Bookmarks 2025-08-16T23:14:27.235Z
by Owen Kibel
21 min read
41 New Bookmarks
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| The ‘Fact Checker’ Checks Out - WSJ Aug 16, 2025 |
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| WSJ Opinion | James Taranto -
Aug 16, 2025
James Taranto
WSJ Opinion |
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Aug 16, 2025
How Beethoven Humiliated His Rivals in Piano Duels
YouTube
What really happened when Beethoven faced down Vienna’s best pianists in high-stakes improvisation battles? These are the true stories behind Beethoven’s leg... |
| | Scientists may have found the tiny DNA switch that made us human | ScienceDaily
Aug 16, 2025
Scientists may have found the tiny DNA switch that made us human
ScienceDaily
Scientists at UC San Diego have discovered a small but powerful section of DNA, called HAR123, that could help explain what makes the human brain so unique. Instead of being a gene, HAR123 acts like a “volume control” for brain development, guiding how brain cells form and in what proportions. The human version of HAR123 behaves differently from the chimpanzee version, possibly giving us greater flexibility in how we think and learn. This finding could also help researchers understand the roots of certain brain-related conditions, including autism. |
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Aug 16, 2025
X (formerly Twitter) |
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| CachyOS Topped DistroWatch’s Rankings
Aug 16, 2025
CachyOS Topped DistroWatch’s Rankings
Linuxiac
The performance-tuned CachyOS takes the crown from Linux Mint, topping DistroWatch’s ranking for the most popular Linux distribution. |
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Aug 16, 2025
Legacy Media In Full Freak Out Over Trump Putin Meeting, "Reached An Understanding" | Timcast IRL
YouTube
SUPPORT THE SHOW BUY CAST BREW COFFEE NOW - https://castbrew.com/Join - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLwNTXWEjVd2qIHLcXxQWxA/joinHosts: Tim @Timcast (eve... |
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Aug 16, 2025
X (formerly Twitter) |
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Aug 16, 2025
X (formerly Twitter) |
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Aug 16, 2025
X (formerly Twitter) |
| | These Gen Z and millennial founders dropped out of college, took $200,000 from Peter Thiel, and have now built companies worth over $100 billion | Fortune
Aug 16, 2025
These Gen Z and millennial founders dropped out of college, took $200,000 from Peter Thiel, and have now built companies worth over $100 billion
Fortune
The Thiel fellowship awards $200,000 to young people who skip or leave college to spend two years building a startup, with notable alumni including Figma CEO Dylan Field and Scale AI cofounder Lucy Guo. |
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Aug 16, 2025
Iconic actor teases fresh feud with Trump agitator
nj
The former California governor jumped back into the political arena. |
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Aug 16, 2025
Nobel Peace Prize for Trump? His biggest foe could give an unlikely endorsement
nj
One of Trump's former rivals floated an idea. |
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Aug 16, 2025
Political journalist has an absolutely wild theory about Trump-Putin summit
nj
He revealed what he believes is Trump's true intention behind the meeting. |
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Aug 16, 2025
Rachel's Notebook | Rachel Cohen Booth | Substack
Journalist Rachel Cohen Booth provides new reporting on housing, homelessness, child care, abortion rights, and more. Click to read Rachel's Notebook, by Rachel Cohen Booth, a Substack publication. |
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Aug 16, 2025
Archive - Rachel's Notebook
Full archive of all the posts from Rachel's Notebook. |
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Aug 16, 2025
Gen Z Men STRUGGLE To Date, Feminism & Dating Apps NUKED Young Men's Chances | Tim Pool
YouTube
Yall are cookedBecome A Memberhttp://youtube.com/timcastnews/joinThe Green Room - https://rumble.com/playlists/aa56qw_g-j0BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO FIGHT BACK ... |
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Aug 16, 2025
Legacy Media In Full Freak Out Over Trump Putin Meeting, "Reached An Understanding" | Timcast IRL
YouTube
