https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/upshot/musk-doge-changes-deletions.html
No surprises but a handy reference. They lie on Trump scales.
Category Archives: share
Why Trump and the GOP betrayed the free world – the view of the technarchy
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-america-betrayed-europe
It’s impossible to separate stupidity and madness from strategy in Trump/Musk land.
Here Noah Smith, who represents the relatively sane side of the technarchy, tries to construct a rationale for why the GOP and Trump should betray democracy and freedom across the world. Including one I think is contributing: “The U.S. has deemphasized manufacturing and let its defense-industrial base go to rot, leaving it incapable of matching even Russia’s rate of weapons production, let alone China’s.”
RIP Simplenote — data freedom and the painless plaintext migration to Notes
https://tech.kateva.org/2025/03/rip-simplenote-data-freedom-and.html
The export / import was simple, except for an annoying style bug in the import tool. Simplenote was a great product for me for 15 years, but it’s time had come.
“… MCP standardizes API access for AI agents”
https://thenewstack.io/mcp-the-missing-link-between-ai-agents-and-apis/
A standard API for the proprietary APIs.
Boys need different schooling — young males left behind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/upshot/teenagers-school-girls-boys.html
This has been true for years and it is part of why we got Trump in the first place. We may need “boy schools”.
Kill Tesla: “… BYD Seagull … about 190 miles of range and a sticker price of around $10,000”
https://www.theverge.com/tesla/627894/tesla-stock-sales-protest-musk-trump-doge
If Trump kills Canada’s auto industry Canada should open the door to Chinese EVs.
Choose Boring Technology – 2015 classic essay on software choices
https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
I only discovered today.
“Using LLMs to write code is difficult and unintuitive”
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/#atom-everything
An impressive tutorial on using 2025 tech. LLM capabilities vary by language and library so will change what is used.
“Don’t fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing LLMs and assuming that failures which would discredit a human should discredit the machine in the same way.”
Claim: Neanderthals and Sapiens shared technologies, goods, genes in Levant 40+kya.
Happier than Sapiens eating Neanderthal
“… vulnerability was exploited in what Apple describes as an “extremely sophisticated” attack against specific targeted individuals”
https://tidbits.com/2025/03/11/apple-updates-keep-malicious-web-content-in-the-sandbox/
Adam says it would have been fixed quietly but Chrome required public disclosure.
Musk mind: “John Lilly, a neurophysiologist and psychedelic researcher … famously abused ketamine until he believed that he was contacted by an extraterrestrial entity who removed his penis”
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/03/ketamine-effects-elon-musk/681911/
Ketamine’s off-label use is deeply crazy and very Musk.
“With Steal My Tesla, you can anonymously register your car to be acquired, transported, and sold within 5-7 business days.”
Recycle to save American constitutional democracy.
“years of experience in the automotive industry, with a special focus on luxury vehicles, premium wheels and rims, catalytic converters, and driver assistance systems”
X went down because they didn’t configured their Cloudflare protection properly.
https://www.wired.com/story/x-ddos-attack-march-2025/
“botnet of cameras and DVRs”
When the MAGA say “woke” they mean “secular humanist”
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/03/when-maga-say-woke-they-mean-secular.html
For the MAGA “woke” is the enemy of “morality, community, rootedness, faith, and civilizational pride”. Which, if you understand “woke” as “secular humanist”, is true. When they say “woke” they mean “secular humanist”.
“Where AI Coding Assistants Fail”
https://thenewstack.io/ai-coding-assistants-are-reshaping-engineering-not-replacing-engineers/
Midway through the article.
“Systems Design: This is the core job of a mid-to-senior-level developer, and AI is terrible at it.”
Trump Says Recession Unfortunate But Necessary Step To Get To Depression.
https://theonion.com/trump-says-recession-unfortunate-but-necessary-step-to-get-to-depression/
We might get 2022 prices again.
