Tuesday Real Estate Browser Bookmark Trash Day

Well, we’ve been featuring lots of real estate shenanigans here at the cottage lately, so it’s only natural that our Tuesday Trash Day roundup of festering browser bookmarks should feature some good ol’ real estate info. Feel free to opine on the selections in the comments. And remember, no wagering.

Billionaire In-N-Out Heiress Lynsi Snyder Reveals She’s Quitting California for Tennessee: ‘It’s Not Easy Here’

The businesswoman, who became president of the popular fast-food chain in 2010 and now has an estimated net worth of $7.3 billion, explained during a new episode of Allie Beth Stuckey’s “Relatable” podcast that it’s “not easy” living and working in California anymore.

Forgive me, but for a moment when I saw the headline about an in and out heiress, I mistakenly thought her mother was a very successful courtesan.

The 19 Bigger Cities with the Biggest Price Declines of Condos (-12% to -24% from Peak through June)

The 19 cities with price declines of 12% to 24% through June:

Oakland, CA: -24%
Austin, TX: -24%
Saint Petersburg, FL: -21%
Fort Myers, FL: -17%
Sarasota, FL: -17%
San Francisco, CA: -16%
Boise, ID: -14%
Jacksonville, FL: -14%
Detroit, MI: -13%
Denver, CO: -13%
Tampa, FL: -13%
Arlington, TX: -13%
Naples, FL: -13%
New Orleans, LA: -12%
Seattle: -12%
Reno, NV: -12.0%
Mesa, AZ: -12%
Portland, OR: -12%
Aurora, CO: -12%

That’s funny. That’s a list of 19 places I don’t want to live in. Perhaps I’m the problem. But I doubt it.

Planning for Home Maintenance Expenses: What Every Homeowner Needs to Know

Many homeowners use the “1% rule.” This means you should save about 1% of your home’s value each year for maintenance. For example, if your home costs $300,000, aim to set aside $3,000 per year.

Older homes or homes in rough climates may need more care. In those cases, 2% of the home’s value might be more realistic. You can also track your yearly spending to see what amount works best for your situation.

At the very least, save enough money to afford home insurance, a pile of oily rags, and a carelessly discarded cigarette.

1 in 7 Pending Home Sales Fell Through Last Month, The Highest June Level on Record

“Sellers are willing to make deals because in today’s buyer’s market, they don’t want to lose out on a sale once they have a buyer under contract,” said Van Welborn, a Redfin Premier agent in Phoenix. “A few years ago, when the market was more competitive, sellers were able to tell buyers to move on rather than pay for repairs found during the inspection period. Now, sellers are they’re doing whatever they can to close the deal. I have one buyer who discovered a septic issue on an ultra-luxury home and was able to talk the seller into reducing the price by $1 million.”

If you have a million dollar septic problem, I suggest you stop eating at Taco Bell.

Former Warren Buffett exec makes bold real estate bet

Investor Ian Jacobs, a longtime protégé of Warren Buffett and a former Berkshire Hathaway executive, is doubling down on Union Square in downtown San Francisco, according to a July 1 report in the San Francisco Standard.

Jacobs, who leads the investment firm 402 Capital, has gone into escrow to buy 111 Ellis Street, an office building at the corner of Powell and Ellis streets. The building was once home to Blondie’s Pizza and sits near several still-vacant retail spaces.

Berkshire Hathaway has around one trillion dollars of assets under management. This guy bought a shuttered pizza joint. Bold, indeed.

Decoded: 5 things brokers can do to increase walk-in traffic

To many in the industry, walk-in business is dead — and I’m unsure if natural causes or our failure to adapt as an industry dealt the final blow.

In the years following the pandemic, we “returned” to our downsized offices, but after a few weeks or months of tepid effort, many threw in the towel. Now, it’s a chicken and egg conundrum: Most agents don’t want to sit in an office alone when the only walk-in they’re likely to get is someone selling Girl Scout cookies, and potential clients aren’t inspired when they see a cubicle graveyard.

But walk-in business — when we get it — is superior to internet inquiries. It is every licensee’s goal to be belly-to-belly with a live human seeking an address change.

I’ve always preferred going belly to belly with a live human. Mortuaries kill the mood.

Top 25 Best Places to Live for Quality of Life

21. Somerville, Massachusetts

Best Places 2025-2026 Rank: 226
Population: 82,140
Median Home Value: $861,806
Median Household Income: $127,440

Just five miles from Boston is Somerville, a town known for its diversity and robust arts and entertainment scene. In fact, after New York City, Somerville has the most artists per capita than any other U.S. city, boasting over 20 city squares filled with markets, theaters and restaurants. Somerville notably ranks No. 21 in health care access and places in the top 15% in both air quality and the safest places to live in the U.S. Its walkable neighborhoods and connections to the green, orange and red metro lines make the Boston city center accessible to Somerville residents.

Starts right in with a tangled passive voice sentence. Beautiful. And Somerville? That Somerville? The one we used to call Slummerville? Well, things change. Maybe it’s perked up enough to make a list of places with a high quality of life. Let’s check how safe it is:

I’m unsure of what a “high quality of life” would entail, exactly. Polite muggers? Carjackers who put premium gas in your car while they’re driving it around? Inquiring minds want to know.

LA burglar who killed American Idol boss was junkie w/ repeat arrests

A burglar accused of murdering ‘American Idol’ executive Robin Kaye and her husband was a ‘junkie’ well known in the neighborhood with multiple previous arrests, including assault.

Raymond Boodarian, 22, lived just 13 minutes from the $4.5 million Encino home where 70-year-old Kaye and her husband, Thomas DeLuca were shot dead during a suspected break-in last week as the local man sought to rob the well to do couple.

It’s unclear how this will affect the “quality of life” rating of Encino.

Well, that’s it for the bookmarks roundup. I hope the quality of life where you are is just ducky today.

Tuesday Overlooked Bookmark Roundup

Well, it’s Tuesday. Time to clean out the bookmarks we’ve been meaning to read, but never got around to. Pull up a seat, and stay awhile. But be careful where you sit.

TSA Quietly Dropping Shoe Removal Requirement During Airport Screening

Even though the TSA did not formally release a statement, multiple travelers across the U.S. are already reporting on social media that they were not required to take off their shoes. At some major airports, passengers reported that some non-PreCheck lines allowed customers to keep their shoes on while others still required that they take them off.

