https://www.quantamagazine.org/are-strings-still-our-best-hope-for-a-theory-of-everything-20260323/
String Theory may be a player after all.
Tag Archives: IFTTT
Wyden: “secret law related to Section 702”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/sen-wyden-warns-of-another-section-702-abuse.html
NSA spies on us. No warrants.
US Senator: “a, nominee say things. In the committee that you know, the nominee knows, everybody in the room knows, are complete and utter bullshit”
https://www.contrariannews.org/p/which-cabinet-member-is-next-on-the
Yes, they aren’t stupid. They know the nominees are just bullshitting through their hearings. They ask the questions hoping it makes good TV. The awful thing is that the media plays along as though nominee hearings were actually for real. All about the clicks.
“The punch will never go away, and what we’ve done will never go away.” Sheldon compares America to an abusive husband assaulting their spouse.
“there is a fundamental conflict between the efficiency with which markets spread information and the incentives to acquire information.”
https://mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-simple-economic-paradox-wrecking
“… Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox … Important or valuable information can be costly to obtain or produce … information gets transmitted to the rest of the marketplace when the information producers can exploit a market opening … the more widely distributed information becomes in a marketplace, you’re likelier to lose your money if you keep investing in producing high-quality information. So everyone stops producing new information”
Meds to the brain by injecting them into the skull.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/right-through-skull
Next drug abuse frontier. But, medically, could be awesome.
Lowe strains to describe RFK’s peptide mania: “there are indeed a whole range of physical and medical effects to be found in these things”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ah-peptides-where-begin
He despairs by the end. There’s nothing to say really. It’s Darwin Awards every day now.
The regulatory burden: detailed example from a US startup.
https://rein.pk/over-regulation-is-doubling-the-cost
Regulatory ratchet is a deep problem.
New regulations are relatively easy to create and always benefit the creators in some way. It is a career ending move to remove or revise existing regulations.
Same problem Gov and industry but Gov has it worse.
HCR summarizes latest phase in the crisis: “Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who urged Trump to start the Iran war, has invested at least $2 billion in Kushner’s private equity firm.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-5-2026
Allegedly Trump came very close to ordering a “tactical” nuclear strike on NK in his first term.
“What migrates into silicon is not abstract reasoning but social intelligence in externalized form, encountering itself on a new substrate.”
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeg1895
Essay from researchers on intelligence and ai. Good description of “community of mind” emergent intelligence.
Which coup strategy will Trump try: “Some variant of terrorism is Trump’s best bet”
https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-next-coup-attempt
Trump will either leverage an actual foreign terrorist attack or create a false attack to stop midterms. Other strategies are much more challenging.
“It’s entirely possible that basically by this time Tuesday, America will have established itself as one of the world’s great villains”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/living-in-hell
Anyone who aided, supported, voted for, funded, enabled the GOP … you are responsible. This is on you.
Vulnerability Research Is Cooked: “You can’t design a better problem for an LLM agent than exploitation research”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/3/vulnerability-research-is-cooked/#atom-everything
Hope you have redundant offsite archived backups.
“2,208 deaths while homeless in Los Angeles in 2024”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-191031947
As American non-college income share declines the most vulnerable are pushed to the streets. Perhaps because support networks collapse. On the streets fentanyl use is arguably rational.
“Life Time is aiming for the high end of the K-shaped economy, a term describing America’s widening wealth gap”
When you look you see this everywhere. Much of it is the college-noncollege class gulf. What I call “mass disability”
“next thing I knew, Trump was getting up and moving to the far left … as far away from Bondi as possible”
https://www.contrariannews.org/p/i-was-there-for-the-trump-bondi-breakup
Bondi’s humiliation is our breakfast cheer. (He will try to do worse — but worse will accelerate his downfall.)
“Medicare-like health plans (sometimes referred to as the public option) would be available to everyone who wants such coverage. These alternatives would then compete against private plans.”
Dems start to imagine again.
