2026 - Wk 02 - Notes and Links
Andy's Newslather
Ten Things in the News This Week
How do scammers target people on-line? Police found scammer manuals showing how: As long as the emotions are in place, their money will follow. Sent in by one of you.
Poland introduces biggest changes to spelling in almost a century.
To be fair, he’s a police chief and not a fire chief.
This hard-hitting publication asks the big questions.
The five stages of the ‘ensh*ttification’ of academic publishing.
Why! Why did we stop building cars that look like this?
Animal shelter catches dog on video, during escape. Cue the Mission Impossible music.
Cartoon characters, Sam Spade and loads of classic American songs entered the public domain this month.
Baltimore cyclist finds joy in collecting lost hubcaps and stringing these into art.
Boffins figure out how to make a material that works like the colour-changing skin of chameleons and octopi.
Amazing Obit
Craig, one of the most photographed elephants in the world, died over the weekend, age 54.
Data this Week
Pedaling pugnacious males persistently perch upon pedals, preventing painful perineal pressure, provoking penile problems.
A new study analyzing a decade of the popular topical debate programme BBC Question Time found that the broadcaster’s flagship political debate show relies disproportionately on journalists and pundits from right-wing media outlets, particularly those connected to The Spectator magazine.
US health institutions are no longer dependable for accurate information for preventable diseases, says America’s neighbour.
Californians have had the right to demand companies stop collecting/selling their data since 2020, doing so used to require a laborious opting out with each individual company, reports TechCrunch. Now Californians can request that more than 500 registered data brokers delete their information with one Delete Requests and Opt-Out Platform request.
Florida licence plates cannot have these 100 rude words.
Tesla sales crater in most European countries.
The Illinois Department of Human Services disclosed that a misconfigured internal mapping website exposed sensitive personal data for more than 700,000 Illinois residents for over four years, from April 2021 to September 2025.
Old Data - Men do eat faster.
Science and Tech this Week
Popular shadow library Anna’s Archive has lost control over its main domain name. The site’s operator doesn’t believe that the actions are related to its recently announced Spotify backup and stresses that the site remains accessible through secondary domains.
La-la-la-la. I’m not listening La-la-la-la. I can’t hear you
Stack Overflow’s monthly question volume has collapsed to levels not seen since the site launched in 2009, according to data from the Stack Overflow Data Explorer that tracks the platform’s activity over its sixteen-year history. Questions peaked around 2014 at roughly 200,000 per month, then began a gradual decline that accelerated dramatically after ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch. Questions began to decline around 2014, when Stack Overflow improved moderator efficiency and closed questions more aggressively.
A fish-mouth-shaped filter removes 90 percent of microplastics from water.
Europa may not be the place we find life beyond Earth. No point attempting landings there.
Fusion power may only be 30 years away, as Canada has just broken a world record in nuclear fusion, producing about 600 million fusion neutrons every second at peak output.
Facebook has just inked long-term nuclear power deals to fuel its data centers.
More good news: RAM prices are going up.
Artificial Intelligence
Hahahahahaha! No.
We didn’t use copyrighted materials to train our systems. That Harry Potter book you found in our LLM must have appeared by magic.
The rapid spread of AI-generated images and videos is accelerating an online trust breakdown, especially during fast-moving news events where context is scarce.
Microsoft is testing a new Windows policy that lets IT administrators uninstall Microsoft Copilot.
The promise of AI-powered workplace tools that sort emails, take meeting notes, and file expense reports is finally delivering meaningful productivity gains -- one software startup reported a 20 per cent boost around mid-2025, but companies are discovering an unexpected tradeoff: employees are burning out from the relentless pace of high-level cognitive work.
OpenAI is facing increasing scrutiny over how it handles ChatGPT data after users die, only selectively sharing data in lawsuits over ChatGPT-linked suicides
Everything you hated about text adventure games is now being sold as a productivity tool. Trying to get AI to give the correct response should be called PromptQuest!
Cops file an AI-generated policer repot that said a constable transformed into a frog.
The US National Weather Service pulled an AI-generated forecast graphic with hallucinated fake towns.
