https://michaeldsellers.substack.com/p/maduros-slow-motion-two-hour-bloodless?triedRedirect=true
I wonder if Maduro has a pardon ahead.
Tag Archives: IFTTT
Flock AI-Enabled People tracking cameras.
The panopticon is the future. In SF stories surveillance-free zones emerge.
“Strix is a dissipative system that “lives on” interaction from me. It appears autonomous, but if you take me away, it’ll collapse.”
https://timkellogg.me/blog/2026/01/01/is-strix-alive
You are also a dissipative system.
2025: Willison‘s year in LLMs
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/31/the-year-in-llms/?ref=werd.io
It’s long. Impressive work.
eSIMs can transfer between phones on command.
https://techinch.com/blog/esim-is-less-scary-than-it-seems
Seems like a significant security risk. Necessary though; I’m surprised it seems to work.
Text, strings and Unicode: so very complex
https://eclecticlight.co/2026/01/03/text-strings-and-unicode/
It is amazing anything works.
“Karen Budd-Falen, the No. 3 at the Interior Department, didn’t disclose a $3.5 million water-rights contract between her husband and the developers of a Nevada mine”
Corruption is bipartisan, but utter shamelessness is MAGA
Neanderthal Discoveries 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/science/archaeology-neanderthals-genetics.html
The kissing studies included modern primates – “There was quite a lot about bonobo tonguing going on, and that wasn’t even the worst of it.”
Vaccines, esp Zoster, lower dementia and cardiovascular risks: “many infections are associated with the onset of dementia, both Alzheimer’s and vascular”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/health/vaccines-dementia-heart-elderly.html
COVID really drove this home because of the scale of simultaneous infections, but many suspected before. Many vital infections damage vessels and can involve the brain.
OTOH – extremely hard to study as most vaccine avoiders are not terribly bright.
Did less than 30% of ICE detainees in 2025 have criminal records? (Yes)
“Traffic and immigration offenses are the most common convictions among detainees.”
London Review of Books – What is Finance for?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/john-lanchester/for-every-winner-a-loser
“… total value of all the economic activity in the world is estimated at $105 trillion … value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity … $667 trillion. … in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless. It does nothing and adds no value. It is just one speculator betting against another…”
“more than 75% of middle-class households in the Twin Cities are able to afford necessities such as housing, food, transportation, child care and health care”
“Economists typically define the middle class as the middle 60% of earners.”
Our definition of “middle class” is so dumb it makes me despair.
“For a lot of our history, you could afford basic necessities — at least in terms of food, housing, child care — within that distribution,”
Ok, so getting closer to understanding. Still so slow…
Ancient Rome: An empire of slavery
https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/crixus-the-spartacus-rebellion-and
“gladiators were everywhere in Roman life”
Perhaps the greatest Roman skill was in controlling vast numbers of enslaved people. A culture of brutal cruelty was essential.
Year one of Trump – corruption, vengeance, cruelty, stupidity, incompetence, and greed.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-30-2025
Also the Mar-a-Lago to Epstein pipeline emerges.
The MAGA mob assault on an innocent student at Brown
https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-high-tech-lynching-of-mustapha
“the government of the United States of America is controlled by a mob led by the criminally insane and the pathologically unscrupulous”
Utter scum and all around bastards.
Gift cards are terrible: complex business, political, and corporate structures enable vast fraud
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/gift-card-accountability-sink/
Of course the unbanked get hit the hardest. Do not use them. Crypto may be less bad. Cash is better.
Zach W (SMBC) has a new book esp for 8-12y
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sawyer-lee-and-the-quest-to-just-stay-home
Great promo comic.
“In December 2023, a mountain lion roamed through Minneapolis’ Lowry Hill neighborhood. It also died after being hit by a car …”
Individual males roam from the west to the east. “there could be five or six mountain lions in the state at any one time … there is no evidence of any finding a mate and having kittens”
2025 LLM Year in Review: “we are getting very different entities in the intelligence space”
https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/year-in-review-2025/
Aliens with a human heritage. My childhood dream was to meet and study alien minds. Now it’s a retirement hobby.
But this is dumb: “human neural nets are optimized for survival of a tribe in the jungle”. An LLM would not make that mistake.
Hypertension updates for 2025
Readable by laypersons. Combo med approaches. Aldosterone/renin measurement standard.
China proposals to limit AI personal interactions
Ubiquitous surveillance is assumed.
AI/robotics and ancient sage David Brooks: “I promised to track my predictions made eight years ago today for 32 years”
https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2026-january-01/
“Deployable dexterity will remain pathetic compared to human hands beyond 2036. Without new types of mechanical systems walking humanoids will remain too unsafe to be in close proximity to real humans.”
Beyond SMBC and XKCD: Charlie Stross reviews webcomics.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/12/webtoons-revisited.html
Of course start with Zach and Randall, but Charles has more suggestions.
Stored (unpowered) SSDs are prone to data loss.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/26/ssds-not-safe-long-term-for-archives/
They are not a good archival solution.
Trump pivots to his last defenders — pseudo-Christian para-fascist gun-worshippers.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-27-2025
My wild guess is the combination of brain rot, Epstein, and realizing he is dying has made him a simple but sincere fundamentalist.
