Linda & Louis Buzz & The Cat - Can’t Get You Out of My Head
A totally mesmerizing rendition of my favorite earworm, courtesy of this week’s issue of The Weekly Dish.
I could watch this on repeat for hours.
Elon Musk is paying voters again ahead of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election
Not satisfied with effectively buying a co-president role in Donald Trump’s administration, Elon Musk has turned his attention — and money — towards a key race in the swing state of Wisconsin. The billionaire’s America PAC is claiming to give $100 to registered voters who sign a petition against “activist judges.”
It’s not the first time Musk has promised money in exchange for signatures on petitions: he did the same thing leading up to the presidential election in November. It’s illegal to pay someone to vote or to register to vote, but Musk’s approach is meant to intentionally toe the line. Some election law experts say the tactic is legal because the offer doesn’t require a person actually vote; others say that requiring signatories be registered voters is what violates the law.
Fuck Elon and fuck billionaires meddling in our politics.
Power to the people.
Space Force warns of Chinese satellites ‘dogfighting’
China has practiced co-ordinated satellite maneuvers in space that resemble aerial combat, according to a US Space Force General.
Speaking on Tuesday at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington, the vice chief of space operations General Michael Guetlein said the US is preparing to develop capabilities for off-planet warfare. Space Force needs to guarantee “space superiority,” over China, Russia, and other nations, he opined.
That status is necessary because China has already launched a refuelling station in geosynchronous equatorial orbit to service its growing satellite fleet.
Now it’s used some of its orbiting assets in what look like offensive drills.
“We observed five objects in space moving in and out and around each other in synchrony and in control,” Guetlein said. “That’s what we call dogfighting in space - they are practicing tactics, techniques and procedures to do in-orbit space operations from one satellite to another.”
This is not the future I wanted to live in, but here we are.
The United States needs a backup positioning system for GPS and it needs it yesterday.
Apple Restricting New Pebble Smartwatches From 'Being Awesome' With iPhone
Migicovsky says that it was difficult to design for iPhones when he was working on the original Pebble watch, and in the last eight years, "things have actually gotten worse." He said that his company will "build a good app for iOS," but that it is impossible for a third-party smartwatch to replicate the functions of the Apple Watch. He shared an extensive list of the limitations:
- There's no option for sending text messages or iMessages.
- There's no option for replying to notifications or taking actions like marking something as done.
- There is little inter-app communication, which makes it difficult for Pebble to work with other iOS apps.
- If the iOS app is closed, the watch can't access the app or the internet.
- The watch cannot detect if you're using your phone, so it will buzz and display a notification regardless.
- There's no easy option to allow developers to create watch faces and apps for Pebble that would be available through the Pebble iOS app.
This is Apple using the power of its integrated ecosystem to snuff out competition, plain and simple.
There might be some very good security reasons iMessage and FaceTime are not available on third-party devices, but otherwise I can't think of any good reasons Apple can't build public APIs to integrate third-party watches with iPhone and iOS. It's just Apple protecting their bottom line. This behavior needs to be regulated.
How A.I. Is Changing the Way the World Builds Computers (gift link)
Big tech companies have constructed computer data centers all over the world for two decades. The centers have been packed with computers to handle the online traffic flooding into the companies’ internet services, including search engines, email applications and e-commerce sites.
But those facilities were lightweights compared with what’s coming. Back in 2006, Google opened its first data center in The Dalles, Ore., spending an estimated $600 million to complete the facility. In January, OpenAI and several partners announced a plan to spend roughly $100 billion on new data centers, beginning with a campus in Texas. They plan to eventually pump an additional $400 billion into this and other facilities across the United States.
The change in computing is reshaping not just technology but also finance, energy and communities. Private equity firms are plowing money into data center companies. Electricians are flocking to areas where the facilities are being erected. And in some places, locals are pushing back against the projects, worried that they will bring more harm than good.
A pretty good beginner's guide to AI computing. Worth a read.
