Daily Tech News 29 June 2026

Top Story

• Tokenmaxxing is dead. Long live tokenmaxxing. (12 Grams of Carbon)
  
  We have reached a tipping point where spending infinite amounts of money can sometimes make the result better rather than worse.
  
  
  
• AI coding costs are on track to match human payrolls. (Infoworld)
  
  But you are still spending infinite amounts of money.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:50 AM | Comments (96) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Sunday Overnight Open Thread - June 28, 2026 [Doof]

Howdy Hordelings! Welcome to the Sunday ONT. Hope your weekend has been a good one. Open thread, as always. Fashion and music, as always. What's on YOUR mind tonight?

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:09 PM | Comments (362) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Gun Thread: Final June Edition!

Howdy, Y'all! Welcome to the wondrously fabulous Gun Thread! As always, I want to thank all of our regulars for being here week in and week out, and also offer a bigly Gun Thread welcome to any newcomers who may be joining us tonight. Howdy and thank you for stopping by! I hope you find our wacky conversation on the subject of guns 'n shooting both enjoyable and informative. You are always welcome to lurk in the shadows of shame, but I'd like to invite you to jump into the conversation, say howdy, and tell us what kind of shooting you like to do!

Holy Shitballs! How in the ever-loving Hell did it get to be the Final June Edition? Adios June! Coming soon: July Editions!

With that, step into the dojo and let's get to the gun stuff below, shall we?

Posted by: Weasel at 07:00 PM | Comments (222) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Food Thread: Don't Rib Me About My Failed Garlic Adventure!

I like lamb. I like lamb ribs. I like lamb ribs slowly grilled on indirect heat and then finished on high direct heat to get them nice and crispy!

But these did not satisfy! They are from a sort-of-local hipster company that my SiL enjoys, and she gave them to me, so who am I to say no?

But I should have. They were incredibly gamey, and not in that delicious lamb way that many people enjoy so much. They were greasy and strong-flavored and reminded me a bit of aged beef that is just a bit too old for consumption.

And the frustrating thing is that I cooked them perfectly!

Posted by: CBD at 04:00 PM | Comments (162) | Trackbacks (Suck)

First World Problems...

The patio is shielded from the sun by a tall and dense canopy of trees. It's lovely, but these chairs take longer to dry after a rain than is normal, so they quickly pick up a patina of green mold. It is easily scrubbed off, but it is a task that one cannot ignore...like I did all of last summer.

I figure the best way to deal with this is to rent a Caterpillar 350 and dig down about 25 feet, dump in the furniture, then fill with gravel.

Posted by: CBD at 02:00 PM | Comments (224) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The DSA Isn't Democratic, And They Aren't Of America!

Graphic courtesy of Dr_No

Socialism is communism with a pretty face, and Democratic Socialists of America are simply socialists wearing expensive clothing paid for by mommy and daddy. That they sound like stoned college sophomores sitting around getting stoned and talking politics is in part because that is exactly who they are. The recent primary in NYC is a sad example of how an organized socialist movement can co-opt the vote. Turnout was just 17%, and they carefully cultivated the young and the stupid, pumping them full of nonsense, promising nirvana paid for by billionaires, and a shift in NYC's foreign policy (hah!) to a vitriolic hatred of Jews, Israel, and the West.

That is about as far from a democratic result as one can imagine, and in the 13th Congressional district it was even worse!

Avila Chevalier drew roughly 33,000 votes from 449,000 active voters in the 13th House District covering much of Upper Manhattan, including Harlem, and a swath of the Bronx, preliminary election data shows.

Steve Rattner, an economic analyst, posted on X that election data showed college-educated, non-Hispanic voters were more likely to vote for Avila Chevalier.

“Last night’s big wins for Mamdani-backed candidates were driven by young college grads, often at odds with the party’s traditional working-class & minority base,” he wrote.

That is the fruit of all of the left's work taking over higher education, beginning in the 1960s. We have two generations of college professors who have been carefully indoctrinated into the socialist mindset, and their students are voting in the socialism that will eventually get them stood up against a wall. They have been taught to accept Marx's labor theory of value as gospel which, in addition to being arrant economic nonsense, creates unmanageable conflict between worker and owner. They have been taught to accept uncritically the concept of immutable class and race division within society, which flies in the face of American Exceptionalism and the principles upon which our country was founded.

And let us not forget the concomitant destruction of basic education in America. Many of us are of an age to remember civics classes in grade school and high school, reciting the Pledge Of Allegiance, studying the failures of socialism in history class, etc. But those college professors whose political philosophy was forged in the 1960s have also trained our teachers, and many of today's elementary school teachers are dyed-in-the-wool socialists, whose world-view of class and racial conflict is the backbone of their instruction.

