Link. Another search comes up empty.
Category Archives: share
The Publicly Traded Politician (2004)
Link. I wrote this back in the 00s and it’s a 00s style web page. I feel it’s worth mentioning every decade or two. Emily suggests adopting NASCAR style logos for our Congresspersons to wear.
“Until the release of macOS Sonoma 14.0, there has been a bug in the Optimize Mac Storage setting, that has allowed eviction of iCloud files from local storage when that setting is off”
Link. Now they will all download. I’m glad I’ve not used the iCloud Drive device document cache feature.
Fact checking doesn’t work.
Link. The false beliefs are unrelated to facts or evidence.
“ I know that online password databases are more convenient. But they’re also risky. This is why my Password Safe is local only…”
Link. But you need to do backups and backup is dying.
“There are no reliable ways to distinguish text written by a human from text written by an large language model”
Link. Hopeless.
“modular forms capture some of the most fundamental symmetries of the world”
Link. This attempt to describe modular forms to non-mathematicians contains the most succinct and oddly understandable summary of the Fermat proof I’ve yet seen.
“still-shoeless 2-year-old was located a short way from the trail, sleeping as soundly as a wood nymph, her head atop Hartley’s body…”
Link. While it’s true her other dog Buddy summoned rescue the dogs may have abetted her escape. So it’s a bit murky.
jk. Good dogs.
Guide to Australopithecus: “more than four million years ago until just around two million”
Link. “middle third of the time since our ancestors first divided from the ancestors of chimpanzees … ancestral population of our genus first separated from australopiths before 2.8 million years ago”
Senolytic therapy for the disease of aging: dasatinib/quercetin.
Link. My whacko theory is you can get dementia both by having too many senescent neurons and by being too aggressive about removing aging neurons.
Google Research: “Our project goal is to tackle an immense challenge in neuroscience: mapping a tiny fraction (2-3%) of the mouse brain. We will specifically target the hippocampal region, which is responsible for encoding memories, attention and spatia
Link. It’s a big consortium.
“would take just two Pixels, the height of an olive, to store the roundworm connectome data, while it would take a stack of Pixels the size of Mount Everest to store the data from an entire mouse connectome.”
“If you do switch off iCloud Keychain, it may no longer be deleted from Apple servers”
Link. Maybe related to family sharing?
Convert PostScript and EPS files in Sonoma in a Monterey VM on Apple silicon with a free VM utility.
Link. Great instructions. Oakley is a legend.
Kagi search engine lowers prices: $5/m for 300 search. (Free tier is 100)
Link. I get much better results with Kagi than Google for most searches.
“My wife died earlier this year. Five years ago, there was cancer in her pancreas…”
Link. This is a story of medical care and the transition to hospice as seen from the outside. It’s short and well told. Everyone did their best.
Krugman: “… economists have a perfect track record when it comes to forecasting recessions. They’ve never been right…”
Link. Like predicting short term stock market movement.
“Ukraine’s special operations forces said in a statement that the strike on Friday killed 34 officers, including the fleet commander, and wounded 105 others”
Link. Made it into the NYT.
PowerPhotos 2.5: Sonoma and interactive merge/duplicate reports
Link. PowerPhotos makes Apple’s macOS Photos.app suck much less than it sucks. (And suck it does.)
India’s assassination of Sikh leader in Canada – consequences for the Quad
Link. “even though Canada is not directly involved in the ‘Quad’ project, such a confrontation may delay or even sabotage the whole idea. It is a thoroughly terrible idea, because the last thing Asia and the world needs is a huge new military alliance ‘containing’ China.”
Only 250 million years to go before continents form Pangea Ultima: “climate will turn deadly thanks to three factors: a brighter sun, a change in the geography of the continents and increases in carbon dioxide”
Link. Mammals … “might be replaced by coldblooded reptiles that could tolerate the heat.”
Don’t worry, we’ll be long gone 249 million years before Pangea Ultima.
“accuracy of OpenAI’s technology has dropped in some situations over the past several months, including while solving math problems, generating computer code and trying to reason. This could be the result of continuing efforts to apply human feedback.”
Link. I might sign up to do this work. Would be interesting retirement gig.
Musk turns his hate-hose on Los Vegas paper because of an obsolete headline.
Link. X has lots of journalists feeding the hate-hose.
Amazon to Invest $4 Billion in Anthropic (Claude).
Link. Once 4 billion was a lot of money. Anthropic will be using Amazon infrastructure so not quite as big as direct cash.
PostScript euthanized in Sonoma.
Link. “any PostScript object can be treated as data, or executed as part of a program, and can itself generate new objects that can in turn be executed. More recently, security researchers have drawn attention to the fact that it’s a gift for anyone wishing to write and distribute malicious code”
Who remembers TeleScript?
“Apple’s new FineWoven cases for iPhone 15 are a huge swing and miss. They suck. Apple should remove them from sale and refund everyone who’s already bought one.”
Link. The hate is strong. Do not go near.
Linear broadcasts (aka TV, cable): “in the most recent network television season, which ended in May, the median viewer was older than 60 for most entertainment shows”
Link. It’s finally dead. Now to kill streaming.
