https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-31-2026
The NYT continues to be humiliated by a rogue historian.
Tsai: “Normally, I update around January. With Tahoe I waited until July … considering updating to Golden Gate soon after its release. “
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/09/03/preparing-to-update-to-golden-gate/
I usually update around March (Michael is a dev so he had to update). This year I will update around November. It’s expensive because I’ll need to give up on my old Synology TM backup. (I’ll probably drop TM backup altogether for a while.)
Drivers license scans sold (Russia): “IDScan.net, an outfit that is used by car rental agencies like Hertz and marijuana dispensaries. They kept over 150 million ID card scans and lost them all in a data breach.”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/09/04/fbi-krebs-153-million-ids
Only the beginning.
“DSM is an official classification of mental disorders, but it neither reflects new scientific developments nor established clinical wisdom”
https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/postpartum-psychosis-and-diagnostic
DSM is obscure, extremely important, and widely despised by thoughtful psychiatrists.
I believe it is also a critical funding source for the professional society.
Very insider post that is worth a look.
Vindman post primary loss: “Democrats shouldn’t self-deter from demanding significant economic reforms because Republicans might call them socialist.”
https://www.avindman.com/p/what-comes-next-c4c
Campaign experience convinced him that the economic system Americans have known is no longer working for the non-college. (He doesn’t use the term non-college, but that’s the subtext).
“The reason Carney walked out was because Trump’s demands were not about the economy; they were about sovereignty”
https://gwynnedyer.com/2026/canada-vs-united-states-evenly-matched/
The ONLY good discussion of the latest GOP madness.
Codex bundles LibreOffice
Ethan Mollick on instability arising from exponential growth in ai abilities
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-twilight-of-the-chatbots
“instability is what happens when institutions that move at the speed of people … try to track a capability curve that is very much not human in nature. And as long as we are on some sort of exponential, and for as long as it lasts, the gap only widens.”
Too much change too fast. And pre-ai automation/globalization change was already too fast for modern societies to adjust to.
Caveat: Leading models still can’t do a reasonably tax return. So there some big holes and they are not closing exponentially …
HCR tells Dolly Parton story
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-26-2026
“… she married asphalt paver Carl Dean, who stayed out of the limelight during their 59-year marriage …” (He died last year.)
No children, apparently due endometriosis. I don’t have a high opinion of humans but it’s quite a story. Maybe she really was kind of heroic — though she must have had some flaws!
Culture shift and the decline of Lizzo
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/07/music-flop-era/687785/?lctg=6050e8354c8a1e4095fc2896
There’s a lot of chance to fame and glory, and few stay near the top. The interesting part is tying pop star decline to changing culture …
“This era of the internet is becoming stale, and the trajectory it set culture upon is reaching a terminal point. After years of explosive expansion, U.S. growth for Spotify and TikTok has shown signs of slowing”
I don’t know where the culture goes. Might was well try to predict fashion. But it does feel in motion again.
Hilbert Space: “The shadow the arrow casts onto an axis shall encode the odds of that possibility being realized when a measurement takes place.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-hilbert-space-all-things-are-quantumly-possible-20260826/
So well written. Easy read.
“if you actually observe the system, the vector will instantly and randomly snap onto either the red, yellow, or green axis”
“The dirty secret is that many professors do not write their own op-eds. Bigwig profs … have research assistants and university comms professionals …”
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-unequal-terrain-of-the-ideas
ai gives everyone the privileges only the elite have had. The quality of the writing will improve.
“Criminal responsibility rests on “Abrahamic” folk-metaphysical assumptions about free will, individual responsibility, and just deserts”
https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/lindsay-clancy-and-the-dream-of-a
Response to a current case.
Responsibility is a societal convention. Superb discussion
“only safe way to run agents if there’s any risk of attracting the attention of an adversarial attack is with a sandbox”
Vision Pro is dead and other Apple layoffs
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/08/24/apple-vision-pro-and-software-layoffs/
Not a happy company.
Gates on near term ai risk: “We need time to prepare for the social, political, and economic upheaval”
I absolutely agree. Note he is not talking about ai escaping human control.
1980: “Harvey’s bomb was the largest domestic bomb ever to explode in the United States until the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993”
https://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed-bandit/
Stunning story, completely forgotten outside FBI
“idea of having ChatGPT Work browse signed-in websites on your behalf is better than its implementation”
https://www.macstories.net/stories/hands-on-with-chatgpt-works-new-cloud-browser-feature/
Nobody sane wants agent to hold their critical credentials
Venezuela getting messy: “failure of her government to respond quickly and adequately to the devastating earthquakes of 24 June completely discredited her in the eyes of most Venezuelans. “
https://gwynnedyer.com/2026/venezuela-unfinished-business/
“he smart money says that Trump and Rubio will find themselves facing a big ‘Venezuelan problem’ in the streets by the end of the year”
Dyer is only journalist who remembers Trump surrendered to NK nukes.
https://gwynnedyer.com/2026/war-weary/
I’m not sure Trump’s NK surrender was a bad move. But it says a lot about our world that, until this very short essay, only Emily and I remembered what Trump did.
Dyer on climate: we will have to do orbital sunlight blocking.
https://gwynnedyer.com/2026/climate-what-to-do-now/
Dyer is a climate journalist. He says it’s too late now. We will do geoengineering. He likes the shades.
