Well, it’s Tuesday. Time for our weekly browser bookmarks cleanup. It’s only moderately cranky this week. Must be because there’s not a lot of things going on in the world to talk about right now. All quiet on the western front, as the saying goes.
Why, no, I don’t watch television. Why do you ask?
Money-Market Funds & CDs: Americans and their Piles of Interest-Earning Cash
The three-month Treasury yield is still at 4.36% currently, and has been in this range since the last rate cut in December. Yields of money-market funds (MMFs) closely track the three-month Treasury yield and remain in the 4.2% range, give or take, and are well above the current inflation rates, with CPI inflation at 2.4% in May. This puts the “real” yield on liquid ultra-low-risk cash at just under 2%, which seems to be an attractive proposition, and households keep pouring their extra cash into them.
This phenomenon is poorly understood. Regular people try to accumulate and save some of their money, and things like CDs just insulate them from the effects of inflation. Any increase is gravy. The stock market is a casino. This is dollars in a sugar bowl.
Microsoft locks Windows 11 user out, shows how easy losing data from forced encryption is
“Microsoft randomly locked my account after I moved 30 years’ worth of irreplaceable photos and work to OneDrive. I was consolidating data from multiple old drives before a major move—drives I had to discard due to space and relocation constraints. The plan was simple: upload to OneDrive, then transfer to a new drive later.
The sooner you learn that The Cloud is just someone else’s computer, the better.
For the first time, social media overtakes TV as Americans’ top news source
For the first time, social media has displaced television as the top way Americans get news. “The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up,” the report’s authors write, “overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time.”
If the people who pass me as I walk down the street are any indication, a solid minority are now getting their news from the voices in their heads.
Intel will lay off 15% to 20% of its factory workers, memo says
“These are difficult actions but essential to meet our affordability challenges and current financial position of the company. It drives pain to every individual,” Intel manufacturing Vice President Naga Chandrasekaran wrote to employees Saturday. He said the company is targeting job reductions between 15% and 20%, with most of the cuts taking place in July.
I’ve read plenty of corporate-speak in my day, but “It drives pain to every individual” sounds like something Conan the Barbarian would say before mentioning the lamentation of the women.
The $50 Trillion Prize: AI’s Real Stakes Exposed
Here’s what every AI company has admitted at some point:
They don’t fully understand how their models work
They can’t predict what capabilities will emerge
They don’t know how to solve alignment problems
They’re building systems they can’t fully control
And yet they want your trust, your money, and control over increasingly important parts of society. Would you trust a pilot who said, “I don’t really understand how this plane works, but hop in”? Would you trust a surgeon who said, “I’m not sure what this procedure will do, but let’s try it”? Then why are we trusting AI companies with civilization?
Says the guy with four booster shots.
The video calls section in cafes is the new smoking section
Then laptops were only allowed at specific 4 or 5 stools by the window. You felt distinctly unwelcome (but went anyway, it’s nice to be out of the house). Then, I was in a couple weeks back, they’ve surrendered. The window stool area is now dense nest of stools and counters and a new wedged-in shared table in the middle. You can probably jam 10 people in there now, shoulder to shoulder and back to back. This area is made for laptops, and people sit there all day yelling video calls on their head-mics, battery farmed knowledge work.
More like a pissing section in a pool.
Scientists detect light passing through entire human head, opening new doors for brain imaging
To achieve this, the team used powerful lasers and highly sensitive detectors in a carefully controlled experiment. They directed a pulsed laser beam at one side of a volunteer’s head and placed a detector on the opposite side. The setup was designed to block out all other light and maximize the chances of catching the few photons that made the full journey through the skull and brain.
Last time I went to the doctors he looked in my ear with his otoscope and clucked his tongue. “Is it bad? What do you see, doctor?” He said, “My diploma.”
