https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/world/europe/text-messages-between-russian-spies-annotated.html
These are funny-sad. Intercepted texts from deep cover Russian spies.
Author Archives: jgordon
KrebsOnSecurity 6.3 Tbps DDoS: “… Project Shield, a free DDoS defense service that Google provides to websites offering news, human rights, and election-related content”
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/krebsonsecurity-hit-with-near-record-6-3-tbps-ddos/
How long will Google do this?
“Aisuru botnet comprises a globally-dispersed collection of hacked IoT devices, including routers, digital video recorders and other systems”
Absurdly cheap: “botnet was rented out in subscription tiers ranging from $150 per day to $600 per week”
Scott Adams, at the end of his life, learns compassion the very hard way
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/us/scott-adams-dilbert-prostate-cancer-biden.html
Adams became an enthusiastic MAGA extremist. But now he’s dying of metastatic cancer of the prostate. He may be reevaluating his beliefs.
“Part of Mr. Adams’ sympathy for Mr. Biden seemed to come from his own lived experience with the disease, which he called “intolerable” … “I don’t have good days,” he said. “Every day is a nightmare. And evening is even worse.”
Autoimmune Disease: B-cell reset – “B cell plasmablasts that were the constant source of the “autoantibodies” directed against the patients’ own tissues”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/autoimmune-disease-transformed
Suddenly a lot of chronic diseases may be cured. Not AFAIK applicable to Rheumatoid Arthritis but Lupus and many less common disorders. Trial results expected over next 1-2 years.
NYT does not terrible job of explaining why experts don’t like early PSA screening.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/health/joe-biden-prostate-cancer-diagnosis-screening.html
Basically it’s a lousy test. High false positive, high false negative, and in 80+ the goal isn’t 20y survival.
“… about half of men have some cancer in their prostate by their 70s or 80s, although most have no symptoms.”
If you find a PSA you have to pay attention to it – even if you don’t want to.
Fascinating story of all the odd places Denisovan fossils have been found it
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01549-3
“… a man bought a lower jawbone from an antique shop in Tainan City in Taiwan. It had been dredged from the Penghu Channel, 20 kilometres offshore. The man donated it to a museum after researchers realized, on the basis of photographs, that it was a hominin bone. When they finally described it in 2015, the researchers noted that its second molar looked distinctly Denisovan”
Paywalled but the free part is still good.
“In 1993, IBM fired 60,000 people, setting the all-time record for largest layoff. Since Trump took office, the government has pushed at least 130,000 people out of jobs”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/05/20/federal-workers-trump-mental-health/
“In 2011, economists examined a decade of data and found that mass layoffs resulted in an additional suicide for every 4,200 men and for every 7,100 women losing their jobs. Mass layoffs can devastate entire communities, they noted, fracturing social networks and creating pools of applicants fighting over limited jobs.”
1/3 are veterans, often more vulnerable than non-veteran cohorts.
“highest density Mr. Bolin tallied in the whale’s eye was about 180 retinal ganglia per square millimeter. Humans can have about 35 to 40,000 per square millimeter, while keen-eyed birds of prey can have up to 70,000 in the same area.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/science/humpback-whale-vision-collisions.html
Humpback whales hardly see anything.
Communications Backdoor in Chinese Power Inverters
Seems interesting … if true …
“A series of studies published in Science in February 2025 provides the best evidence yet that birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently.”
https://www.wired.com/story/intelligence-evolved-at-least-twice-in-vertebrate-animals/
Stephen Baxter’s SF novel “Evolution” does a very good job of portraying a velociraptor like dinosaur with hunter-gather tech and intelligence — doomed by inability to domesticate animals or cooperate. It was a small part of the novel but a fascinating bit of prescience.
“Rather than neat layers, birds have “unspecified balls of neurons without landmarks or distinctions” but the neural networks resemble ours. And resemble LLMs.
Garmin chooses the road more traveled – “Garmin’s new “premium” Garmin+ tier takes several features users already enjoyed for free, put them behind a $7 per month paywall, and called it innovation.”
“By training AIs to fight and defeat other AIs we can perhaps preserve a healthy balance in the new ecosystem … building AIs whose sole purpose was to predate upon existing AI models”
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/remarks-on-ai-from-nz
The mammals scurry about while T-Rex fights Triceratops. I like that Stephenson remembers McLuhan. His “optimistic take” is, inevitably, pretty dark. If AGI works there are no good futures left …
“preserving and advancing our own intelligence by holding at arms length seductive augmentations in order to avoid suffering the amputations that are their price”
Uh-no. Not happening.
