https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/20/business/ai-coding-software-engineers.html
An incremental improvement so far, in line with search, IDEs, and the like.
NYT summary of Trump actions — which are illegal, which before courts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/20/upshot/trump-executive-orders-legality.html
I hope they update regularly.
macOS ACLs and more: “only common use in modern macOS is to preserve standard structures of folders in the Home folder”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/02/20/permissions-privacy-and-security-whos-in-control/
ACLs were maybe a mistake?
“case makers like Spigen are pitching iPhone 16e protective cases that include MagSafe as part of the design”
https://9to5mac.com/2025/02/20/apples-most-puzzling-iphone-16e-decision-is-being-corrected/
Omitting MagSafe was such a weird decision. I still suspect a modem problem — which makes me worry about the modem.
Dyer claims the Heritage plan is on track for hard right control.
https://gwynnedyer.com/2025/trump-flood-the-zone/
His take is that the flailing is mostly a deliberate distraction (Canada, Gaza, Greenland, Ukraine extortion).
He also predicts Vance will take over before 2028.
Aaronson on Microsoft’s topological qubit claim
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8669
It’s good science if true.
“Think about the level of incompetence it takes to get a number crucial to your case wrong by a factor of a thousand”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/an-explosion-of-lies
K makes a persuasive case that Musk and Trump are flailing and increasingly desperate.
I wonder if they really believed the whacko things they campaigned on.
How to trim a video in macOS Finder
https://christianheilmann.com/2025/02/20/how-to-trim-a-video-in-macos-using-finder/
Similar to the behavior in iOS Photos. Very cool.
Virome project: “A vast majority of the world’s population gets infected with cytomegaloviruses … which can colonize just about every organ”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/health/human-virome-program.html
Animals are a mobile viral habitat
macOS kernel panic: “One quick way to disable all third-party kernel extensions on an Apple silicon Mac…”
The US is not Hungary: “ad revenue for American outlets comes overwhelmingly from private, not public, sources, thus depriving Trump of a key tool wielded by other autocrats.”
https://www.readthedetox.com/p/trump-can-be-stopped
This is one of our best references so far.
“Dellinger case … no matter how the Court rules, we shouldn’t view the result as foreshadowing …”
https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/125-the-courts-first-trump-ii-case
Challenge to Trump’s removal of the head of the Office of Special Counsel could be legitimately decided either way
American Authoritarianism: what we can expect from Trump, Musk and Vance. (Free article)
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/path-american-authoritarianism-trump
“But the opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Opposition under competitive authoritarianism can be grueling”
The author gives good reasons why the US will be harder to crack than Hungary.
“HR officials at the NNSA resigned after they became frustrated at being forced to tell employees, falsely, that they were being fired for performance reasons”
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/doge-mismanagement-principles
There are still people with honor. Even if honor is forgotten by those who made much of it once.
Euthanasia for the demented: “Assisted dying while mentally incompetent, it’s not going to happen”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/health/assisted-death-alzheimers-netherlands.html
The demented person you become is not the person who wants to die. That new person often wants to live.
I settled on 85th BD as my die date — but we don’t have euthanasia so I’m relying on my hobbies.
Apple’s Reminders “if there’s a set list of tasks you always need to do for whatever reason, you can turn that list into a template”
https://9to5mac.com/2025/02/14/apples-reminders-app-seven-power-user-features/
I don’t need it now but one day maybe.
“you can add tags then set up a Smart List based on the tags”
“TIPS protect you against future inflation that the U.S. government admits is happening”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lies-damned-lies-and-trumpflation
Trump will fake the numbers.
“I don’t think it’s the singularity”
https://timkellogg.me/blog/2025/02/12/recursive-improvement
Nice it is still not yet.
LLMs and World Models – Othello “Any individual rule is not always correct, and in some cases these rules contradict one another, but the collective activations of large numbers of neurons representing different heuristic rules”
https://aiguide.substack.com/p/llms-and-world-models-part-2
Biological systems are like that. Contradictory.
