https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/22/claude-code-confusion/#atom-everything
Suddenly they seem scared.
Tag Archives: Pinboard (jgordon)
29yo MAGA bureaucrat with sex work sideline
“spent $40,000 on her over the course of three months, including first-class trips to Aruba and Italy.”
Very high end sex work.
How American health insurance games the system – prior auth
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-prior-authorizations-limit-access
If you want this fixed mandate publication of auth criteria.
A mathematician on the tedium of proving theorems.
https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-the-theorem-economy
ai is good at tedium where testing is possible.
“tension between two versions of mathematics, official math and secret math.”
“the person in the White House pushing for Trump’s pointless prime time address on the Iran War was “White House chief of staff Susie Wiles,” who “thought it would reassure the country that Trump had a plan.”
https://goodpoliticsbadpolitics.substack.com/p/how-trump-does-war
She’s no James Baker.
“if you can wrap the same LLM with a thick layer of memory and experiences, it elicits behavior from the LLM that is very far from mid”
https://timkellogg.me/blog/2026/04/14/forgetting
Memory, forgetting and long lived agents. A very readable overview.
open-strix not open-claw
“need to prepare for a world where zero-day exploits are dime-a-dozen, and lots of attackers suddenly have offensive capabilities that far outstrip their skill”
Schneier praises Anthropic’s PR skills, but the crisis is truly here.
Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/04/13/artemis-iis-fault-tolerant-computer/
A very different world.
“A minute after posting the image of himself as Jesus, Trump posted an image of a Trump tower on the moon.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-12-2026
NEVER FORGET. Tell your grandchildren. Tell your great grandchildren.
“The land the Clovis people entered around 13,000 years ago was full of enormous ambulatory meat lockers with little-to-no experience of human predation.”
https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/anzick-1-the-clovis-people-and-life
I loved this informed recreation of life of early Americans.
A few hundred exploded across the continent. “The sheer speed of their expansion is remarkable, and in my opinion, perhaps the clearest example of demographic success we can see anywhere in prehistory.”
Operation Enduring Glory; all the places Trump stuck his name.
https://www.contrariannews.org/p/operation-enduring-glory
America the pathetic.
THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES BY DR. TERENCE TAO AND ZACH WEINERSMITH
“Trump told a reporter he did not know the first lady was preparing to give a speech”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-9-2026
I laughed when he called Iran “dishonorable”. That’s Classic Trump.
“hours after his wife gave an unexpected press conference about Jeffrey Epstein, Trump posted a video of a woman’s murder.”
Reminder?
A complete pizzagate nutcase is now a MN DOJ immigration “judge”
https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/04/09/right-wing-poster-is-minnesotas-newest-immigration-judge/
So many grifters, so many people with psych issues.
What is a Recession: “economists have the words to talk about what we are going through in the labor market right now because we’ve never seen it before”
https://www.kedits.com/p/what-is-a-recession
She covers a lot of territory in one informal essay. We need more economists like her.
Idaho proves the value of 1970s medicaid ACT program – by cutting the program.
“assertive community treatment”. State cut the program, then so many died that even Idaho Republicans decided to restore it.
Neutrinos still fascinate but there isn’t a sterile version.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/experiments-ring-the-death-knell-for-sterile-neutrinos-20260408/
A loose thread physicists keep picking at.
“a particle as a ripple traveling through a quantum field in space, and a massive particle as two overlapping ripples traveling through two fields”
“the American voters did resummon Nyarlathotep because enough of us remain enthralled by his unfettered madness, wanton cruelty, and nonsensical brinkmanship…”
“A study by Peking University analyzed more than a million online job postings in China between 2018 and 2024 …. functions that could be performed using AI had seen a significant decline in hiring … computer programming, accounting, editing, and sal
https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ai-anxiety-openclaw-jobs-redundancy/
The tranquility and calm of 2025 was a kind of golden age. More seriously, employment anxiety in China has multiple causes.
Academic talent is now the great class divide: “anywheres are 25–30% of the population, while somewheres are closer to 45–50%”
https://www.persuasion.community/p/david-goodhart
Most people who lack academic access or talents have an unhappy future. So they have an incentive to burn the world. Maybe that isn’t good even for the lucky 30%.
“The upshot is that for the universe to be ultrasoft, string theory is the only way”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/are-strings-still-our-best-hope-for-a-theory-of-everything-20260323/
String Theory may be a player after all.
Wyden: “secret law related to Section 702”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/sen-wyden-warns-of-another-section-702-abuse.html
NSA spies on us. No warrants.
US Senator: “a, nominee say things. In the committee that you know, the nominee knows, everybody in the room knows, are complete and utter bullshit”
https://www.contrariannews.org/p/which-cabinet-member-is-next-on-the
Yes, they aren’t stupid. They know the nominees are just bullshitting through their hearings. They ask the questions hoping it makes good TV. The awful thing is that the media plays along as though nominee hearings were actually for real. All about the clicks.
“The punch will never go away, and what we’ve done will never go away.” Sheldon compares America to an abusive husband assaulting their spouse.
“there is a fundamental conflict between the efficiency with which markets spread information and the incentives to acquire information.”
https://mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-simple-economic-paradox-wrecking
“… Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox … Important or valuable information can be costly to obtain or produce … information gets transmitted to the rest of the marketplace when the information producers can exploit a market opening … the more widely distributed information becomes in a marketplace, you’re likelier to lose your money if you keep investing in producing high-quality information. So everyone stops producing new information”
Meds to the brain by injecting them into the skull.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/right-through-skull
Next drug abuse frontier. But, medically, could be awesome.
