https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-11-2026
I like that HCR is clear about where Trump gets his orders.
Author Archives: jgordon
“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
“Has Tahoe’s interface improved?”
https://eclecticlight.co/2026/05/31/last-week-on-my-mac-razzle-and-dazzle/
No. Apple does not care.
macOS: “You can also lock an open file inside an app. Click on the down arrow to the right of its name in the title bar to see this pane, then click on the padlock to lock that file.”
https://eclecticlight.co/2026/05/30/protect-files-with-the-locked-or-immutable-flag/
Sigh. I had no idea this existed.
As is typical it does not work properly with iCloud. Which I am so glad I avoid.
Washington, D.C.’s crime decline – National Guard and more effective policing
https://www.niskanencenter.org/washington-dc-crime-decline-and-its-lessons-for-american-policing/
“Guard brought was a massive, sudden shock from the visible presence of uniformed military personnel on the streets of Washington almost overnight. For crimes driven by opportunistic calculation, that visibility appears to have mattered. For violent crime, which is less deterrable by patrol presence alone, it did not.”
MPLS also doing the upstream thing
Technical Interview: “interviewing was broken long before I learned the trade, and despite the many attempts to band-aid it, it’s still broken today”
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-last-technical-interview-bc13ddcf4564
A poor test. This is a fascinating discussion from a very smart person who has thought a lot about interviewing. Also … Geoworks!
“The recruiters had tricked us into reviewing our own interview packets, and we had voted not to hire most of our own group.”
I once did some medical student interviews. Same problems. It’s random
“the Late Bronze Age Collapse is a sequence of site destructions visible archaeologically from c. 1220 BC to c. 1170 BC”
continual learning: “systems to achieve efficient and cumulative continual learning, we need to remove the artificial boundaries we’ve introduced between the present context and the rest of their past experiences…”
https://infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/what-are-the-real-problems-of-continual
A fairly readable review of continuous learning. AI researchers continue to draw on ideas from biological systems and cognitive science.
Online reference to external displays for Apple silicon Macs
Notes on Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas
https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/25/encyclical-on-ai/#atom-everything
The best excerpts have seen so far
Election analysis is useless in most American elections
https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-05-29-dnc-autopsy-few-more-thoughts?r=13cw5&triedRedirect=true
The parties are very close in national votes. There is no way to disentangle variables.
“Google doesn’t have a clear competitor for Claude Code and Codex”
https://www.interconnects.ai/p/some-ideas-for-what-comes-next-may
Even I can see the gap when playing with antigravity.
“Opus 4.8 is around four times less likely than its predecessor to allow flaws in code it has written to pass unremarked.”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/28/claude-opus-4-8/#atom-everything
Described as a minor update
Bluesky enhances support for Standard.site AT protocol-based publishing apps.
https://atproto.com/blog/standard-site-bluesky-timeline
“If you’re publishing a website today, you could be writing Standard.site records”
AI: Lexicon: “JSON file that defines exactly what fields a particular type of record must contain, what types those fields are, and what constraints apply …. any blog post written in one app can be read, displayed, or indexed by any other app that understands that same schema”
“W3C Web Monetization proposal envisions exactly this: content objects tagged with a payment pointer that browsers or apps can stream micropayments to as users consume content”
“newly emerged x402 protocol (backed by Coinbase and Google) enables HTTP-native micropayments using stablecoins, with fees as low as fractions of a cent”
ai über alles: “GPT was helped by the facts that human mathematicians had wasted most of their time trying to prove Erdös right …”
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9782
“… even if they did look for a counterexample, they’d need to be experts in algebraic number theory to find this one, which hardly any discrete geometers are”
It’s the breadth of expertise that is beyond human capability
Siegel updates the Drake equation: “there are likely somewhere around 10 billion (possibly more) planets out there, just in our own galaxy, that are similar to Earth in size, mass, composition, and equilibrium temperature”
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/three-big-hopes-alien-life/
He doesn’t mention the Fermi paradox. Or the implications of the great silence.
“The issue here is not some indefinable evil present in the Israel psyche; it is the bleakly banal cruelty of humanity, which seems subject to convergent evolution”
Some cultures are less cruel than others, but human are the same everywhere.
X “IPO affords the opportunity for investors to exit into retail and index flow and so realise generational-wealth windfall gains.”
https://www.ft.com/content/f471fed4-0aee-44b4-8828-d6887c4978f2
Index funds were always a bit weird. They have worked well for us, but soon we will see the flaw. A Musk level scam can destroy them.
Oligarchies run on mediocrities: “desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality.”
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