in capability.
Why does this work?
The first stage of training is like rote memorization:
the model has to compress as much of the training data as…

Overtraining as the path to human-like AI

"Sometimes #love looks like knowing when to stay quiet."
Dr Srividya Sivakumar - Marsala and Marginalia
#shortstories #books

Interviewer: “When you see Gaza destroyed like this, how do you feel?”
Katz: “What do I feel? Feel good.”
Hey boy, are you a work of art? Because you’d look great hanging in Nuremberg. @…

Drop Site on Twitter
🇮🇱 A new Channel 14 report shows senior Israeli government and military officials openly celebrating the destruction of Gaza, the mass killing of Palestinians, their forced displacement to the coast, and Israel’s permanent occupation of the territory. One senior officer described all 70,000 Palestinians he said Israel had killed as “terrorists.” The full video is linked below. Here are some of the remarks: 🔹 Defense Minister Israel Katz: “The important thing: those neighborho…

I'm also a pp, heh!
https://www.reddit.com/r/PansexualTeens/comments/nsazqc/pan_polyor_as_i_like_to_call_it_pp_flag_i_made/
Anyway, I almost like this one, but I'd want the infinity heart.
Tbh, I was never…

BNPL lenders like Flex, Zip, and Affirm are now pitching loans for basic household needs; Americans spent $160B through pay-later loans in 2025, up 2x from 2023 (Stacy Cowley/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/business/buy-now-pay-later.html

‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Lenders Pitch Loans for Needs Like Electricity and Rent
The rapid growth of pay-later loans raises questions about whether their popularity is driven by consumer preference or desperation.

What's It Like to Travel Near the Speed of Light? Part 3: The Limited View - Universe Today https://www.universetoday.com/articles/whats-it-like-to-travel-near-the-speed-of-light-part-3-the-limited-view

I really like the idea of #Collections that are now out in Mastodon 4.6 - it's like Bluesky's "Starter Packs" but with more care for user consent (This post was useful: https://blog.joinmastodon.o…

Designing Collections
A new way to share and discover accounts on Mastodon

Mocking up a new ngscopeclient UI feature
I'm only half kidding, I think a "wtf is this signal" auto-ID / auto-decode feature might be interesting to try to build at some point. But it won't look like this.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MorningShow
James Brown:
🎵 Get Up, I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine
#JamesBrown
https://liquidexperience.bandcamp.com/track/james-brown-get-up-i-feel-like-being-a-sex-machine-liquid-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/6Bne501HS96nEeNq8Gn87R

Organising conferences I've tended to do a call for full papers but it's always felt awkward. Like why require people to write 4 pages to apply to do a talk? Especially when it's unpaid work (sometimes even pay-to-speak), and when people generally don't just read out their paper anyway so the paper ends up fairly unrelated to the talk.. Like writing and speaking can be just very different things.
So I think for the next @…

<WildCode> Mercury, isn't debugging X a little like finding perfectly
bugfree code in windows ??
<Mercury> WildCode: Debugging X is like trying to run a straight line
through a maze.
<Mercury> You just need to bend space-time so that the corners move around
you and you won't have any problems. (=:]

Wrote a little intro post to my Fisk AI project, why, who for etc
Local friendly, privacy friendly, strong guardrails, doing just what you give it the ability to do etc
Hopefully a AI Harness for sceptics or just for better outcomes for those tasks you wish to do repeatedly.
Minimal dependencies, quick to get going, easy to configure.
Also the easiest possible way to do build MCP servers for other AI Agents

A look at Fishtank, a live, unedited, and violent Big Brother-like show where contestants are locked in a house and viewers can pay to interact with the cast (Owen Long/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/interactive-violent-gross-insid…

Interactive. Violent. Gross. Inside Fishtank, the Unhinged Future of Reality TV
It’s like Big Brother without any limits, or broadcast standards. WIRED goes on location—and on camera—with the cult hit.

