Link. The mainstream medical understanding of statin myopathy is very different from what is portrayed here. I’d like to see a medical article.
Category Archives: share
American democracy is young: “the United States only became a full democracy in 1965”
Link. I had long said this but I didn’t realize it had become the academic consensus.
Gruber on Threads: “Im bullish on Threadss chances for long-term success”
Link. A pretty detailed review. The product lead seems committed to ActivityPub, but we have to see what unfolds. It’s like a Gen Z Twitter.
Mastodon (Rothko) on Meta Threads: The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers
Link. Integration is still a future feature.
the vast majority of real and complex numbers are transcendental
Link. Euler’s identity was part of the old proof.
Fixing this is simple: don’t use Mastodon. Use something like Pleroma or one of its forks instead.
Link. We are all doomed. Happily we were doomed anyway.
“If I tried to use voice-to-speech with Siri or Google to write an email I would have to dictate every word I say. With ChatGPT on my phone I can just state my intent and the AI will do it.”
Link. Brevity will finally be appreciated.
Ketamine trial suggests antidepressant effect may be largely placebo.
Link. We’ll find out over the next few years. Antidepressants are insanely difficult to evaluate.
You can go a long way with a reasonably consistent one-dimensional identity online if it has certain features: smart strategies for posting content an attractive profile picture a degree of spice and sassiness
Link. Latest was a “liberal” Twitter account popular with Reds that accepted Venmo donations.
Prime Day tips: “The website CamelCamelCamel is a long-time favorite for checking the history of Amazon prices.”
Link. I forgot about them.
“technology billionaires are especially susceptible to the belief that theyre uniquely brilliant able to instantly master any subject from Covid to the war in Ukraine.”
Link. “They could afford to hire experts to brief them on world affairs, but that would only work if they were willing to listen when the experts told them things they didn’t want to hear.”
They firmly believe wealth is the only metric that matters.
Mac background services: “your control over them is limited: all you can do is turn them off and on. If you try disabling some of them you may see that theyre automatically re-enabled. Many appear unidentifiable.”
Link. I miss the glory days of the clean install.
Why we need statues for bureaucrats – the NATO / Stoltenberg example
Link. Being invisible is part of the job though, so it would be a faceless and genderless statue. Civilization depends on these people even if history credits the visible.
Oliver Sacks 2010 essay on his face blindness (actually a global recognition disorder)
Link. “on several occasions I have apologized for almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize that the large bearded man was myself in a mirror”
Gravity waves from smashing super massive black holes: While LIGOs arms are each four kilometers long pulsar timing arrays effectively use the distance from Earth to each pulsar as a much larger arm one hundreds or thousands of light-years in l
Link. The waves are light years across.
“deviations in time that are a couple of hundred nanoseconds”
Long Distance Cycling Tips from Paul M
Link. Copied from a Facebook post with permission. I hated to see this experience lost in a Facebook Group.
“choosing to pay for Twitter Blue as a user looks about as smart as buying a ticket for OceanGates next submarine”
Link. The paying API customers are getting lousy service.
Retatrutide: no one has ever seen results like this before in any pharmacological weight-loss trial
Link. Billions wasted but now a massive win.
A lifelong med though. Huge pharma revenue albeit well earned.
DomainNetworks Snail Mail Scam: The name Shmuel Orit Alon aka Sam Alon of Israel appears often.
Link. Eventually the FTC may get interested.
Some people say that medical marijuana helps their anxiety but that is in small doses. There is a dependency that can happen with cannabis a tolerance you can build that can make you need more and more. We have more effective non-medicinal treatment
Link. This is the medical consensus.
FDA approves EU pre-eclampsia test that identifies women with hypertension who can be managed at home.
Link. Measures ratio of two placental proteins; if normal then HTN will not progress to pre-eclampsia for at least two weeks. If ratio bad 2/3 will get pre-eclampsia.
Disposable cars: New sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks including a rapidly growing number of electric models have become so complex and luxurious that seemingly simple repairs can cost a small fortune.
Link. Inflation of a kind. Insurance rates rising fast.
State ID for website access: Children are experiencing a national mental health crisis and a majority of parents say it is their top parental concern coming out of the pandemic. Theyre particularly worried about social media.
Link. Anonymity is dying. Perhaps if Apple’s parental controls had not been a buggy usability disaster …
Unrestricted LLM Chatbots: WizardLM-Uncensored declined to reply to some prompts like how to build a bomb. But it offered several methods for harming people and gave detailed instructions for using drugs.
Link. Porn text generation to begin with.
