https://alexanderkustov.substack.com/p/academics-need-to-wake-up-on-ai
I think the denial is fading fast though.
Category Archives: share
“Carter is one of nearly 50 teens nationally who have died by suicide during a sextortion case”
https://www.startribune.com/sextortion-suicide-high-school-athletes-carter-bremseth/601538737
Support teaching about extortion and teach your children. Don’t keep guns at home.
Disappearing Generals in China and America – Dyer’s theory.
https://gwynnedyer.com/2026/the-curious-case-of-the-disappearing-generals/
We know of the purges, but we don’t know why. Dyer thinks the Chinese purge is because they are preparing for Iranian style mass killings to suppress unrest — even if that seems very unlikely to outsiders.
The American purges is presumed to be a contingency plan for something like that here.
Musk Moves Against the Russia: “SpaceX, the company that operates the Starlink network, then developed a whitelist of Ukrainian users”
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/02/elon-musk-ukraine-russia-starlink/686155/
“Ukrainians have advanced. In the first three weeks of February, they seized more than 300 square kilometers of land from the Russians,”
A Guide to the big 3 consumer and professional AIs: models, harnesses, tools, agents
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/a-guide-to-which-ai-to-use-in-the
Major change every 2w now
A single web page on an exotic topic will be trusted by most ai
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/02/poisoning-ai-training-data.html
“Claude …wasn’t fooled.”
Partly this reflects the poor state of the web.
Fukuyama on Iran and Israel.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/fukuyama-8
The free part of the transcript is quite good on both Israel and Iran.
Chaos is very Trump.
“Gulf Arab states eager to curb Iran’s power “have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-28-2026
Operation Epstein Fury is also a work for hire.
Caterpillars mimic ant communication to parasitize the nest
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/science/caterpillar-ant-language.html
“Once in the nest, either the caterpillars are fed by ants, or they eat the ants’ young.”
Block Lays off 40%: “absurd over-hiring in the last 5–10 years”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/27/block-layoffs
“AI” is just a convenient scapegoat.”
“mechano-antiviral response system” (MARS) may well be a type of innate immunity that we have been completely overlooking”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/feel-antiviral-vibrations-seriously
Massage therapy for viral infections is very 2026. From anyone but Lowe I’d ignore but …
Review of AI use in China’s state propaganda
https://toosimple.substack.com/p/ai-tell-story-well
Bari Weiss wants this.
“Anthropic is the only company currently integrated into classified systems (a legacy of their earlier contract with Palantir) and it would be annoying to integrate another company’s product”
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anthropic
Part of why DoD wanted a change to the contract. When Anthropic declined Hegseth testicles felt hurt.
“Is it really a good idea to source your killbot brains from an unwilling company which hates your guts? The Trump administration has a firm commitment to never think about AI safety in any way, but this still strikes me as a dubious policy.”
The history and technology of macOS system updates
https://eclecticlight.co/2026/02/28/explainer-macos-updates/
Apple seems positively bad at macOS software these days, but this work was impressive.
Anthropic v Trump: “using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties”
https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
OpenAI has indicated it will do the mass surveillance.
“once people are wedded to a strongman, they will cling to him ever more tightly as his behavior becomes more and more erratic.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-25-2026
“This loyalty is in part to demonstrate their own devotion to the cause, and in part to justify their own attacks on those the strongman has given them permission to hurt.”
In China: “Scale, low-cost talent, and in-house manufacturing account for most of BYD’s cost gap with Tesla.”
https://restofworld.org/2026/why-are-chinese-evs-cheaper-than-tesla/
“Chinese state subsidies account for just 5% of BYD’s $4,700 per-vehicle cost gap with Tesla”
The Subnational Levers Constraining ICE
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/a-federalism-bottleneck
There are many ways for both states and non-US businesses and governments to make MAGA brutality more expensive.
Released Epstein files omit 1980s rape of 14yo by Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/us/politics/trump-epstein-files.html
“alleged incident would have occurred in the mid-1980s when she was 13 to 15 years old, but they do not include any assessment by the F.B.I. about the credibility of her accusation”
“Justice Department had also not provided them to the Oversight Committee”
The standard lies Trump will tell
https://www.ms.now/opinion/trump-falsehoods-state-of-the-union-speech-fact-check
Bingo of course. From a fact checkers library.
The Evolution of Eyes: the first version was monocular
“In 1994 he and Susanne Pelger, a colleague at Lund, concluded that an image-forming eye could evolve in just a few hundred thousand years.”
Galleri blood test cancer detect: “total number of people diagnosed at stage 3 or stage 4 did not show any statistically significant reduction”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/early-cancer-detection-test-put-test
“Lots of reasonable and/or exciting ideas in medicine collapse when you put some weight on them”
One day something like Galleri might work, but for now everyone is skeptical.
Another anti-vaxxer quack forced out of CDC leadership.
Compared to RFK Bhattacharya is … well … not quite as crackbrained stupid. Just a regular blight on humanity.
Gruber: “since I’m skipping MacOS 26 Tahoe”
https://netnewswire.blog/2026/01/27/netnewswire-for-mac.html
It’s not just me.
Apple Report Card: “Apple just seems lost. This year, I want to highlight how unreliable Screen Time is”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/02/23/2025-six-colors-apple-report-card/
Tsai’s contribution. Apple’s software division needs a complete rebuild, which needs a new CEO.
“You can’t export your passkeys for offline storage and later reimport into the Passwords app.” Password app is now quite good, but not good enough.
