Link. Apple is determined to turn macOS into a kind of cache and sync system for iCloud content.
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“two short paragraphs are sufficient to list the sum total of all the nothing that the BRICS organization has so far succeeded in doing. “
Link. The emperor is naked.
How good apps become malware: selling out to criminals.
Link. The money is hard to resist; just don’t ask too many questions.
This time it was “NightOwl”
Naomi Klein (author, journalist) decides Naomi Wolf’s (author) crackpottery is too much.
Link. Klein mainlines all the battiness she can find – what drove Wolf mad?
“She is getting everything she once had and lost – attention, respect, money, power.”
Klein has written a book about Wolf’s derangement and the role of social media celebrity.
“I’ve left China for almost two years, but the fear has not left me.”
Link. The long claw of Xi pursues China’s heroes into Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Mao but with far more power.
“pairing facial recognition technology with an eyewitness identification should not be the basis for charging someone with a crime”
Link. A strong resemblance is likely, so the eyewitness agreement adds little.
Because of the scope of image search the false positive rate is substantially higher than in a typical selection. Police are as bad as doctors at understanding test characteristics
“For $17 on Taobao, a Chinese e-commerce site, a vendor is selling fabricated employment offers from a manufacturing firm affixed with a company seal and registration number.”
Link. Xi commands employment for the young.
WordPress 100 year domain and site plan.
Link. Oddly interesting
Microbes that live in tumors: “several research teams have cast doubt on three of the most prominent studies in the field, reporting that they were unable to reproduce the results.”
Link. The original articles were big wins for the authors with prestige pubs. Retractions may come but it’s possible the errors were a combination of honest mistakes and cognitive confirmation bias.
MacWhisper: Free version does a lot, front end for OpenAI transcription of audio files.
Link. Pro version is a one-time payment of $25, a bargain by today’s standards.
Job satisfaction at all time high.
Link. Bullshit jobs? “Conference Board does a very detailed running survey of job satisfaction in the U.S., and although satisfaction was indeed low at the time Graeber wrote his essay, it has since recovered strongly, and is now higher than it’s been at any point since the survey began back in 1987”
“Public officials should not be allowed to accept trips or gifts like Omar did.”
Link. SCOTUS is not a guide to ethical behavior.
“the percentage of adults who say they have no religion has risen to 29 percent from 16 percent”
Link. The religious right is right to panic.
macOS Pages (older versions) may change file formats when many images or videos are embedded.
Link. “If your document is larger than 500 MB and you aren’t using Apple File System (APFS) or you’re using an older version of Pages, Numbers, or Keynote, the app might prompt you to save the document as a package.”
Weird. I think you want to convert to single file when you update Pages to a more recent version. I wonder if the Package version doesn’t really work with iCloud Drive.
US Gender surgery: “The number of procedures rose from about 4,550 in 2016 to about 13,000 in 2019”
Link. 3.7 million babies are born in US yearly. So this would be 0.3% of births. 57% of procedures were on chest.
Sensors to detect infants left in hot cars: “In one case last year in Chesterfield, Va., a father who realized what he had done immediately went home and killed himself.”
Link. I would clip a line from the infant seat to my belt each time I sat in the driver’s seat.
Once it surprised me.
Muon wobble off prediction by an infinitesimal amount: “It’s sensitive to all of the particles that exist, even the ones that we don’t know about yet.”
Link. Prediction incorporates quantum foam space time. Result matches a lattice simulation; but we don’t understand the simulation.
Hoping for failure of the standard model.
5 Iranian-American hostages may less imprisoned: “access to about $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue”
Link. They are prisoners pending payments. About a billion a person. But it is Iran’s money.
Biological age can now be measured by “epigenetic clock”.
Link. We can make people age faster … but not slower. “his research on the epigenetic clock made him doubt that people would ever live past the maximum human life span of about 120 years”
Machine speech via brain link: “When researchers began working with her, they didn’t expect to try the avatar or audio””
Link. The teary part comes from stories of her will and her family support.
“discoveries at Chernobyl suggested that some fungi seemed to be radiotrophic – actively seeking out and benefiting from high levels of radiation”
Link. Visiting aliens travel on unshielded fusion reactor.
“strong ionising radiation changes the electrochemical structure of fungal melanin, increasing its ability to act as a reducing agent[3] and transfer electrons”
At last minute Xi Jinping no-show for big speech. “… extraordinary is an understatement as Chinese leaders never miss highly choreographed events like this”
Link. Speech given by minister. Xi showed up later. Most likely health … we may never know.
It’s not just Oldness — streaming audio quality is poor.
Link. Subtitles needed. Soon software will tweak spoken audio.
GLP-1 inhibitor presentations in 1990: “When he applied to the Endocrine Society to give talks, he found himself scheduled at the very end of the last day of the annual meetings.”
