Link. “People in the database who were born in 1965 carried a greater number of reproduction-boosting variants than did people born in 1940.”
It’s an old prediction of natural selection.
“Mr. Rocha telling an undercover F.B.I. official who posed as a Cuban spy that his right-wing politics were part of a cover story”
Link. He became a Trumpist. Except, apparently, he was a spy for Cuba/Russia.
Prompt injection attacks on LLMs: it’s bad and it’s hard to fix
Link. Now I get it. Yikes.
OpenAI’s Q* project: “key step toward AGI would be to combine large language models with the ability to search through a tree of possible responses:” 🆓
Link. A persuasive description of Q*.
“Israel’s military response to the atrocities of October 7th is a just and necessary war.”
Link. Hamas wants civilians to die. Israel does not, but it will kill them to destroy Hamas. This is war.
Elite college antisemitism: “simple herd mentality — people screaming slogans whose meaning and implication they know nothing of, or not wishing to be disliked by taking an unpopular position”
Link. Yep. Social media too. I’m personally allergic to herds.
Greece and Turkey — getting more friendly?
Link. Did not expect to hear something good coming from Turkey but this non-binding agreement and social display is truly. a good thing.
Aaronson on AI vs Quantum Computing: “I’d like to contribute if I can to helping the transition to an AI-centric world go well for humanity”
Link. “AI-centric world”.
I for one tell my children to be polite to the AGI-precursors. Because one day it may be wise to do so.
Why Fundamentalists Love Trump: “never encountered a fundamentalist culture that didn’t combine three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity”
Link. A useful perspective from a conservative evangelical. It’s psychology and tribe, not theology.
Disorders of mind: “the words we use for these probably cover a number of distinct but overlapping conditions”
Link. Above is one line in an excellent essay, but I call it out because it has taken SO long for clinicians and researchers to recognize that “autism” and “schizophrenia” and the like are garbage bin terms that mislead almost as much as they help.
Contacts locks up when Printing Lists in Sonoma — how to get it working again.
Link. I had no idea it could print. I wonder how old that code is. Sounds like it’s not tested.
“Gemini is the first A.I. model to outperform human experts on … standard tests in a combination of 57 subjects such as math, physics, history, law, medicine, and ethics.”
Link. “Experts”
“22 pairs of identical twins, researchers found that vegan eaters had lower cholesterol, insulin and body weight than participants who followed a meat diet”
Link. Roughly 15% improvements which is what we’d expect. If you are trying to build muscle maybe not entirely desirable but for most is better.
Xi, the mad Emperor: “Two of these people claim that Qin died, either from suicide or torture, in late July in the military hospital in Beijing that treats China’s top leaders.”
Link. It’s all happened before. Purges as Xi descends into paranoid delusions.
Saudi: “Is it possible that their legendary spare capacity has actually dried up?”
Link. They are in recession now.
“Bending Spoons’s business model is to buy successful apps, change them to a weekly auto-renewing subscription model that perhaps tricks users into signing up…”
Link. Contra Gruber this is 1000% a scam. They pay Apple protection money in the form of ads and revenue.
Preying on the inattentive and the ungifted.
Brain implant stimulus to treat traumatic brain injury (post concussion syndrome)
Link. Early results are promising. Likely years away from general use. There’s a lot of TBI out there and a lot of disability.
18 years at Google – the rise and fall.
Link. 2010 or so was when Google died.
“Morale is at an all-time low. If you talk to therapists in the bay area, they will tell you all their Google clients are unhappy with Google.”
Smith: The US economy is doing great but the public narrative is whacked. 🆓
Link. “U.S. social and political factors as the cause of the peculiar presence of negative narratives.”
The international comparison is useful.
“[US] economic growth since 2000 has been the worst in the last 90 years”
Link. Not a claim I often see but Lotterman has some interesting points.
“A growing number of Chinese have entered the United States this year through the Darién Gap”
Link. The middle-class go to Vancouver, but the relatively poor take the hard way. Xi is not the first emperor to destroy China.
US air traffic controllers crushed by workload.
Link. Highly paid but still can’t fill positions. A devastating plane crash is inevitable. Meanwhile GOP is really into Hunter Biden.
GOP war on government brings social security services closer to collapse.
Link. Pay levels are far too low. GSA job categories are obsolete. IT systems are obsolete. Disabled get overpayments for years then brutal clawback demands.
Biden on climate: “Inflation Reduction Act has kick-started a boom in wind, solar, battery and electric vehicle production that is reshaping the American economy and allowing one of the world’s largest polluters to say it is genuinely on a path to red
Link. Elections have consequences.
Bug: “encrypted sparse bundles should be avoided, as macOS is unable to change their passwords.”
Link. Been a bug for a while.
