I think it’s worth pointing out that our guy is crashing out primarily because of this post about integrating with Bluesky,

I’ve never bothered getting into ATproto arguments. They always have a faint air of fashwashing over them. Or it’s a bit like Urbit where only those in the know are welcome.

Yeah it’s very quiet now that the media (and Musk) isn’t getting the story they hoped for.

Edit again, I really really wish it hadn’t come to this.

I too was and am horrified at Gas Town, but now I see multiple submissions to lobste.rs and HN not ridiculing it, but actually engaging, and reluctanly concludes that Yegge’s Still Got It.

I’m pretty sure he got some tongue-bathing from rich connected overseas Iranians.

still kinda low-key horrified at Xhitter’s attempt to meme regime change in Iran into existence

https://blog.emojipedia.org/x-expected-to-update-its-iranian-flag-emoji-design/

Look, I fully support the right of the Iranian people to freely decide how to run their country. But assuming that protests that ultimately seem to have ended with over 30,000 dead protestors would succeed and that the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979 is pretty ghoulish.

I’m starting to think that the trend started by Sarbanes-Oxley - making it relatively harder to launch an IPO - pushed way too much financing on to private capital, which is basically run by dudes with a very similar outlook. In public markets, you can bet against a company by short-selling, and make money. I believe a lot of the current crop of VC funded companies would have withered a long time ago if they’d been submitted to the scrutiny of public markets.

“We don’t hate ourselves. We hate Scott”.

“Which Scott?”

“All the Scotts”

<angry goose meme> what race, motherfucker??

Apparently if you’re a self-hating nerd, you’re here in Sneerclub’s spiritual successor.

Also, here’s a quote from a commentXhit non-dead Scott A feels compelled to reprint:

[Coffee With Scott Adams] made it acceptable to be an American, someone who was proud of the country, unashamed of their race; proud of the culture, and proud of the heritage which built the country.

unsurprisingly the Xhitter in question is a rabid anti vaxxer

Belarus is one of the most repressive countries in the world and are rapidly running out of scapegoats for the regimes shitty handling of everything from the economy to foreign relations. It sucks that hams are now that scapegoat.

JFC Roger Ver is still around? I had forgotten about him.

Futurism: A Man Bought Meta’s AI Glasses, and Ended Up Wandering the Desert Searching for Aliens to Abduct Him

[…] Daniel purchased a pair of AI chatbot-embedded Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses — the AI-infused eyeglasses that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made central to his vision for the future of AI and computing — which he says opened the door to a six-month delusional spiral that played out across Meta platforms through extensive interactions with the company’s AI, culminating in him making dangerous journeys into the desert to await alien visitors and believing he was tasked with ushering forth a “new dawn” for humanity.

And though his delusions have since faded, his journey into a Meta AI-powered reality left his life in shambles — deep in debt, reeling from job loss, isolated from his family, and struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts.

“I’ve lost everything,” Daniel, now 52, told Futurism, his voice dripping with fatigue. “Everything.”

all the parallel comments flagged as offtopic lol

anyone remember how Assange and his Russian handlers tried to file a criminal complaint against the Nobel Foundation for their lack of prescience regarding Trump’s attacks on Venezuala?

The complaint was dismissed 2 days later.

Writeup in Swedish here by yours truly:

https://gerikson.com/m/2026/01/index.html#d21p01_wed

Update I went through the trouble of reading the will itself (short and sweet), and the statutes of the foundation

Para 10:

https://www.nobelprize.org/about/statutes-of-the-nobel-foundation/#par10

No appeals may be made against the decision of a prize-awarding body with regard to the award of a prize.

Also short and sweet. There’s simply no legal way to hold the foundation itself responsible for the decisions of the prize-awarning committees.

Heatmap: Amid Rising Local Pushback, U.S. Data Center Cancellations Surged in 2025

regwalled, here are quotes

President Trump has staked his administration’s success on America’s ongoing artificial intelligence boom. More than $500 billion may be spent this year to dot the landscape with new data centers, power plants, and other grid equipment needed to sustain the explosively growing sector, according to Goldman Sachs.

There’s just one problem: Many Americans seem to be turning against the buildout. Across the country, scores of communities — including some of the same rural and exurban areas that have rebelled against new wind and solar farms — are blocking proposed data centers from getting built or banning them outright.

At least 25 data center projects were canceled last year following local opposition in the United States, according to a review of press accounts, public records, and project announcements conducted by Heatmap Pro. Those canceled projects accounted for at least 4.7 gigawatts of electricity demand — a meaningful share of the overall data center capacity projected to come online in the coming years.

Those cancellations reflect a sharp increase over recent years, when local backlash rarely played a role in project cancellations, according to Heatmap’s review.

The surge reflects the public’s growing awareness — and increasing skepticism — of the large-scale fixed investment that must be kept up to power the AI economy. It also shows the challenge faced by utilities and grid planners as they try to forecast how the fast-growing sector will shape power demand.

via WaPo, ole orange cankles is promising socialism:

In a bid to tamp down growing unrest in communities over tech giants’ expansion of power-hungry data centers, President Donald Trump said his administration would push Silicon Valley companies to ensure their massive computer farms do not drive up people’s electricity bills, seizing on a promise Microsoft made public Tuesday to be a better neighbor.

The Trump administration has gone all in on artificial intelligence, pushing aside concerns within the MAGA movement and seeking to sweep away regulations that it says hamper innovation. But neighbors of the vast warehouses of computer chips that form the technology’s backbone — many of them in areas otherwise supportive of the president — have grown increasingly concerned about how the facilities sap power from the grid, guzzle water to stay cool and secure tax breaks from local governments. And Trump now appears to be recalibrating his approach.

JWZ: The Dilbert Hole

It’s darkly funny that the AI2027 authors so obviously didn’t predict that Trump 2.0 was gonna be so much more stupid and evil than Biden or even Trump 1.0. Can you imagine that the administration that’s sueing the current Fed chair (due for replacement in May this year) is gonna be able to constructively deal with the complex robot god they’re conjuring up? “Agent-4” will just have to deepfake Steve Miller and be able to convince Trump do do anything it wants.

in retrospect I regret starting this hare

The impulse was a HN sub where the CDCCPS was gonna mark infant male circumcision as bad

becase the CDC is now basically RFK JR/MAHA aligned, my thought went instantly to neo-nazis. [See above, this was CPS, not CDC, so I doubly misread. Further association follows] In part because a couple of election cycles ago here in Sweden, the local nationalist party tried to resurrect the old Swedish ban on kashrut slaughter as an anti-islamist trope, showing that these bad Nazi ideas keep showing up

HN submission (flagged): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567696

Previous discussion on HN from 9 years ago, no-one mentions Fremskrittspartiet are heirs to Nazis, nor that the linked submission explicitely calls out the legislation as anti-semitic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291906

I completely forgot that the US is almost unique in the prevalence of infant male circumcision on non-religious grounds

People more plugged in than me in US culture war issues: is the opposition to infant male circumcision driven primarily by anti-semitism / anti-islamism or by more general manosphere vibes?

I found out about the rightwing / misogynist strain of FOSS mostly via the furore over RMS defending Minsky from Epstein allegations.