GLP-1 and visual problems: “GLP-1 drugs might be causing at least some of these cases indirectly, by rapidly lowering blood sugar, rather than through any direct toxic effect of the medication itself”
https://gizmodo.com/eye-doctors-are-finding-new-links-between-ozempic-and-vision-problems-2000563080
A friend of mine developed a kind of persistent neuropathy/myopathy after rapidly lowering their “type II” glucose levels — but not by a GLP-1.
There’s a lot about “Type II” DM we don’t understand, including the shifting balance between insulin resistance and beta cell failure.
Metrics of United States show “anocracy” moving to competitive autocracy.
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/is-the-united-states-still-a-liberal
At root this is a failure of the American people.
Apple introduces ability to migrate all purchases from one account to another account
https://support.apple.com/en-us/117267
We have a family Apple ID that exists only because it owns so many purchases. I advise WAITING a few months before trying this. There are likely surprises.
If we do it we’ll be able to enlarge our family sharing; the legacy Apple ID is a family member.
“If there’s anything else associated with your secondary Apple Account that you still need access to, you might need to undo migration. iCloud data from your secondary account can still be easily accessed by signing in to iCloud.com on a computer.”
“nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-tricked-strong-economy-00203464
The data is not bad, but our framing of the data is weirdly rigid. The price for failing to dig into the state of America over the past 25y is we got Trump.
“since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI”
Citizens United was in 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Historians will consider it the beginning of the end of American democracy. It accelerated an existing corruption trend.
“Musk functionally in control of the U.S. government”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/not-hyperbole-anymore-musk-is-in-charge-of-the-us-government
Does Lachlan Murdoch want to be under the thumb of President Elon Musk and his commissars?
Huntington’s Disease neuron injury: slowly, slowly, then all dead
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/huntington-s-disease-cell-cell
Even if we can’t fix the mutation, slowing replication velocity could greatly increase healthy life.
Pope to alleged Catholic Vance: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups”
Sociology of science: arsenic metabolizing life, celebrity, and sexism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/science/arseniclife-felisa-wolfe-simon-retraction.html
Celebrity can mean grants, but the cost of public attention has increased. Not least because American culture has soured over the past 25y. A new balance will be found.
macOS “System Data” in Storage Settings – means “Other”.
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/02/11/what-is-system-data-in-storage-settings/
Great discussion of macOS file storage
IOS Calendar: “You can pinch to zoom the Month view to resize it to your liking”
Root cause of Reagan airport crash is probably Congress.
They force exemptions to make their lives easier.
Jon Udell – 30 years of building distributed web services by component
https://thenewstack.io/how-to-build-web-components-using-chatgpt/
I’ve been a Udell fan since his BYTE days (we lost a lot when BYTE died, it was never truly replaced). WAP, WML, Yahoo! Pipes, VBX, web components … and now building web apps with HTML, CSS and *minimal* JavaScript.
OpenAI signs with publisher who does Guardian.
https://openai.com/index/openai-partners-with-schibsted-media-group/
This is the 2nd or 3rd publisher agreement I’ve seen. There will be hundreds to come.
How we will known who is human and who is not: Shared TOTP setup
https://ksze.github.io/PeerAuth/
This is a nice technology demonstration, presumably similar approaches will be be built. Tap iPhones to establish authentication.
The Contrarian is assembling a metric for the state of American democracy: “The Democracy Index”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-democracy-index
We dropped WaPo and used the money for the Contrarian.
The five rational reasons to go along with Trump and Musk. 🆓
“when people or institutions cede power voluntarily, they are acting not so much out of fear but rather on a set of apparently reasonable arguments. These arguments tend to fall into one or more of five categories”
Wonderful essay by one who lived under Putin’s rise. Acquiescence, in the end, did not work.
