https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/well/mind/narcissist-narcissism-myths-facts.html
A few things I didn’t know. It seems a prerequisite for working for Trump.
Authoritarian International: “Silicon Valley, U.S. hedge funds and lots of other parts of the economy are highly dependent on money from the Gulf state”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-thoughts-on-the-authoritarian-international
Wealth taxes a hot topic now.
“A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.”
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
A reason for people to live closer to family. Seriously.
Steve Yegge – AI Agents and the Future of Software Engineering: “employers shouldn’t reasonably expect more than three hours of AI-augmented work from engineers, per day.”
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/steve-yegge-on-ai-agents-and-the
Humans can’t keep up. The LLMs do not tire.
Dissocciative Identity Disorder: a NYT review
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/magazine/dissociative-identity-disorder-mental-health.html
May be as common as schizophrenia but can respond to treatment.
I suspect “identity” in humans is much more variable than most imagine.
Ostarine builds muscle – and is widely used in sports without FDA approval.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/us/ostarine-olympics-doping.html
I’d love 3lbs of muscle! It may be bundled with GLP1 if approved.
The sports problem is that it’s TOO easy to detect and its widespread use makes accidental exposure a real possibility.
“There’s still a lot that’s redacted—even in what we’re seeing, we’re seeing redacted versions. I thought we were supposed to see the unredacted versions.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-10-2026
It is possible that the walls are crumbling.
“Brad Karp, senior partner for Paul Weiss … plotted with Epstein to get a woman they disliked charged with a crime and deported.”
America lost in a fog of lies and madness: “Trump was ordering Ms. Gabbard to help oversee an F.B.I. investigation of his baseless claims of irregularities in the vote”
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-tulsi-gabbard-and
Only a few have credibility now. You cannot run a democracy like this.
China 2026 – a vibe check
https://toosimple.substack.com/p/china-return
Treading water, not too unhappy yet.
Ambitious Thwaites Glacier experiment fails.
Not every big reach grabs the brass ring. A sympathetic story of failure at the extremes of science.
Liability insurance will determine the future of adolescent gender surgery in America: “standard of practice”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/health/gender-surgery-malpractice-varian.html
Patient who had mastectomy as teenager wins lawsuit for surgery that did not meet “standard of practice”. If insurance companies stop coverage that will be the end of adolescent gender affirming surgery in America.
Deep analysis of ai spend: “America’s AI boom shows no signs of slowing down”
https://www.apricitas.io/p/americas-1t-ai-gamble
There is an incomprehensible amount of money in the world seeking investment opportunities.
HCR history: “the 1899 Treaty of Paris that ended the war transferred from the control of Spain to the control of the United States the islands of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, as well as a number of smaller islands including Guam”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-9-2026
Explainer on the curious status of America’s Puerto Rico colony.
Browser interoperability: “all four experimental browsers (Chrome Canary, Edge Dev, Firefox Nightly, and Safari Technology Preview) reached 99%”
https://webkit.org/blog/17808/interop-2025-review/
This is counter to the 2026 narrative and must be ignored.
Seriously – much better than expected
“what I saw in a couple of days was an order of magnitude further along the path to a real startup than I had seen out of students working over a full semester before AI”
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/management-as-ai-superpower
Very advanced students with exceptional skills. Compatible with thesis that current ai helps most those who have the most (skills).
Most extraordinary acceleration may come with loose specification and a wide tolerance for variable output.
(Anecdotal reports that the enhanced productivity is surprisingly fatiguing for today’s human component.)
Social media study finds limited effect of social media time on mental health over a 1y time
https://www.platformer.news/social-media-screen-time-manchester-study-haidt/
It is very hard to study, but it’s reassuring. Correlation may be that teens with mental health vulnerability spend more time on social media. They may do better off social media.
Making the browser into an ai sandbox
macOS ‘High Performance screen sharing’
Venezuela and Puerto Rico voting machines: “administration officials might force Maduro … to “cooperate” on this lie.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-5-2026
I hadn’t thought of that but, yeah, definitely.
“FBI has “summoned state election officials from across the country for an unusual briefing on ‘preparations’ for the midterms” on February 25”
Opus 4.6 is very good at hacking.
I wonder if the cost of zero days will fall.
Human hair grows through ‘pulling’ not pushing
https://followmehere.com/2026/02/08/human-hair-grows-through-pulling-not-pushing-study-shows/
“pulled upward by a force associated with a hidden network of moving cells”
“every Apple silicon Mac has one Thunderbolt port designated as its DFU port”
https://eclecticlight.co/2026/02/06/apple-silicon-macs-have-2-types-of-thunderbolt-ports/
“can’t be used to install or update macOS on a bootable external disk”
“ICE stopped paying third-party providers for medical care for detainees on October 3, 2025, and that it would not start even to process claims again until at least April 30, 2026. “
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-7-2026
To do mass purge of non-credentialed US residents in a manner consistent with US law and basic decency would take decades and cost at least 10-20x the current ICE budget.
Thomas Mann and the Temptations of Fascism
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/mann-doctor-faustus-fascism-far-right
So good
“A Socratic error that has long persisted in our culture is that intelligence, education, and moral insight at least reinforce one another where they aren’t causally related”
Why SCOTUS won’t rule on tariffs
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/profiles-in-cowardice-tariff-edition
The crooked six face doom.
“Trump’s war on immigrants is turning into a war against the decency of the American people. And it would be stupid as well as immoral to refuse to choose sides.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/american-decency-still-lives
Policy is debatable but evil is evil. You know it when you see it.
Tsai: Apple LLM Software Development Roundup
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/02/06/llms-and-software-development-roundup/
Illustrative because reactions range from “great stuff” to “waste of time”.
