Utkarsh Gupta

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

The CEO of a a multi-trillion dollar company went to the White House, openly handed the US president a gift made of gold, and his company got a special exemption to tariffs the president has illegally imposed.

Also, the Founders took bribery so seriously the Constitution bans it 3 separate times.

Mo Salah is asking the right questions

Sunday at the garden party for Curtis Yarvin and the new, new right [FREE TO READ] What you learn at a gathering of neoreactionaries, Very Online rightwingers and the formerly cancelled

I spent the day with Curtis Yarvin and the "dissident right" at a garden party in Surrey and wrote quite a few words about it.

My cover story for today’s FT Magazine

on.ft.com/4ooXS4t [GIFT LINK! 🎁]

A most generous offering for His Excellency, the Dear Leader. Us shareholders are overjoyed with this golden idol. Truly, a new era of devotion and dividends.

the brain that can see a face in a wall outlet was always doomed to hear the voice of God in a markov chain

Hi, former Foreign Service Officer here

The Secretary of State might be interested to learn that visa requirements and terms are generally reciprocal. We do it to them, they do it to us.

As a percentage of US GDP, AI datacenter capex is already larger than peak telecom spending during the dot-com era and is approaching the railroad spending boom (Paul Kedrosky)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

chart: capital expenditures, quarterly shows hockey-stick like growth in the capex expenditures of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and meta, almost entirely on data centers in the most recent quarter it was nearly $100 billion, collectively

The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6 months, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/

The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months *alone*

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sili...

World chess just placed restrictions on both trans women and trans men The International Chess Federation will stop allowing transgender women to participate in women's tournaments. The group said changing genders has a "significant impact" on a player's status.

All you need to know about transphobes/terfs/gender critical people is that they think trans people have an unfair advantage in chess.

An aerial view of what the Gaza City area looked like this week. Taken from a Jordanian military aircraft, by our colleague Heidi Levine.

Me three months ago:

agrowingculture 3 hours ago 2/5 This morning, Israeli forces raided and demolished the Seed Multiplication Unit of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees' (UAWC) national seed bank in Hebron. Using bulldozers and heavy machinery, the Israeli army destroyed the storage warehouses and infrastructure where essential equipment, seed materials, and tools for indigenous seed reproduction were kept. This is not just an attack on a building-its an attack on Palestinian food sovereignty, biodiversity and cultural memory.

Israel destroyed a Palestinian seed bank today. This is such a specific kind of evil, targeting literal hope for the future. Attempting to further alienate Palestinians from their home and land. So much destroyed just for the sake of destroying. It's awful.

A female Western Gull was recorded riding 150km in a garbage truck from San Francisco to a compost facility in Central CA, probably to forage. TWICE. An innovator, an icon, a genius.

This is one of my favorite @waterbirdsociety.bsky.social papers I've ever handled as managing editor #ornithology

Please don't plug keyboards or other devices into random USB ports, ok?

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens ISLA VISTA, CA—In the days following a violent rampage in southern California in which a lone attacker killed seven individuals, including himself, and seriously injured over a dozen others, citizens ...

12 years earlier.

NYC Mass Shooting Was Nearly Impossible to Prevent, Experts Say

Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.

Emmett Till memorial shot up with bullets

People with guns proudly posing in front of the Emmett Till memorial shot up with bullets

A bulletproof Emmett Till memorial. Riddled with bullet dents.

All I think about when I hear people say that it’s bad taste to dance on Hulk Hogan’s grave is that Emmett Till’s monument had to be replaced with a 500lb steel bulletproof monument because white people simply won’t stop riddling it with bullets. So now it just has tons of dents. From bullets.

July 18: If we have a smart president, you're never going to let the dollar slide. If you have a dummy, that could happen.

July 25: A weak dollar makes you a hell of a lot more money. It doesn't sound good, but you make a hell of a lot more money with a weaker dollar than with a strong dollar

Headline from NY Post: NYC kids banned from using phones, smartwatches, tablets in public schools starting this fall

Nearly two decades after my principal said we couldn't do anything about kids' phones, so we had to figure out how to use them in our lessons, and after two decades of schools failing to "teach kids how to use them responsibly," phones are being banned and we're getting the same message about AI.

I found another fun Veo 3 prompt: "Realistic footage of the moon landing, but it took place in [year]"

Here is 1883 AD, 1255 AD, 44 AD, 2300 BC, 30,000 BC, and 65 million years ago

Yes, there was apparently wind on the moon back then, you are just going to have suspend disbelief a bit.

when they close it all up, I do believe this will go down as the funniest video on the internet

An AI slop factory apparently tried to rewrite our article about AI not replacing workers en masse, but hit the paywall... so just summarised the paywall. If this is the robot that takes my job I'll be v embarrassed

Trump: ‘We Could Argue All Day About Who Is Or Isn’t A Child Rapist’

Trump: ‘We Could Argue All Day About Who Is Or Isn’t A Child Rapist’

Ghislaine Maxwell Can’t Help But Notice Interview Room Covered In Plastic Sheeting TALLAHASSEE, FL—Perplexed that the Department of Justice had chosen a setting with such strange decor to ask her about Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators, Ghislaine Maxwell confirmed Thursday that she ...

Ghislaine Maxwell Can’t Help But Notice Interview Room Covered In Plastic Sheeting

I gave Claude the Mistral report on its AI's environmental impact and the prompt: "visualize this in two different ways, one that makes the numbers appear positive, one that makes them seem negative, using vivid comparisons"

(I then had it do some error checking & corrections on its calculations)

Under the next president, the EU should threaten huge tariffs against U.S. digital and services exports until we agree to accept European ISO window energy efficient ratings as on par with U.S. NFRC ratings without being a nitpicky little brat about the slight differences

Yes he now physically looks like when ET was very sick in the movie ET, and yes his brain is visibly running in thin gray rivulets out of his ears, but I'll be damned if the big fella can't still say a bunch of big numbers. It's the last skill to go.