Lowe strains to describe RFK’s peptide mania: “there are indeed a whole range of physical and medical effects to be found in these things”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ah-peptides-where-begin
He despairs by the end. There’s nothing to say really. It’s Darwin Awards every day now.
The regulatory burden: detailed example from a US startup.
https://rein.pk/over-regulation-is-doubling-the-cost
Regulatory ratchet is a deep problem.
New regulations are relatively easy to create and always benefit the creators in some way. It is a career ending move to remove or revise existing regulations.
Same problem Gov and industry but Gov has it worse.
HCR summarizes latest phase in the crisis: “Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who urged Trump to start the Iran war, has invested at least $2 billion in Kushner’s private equity firm.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-5-2026
Allegedly Trump came very close to ordering a “tactical” nuclear strike on NK in his first term.
“What migrates into silicon is not abstract reasoning but social intelligence in externalized form, encountering itself on a new substrate.”
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeg1895
Essay from researchers on intelligence and ai. Good description of “community of mind” emergent intelligence.
Which coup strategy will Trump try: “Some variant of terrorism is Trump’s best bet”
https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-next-coup-attempt
Trump will either leverage an actual foreign terrorist attack or create a false attack to stop midterms. Other strategies are much more challenging.
“It’s entirely possible that basically by this time Tuesday, America will have established itself as one of the world’s great villains”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/living-in-hell
Anyone who aided, supported, voted for, funded, enabled the GOP … you are responsible. This is on you.
Vulnerability Research Is Cooked: “You can’t design a better problem for an LLM agent than exploitation research”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/3/vulnerability-research-is-cooked/#atom-everything
Hope you have redundant offsite archived backups.
“2,208 deaths while homeless in Los Angeles in 2024”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-191031947
As American non-college income share declines the most vulnerable are pushed to the streets. Perhaps because support networks collapse. On the streets fentanyl use is arguably rational.
“Life Time is aiming for the high end of the K-shaped economy, a term describing America’s widening wealth gap”
When you look you see this everywhere. Much of it is the college-noncollege class gulf. What I call “mass disability”
“next thing I knew, Trump was getting up and moving to the far left … as far away from Bondi as possible”
https://www.contrariannews.org/p/i-was-there-for-the-trump-bondi-breakup
Bondi’s humiliation is our breakfast cheer. (He will try to do worse — but worse will accelerate his downfall.)
“Medicare-like health plans (sometimes referred to as the public option) would be available to everyone who wants such coverage. These alternatives would then compete against private plans.”
Dems start to imagine again.
VHA should be a part of any public option system.
What serious social engineering looks like – you don’t have a chance.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/3/supply-chain-social-engineering/
“I join a lot of meetings where I find myself needing to install Webex or Microsoft Teams or similar at the last moment and the time constraint means I always click “yes” to things as quickly as possible to make sure I don’t join late.”
“Hegseth has reworked the Chaplain Corps recently to limit the range of religious instruction available to military personnel.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-2-2026
Evangelicals will regret this.
Claude-built python app for tuning macOS Preview PDF highlights into a plaintext list
https://tech.kateva.org/2026/04/my-new-favorite-utility-claude-built.html
I like this app a lot. Turns my macOS Preview highlights into plaintext I dump into MindNode. With page refs and a header. It’s all ai generated, so I share the output and a general description. Code available on demand.
“There is a pervasive billionaire assumption that mainstream legacy journalism is “liberal,”
I wasn’t always a wealth tax guy.
“in a basic sense the current American right simply isn’t interested in news or journalism as most of us conceive it.”
Microsoft Xbox One Hacked: “instead of tinkering with the system rest pin(s) the hacker targeted the momentary collapse of the CPU voltage rail”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/microsoft-xbox-hacked.html
Technically impressive. Unclear economic impact but a great lesson.
Neal Metaverse Stephenson on the non-Metaverse: “Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles.”
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/my-prodigal-brainchild
And a retrospective from his time at Magic Leap. They were decades premature.
Private equity and the cliff: “2025, nearly 1 out of every 5 private equity asset sales was to a continuation fund”
Continuation funds are a scam to delay recognizing losses. Lots of detail in this important pub.
Miller’s Minneapolis strategy: “be sent to areas where DHS knew there would be a lot of protesters because he wanted to “force confrontations”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-30-2026
Miller deliberately set up the murders of Good and Pretti. In a just world he’d serve time in a Minnesota prison.
The failure of his operation to provoke riots is worth studying.
Public health in America: status 2026
https://rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/the-maha-morbidity-and-mortality-739
The lunatics continue their assault on multiple fronts.
“NASA is going to fly Artemis II based on vibes, hoping that whatever happened to the heat shield on Artemis I won’t get bad enough to harm the crew on Artemis”
Epstein: “The dark connector’s role is to make it easier for people of standing to move between their public obligations and their private desires …”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/opinion/epstein-elite-men.html?smid=bs-share
I have wondered how many other Epsteins there are.
Binance going down.
The NYT says Binance “missed” the crypto money funneled to Iran. By which they mean conspiracy. They are gonna get sued into oblivion.
“vendor’s chief executive shared a Singapore villa with a Chinese entrepreneur whose corporate office was placed on the U.S. blacklist.”
Trump admin won’t prosecute but others will.
AI glasses in China rented for exam cheating.
https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ai-glasses-cheating-privacy-boom/
I suspect proctors know they are being used … but they aren’t enforcing rules. That is curious.