Off the Kuff

“The U.S. and Israeli war against Iran is disrupting energy markets and driving oil and gas prices higher in the United States and globally. While those increases are modest so far, experts say the war has the potential to cause more severe and lasting impacts if Iran damages the region’s energy infrastructure or restricts shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.”

“Ring the Fish Doorbell to help migrating fish navigate a Dutch canal”.

“Found: The 19th century silent film that first captured a robot attack“. And you can watch it right there, it’s only 45 seconds long.

“There are big swathes of experimental physics that have more in common with similarly large swathes of experimental chemistry than either has in common with computational modeling (of either field), or with large-scale experiments in high energy physics and astrophysics. Other bits of physics have more in common with math and philosophy than either experimental or computational work. The tools and approaches used to study the world— are you shining lasers on things or are you proving theorems?— are in some important ways more fundamental than the specific things being studied.”

“Here’s one likely reason US companies stay mum: They’re reluctant to admit just how heavily programs like Medicaid and SNAP subsidize the cost of their employees (and how much money they save as a result). At Walmart, for instance, median worker pay is $29,469—significantly below the threshold for Medicaid and SNAP eligibility for a family of three. In states like Nevada, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, nearly 30 percent of Walmart workers are Medicaid enrollees. Dependence on federal programs is corporate America’s dirty secret.”

RIP, Country Joe McDonald, musician best known for his performance at Woodstock and the anti-war anthem “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag”.

“We do not have a “commander in chief.” The interns are in charge. And they don’t know what’s going on either.”

“The robot butlers are useful, they’re not going away and the economics of AI agents make widespread adoption inevitable regardless of the security tradeoffs involved. The question isn’t whether we’ll deploy them – we will – but whether we can adapt our security posture fast enough to survive doing so.”

RIP, Augie Meyers, keyboardist and last surviving original member of The Texas Tornadoes.

“QAnon wasn’t right. It was spectacularly wrong, stringing its believers along for years with promises of revenge and justice that all turned to dust. The enemy of the deep state turned out to be its most high-profile protector. And the people desperate for accountability are still vulnerable to conspiracy theories that prey on their very natural desires.”

“Here is my theory of an answer. Yes, many of the men in Epstein’s network coveted contact with women and girls — but not all forms of contact. This is their general delineation as far as I can make it out: You would swim with women and girls, but you wouldn’t attend a lecture with or by one. You would sit across from women and girls at a private jet table, but you would avoid a sit-down dinner with them. You might pose for smiling photos with women and girls, but you were unlikely to be photographed getting lost in an idea with them. A woman or girl might sit on your lap, but you wouldn’t want her sitting to your left. To browse through the Epstein photos is to identify, through its absence, what must be most terrifying to men in this circle: a forty-something woman with thoughts.”

“A growing number of critics and experts believe that Noem’s interference with FEMA may well have been illegal. This week, two Senate Democrats released a report alleging that Noem’s blanket freeze on FEMA payments violated federal law. At the same time, lawyers for a federal workers’ union argued to a federal judge in California that Noem’s workforce cuts also violated the law. In both cases, critics pointed to legislation passed after Hurricane Katrina, which prohibits DHS from interfering with FEMA.” Lock her up, I say.

“In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it.”

“Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such “hallucinations” persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious — they originate simply as errors in binary classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded — language models are optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This “epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems.”

“Are prediction markets just sports betting by another name? How legal battles are taking shape”.

“California Rep. Kevin Kiley announced on Monday he is switching his congressional party designation from Republican to independent, formalizing his party switch as he pursues a longshot bid to win reelection in a Democratic-leaning district.”

“A Democratic lawmaker filed suit against Donald Trump, seeking a court order to prevent the president’s announced plans for closing the Kennedy Center and warning that he may be planning to demolish the building.”

“How Taxpayers Are Still Getting Screwed on Kristi Noem’s Big Beautiful Jet”.

“Anyway: If you’re a writer or creator, never be ashamed of what else you do. It’s 2026 and this special flavor of gilded age we live in at the moment means that what qualifies as “selling out” has an extremely high bar. Making a living was very rarely “selling out” in any era. I think these days the phrase should be mostly reserved for writing things you absolutely don’t believe, for the sort of people you would in fact despise, with the result of your work is you making the world worse for everyone. Avoid doing that, please.”

“So, however disappointing the initial result may be for everyone who desired some accountability for Ticketmaster’s myriad sins (crashing during “Eras” tour sales, overcharging venues and attendees, teaming up with scalpers), the fight is not over. And the current deal also comes with notable concessions that clamp down on some of Live Nation’s most risible business practices. Bit by bit, the near-unanimous public antipathy toward Ticketmaster is gradually transforming audiences’ ticket-buying experience for the better—in large part by opening up access to competitors eager to demonstrate that they’re not the dreaded, hated Ticketmaster.”

