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.
Author Archives: jgordon
“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.
Viewing metadata in the Finder and Tetminal
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/19/viewing-metadata-in-the-finder/
“mdls filename … list all attributes with their values, except indexed content such as text tokens.”
Cloudflare: “What’s striking is how much of the internet has had to hide behind Cloudflare infrastructure to avoid denial of service attacks”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c629pny4gl7o
If we were to design a global network today what would we do differently?
Trump lawyer: “If Jeffrey Epstein had any dirt on Donald Trump, he would have had great leverage in the criminal case against him at the time he died”
Rothko: “I remember somebody jokingly suggesting that I challenge Elon Musk to a fight … and quietly thinking to myself, I am literally not paid enough for that.”
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/my-next-chapter-with-mastodon/
It’s a good essay.
MindNode 2025.7 reunites with Finder: “Desktop or any folder in Finder or the Files app. MindNode will automatically create an Alias that opens the document instantly”
https://mindnode.com/post/mindnode-2025-7
Mindnode switched a few years from a traditional file based approach to an “app-managed local data cache”. That meant MindNode projects could not be represented in finder and it made local backup/restore very clumsy. 2025.7 mitigates the first of those problems. I’m still on MindNode Classic but now I have to think about migrating.
“Chris Buskirk of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization funded by tech leaders to create a network that will permit the MAGA movement to outlive Trump”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-16-2025-190
Their dream is a really dumb version of Singapore — on a vastly larger scale and without Singapore’s odd socialist streak.
“a majority of people would prefer to live in a world where a child does not have to sell her body to older men in order to save enough money to get braces on her teeth.”
Web Archive explained – and other ways to archive Safari pages
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/17/how-to-save-web-pages-using-safari/
First I’ve seen web archive explained! Definitely do not use. Sounds like export as PDF is the best we can do.
“scope of fraud on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp”
https://www.platformer.news/meta-scams-prevalence/
Minimum 10% of Meta revenue is from scams. Which they are curiously slow to block.
(Daytime broadcast TV was about 100% scams however)
Evaluating ai for the work you do.
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/giving-your-ai-a-job-interview
Subtext is that Claude is the best useful LLM for what most of us do.
American healthcare: private equity and oligopolies join the feast.
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/aca-health-care-insurance-us-jetelina
Same old, but with added evil. Essay has no concrete recommendations though.
Virologist Angela Rasmussen substack on pandemic preparedness.
https://rasmussenretorts.substack.com/about
Substack RSS still works.
Five (major) Tahoe bugs
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/16/last-week-on-my-mac-five-tahoe-bugs/
“used to keep track of some of the more serious bugs in macOS. As that developed into what would have occupied me full-time”
I hope Cook retires.
Fibromyalgia: genetics study claims primary brain disorder also associated with Long COVID.
https://www.medicalrepublic.com.au/fibromyalgia-finally-gets-a-genetic-fingerprint/121461
“The strongest genetic signal emerged from a variant in the HTT gene, which also causes Huntington’s disease when mutated. Another key player, GPR52, regulates HTT and is already being explored as a drug target for Huntington’s. Other implicated genes, including CAMKV, DCC, DRD2, MDGA2 and CELF4, have established roles in brain development, neuronal signalling and pain processing.”
Fibromyalgia has long been thought of as a brain disorder. The question is whether the environmental trigger is viral infection/immune response.
Margaret Sullivan, former NYT ombudsman, confirms BlueSky takes on the NYT
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-with-margaret-sullivan
Mamdani meltdown was revealing. The NYT serves old wealth, WaPo serves Bezos.
HRC 11/14/25 – yet more new impeachable crimes
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-14-2025
Some new, some old. The Teapot Dome was child’s play. America’s rot is Russian class.
“Trump’s…an imperfect instrument, but one infused by divine providence. Without him, we’d have nothing.” Bannon.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-13-2025
The MAGA seem to believe Trump is on the way out.
Sequoia timer bug: “the MTTimers list continues growing until mobiletimerd exceeds its memory limit and can no longer be run.”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/14/how-the-clock-hoards-timers-until-it-breaks/
“If any part of the Clock app becomes dysfunctional, delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mobiletimerd.plist to see if that fixes it.”
PowerPhotos 3.2 export features.
https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/comments/powerphotos_3.2_adds_a_whole_bunch_of_new_export_features
I’m includes whole library export – which ought to be one a standard for migrations.
The End of Naked Locker Rooms
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2025/11/naked-locker-room-end/684907/
I’m glad this got a notice. I saw it happening over decades.