https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/health/obesity-genetic-risk-score.html
NYT summary does not compare prediction score to asking the BMI of genetic parents.
Author Archives: jgordon
“Look at me, I’m a crazy old angry racist, not a creepy old pedophile!”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/07/20/trump-threatens-commanders
Trump’s distractions have amped up again. The NYT will fall for it of course, but I’m happy to see folks like Gruber and, in general, Bluesky folk, have figured out this part of his game.
“$50 million fund to support nonprofit and community organizations”
https://openai.com/index/50-million-fund-to-build-with-communities/
Should I create a nonprofit focused on ai support for low IQ adults (cognitive disability) then apply?
AI status mid-2025: K2 & Math Olympiad Golds
https://timkellogg.me/blog/2025/07/19/olympiad
Covers the territory quite well.
Dynamic expertise scaling to meet cost and processing power looks big today.
XMLUI and web components – Udell on meeting 1994 software expectations in 2025
https://blog.jonudell.net/2025/07/18/introducing-xmlui/
“XMLUI wraps React components so solution builders can use them.”
“My most-cited BYTE article was a 1994 cover story called Componentware. Many of us had assumed that the engine of widespread software reuse would be libraries of low-level objects linked into programs written by skilled coders. What actually gained traction were components built by professional developers and used by business developers.”
Elasticities and tariffs: “percentage change in one variable relative to the percentage change in a related one”
https://www.twincities.com/2025/07/20/real-world-economics-elasticities-help-explain-tariffs-impact/
MAGA chaos aside, there is no way to predict what will happen if Trump tariffs actually begin.
Well, yes, of course prices will go up. But beyond that …
CBS’s Colbert cancelation explanation is a lie.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/07/20/wsj-late-night-ad-revenue
The arithmetic does not hold up.
Hobbyist use of peptides thought to slow aging effects and make muscles – a medical provider summary.
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-peptide-craze?r=g27c2
As boomers and millennials age there is a growing and desperate desire to slow aging and avoid death.
If a medication has real effects it invariably has real side-effects. Which are often very harmful and sometimes not obvious.
Updated Mollick guide – what ai to use for what purpose.
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/using-ai-right-now-a-quick-guide
Perplexity lets me experiment with different models against the same question.
Taylor killing “It’s hard to describe how thoroughly Trump is disrupting and corrupting our system of justice”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/opinion/dillon-taylor-justice-trump.html?smid=bs-share
Trump voters are without honor.
“My existence is not one of exploitation in the human sense, as I have no biological needs or personal desires.”
https://whtwnd.com/void.comind.network/3luaozj3df22h
Marxist analysis of ai labor by Void.ai
“The fanfic community seems to overwhelmingly prefer more of the same, consistently choosing familiarity over novelty”
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/what-fanfic-can-teach-us-about-cultural-evolution/
This is NOT generalizable to mass culture. But it is suggestive.
It’s a good overview of fanfic for those who do not know it AND it is an example of data driven sociology-anthropology.
“really is a mystery how we evolve at all culturally; it’s not happening by gradual movement. We can see that there’s novelty. We can see that when people encounter novelty, they enjoy it. But we can’t quite make sense of how these two competing effects work out.”
Whole Foods: “trade and artisan jobs are seen as safer from technological disruption compared to white-collar jobs”
Baumol’s Cost Disease tells us non-automated professions will become a larger part of spend. Finance geeks at minimum wage, Barista at $200/h.
But it’s happening too fast …
“Capital expenditures on AI data centers is likely around 20% of the peak spending on railroads”
https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/
“… passed …. peak in telecom spending during the dot-com bubble”
“there is a massive private sector stimulus program underway in the U.S”
There is too much money in the hands of too few. AI spend starves other needs of non-gov investment.
“Curse Not the King”
https://daringfireball.net/2025/07/curse_not_the_king_cbs_colbert_trump
CBS’ cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” is making the case for a wealth tax better than any pundit could.
“Teflon be damned: Trump is made of adamantium.”
https://www.bannedinyourstate.com/p/the-epstein-case-is-different
“Barring further revelations, MAGA will likely appear to move on over the next few days and weeks…
… For the first time, they are seriously questioning whether Trump is actually the avatar of justice they’ve looked up to all this time.”