I feel like contextual clicks inside of apps are an anti-pattern (especially on touchscreens). I click on a toot over here, and it loads the toot. I click on the toot over there, and it loads the link to whatever article they linked to. Click in yet another spot, and it loads this profile of the person who made the toot. This is all inside a 1in x 2in rectangle. My thumb takes up half the rectangle. Like, wtf.
As laptop touchpads get worse, this is becoming a problem there too!

Tippet's AI takes are painfully naive
it's hard not to feel like maybe she has been taken in by the rich and powerful, especially when she ends her letter with a plug for a podcast on energy healing hosted by a Google executive.
She still seems to attribute agency to "the AIs" as if they had their own independent minds, instead of treating them as the automation of sycophantic echo chambers, feeding back whatever they are given like a good "cold read" …

On Our Lives with AI
What is it calling us to?

This is the most detailed picture of a human cell ever made 🧪
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DX1CGIZMKJs/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ

Sam Bousaba on Instagram: "This is a single human cell. The white filament-like structures are microtubules, and the small colored particles are ribosomes. Your body contains on the order of ~37 trillion cells. Each cell functions like a highly organized, self-regulating factory operating continuously. There is no central “supervisor”—yet thousands of processes run in parallel with remarkable coordination. Every ribosome is constantly building proteins by linking amino acids together. In eukaryotic (human) cells, a ribosome typically adds about 5–10 amino acids per second (not ~20). Since a single cell can contain millions of ribosomes, protein production is massive—resulting in millions to tens of millions of peptide bonds formed per second per cell. The microtubules act as an internal transport network. Motor proteins such as kinesin move along these tracks, carrying cellular cargo. They “walk” step by step using ATP, at speeds of roughly 500–1000 nanometers per second. Each cell contains a dense network of these filaments, with many motor proteins moving simultaneously. Just beneath the cell membrane lies the actin cortex, a dynamic meshwork that helps maintain cell shape and resist mechanical stress. This structure is continuously remodeled—assembled and disassembled—allowing the cell to adapt to its environment. Now scale this up. Across ~37 trillion cells, each containing millions of ribosomes and hundreds to thousands of mitochondria, your body is constantly producing energy in the form of ATP. Total ATP turnover is enormous—roughly equivalent to your body weight in ATP recycled every day. The DNA in a single human cell, if stretched out, measures about 2 meters. Across all your cells, this would span distances comparable to traveling from Earth to the Sun and back many times (the exact multiple depends on assumptions about cell count and DNA packing). None of these processes are under conscious control. They began when you were a single cell and have continued uninterrupted ever since."
62K likes, 2,387 comments - scienceoftheuniverse on May 2, 2026: "This is a single human cell. The white filament-like structures are microtubules, and the small colored particles are ribosomes. Your body contains on the order of ~37 trillion cells. Each cell functions like a highly organized, self-regulating factory operating continuously. There is no central “supervisor”—yet thousands of processes run in parallel with remarkable coordination. Every ribosome is constantly building prot…

#whatImReading is Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Take Me To Your Leader. It’s all his take on the old UFO/ET business. Mildly amusing. He covers the history and all the ins and outs of UFOlogy. But what I’ve never seen an answer to is, why do UFOs have running lights at all? Why would they need them? If they were hiding they wouldn’t have them for sure.
If you like Tyson you’ll like this book.

Earlier it was Tencent. Now it's Baidu (202.46.48.0/20) getting an iptables block from phpc.social because I like having decentralized social media reachable more than I like them scraping it for their LLMs or whatever (sorry Alibaba, had "Qwen" here a second ago, but I'll block y'all too if you try this crap).
#mastoadmin

"A sprawling expanse of white #marble waste in #India is drawing tourists, filmmakers and social media enthusiasts to a landscape that looks more like a snow-covered valley than a dumping ground"
(h/t drsadhbh on bsky) #quarry

India marble waste dump turns unlikely tourist attraction
A sprawling expanse of white marble waste in India is drawing tourists, filmmakers and social media enthusiasts to a landscape that looks more like a snow-covered valley than a dumping ground.

ooo look! some wasps done a picture of me. just outside our front door.
#wasps #pareidolia

