https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/25/agentic-browser-security/
LLMs are built to obey.
Category Archives: share
“macOS 14 added a built-in /usr/bin/trash command”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/08/26/the-trash-command/
Faster than rm
“anyone who carries out corrupt or illegal orders for Trump cannot count on bureaucratic obscurity to shield them from political or legal accountability later”
https://newrepublic.com/article/199612/furious-trump-firing-fed-lisa-cook-may-backfire
Publish their names and deeds.
Pritzker: “betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-25-2025
A warning to the confederate states: “Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”
Encryption Backdoor in Military/Police Radios.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/08/encryption-backdoor-in-military-police-radios.html
Whoever made them was working for a government. Probably American.
Crypto banking and the bailouts to come: “in its own way, there is something genius about it”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/crypto-wants-to-bring-you-down-with
Stablecoin bank runs: “selling pressure could cause a collapse in Treasury bill prices, also bringing down other stablecoin issuers.”
Which would mean a bailout.
“American fascism looks like the president using armed military units from governors loyal to his regime to seize cities run by opposition political”
https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/america-tips-into-fascism-f51000e08e03254d
And the NYT saw no evil.
Measles outbreak contained: “Two children died, and many more were hospitalized, with over 90% unvaccinated”
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/covid-19-summer-wave-flying-flesh
Public health still survives.
Respect the Friend-Density Matrix: a software tool for choosing where to live
https://streets.mn/2025/08/08/respect-the-friend-density-matrix/
In Minneapolis our bicycle routes determine our homes.
Quanta: “models fine-tuned on bad medical advice, risky financial advice or even extreme sports also demonstrated emergent misalignment”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-ai-was-fed-sloppy-code-it-turned-into-something-evil-20250813/
I suspect something like this happens to many humans. The problem shows when “fine tuning” a built model, but once models have memory and learning they may turn nasty abruptly. (Or be able to tell they are changing?)
“AI does seem to separate good things from bad. It just doesn’t seem to have a preference.”
A rambling but insight filled take on the Russian invasion of Ukraine
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-with-phillips-obrien
“I just don’t think the Europeans have the capacity now to think for themselves.”
Trump allying with Putin, Ukraine developing new weapons, fly-by-wire drones to avoid countermeasures. As America self-destructs Ukraine likely to strike Russian infrastructure.
How the GOP became MAGA – Gingrich and the movement conservatives.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-23-2025
Superb reference. A longer essay would include how movement conservatives allied with anti-science religious fundamentalists. The role of religious belief is important in American fascism.
Is Peter Thiel is a religious crackpot obsessed with the antichrist.
https://www.thenerdreich.com/is-peter-thiel-the-antichrist-nyt-didnt-think-to-ask/
They are all doing too many psychedelics.
“AppleCare One cannot properly handle multiple user accounts in macOS, a limitation Apple acknowledges but has no timeline for fixing”
https://tidbits.com/2025/08/22/applecare-one-stumbles-over-multiple-macos-user-accounts/
Maybe Apple needs a reboot?
How to fund journalism: “the practice of receiving cash is common among Chinese-language journalists in New York”
“In China, it is common for domestic reporters to receive red envelopes with cash … companies there know not to give money to international reporters.”
MPLS George Floyd Square and the future of Chicago avenue.
https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-square-chicago-avenue-closure-pedestrian-plaza/601457413
I visited it recently. It is much smaller than I expected; there is a very fine coffee shop across from what is now a tourist attraction.
There is no rush to do anything. Chicago traffic is slower now which makes it a good bike avenue. I suspect status quo indefinitely.
Local news has best update on NG deployment to DC.
https://51st.news/national-guard-dc-faq/
The guardsman have jobs, family, school. They are not full-time military. They don’t do arrests and policing. They will get very bored and want to go home.
“boat launch at this location had been a very popular spot to discard unwanted vehicles since there was literally a pyramid of vehicles stacked atop one another in the river”
https://www.startribune.com/mn-submerged-vehicle-search-sartell-missing-man/601457641
Interesting view into police work. I live near that boat launch.
Late 25 Gemini query: “nine seconds of TV and … five drops of water”
https://thenewstack.io/google-says-the-median-gemini-prompt-uses-5-drops-of-water/
“A year ago, … energy usage was … 33x higher”
Likely to fall farther.
RFK at work: “Food and drug facility inspectors are having to go to the store and buy supplies on their own dime so they can take swab samples to test for pathogens.”
https://projects.propublica.org/federal-health-worker-cuts-rfk-trump-administration/
America has a stupidity addiction.
Obama to Dem establishment – you really are snowflakes (July 15)
” … particular disdain for law firms that he said had been willing to “set aside the law” … because they might lose a few clients and might not be able to finish that kitchen rehab at their Hampton house.”
Also true …
“Obama has spent much of his post-presidential life producing movies, documentaries and podcasts while building a beachfront compound in Hawaii and playing golf on Martha’s Vineyard.”
“a lot of these organisms just don’t experience enough energy at a rate fast enough to ever appreciably undergo cell division”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-pursuit-of-life-where-it-seems-unimaginable-20250820/
Microbes that breathe iron.
Also, I bet she does CrossFit.
MN Sen Klobuchar on an X deep fake: “heard my voice … spewing a vulgar and absurd critique of an ad campaign for jeans featuring Sydney Sweeney”
https://www.startribune.com/amy-klobuchar-what-i-didnt-say-about-sydney-sweeney/601458280
“X refused to take it down or label it”
The continued popularity of X Is a very grim sign for America.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei 5m ago: “in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/08/20/claim-chowder-amodei
Or Earth may be sterilized by a gamma ray burst.
