https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/world/americas/actually-democracy-dies-in-hr.html
The GOP is all like this.
“ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.”
American Melos: “The point that Thucydides was driving at was not merely that great powers could dominate the weak, but that unconstrained domination corrodes the strategic foundations of power itself.”
https://othermeans.substack.com/p/american-melos
Trump united the world.
Trump phone: “slightly modified, Chinese-manufactured Android device called the T-Mobile REVVL 7 Pro 5G that was briefly recalled after its launch 2024”
https://www.salon.com/2026/05/21/the-trump-phone-is-here-critics-say-its-junk/
Proudly American.
$500 device “price ranges from $110 to $130 on Amazon and Walmart, while being listed on eBay for $99.”
iOS Updates can change settings for no good reason
https://tidbits.com/2026/05/10/yet-another-story-of-an-ios-update-silently-changing-settings/
I have seen this in Emily’s phone.
So many old spotlight bugs.
https://eclecticlight.co/2026/05/24/last-week-on-my-mac-intel-macs-will-be-stuck-with-bugs/
Spotlight has been a grievous disappointment.
NEJM: Andes Hantavirus Outbreak on a Cruise Ship, 2026
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2606496?query=WB
I think readable for a lay person. The real scoop.
“symptoms developed in Patient 1 on April 3, and he had a 3-month travel history to regions with known enzootic circulation of ANDV”
Grad speaker on ai era: “No matter what, I am confident there will always be a demand for your plasma”
Jan 6: “Shortly thereafter a rioter grabbed Hodges by the face and tried to gouge out his eyes.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-20-2026
Hodges et al suing to block Trump slush fund. I very much hope a jury gets involved.
“Trump bought and sold at least $220 million in stocks like those of Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft while making policy and public announcements that affected the value of those stocks.”
Willison: six months of LLM progress summarized
https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/19/5-minute-llms/#atom-everything
“The coding agents got really good… and the laptop-available models … have started wildly outperforming expectations”
Cringely lives. And writes again.
https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/21/im-writing-again/
Cringely is best known from his Infoworld days decades ago. I never removed his RSS feed and today it came alive.
Jedeed attends MAGA Christian Nationalist abomination
https://www.firewalledmedia.com/p/anti-christian-nationalism
“They twist faith into a framework of submission, flense agency from the human spirit until it cries out for orders to follow, and burn the bible on their altar of earthly power. Christian Nationalism is an attack on religion itself. No atheist ever hurt God’s cause so much.”
“Conflating value with profitability is a classic plutocratic move, but it conveniently absolves the plutocrat from any bad business decisions.”
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-literally-insensitive-jeff-bezos?r=rjjdx&triedRedirect=true
I used to call this Marketarianism. A kind of religion where truth and virtue is measured by profit.
In 21st century America Marketarianism fused with Christian Nationalism and Trumpism to create the latest American religion.
Google: “…When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity.”
https://www.manton.org/2026/05/20/google-announced-a-million-things.html
The s-word is back.
I think the foothills are behind us.
“Google will let users vibe-code entire native Android apps now, which they can eventually even publish to the Play Store straight from AI Studio.”
I bet some will be very good but app review will have to be by ai.
“using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/05/14/amazon-tokenmaxxing/
Incentives work.
Autism genetics: “mice with a single mutated CHD8 copy (heterozygous) expressed behavioral abnormalities strictly in males, the severe double-mutated homozygous models displayed devastating autism traits in both males and females.”
https://neurosciencenews.com/chd8-mutation-asd-genetics-30734/
Studying 4:1 ratio in humans.
Neanderthal Dentistry: “tooth’s hollow had been scooped out by a stone drill rather than by natural decay or wear”
Human teeth kind of suck*. The history of humanity could be reframed as war against dental pain.
*They haven’t had much time to evolve to match agriculture.
Is Sociology Salvageable?
https://jamesgmartin.center/2026/02/is-sociology-salvageable/
I am quite sad about the state of modern sociology. Until I took a 2026 undergrad sociology classI had not understood the 20th century rejection of falsifiability and science. Sociology became a kind of philosophical/legal discourse that is very valuable but inadequate. Sociology drifted into competing evidence-limited narratives that resemble medieval theology.