Google’s AI Overviews -- the generative AI summaries that appear at the top of search results -- are serving up inaccurate health information that experts say puts people at risk of harm.
The ‘occupations most exposed to AI automation’ actually outperform the rest of the job market.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s outgoing chief AI scientist and one of the pioneers credited with laying the groundwork for modern AI, has acknowledged that the company’s Llama 4 language model's benchmark results were manipulated before its April 2025 release. LeCun said the results were fudged a little bit and that the team “used different models for different benchmarks to give better results.”
AI startups now outnumber all publicly traded U.S. companies, according to a year-end note to investors from economists at Vanguard. Don’t worry. It’s clearly not a bubble.
Australia’s largest pension fund is planning to reduce its allocation to global equities this year, amid signs that the AI boom in the US stock market could be running out of steam.
Infographics
What is the Most Successful Hollywood Movie of All Time?
3D Map with the depth and magnitude of earthquakes since July
Britain’s World: the strategy of security in twelve geopolitical maps from a gent here on Substack.
Resources
VibeVoice can generate expressive, long-form, multi-speaker conversational audio like podcasts from text.
Here’s a really cool archival 24/7 streaming of music videos from 1981-2024, organized by decade and genre channels (Rap City, Headbangers Ball, Club MTV, 120 Minutes, Unplugged). Vintage commercials (Blockbuster, GAK, Mentos, Orbitz) randomly mixed in between videos - pure 90s/2000s nostalgia. Watch videos in the order they actually aired. No algorithm deciding what you see next, just random discovery like flipping on MTV after school. No login, completely free.
Viewing Pleasure
This week’s comedy video: Are we the baddies?
How do you wear a medieval cloak?
Companies come and go. The Company Man YouTube channel specializes in documenting how well-known companies vanish down the drain. I’m sure you’ll see firm that you loved in here. It’s worth a deep dive.
How to drive a forklift.
The year after Star Wars came out, there was a mad rush to get anything vaguely like it into the theatres. Here, in all its ‘glory,’ is Message From Space, a Japanese film with a hastily inserted US cast.
Making Sense of the Moment, by Heather Cox-Richardson, one of the top Substackers. Sent in by one of you.
Five things to make from an old hair dryer.
Listening Pleasure
67 years ago, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation recorded a collection of predictions about the future—the one we’re living in now, in 2026. Their forecasts are truly extraordinary - Intergalactic super speed travel, future pod houses, Nuclear fallout, but all of these are wrong.
The world’s biggest risks, with Gerry Butts, the vice chairman of the global political risk firm, the Eurasia group, which releases a “Top Risks” list every year. We’ll drill down on a few of them.
Does God Fart: A song.
How Silicon Valley soured on democracy and embraced authoritarianism
Tales of the Unexpected
Unintended consequences and correlations
City officials say Omaha’s New Year’s Eve fireworks show was cut short after someone tripped over a cord and disabled the show.
Hey, at least they tried. Other New Year’s Eve revellers turn out for non-existent fireworks – for second new year in a row.
Laws and rules to protect coral reefs now stand in the way of radical action to save them from heat death.
A woman whose last name is Null has a lot of problems with computer records.
I was Catholic when I put the album on. Midway through, I became a full-blown Satanist.
Man sues restaurant after promotional TikTok video exposes his secret affair.
Crazy Crime
Aspirations of becoming a mermaid is not a crime. Public nudity and attacking the police are, however.
If you’re going to pretend to be a member of the Royal Navy, maybe don’t sneak into the event dressed as an admiral.
Beloved walrus penis stolen from restaurant.
There’s a reason why UPS is pronounced ‘Oops’.
A lace bra, a G-string, and a hidden gun? I have a question for this man…
Look, times are tough. Even cops need a side hustle.
Strange Headlines
This headline takes matters in hand.
Russian media praises horseback units that have been destroyed by drones
Ghana has decided to deal with the viral spread of prophetic content on social media by setting up an official reporting mechanism for sensitive predictions, a move triggered by the August 2025 helicopter crash that killed the country’s defence and environment ministers along with six others.