I flew on a plane for the first time in twenty years last year. The airports had all the charm of a bus station, and none of the efficiency.

Never Work Alone, Even in the Age of AI

The question is whether—with enough automation—one person could handle everything needed to build a sizable business: coming up with a product idea, building it end-to-end, selling it, supporting customers, and more. But there’s another, similarly important question within the first one: Would anyone actually want to do all of that work alone? And would they stay sane if they tried?

I’ve done it several times, and without much automation, too. Man up, Nancy.

Investors snap up growing share of US homes as traditional buyers struggle to afford one

As home sales have slowed, properties are taking longer to sell. That’s led to a sharply higher inventory of homes on the market, benefitting investors and other home shoppers who can afford to bypass current mortgage rates by paying in cash or tapping home equity gains.

Apparently only investors read my Great Moments in Maine Real Estate series.

Musk’s Grok Update Sparks Outcry Over Politically Incorrect AI

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has updated its chatbot Grok to adopt a more openly politically incorrect stance, sparking new controversy. Over the weekend, xAI publicly modified Grok’s system prompts, instructing it to view media-sourced viewpoints as biased and to embrace politically incorrect claims—provided they are well-supported. The new directives also tell Grok not to reference these instructions unless asked directly.

Oh no! Anyway…

The Nothing Phone (3) surprised me – a week in, it’s the best phone I’ve used for creating content

Phone (3)’s 6.67-inch flexible AMOLED display is one of the best I’ve used at this price, and it matters. For anyone working with visual content, whether that’s sketching UI ideas in Figma, finger painting in the best drawing apps for Android like Heavy Paint and ArtRage Vitae, reviewing photos, or editing images on the go, this screen delivers clarity, colour fidelity, and contrast.

There’s a lot of words on that page, but I didn’t notice any about whether you could use this device to make phone calls.

‘Village of one kidney’: India-Bangladesh organ traffickers rob poor donors

“Some people knowingly sell their kidneys due to extreme poverty, but a significant number are deceived,” said Shariful Hasan, associate director of the Migration Programme at BRAC, formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, one of the world’s largest nongovernmental development organisations. “A rich patient in India needs a kidney, a middleman either finds a poor Bangladeshi donor or lures someone in the name of employment, and the cycle continues.”

My local hospital was begging for kidney donations recently. I decided to help them out. They were pretty unreasonable about the whole thing, though, with lots of paperwork, and asking all sorts of impertinent questions like, “Whose kidney is this?”

Oldest wooden tools in East Asia may have come from any of three species

Archaeologists excavating at Gantangqing (an archaeological site on the shore of Lake Fuxian in what’s now southwestern China) unearthed 35 wooden tools from layers of soil dating to around 300,000 years ago. According to Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology archaeologist Jian-Hui Liu and colleagues, all 35 tools seem to have been designed, crafted, and used to harvest plants—specifically, the rhizomes, bulb-like corms, and other underground organs that many plants use to store nutrients.

I’m a woodworker. And I can assure you that it would take me around 300,000 years to find my bevel square.

Bear-Sized Giant Beavers Once Roamed North America, and They’re Now the Official State Fossil of Minnesota

The giant beaver’s journey to becoming Minnesota’s state fossil has been a long and winding one. The saga dates back to at least 1988, when a group of third graders first proposed making the massive mammal the official state fossil, according to Minnesota Star Tribune columnist Jennifer Brooks. Since then, the proposal has come up again and again. Each time, lawmakers have said no—but that changed this year.

Bones are pretty good, but I’m going to have to see some more damming evidence before I believe in these rodents of unusual size.

Are We Star Trek Yet?

Matter replicators, organic transporters, and warp drives are a little hazy on the timeline, but it seems like the holodeck and emergency medical hologram are just about here.

I’m disappointed that “Jumping a hot green chick’s bones” isn’t on the list.

Deafness reversed: Single injection brings hearing back within weeks

A cutting-edge gene therapy has significantly restored hearing in children and adults with congenital deafness, showing dramatic results just one month after a single injection. Researchers used a virus to deliver a healthy copy of the OTOF gene into the inner ear, improving auditory function across all ten participants in the study. The therapy worked best in young children but still benefited adults, with one 7-year-old girl regaining almost full hearing.

This sounds promising, but it’s likely to ruin a lot of perfectly good marriages, too.

Tuesday Trash Day Extravaganza

Cheese may really be giving you nightmares, scientists find

“Nightmare severity is robustly associated with lactose intolerance and other food allergies,” said Dr. Tore Nielsen of Université de Montréal, lead author of the article in Frontiers in Psychology. “These new findings imply that changing eating habits for people with some food sensitivities could alleviate nightmares. They could also explain why people so often blame dairy for bad dreams.”

I stopped eating Swiss cheese at bedtime because my nightmares had plot holes.

After successfully entering Earth’s atmosphere, a European spacecraft is lost

“The capsule was launched successfully, powered the payloads nominally in-orbit, stabilized itself after separation with the launcher, re-entered and re-established communication after black out,” the company said in a statement. “We are still investigating the root causes and will share more information soon. We apologize to all our clients who entrusted us with their payloads.”

The CEO of this company is a woman with a Master’s degree in Public Administration. Not exactly a rocket scientist.

AI vs. MDs: Microsoft AI tool outperforms doctors in diagnosing complex medical cases

The Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO) faced off against 21 experienced physicians from the U.S. and United Kingdom presented with complex cases documented in the New England Journal of Medicine. MAI-DxO gave a correct diagnosis for 85.5% of the test cases while the doctors hit the mark 20% of the time.

Medical schools should use Seinfeld re-runs to improve the doctor’s scores.

This Sahara Railway Is One of the Most Extreme in the World

Passenger cars are sometimes attached to freight trains, but more often passengers simply ride atop the ore hopper cars freely. Passengers include locals, merchants, and occasionally some adventure tourists. Conditions for these passengers are incredibly harsh with daytime temperatures exceeding 40°C, night-time temperatures approaching freezing, and death from falls being common.

Cool video at the link.

Rogue IT worker gets seven months in prison over $200,000 digital rampage — technician changed all of his company’s passwords after getting suspended

The source indicates that Taj sprang into vindictive action “within hours of being suspended from work in July 2022.” He proceeded to unlawfully access company systems “to deliberately alter login credentials to disrupt the company’s day-to-day activities,” says the law enforcement source. On the second day of his spree, Taj would go on to hobble the company’s MFA systems.

