Link. I’ll give it a month or two post release but then – definitely.
Category Archives: share
Google Drive – shockingly they lied about the unlimited storage.
Link. One week notice of a purge. Google is drunk and dysfunctional. They desperately need a new CEO.
Standard ebooks feeds with a Patreon donation.
Link. A nice perk and also supports a noble cause. Quality free EPUBs of public domain books prepared with love. (I posted on them 6y ago)
Social Network 2023: Threads has won.
Link. X is gone. Bluesky ain’t gonna fly. Mastodon will survive as a nerdy niche alongside Threads — but only on instances that don’t block Threads.
“Russia has lost 87 percent of the total number of active-duty ground troops that it had prior to launching its invasion of Ukraine”
Link. This seems … impossible. Even for Russia. Did it have a tiny army?
Aaronson responds to critiques of his wrong 2009 AI prediction.
Link. I wrote a blog post at the time critiquing his 1000y estimate. I thought 2080 was more likely. I didn’t think 2028.
He is way too sensitive though.
A newly identified hormone, GDF15, causes hyperemesis gravidarum.
Link. Key researcher had a personal agenda. Likely years from a therapy but basic science will help in many areas.
Metformin increases GDF15 which may account for some drug intolerance.
Crawling out from COVID: making twin cities transit useable again
Link. The smoking (meth, etc) and other drug use on local transit killed ridership. It’s good to see a consensus approach emerging.
Apple Diagnostics for Self Service Repair – iPhone and M-Macs.
Link. A nice addition, especially for iPhones.
Case reports of CAR-T therapy success for autoimmune disorders including SLE.
Link. “unclear how much of this success is due to the CAR-T therapy as opposed to the chemotherapy”
Lots more work to do.
Best Space Images of 2023
Link. “This visualization of the CEERS (Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey) deep field flies you through ancient galaxies”
“in war, symmetry and proportionality are unrelated”
Link. The legality of a war act is not what most people think. Hamas has many war crimes, Israel is not so simple.
Goose Bay again welcomes stranded passengers: “Everybody was super, super, super nice.””
Link. I’ve been there. Very very remote.
Tsai on Journal: “I don’t think any app should ship without export functionality.”
Link. Hard core data lock. You’d have to be crazy to use it.
“you should only read reviews from people who love bikes, but if you truly love bikes it’s almost impossible to review them” 🆓
Link. He’s mostly right — bikes are all pretty good.
“Threads … is going to be the mass-market replacement choice for the former Twitter”
Link. Scalzi compares the big 3 (Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky) from a business reach perspective. I agree.
Test scores decline across world: “There are actually a lot of studies measuring the impact of smartphones on student learning, and the consensus is that it’s bad”
Link. I think also quite bad for young woman friendships.
iCloud Shared Photo Library vs. Shared Albums in Photos
Link. A shared library is intended to be deleted after use … “When a Shared Library is deleted, any participant (including the host) who was involved for more than one week automatically gets a copy of every photo”.
Mobile Passport Control app): speed reentry to US (also Canadian passports)
Link. Has good ratings on iOS App Store. One phone can serve family.
It’s a bit odd in that you set it up beforehand but then it expires and you redo it?
Threads to Fediverse: “project is proceeding more or less as planned, and there are no major obstacles”
Link. This will be amazing to watch and experience.
“dengue infections appear to have dropped by 94 to 97% in the cities where the Wohlbachia mosquitos were well-established”
Link. Grand slam home run. He doesn’t explain why Wohlbachia makes mosquitoes resistant to viruses.
macOS Sonoma 14.2 Update: installers, IOSW, links, references.
Link. Mr Macintosh.
“Conquest has returned to our world.” 🆓
Link. The end of Pax Americana.
“Epic’s lawyers said Google had deleted some internal chat messages that may have been relevant to the case”
Link. Juries do good work.
“U.S. and Ukrainian strategists did not initially realize how much more Russians were strengthening their defenses.”
Link. “Russia’s use of a variety of drones, including Chinese-made commercial drones, that fundamentally changed the nature of mechanized maneuver warfare.”
Russia’s hold is strong and Trump looms.
“Talk to the datasette.io database is the result. It’s a GPT that can answer questions by executing SQL queries against the /content.db database that powers the official Datasette website.” 🆓
Link. From Nov but an explanation of GPTs. Not too useful now, but eventually
“… a way of building conversational interfaces for all kinds of weird and interesting problems”
However: all GPT content can be hacked by prompt injection.
“Sketch out a rough UI prototype using the open source tldraw drawing app … sends that to GPT-4 with instructions to turn it into a Tailwind HTML+JavaScript”
Link. Early days.
How Beeper worked and why Apple killed it.
Link. Why did anyone think Apple wouldn’t kill it? Even people who ought to know better.
Patient advocacy groups are pushing bad treatments through FDA.
Link. Worked for HIV but now harmful.
“Alzheimer’s Association has celebrated every bit of it and complained about any attempts to limit access to these drugs”
Stoke therapy med made it to phase III trial before evidence of PI fraud discovered. 🆓
Link. Fraud is part of the modern crisis in science. Patients may have been harmed. This merits criminal investigation.
Brains of the bowels: “New tools that allow scientists to manipulate gene activity in glia or visualize them in different ways have “dramatically changed the way we look at the enteric nervous system” 🆓
Link. GI disorders in autism are thought to be similar to changes in autistic brain. I don’t know of using intestinal biopsy to analyze brain. #autism
Car cost inflation ends as chip shortage resolves. 🆓
Link. Just one example of COVID impacts winding down.
American foreign policy and unintended economic consequences.
Link. From China to Brazil to Israel. Just a wonderful very short essay.
Don’t write paper checks ever.
Link. Check fraud is way harder on banks and customers than electronic fraud. Checks must die.
Genes That Boost Fertility Also Shorten Our Life
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.