The 25 strangest things pulled out of backsides in 2025, according to the US government. 26, if you count their foreign policy.
Lawyer representing Elon Musk in OpenAI legal battle with Sam Altman is also a working clown, like his boss.
A train employee served food dumped in the garbage to first-class passengers. On with the revolution, Comrades!
A headline that would usually be unimaginable.
Tepid Dystopia
Saudi Arabia sets execution record in 2025, putting 356 people to death.
If you’re reading this in Ghana, you may want to stop eating meat for a bit. And, maybe, stop burning tires.
Thousands of British police officers and staff were not properly checked amid pressure during a national recruitment drive from July 2019 to March 2023. Including this guy.
A new working paper from researchers at the University of Hong Kong has found that Chinese graduate students who plagiarized more heavily in their master’s theses were significantly more likely to pursue careers in the civil service and to climb the ranks faster once inside.
US targets enemies of America with sanctions, like this Canadian judge on the International Criminal Court, who just happens to be looking into war crimes committed by US troops.
Between 2022 and 2024, SARs-Covid-19 killed roughly 100,000 Americans annually, new research by CDC scientists shows.
A New York City grocery store has started collecting data about the faces, eyes and voices of people entering to ’protect the safety and security of our patrons and employees’.
Stuff
Linguistic Goof of the Week: …Michael [Croleone]’s brother, Frodo…
Weird Wiki: It all started with a tree obscuring someone’s view.
This week’s nincompoop.
Conflict Studies
The evolution of Chinese and Russian air power threats.
Putin branded the ‘Anti-Christ’ by church leaders after claiming Ukraine war is ‘holy mission’.
Camouflage nets that look like construction debris appear at the front.
A ceasfire in occupied Ukraine would mean ongoing partisan resistance.
How desperate do you have to be to recruit gamers as foot soldiers in your military?
Key Russian terminal exported $8.4 billion of LNG to Europe in 2025, watchdog finds.
Remember how the Invasion of Iraq was going to be self-financing because of the oil revenues the US would control? Good times. I’m sure Venezuela will be the same thing. Read that as you will.
Strategic Winners and Losers of 2025 - Outcomes, Strategy & The Road to 2026, a video.
A great resource for following the Ukrainian War is the daily discussion on Fark.Com. Here is today’s thread.
Twilight Struggle
Russia Uses Fishermen, Tourists for Espionage Near Norwegian Border, Norway’s Military Says
French and U.K pitch Canada on ‘sovereign’ satellite service for Arctic military operations.
Jonathan Fink, Silicon Curtain host and disinformation expert, deconstructs Russian hybrid operations, giving insight into mechanisms behind Russian psychological warfare and provides symptoms of Russian manipulation.
How does a shadow banking system permit or enable illegal oil sales?
China’s hacked the mail system of US Congressional staff.
Iran also uses its oil surplus to power Bitcoin mining, effectively converting energy into cryptocurrency. Given Iran’s extensive use of cryptocurrency and its connections across various blockchains to international markets, generating Bitcoin in this way creates liquidity for Iran, generates revenue that can be used to purchase goods and services, and provides funds it can send to its proxies in its ‘Axis of Resistance’.
People Watching
Did the Romans wear underwear?
Should you dust first? Or vacuum?
It Can’t Happen Here is a 1935 dystopian political novel by the American author Sinclair Lewis.[1] Set in a fictionalized version of the 1930s United States, it follows an American politician, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, who quickly rises to power to become the country’s first outright dictator. Read it here.
John le Carré’s influence never seems to wane.
In September 2023, in the middle of the Northumberland night, a mechanic named Adam Carruthers cut down one of the most photographed trees in the UK. Yep. People noticed.
‘I don’t want to be a perfectly automated cyborg bitch’: an interview with Lyra Pramuk.
Post of the Week
I drive a wheelchair van or bus for my job, and I frequently find people parked in the blue-lined spot next to a handicapped space thinking they’re fine because they aren’t actually in the handicapped spot. But the whole point of the blue-lined space next to the accessible spot is to allow wheelchair vans to lower their ramp (which usually exits through the right passenger-side door) and safely enter or exit the vehicle from the side without hitting another car.
