So why is software so terrible? Why do high-end gaming PCs struggle to browse the web at 60 frames per second? Why does a simple calculator need a splash screen? Why does your phone’s battery still die so quickly? And why does each update make the problem worse?And why do we all use huge frameworks that no one understands? Why do our projects take minutes to compile? Why do we have to restart our language servers every twenty minutes? And why does everyone think this is fine? We made it terrible.

Desperately looking for the country of origin I see ‘Netherlands’. The tomatoes look as desperate as I do. They traveled a long way, from the Netherlands to a Croatian island and I am sure the producers spent a lot of effort to grow them, but they look pale and boring, worn out like I do after travelling all day. The smell is horrible.

There is no “company success” unless civilization itself continues to progress.

The five-minute video shows a conversation between a person identified as Dr. Stacy De-Lin, Planned Parenthood New York City Medical Director for Abortion Services, and an undercover reporter with the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). During their conversation, De-Lin seems to acknowledge that Planned Parenthood would sell the livers of aborted babies.

Higher prices today can mean greater efforts at price discrimination, including over time.  That too can mean lower prices (compared to the counterfactual) at later points in time, or sometimes today as well.

Why does this matter? On one level, it’s an indicator of the unsustainability of many generative AI applications. Even with $150m in funding — which is a decent amount of capital — Character.ai likely couldn’t keep the lights on for very long, thus necessitating its absorption by a larger company. 

some wild stats in judge’s ruling: Google’s internal numbers showed that they’d lose up to 80% of searches on Apple devices, a revenue hit of $30B, if they surrendered default search position

The analysis sheds light on a legal and common way deep-pocketed groups lobby lawmakers in the state of California that is home to Hollywood, musical powerhouses, renowned theme parks and high-grossing sports teams. While many lawmakers accept invites to such events as a way to build relationships with important constituents or highlight major players in their districts, the gifts also raise ethics questions about the privileges enjoyed by public servants.

Hamtramck’s first woman mayor told our journalist she is “absolutely positive” she was ballot harvested out of office. Karen Majewski lost her election bid in 2021 after serving the city of Hamtramck for 18 years, first as a city council president, and then 16 years as mayor. A true Hamtramck insider, Majewski shepherded her city through major ethnic, racial, and religious shifts only to see the town’s progressive open door policy result in her ouster.

A Message to X Users

This Is How Much It Costs to Bring the Michelin Guide to Houston

These are the main building blocks of how I built a scraping pipeline forpricewatcher in order to keep track of how supermarkets change their prices.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is one of my favorite datasets because it has anything and everything. If it could conceivably exist on a map, it probably exists in OpenStreetMap. Whether it’s military bases, lakes, hedges, or power lines, it can all be mapped in OSM. But the scope of this data can be daunting. The entire planet file takes up a whopping 1,931 GB uncompressed.¹ As such, using this data can require a lot of RAM and a lot of time. Luckily, there are many open source tools freely available to help make sense of this large dataset. In my experience creating projects with OSM, I’ve used many of these tools to create interesting visualizations and to answer questions about the world we live in.

Often, the issue was not with the copier but with unintentionally destructive behavior by the users.  That, too, was considered fixable.  Orr declares that the technicians’

Now let’s normalize this by comparing $RIVN and $LCID to $TSLA when they had similar Revenue back in the day*:

They will use those drones to create pop-up blockades (air/land/sea) for commercial traffic stretching hundreds—thousands of miles.

During a fireside chat yesterday, SpaceX President & COO Gwynne Shotwell confirmed that Starlink can provide everybody in rural and semi-rural U.S. with high-speed broadband internet connectivity for a very small fraction of the price of laying down a fiber optic cable.

Signs of the approaching storm were already visible the day after the murders, when Britain’s new Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visited Southport to lay the obligatory wreath and was met by vocal hostility from locals. This time the public wasn’t willing to go along with the British state’s choreographed rites of candlelit vigils and the hollow “anti-hate” messaging from state-sponsored community leaders mechanically deployed in the aftermath of now-increasingly frequent atrocities.

Given that the problems are, on some level, built into the structure of the NPS, “I think it needs a complete radical reform,” says Jarvis, the former director. The National Park Service Centennial Act from 2015 lays some groundwork to level the playing field with concessionaires, he says: It gives the agency broad authority to award new contracts without specifying how they should be structured, unlike earlier laws. Almost a decade later, the park service is still working on regulations to implement the law. But in theory, it could take greater control of its own assets and shift the balance of power back to the land it’s bound to protect. For change like that to happen, there needs to be pressure from political leadership, Jarvis says—and therefore, ultimately, from the American people. After all, the parks are supposed to be for them, and Jarvis says, “They should be pissed off.”

NASA is planning to significantly delay the launch of the Crew 9 mission to the International Space Station due to ongoing concerns about the Starliner spacecraft currently attached to the station.

Pilot labor leaders from around the world have sent Airbus CEO @GuillaumeFaury a letter that makes clear: technology alone can never replace the indispensable role of two pilots on the flight deck.