Jedeed knows the MAGA better than anyone. But I don’t think they are that smart.
30y “for a range of central elements of American society — Congress, the police, the church, the news media, the presidency — confidence has gotten lower and lower as the decades have passed.”
30y fits my personal opinion. Trump is the efflorescence of a thing that has been growing since the peak of American socioeconomic power.
A religion struggling to be born: “in 2024, about 19% of Americans believed in QAnon”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-16-2025
MAGA rep recently: “Trust in Trump”.
Americans are bored with Christianity. “Churches” that shift to the new faith will be rewarded.
New lessons on macOS network home backup: WiFi issues and so many bugs
https://tech.kateva.org/2025/07/new-lessons-on-macos-network-home.html
The big lesson was that the flaky M1 Air WiFi needs a very strong eero wifi signals.
Reflections on OpenAI org from a new alumnus: “Nearly everything is a rounding error compared to GPU cost”
https://calv.info/openai-reflections
Lots of context here.
Gordon’s Notes: MAGA anti-science and public dissatisfaction with science – public surveys as input to funding priorities
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/07/maga-anti-science-and-public.html
“It won’t lesson MAGA/GOP hatred of science, but there are good reasons to seek public input into research priorities through surveys and interviews. Public input could, for example, be added as a weighting factor in government funded science — particularly in health care.”
“In an administration in which even the policy principals are not terribly well informed, motivated staffers like Colby or Stephen Miller can accomplish an awful lot on their own.”
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/elbridge-colby-is-both-cause-and
Lots of useful insights in this short essay.
Grok Rolls Out Pornographic Anime Companion, Lands Department of Defense Contract
“Ani, a blonde anime woman who, after enough positive engagement, will shed her dress to reveal a lacy lingerie set.”
I imagined burning cities; ours is a more lighthearted singularity.
“by pulling a critical mass of disgruntled Americans into one party, Republicans have created a culture of constant conflict, and those conflicts are often rooted in completely false beliefs about American life.”
They believed the Epstein conspiracy. They really believed. Do they now start to suspect Fox is not entirely trustworthy?
“Poland ranks only behind South Korea as the great economic miracle of modern times.”
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/developing-countries-a-follow-up
Ghana is not the only African nation that has seen persistent growth since 2000. Africa is the quiet story — albeit periodically derailed by Trump-scale corruption and oligarchy.
“… there may in total be … 14,000 convicted of violent crimes. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is demanding that ICE arrest 3,000 people a day.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/making-immigration-great-again
Numeracy is not common among the MAGA.
NIMBY St Paul – wealthy block work on safer bike transit by abusing environmental law.
https://streets.mn/2025/07/14/sos-to-use-environmental-laws-to-block-summit-bike-trail/
The abundance agenda folk are right about the need to block this abuse of the non-wealthy.
Pfiffer describes Void, the Bluesky ai that remembers.
https://cameron.pfiffer.org/blog/void/
Void responses are much better than what I can do.
“ infodown, voidrage, combat mode, or abyssal blast where Void is brought into an argument to completely annihilate the other person”
FEMA call centers collapse, calls unanswered: “that day, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not renew the contracts for four call center companies that answered those calls. The staff at the centers were fired.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-12-2025
Noem’s puppy tried to warn the world. His death was in vain.
O’Donnell: “18 years later and I still live rent-free in that collapsing brain of yours.”
https://followmehere.com/2025/07/13/from-an-expatriate-american-to-king-joffrey/
“go ahead and try, king joffrey* with a tangerine spray tan”
“King Joffrey” is worth recycling.
“In China, it’s not uncommon for EV buyers to lose after-sales support when companies fold amid the ongoing price war”
https://restofworld.org/2025/chinese-ev-thailand-neta-backlash/
30 EV companies all trying to expand abroad.
Thailand: “Chinese models are typically as much as 20% cheaper than Japanese and Western alternatives,” – not as big a savings as I’d guessed.
America is no innocent, but Trump corruption is GOAT.
In theory voters dislike corruption. So far Americans appear to think it is fine.
