The hard part is not reactively avoiding topics the quackers are keen on.
Author Archives: jgordon
“DHS is calling on the media, leftist groups, and sanctuary politicians to end their demonizing DHS law enforcement…”
This seems … weak. I thought Trump didn’t like weak.
macOS 26 Tahoe: “Apple no longer allows you to store your Recovery Key in your iCloud account”
https://tidbits.com/2025/09/17/macos-26-tahoe-pushes-filevault-use/
Otherwise Trump would demand a copy. (If you have your recovery key in iCloud now …)
“‘Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like’: The rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof gang”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/sep/18/baader-meinhof
Familiar in many ways.
Chrome Gemini: “and the ability to ask questions about the web page you’re on.”
https://thenewstack.io/chrome-switches-on-ai-the-future-of-browsing-begins-now/
Assuming this includes summary I will switch from Safari
“… will need to be truly ready on day one…to implement a domestic Marshall Plan for the U.S. government”
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-social-scientists-could-help
The MAGA burned the government we had. It was not pretty but it limped along.
Might as well think about what happens if there is a resurrection
“After Kimmel’s suspension, Johnson posted on social media: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re just getting started.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-17-2025-wednesday
The GOP is coming to the conclusion of its journey.
“James McHenry, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, recorded in his diary that a lady had asked delegate Benjamin Franklin whether the convention had established a republic or a monarchy. “A republic,” Franklin said, “if you can keep it.”
“iPhone 17 Pro handles ProRAW shooting, with the JPEG-XL Lossy format”
JPEG-XL has had limited acceptance. New and pretty nice. So is Apple into it?
Ant species, sperm parasitization, and healthy hybrid slaves
“It’s like a human having chimp babies,” which they use as “a source of sperm for giving birth to human-chimp hybrids that would do all their tasks,”
Why HCR writes and fights
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-15-2025
“I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities: the idea that we all have the right to work to become whatever we wish. I believe that American democracy has the potential to be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.”
Kirk wanted to undo the changes in women’s roles that happened in the 70s and 80s.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/women-jobs-and-charlie-kirk
“Kirk … wanted to reverse what Claudia Goldin … has called the “quiet revolution” in women’s role in American society that occurred between the late 1970s and early 1990s.”
I don’t like K’s phrasing of “dislocation and humiliation on the part of men”. It is condescension; it trivializes a vast amount of pain arising from social transformation. He actually admits the pain later in the piece, but a good editor would have helped him.
Tahoe: “many combinations of appearance mode, Accessibility settings and icon and widget style degrade its human interface rather than enhancing it”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/15/appearance-matters-get-tahoe-looking-in-better-shape/
Tim Cook stayed too long.
India: “In the 2023 fiscal year, the top four IT exporters hired a combined 225,000 fresh graduates; by fiscal 2024, that figure had plummeted by over 70% to some 60,000.”
https://indiadispatch.com/p/hollow-at-the-base
Thought to be ai.
Federal government to explicitly attack liberal groups.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/politics/jd-vance-charlie-kirk-show.html
Screenshotted for the history books
“currently existing quantum processors can generate and manipulate entangled states of sufficient complexity to access the exponentiality of Hilbert space”
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9138
If paper is accepted it confirms expectations. Of course the implied acceleration in QC technology is not something most wish for quite now.
OpenAI & Microsoft – a detailed review of the extremes of capitalism.
https://spyglass.org/openai-microsoft-agree-to-agree-tentatively/
Expectations for near-term AGI drive trillions of dollars here and there.
Everything from socialism to totalitarianism to anarchy and socioeconomic collapse are on the menu. If we “muddle through” I will credit the supernatural.
“Unintended Side Effects of HPV and Shingles Vaccines”
Clever title. The unexpected side effects are substantial, surprising, and entirely good.
