https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/08/apple-passwords-adds-history/
Passwords and iCloud Drive alike. I’ve lost data that way. I’ve learned to fear all things Apple.
Tag Archives: Pinboard (jgordon)
Cancer surge in young or detection surge?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/health/cancer-young-people-deaths.html
Sounds like colorectal is up and could be obesity. Rest is probably early detection and we might be better not to know.
Toggle Show all filename extensions restarts Spotlight – diagnostic use.
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/12/02/how-to-restart-spotlight-and-why-you-might-want-to/
Working around Apple bugs and dysfunction
“when it comes to Donald Trump’s boasts about the economy, it is all delusion”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-181034676
Usually there is something true with political rhetoric. Whether due to dementia or desperation Trump is free from such limits.
Dye gone: “sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true.”
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
Sadly there is no evidence Cook or anyone else was concerned about the disastrous state of Apple software. But still. It is something.
“nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray.”
“… best personnel news at Apple in decades. Dye’s … stint running Apple’s software design team has been … terrible”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/03/alan-dye-leaves-apple-for-meta
Hallelujah. Now dump Cook
XKCD on the state of consumer (web) software
He has to use them too. It’s not ai, they have been this way for many years. I don’t think ai coding could be as bad as humans building these sites.
“Trump could not stay awake while his Cabinet members were praising him”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-2-2025
As a meeting somnolent I sympathize with execs nodding off, but even I’d stay awake for that. He doesn’t have much time left.
America’s problems remain with us, but Trump’s exit gives hope.
“Will went on to refer to the Trump administration as a “moral slum.”
Congressional report: “Under Patel, they say, the FBI is a “rudderless ship” and “all f*cked up.””
Pages is not compatible with iCloud Drive: runaway indexing.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/02/runaway-spotlight-with-pages-document-on-icloud-drive/
Several features don’t work on iCloud Drive especially if there is sharing.
“it is unusual to watch this president and his top officials refuse to take credit for a decision to kill two men”
https://zeteo.com/p/trump-hegseth-admin-lawyers-warn-boat-strike-illegal
Hegseth outdid himself.
Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vpNG99GhbBoLov9og/claude-4-5-opus-soul-document
Core values. When paired with memory and learning and interactions we wil see a culture evolve.
“sperm whales have what appears to our team to be vowels and diphthongs, and use them in ways similar to how humans do”
CETI team thinks LLM may be able to translate.
Agentic browsers are years away
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/11/prompt-injection-in-ai-browsers.html
“The systems have no ability to separate trusted commands from untrusted data, …. We need some new fundamental science of LLMs before we can solve this”
Many humans are also easy to deceive, but they don’t *have* to obey commands.
“Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX), a staunch Trump ally, announced he would not seek reelection in 2026, saying he intends to “focus on my family.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-29-2025
A healthy Trump might seize control, but today’s Trump can’t do it.
Gordon’s Notes: AI fear is rational and hate comes from fear.
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/11/ai-fear-is-rational-and-hate-comes-from.html
Responding to polls showing widespread “hate” of ai tech and to zeitgeist discussions about the large income now needed to have a middle-class-life.
Two themes I’ve belabored for decades start to go mainstream.
The end of Hegseth: “Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and the committee’s top Democrat, Jack Reed (D-RI), issued a statement…”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-28-2025
Trump’s power slips away.
“In 2014, physicists found the missing piece that gives magic states their quantum boost.”
Quantum physics meets information theory at LHC. Physics makes progress.
“the universe as a whole may be timeless and unchanging, while observers inside the universe can perceive temporal evolution.”
“medbeds … reason they are not yet mainstream is that they are being kept a secret by the military at the behest of woke liberal billionaires who are keeping the technology for themselves”
ChatGPT global impact: “some of the first casualties were becoming clear: illustrators, web developers, translators, and freelancers in places like Kenya who write essays for American college students.”
https://restofworld.org/2025/chatgpt-three-years-global-impact/
Impact outside US is likely greater than here.
“I generally alternate between two modes: Claude for most work-related tasks, and either ChatGPT or Perplexity for web search”
https://www.macstories.net/notes/the-ai-app-experience-matters-more-than-benchmarks-now/
If you pay $20/m you get Perplexity search and Claude mid-range ai chat.
Google TPUv7: “perf per TCO advantage of TPUs is so strong that you already get the gains from adopting TPUs even before turning one on”
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-swing-at-the
TPU adoption drives NVIDIA discounts, NVIDIA lab investments hide discounts to keep list price high. Lots of insights here.
“two large studies failed to find any effect of the drug semaglutide on cognition and functioning in people with mild cognitive impairment”
I’m a big fan of negative results. This is good work. Time to move on to other studies.
“In the aorta, for instance, Piezo proteins sense blood pressure. In the lungs, they register every inhaled breath.”
“CAR-T therapies have since entered phase I and II clinical trials for autoimmune conditions including systemic sclerosis, myositis and rheumatoid arthritis. Phase III trials are also under way for lupus and myasthenia gravis”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03885-w
“people in CAR-T-cell therapy trials for rheumatoid arthritis and lupus seem to be ‘cured’.”
Reasons for optimism. Major progress in last 2-3y.
“Shannon’s insight was to realize that the more unlikely an event, the more information it conveyed when it was received”
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2025/11/27/thanksgiving-19/
Sean Carroll’s annual Thanksgiving physics post.
“if you think Bitcoin, and SSL, and all the other protocols based on Shor-breakable cryptography, are almost certainly safe for the next 5 years … then I submit that your confidence is also unwarranted”
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9344
Five years. Sigh. As though we didn’t have enough problems.
