2026 aug 26

[rcjordan]

Google expands Gemini Enterprise AI platform for law firms, lawyers | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/business/google-expands-gemini-ai-platform-law-firms-lawyers-2026-08-25/

US consumer confidence slides again | AP News
https://apnews.com/article/consumer-confidence-inflation-economy-gas-prices-8fdcfa56f35b9eac2399fe1d167f8fbd

[rcjordan]

Meta to pay 47 states up to $17.1B in landmark child safety settlement • Kansas Reflector
https://kansasreflector.com/2026/08/26/repub/meta-to-pay-47-states-up-to-17-1b-in-landmark-child-safety-settlement/

[Travoli]

>$17.1B

Not enough to sting.

"The lawsuit settlement news broke before the market opened, causing the stock to gap up and spike 4% in pre-market trading..."

[rcjordan]

>sting

I started to add a very similar comment.  The state AGs are suspender-snapping and doing lots of "we did a great job" political posturing now.

[rcjordan]

How many OnlyFans millionaires are there? | Mashable
https://mashable.com/life/onlyfans-millionaires-financial-report

FBI Disrupts Chinese Proxy Tools Used in Mass Hacking of US Agencies and Infrastructure | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/fbi-disrupts-chinese-proxy-tools-used-in-mass-hacking-of-us-agencies-and-infrastructure/

California plug-in solar bill earns approval of both legislative houses - pv magazine Global
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/08/26/california-plug-in-solar-bill-sb-868-earns-approval-of-both-legislative-houses-nears-governors-desk/

TLDR; Mechanical Turk
Amazon Putting End to Service It Has Offered for 21 Years
https://www.newser.com/story/395311/amazon-putting-end-to-service-it-has-offered-for-21-years.html

[rcjordan]

^{Florida smells money.}
Meta settles states' child-safety claims for $18B; Florida rejects deal as "peanuts" - Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/meta-settles-states-child-safety-claims-for-18b-florida-rejects-deal-as-peanuts/

[rcjordan]

Brief independent investigation of agents' behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident - METR
https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/

CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in the Venezuela Response - HOT Website
https://hotosm.org/en/news/comaps-the-offline-app-that-guided-rescuers-without-a-signal-in-the-venezuela-response/

FDA Approves First in Class Targeted Therapy for Metastatic Pancreatic Cancer | FDA
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-class-targeted-therapy-metastatic-pancreatic-cancer

Taylor Farms: How One Company's Reach Became a National Risk
https://farmaction.us/taylorfarmsreport/

[rcjordan]

^{Gates has been reading th3core again...}

In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism.

Bill Gates Is Warning That A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html

[Travoli]

If you haven't seen the flood videos:

There is no chance anyone in the top video survived. Unbelievable wall of water. Some reports 270ft. above normal river level. It looks like that was instant.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1042667471962683

[rcjordan]

Satellite views indicate an ice dam from melting glaciers formed, jammed, backed up the river, then gave way.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c6y8mjmnpxv0t

update: ice & rock slide
Satellite Images Reveal Possible Cause Behind Devastating Nepal Flash Floods
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/satellite-images-reveal-possible-cause-behind-devastating-nepal-flash-floods-11962416

[rcjordan]

Nearly 100 Local Governments Cancel Flock Cameras
https://www.mediaite.com/crime/nearly-100-local-governments-across-u-s-have-turned-off-their-flock-cameras-amid-growing-backlash/

Plug-in Balcony Solar panels now legal in the UK - pv magazine Global
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/08/26/plug-in-solar-panels-now-legal-in-the-uk/

[ergophobe]

>  plug-in solar

Generally, I think this is great. I am surprised that I still sometimes hear people say they don't like rooftop solar because it's ugly and, recently, a person said she was surprised balcony solar was allowed because it's ugly and she wasn't sure it was safe.

Generally, the answer is that it is safe, but there are some concerns. The scenario runs like this.

- you have 1200w of balcony solar. At 120v, that means you're pushing 10 amps up the wire.

- you have a 15 amp circuit with two outlets. The first outlet gets the balcony solar input. The second outlet gets the load.

- you can now run 25 amps to the load. In other words, if someone plugs in a 25 amp appliance or, more likely, a couple of power strips that run five 5-amp loads, you can overload the circuit. Under normal circumstances the breaker trips before you overload the circuit, but the breaker only knows what's coming off the grid, not the total that's in the wire. So the breaker only sees 15 amps so it doesn't trip, even though the circuit has been overloaded to 25 amps. If the wire is truly specced to handle just 15 amps of continuous load and you have three hours of good sun, you could have a steady load beyond the wire spec, which could heat up and cause a fire.

Basically, the breaker lets 15 amps onto the first leg of the circuit. The solar adds 10 amps at the first outlet. Now the second leg between that first outlet and the load is running 25 amps on a circuit rated for 15 amps.

Ideally, balcony solar should go on a dedicated circuit, but you know that won't happen. Most modern wiring is built with large safety margins so 10 amps probably would have little effect, which is presumably the reason for the limit. But very old wiring may not have that margin and there will inevitably be some yahoo who decides to bandit install three units and since the best solar gain is on that one wall where all three outlets are on the same circuit...

I don't know enough about electrical wiring to know how likely it would be for 1200w to create a dangerous situation, but the first time there's a fire caused or suspected to have been caused by balcony solar, there will be trouble. Hopefully that's more a theoretical concern.

I wish I had more panels and I wish my roof panels weren't covered in snow for several months each year. I don't know as I would have good ROI on balcony solar. It would only work during a power outage if my main battery was still charged and the inverter was pushing AC to the circuit. Once the battery is dead, the balcony solar has to shut down.

[ergophobe]

> I don't know enough

Surprise, the internet knows a lot about this. There are tons of articles. Not surprisingly, many are from solar installers explaining just how dangerous it is to use balcony solar and just how much safer it would be to hire them to put in a proper system. They aren't entirely wrong, but...

My concern has a name, of course: breaker masking

It turns out to be a minor concern because, as I suspected, most things are specced high enough that this small amount of input is not typically an issue.

This was a concern in Germany, so it developed standards that limit balcony solar units to just 800 watts... low enough that even in the country's oldest homes, the wiring can withstand the heating... there haven't been any cases of breaker masking causing harm.

https://www.wired.com/story/why-balcony-solar-hasnt-taken-off-in-the-us/

An issue that I had not thought of from that article - US GFCI's (outdoor outlets are supposed to be GFCIs now) are not designed for bidirectional flows. The German equivalent are.

It's all being worked on though. Apparently UL created a new code standard.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/what-to-know-balcony-solar

[ergophobe]

On OnlyFans creators that are pulling in $1m... is that really a good metric? I would be more interested to know how many are making a comfortably living. $100k or so.

In any case, I think the chances of eeking out a living on OF are some multiple of doing the same on an ad-supported mainstream podcast.

https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/how-much-do-podcasters-make-79071/

I have no idea how accurate that article is, but a) it corresponds roughly with the numbers Gemini gave me and b) it was #1 in Google, so probably Gem's major source.

[rcjordan]

>just 800 watts

IIRC, that's what the first US state approvals set as the limit.