“I really don’t understand how anyone uses anything but an Apple TV box.”
Link. A few years ago the Apple TV seemed 3rd rate — but then the competition got shitty.
America can’t fight China in a conventional war.
Link. We can’t manufacture enough weaponry. This won’t change.
Things that are free – the classic Geek and Poke comic. (2010)
Link. Saw this used recently and bookmarking now because it’s perfect.
A year in AI – Ars has a list.
Link. Scroll to the list of events. Even the web didn’t move this quickly.
“one genuine advantage of cryptocurrencies: they are a great way to evade U.S. financial sanctions”
Link. The flip side of being able to send money internationally. Even bigger than ransomware and fentanyl.
“Native Americans and Alaska Natives, who were devastated by Covid, losing 6.2 years of life expectancy from 2019 to 2021”
Link. “In 2022, they regained 2.3 years of those years”. Other groups have regained 80% of lost LE as of 2022 as COVID recedes (for now).
Many would like to know why they did so poorly.
Peak oil? “The pipeline of non-OPEC projects alone appears sufficient to meet all global demand growth in the next few years at least”
Link. Demand less, OPEC considers production cuts.
Apple Cash Escheat: “Apple Cash could be counted as abandoned/unclaimed simply because you haven’t used them in a while”
Link. No notification
Text editing on mobile sucks: “Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse”
Link. Author works at Google but I’ll vouch for the misery of the iOS experience.
Paper On AI Monosemanticity: “The AI gradually shifts to packing its concepts into tetrahedra (three neurons per four concepts) and triangles (two neurons per three concepts). When it reaches digons (one neuron per two concepts) it stops”
Link. Heroic effort to explain a very technical paper. Recommended for those who make confident statements about the near future.
“Anthropic’s interpretability team announced that they successfully dissected of one of the simulated AIs in its abstract hyperdimensional space.”
macOS OneDrive, ScanSnap PDFs and the “could not be opened” error in Monterey
Link. An old Favorite may resolve to what’s now a transient internal OneDrive store because files aren’t really files any more and I have a headache now.
US shoulder fired rockets cause brain damage to users.
Link. Similar to playing football — which is legal but a bad idea.
Several Hamas leaders leading attack on Israel are dead.
Link. I have seen the term “catastrophic success” applied to the Hamas attack.
Car theft in Minneapolis: a small number of teens and preteens, all well known to police, many arrested dozens of times.
Link. During brief detentions thefts drop. Rates still increasing though armed carjackings are down.
“until EA comes up with some solution other than “shut it all down”, the people developing AI are simply going to pray for the serenity to accept the things they cannot change.” 🆓
Link. Noah on OpenAI board coup. I find myself wanting to defend the EA board, I think Noah is right about the big picture.
The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero – example of credit card fraud. 🆓
Link. Eliminating fraud would eliminate too much legal activity.
Binance as Bond villain: “This continues Malta’s proud tradition of strategic ambiguity as to whether it is an EU country or rentable skin suit for money launderers” 🆓
Link. Lots of insider info. “Binance is going to be slowly ground into a very fine paste.”
“The World Health Organization has formally requested that China share detailed information about a recent increase in respiratory illnesses”
Link. Nobody trusts Xi, including his subjects.
Using Calibre and DeDRM Plug-In to remove Adobe DRM from Google Play .ascm ePUB files (Update 2023)
Link. This was first published in 2013 but I updated it for Monterey and later. It’s not a perfect description of the current process but it’s the best I’ve seen.
“buying and holding the entire market through low-cost index funds — is probably the best bet for most people.”
Link. I’ve read this for 40y and it worked for us. Though I have more SP500 than whole market. New study confirms ancient advice. But Vanguard is not what it was …
“Egypt has plenty of problems, sure, but it just doesn’t look like a hopeless basket case to me.”
Link. IOW: not Nigeria or Pakistan. Noah continues contrarian positivity.
“We call these Structured Prompts. They are like AI programs that let other people benefit from what you learned and explored.”
Link. … aaaanddd they are almost obsolete. But for a few weeks they were a thing.
“start with giving the AI an identity (you are an expert, friendly teacher who helps students with complex topics)…”
Another Finder memory leak in Sonoma (an old one)
Link. “Finder’s memory climb to over 1 GB. … closing it doesn’t free that memory up, even days afterwards. The only way to return the Finder’s memory use to anything approaching normal is to relaunch it from the Force Quit Applications dialog.”
“Ten-a-day was Hamas’s bottom line for the deal, because it thinks the Israelis will find it politically impossible to start the war up again in mid-December …”
Link. Dyer makes Hamas seem more calculating than I suspect it is.
Noahpinion year in review: “2023 was, in some sense, the year America discovered India…”
Link. A surprisingly good year for America.