Is it my imagination, or has Google Maps recently become much shittier after years of improvement?

Rest stop food in France is so much better than in Germany

When someone is described as "often controversial, never boring" in 2026 it just means: full nazi but also part of the establishment.

AI is great because it can cut the human trafficking out of fraud

Arnold Palmer has the all time PGA record for shooting his age when he hit a 71 at the age of 71. But Trump of course is shooting a 70 at age 80 making him a much better golfer. Why is everyone laughing?

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3d ago

Trump: “The Winning Shot in the Bedminster Club Championship! Thank you very much to all of those who participated. I won with a 70, & am so honored in that, unlike the rest of the field, I’m given very little time to practice, bc I’m focused on many other things. It’s called TALENT, and I have it”

Looks like my contractor friend got it right. www.cnn.com/2026/07/31/p... The DOJ dropped all charges against the "vandals," admitting a "rushed and flawed installation process" with "overspraying and a failure of the coatings to bond" the primary results. Also failure to dry properly first.

𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗@charlescmann.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Asked a contractor pal about the $13M paint job peeling off the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Him: I knew that was going to happen. Me: How? Him: You can't rush that kind of job. The pool bottom has to be really dry or it'll exude water. And you have to clean it like a mofo first...

"...Munich court today ruled that by training its AI systems on hits from GEMA’s repertoire in the US, and by storing and reproducing them in Europe, Suno had breached both US and German copyright laws." grahamlovelace.substack.com/p/collecting...

Collecting society GEMA triumphs in copyright clash with AI music generator Suno

#115 | PLUS: Creators petition new PM on AI | Music industry unites on AI and charts |✨AND: Meet the Prof who set an AI trap

grahamlovelace.substack.com

UPDATE: After the publication of this piece, Google sent 404 Media a statement saying it was “rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails.” www.404media.co/google-earth...

Google Earth’s New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Completely Bullshit Satellite Images

"Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam."

404media.co

There is nothing easy about managed relocation of potentially hundreds of millions of people over the coming decades. But it is necessary. And that requires proper planning and preparation. Cueta is a window both into the future and into our souls as human beings.

The German government is working on a plan on what to do if regions vote in extreme-right AFD governments which may not allow NATO troop movements or may otherwise want to impede defence policies and Russia deterrence. www.n-tv.de/politik/Sorg...

Sorge vor AfD-Wahlerfolgen - Bund arbeitet an Nato-Notfallplan

Im September werden in Sachsen-Anhalt und Mecklenburg-Vorpommern neue Landtage gewählt. In Umfragen liegt die AfD klar vorn. Die Sorge vor einem Wahlerfolg führt in Berlin laut einem Bericht zu konkre...

n-tv.de

Diplomatic AI in action www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference

State department ‘takes full responsibility’ for erroneous, widely shared chart displayed at Aids conference in Brazil

theguardian.com

This is going to make it very difficult to know which sports we should ban them from.

Kat Kerlin@katkerlin.bsky.social · last wk.

Some avocados are female in the morning and male in the afternoon, while others are on the opposite schedule. This helps them avoid self-pollination. How do they do it? A @ucdavis.bsky.social study explains. www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/st...

We are watching, in real time, the biggest fuck-up by any president in the history of the United States of America.

Would like to see this on every social media website, and I’m glad we’re calling it what it is now

Tits McGee@scientits.bsky.social · 6d ago

Oh my God, this is not a drill - LinkedIn has added 'seems like AI slop' as an option on posts Genuinely thought it was a joke until I clicked on a few posts

Nearly 10,000 dead in Germany due to this year's heat waves so far, I have yet to see a statement about this from a government minister

DIE ZEIT@zeit.de · 7d ago

Bundesweit sind in diesem jahr 9.800 Menschen wegen hoher Temperaturen gestorben. Das übersteigt die Zahl jedes Gesamtjahrs seit 2016.

Additionally, the UK and French governments have also issued a similar statement on climate change: "[We] call on all countries to intensify their efforts to tackle its causes while boosting resilience to its effects" www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/presse-et...

++BREAKING++ The UK and Spanish governments have issued a joint statement overnight: "[We] agreed that this summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life." www.gov.uk/government/n...

It is imperative that #UEFA punishes #FIFA and torpedoes #WorldCup2030 until Infantino is gone and FIFA ends its corruption.

Sky News@news.sky.com · 6d ago

FIFA plans to speed up launch of new World Cup spin-off

Aaah the Leto story is finally emerging from plain site. I wrote one of my interactions with him here, the most palatable. What I also witnessed was much less amusing. open.substack.com/pub/arutherf...

Working science into great movies, and also with Jared Leto

The joys of being a science advisor on movies, and the HORROR.

open.substack.com

"As Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Asia found in a recent investigation, just five US tech giants — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — are hiding an estimated $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. futurism.com/artificial-i...

AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt

AI companies are pouring tens of billions of dollars into enormous data centers. They're being built on top of a mountain of hidden debt.

futurism.com

And here is some of that "Mediterranean lifestyle", as reported by today's Telegraph website...

The Daily Telegraph has raced through all five stages of climate denial this week. But this is, perhaps, the most ridiculous column so far: "Without minimising the severe downsides…especially on some poorer nations, many in Britain would enjoy the kind of warmer climate predicted by modellers..."

🚨 Senate Commerce Committee has just announced a markup on KOSA and other kids safety bills next week 🚨 So if you're in the US, now's a very good time to call your Senators! @fightforthefuture.org's Bad Internet Bills page makes it easy ... www.badinternetbills.com

Bad Internet Bills

All of the bad internet bills. One website.

badinternetbills.com

Blake C. Stacey@blakestacey.myatproto.social · last wk.

Punchbowl reporting that the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a mark-up for #KOSA next week, citing "a person familiar". Nothing on the Committee website itself yet. punchbowl.news/article/tech... #SaveSpeech

wow, Gemini now generates full-length songs (not just 30 sec snippets) when you ask it to create dumb AI music

Here's a video on those calls - including from within the AI industry - for the AI industry to slow down youtu.be/LluGVZPq584

Can the AI industry slow down?

YouTube video by Tech Gets Real

youtu.be

Manifestantes interromperam o CTO da Amazon numa palestra da "AI For Good", um evento das Nações Unidas, onde ele falaria sobre o Projeto Nimbus. Isso aqui foi incrível.

See you in court, creep.

MPR News@mprnews.org · last wk.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is suing Minnesota over a first-in-the-nation law banning technology that allows users to create and post deepfake videos or images of people naked without their consent.

“boy george admits he used AI to create his new pro-israel song” is now a sentence we can say