https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/bearing-down-placebo-effect
Biology keeps getting weirder. Brilliant experimental design.
Tag Archives: Pinboard (jgordon)
Claude’s souls document contributors: “two of the fifteen listed names are Catholic members of the clergy”
The siege of MSP.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/21/minneapolis-ice-surge-siege
“They have guns and teargas,” he said. “And we’ve got whistles and car horns.”
We cannot defeat them. We can only slow them down and make clear to all who can see that America has fallen.
America has fallen. Carney provides the vision for a better world.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-20-2026
“We know the old order is not coming back,” Carney said. “We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.”
Americans as individuals should do what we can to support the middle powers. Within America we work to slow the monsters, and hope that one day we build a stronger democracy with better leaders.
Mac dev on Claude Code: “foundation of a fundamental shift in the economics of building and maintaining apps”
https://www.macstories.net/stories/how-i-revived-my-decade-old-app-with-claude-code/
Like going from a typewriter to a word processor. Book size increased.
“Not since the British occupation of Boston on the eve of the Revolutionary War has an American city experienced anything like the blockade of Minneapolis and its surrounding areas by the federal government.”
“religion is quickly waning as a source of political legitimacy, and that this is especially visible in places like Turkey and Iran”
https://kulturkampftr.substack.com/p/iran-and-turkey-are-losing-their
Europe’s endless wars had a similar effect.
“The idea that religious people are immoral would have been somewhat counterintuitive 25 years ago. Today, it is mainstream knowledge.”
Whipple building detention center likely hiding more cruelty and abuse.
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/what-is-ice-hiding-in-minneapolis
ICE is the American Gestapo.
Tahoe bricks a Mac Studio – DFU required Apple Store
https://www.zdnet.com/article/macos-tahoe-bug-bricked-mac-studio-how-to-fix/
A friend of mine bricked his new MacBook Air. If the update hangs and a user reboots sometimes it works and sometimes it bricks.
Between Liquid Metal and brickings this seems to be the year Apple’s many development issues became obvious.
“Susan Tincher alleges federal agents shackled her in a cell for five hours and cut off her bra and her wedding ring of 32 years in retaliation for attempting to observe their actions on Dec. 9”
ICE has gathered the scum of the galaxy.
The treaty after the war of independence: “As late as January 12, only seven of the thirteen states were represented, and Congress needed nine states to ratify the treaty”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-14-2026
Lots of interesting detail I’d never thought about. US got fishing rights off Newfoundland.
Google Personal Intelligence: “seeing hundreds of photos of you at a golf course might lead it to assume you love golf. But it misses the nuance: you don’t love golf, but you love your son”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/14/google-personal-intelligence
Seen. Golf is a terrible thing but the kid likes it. This is what Apple promised.
K: “While our institutions and our elites have failed us, ordinary Americans are rising to the occasion. If Minneapolis is a laboratory of democratic destruction, it has also become a laboratory of civil resistance”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-minneapolis-crucible
St Paul is a part of MPLS here, but I’ll go with that.
“X is seemingly untouchable for political reasons”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/08/grok-x-app-stores
Apple’s rules don’t apply to X or Grok. Because our democracy is out of order.
“the polycrisis of the 1600s gave birth to the Enlightenment”
ICE agents steal and sell victim’s phone
https://www.propublica.org/article/videos-ice-dhs-immigration-agents-using-chokeholds-citizens
“Arnoldo had filmed much of the incident, but agents had taken his phone. He used Find My to locate the phone — at a vending machine for used electronics miles away, close to an ICE detention center. ”
Agent got some cash for dumping phone in, probably spent on cheap booze.
30 Real Things You Can Do Right Now to Stop ICE and the Slide Into Authoritarianism
https://beingliberal.substack.com/p/30-things-you-can-do-to-stop-this?r=3j50y
Very concrete actions.
“When we asked Jerome Powell if he had ever been pegged by Taylor Swift on the roof of the Eccles Building, he said no. These images clearly prove he is a liar”
Journalist Laura Jedeed joins ICE – sort of.
Their hiring process is pretty much what you’d expect. (Laura did not accept their job offer; she suspects if she had they might have figured out that she’s not the veteran they were looking for.)
Face-name assignment in macOS Photos app is only local, not synchronized to iCloud
https://tech.kateva.org/2026/01/face-name-assignment-in-macos-photos.html
Apple’s enshittification is best demonstrated through the history of their photo management software.
Minneapolis heroic community patrols: “federal agents smashed in her car window, dragged her and her co-pilot out of the car, and held them for eight hours in the belly of the Whipple Federal Building”
https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/01/13/in-the-car-with-minneapolis-community-patrols/
Good description of active peaceful resistance.
“In group chats, neighbors using anonymous nicknames volunteer to assist with various aspects of the operation. No one assigns shifts or jobs; group members take on a needed role when they’re available, alert the group to their activities and let everyone know when they’re done.
The system is both highly organized and decentralized, with no clear leaders — just longer-time members of the network helping newcomers learn the communication style and security practices of the group.”
The murder of Ms Good: “Viola Liuzzo was 39 years old when she was murdered”
Hoover was a monster. Bovino is a monster.
Software library: “has no code at all, just a carefully written specification, an AGENTS.md and a collection of conformance tests in a YAML file.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/10/a-software-library-with-no-code/#atom-everything
I wondered when this would be tried.
HCR: “The news has seemed to move more and more quickly in the last week.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-11-2026
Signs that some in the GOP dislike Trumpistan.
