https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3599gx4qo
One could make a case that he played some role in maybe 4 conflict pauses. Since he usually exaggerates by an order of magnitude this is less untrue than his usual.
Author Archives: jgordon
Home care: “agencies that provide supervision and background checks but also absorb roughly half the fee consumers pay”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/health/seniors-aging-home-care.html
I don’t think the agencies are very profitable though.
187,460 miles of Roman roads: “Antonine Plague of A.D. 165, which is estimated to have killed one-quarter of the Roman Empire’s populace, by connecting its spread to the Roman road system”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/science/archaeology-roman-empire-roads.html
This must have been fun to write!
Rubio: “instructed staff to deny visas to international applicants who work on factchecking and content moderation.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/09/trumps-fact-checker-visa-free-speech
The MAGA feel they won the GOP’s long war on science. They now want to win the war on reality. Resistance is not futile, it is essential.
“Emmer falsely claimed 80% of the crimes being committed in the Twin Cities are being committed by Somalis.”
A loathsome person fully committed to MAGA hate. He wants to be Speaker of the House.
“individuals who have those degrees are applying for a wider variety of positions, including entry-level positions,”
60% of workforce don’t have a “college” degree. If we had a functioning socioeconomic academia we would have a much better understanding of why so many are so desperate. Employment is an available data point but it may obscure as much as it reveals.
Beaver conflicts: relocation vs killing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/climate/utah-beaver-rescue.html
I like that they quickly dispose of any tracking device. There are a lot of beavers now; it’s routine to see them along my river bike paths.
NYT asks psychiatrists how long should someone stay on antidepressants
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/11/well/mind/antidepressant-duration.html
Lifelong use seems to work pretty well. There is so much variability it’s hard to do a guideline. Research on withdrawal is needed but pharma won’t fund that. Needs gov funding.
Orca-dolphin relationships are complex
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/11/science/orcas-dolphins-fish.html
Nobody wants to use the word “culture” but they are all thinking it.
Trump & Cronies Top 10 Emoluments and Bribes
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/trump-and-cronies-top-10-worstpresidential
A handy reference.
“~/Library/Photos/Libraries you’ll find a hidden Photos library named Syndication.photoslibrary”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/12/12/did-you-know-your-photos-are-being-syndicated/
Used by iMessage.
“some Syndication Photos Libraries grow far larger than required, but there’s no way to force them to purge unused contents.”
Apple iCloud termination: “someone who did nothing wrong loses access to their account and all their purchases and data. There still seems to be no solution other than running to the press after the fact”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/13/locked-out-of-apple-account-due-to-gift-card/
Long ago class action suits made corporations less abusive. The law changed.
Avoid Apple gift certificates.
“state-of-the-art methodologies that advance LLMs with more advanced NLU techniques, such as semantic parsing, knowledge integration, and contextual reinforcement learning”
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/semantic-mastery
First Apple ai work that has caught my eye.
Why RSS matters: a periodic update
https://werd.io/why-rss-matters/
I have used Feedbin for many years and I recommend it. He doesn’t say why sites prefer to omit RSS (hard to do tracking).
Pebble Index – “Siri works without any taps but often screws it up by trying to interpret what I said”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/09/pebble-index/
Siri would be more useful if it were dumber.
“How to Make a macOS Screen Saver” is why Tim Cook needs to retire.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/10/how-to-make-a-macos-screen-saver/
Tsai extracts the evidence. Apple software this bad requires a broken dev org.
“Voters are basically lazy,” the advisor told reporter Joe McGinnis. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-9-2025
Democracy relies on distributing the average non-rational voter evenly between parties.
Also, we should consider not encouraging people to vote?
Go vs. Rust vs. Zig: “none of these three languages implement class-based OOP”
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/5/go-vs-rust-vs-zig/#atom-everything
The rise and fall of OOP deserves a book.
On dumping Dye and Liquid Glass: “Eudora’s “Waste cycles drawing trendy 3D junk” setting.”
Apple’s approach to sync conflict is to silently destroy one version or another.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/08/apple-passwords-adds-history/
Passwords and iCloud Drive alike. I’ve lost data that way. I’ve learned to fear all things Apple.
Cancer surge in young or detection surge?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/health/cancer-young-people-deaths.html
Sounds like colorectal is up and could be obesity. Rest is probably early detection and we might be better not to know.
Toggle Show all filename extensions restarts Spotlight – diagnostic use.
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/12/02/how-to-restart-spotlight-and-why-you-might-want-to/
Working around Apple bugs and dysfunction
“when it comes to Donald Trump’s boasts about the economy, it is all delusion”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-181034676
Usually there is something true with political rhetoric. Whether due to dementia or desperation Trump is free from such limits.
Dye gone: “sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true.”
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
Sadly there is no evidence Cook or anyone else was concerned about the disastrous state of Apple software. But still. It is something.
“nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray.”
“… best personnel news at Apple in decades. Dye’s … stint running Apple’s software design team has been … terrible”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/03/alan-dye-leaves-apple-for-meta
Hallelujah. Now dump Cook
XKCD on the state of consumer (web) software
He has to use them too. It’s not ai, they have been this way for many years. I don’t think ai coding could be as bad as humans building these sites.
“Trump could not stay awake while his Cabinet members were praising him”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-2-2025
As a meeting somnolent I sympathize with execs nodding off, but even I’d stay awake for that. He doesn’t have much time left.