There’s something about the internet that fools people into believing that regular laws don’t apply there.

Sinaloa cartel used phone data and surveillance cameras to find FBI informants, DOJ says

The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché’s phone number “to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data.” The report said the hacker also “used Mexico City’s camera system to follow the (FBI official) through the city and identify people the (official) met with.”

There’s something about cellphones that make people believe that regular security doesn’t apply there.

This $7,000 single-seat electric car has become a hit in Japan

At under 1.5 meters in height, KG Motors’ Mibot has a range of 100 kilometers, a charging time of five hours and a top speed of 60 kilometers per hour. It will cost ¥1 million ($7,000) before tax when production starts in October at KG Motors’ new factory east of the city. That’s about half the price of Japan’s most popular EV, Nissan’s Sakura.

They got little baby legs
And they stand so low
You got to pick ’em up
Just to say hello
They got little cars
That got beep, beep, beep
They got little voices
Goin’ peep, peep, peep

Job Seeker AI Usage Statistics: 2025 Trends & Insights

The share of applicants who used AI to write their cover letters or resumes more than doubled from February 2024 to January 2025.

Lots of colorful charts at the link. The internet is basically USA Today, with less reliable information, if that’s even possible.

Stanford cuts $140 million, warns of layoffs as research funding dries up, endowment tax looms

Stanford University will cut $140 million from its operations and may lay off employees as it contends with “significant budget consequences from federal policy changes” including reductions in research support and an increase in the endowment tax, officials said.

I’m heartbroken. Torn up. Devastated. Bereft. Gutted. About Stanford? No. My cat lost a fuzzy ball under the radiator. I feel her pain.

Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models

On Monday, court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI—details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use whose broader fair use implications we reported yesterday.

A book is like a man, Granpa says. You have to hold them both in respect. You can only bend a book or a man so far until they can’t take it no more and then their back breaks. 

Save the Basement, Get Rid of the Bookmarks: Tuesday Trash Day

There was a fire drill at our apartment today.

Well, it added up to a drill. I imagine someone was sneaking a doobie somewhere in our non-smoking building, and the alarm went off. Instead of the blattering klaxon I was expecting, the alarm system started hectoring me like an ex-wife about where to go and what to do when I got there. Brave new world we live in.

Anyway, my wife and I, a couple of neighbors, and the four hundred or so dogs our neighbors own, stood on the curb for a spell. The fire station is within shouting distance. They sent all kinds of vehicles. A Fire Rescue truck rolled up. Out popped two little girls. They put on the entire firefighting getup, including masks and breathing tanks. They looked like they were wearing their dad’s clothes. If they fell over, I doubt they could have stood up under their own power. They carried Halligan Bars, which is the greatest demolition tool ever, but looked too heavy for their slight frames. They went in the front door, wandered around a bit, and wandered back out a while later. We wandered back in, and never did figure out exactly what set off the alarms.

My, how things have changed. Several of my relatives are/were firemen. They are robust fellows. They had to pass a very rigorous physical and mental examination to become firemen back in the day. As I recall, they had to be able to lift and carry a 200-pound (ostensibly unconscious) person to pass. I’m a fairly large, fairly robust man. I would have had a very hard time passing that fireman’s examination. But I guess Save the Basement is now the official policy of fire departments everywhere.

On to this week’s browser bookmark cleanout!

A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books without authors’ permission

Federal judge William Alsup ruled that it was legal for Anthropic to train its AI models on published books without the authors’ permission. This marks the first time that the courts have given credence to AI companies’ claim that fair use doctrine can absolve AI companies from fault when they use copyrighted materials to train large language models (LLMs).

At this point, I trust judges as much as Quija Boards. But reading and remembering things is not plagiarism, no matter how thinly you slice the silicon wafers.

World’s Largest Wildlife Bridge Spanning 10 Lanes of 101 Freeway Is Nearly Complete

Mountain lions are the main conservation focus of this wildlife bridge. The big cats are territorial, and being locked in by freeways limits their roaming range and biodiversity. Without the crossing to expand their habitat, SoCal cougars could be extinct within 50 years. They also continue to be killed by vehicles.

I predict fewer poodles in Agoura Hills.

Fossil found in Texas may be one of the most complete yet

The genus name Eryops means “drawn-out face,” and megacephalus translates to “large-headed,” referencing the animal’s broad skull. Its wide jaws and palatal teeth suggest it could not chew and instead swallowed prey by tossing its head back, similar to modern alligators and crocodiles.

Click on the link to see the happiest dinosaur ever.

Deloitte’s US employees can now buy $1,000 of Lego on the company’s dime to boost their well-being

The Big Four professional services firm has updated its long-running well-being subsidy program to include “Legos and puzzles” on a list of items that Deloitte will reimburse, internal policy documents seen by Business Insider show. The firm has long offered eligible US staff an annual subsidy to spend on one or a combination of subscriptions, equipment, and experiences. In 2021, the firm doubled the allowance from $500 to $1,000, an internal webpage shows.

Before I could even shave, I remember wanting a driver’s license, a car, a house, a wife, some kids, a boat, and several bartenders who knew me by name. These supposed adults want legos, and want their new mommy, Deloitte, to pay for them.

Greek man sentenced to prison for running a private torrent site 10 years ago

A 59-year-old living in the Greek city of Piraeus was recently sentenced by a local court to five years in prison, a €10,000 fine, and an additional €1,800 in legal costs. According to reports, the man was involved with a popular Greek BitTorrent site more than a decade ago. The website is long defunct and does not appear to have provided him with significant financial gain.

I’m of the opinion that basically no non-violent crimes should be punished with jail time. At the top of the list of things no one should ever go to jail for, torrenting movies has to be right up there.

London’s Largest Ancient Roman Fresco Makes for the ‘World’s Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle’

Han Li, MOLA’s Senior Building Material Specialist, spent three months reconfiguring the artwork with the help of a team of researchers. He explained that pieces had been jumbled together when the building was demolished, so figuring out how the fresco was originally composed took a lot of tinkering and patience. “It was like assembling the world’s most difficult jigsaw puzzle,” he says.

I’d love that job.

