2026-07-17 05:07:03
US gas prices this month are so far the highest ever recorded for August
as peace talks between the US and Iran have stalled and Donald Trump launched fresh threats against Oman.
The national average price of gas was $4.06 per gallon on Monday,
according to data from AAA,
$0.05 higher than last week
and $1 more expensive than a year ago.
In California and Hawaii, averages hit about $5.50 a gallon.
A former US State Department envoy says the US-China AI safety talks will not yield a breakthrough treaty as Beijing is prioritizing its strategic advantage (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/opinion
RAM aus China: US-Regierung macht Druck auf Apple
Apple ist von Micron und zwei südkoreanischen RAM-Produzenten abhängig und würde gerne CXMT-DRAM aus China kaufen. Doch das gibt Ärger mit der US-Regierung.
https://www.
Fat Loser is now openly destroying American democracy on live TV.
#trump
☑️ How Trump’s address was bluntly aimed at destabilizing the US electoral system | Donald Trump | The Guardian
Yes on I kickoff today in Duboce Park was a huge success! That’s (1) our campaign manager Jacob speaking, (2) Deepa Varma from Tenants Together, (3) Kristin Hardy from SEIU 1021, who talked about how affordable housing is their top, top, top, top priority to keep their members in the city.
Afterward we asked shops if we could put up signs. Donate or find the next volunteer event at
I made a theme for #Mastodon 4.7 that improves usability and adds some nice acrylic translucency effects while we wait for version 5. :) https://github.com/adamzea/Mastodon-4.7-Usa…
Looking at https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/732341/trump-claims-that-declassified-documents-show-us-election-vulnerabilities it's worth noting that the Heritage Foundation wrote the Project 2025 plan, and they're …
wtf?
"Washington has blocked the issuance of SSL security certificates for Fars News Agency's website, cutting the country's most visited news outlet off from browser-trusted encryption, the agency revealed on 17 July."
https://thecradle.co/articles/us-b…
"I used to think AI would kill us all, until the techbro CEOs said AI will kill us all and now I’m not so sure", says First Dog on the Moon
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/
Achievement unlocked: Control a Duux Whisper Flex with @…
#Duux #HomeAssistant
DHS announces plans to shorten visas for foreign journalists in the US from up to 5 years to 240 days and cut those for Chinese journalists to 90 days (Edward Helmore/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/17/trump-administrat…
us_congress: US Congressional co-sponsorship (1973-2016)
Two temporal networks of bill co-sponsorship tendencies among US Congresspeople, from 1973 (93rd Congress) to 2016 (114th Congress). Edges are signed, indicating the presence of a significant tendency to co-sponsor, or tendency to not co-sponsor, bills. Two networks per year, one for each chamber (House, Senate). Each file contains the signed network for a chamber of congress (H = House, S = Senate) in one session (e.g. 93 = 93rd…
RE: https://assortedflotsam.com/@NewsBot/116942297332156781
What were US soldiers doing in Jordan? It’s very far from the US. Maybe US soldiers should stay home where they belong.
Was anyone else traumatized by the movie "The Red Balloon" as a child?
BATARD TRONIQUE – Parasite
https://camembertelectrique.bandcamp.com/album/parasite
https://www.
With our director, David Odo, moving on to the Honolulu Museum of Art, we sat down with him one last time to review his time here, talk about what he’ll miss in Athens and discuss his hopes for the future in his new position.
https://georgiamuseum.org/qa-georgia-…
They say nobody reads poetry. Almost nobody reads *anything* any more except for posts and tweets and toots. But keep on writing. Maybe someday ...
#poetry
In an incoherent speech last night, Trump prepared the US public for him stealing the midterm elections in November, which his Republican party would normally lose.
https://bbc.com/news/articles/cx2k9wvv5wyo
Tell your representatives to support the Fair Choice Act, and support #RankedChoiceVoting
https://fairvoteaction.quorum.us/campaign/VCA2026/
Sources: the US "almost started a war" after an AI-assisted report hallucinated that a Chinese ship was carrying nuclear weapons components in the Middle East (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-…
Der Präsident, der von Unlauterkeit lebt, wirft anderen Unregelmässigkeiten vor. Exakt mein Humor.
"Das [Gesetz] würde dazu führen, dass der Zugang zur Wahl erschwert würde für jene, die diese Dokumente nicht zur Hand haben, so die Gegner."