FDA regulation of pharma ads: “The new directive sounds tough, but in practice it doesn’t have much bite”
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/pharmaceutical-ads-in-the-us-top
A fair review. They are basically problem number 200 on our list of things to fix but nobody loves them so worth a try.
Claude’s Native Integration with Reminders and Calendar on iOS and iPadOS
I didn’t realize Perplexity had some integration— it’s voice only. That is dumb.
Mars: “biogenic mechanisms… would seem to fit the observations quite well, while abiogenic ones are harder to come by.”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/life-maybe-mars-unless-we-change-our-minds
“We definitely need to study these formations more and try to model them here on Earth, but what we need to do for sure is make good on the sample-return part of the Perseverance mission … the proposals for how to go get them are in a state of expensive disarray”
macOS Tahoe 26 RC – Tsai roundup is instructive.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/10/macos-tahoe-26-rc/
Do not upgrade.
“primary reason nearly all LLM inference endpoints are nondeterministic is that the load (and thus batch-size) nondeterministically varies!”
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/11/defeating-nondeterminism/#atom-everything
Not primarily floating point arithmetic
Religions classified by self and suff.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/suffering-4
Christianity took a different path.
Apple and Memory Integrity Enforcement: “The only system-level iOS attacks we observe in the wild come from mercenary spyware …”
https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/
This is a fascinating Apple Research post.
“Known mercenary spyware chains used against iOS share a common denominator with those targeting Windows and Android: they exploit memory safety vulnerabilities”
The first Trump economic crisis will be in agriculture – early 2026
https://archive.ph/OA5Jc#selection-2415.93-2415.271
“prices of cropland are 10 times as high as they were in the wake of the 1980s crisis”
“with interest rates above where they had been for at least a decade after the 2007 Wall Street financial debacle, there is not enough revenue left over to pay all the fixed costs”
The collapse of rural America will accelerate. Again.
macOS versioning: “restoring from a backup, or migration from another volume or Mac, always loses all saved versions”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/08/managing-macos-versioning-and-the-documentrevisions-v100-folder/
Good to know!
“To remove all versions of a document quickly and simply:
Select the document in the Finder and Duplicate it using Command-D.
Delete the original file and rename the duplicate”
“Minnesota counties that are entirely rural had 23.4 suicides per 100,000 residents in 2024, compared with 11.5 in the Twin Cities region.”
The explainer claims limited mental health and easy gun access.
I disagree. Guns are everywhere now. And mental health interventions aren’t available to most in cities and are of uncertain efficacy for suicide prevention (primarily an impulsive act).
This is a blaring red howling siren signal that rural America is in longterm existential crisis.
Why are old Americans falling more than old Europeans?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/health/falls-deaths-elderly-drugs.html
“prescriptions for some fall-related drugs have already declined or hit plateaus, even as death rates because of falls have risen”
I doubt it’s only, or even primarily, the meds. I suspect it’s also lack of walking, inequality, and poor healthcare. We are more feeble.
Testosterone supplements and hair loss in those susceptible to male pattern baldness
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijd.17567
Open access and probably unreviewed but there’s really not much out there – which is what they concluded. It is biologically plausible that susceptible men (including trans-men) will have accelerated hair loss with testosterone supplementation.
“Wolf said that Epstein suspected that Trump was the guy who ratted him out to the authorities.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/is-this-the-hidden-part-of-the-trump-epstein-drama
“Yeah I knew he was a big time pedophile and we were big pals and partied together all the time and I was fine with it. But then he tried to expose my money laundering scheme so I called my friends at the FBI.”
“I think this has been known as a rumor at least for some time.”
When America last faced immense corruption the states fought back – led by WI!
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-4-2025-thursday
“Under Governor Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, Wisconsin led the way, bringing together researchers, lawmakers, and state officials to craft policies that would end corruption, promote education and social welfare, and create a strong and fair economy.”
Governor of WI 1901 to 1906.