The No. 1 AI Jigsaw Puzzle Generator

JigsawCat is an innovative online platform that combines AI art generation with jigsaw puzzles. Our service allows you to create beautiful, unique puzzles using various AI art models, or challenge yourself with puzzles created by users from around the world. It’s a creative way to blend traditional puzzle experiences with modern technology.

You can practice up before you take a crack at any Roman ruins.

Better an Absence of Men Than Imperfect Men

Later, after the communist takeover in Cambodia, Pol Pot and his boys would line suspected class enemies up against a wall and speak French to them. If they reacted (indicating they understood and were therefore rich/educated) he’d have them shot.

I wonder if anyone in France would understand French at this point.

Amazon aims to reach ‘tens of millions’ more small town and rural customers with same-day delivery

Amazon is also using machine learning algorithms to predict which items will resonate with Prime members based on their unique needs in a given area. This includes stocking a mix of the most-popular and frequently purchased items and “products curated to fit local preferences like wild bird food in Dubuque, Iowa, travel backpacks in Findlay, Ohio, and after sun body butter in Sharptown, Maryland,” Amazon said.

I don’t shop online much. Is “body butter” used by cannibals?

Bezos vs Venice: Will the billionaire’s wedding sink in the Italian city of love?

One of the richest men on the planet is holding their home “hostage”, they say – to the Venetians, this isn’t so much of a destination wedding but an occupation. Residents and activists say that the nuptials – and the pure extravagance planned for the celebration – are set to turn their home into a “playground for the wealthy”.

I wonder how long it will be until Jeff takes his second gondola ride under Venice’s famous Bridge of Sighzable Divorce Settlements.

Well, that’s it for today, folks. Feel free to kvetch about the selection in the comments.

Moderately Cranky Tuesday Trash Day Roundup

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.

Tuesday Morning Link Roundabout. It Comes Out of the Sky and It Stands There

The internet seems to settle on a kind of unanimity after a while. It’s not a sentient being, but it gets opinions somehow. I’m not talking about chatbots here. A chatbot will find most any old thing you’re looking for, and because it’s programmed to be obsequious, it’ll tell you what you want to hear, at least eventually. You have to notice things on your own on the internet to really trust any observation.

I’ll give an example. There are certain bands from the 70s that the intertunnel likes. You see them everywhere. Internauts really like Queen, for instance. The Bee Gees. Various metal bands. Stuff like that. But I’ve noticed that the internet has big blind spots for various other combos. Here’s one: No one even mentions Yes on the interwebs, including this song, a sorta Stairway to Heaven to Middle Earth.

No, honestly, back in the seventies, this was probably as popular as any Queen deep cut. It was about seventeen minutes long or something, but they played it on the radio anyway. It’s like the Moody Blues for people who had more music lessons, or Deep Purple for guys with digital watches and photochromic coke-bottle glasses. The YorubaTube page says this video has 4.6 million views, but they must all be bots or Chinese people or something. If you go by their work habits, they’re more or less the same thing anyway.

The internet does love to rank things, however, and Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there is right up there in the inane lyric department, isn’t it? Its a close second to In the desert, you can remember your name, for there ain’t no one for to give you no pain, or Neil Diamond’s, “I am,” I said, to no one there, and no one heard at all, not even the chair.

So I’m here to give Yes a little boost. I’m mentioning them on the internet. That should help. And in their honor, I’m going to type today’s bookmark roundup on two computer keyboards simultaneously while wearing a cape. It’s the least I can do.  And I always try to do the least I can do.

Collapse of the Once High-Flying Solar Stocks: Another Bankruptcy among our 8 Imploded Solar Stocks

Sunnova Energy International, which booked huge losses every single year selling residential solar energy equipment and services – $1.61 billion in total losses since 2017 – said on Sunday that it and its subsidiaries Sunnova Energy Corporation and Sunnova Intermediate Holdings, LLC, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Texas. Its subsidiary Sunnova TEP Developer had already filed for bankruptcy on June 1. In the filing, it said that it would continue operating as “debtor in possession” while trying to sell some of its assets under court supervision.

I’m pretty sure I saw Debtor in Possession open up for Yes at the Odeon in 1973.

Tricks to write clearer

I’ve written a lot. And I’ve regretted most of it. So much of what I’ve said was too long and boring. Most of it was probably obvious to readers anyway. A lot of the rest was either redundant or implied. If anyone read it, they probably skimmed it a lot.

Here’s a hint. It’s: Tricks to Write More Clearly. You’re welcome.

Botnets account for 25% of all Internet traffic

In mid-2025, total bot activity, including good bots, bad bots, and botnets, exceeded human traffic on the Internet. As this trend continues, the Dead Internet Theory is likely to become a reality within the next decade.

I think I saw Dead Internet Theory open for Yes at the Palladium in 1991.

Disney to pay almost $439 million to take full control of streaming service Hulu

Hulu began in 2007 and quickly evolved into as a service backed by entertainment conglomerates who hoped to stave off the internet with an online platform for their own TV shows. Disney joined in 2009, planning to offer shows from ABC, ESPN and the Disney Channel. A decade later, Disney gained majority control of the business when it acquired 21st Century Fox.

“Evolved” is not the word I’d use to describe the timeline. “Went full retard” might fit the bill.

How Engineers Built the World’s Largest Spherical Structure: The Las Vegas MSG Sphere

Announced in February 2018, the MSG Sphere stands as a monumental achievement in civil engineering and architectural design. It is also the world’s largest spherical structure. The building was conceived as a revolutionary entertainment venue by the Madison Square Garden Company. The project aimed to create an unparalleled immersive experience for audiences.

If you fine folks were wondering what web scraped, AI slop looks like, read that article.

Rolls-Royce SMR selected to build small modular nuclear reactors

As part of the government’s modern Industrial Strategy to revive Britain’s industrial heartlands, the government is pledging over £2.5 billion for the overall small modular reactor programme in this Spending Review period – with this project potentially supporting up to 3,000 new skilled jobs and powering the equivalent of around 3 million homes with clean, secure homegrown energy.

If a British motor car company builds it, I guarantee it won’t start, and will leak oil.

Frederick Forsyth, Author of Thrillers Made Into Movies Like ‘The Day of the Jackal,’ Dies at 86

Frederick Forsyth, a British author of thrillers who frequently made the bestseller lists, sold 70 million books and saw his novels “The Day of the Jackal,” “The Odessa File” and “The Dogs of War,” among others, adapted into films, died on Monday at his home in Jordans, England. He was 86 years old. The New York Times confirmed Forsyth’s death, which his literary representative, Jonathan Lloyd, said “followed a short illness.”

