Link. We live on the knife edge now.

Link. It’s a big weird world.

Link. “Today’s vendors sell our data to third parties and then market products to us. Vendors have a hard lock-in. This kind of service decay is now known as “enshittification”.

Link. I recalled this in the context of 1980s IBM, but I wonder if it’s also true of 2024 Apple.

Link. Mostly thought to represent sounds. The Inca knot language is a debatable inclusion.

Link. “Take away the holiday tourists and Midtown Manhattan feels sleepy … So many people are working from home, or not working, or not in the city anymore. There are many vacant storefronts around town, and empty building floors …”

I think the same in many cities, especially those with high housing costs. (I wonder if, conversely, Detroit is fine.) The crash in urban real estate prices is going to be painful.

Link. I was so wrong about YouTube.

Link. Learn from this. All apps die and they want to take your data with them. Often a simple but inferior solution is best.

Ask me about Apple’s Aperture prosumer photo management app.

Link. Mostly I agree, but he’s too quick to assume humans don’t themselves use something like “spicy autocomplete” in their thinking.

Human thinking is not magical.

Link. “We believe the general paradigm of combining intelligent few-shot exemplar selection, self-generated chain of thought reasoning steps, and majority vote ensembling can be broadly applied to other problem domains”

They are vague about how they package MedPrompt, I suspect it’s going to be a commercial product.

Link. “Surpasses 90% on MedQA dataset for the first time
Achieves top reported results on all nine benchmark datasets in the MultiMedQA suite”

Some naive folk still think ChatGPT4 won’t be used by physicians in patient care.

#AI #medicine

Link. A bit cold, but far fewer shootings.

“goal of attracting 1.45 million immigrants between 2023 and 2025”

Link. A different evil from the Holocaust, but similar racism and cruelty.

All cultures can go this way. We see the modern American seeds in Trumpism and the fallen GOP.

Link. The United States, and Taiwan, need to spend much more on the US military …

“Ukraine is expending between 110,000 155mm shells per month…Even after doubling shell production, the U.S. produces only 28,000 per month…”

Link. Everyone wonders if the backdoor was engineered and by whom.

Link. “contrarianism might be one of the most overrated signs of intelligence or cleverness” They are easy to fool.

“it’s hard for you to bet better than to pay attention to the credentialed experts”

Link. Initially 75% plagiarized but after the required analysis it fell to 0%.

Link. Nice review of the weirdness. Very active research area.

Link. Exercise extends lifespan and reduces much cancer risk – except melanoma and prostate CA.

I suspect it’s increased testosterone levels. Or a statistical anomaly.

Link. DeSantis might get nervous — he will be blamed for Florida’s Covid deaths to come.

Link. US, Russia, China, Israel – so many suspects.

Link. That is reassuringly far off. In particular, I’ll be dead.

Link. Smaller but not gone.

Link. “This is only a dull hatred because Apple’s Aperture migration fiasco killed my hate glands.”

Link. Overhead baggage stayed closed.

Link. From the New Republic.

“For years it’s been clear that Harvard … treat plagiarism as a minor offense when it’s committed by faculty or administrators and a major offense when it’s committed by undergraduate”

Link. Unsurprisingly the staff lied. (Probably wise, they’d have been killed otherwise).

Link. They are on the border of illegal. Article explains the chemistry.

Link. Car jackings have stayed up even as other violent crime fell. So this is great news.

Link. Reconciling “living fossils” with short term rapid adaptation.

Link. Scammers convince them their families will be harmed unless they disappear … then tell parents they have been kidnapped. Prosecution near impossible. Humans need AI guardians.

Link. XKCD classic

Link. The early 90s were pretty good (after Fall of Iron Curtain + PC payoff) but the 70s were really bad. Before that – all bad. (And 90s were when GOP died)

Link. Fascinating essay.

Link. Current LLMs may be most useful for writing code. The cost of writing a GPT-3 class LLM is less than a new car and they run on smartphones. Nobody is talking about how to get beyond GPT-4.

Link. Oakley is keen on the M3.

Link. By “mainstream media” he means WaPo and NYT. He is absolutely correct.

If our democracy does those two papers and their publishers will have blood on their hands.

Link. A paeon to a movie that started small and became huge.

Link. 2022, probably reopened post-COVID

Link. We didn’t worry about climate change, just nuclear war.

Link. Hardcore computer science work.

Link. Goal is to add 500k homes without changing the look and feel of NYC.

Link. HCR writes the obituary.

“today’s Republicans advocate a strong government that imposes religious rules on society”

Link. Protosterol molecular “fossils” can last billions of years but were thought bacterial. Gap filled.

Link. No Homo erectus though.

Link. I’m a Stross fan but I think Noah has the better argument.

Link. Good to know.

Link. COVID research is teaching us that many diseases are more harmful than we thought. COVID just happened all at once in large numbers.

“after adjusting for multiple testing, only loss of smell was significantly more common at 18 months”

Link. 2024 optimism.

Link. ChatGPT is involved. Via Charlie Stross a master hacker shows off.