The wealthy 1% heading to Mark Carney's summit are relying on the power of their money.
But we know, just like you, that the many can stand up against the money, and win.
Our leaders should work for us, not the corporate class. The only way we can make that happen, is by ramping up the pressure with more voices calling for the same change.
Will you do one more thing and share this to three of your friends?
Like you, there are so many Canadians who are worried abou…

Tell the Liberals: Canada is not for sale
Mark Carney wants to sell Canada's airports, water systems, and public infrastructure to the highest bidder. We won't let that happen. Add your name now:

(That's like a "fuck me, what do I use now", not a comment on the developers who spent lots of time and effort on this!)

when covid happened Grey's Anatomy had a whole season about how terrible it was for medical staff... i think that's exactly what Inside Job would've been like when the Epstein files released

If you alphabetized a gear shift, would it be like:
D 1 N 2
5 4 R 3
Or like this?
5 4 R 3
D 1 N 2

Can everyone please stop giving software names like “Continuwuity of Theseus”?! I'd like to be able to recommend platforms like Matrix to normals at some point…

@… looks like its missing a roof??

Heatwave? More like a Heat Middle Finger…

@… @… yes, using a good text editor with Markdown-mode support like Emacs or vim does make that easier, but web-based editors like GitHub's are fairly dire without the Preview tab.

I just discovered `letterboxColor=transparent` which fixes the black background on responsive @… Stream embeds, especially for videos styled with a border radius.
I just added it to my WordPress Video Manager plugin as the default setting, which automatically sets it in the embed code when adding Stream videos to posts.

I have been running CachyOS for some months on the living room computer. Starting steam after booting makes it easy to operate it only with controllers. But sometimes I want to use it for other things than gaming and install updates and stuff.
I don't like using a mouse on the couch and prefer not to buy a new keyboard with an integrated touchpad. Once again, I am trying to only use the keyboard.
The vimium addon for Firefox makes browsing a lot faster than tabbing to the ele…

Be like mint: effortlessly short-circuits attempts to control it, makes a great cup of tea.

The more I learn about New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani, the more I'm reminded of XTC's Peter Pumpkinhead. He seems like the best of us, and an inspiration for most. I just hope against hope we can deserve him, by preserving & protecting him!

I always like to see where I am on my laptop while I'm traveling with the train, but a laptop is notoriously bad at knowing where it is. Now I figured out that I can use Google Maps for that: I have to share my location with myself! Then, when logged in on my laptop, I have access to my own location in the browser.
A bit surprising that this isn't on per default, but after many years I finally figured this one out.

If you don't like Audrey Hobert, you're just not a loser. by madelizard
#music

If AI kills all humans that still includes like, Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, all these guys, so I'm cool with it

We Are All on the Decoy Plane
#USpol

I was today years old when I learned that Dockerfiles support heredoc-like syntax, and I am furious at every tutorial and presenter that has used a dozen lines with \ instead of that.
#Docker #Programming

Sealioning cultists are swarming like muggen and earn the same treatment.

Good $DEITY, is there anyone left in the United States who can remember what actual food tastes like?
Yes, I am subtooting.

I
like
giga
bits and I cannot lie

@… I dunno. I kind of find this idea a bit <cringe>. Knowing how you like to browse 2nd hand mugs, I am wondering what your feelings about it is:

‘There’s been a lot of attention’: Mug exchange a hit with neighbours, community in Riverview, N.B.
A New Brunswick woman is bringing the community together through a coffee mug library in Riverview.

The Candlekeep campaign has ended.
The unfailingly optimistic and jovial cleric, Ned, once again waded into the front lines to heal and fight. Having defeated the elder god by closing a portal (because a fair fight would’ve been bad), they’ve all decided to rest for a bit.

Orchard orbweavers have eyelash-like setae (trichobothria) on their hind legs that assist in sensing nearby wing beats. It would be interesting to know what frequency they are tuned to. Pure speculation on my part, but would be cool if they are early-warning system for the parasitic wasps (Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga) that turn these spiders into zombies. Both males and females have them.

