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.
Adobe Scan (free): “Adobe Scan was the standout best. You can line up a set of documents, then pan your phone over the set and turn them into a single PDF in a literal minute.”
https://techinch.com/blog/best-scanner-apps
I avoid Adobe but this I will try.
TikTok ban blocked because Trump can now command others to break laws.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-6-2025
“core presidential national security and foreign affairs powers”
As America burns legacy media fiddles.
Iran and the need to flatter the Sun-King.
https://gwynnedyer.com/2025/iran-much-ado-about-nothing/
King Trump I is best managed by a revolting stream of obsequious flattery.
Hold your nose.
“U.S. agriculture is on the brink of a financial shakeout that will be the worse since the farm crisis of the 1980s”
https://www.twincities.com/2025/07/06/real-world-economics-looming-farm-crisis-by-the-numbers/
Low interest rates caused land prices to rise and commodity prices are now falling. Some of this is Trump, other parts are longterm.
Meanwhile Trump is decimating healthcare in rural America while young women continue to leave.
Trump turns up scam volume to max.
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-scammers-golden-age-crypto
GOP love for scams goes back to Amway and before. But Trump, who may be the most talented con man in history, is taking it next level.
The MAGA will be fleeced.
Porting a landline number to a secondary Ting eSIM on iPhone with primary AT&T account
https://tech.kateva.org/2025/06/porting-landline-number-to-secondary.html
We falied with Tello, but finally succeeded with Ting. I think the carriers have more or less sabotaged the federally mandated landline number porting process.
Anyway, ported landline now $10/month on a secondary eSIM on Emily’s personal iPhone.
Jonathan (ACA) Gruber (and K) on healthcare v MAGA. Truly worth reading.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/health-care-jonathan-gruber
It’s rare I read these kinds of interviews but Gruber is another level. A must read.
Preparing for MAGA to sell the labor of concentration camp prisoners.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/concentration-camp-labor
Inevitable next step. Somebody needs to do the harvests.
Neal Stephenson, writer of the technarchy, reflects on AI and education.
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/emerson-ai-and-the-force
Nobody predicted our times better than Stephenson (once optimistic) and Gibson (always realist).
“increase in hip and pelvic fractures with semaglutide that was 4 times as high as that with placebo”
“maximum loss of fat-free mass as measured by DXA had occurred by 1 year after the start of a weight-loss intervention, but by 8 years fat mass was regained without regain of fat-free mass”
Areas of active research. We don’t know if strength training offsets these effects but we do know most people will not voluntarily do exercise.
Structured Exercise after Colon CA Chemo: “The 8-year overall survival was 90.3% in the exercise group and 83.2% in the health-education group”
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2502760?query=TOC
“The 5-year disease-free survival was 80.3% in the exercise group and 73.9% in the health-education group”
This is a much bigger effect than I would have expected. It’s a strong study design. There was no diff in body weight, this was not an obesity effect.
“Murkowski had planned to vote against the bill if she was not the decisive vote; but would vote yes if she was.”
https://charliesykes.substack.com/p/the-conscience-of-lisa-murkowski?r=2k4r8&triedRedirect=true
Remember courage? Remember decency?
If you have both you are far above Murkowski.
Anker Recalls More Power Banks. Again.
https://tidbits.com/2025/07/01/anker-recalls-six-more-power-banks/
Maybe power banks in general are a bad idea.
Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah Ginger: “dog’s brain breaks up speech into two parts: the emotional cues and the meaning of the words. Then it processes these two components on opposite sides of the brain”
https://desertdemocrat.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/blah-blah-blah-blah-ginger/
It’s still a magnificent cartoon.
Scraping wars are new spam wars.
https://www.wired.com/story/cloudflare-blocks-ai-crawlers-default/
ICYMI – we lost the spam wars. This is about giving publishers more leverage in their negotiations with the answer engines.
“Cloudflare’s shift to blocking by default could prove a significant roadblock to surreptitious scrapers and could give publishers more leverage to negotiate, whether through the Pay Per Crawl program or otherwise.”
“You can get $1000/mo of value from coding agents now.”
https://allenpike.com/2025/coding-agents
They are using the big ones, esp o3, for coding.
“defrauding elderly authors across the United States of almost $44 million …
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/ghostwriting-scam.html
… by “convincing the victims that publishers and filmmakers wanted to turn their books into blockbusters”
Somehow worse than romance scams.
Minnesota’s Mesabi Bike Trail – A 2025 Review
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/06/minnesotas-mesabi-bike-trail-2025-review.html
A truly extraordinary journey across Minnesota’s iron range. Worthy of traveling to do – for a reasonably strong cyclist (or an eBike).
Brain of pregnant mother: “gray matter decreased about 4%, and those changes are pretty permanent”
So many questions from this. Researcher imaged her brain during pregnancy.
EPA Staff declaration of dissent.
https://www.standupforscience.net/epa-declaration
Fighting the onslaught of the idiots.
“creativity of diffusion models can be thought of as a by-product of the denoising process itself, one that can be formalized mathematically and predicted”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-uncover-hidden-ingredients-behind-ai-creativity-20250630/
Those who claim they understand genAI do not.
