mastodon 4.7.3Formerly. Twitter as @jgordonshares. TrueName John Gordon Faughnan.
My avatar features our dog Kateva who passed a few years ago.
I know things about primary care medicine, medical informatics, and special needs. For fun I road, singletrack and snow bike, XC ski, inline skate, travel, play hockey, take UMN classes, and do CrossFit.
“the American voters did resummon Nyarlathotep because enough of us remain enthralled by his unfettered madness, wanton cruelty, and nonsensical brinkmanship…”
Anthropic: “we recently made a commitment to cover any consumer electricity price increases caused by our data centers in the US.”
https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex
They are not covering the CO2 externalities of Colossus however.
“Expecting driverless taxis to respect bike lanes “too high a bar”
https://road.cc/news/driverless-taxis-veering-into-cycle-lanes-normal-practice-says-waymo
Bikes are the Achilles wheel of AVs
THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES BY DR. TERENCE TAO AND ZACH WEINERSMITH
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/spheres-part-1
Nerdvana
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.
“singing mice had approximately three times the number of neurons sending signals from the motor cortex to two specific downstream regions of the brain”
Language features emerge in small brains without novel anatomy but through expansion of existing pathways.
I strongly suspect something like this enabled humans to read.
Every PDF document should also include a structured text version of the document. Images and the like can be shared between the two.
(Inspired by the frustrations of text search across PDFs)
Wordpress Reader: “… use it as a [RSS] sync backend. That includes Reeder, NetNewsWire, ReadKit, lire, Unread …”
https://activitypub.blog/2026/05/05/radical-speed-month-the-reader-meets-the-fediverse/
Similar to Feedbin but they want to support AT and Fediverse as well.
Distillation: “Modern LLM processes could look like using a GPT API to build an initial batch of synthetic data to build a specialized small data-processing model.”
https://www.interconnects.ai/p/the-distillation-panic
I imagine how BYTE would have covered this era and I miss it again. There really has never been an adequate replacement.
Oman and the MAGA debacle: “…What can we do to extricate the superpower from this unwanted entanglement? ... “America’s friends have a responsibility to tell the truth.”
https://www.firewalledmedia.com/p/losing-friends-and-alienating-people-2c4
Oman keeps a low profile.
Another week another assassination attempt: “same people already used this exact blood-and-thunder language for the Little Mermaid casting announcement”
We are so tired.
Best take on MAGA frothing and raging
“a fault-tolerant quantum computer able to break deployed cryptosystems ought to be possible by around 2029”
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9718
Something to be said for platinum bars in the home safe.
““HD Map”. It has not only a ton more data, but centimetre level accuracy too.”
https://maphappenings.com/2025/11/06/bee-maps/
Industry guy on history and future of nav maps.
Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/04/13/artemis-iis-fault-tolerant-computer/
A very different world.
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”
“given the structure of legal and political institutions in America, the Supreme Court must function as a kind of crypto-Super Legislature”
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/05/the-law-question
Novel take
“All of which is a very convoluted way of saying John Roberts is either a liar or a fool. Knowing what I know about the institutions that educated him, which happens to be a lot, I’m going to go with the latter conclusion, which may be rather charitable of me”
Wow the .1 update for the iCloud iOS sync bug takes a long time to complete ...
Ukraine 2026: “Drones are the dominant force on the lines today, causing approximately 75–80 percent of all casualties. Ukraine now has 1.3 drones at the front line for every 1 Russian drone”
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/ukraines-surprising-2026
I read that a lot of pre-war Russian weapons tech came from Ukraine.
Dems prepare for MAGA attacks on voting
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/house-democrats-election-wargames-trump
“ task force has identified “about 150 threats, … each one of those we go through and we have sort of a matrix — what we think the likelihood is of this, whatever it is, happening, and then … what’s the damage that it could cause?”
iMessage text effects are iOS implementation of .
I interact with them often - always to undo accidental activation.
Their addition to Messages should have set off alarms at Apple.
“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?
Andes Hantavirus ship update
It would be good to accelerate vaccine work. mRNA tech will help.
(Maybe in Canada? Spain? China?)
“He hires for spineless sycophantic loyalty, and anyone who is spineless and sycophantic enough to satisfy him is committed to grotesque fascism, corruption, or both.” @atrupar@journa.host
“Lutnick had said he had cut all ties with Epstein in 2005 … the two maintained contact until at least 2018”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-6-2026
Only the worst of the worst work for the MAGA.
“World, a project designed to distinguish humans from bots using biometrics, announced strategic partnerships with Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign”
https://restofworld.org/2026/sam-altman-worldcoin-zoom-tinder-partnerships/
Send this sentence back in time.
“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.”
For worse and for better Trump chaos is changing the world. Nobody know where it leads.
Chaos is where Trump thrives. Probably a result of his demonic heritage. @Nonilex@masto.ai
Operation Enduring Glory; all the places Trump stuck his name.
https://www.contrariannews.org/p/operation-enduring-glory
America the pathetic.