They do make rear exit vans, but you’re basically exiting into potential traffic, which is more dangerous.
Whenever I see someone parked on the blue lines, I park behind them to block them in, then lower the ramp into the accessible spot. Sometimes I have to unload five or more people, which takes a while.
I take my time to ensure I do it safely and correctly, and almost always see the person who parked on the blue lines exit the store. They usually turn beet red upon realizing not only did they cause a huge problem for a bunch of handicapped people, but they are also now stuck waiting for me to finish. I love seeing them standing on the sidewalk looking like a damn fool, getting angry glares from passersby.
There is no feeling as joyous as righteous comeuppance.
Quotes found On-Line
I look at everything Trump has done this week, and think….So, about those Epstein Files…
He looks and sounds like a sentient genital wart.
The next James Bond film will be sanitized to tiptoe around what America has become.
I love cats, but I can’t eat a whole one
We have been directed to enable sports betting sites on some of the laptops of our C suite. Apparently, it’s not enough for them to use their phones.
Deer should learn to make better choices in life.
Bayonettes, blood and blunders: history is full of great powers getting involved in colonial wars they thought would be easy.
So, the US killed 150 Venezuelans in the name of a law enforcement of pulling a sleeping man from his bed.
The Russian representatives preparing for the Paris talks said their government was committed to peace talks, and also answered questions about the hospital in Kyiv that had been bombed overnight.
The curse of intelligence is that you are forced to comprehend the malevolence of the world in exchange for being able to understand its beauty.
It’s better to be rich than poor, if only for financial reasons - Woody Allan.
‘I’m incredibly ignorant of what the UN does’ isn’t the flex you’ve been told it is.
Let’s not lament the death of the old international order. Yes, it was good for liberal democracy, bad for totalitarianism, and so-so for autocracies. But what’s dead is dead.
This is about as useful as a Doctor of Phrenology diploma from Trump University.
I child-proofed the house, but they keep getting in.
Barbed wire tattoos are the Honda Accord of tattoos.
Greenland isn’t just cold, it’s equipment-breaking cold.
I always wanted to be a proofreader. It was in my blood: Type O Negative.
Microsoft: Always late, never secure. And this is in a phase where they still have IT security as their “highest priority”. They simply cannot do it. They are still stuck in the era of single-user computers and no Internet. And they will never be able to catch up.
I’ve played a lot of Medieval: Total War 2 over the years, and frankly, Putin’s regime acts like an AI from about twenty years ago.
If the purpose of tariffs is to encourage domestic production, why are we putting tariffs on Colombian coffee? We can’t grow coffee in America.
Indeed, lessons of foreign policy that are right up there with “never enter a land war in Asia” (R.I.P. Rob Reiner) are don’t try to do regime change, don’t enter oil wars, and don’t have your country run by a bunch of incompetent nitwits.
Hate to say it, but DeGaul was right about NATO.
Trump and those flanking him, seemed to have been cast straight out of an eighties movie about high-school f***-ups.
The thing about people is they always want to help those right in front of them. So put yourself in front of them.
We should tell Trump to invade Vuvuzela next.
Your choices are either roll over and take it, or fight back; there is no appeasement, there is no ask nicely, there is no compromise. There is a show belly, or a show spine, that’s it.
Only the good die young. It’s why so many of our politicians are all so old.
I inherited my father’s prosthetic eyes.
Even the worst Miata is an amazingly fun car.
The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased in advance, with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place these in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist, to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.
My phone battery lasts longer than my New Year’s resolutions.
I have been to a number of protests in Boston, and you know what I have never seen even once? A voter registration table. When I ask the organizers about this, I’m met with “now is not the time for that” but I fail to see how these marches are nothing more than performative stunts when there’s no direct action tied to them.
Cats don’t wear bras.
The last James Bond film was apparently written by people unfamiliar with the character, and had him described to them by someone who hates the idea of 007.