DeSantis did not abuse Guantánamo Detainees.
Link. The NYT did a serious investigation. Found nothing.
“Mr. DeSantis was a junior officer, who visited only for short stints and was tasked with what one fellow lawyer described as “scut work.” He would have had no reason to witness, and no power to authorize, a force feeding.”
DeSantis likely found untrue story politically helpful.
Venezuela exodus explained: “The average salary for a public-school teacher or nurse is roughly $3 a month”
Link. Presumably parents pay on the side. There’s now a migration industry. The real question is why the military doesn’t change the government.
iPhone 15 Pro Max vs. Canon 80D DSLR
Link. The 80D gives better images, but the 15 Pro is the better camera for most uses. Only big telephoto (birding, sports) would justify a DSLR now.
Man who killed Palmdale deputy: “son had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia about five years ago. She added that she had called deputies to respond in the past when he had become too aggressive after not taking his medication”
Link. Schizophrenia causes immense amounts of pain to schizophrenics, family, and sometimes others. It deserves much more research.
“Older adults who ride free of charge make up about 15 percent of Seoul’s annual ridership”
Link. Over 65. The AC Is much appreciated. A tough crowd:
“Seventy, 75-year-olds are spring chickens,” he said. “Sixty-five-year-olds are basically children.”
Southern border: “They come from Brazil, Burkina Faso, Uzbekistan, India and dozens of other countries, a moving global village of hundreds of thousands of people crossing the Rio Grande…”
Link. Just a taste of what is to come. Good for social security though.
DeSantis grows admission at Florida’s New College: “… admissions essay that was a screenshot of cellphone notes, “riddled with incorrect spelling and grammar, saying, basically, ‘I just want to play ball.’”
Link. Student accepted. DeSantis is the ultimate troll but he can’t get any love from Trump’s party.
“The Treasury Department said on Friday that the United States and China had agreed to create economic and financial working groups that would hold regular meetings to discuss policy and exchange information.”
Link. How to talk about not invading Taiwan without actually using the word Taiwan.
Biden used email aliases in redacted archives!! (For scheduling his personal trainer.)
Link. “G.O.P. lawmakers make provocative claims without concrete evidence, sowing a vague public narrative of nefarious conduct that turns out to be exaggerated — or simply false.”
Benghazi 2.0. It works.
Genetically Modified Pig’s Heart Is Transplanted Into a Second Patient: “Realistically, this is in the early-stage learning process,” he said of the procedure.”
Link. Patients who do this want to survive — but they are also doing it to help others in the future. The odds are very bad for now.
Florida Woman Who Stole Diary of President’s Daughter Faces Sentencing
Link. “Aimee Harris, sold the diary to Project Veritas”
The evidence is overwhelming she knew she was stealing.
iOS 17 update bug: “Apple recommends that you update using iCloud Backup instead”
Link. Sane people recommend not updating until the fix is published.
Lost tribe of Borneo: “His eyes were glued to a cellphone in his hands, though there was no reception. He was playing a video game.”
Link. The Punan Batu appear to be descendants of a very early African diaspora and have an exotic language used in song. Photography is superb and respectful.
Delta: “for Las Vegas, if it’s hotter than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, every degree over 100 is going to mean about 1,400 pounds off.”
Link. A different kind of overbooking.
“placozoans have 14 types of peptidergic cells that are also important for building neurons in cnidarians and bilaterians”
Link. Tracking the evolution of neurons.
FTC finally sues a healthcare private equity monopsonist.
Link. I suspect the fines are a pittance.
“an orphaned harbor seal at the New England Aquarium could utter English phrases in a perfect Maine accent (“Hoover, get over here”
Link. Anecdote in animal language article. I think original recording is very old.
Assassinated Sikh separatist: “He was acquitted in 2005 in a lengthy trial that came after the deaths of many witnesses — some of whom were murdered. Other witnesses were intimidated into not testifying.”
Link. Ugly.
“India may have been involved in the killing of a Canadian Sikh leader”
Link. I suspect it’s not much of a may.
“Nearly half a million years ago, humans in Africa were assembling wood into large structures, according to a study published Wednesday that describes notched and tapered logs buried under sand in Zambia.”
Link. Maybe Homo heidelbergensis. Not Homo erectus. Big brains by primate standards, but they didn’t do a lot of tech over 500ky.
“Many of the claims and insinuations they leveled against Mr. Garland … were not supported by fact”
Link. By NYT historic standards it’s progress to declare that the House GOP is lying.
“All kinds of idiotic crap made it through peer review before we had chatbot assistance, although this technology will likely mean that we get even more of it.”
Link. The fraudulent academia industry is generating ChatGPT papers.
“new version of my free utility Mints can now resolve an inode number to a name and path for you”
Link. He’s got a tool for most macOS gaps.
MN: “… elected officials guided by a center-left philosophy controlled the top offices 84% of the time, or 126 years out of 150”
Link. I’m still traumatized by the Pawlenty years but few states have done so well. Arne Carlson was a Democrat in disguise.