Link. Review of how computers got faster over the decades. Using Apple’s Accelerate library requires careful coding.
Category Archives: share
China screwed the Hugo awards. Uganda has next set.
Link. Scalzi is cautious but doesn’t leave a lot of doubt about what China did.
We can’t do international awards any more.
Boeing 1990s: “allow Boeing to follow “all the other industrial sectors in the United States to industrialization and outsourcing and globalization.”
Link. Software outsourcing killed a lot of 90s companies.
Six Reasons American Drug Prices are High. 🆓
Link. They even mention PBMs. Which need a lot more mentions.
Ackman gives whacked Biden challenger $1 Million and demands DEI policy language disappear.
Link. Gone the next day.
Billionaires lose money on news like everyone else: “The very rich find it very difficult to lose money year over year,” Mr. Doctor said, “even if they can afford it.”
Link. NYT article is quiet about NYT.
Indian courts globally kill Reuters news story about Appin — an Indian cyberhack company.
Link. Did Modi use Appin when his people hacked phones?
Bidenomics failure risks
Link. “Lack of bureaucratic state capacity
Onerous contracting requirements
Permitting, especially NEPA”
Set asides for underserved and other well intentioned restrictions have a terrible track record.
ScreenFloat 2 – macOS screenshots.
Link. I like the floating feature
New York Public Library’s Scholarly Press Backlist Revival Project: “published monographs that are neither in the public domain nor commercially available for the library to purchase or license”
Link. They are moving very carefully.
Meetup death watch begins.
Link. Bending spoons bought them. They are a scammy vendor.
Not receiving SMS two factor authentication codes for Facebook, Instagram, others: remove blocked numbers
Link. SMS authentication is easy but has risks.
Bluesky Adds RSS for public user feeds.
Link. More RSS goodness. I track Jedeed this way.
Feedbin now tries to fix broken feeds.
Link. “Visit your subscriptions page to get started. There will be a notice at the top of the page if Feedbin has detected any broken feeds it can help with”
Fixed 20 for me.
“we’ve reversed almost 40 percent of the rise in one key measure of inequality that took place during the great income divergence from 1979 to 2019.”
Link. I believe inflation made this possible.
“the gap between Black and white unemployment rates is the smallest it has been”
“previously reported increases in maternal mortality rates in the United States were an artifact of changes in surveillance. The pregnancy checkbox, introduced in the revised 2003 death certificate …” 🆓
Link. Watch this space.
Mail carriers mugged for mailbox keys: “Just 14% of attacks lead to an arrest, and even fewer attacks lead to convictions”
Link. Article doesn’t explain why low arrest rate.
7 Guiding Principles for Working with LLMs – Jon Udell
Link. The chorus technique was new to me. He uses ChatGPT and Claude to get cross-validation.
The history of KKK II – 1920s and beyond.
Link. Teen vogue has replaced Time magazine.
CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”
Link. Was HP’s fall similar?
Covid-19 research roundup: Jan 11
Link. 1. Longer delays from symptoms to antigen positive. Don’t know if infectious before antigen positive. Wait 4-5 days before testing?
2. COVID spread maybe unaffected by humidity, temperature?
3. Vaccines are great and probably worthwhile even in teens.
ooh.directory: an index of blogs
Link. Very old web – but still active. A personal index to blogs.
More on Multiple Sclerosis and EBV
Link. “Denmark, in particular, seems to have gone through some population changes so complete and drastic that genocidal conquest comes to mind”
Or a novel disease.
“Perplexity.ai … the best implementation I’ve seen of LLM-assisted search …”
Link. “Perplexity has their own search index now and is running their own crawlers, and they’re using variants of Mistral 7B and Llama 70B …”
India government failure: “The next day, he lodged a police complaint, and investigators soon filed charges. That was 26 years ago.”
Link. A complaint — that 58 people were murdered. Bihar state is probably a worst case. Lots of corruption, a government that manipulates courts and blocks reform. (India is more a coalition of states than a country so presumably varies by state.)
It’s easy to see how SCOTUS could turn into India’s massively corrupt Supreme Court.
Ecuador’s Black woman Attorney General triggered the gangs by arresting the judges and police they owned.
Link. “Ms. Salazar, Ecuador’s first Black attorney general, was appointed in 2019. She prosecuted a former president, Rafael Correa, on corruption charges the next year.”
“bfloat16 was developed as part of Google Brain, and has been adopted quickly over the last couple of years across Intel, AMD and Arm processors”
Link. I learned a lot. 30y ago BYTE magazine would have covered all this. We have no equivalent now.
“The response on Friday from the Houthis, however, was a single anti-ship missile lobbed harmlessly into the Red Sea, far from any passing vessel”
Link. Reports so far suggest very low mortality for such broad attacks.
