https://austegard.com/etc/housing-affordability.html
Good details in this ai generated report. Regional breakdowns as well. It would be neat to read a human domain expert’s critique and explanation. There is a lot to think about.
“it is slowly dawning on Trump that he has an election year nightmare on his hands”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/desperate-trump-begs-for-help-to-escape-iran-fiasco
Impeachment and conviction?
How coding agents work – a basic primer
Quick read. Useful for non-dev users especially
“Right answer: USAID got sucked up into a vortex of culture wars and democratic breakdown”
https://timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/everyone-is-misunderstanding-what
By far best I’ve read. Project 2025 wanted funding reverted to 2019 levels. Musk had other ideas.
Kagan: “Like most people, I thought Trump would declare victory and bug out. But things have gotten to the point where I don’t think he can.”
Dev does deep dive to find bug in canon firmware that will never be fixed.
https://furbo.org/2026/03/14/your-mac-and-a-canon-printer/
I wonder about a utility that would reset the Bonjour cache every few minutes?
I only buy Brother peripherals now
Adobe fined pittance for their subscription games.
Part of our societal collapse over past 30y is meaningless laws. $75 million is nothing for Adobe.
“large majorities of Americans rejecting policies such as trans women in female sports”
https://www.persuasion.community/p/how-trans-activism-became-so-radical
Those survey numbers are stark.
“trans politics definitively revealed as a losing political issue for Democrats”
Claim that activists got ahead of the social curve. “Old-school transsexuals—who came to be known as “transmedicalists”—were quickly outnumbered by a growing cohort of people with a radically different view of trans”
“The belief that coherent sense can be made out of Trump’s shuffling words is a weakness of the rational mind”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/14/trump-iran-vietnam?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
The media machine assumes the president is cognitively intact. It doesn’t rebuild in a day.
[toread] NYT on end of WaPo includes Bezos take: “The newsroom has shrunk by nearly half over the past two years, to about the size it was when he bought it”
They are metric driven, not culture driven. Probably Twitter based but they don’t say. I suspect NYT has same problem.
Digg lesson: “The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts”
https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/13/digg-shuts-down-two-months-after-highly-anticipated-return/
“We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us.“
Reddit down 40% yoy. OTOH I personally don’t notice them outside of Reddit.
Merz on Trump’s gift to Putin: “would like to know what additional motives led the US government to make this decision”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-13-2026
As would we all
HCR on the billionaires running America
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-12-2026
Wealth tax necessary.
Antivaxx fear RFK is no longer lying enough about vaccines.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/health/kennedy-maha-vaccines.html
RFK got whacked by someone with power.
“a majority of Republican men under 50 think that the Holocaust either didn’t happen or was exaggerated”
Trump is good at corruption and America was rife with exploits.
Tsai on our epochal shift in automation
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/03/11/greg-knauss-is-losing-himself/
Good enough code. Innovators Dilemma had some good ideas.
Quotes for the history books
Donald Knuth: “learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/3/donald-knuth/#atom-everything
A mini-Knuth in every pocket.
GPT‑5.4
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/5/introducing-gpt54/#atom-everything
The next Pelican will be interesting.
Plan Mode makes ai coding less efficient? “Claude is a cool dude. So when confronted with another Claude, they each try to out-cool the other dude until they’re just talking super cool nonsense”
https://timkellogg.me/blog/2026/03/08/plan-mode
There are a lot of insider impressions here
“Claude shows a striking “spiritual bliss” attractor state in self-interactions.”
“Sadie Gurman and Caitlin Ostroff of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that 47,635 files are missing from the Epstein files documents that the Justice Department has made public”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-4-2026
“at least one of the missing files contains allegations that Trump sexually assaulted a thirteen-year-old girl …
… House Oversight Committee agreed to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about the release of the Epstein files…. it appears about half the files have been released, and many are heavily redacted.
The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Bondi against the wishes of committee chair James Comer (R-KY). Bondi will have to testify under oath.”
“What Texas does do right, however, is let businesses build stuff, especially housing, in stark contrast with the regulations and multiple veto points that strangle construction in many blue states.”
“As of today, all mentions of Liquid Glass have disappeared from developer.apple.com”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/03/06/welcome-back-to-macintosh/
Tsai assembled a good set of expert comments on Tim Cook’s murder of the Mac.
Light across the universe: a zoo of physics effects that change the signal.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/signals-degrade-space/
A readable and remarkable review. I wonder how many of these exotic signal changes were known 25y ago.
Social sciences: “Many academics—especially those concentrated on Bluesky and, I suspect, those who are completely offline—are in complete denial about what’s already happening.”
https://alexanderkustov.substack.com/p/academics-need-to-wake-up-on-ai
I think the denial is fading fast though.
“Carter is one of nearly 50 teens nationally who have died by suicide during a sextortion case”
https://www.startribune.com/sextortion-suicide-high-school-athletes-carter-bremseth/601538737
Support teaching about extortion and teach your children. Don’t keep guns at home.
Disappearing Generals in China and America – Dyer’s theory.
https://gwynnedyer.com/2026/the-curious-case-of-the-disappearing-generals/
We know of the purges, but we don’t know why. Dyer thinks the Chinese purge is because they are preparing for Iranian style mass killings to suppress unrest — even if that seems very unlikely to outsiders.
