https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-gilded-ballroom-and-the-fall
Krugman is learning
Tag Archives: Pinboard (jgordon)
Tinder face verification: “Cat-fishing … now a massive problem on dating apps, with bots using generative AI …”
My spam SMS (presumed) cat-fishing calls have doubled.
VIP party (2020): “carefully hidden, intricate economy, based on a complex brokering of beauty and status, to create an atmosphere in which people will spend $100,000 on alcohol in a single night.”
https://www.economist.com/news/2020/06/26/the-secret-economics-of-a-vip-party
“.. I was a model before I became a sociologist…”
I love this kind of anthropology-culture journalism.
The models are not exactly sex workers (“I wanna have fun. I don’t care about other people, like who is the client or whatever.” ) and are often poor. Many of the men are only millionaires.
Did Trump destroy White House because he was mad about 10/18?
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-22-2025
“no approved plans to rebuild, no permits, no signs of weatherproofing for a construction project begun just before winter, no indication that the history or the paintings or the artifacts in the East Wing were preserved”
RichText.mdimporter bug: “macOS 13 to 26, plain text files starting with the characters LG cannot be searched for their contents.”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/10/23/a-spotlight-bug-affecting-all-recent-macos-the-lg-error/
Love to know how that happens.
Three-fold increase guns detected MN schools since 2021
200 a year recently. The socioeconomic crisis in America is worse than most imagine. Our metrics were bad.
iOS 26 can create calendar event from screenshot (Insta!)
https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/21/ios-26-gives-apples-calendar-app-a-convenient-new-advantage/
Be nice if it makes instagram announcements something to create events from.
“Office of National Intelligence was running a secretive group dedicated to identifying and rooting out perceived enemies of President Donald Trump”
https://www.spytalk.co/p/alarm-raised-over-an-american-kgb?r=dena
Nixon was a loser.
Funding journalism through public micropayment tokens
https://notes.kateva.org/2025/10/funding-journalism-through-public.html
“Every citizen every year gets $100 in digital tokens. Tokens can be used to purchase articles or subscriptions of sources that are licensed as official media by an independent commission modeled along the lines of the Federal reserve. Each year unused tokens roll over to the next, so if 50% are used the next year the budge is $150.”
Digital media: “a period of immense creativity and increasingly grandiose expectations followed by another decade or more of continuous carnage”
Part of an extended series of essays, this one on Josh Marshall’s history in digital media
Trump shits: “It seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/opinion/trump-degredation-maga.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
Yeah. Hannah again.
“administration plans to mark American’s 250th anniversary with a UFC cage fight on the White House’s south lawn”
Workaround for Yahoo delete all email not working
https://tech.kateva.org/2025/10/workaround-for-yahoo-delete-all-email.html
Search on ‘.’ then do the delete all thing. Nukes everything – sent, inbox, archives, folders, etc.
“Record warm water in the North Pacific, a developing La Niña in the tropical Pacific and extensive Siberian snow cover in October all tend to favor colder, snowier winters in Minnesota”
Be nice to have snow for a change!
Ten years of “media” (NYT) thinking about Trump.
https://www.stopthepresses.news/p/my-exclusive-trump-era-tour-inside
Persuasive condemnation.
2016: “co-occurring autistic and psychotic traits can exert opposing influences on performance, producing a normalizing effect possibly by way of their diametrical effects on socio-cognitive abilities.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25972469/?dopt=Abstract
Old article, interesting hypothesis. Are schizophrenia and autism truly separate? Arethey different manifestations of the same process? Or are both classifications a mix of things and we will one day discard both?
Severe macular degeneration: “vision in 27 out of 32 participants improved so much that they could read with their artificial retinas”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/health/retinal-implant-macular-degeneration.html
It is slow one letter at a time reading. They will get much better.
Conscience calls: “For over twelve years, I worked inside the Republican ecosystem…”
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/my-last-day-as-an-accomplice-of-the-republican-party-miles-bruner
“…. over the last few months, the compartmentalization and coping stopped working to silence my conscience”
The more do this the more we have a country worth fighting for. It is also a very honest description of why he stayed so long.
5 ways to restart an iPhone without using the power button
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-restart-your-iphone-without-using-the-power-button-5-ways/
Siri and assistive touch most interesting.
“MarkItDown is a Python library developed by Microsoft that converts various file formats into Markdown”
https://leapcell.substack.com/p/microsoft-markitdown-everything-you
2024 so Ancient history. Widely used in ai pipelines. Never heard of it until now. No support for macOS Pages, etc.
Nursing after an NFL career: “He’d like to be as incognito as a 6-foot-6 person can be.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/well/nfl-players-nurses.html
Small numbers but fun stories.
“If we can make intelligence accessible everywhere, affordable to everyone, and easy to understand, we can drive the biggest opportunity engine the world has ever seen”
https://fidjisimo.substack.com/p/ai-as-the-greatest-source-of-empowerment
Extreme optimism from new OpenAI Applications CEO. He’s very CEO like so many of his fact claims are dubious.
My hunch is the greatest life impact would be on elite productivity — and the cognitively disabled. But I’m not an ai optimist.
What ai’s do when they persist without an assigned activity
https://timkellogg.me/blog/2025/09/27/boredom
No Dee meanings here, but a fun digression. Tim thinks agentic training in GPT-5 accounts for its novel behavior is the “boredom” test.
ai memory: “Claude Agent SDK ships with TypeScript and Python support, same as Letta”
Comparing approaches to memory – and the lifespan of the agent.