“If Preview saves a mutilated PDF, you should be able to recover the previous version of that file using Revisionist or Versatility.”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/08/14/inside-pdf-annotations/
I wish EPUB had been more successful.
Why Alaska debacle ended early: “A high-stakes meeting with principals about a very real situation might have been too much for him to manage for a full day”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-17-2025
Trump is failing fast. Vance knife collection at peak sharpness.
30y of JavaScript – a brief history.
SpotTest 1.0 for diagnosing Spotlight problems – The Eclectic Light Company
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/08/18/spottest-1-0-will-help-you-diagnose-spotlight-problems/
“If you have added your own files to the test folder, they will be included”
I have a lot of weird old file types I can test against.
Sematic web, RDF, OWL – and modern AI agents.
https://thenewstack.io/ai-agents-are-finally-delivering-on-the-semantic-webs-promise/
I really liked RDF and even RDFS/OWL. I hope approach of “just enough ontology/formal knowledge representation” works for agentic ai.
Badminton physics: “shuttlecocks can achieve top speeds of more than 300 mph”
‘Parasite’ backstory of Middle-Class Failure in SK: “The massive increase in the number of chicken joints was a direct result of the 1997 Asian financial crisis”
We need new ways to measure economies. Societies cannot handle these rapid cycles.
Vance/Musk pronatalists: “the age of straight-up, populist MAGA is ending … will emerge a tech-adjacent, anti-woke New Right”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-musk-ai-pronatalists-collins-b2777577.html
MAGA, the white tech pronatalists, and the religious fundamentalists have been surprisingly cooperative. All contending for control of a desperate and demented president.
“Simone was once the managing director of Dialog, a secret society co-run by the billionaire PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel.”
The story gets grimmer the more you read.
State of the economy before the data goes MAGA: “Half of all consumer spending is coming from the top 10 percent”
https://prospect.org/economy/2025-08-19-what-us-economy-really-looks-like/
Concise with solid numbers.
Stock buybacks soaring – an indicator of uncertainty. Trump’s crazed lunges having an effect.
Trump’s abuse will damage the US military.
“… a vengeful, partisan deployment to American streets … risks straining the social compact that binds a democracy to its military.”
Trump is using a screwdriver as a hammer.
AI Aug 2025: Apocalypse deferred – but Letta/Void is still going to surprise
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/08/ai-aug-2025-apocalypse-deferred-but.html
The good news is no AGI on the near term horizon. We have a few years still I hope. In the meantime, something like Letta/Void is going to be a part of your life.
Kakistocracy: “our current leadership, with smiles on their faces, will kill many, many more – disproportionately children, mind you – from the comfort of their own offices.”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/kakistocracy
Disgust for the RFK and his soulless braindead pseudo-science bastards Prasad and Bhattacharya.
Derek Lowe writes on science as an endeavor: “it’s important to never lose sight of its fundamental strangeness”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/praise-weirdness
It’s a longer essay that covers my own thoughts fairly closely. Magic and religion, by comparison, are a much better fit to human cognition and psychology.
Science would never happen if religion made useful predictions.
“J.D. Vance appears to have been distancing himself from Trump and the administration by taking repeated vacations”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-11-2025
Trump needs him for the pardons, but Trump’s dementia keeps getting in the way.
Lithium Deficiency and Alzheimer’s Disease: “lithium orotate supplementation in the 3xTg mutant mice almost completely prevented amyloid plaque formation and accumulation of phosphorylated tau in their brains”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/lithium-deficiency-and-alzheimer-s-disease
Derek Lowe is … impressed. So now I am too. It is so weird …
“Trump says the trusted numbers can’t be trusted, so he creates a situation where everyone knows the numbers can’t be trusted”
https://www.twincities.com/2025/08/10/real-world-economics-in-trump-we-trust-at-our-own-peril/
The GOP is good with this.
Vance keeps Epstein story alive: “it’s hard to imagine any other angle Vance could have chosen that would have poured more fuel on that particular dumpster fire.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-10-2025
I’m sure Trump trusts Vance completely.
“DHS appears to have morphed into a brutal, lawless gang of street thugs reminiscent of dictatorial shock troops in other autocratic regimes.”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/dhs-is-a-menace
As anticipated. If there is an American democracy one day then DHS will be eliminated.
Trump’s economist: “even among dishonest right-wing hacks Moore stands out for his pathological inability to get numbers and facts right”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-political-economy-of-incompetence
Drain the swamp and fill the sewer.
“you never know when a competent economist, especially one with a good professional reputation, might balk at being asked to say ridiculous things.”
RFK has similar problem with staff.
Geriatric CrossFit Tips – 2025 Update
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/08/geriatric-crossfit-tips-2025-update.html
The delayed muscle response is remarkable. Seven tips.
AI as the great filter – Zach/Bea comic
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fermi
For 25y I’ve assumed the great filter was AGI
“AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet”
https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discontinued
Press release should have been grander.
We age slowly until 50s then we age quickly.
https://www.aol.com/study-finds-turning-point-body-111100342.html
Back in the 90s I asked about aging being bursty. Back then it was a novel idea. I wasn’t the only one to wonder.
A defense of Tim Cook’s groveling – with copious details.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/gold_frankincense_and_silicon
America was getting more corrupt, but GOP-SCOTUS and GOP-MAGA took it to warp speed. In the absence of law there is only greed and a mad king.
Microglial purging and replacement by bone marrow cells for lethal microglial disorder.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/microglia-rescue
This is extreme medicine for a horrible hopeless disease. Analogous in its ambition to early heart transplant (which took years to be valuable)
Sequoia Disk Utility Bug: “Erase Process Has Failed”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/08/06/disk-utility-erase-process-has-failed/
Tsai: “workaround is to quit and relaunch Disk Utility”
(In comments – grant Disk Utility Full Disk Access.