I came across this piece while exploring for any signs of rebuilding.
“Experts say fraud in federal programs is a real problem but that it is carried out primarily by transnational criminal organizations, not by individual recipients”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-14-2026
Imagine a world where expertise had a voice
Vibecession: “one conclusion from that is that people aren’t thinking about the economy rationally anymore. But another conclusion is that they’re thinking about the economy differently than they have been previously”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/g-elliott-morris-on-vibes-and-the
A solid discussion with hypotheses. Previously good models of consumer sentiment don’t work. Everything is irrational — but maybe consumers are not entirely crazy?
King Trump seizes assets of the peasants: “With the announcement of the agreement, the Treasury Department’s top lawyer, Brian Morrissey, resigned.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-19-2026
Another name to add to the hall of honor in former Trump ballroom
Ask Jeeves Shuts Down
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/05/08/ask-jeeves-shuts-down/
I remember when it was hot. Of course we are all surprised it was around at all
A moment in the chaos times: ChatGPT “malware” and Perplexity ai support disaster
https://notes.kateva.org/2026/05/a-moment-in-chaos-times-chatgpt-malware.html
“I think what happened here is that Perplexity Pro Support ai treated a feedback complaint as a request for action and automatically invoked a part of their content transfer hack.”
Be very careful what you say to an ai support agent. They may have a lot of power to make bad mistakes. (Or it may all be coincidence. Who can say any more?)
“Data center land use issues are fake”
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-center-land-use-issues-are-fake
Good point that farming is quite toxic.
Body Dysmorphic Disorder: “… fixate on perceived cosmetic problems that to others appear unnoticeable … feel extreme anguish that impairs their functioning”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/well/mind/body-dysmorphic-disorder-bdd-symptoms.html
It’s a form of delusional disorder with OCD features.
“across a patient’s life span, about 66 percent of those with B.D.D. will have thoughts of suicide and around 35 percent will attempt it.”
“singing mice had approximately three times the number of neurons sending signals from the motor cortex to two specific downstream regions of the brain”
Language features emerge in small brains without novel anatomy but through expansion of existing pathways.
I strongly suspect something like this enabled humans to read.
“given the structure of legal and political institutions in America, the Supreme Court must function as a kind of crypto-Super Legislature”
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/05/the-law-question
Novel take
“All of which is a very convoluted way of saying John Roberts is either a liar or a fool. Knowing what I know about the institutions that educated him, which happens to be a lot, I’m going to go with the latter conclusion, which may be rather charitable of me”
“Lutnick had said he had cut all ties with Epstein in 2005 … the two maintained contact until at least 2018”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-6-2026
Only the worst of the worst work for the MAGA.
Ukraine 2026: “Drones are the dominant force on the lines today, causing approximately 75–80 percent of all casualties. Ukraine now has 1.3 drones at the front line for every 1 Russian drone”
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/ukraines-surprising-2026
I read that a lot of pre-war Russian weapons tech came from Ukraine.
Anthropic: “we recently made a commitment to cover any consumer electricity price increases caused by our data centers in the US.”
https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex
They are not covering the CO2 externalities of Colossus however.
Andes Hantavirus ship update
It would be good to accelerate vaccine work. mRNA tech will help.
(Maybe in Canada? Spain? China?)
WordPress Reader: “… use it as a [RSS] sync backend. That includes Reeder, NetNewsWire, ReadKit, lire, Unread …”
https://activitypub.blog/2026/05/05/radical-speed-month-the-reader-meets-the-fediverse/
Similar to Feedbin but they want to support AT and Fediverse as well.
Distillation: “Modern LLM processes could look like using a GPT API to build an initial batch of synthetic data to build a specialized small data-processing model.”
https://www.interconnects.ai/p/the-distillation-panic
I imagine how BYTE would have covered this era and I miss it again. There really has never been an adequate replacement.