SUPPORT THE SHOW BUY CAST BREW COFFEE NOW - https://castbrew.com/Join - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLwNTXWEjVd2qIHLcXxQWxA/joinHosts: Tim @Timcast (eve... |
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Aug 16, 2025
Hillary Says She May Nominate Trump For The Nobel Peace Prize
YouTube
SUPPORT THE SHOW BUY CAST BREW COFFEE NOW - https://castbrew.com/Join - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLwNTXWEjVd2qIHLcXxQWxA/joinHosts: Tim @Timcast (eve... |
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Aug 16, 2025
Myron Gaines Argues Men Are More VALUABLE To Society Than Women
YouTube
BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.comHosts:Tim Pool @Timcast (everyw... |
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| Maximizing self-hosted LLM performance with limited VRAM
Aug 16, 2025
Here's how I get the most out of my self-hosted LLM, especially when limited by VRAM
XDA
Don't have an RTX 5090? No problem! |
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Aug 16, 2025
X (formerly Twitter) |
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Aug 16, 2025
Silicon Valley Wants to Optimize Your Children’s Genes | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
YouTube
Subscribe to the podcast @InterestingTimesNYT for more episodes like this. Is it ethical to use an algorithm to select your embryos? Enter Orchid, a company ... |
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Aug 16, 2025
X (formerly Twitter) |
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Aug 16, 2025
X (formerly Twitter) |
| | LL3M: Large Language 3D Modelers
Aug 16, 2025
LL3M: Large Language 3D Modelers
LL3M: Large Language 3D Modelers |
| | BART reverses longtime rule after unauthorized YouTube video
Aug 16, 2025
BART reverses longtime rule after unauthorized YouTube video
SFGATE
BART is set to unveil footage of continuous train rides during a movie night Saturday.
Late one night in 2009 after the trains had stopped, a multimedia producer for BART walked the tracks with a flashlight searching for a tiny square box. Cheryl Stalter had set out to record a fresh point of view of a ride on the Bay Area transit system, attaching a camera to the front of a train car before it left the yard in Richmond. But the primitive setup by a single employee with a creative vision — just one GoPro on a clamp — barely made it out of the gate. “I had it for a minute,” Stalter recalled to SFGATE on Wednesday. “It got to 12th Street before I lost it.” She hiked out the next night after the trains halted in search of the camera, eventually finding it on the tracks. It would take 16 years for Stalter’s idea to record a continuous BART ride to officially come to fruition. Although some BART employees had actively advocated for filming rides, referencing counterparts like the Chicago Transit Authority that have done it for years, their cause was always denied due to security concerns. History | Why a wealthy banker blasted a huge hole in a Bay Area cliffLocal | There's a mansion hidden directly under the Bay BridgeCulture | Inside the Bay Area’s cult-like obsession with Beanie BabiesLocal | The world's last lost tourist thought Maine was San Francisco Get SFGATE's top stories sent to your inbox by signing up for The Daily newsletter here. That is, until director Vincent Woo posted “Tunnel Vision: An Unauthorized BART Ride” online in July 2023. The 90-minute timelapse follows a ride from SFO to the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART Station using hidden cameras attached to a train. The public responded glowingly, with more than 300,000 views on YouTube and a sold-out premiere at the Roxie Theater, but the biggest fans of the unlicensed video were the folks at BART. “People just really want to see this. Period,” said Jay Sathe, a graphic designer for the agency. “And I don’t think there’s a better example of this than ‘Tunnel Vision.’ We said that if we don’t do this ourselves, other people are going to do it.” BART leadership gave the green light in the wake of Woo’s successful video, and earlier this year, a group of BART employees, including Stalter and Sathe, set out to make an official version of “Tunnel Vision.” They used suction cups with safety ties to hold the cameras in place, later realizing they needed backup battery banks to support the continuous clips. Attaching four cameras to one BART line at a time, they recorded all five lines during a stretch between April and May. When Sathe received the footage, capturing over 90 minutes of a complete ride, he said the file sizes were gargantuan. “I processed every frame into 4K to get this flowing look, and it took over a week,” he said. “I’d come back after the weekend, and it would still be rendering on Monday.” The production wasn’t without a few bumps — someone stole a GoPro inside a car on the Green Line in the East Bay — and, for security reasons, Sathe is blurring parts of the system’s critical assets during the ride in order to make the content public. The footage makes its public debut Saturday during a family movie night at the Concord BART Station. Before BART screens the film “Madagascar” after sundown, it’s unveiling a 20-minute movie of rides on all the BART lines. These clips will soon appear in promotional material, but they’re starting to be of further use to the agency. Stalter said the landscaping and maintenance department has reached out to study the videos so it can detect tree branch encroachment on the tracks. And they’ll also provide a clear simulation to train new BART crews. “It’s something we fought for and were told no but is now an incredible asset,” BART spokesperson Alicia Trost said. “Now [Stalter] is getting asked: Can you do this every six months?” - An ode to the midnight East Bay-bound BART train - Mahershala Ali talks BART, his favorite Bay Area restaurant and new Oakland film - BART wants to ban this street dance crew. Here's their response.|
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Aug 16, 2025
The Best Way to Learn a New Skill? Go Deep
Psychology Today
"Practice makes perfect" may be true, but research shows that some forms of practice are better than others. Enter deep practice—what it is and how to do it. |
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| Google develops Projects feature for Gemini
Aug 16, 2025
Google develops Projects feature for Gemini
TestingCatalog
What we know so far: Gemini is likely to get the Projects feature, where it will be able to run Research tasks across uploaded files. |
| | Interstellar "tunnel" found that connects solar system to other stars - Earth.com
Aug 16, 2025
Astronomers discover an 'interstellar tunnel' that connects our solar system to other stars
Earth.com
Astronomers found hidden cosmic channels, like tunnels, connecting our solar system to distant stars, reshaping views of interstellar space. |
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Aug 16, 2025
Follow for music, memes & unexpected fun! 🎹#funnykitty #cats #cutekitty
YouTube
Follow for music, memes & unexpected fun! 🎹#funnykitty #cats #cutekitty |
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Aug 15, 2025
X (formerly Twitter) |
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Aug 15, 2025
Newsom mocks Trump's social media in a flurry of redistricting posts
Axios
"DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER 'HOT,'" Newsom's office wrote in Thursday post. |
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Aug 15, 2025
"Next time in Moscow": Putin extends Trump invitation as summit ends
Axios
No U.S. president has visited the country in over a decade. |
| | 40 Co-Stars Who Couldn't Stand Each Other When The Cameras Shut Off
Aug 15, 2025
40 Co-Stars Who Couldn't Stand Each Other When The Cameras Shut Off
TutorialRepublic
Sometimes Being A Professional Actor Means Having To Pretend Just To Like Someone |
| | All the details in Democrats’ California gerrymander - POLITICO
Aug 15, 2025
All the details in Democrats’ California gerrymander
POLITICO
State legislators plan to place the redraw on the November ballot. |
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Aug 15, 2025
Google Gemini's Deep Research is finally coming to API
Google Gemini's one of the most powerful features is Deep Research, but up until now, it has been strictly limited to the Gemini interface. This could change soon. |
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Aug 15, 2025
Blow his eyes out like a balloon? #wildlife #animals #shorts
YouTube |
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| The Timmy Trap | Hacker News
Aug 15, 2025
The Timmy Trap | Hacker News |
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| The Timmy Trap – Scott Jenson
Aug 15, 2025
The Timmy Trap – Scott Jenson |
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| Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed
Aug 15, 2025
Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed
The Hill
For students trained to perform, the act of telling the truth felt strangely radical.
