The Onion, gloriously on target as ever.

https://theonion.com/the-onions-exclusive-interview-with-sam-altman/

“we estimate that a million satellites could mean that a teragram (one billion kgs) of alumina accumulates in the upper atmosphere – enough, alongside launch emissions, to significantly alter atmospheric chemistry and heating in dramatic ways we do not yet understand.

There is no public mandate for a single company in one country to make changes on that scale to the planet’s atmosphere.”
https://theconversation.com/a-new-space-race-could-turn-our-atmosphere-into-a-crematorium-for-satellites-276366

The ability to make complex distinctions with high accuracy after ingesting a sufficient amount of training data is a signature feature of machine learning algorithms. But humans also have this ability, even if they are not always consciously aware of it. One of my favorite illustrations of this is the learned ability to determine (qualitatively) the temperature of water from its sound, which almost all of us have acquired purely through training data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri_4dDvcZeM

We even have the learned ability to accurately predict the next word in a sentence, even when we do not understand the semantic content of the sentence itself. Some (rather frustrated) examples of this occur in the later stages of the classic "Who's on first?" sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9t097tbeT0

A picture was taken of a sheet of paper that had, at some point in the past, been bound with other similar sheets into sketchbook form and, at a later date, had a human apply ink to it over a period of time. Said picture was then uploaded to a server and partnered with this very text being read (or skipped over) right now and made available for public consumption.

#art #abstract #ink

passed to me from a minnesotan on the ground in minneapolis, boiled down into bullet points

-- people are hiding others in their houses now.

-- ICE is following white people home from the store if they think they might be buying food for someone else.

-- ICE is supposed to be switching to night raids soon to avoid observers.

-- it's generally understood that if you're detained it's a mugging and if you're raided it's an armed robbery because they WILL steal your shit. phones are #1 obviously so they can find more victims, but anything they can steal and sell, they will. pass this on if you have anyone to pass it onto. i have been explicitly given the "PLEASE DO" of sharing on this. social media has slowed down not because it's gotten better but because people have gotten tired or bored and minnesotans are too busy fighting back and trying to survive.

Reflect Orbital wants to destroy the night sky to deliver "sunlight as a service". SpaceX wants to destroy Low Earth Orbit to launch one million "AI datacentres"

The only way to formally protest these two ideas is to file a comment with the US FCC, which is horribly complicated, but the American Astronomical Society has detailed instructions posted here: https://aas.org/posts/advocacy/2026/02/how-submit-comments-satellite-applications-fcc

Comments due March 6 for SpaceX and March 9 for Reflect Orbital. Write! Write! Write!

Just so EVERYONE understands this:

Moderna has a flu shot. It works. It works well. It is safe. It is safe in people with compromised immune systems (like cancer patients!).

Trump’s nutjob at FDA, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to have ordered FDA to refuse to even accept the application to review the shot for approval.

RFK wants to kill your grandma. Fuck RFK.

Wow, this is super cool!

Solve one long path-drawing paper puzzle where each segment has different rules and was designed by a different puzzle designer: https://brokensign.com/puzzle/2025/12/31/rorschachs-river.html