Should Wyoming Ranchers Paint Zebra Stripes On Their Cows? Science Says Yes
Specifically, the scientists hypothesized that painting a zebra-striped pattern on domestic cattle would reduce the number of biting flies plaguing livestock. Biting flies are a more-than-annoying scourge for ranchers worldwide, including in Wyoming. Their findings were that the frequency of biting flies landing on the painted cattle decreased by over 50%. Furthermore, the cattle were more relaxed since they weren’t reflexively fighting off so many flies.
I’d do it strictly for the Lulz.
Cabinet to advise parents to ban social media before age of 15
Deputy health minister Vincent Karremans is expected to publish official guidance on the use of smartphones, which also includes a recommendation not to buy phones for children until they enter the final year of primary school, aged 11 or 12. Two weeks ago Karremans dismissed the idea of an outright ban on phones for under-14s, arguing it would be unenforceable.
Smart cabinet, there. I wonder what a credenza would say.
Amazon is reportedly training humanoid robots to deliver packages
Citing an anonymous source “involved in the effort,” The Information says that Amazon has almost finished constructing an indoor “humanoid park” at one of the retail giant’s San Francisco offices that’s roughly the size of a coffee shop. The obstacle course reportedly contains one Rivian van for training purposes, with Amazon aiming to have humanoid robots “hitch a ride in the back of Amazon’s electric Rivian vans and spring out to deliver packages.”
If they deliver a heavy package inside my apartment on a hot day, would it be good manners to offer them a nice cold glass of vaseline or something?
Well, there’s the bookmarks mulch pile for this Tuesday. Weigh in down there in the comments if your cabinet has any opinions it shared with you.
2 Responses
Wow, this is a rich trove of trash today. Let’s see if I can distract someone…
I simply don’t understand people using “the cloud”, now that storage has become stupidly cheap. I back up our iMac on two different drives, one of which is terabyte, and the other is two terabytes. They were dirt cheap, reasonably reliable and stable, and offer good long-term storage. One of ’em sits behind the computer while the other is locked inside a small (supposedly) “fire-proof” safe and then that safe is tucked inside the big “fire-proof” gun safe. Yes, like the Scotsman, belt, suspenders, and one hand on me trousers. Who would be crazy enough to put your personal data on somebody else’s drive?
AI appears to be the latest scam, right up there with the ozone hole and glueball wormening. BILLLLLYONS of dollars being spent on something that doesn’t work, and if it ever does work, will need to be instantly shut down. Where’s my checkbook?
Heck, they can shine a light right from one side of my head through the other. You just have to line up the ears correctly since there’s apparently nothing in there to interfere.
But it’s the concept of paining white strips on the Wyoming cattle that got me laughing. I can just see somebody out in the sagebrush desert, where there’s about one cow per square mile, slapping on whitewash stripes. You might want to skip the intact bulls though, they can get a little cranky if they don’t like the color. And I can see the massive traffic jam on a rural road (in other words, BOTH pick-ups) stopped to look and laugh at a herd of zebra-cattle. At least the range horses have learned to stand around with their heads near the other’s rear so that each of them can swish the flies off the other’s head. When one of ’em gets lazy and stops swishing, the one with the flies in its face gives him a gentle reminder, like a solid bite in the butt.
And if I see a humanoid robot approaching my house, package or no, he’s getting zapped with a Westinghouse M-25 phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range.
I don’t think the fact of where we get our news from is as important as the fact that we have now become immersed in the news. We bathe in it, it’s like the air we breathe. When I was a kid, we got a newspaper once a day, and it brought the news. Then, later, we got the news every night at 6:00 on a black and white television.
Around the 1990s, cable news started with CNN, and it covered the first Gulf War. People became addicted to watching the news 24 hours a day, and then it was off to the races. People no longer have time for things that made our civilization worth living in, and now they are consumed by endless petty BS. And scaremongering.
I was reading the online website of my local television station, Channel 10, and I am in South Florida, and one of their stories was about somebody who got into an argument with someone in a parking lot of a convenience store in Wyoming and called someone a racial slur. That was news.