Link. Drag and drop to trash. Weird this persists.
Category Archives: share
Spacecraft cemetery: “Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, otherwise known as Point Nemo” 🆓
Link. “Between 1971 and 2018, global space powers, including the United States, Russia, Japan and Europe, crashed more than 263 space objects in the uninhabited region of the ocean around Point Nemo. “
“researchers found a close genetic link between Honduras and Mongolia”
Link. In human lice. Consistent with land bridge crossing 23kya.
“How did a giant company like Chamberlain come to this enshittening juncture, in which it felt empowered to sabotage the products it had already sold to its customers?”
Link. “Chamberlain doesn’t have to worry about competition, because it is owned by a private equity fund that “rolled up” all of Chamberlain’s major competitors into a single, giant firm…”
Doctorow taught me a lot with this one.
“Minimum wage” disability activists are bonkers.
Link. The author of this essay is way more polite than my title, but internally she seethes.
“It is predicated on a sanitized version of disability in which there is no such thing as severe cognitive impairment.”
They are f* on another plane of reality. It drives parents of cognitively disabled adults to despair.
Microsoft AI: “Microsoft has even investigated using nuclear microreactors” 🆓
Link. “ The company is using over a billion gallons more water than it had in past years to help keep its data centers cool.”
Hell of a gamble.
“Hamas traded a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, for more than 1,000 Palestinians, including Mr. Sinwar, a prison leader who had been involved in the negotiations”
Link. Hamas feared irrelevance; the dull burden of governance. They thought war might save them, and Israel had shown they would pay any price to free a hostage. Then they succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
Vampire viruses and virology 2023 🆓
Link. “Subsequent research has shown that most bacterial species have a diverse set of satellite-helper systems, like that of P4-P2. But viral satellites are not limited to bacteria…”
Most of this is over last 10y.
If you plead your AI may deign to help.🆓
Link. “No, it is really important, and you are great at this and can do it, I know you can! (A new paper shows the AI responds to emotional pleas — LLMs are weird — and it seemed to work here)
Trump’s honesty: he wants to be a dictator. 🆓
Link. Nobody can say they didn’t know.
My Turn: Biden’s record and accomplishments are extremely positive 🆓
Link. Keep this ref to share in 2024.
Xi’s China: “Some business executives report spending a third of the workday on “thought work,” including reading an average of four books a month.” 🆓
Link. Extensive New Yorker profile of China under the Emperor’s heel. It’s ugly.
Many will want to emigrate to Canada — the country Xi hates most.
Potent new meds: “the marriage of covalent chemistry with the vast screening potential of biomolecule scaffolds” 🆓
Link. There’s a tsunami of new meds headed our way over the next decade.
Inadvertently Krugman explains the GOP strategy of American collapse…
Link. “deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide happen everywhere, they’re happening disproportionately not in liberal big cities but in left-behind rural regions”
It’s the rural where the GOP lives and rural really does suck. They aren’t making that up.
How Ireland got wealthy.
Link. The wealth isn’t just a tax evasion illusion, it’s real. A fascinating story.
Aaronson’s refreshingly novel take on SBF and “Going Infinite”
Link. “apparent rampant stimulant use at FTX” does deserve more attention — I gather stimulant/cognitive drug use is popular among SV types who are too young to remember how it turns out. Stimulants are a great way to send someone on the edge over the edge.
SBF does seem a tragic figure to me — as are many crooks big and small. I wonder what story he’ll tell after a few years in prison.
Exercise and weight loss – at least an hour a day (abstract only) of serious exercise
Link. From 2009 but I don’t think there’s much better since. Exercise can cause weight loss assuming some dietary control — but it’s a LOT more exercise than most people imagine.
Greater amounts of PA (>250 min wk(-1)) have been associated with clinically significant weight loss.
Protein Language model leverages evolutionary history to optimize synthetic proteins.
Link. Not original design but the model “knows things”.
“What Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it,” Mr. Obama said. “And what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable.”
Link. Israel has no moral authority any more. Hamas deserves to be destroyed. Biden’s approach is probably the best the US can do.
The quick guide to voting for the right Dem.
Link. Republican? Maybe if you have a time machine.
Mark Meadows prosecution deal shows he lied in his memoir, publisher sues.
Link. “All Seasons Press, which published Meadows’ memoir The Chief’s Chief in 2021, is seeking nearly $3 million in damages”
“Final Cut fans are getting the heebie-jeebies that Final Cut is going the way of Aperture”
Link. They were warned.
“… 27 elite Kenyan runners were suspended for doping offenses — a total that amounted to 40 percent of the athletes suspended …”
Link. Not a shock.
War Crimes explained: it’s complicated.