Patient and detailed explanation of the Tahoe UX screwup.
Rising costs: “the average life span for people with those disabilities has increased from 66 years in 1950 to 78 years in 2007”
Healthcare makes disability care much more costly. Health economics is weird.
Early dementia in Downs patients is a heartbreaking curse.
[toread] Trump on the island: “…passenger on at least eight flights between 1993 and 1996 … four flights on which Maxwell was also present”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-26-2025
Suspicion is Trump was once listed as a co-conspirator and that was squashed.
The technarchy: “the belief that they, and they alone, possess the long-term time horizon to avert existential risks to humanity”
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/on-monsters-men-and-time-horizons
William Gibson documented this in the early 80s.
Inevitable 2925 recap for MN is grim: “Amid layoffs and slumping sales, the company is encouraging its store workers to smile more.”
There have been much worse years. But definitely below average.
We were ready to eliminate humanity, but then …
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxwllqz1l0o
It’s frustrating. Every time we get close there’s another exception. The centuries add up.
Dissipative structures and avoiding LLM reasoning sinks with memory structures.
https://timkellogg.me/blog/2025/12/24/strix-dead-ends
Without memory there is no arrow of time. I think similar collapse occurs with humans who have anterograde amnesia
“Apple apparently designed a home-control device with smart Siri as its brain, and if there was no smart Siri, that product had to be put on hold.”
https://www.macworld.com/article/3019152
Apple’s Siri failure is public, but their other software quality failures are a bigger problem.
Rural MN sheriffs defy state to support ICE
Extreme Trumpists they also want the money.
Fighting corruption and fascism in 2025: a review of the heroes
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/remember-the-unsung-resistance-fighters
Too many to name individually. Keep fighting.
A non-technical attempt to explain 2025 LLM-based ai
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/12/a-non-technical-attempt-to-explain-2025.html
No math here and nothing about token selection and prediction. It may be nonsense or misleading. It is brief.
::target-text: “Safari, that means right clicking and selecting “Copy Link with Highlight” from the menu and getting a url that will highlight the text fragment when the page loads.”
https://webkit.org/blog/17628/target-text-an-easy-way-to-style-text-fragments/
This actually sounds useful!
Aaronson – declares the QC era is actually imminent
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9425
Likely good for simulation of quantum physics and chemistry and breaking crypto. Things will get quiet as QC starts to break crypto – for national security reasons.
Closing the trade deficit with tariffs would barely raise the share of US manufacturing employment.
I thought it would might have more effect. Nope.
1830s … white enslavers relied on religious justification for their hierarchical system that rested on white supremacy. God, they argued, had made Black Americans for enslavement and women for marriage…”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-21-2025
Christian Nationalism roots.
Sounds like Thiel: “For my part … I am well pleased with the established order of the universe. I see…subordination everywhere. And when I find the subordinate content…and recognizing his place…as that to which he properly belongs, I am content to leave him there.””
Bill C: “calls “on President Trump to direct Attorney General Bondi to immediately release any remaining materials referring to, mentioning, or containing a photograph of Bill Clinton.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-22-2025
As expected they will play for time. That has been a very successful strategy for Trump. The GOP understand well that American memory is shorter than an LLM’s context window.
“Rubio’s fantasy could lead the United States into a forever war in Venezuela”
https://gwynnedyer.com/2025/rubios-strategy-the-tail-wags-the-dog/
Rubio believes the road to Cuba, his family home, goes through Venezuela.
Thank you EU: “Apple and Google are implementing this functionality because the DMA requires services to offer effective data portability”
“anti-theft shortcut” … runs when your iPhone receives a specific text message…. it triggers a photo to be taken”
https://www.zdnet.com/article/find-lost-iphone-with-text-shortcut/
First interesting Shortcut I have heard of. Text message the triggering is interesting.
Musk and DOGE fraud destroyed services, increased the cost of government
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/us/politics/doge-musk-trump-analysis.html
“savings were an accounting mirage” You can’t get more incompetent than this. But Tesla will try.
“DOGE took credit for canceling the same Department of Energy grant twice, adding $500 million in duplicate savings.”
Fraud basically.
FBI expert explains how Patel’s venal stupidity compromised serial killer investigation.
https://prospect.org/2025/12/23/kash-patel-fbi-director-brown-university-shooting/
Usually political incompetents are smart enough to defer to the real experts, usually career bureaucrats under the political layer.
But Trump people are another level of stupid.
“The fact that Buttfield-Addison’s account has not yet been restored, despite the publicity and apparent escalation to Executive Relations, makes me think it can’t be restored”
https://tidbits.com/2025/12/17/compromised-apple-gift-card-leads-to-apple-account-lockout/
Apple is a decaying behemoth.
Hegseth probably used Posobiec to blackmail an antagonistic journalist
Effort failed this time. Others likely succeed.
Do not buy or use Apple gift cards. DEFINITELY not from a retail store.
https://tidbits.com/2025/12/18/compromised-apple-gift-card-saga-ends-well-but-risks-remain/
Do not do not do not. Just don’t. Please don’t.
Nazi America kills Venezuelans to remind the West how brutal and stupid we are.
https://gwynnedyer.com/2025/venezuela-performative-murder/
This is a forked country.