VHA should be a part of any public option system.
What serious social engineering looks like – you don’t have a chance.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/3/supply-chain-social-engineering/
“I join a lot of meetings where I find myself needing to install Webex or Microsoft Teams or similar at the last moment and the time constraint means I always click “yes” to things as quickly as possible to make sure I don’t join late.”
“Hegseth has reworked the Chaplain Corps recently to limit the range of religious instruction available to military personnel.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-2-2026
Evangelicals will regret this.
Claude-built python app for tuning macOS Preview PDF highlights into a plaintext list
https://tech.kateva.org/2026/04/my-new-favorite-utility-claude-built.html
I like this app a lot. Turns my macOS Preview highlights into plaintext I dump into MindNode. With page refs and a header. It’s all ai generated, so I share the output and a general description. Code available on demand.
“There is a pervasive billionaire assumption that mainstream legacy journalism is “liberal,”
I wasn’t always a wealth tax guy.
“in a basic sense the current American right simply isn’t interested in news or journalism as most of us conceive it.”
Microsoft Xbox One Hacked: “instead of tinkering with the system rest pin(s) the hacker targeted the momentary collapse of the CPU voltage rail”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/microsoft-xbox-hacked.html
Technically impressive. Unclear economic impact but a great lesson.
Neal Metaverse Stephenson on the non-Metaverse: “Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles.”
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/my-prodigal-brainchild
And a retrospective from his time at Magic Leap. They were decades premature.
Private equity and the cliff: “2025, nearly 1 out of every 5 private equity asset sales was to a continuation fund”
Continuation funds are a scam to delay recognizing losses. Lots of detail in this important pub.
Miller’s Minneapolis strategy: “be sent to areas where DHS knew there would be a lot of protesters because he wanted to “force confrontations”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-30-2026
Miller deliberately set up the murders of Good and Pretti. In a just world he’d serve time in a Minnesota prison.
The failure of his operation to provoke riots is worth studying.
Public health in America: status 2026
https://rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/the-maha-morbidity-and-mortality-739
The lunatics continue their assault on multiple fronts.
“NASA is going to fly Artemis II based on vibes, hoping that whatever happened to the heat shield on Artemis I won’t get bad enough to harm the crew on Artemis”
Epstein: “The dark connector’s role is to make it easier for people of standing to move between their public obligations and their private desires …”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/opinion/epstein-elite-men.html?smid=bs-share
I have wondered how many other Epsteins there are.
Binance going down.
The NYT says Binance “missed” the crypto money funneled to Iran. By which they mean conspiracy. They are gonna get sued into oblivion.
“vendor’s chief executive shared a Singapore villa with a Chinese entrepreneur whose corporate office was placed on the U.S. blacklist.”
Trump admin won’t prosecute but others will.
AI glasses in China rented for exam cheating.
https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ai-glasses-cheating-privacy-boom/
I suspect proctors know they are being used … but they aren’t enforcing rules. That is curious.
“Photons, which are massless, could be made out of massive particles in de Sitter space.”
American salvage: root causes of the long collapse
https://notes.kateva.org/2026/03/american-salvage-root-causes-of-long.html
Automation / Globalization / AI? -> no middle-class bourgeois lifestyle for non-elite
Rural collapse (esp US)
Corruption (governmental, corporate, non-profit)
Wealth and power concentration and the oligarchy (Citizens United)
Collapse of journalism business model
Regulatory ratchet (career-ending to remove, path dependency)
American societal response to the rise of women
Capture of the GOP by the MAGA powered by LIV exploitation
“The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes, and loads JavaScript from some guy’s GitHub Pages”
https://blog.thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app
A perfect mirror.