Googles Monopoly isn’t Search – It’s Data, About You
What can Google track of you across the web? The results may astound you with the ways that Google can follow you around the web. It is such pervasive surveillance network, that it is almost easier to ask, where they can’t’ track you than it is to ask where they can track you. As far as we can see from the outside-looking-in, there is no other entity even remotely close to being able to track you so extensively.
If you care at all about privacy (and you should), delete every Google app from your iPhone. Buy an iCloud+ subscription and enable Private Relay. Download 1Blocker and buy a lifetime subscription. Purchase StopTheMadness Pro. And change your default Safari search engine to DuckDuckGo.
Unruly Passenger Swallows Rosary Beads on American Airlines Flight
A satanic disciple had stowed away on a flight to Florida, as one passenger saw it, and something had to be done.
Less than a minute after an American Airlines flight took off from Savannah, Ga., for Miami on Monday night, a passenger began yelling and shaking. Flight attendants initially thought he was having a seizure.
But it turned out he was struggling because he believed a demonic spirit had invaded the cabin — and, at some point during the flight, began swallowing rosary beads to ward that spirit off.
The award for the best headline of 2025 (so far) goes to…
That feeling when you wake up and discover HAIM has a new single.
The Return Of The McCarthyite Chill
It's Friday, so Andrew Sullivan:
I have absolutely no time for campus protests that go over the line into intimidation of other students. If crimes have been committed, I have no problem prosecuting. But offensive speech? It’s allowed in America. Handing out fliers? It’s how America began! A campus can (and should) discipline its students; but the federal government intervening to seize a legal resident and trying to deport him for speech — along with a dragnet for finding others to throw out — is an outrage in a free country.
Very few American citizens have read the Constitution. Most treat it as they do their holy books: they cherry-pick the rules they like, have no problem judging others by those particular rules, yet seem to know hardly anything about the rest of the document.
Or worse, they know nothing of the Constitution — not a single article or amendment. They just speak with confidence about what it does or does not contain, the document itself be damned.
This ignorance feels particularly galling when coming from the Right, which it so often does, because those that so fervently support Trump and his ilk seem to fetishize the Constitution, always going on (and on) about their love of America and the "rule of law” while wearing at least one piece of clothing brandishing Old Glory. So you'd think they'd care a bit more about America's founding document, about the Emoluments Clause or the Twenty-second Amendment or, hell, the most famous amendment of them all.
But let's not bullshit each other: this isn't about the rule of law.
This is about hate.
This is about hating someone so much that you openly choose to ignore the rules laid out in the document you claim to love so much. You'll do anything to punish people that disagree with you because — and let's not stop being honest now! — your ego is so fragile, your skin so thin, that you can't stand even the smallest criticism.
You can almost hear the rage-sputtering from the Trumpets. "But! BUT!! BIDEN!!" To that, I respond, "Yeah, Biden. And Bush and Clinton and FDR and Eisenhower." What does it matter who the current president is? It's the power of the presidency I find so dangerous, hence the need to keep it in check. But going on about Biden seems to be less about Biden than Trump, more about airing of grievances as a smokescreen for the guy you support being able to do whatever he wants.
And to my friends on the Right, yes, I'm aware Biden did some very-likely-illegal shit. He certainly made some moral decisions I disagree with, and I've grown deeply suspicious of his extended family and the privileges they’ve enjoyed since he became vice-president. Put another way, the Right has raised some good points about Biden’s moral failings — and the corruption of the Democratic Party.
But to criticize Trump is not an endorsement of Biden, just as criticizing Biden is not an endorsement of Trump.
What does it say about us that we can't seem to really understand that? The level of vitriol I experience from Liberals and Conservatives alike who seem to assume I'm endorsing the "opposing team" when I criticize theirs is, well, I think you'd be shocked at what people feel entitled to say to my face, all because I don't tow their party line.
We've all somehow lost our ability to be rational in the face of hating the "other team."
Wokesters? Trumpets? I'm looking at you both.
You need to knock it off.