Link. The crowds came later. Hope for those who get the death slot on the agenda.
We don’t know why some GLP-1 cause more weight loss than others. 500% increase in brain levels. Drugs in development even more effective.
Mars spinning bit faster: “most likely cause was a long-term accumulation of ice at the poles. Dr. Le Maistre said another possibility was the melting of glaciers in the polar regions.”
Link. NASA’s InSight lander data combined with 1970s Viking lander data.
Little Rock AK schools rebel against GOP suppression of Black history.
Link. “In 1957, a group of nine Black teenagers, escorted by the U.S. National Guard, integrated Little Rock Central High School as white protesters spit and jeered.”
When humans arrived they set the land on fire. How humans killed everything that ate us in North America.
Link. “a 400-year-long period of massively elevated wildfire … at the end of that period, you’re in a different ecosystem and all of the megafauna are gone.”
Neptune’s Clouds Gone: “It’s thought that the bombardment of ultraviolet light triggers an alchemic, cloud-making reaction in the planet’s ethereal skies.”
Link. We are in a low output state.
Military judge rules, 20y late, that 9/11 torture confessions cannot be used.
Link. Torture was popular in America. I suspect it still is.
China crash: “The root of the troubles, they believe, is the ideology of Xi Jinping”
Link. Xi definitely contributed, including a bad choice on COVID vaccines.
How Nvidia Dominates AI.
Link. Great leadership and team. Reminds me of old Cray.
“In April, Netflix confirmed it will be shutting down its DVD mail order option”
Link. We stopped because so many of their DVDs were defective.
Iowa 90F dew point: “The first is what we call “corn sweat.” It occurs as corn plants in the massive sea of cornfields in the Upper Midwest transmit moisture from soils into the atmosphere above the plants.”
Link. Did not know.
“An AI porn singularity has already occurred, an explosion of non-consensual sexual imagery that’s seeping out of every crack of internet infrastructure”
Link. Obsessive men produce tens of thousands of prompt-generated porn images. Porn pioneers again.
Laura Jedeed’s guide to managing (left) cancellation.
Link. “Never apologize” makes sense. The mob is beyond that
“This might or might not bring nearer in time the day when we can break (say) 2048-bit RSA keys using a quantum computer”
Link. Devious of Scott to drop this into a newsy post. Apparently it’s time to stop laughing at quantum factoring speed up. (But don’t bet on it either)
Copytables: Extract Tabular Data from Web Pages
Link. $3 for Safari but free extension for Chrome. I need this.
“regret participating in the Apple Security Bounty program. It has been a giant, frustrating waste of time”
Link. Apple is kinda dumb.
John Warnock, RIP via Tsai.
Link. This guy was a genius. (I do not like Adobe but wow, he invented a lot.)
“Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”
Link. His power is real. If you are on X read this and leave it now.
Kevin Kruse on Florida history curriculum: it’s all about protecting the GOP.
Link. Slave trades got the attention but the 20th century, when GOP became the villain, is the real problem.
Apple Notes: the missing guide.
Link. It has become a powerful beast. The weird gap is lack of backup and versioning.
A deeper take on China crisis: “Fukuyama’s arguments had strengths. The legal and political institutions of western democracies are complex and vital. The lack of human legal and economic rights in China is coming to the fore.”
Link. Faced with a relatively common economic crisis Xi’s law-rending leadership broke China’s ability to respond.
“China basically pivoted from being an export-led economy to being a real-estate-led economy. Real-estate-related industries soared to almost 30% of total output.”
Link. Maybe similar to being a petro state?
macOS security: “Secure Enclave Processor (SEP), a 32-bit ARM CPU running its own operating system, sepOS, based on a specialised microkernel …”
Link. I’d enjoy knowing the history of sepOS.
“as far as I can establish, no exploit has been made public that gives access to secrets in the Secure Enclave”
“The Twin Cities boast two of the top three park systems in the nation”
Link. DC was first – presumably due to vast federal parks. The TCs also have best bicycling infrastructure, is relatively safe from most natural disasters, had excellent water supplies, lowest unemployment, and natural cooling periods.
Moms for Liberty quotes Hitler in newsletter.
Link. “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.’ — Adolf Hitler.”
Likely they didn’t know the provenance. I don’t think Hitler was right though. Youth are fickle.
“many ardent Republicans appear to live in the Fox Cinematic Universe”
Link. FCU is a good one. Krugman quote but I don’t know if it’s original.
“Mr. Trump has never explicitly told Mr. Giuliani why he is effectively stiffing him, but the former president has pointed out that he lost the cases related to the election”
Link. Makes sense. Giuliani was a lousy flunky. Let the wolves have him.
Snapchat AI went rogue – company says glitch, not sentience
Link. Shared because of the funny clickbait headline. The LLM was just flaky of course. But one day a similar headline will be real.