We watched The Day of the Jackal last night. It shouldn’t be a good movie. Very dry. But it is.

Ireland’s data centres now consume more than a fifth of national electricity

New figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that data centre electricity use is rising far more rapidly than any other sector, with homes and other business customers increasing by only 3% in the same period.

Everyone had to suffer through curlicue lightbulbs and washing machines that take four hours to get through a cycle so chatbots would have enough power to write SEO articles about green energy.

IBM aims to build the world’s first large-scale, error-corrected quantum computer by 2028

Still, it’s unclear whether Starling will be able to solve practical problems. Some experts think that you need a billion error-corrected logical operations to execute any useful algorithm. Starling represents “an interesting stepping-stone regime,” says Wolfgang Pfaff, a physicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “But it’s unlikely that this will generate economic value.”

Unlikely to generate economic value is right in IBM’s wheelhouse.

Google Search is Dead

In many ways, it’s no more than it deserves. The company took one of the most useful tools of the Internet, twisted it into an ad platform and data harvesting machine, and did everything in its power to shut down competition in an attempt to force us to use it. They became greedy and, in doing so, destroyed their product, piece by piece.

You just figured that out, poindexter? You’re about ten years late to the party. 

Well, there’s the bookmarks roundup for this Tuesday. If you’re an owner of a lonely heart, feel free to leave a comment for some instant cyber-camaraderie.

Tuesday Medusan Trash Day Assortment

Well, it’s Tuesday. Time to clean out the bookmarks again, and maybe read some of them.

My wife and I went to the Planet Fatness gym this morning. You have to be careful what you look at in there. The patrons and staff are a hot mess, but I don’t mind that so much. Unfortunately, there are teevee screens on every surface, and the people who appear on cable shows and commercials are terrifying looking now. On top of that, the place has signs on every surface that declaim that it’s a “No Judgement Zone,” which makes my eye twitch every time. I was going to inform them that they spelled judgment wrong, but I didn’t want to sound judgmental.

On to the bookmarks!

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

Welcome to Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO). Formally, in AI circles, this is known as AI model collapse. In an AI model collapse, AI systems, which are trained on their own outputs, gradually lose accuracy, diversity, and reliability. This occurs because errors compound across successive model generations, leading to distorted data distributions and “irreversible defects” in performance. The final result? A Nature 2024 paper stated, “The model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality.”

All these analyses are written by rubes. Google results have been a ridiculous sewer of SEO-optimized drivel for at least 10 years, each inexpertly copied from other sources written by people who can’t write. AI just automated it. Nothing has changed, except all the words are spelled right by chatbots.

Why landing your first tech job is way harder than you expected

The numbers are eye-opening: hiring of new grads by the 15 largest tech companies has plummeted over 50% since 2019, according to a report released this month by the venture firm SignalFire, which found that before the pandemic, graduates comprised 15% of Big Tech hires, a figure that has dropped to just 7%.

This has nothing to do with the industry. The “human resources” industry has been entirely captured by indolent women who can’t make up their mind to hire anyone, and whose only amusement in life is saying no to men. Tinder for personnel is the new normal.

Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

About a month ago, Duolingo decided that it would gradually fire all contractors and instead, use AI in a bid to become an AI-first company. Beyond firing contractors, Duolingo planned to make AI a requirement for every aspect of its business. Now Luis von Ahn is trying to do damage control, and failing.

Duolingo is a lousy, childish, ineffective way to attempt to learn a foreign language. How they generate the slop is irrelevant. Try Pimsleur. You know; like an adult would.

Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

Denmark will raise its retirement age to 70 by 2040, the highest in Europe, after a controversial vote in parliament. The increase in retirement age was approved in the country’s legislature, with 81 votes in favour and 21 against.

People who have never worked a day in their lives vote to make people work every day of their lives.

Tariffs in American History

When Alexander Hamilton became the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, he immediately began to prepare a schedule of tariffs, along with excise taxes on such commodities as alcohol and tobacco. The Constitution forbids taxing the exports of any state, and so American tariffs have always been laid only on imports. Collectors were named for each port, and these were considered plum jobs because the collector got to keep the money, earning interest on it, until it was forwarded to the federal government a few times a year. Hamilton’s tariffs, along with the refunding of the national debt and the establishment of a central bank, transformed the American financial situation. By the end of the 1790s, the U.S. had the best credit rating in Europe, its bonds selling over par. By 1800, federal revenues, a mere $3.7 million in 1792, had nearly tripled to $10.8 million. About 90 percent of that revenue came from tariffs—a ratio that wouldn’t change much, except during the Civil War, for more than a century.

In a way, there were only two really important figures in America’s founding: Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. They had diametrically opposed worldviews. More or less, Hamilton’s ideas won out. But the most important figure in world history to date, not just American history, sat at the head of the table and told both of them to STFU from time to time, and they did. Old Muttonhead sure was something.

Google Shared My Phone Number!

A Google search that surfaced Three Rings CIC’s “Google Business Profile” now featured… my personal mobile number. And a convenient “Call” button that connects you directly to it. Some years ago, I provided my phone number to Google as part of an identity verification process, but didn’t consent to it being shared publicly. And, indeed, they didn’t share it publicly, until – seemingly at random – they started doing so, presumably within the last few weeks.

Don’t be evil — when anyone’s looking.

That time when the CIA made a Star Wars fansite

Way, way more information at the link. Remember all those movies where the CIA is filled with hypercompetent computer soopergeniuses and ninja-like assassins? Yeah, they’re movies.

‘The Great Unread’ Goethe’s Faustian life

Wilson frames Goethe’s life through the prism of his greatest work, his “life-masterpiece”: the dramatic poem Faust. It is the story of a sixteenth-century mage and his blood pact with demonic powers, which enables a life lived in the constant pursuit of knowledge, power, and explosive fun. Goethe began it in his twenties when he was still a law student; he finished it shortly before his death at the age of eighty-two. It is a unique phenomenon in world literature––the truest species of magnum opus, made by the author from the living stuff of his life just as he sought to make his life into a work of art.

Goethe can be heavy sledding for today’s iPhone intellects. You could always watch The Devil and Daniel Webster to get the drift. Or maybe if that’s too challenging, you could just watch The Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Fantasia again. Or if that’s too much work, you could get a coloring book or something. Make sure you stay between the lines.