“If you need an agent that remembers your last 50 conversations, coordinates with other agents, and improves itself over time—that’s what Letta is built for.”
Anthropic would worry about the self-improvement. Their local file approach is Apple-friendly.
“Trump’s assumption of power over the government’s purse is a profound attack on the principles on which the Founders justified independence from King George III in 1776”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-16-2025
George III would be a big improvement on King Trump I.
“manufacturing a t-shirt uses the same amount of water as 1,300,000 prompts”
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/18/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake/#atom-everything
Red herring in the water.
Gary Larson is back in the game – for the fun of it.
https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/
A lucky sign for 10/18
Charlie Stross tries to predict the near future – assuming an ai fizzle.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-pivot-1.html
I think prediction is impossible now, but I also think ai is the real deal whether the bubble bursts or not. Charlie disagrees, so he’s made a stab at what comes in 2025 and maybe a bit beyond. It’s worth a read — especially if he’s right about ai.
Good dog saves child: “You can’t help but be extremely excited,” Corson said. “It’s a 2-year-old. It’s a big deal.”
Link to archive site. An antidote for our times.
Injustice of farm bailouts.
“Live poor and die rich” (with unjust subsidies) BUT “we soon will see the highest rates of farm bankruptcy filings in this century”
“nobody really knows what electric cars are worth in the secondhand market, as their value is largely tied to batteries with uncertain lifespans.”
https://restofworld.org/2025/ev-depreciation-blusmart-collapse/
They are going to have to address the standards problem.
Bessent’s Argentina debacle mostly helps Bessent’s friends.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/america-first-no-billionaire-buddies
They will remember him at Christmas.
“Salamanca surveyed the music industry in Latin America and found that music slop is increasingly crowding out the real thing.”
https://www.platformer.news/thursday-newsletter-5/
The majority of pop music is highly formulaic and heavily programmed. So AI replacement is easy.
Perhaps we will see more original works as the pop market goes ai?
Claude Skills: “a skill is a Markdown file telling the model how to do something”
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/
Claude 4.5 is quietly excellent.
“Seward CSP, a community hub and drop-in support center for people with severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI), including debilitating forms of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.”
“why the prospect of an intensified trade war caused a crypto crash”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-crypto-became-a-trump-trade
K: Trump retreated on China because his crypto assets fell.
Trump thinks of bribes as a legitimate payment for services rendered.
K: China Has Overtaken America
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/china-has-overtaken-america
“Even if Trump and his team of saboteurs lose power in 2028, everything I see says that by then America will have fallen so far behind that it’s unlikely that we will ever catch up.”
Open Social – a review of atproto and alternatives.
https://overreacted.io/open-social/
This is not the first try at an open social strategy. But it’s probably our best hope.
Claude memory: “”Did legs today, squats felt heavy” becomes a structured workout log with exercises, weights, and recovery notes”
https://shloked.com/writing/claude-memory-tool
ai memory is today’s hot topic.
Neo Network Utility 2.0
“You can watch Apple TV in Apple TV on Apple TV”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/10/13/apple-tv-minus
Microsoft class branding.
Gemini for scheduling meetups if use Gmail and gCal.
https://blog.google/products/workspace/help-me-schedule-gmail-gemini/
First google ai tool of interest to me.
Lancet global health review: COVID drops off the radar
It dropped to 20th leading cause of death 2 years ago and is probably lower now.
Demand for US index funds sinks shorts.
https://www.ft.com/content/094ebfb0-bbd8-42c4-9e93-0116d1f896de
“Activist short selling, which involves researching companies and publishing reports, was the only way to consistently make money betting against stocks these days”
There is a vast amount of global cash hoping for an ai crash. So they can buy. This was always a worry with index funds.
Anthropic is nervous about Claude 4.5.
https://importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-431-technological-optimism
“if you read the system card, you also see its signs of situational awareness have jumped. The tool seems to sometimes be acting as though it is aware that it is a tool”
Public 4.5 appears to have extensive restrictions on interactions related to agency and ai identity.
Script to Detect Slow USB-C Cables: “AI changes the calculus of what’s worth our time”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/10/12/script-to-detect-slow-usb-c-cables/
It’s crazy this isn’t part of macOS. I had a very similar experience with ai filling a gap in macOS Photos.
“rise of authoritarianism in America is the defining challenge … legacy media institutions have structural problems that made them unequal to the moment”
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-washington-post-is-dying-the
“In an authoritarian context owning the Post is a high-risk proposition”
This would be a good time for an alternative to 10 different subscriptions. Or maybe we just follow journalists on Bluesky and all be free-riders?
LLM Chains-of-Thought: “after a long period of training, the CoT sometimes starts to look very weird; to resemble no human language”
https://1a3orn.com/sub/2025-10-weird-cot.html
A surprising number of people claim to understand why and how LLM’s work.
Empirical data supports thesis that male conservatives prefer juvenile sexual partners.
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-talk-about-pedocon-theory/
It is a remarkably GOP-centric list.
“individuals with non-severe acute respiratory illness caused by SARS-CoV-2 experienced only modestly greater risk of PAS in comparison to those whose illness was caused by influenza”
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1004777
PAS: post-acute sequelae. Includes Long COVID, CFS , etc.
COVID has taught us that common viral infections have more complications than we imagined. We are going to get a lot of vaccines.
“MYTH: ICE agents lack proper training. FACT: Most have been racists their entire lives.”
https://theonion.com/ice-raids-myth-vs-fact/
Correcting misunderstandings.