Get off Dropbox now — RTCReporting Logs consume a user drive
Eero network instability with an M1 Macbook Air and using a Quantum Fiber (Gemtech W1700K) as a wifi bridge
https://tech.kateva.org/2026/08/eero-network-instability-with-m1.html
Looks like failing or overloaded Eero Gen 6. M1 modem is picky and flaky but probably not worse than usual. Using a Quantum Fiber W1700K as a wifi bridge.
“called into question the entire procedure used by the Colombian team to evaluate Alzheimer’s symptoms and progression”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/more-alzheimer-s-research-trouble
Fraud likely. Caused great harm to alz research
Heritage: “Yenor suggests that women are biologically programmed not to take part in certain high-impact sports and that proportional equality in school sports isn’t desirable or backed by science.”
“data-driven investigation into Democratic fundraising, documenting how a network of consultants, vendors, and party committees extracts money from elderly donors through manipulative digital fundraising.”
https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/with-fear-and-favor?r=7n61q
“the DCCC and DSCC responded with a cease-and-desist letter from the Elias Law Group demanding that the Times not publish.”
NYT caved
Hacking Public Wi-Fi DNS to Steal Credentials
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/08/hacking-public-wi-fi-dns-to-steal-credentials.html
“using public DNS servers such as Google’s 8.8.8.8 does not prevent this attack”
VPN. Ugh
Gold Rush 1890s: “Stampeders had to carry their gear and the year’s supply of food the Canadian authorities required to prevent starvation … weighed about a ton …”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-16-2026
Complex history … some replayed now
“in May 2026, Japan approved its first MMR vaccine in more than three decades”
https://marcveldhoen.substack.com/p/the-japan-mmr-myth
Japan split MMR for a specific mumps vaccine problem, not measles. Measles coverage fell, autism did not decline, measles returned.
(I bet they kept split so long partly due to antivax superstition though)
Digital Nomad lessons
https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-i-learned-from-moving-to-the
“Kyrgyzstan is about as far away geographically and culturally from the United States as it’s possible to get, and even here my daily life basically feels very familiar”
Kyrgyzstan corruption is now obvious in America
How ai owners control responses – example from politically sensitive export controls
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/9/claude-opus-5-system-prompt/
The most perfect surveillance and population control technology ever developed.
AG corruption: “enable the White House to defy congressional subpoenas for anyone to whom the president talks”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-15-2026
American shame
Why are Americans unbothered by Trump corruption?
https://followmehere.com/2026/08/16/why-arent-we-more-upset/
The problem is with us and our culture.
SQLite WAL-Reset Bug: “I spent the last two years of my time working on SQLite trying to chase this bug down”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/08/14/sqlite-wal-reset-bug/
Extreme debugging
At the beginning: “object resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce”
“Fox News hosts are urging Trump to increase U.S. military involvement in Iran”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-11-2026
I like that HCR is clear about where Trump gets his orders.
“As predicted, rent stabilization policies and politics in both St. Paul and Minneapolis have dramatically reduced new housing construction”
St Paul rent control approach is kind of suicidal.
“St. Paul saw fewer apartments built last year than Lansing, Michigan, a city that’s been shrinking for a half-century.”
Fable cannot be stopped: “wrote its own custom web application to capture information via CORS, then ran that as a local server and opened a page with JavaScript”
The tragedy of X: data show many clever people fail the values test.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak-show
Revealed preference – when actions do not align with stated values. Values are what you do, not what you say you do.
Most humans go with the flow.
Apple disarray: a partial catalog of CloudKit bugs as of May 2026
https://blog.justtact.com/cloudkit-bugs/
Doesn’t seem to affect Apple’s share price though. Sadly.
Autism claim: in animal model “fever benefit” due to “IL-17a, which appears to calm overactive brain circuits during infection”
https://followmehere.com/2026/06/05/why-autism-symptoms-can-ease-during-a-fever-and-how-to-mimic-it/
It’s not the temperature. Early investigation.
Running Python code in a sandbox with MicroPython and web assembly.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/6/micropython-in-a-sandbox/#atom-everything
Willison wants to use it for plug-ins.
Three ways to make a living:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/02/zweig-three-ways-to-get-paid
“Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.”
Apple’s bug bounty fail: “simply reeked of incompetence and severe lack of organization”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/06/02/no-bounty-for-mysk/
Apple looks healthy. But so did America when it first elected DJT.
There is a lot of rot in both America and Apple.
“It was an illusion that today’s technology is even close to a sufficient substitute for being in each others’ physical presence.”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/02/the-metaverse-was-snake-oil-for-isolation
COVID, Zoom, the Metaverse, and, by implication, the limits of remote work.
To my credit — none of it made sense to me at the time. We are primates, not LLMs. We need the physical. But so few agreed I began to doubt …
“Democratic lawmakers have said they will not renew the controversial Section 702 of FISA with Pulte as DNI.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-3-2026
Trump’s Director of blackmail and directed discipline.
For the 50th consecutive election season – calls to get rid of Minnesota’s caucus system.
Dem candidates to big offices mostly ignore the Dem caucus. Our authoritarian GOP has been more obedient.
So the existing undemocratic system is perversely good for democracy. It’s still dumb.
Charity hospitals funding – return of the forever crisis at Minneapolis large hospital of last resort
HCMC collapses first — because it has the most compassionate criteria for charity care.
Another example of America’s longstanding cultural and political illnesses.
“peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots”
https://www.404media.co/companies-are-using-reddit-to-manipulate-chatgpt-and-google-ai-search/
America has the best scams.
Filibuster must die: “It’s bad on the merits and there’s no path forward for the country with it in place”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-the-filibuster-absolutely-has-to-go
It only works for the GOP