Tsai documents the end of mythic Apple.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/02/27/our-changing-relationship-with-apple/
Jobs could run Apple more or less as he wished, but Apple since Jobs operates like a normal publicly traded corporation. A PTC with monopolistic power over its locked-in customers.
(Tsai says peak Apple was 2010. Seems right)
Project 2025: 20 or so key points in bullet form
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/03/project-2025-perplexity-summary.html
“The weirdest parts are the trans and porn obsessions. The funniest part is the TikTok ban. The fossil fuel thing wins “most insane”. The cruelest part of 2025 may be removing support persons with cognitive disabilities.”
Produced by reading a Perplexity Deep Research summary and extracting key points from that. Usual LLM caveats apply.I’ll correct if I see anything better. I’m not going to read the originals.
The Bitter Lesson: Classic essay about why the black box won.
http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
Computation got better faster than humans could figure out rules.
American Liberal Democracy never developed in the south.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/liberal-democracy-american-south-vance-bourbons
Similar to eastern Germany?
SCOTUS corruption drove US fall in international governance quality back in 2024. Now is much worse.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/06/trump-corruption-united-states/
It took the Great Depression to drive reform in prior episodes of massive corruption. The corruption needs to be covered relentlessly.
“ Elon isn’t just the President. In the realm of administering the fundamental structures of the state he’s something quite a bit more than the President.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/new-wapo-piece-on-post-constitutional-america
Only Putin is over Musk.
Derek Lowe summarizes the Musk/Trump hatred of knowledge and science: “… So forget science, forget knowledge. No, what matters is money and power”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/continuing-crisis-part-vii-overview
Excellent summary, well written.
There is nothing in the GOP now save love of power and scorn for those who love discovery, knowledge, grounded truth.
Beyond that is hatred for compassion. Hatred of the weak that cling to life. Endless ignorance and hatred. That is what we oppose.
Mobile radio chips are a nightmare: “every variation of every generation in every country”
https://9to5mac.com/2025/03/06/heres-why-the-c1-chip-doesnt-have-mmwave-5g-says-kuo/
Cables had to more or less conform to a standard. Wireless connections are free to be anything.
K on Trump’s crypto scam
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-planning-the-biggest-heist
American voters are going to give Andreesen dollars for his bitcoins. Because we are so stupid there are no words.
Strong analysis of SCOTUS Foreign Aid Ruling
https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/129-untangling-the-foreign-aid-ruling
‘Alito’s dissent … it combines a remarkable amount of hypocrisy with statements that are either materially incorrect or, at the very least, misleading.”
It’s amazing how little competence is needed to join SCOTUS.
Dark humor laugh of the day – the true SOTU
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-state-of-the-union-is-less-than
“Forty-two days, nine hours, three minutes, and two million years into my second term, we can all agree I’ve done lots of stuff”
Tsai on Apple quality: “I recently set up a brand new iPad for my father, and we ran into a dozen or so bugs just between plugging it in and getting the built-in apps working”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/04/linus-sebastian-switches-to-iphone-for-30-days/
This is my experience. Bugs everywhere. It isn’t going to get better unless Apple gets new leadership.
RFK: “treating measles cases with a steroid, budesonide; an antibiotic called clarithromycin; and cod liver oil”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/health/texas-measles-outbreak-kennedy.html
He is insane. America is insane.
“Musk’s relationship with the Millers has become a subject of great intrigue in Washington”
https://www.bannedinyourstate.com/p/what-the-hell-is-going-on-part-2-ba8
I couldn’t figure out what the rumors are. Jedeed is being cautious, as one must when Musk is mentioned.
Tesla Takedown events
https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaigns/teslatakedown
Join a takedown near you.
Sovereign crypto funds add new dimensions of corruption to American autocrats
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/a-sovereign-crypto-fund-is-a-new
“a relatively small number of people are going to get enormous taxpayer-funded payouts”
Anonymity enables many dimensions of criminal activities, including payoffs to supporters and to leaders. (In addition to transferring tax money to crypto holders.)
Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog: “the people doing the dismantling frequently tell you exactly what they’re going to do … They just wrap it in language that makes it sound like the opposite”
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/why-techdirt-is-now-a-democracy-blog-whether-we-like-it-or-not/
Young mainstream journalists do not understand the technarchy
Zack (SMBC) Weinersmith: on art, Instagram, and why ads are scraping bottom.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/announcement-2
This is important stuff. The ad-supported net is dying quickly.
Homo erectus ruled earth: axes from elephant bones.
Sapiens have a much bigger peak population but erectus ruled for much longer.
Heroes, USAID chapter “Enrich sent another memo to staff, thanking them for their work and telling them he had been placed on “administrative leave, effective immediately.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-3-2025
The villains and their scum get all the attention, but many heroes are making sacrifices to defend America-the-not-evil.
“iPhone 16e also omits … the chip Apple uses for precise location detection — like tracking an AirPod to within a foot”
https://daringfireball.net/2025/02/the_iphone_16e
No MagSafe and no precision detection. It is an annoying product to buy.
Code is not the problem: “most websites, as experienced on phones, are designed and engineered to suck”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/03/keith-web-on-mobile
The design and requirements are the problem. Which usually means a business model problem.
Musk’s AI beliefs: “… A.I. would be smarter than any individual human in the next year or two, and predicted that A.I. would be smarter than all humans combined by 2029 or 2030”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/elon-musk-joe-rogan-podcast.html
Somewhere in his wrecked and tortured brain this belief is important.
It is possible that he thinks AI will be ready to replace the federal bureaucracy.
Canada: “Trump hates them for their decency”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-hates-canada-for-its-decency
Xi is similar. Honor, integrity, courage, compassion — Musk and Trump loathe them. They sense, perhaps, that they are vulnerable. That one day Americans will look in the mirror and rediscover courage. And on that day they will fall.
“a more idealistic political culture offered statesmen with their eyes on the history books an important inducement to better behaviour”
Humans are drawn to narrative. We make stories. We live stories.
We have lost our stories of honor, courage, integrity and compassion. We need to find them again.
“When Bezos spoke in December at the Times’ DealBook conference, it was as if he were a different person. He looked different, more buff. He sounded different, more meek”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/bezos-appease-trump-administration/681899/
Before he became a coward Bezos was a decent publisher. Then he broke.
Dem crisis: their entire political operation depends on Apax Partners, a private equity corporation that runs their voter information database.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/us/politics/democrats-voter-data.html
Might contribute to Dem text spam problem. GOP insourced their operation.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse – GOP SCOTUS is even more corrupt than you thought it was
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/recapturing-the-supreme-court-for
They were chosen for their weakness.
“Putin went through a hell of a lot with me” – Trump stands down US cybersecurity.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-2-2025
With Trump obeying Putin why do we need security from our masters in Moscow?
“general collapse of America’s public morality”
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-is-ruled-by-gangsters-now
Sometimes Noah does say important things most journalist miss.
The corruption and dishonesty feels unprecedented. Nothing like it in my lifetime. It is revolting and despicable and Americans seem not to care.
HCR documents the Day of Infamy. The day we learned we serve Putin.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-28-2025
Bluesky is the home of the resistance for now.
“modern tower blocks within sight of the Thai side of the frontier — continued to weld and hammer into the night, brazenly building new warehouses dedicated to crime.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/world/asia/scam-centers-myanmar-thailand-china.html
China-Myanmar cybercrime industry expands.
“citizens of at least 40 nations have been forced by Chinese criminals to engage in crypto-fraud, online dating deception, TikTok shopping swindles, WhatsApp real estate dodges, Instagram deep fakes and Facebook trickery.”
Documenting extreme corruption and lawlessness of the Trump-Musk administration.
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-democracy-index-9d9
Each would have been a red alert event before the war on democracy. Now they are routine.