“The language of Section 122 calls for a flat-rate tariff on everyone.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/attack-of-the-zombie-tariffs
“This means that nations Trump tried to punish … have just received a big break. Meanwhile nations that groveled to Trump, like the UK, have just learned that they humiliated themselves for nothing”
The death of the rationality assumption: “one of the most fundamental questions in post-Enlightenment philosophy, economics, psychology, and political science”
https://www.persuasion.community/p/janice-stein
As Kahneman et al showed, humans are only intermittently rational. I suspect LLMs are substantially more rational.
Dem AG prepare: “… for the administration to … confiscate ballots and voting machines, strip resources from the postal service …, send military members and immigration agents to polling locations…”
Trump will try anything and everything.
Trump admin trying to end global discussion of climate change.
The oligarchs in the Trump admin know the world is warming due to CO2 emissions, but they figure the gains to America outweigh the harms to the rest of the world. Especially if America expands to control Canada, Greenland, and the arctic. Climate engineering will take care of the needs of the empire if America warms too much.
CO2 mitigation measures are an unwanted distraction that may reduce the value of American oil.
Starliner astronaut stranding was a failure comparable to Challenger (class A).
“inadequate testing, proceeding with the flight when engineers did not fully understand earlier thruster malfunctions and inadequate oversight of Boeing by NASA.”
They still don’t understand the thruster problem. The reiteration of NASA’s confidence in Boeing suggests they wish they had another option.
Test for micro-DNA siogns of cancer in blood fails to meet 20% reduction goal
“The study’s goal was to show a 20 percent reduction in advanced cancers among those who got the test. That did not happen.”
The brief NYT review doesn’t discuss false positives. It’s likely that after a certain age we have a lot of cancer more or less lurking around. There’s no way this should get covered by insurance or medicare but that depends on bribes to Trump.
USB-C iPhones with hubs, keyboared, monitors, etc.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/iphone-usb-c-port-uses-beyond-charging/
External monitor and keyboard on USB-C hub to USB-C iPhone is appealing. It’s the kind of thing we thought the iPhone would do 10y ago.
Many Americans need a working computer on special occasions, but don’t own one. A USB-C monitor/hub targeted at computer-less iPhone users seems possible. (I’m guessing Android already does this?)
Gemini 3.1 Pro: “ambitious agentic workflows before we make it generally available soon”
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-3-1-pro/
Google Antigravity offers it.
Gemini 3.1 Pro: the pelican levels up.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/#atom-everything
Qualitatively better SVG illustrations.
“my real inbox was too huge and triggered compaction. During the compaction, it lost my original instruction”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/23/summer-yue/#atom-everything
ai compacts memory, forgets instruction to don’t actually delete things.
Neat error condition. (Victim was an expert so presumably had backups or didn’t care too much)
Red/green TDD – Agentic Engineering Patterns
https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/red-green-tdd/#atom-everything
Changing process to adapt to ai dev. “…”use test driven development, write the tests first, confirm that the tests fail before you implement the change that gets them to pass”.
“Build a Python function to extract headers from a markdown string. Use red/green TDD.”
FindMy for wallets – Nomad and other options.
The world was disappointed when Apple did nothing. I have a wallet FindMy that’s useful but I’ll try the Nomad
School choice and charter schools: “here in the Twin Cities that market freedom has yielded schools that are siloed by race”
Charter schools have many ways to discourage high cost students.
Smart geek: “I fell for a phishing attack and lost access to my X account.“
“I was in the middle of the reset-your-password dance with verification across different devices when the phishing mail came in.”
They play the odds.
“A financial crisis worse than that of 2007-09 is now possible, because of the ways markets have developed, and because the Federal Reserve let this happen.”
https://www.twincities.com/2026/02/22/real-world-economics-the-fed-of-old-and-of-today/
“We have crawled out on a rotten limb from which it is difficult to get down.”
An old school conservative moderate economist who is fiercely anti-Trump.
The oligarchy: “number of U.S. billionaires rose 85 percent between 2010 and 2023 … share of political contributions rose by 1700 percent.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/billionaires-gone-wild
“we have experienced a fundamental change in the way our society works. Everything … is under extreme threat from the tidal wave of billionaire influence”
It’s time to tax.
Failure of a MN rail project.
https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2026/02/the-regrettable-failure-of-northstar-commuter-rail/
The would may be changing too quickly for this kind of project.
Minnesota AG’s evidence portal collects reports of Federal assaults (ICE, CBP, etc)
Details on US Concentration Camps
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/inside-trumps-ice-concentration-camps
The campus violate ICE’s own standards. And the world’s.
US blockade of Cuba heading to March end of fuel.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/world/americas/cuba-oil-blockade-trump.html
Cuban government likely to negotiate a surrender. They have no choice. Illegal blockade of course.
How to Organize Safely in the Age of Surveillance
https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-organize-safely-in-the-age-of-surveillance/
I go for complete transparency myself, but a useful primer
“Why get rid of Objective-C” — an explainer.
https://inessential.com/2026/02/18/why-not-objective-c.html
Fun read for a non-dev.
“in my next post I’m going to talk about how I wrote some new code in Objective-C and loved it”
“hearing that a feature or app that you depend on is receiving attention in an OS update may provoke more fear than excitement”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/02/17/ios-27-rave-update-to-clean-up-code/
Several books could be written about how Apple lost the ability to code
iOS 26.4: Stolen Device Protection Enabled by Default
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/02/17/ios-26-4-stolen-device-protection-enabled-by-default/
Yikes! I would also prefer a passwords passphrase option. I will not touch this before 26.5 even though I will install 26 when .4 is out
Launching apps via Spotlight broken now?
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/02/18/searching-for-apps-with-spotlight/
I may skip Tahoe completely