Apple’s AI fail: A non-paywalled summary.
https://spyglass.org/theres-no-free-lunch-at-apple/
Bloomberg’s juicy summary is paywalled but this is a decent free version of same content.
“Shipping polished jewels.” tells me, however, that Siegler does not actually use any Apple software.
WaPo confusing reporting on FDA vs CDC “approval” of COVID vaccine for low risk
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/05/20/covid-vaccine-elderly-high-risk-fda/
The reporting is confusing because it doesn’t describe what is meant by “approval”. I suspect it’s about whether “insurance companies are required to cover the cost of the shots with no out-of-pocket charges to consumers.”
There is limited benefit to current COVID vaccines for lower-risk people so this would be a cost consideration even if the CDC/FDA were not being run by lunatics.
AI was going to end radiologists image reading: “Predictions that A.I. will steal jobs often “underestimate the complexity of the work that people actually do”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/technology/ai-jobs-radiologists-mayo-clinic.html
It is really too early to know but even if radiologist image reading shrinks there is lots of other high value work to do.
Lessons for education predictions here.
Beyond the merely insane: tax bill full of perverse incentives
https://www.twincities.com/2025/05/18/real-world-economics-tax-bill-full-of-perverse-incentives/
The MAGA party is almost dumber than the GOP.
House budget: “cuts to Medicaid are currently scheduled not to hit until 2029, enabling the Republicans to avoid voter fury over them in the midterms and the 2028 election”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-18-2025
Rather than raise taxes or cut costs MAGA will cut taxes and cut *future* costs. If they win.
Neo Network Utility 1.1.4: “free network discovery, testing, and monitoring tool”
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/neo-network-utility-1-1-4/
“Free, 4.9 MB, macOS 13+”
AI-Generated Law – Schneier. A thoughtful take.
Colin Fraser on exploring LLM reasoning through puzzles.
https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/how-to-outwit-generative-ai
The thought/language debate is very complex. Ii suspect there is a lot of variation between people.
Former CNN insider says media execs can be shamed.
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/we-can-demand-better-from-the-media
I am a bit skeptical they have any capacity for shame but it’s worth a shot.
“latest generation of Ironwood pods, with 9,216 chips per pod, provides a total compute power of 42.5 exaflops”
https://thenewstack.io/google-ai-infrastructure-pm-on-new-tpus-liquid-cooling-and-more/
Were we supposed to be into exaflops in 2025? I have lost track.
Perplexity: Sonar-reasoning Pro system prompt.
It is amazing. Truly worth a scan. I’m saving a local copy to mine it for prompt ideas. (They need to add APA citation formatting.)
“after Kushner talked to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the two states imposed a blockade on Qatar, Qatar suddenly threw in the necessary cash.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-12-2025
Don’t blame Qatar, they are just playing by MAGA rules.
Schedule F and making the civil service serve Trump: “If judges will consistently accept facially absurd factual claims or facially absurd interpretations of statutes then there is no law”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-novel-concept-will-judges-start-enforcing-the-law-with-doge
Roe v Wade never made legal sense to me. The judicial interpretation of the 2nd amendment is absurd.
Now it’s going to new extremes. The GOP SCOTUS corruption has old roots.
“boys have always lagged girls in certain areas, yet there has been little focus on their issues, perhaps because men have dominated in so many spheres.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/upshot/boys-falling-behind-data.html
Girls are better at school work and better at modern employment settings. And women do not “marry down” (might change).
We will need boy-oriented school options (open to all), which implies charter schools.
“tariffs ultimately proved too painful to American businesses for Mr. Trump to sustain”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/business/economy/trump-trade-china-tariffs.html
Xi didn’t even break a sweat. “Trumpian” will become a synonym for incompetence beyond the bounds of imagination.
Trump-Musk tariff smokescreen “Dozens of Afrikaners who claim discrimination in their home country”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/11/world/africa/trump-white-south-african-refugees.html
Dozens. I was thinking they would get at least a hundred. This is just nonsense to obscure the Qatari bribe and the crypto corruption and the tariff humiliation. Focus.
“If you want your armed forces ready and able to defend the country against all enemies, foreign and domestic, it’s hard to imagine someone worse for the job than Pete Hegseth. If, however, you want to transform it into a personal army of uniformed thug
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/why-pete-hegseth-still-has-a-job/
Jedeed explains why Hegseth will not be fired.
“If we were still a serious country, Trump’s crypto corruption would lead to his immediate impeachment and removal from office.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/crypto-is-still-for-criming
We are 25y into being a broken nation. A place where Qatar sends its bribery budget.