The American purges is presumed to be a contingency plan for something like that here.
Musk Moves Against the Russia: “SpaceX, the company that operates the Starlink network, then developed a whitelist of Ukrainian users”
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/02/elon-musk-ukraine-russia-starlink/686155/
“Ukrainians have advanced. In the first three weeks of February, they seized more than 300 square kilometers of land from the Russians,”
A Guide to the big 3 consumer and professional AIs: models, harnesses, tools, agents
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/a-guide-to-which-ai-to-use-in-the
Major change every 2w now
A single web page on an exotic topic will be trusted by most ai
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/02/poisoning-ai-training-data.html
“Claude …wasn’t fooled.”
Partly this reflects the poor state of the web.
Fukuyama on Iran and Israel.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/fukuyama-8
The free part of the transcript is quite good on both Israel and Iran.
Chaos is very Trump.
“Gulf Arab states eager to curb Iran’s power “have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-28-2026
Operation Epstein Fury is also a work for hire.
Caterpillars mimic ant communication to parasitize the nest
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/science/caterpillar-ant-language.html
“Once in the nest, either the caterpillars are fed by ants, or they eat the ants’ young.”
Block Lays off 40%: “absurd over-hiring in the last 5–10 years”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/27/block-layoffs
“AI” is just a convenient scapegoat.”
“mechano-antiviral response system” (MARS) may well be a type of innate immunity that we have been completely overlooking”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/feel-antiviral-vibrations-seriously
Massage therapy for viral infections is very 2026. From anyone but Lowe I’d ignore but …
Review of AI use in China’s state propaganda
https://toosimple.substack.com/p/ai-tell-story-well
Bari Weiss wants this.
“Anthropic is the only company currently integrated into classified systems (a legacy of their earlier contract with Palantir) and it would be annoying to integrate another company’s product”
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anthropic
Part of why DoD wanted a change to the contract. When Anthropic declined Hegseth testicles felt hurt.
“Is it really a good idea to source your killbot brains from an unwilling company which hates your guts? The Trump administration has a firm commitment to never think about AI safety in any way, but this still strikes me as a dubious policy.”
The history and technology of macOS system updates
https://eclecticlight.co/2026/02/28/explainer-macos-updates/
Apple seems positively bad at macOS software these days, but this work was impressive.
Anthropic v Trump: “using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties”
https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
OpenAI has indicated it will do the mass surveillance.
“once people are wedded to a strongman, they will cling to him ever more tightly as his behavior becomes more and more erratic.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-25-2026
“This loyalty is in part to demonstrate their own devotion to the cause, and in part to justify their own attacks on those the strongman has given them permission to hurt.”
In China: “Scale, low-cost talent, and in-house manufacturing account for most of BYD’s cost gap with Tesla.”
https://restofworld.org/2026/why-are-chinese-evs-cheaper-than-tesla/
“Chinese state subsidies account for just 5% of BYD’s $4,700 per-vehicle cost gap with Tesla”
The Subnational Levers Constraining ICE
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/a-federalism-bottleneck
There are many ways for both states and non-US businesses and governments to make MAGA brutality more expensive.
Released Epstein files omit 1980s rape of 14yo by Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/us/politics/trump-epstein-files.html
“alleged incident would have occurred in the mid-1980s when she was 13 to 15 years old, but they do not include any assessment by the F.B.I. about the credibility of her accusation”
“Justice Department had also not provided them to the Oversight Committee”
The standard lies Trump will tell
https://www.ms.now/opinion/trump-falsehoods-state-of-the-union-speech-fact-check
Bingo of course. From a fact checkers library.
The Evolution of Eyes: the first version was monocular
“In 1994 he and Susanne Pelger, a colleague at Lund, concluded that an image-forming eye could evolve in just a few hundred thousand years.”
Galleri blood test cancer detect: “total number of people diagnosed at stage 3 or stage 4 did not show any statistically significant reduction”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/early-cancer-detection-test-put-test
“Lots of reasonable and/or exciting ideas in medicine collapse when you put some weight on them”
One day something like Galleri might work, but for now everyone is skeptical.
Another anti-vaxxer quack forced out of CDC leadership.
Compared to RFK Bhattacharya is … well … not quite as crackbrained stupid. Just a regular blight on humanity.
Gruber: “since I’m skipping MacOS 26 Tahoe”
https://netnewswire.blog/2026/01/27/netnewswire-for-mac.html
It’s not just me.
Apple Report Card: “Apple just seems lost. This year, I want to highlight how unreliable Screen Time is”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/02/23/2025-six-colors-apple-report-card/
Tsai’s contribution. Apple’s software division needs a complete rebuild, which needs a new CEO.
“You can’t export your passkeys for offline storage and later reimport into the Passwords app.” Password app is now quite good, but not good enough.
“The language of Section 122 calls for a flat-rate tariff on everyone.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/attack-of-the-zombie-tariffs
“This means that nations Trump tried to punish … have just received a big break. Meanwhile nations that groveled to Trump, like the UK, have just learned that they humiliated themselves for nothing”
The death of the rationality assumption: “one of the most fundamental questions in post-Enlightenment philosophy, economics, psychology, and political science”
https://www.persuasion.community/p/janice-stein
As Kahneman et al showed, humans are only intermittently rational. I suspect LLMs are substantially more rational.