Of course the conventional wisdom is that these people are too far to the left for the Democrat Party. But that is nonsense. The singular goal of the Democrat Party has always been and will always be the accumulation and use of power over us. The schism between the DSA and the traditionalists in the Democrat apparatus is one of strategy and tactics, not of political philosophy. James Carville's hysterical screeching is simply frustration that these young "Democrats" are saying the quiet part out loud. He and his ilk will never leave the Democrat Party, and his dishonest criticism of a DSA candidate ignores the long and sordid history of his own branch of the Democrat Party.

But all is not lost. The exposure of higher education in the wake of the Covid fiasco as a bald-faced money grab and indoctrination scheme has increased the number of young Americans who will forego college and actually do something worthwhile. And that exposure to the world outside of the cloistered and insular campuses is vital, since they will see reality, and not the nonsense of a socialist dream. And as AI gradually does more and more entry-level drone work, those college educated fools will scramble for employment.

AI cannot wire a home or fix plumbing or frame a wall or build a highway, so the demand for skilled labor will continue to grow, while the demand for useless "Studies" degrees will shrink. How many baristas does America need?

That, coupled with the demographic shift away from blue cities and states may be the tipping point that moves America firmly to a right-of-center country. Yes, NYC will probably always be socialist, but hopefully it will be isolated, and a prime example of the abject failure of its political philosophy.

Posted by: CBD at 12:00 PM | Comments (181) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Sunday Morning Book Thread - 6-28-2026 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]

Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever guilty pleasure we feel like reading. Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...

So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?

Posted by: Open Blogger at 09:00 AM | Comments (283) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 28 June 2026

Top Story

• You might not be interested in Langford's basilisk, but Langford's basilisk is interested in you. (Nerds.xyz)
  
  Langford's basilisk is a science fiction concept where images can be crafted specifically to rewire the brain.
  
  This doesn't work well on humans - and a good thing too, because in the original story it was instantly fatal. But guess what can also see and in some sense understand images and has no separation of instructions and data?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM | Comments (166) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Saturday Night Club ONT - June 27, 2026 [D&D]

Welcome to Club ONT - a collaboration of The Disco and The Dino. We built this place for you so you can have some fun. Come in in, grab a drink or 3. Keep it light and friendly. Jerks need not enter the premises (the moose out front is keeping track and you do NOT want to disappoint the moose).

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:00 PM | Comments (385) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Music Thread: Quotations Are The Last Refuge Of The Scoundrel

But first...

Who knew that Bowie was that old!

If music be the food of love, play on.

-- William Shakespeare

Where words fail, music speaks.

-- Hans Christian Andersen

Posted by: CBD at 07:30 PM | Comments (166) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hobby Thread - June 27, 2026 [TRex]

Welcome hobbyists! Pull up a chair and sit a spell with the Horde in this little corner of the interweb. This is the mighty, mighty officially sanctioned Ace of Spades Hobby Thread. For this week, the Wheel of Hobbies (TM) is taking flight. It spun and spun and landed on a flight simulator theme for this Hobby Thread.

[Photo credit: National Air and Space Museum Dulles annex at the Udvar-Hazy Center]

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:30 PM | Comments (145) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Ace of Spades Pet Thread, June 27

* * *

Good afternoon and welcome to the almost world famous Ace of Spades Pet Thread. Thanks for stopping by. Kick back and enjoy the world of animals.

Would you like a treat?

Let's relax a little with the animals and leave the world of politics and current events outside today.

* * *

Posted by: K.T. at 03:40 PM | Comments (75) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Gardening, Home and Nature Thread, June 27

Silene regia, Platycodon "Hakone Blue"

Happy Saturday! Don in Kansas has posted severa; interesting recent snapshots, some of which remind me of fireworks. Flower fireworks could come in handy where sensitive pets live, or where drought has resulted in restrictions on noisy fireworks.

Balloon flowers are easy from seed and can bloom their first year, as can Silene regia.

Posted by: K.T. at 01:40 PM | Comments (59) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Let's go forward, not backward or sideways, in medicine!

Raccoon Dog, once suspected as the source of Covid-19

The Japanese raccoon dog was once thought to be capable of shape-shifting, even to human form. Suspicious!

Covid-19 really destroyed trust in the medical field

I remember seeing clips of meetings, before Covid-19 was invented, suggesting that some emergency would be necessary in order to kick-start progress into new ways of, say, making vaccines. One concern was that people would want to wait for safety data.