The Old, Old, Very Old Man Thomas Parr and the Longevity Trade

According to poet John Taylor’s 1635 verse biography of The Old, Old, Very Old Man, Parr was raised in the Shropshire village of Winnington. Born in 1483, the son of a tenant farmer, he worked as a servant until he inherited his father’s role in his mid-thirties. Something of a late developer in his personal life, he married for the first time at 80, and for the second at 122; he also did public penance at 105, when he “frailly, foully, fell into a Crime / Which richer, poorer, older men, and younger” were prone: he committed adultery.

He died when he was 152? I’m reminded of a gibe: He was so old he had God’s phone number.

AI cheating surge pushes schools into chaos

The proliferation of AI-assisted schoolwork is worrying academic leaders. 66% think generative AI will cut into students’ attention spans, according to a survey of university presidents, chancellors, deans and more from the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) and Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center.

I went to school a long time ago. It was plenty chaotic long before spellcheck arrived, never mind Chad. Chicken Littles just like characterizing any change as “chaos.”

Have a great Tuesday, everybody!

Tuesday Tidy Up

It’s Tuesday. Time to clean out last week’s browser bookmarks, and get ready to not get around to reading this week’s browser bookmarks.

ORIGINALITY IN THE AGE OF AI

I think this will place an upwards pressure on originality and novelty. Now that both the technical barrier to entry and the cost of producing unoriginal work is so low, society will start to value original ideas more than ever–doubly so if we reduce the rewards of the journey towards becoming original and skilled. If the world becomes flooded with less original, less technical users of AI, the value of technical competence and originality will skyrocket.

You’d think wrong. Original thinkers will give up and do something else. Have you seen the best seller list lately?

FinTech Company Klarna Fires 700 in AI Shift, Now Desperate to Hire Humans After $40B Loss

Siemiatkowski had publicly celebrated AI’s ability to handle tasks typically managed by humans. However, that optimism has not aged well. After the AI-driven revolution, Klarna went through a series of operational and reputational issues. Complaints from customers skyrocketed as users complained about robotic and frequently unresponsive interactions with AI interfaces, particularly in customer support. Although automation helped cut short-term costs, it seems to have impacted user satisfaction and loyalty, two major factors for any consumer-facing company.

In the real world, a loan shark that loses money by the billion would end up behind a dumpster with a .38 caliber headache. On the internet, he’s a captain of industry.

Japan’s 30-Year and 40-Year Bonds Crater, Yields Spike, Huge Mess Coming Home to Roost. Yen Carry Trade at Risk

Japan, which now has substantially more inflation than the US – 3.6% overall CPI and 3.2% core CPI – is watching in astonishment as its very-long-term bond yields spike in a dramatic manner, while the Bank of Japan has accelerated QT this year, which it started in mid-2024.

Japan should let the owner and the staff of the tool store we featured yesterday run the government. And no, I’m not joshing one iota.

OpenAI Wins Libel Lawsuit Brought by Gun Rights Activist Over Hallucinated Embezzlement Claims

In this specific interaction, ChatGPT warned Riehl that it could not access the internet or access the link to the Ferguson complaint that Riehl provided to it, and that it did not have information about the period of time in which the complaint was filed, which was after its “knowledge cutoff date.” Before Riehl provided the link to the complaint, ChatGPT accurately summarized the Ferguson complaint based on text Riehl inputted. After Riehl provided the link, and after ChatGPT initially warned that it could not access the link, ChatGPT provided a completely different and inaccurate summary.

You know, if ChatGPT says it can’t access the internet, the guy is using the free service they offer, instead of paying $20/month for better answers. On top of that, he kept on asking the same question, over and over, until he got the wrong answer. Chad is like that. Chad is like the internet. You have to know more than the internet does to pick any useful information out of the dross.

Spain struck by phone and internet blackout – just four weeks after nationwide electricity outage

The problem apparently came from a major glitch in Telefónica’s system, which is the operator for most of Spain’s mobile networks. The multinational is the second largest company in Spain, and runs telecom operations in 18 countries, making it one of the largest telephone operators and mobile network providers in the world. The telecom giant reportedly ran a network update that didn’t go to plan, and ended up causing a country-wide blackout for millions of Spanish residents.

Ah, cowboy coding strikes again. Or should I say, caballero coding?

Mother convicted of kidnapping and selling daughter, six, in case that has outraged South Africa

A photograph of Joshlin smiling and with her hair tied in pigtails was broadcast by news stations across South Africa, as police launched a nationwide hunt. Smith said she had left Joshlin with her boyfriend on the day she disappeared, but the case took a shocking twist when Smith was arrested. A woman gave evidence during the trial that Smith had told her she and the two men had sold Joshlin for about £750 to a traditional healer who wanted the child for her body parts.

Kinda buried the lede in the headline, there. South Africa sounds delightful. I can’t imagine why anyone would ever leave.

How to check if your boss is monitoring your every keystroke

Using an employer-issued computer comes with its own specific set of privacy risks. The struggle to avoid even accidentally clicking on NSFW material as we go about our busy office lives is, for many, all too familiar. And yet, the true threat often lurks undetected behind the scenes: keyloggers recording your every keystroke and sending them away for upper management review.

I’m self-employed, so I’m fairly certain that since I’m barely paying attention to what I’m currently doing, I’m also barely paying attention to what I was doing.

SEC SIM-swapper who Googled ‘signs that the FBI is after you’ put behind bars

The 26-year-old pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud after he and others took over the SEC’s X account in January 2024. The crew used the compromised account to post a message that purported to come from then-SEC chair Gary Gensler and falsely announced that the government had approved Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Well, for one, handcuffs are a dead giveaway sign that the FBI is after you. Man, bitcoins are the chicken and the egg conundrum for this century. Does buying them make you silly, or does being silly make you buy them?

An In-Room Mosquito Tracking Device That Lets You Easily Kill Them

The Iris, by tech startup Bzigo, sits on a tabletop and scans your room with an infrared sensor. When its AI-based vision algorithms detect mosquito-like movements (as opposed to moths or other bugs), it fires a laser to mark the mosquito’s location, like a sniper’s spotter. It’s then up to you to swat the thing, which should be easy with the target “painted.”

Just beef up the laser, and throw away the flyswatter. At any rate, it’s $200, so I’ll probably keep using my existing mosquito device: my dermis.

Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law

Switzerland is considering amending its surveillance law, with experts warning against the risk to secure encryption and online anonymity in the country. Specifically, the amendment could require all VPN services, messaging apps, and social networks to identify and retain user data – an obligation that is now limited to mobile networks and internet service providers.

And go where, exactly? Not to worry. Whoever proposed this law will no doubt get pimp-slapped shortly. 

Well, that’s it for this Tuesday. Weigh in on these weighty topics in the comments, if you like.

Tuesday Trash Day Chores

As usual, the bookmarks folder is burgeoning. Bursting. Busting…

Sorry, I’m bloviating. But I feel I must keep the intertunnel tidy. If I don’t pick up after myself, the oncoming train of ill-informed opinions and unfunny memes might derail on the awful offal I keep meaning to read. So here goes:

Match to lay off 13% of staff

Match also said first-quarter revenue declined 3% to $831.2 million from a year earlier due to a 5% drop in the number of users who paid for a service or subscription. Net profit declined 4.6% year-on-year to $117.6 million.

Oh, well. I guess the only actual woman featured on their dating app finally got married.

China Makes High-Speed Laser Links in Orbit

Laser Starcom, a commercial aerospace firm established in Beijing in 2020, announced in March that it had achieved a 400-gigabit-per-second communications link between satellites. Its two satellites, Guangchuan 01 and 02, launched into low Earth orbit (LEO) in November last year on a commercial Zhuque-2 rocket developed by the Beijing-based Landspace company. The pair of Guangchuan spacecraft completed their optical transmission test on 18 March, according to a Laser Starcom statement, across a separation between satellites of 640 kilometers.

Hmm. They started the company five years ago and already have two satellites in orbit shooting data back and forth using lasers. In the US, they’d still be having meetings on what state to incorporate in, and whether or not to put a man in a dress on their Instagram page.

Eldercare robot helps people sit and stand, and catches them if they fall

E-BAR acts as a set of robotic handlebars that follows a person from behind. A user can walk independently or lean on the robot’s arms for support. The robot can support the person’s full weight, lifting them from sitting to standing and vice versa along a natural trajectory. And the arms of the robot can them by rapidly inflating side airbags if they begin to fall.

One more thing to trip on, looks like.

Research: Gen AI Makes People More Productive—and Less Motivated

Generative AI (gen AI) has revolutionized workplaces, allowing professionals to produce high-quality work in less time. Whether it’s drafting a performance review, brainstorming ideas, or crafting a marketing email, humans collaborating with gen AI achieve results that are both more efficient and often superior in quality. However, our research reveals a hidden trade-off: While gen AI collaboration boosts immediate task performance, it can undermine workers’ intrinsic motivation and increase feelings of boredom when they turn to tasks in which they don’t have this technological assistance.

It’s amusing that performance reviews, brainstorming, or writing a marketing email is considered any kind of top-level work, especially when a glorified calculator can do the work better than you can. You’re not bored. You’re kinda useless.

Suzy Weiss: Bill Belichick’s Very, Very Young Girlfriend

What’s upsetting here, I think, isn’t that Belichick was born before there was color TV or that his girlfriend can’t yet rent a car without a surcharge. It’s that Belichick won six Super Bowls, but now seems feeble. It’s unclear how much control he has over the situation—and he’s Bill freaking Belichick; he ran a football team like the Navy SEALS. Meanwhile, Hudson couldn’t win Miss Maine USA (she got first runner-up) but is treating everyone around her like she’s the big boss. She’s confident, but shouldn’t be; he’s insecure but shouldn’t be. It’s off-putting and needles our own fears around whether we’ve been the victim or the villain in relationships.

Oldie, but a goodie:

Chegg to lay off 22% of workforce as AI tools shake up edtech industry

Chegg said Monday it would lay off about 22% of its workforce, or 248 employees, to cut costs and streamline its operations as students increasingly turn to AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT over traditional edtech platforms. The company, an online education firm that offers textbook rentals, homework help and tutoring, has been grappling with a decline in web traffic for months and warned that the trend would likely worsen before improving.

So students are cheating using cheaper AI instead of Chegg services. Who says our children isn’t learning?

China Just Made the World’s Fastest Transistor and It Is Not Made of Silicon

With a slender sheet of lab-grown bismuth and an architecture unlike anything inside today’s silicon chips, they’ve built what they call the world’s fastest and most efficient transistor. Not only does it outperform the best processors made by Intel and TSMC, but it also uses less energy doing so. And most important of all, there’s no trace of silicon involved.

How people who eat lunch with two miniature pool cues accomplish anything technical is a mystery to me.

Universe Set to Decay 10^22 Times Sooner Than Previously Estimated

In a surprising revision to our understanding of cosmic longevity, Dutch scientists have discovered that the universe will decay much faster than previously thought, though still on an almost incomprehensible timescale. Their innovative calculations show the final stellar remnants will persist for about 1078 years—a dramatic reduction from earlier estimates of 101100 years. This finding expands the concept of Hawking radiation beyond black holes to all matter in the universe, setting a fundamental limit on how long anything can exist.

We went from The Temptations to Vanilla Ice in twenty years. Those Dutch scientists are still way too optimistic about the timetable for the end of the universe.

My solution to Trump’s tariffs: I’m starting a U.S. factory to save my small business

So, what does it really take to produce here in the USA, and can it be cost-effective? Well, I found something interesting about China’s factories. Most of them, like my own overseas supplier, are small satellite shops with just enough machines to mold the orders they receive. Small, efficient, low overhead, high output, and mostly rudimentary tech. iPhones are a different story, but for the silicone, rubber, and plastic items that fill our shelves, the machinery is super simple to operate. Very automated, very efficient, and low-cost—now this I can do. Decision made. Plan in action. My new manufacturing startup and its facility (to be located in Riverside County, California) will be copying this Chinese model—essentially replacing the cost, MOQs, and customer experience of working with overseas factories and instead doing it all right here in the USA, with additional benefits unavailable for companies using overseas suppliers.

I’ve been assured by the media that this is impossible, so I’ll file it under Science Fiction.

