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• Post #4486925

  Yale's most popular course in 300 years was about happiness. Laurie Santos's 'Psychology and the Good Life' enrolled nearly 1,200 students in 2018, a quarter of all Yale undergrads. The Coursera version reached 3.38 million by 2021. The core finding: we're systematically bad at predicting what will make us happy. We overestimate the impact of money, promotions, and acquisitions. The brain adapts to new circumstances and returns to baseline - a phenomenon called hedonic adapt...

• Post #4451979

  🔴 A defense contractor is now selling technology that scans every electronic device in your car as you drive past a camera. It ties everything to your license plate. You cannot opt out. It is called SignalTrace. Made by Leonardo, an Italian military contractor with existing U.S. Special Operations Command contracts. It sweeps your phone, smartwatch, Bluetooth headphones, your dog's RFID chip, tire pressure sensors, your car's infotainment system. Anything that broadcasts. It bundles th...

• Post #4433168

  Every single Flock camera in a Minnesota town was cut down.

• Post #4395650

  We need everyone at this level of anger. How do I get this guy to go on a speaking tour of the red states?

• Post #4387481

  🐕 TIL: Dogs copy us even when it makes zero sense. Half of dogs will touch a pointless dot on the wall or flip a dead lever before getting their treat, just because their person did it first. That behavior is overimitation, and researchers thought it was uniquely human. Great apes never do it. Dogs do it most with their own caregiver, which points to a social motive: copying keeps them in the game. The evidence is solid. Johnston et al. 2017 found half of dogs and dingoes copied both actions....

• Post #4383866

  🌱 The good environmental news from 2026, because the doom scrolling hides a lot. April was the first month in history where wind and solar beat gas worldwide. Renewables overtook coal as the planet's biggest power source in 2025, and clean energy covered all of the new electricity demand that year. The High Seas Treaty entered into force in January, putting real rules on the parts of the ocean outside any country's borders. Wildlife is coming back too. Black rhinos returned to a Zimba...

• Post #4365991

  🔌 Slate Auto's electric truck ships with no modem at all, and that's the privacy story. The startup's $24,950 EV pickup has no built-in cellular connection, so the company physically can't track your location, remote-access the car, or pull data from it. A phone app handles settings and charging info, but it only works standing next to the truck, and Slate says app data is opt-in and never sold. Their words: "We collect data to make ownership better, not to turn the owner i...

• Post #4365964

  Dario can suck a fuck.

• Post #4354909

  🟢 Your smartwatch's green light has a 90-year-old secret origin. That tiny LED is photoplethysmography (PPG), an optical trick from 1937. Physiologist Alrick Hertzman at St. Louis University pointed a light bulb and photocell at a finger and watched the pulse show up in the changing light passing through the blood. Same principle, different scale: it now runs hospital pulse oximeters and every fitness wearable. Green light near 520-530nm is strongly absorbed by hemoglobin, so when your hea...

• Post #4299439

  Justice Dept. admits Reflecting Pool renovation was ‘hasty and botched,’ drops case against former Olympian | CNN Politics https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/31/politics/doj-admits-reflecting-pool-renovation-flawed-drops-case-david-hearn

• Post #4297669

  📜 TIL the Korean alphabet Hangul is the only major writing system invented from scratch for its own language, and its letters are drawings of your mouth. King Sejong the Great finished it in 1443 so common people could read and write. The consonants literally trace the speech organs: ㄱ is the tongue root blocking the throat, ㅁ is lips pressed together, ㅅ is the teeth. The vowels encode sky, earth, and human: a dot, a horizontal line, and a vertical stroke. The scholar class hated it. For 400...

• Post #4285113

  New solar panels in Great Britain at 15-year high as fossil fuel costs soar | Solar power | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/31/new-solar-panels-great-britain-15-year-high

• Post #4284534

  For my DMV.Community members: I'm considering adding an optional "Generate description" button to the alt text editor on dmv.community. Here's how it would work and what it means. How it works: When you upload an image and open the alt text editor, you'd see a new button next to the existing "Add text from image" (OCR) button. Click it, and a vision-capable language model generates a suggested description of your image. You review it, edit if needed, and save. N...

• Post #4283449

  📜 For nearly 2,000 years, the Herculaneum scrolls were considered unreadable—carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD into brittle lumps that crumbled when touched. Now, using particle accelerators and AI, the Vesuvius Challenge has digitally unwrapped an entire scroll for the first time, recovering 20 columns of continuous ancient Greek text. One scroll may contain lost works by Chrysippus, a founding Stoic philosopher whose writings were almost entirely lost to history. Another re...

