The move follows a “series of layoffs and cancellations" at Ubisoft, the article points out, plus what the company calls a “major organizational, operational and portfolio reset” that will lead to more layoffs and cancellations announced last week. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot even sent an end-of-day message warning that management continues to “make difficult decisions, including stopping certain projects” and “potentially closing select studios,” an earlier article points out:
Slipped in between the grand vision and subtle threats was the reversal of a popular hybrid work-from-home policy that would have a direct impact on everyone working at Ubisoft. Staff would be back in the office five days a week, but with the promise of a generous number of work from home days. “The intention is not to question individual performance, but to regenerate our collective performance, which is one of the key elements in creating the best games with the required speed,” Guillemot wrote.
There was immediate confusion and frustration. One French union representing Paris Ubisoft developers called for a half-day strike. “It is out of the question to let a boss run wild and destroy our working conditions,” Solidaires Informatique wrote in a press release. “Perhaps we need to remind him that it is his employees who make the games....” [The article notes later that “There’s concern that these shifts could make it harder for Ubisoft to recruit the talent it needs to improve, or even worse, actively drive away more of the company’s existing veterans.”]
Particularly galling about the new return-to-office policy for some Paris staff was that they had only recently finished negotiating to ensure two days of work-from-home per week. “It’s only been six months since the situation was more or less ‘back to normal’ and now it’s shattered to the ground by Yves’ sole decision with zero justification, zero documents, zero internal studies proving RTO increases productivity or morale, nothing,” one developer told me. The specific details for the rollout of the return-to-office policy have yet to be communicated to everyone, could vary team by team, and might not go into effect for much of the year.
The “massive international strike” would take place from February 10-12, Aftermath notes, citing the five French unions representing Ubisoft workers (CFE-CGC, CGT, Printemps Ãcologique, Solidaires Informatique, and STJV):
“The announced transformation [at Ubisoft] claims to place games at the heart of its strategy, but without us, these games cannot exist,” the unions wrote in a joint release.... We are not fooled: rather than taking financial responsibility for layoffs, they prefer to push us out by making our working conditions unbearable. It’s outrageous....”
The Ubisoft unions hope that February’s strike will be the largest yet, and they’re coordinating with unions outside France to present a globally united front against the company.
A union representative at Ubisoft Paris even argued to Aftermath that because the CEO “needs to find 200€ million for the coming year, any person who has to quit because of this is a net benefit for him.”
US Government Also Received a Whistleblower Complaint That WhatsApp Chats Aren’t Private
Similar claims were also the subject of a 2024 whistleblower complaint to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the records and the person, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified out of concern for potential retaliation. The investigation and whistleblower complaint haven’t been previously reported…
Last year, two people who did content moderation work for WhatsApp told an investigator with Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security that some staff at Meta have been able to see the content of WhatsApp messages, according to the agent’s report summarizing the interviews. [A spokesperson for the Bureau later told Bloomberg that investigator’s assertions were “unsubstantiated and outside the scope of his authority as an export enforcement agent.”] Those content moderators, who worked for Meta through a contract with the management and technology consulting firm Accenture Plc, also alleged that they and some of their colleagues had broad access to the substance of WhatsApp messages that were supposed to be encrypted and inaccessible, according to the report. “Both sources confirmed that they had employees within their physical work locations who had unfettered access to WhatsApp,” wrote the agent… One of the content moderators who told the investigator she had access said she also “spoke with a Facebook team employee and confirmed that they could go back aways into WhatsApp (encrypted) messages, stating that they worked cases that involved criminal actions,” according to the document…
The investigator’s report, dated July 2025, described the investigation as “ongoing,” includes a case number and dubs the inquiry “Operation Sourced Encryption…” The inquiry was active as recently as January, according to a person familiar with the matter. The inquiry’s current status and who may be the defined target are both unclear. Many investigations end without any formal accusations of wrongdoing…
WhatsApp on its website says it does, in some instances, allow information about messages to be seen by the company. If someone reports a user or group for problematic messages, “WhatsApp receives up to five of the last messages they’ve sent to you” and “the user or group won’t be notified,” the company says. In those cases, WhatsApp says it receives the “group or user ID, information on when the message was sent, and the type of message sent (image, video, text, etc.).” Former contractors outlined much broader access. Larkin Fordyce was an Accenture contractor who the report says an agent interviewed about content moderation work for Meta. Fordyce told the investigator he spent years doing this work out of an Austin, Texas office starting as early as the end of 2018. He said moderators eventually were granted their own access to WhatsApp, but even before that they could request access to communications and “the Facebook team was able to ‘pull whatever they wanted and then send it,’" the report states…
The agent also gathered records that were filed in the whistleblower complaint to the SEC, according to his report, which doesn’t describe the materials… The status of the whistleblower complaint is unclear.
