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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.”
https://spyglass.org/europe-cookie-banners/
The cookie debacle has shown that EU regulators are incompetent and it weakened any other user privacy initiatives.
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.
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.…”
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9183
There are still a few voices saying there’s “nothing there”, but they are fainter and fewer every day.
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.
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.”
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…
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-worst-adult-in-the-room
The best of MAGA is the worst of humanity.
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.
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 …
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
The hard part is not reactively avoiding topics the quackers are keen on.
This seems … weak. I thought Trump didn’t like weak.
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 …)
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/sep/18/baader-meinhof
Familiar in many ways.
https://thenewstack.io/chrome-switches-on-ai-the-future-of-browsing-begins-now/
Assuming this includes summary I will switch from Safari
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
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.”
JPEG-XL has had limited acceptance. New and pretty nice. So is Apple into it?
“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,”
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.”
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.
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/15/appearance-matters-get-tahoe-looking-in-better-shape/
Tim Cook stayed too long.
https://indiadispatch.com/p/hollow-at-the-base
Thought to be ai.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/politics/jd-vance-charlie-kirk-show.html
Screenshotted for the history books
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.
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.
Clever title. The unexpected side effects are substantial, surprising, and entirely good.
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.
I didn’t realize Perplexity had some integration— it’s voice only. That is dumb.
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”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/10/macos-tahoe-26-rc/
Do not upgrade.
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/11/defeating-nondeterminism/#atom-everything
Not primarily floating point arithmetic
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/suffering-4
Christianity took a different path.
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”
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.
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”
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.