The Orange Menace says he "had a conversation with Theodore Roosevelt" about the Panama Canal, which is a neat trick since Roosevelt died in 1919 and Trump was not born until 1946.
So, now we're at the President openly describing recent conversations with a 107-year-dead person yet remaining in command of the world's largest, yet quickly shrinking in effectiveness, military. — Read the rest
Foreigners will never understand how someone like Rawhide Kobayashi would immediately become a beloved local fixture in whatever small American town he ended up in.
every single time someone pulls the “How would you AMERICANS like it if someone came to AMERICA and” reversal, the answer is always “we’d fucking love it”
Your tags summed up the exact feeling I had about this
I just Googled the Swedish-Japanese guy in the OP, and according to this interview, his Japanese name was given to him by the master gardener he was apprenticed under:
“The family name ‘Murasame’ was given to me by my master. The given name ‘Tatsumasa’ is a combination of ‘dragon’ (tatsu), the [zodiac] year when I was born, and one character from my master’s name,” says Murasame.“
So I think maybe it’s less like naming yourself ‘Brandon McFreedom’ and more like moving to the states to work under a veteran car mechanic named Bud McLean, and then having him turn to you after a few years on the job, and say "Son, it’s time for you to become an American so you can open up your shop. And when that day comes, I think the world should know you by a new name: McLeo GM Corvette.”
Named by his superior by conventions one would apply to a super chill stray cat
Tom the Dancing Bug: Elon Musk and His DOGE Pals, in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"
-> Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this hostile Trumpverse! JOIN US IN THE INNER HIVE, and be the first kid on your block to get each week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic – before it's published anywhere. — Read the rest
Hovertext: We're going to build a recursively self-improving god-like machine intelligence that wants to destroy humanity, but it's OK because I have a hole.
Prolific FromSoft game multiplayer modder Yui is "close" to being ready to open up alpha testing of their latest seamless co-op mod, this time for Dark Souls 2. Despite it following the the footsteps of their seamless co-op mods for the likes of Elden Ring, Nightreign, and the original Dark Souls, Yui said this DS2 mod's turned out to be a very different kettle of fish and one of their "most complicated and ambitious projects to date".
‘Historian’ claims ‘overwhelming difference’ between him and rogues’ gallery of autocrats is that Trump is more powerful
Donald Trump has enthusiastically agreed with a public assessment by a man he met while golfing that the “overwhelming difference” between the current US president and historical figures who incited fear – such as Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao and Hitler – is that Trump is more powerful.
The US president reposted a short text in the early hours of Friday morning, in which the author writes:
So close, but it's still virtual buttons on a flat screen. I'm much more excited about the Ayaneo Play, assuming it makes it to production.
Well, this is a sweet bonus: if you own an Android foldable like a Samsung Z Series foldable, OnePlus Open or Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold, you may soon have access to a customizable, virtual gamepad baked into Android 17, which is set to start rolling out to Android hardware today. — Read the rest
If we get to a Friday signing ceremony without this uncertain new US-Iran deal being derailed by any of its inherent ambiguities, then nuclear talks can finally restart in the same place – and at almost exactly the same point they were before this conflict started.
The world will have irrevocably been changed in other ways. There is no going back for the 120 Iranian children in Minab killed in their primary school in the war’s first hours, nor for their bereaved parents, or any of the thousands in Iran, Lebanon and around the region whose lives were erased or blighted by a feckless war of choice.
Elon Musk hates taxes, government, regulation, and the public sector right up until the check clears.
CNN's Chris Isidore lays out the part of the Musk myth that gets buried under all the rocket smoke and Cybertruck cosplay: SpaceX needed early NASA grants and a crucial $1.6 billion contract, while Tesla leaned on a $465 million federal loan, EV tax credits, and billions from emissions-credit rules that forced other automakers to buy their way into compliance. — Read the rest
After weeks of regaling us with his knowledge of great pool guys and shades of blue, The Orange Menace's taxpayer-funded vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is complete. By complete, we mean completely filled with algae.
The most likely thing to have actually happened here is that some friend or donor got paid off by this personal pool guy of the United States zero-bid contractor receiving the job. — Read the rest
Many publishers and news organizations, including the New York Times, USA Today, The Atlantic, and more, continue to block the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine from archiving journalism. According to Forbes, 23 major news sites currently block ia_archiverbot, which is the web crawler used by Internet Archive for the Wayback Machine. — Read the rest
Lego Batman, like all Lego games, is absolutely loaded with references and easter eggs. As well as recreating memorable scenes from the Dark Knight's storied history, it is packed with geeky, niche in-jokes. One such easter egg requires a Commodore 64 to actually make sense of.
As pointed out by Cabelsa over on TikTok, when Batman analyses something on his computer in-game, a short splash screen pops up to signify that the computer is booting up. Turns out that screen isn't just for show, as Cabelsa points out: "Did you see that? Did you catch that? Back up. That, my friends, looks like Commodore 64 BASIC."
Effectively, the 1982 8-bit Commodore 64 (otherwise known as the C64) required its users to know some code in order to get it to function, and BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is the language used for the machine. Think of the modern Terminal you find in Windows, imagine having to use that all the time, and you have a decent idea of how the C64 functioned.
Well, if you bust out your C64 or type the two pages of code into a C64 coding emulator, it puts a small yellow bat symbol on screen and makes it float around. It's a simple effect for quite a lot of work, but still a neat easter egg nonetheless.
Now that you've seen it work in Cabelsa's video, it may not be worth all the effort of actually trying it yourself, but part of the bit is how much effort was put into just this tiny portion of the game. It's an animation that will take a few seconds to watch, and yet even typing in the code will take significantly longer (I know, as I tried).
