https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-4-2026

“at least one of the missing files contains allegations that Trump sexually assaulted a thirteen-year-old girl …

… House Oversight Committee agreed to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about the release of the Epstein files…. it appears about half the files have been released, and many are heavily redacted.

The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Bondi against the wishes of committee chair James Comer (R-KY). Bondi will have to testify under oath.”

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/dreaming-of-a-blue-texas

Thoughtful

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/03/06/welcome-back-to-macintosh/

Tsai assembled a good set of expert comments on Tim Cook’s murder of the Mac.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/signals-degrade-space/

A readable and remarkable review. I wonder how many of these exotic signal changes were known 25y ago.

https://alexanderkustov.substack.com/p/academics-need-to-wake-up-on-ai

I think the denial is fading fast though.

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.

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.

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,”

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/a-guide-to-which-ai-to-use-in-the

Major change every 2w now

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.

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.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-28-2026

Operation Epstein Fury is also a work for hire.

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.”

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/27/block-layoffs

“AI” is just a convenient scapegoat.”

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 …

https://toosimple.substack.com/p/ai-tell-story-well

Bari Weiss wants this.

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.”

https://eclecticlight.co/2026/02/28/explainer-macos-updates/

Apple seems positively bad at macOS software these days, but this work was impressive.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

OpenAI has indicated it will do the mass surveillance.

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.”

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”

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.

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”

https://www.ms.now/opinion/trump-falsehoods-state-of-the-union-speech-fact-check

Bingo of course. From a fact checkers library.

https://archive.ph/20260224034958/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/science/evolution-vertebrate-eye.html#selection-4671.0-4675.38

“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.”

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.

https://archive.ph/20260223180351/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/health/cdc-ralph-abraham.html#selection-733.22-733.34

Compared to RFK Bhattacharya is … well … not quite as crackbrained stupid. Just a regular blight on humanity.

https://netnewswire.blog/2026/01/27/netnewswire-for-mac.html

It’s not just me.

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.

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”

https://www.persuasion.community/p/janice-stein

As Kahneman et al showed, humans are only intermittently rational. I suspect LLMs are substantially more rational.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/dem-attorneys-general-prepare-for-what-seems-inevitable-trump-election-interference

Trump will try anything and everything.

https://archive.ph/20260219194134/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/climate/us-tells-international-energy-agency-to-drop-its-focus-on-climate-change.html

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.

https://archive.ph/20260220052635/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/science/starliner-boeing-nasa-iss.html#selection-819.63-823.0

“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.

https://archive.ph/20260223132247/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/health/cancer-detection-test-grail.html#selection-907.0-907.122

“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.

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?)

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-3-1-pro/

Google Antigravity offers it.

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/#atom-everything

Qualitatively better SVG illustrations.

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)

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.”

https://tidbits.com/2026/02/20/third-party-gadgets-bring-find-my-tracking-to-wallets-chargers-and-more/

The world was disappointed when Apple did nothing. I have a wallet FindMy that’s useful but I’ll try the Nomad

https://www.startribune.com/ramstad-major-legal-battle-simmering-over-minnesota-school-segregation/601578189

Charter schools have many ways to discourage high cost students.

https://christianheilmann.com/2026/02/22/i-fell-for-a-phishing-attack-and-lost-access-to-my-x-account-here-are-five-mistakes-i-did-that-you-need-to-avoid/

“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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.minnpost.com/state-government/2026/02/minnesota-attorney-generals-evidence-portal-draws-nearly-1500-submissions-in-first-month/

ACLU also

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/inside-trumps-ice-concentration-camps

The campus violate ICE’s own standards. And the world’s.

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.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-organize-safely-in-the-age-of-surveillance/

I go for complete transparency myself, but a useful primer