https://www.thenerdreich.com/is-peter-thiel-the-antichrist-nyt-didnt-think-to-ask/
They are all doing too many psychedelics.
Tag Archives: IFTTT
“AppleCare One cannot properly handle multiple user accounts in macOS, a limitation Apple acknowledges but has no timeline for fixing”
https://tidbits.com/2025/08/22/applecare-one-stumbles-over-multiple-macos-user-accounts/
Maybe Apple needs a reboot?
How to fund journalism: “the practice of receiving cash is common among Chinese-language journalists in New York”
“In China, it is common for domestic reporters to receive red envelopes with cash … companies there know not to give money to international reporters.”
MPLS George Floyd Square and the future of Chicago avenue.
https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-square-chicago-avenue-closure-pedestrian-plaza/601457413
I visited it recently. It is much smaller than I expected; there is a very fine coffee shop across from what is now a tourist attraction.
There is no rush to do anything. Chicago traffic is slower now which makes it a good bike avenue. I suspect status quo indefinitely.
Local news has best update on NG deployment to DC.
https://51st.news/national-guard-dc-faq/
The guardsman have jobs, family, school. They are not full-time military. They don’t do arrests and policing. They will get very bored and want to go home.
“boat launch at this location had been a very popular spot to discard unwanted vehicles since there was literally a pyramid of vehicles stacked atop one another in the river”
https://www.startribune.com/mn-submerged-vehicle-search-sartell-missing-man/601457641
Interesting view into police work. I live near that boat launch.
Late 25 Gemini query: “nine seconds of TV and … five drops of water”
https://thenewstack.io/google-says-the-median-gemini-prompt-uses-5-drops-of-water/
“A year ago, … energy usage was … 33x higher”
Likely to fall farther.
RFK at work: “Food and drug facility inspectors are having to go to the store and buy supplies on their own dime so they can take swab samples to test for pathogens.”
https://projects.propublica.org/federal-health-worker-cuts-rfk-trump-administration/
America has a stupidity addiction.
Obama to Dem establishment – you really are snowflakes (July 15)
” … particular disdain for law firms that he said had been willing to “set aside the law” … because they might lose a few clients and might not be able to finish that kitchen rehab at their Hampton house.”
Also true …
“Obama has spent much of his post-presidential life producing movies, documentaries and podcasts while building a beachfront compound in Hawaii and playing golf on Martha’s Vineyard.”
“a lot of these organisms just don’t experience enough energy at a rate fast enough to ever appreciably undergo cell division”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-pursuit-of-life-where-it-seems-unimaginable-20250820/
Microbes that breathe iron.
Also, I bet she does CrossFit.
MN Sen Klobuchar on an X deep fake: “heard my voice … spewing a vulgar and absurd critique of an ad campaign for jeans featuring Sydney Sweeney”
https://www.startribune.com/amy-klobuchar-what-i-didnt-say-about-sydney-sweeney/601458280
“X refused to take it down or label it”
The continued popularity of X Is a very grim sign for America.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei 5m ago: “in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/08/20/claim-chowder-amodei
Or Earth may be sterilized by a gamma ray burst.
“If Preview saves a mutilated PDF, you should be able to recover the previous version of that file using Revisionist or Versatility.”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/08/14/inside-pdf-annotations/
I wish EPUB had been more successful.
Why Alaska debacle ended early: “A high-stakes meeting with principals about a very real situation might have been too much for him to manage for a full day”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-17-2025
Trump is failing fast. Vance knife collection at peak sharpness.
30y of JavaScript – a brief history.
SpotTest 1.0 for diagnosing Spotlight problems – The Eclectic Light Company
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/08/18/spottest-1-0-will-help-you-diagnose-spotlight-problems/
“If you have added your own files to the test folder, they will be included”
I have a lot of weird old file types I can test against.
Sematic web, RDF, OWL – and modern AI agents.
https://thenewstack.io/ai-agents-are-finally-delivering-on-the-semantic-webs-promise/
I really liked RDF and even RDFS/OWL. I hope approach of “just enough ontology/formal knowledge representation” works for agentic ai.
