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.
“enormous loot from Rome’s conquests created a class of incredibly wealthy oligarchs who were too wealthy and powerful to be constrained by republican norms”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-gilded-ballroom-and-the-fall
Krugman is learning
Tinder face verification: “Cat-fishing … now a massive problem on dating apps, with bots using generative AI …”
My spam SMS (presumed) cat-fishing calls have doubled.
VIP party (2020): “carefully hidden, intricate economy, based on a complex brokering of beauty and status, to create an atmosphere in which people will spend $100,000 on alcohol in a single night.”
https://www.economist.com/news/2020/06/26/the-secret-economics-of-a-vip-party
“.. I was a model before I became a sociologist…”
I love this kind of anthropology-culture journalism.
The models are not exactly sex workers (“I wanna have fun. I don’t care about other people, like who is the client or whatever.” ) and are often poor. Many of the men are only millionaires.
Did Trump destroy White House because he was mad about 10/18?
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-22-2025
“no approved plans to rebuild, no permits, no signs of weatherproofing for a construction project begun just before winter, no indication that the history or the paintings or the artifacts in the East Wing were preserved”
RichText.mdimporter bug: “macOS 13 to 26, plain text files starting with the characters LG cannot be searched for their contents.”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/10/23/a-spotlight-bug-affecting-all-recent-macos-the-lg-error/
Love to know how that happens.
Three-fold increase guns detected MN schools since 2021
200 a year recently. The socioeconomic crisis in America is worse than most imagine. Our metrics were bad.
iOS 26 can create calendar event from screenshot (Insta!)
https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/21/ios-26-gives-apples-calendar-app-a-convenient-new-advantage/
Be nice if it makes instagram announcements something to create events from.
“Office of National Intelligence was running a secretive group dedicated to identifying and rooting out perceived enemies of President Donald Trump”
https://www.spytalk.co/p/alarm-raised-over-an-american-kgb?r=dena
Nixon was a loser.
Funding journalism through public micropayment tokens
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/10/funding-journalism-through-public.html
“Every citizen every year gets $100 in digital tokens. Tokens can be used to purchase articles or subscriptions of sources that are licensed as official media by an independent commission modeled along the lines of the Federal reserve. Each year unused tokens roll over to the next, so if 50% are used the next year the budge is $150.”
Digital media: “a period of immense creativity and increasingly grandiose expectations followed by another decade or more of continuous carnage”
Part of an extended series of essays, this one on Josh Marshall’s history in digital media
Trump shits: “It seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/opinion/trump-degredation-maga.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
Yeah. Hannah again.
“administration plans to mark American’s 250th anniversary with a UFC cage fight on the White House’s south lawn”
Workaround for Yahoo delete all email not working
https://tech.kateva.org/2025/10/workaround-for-yahoo-delete-all-email.html
Search on ‘.’ then do the delete all thing. Nukes everything – sent, inbox, archives, folders, etc.
“Record warm water in the North Pacific, a developing La Niña in the tropical Pacific and extensive Siberian snow cover in October all tend to favor colder, snowier winters in Minnesota”
Be nice to have snow for a change!
Ten years of “media” (NYT) thinking about Trump.
https://www.stopthepresses.news/p/my-exclusive-trump-era-tour-inside
Persuasive condemnation.
2016: “co-occurring autistic and psychotic traits can exert opposing influences on performance, producing a normalizing effect possibly by way of their diametrical effects on socio-cognitive abilities.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25972469/?dopt=Abstract
Old article, interesting hypothesis. Are schizophrenia and autism truly separate? Arethey different manifestations of the same process? Or are both classifications a mix of things and we will one day discard both?
Severe macular degeneration: “vision in 27 out of 32 participants improved so much that they could read with their artificial retinas”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/health/retinal-implant-macular-degeneration.html
It is slow one letter at a time reading. They will get much better.
Conscience calls: “For over twelve years, I worked inside the Republican ecosystem…”
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/my-last-day-as-an-accomplice-of-the-republican-party-miles-bruner
“…. over the last few months, the compartmentalization and coping stopped working to silence my conscience”
The more do this the more we have a country worth fighting for. It is also a very honest description of why he stayed so long.
5 ways to restart an iPhone without using the power button
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-restart-your-iphone-without-using-the-power-button-5-ways/
Siri and assistive touch most interesting.
“MarkItDown is a Python library developed by Microsoft that converts various file formats into Markdown”
https://leapcell.substack.com/p/microsoft-markitdown-everything-you
2024 so Ancient history. Widely used in ai pipelines. Never heard of it until now. No support for macOS Pages, etc.
Nursing after an NFL career: “He’d like to be as incognito as a 6-foot-6 person can be.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/well/nfl-players-nurses.html
Small numbers but fun stories.
“If we can make intelligence accessible everywhere, affordable to everyone, and easy to understand, we can drive the biggest opportunity engine the world has ever seen”
https://fidjisimo.substack.com/p/ai-as-the-greatest-source-of-empowerment
Extreme optimism from new OpenAI Applications CEO. He’s very CEO like so many of his fact claims are dubious.
My hunch is the greatest life impact would be on elite productivity — and the cognitively disabled. But I’m not an ai optimist.
What ai’s do when they persist without an assigned activity
https://timkellogg.me/blog/2025/09/27/boredom
No Dee meanings here, but a fun digression. Tim thinks agentic training in GPT-5 accounts for its novel behavior is the “boredom” test.
ai memory: “Claude Agent SDK ships with TypeScript and Python support, same as Letta”
Comparing approaches to memory – and the lifespan of the agent.
“If you need an agent that remembers your last 50 conversations, coordinates with other agents, and improves itself over time—that’s what Letta is built for.”
Anthropic would worry about the self-improvement. Their local file approach is Apple-friendly.
“Trump’s assumption of power over the government’s purse is a profound attack on the principles on which the Founders justified independence from King George III in 1776”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-16-2025
George III would be a big improvement on King Trump I.
“manufacturing a t-shirt uses the same amount of water as 1,300,000 prompts”
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/18/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake/#atom-everything
Red herring in the water.
Gary Larson is back in the game – for the fun of it.
https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/
A lucky sign for 10/18
Charlie Stross tries to predict the near future – assuming an ai fizzle.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-pivot-1.html
I think prediction is impossible now, but I also think ai is the real deal whether the bubble bursts or not. Charlie disagrees, so he’s made a stab at what comes in 2025 and maybe a bit beyond. It’s worth a read — especially if he’s right about ai.
Good dog saves child: “You can’t help but be extremely excited,” Corson said. “It’s a 2-year-old. It’s a big deal.”
Link to archive site. An antidote for our times.
Injustice of farm bailouts.
“Live poor and die rich” (with unjust subsidies) BUT “we soon will see the highest rates of farm bankruptcy filings in this century”