Dehumidifier WiFi (xkcd).
We will eventually ban connectivity in household appliances.
Microsoft bows to Trump, suspends email of lead prosecutor of Israeli war crimes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/technology/us-tech-europe-microsoft-trump-icc.html
Netenyahu and Trump are their own axis of evil.
Microsoft and ICC work on mitigating harm. The bright side is EU now forced to separate from US tech services.
Google Offerwall: publisher alternative to dying ad revenue.
Most interesting non-AI tech news this year.
Krugman an the raw bigotry of the MAGA: “We’re All Rats Now”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/were-all-rats-now
Rats against the MAGA.
“using the gimmick of ignoring the tax extensions by saying they are simply a continuation of policies already in place, the Senate claims the bill will cost $442 billion”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-28-2025
OTOH everybody knew the GOP was lying when they set a sunset date. If they won the cuts would be extended.
OTOH they lied then and they are now lying about the rules.
OTOH nobody sane trusts the GOP.
“With Barr publicly opposing his renegade colleagues, the leadup to the next FOMC meeting, July 30- 31, seems like a standoff from Gunsmoke.”
Details of the Fed you never see elsewhere.
“by last month, the money supply was 42% greater than it was pre-COVID while real output is not even 14% greater.”
Exotic gut bacteria implicated in MS transmit disease in a mouse model.
“In animals that received bacteria from the sibling with multiple sclerosis, paralysis appeared within twelve weeks. Mice given microbes from the healthy twin stayed mobile the entire study.”
I did not expect this. More to come I am sure.
“This Apple has been dismantling Mac OS, as if it’s a foreign tool to them.”
https://morrick.me/archives/10078
Jobs was an asshole and a science denialist, but his taste was exceptional.
“Thind, an Indian Sikh man who identified himself as Indo-European, could not become a U.S. citizen because he was not a “white person” under U.S. law”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-27-2025
SCOTUS, in thrall to the MAGA, leads us back to the pit.
“Many of us abandoned Internet Explorer for alternatives such as Camino.”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/06/28/a-brief-history-of-web-browsers/
A nostalgic trip through Mac browser history. I liked Camino.
Gilbert of Pack Hortman was remembered together with his people.
Killed by the MAGA assassin as he killed Mark and Melissa.
MacWhisper now has Nvidia Parakeet transcription model
https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/27/macwhisper-13-supports-nvidia-parakeet-transcription-model/
Nvidia’s Parakeet … promised to transcribe “60 minutes of audio in just 1 second”, provided you had the right hardware, such as A100, H100, T4, or V100 GPUs.
Prediction: A post-AGI American democracy will be socialist
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/06/prediction-post-agi-american-democracy.html
Totalitarian state is perhaps more likely, but I did say “democracy”.
Adder: 1984 meets 2025
Medical societies respond to anti-science MAGA: “physicians must align around clear, evidence-based guidance for patients”
Politic language but very clear. I can’t see any medical society that didn’t sign.
Apple enshitification: Apple F1 ad as wallet notification
Cook should be replaced today. Infuriating.
Boycott F1.
Tsai roundup of expert dev commentary on AI coding: “Using Claude Code to interact with your own software over MCP, and see it autonomously solve problems with it and using it, is transcendent.”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/06/26/software-is-changing-again/
AIs don’t talk Swift. This is a huge problem for Apple.
Tsai has been cautious about the tech.
Reddit signs deal with the devil, now overwhelmed with LLM spam.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/26/reddit-is-being-spammed-by-ai-bots-and-its-all-reddits-fault/
I don’t see the direct connection to the despicable Google deal, but I can confirm subreddits are increasingly LLM-boring.
MN gov Walz run again: men 34%, women 55%
“LLMs are going to open a whole new world of intimate surveillance.”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/what-llms-know-about-their-users.html
Their ever evolving individual user profiles are very detailed.
“After peaking at … 1.6 million Americans in 2009, the prison population was … 1.2 million at the end of 2023 … on track to fall to about 600,000”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/prisoner-populations-are-plummeting/683310/
“The principal political barrier to closing half-full prisons is the power of public-sector unions. In contrast, a private prison can be sent to its reward if its contract is canceled.”
This is a well reported piece
I suspect MAGA will reverse the decline. But still impressive. Demographics plays a role.
Ken Kocienda – Coding With AI using Cursor
https://kocienda.micro.blog/2025/06/25/coding-with-ai-all-the.html
A significant productivity boost but not a qualitative change. Yet.
“we have low overall unemployment, … but unemployment among college graduates between 22 and 27 at recession-like levels”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/bad-times-for-college-graduates
Unprecedented. I suspect it’s mostly a sign that the expected recession is underway.
On the bright side, MAGA will destroy rhe rural communities that voted MAGA.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/maga-will-devastate-rural-america
K omitted that parts of rural America had pivoted to tourism. And MAGA is killing tourism.
I have lived in rural America. Most of it has been in decline for at least decades; the economic foundations eroded. It is going to get clobbered.
Another bit of dark humor is that Vance understands what is going to happen. And he is making it happen.