It should probably be split into 10 different slices, but that won’t happen until we understand a hell of a lot more. In the meanwhile – yeah, break it up. I think a NIMH director tried to push a division of the insanely broad syndromic classification years ago. The current definition is too broad to be useful for either research, prognosis, or treatment.
Category Archives: share
Cheap LiOn batteries come with high risk
I suspect airlines will eventually ban all batteries not sealed within a device.
Apple removes Eyes Up app that gathered evidence of ICE crimes for future prosecution.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/10/09/eyes-up-removed-from-the-app-store/
Don’t buy Apple products until you absolutely need them. Nobody really needs an Apple Watch.
There is no longer any way to defend Apple’s App Store monopoly.
Making Liquid Glass less dumb with Accessibility options in iOS and macOS.
https://tidbits.com/2025/10/09/how-to-turn-liquid-glass-into-a-solid-interface/
If you still read this can help.
“cycling traffic in Paris has increased by 240% between 2018 and 2023, while car traffic has steadily declined”
https://momentummag.com/new-study-paris-cycling-revolution/
American cities have an opportunity now. The urban corporate model is ending.
“taxpayers are on the hook for billions more to bail out Bessent’s hedge fund buddies in a predictably futile attempt to save the Elon Musk of the South.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/bailing-out-bessents-buddies-bets?publication_id=277517&r=4yubqd
Small change next to the crypto bailout to come.
President Miller’s political attention strategy.
“in Miller’s worldview, polls like that only register shallowly held convictions … what really matters is the political attention economy, and how conflict plays within it.”
Miller understands the MAGA base are fundamentally credulous.
Soaring gold: Trump billionaire morons start to worry
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/ingots-we-trust
“holding gold isn’t an alternative to holding currency. It is, instead, an alternative to holding bonds, which pay interest.”
So prices should drop, but they are riding a lot. Are nation states realizing America is a rogue state now? Or do they fear the reaction that follows MAGA rule?
“He has a rare genetic mutation that essentially guaranteed he would develop Alzheimer’s disease in his late 40s or early 50s and would likely die within a decade.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/health/alzheimers-gene-mutation.html
But then he didn’t get dementia and die. Unlike most of his family.
“spending on information processing equipment and software, as a percentage of GDP, had already matched its peak in 1999, the height of the Internet bubble.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-arent-we-partying-like-its-1999
Less than I expected, so reassuring.
Gruber joins the alt iOS App Store cause.
https://rileytestut.com/blog/2025/10/07/evolving-altstore-pal/
“Apple’s decision shows that developers cannot trust the App Store…”
The alt App Store is going to happen. Apple absolutely cannot be trusted.
Tsai: Testing CarPlay Ultra
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/10/07/testing-carplay-ultra/
So much lying. Bugs aside the reasons manufacturers hate CarPlay has nothing to do with what they say.
macOS: “As annoying as Bluetooth is as a user, it’s even more so as developer.”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/10/07/toothfairy-2-8-8/
“Seemingly straightforward APIs don’t work as advertised…. they can succeed but say that they failed. Sometimes the synchronous API will work when the asynchronous one doesn’t …”
Maybe ai dev will work better than whatever Apple does.
“break the trust and bipartisan consensus around a non-partisan professional military for the foreseeable future”
https://othermeans.io/p/expert-in-a-dying-field
America broke. It won’t look the same even if it is rebuilt.
“if the President has taken a conscious effort to shape the force around partisan political loyalties, then those institutions are untrustworthy.”
Reasoning model reasoning: “rule is correct on the demonstrations and the given test, but it is right for the wrong reason—“correct but unintended”.
https://aiguide.substack.com/p/do-ai-reasoning-models-abstract-and
“while o3, Claude, and Gemini approach or exceed human accuracy on these tasks with textual inputs, they are substantially more prone to use unintended “shortcuts” to solve the tasks than do humans”
They can reason but they are not very good at it.
DOGE brilliance: “131 leases expired without the government actually leaving the office space, costing the agencies steep fees.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-3-2025
Musk’s wealth tells us the world is broken.
“administration is laying claim that the U.S. is in an active armed conflict, which would give the president extraordinary wartime powers”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-2-2025
Most Americans expect somebody will do something.