"Vielleicht geht es Trump aber auch darum, seine Basis, die an Wahlbetrug glaubt, für die Wahlen zu mobilisieren."
"Vielleicht schafft Trump hier einen Vorwand, um mit der Bundesregierung in die Wahl im Hebst ein…
Rams, Packers, Chargers, Patriots: Which Week 1 losses should scare us most?
https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/rams-packers-chargers-patriots-week-1-losses-that-scar…
Chambers has said that he has known since 2015 that he was on the US federal government’s radar,
due to activism against police in Atlanta.
A self-described communist and anti-imperialist, he is heir to one of the richest families in the US,
the owners of Atlanta-based Cox Communications.
He sold stock back to his family worth about $250m in mid-2023 and since then has been funding an estimated 100 projects in 20 countries, Schnabel said.
She said that includes,…
Rede an die Nation - Trump wirft China Diebstahl von US-Wählerdaten vor #News #Nachrichten
TSMC will US-Investitionen auf 265 Milliarden US-Dollar erhöhen
Der Weltmarktführer TSMC will weitere Halbleiterwerke in den USA bauen. Dafür stehen weitere 100 Milliarden US-Dollar bereit.
https://www.
It's important to understand that keeping consumers safe and healthy is much less important than corporate profits. The technology to make items traceable is well established. Bit it adds a small cost that would impact profit margins:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-ne…
It's important to understand that keeping consumers safe and healthy is much less important than corporate profits. The technology to make items traceable is well established. Bit it adds a small cost that would impact profit margins:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-ne…
Cars are the reason SF’s tree canopy is so sparse.
This is typical. That’s gotta be, what, 200 feet without trees due to continuous driveways. And down the block the trees that are there are small, offering little shade. That’s because the sidewalk is too narrow for large, healthy, mature trees. And why’s it narrow? To fit a parking lane.
We can choose trees over cars, life over luxury transport.
Before you head out for what is hopefully a smoke-free-atmosphere weekend, check out Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you need to know, including
--Moonshot's Kimi K3 raises stakes in battle over AI vulnerability-hunting models,
--DHS seizes 30K SIM cards in anti-fraud crackdown,
--Coca-Cola's Fairlife ransomware attack disrupts US production,
--US charges pair in $43m cyber scam laundering ring,
--Police use Flock cameras to search f…
Dutch company Fairphone launches its $650 flagship repairable Fairphone (Gen 6 ) in the US and plans to keep launching new phone generations every two years (Julian Chokkattu/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/you-can-finally-buy-a-f…
us_congress: US Congressional co-sponsorship (1973-2016)
Two temporal networks of bill co-sponsorship tendencies among US Congresspeople, from 1973 (93rd Congress) to 2016 (114th Congress). Edges are signed, indicating the presence of a significant tendency to co-sponsor, or tendency to not co-sponsor, bills. Two networks per year, one for each chamber (House, Senate). Each file contains the signed network for a chamber of congress (H = House, S = Senate) in one session (e.g. 93 = 93rd…
I saw a guy at B&H Photo pour the whole bowl of free candy into his bag.
room101 – The Desiring-Machines (15th Anniversary Edition)
https://archive.org/details/room101_desiring_machines
Fantastic devotional for today by Ed Mathews:
#devotionals #better
Donald Trump used the imprimatur of the presidency and United States intelligence agencies
to try to undermine confidence in American elections
in a presidential address on Thursday
that seemed bluntly aimed at laying the groundwork for further destabilizing the electoral system
before November’s midterm elections.
In his address from the East Room at the White House,
Trump attempted to give the impression that his administration had uncovered new bombshel…
In opening arguments, US state AGs said Meta intentionally sought to addict children to Facebook and Instagram in pursuit of profit; Meta rejected the claims (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/meta-faces-29-state-trial-that…
Trump says he will declare Strait of Hormuz US territory after 'finishing defeating Iran' (very badly, pretty soon).