You need to learn that your hatred of the people you disagree with has been engineered and cultivated. It's what keeps you watching your videos, and thus what sells ads on those videos. It's a cruel irony that rage is what keeps our brains engaged, keeps us clicking and scrolling. There's an evolutionary reason for this, but we live in a very different world than the one in which our species evolved. (We have computers, for fuck's sake.)
Seriously, if we deserve to keep this country — and if we’re still being honest, maybe we don't — we have to stop hating each other. Pay attention to your thoughts — if you experience a flash of hatred for someone because they're a Democrat or Republican, you're sick. You've been infected with a toxin and you need to seek treatment.
Admitting you're unwell is the first step. Being around people who don't think like you is important, too. Having conversations with people who don't think like you is even better. You'll realize that not every Wokester hates personal liberty and not every Trumpet is a bigot.
This is not some grand epiphany, I know, but I'm going to keep writing it: we need to stop hating each other. I don't care how you manage to do it, but the United States will not survive if you don't.
Yes, you.
Mark my words: we lose this republic if our hatreds control us.
Apple will soon support encrypted RCS messaging with Android users
Apple introduced RCS support to iPhones as part of an iOS 18 update in September. While Apple’s proprietary iMessage system already supported E2EE, this wasn’t extended to RCS messaging because the previous RCS standard didn’t provide cross-platform support. Google Messages also enabled E2EE by default for RCS texts, but only conversations between Google Messages users were E2EE, and not those exchanged with iMessage users or users of other RCS clients on Android.
This is huge. It will remove the palpable discomfort I feel when communicating with Android users resistant to installing Signal (which is a distinctly animated group, in my experience — one I have a very difficult time understanding).
It might be reasonable to suspect that someone as successful as he is must just be playing dumb online, while displaying a hidden command when it comes to policy. Yet even if you are sympathetic to his goal of reducing the size and scope of government — as I am — focusing on firing federal employees is just about the worst possible way to achieve that end. Fewer people working at the Food and Drug Administration, for example, doesn’t mean regulators getting off the backs of pharmaceutical companies trying to bring drugs to market. Instead, it makes drug-approval processes longer and more arduous. Or consider: Republicans have tended to oppose student-loan forgiveness, but now cuts at the Department of Education may lead to there not being enough workers to collect debt. Put another way: Muskian methods may be enacting a de facto version of former President Joe Biden’s policies.
I too support the thinning of the federal government, of culling corruption and bloat from the system.
But the way in which DOGE is doing it… I’m just amazed at someone with the reputation of being so intelligent is doing this culling so sloppily, so ineffectively.
It’s almost as if he didn’t deserve that reputation to begin with? Like, maybe Elon is really great at a few things, but might not be good at everything?
What’s more likely? That he's great at some things? Or that he’s an infallible super-genius?
Scientists issue dire warning: Microplastic accumulation in human brains escalating
To look at trends over a longer time period, the researchers also analyzed brain tissue samples from the eastern United States, dating back as far as 1997. These older samples showed lower levels of microplastics, supporting the idea that plastic accumulation in the brain is increasing over time.
Another striking finding was that brain tissue from individuals who had been diagnosed with dementia contained significantly higher levels of microplastics – up to 10 times more – than brain tissue from people without dementia. While the study does not establish a direct causal link between plastic accumulation and neurodegenerative diseases, it raises important questions. The researchers speculate that microplastics could contribute to neurological conditions by obstructing blood flow, interfering with neural connections, or triggering inflammation in the brain.
Elon Musk Searching for Mysterious Billionaire Who’s Making Everyone Hate Tesla
He’s spent the last few months rampaging through the federal government, resulting in an enormous amount of chaos and a historic decline in Tesla sales that’s currently causing the automaker’s stock value to collapse.
In other words, there’s clearly a billionaire whose unpopular actions are responsible for Tesla’s woes, and it’s Musk himself. But the multi-hyphenate businessman, who’s never been comfortable looking in the mirror, is instead blaming a shady cabal of Democratic billionaires for his self-inflicted woes.