Some key points from the article:
“The investigative report seen by Bloomberg doesn’t include a technical explanation of the contractors’ claims.”
“A spokesperson for Meta, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, said the contractors’ claims are impossible.”
One contractor “said that there was little vetting” of foreign nationals hired to do content moderation for Meta, saying this granted them “full access to the same portal to review” content moderation cases
American workers adopted artificial intelligence into their work lives at a remarkable pace over the past few years, according to a new poll. Some 12% of employed adults say they use AI daily in their job, according to a Gallup Workforce survey conducted this fall of more than 22,000 U.S. workers.
The survey found roughly one-quarter say they use AI at least frequently, which is defined as at least a few times a week, and nearly half say they use it at least a few times a year. That compares with 21% who were using AI at least occasionally in 2023, when Gallup began asking the question, and points to the impact of the widespread commercial boom that ChatGPT sparked for generative AI tools that can write emails and computer code, summarize long documents, create images or help answer questions…
While frequent AI use is on the rise with many employees, AI adoption remains higher among those working in technology-related fields. About 6 in 10 technology workers say they use AI frequently, and about 3 in 10 do so daily. The share of Americans working in the technology sector who say they use AI daily or regularly has grown significantly since 2023, but there are indications that AI adoption could be starting to plateau after an explosive increase between 2024 and 2025…
A separate Gallup Workforce survey from 2025 found that even as AI use is increasing, few employees said it was “very” or “somewhat” likely that new technology, automation, robots or AI will eliminate their job within the next five years. Half said it was “not at all likely,” but that has decreased from about 6 in 10 in 2023.
A bar chart lists the sectors most likely to be using AI at their jobs:
I’ve seen many people comment on other discussion platforms they are using AI simply because the leadership at their employer is requiring it. And many of those comments follow up with how the results of the AI usage are not helpful, or worse, require checking/correcting work and resulting in a net negative for productivity verses if they had just done it themselves.
Re:Very good for novices, but reinforces bad habit
AI is very good for novices, people who don’t know something well.
There is plenty of evidence already that novices using AI will remain novices, rather than develop advanced skills. So yes, as a “novice”, you can get to some result quicker by using AI, but the result will be that of a “fool with a tool”, and your next work’s result won’t be better, because you didn’t learn anything.
I do use LLM-type AI “daily” too. DDG gives an AI answer by default. As that is somewhat useful in, maybe, 50% of all simpler searches, I leave it on. But does that mean I have “integrated AI into my workflow”? Hell, no. That claim would be a direct lie.
Electric Flying Cars Now for Sale by California Company Pivotal
“All you need to order your own is about $200,000 and some hope and patience.”
The Palo Alto-based company Pivotal has been developing the technology since 2009 and is nearly ready to bring it to market… [Company founder Marcus] Leng engineered an ultralight, electric-powered vertical takeoff and landing aircraft known as an eVTOL. Other VTOL aircraft, such as helicopters, had existed for decades, but Leng’s invention was fixed-wing and didn’t rely on gas. The Canadian engineer dubbed his creation BlackFly and spent years working on it in secret. The company moved to the Bay Area in 2014 and by 2018 had developed a second version of BlackFly that laid the groundwork for Helix, the aircraft Pivotal now offers for sale…
Those who are curious — and wealthy — can reserve a Helix today with a $50,000 deposit. The aircraft starts at $190,000 with the option of purchasing a transport trailer for $21,000 and a charger for $1,100. A customer who makes their reservation today could receive their aircraft in nine to 12 months, [Pivotal Chief Executive Ken] Karklin said. It takes less than two weeks to learn how to fly it. In order to complete Pivotal’s flight certification training, a customer has to pass the FAA knowledge test and complete ground school. Training, which takes place at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters and at the Monterey Bay Academy Airport, teaches customers how to control and maintain the aircraft, as well as how to transport and assemble it…
It is uncertain how fast the company and others like it can ramp up production and how communities will react. Not everyone is on board. Darlene Yaplee, president of the Aviation-Impacted Communities Alliance, said there are concerns about having different types of aircraft in limited airspace. Pivotal has around six early-access customers who already own a version of the BlackFly and are flying it for fun… Helix will have an electric range of about 30 minutes and a cruise speed of 62 mph, the company said. It takes 75 minutes to charge it using a 240 volt charger. The noise produced by the aircraft during takeoff and landing is equivalent to a couple of leaf blowers, Karklin said. When flying it is overhead, someone on the ground might not be able to hear it.