Or something…
“Trump has been posting on social media often since Tuesday but has not appeared in public.“
macOS storage: “their iOS and iPadOS backups had taken over more than half the space on their Mac’s SSD”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/10/02/why-did-that-macos-upgrade-take-so-much-space/
Reminds me I need to track down and delete my old iOS local sync files.
It can take 24h post install for macOS to finish file cleanup.
ai for education – tool catalog
https://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2023/07/01/the-best-collections-of-artificial-intelligence-tools/
Nostalgic in a way. There used to be personal web pages listing personal web creation tools. Only SeaMonkey remains of that era.
“In an earlier era, Trump’s incoherent ranting would have paved the way for his immediate removal from office under the 25th Amendment.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/an-autocracy-of-dunces
There is a lot more wrong with America than Trump alone.
“leading Steve Dorner to add his cranky “Waste cycles drawing trendy 3D junk” setting to Eudora”
https://tidbits.com/2025/09/30/nick-heer-peers-through-liquid-glass/
Mostly about Liquid Glass but I was a big Eudora fan.
Feedbin Browser Extension update
https://feedbin.com/blog/2025/10/01/newsletter-extension/
One of my best subscriptions
“Collins’s and Murkowski’s refusal to sit down with Antoni meant trouble for the success of his candidacy”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-withdraws-nomination-ej-antoni-bureau-labor-statistics
The GOP Senate has been very quiet.
Google hiding AI summary for Trump dementia searches.
https://www.theverge.com/news/789152/google-ai-searches-blocking-trump-dementia-biden
Lots of people now trying the search. I can confirm all I got was articles about Google blocking the ai summary, no ai summary.
Gemini Pro is circumspect but makes a good case. Claude 4.5 is more direct.
Thiel’s Antichrist wears yoga pants and votes Dem – a Wired guide to beliefs of the technarchy.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/
Not all are as weird as Thiel, but the sentiments here are common. Someone should interview Neal Stephenson.
“he would bop down those stairs. I’ve never seen it. Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop. He’d go down the stairs. Wouldn’t hold on. I said, It’s great.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-30-2025
Trump also went back to Canada as 51st state.
Vascular dementia seems possible.
Argentina update – how an autocratic populist can lose power
https://someunpleasant.substack.com/p/homo-economicus-or-homo-argentum?r=rjjdx&triedRedirect=true
Argentina is more of a mess than America, but we are far more dangerous in decline. This story, however, did give me a sense of optimism about how a Trump can lose political support. Note the role of family corruption.
“decline in coal employment between 1950 and the 2000s, from half a million miners to around 80,000” even as coal production remained stable
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/fossil-fuels-and-fossilized-minds
The collapse of rural America has been so extreme, and the implications so grim, that nobody in leadership was willing to talk about it. That was a colossal failure.
Coal decline was automation and technique. Those jobs aren’t coming back. The people and communities are zombie shells.
Trump: ‘Am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?’
“raises all sort of questions about his mental functioning and agency that the access-dependent Washington press corps would rather not acknowledge”
The DC press corps needs to leave and do less harm somewhere else.
Oldness: how does learn new productive work-study practices?
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/09/oldness-how-does-learn-new-productive.html
Variants of this have bugged me for decades. Every time I’ve gotten to watch a productive person working I’ve seen things I could learn from. I remember the days of “life hacks” when these were widely shared. (That died.)
I need Clippy 2.0. Maybe my personal ai overlord will help.
Hertling on the meeting of the Generals: “I believe they will maintain that silence and their poker faces; that is what I would do if in the audience.”
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/what-to-expect-quantico-meeting-generals-admirals-trump-hegseth
This will be a historic test of the American military’s integrity and honor.
Hertling is not flawless at prediction. SCOTUS corruption is deep and Generals are as vulnerable to money as any.
“Comey was worried that if he did not release info about the Weiner emails, anti-Clinton FBI agents in New York might leak them.”
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/comey-indictment-trump-doj-weaponization
Good background on Comey’s mistake. The deeper cause was not Comey though – to produce a Trump candidate the nation had to be ill.
“Everything he hoped to achieve by palliating the GOP — personally, politically, institutionally — has failed. He destroyed himself and everything he cared about.”
15 years of stupidity: the EU cookie consent
https://spyglass.org/europe-cookie-banners/
The cookie debacle has shown that EU regulators are incompetent and it weakened any other user privacy initiatives.