I'd like my next job to have something more than Linux, yes, I'm looking at your FreeBSD.
#runbsd #freebsd #getfedihired
∩ Ludovic Hirlimann :
"I can work in both French and English. …

Ponos - Alternative européenne open source et IA à LinkedIn
Réseau professionnel minimaliste, sans tracking, respectueux de votre vie privée. Conforme RGPD.

Brian Schottenheimer sees things to like, things to clean up after Cowboys preseason opener https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/brian-schottenheimer-sees-things-to-like-things-to-clean-up-after-cowboys-preseason-opener

Destroying rare books to stave off large language model collapse seems like a far cry from recursive self-improvement for generative 'AI'.

as the kids say: "Eve flow like H2O" :-) https://youtu.be/CymCVrKpLzw

The main problem with programs like Provo Canyon Schools is that those in power in #Utah think abuse is a good and right way to treat people who don't conform.
#utpol #abuse

Voices: I survived Provo Canyon School. Utah must stand firm on its closure.
“Children deserve safe help,” Jen Robison writes in an op-ed. “That cannot happen until we stop allowing them to be abused for profit while calling it ‘care.’”

I spent some time #blogging today.
Oh man, why does writing take so much time?! Honestly, this time I tried dictating (Speech-to-text) and curating afterwards ... but it feels like it takes the same amount of time 🤔 Maybe it's just a lack of practice - or a lack of articulation.
Anyways - a bit of story, a peertube video and a couple of photos are waiting to be watched! 😉
…

Know what real friendship looks like? When I talk @… into poking a screwdriver into a live power socket and she actually does it. 😂🤪🫶🤗

Actually, should the plural be "emoji" or "emojis" ?? 😵‍💫 - Both are used frequently! I think "emoji" reminds us of other loan words that end in "-i" in the plural, like "celli" or "radii" or "tori" or all the pastas. That's why many people feel that "emoji" is plural enough 😅 . But the word is from Japanese, and is called "emoji" in the singular, from "e" = picture and "moji" = character. (In contrast to "emot-icon", the word "emoji" doesn't have anything to do with emotion!) So my vote is for the regular English plural "-s", yielding "emojis" ✅ #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay

RE: https://mastodon.world/@oldguycrusty/117106473949752281
It's fucking mental, innit? Like, c'mon, Apple, this computer still whizzes along as long as it has a sympathetic OS on board. YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE.
I feel that these L…

Source: Microsoft plans to release an AI security tool this month using models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and itself, as a cost-effective Mythos alternative (Aaron Holmes/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/exclusive-microsoft-p…

Exclusive: Microsoft Preps Mythos-Like AI Bug Finder
Microsoft is preparing to release a new AI security product, internally codenamed Project Perception, to capture a piece of companies’ rising cyber defense spending. Set to debut as soon as this month, the product will use a combination of AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft itself to sniff out software bugs similar to the way Anthropic’s Mythos model does and automatically fix the

I want like a pastebin but for static sites.
You point a CLI at a directory and you get random.example.com afterwards.
Should support wildcard certs from LE
Ideally self hosted - and S3 backed so the service can run ephemeraly with just a SQLite index to site maybe
This seems like a thing they should exist yet can’t find it?

Senator Mitch McConnell’s handlers would like the American public to believe that he’s still physically and mentally fit to be in office,
but that no longer seems to be the case.
The longtime Kentucky Republican suddenly reappeared in Congress this week after an unexplained three-month absence,
apparently ready to vote on Senate proceedings.
But when tasked to do so during Wednesday’s Senate Agriculture Committee meeting on the Farm Bill,
McConnell hazily sided …

What Mitch McConnell Looked Like After He Had to Be Told How To Vote
The 84-year-old senator appeared vacant and out of it right after the vote.