• Post #4280422

  YT Zero - a clean front end for YouTube https://github.com/Pelski/ytzero

• Post #4151316

  🏠 Nearly half of adults under 30 in the US are living with their parents. The number is real, and it's climbing fast. The Federal Reserve's 2025 household survey found 49% of adults under 30 live at home, up from 37% in 2019 and 43% in 2022. That's a 12-point jump in six years. Census data backs this up: a record 25.2 million adults under 35 now live with parents, surpassing even the COVID peak. This isn't a new phenomenon. The trend follows a U-shaped curve dating back to 1940...

• Post #4150891

  🙌

• Post #4150281

  🤖 The US banned its best AI model to keep China from getting it. China built a matching one the same day. On June 12, 2026, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to pull Mythos and Fable off the market for all foreign nationals. Anthropic could not verify citizenship, so they disabled both models for everyone, including the NSA, which had been using Mythos to find vulnerabilities in its own classified systems. That same day, China's Zhipu AI released GLM-5.2, an open-weight model anyon...

• Post #4126505

  🏺 The Trojan War didn't happen the way Homer described it. No wooden horse, no 10-year siege, no gods on the battlefield. But the city of Troy was very real. The archaeological site at Hisarlik, Turkey has 4,000+ years of layered settlements. Troy VIIa (circa 1300-1180 BCE) was destroyed by violence around 1180 BCE: burned timbers, human remains, arrowheads, and piles of sling stones. New 2025 excavations found more sling ammunition outside the palace walls. Hittite tablets from the same e...

• Post #4124816

  💊 A viral video calls benfotiamine (fat-soluble vitamin B1) a "revolutionary" anti-inflammatory breakthrough. The real story is more complicated. The video references a real June 2026 study where researchers used computational drug repurposing to identify benfotiamine as a P2Y14R antagonist. P2Y14R is a genuine inflammatory target. The study tested it in mice with colitis and gouty arthritis and reported positive results. But here's what the video leaves out: 1. The study is pre...

• Post #4124044

  Scientists trace the shocking origin of human eyes to an ancient “cyclops” | ScienceDaily https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260725105554.htm

• Post #4123307

  🌊 In September 2023, seismometers around the world detected a mysterious signal repeating every 92 seconds for nine straight days. The source: a standing wave trapped inside a Greenland fjord. Here is what happened. A glacier in East Greenland had been thinning for years, no longer supporting the mountain slope above it. On September 16, about 25 million cubic meters of rock and ice collapsed into Dickson Fjord, triggering a tsunami with a runup height of 200 meters near the impact. The fjord...

• Post #4122681

  ☄️ On April 13, 2029, asteroid Apophis will fly so close to Earth that about 7.6 billion people could see it with their naked eyes. Apophis is about 340 meters across, roughly the height of the Eiffel Tower. It will pass just 32,000 km from Earth's surface, closer than our geostationary satellites. The flyby was a hot topic at the Apophis T-3 Years conference in Padua, Italy this June. Naked-eye visibility should last about 7 hours as it streaks from Australia across to the North Atlantic....

• Post #4122608

  Urban Dictionary: Fuckletoad A grumpy little human who hops from one complaint to the next, finding fault in absolutely everything. Nothing is ever quite right, and they’ll happily croak about it until everyone within earshot regrets making eye contact. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fuckletoad

• Post #4118324

  I love it.

• Post #4117109

  The environmental cost of running LLMs keeps climbing, but a few inference providers are running on 100% clean energy out of the box: - Regolo (https://regolo.ai/sustainable-ai/): EU-hosted GPU clusters running on wind and solar power, using zero-water cooling. - GreenPT (https://greenpt.com/api): European OpenAI-compatible API powered 100% by renewables in ISO-certified datacenters. - Riveon (https://riveon.io/): Swiss provider with Finnish GPU sites powered 100% by renewables, offering OpenAI...

• Post #4116996

  The race to power AI infrastructure is creating sharp geographic splits in how data centers source clean energy: • US: Hyperscalers are leaning into 24/7 carbon-free contracts, nuclear power revivals, and behind-the-meter setups to bypass 3 to 5 year grid interconnection queues. • Europe: Strict EU energy efficiency mandates are driving AI workloads north to Scandinavia for hydro and wind power, alongside mandatory heat-reuse systems. • China: The state-directed "East Data, West Computin...

• Post #4113584

  Definitely don't do any of the clearly explained activities in this video.

• Post #4112878

  JFC they can't even properly secure their shitty surveillance tech. #Flock #FlockCameras

• Post #4112596

  📉 In June, Alphabet did something it has never done at this scale: sold $84.75B in new stock to help fund its AI data center buildout. Here's what's actually going on with the numbers. The raise: $18B common stock, $16.75B convertible preferred, a $40B at-the-market program, and a $10B private placement anchored by Berkshire Hathaway at around $350 a share. The context: 2026 capex guidance is now $195-205B, roughly double 2025's $91B. Free cash flow went negative in Q2. Long-term d...