Badminton physics: “shuttlecocks can achieve top speeds of more than 300 mph”
‘Parasite’ backstory of Middle-Class Failure in SK: “The massive increase in the number of chicken joints was a direct result of the 1997 Asian financial crisis”
We need new ways to measure economies. Societies cannot handle these rapid cycles.
Vance/Musk pronatalists: “the age of straight-up, populist MAGA is ending … will emerge a tech-adjacent, anti-woke New Right”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-musk-ai-pronatalists-collins-b2777577.html
MAGA, the white tech pronatalists, and the religious fundamentalists have been surprisingly cooperative. All contending for control of a desperate and demented president.
“Simone was once the managing director of Dialog, a secret society co-run by the billionaire PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel.”
The story gets grimmer the more you read.
State of the economy before the data goes MAGA: “Half of all consumer spending is coming from the top 10 percent”
https://prospect.org/economy/2025-08-19-what-us-economy-really-looks-like/
Concise with solid numbers.
Stock buybacks soaring – an indicator of uncertainty. Trump’s crazed lunges having an effect.
Trump’s abuse will damage the US military.
“… a vengeful, partisan deployment to American streets … risks straining the social compact that binds a democracy to its military.”
Trump is using a screwdriver as a hammer.
AI Aug 2025: Apocalypse deferred – but Letta/Void is still going to surprise
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/08/ai-aug-2025-apocalypse-deferred-but.html
The good news is no AGI on the near term horizon. We have a few years still I hope. In the meantime, something like Letta/Void is going to be a part of your life.
Kakistocracy: “our current leadership, with smiles on their faces, will kill many, many more – disproportionately children, mind you – from the comfort of their own offices.”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/kakistocracy
Disgust for the RFK and his soulless braindead pseudo-science bastards Prasad and Bhattacharya.
Derek Lowe writes on science as an endeavor: “it’s important to never lose sight of its fundamental strangeness”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/praise-weirdness
It’s a longer essay that covers my own thoughts fairly closely. Magic and religion, by comparison, are a much better fit to human cognition and psychology.
Science would never happen if religion made useful predictions.
“J.D. Vance appears to have been distancing himself from Trump and the administration by taking repeated vacations”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-11-2025
Trump needs him for the pardons, but Trump’s dementia keeps getting in the way.
Lithium Deficiency and Alzheimer’s Disease: “lithium orotate supplementation in the 3xTg mutant mice almost completely prevented amyloid plaque formation and accumulation of phosphorylated tau in their brains”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/lithium-deficiency-and-alzheimer-s-disease
Derek Lowe is … impressed. So now I am too. It is so weird …
“Trump says the trusted numbers can’t be trusted, so he creates a situation where everyone knows the numbers can’t be trusted”
https://www.twincities.com/2025/08/10/real-world-economics-in-trump-we-trust-at-our-own-peril/
The GOP is good with this.
Vance keeps Epstein story alive: “it’s hard to imagine any other angle Vance could have chosen that would have poured more fuel on that particular dumpster fire.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-10-2025
I’m sure Trump trusts Vance completely.
“DHS appears to have morphed into a brutal, lawless gang of street thugs reminiscent of dictatorial shock troops in other autocratic regimes.”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/dhs-is-a-menace
As anticipated. If there is an American democracy one day then DHS will be eliminated.
Trump’s economist: “even among dishonest right-wing hacks Moore stands out for his pathological inability to get numbers and facts right”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-political-economy-of-incompetence
Drain the swamp and fill the sewer.
“you never know when a competent economist, especially one with a good professional reputation, might balk at being asked to say ridiculous things.”
RFK has similar problem with staff.
Geriatric CrossFit Tips – 2025 Update
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/08/geriatric-crossfit-tips-2025-update.html
The delayed muscle response is remarkable. Seven tips.
