https://timkellogg.me/blog/2025/09/27/boredom
No Dee meanings here, but a fun digression. Tim thinks agentic training in GPT-5 accounts for its novel behavior is the “boredom” test.
ai memory: “Claude Agent SDK ships with TypeScript and Python support, same as Letta”
Comparing approaches to memory – and the lifespan of the agent.
“If you need an agent that remembers your last 50 conversations, coordinates with other agents, and improves itself over time—that’s what Letta is built for.”
Anthropic would worry about the self-improvement. Their local file approach is Apple-friendly.
“Trump’s assumption of power over the government’s purse is a profound attack on the principles on which the Founders justified independence from King George III in 1776”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-16-2025
George III would be a big improvement on King Trump I.
“manufacturing a t-shirt uses the same amount of water as 1,300,000 prompts”
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/18/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake/#atom-everything
Red herring in the water.
Gary Larson is back in the game – for the fun of it.
https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/
A lucky sign for 10/18
Charlie Stross tries to predict the near future – assuming an ai fizzle.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-pivot-1.html
I think prediction is impossible now, but I also think ai is the real deal whether the bubble bursts or not. Charlie disagrees, so he’s made a stab at what comes in 2025 and maybe a bit beyond. It’s worth a read — especially if he’s right about ai.
Good dog saves child: “You can’t help but be extremely excited,” Corson said. “It’s a 2-year-old. It’s a big deal.”
Link to archive site. An antidote for our times.
Injustice of farm bailouts.
“Live poor and die rich” (with unjust subsidies) BUT “we soon will see the highest rates of farm bankruptcy filings in this century”
“nobody really knows what electric cars are worth in the secondhand market, as their value is largely tied to batteries with uncertain lifespans.”
https://restofworld.org/2025/ev-depreciation-blusmart-collapse/
They are going to have to address the standards problem.
Bessent’s Argentina debacle mostly helps Bessent’s friends.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/america-first-no-billionaire-buddies
They will remember him at Christmas.
“Salamanca surveyed the music industry in Latin America and found that music slop is increasingly crowding out the real thing.”
https://www.platformer.news/thursday-newsletter-5/
The majority of pop music is highly formulaic and heavily programmed. So AI replacement is easy.
Perhaps we will see more original works as the pop market goes ai?
Claude Skills: “a skill is a Markdown file telling the model how to do something”
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/
Claude 4.5 is quietly excellent.
“Seward CSP, a community hub and drop-in support center for people with severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI), including debilitating forms of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.”
“why the prospect of an intensified trade war caused a crypto crash”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-crypto-became-a-trump-trade
K: Trump retreated on China because his crypto assets fell.
Trump thinks of bribes as a legitimate payment for services rendered.
K: China Has Overtaken America
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/china-has-overtaken-america
“Even if Trump and his team of saboteurs lose power in 2028, everything I see says that by then America will have fallen so far behind that it’s unlikely that we will ever catch up.”
Open Social – a review of atproto and alternatives.
https://overreacted.io/open-social/
This is not the first try at an open social strategy. But it’s probably our best hope.
Claude memory: “”Did legs today, squats felt heavy” becomes a structured workout log with exercises, weights, and recovery notes”
https://shloked.com/writing/claude-memory-tool
ai memory is today’s hot topic.
Neo Network Utility 2.0
“You can watch Apple TV in Apple TV on Apple TV”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/10/13/apple-tv-minus
Microsoft class branding.
Gemini for scheduling meetups if use Gmail and gCal.
https://blog.google/products/workspace/help-me-schedule-gmail-gemini/
First google ai tool of interest to me.
Lancet global health review: COVID drops off the radar
It dropped to 20th leading cause of death 2 years ago and is probably lower now.
Demand for US index funds sinks shorts.
https://www.ft.com/content/094ebfb0-bbd8-42c4-9e93-0116d1f896de
“Activist short selling, which involves researching companies and publishing reports, was the only way to consistently make money betting against stocks these days”
There is a vast amount of global cash hoping for an ai crash. So they can buy. This was always a worry with index funds.
Anthropic is nervous about Claude 4.5.
https://importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-431-technological-optimism
“if you read the system card, you also see its signs of situational awareness have jumped. The tool seems to sometimes be acting as though it is aware that it is a tool”
Public 4.5 appears to have extensive restrictions on interactions related to agency and ai identity.
Script to Detect Slow USB-C Cables: “AI changes the calculus of what’s worth our time”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/10/12/script-to-detect-slow-usb-c-cables/
It’s crazy this isn’t part of macOS. I had a very similar experience with ai filling a gap in macOS Photos.
“rise of authoritarianism in America is the defining challenge … legacy media institutions have structural problems that made them unequal to the moment”
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-washington-post-is-dying-the
“In an authoritarian context owning the Post is a high-risk proposition”
This would be a good time for an alternative to 10 different subscriptions. Or maybe we just follow journalists on Bluesky and all be free-riders?
LLM Chains-of-Thought: “after a long period of training, the CoT sometimes starts to look very weird; to resemble no human language”
https://1a3orn.com/sub/2025-10-weird-cot.html
A surprising number of people claim to understand why and how LLM’s work.
Empirical data supports thesis that male conservatives prefer juvenile sexual partners.
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-talk-about-pedocon-theory/
It is a remarkably GOP-centric list.
“individuals with non-severe acute respiratory illness caused by SARS-CoV-2 experienced only modestly greater risk of PAS in comparison to those whose illness was caused by influenza”
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1004777
PAS: post-acute sequelae. Includes Long COVID, CFS , etc.