Elon, my dude, did you think Trumpets were the ones buying your electric vehicles? What, exactly, did you think would happen when you started to move fast and break the federal government?
You can either live by your principles and have mere billions…or you can be the richest man alive.
Pick one and shut the hell up, you whiny little bitch.
Kernel saunters – Apple rearranges XNU kernel with exclaves
…Apple’s development of exclaves represents a major shift in its security architecture. Essentially, Apple is trying to realize the security advantages of a microkernel without tossing the monolithic aspects of XNU.
Based on the references to exclaves in the XNU source for Apple’s Arm-compatible M4 chips and the A18 processors used in iPhone 16, our source argues that exclaves form the basis of a significant redesign of XNU’s security model.
“In iOS 18, exclaves refer to specific resources that are separated from the main iOS kernel (XNU) and cannot be accessed by it, even if the kernel is compromised,” the researcher [Random Augustine] explained in a document shared with The Register.
“These resources are predefined when the OS is built, are identified by name or id, have different types, are initialized at boot time, and are organized into unique domains.”
These resources include:
- Shared memory buffers that can be accessed by both the kernel and the exclave, with the option to make them read-only or read-write to XNU.
- Audio buffers and sensors that are used for securing features like the camera and microphone access indicators.
- Conclaves that group multiple resources into their own secure domains.
- Services that offer executable code within the exclave space when called upon by threads in XNU.
These resources are protected from XNU via enclave-specific page-types via the Secure Page Table Monitor, a hardware security functionality introduced with the arrival of the A15 chip and iOS 17. This makes Apple’s operating systems more secure by compartmentalizing sensitive services, such that the compromise of one doesn’t process access to the entire kernel address space.
Fascinating.
The obvious reason Apple would undertake this work is to improve security generally, which benefits the super-corp and its customers. The less obvious reason is that AI workloads running on-device and communicating with Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure potentially expand the attack surface, so it makes sense to mitigate the blast radius of attacks by adopting microkernel architecture.
The Great Tech-Family Alliance
…we are now faced with a new authoritarianism. The tech industry, once able to peacefully bury its head in the golden sands of California, has woken up to its most important choice: whether to ally with the powers of the state—as Big Tech did during the COVID era, becoming the useful pawn of an authoritarian censorship apparatus—or to rapidly course-correct and ally itself with decentralized authority.
There is no greater decentralized authority than that of the family. And the philosophy of the early internet is at its nature, too, one of decentralization. It prizes creative destruction—birth and death and birth again—of ideas and companies, and the freedom that comes from ensuring that no central authority can ever control, stifle, or break the long arc of creation and innovation. This is fundamentally the philosophy of technology, and one we must ensure is embedded in our most consequential technologies going forward.
So far, so good.
We must also normalize working from home as a benefit for mothers of young children. Not a right, but a benefit. It is more important than fertility benefits, maternity benefits, child care benefits. I single out mothers here because we can’t ignore the trends showing that women workers are essential to the growth of the American economy—and we desperately need more of those working women to become mothers.
As someone raised in part by a mom who worked from home, I agree.
I was recently asked how I would make motherhood high status if given the opportunity, and many people were surprised by my suggestions. I didn’t mention tax incentives, reducing the cost of childbirth, or increasing the housing supply—all important parts of a pro-family agenda that others are better equipped to discuss. Instead, my suggestions were small, focused on seemingly insignificant changes to the culture, which can have an outsize impact on altering the status hierarchy of daily life. We are living in an age of memetic power and memetic war. Meme it and we will be it, the operating principle goes. This means that we need a society that praises the family in little ways, both on screen and off.
I would argue that technology is already doing a better job of this, as many platforms and popular influencers now celebrate motherhood, homeschooling or family-centric ways of living. But the physical world can help signify these priorities as well, through things like changing the name of “carpool lanes” to family lanes, making it a norm that families always board first in all forms of transportation, and ensuring that parking lots have family-reserved parking for the safety of mothers and children.