Link. If one side uses human shields the other side still cannot disregard their safety. Siege is not legal (I think).
Maine’s system for removing gun access for psychotic people is mostly broken.
Link. Blame the GOP.
Drones as expected: “soon we will have to put up such nets above our cities, or at least government buildings, all over Europe.”
Link. For once nobody is surprised.
“a return to removable, user-accessible batteries has now become a blue-ocean opportunity just waiting for Apple to seize it”
Link. It would kill Apple revenue.
Another malaria vaccine: “this will keep huge numbers of children from dying before their lives had ever really gotten started”
Link. For things like this there are Nobel prizes.
Microsoft Copilot impact pending: “Enterprise customers will have to pay $30 a month per user”
Link. This is going to be very interesting. Apple is going to be embarrassed.
WH focused on AI robocalls that target cognitively vulnerable (esp 75+).
Link. An obvious threat that will require many interlocking defenses.
Germany’s Greens lost support due to aggressive decarbonization.
Link. A warning to left Dem.
China: “hostels have become refuges for young people trying their fortunes in major cities, who need a place to crash between back-to-back interviews, to strategize on their next networking meeting or to fire off yet another résumé”
Link. Employers have infinite choice so make candidates travel to interview.
Infant Deaths up in pandemic, reversing long term trend.
Link. Up for Native American, Alaska Native and white mothers, Black infants remain at highest risk.
Theia’s corpse found.
Link. ““We looked into the deeper Earth,” said Qian Yuan, a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology who led the research. “We found big chunks of the impactor Theia.”
Time Machine in Sonoma: a retrospective.
Link. “When backing up to APFS, Time Machine reverses the design used in High Sierra: instead of using snapshots to determine what needed to be backed up before creating a backup using traditional hard links, most of the time Time Machine determines what has changed using the original method with FSEvents”
“The U.S. should therefore continue to maintain as light a presence in the Middle East as possible”
Link. We can’t fix it and it doesn’t matter economically any more. Oil disruption only speeds decarbonization.
Asia is what matters. Containing China.
Mozi botnet takedown is probably Chinese law enforcement.
Link. Many Mozi victims in China and Russia. Sounds like Mozi’s author is now cooperating.
Extensive review of childhood obesity and treatment by bariatric surgery and glutides by NYT physician journalist.
Link. Her review of the “obesity is not a disease” movement is as fair as can be.
The inverse correlation between wealth and weight suggests room for cultural factors (or curious genetics).
Retailers are overstating the impact of shoplifting.
Link. Loss numbers don’t fit the media story.
“among participants who were older and less affluent, hearing aids reduced the rate of cognitive decline by 48 percent”
Link. But no effect in a less at-risk group. I’m skeptical. I doubt the real effect is anywhere near 48%.
Simulation of quantum level time travel supports 90s theories of Planck scale closed timeline curves.
Link. I hope the experiments are one day feasible. I didn’t think one could use entanglement to pass information back (very small jump) in time .. seems suspiciously similar to FTL.
iMessage Contact Key Verification blocks “‘ghost proposal’ made in 2019 by the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)”
Link. Similar to adding an eavesdropper to a phone call in 1935.
“they must first sting an American cockroach, and inject the much larger insect with mind-control toxins that turn it into a defenseless zombie”
Link. “emerald jewel wasp both eats the cockroach’s heart out and takes its breath away”
Ampulex compressa. Your next Halloween costume.
US Debt: “if these have a maturity of a year or less, they are “bills,” if two to 10 years, they are “notes” and if over 10 years they are bonds”
Link. TIL the 3 different names for bonds.
Economy is very strong but … “GOP unhappiness with the state of the nation is really what’s driving the bulk of the negative sentiment here.”
Link. The GOP base is saying their finances are ok but the US economy is catastrophic. It’s not the economy that’s the problem.
“Sonoma brings radical changes to iCloud Drive, including the removal of traditional stub files for those files evicted to iCloud”
Link. I’ll wait until spring to upgrade.
Obsidian’s Importer Plugin Lets You Move Your Apple Notes to Any Note-Taking App That Supports Markdown
Link. Data freedom is the work of net heroes.
Gordon’s Tech: Scripting Photos.app in Ventura (and maybe Sonoma) with AppleScript, Automator, and Shortcuts
Link. This is a stub article, but is already better than what I can find via Kagi or Google today. It’s for Ventura but will be updated to Sonoma in next few months.
Photos for Mac (Apple Photos.app): outline of Photos tips and warnings
Link. It’s more scriptable than I’d thought but there doesn’t seem to be a home for the user scripts. #photos #AppleScript
“the typical American family got about 37% richer between 2019 and 2022”
Link. I wonder how much was COVID accelerated inheritances.