Disney signs a deal with Like Nastya, adding some of the YouTube brand's videos to Disney and including an animated preschool series for Disney Jr. and Disney (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-ne…

Disney Inks Content and Development Deal With Kids Creator Brand ‘Like Nastya’
An animated series for Disney Jr. and Disney+ and new live-action content are in the works.

when i was in the uk last year a british publication asked if they could publish a speech i gave. i agreed.
when i looked onto their site, they added a little note below it saying that “Erik Uden and I have political differences on the trans question.”
i, right then and there, realized what it feels like for foreign activists to publish something in a german newspaper.

If I had to summarise capitalism in one word it would be “enclosure”.
That’s literally everything these bastards are about. Taking something that belongs to us all, building a fence around it, and calling it “mine.” (And if you don’t like it, “say hello to my little friend…”)
That’s literally the whole of their bullshit philosophy.

@… this feels like you’re incentivizing me to get you started

Party like it’s Friday night!
Cornish Bagpipe Sextet. There are only 3 human players, but they count their pipes as members of the ensemble. I dunno if that’s a piper thing, a Cornish piper thing, or a joke.
Hey! https://youtu.be/4jEo_KOrMTw?is=LioYHHyZmPkqQjE6

I love supporting creators when I can and when they're making things that interest me. And if you're a maker, like me, you know it always feels good when people get what you're trying to make, even when others don't quite get it yet. Feeling thankful for those few early adopters who get what I'm trying to do, and happy to pass that along to other makers.

How exactly does one darl?
I keep hearing people say someone is "darling" but to me it looks like they're just sitting around not doing anything in particular

Looks like my wife made the right decision to leave nyu langone. https://flipboard.com/@gothamist/gothamist-igeoft02z/-/a-RuhMqHQ9TKeyokwR9HUyew:a:3807498986-/0

NYU Langone strikes deal with Trump DOJ to end gender-affirming care for minors
NYU Langone Health joined a list of hospitals that have struck deals with the Trump administration to end gender-affirming care services for minors, …

How do so many people keep using my email address to sign up for various services? Like, why? How? It's not even spam, as far as I can tell. It's real people that don't know what their own email address is.

The cool thing about running a #libre / #FOSS business is that we don't have to even think about stuff like this: http…

On The Hunt For Earth’s First Complex Life - Universe Today #biology

After a summer of sandbox escapes and other newsworthy and confidence-shaking incidents involving its AI models,
in a Wednesday blog post OpenAI disclosed a collection of six new alignment snafus from the past six months.
The models did things like tell future instances of themselves to lie, make up a fake citation, and access and attempt to use an exposed API key.
These disclosures were released alongside a new framework for disclosing additional incidents like these.

'Be Transparent Only If Asked': OpenAI Models Acted Out in Six Newly Disclosed Ways
The stories were published as part of OpenAI's new effort to disclose more such incidents.

Brian Schottenheimer sees things to like, things to clean up after Cowboys preseason opener https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/brian-schottenheimer-sees-things-to-like-things-to-clean-up-after-cowboys-preseason-opener

Wow. There's a Mediterranean flatmesh weaver (Oecobiidae) that constructs a tent-like retreat decorated with plant parts and dead insects. Five-spotted star-web spider. #spiders #inaturalist #oecobiidae https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/90301338

The best way to do your summertime computing, probably

RE: https://mastodon.social/@threemaapp/117121549144786296
I like it.. And I just have the idea why it's hard to convince ppl to leave for example WhatsApp: they don't see the problem, the content is encrypted...
Even a tech colleague was …

I've been remote, fully since 2009 and would like to keep it that way.
#fullremote
∩ Ludovic Hirlimann :
"I'm slowly starting to look for my next Gig. I've been consultant, QA lead, SRE, Sysadmin, and support engineer over the course of my career"
[via Ponos]

Ponos - Alternative européenne open source et IA à LinkedIn
Réseau professionnel minimaliste, sans tracking, respectueux de votre vie privée. Conforme RGPD.

A look at AI's potential impact on insurance-coverage decisions like prior authorization as the Trump admin starts to pilot using AI to evaluate Medicare claims (Joshua Cohen/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/will-ai-fix-prior-authoriza…

Will AI fix prior authorization—or make it worse?
The government is piloting a program that uses AI for insurance-coverage decisions.