AI as the great filter – Zach/Bea comic
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fermi
For 25y I’ve assumed the great filter was AGI
“AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet”
https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discontinued
Press release should have been grander.
We age slowly until 50s then we age quickly.
https://www.aol.com/study-finds-turning-point-body-111100342.html
Back in the 90s I asked about aging being bursty. Back then it was a novel idea. I wasn’t the only one to wonder.
A defense of Tim Cook’s groveling – with copious details.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/gold_frankincense_and_silicon
America was getting more corrupt, but GOP-SCOTUS and GOP-MAGA took it to warp speed. In the absence of law there is only greed and a mad king.
Microglial purging and replacement by bone marrow cells for lethal microglial disorder.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/microglia-rescue
This is extreme medicine for a horrible hopeless disease. Analogous in its ambition to early heart transplant (which took years to be valuable)
Sequoia Disk Utility Bug: “Erase Process Has Failed”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/08/06/disk-utility-erase-process-has-failed/
Tsai: “workaround is to quit and relaunch Disk Utility”
(In comments – grant Disk Utility Full Disk Access.
Even red state fertility falls: “states that had above average fertility rates in 2014 are responsible for more than 80% of the collapse in American birth rates over the past decade.”
“by making 15 percent tariffs the new normal … Trump has used up much of whatever trade ammunition he had”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-emperors-new-trade-deal
K has a mixed record on economic impacts of gov policy, but for EU at least this seems plausible.
“America now looks less like a traditional federal republic and much more like whatever political label you might apply to a writhing pile of lobsters on the ocean’s floor,”
I think more like Crab Bucket politics myself. (viz, Pratchett)
“Starting today, students (ages 18+) in the U.S. as well as in Japan, Indonesia, Korea and Brazil can sign-up for a 12 month Google AI Pro plan for free”
https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-ai-pro-students-learning/
Most universities get it with their Google Workspace plan, not sure if extra fee for them.
MAGA mRNA kill: “Kennedy’s own statement about the decision is a steaming pile of bullshit”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-crime
“the American people elected these lying, incompetent fools and we elected the craven opportunists who confirmed nominees like RFJ”
Craven pond scum like Senator Bill Cassidy, MD.
“Two continent-size masses occupy as much as 30% of the core-mantle boundary, one of them thousands of kilometers below Africa, the other under the Pacific.”
Fun terrestrial geology review. The crystalline structure of the blobs may play a role in transferring material from the core to mantle.
Regularity, a judicial presumption of federal prosecutor integrity, is dying.
Trump’s prosecutors lie and bully. Judges are beginning to act on that basis, and to set aside a presumption of integrity.
“if judges continued to lose faith in the Justice Department, its lawyers would have to spend enormous time and energy backing up what are now considered to be routine courtroom assertions”
“number of fake journal articles being churned out by “paper mills” is doubling every year and a half”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/science/04hs-science-papers-fraud-research-paper-mills.html
And the indexing services share them and nutcases use them to advance personal theories.
“disappointed that [DOJ] has not released the full report so the victims and the public can have a fuller accounting of the depth of interference that led to the patently unjust outcome in the Epstein case.”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-epstein-files-what-we-should
A lot of people had novel information to share at the right time.
Vibrio pectenicida has wiped out 90% of some sea star species.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/science/sea-stars-disease-vibrio-pectenicida.html
Big ecological impact. Now cause discovered there is optimism for recovery.
Of course everyone wants to know “why now”
K: The MAGA are running out of time — and they will take bigger risks and more desperate moves.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-getting-desperate-and-dangerous
The MAGA redistricting in Texas is both a useful Epstein distraction and a sign of desperation. I am not convinced their desperation is justified, but they do seem to be afraid. And so, more likely to make drastic (general strike inducing) moves.
Apple’s ai opportunity is context
https://tech.kateva.org/2025/08/apples-ai-opportunity-is-context.html
For Aug 2025 AI context is key to getting the best results. Apple’s (only) ai advantage is they have access to a lot of user context.