How news media ignited McCarthyism: “The AP bulletin turned an unremarkable speech, given before a minor-league political group, into an alarming declaration about government”
https://time.com/7213586/media-mccarthyism/
The history here is new to me. It gives the media too much blame however – the real responsibility was with voters and the GOP of the day.
The attack on American democracy is not coordinated genius – it is a de facto alliance of the stupid, the racist, and the cruel.
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/maga-feeding-frenzy-has-caused-a
“reactionary elites mostly aligned with Heritage and Project 2025; there are the America First nativists; there are the techbro feudal barons. There is also, let’s not forget, Donald Trump as a slightly idiosyncratic factor, driven entirely by a sense of grievance, a desire for revenge, and his personal obsessions”
Our democracy had become weak, it leaked blood in the water.
“investigative reports have been a kind of civic WD-40, slicking the tracks for the sluggish Resistance 2.0 to slide into place”
https://mattdpearce.substack.com/p/investigative-journalism-and-the
Mostly new media. Those who escaped the corruption of oligarch owners.
“In times of uncertainty it’s the fearless who set the tone, and a lot more people will need to get brave”
Be brave.
LLM training: “Torrenting 81 terabytes of pirated books is not in the gray zone”
I suspect others did this. The med answers are too good to be web only.
GOP war on non-MAGA Christians.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/08/catholic-lutheran-vance-flynn-musk-trump/
Emboldened by defeating science the Magists pivot to attacking the infidel faiths.
“In a brief phone conversation, Flynn said he didn’t want to speak with a Post reporter”
I’m sure he was polite.
Project 2025 Oren Cass on Tariffs
https://www.persuasion.community/p/oren-cass
Cass is, by association, clearly a very bad person. But I, an average person, agree with parts of his thesis:
“Ensuring that someone who doesn’t have a college degree … is actually in a position to raise a family and achieve anything we would consider to be middle-class security… that’s what is missing”
Biden worked towards this of course.
“Fibonacci” transformed medieval European commerce and was largely forgotten.
https://skullsinthestars.com/2025/02/07/the-man-of-numbers-by-keith-devlin/
Leonardo was his actual name.
USAID: “Musk is a big fan of a guy named Mike Benz, a far-right provocateur, white supremacist, and all-around conspiracy crank”
https://jabberwocking.com/heres-how-usaid-ended-up-in-trumps-crosshairs/
A broken nation is led by a broken man.
Passwords app can share WiFi access with QR code
“Tap to open a Wi-Fi network inside the Passwords app, and you’ll see a button that reads, ‘Show Network QR Code.’
This QR code can then be scanned by anyone nearby to instantly connect them to your network”
Sounds like how hidden network QR codes work.
To restore the Republic Dems need to fight corruption.
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/its-the-corruption-stupid
GOP is entirely corrupt, but Dems are not great. This is the way.
DOGE minion so racist even Trump couldn’t deal: “fixated on people from India, writing “Normalize Indian hate” and supporting a so-called “eugenic immigration policy”
https://gizmodo.com/doge-engineer-resigns-over-extremely-racist-tweets-report-2000560615
Hitler youth. Exposed by … the WSJ?!
Whale song has statistical structure similar to human languages: “linguistic laws derived from studies of human communication may actually be broader biological principles”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/science/language-humpback-whale-song.html
Chomsky’s “universal grammar” is thought to reflect human brain structure.
Lowe on the LLM problem: “you have to know the material already to realize when your foot has gone through what was earlier solid flooring”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/evaluation-deep-research-performance
I’m happiest when I use them on things I know of. Because of my nature that is a broad range, but I am nervous when it’s a new topic.
“deepest divide in America isn’t between left and right, it’s between “rationalists” who focus on facts and reason, on one side, and “intuitionists,” who rely on their feelings”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/rfk-jr-and-the-maga-death-trip
The GOP became full anti-science over 30 years.
“When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head”