Public Anthropic report on cybercrime automation (Claude Code and more)
https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-countering-misuse-aug-2025
Quite readable and not surprising. Hospitals are going to be increasingly shut for recovery.
Automated global crime with LLMs.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/generative-ai-as-a-cybercrime-assistant.html
North Korean economy likely to grow.
Oakley digs into the morass that is Apple Spotlight.
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/04/quirks-of-spotlight-local-search/
“Once Spotlight has indexed objects in images discovered by mediaanalysisd, moving that file to a different folder breaks that association immediately,”
Files and paths rather than inodes. So much broken corporate flail
RFK dredges river to find seven willing to kill on command
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-rfk-jr-seeks-to-rush-7-new
RFK ACIP minions:
Hilary Blackburn
Joseph Fraiman
John Gaitanis
Evelyn Griffin
Kirk Milhoan
Raymond Pollak
Catherine Stein
iOS 26 expected to be buggiest OS release in decades.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/03/ios-26-developer-beta-9/
Maybe 26.2 will be usable on iPhone? (I hope to skip macOS 26 entirely.)
California, Oregon, Washington take on vaccine science as Federal government begins to collapse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/us/western-health-alliance.html
Next will be food and pharma safety.
“if the Democrats won control of Congress and Trump, through obedient members of Congress, somehow managed not to seat them, that would mean the federal government ceases to exist”
The ultimate bike lock review for 2025 – The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2025/aug/29/best-bike-locks-us?CMP=us_bsky#Echobox=1756486219-1
Best was Litelock X1 at $190…
Apple’s mandates suppliers automate production.
Tennessee Sheriff Buford “‘Walking Tall” Pusser assaulted his wife repeatedly and murdered her in 1967.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/09/01/buford-pusser-wife-murder-walking-tall/
Sounds like someone talked – and the 1967 forensics were pretty bad. He tried to kill himself after the murder but survived.
Local museum future limited.
Trump, India, and a Nobel obsession: “U.S. foreign policy is currently being managed by the dumbest motherfuckers alive”
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/donald-trumps-biggest-dumbest-personalist
If Trump resolves India-China clashes he could get two prizes. (One for NK in T1)
The MAGA House: “each day for the rest of the congressional session will not “constitute a day for purposes…of the National Emergencies Act.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-29-2025
American 2.0 is dead.
“No well-informed and sane person would want to go into the 2026 election with mortgage and medium-term farm and business loan interest rates rising”
https://www.twincities.com/2025/08/31/real-world-economics-federal-reserve-follies-continue/
The MAGA are not sane.
Rowing the Pacific is a thing apparently: “the experience gave them a new perspective on life”
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/30/nx-s1-5522916/scottish-brothers-rowing-pacific-ocean-record
In 2014 Russian maniac set solo record.
The death of rural America: “two-thirds of rural hospitals in eight states were without obstetric services.”
There is no fix. Declining birth rates meets exodus of young women meets unsustainable economics.
A big part of why we have both MAGA and idiocracy.
A reasoned review of connectionist models and concept theories in 2025 ai.
https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/neurosymbolic-ainot-with-a-bang-but
A fair seeming review by a skeptic of connectionist approaches with references to texts from the linguistics-conceptual domain. He acknowledges recent models have exceeded predicted limits.
CDC staff walkout to applaud heroes.
https://gizmodo.com/the-cdc-implosion-continues-as-staff-plan-walkout-2000649819
Let the MAGA inherit the ruins. We can call it the Cassidy Cowardice Center now.
“retrofit analyses and policy actions to match inadequately thought-out announcements in poorly scripted videos or page-long X posts should not be how organizations responsible for the health of people should function”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/rfk-jr-must-go-and-he-s-not-only-one
Heroes of the CDC. Bill Cassidy should be mailed a “white feather of cowardice”.
Tankus: markets are a “conventional wisdom processor.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-arent-markets-freaking-out
K has fallen for “rational markets” several times. It’s a hard habit to break.
Buffett understands.