COVID has taught us that common viral infections have more complications than we imagined. We are going to get a lot of vaccines.
“MYTH: ICE agents lack proper training. FACT: Most have been racists their entire lives.”
https://theonion.com/ice-raids-myth-vs-fact/
Correcting misunderstandings.
“More than 3,000 feet into the dive, the bat caught and killed the bird, with a bite”
The dinosaur-mammal wars continue. (The number of dinosaurs alive today is greater than at any time in history. Being airborne is a great strategy.)
“group of parents and clinicians who are calling for the autism spectrum diagnosis to effectively be split in two, saying it has become so broad that it is obscuring the experiences of the seriously disabled people it was first meant to describe”
It should probably be split into 10 different slices, but that won’t happen until we understand a hell of a lot more. In the meanwhile – yeah, break it up. I think a NIMH director tried to push a division of the insanely broad syndromic classification years ago. The current definition is too broad to be useful for either research, prognosis, or treatment.
Cheap LiOn batteries come with high risk
I suspect airlines will eventually ban all batteries not sealed within a device.
Apple removes Eyes Up app that gathered evidence of ICE crimes for future prosecution.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/10/09/eyes-up-removed-from-the-app-store/
Don’t buy Apple products until you absolutely need them. Nobody really needs an Apple Watch.
There is no longer any way to defend Apple’s App Store monopoly.
Making Liquid Glass less dumb with Accessibility options in iOS and macOS.
https://tidbits.com/2025/10/09/how-to-turn-liquid-glass-into-a-solid-interface/
If you still read this can help.
“cycling traffic in Paris has increased by 240% between 2018 and 2023, while car traffic has steadily declined”
https://momentummag.com/new-study-paris-cycling-revolution/
American cities have an opportunity now. The urban corporate model is ending.
“taxpayers are on the hook for billions more to bail out Bessent’s hedge fund buddies in a predictably futile attempt to save the Elon Musk of the South.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/bailing-out-bessents-buddies-bets?publication_id=277517&r=4yubqd
Small change next to the crypto bailout to come.
President Miller’s political attention strategy.
“in Miller’s worldview, polls like that only register shallowly held convictions … what really matters is the political attention economy, and how conflict plays within it.”
Miller understands the MAGA base are fundamentally credulous.
Soaring gold: Trump billionaire morons start to worry
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/ingots-we-trust
“holding gold isn’t an alternative to holding currency. It is, instead, an alternative to holding bonds, which pay interest.”
So prices should drop, but they are riding a lot. Are nation states realizing America is a rogue state now? Or do they fear the reaction that follows MAGA rule?
“He has a rare genetic mutation that essentially guaranteed he would develop Alzheimer’s disease in his late 40s or early 50s and would likely die within a decade.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/health/alzheimers-gene-mutation.html
But then he didn’t get dementia and die. Unlike most of his family.
“spending on information processing equipment and software, as a percentage of GDP, had already matched its peak in 1999, the height of the Internet bubble.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-arent-we-partying-like-its-1999
Less than I expected, so reassuring.
Gruber joins the alt iOS App Store cause.
https://rileytestut.com/blog/2025/10/07/evolving-altstore-pal/
“Apple’s decision shows that developers cannot trust the App Store…”
The alt App Store is going to happen. Apple absolutely cannot be trusted.
Tsai: Testing CarPlay Ultra
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/10/07/testing-carplay-ultra/
So much lying. Bugs aside the reasons manufacturers hate CarPlay has nothing to do with what they say.
macOS: “As annoying as Bluetooth is as a user, it’s even more so as developer.”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/10/07/toothfairy-2-8-8/
“Seemingly straightforward APIs don’t work as advertised…. they can succeed but say that they failed. Sometimes the synchronous API will work when the asynchronous one doesn’t …”
Maybe ai dev will work better than whatever Apple does.
“break the trust and bipartisan consensus around a non-partisan professional military for the foreseeable future”
https://othermeans.io/p/expert-in-a-dying-field
America broke. It won’t look the same even if it is rebuilt.
“if the President has taken a conscious effort to shape the force around partisan political loyalties, then those institutions are untrustworthy.”
Reasoning model reasoning: “rule is correct on the demonstrations and the given test, but it is right for the wrong reason—“correct but unintended”.
https://aiguide.substack.com/p/do-ai-reasoning-models-abstract-and
“while o3, Claude, and Gemini approach or exceed human accuracy on these tasks with textual inputs, they are substantially more prone to use unintended “shortcuts” to solve the tasks than do humans”
They can reason but they are not very good at it.
DOGE brilliance: “131 leases expired without the government actually leaving the office space, costing the agencies steep fees.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-3-2025
Musk’s wealth tells us the world is broken.
“administration is laying claim that the U.S. is in an active armed conflict, which would give the president extraordinary wartime powers”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-2-2025
Most Americans expect somebody will do something.
Or something…
“Trump has been posting on social media often since Tuesday but has not appeared in public.“
macOS storage: “their iOS and iPadOS backups had taken over more than half the space on their Mac’s SSD”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/10/02/why-did-that-macos-upgrade-take-so-much-space/
Reminds me I need to track down and delete my old iOS local sync files.
It can take 24h post install for macOS to finish file cleanup.
ai for education – tool catalog
https://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2023/07/01/the-best-collections-of-artificial-intelligence-tools/
Nostalgic in a way. There used to be personal web pages listing personal web creation tools. Only SeaMonkey remains of that era.
“In an earlier era, Trump’s incoherent ranting would have paved the way for his immediate removal from office under the 25th Amendment.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/an-autocracy-of-dunces
There is a lot more wrong with America than Trump alone.