Given that this was not the case, we are left wondering why this politician wrote the complaint in the first place. The simplest explanation is that he’s a maniac.
Roger Kirkness, CEO of 14-person software startup Convictional, noticed that after AI took the scut work off his team’s plates, their days became consumed by intensive thinking, and they were mentally exhausted and unproductive by Friday. The company transitioned to a four-day workweek; the same amount of work gets done, Kirkness says.
My emergency contact is my cat’s vet.
I ignored ample hot, shirtless men on French beaches to read about royal falcons.
The government is marching over the edge of an abyss, and the nation must march solidly behind it.
I might be wrong here, but I assume that people with face tattoos most likely lead lifestyles that will not end in an old folks’ home.
Nothing will happen, and nothing can change that.
I wet myself the first time I sneezed after having had CPR done on me. I still had ‘sneeze pain’ six months later right around my breastbone. Although I did think I would die the first time I got hiccups, don’t get hiccups when your ribs are broken, it a very bad idea.
The official answer is yes. The real answer is laughter.
It’s defecate and desecrate that confuse me. Of course, these can both happen at the same time.
I feel terrible for those who have to run SharePoint on-premises in this day and age. That’s a level of misery and pain that not even a masochist would enjoy.
Narcissists don’t remember. They edit.
Aliens can build a giant fire extinguisher to extinguish the sun and really screw us over.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall when the oil execs explain, using very small words and hand puppets, how the US has no refining capacity for that thick Venezuelan goo. And it would cost billions to create it in the US.
Putin’s regime is a machine with one setting. A collapse is inevitable, and when it happens, China will be forced to shift its focus from the Pacific to Central Asia to stabilize its global logistics network. The sooner that happens, the less likely a Chinese assault on Taiwan becomes.
I no longer confuse distance with strength or dependence with danger.
Fellatio is an evolutionary mystery.
Oregano is not a valid treatment for brain and central nervous system infections.
If regime change worked, there’d be more instances of it. There’s a reason someone does it, everyone says ‘Oh, yeah,’ and no one talks about it for 20 years. Electing a businessman to run government is the same thing.
Canonically, the Ewoks ate the stormtroopers after Return of the Jedi. Ewoks also defecate three times their own bodyweight daily.
Why is the US president’s skin going from copper to brass? Is he oxydizing?
So, America, maybe next time try the black woman.
I accidentally followed a fox into the British Museum.
Sovereign Citizens are the Flat Earthers of the justice system.
In the days before instant Jello, gelatin dishes were homemade, like most things. The gelatin part was a byproduct of beef. So, not really the super cheap food it is considered now. To the contrary, to be able to have so much beef that you had enough byproduct to make gelatin that frequently was quite the brag. Having all these [copper] jello molds was a way to display that wealth. It really was a status symbol.
I’ve never understood how an intoxicated man or woman can’t consent to sex, but a casino is allowed to serve you ‘free’ alcohol while you gamble away your mortgage payment.
There was a brief moment in time when I thought that the cameras on everyone’s phone would increase the shame of people doing obnoxious acts, then people just started doubling down and getting rich over it on occasion [on YouTube].
I wish people would recognize that just because someone is nice to you doesn’t mean they are nice to their children.
I got into day trading during the pandemic. Made $6k in one day. Was down $13k within a couple of weeks. Then I was like O, s***, I need to make it back. Lost a few thousand more. I’ve never been a risk-taker. Never even bought so much as a lottery ticket. I have a high understanding of statistics. But it was crazy how quickly I could justify that it wasn’t gambling, it was skill. And then the thought of okay, I’ll stop. I just need to make back what I lost. Just a few big ones and I’ll be okay. Luckily, I was able to take a step back and look at the thought patterns as classic gambling addiction stuff. I lost a good bit, and the setback definitely sucked, but at least I caught myself before it had a major impact on my life. It was just so wild to me how I could know all the pitfalls and still end up susceptible to it. The temptation has come back several times, too, but I’ve been able to say a firm no, thankfully.
Bon Mots
Funny Photos
