Remember all those Reddit postings and news items claiming that we've had the hottest summer on record? Yeah, that's not really true. Taking the broader view, there's no steady trend since 1899. Paper here.
New Study Links Coffee Intake to Microbiome Changes and Improved Mental Well-Being. Having coffee as I type this.
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The most misunderstood math theorem. Well, not the most misunderstood math theorem, but it's certainly one that election policy-makers need to know about. The link provided is worth reading. People need to at least know about the Cordorcet Paradox. And Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. This is why it's probably best that we have a two party system, rather than a 3-party system. And why ranked-choice voting is an exercise in futility.
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Google plans to encrappify the Web in a new way to make you look at ads. This is why is best to get a browser where you can install ad-blockers and protect yourself from this.
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This is every software engineer's nightmare. A coder woke up to a $18,000+ Google Cloud bill because Google took it upon themselves to remove a safety protection, letting a malicious hacker rack up charges on his account. I've had experiences like this with Amazon Sagemaker, but was able to explain to tech support what happened, so I wasn't charged.
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Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible. Guess we got satellites now, so we don't need the cables.
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There's a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities. This is from fingerprint.com. Thankfully, they fixed it in version 150, and I upgraded my LibreWolf to version 150. And Mozilla incorporated Brave's adblock-rust engine, which can help, but it's off by default and you have to turn it on. But that's easy to do.
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Another report about the Largest US Study Finds Teen Cannabis Use Linked to Slower Cognitive Development. And I look at where cannabis is legalized, and see that in most of world, it is still illegal. But in the Blue states in the U.S.A. and in Canada, it is legal, and so we have dumber young people entering the workforce. The Chinese laugh at us, I'm sure.
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Caltech researchers just found out how melatonin promotes sleep. It's not a sedative. It just promotes sleep by suppressing responses to visual stimuli via MT1 receptors. Kinda disappointing actually, but it does sorta explain how it helps you to get sleepy in a different timezone even when it's bright outside.
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Speaking of extra-bright, here's a handy website that adjusts brilliance of images to give them that extra punch. It's kinda like what you can do on your iPhone Photos app.
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SpaceX has acquired the rights to buy Cursor. I don't think they've sealed the deal yet. But Grok needs to get into the coding support business instead of depending on Anthropic. We'll see what happens.
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The most amazing thing about this ad was that there are a lot of Asian actors in it. Like you'd see in an actual tech company. It's an ad for Photon's Spectrum. With this production quality, it could have been an Apple ad, but let's be honest, it would look different, wouldn't it?
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Oregon teachers want even more money and want a lesser workload, and the union is fighting Democrats who oppose them. But money is clearly tight, and now in Beaverton, they're thinking of combining grade levels into multi-grade classrooms. How much crappier can Oregon education be?
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Starbucks expansion in Nashville brews bitterness in Seattle. If Amazon ends up leaving, which major players will be left in Seattle holding the bag? Just Nordstrom and Weyerhaeuser? And a smattering of smaller companies that could easily relocate elsewhere?
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