Karklin said the simplicity of the aircraft comes with lower cost, lower weight and higher safety. The aircraft, which has only 18 moving parts, is full of redundancy to prevent system failures.
In short, the article describes it as “a single-person aircraft for recreational use and short-haul travel that also has the potential to support emergency response and military operations.”
God dammit! STOP calling these things “flying cars” !1!!!ll1l1ll!L1!!!one!one!!.. THEY ARE NOT CARS!! They have no “car” features! You can’t drive them anywhere. I might go full Steve Ballmer on any motherfucker that calls these things flying cars one more time. They are electric helicoptors. Electric multi-rotor fuckthings. Fuck!
1) 1907, by Paul Cornu. He called it a helicopter. Did not go commercial until Sikorsky in 1939. You can keep it in your back yard, go straight up, needs no runway, fly anywhere, that’s a personal flying vehicle, how is it different than a flying car?
2) 1930 if you demand a road ready vehicle for under $10,000 in 2026 dollars. Barry Bushmeyer created the first Powered Parachute. This is a wheeled vehicle with a pusher fan to push it forward. Get up to 25 miles per hour, release a parachute and up up away you go. You can get up to 10,000 feet in the air, with a max speed of 35 mph.
Helicopters are super expensive and hard to fly. PPCs are cheap, easy and fun to use - but are s.l.o.w. Faster, cheaper, safer, easier is what we have been working on it.
But we have definitely had commercially available flying cars for almost a century.
Apple has shifted from selling pre-configured Mac models to a fully customizable build-to-order system on its website, allowing customers to select display size, chip, memory, and storage options… This change emphasizes building a machine within budget rather than choosing from set configurations, potentially preparing for future CPU/GPU core selection with M5 chips. Third-party retailers like Amazon and Best Buy are expected to continue offering standard configurations for customers preferring traditional purchasing methods…
Apple is rumored to offer the ability to customize CPU and GPU cores with the upcoming launch of the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models, so this new system could pave the way for more build-to-order options. It could also be a way to âoehideâ smaller price increases as memory and other component costs rise throughout 2026.
(Apple Store Worker) ”Alright, we’re at $1799 so far for your new system.”
(iStudent) ”See Mom, it’s not so bad.”
(Apple Store Worker) ”Mmm, yes. Now if you’ll just take your build ticket here over to counter 7, where Marco our RAM sommelier will refresh your memory as to why we’re not quite done yet. Mom, you’ll be heading over to Chapt, er I mean counter 11 where our finance concierge will walk you through our pre-approval process for memory mortgage options.”
I bought my first and only Macbook Pro in 2006. Over time, I upgraded the RAM to max it out and I upgraded the disk drive several times as storage prices fell. Due to all of this upgradability, I was able to use this as my primary device for fourteen years until the GPU finally crapped out. While I’d never had any issues with the laptop before the GPU died, it was made up of commodity components that could easily be sourced and replaced by skilled technicians at third-party shops. Due to that, I never felt the need to get AppleCare. It will likely go down as the best laptop I’ve ever owned.
Contrast that with the current Macbooks which can’t upgrade the RAM or storage after purchase. This means that if you want to build a laptop that lasts a long time, you need to pay Apple their extortionate fees upfront for RAM and storage as there is no ability to change your mind later. Most of the components can no longer be sourced by third-parties, so you’d better max out AppleCare as well. And after that expires, if any component dies on the motherboard, even a $5 IC or capacitor, your only option is to pay Apple $800-$1500 for a refurbished board since they refuse to replace individual components on the board. And if you maxed out the RAM and storage to future-proof your machine, you’ll be paying the upper end of that price range. Also, depending on the component that dies, you may lose all of your data in the process. And that’s only if Apple doesn’t refuse to service the laptop in the first place. Tally that up, and it’s hundreds, maybe well over a thousand, dollars just for future-proofed RAM and storage, hundreds for AppleCare since third-party board repair is virtually impossible, and well over a thousand after that if any component on the board shits the bed after AppleCare expires. Macbooks have essentially become premium disposable laptops.
So while the option to customize your Macbook via build-to-order will certainly alleviate some of the TCO issues that modern Macbooks present, they’re still a very far cry from what they were in the mid 2000s and early 2010s. It’s a shame because the M-series chips seem pretty great, but I personally can’t justify the enormous hike in TCO. But based on their sales numbers, I don’t think my priorities mirror the average person and I highly doubt Apple is missing my business.