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-15/trump-says-he-will-declare-hormuz-us-territory/107041530
Chainalysis sues the US government over ICE's $94.6M contract to buy forensic software and services from its competitor TRM Labs, calling the deal "arbitrary" (Ezra Reguerra/Cointelegraph)
https://cointelegraph.com/news/chainalysi…
Various Artist – 👽 I want to Believe (X-files Tribute)🔍
https://archive.org/details/v-a-i-want-to-believe
In case you missed it a couple weeks ago, here's what's wrong with San Francisco's Props D, E, and F (Mayor Lurie's billionaire-backed charter amendments to consolidate power):
https://dsasf.org/oppose-mayor-luries-power-grab-no-on-d-e-f/
@… max, plus almost a dozen extensions raising it even higher. ~100 errors in config, ~600 in the code, and the other ~1300 in the unit tests. The unit tests will be easy, just a matter of updating mocking. Should be an evenings work to get 80% addressed
Over the past year and a half, at least 28 federal datasets have been deleted
and another 338 data collections have been modified, according to an online tracker released last week from dataindex.us,
a group of data policy experts, researchers and developers that formed last year to monitor changes to government data.
“We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden administration and a co-founder of dataindex.…
This has been a bad week for beverage and grocery-related cyberattacks.
Coca-Cola Suspends US Fairlife Operations After Cyberattack
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-16/coca-cola-suspends-us-fairlife-operations…
Longtime Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer announces his retirement, saying his understanding of the outlet's "value and mission" differs from DOD plans (Svetlana Shkolnikova/Stars & Stripes)
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-0
@… if you have 500 workers it will
US and Chinese experts propose nuclear-style AI safeguards, including a dedicated AI military hotline, as part of a dialogue ahead of planned bilateral talks (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-china-security-ex…
I would love to know what this poll looks like specifically in San Francisco.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.aspx
Donald Trump’s move to gut Washington’s 73-year-old military alliance with Seoul has been called “inane” and “shortsighted”
as lawmakers warned it risked strengthening Russia’s hand in Ukraine.
The US president abruptly ordered the Pentagon to scale back joint exercises with South Korea
just days after North Korea test-fired ballistic missiles,
justifying the decision by citing his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong-un, the nuclear-armed dictator such exercises ex…
DoorDash says Costco members can order same-day delivery from every US Costco warehouse, after Uber expanded its delivery partnership from 17 to 47 US states (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-17/doordash-…
@… never got that good, but that balloon ❤️
Officials from the US met Houthi leaders over the weekend at the country’s embassy in Muscat, Oman, it has been confirmed,
leading to the US decision
⚠️ not to intervene to help Saudi Arabia drive back a Houthi advance inside Yemen.
The Iran-backed militant group reassured the US that the ceasefire agreement between the two sides struck in 2025 still held
⚠️and the movement had no intention of attacking US shipping in the Red Sea.
Only Saudi-linked shipping was…
The US SEC unveils a five-year "Innovation Exemption" to free platforms that facilitate blockchain and tokenized stock trading from many stock exchange rules (Hannah Lang/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-securitie
Sander Kulu – Nær Home
https://sanderkulu.bandcamp.com/album/n-r-home
https://www.clongclongm…
Donald Trump’s state department intends to allocate $12m to organisations in the UK
founded by the prominent Conservatives Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young, the Guardian can reveal.
The intended grants, revealed in US government documents, are part of a package of support for European groups viewed favourably by the Trump administration.
Former US officials have criticised the funding as a misuse of public money to seek influence over foreign politics.
The documents re…
Google quietly rolled out a new program to let verified political campaigns more easily bypass Gmail's spam filter, after years of complaints from the GOP (Shane Goldmacher/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/us/politics/google-pol…
In opening arguments, US state AGs said Meta intentionally sought to addict children to Facebook and Instagram in pursuit of profit; Meta rejected the claims (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/meta-faces-29-state-trial-that…
Coming back to a code base and finding the following class `SchwererGustav ` implementing the `Cannon` contract as an event dispatcher...
The grassroots group HumansFirst is organizing protests against the "unaccountable" buildout of data centers across 125 US locations on July 18 (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-data-center-…
kleinhirnkammer – an ambient sonic journey: bass improvisations 2026
https://kleinhirnkammer.bandcamp.com/album/an-ambient-sonic-journey-bass-improvisations-2026
Tycoon Harold Hamm is one of the US’s most successful oilmen,
the son of Oklahoma sharecroppers who hit it rich as a “wildcatter”
and pioneered fracking techniques that drove the shale boom in 2008 that reversed declining US oil production.
