0xbitcoiner

charts_and_numbers

> Online shopping is increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. From product discovery to price comparison, AI tools are now acting as intermediaries between consumers and digital storefronts.
>
> This visualization shows which online marketplaces are receiving the most referral traffic from AI sources and how concentrated this traffic is among a handful of major players.
>
> The data for this visualization comes from Similarweb. It tracks AI-generated referral traffic between July 2024 and June 2025, measuring both share of referrals and total visit volumes.
>
> ![](https://m.stacker.news/123455)
>
> [**🔗 visualcapitalist.com**](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-online-marketplaces-getting-ai-traffic/)

~AI 

The Online Marketplaces Getting AI Traffic

econ

> **Healthcare can be declared a right, but it cannot be delivered without willing providers. Closing the gap will require uncomfortable trade-offs.**
>
> For three months at the peak of COVID-19, I treated some of New York City’s sickest patients at Bellevue Hospital, the city’s historic public hospital. There, extraordinary clinicians delivered heroic care to the most at-risk patients. While there, I couldn’t help but compare Bellevue to the gleaming NYU Langone Tisch Hospital — a nonprofit private facility almost next door where patients with robust insurance predominantly received care. The hospital even maintained a quasi-VIP room in its emergency department, a feature that had ignited controversy in 2022 for symbolizing stratified care.
>
> Rich and poor patients receive starkly different treatment in New York City — and nationwide. It’s exactly these types of disparities that infuriate newly elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who vows to eradicate them in the name of equity.
>
> The mayor-elect wants to increase access to healthcare. His administration has prioritized affordability and expansion of public services, building on a campaign that mobilized young voters and progressives toward a vision of universal rights.
>
> [**...read more at thedailyeconomy.org**](https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/can-zohran-mamdani-force-doctors-to-treat-patients/)

~Politics_And_Law ~HealthAndFitness 

Can Zohran Mamdani Force Doctors to Treat Patients?

Stacker Saloon

saloon

![](https://m.stacker.news/123453)

[previous 🧟 items report](https://stacker.news/items/1369655?commentId=1369662)


> **Big AI companies courted controversy by scraping wide swaths of the public internet. With the rise of AI agents, the next data grab is far more private.**
>
> For years, the cost of using “free” services from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other Big Tech firms has been handing over your data. Uploading your life into the cloud and using free tech brings conveniences, but it puts personal information in the hands of giant corporations that will often be looking to monetize it. Now, the next wave of generative AI systems are likely to want more access to your data than ever before.
>
> Over the past two years, generative AI tools—such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—have moved beyond the relatively straightforward, text-only chatbots that the companies initially released. Instead, Big AI is increasingly building and pushing toward the adoption of agents and “assistants” that promise they can take actions and complete tasks on your behalf. The problem? To get the most out of them, you’ll need to grant them access to your systems and data. While much of the initial controversy over large language models (LLMs) was the flagrant copying of copyrighted data online, AI agents’ access to your personal data will likely cause a new host of problems.
>
> “AI agents, in order to have their full functionality, in order to be able to access applications, often need to access the operating system or the OS level of the device on which you’re running them,” says Harry Farmer, a senior researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute, whose work has included studying the impact of AI assistants and found that they may cause “profound threat” to cybersecurity and privacy. For personalization of chatbots or assistants, Farmer says, there can be data trade-offs. “All those things, in order to work, need quite a lot of information about you,” he says.
>
> [**...read more at archive.is**](https://archive.is/gG7rh)

The Age of the All-Access AI Agent Is Here

Music

Daily Discussion Thread ~Music Saloon!

Public_N_M_E

**Lande Hekt - Favourite Pair of Shoes**

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XOFolHErQg

culture

> American identity is based on belief in a broad creed, not on ethnicity, religion, or ancestry. That point should be uncontroversial. Yet a small, ultra-online nationalist subculture now disputes it. The dispute publicly surfaced recently after Vivek Ramaswamy’s New York Times op-ed and his speech at the Turning Point USA AmericaFest conference, which basically made that point. 
>
> The wild online disagreement to it was shocking to most but centered around a mostly anonymous subset of people who are pushing the idea that “Heritage Americans,” those descended from the colonial era or at least the Civil War, are more American than the rest of us. This disagreement gets to the heart of why American society and the economy work so well while being so ethnically, religiously, and racially diverse.
>
> The debate over Heritage Americans and what it means to be an American is in the backdrop of a mass deportation campaign by the Trump administration, the government’s anti-legal immigration policies, and a Supreme Court case that could reinterpret birthright citizenship. Reinterpreting what it means to be a real American isn’t necessary for those immigration restrictionist policies because they are happening without such a big shift in attitudes. It would be a titanic shift to redefine what it means to be an American in the way those small numbers of crude ultra-online nationalists want.
>
> A recent YouGov poll asked, “What makes someone American?” Ranked in order of importance, the first unique cultural marker is speaking English, which is in seventh place. Tenth place is participating in American customs and traditions, which is as vague as you can be. Creedal definitions dominate: obeying the law, supporting the Constitution, citizenship, and adherence to shared principles. This is the way it should be. These are universal commitments, not ethnic markers, and therefore conflict directly with nationalist definitions of Americanness.
>
> ![](https://m.stacker.news/123406)
>
> [**...read more at cato.org**](https://www.cato.org/blog/heritage-doesnt-make-somebody-american)