Having once been part of medium-sized pharma (as opposed to "Big Pharma", I am familiar with some of the political changes that contributed to our current vaccine situation. One problem was our legal system, which allowed for big punitive damages to be awarded to people injured by vaccines in the USA. Vaccine manufacturers were leaving the business. Congress panicked and passed legislation which limited liability for manufacturers and set up a fund to reimburse people who were injured by vaccines. This system didn't work very well. Other parts of the law discouraged development of non-vaccine treatments where vaccines were considered the only viable treatments.

Our company held big meetings concerning this legislation, even though we did not make vaccines. It was a big deal.

Meanwhile, we had a healthy respect for the FDA, and surprise visits were occasions of anxiety. FDA agents sometimes wore sidearms. People had to sign in and out of meeting rooms. Not that there had never been ethical concerns. There was a "generic drug scandal" during that time period in which favors consisted of changing the order in which inspections of facilities were done, manufacturing approved and so forth, to give an edge to certain companies.

But no one expected to be allowed 75 years to turn in raw data from clinical trials, as in the first Covid-19 trials.

Posted by: K.T. at 11:19 AM | Comments (235) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Classical Saturday Coffee Break & Prayer Revival

*****

Good morning boys and girls and everything in between. Before we enter the Prayer Revival just a few housekeeping matters to go over. (Rulz for those of you in Elroy)

1) This is an open thread. Feel free to lurk, opine and/or bloviate.
2) Be kind. Be nice. If not, adios.
3) Running with sharp objects has not been approved by upper management.
4) Have a great weekend!

Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 07:52 AM | Comments (270) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 27 June 2026

Top Story

• OpenAI has restricted ChatGPT 5.6 to a select list of customers, saying such regulations shouldn't be the norm. (Tech Crunch)
  
  After spending years pushing for regulatory capture.
  
  The captor, captioned.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM | Comments (133) | Trackbacks (Suck)

I Think That I Will Never See A Poem As Lovely As The ONT

Hi everyone! Y'know, I should have posted this last week. Better late than never, I suppose.

Posted by: WeirdDave at 10:00 PM | Comments (410) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Fri-Yay! Cafe

A robot built out of 200 "bones" and 1000 hydraulic "muscles."

July 4th Advisory: The bears will be out of control.

Baby seal investigates a cameraman but the real stars are in background.

Beiuga whale has a crush on a single zookeeper.

A full-sized fully-operational Bugati Chiron made of Legos. Supposedly. Seems like Fake News to me.

Pole dancer.

Dogs will try to make friends with anyone.

Disney's Skeleton Dance (1923).

Testing the terrain before committing to it.

I could do this but I don't feel like it.

Whale decides to do a Jump Scare on whale watchers.

Supposedly, a woman's dog had been missing for a month but she found it partying with some Mexicans at the World Cup.

Neat-- scanning a QR code turned fans' phones into a coordinated light display.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 07:30 PM | Comments (225) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Week in Woke

The Texas State Board of Education voted to remove knowledge of the battle of Lexington and Concord from the corpus of knowledge that students need to know to be proficient in history.

They had to make room in the curriculum.

You see, they had to make Oprah Winfrey a required part of a historical education.

On Wednesday, the Texas State Board of Education voted to remove the American Revolution from 11th-grade U.S. History. The Battles of Lexington and Concord, the opening shots of the war that created this country, gone. In their place? Oprah Winfrey.

Let that sink in.

...

The result: the American Revolution, one of the most consequential events in human history and the founding act of this nation, was stripped from 11th-grade U.S. History. Three Republican members crossed the aisle to join five Democrats in passing this and dozens of other ill-conceived amendments.

The progressive vision of social studies curriculum treats the TEKS as a storytelling anthology, a collection of interesting characters and compelling narratives that whoever sits at the table that day can swap in and out. Every story has value, the thinking goes, so every story deserves a slot. But that is precisely the wrong framework for a standards document.

...

Oprah Winfrey is a remarkable American success story. Her place in the cultural and business landscape is undeniable.

I'll deny it. Rush Limbaugh was a more important broadcaster and businessmen and no one's including him in a high school history textbook. (And I wouldn't ask for him to be included.)

But Oprah's a Stronk Black Woman, so.

We're now choosing what counts as history by DEI "standards."

Angela Davis, the black radical murderess protected by the Democrat Establishment, learns that she is descended from one of the 101 original colonists of The Mayflower.

Court fillings confirm the persistent actions of leftist criminals to destroy a national monument.

Details of the alleged vandalism to the recently refurbished Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C. were revealed in a court filing.

According to Deputy Director for the National Park Service Frank Lands, the incident took place shortly after the resurfaced pool was filled again with water on June 9, ABC News reported.

"The U.S. Park Police responded to an NPS report of damage to the reflecting pool, including a caulk over the foam sealant that was cut with a sharp knife or razor and destruction of delaminating surface material. In addition, approximately 70 fence post tops were thrown into the pool," Lands said in a declaration.