I would argue that ultimately, the same will be true for Google. What will eventually end the reign of Google Search isn’t the rise of Bing or some other would-be competitor in internet search, it’s going to be something tangential that makes internet search just matter less. Maybe it has something to do with AI (though I’d be skeptical that something like SearchGPT is the, um, answer). Or perhaps it’s something no one is really thinking about right now. I don’t know. I’m just pretty certain that this case will have little to do with that end.

The third bomb’s plutonium core went on to have a history of its own. After the surrender it was sent to Los Alamos for use in experiments to determine how much material was needed to produce a critical mass under different circumstances. On August 21, 1945, less than a week after Japan notified the US that it would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, physicist Harry Daghlian was performing an experiment when he accidentally dropped a piece of “tamper” material, used to reflect neutrons back into the core, and triggered a critical mass. Daghlian used his bare hands to pull the mass apart to stop the chain reaction, and absorbed a fatal dose of radiation. He died three weeks later. A military security guard in the room with him, Private Robert Hemmerly, was also irradiated but survived, only to die of cancer 33 years later.

Confused? That’s because these filings from Harris are irregular. If Kamala Harris had used her own candidate ID number, like every other candidate in modern history, this wouldn’t have been so complicated, but then it would have been difficult to make the case that she’s entitled to Biden’s war chest. Undoubtedly, these filings are trying to circumvent those pesky campaign finance laws.

Another example of how US competitiveness, security, and resilience is becoming completely reliant on out of the box thinking and “moonshots” (SpaceX, Anduril, OpenAI, MCCPDC, etc.) by rogue billionaires.

Ortberg’s long list of things to do reflects a failure of leadership by Calhoun.

“According to Safety and Mission Assurance officials at NASA and DCMA officials at Michoud, Boeing’s quality control issues are largely caused by its workforce having insufficient aerospace production experience.”

…Weiss just made the case against the Justice Department and himself in protecting Hunter Biden from the most damaging charges of being an unregistered foreign agent. The latest filing includes another presumptive FARA violation involving Romanians and influencing U.S. policy.

Additional footage was just released of abortion leaders at Planned Parenthood giggling about MUTILATING fetal bodies to cover up criminal LATE-TERM abortions.

and to this very moment we have heard no explanation from Biden as to why he withdrew, and not a single “journalist” has had the cajones to ask Biden, Harris, Obama, Pelosi, Schumer or Jeffries a SINGLE QUESTION about all of this. This is the biggest political story of any of our lifetimes, and the major media is wholly and utterly incurious about it.

The evidence I can find does show that Frankfurt has the highest crime rate in Germany, although perhaps much of that standing comes from the presence of the financial district and the city being such a transport and convention hub, rather than from the immigrants per se. In any case, if you wish to understand the popularity of AfD — which now seems to be Germany’s #2 political party — I suggest you take a walk around Frankfurt.  I didn’t even go near the train station.

Notes on voting machines.

The U.S. Army has a 25% recruitment deficit. Ask yourself why.

“According to a 2023 University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) report, beef production can be climate-neutral or even better if management practices are optimized to minimize emissions and maximize abilities to store carbon.

Harris’s campaign Web site, meanwhile, does not even have a policy section, or an articulation of beliefs. There’s just a button to donate, some merch and yard signs, and a biography that describes her as “the daughter of parents who brought her to civil rights marches in a stroller.”

During the USS Eisenhower carrier strike group’s twice-extended nine-month deployment to the Red Sea, U.S. forces fired over 135 Tomahawk land attack missiles, weapons that cost upwards of $2 million apiece, at Houthi targets in Yemen. The ships also launched 155 standard missiles of various kinds, which cost between $2 million and $4 million per missile, to destroy the drones.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has quietly hired a celebrity photographer — who boasts Mark Zuckerberg, George W. Bush and Barack Obama as previous clients — to burnish his man-about-the-state image. Charles Ommanney, a former photojournalist and war photographer who traveled with Newsom to China last fall as a freelancer, was on hand Thursday to capture Newsom in aviator sunglasses, jeans and work gloves, picking up detritus left over from a recently-cleared homeless encampment in Los Angeles County. Late last month, he photographed the governor surveying the damage of the Borel Fire in Kern County.

On July 22, POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account. Over the course of the past few weeks, the person — who used an AOL email account and identified themselves only as “Robert” — relayed what appeared to be internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official. A research dossier the campaign had apparently done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, which was dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them and granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.

Blunt truth telling by Prof. Decosimo. People may avert their gaze, pretend not to know, change the subject, but it does not change the reality.

Forest Service orders Arrowhead bottled water company to shut down California pipeline

AI systems, when trained on historical data, can inherit and amplify human biases, particularly from flawed past hiring practices. This can result in the unfair exclusion of candidates based on irrelevant factors, undermining the potential of otherwise qualified individuals. Combining AI with human oversight can ensure balanced and just decision-making.

The Biden-Harris Admin also launched a novel new IRS crackdown on tips, getting the IRS inside the door at bars & restaurants to directly monitor tips at the cash register, “at point-of-sale.” She also backed the $1.7T spending legislation expecting taxpayers to report their $600 phone app transactions to the IRS without she and the Senate reading the bill (later dropped as untenable). Kamala Harris, who now claims to be against taxing tips, was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which expanded the IRS so it could go after people not paying taxes on tips.