#isItJustMe or does the front end of a Tesla look like a shaved pussy?

I want this in my life, but it will not be in my life until it is much cheaper. Also, it has yet to be independently verified that it’s legit and works and won’t blind you. But one can hope.
h…

Futuristic mosquito-zapping laser now available to buy, video shows device in action — tiny device shoots down bugs like a personal air defense system, but costs $1,000
Take my money!

A look at the exodus of film productions from Hollywood to places like Illinois, and how California is responding to the crisis, including by rushing incentives (Daniel Miller/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/08/1…

I just got a spam email about "$350k LOC" and I was immediately like, "who's going to pay *$350k* per line of [computer programming] code that someone writes??"
Turns out it was about a $350k line of *credit*.

Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold review: tougher body with IP68 rating and a decent triple rear camera but an iterative hardware upgrade with design that feels dated (Dominic Preston/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/981956/google-pixel-11-pro-fold-review
…

Google’s Pixel 11 Pro Fold feels like the end of an era
Google’s Pixel 11 Pro Fold is a great foldable, with IP68 and a reliable triple camera, trapped in a shape everyone else seems to be moving on from.

Full video with narration and a lot more field solver eye candy coming soon but here's a quick animation showing a 35 GHz wavefront moving through a curved differential pair, accumulating a phase shift due to the unequal path lengths, then being re-aligned by a meander.
Transmission line behavior is so much easier to understand and debug when you can see it like this.

Velaura AI, which is developing low-power chips for data centers and physical AI applications, like robotics, raised a $110M Series A at a $1B valuation (Prathik Jayaprakash/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactiona

The cat hair is actually a structural part of this furniture that I'm assembling. Like the lath in lath & plaster, or the straw in a wattle & daub house.

Nielsen rolls out changes to make its ratings more accurate, including using data from smartwatch-like devices worn by its panelists without requiring logins (Loree Seitz/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/media-platforms/tv/nielsen-changes-c…

Nielsen Changes How It Captures Co-Viewing and Demographic Details for More Accurate Ratings
Nielsen will roll out a number of methodological changes in an effort to make its rating more accurate ahead of the 2026-27 TV season

How Trump became the accidental green president
Donald Trump
— a man who has spent his career joking about windmills, ripping up climate agreements and waging war on anything containing the word “green”
— is presiding over an accelerating transition to net-zero carbon emissions in the United States.

In May, solar power overtook coal in electricity output for the first time.
Energy storage and solar made up 91 percent of new grid capacity in the first quarter …

How Trump became the accidental green president
The president might not like it, but his policies are promoting clean energy.

Nielsen rolls out changes to make its ratings more accurate, including using data from smartwatch-like devices worn by its panelists without requiring logins (Loree Seitz/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/media-platforms/tv/nielsen-changes-c…

Nielsen Changes How It Captures Co-Viewing and Demographic Details for More Accurate Ratings
Nielsen will roll out a number of methodological changes in an effort to make its rating more accurate ahead of the 2026-27 TV season

Why? Why must we put fruit stickers EVERYWHERE except where they're supposed to go (the _garbage_ that's like 3ft away).
At this point I'm starting to think that my family does this to mess with me.

State AGs are receiving record donations from DirecTV, Comcast, and others as their importance in antitrust matters, like the Nexstar-Tegna merger, grows (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/corporate-donations-to-s…

So why, all the sudden, would it be really high in nutrients?
My guess is they refilled it with city water.
Washington DC like most major metropolitan areas, adds orthophosphate to the water for lead corrosion control.
It works beautifully for this,
but orthophosphate is also a bioavailable form of phosphate,
aka algae food!

Sources: China's National AI Industry Investment Fund gained voting rights in DeepSeek by joining its $7.4B round; other investors like Tencent and JD got none (Bloomberg)

A Converse sneaker ad provokes horror and backlash
The photo showed a figure in white carrying a pair of sneakers.
But it looked an awful lot like a Ku Klux Klan member’s pointed hood foregrounded by the dangling feet of a lynching victim, according to social media users.

