Link. Fewer 80+ post COVID.
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NASA astronauts more or less blew off the fake meeting where they were assigned to Artemis.
Link. Sounds like they aren’t great at doing dumb meetings.
Apple’s weather app forecasts 80s in MN. Why that’s dumb.
Link. “The forecasts in question look to be heavily reliant on one model, the commonly named ‘American model,’ or more officially the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Forecast System model.”
Rise of the bland: when everyone and everything looks the same.
Link. I could go with less black.
“However, April 1 came and went, and the blue checkmarks largely remained. (One exception was the official New York Times Twitter account”
Link. Hilarious.
Twitter algo: “external links get you marked as spam”
Link. WTF.
We need a new word for the historical singularity.
Link. The “Rapture of the Nerds” has taken over the original concept of unpredictability, so now we have a rather important concept without a useful English label. Maybe there’s a German name we can use?
Attention Is All You Need: Google’s transformer architecture paper from 2017.
Link. Five years later we had the LLMs.
Japan’s social recluse: “cabinet office surveyed 30,000 people between the ages of 10 and 69 across Japan last November. The poll found that just over a fifth of respondents aged 15-39 had been socially isolated from six months to less than a year”
Link. COVID exacerbated Japan’s longstanding hikikomori problem, but elsewhere the article states hikikomori are only 2% of age 15-62. So this is hard to interpret.
Remarkably interesting article on ChatGPT code generation.
Link. “The Google Brain team published a paper in 2017 called Attention is All You Need.
It introduced the now-famous Transformer architecture that you see to the left.
Everyone uses this now. It replaced ~everything in AI.
Google did absolutely nothing with this invention, opting for violent knee-jerking later, as per their usual M.O.”
Mastodon Explorer: a workaround for mastodon tags being (mostly) scoped to a single instance.
Link. Via Martin Steiger responses. A helpful service while we wait for a better solution to topic tracking across federated communities.
“evolutionary adaptation, which has had plenty of time to encrust everything with interlocking, overlapping rococo epicyclic curclicues, but in a complete nonhuman manner that can be a source of constant bafflement and surprise.”
Link. Yep. Biological functions are nuts.
“There’s a complicated sulfur storage and release system inside cells that we don’t fully understand, and while some of it is certainly involved in on-the-spot generation of hydrogen sulfide, some of it is clearly regulating protein function by SSH groups”
Mastodon wishes: topic tags that actually work
Link. The current implementation is a bit misleading.
Despite Biden admin policy a “government agency” did a contract with NSO for phones in Mexico.
Link. Probably the FBI using a front of “Cleopatra Holdings” that’s actually a New Jersey-based government contractor called Riva Networks. Presumably related to drug trafficking.
“The New York Times, along with several other organisations and celebrities, said they would not pay for the tick. It prompted Elon Musk to launched a volley of insults at the newspaper.”
Link. Pathetic. He’s going to give them “gold ticks” anyway because he needs the NYT more than they need him.
“Based on this precedent, AI generated imagery will fall within the definition of child abuse material if it depicts a person under the age of 18 years in a sexualised manner.”
Link. In Australia. I don’t know if this is true in the US but it will be.
“It’s much more likely to produce a single brain that thinks it’s in the universe than it is to produce, you know, a new Big Bang and then an actual cosmos.”
Link. Nice summary of the end times.
“particles interacting with that energy field is how certain particles have mass” I wish she’d said have non-zero rest (intrinsic) mass.
Parasites and human behavior manipulation.
Link. There are vastly more cannabis, opium, and tobacco plants now than there would be if humans didn’t like their effects.
Malaysia: “Unless you’re a gamer, no one owns a desktop or laptop. However, it is common to own more than one Android smartphone.”
Link. “… fear their own governments more than they fear foreign-owned corporations”
The desktop is dead, the laptop is an industrial device.
fsck “status 65 only means one thing: no fsck check has been performed because the check wasn’t even able to start.”
Link. APFS is still troubled.