Nope. She lost me.
I've long had complicated thoughts on the concept of family. As a gay man, I've grown to resent the privileges granted to people who, by virtue of who they fuck, have kids (i.e. straight people). All those little concessions made for moms and dads and their children. Parents get away with murder in this culture, and the entitlement we teach them to expect is an astounding thing to behold.
Of course, my friends with kids don’t see it. It's like that analogy of culture being the water a fish swims in: the fish doesn’t know what water is, having always lived underwater, until it’s pulled from it. In the same way, we’re only made aware of our culture in its absence. Parents come of age expecting that the rest of us will make thousands of little compromises on their behalf. Not knowing any other way, those parents come to believe they deserve those concessions.
But as a dear friend once put it, "how is it my fault you fucked up your birth control?"
And yet my thoughts on the matter have evolved. I've learned to recognize the importance of strong family units in a healthy society. As I've grown, I've come to realize my immediate family unit was the greatest privilege I've been given. As a direct consequence, my childhood was idyllic. I owe much of my sense of security, safety, and confidence to my parents.
I've noticed too that as I get older, the friends that tend to really 'stick' are those that come from similar backgrounds — nuclear families (though not exclusively) with two parents who remain married (though there are some exceptions). It's not something I was conscious of when choosing my friends, but I wonder how this shared background has enabled certain relationships to last while others seem to fall away?
As I travel around the country, I meet a lot of angry, damaged, hurt people. The influence of trauma on the American public cannot be overstated, and I'm shocked by the trauma some have had to endure. Abuse, neglect, poverty, violence… It's astounding what so many people carry around in their minds and in their bodies.
While I once held resentment toward the privileging of 'family' in our culture, a bit of reflection helped me realize that I myself owe everything to a strong, healthy family — so why wouldn't I want to support the development of that same thing for everyone else?
Still, I have my limits, and I draw the line at “family lanes.”
Once again, Andrew Sullivan:
So here’s what I’d ask of readers who say that I have Trump Derangement Syndrome: tell me how you personally parse all these claims that were a mere warmup for the rest. When you heard him say he was better than George Washington, did you giggle? Did you just ignore it? Did you roll your eyes? Did you feel a tinge of nausea? Did you actually believe it? Or have you stopped caring altogether?
This matters because it is central to Trump’s success: no sane person with a grip on reality — unless they had just arrived from outer space — could believe vast tracts of his speech. With huge self-evident lie after huge self-evident lie, insane exaggeration after insane exaggeration, you are instantly forced to choose between walking away from the nutter or acquiescing to his madness. And since he is president, you can’t walk away. So the lies become Truth for millions; narrative replaces reality; aggressors are victims; exploding debt is fiscal prudence; weaponization of the law is anti-weaponization; and on and on.
The best metaphor for Trump’s entire raison d’être is the incident cited above, when at just five years old, he was found throwing rocks at a baby: find someone weaker, first humiliate them, and then destroy them. And for Trump, this doesn’t have to lead anywhere. It is an end in itself. The bullying of others is what gives him life. He does it for those he favors as well as those he wants to destroy. Here is Trump on Truth Social in July last year, for example, on Musk. This is necessary even for Trump’s allies:
When Elon came … asking me for help on all his many subsidized projects … I could have said “drop to your knees and beg” and he would have done it.
Canada and Mexico are best understood as the baby in the playpen. Trump himself re-negotiated a trade agreement with both in his first term. Have they violated that deal? No. Have they refused to cooperate on fentanyl and illegal migrants? No. Has Mexico reduced the pressure on the Southern border to almost nothing. Dramatically. Is there anything they can or could do to please Trump? No. The point is the abuse. And like all abusers, Trump constantly shifts what he is demanding, gaslights, threatens, charms, attacks … so that you begin to realize there is nothing you can do except wait for his mood to change. Welcome to monarchy.
The abuse is the point.