Nvidia CEO Denies OpenAI’s $100B Investment from Nvidia is ‘Stalled’
[T]he talks haven’t progressed beyond the early stages, some of the people said. Now, the two sides are rethinking the future of their partnership, some of the people said. The latest discussions, they said, include an equity investment of tens of billions of dollars as part of OpenAI’s current funding round. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has privately emphasized to industry associates in recent months that the original $100 billion agreement was nonbinding and not finalized, people familiar with the matter said. He has also privately criticized what he has described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI’s business approach and expressed concern about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic, some of the people said…
OpenAI is laying the foundation to go public by the end of 2026, and has spent much of the past year racing to secure large amounts of computing capacity to help power OpenAI’s future products and growth. The stalled Nvidia pact is a blow to this effort and shows how Chief Executive Sam Altman’s penchant for announcing flashy big-ticket deals carries the potential to backfire if the terms have yet to be finalized. In a joint announcement unveiling the September deal with Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Huang called the deal “the largest computing project in history....” OpenAI went on to sign a string of other agreements with chip and cloud companies that helped fuel a global stock market rally.
But investors have since grown jittery about the startup’s ability to pay for these deals, leading to a sell-off in some tech stocks tied to OpenAI. Altman has said that the deals put the startup on the hook for $1.4 trillion in computing commitments — more than 100 times the revenue it was on pace to generate last year. OpenAI executives say the total commitments are lower when you account for overlap in some of the deals, and that the agreements will take place over a long period of time.... Huang has indicated to associates that he still believes it’s crucially important to provide OpenAI with financial support in one form or another, in part because OpenAI is one of the chip designer’s largest customers, people familiar with the matter said. If OpenAI were to fall behind other AI developers, it could dent Nvidia’s sales.
“Speaking to reporters in Taipei, Huang said it was ‘nonsense’ to say he was unhappy with OpenAI,” CNBC reported Saturday:
“We are going to make a huge investment in OpenAI. I believe in OpenAI, the work that they do is incredible, they are one of the most consequential companies of our time and I really love working with Sam,” he said, referring to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “Sam is closing the round (of investment) and we will absolutely be involved,” Huang added. “We will invest a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we’ve ever made.”
Asked whether it would be over $100 billion, he said: “No, no, nothing like that.”
Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin is pausing its space tourism flights for “no less than two years” in order to focus all of its resources on upcoming missions to the moon, the company announced Friday. The decision puts a temporary halt on a program that Blue Origin has been using to fly humans past the Kármán line, the recognized boundary of space, for the last five years. Blue Origin made the announcement just a few weeks ahead of the expected third launch of its New Glenn mega-rocket, which is slated for late February…
The company said Friday that New Shepard has flown 38 times and carried 98 humans to space, along with more than 200 scientific and research payloads.
“The move is a clear sign that Blue Origin is going all in on its moon program as the company races with rival SpaceX,” reports the Business Standard, “to be the first private company to land humans on the lunar surface for Nasa’s Artemis program.”
Blue Origin holds a $3.4 billion contract with Nasa to develop its Blue Moon lander, designed to shuttle astronauts to and from the moon, with a landing originally targeted for 2029… The company is targeting the launch and landing of a cargo version of its lander as soon as this year, as a test ahead of eventually landing humans. Blue Origin has also presented an accelerated plan to Nasa for developing a lander that may be ready for carrying astronauts ahead of Starship, the large new rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Can We Slow Global Warming By Phasing Out Super-Pollutant HFCs?
[M]ore than 170 countries — including the U.S. — have agreed to act on this one solution. That solution: phasing out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a group of gases used in refrigerators, air conditioners and other cooling systems that heat the atmosphere more than almost any other pollutant on Earth. Pound for pound, HFCs are hundreds or even thousands of times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.
Companies are replacing HFCs with new gases that trap much less heat. If you buy a new fridge or AC unit in the United States today, it’ll probably use one of these new refrigerants — and you’re unlikely to notice the difference, according to Francis Dietz, a spokesperson for the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, a trade group representing U.S. HVAC manufacturers… But that invisible transition is one of the most important short-term tactics to keep Earth’s climate from going catastrophically off-kilter this century. HFCs are powerful super-pollutants, but the most common ones break down in the atmosphere within about 15 years. That means stopping emissions from HFCs — and other short-lived super-pollutants such as methane — is like pulling an emergency brake on climate change.
