Trump administration is upset with 2030 projections. That would make US oil reserves far less valuable.
macOS Tahoe: Old school “big fix” no longer apply.
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/11/big-guns-for-tahoe-problems-which-radical-fixes-still-work/
If safe boot and the like doesn’t work, you basically reinstall the OS or even go to DFU reset.
Sarepta Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy drugs: “Neither of them work. They never had. They never did.”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sarepta-enough-god-s-sake
Corruption and desperation
“chances of finding a de novo mutation go up if a patient has severe autism and other, co-occurring conditions, like epilepsy, movement disorders or an intellectual disability. “
De novo mutations are mistakes during routine DNA manipulation, not inherited. Autism is a crap syndromic term for a wide range of conditions many of which are associated with a variety of inherited and de novo mutations in a wide variety of proteins. There really doesn’t seem to be a single cause to focus on.
Merck PCSK9 pill may replace injectables for maximal LDL reduction
“circle of peptides, a one-hundredth the size of an antibody but larger than a typical pill-delivered small molecule”
Technology sounds like it may replace other injectables.
Judge Mark Wolf, American patriot: why he resigned to fight for democracy
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-9-2025
“Trump’s use of the Department of Justice to hurt his political opponents, his firing of inspectors general, the administration’s pay-to-play policies in which wealthy donors get government favors, the corruption of cryptocurrency, unconstitutional executive orders, and the threats against judges as Trump attacks the rule of law.”
Web browsers are second software victims of ai
https://spyglass.org/ai-browsers-breaking-web/
First they came for the search engine. Now they have come for the browser. Meanwhile the cyber breaks by nation, content license, and user license.
Stay healthy.
Forcing Copilot AI in Windows
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/11/05/forcing-copilot-ai/
Apple is terrible. M&G are worse. Perhaps the backlash will guide Apple and the EU across several domains.
Denmark responds to Russian sabotage with inspections of covert Russian oil ships.
https://gwynnedyer.com/2025/denmark-vs-the-shadow-fleet/
Meanwhile new Ukrainian missiles will take out Russian refineries.
“after 80 years of on-and-off support for the Palestinian cause the [arab] regimes have finally written them off”
https://gwynnedyer.com/2025/arab-nadir-clueless-hegemons/
“highest policy priority of Israel’s immediate neighbours, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, is not to prevent the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. It is rather to ensure that the new wave of Palestinian ‘refugees’ does not end up on their territories”
“the administration’s lawyer admitted that American consumers pay from 30% to 80% of the tariffs.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-6-2025
Seems good to note. Is this the biggest tax increase in US history?
Sudan: war may end with partition.
https://gwynnedyer.com/2025/sudan-civil-war-and-partition/
UAE is main funder of war.
Claude face plants when interpreting macOS logs.
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/07/inside-the-unified-log-7-claude-diagnoses-the-log/
Truly dismal results. A corrective to my Claude enthusiasm.
Models for production AI – Anthropic is the default
https://cameron.pfiffer.org/blog/production-ai-landscape/index.html
Anthropic has really taken the lead.
Google Maps with Gemini sounds kind of useless actually.
https://blog.google/products/maps/gemini-navigation-global/
Nothing interesting to me so far. I can think of lots of interesting things they could do, but I suspect they are too expensive.
Quanta: It is or is not possible to do quantum mechanics without imaginary numbers.
You can imitate vector rotations in real numbers, but it’s klunky.
Generic drug pricing explained – American manufacturing would require much higher prices
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/making-pills-not-making-them-here
However it’s done, through regulation or tariffs, you’d have to dramatically increase generic drug prices to manufacture them in America.
MAGA idiocrats control GOP funding: GOP campaigns now run by incompetents.
https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/3m2znbd5z4k2p/l-quote/13_0-13_521?auth_completed=true#13_0
The GOP captured the LIV. Then the LIV captured the GOP.
macOS Photos: Optimized Storage version and External Drive Full Resolution version of same library
https://tech.kateva.org/2025/11/macos-photos-optimized-storage-version.html
“The trick is to have two macOS user accounts with the same Apple ID [2]. One you use strictly for backup.”
60 min, pravda version: “Trump brought up his predecessor, President Joe Biden, more than 40 times in the interview but only six instances made the broadcast”
They edited to hide the raving and the confusion.
“another week of the shutdown could lead to “mass chaos” that would force him to close some of the nation’s airspace”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-4-2025-tuesday
Encouraging news.
“When you look at what’s driving electricity bills, it’s really poles and wires”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/climate/electricity-prices.html
Mostly not data centers or generation costs.
“utilities have nearly tripled the amount they spend annually on the network of poles, wires, substations and transformers … Large portions of the electric grid are nearing the end of their 50-year life spans …deal with storms, fires and heat waves …”
LLMs enabling Data Freedom between apps
https://www.macstories.net/notes/llms-for-data-portability/
“I opened Claude for Mac, installed one of its built-in Notes extensions, and asked it to replicate content from a specific folder of the Notes app in a Notion database while keeping as much of the original formatting intact as possible.”
This is very encouraging. One day I hope an LLM will free my blogs from Blogger (existing migration options suck).
iOS 18 – iOS 26 autocorrect is kind of fubared
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/11/03/ios-18-and-ios-26-autocorrect/
I think it’s been getting worse for quite a while, but not dramatically worse for me. I’m still on 18 though.
An overview of Trump’s cognitive decline.
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/how-to-appease-a-declining-president
Assumed to be vascular dementia, but often there are other concurrent causes.