(Alas, many Dems are crypto-corrupt. It’s not just the MAGA.)
M2 money supply: “figure for March 2025, is 40.7% above five years ago”
9/11. Lehman Bros. COVID. The US economy took at lot of hits before the MAGA took power.
“presidential library system offers quite a lot of opportunities for … graft”
https://musgrave.substack.com/p/everything-has-a-price
The more you look for America’s corruption the more you see.
Molly Jong-Fast on fleeting fame.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/molly-jong-fast-reflects-on-her-mothers-dementia
Daughter of fame writes about celebrity and transience: “Watching my mother’s failed metamorphosis back to normal made me a sort of fame hobbyist”
“AI Won’t Overtake Software Engineering”
https://timkellogg.me/blog/2025/05/10/ai-code-updated
AI coding: What works for Tim doesn’t work for others:
“I’m using a lot of hidden technical skills.
Yes, anyone can do it, but few will”
GenAI seems to work best for experts, and maybe only peculiar experts.
You will want to skip macOS 16.
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/05/11/last-week-on-my-mac-whos-afraid-of-changing-interface/
Oakley makes the case: macOS 16 will be a disaster. The tech doc example alone is persuasive.
“of the world’s nine nuclear powers, four — India, Pakistan, Russia, and Israel — are now at war.”
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-crisis-of-the-21st-century-is
A good time for Americans to vote for the most corrupt, delusional, and incompetent leaders of our history.
Google Ends Support for Early Nest Thermostats
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/04/29/google-ends-support-for-early-nest-thermostats/
They still work as fancy regular thermostats. My dumb home is unaffected.
Siracusa: “It’s time for new leadership at Apple”
http://hypercritical.co/2025/05/09/apple-turnover
I also want to see Cook go.
Trump admin secure messaging app copied chat logs to servers as plain text.
Installed by MDM so somewhere in MAGA land an admin thought this was good.
China readjusting estimates of US intelligence into new realm.
NK worker-spy test question: “How fat is Kim Jong Un?”
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/29/north_korea_worker_interview_questions/
Living in a state of fear. Forever.
Devon Technologies Word Services in macOS Sequoia: reenabling after migration
https://tech.kateva.org/2025/05/word-services-in-macos-sequoia.html
These are great time savers, but in a macOS migration I lost them. Turns out I had to reenable deep in the bowels of macOS settings.
macOS: “In the first few seconds following a double-click to run an app, the log can accumulate well over 25,000 entries”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/05/08/reducing-noise-by-searching-loguis-views/
And yet the log cannot tell us whether Spotlight has died indexing an obscure document.
It’s impressive anything works.
“putting historical knowledge back into the bottle after decades of reckoning with the nation’s racist history will be more difficult than the administration believes”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/us/politics/trump-censorship-black-history.html
The people who teach these topics are unlikely to obey.
“the Smithsonian issued a statement saying it would do no such thing.”
There is Streisand Effect potential here.
More on the snake-bit man’s once-in-a-billion-years antibody gift.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/whole-lotta-snakin-going
“Holy #$%#!, that’s some list”
“Maybe your issue has 80-20 support. But if it’s not what voters are voting on it’s irrelevant.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/into-the-wilds-of-democratic-navel-gazing-and-big-think
“fundamentally the job of an opposition is to oppose. Don’t overcomplicate it.”
Dropping out of the race – to look for another path
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/insider/mini-retirement-trend.html
“Death is coming either way …. We might as well take risks and see if we can make our lives better by trying something different.”
In the 70s we thought the future would include mixtures of work and education and redirection.
“the true cost of enshittification isn’t just a worse internet experience… It’s a worse society.”
https://www.persuasion.community/p/enshittification
It isn’t just Google search. It is widespread corruption in government and journalism. It is medicine failing to confront scientific fraud and fake journals. It is shooting the messengers rather than judging the message.
“In 102 pages, Howell meticulously analyzed Trump’s unconstitutional and tyrannical edict, striking it down in its entirety”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/putting-trumps-threats-in-writing
Courage, duty, integrity, wisdom. Some Americans still have what it takes.
A democracy, if you can keep it.
Singapore remains a one-party pseudo-democracy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/world/asia/singapore-election-pap-workers.html
Disappointing. Result underscores how hard it is to build and sustain democracy. Wealth and education are not enough.
“dual-state theory posits that authoritarianism can take hold in small pockets, even while the broader legal system appears to function more or less normally”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/world/trump-dual-state.html
Developed to describe Nazi era, applies well to MAGA era.