“It’s really the fastest, easiest and, some would say, the only way to slow the rate of warming between now and 2050,” said Kiff Gallagher, executive director of the Global Heat Reduction Initiative, a business that advises companies and cities on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The only other solution that comes close to the speed and scale of slashing HFCs would be dimming the sun, a much more controversial and potentially dangerous option… [P]hasing out HFCs now “would buy us a little bit of time to develop other solutions that maybe take longer to implement,” said Sarah Gleeson, a climate solutions research manager at Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that models how much different strategies would slow climate change. It could also keep the planet from crossing dangerous climate tipping points this century.
Of course it would help. Just look at a refrigerant chart for global warming potential. A lot of the older ones have already been phased out to reduce ozone depletion potential, but their replacements were almost as bad in terms of global warming potential, which we weren’t as worried about at the time.
For example, R-12’s high ozone depletion potential also had an extremely high global warming potential, but its replacements like R22 and later R134a are still relatively high for global warming potential. These are being replaced with R600a (isobutane, which is flammable) and R1234yf, which is a blend of gases that have very different maintenance requirements due to partial pressures (one gas can leak out over time but leave the others, making the mixture less efficient and then you’d have to purge and replace the entire charge, not just top it up). It’s a complex issue.
As we know more about these gases, hopefully we can resolve this… Obviously the sooner, the better.
It was CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) not HFCs that were destroying the ozone layer. And yes, the human race stopped using them after the 1987 Montreal Protocol was created, and the ozone layer recovered. HFCs don’t destroy ozone, but they are greenhouse gases.
Scientists Found a Way To Cool Quantum Computers Using Noise
Quantum computers need extreme cold to work, but the very systems that keep them cold also create noise that can destroy fragile quantum information. Scientists in Sweden have now flipped that problem on its head by building a tiny quantum refrigerator that actually uses noise to drive cooling instead of fighting it. By carefully steering heat at unimaginably small scales, the device can act as a refrigerator, heat engine, or energy amplifier inside quantum circuits.
“It’s pretty long on accusations and thin on any sort of evidence,” Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, said over Signal. “WhatsApp has been very consistent about using end-to-end encryption. This lawsuit seems to be a nothingburger.” Nicholas Weaver, a security researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, criticized the lawsuit in a post on Bluesky for lacking detail needed to back up its claims. “They don’t even do a citation to the actual whistleblowers,” he wrote, calling the suit “ludicrous.”
And Meta has done more than just deny the allegations:
On Wednesday, WhatsApp sent a letter to [law firm] Quinn Emanuel threatening to seek sanctions against the firm’s lawyers in court if they do not withdraw the suit, according to a copy reviewed by The Washington Post. “We’re pursuing sanctions against Quinn Emanuel for filing a meritless lawsuit that was designed purely to grab headlines,” Woog said by WhatsApp message. Woog also suggested the suit against WhatsApp was related to Quinn Emanuel’s work on a separate case, between the social network giant and the spyware company NSO Group. The surveillance vendor is appealing a $167 million judgment entered against it in federal court last May, after a jury found that NSO’s Pegasus tool exploited a weakness in the WhatsApp app to take over control of the phones of more than 1,000 users. An attorney from Quinn Emanuel joined NSO’s legal team on that case on Jan. 22, according to legal filings, and different attorneys from that firm filed the case against WhatsApp on Jan. 23. “We believe a lawsuit like this is an attempt to launder false claims and divert attention from their dangerous spyware,” Woog said.
“It’s very suspicious timing that this is happening as that appeal is happening,” Maria Villegas Bravo, counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the site Decrypt, “as NSO Group is trying to lobby to get delisted from sanctions in the U.S. government.”
EPIC’s counsel also told the site that the complaint appears light on factual detail about WhatsApp’s software:
“I’m not seeing any factual allegations or any information about the actual software itself,” Villegas Bravo said. “I have a lot of questions that I would want answered before I would want this lawsuit to proceed.... I don’t think there’s any merit in this lawsuit,” Villegas Bravo said.
Meta has forcefully rejected the allegations. In a statement shared with Decrypt, a company spokesperson called the claims “categorically false and absurd… WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade,” the spokesperson said. “This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction, and we will pursue sanctions against plaintiffs’ counsel.”
“It’s pretty long on accusations and thin on any sort of evidence,” Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, said over Signal.
