https://ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-line/
Icon of our era.
Author Archives: jgordon
“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”
Operation Chain Reaction: “JPMorgan Chase neglected to report more than $1 billion in suspicious financial transactions linked to Epstein”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-18-2026
Money laundering, drug trafficking, prostitution. I suspect there are mob relationships still to be uncovered. Also, Melania connections.
Doubtless Trump’s AG, Todd Blanche, is implicated too. He blocked records release.
Gruber: “Most of the advertising-bearing websites I read have gotten so bad that it’s almost beyond parody.”
https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/your_frustration_is_the_product
“It’s like going to a restaurant, ordering a cheeseburger, and they send a marching band to your table to play trumpets right in your ear and squirt you with a water pistol while trying to sell you towels.”
For ages I’ve used Apple Reader in place of an ad blocker. It works well and I also get to see how the natural state of the web. Many sites have been unreadable on mobile for 1-2 years now. A part of the reason ai has enormous consumer adoption is that Google’s web destruction practices have reached the end of the road.
The ad-click web is dead.
“When a coding agent uses a subagent it effectively dispatches a fresh copy of itself to achieve a specified goal, with a new context window that starts with a fresh prompt.”
“AI is advancing very quickly. How can you keep it from getting out of control? That’s more of a two-years-ago question.”
https://theonion.com/the-onions-exclusive-interview-with-sam-altman/
The onion interviews sama
iOS 26.4: “Purchase Sharing lets adult members in Family Sharing groups use their own payment method when making purchases, without relying on the family organizer.”
“I will lay out the foundation of public choice in liberalism, and show how liberalism needs public choice”
https://www.liberalism.org/p/seeing-with-two-i-s-states-markets-and-some-advice-for-us-liberals
Related: ACA really needed the public option. It was not politically feasible then.
“In the early 2010s, Frank Bardacke … and Matt Garcia … wrote books showing that, basically, Chavez was an awful person”
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/03/on-the-chavez-revelations
I often wonder how bad I’d have been in different settings. Not as bad as Chavez I hope.
“Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country,”
“appendix-like structure evolved independently in at least three distinct lineages of mammals – marsupials, primates and glires”
We still think it’s not helpful to modern humans. But perhaps helpful in pre-modern environments
“CPT” symmetry primer
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/most-unbreakable-symmetry/
“CPT symmetry says that any physical system made of particles that moves forward in time will obey the same laws as the identical physical system made of antiparticles, reflected in a mirror, that moves backward in time”
Military perspective and n Hegseth-Trump war: “good tactics with a bad strategy is the slowest way to lose a war, and bad tactics with a good strategy is the slowest way to win one”
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/iran-gets-vote-in-this-war-thormuz-trump-hegseth-israel-strategy
A much more technical take than we usually read.
VA to accelerate guardianship programs for impaired veterans
I suspect this is unrelated to Trump. Many will be watching the program; if it succeeds states will do similar.
US Housing Affordability over 60y
https://austegard.com/etc/housing-affordability.html
Good details in this ai generated report. Regional breakdowns as well. It would be neat to read a human domain expert’s critique and explanation. There is a lot to think about.
“it is slowly dawning on Trump that he has an election year nightmare on his hands”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/desperate-trump-begs-for-help-to-escape-iran-fiasco
Impeachment and conviction?
How coding agents work – a basic primer
Quick read. Useful for non-dev users especially
“Right answer: USAID got sucked up into a vortex of culture wars and democratic breakdown”
https://timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/everyone-is-misunderstanding-what
By far best I’ve read. Project 2025 wanted funding reverted to 2019 levels. Musk had other ideas.
Kagan: “Like most people, I thought Trump would declare victory and bug out. But things have gotten to the point where I don’t think he can.”
Dev does deep dive to find bug in canon firmware that will never be fixed.
https://furbo.org/2026/03/14/your-mac-and-a-canon-printer/
I wonder about a utility that would reset the Bonjour cache every few minutes?
I only buy Brother peripherals now
Adobe fined pittance for their subscription games.
Part of our societal collapse over past 30y is meaningless laws. $75 million is nothing for Adobe.
“large majorities of Americans rejecting policies such as trans women in female sports”
https://www.persuasion.community/p/how-trans-activism-became-so-radical
Those survey numbers are stark.
“trans politics definitively revealed as a losing political issue for Democrats”
Claim that activists got ahead of the social curve. “Old-school transsexuals—who came to be known as “transmedicalists”—were quickly outnumbered by a growing cohort of people with a radically different view of trans”
“The belief that coherent sense can be made out of Trump’s shuffling words is a weakness of the rational mind”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/14/trump-iran-vietnam?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
The media machine assumes the president is cognitively intact. It doesn’t rebuild in a day.
[toread] NYT on end of WaPo includes Bezos take: “The newsroom has shrunk by nearly half over the past two years, to about the size it was when he bought it”
They are metric driven, not culture driven. Probably Twitter based but they don’t say. I suspect NYT has same problem.
Digg lesson: “The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts”
https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/13/digg-shuts-down-two-months-after-highly-anticipated-return/
“We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us.“
Reddit down 40% yoy. OTOH I personally don’t notice them outside of Reddit.
Merz on Trump’s gift to Putin: “would like to know what additional motives led the US government to make this decision”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-13-2026
As would we all
HCR on the billionaires running America
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-12-2026
Wealth tax necessary.
Antivaxx fear RFK is no longer lying enough about vaccines.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/health/kennedy-maha-vaccines.html
RFK got whacked by someone with power.
“a majority of Republican men under 50 think that the Holocaust either didn’t happen or was exaggerated”
Trump is good at corruption and America was rife with exploits.
Tsai on our epochal shift in automation
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/03/11/greg-knauss-is-losing-himself/
Good enough code. Innovators Dilemma had some good ideas.
Quotes for the history books
Donald Knuth: “learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/3/donald-knuth/#atom-everything
A mini-Knuth in every pocket.
GPT‑5.4
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/5/introducing-gpt54/#atom-everything
The next Pelican will be interesting.
Plan Mode makes ai coding less efficient? “Claude is a cool dude. So when confronted with another Claude, they each try to out-cool the other dude until they’re just talking super cool nonsense”
https://timkellogg.me/blog/2026/03/08/plan-mode
There are a lot of insider impressions here
“Claude shows a striking “spiritual bliss” attractor state in self-interactions.”
“Sadie Gurman and Caitlin Ostroff of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that 47,635 files are missing from the Epstein files documents that the Justice Department has made public”
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.”
“What Texas does do right, however, is let businesses build stuff, especially housing, in stark contrast with the regulations and multiple veto points that strangle construction in many blue states.”
“As of today, all mentions of Liquid Glass have disappeared from developer.apple.com”
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.
Light across the universe: a zoo of physics effects that change the signal.
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.
Social sciences: “Many academics—especially those concentrated on Bluesky and, I suspect, those who are completely offline—are in complete denial about what’s already happening.”
https://alexanderkustov.substack.com/p/academics-need-to-wake-up-on-ai
I think the denial is fading fast though.
“Carter is one of nearly 50 teens nationally who have died by suicide during a sextortion case”
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.
Disappearing Generals in China and America – Dyer’s theory.
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.
Musk Moves Against the Russia: “SpaceX, the company that operates the Starlink network, then developed a whitelist of Ukrainian users”
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,”