Donald Trump describes him as a “long time” friend and is said to have called him his “original oil guy”
The Continental Resources founder has also faced scrutiny from climate advocates and groups and some Democratic lawmakers ov…
Fabio Keiner – fragile
https://emerge.bandcamp.com/album/fragile
https://www.clongclongmoo.org/2026…
1,12 Milliarden US-Dollar: Infineon will Spezialspeicher abstoßen
Winbond plant den Kauf von Infineons Produktlinien rund um die nicht flüchtigen Speichertypen NOR-Flash und F-RAM.
https://www.
American troops need to prepare for combat not only in Earth’s orbit but
around the moon,
Donald Trump’s top military adviser said on Wednesday,
looking ahead to a new frontier in warfare
after the US revealed for the first time that it has deployed weapons in space.
Gen Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told service members and industry figures at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference outside Washington that
the US military should adapt now …
Various Artist – 👽 I want to Believe (X-files Tribute)🔍
https://archive.org/details/v-a-i-want-to-believe
The drug giant Merck on Thursday announced it had received FDA approval for a daily pill that can be an alternative to statins for treating high LDL levels, or so-called bad cholesterol.
The new pill, Lipfendra, is a version of a drug called a PCSK9 inhibitor.
https:…
BATARD TRONIQUE – Parasite
https://camembertelectrique.bandcamp.com/album/parasite
https://www.
Uber and Lyft were just not meant to be, says Travis Kalanick.
The former Uber CEO said he has no regrets about how he handled a potential acquisition of Lyft.
Uber-Lyft talks in 2014 collapsed over valuation disagreements and cultural mismatches.
Kalanick recently launched robotics company Atoms and raised $1.7 billion for the startup.
An analysis of 60 of the largest planned US data centers: they could together produce 101.5M tons of CO2 per year, or ~7% of US power sector emissions in 2025 (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/8158cb5a-4bbd-43fd-b329-15a54e8422c8
ONO x ILLER – .D.Y.S.T.O.P.I.A.
https://elementperspective-04.bandcamp.com/album/d-y-s-t-o-p-i-a
ht…
Source: Demis Hassabis plans to hold meetings with US policymakers in Washington next week about his proposed US-based Standards Body for "Frontier-class" AI (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20
room101 – The Desiring-Machines (15th Anniversary Edition)
https://archive.org/details/room101_desiring_machines
A US federal judge rules the State Department engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination by denying visas to researchers studying misinfo and disinfo (Mike Masnick/Techdirt)
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/07/15/rubio-
Einige der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
Fürs KI-Training: Google kauft interne Daten der insolventen Spirit Airlines
Einige der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
Fürs KI-Training: Google kauft interne Daten der insolventen Spirit Airlines
A US official says TSMC plans to spend an additional $100B to build four new US chip fabs, bringing total pledge to $265B as part of a broader US-Taiwan deal (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-16/tsmc-to-s…
Court doc: a US federal jury says Japanese chipmaker Kioxia owes Viasat $229M for infringing Viasat's flash-memory patent that helps devices use less energy (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/k
Meta's personal AI agent Muse climbs to No. 1 among free apps on Apple's US App Store, ahead of ChatGPT; Muse launched on September 8 (Georgia Hennessy/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-muse-personal-ai-agent-top-app-store-…
Mistral and other European AI startups accuse US rivals of using safety concerns to entrench their dominance, rejecting Anthropic's calls to pace the frontier (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/europes-ai-firms-playing-ca…
Survey: 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about increased AI use in daily life, up from 37% in 2021, including 55% of those under 30 (Pew Research Center)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/20
Sources: Google has told suppliers it plans to move all Pixel phone, smartwatch, and wireless earbud manufacturing out of China in 2027 amid US-China tensions (Lauly Li/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/supply-…
Meta ran ads for a nudify app featuring a porn video with a deepfake closely resembling a prominent US politician; Apple removed the app from the App Store (Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-ran-ads-for-an-app-promising-to-nudify-female-polit…
Sources: SK Hynix subsidiary Solidigm weighs building a NAND flash memory factory in the US; SK Hynix is also in talks with Intel for a separate project in Ohio (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific
OnePlus confirms it will no longer operate in North America or Europe but will continue in China, while Realme, another Oppo sub-brand, will exit China (CNET)
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/oneplus-pulls-out-of-us-and-europe/