Yeah, buddy, you might be good at reading scientific papers and research, but you’re not so good at reading lawsuits. The suit itself is just a bunch of claims. Evidence is the stuff you present in court. So if you’re thinking, “But I’m not a party to this suit, so I don’t have access to all the evidence attorneys are planning to present” … now yer thinkin’.
Their device link feature doesn’t alert the user when a new device is added, and it doesn’t require any action from them. The server can request the private encryption key from the primary device and provide it to the new device.
What’s stopping Meta from adding one of their devices to your account?
Signal app on the other hand requires user action on the primary device, and it modifies the device signature, alerting all chat partners of the security change.
What’s App eliminated this level of security supposedly to streamline user experience. But it has costly implications to end to end encryption channel integrity.
The Bill Gates-Epstein Bombshell - and What Most People Get Wrong
“Salacious claims from Jeffrey Epstein that Bill Gates contracted an STD following ‘sex with Russian girls,’ and colluded with the disgraced financier on a plot to secretly slip his wife antibiotics, were revealed in the latest Epstein files release.”
“A representative of the Gates Foundation said, ‘These claims — from a proven, disgruntled liar — are absolutely absurd and completely false. The only thing these documents demonstrate is Epstein’s frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates and the lengths he would go to entrap and defame.’"
None paid attention to who actually wrote the email. The email was from Epstein — to Epstein… Both the “From” and “To” fields list Epstein’s personal Gmail address. The message appears to be a draft, written during a period when Epstein’s relationship with Gates had deteriorated. In it, Epstein alleges that Gates asked him to delete messages related to an STD. But the document does not show Gates making that request, nor does it provide independent confirmation that any of the claims are true.
It reads like Epstein venting. It is not Gates confessing.
“In a 2021 interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Gates called his relationship with the disgraced financier ‘a huge mistake’,” notes the New York Times. “He also sought to downplay his interactions with Epstein, saying he had several dinners with Epstein, with the hope of getting him to generate donations to the Gates Foundation.”
Epstein was given a sweetheart deal by Alex Acosta who was Labor Secretary in Trump’s first term. Instead of prosecuting him for the multiple instances of trafficking under federal laws, Epstein was given a single charge of soliciting prostitution and instead of spending it in prison, was allowed to spend most of his time at home under “prison release”.
Pam Bondi, the AG for Florida from 2011 - 2019, then refused to pursue any charges against Epstein despite numerous instances of sworn testimony from victims.
It’s all a giant nothing burger. If anyone is getting convicted from all this it’ll be Clinton due to additional investigation and lets be honest, that isn’t news to anybody.
Riiiiiiiigt. A “nothingburger”. Clinton’s the one who will take the fall. Tell us, is there any situation you can imagine where Trump or any of his minions would be held accountable for anything? After all, as the documents show, he was there on multiple occasions and the girls, not women, refused to enter a room when he was around.
As a follow up, here is the unredacted document before the DOJ removed it which has Trump forcing girls to perform oral sex on him as well the murder of her child after she got pregnant from being raped.
Sure but even in that absolute-most-charitable-best-case scenario you lay out it just shows Trump is once again a terrible and incompetent executive, like, why else specifically hire Acosta for that role? He has no unique qualifications, there are probably a dozen other just as or more well qualified Republicans he could have tapped for the role, so why that guy who ended up having to get thrown under the bus anyway?
Can we at least admit it all looks real bad? Suddenly after Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden we’re gonna slow down and dig into the nuance now? There is more here than there was against either of them.
Microdosing For Depression Appears To Work About As Well As Drinking Coffee
About a decade ago, many media outlets — including WIRED — zeroed in on a weird trend at the intersection of mental health, drug science, and Silicon Valley biohacking: microdosing, or the practice of taking a small amount of a psychedelic drug seeking not full-blown hallucinatory revels but gentler, more stable effects. Typically using psilocybin mushrooms or LSD, the archetypal microdoser sought less melting walls and open-eye kaleidoscopic visuals than boosts in mood and energy, like a gentle spring breeze blowing through the mind. Anecdotal reports pitched microdosing as a kind of psychedelic Swiss Army knife, providing everything from increased focus to a spiked libido and (perhaps most promisingly) lowered reported levels of depression. It was a miracle for many. Others remained wary. Could 5 percent of a dose of acid really do all that?
