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.
Category Archives: share
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.
How Musk perverted USDS: “U.S.D.S. veteran named Amy Gleason rejoined its staff as a senior adviser at the end of the Biden administration”
Emergent Misalignment” in LLMs: a taste of the forbidden sets LLM on the road to damnation
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/emergent-misalignment-in-llms.html
“The emergent properties of LLMs are so, so weird”
The emergents are why predicting near-term AI outcomes is so hard. Outcomes range from barely nudging GDP to destroying the world economy.
Noah Smith’s Econ book list: good and the questionable
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/popular-econ-books-what-to-read-what
Freakonomics now understood as bad.
“The real purpose of work requirements is to create more hoops for people to jump through, to make it harder to collect the benefits they’re legally owed.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/cruel-and-usual-republicans-prepare
This has always been true for many programs — but I have rarely seen a journalist point it out.
“Almost 9 in 10 Americans believe that people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body.”
As America falls will Europe rise?
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/europe-is-the-force-awakening
Maybe … we can only hope.
Schneier’s explainer on the backdoor problem given UK law.
A good reference to share
LLM tech kills homework help company: “Chegg’s stock is trading at just $1 per share today, down from a peak of $113 in 2021”
https://gizmodo.com/chegg-sues-google-says-ai-search-results-are-killing-its-business-2000568061
They are suing Google because that is where the money is. First industry to die.
In classic Trump-Musk con the fraudulent DOGE “savings” are removed and the total savings claim is increased.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/upshot/doge-spending-cuts-changed.html
The MAGA are soooooooo dumb.
After 50y – how HCTZ lowers BP: “membrane-associate protein in the endocannabinoid system whose dimeric structure is stabilized by the binding of hydrochlorothiazide”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/thiazide-target-last
Endocannabinoids again! The diuresis is a side-effect, not the cause of lower BP.
Creating the dog in 15ky: “docile wolves had an evolutionary advantage, allowing them to approach human settlements and eat food waste”
https://gizmodo.com/new-study-backs-theory-that-wolves-traded-the-wild-for-table-scraps-2000567958
Changes so radical some wondered about human guided breeding, but a simulation suggests could happen naturally.
Which makes everyone wonder how quickly humans changed in the past 50ky.
Trump’s Trade War Resumes: all the tariffs you can imagine.
https://www.apricitas.io/p/trumps-2nd-trade-war-begins
China is waiting and watching. It has not yet begun to fight.
“as you get close to a singularity, the strong gravity causes every point in space to decouple from every other one”
New tools and techniques allow physicists to edge closer to the breakdowns.
NK steals another 1.4 billion crypto: “Lazarus managed to use social engineering tactics to trick exchange employees into signing off on a transaction they believed was a routine transfer”
A novel model for economic development.
Wealthy money guy: “The one thing I’ve learned after 40 years of running money is that my idea of where the markets are going is pretty much worthless.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-ai-spending-reminds-jim-chanos
One of my best life decisions back in my early 20s was to invest only with low cost Vanguard index funds and ignore the market news.
Rural despair behind German fascism: “people who moved away from those regions tended to skew younger and female, and were more likely to have advanced degrees”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/world/how-a-demographic-doom-loop-helped-germanys-far-right.html
I believe this is a large driver of American fascism.
A poem: what war is
https://snyder.substack.com/p/what-war-is
“Ostap Slyvynsky, in an original translation from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser”
“When GPT-4 came out it was around $50 per million tokens … now [Gemini 1.5 Flash] costs around 12 cents per million tokens …”
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/a-new-generation-of-ais-claude-37
I cannot think of any historical precedent for this quick a fall in costs.
“amount of RNA G-quadruplexes (rG4s) in hippocampal tissue increases as a function of age, and what’s more, it increases as a function of the severity of diagnosed Alzheimer’s at the time of death”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/neurodegeneration-might-come-down-rna
I have long thought Alzheimer’s is basically accelerated brain aging. If we live long enough we all get disabled.
“rG4 staining is also strongly influenced by the APOE4 status of the individuals”
DOGE hasn’t found any fraud.
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/despite-the-hype-doge-hasnt-found
There is lots of fraud of course, but it is widely known (esp Medicare fraud by providers).
Musk-Trump do not actually care about “waste, fraud, and abuse”. It was always a scam.
Trump-Musk impacts on GOP base (and others): Feb 2025 summary.
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/coast-to-coast-the-effects-of-the
These are impacts that impact people with power – red state voters.
Making a PDF sesarchable – Adobe’s online tools are quire good
https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/online.html
I avoid Adobe whenever possible — but these free online tools for dealing with PDF issues are quite good. I use them when I get a scanned PDF I want to be able to search and index. (Convert to Word makes a scanned PDF MUCH smaller.)
End of outdoor ice rinks in Minneapolis makes it to WaPo.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/24/climate-change-ice-rinks-minnesota/
This has been happening for years across the MSP region and across Canada. Our cross-country ski trails are likewise doomed (making snow for XC skiing is … wrong. I understand. I grieve. But it’s dead. Let it go.)
Without outdoor ice Hockey will also slowly fade.
Even though it’s old news, I’m glad to see mention of it.
Hope: “George Dale hated the Ku Klux Klan”
https://dansinker.com/posts/2025-02-23-dale/
George Dale would have crushed scum like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And spat on cowards like Bezos.
Cold, Dark, Comfort: “One night, after one of those painful and humiliating dressing changes I walked out of my bedroom to find a pretty brunette sitting on my parents couch”
https://in-the-pines.ghost.io/cold-dark-comfort/
You gotta cry sometimes.
“After reporters determined that the $50 million for condoms story was untrue, Mr. Trump not only repeated it, he increased the supposed total to $100 million”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/23/us/politics/trump-alternative-reality.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Musk and Trump are very similar people.
Apple’s Advanced Data Protection off in UK: few people use it in US
Noah attempts a rationale for Trump’s strategy: Surrender to China.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-is-being-sold-out-by-its
The United States prostrate.
Paxlovid unhelpful for acute disease in typical vaccinated 65+.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/paxlovid-you-d-have-expected-more
Can’t rule out some long covid benefit but I’m not gonna bother with it. I like vaccines.
(Primary care docs likely feeling validated. We were never impressed.)
Elon Musk Rants Incoherently: “body-mic picked up the flopping and rubbing of the gold chain as Musk nervously twitched and gesticulated”
A broken bitter fear-filled wreck of a human being.
“The Heartbreak That Was Aperture”. A memorial.
https://derrickstory.medium.com/the-heartbreak-that-was-aperture-13d984857088
7y. Feels longer. I will never forgive Apple for killing Aperture AND leaving every Aperture customer stranded with no good exit.
“recession starting in 2025Q4, with a peak at 2025Q3, although a starting data of 2025Q2 is plausible”
Rubio tells EU: “ignore the boss, we really aren’t doing what he says we are doing”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/20/us/politics/rubio-russia-europe.html
Nobody believes him.
Also, this was atypically good NYT reporting:
“[Trump] ….mocked Ukrainians’ complaints that their country, having sacrificed tens of thousands of lives to preserve its independence, had been left out of negotiations about its future”
“appear to improve the daily productivity of developers in actual business settings between 10 percent and 30 percent”
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.