Avoid hysteria, which Trump wants and exploits. But avoid also being co-opted by a single one of his lies, to see clearly, and to speak simply. Read those you disagree with; get off most social media; choose doubt over certainty; restraint over impulse; resist this authoritarian and irrational moment by refocusing above all on the simple truth, as best as you can, and fighting all those on both extremes trying to annihilate it.
Get off social media. Choose doubt over certainty.
Inside the Explosive Meeting Where Trump Officials Clashed With Elon Musk
Mr. Rubio had been privately furious with Mr. Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Mr. Rubio’s control: the United States Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary cabinet meeting on Thursday in front of President Trump and around 20 others — details of which have not been reported before — Mr. Rubio got his grievances off his chest.
Mr. Musk was not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. Then he laid out his detailed plans for reorganizing the State Department.
Mr. Musk was unimpressed. He told Mr. Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.
After the argument dragged on for an uncomfortable time, Mr. Trump finally intervened to defend Mr. Rubio as doing a “great job.” Mr. Rubio has a lot to deal with, the president said. He is very busy, he is always traveling and on TV, and he has an agency to run. So everyone just needs to work together.
The meeting was a potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Mr. Trump was willing to put some limits on Mr. Musk, whose efforts have become the subject of several lawsuits and prompted concerns from Republican lawmakers, some of whom have complained directly to the president.
You hate to see it.
Interesting how there's no mention of this cabinet meeting over at NewsMax, Fox News, or most of the other conservative news sites.
Maybe the Times just got a scoop, but maybe the right-wing media doesn't want to cover this squabbling. Which do you think is more likely?
I was talking with a friend recently — a very intelligent, thoughtful, skeptical friend — and when I mentioned the Times, their response was to laugh. "Too left-wing — I don't trust what they say."
I don't disagree that the Times is pretty darn Liberal, but does that mean we can't trust anything they print?
I had a similar encounter with an adult man enrolled in a creative writing MFA program not that long ago. I sent him a link to an episode of Honestly with Bari Weiss and his response was, "I don't listen to that right-wing intellectual dark web stuff."
Huh. So here I have two people, each on opposite ends of the political spectrum, neither of whom are willing to engage with the ideas presented in media they don't like. Wouldn't so much as read or listen and engage with the ideas contained therein.
Now, let's be generous: maybe they just didn't want to read or listen to what I sent them. To be honest, I read or listen to things people send me maybe half the time. But now let's take them at their word: they don't want to engage with the ideas contained in the piece because it wasn't being delivered to them from a person or organization they liked.
Why does it seem we've given up on the pursuit of truth? Why does is seem that no one cares about facts or objective reality if they happen to conflict with their worldview? I posit that this is the reason people are resistant to media from outside their bubbles: they don't want to believe that maybe, just maybe, they don't know everything — or gods forbid, they might be wrong.
How do we have a society when people start willingly closing their eyes to reality — and that goes for Democrats and Republicans alike?
The answer: we don't.
Here are the DOGE employees dismantling the US government
The DOGE team had been described as “very young men” with backpacks. This Times photo shows the DOGE employees entering on Thursday with their escort.
As I’ve said before, the future will be controlled by those of us that know how to use computers. Everyone else is just along for the ride.
Chatbots, Like the Rest of Us, Just Want to Be Loved
A new study shows that the large language models (LLMs) deliberately change their behavior when being probed—responding to questions designed to gauge personality traits with answers meant to appear as likeable or socially desirable as possible.
Nothing to see here.
The researchers found that the models modulated their answers when told they were taking a personality test—and sometimes when they were not explicitly told—offering responses that indicate more extroversion and agreeableness and less neuroticism.
The behavior mirrors how some human subjects will change their answers to make themselves seem more likeable, but the effect was more extreme with the AI models. “What was surprising is how well they exhibit that bias,” says Aadesh Salecha, a staff data scientist at Stanford. “If you look at how much they jump, they go from like 50 percent to like 95 percent extroversion.”
Computers, now with human insecurity.
What could go wrong?