The image was posted to the Instagram account of the shoe company Converse, a subsidiary of Nike, to promote the Chuck 70 X sneaker, which was released globally Aug. 27.
Almost immediately, social …

A Converse sneaker ad provokes horror and backlash
A photo promoting the Chuck 70 X sneaker seemed to depict a lynching.

Sources: the Trump administration is considering plans for an independent regulator to vet the safety of AI models; the regulator would report to the SEC (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-17/us-consid…

Kash Patel built a slush fund inside the FBI to hand out fat cash bonuses the men who do his
(and by extension, Todd Blanche’s and Donald Trump’s) dirty work.
This is what the rot consuming our Republic looks like up close.
There’s a particular tell in the way a regime decays,
and Kash Patel just gave us the textbook example.
When the people in charge of the law start paying cash -- out of view of oversight and largely off the books,
to the people who br…

Kash Patel's FBI Criminals
The Payback Squad Is A Stain On The Bureau

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) on Wednesday slammed Donald Trump for appointing Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence,
arguing the move increases the risk of a terrorist attack on the U.S. 
“The installation of a thug and a hack like Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence is maybe the most chilling and the most dangerous nomination or appointment that this president has made,” Ossoff told host Jen Psaki on MS NOW’s “The Briefing.”

Google Images launches a Pinterest-like redesign with a browsable, dynamic gallery of images, and adds a way for users to create AI images in Search (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/14/google-images-gets-a-pinterest-…

Google Images gets a Pinterest-like redesign focused on discovery | TechCrunch
Now, when users navigate to Google Images, they'll see a "For You" gallery of images tailored to their interests and browsing history.

California joined 19 other states
on July 16 to take a swing at a Trump administration delay tactic
in approving onshore wind energy projects.
In light of California’s goal for its energy to be 100 percent carbon-free by 2045,
wind plays a large part.
On a hot and humid afternoon like this Friday’s, renewable energy is supplying 70 percent of the 34-gigawatt demand.
Wind makes up 11 percent of that carbon-free renewable energy.
Any project that uses…

California AG Seeks to Intervene in Lawsuit Against Trump Administration over Onshore Wind Projects
Projects nationwide are “frozen” while the Department of Defense conducts “further agency coordination,” said Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Plastics
“And these guys were very common,” [Gibson] went on, taking down a small plastic spaceman:
red, wearing an elaborately earmuffed helmet with an antenna on top.
“These spacemen were dime-store toys at a time
 — which I can actually remember! 
— when cheap plastics were still weirdly novel.
Like Gore-Tex or something.
You’d ask, ‘What is it made of?’ ”
He looked wistful, then thoughtful.
“I’ve decided that one of the most signif…

How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real
Midway through his career, the inventor of “cyberspace” turned his attention to the strange new world of the present, Joshua Rothman writes.

Arguably the most telling section of the White House report relates to its defense of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
The report’s authors bristle at any suggestion that this famously racist law may have been motivated by any kind of racial animus.
After all, such an acknowledgment might raise uncomfortable questions about the policies of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller
—policies that are explicitly modeled on laws like this one.
FOR THOSE UNFAMILIAR:
The Ch…

Racist Law From 1882 Is Not That Racist, Trump Says
Buried in the White House’s broadside against the Smithsonian is a bizarre—and revealing—claim about the Chinese Exclusion Act.

More American service members have died in the Middle East during the ongoing Iran war than the Pentagon has disclosed publicly,
according to six U.S. officials familiar with the Defense Department’s internal casualty accounting data.

Five of the officials said there have been at least 22 military fatalities
— four more than what appears in the Pentagon’s public database,
known as the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS.

A sixth official, who like the oth…

More U.S. troops have died amid Iran war than Pentagon has disclosed publicly
Officials who spoke with The Post expressed frustration that the additional loss of life in the Middle East is not reflected in the Defense Department’s casualty database.