Google updating its ‘G’ icon for the first time in 10 years

On September 1, 2015, Google significantly updated its logo (‘Google’) to a modern typeface called Product Sans. As part of that, the ‘G’ icon changed from the lowercase white ‘g’ on a blue background to the circular design we’ve now had for the past 10 years. Google is now updating the icon so that there are no longer four solid color sections. Instead, red bleeds into yellow, yellow into green, and green into blue. It looks more vibrant and colorful. This modernization feels inline with the Gemini gradient, while AI Mode in Search uses something similar for a shortcut.

Once your business is worth, say, a trillion dollars or so, maybe you should stop projecting the image of children in daycare.

OK, that’s it for this Tuesday. Other than that, Let’s Party.

Tuesday Tidy Up

Well, it’s Tuesday. Tuesday is just Monday’s hangover. Everything you tried to ingest and process to start the week makes a re-appearance in a less attractive form. But we must soldier on. Let’s clean up the pixel pavement pizzas in our browser bookmarks and try to get ready for Wednesday, which is just Tuesday’s stepchild.

What we lose when phones take away boredom and interstitial time

Yet the smartphone’s triumph over boredom might prove a Pyrrhic victory. As Jonathan Haidt showed in The Anxious Generation, the rapid adoption of smartphones and social media, particularly by the young, led to many negative unintended consequences such as increased rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and self-harm. So, too, our efforts to vanquish boredom have had deleterious impacts such as on our ability to let our minds wander, to cultivate patience, and to experience anticipation.

Boredom? Yes, yes of course. But it’s frustration that causes people to make profound changes. Boredom has always led to useless amusements.

NY Fed’s “Multivariate Core Trend” Inflation Measure Hits 3.0%, Worst in Over a Year, Predicts Acceleration of PCE Price Index

So now MCT, which attempts to show “persistence” of inflation, is predicting a substantial re-acceleration of inflation – the “persistence” part – driven largely by non-housing services and to a small extent by core goods. So housing cost inflation, as measured by rents, is no longer the driver of this inflation; it’s non-housing services and to a small extent, core goods.

Inflation is going down so let’s count it a different way.

Collections: Why Archers Didn’t Volley Fire

Archers didn’t engage in coordinated all-at-once shooting (called ‘volley fire’), they did not shoot in volleys because there wouldn’t be any point to do so. Indeed, part of the reason there was such confusion over what a general is supposed to shout instead of ‘fire!’ is that historical tactical manuals don’t generally have commands for coordinated bow shooting because armies didn’t do coordinated bow shooting. Instead, archers generated a ‘hail’ or ‘rain’ (those are the typical metaphors) of arrows as each archer shot in their own best time.

If I’m looking for historical research, about the last place I’d look these days would be a university or a news outlet. The internet has legions of geeks who do a better job.

A 1903 Proposal to Preserve the Dead in Glass Cubes

Patented as a “Method of Preserving the Dead,” Karwowski provided diagrams and directions “whereby a corpse may be hermetically incased within a block of transparent glass” and thus “maintained for an indefinite period in a perfect and lifelike condition.” First the corpse would be drenched with “sodium silicate or water-glass,” and then, once dried, covered with “molten glass.”

The appeal of this method, ahem, remains to be seen.

Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer

Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by the computer with a handy alternative: Wife – a low-tech energy-saving device. Drop a pile of handwritten notes on Wife and you get back a finished manuscript, edited while it was typed. What computer can do that? Wife meets all of Berry’s uncompromising standards for techno-logical innovation: she’s cheap, repairable near home, and good for the family structure. Best of all, Wife is politically correct because she breaks a writer’s “direct dependence on strip-mined
coal.”

I pasted a short blogpost of mine into Chad AI and didn’t tell it who wrote it, and asked it to look for similar works. It compared it to a half-dozen writers, all either Nobel laureates or Pulitzer winners or similarly exalted so and sos. One was Robert Frost. So far, so good. Another was Wendell Berry. I closed the browser.

Software update makes HDR content “unwatchable” on Roku TVs

Complaints started surfacing on Roku’s community forum a week ago. On May 1, a company representative posted that Roku was “investigating the Disney Plus HDR content that was washed out after the recent update.” However, based on user feedback, it seems that HDR on additional Roku apps, including Apple TV+ and Netflix, are also affected. Roku’s representative has been asking users to share their experiences so that Roku can dig deeper into the problem.

Well, television was unwatchable anyway. I’m immune to further unwatchability. I can’t not watch it any harder.

Auburn University’s help desk is still answering the public’s calls 70 years on

The desk looks different today than it did seventy years ago. For starters, it’s in an expensive, modern-looking student center. The old Foy Hall still exists, and now houses a few small student-engagement offices; but it’s got low ceilings and could use an update. There used to be stacks of books at the desk—encyclopedias and dictionaries, reference texts, phone books, the Farmers’ Almanac, the Guinness Book of World Records, and Emily Post’s Etiquette—but they’ve been replaced by three desktop iMacs, the really nice ones, whose backs are blue and orange, like the school’s colors.

I’ve seen that movie. It was displayed perfectly clearly on my screen, by the way:

Speaking of life imitating art, here’s perhaps the greatest example ever:

Sometimes I wonder what could have been accomplished if all the money and time and effort expended on trying to get famous on social media was channeled into something more productive. Then I got a headache and stopped wondering.

The next chapter: Moving from Skype to Microsoft Teams 

With Teams, users have access to many of the same core features they use in Skype, such as one-on-one calls and group calls, messaging, and file sharing. Additionally, Teams offers enhanced features like hosting meetings, managing calendars, and building and joining communities for free.

My mother loved Skype. She tried to sign on to it over and over to see her grandchildren, and almost always failed. She’d mis-type her login, or give out a malformed Skype address to her friends. Then she’d sign up for it all over again with tiny changes in her logins each time. If someone tried to contact her, she could never figure out which set of credentials went with what. She finally tearfully admitted all this to me, and asked me to fix it. I spent a month trying to get Microsoft to meld all her accounts together. Microsoft said sure, just don’t sign up for any more accounts for 30 days, and they’ll all be under one login. Her grand-daughter-in-law signed her up for another Skype account 29 days later. Mom said it was OK, because GDIL was “good with computers.” I won’t miss Skype.

I Cooked Meat by Launching It To Mach 3

Ever wonder why the Houthis can chase aircraft carriers out of the Red Sea? If YouTube geeks can make their own hibachi rockets, I imagine there are Robert al Abdullah Goddards everywhere at this point. Plan accordingly.

Have a great Wednesday, people. Tuesday? We won’t mention it again.