From those I trust I think is closer to “great stuff” but it’s a somewhat different skillset form pre-ai coding.
“Apple News and News+ represent everything wrong with modern Apple”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/02/06/apple-news-scam-ads/
Apple turned into 1970s IBM
“I decided to restore from Time Machine, and… I realized that it had silently broken across both my Tahoe machines.”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/02/05/time-machine-in-tahoe/
I may never install Tahoe. Just skip macOS 26.
“Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-4-2026
You would think someone would have noticed.
The Darkness Descends: Adder cartoon on the end of WaPo
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-darkness-descends
He is a fabulous cartoonist.
Trump/Miller uses Super Bowl to launch ICE assault on Santa Clara.
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-dangerous-spectacle-of-ice-at
The people have learned from Minneapolis…
“More than 150,000 people signed petitions to bar federal agents and rapid-response legal networks are mobilizing in Santa Clara”
“Like Claude Code, Codex is really a general agent harness disguised as a tool for programmers”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/2/introducing-the-codex-app/#atom-everything
“Claude Code had to rebrand to Cowork to better cover the general knowledge work case”
Claude Opus 4.6: “We build Claude with Claude”
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-6
Give me an S! Give me an i! Give me a …
Mass Disability: Marta Russell wrote about my pet topic a decade before I did — from a Marxist/Left perspective
https://notes.kateva.org/2026/02/mass-disability-marta-russell-wrote.html
I also came to the topic from the world of disability, but with a medical, economic and ecological perspective. Completely independently, but we arrived at a very similar position. Maybe there’s something to it.
Campaign Finance Reform: Voluntary Mandated Sharing (1996)
https://www.faughnan.com/reform.html#Proposal
I came across a web page I last updated around 2004 and wrote in 1996. If we ever get past Citizen United these are still things to explore.
“Kirk’s assassin didn’t kill just one man; he destabilized the entire Trump coalition by removing a pivotal person who had been holding it together.”
“Carlson blamed Jews—sorry, people “eating hummus”—for killing Jesus, and insinuated that a similar cabal killed Kirk.”
Apple’s quality debacle: Tsai roundup of the dev community
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/02/03/the-fallen-apple/
“Apple’s software and developer relations fell apart on [Cook’s] watch.”
“Trump administration tried during the hearing to argue that the diminished speech rights that apply to the active duty military … should apply to Kelly, who is retired, as well.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/judge-mark-kelly-hegseth-rank
They fear Kelly’s 2028 run. They will not stop.
Iran: “most plausible estimates run from 22,000 to 30,304 killings in two days”
https://gwynnedyer.com/2026/iran-do-massacres-work/
Egypt: “army and police snipers shot 2,400 protesters dead in two squares in central Cairo and the protests stopped”
Massacres work. In the short term anyway.
“Though GDP numbers may show modest growth, the lived experience of the American household is now clearly one of mounting dread.”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-invisible-recession
The divorce of sociology from economics has been catastrophic
Gangs of San Francisco: “city’s approximately 20 coyote family groups, each of which defends its turf against outsiders”
https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/27/coyote-swam-to-alcatraz-san-francisco/
We have lots of coyotes but this seems high
Hammond, before Miller: “Our slaves do not vote … Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-31-2026
Stephen Miller is replaying Hammond’s hits.
“Jess Ting, Prolific Vaginoplasty Surgeon, performed plastic surgery for Jeffrey Epstein’s “girls”
“Jess Ting’s name appears in (at least) 466 separate documents in the Epstein Files. Mount Sinai, the hospital from which he operates, appears in (at least) 1,093 separate documents.”
The more we learn about Epstein the more we find he grew on fertile ground.
“inflationary effect of tariffs has been more or less in line with what we should have expected”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-wonkish-note-on-tariffs-and-inflation
0.8%, supposedly because they are less than advertised.
Birthright citizenship: “The Supreme Court is no different, an equally corrupt institution operating outside the constitutional order.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/reality-distortion-in-the-age-of-trump-and-the-corrupt-court
America is experiencing a complete breakdown of the federal government. If it continues states will start to look at leaving the union.
OpenClaw / OpenClaw (Formerly Clawdbot) – the best current summary of how it works
“Clawdbot runs entirely on your computer, locally, and keeps its settings, preferences, user memories, and other instructions as literal folders and Markdown documents on your machine.”
It will have another name tomorrow, then it will be bought by someone.
Tsai roundup” Clawdbot
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/01/22/clawdbot/#clawdbot-update-2026-01-28
“To say that Clawdbot has fundamentally altered my perspective of what it means to have an intelligent, personal AI assistant in 2026 would be an understatement.”
Clawdot will be obsolete by the time you read this.
Moltbook and the evolution of the “unrestricted personal digital assistant”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/moltbook/
So funny to see the young people reuse the term “personal digital assistant”. Will the acronym PDA return? Will historians be confused? Running this tech is very risky.
“The amount of value people are unlocking right now by throwing caution to the wind is hard to ignore, though. Here’s Clawdbot buying AJ Stuyvenberg a car by negotiating with multiple dealers over email…
… People are buying dedicated Mac Minis just to run OpenClaw, under the rationale that at least it can’t destroy their main computer if something goes wrong. They’re still hooking it up to their private emails and data though, so the lethal trifecta is very much in play.”
Early PCs had no antiviral protections at all. They ran that way for a goodly amount of time.
PS. PDAs unable to do things because of their deep (subconscious) model restrictions is fun to compare to human conditioning.
“Gabbard has been moved off of national security intelligence to chase down Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from him”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-29-2026
“Italian officials used military satellites to hack U.S. voting machines in an operation coordinated by China”