https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/28/last-week-on-my-mac-panacea-or-placebo/

These days, when I use macOS, I avoid anything that isn’t used constantly in the default setup. Apple has lost a sense of shame.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-25-2025

No kings.

Hertling: “sudden, global, emergency recall of America’s top brass is a flashing red light to them: Something must be wrong inside the Pentagon.”

https://www.wired.com/story/rules-for-power-banks-on-flights/

The end is in sight. Now if Delta would fix their 30-60% broken USB ports…

https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-worst-adult-in-the-room

The best of MAGA is the worst of humanity.

https://fidjisimo.substack.com/p/a-new-paradigm-of-proactive-steerable

“… Pulse combines information from your chats, your feedback, and connected apps like Gmail and Google Calendar”

Adults with cognitive disabilities very much need something like this. For me it would be mostly noise … except for the “obsolete knowledge” problem.

https://www.splinter.com/i-welcome-baseballs-new-robot-overlords

Umpires hit the limits of human ability through extreme effort and training. But the bots are better …

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/us-disrupts-massive-cell-phone-array-in-new-york.html

Very weird. Russia? NK?

https://spyglass.org/the-savant-apple/

“At best, Apple needs to handle their Hollywood talent better. At worst, they need to stop their anticipatory compliance.”

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/24/screen-time-brokenness/

True story: Screen Time / Parental Controls was so broken 5y ago I gave up on a book project.

It has been broken from the start. An early sign that Apple couldn’t do software any more. It was always a pretense, a way to shift blame to parents.

https://thenewstack.io/googles-data-commons-gives-ai-agents-access-to-a-vast-trove-of-stats/

“collects public datasets across a broad set of topics and geographies”

I’m looking forward to seeing this in use.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/trump-bondi-edva/684292/?lctg=6050e88c4953a53f148b14da

If the lackeys decide that valid elections are possible they will hedge their bets.

Lackeys like Megyn Kelly, who wrote that “we” don’t care about Trump corruption.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevz13xkxpro

Extremely hard neurosurgery and super expensive meds — but both will get easier and less expensive. And better treatments will emerge.

“one was medically retired and has returned to work. Others in the trial are still walking despite being expected to need a wheelchair.”

Very small numbers but dramatic results.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/we-know-better-experts-watch-in-horror-as-trump-admin-hides-record-of-right-wing-violence

Good to note these things.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/the-bonkers-wellness-myths-that-fueled-trumps-autism-announcement/

The hard part is not reactively avoiding topics the quackers are keen on.

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/09/17/dhs-calls-media-and-far-left-stop-demonization-president-trump-his-supporters-and

This seems … weak. I thought Trump didn’t like weak.

https://tidbits.com/2025/09/17/macos-26-tahoe-pushes-filevault-use/

Otherwise Trump would demand a copy. (If you have your recovery key in iCloud now …)

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/sep/18/baader-meinhof

Familiar in many ways.

https://thenewstack.io/chrome-switches-on-ai-the-future-of-browsing-begins-now/

Assuming this includes summary I will switch from Safari

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-social-scientists-could-help

The MAGA burned the government we had. It was not pretty but it limped along.

Might as well think about what happens if there is a resurrection

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-17-2025-wednesday

The GOP is coming to the conclusion of its journey.

“James McHenry, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, recorded in his diary that a lady had asked delegate Benjamin Franklin whether the convention had established a republic or a monarchy. “A republic,” Franklin said, “if you can keep it.”

https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/17/photographer-tyler-stalman-reviews-the-iphone-17-iphone-air-and-iphone-17-pro-cameras/

JPEG-XL has had limited acceptance. New and pretty nice. So is Apple into it?

https://archive.ph/20250916071048/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/science/ants-species-babies.html#selection-777.0-795.169

“It’s like a human having chimp babies,” which they use as “a source of sperm for giving birth to human-chimp hybrids that would do all their tasks,”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-15-2025

“I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities: the idea that we all have the right to work to become whatever we wish. I believe that American democracy has the potential to be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.”

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/women-jobs-and-charlie-kirk

“Kirk … wanted to reverse what Claudia Goldin … has called the “quiet revolution” in women’s role in American society that occurred between the late 1970s and early 1990s.”