“Pokémon Company International has condemned the White House’s use of its imagery, including a tiny version of the popular character Pikachu, in a meme posted online with the phrase “Make America Great Again”.”

If you’re suffering from curling withdrawal since the end of the Olympics, watch this and you’ll feel better. Or just watch because it’s awesome, even if you know nothing about curling.

“How We Hacked McKinsey’s AI Platform“. That’s, um, bad and embarrassing for McKinsey.

“10 Pictures of Pete Hegseth From the ‘Unflattering’ Batch the Pentagon Reportedly Doesn’t Want You to See“.

Joe Manchin is very disappointed in you, John Cornyn.

Probably more than you wanted to know about the memetic language used in the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmak”. Or maybe it’s exactly what you wanted to know.

“Legendary anchorman and America’s favorite judge and scorekeeper, Bill Kurtis is retiring from his role at Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, capping off a phenomenal 12-year run with the show.”

“Poppycock. She’s doing none of those things. She’s writing science fiction which will be used by a mathematical equation to alter the statistical likelihood of a computer program choosing some tokens rather than other tokens as its output. Saying that any of this is teaching a chatbot philosophy is like calling yourself a psychiatrist because you thought about Oedipus while jacking off.”

“Trump’s War on National Park Signs Is Even Dumber Than You Think”.

“Looksmaxxing Is Just Mar-a-Lago Face For Men“.

“Pretty consistently for the last few rounds of the dietary guidelines updates, Americans have been a little short on calcium, potassium, fiber and vitamin D. Protein was not and has never been in that list of things that we’re short of.”

“The place on Earth from which you can, in theory, see further than any other is between an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan. It is just over 530km.” You can see all the views in the world here.

“I think it’s worth operating from the premise that we are seeing a step-change in what [AI] tools can be used for. But it does mean we should keep in mind that the experience of early adopters — the people who are most enthused by coding agents — is probably dissimilar to the normies. This thing can be revolutionary for coders and entrepreneurs, while still being nothing like the social revolution they imagine is in the offing. It feels very much like Neal Stephenson overestimating the social contagion of the Linux revolution circa 1999. It can be a lightning bolt within one sector of the economy, but still limited to people with a very specific set of tastes and preferences.”

“Bills introduced in recent weeks in the legislatures of at least four Democratic-led states would impose long-term consequences on new ICE employees by rendering them ineligible for jobs in law enforcement, public education, and, in their most expansive form, the entire state civil service.”

“In addition to its human horrors, the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants living in the U.S. is having a chilling effect on people traveling here from outside the country. International travel to the U.S. is in a certifiable freefall, with nine straight months of decline in foreign visitors versus the year before.”

A long list of reasons why Dr. Phil sucked, and still sucks.

“Idaho considers an ‘apocalyptic’ choice for disabled people and families”. Spoiler alert, it’s all about the Big Beautiful Medicaid cuts.

“Surprise, You Might Be Canadian And Not Even Know It!”

Lock him up.

“That we are discussing the ins-and-outs of which random gamblers get paid out during an illegal war in which already hundreds of school children have been bombed to death feels like the type of grotesque sideshow that is only possible because the U.S. government is only interested in regulating its perceived political enemies, and which only feels possible because much of the American economy feels held together by cope and the gobs of money being thrown into AI, data centers, and gambling.”

“Let’s be clear here: Meta Glasses are awful, both for our right to privacy and for our species’ ability to separate itself from a cycle of corporate media monopolies that have made us addicted to their toxic algorithms.”

“When FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen FBI agents and staff last week for their role in the classified documents investigation of Donald Trump, he targeted an elite counter espionage unit that investigates threats from foreign adversaries and specializes in Iran, according to more than a half dozen sources with knowledge of the firings.”

RIP, Len Garry, guitarist who was Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s bandmate in The Quarrymen.

“But less than 24 hours later, the DOJ changed its mind, filing what can only be described as a “whoopsie, we take it back” motion. Is there any explanation or legal justification for this? Of course not.”

RIP, Lou Holtz, Hall of Fame college football coach who won a national championship at Notre Dame.

“Speaker Mike Johnson already faces an almost daily attendance problem with his slim House majority, and the Texas elections on Tuesday might have made that dynamic worse.

“Ukraine is prepared to send military experts to the Middle East to help the U.S. and its partners counter Iranian drones, the country’s president said this week.”

Would you like to buy a lightly used triceratops skeleton? Reasonably priced, as far as these things go.

Might The Bride! cause Oscar problems for Jessie Buckley as Norbit is supposed to have done for Eddie Murphy?

RIP, Bernard LaFayette, civil rights activist who did the risky groundwork for the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.