Adrienne Rich wrote an excellent poem on ai in 1961.
https://rodneybrooks.com/a-prophetic-poem-about-artificial-intelligence-written-in-1961/
Contrasted to ai generated pablum.
Why Spotlight can’t spot: “Spotlight’s service was using a completely different method to check the type of the contents, the ‘magic’ database used by the file(1) command.”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/10/26/last-week-on-my-mac-why-spotlight-cant-find-some-files/
A completely horked and kludgy code base would explain a lot about Spotlight.
How to remove the “Live Photo” video from a macOS Photos.app image
https://tech.kateva.org/2025/11/how-to-remove-live-photo-video-from.html
Duplicate, choose “Duplicate as Still Photo” and delete original.
Fuentes and Carlson unite: “Now members of that base are strong enough to tie the party itself to Nazism”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-2-2025
The capture of the GOP by the MAGA base is both proof of the power of democracy and proof of the instability of our version of democracy.
But nobody wants to talk about this …
“strategic interactions with AI notetakers and summarizers may soon be a necessary executive skill for navigating corporate culture”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/11/ai-summarization-optimization.html
SEO techniques apply. I’m not sure this will make meetings worse. I can imagine more offline discussions.
“China’s limits on rare-earth exports to the United States were a much bigger problem for us than Trump’s tariffs were for them.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/were-number-two
Trump surrendered. He had no choice.
Piketty on what Left tariffs would look like.
https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2025/10/07/rethinking-world-trade/
Mostly about China.
Brooks: “humanoid robots will be “plug compatible” with humans and be able to step in and do the manual things that humans do … believing that this will happen any time within decades is pure fantasy thinking”
https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/
His voice carries weight.
“Schunk, a German company, sells over 1,000 varieties of parallel jaw grippers, both electric and pneumatic (using compressed air), for robot arms.”
“it’s remarkable just how many con artists and child abusers have latched themselves onto various royals”
macOS 26 Tahoe and Music: “really doesn’t appear like macOS 26 was ready for Prime Time”
https://dougscripts.com/itunes/2025/10/whats-up-with-macos-26-tahoe-and-music/
26.1 a bit better but I think I’ll be upgrading in 2026 rather than 2025.
Anomalous heat flow can theoretically measure entanglement without disrupting it.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-thermometer-for-measuring-quantumness-20251001/
“Because the memory is entangled with both the quantum system and the sink, it can again catalyze heat flow between them … entanglement within the quantum system converts into extra heat …”
Reality computes.
Trump’s insurrection strategy.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-30-2025
The Epstein files must hold a dead body somewhere. Trump goes to insurrection when squeezed.
“The establishment of a domestic quick reaction force to quell civil disturbances at a time when there are no civil disturbances that can’t be handled easily by existing law enforcement suggests the administration is expecting those conditions to change”
Trump admin creates national “riot control” forces.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/29/pentagon-memo-quick-reaction-forces
Particularly important should elections need to be canceled or disrupted.
Young Republicans 1950s: “Citizens’ Councils served as the “respectable” counterpart to the Ku Klux Klan”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-young-republicans-chat-echoes
“casual cruelty, the smirking slurs, the need to dress violence as irony”
Claims pediatric porn-gore and social media not necessary, cruelty arises easily among young men.
Consciousness science review series.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/article-hubs/advancing-consciousness-science
Are humans conscious? We know they think they are.
(I am 99.9% sure that we will find that any quantitative measure of consciousness will show it varies among humans.)
Mexico 1519-1600: most everyone died.
https://bsky.app/profile/c0nc0rdance.bsky.social/post/3m4difgikac24
“70% of those deaths were the result of an UNKNOWN hemorrhagic fever.”
Makes Bubonic Plague look little league.
RFK quack fired.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/us/politics/hatfill-covid-hhs-ousted.html
“Dr. Hatfill, a onetime Army biodefense researcher, gained national attention more than two decades ago when he was wrongly accused of being involved in the 2001 anthrax attacks.”
Wikipedia “You want me around now? Well, maybe if you ask nicely. And make it worth my while.”
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hi-its-me-wikipedia-and-i-am-ready-for-your-apology
We all pledge allegiance.
First Wap surveillance tech: “shrewd use of the antiquated telecom language Signaling System No. 7, known as SS7, that phone carriers use to route calls and text messages.”
RIP Nisus Writer
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/10/27/nisus-probably-moribund/
It lived a long time. I used it for a while; I liked the rich text format. We are in the dark ages of word processing — Pages is buggy and incomplete and Word for macOS is eye-bleach.
“Are women unsuited for the pursuit of truth?” – The Great Feminization, Helen Andrews
https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/are-women-unsuited-for-the-pursuit
There are gender differences, both gender stereotypes are not good at doing science. (One gender seems to own a lot of fraud.)
Amelia Earhart was not a great pilot and ran out of fuel: “Noonan was drinking heavily in the days leading up to their fateful takeoff”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/amelia-earhart-truth-conspiracy/684430/
In the news because Trump’s military funder is an Earhart conspiracy crackpot.
If we don’t get superintelligence soon we get the big crash: “all because OpenAI has set itself up for a completely binary outcome”
https://spyglass.org/agi-or-bust/
Of the two outcomes the crash is more survivable. I’m rooting for team crash.
Tsai shares his very long list of Apple bugs and defects.
American elite revealed as pretty craven and cowardly. (The heroes we know – they get taken out)
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/fear-greed-civic-virtue-and-the-fall-of-the-elites
There is a lot more rotten in America than just Trump, the GOP, and SCOTUS.