~charts_and_numbers 

Heritage Doesn’t Make Somebody an American

bitcoin_Mining

> - Elvira Nabiullina said bitcoin mining may be an additional factor supporting the ruble.
> - She cautioned the impact is hard to quantify because mining often sits outside reporting channels.
> - Russia legalized bitcoin mining in August 2024 after years of gray-market operations.
>
> Russia’s central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina said bitcoin mining may be providing incremental support to the ruble, an unusual acknowledgment from a policymaker who has historically treated digital assets as a financial risk.
>
> [**...read more at bitbo.io**](https://bitbo.io/news/russia-bitcoin-mining-ruble/)

~Politics_And_Law ~bitcoin 

Russia Central Bank Links Bitcoin Mining to Ruble

> ## INTRODUCTION:
>
> Before you read any further, sign the petition to pardon Samourai Wallet. Software developers should not be held accountable for the actions of end users. That is a very basic and reasonable position to hold, so if you agree then show your support by joining the thousands who have taken a stand to pardon Samourai Wallet.
>
> Welcome to the Twelfth newsletter produced by The 256 Foundation and supported by Proto! This will be the last monthly newsletter and will move to a weekly cadence after January 1, 2026. Massive shout out to Proto for their support over the last 12 months! We have been refining the format of this newsletter to try and maximize the focus on signal. Below you will find short descriptions on a number of freedom tech topics spanning last month that are centered around open-source Bitcoin mining.
>
> [**...read more at 256foundation**](https://256foundation.substack.com/p/assembling-freedom-12)

~bitcoin 

Assembling Freedom #12

Stacker News Is The Best (But you already knew that)

siggy47

Do Austrian economists like prediction markets?

SimpleStacker

There’s mad money to be made in prediction markets, and liquidity bots are the way to get it. But please, don't call them prediction markets, that’s just a buzzword. A dope name would be LiFe`BET`CaSiNo! ~lol 

Prediction markets shouldn't have automated liquidity bots, because that just messes with the forecast. daahhhhh

SN release: stage one of isomorphic markdown to wysiwyg editor

k00b

This part used to be clickable (in notifications)

![](https://m.stacker.news/123387)

cc/ @sox 


What’s one album you’d recommend listening to straight through, with no skips?

roytheholographicuniverse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQgDYT836Kk

**Metallica — Ride the Lightning ⚡**

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGOe8h867Gc

> **The arrival of generative AI assistants in our smart homes held such promise; instead, they struggle to turn on the lights.**
>
> This morning, I asked my Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machine to make me a coffee. Instead of running my routine, it told me it couldn’t do that. Ever since I upgraded to Alexa Plus, Amazon’s generative-AI-powered voice assistant, it has failed to reliably run my coffee routine, coming up with a different excuse almost every time I ask.
>
> It’s 2025, and AI still can’t reliably control my smart home. I’m beginning to wonder if it ever will.
>
> The potential for generative AI and large language models to take the complexity out of the smart home, making it easier to set up, use, and manage connected devices, is compelling. So is the promise of a “new intelligence layer” that could unlock a proactive, ambient home.
>
> But this year has shown me that we are a long way from any of that. Instead, our reliable but limited voice assistants have been replaced with “smarter” versions that, while better conversationalists, can’t consistently do basic tasks like operating appliances and turning on the lights. I want to know why.
>
> [**...read more at archive.is**](https://archive.is/w3Ewe)

~tech 

How AI broke the smart home in 2025

👀 https://stacker.news/items/1363098?commentId=1364103

> **Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... works**
>
> Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.
>
> UNIX V4, the first ever version of the UNIX operating system in which the kernel was written in the then-new C programming language, has been successfully recovered from a 1970s nine-track tape drive. You can download it from the Internet Archive, and run it in SimH. On Mastodon, "Flexion" posted a screenshot of it running under SGI IRIX.
>
> Last month, we wrote about the remarkable discovery of a forgotten tape with a lost early version of Unix, found by Professor Robert Ricci at the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah. At the time, we quoted the redoubtable Kossow, who also runs Bitsavers, as saying that it "has a pretty good chance of being recoverable." Well, he was right, and at the end of last week, he did it. Ricci also shared a video clip on Mastodon.
>
> There's a video of the recovery here. It's only slightly over five minutes long, but then, UNIX V4 wasn't very big yet: for instance, the kernel was some 27 kB of code.
>
> [**...read more at theregister.com**](https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/23/unix_v4_tape_successfully_recovered/)

~tech 

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered

> This chart by Aneesh Anand visualizes the net additions to official gold reserves from 2000 to 2024, using data from the World Gold Council, IMF, World Bank, and other central banking sources.
>
> ![](https://m.stacker.news/123380)
>
> [**🔗 visualcapitalist.com**](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/countries-stockpiling-most-gold-reserves-since-2000/)


Countries Stockpiling the Most Gold Reserves Since 2000

> On December 11, the Cato Institute hosted a Hill briefing on affordability. I was joined by my colleagues Romina Boccia, Adam Michel, and Michael Cannon to discuss a reality that most politicians in Washington would prefer to ignore: deficit spending drives up prices and reduces earnings.
>
> ## The root of today’s “affordability crisis” is the fiscal crisis.
> ## Americans’ inflation frustrations are part and parcel with the pandemic spending spree.
> ![](https://m.stacker.news/123375)
> ## The alternative to shoveling more money into the pit is supply-side reform.
> ![](https://m.stacker.news/123376)
> ## Subsidies are driving healthcare costs higher.
> ![](https://m.stacker.news/123377)
> ## Conclusion
>
> [**cato.org**](https://www.cato.org/blog/fiscal-policy-raising-costs-american-families)