An Interior Department spokesperson said the vandalism is believed to be an isolated incident, and details weren't disclosed in order to prevent "deranged individuals" from copycatting the crime. Several days after the incident, the spokesperson said, there were recurring cases and videos of people ripping at the coating.

"We then knew this was not an isolated incident, but a new trend to attempt to damage the Reflecting Pool," the spokesperson told ABC.

As of Thursday afternoon, there have been seven arrests, seven federal citations and 18 police reports filed related to intentional damage to the pool, according to the Interior Department.

The Washington Post blames Trump for standing water being a broth for algae.

Because Trump is causing global warming and global warming causes algae. Q.E.D.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:30 PM | Comments (182) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Democrats Recruited Antifa As their Zombie Street Enforcers.
Now the Antifa Zombies Are Running the Show.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, founder of the pro-Hamas, pro-October 7 group CUAD and committed to -- quote -- the "total eradication of Western civilization," will soon officially be a Democrat congresswoman.

Avila Chevalier, the most overtly radical of the three, is an interesting figure because she represents a stunning triumph for modern campus progressive activism; she will be the first person elected to Congress who comes directly from that world. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D--N.Y.) is a democratic socialist and a progressive activist, but she was not a central figure in those movements until well after she graduated from Boston University. Avila Chevalier, on the other hand, was a prominent far-left activist at Columbia University throughout the 2010s and remained involved with the pro-Palestinian campus protests there in 2023 following Israel's attacks on Hamas in Gaza.

She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid and Divest (CUAD), an organization that did not merely oppose the state of Israel but also celebrated terrorism outright. After the death of Yahya Sinwar, CUAD's Substack published a glowing eulogy of the Hamas terrorist who masterminded the October 7 attack on Israelis. CUAD hailed him as a "hero of the revolution" guided by "pragmatic optimism." The group called on its followers to "reflect on how we can make ourselves more like him."

Avila Chevalier was also involved with the related group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which explicitly celebrated the October 7th terrorist attack as a "historic win."

...

So it should come as no surprise that Avila Chevalier is not merely furious about the state of Israel. She is part of an activist movement that favors "the total eradication of Western civilization," a goal that--somehow--is not viewed as in tension with the movement's stated desire to prevent genocide. (One wonders how Avila Chevalier plans to make Western civilization go extinct without anybody getting hurt.) In keeping with her stated desire to eliminate the U.S.-led West, Avila Chevalier has previously commented in favor of Russia's invasion of Ukraine; i.e., she is not merely opposed to American involvement in the conflict (a defensible position) but affirmatively on the side of the attackers.

Indeed, Avila Chevalier's past statements on X--Twitter at the time--are a veritable gold mine of 2010-era radicalism. For instance: She wants to abolish not just the police but the very concept of policing entirely. For good measure, she views interracial relationships with suspicion, thought COVID-19 originated in France, and thinks white people are not hygienic.

Whatever you do, don't be racist. It's the worst thing in the word.

For you, I mean. For the left, it's political rocket fuel.

She refuses to answer when asked if she's a communist. So, obviously, yes. She's happy to identify herself as a terrorist. I'm not sure what's holding her back from admitting she's a communist.

Male swamp-hag James Carville freaks out over the inevitable full communization of the Democrat Party. Which has always been 40% communist.

'I'm Done, I'm Not in That F*cking Political Party': James Carville Freaks Out After Progressives Win Big in Democratic Primaries

Democratic strategist James Carville called for a "schism" in the Democratic Party, stating that he wants nothing to do with the likes of three candidates who won their Democratic primaries in New York.

...

On Wednesday's Politicon podcast, Carville freaked out at the results. He noted that Avila Chevalier, who was born to Dominican immigrants, once said white people should not be in interracial marriages.

"Lady, I ain't in the same party as you," Carville said. "I'm sorry. I'm just not. And I actually do think it's time for Democrats to talk the 's' word: schism. I really do. Everybody's always said, 'No, no. We're a coalition. We're a big tent. And there's just some sh*t I can't be in the same tent with."

Carville then insisted that despite winning their Democratic primaries, "these people are not Democrats." He then suggested that establishment Democrats "negotiate the terms of a schism" with democratic socialists in the party.

"But I'm done," he continued. "I'm not in that f*cking political party. I am totally comfortable in a political party that spends time questioning the policies of the government of Israel. In fact, I'm enthusiastic about that. I don't want to be in a political party that denies the right of the state of Israel to exist. That's just not-- I just can't do that."

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:30 PM | Comments (267) | Trackbacks (Suck)