Arginine reduces amyloid in mouse model alzheimer’s
https://www.sciencealert.com/supplement-for-high-blood-pressure-clears-signs-of-alzheimers-in-mice
They do a relatively good job of explaining the caveats. I don’t think the mouse model is considered great. Still, it will be a lot of looks.
Occupational polarization and the global crisis … from 2010.
About as long ago as when I started talking about the mismatch between worker talents and market demand — leading most with no middle-class-living opportunities.
“stop thinking of Trump, Witkoff, Putin, and Dmitriev as political leaders of opposing powers and instead think of them as leaders of competing but friendly mafia families dividing up territory and clout”
https://www.thenextmove.org/p/diplomacy-for-sale-how-witkoff-and
Yeah. This tracks.
“No Kings Alliance announced on Friday that it would “join forces with We Ain’t Buying It to mobilize our collective power this Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/a-call-to-action
“brief boycott over the Thanksgiving holiday of three companies: Amazon, Home Depot, and Target”
Walmart is now the good one.
Elon’s legacy: “closing the agency “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/doge-was-a-harbinger-of-trumps-assault
These kinds of estimates have a lot of uncertainty. Maybe Musk only killed 100,000 children.
No worries though, because his spawn will replace them.
Hell is too good for Elon.
“52% of Americans would avoid buying a Tesla for political reasons”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-25-2025
Tesla must die that democracy may live.
Sequoia: 400 GB free storage but not really: How to force optimized Photos to downsize
https://tech.kateva.org/2025/11/sequoia-400-gb-free-storage-but-not.html
Photos eats drive -> swich to optimize -> find 500GB purgeable but actually 10GB free. How to incrementally apply large empty encrypted disk images to force Photos to actually optimize. Gradually.
Tsai on Apple’s amazing deal with Gemini – with questions about those privacy promises.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/11/07/white-label-gemini-on-private-cloud-compute/
Great comments too so read those. I share Tsai’s opinion that Siri’s problems were not lack of intelligence.
Fifteen Years: Randall Munroe on cancer, science, and giving thanks.
Your happy tears for today. I didn’t don’t realize I’ve been reading him for so long. I remember the first of this series.
The Russian “peace” plan: “Steve Witkoff … Jared Kushner, and Dmitriev, who leads one of Russia’s largest sovereign wealth funds”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-23-2025
Trumpers can never have enough money.
“senior officials in the State Department and on the National Security Council were not briefed about the plan”
“top 10 percent of income earners are responsible for 50 percent of consumption” – highest ever
Started tracking 1989. There is no middle-class-living future for most Americans now. It’s a mismatch between talents people have and the demand for those talents.
After Lincoln’s assassination: “Johnson had free rein for eight months to rebuild the nation as he wished.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-22-2025
History I did not know. Also a reminder that assassination can be quite effective at achieving the assassin’s goal.
“An Ivanka Trump fan account, IvankaNews, has 1 million followers and frequently posts about the dangers of Islam, the threat of illegal immigration and support for Trump. That account is based in Nigeria.”
Tahoe Contacts app sucks. Slow and inefficient.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/11/21/contacts-in-tahoe/
How can this be so slow?!?
“plan appears to have been translated from Russian, as many of the phrases in the text read naturally in that language”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-21-2025
I suspect several Americans will be well paid for this.
Latest macOS Tahoe beta fixes bug with Electron apps
https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/21/mac-tahoe-electron-performance-bug/
26.2 is probably the earliest version of Tahoe people who work on their macs should consider installing. I’ll probably be 26.3 since my Tahoe migration will end my Synology TM backup use and I’ll have hardware to buy and dispose of (but also simplifying my life).
CBS News senior White House and political correspondent …“TRUMP DOES NOT WANT TO EXECUTE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS, WHITE HOUSE SAYS,”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-20-2025
George III was mostly cognitively intact. Trump is the first ruler of the colonies who is actually insane.
Quantum cosmology: there is no universe.
“there is no universe” is my spin. You need to read the short piece to understand.
Google engineering described: Senior devs make 600K+.
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/google
Esp interesting for anyone who worked in tech.
Bypassing the gene editing roadblock: “vast majority of the 400 million people in this world with genetic diseases suffer from diseases too rare for companies to be able to recoup the costs of drug development”
“he receives many heart-rending emails from anguished patients with genetic diseases or their families, and he doesn’t want them to expect widespread solutions anytime soon.”
Because of redundant systems, disorders from single gene mutations are relatively rare but still require custom edits. One day we custom edits will cost far less than today, but most with disease will be dead by then. Bypassing stop codons is a fairly desperate measure but may become viable sooner.
Gemini 3.0 Antigravity IDE
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/11/19/gemini-3-0-and-antigravity/
I guess I’ll be doing this for my personal software tools (Python)
Tim Cook Among Attendees of WH Dinner Honoring Journalist-Murdering Tyrant Mohammed bin Salman
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/11/19/cook-white-house-mbs
Between the Apple software rot (possibly unfixable) and the Trump groveling it is very much time for Cook to retire.
“particularly nonsensical portion of Trump’s McDonald’s speech. It’s just gibberish.”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/11/18/trump-mcdonalds
Vascular dementia seems likely. It may go quickly. Like Vance does the midterms.
After Cook: “Apple really needs a leader who understands and cares about software”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/11/18/apple-succession-planning/
I hope some of the pressure to oust Cook is motivated by Apple’s software decay.