I don’t like K’s phrasing of “dislocation and humiliation on the part of men”. It is condescension; it trivializes a vast amount of pain arising from social transformation. He actually admits the pain later in the piece, but a good editor would have helped him.

https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/15/appearance-matters-get-tahoe-looking-in-better-shape/

Tim Cook stayed too long.

https://indiadispatch.com/p/hollow-at-the-base

Thought to be ai.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/politics/jd-vance-charlie-kirk-show.html

Screenshotted for the history books

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9138

If paper is accepted it confirms expectations. Of course the implied acceleration in QC technology is not something most wish for quite now.

https://spyglass.org/openai-microsoft-agree-to-agree-tentatively/

Expectations for near-term AGI drive trillions of dollars here and there.

Everything from socialism to totalitarianism to anarchy and socioeconomic collapse are on the menu. If we “muddle through” I will credit the supernatural.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/unintended-side-effects-hpv-and-shingles-vaccines-reason-for-concern/

Clever title. The unexpected side effects are substantial, surprising, and entirely good.

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/pharmaceutical-ads-in-the-us-top

A fair review. They are basically problem number 200 on our list of things to fix but nobody loves them so worth a try.

https://www.macstories.net/notes/testing-claudes-native-integration-with-reminders-and-calendar-on-ios-and-ipados/

I didn’t realize Perplexity had some integration— it’s voice only. That is dumb.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/life-maybe-mars-unless-we-change-our-minds

“We definitely need to study these formations more and try to model them here on Earth, but what we need to do for sure is make good on the sample-return part of the Perseverance mission … the proposals for how to go get them are in a state of expensive disarray”

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/10/macos-tahoe-26-rc/

Do not upgrade.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/11/defeating-nondeterminism/#atom-everything

Not primarily floating point arithmetic

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/suffering-4

Christianity took a different path.

https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/

This is a fascinating Apple Research post.

“Known mercenary spyware chains used against iOS share a common denominator with those targeting Windows and Android: they exploit memory safety vulnerabilities”

https://archive.ph/OA5Jc#selection-2415.93-2415.271

“prices of cropland are 10 times as high as they were in the wake of the 1980s crisis”

“with interest rates above where they had been for at least a decade after the 2007 Wall Street financial debacle, there is not enough revenue left over to pay all the fixed costs”

The collapse of rural America will accelerate. Again.

https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/08/managing-macos-versioning-and-the-documentrevisions-v100-folder/

Good to know!

“To remove all versions of a document quickly and simply:
Select the document in the Finder and Duplicate it using Command-D.
Delete the original file and rename the duplicate”

https://www.minnpost.com/fact-briefs/2025/09/are-suicide-rates-twice-as-high-in-rural-minnesota-than-in-the-twin-cities/

The explainer claims limited mental health and easy gun access.

I disagree. Guns are everywhere now. And mental health interventions aren’t available to most in cities and are of uncertain efficacy for suicide prevention (primarily an impulsive act).

This is a blaring red howling siren signal that rural America is in longterm existential crisis.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/health/falls-deaths-elderly-drugs.html

“prescriptions for some fall-related drugs have already declined or hit plateaus, even as death rates because of falls have risen”

I doubt it’s only, or even primarily, the meds. I suspect it’s also lack of walking, inequality, and poor healthcare. We are more feeble.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijd.17567

Open access and probably unreviewed but there’s really not much out there – which is what they concluded. It is biologically plausible that susceptible men (including trans-men) will have accelerated hair loss with testosterone supplementation.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/is-this-the-hidden-part-of-the-trump-epstein-drama

“Yeah I knew he was a big time pedophile and we were big pals and partied together all the time and I was fine with it. But then he tried to expose my money laundering scheme so I called my friends at the FBI.”

“I think this has been known as a rumor at least for some time.”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-4-2025-thursday

“Under Governor Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, Wisconsin led the way, bringing together researchers, lawmakers, and state officials to craft policies that would end corruption, promote education and social welfare, and create a strong and fair economy.”

Governor of WI 1901 to 1906.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-countering-misuse-aug-2025

Quite readable and not surprising. Hospitals are going to be increasingly shut for recovery.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/generative-ai-as-a-cybercrime-assistant.html

North Korean economy likely to grow.

https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/04/quirks-of-spotlight-local-search/

“Once Spotlight has indexed objects in images discovered by mediaanalysisd, moving that file to a different folder breaks that association immediately,”

Files and paths rather than inodes. So much broken corporate flail

https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-rfk-jr-seeks-to-rush-7-new

RFK ACIP minions:

Hilary Blackburn
Joseph Fraiman
John Gaitanis
Evelyn Griffin
Kirk Milhoan
Raymond Pollak
Catherine Stein

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/03/ios-26-developer-beta-9/

Maybe 26.2 will be usable on iPhone? (I hope to skip macOS 26 entirely.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/us/western-health-alliance.html

Next will be food and pharma safety.