“We have zero agentic AI systems that are secure against these attacks”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/abusing-notions-ai-agent-for-data-theft.html
Many gifted minds have failed to find a solution. LLMs are more credulous than humans and humans cannot be secured.
Agentic AI is not ready for public use.
Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano, speaking about the point in 2033 when the Old Age and Survivors trust fund runs out of money: “Eight years is a long time away.”
America is going to get very keen on euthanasia.
“Planners in 1984 worked with 85% of all household earnings being subject to FICA, and assumed this would continue. Soon, however, high proportions of increases in income went to the richest fraction of the population … it was investment income, subject to capital gains, but not funding Social Security.…”
“in September 2025, I’m here to tell you that AI has finally come for what my experience tells me is the most quintessentially human of all human intellectual activities: namely, proving oracle separations between quantum complexity classes.”
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9183
There are still a few voices saying there’s “nothing there”, but they are fainter and fewer every day.
macOS: “In Recovery mode, typing repairHomePermissions into Terminal launches a GUI app … each time I have tried this it locks me out of every folder in my Home folder and wreaks havoc elsewhere”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/28/last-week-on-my-mac-panacea-or-placebo/
These days, when I use macOS, I avoid anything that isn’t used constantly in the default setup. Apple has lost a sense of shame.
Comey: “But we…will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either. Somebody that I love dearly recently said that fear is the tool of a tyrant”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-25-2025
No kings.
Hertling: “sudden, global, emergency recall of America’s top brass is a flashing red light to them: Something must be wrong inside the Pentagon.”
“Cathay Pacific, China Airlines, Emirates, EVA Air, Singapore Airlines … South Korean Airlines, and Thai Airways all forbid the use of power banks onboard”
https://www.wired.com/story/rules-for-power-banks-on-flights/
The end is in sight. Now if Delta would fix their 30-60% broken USB ports…
“Bessent’s degree of immaturity makes John Kelly and John Bolton seem like the oldest, wisest men inside the Beltway.”
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-worst-adult-in-the-room
The best of MAGA is the worst of humanity.
ChatGPT Pulse: personal ai for data monitoring and genetic actions.
https://fidjisimo.substack.com/p/a-new-paradigm-of-proactive-steerable
“… Pulse combines information from your chats, your feedback, and connected apps like Gmail and Google Calendar”
Adults with cognitive disabilities very much need something like this. For me it would be mostly noise … except for the “obsolete knowledge” problem.
Automation of the umpire: “banking on umpires missing some pitches is a fundamental part of how pitchers have strategized for over a century”
https://www.splinter.com/i-welcome-baseballs-new-robot-overlords
Umpires hit the limits of human ability through extreme effort and training. But the bots are better …
“US Secret Service disrupted a network of telecommunications devices … as leaders gather for the United Nations”
Cook kneels more – appeasing the MAGA.
https://spyglass.org/the-savant-apple/
“At best, Apple needs to handle their Hollywood talent better. At worst, they need to stop their anticipatory compliance.”
Screen Time is still broken.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/24/screen-time-brokenness/
True story: Screen Time / Parental Controls was so broken 5y ago I gave up on a book project.
It has been broken from the start. An early sign that Apple couldn’t do software any more. It was always a pretense, a way to shift blame to parents.
Google’s Data Commons to add MCP server for ai access.
https://thenewstack.io/googles-data-commons-gives-ai-agents-access-to-a-vast-trove-of-stats/
“collects public datasets across a broad set of topics and geographies”
I’m looking forward to seeing this in use.
The calculations of the lackey: “Do the present benefits of submitting to Trump’s will outweigh the future hazards?”
If the lackeys decide that valid elections are possible they will hedge their bets.
Lackeys like Megyn Kelly, who wrote that “we” don’t care about Trump corruption.
Radical therapy seems to slow Huntington’s disease progression by 75%.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevz13xkxpro
Extremely hard neurosurgery and super expensive meds — but both will get easier and less expensive. And better treatments will emerge.
“one was medically retired and has returned to work. Others in the trial are still walking despite being expected to need a wheelchair.”
Very small numbers but dramatic results.
MAGA purge hx of right wing violence: “Justice Department even scrubbed from its website a study finding that far-right extremists have committed far more homicides than those on the left”
Folinic acid: “widespread myth in the wellness community concerning an extremely common gene mutation called MTHFR”
The hard part is not reactively avoiding topics the quackers are keen on.