But then, that's part of the joy of the game. I've played the opening hours, and it's very silly and self-referential. Our Jody Macgregor had a great time with the game, giving it 83% in his review. He says, "This is an Arkham game in all but name. In some ways, the fact it's Lego makes it better."
Sometimes someone does something that makes you think, 'Why the hell had no one tried this before?' That's the question that crossed my mind when I learned about 'Noah Doe', a (presumably) placeholder name for a man who is trying to get the New York courts to officially recognise him (and the other plantiff companies) as the owner of 39,069 seemingly abandoned Bitcoin wallets worth billions of US dollars.
Doe's complaint, brought to my attention by International Cyber Digest on X, was filed at the start of this month (PDF warning) in the New York Supreme Court. The suit makes the case that Doe should be given legal ownership of the seemingly abandoned wallets because the correct procedures were followed to attempt to "return" the virtual wallets to their owners under the city's law.
In normal circumstances—with, say, a regular physical wallet—if enough time passes without anyone claiming ownership and the correct procedures are followed, including trying to get it back to the original owner, the "finder" can then usually become the new legal owner.
Using an "algorithm" that he cooked up, Doe found 1,544 Bitcoin wallets in December 2024, 546 in March 2025, and 39,911 in April 2025. These were then whittled down a little as some were in fact demonstrated to not be abandoned by their owners. The addresses of all 39,069 remaining seemingly abandoned wallets are listed in the court document under Exhibit 1.
All wallets were "dormant or inactive for at least five years and apparently abandoned", and in each case there was a full year of efforts to identify and notify any owners of the wallets. With each batch of wallet discovery Doe handed over a USB stick containing the addresses to the police department as lost property. Some months later, the police would return the drive.
(Image credit: da-kuk via Getty Images)
Doe's efforts to "return" the wallets included having "strategic consultant" Salomon Brothers help come up with a plan to reach out to any owners. A cyber/blockchain expert would also review the wallets and assist with contacting any potential owners.
"The expert confirmed that the Found Wallets validly exist on the blockchain, contain digital assets, and have been dormant or inactive for at least five (5) years."
On the back of this, Doe added a message as a token into the transaction records, directing potential wallet owners to a webpage giving wallet holders 90 days to say they are the owner. And after this, they put out a press release to try to reach any of the wallet holders that way, too.
So it seems due diligence was definitely done, but that doesn't mean it will be a straightforward decision given the uniqueness of the situation here.
(Image credit: Getty Images / Anna Barclay)
What's particularly noteworthy about this case is that one of the 30-odd thousand wallet addresses is the Mt. Gox hack wallet (1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF) containing about 80,000 Bitcoins worth almost $6 billion USD today. This wallet is the destination for Bitcoin that was stolen from the Mt. Gox exchange back in 2011, and has been untouched ever since given it's been watched the world over for any activity. That wallet is listed as the very first one of the thousands in Doe's court doc—perhaps the list is ordered by value.
Some online have already been speculating whether Doe perhaps already had access to some of these wallets and is just trying to make it 'legal' to use them. Or, Doe could be waiting for a time when he will be able to use advanced tech (such as quantum computing) to gain access.
One thing that crossed my mind is what would happen if Doe is granted legal ownership and then somewhere down the line an original owner of one of the wallets finds their private key and uses it. Would this mean Doe is now being stolen from?
It's a ridiculous thing to ponder, and surely something that won't come to pass because one would like to assume the court will throw this case out, not least because it's hard to reason that the Bitcoin wallets are actually located in New York at all. But I'm not a lawyer, so I can't make any definite claims here. It will be interesting to see exactly how the court handles it, as it could set precedents for the future regarding blockchains and digital wallets.
These days, a typical Google Search feels like an obstacle course. Type out 'upcoming PC games 2026' and your gaze has to swerve around a chunky AI overview which recycles the work of human writers in a bid to kneecap efforts to click away from Google. It's a bleak state of affairs for what was once the premier discovery tool for the internet, and as such many users are looking for alternative search engines.
DuckDuckGo has been one major winner of this Google Search abandonment. Just for a start, visits to its AI-free search page noai.duckduckgo.com between May 20 to May 25 are said to have increased by 22.7% on average week-on-week, with the figures peaking May 24 at 27.7%.
The DuckDuckGo mobile app saw installs spike in the US by 18.1% on average compared to the previous week. TechCrunch reported this growth was sustained over six days, peaking at 30.5% on May 25. An even greater number of iOS users hit download on the app though, with installs seeing an average week-on-week growth of 33% and a peak of 69.9%.
This all follows Google CEO Sundar Pichai claiming last week that, "People love [Search's AI Mode]." DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg criticised Google's all-in-on-AI approach to Search, telling Paul Thurrott, "Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out. As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want."
(Image credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images (left) / Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images (right))
DuckDuckGo also offers AI products such as duck.ai, which allows users to chat privately with a number of major LLMs such as GPT-5 mini and Claude Haiku 4.5. Given that Google reported its revenue from search grew by 19% during Q1 2026—apparently thanks to its "AI experiences like AI Mode and AI Overviews"—it wouldn't make much business sense for any company to completely exile itself from the AI industry at this moment in time.
However, DuckDuckGo has endeavoured to prioritise user choice and privacy. Weinberg said earlier this week, "Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is private, we don’t collect search histories or chats, and nothing is used for AI training."
According to chief communications officer Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo's own AI overviews remain popular—though so does the option to filter out AI-generated images from search results. He said, "People just want a choice." Amen to that.
ALT
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/htzo5ycooeah1.png){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/3l8l69v7ud7h1.png){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/4fz837fnw87h1.png){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/8hvrqmazo14h1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/z0wkybtxvn3h1.jpeg){kind=link}