Oakley’s free macOS utilities.
Link. A gift.
Iran faces grim choices: “neither Moscow nor Beijing came to Tehran’s rescue by vetoing the resolution. Instead they abstained, alongside Algeria and Mozambique”
Link. The Houthi are religious zealots who believe they have a divine mission. Iran’s faux-devout rulers are more pragmatic but have lost control.
CrossFit in my 65th year: Act II
Link. Starting over for a new stage of Oldness.
The misery of switching iPhones: “Many apps required re-entering login credentials, even though I let iOS use the keychain…”
Link. Tsai always describes the truth I see. It really sucks to switch phones. One reason I go 4-5 years.
“Eventually, iMessage did start working, but then a few hours later it spontaneously signed me out…”
The evolution of psilocybin – gastropod mind control.
Link. Fungi flourished when the asteroid whacked T-Rex; that’s when they deployed the psychedelics.
Gaza: “The desperate conditions in Gaza are not an inevitable by-product of war; they are in part the result of political decisions made by the Israeli government”
Link. The Economist is no friend to Hamas.
“Egyptian Red Crescent, which is responsible for aid deliveries at Rafah, is “not competent”. Corruption is rife. Lucrative goods disappear from warehouses while expired ones are delivered to Gaza”
Houthi and Yemen backgrounder: “above all, they believe fervently that God is on their side”
Link. Religion is a plague.
In the Netflix age it took a broadcast TV drama to bring some justice to victims of a UK bureaucracy.
Link. “However brilliant the journalism is, it maybe appeals to your intellect, to your head … drama is designed to appeal to your heart …”
The bureaucrats were righteous I am sure.
“variants that raise the risk of multiple sclerosis, for example, became steadily more common among the Yamnaya”
Link. Metabolic syndrome in Northern Europe.
Gas station and smoke shop drugs: “Tianeptine, which also appears as a concentrated powder or an ingredient in products such as Tianaa, Zaza and Pegasus”
Link. “illegally sold with claims to improve brain function and treat anxiety, depression, pain, opioid use disorder and other conditions,”
Delivered to you courtesy of Utah and Orrin Hatch.
Noah Smith’s 2024 tech predictions
Link. The battery tech review is the most interesting.
Longevity drugs for dogs.
Link. Interesting way to approach the marketplace. I’m skeptical they will be both safe and effective but the human/dog aging differences suggest room to improve.
“The ‘Auto Unlock with Apple Watch’ feature seems to be somehow related to a background system service that is also responsible for Continuity Camera”
Link. Wireless continuity camera is unreliable.
Minnesota crosswalk law: “Regardless of what the law says, “unmarked” crosswalks are effectively invisible to drivers and dangerous to pedestrians.”
Link. It’s gotten worse. Article doesn’t mention that education and enforcement stopped after riots.
“… in modern times we need to explain the Wolfram Language not just to humans, but also to AIs…”
Link. “for AIs we’re providing a variety of tools—like immediate computable access to documentation, and computable error handling”
Mathematica 14 pivots to non-human users. Wolfram is old, knows AI history, wrote an explainer on LLMs, and has no qualms about using the term “AI”.
Patient blood and tissue samples negative for known pathogens found to contain unknown pathogens and commensals
Link. The next few years should show us a lot more like this. I wonder how many hours of the year our bodies are not engaged in warfare with a virus, bacteria, rogue cell or something else. (Probably zero.)
Science vs MS: “Antibodies that are raised to the 386-405 part of the EBNA1 protein [of EBV] also recognize a particular epitope (amino acids 370-385) of a protein in human glial cells”
Link. The “kissing disease” (mono) virus needs a vaccine.
Why Iowa Went Red: “The movement of young college graduates out of Iowa and the Dakotas to the metropolises of Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul made a mark on the politics of all five states.”
Link. Iowa has great schools but MSP has far more opportunities. It hurts to lose the young.
iPhone shutter sound – why most don’t get it: “Enable Live Photo: If you’re hearing a click, you don’t have this feature turned on,”
Link. If you disable Live Photo you can mute phone but everyone would like the option to turn the damn clicks off.
Supernovae and astronomer happiness. XKCD.
Link. Ends abruptly.
“We depend on the services of Elon Musk, our CEO and Technoking, and we are worried that he isn’t getting enough sleep, if you know what we mean…”
Link. I assume a creative legal team will find many financial opportunities in Musk’s recreation.
“[worm] mitochondria function as cellular walkie-talkies, sending messages throughout the body that influence the survival and life span of the entire organism”
Link. Mitochondria have a peculiar agenda. Wildly speculative but a fun read. My mitochondria wave little white flags.
I suspect humans are already at max lifespan; this effect won’t help us.