Piketty: The state of America and lessons from its its broken democracy
https://thomaspiketty.wordpress.com/2026/03/10/militaristic-drift-admission-of-weakness/
“democracy must be continually reinvented and reconsidered in its institutional foundations, such as constitutions, electoral procedures, organization of parliamentary work, functioning of political parties, funding and governance of the media, and so on. Nothing should be taken for granted”
“The saddest thing about the current situation is the inability of France and Germany to agree on anything”
An OpenAI insider perspective on AI 2026
https://semaphore.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-at-openai
AGI 2029?
“post-training is where the next frontier of AI progress happens … Model personality is a reflection of the people who trained it. This is more literal than most realize.”
HCR reviews Trump’s project to rewrite American history
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-28-2026
Just another aspect of American collapse.
“By roughly 14,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer societies across Europe had discovered dogs”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/science/paleontology-humans-dogs-dna.html
I wonder if dogs played a key role protecting women against men.
“the dogs were more genetically similar than the humans were”
They passed between clans and tribes. Actual creation of dogs happened many times and likely is much older.
Check Time Machine APFS backups with (free) sThe Time Machine Mechanic, T2M2
https://eclecticlight.co/2026/01/08/check-time-machine-backups-in-macos-sequoia-and-tahoe/
For the 0.1% who do backup.
LLM agency: using a separate agent to monitor for dangerous behavior
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/24/auto-mode-for-claude-code/#atom-everything
“the classifier runs on Claude Sonnet 4.6, even if your main session uses a different model.”
Apple ai: “… mechanism for why semantic calibration emerges as a byproduct of next-token prediction …”
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/trained-on-tokens
The concept relationships presumably emerge from the token relationships?
Saudi Arabia’s Neom crash: “30-storey glass-and-steel building would hang from the arch”
https://ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-line/
Icon of our era.
“TurboQuant achieves perfect downstream results across all benchmarks while reducing the key value memory size by a factor of at least 6x. PolarQuant is also nearly loss-less for this task”
https://research.google/blog/turboquant-redefining-ai-efficiency-with-extreme-compression/
Certainly sounds like another jump in ai capability.
20y of mouse cloning: “These re-cloned mice appeared normal and had normal lifespans, but large structural and lethal mutations accumulated in their DNA with each generation”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69765-7
It took a long time to manifest as illness!
“According to the administration itself, there is only one objective: attack Iran until Trump feels like the war is over.”
https://www.firewalledmedia.com/p/why-were-really-in-iran-part-1
Jedeed does a great job of exposing the nexus of insanity in the War against Reason.
The case against ai “fast takeoff”
https://www.interconnects.ai/p/lossy-self-improvement
Unpredictable chaos develops over years, not weeks. That’s the optimistic case now.
“United Airlines is planning for $175 per barrel through the end of 2027”
https://no01.substack.com/p/march-19-21-god-is-a-comedian
Best I can tell it’s a pretty good description of the current state. A broken mix of effective war tech and mad king.
“Let’s keep his “Good, I’m glad he’s dead” post bookmarked for when Trump himself finally keels over”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/22/trump-glad
I just outlive Trump. I must …
“BSIs are a worse mess than RSRs were in Ventura … technology is still brilliant, but their current interface is shockingly flawed”
https://eclecticlight.co/2026/03/22/last-week-on-my-mac-brilliant-engineering-in-a-flawed-interface/
I hope LLMs turn out to be good at following basic UX principles. Because humans obviously cannot.
“The American Constitution had a crucial defect at its heart, he said: it based the government on the principle that humans were inherently equal.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-21-2026
Musk, Bezos, Thiel are there.
“Owens has placed her support for Kent’s decision to resign over the Iran War front and center in her ugly, relentless battle to elevate the antisemitic Catholic right as a righteous opponent of America’s alliance with Israel”
“disservice to stereotype us Singaporeans as oppressed, timid, politically apathetic digits … it would also be a mistake to assume that we’re free.”
https://adimagazine.com/articles/no-free-labor-for-authoritarians/
Singapore is a different dystopia
“experience is akin to being oppressed by the most insufferable middle manager you’ve met. They won’t beat you; they’ll just irritate you to death”