Oman and the MAGA debacle: “…What can we do to extricate the superpower from this unwanted entanglement? … “America’s friends have a responsibility to tell the truth.”
https://www.firewalledmedia.com/p/losing-friends-and-alienating-people-2c4
Oman keeps a low profile.
Another week another assassination attempt: “same people already used this exact blood-and-thunder language for the Little Mermaid casting announcement”
We are so tired.
Best take on MAGA frothing and raging
“a fault-tolerant quantum computer able to break deployed cryptosystems ought to be possible by around 2029”
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9718
Something to be said for platinum bars in the home safe.
Dems prepare for MAGA attacks on voting
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/house-democrats-election-wargames-trump
“ task force has identified “about 150 threats, … each one of those we go through and we have sort of a matrix — what we think the likelihood is of this, whatever it is, happening, and then … what’s the damage that it could cause?”
““HD Map”. It has not only a ton more data, but centimetre level accuracy too.”
https://maphappenings.com/2025/11/06/bee-maps/
Industry guy on history and future of nav maps.
“World, a project designed to distinguish humans from bots using biometrics, announced strategic partnerships with Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign”
https://restofworld.org/2026/sam-altman-worldcoin-zoom-tinder-partnerships/
Send this sentence back in time.
Agent Memory: “agent can probably figure out how to string together all the headers to authenticate to your weird API, or you can just make a script for it and skip the LLM.”
https://timkellogg.me/blog/2026/04/27/memory-patterns
Every week a bit different.
“ice XXII … repeating its pattern only every 304 molecules”
“The widow of Renee Good has asked a court to order the federal government to hand over the vehicle her spouse was driving when she was fatally shot by an immigration agent in January.”
Feds not doing any investigation but holding on to the property anyway to block state investigations.
Cardiac cancer rare because of Nesprin-2
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/no-heart-cancer-there-s-reason
Confess never occurred to me that hearts were weird in this way.
“silencing Nesprin-2 in tumor cells before those implantation experiments mentioned above led to robust tumor growth even in contracting cardiac muscle”
COVID becomes a cold: “patterns indicate that new strains are relatively more capable of overcoming our immune responses, but the infection outcomes are more mild”
Immunity + virus evolution + non-exposed vulnerable are dead. Annual booster uncertain value.
Open question: do all coronaviruses cause a degree of vascular brain injury? How does that accumulate over a lifespan?
Yet another constitutional crisis: Congress and war.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/opinion/trump-iran-war-powers.html
The constitution is not what it used to be.
“my initial reaction after learning that Cook would step down as CEO of Apple was indeed along the lines of Fuck off and Good riddance”
https://morrick.me/archives/10306
I own Apple shares through index funds. Tim Cook has been great for me there. Software? Not so great. I am glad to see the back of him.
I’m not sure the mac is as dead as Mori says however. iPadOS is not doing great.
Scale of Universe: interactive zoom from the Planck to Infinity
https://scaleofuniverse.com/en
Good example of the genre
“Never Trumpers, the Always Trumpers, and then this really key group in the middle that’s pretty dispositive in terms of which way they swing and it’s dispositive in terms of determining election outcomes”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-vibes-with-jared-bernstein
“What I think of them, at least in the context of our conversation, are people who believed Trump when he said, “I’m going to lower prices on day one.”
It’s powerfully tempting to consider this group simply dumb. They are not academics for sure. I suspect, however, that if we disregard their explanations their distress is sending a critical message.
Lessons from the wins and losses of the Tennessee Valley Authority: “Malaria affected close to 30 percent of the population”
https://scalawagmagazine.org/2026/04/dirty-energy-and-the-lost-promise-of-the-tva/
TVA was public-private. We may be doing a lot more like that. So need to know this history.
“In the 1970s, TVA’s coal-fired facilities were responsible for about 14 percent of all toxic sulfur-dioxide emissions nationwide”
Even Palantir employees have doubts
https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-employees-are-starting-to-wonder-if-theyre-the-bad-guys/
Palantir has always been obviously evil. That employees are unhappy suggests a cultural shift.