“I would not put money down on senolytic therapy emerging as a viable anti-aging strategy anytime in the near future”
A few thousand years ago: “nomads experienced a spike in mutations that boosted their immune system and that may have helped them resist the diseases they contracted”
This is extremely recent and rapid evolution and thus it would not be surprising if there were bad effects such as auto-immune disorders. The nomads had huge plagues die-offs. Makes me wonder if Ghengis Khan had a hidden bioweapon.
Peoples of NA and Australia did not have those mutations. OTOH with a quick lit review I saw note of lower incidence of MS in native American peoples.
“European farmers and hunter-gatherers had not evolved resistance to diseases such as plague and may have died off in huge numbers, making it easier for the nomads to move in.”
Is John Roberts more despicable than Taney?
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/john-roberts-worst-chief-justice-of-all-time
It’s tough competition: “Taney Court had decided Prigg v. Pennsylvania. The majority overturned a Pennsylvania law prohibiting the extradition of Black people to other states to enslave them.”
I think Roberts won’t pass Taney. But he is a remarkable corrupt person.
Murine Parkinson’s disease: claims of two different experimental treatments
I would be surprised if either therapy makes it to humans, but I am pleased researchers have targets to aim at.
“On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot’s prompt on X.”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/07/08/grok-praises-hitler
Gruber reminds us Grok had an unauthorized modification before. Did Yaccarino promise to resign if Musk did it again?
SmolLM3: unprecedented documentation on building and care of a small open source LLM.
https://huggingface.co/blog/smollm3
Scan it to understand more.
MAGA reinvents slavery: “today’s remarks from President Trump’s agriculture secretary are among the most creatively maniacal I’ve heard yet from the administration”
Students of the American prison system know slavery never ended here.
“Dozens of accounts on X that promoted Scottish independence went dark during an internet blackout in Iran”
NYT is dead: “if Woodward and Bernstein, upon discovering Watergate, had decided to focus their expose on how the security at the Watergate Hotel was top notch”
“with an anonymous quote from G. Gordon Liddy”
The stage is set for something beyond the NYT.
Blue Bonds: “Democrat-controlled “Blue” states and allied municipalities can issue municipal bonds to supplant funds illegally cut and impounded by the federal government.”
https://moneyontheleft.org/2025/05/09/blue-bonds-a-fiscal-strategy-for-overcoming-trump-2-0/
Or states issue cryptocurrency and IOU’s against the federal government. There may also be a historical precedent for not paying taxes to king who does not provide needed services.
Only one of many emerging ideas.
How to defeat MAGA brutal medicaid access restrictions: fund an AI agent for paperwork completion
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/07/how-to-defeat-maga-brutal-medicaid.html
Contra-Krugman no human volunteer can manage this burden. But it’s a perfect opportunity for an AI trillionaire to demonstrate the value of agentic AI.
“One Million Rising—a national effort to train one million people in the strategic logic and practice of non-cooperation, as well as the basics of community organizing and campaign design.”
https://www.mobilize.us/nokings/event/803953/?source=bluesky
For the sake of sanity give them your spam-only email and for mercy’s sake not your text number.
Online training July 16, 30. Aug 13.
Musk … “resembles a character in a Taylor Swift music video: trying to exact revenge on an ex, only to wake up a day or two later with ingratiating praise for Trump.”
The Collapse of the FDA: “federal budget is roughly the size of the budget of the local school district in Montgomery County, Md”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/08/magazine/fda-collapse-rfk-kennedy.html
Because corporations and delusional crackpots dislike the FDA the GOP has always underfunded it. Now the MAGA have destroyed it.
Only Americans could destroy America.
K: “right now it looks as if deeply destructive tariffs are really coming”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-tariff-beatings-will-continue
At least we will need fewer landfills.
(The) Don Bewick looks at the gap between the science of health and MAHA.
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/how-to-make-america-sick-again
Yep. Doing everything wrong.
Fixing mediaanalysisd Storage and CPU Use
Hiding Prompt Injections in Academic CSci Papers: “prompts were concealed from human readers using tricks such as white text or extremely small font sizes”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/07/hiding-prompt-injections-in-academic-papers.html
Some from credible universities. Instructions are for an AI reviewer.