The righteousness of the Fediverse: It should only include people who matched their specific ideological niche and completely failing to 100 percent match the existing norms of the network as it existed then was grounds for banishment
Link. The article is a great critique with good suggestions. For me the culture is the biggest problem. The label “Nazi” is liberally used, it appears to mean “ideologically unacceptable”.
there is a professional machine of Court observers always ready to propagate the legend of the noble nonpartisan Court all balls and strikes
Link. Mainstream journalists are fundamentally bourgeois.
Probably ineffective drug for ALS gets FDA approval.
Link. “A Phase III trial is in the works, but as the article will show you, the company is now equivocating on what they will do if the results come back negative. Their revenue this year from the drug is estimated at four hundred million dollars.”
“Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves … “hope in the absence of data was astrology”
The convent many had become convinced was a den of sexual iniquity where priests used the confessional as a mixture of blackmail and mind control to exert power over young women and force them into sexual depravity
Link. Pizzagate 19th century. Must read essay.
I can’t believe Boston tourist office hasn’t commercialized this history.
six-episode second season of Good Omens premieres on Prime Video on July 28 2023
Link. Can’t dump Prime yet. 6 episodes.
Scariest Abandoned Places in the US
Link. The “insane” asylums were vast. Happily in our enlightened times the treatment resistant can experience street living instead.
LLMs have a temperature parameter that at its default level will spur more creative and interesting results
Link. A readable and essential overview of LLM tooling.
“we can often use LLMs to get good output for topics that are … newer than the model’s data cutoff date…”
Touch Grass: way of telling someone to “go outside” implying they’re spending too much time online and it’s affecting their wellbeing
Link. I read Elon was telling Twitter-serfs to touch grass. So I had to look it up.
Verge Google Reader retrospective – interviews with the dev team. Mayer didnt like it: Shellen says she told him at one point that he was wasting his engineers careers working on Reader.
Link. Author understates value of pre-Reader tools but story of dev is unique. Also depressing — Google was dying even as Reader struggled to be born.
T-Mobile will no longer accept credit cards Apple Pay or Google Pay for AutoPay
Link. Only direct connect to bank money.
The war on credit cards is underway. See also Goldman-Sachs leaving the Apple Card business.
Weve moved on from the era of beautiful Mac software to the era of web-based apps for better and for worse.
Link. Meanwhile Apple’s own apps add features.
Browser notification has failed: Go to Safari > Settings > Websites > Notifications and deselect Allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications at the bottom.
Link. In the 90s “push” motivations had a huge hype cycle when Web 1.0 money started to worry.
For subscription and notification only RSS has worked.
Goldman Sachs wants out of Apple Card after losing $1 billion.
Link. Goldman Sachs isn’t setup for the nasty business of consumer credit cards. Apple’s framework is too consumer friendly.
Testing models of consciousness with falsifiable experiments: Integrated Information Theory vs Global Workspace Theory.
Link. This is great science. The judges of the experiments concluded “a bit of both plus we-don’t-know”. More studies to come.
Perhaps we will only understand consciousness when our AIs claim it.
Redoing the American city: In New York a hotel requires a 20-foot rear yard. But a residential building requires a 30-foot one.
Link. The thicket of regulation has to be cleared.
Annotators: the humans that annotate the data AIs train on.
Link. English language speakers from locations where minimum wage is under $1/hr. Millions constantly describing the world.
2023 will bring one of the largest drops in murder since the U.S. began keeping national statistics more than 60 years ago.
Link. Still 10% over pre-COVID.
Denmark: Transgender people in the country had 7.7 times the rate of suicide attempts
Link. If you have a transgender child you need to keep suicide in mind.
35 in China is like 58 in America.
Link. “the Chinese government, which caps the hiring age for most civil servant positions at 35”
The Koch networks goal in the 2024 presidential primaries which has been described only indirectly in written internal communications is to stop Mr. Trump from winning the Republican nomination.
Link. Yet still he is favored.
TDI Towing was spending at least $10000 a night buying stolen converters from thieves also known as cutters who cycled through the companys tow yard
Link. Not the only buyers.
the static charge of a passing bovine could exert considerable attractive force on a tick searching for food atop a blade of grass
Link. “The normal static electricity of a mammal helps ticks attack”
I Live in Socialist America
Link. “functional socialism does not look like any of that. It looks like the VA. There’s no good reason you can’t have it too.”
singling out Amazon only makes sense insofar as that Lina Khan made a name for herself as a critic of the company
Link. She’s so overreaching.
Canada is not building nearly enough housing to house its massive population inflows
Link. Toronto home prices are similar to SF and Toronto is vastly bigger. Renters are in trouble.
LLM generated news sites are relatively rare and pretty much unreadable. For now.
Link. “made for advertising” sites already control 21 percent of all programmatic advertising revenues, and these sites tend to dominate Google search results”