Machine learning’s crumbling foundations. Doing ‘data science’ with bad data.

ASML is the most important company you’ve never heard of.

You’ll hear a lot of utilitarian nonsense about $2.2 trillion etc. but that’s just the price tag you see. What you don’t see, as Harry Hazlitt reminds us, is where the real costs are — the lost opportunities, the Afghan and American lives spent, the bureaucracy empowered, the capital diverted from productive work — that come with prosecuting endless war for impossible democracy.Before Afghanistan was there a Dept. of Homeland Security? The Patriot Act? The Military Commissions Act? A Global War on Terror?Are those part of that $2.2 trillion? No. They aren’t. And yet we paid them anyway.

Censored COVID commentary.

Hospitals and Insurers Didn’t Want You to See These Prices. Here’s Why.

I Was There: When the DC-8 Went Supersonic

Meet the Real-Life Inspiration Behind “Mr. Toad”

More than anything, the Beetle demonstrated the tremendous advances robotic manipulators made in practical applications. This directly lead to the invention of RUM in 1960 (Remote Underwater Manipulator), which could crawl along the ocean bed 20,000 feet from the surface. The lessons learned in testing and improving Beetle and RUM lead to their prized relative in 1964: the Deep Sea Vehicle (DSV) Alvin. Among Alvin’s stunning exploits…being the first manned sub to explore the Titanic in 1986.

Terms of Service, didn’t read.

Outgoing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo marked his final day in office Monday by handing out four sentence commutations and one pardon. He also made a parole board referral for a 76-year-old man over his role in the deadly 1981 Brink’s armored car robbery. David Gilbert, a Weather Underground member who was convicted of three counts of second-degree murder and four counts of first-degree robbery for his role in the crime that resulted in the deaths of Nyack police Sgt. Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly Brown as well as Brink’s guard Peter Paige. He was serving a sentence of 75 years to life in prison with no possibility of parole until 2056. Gilbert’s son, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, had lobbied Cuomo for his release

The real reason you’re not more productive at work? It’s not boredom—it’s bad UX Surprise! Enterprise software still stinks.

Silicon Valley’s driverless car dream is on the road to disaster

Open-Source Insulin: Biohackers Aiming For Distributed Production

Is Hacker News a Good Predictor of Future Tech Trends?

California’s leaders are turning the state into a third world nation complete with shantytowns. Somewhere around half of all fires in Los Angeles and the Bay Area are in tent cities and shantytowns euphemistically referred to as “homeless encampments.” In them, the strong are allowed to prey upon the weak. Many of the fires are started deliberately as revenge and retaliation for violence and crime.

The answer, it turned out, is Googlespeak™.

Nike’s End of Men: Why Nike no longer wants us to Be Like Mike

The issue of safeguarding against exploitation also applies for surrogacy, which is why most surrogacy agencies recommend that a surrogate limit the number of her pregnancies to no more than four times. Yet, according to Tober’s study, many fertility doctors and surrogates ignore these recommendations and push the limits of their bodies for financial gain. Some countries have enacted policies to counter that ability. In 2015, India, which used to have a thriving international surrogacy program, placed restrictions on the program because of popular protests led by women’s rights activists who pointed out that these programs were putting poor, uneducated women at risk of exploitation by the rich. Many of these women lived in substandard housing that were essentially foreign baby mills. Now surrogacy is only available to Indian couples or single people who need a surrogate to carry a baby.

Torrance police find 300 unopened recall ballots, with gun, drugs and mail, in sleeping man’s car

Why Innovation Heroes are a Sign of a Dysfunctional Organization

Surveillance of the Internet Backbone

Ukrainian historians say that hundreds of thousands of people were killed during Joseph Stalin’s violent repression of the 1930s, with other mass graves found in Odessa and elsewhere in Ukraine.

Increasing productivity with significant price deflation creates a depressing environment. Farmers have to invest in new methods and equipment just to stay even. Their debts are in dollars, not bushels of wheat, meaning it can be increasingly difficult to pay the bills. This impact is doubly true for tenant farmers (who skew young) that rent instead of own land. William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” and the Green Corn Rebellion are just two examples of how farm product price deflation leads to unrest and radicalism in rural areas. Once politicians could afford to pay off farmers with massive subsidy programs, they did.

Our work collectively shows that the confluence of vehicle electrification, vehicle automation and vehicle sharing may not – contrary to existing discourse – produce a favorable energy outcome.

China’s cyberspace watchdog, the CAC, just published a long (and unprecedented) set of draft regulations for recommendation algorithms. The short version: they will be tightly controlled. Key points below.

It was well known that the Taliban would come back. Afghanistan never had a functioning government and we should have prepared for the inevitable.

The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

Nvidia charges $10k for their datacenter GPUs, and they fly off the shelves. If Samsung or Intel were manufacturing, these would not be as powerful or efficient. Nvidia’s architecture prowess allows the portability of software and ease of use. It enables the new use cases for GPUs. Most power usage on GPUs is still burned on data movement and computation. Nvidia GPUs are enabled by TSMC’s prowess in leading edge silicon and advanced packaging.

How can you improve a process when you don’t know what the right process is?

Unhappy with her breast implant surgery, she wrote negative reviews. Now she owes the surgeon $30K

Scanning QR Codes in Restaurants: Why A Meal May Cost You Your Privacy

Missile Base for Sale