On today’s college campuses, students are not maturing — they’re managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity. Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: "What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?" We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes. These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe. The result is not conviction but compliance. And beneath that compliance, something vital is lost. Late adolescence and early adulthood represent a narrow and non-replicable developmental window. It is during this stage that individuals begin the lifelong work of integrating personal experience with inherited values, forming the foundations of moral reasoning, internal coherence, and emotional resilience. But when belief is prescriptive, and ideological divergence is treated as social risk, the integrative process stalls. Rather than forging a durable sense of self through trial, error, and reflection, students learn to compartmentalize. Publicly, they conform; privately, they question — often in isolation. This split between outer presentation and inner conviction not only fragments identity but arrests its development. This dissonance shows up everywhere. Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation. To test the gap between expression and belief, we used gender discourse — a contentious topic both highly visible and ideologically loaded. In public, students echoed expected progressive narratives. In private, however, their views were more complex. Eighty-seven percent identified as exclusively heterosexual and supported a binary model of gender. Nine percent expressed partial openness to gender fluidity. Just seven percent embraced the idea of gender as a broad spectrum, and most of these belonged to activist circles. Perhaps most telling: 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains as sports, healthcare, or public data — but would never voice that disagreement aloud. Thirty-eight percent described themselves as “morally confused,” uncertain whether honesty was still ethical if it meant exclusion. Authenticity, once considered a psychological good, has become a social liability. And this fragmentation doesn’t end at the classroom door. Seventy-three percent of students reported mistrust in conversations about these values with close friends. Nearly half said they routinely conceal beliefs in intimate relationships for fear of ideological fallout. This is not simply peer pressure — it is identity regulation at scale, and it is being institutionalized. Universities often justify these dynamics in the name of inclusion. But inclusion that demands dishonesty is not ensuring psychological safety — it is sanctioning self-abandonment. In attempting to engineer moral unity, higher education has mistaken consensus for growth and compliance for care. Students know something is wrong. When given permission to speak freely, many described the experience of participating in our survey not as liberating, but as clarifying. They weren’t escaping responsibility — they were reclaiming it. For students trained to perform, the act of telling the truth felt radical. We do not fault students for perpetuating a climate that is hostile to intellectual integrity. We fault the faculty, administrators, and institutional leaders who built a system that rewards moral theater while punishing inquiry. In shielding students from discomfort, they have also shielded them from discovery. The result is a generation confident in self-righteousness, but uncertain in self. This is not sustainable. If higher education is to fulfill its promise as a site of intellectual and moral development, it must relearn the difference between support and supervision. It must re-center truth — not consensus — as its animating value. And it must give back to students what it has taken from them: the right to believe, and the space to become. Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman are researchers in clinical and applied psychology at Northwestern University.|
A Ballad of the Bookmarks
The world's a stage, a curious sight, With tales of power, And bytes that gleam. From political theater, To science's dream.
Old rivalries sparked, On the keyboard's bright stage, Where intellect warred, And passion would rage. Beethoven's forte, A duel of pure sound, In symphonies grand, No equal was found.
The digital realm, A garden of code, Where new systems bloom, And knowledge is sowed. CachyOS takes flight, On Linux's soft breeze, While AI advances, Through digital trees.
From genes to the stars, The cosmos unfurls, A DNA switch, That the human mind hurls. An interstellar tunnel, A cosmic embrace, Connecting our system, To time and to space.
The media buzzes, With whispers and fears, Of summits and meetings, And political cheers. From Trump's bold maneuvers, To Russia's strong call, The headlines they flicker, And capture us all.
A founder's bold venture, With Thiel's golden hand, Builds empires of thought, Across digital land. While scholars debate, On screens far and wide, The nature of truth, And where it does hide.
And through it all, A touch of the jest, Of actors' feuds playing, Putting hearts to the test. From witty remarks, To humor's soft art, A moment of lightness, To mend every heart.