A new, wide-ranging study by an Australian biopharma company suggests that microdosing’s benefits may indeed be drastically overstated — at least when it comes to addressing symptoms of clinical depression. A Phase 2B trial of 89 adult patients conducted by Melbourne-based MindBio Therapeutics, investigating the effects of microdosing LSD in the treatment of major depressive disorder, found that the psychedelic was actually outperformed by a placebo. Across an eight-week period, symptoms were gauged using the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), a widely recognized tool for the clinical evaluation of depression. The study has not yet been published. But MindBio’s CEO Justin Hanka recently released the top-line results on his LinkedIn, eager to show that his company was “in front of the curve in microdosing research.”
He called it “the most vigorous placebo controlled trial ever performed in microdosing.” It found that patients dosed with a small amount of LSD (ranging from 4 to 20g, or micrograms, well below the threshold of a mind-blowing hallucinogenic dose) showed observable upticks in feelings of well-being, but worse MADRS scores, compared to patients given a placebo in the form of a caffeine pill. (Because patients in psychedelic trials typically expect some kind of mind-altering effect, studies are often blinded using so-called “active placebos,” like caffeine or methylphenidate, which have their own observable psychoactive properties.) This means, essentially, that a medium-strength cup of coffee may prove more beneficial in treating major depressive disorder than a tiny dose of acid. Good news for habitual caffeine users, perhaps, but less so for researchers (and biopharma startups) counting on the efficacy of psychedelic microdosing.
“It’s probably a nail in the coffin of using microdosing to treat clinical depression,” Hanka says. “It probably improves the way depressed people feel — just not enough to be clinically significant or statistically meaningful.”
Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft to co-found Amutable, a new Berlin-based company aiming to bring cryptographically verifiable integrity and deterministic trust guarantees to Linux systems. He said in a post on Mastodon that his “role in upstream maintenance for the Linux kernel will continue as it always has.” Poettering will also continue to remain deeply involved in the systemd ecosystem. The Register reports:
Linux celeb Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft and co-founded a new company, Amutable, with Chris Kuhl and Christian Brauner. Poettering is best known for systemd. After a lengthy stint at Red Hat, he joined Microsoft in 2022. Kuhl was a Microsoft employee until last year, and Brauner, who also joined Microsoft in 2022, left this month. […]
It is unclear why Poettering decided to leave Microsoft. We asked the company to comment but have not received a response. Other than the announcement of systemd 259 in December, Poettering’s blog has been silent on the matter, aside from the announcement of Amutable this week. In its first post, the Amutable team wrote: “Over the coming months, we’ll be pouring foundations for verification and building robust capabilities on top.”
It will be interesting to see what form this takes. In addition to Poettering, the lead developer of systemd, Amutable’s team includes contributors and maintainers for projects such as Linux, Kubernetes, and containerd. Its members are also very familiar with the likes of Debian, Fedora, SUSE, and Ubuntu.
It’s pithy and funny, but it’s true. Poettering is the enemy of Linux, open source, and security, which is why he was hired and well-paid by Microsoft. My guess is that they’re still paying him to set up this sham company in order to continue sabotaging Linux.
If the Linux community had any sense, they would blacklist this asshole — from EVERYTHING — for life.
Trust is more than just technical stuff. You actually have to have the right attitude. Pottering’s pretentious and overconfident attitude already casts doubt that he can be trusted.
What was the point of the journal log system? We had stable tools for decades for manipulating and managing text logs. So systemd made the logs binary and then re-invented all the same tools but slightly different. Same as with ifconfig. Worked great for decades and now it’s replaced with “ip” and a different syntax. What was gained?
Researchers at the University of New South Wales are developing a “reverse solar panel" that generates small amounts of electricity at night by harvesting infrared heat radiated from Earth. “In the past, scientists have demonstrated that a 'thermoradiative diode' can convert infrared radiation directly into electricity; when used to convert heat from Earth, they exploit the temperature difference between Earth and the night sky, generating a current directly from heat,” notes ExtremeTech. “This approach completely eliminates the need for heat to generate steam, though the resulting capacity is fairly low.” From the report:
The researchers estimate they could generate only about a watt per square meter, which isn’t much. One reason for the low output is that the Earth’s atmosphere lessens the heat differential that drives the generative process; in space, though, that’s not an issue.
Now, researchers believe that the ability to generate power in the moments between direct sunlight could help power satellites. That could be especially true in deep space, where periods without sunlight can be longer, and sunlight is often weaker; in these situations, losing electricity to heat loss is unacceptable.
Many satellites already use heat to generate electricity, though with a much more rarified “thermoelectric generator” that uses rare, expensive materials like plutonium to create heat. With thermoradiative diodes, the heat source can be the Sun-warmed body of the satellite itself.