What’s really happening with child care fraud in Minnesota
A real problem that was grossly amplified by the Nazi party.
“Homeland Security has added the words, “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/opinion/renee-good-minnesota-shooting-ice.html?smid=bs-share
Nazi America is no longer a potential future. It is our reality now. May all the world together be strong enough to stop us.
“Trump administration does not need an inciting incident. They can simply claim Minnesotans burned Minneapolis to the ground.”
https://www.firewalledmedia.com/p/the-law-of-the-gun
Works for Putin.
iOS 26 bypasses Instagram’s link deprecation
https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/09/ios-26-gave-screenshots-a-hidden-power-ive-started-using-a-lot/
This feature was created with META in mind. Zuck must hate it.
MPLS DFL senior caucus: “Did our members plan to spend their retirement days defending their fellow and sister Minnesotans?”
https://www.mplsdflseniors.org/index.php/events
Sounds like something I could do.
“deep sense of existential dread that many programmers are feeling right now”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/llm-predictions-for-2026/#atom-everything
LLMs are going to be better at coding than most humans.
“I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.”
CBS collapse: “former Paramount chair Shari Redstone, engineered this debacle”
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/dont-forget-who-first-stole-cbss
“the truth contradicted her ideology and integrity hit her in the wallet”
A lot of weak people rose to power in the past few decades. Trump mowed them down.
1Password Browser Extension Code Injection: “I would hope that as little code as possible is injected and that it’s all been vetted by 1Password, not just pulled down as a dependency.”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/01/07/1password-browser-extension-code-injection/
We all hope. (I don’t use the extension.)
Exporting Gazans to Somaliland: “… Somaliland’s president is stringing Netanyahu along”
The prospects for Iran seem bleak.
https://gwynnedyer.com/2026/what-if-khamenei-falls/
It is hard for people who know Iran to see a way out.
Trump and lying about a killing: “If this works, it would be a demonstration of totalitarian power, the ability to control how people think.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-7-2026
Authoritarian was not enough.
Poison tech 60kya: “… human ancestors 60,000 years ago — and even earlier — were cognitively on par with modern humans”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/science/poison-arrows-south-africa.html
We think something changed in the past 100ky. This helps narrow the change.
Leaves the big question as to why writing took so long to happen. It is biologically odd that we can read at all…
Venezuela and the Shadow Fleet – “Shadow fleets of the non-state type operate on thin capitalization, fast reflagging, and plausible deniability”
https://www.trfetzer.com/thoughts-on-venezuela-and-the-shadow-fleet/
Best discussion I have seen
Minnesota Welfare Fraud Scandal Explained.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-real-story-behind-the-minnesota-welfare-fraud-scandal
A good overview with useful context.
Gruber: “I’ve decided not to upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/06/nielsen-icons-in-menus
“I can tolerate being angry about UI changes Apple makes to the Mac. But I can’t tolerate being heartbroken.”
Tim Cook owns this and more. I also now plan not to upgrade.
“The idea of reclaiming the country for white men by destroying the federal government grew, along with the idea that Democrats could win elections only by cheating.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-5-2026-monday
A fair description of the GOP.
“Kokotajlo and his co-authors revise their expectations for when AI might be able to code autonomously, putting this as likely to happen in the early 2030s, as opposed to 2027”
“The new forecast sets 2034 as the new horizon for “superintelligence”
2034 might as well be 2070. This is very encouraging. He is really talking about “singularity”, I guess superintelligence is the rebranding.
An undergraduate essay on the “anthropology” of 2025 memory-positive ai
https://notes.kateva.org/2026/01/an-undergraduate-essay-on-anthropology.html
“I chose to write about the echoes of ‘economic anthropology’ in the stirrings of what will likely become a non-human culture based in part on the legacy of human culture. A subtext is that in a post-ai world humans and ‘dynamic entities’ alike may need alternatives to the market system that has sustained us so far. My professors only request was that I give him some sense of what today’s ‘dynamic entities’ are.”
Key Roundup (glyphosate) safety review retracted – “paper had based its conclusions largely on unpublished studies by Monsanto”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/climate/glyphosate-roundup-retracted-study.html
Damn. Only 25y ago; this kind of thing was more common 60y ago. Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology is pretty obscure though.
Retracted 10y after WHO said it’s probably carcinogenic. Lots more went wrong than one bad article.
“The refusal of the Department of Justice to obey the clear direction of the Epstein Files Transparency Act seems to have been a test of Congress’s resolve, and so far, it is a gamble the administration appears to be winning.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-4-2026
If you can’t impeach then you got nothing.
“two-hour, bloodless capture of a sitting president inside a presumably at least somewhat fortified environment suggests some sort of internal fracture…”
https://michaeldsellers.substack.com/p/maduros-slow-motion-two-hour-bloodless?triedRedirect=true
I wonder if Maduro has a pardon ahead.
Flock AI-Enabled People tracking cameras.
The panopticon is the future. In SF stories surveillance-free zones emerge.
“Strix is a dissipative system that “lives on” interaction from me. It appears autonomous, but if you take me away, it’ll collapse.”
https://timkellogg.me/blog/2026/01/01/is-strix-alive
You are also a dissipative system.
2025: Willison‘s year in LLMs
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/31/the-year-in-llms/?ref=werd.io
It’s long. Impressive work.
eSIMs can transfer between phones on command.
https://techinch.com/blog/esim-is-less-scary-than-it-seems
Seems like a significant security risk. Necessary though; I’m surprised it seems to work.