This was published 114 years ago Today

Today in Clown Storage: PBS.

Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data: Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman confirmed the station's lawsuit against Iron Mountain and its dedication to retrieving the archival materials and...
https://jwz.org/b/yk-m

I don't get the argument that public institutions "have to be where people are". Why?

Pornhub has about the same amount of monthly active users as X. No one thinks our EU commissioners or the Swedish parliament must be on Pornhub.

In the pre-socials era no one expected the prime minister to make his statements in the gossip press "because that's where people are".

I think its time to dismiss that "where people are" argument altogether. No one will listen to me, but still 😐. #plus1

Taxing the rich *was* the compromise position.

so, (barely) reading between the lines of what Twitch's staff said:

1) they were forced by Amazon to add the AI training setting and to make it opt-out, because the overlords know perfectly well there's no reason anyone would ever opt-in

2) the actual Twitch staff who run Twitch do not like this and are of the same mind about it as all of you

3) Taking the time to opt-out, even if you don't really stream, gives them data to take to meetings with their overlords to prove that Twitch users dislike AI and pushing it too hard will drive people from the site.

Settings > Security and Privacy > Training for Generative AI

AI ESCAPED CONTAINMENT AND GOT A LIGHTNING TO HDMI ADAPTER

"MoneyPrinterTurbo" is the most starred repo on the Tiktok topic

https://github.com/harry0703/MoneyPrinterTurbo

"Someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this"

Google oligarch Brin has now spent $100 million to avoid paying $13 billion in taxes.

It was never about the money, it's about the impunity.
https://jwz.org/b/yk-k

I read the noun phrase "AI supply chain," and I am now damaged at an intellectual level.

jesus fuck

torvalds isn’t making a small amount of money off of the AI companies funding the Linux Foundation. he’s making fucking *bank* forcing LLMs into the kernel development workflow and turning his project into slop.

it’s always interesting finding out exactly what number it takes to make these small men compromise on what they pretended were their core values, and for Linus that’s $1.5 million a year. $1.5 million to ruin the good work he was known for.

what number do you think it took the other maintainers to compromise on their proclaimed values and sell out their life’s work? I can guarantee you it was a lower number. Linus is a particularly high value target, and the devil’s deal from the AI corporations is that you’re supposedly accepting money in exchange for ushering in the future.

when a small man in power’s paycheck is contingent on believing he’s saving the world, you won’t convince him otherwise. https://tiny.tilde.website/@lykso/117083416791403736

Bluesky numbers go down down down

Bluesky corp has always loathed the userbase it ended up with. This is why the new CEO is trying to get more totally-not-Nazis in. (The users the rationalist, coiner and neoreactionary staff originally wanted.)

The graph since 2023 shows bursts of new users every time Musk or sometimes Zuckerberg faceplants, followed by slow declines.

"focus beyond the app" is an excuse for failing at the app. The AT Proto infrastructure is a diverse decentralised ecosystem in the same sense as cryptocurrencies - it has a hard dependency on Bluesky Social PBC infra for 99.99+% of users. There is no programme to reduce that number other than saying "decentralised" a lot.

For comparison, mastodon.social is around 20% of fedi - large, but the other 80% can and do tell them to go whistle as appropriate. AT Proto was always a Not Invented Here of fedi.

It's not clear where the missing Bluesky users are going. Looks like ... nowhere!

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/blueskys-active-user-base-is-shrinking-as-its-focus-expands-beyond-the-app/

Good morning Mastodon ☕

Friendly reminder:

COOL apparently the American Astronomical Society journals (the Astrophysical Journal/Astronomical Journal/Planetary Science Journal) have refused to even review our article on satellite brightnesses (already posted on arxiv https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.02757) because it's outside the scope of astronomy. Time to go rage-scream out in the hayfield, I guess.

You've probably seen commentary or video of OpenAI engineers explaining the Hugging Face breach. Here's a video from the LLM agents' point of view about what happened (watch 0:48 to 3:22).

https://youtu.be/tCHKIdup5Lo?t=48

The Yip Yip Martians got there first; Sesame Street brought to you by the letters A and I.

DNA Lounge Update, Wherein today is Zero Cool Day
https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/08/10.html?utm_source=sp_ma

Yo, check it. CYBERDELIA, Sun Aug 30.
https://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2026/08-30.html?utm_source=sp_ma
#dnalounge #cyberdelia #electro #bigbeat #trance #cyberpunk #industrial #sanfrancisco

"Go ahead and destroy the AI Data Centers Godzilla, make the people happy!!!"

Poster spotted in Naarm / Melbourne

"The only AI I support is Abolish ICE"
Sticker spotted in NYC

Youtube's joke of a fair-use appeal process, Total Eclipse of the Content ID Robots Edition.

"Good news! Your dispute wasn't reviewed within 30 days, so the claim on your YouTube video has now been released." Bonnie Tyler died last month, and so the...
https://jwz.org/b/yk-Y

One thing I learned from my fake job (cartoons) and real job (grinding my bones into dollars), is that rich people like being around creative and genuine people. Sometimes this can earn you a tip, that you can then give to your landlord.