Many satellites already use heat to generate electricity, though with a much more rarified “thermoelectric generator” that uses rare, expensive materials like plutonium to create heat
The USA and USSR have launched a few dozen spacecraft with RTGs, out of more than 12,000 satellites launched in total. That’s not “many”.
Damn. This seems to be a shortened version of the CNN article, https://www.cnn.com/science/ni… except they left out the second half of the article, where the CNN reporter includes several quotes from me.
I guess my fifteen minutes of fame got cut down to thirty seconds. At least the second link in the summary mentions me.
There are 4047 square meters in one acre. If I had a home with a heat pump that consumed 4kW I could run it with one acre of these panels - although I probably couldn’t start it up. There won’t be much use for this technology on Earth.
A light bulb is a reverse solar panel: Solar panel: absorb light, produce electricity. Light bulb: absorb electricity, produce light.
More specifically, a LED is a reverse solar panel, and in fact, if you power a solar cell backwards, they emit light (electroluminescence).
But thermoradiative cells are reversed in a different way, solar cells are essentially carnot engines if you think about them right: Solar light at 6000K in (“hot side”), waste heat out (“cold side”) and electrical power produced. In a perfect carnot cycle, the hot and cold sides can be swapped. Thermoradiative cells switch the hot and cold side: heat in (“hot side”), light out (“cold side”), and electrical power produced.
Of course the light out is the thermal spectrum, not the solar spectrum, and hence the semiconductor used isn’t the same as the one used in solar cells.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian:
The UK’s first superfast-charging train running only on battery power will come into passenger service this weekend — operating a five-mile return route in west London. Great Western Railway (GWR) will send the converted London Underground train out from 5.30am to cover the full Saturday timetable on the West Ealing to Greenford branch line, four stops and 12 minutes each way, and now carrying up to 273 passengers, should its celebrity stoke up the demand.
The battery will recharge in just three and a half minutes back at West Ealing station between trips, using a 2,000kW charger connected to a few meters of rail that only becomes live when the train stops directly overhead. There are hopes within government and industry that this technology could one day replace diesel trains on routes that have proved difficult or expensive to electrify with overhead wires, as the decarbonization of rail continues.
The train has proved itself capable of going more than 200 miles on a single charge — last year setting a world record for the farthest travelled by a battery-electric train, smashing a German record set in 2021. The GWR train and the fast-charge technology has been trialled on the 2.5-mile line since early 2024, but has not yet carried paying passengers.
The UK has a Victorian rail infrastructure that operates extremely intensively in a tightly constrained landscape, full of buried utilities, low overhead bridges made of stone that would need to be completely rebuilt, and lacking space at the side of the routes for transformers etc. Electrification costs a fortune, £8m per route mile. Third rail is dangerous and poorly suited to the unelectrified remaining UK routes, which are mainly intercity / freight and relatively lengthy, and it needs 750V DC, which needs way more current than 25kV AC.
LFP batteries are very unlikely to catch fire. You can find videos of people trying on YouTube, attacking them with power tools. One I saw only managed to set the plastic housing on fire with a blowtorch, the battery itself didn’t ignite.
Plus most of the London Underground is actually above ground.
There is a train using batteries in Japan. It’s not light rail, it’s a conventional high-ish speed train. There is a section of the track that isn’t electrified, which it uses a battery to bridge.
Welcome to the UK. It’s extremely difficult and expensive to build anything, such as overhead wires or the hardware needed to support a third rail. The feasibility and safety study alone would probably cost hundreds of millions. We spent over a billion just looking at the feasibility of a tunnel under the Thames.
Much easier to just install a charger at one end of the line, and use battery powered trains.
Reminds me of efforts in Germany to install overhead wires on some roads, so that trucks could charge without stopping. Nice idea, but pointless given how cheap batteries are and how fast they can charge now.
Just to give a rough sense, for a 100 mile intercity route, it would cost about £900m in capex to electrify in the UK (£8m per mile plus power supply upgrades etc at £100m). Deploying the BEV technology would cost about £40m in capex (8 trains at £3m per, 3 charge sites at £2m per, grid strengthening at £10m). BEV opex is mainly battery replacement, figure £24m; electrification opex is OLE and equipment, figure £200m. So it’s like 10% of the costs.
Electrification is justified where traffic density is high (4+ tph) or expected to be high, or where there’s lots of freight, high speeds, or long gaps between stations. That said, the UK has a terrible track record of failing to electrify, and personally, I’d rather see BEV passenger trains roll out now where they can, than wait for some putative full electrification that may well never happen
Now do …
… alcohol.