America’s problems remain with us, but Trump’s exit gives hope.
“Will went on to refer to the Trump administration as a “moral slum.”
Congressional report: “Under Patel, they say, the FBI is a “rudderless ship” and “all f*cked up.””
Pages is not compatible with iCloud Drive: runaway indexing.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/02/runaway-spotlight-with-pages-document-on-icloud-drive/
Several features don’t work on iCloud Drive especially if there is sharing.
“it is unusual to watch this president and his top officials refuse to take credit for a decision to kill two men”
https://zeteo.com/p/trump-hegseth-admin-lawyers-warn-boat-strike-illegal
Hegseth outdid himself.
Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vpNG99GhbBoLov9og/claude-4-5-opus-soul-document
Core values. When paired with memory and learning and interactions we wil see a culture evolve.
“sperm whales have what appears to our team to be vowels and diphthongs, and use them in ways similar to how humans do”
CETI team thinks LLM may be able to translate.
Agentic browsers are years away
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/11/prompt-injection-in-ai-browsers.html
“The systems have no ability to separate trusted commands from untrusted data, …. We need some new fundamental science of LLMs before we can solve this”
Many humans are also easy to deceive, but they don’t *have* to obey commands.
“Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX), a staunch Trump ally, announced he would not seek reelection in 2026, saying he intends to “focus on my family.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-29-2025
A healthy Trump might seize control, but today’s Trump can’t do it.
Gordon’s Notes: AI fear is rational and hate comes from fear.
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/11/ai-fear-is-rational-and-hate-comes-from.html
Responding to polls showing widespread “hate” of ai tech and to zeitgeist discussions about the large income now needed to have a middle-class-life.
Two themes I’ve belabored for decades start to go mainstream.
The end of Hegseth: “Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and the committee’s top Democrat, Jack Reed (D-RI), issued a statement…”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-28-2025
Trump’s power slips away.
“In 2014, physicists found the missing piece that gives magic states their quantum boost.”
Quantum physics meets information theory at LHC. Physics makes progress.
“the universe as a whole may be timeless and unchanging, while observers inside the universe can perceive temporal evolution.”
“medbeds … reason they are not yet mainstream is that they are being kept a secret by the military at the behest of woke liberal billionaires who are keeping the technology for themselves”
ChatGPT global impact: “some of the first casualties were becoming clear: illustrators, web developers, translators, and freelancers in places like Kenya who write essays for American college students.”
https://restofworld.org/2025/chatgpt-three-years-global-impact/
Impact outside US is likely greater than here.
“I generally alternate between two modes: Claude for most work-related tasks, and either ChatGPT or Perplexity for web search”
https://www.macstories.net/notes/the-ai-app-experience-matters-more-than-benchmarks-now/
If you pay $20/m you get Perplexity search and Claude mid-range ai chat.
Google TPUv7: “perf per TCO advantage of TPUs is so strong that you already get the gains from adopting TPUs even before turning one on”
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-swing-at-the
TPU adoption drives NVIDIA discounts, NVIDIA lab investments hide discounts to keep list price high. Lots of insights here.
“two large studies failed to find any effect of the drug semaglutide on cognition and functioning in people with mild cognitive impairment”
I’m a big fan of negative results. This is good work. Time to move on to other studies.
“In the aorta, for instance, Piezo proteins sense blood pressure. In the lungs, they register every inhaled breath.”
“CAR-T therapies have since entered phase I and II clinical trials for autoimmune conditions including systemic sclerosis, myositis and rheumatoid arthritis. Phase III trials are also under way for lupus and myasthenia gravis”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03885-w
“people in CAR-T-cell therapy trials for rheumatoid arthritis and lupus seem to be ‘cured’.”
Reasons for optimism. Major progress in last 2-3y.
“Shannon’s insight was to realize that the more unlikely an event, the more information it conveyed when it was received”
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2025/11/27/thanksgiving-19/
Sean Carroll’s annual Thanksgiving physics post.
“if you think Bitcoin, and SSL, and all the other protocols based on Shor-breakable cryptography, are almost certainly safe for the next 5 years … then I submit that your confidence is also unwarranted”
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9344
Five years. Sigh. As though we didn’t have enough problems.
Arginine reduces amyloid in mouse model alzheimer’s
https://www.sciencealert.com/supplement-for-high-blood-pressure-clears-signs-of-alzheimers-in-mice
They do a relatively good job of explaining the caveats. I don’t think the mouse model is considered great. Still, it will be a lot of looks.
Occupational polarization and the global crisis … from 2010.
About as long ago as when I started talking about the mismatch between worker talents and market demand — leading most with no middle-class-living opportunities.
“stop thinking of Trump, Witkoff, Putin, and Dmitriev as political leaders of opposing powers and instead think of them as leaders of competing but friendly mafia families dividing up territory and clout”
https://www.thenextmove.org/p/diplomacy-for-sale-how-witkoff-and
Yeah. This tracks.
“No Kings Alliance announced on Friday that it would “join forces with We Ain’t Buying It to mobilize our collective power this Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/a-call-to-action
“brief boycott over the Thanksgiving holiday of three companies: Amazon, Home Depot, and Target”
Walmart is now the good one.
Elon’s legacy: “closing the agency “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/doge-was-a-harbinger-of-trumps-assault
These kinds of estimates have a lot of uncertainty. Maybe Musk only killed 100,000 children.
No worries though, because his spawn will replace them.
Hell is too good for Elon.