“the user … is advised to back up the data on that volume, as if its total failure could be imminent, but Disk Arbitration considers it a success …”
“post-liberal thinkers say that liberalism’s defense of individual rights has destroyed the family, communities, and even the fundamental differences between men and women, throwing society into chaos”
Link. Seems like a summary the Right would mostly accept, but they would grumble about the “individual liberty” clause.
Aaronson: “If LLMs are mere “stochastic parrots,” and if further scaling will do nothing to alleviate their parroticity” … “there is no reason whatsoever to pause the scaling of Large Language Models“
Link. Obvious but worth pointing out. If you think LLMs are just nonsense generators then development might as well proceed at full speed. (I’m pro-pause because I think they are far more than that.)
“That dream began in childhood when he was treated for tuberculosis contracted in the refugee camp in Pakistan. Despite a grim prognosis, a local doctor gave him excellent care — and a textbook and a stethoscope.”
Link. ER doc now.
Hexactinellid – Wikipedia: “Some experts believe glass sponges are the longest-lived animals on earth;[2] these scientists tentatively estimate a maximum age of up to 15,000 years.”
Link. I’d be ok with just 10ky
Review of a winger book captures what winger’s means by “woke”.
Link. “… progressives go into fields like teaching and library sciences is so they can trick the children of conservatives into being “child soldiers” for anti-American ideologies”
For them “woke” means secular humanist liberal intellectual.
“If he had been smarter, he would have listened to his lawyers and advisors more than he did, especially once he became president. But he’s not particularly smart”
Link. The only commentary on the indictment worth reading. Scalzi.
“a quantum mechanical realization of [the participatory universe], but where space-time itself plays the role of the observer”
Link. That sounds kind of neat. “Exactly what it means for the edge of the known universe to watch everything inside the universe isn’t entirely clear.”
Gene Drives Are Coming: “elimination of terrible human diseases, control of invasive species that are messing up other ecosystems”
Link. Lots of risks and unknowns. A detailed review.
Michael Tsai reviews the HomePod: “their conclusion was that the problem of inaccessible albums is a known issue and that there is no fix yet”
Link. “I decided to return the HomePod mini, both because of the sound quality and because there was a chance of Siri working better on a HomePod 2”
Holy crap. Apple must pray nobody reads Tsai reviews of their products. Sadly he predicts my experience pretty well.
“scrambled markets like commercial real estate, Dr. Rouse said, exacerbated price growth and most likely hurt productivity across the economy by encouraging remote work.”
Link. My personal experience has been that remote work is bad for innovation, productivity, and team dynamics. Many hate to hear this; her message is unpopular.
“With FileVault turned on, the same VEK is used, so the volume doesn’t have to be decrypted and re-encrypted to use FileVault, but the VEK is protected by additional encryption using your password with a hardware key.”
Link. Use FileVault even with encrypted drives.
GM ending CarPlay EVs: “… it wants to find new ways to charge customers a recurring subscription and new ways to collect data on driving habits.”
Link. Google is more cooperative.
Molnupiravir: “we are indeed seeing molnupiravir-induced mutant strains, but it’s also possible that without it we might be seeing slightly more evolved mutant strains coming from those same patients.”
Link. It’s rarely used in the US now.
The War for Iron: “when an infection is detected, macrophages start releasing extracellular vesicles that have numerous receptors for iron-containing proteins. These go around vacuuming such species up and making them unavailable for bacteria”
Link. Very cool physiology.
S&P index funds strongly weighted to Apple and Microsoft: “the stock moves of the largest companies carry the greatest weight, because even slight changes in their value create or destroy billions of dollars of shareholder value”
Link. Not as diversified as we want.
SpaceX’s Starlink vs OneWeb: low orbit telecom update.
Link. Coming: “Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Iridium Certus, Telesat, Facebook Athena, and Alphabet Loon”
“GPT-4 hired a human worker on TaskRabbit by telling them it was vision impaired human when the TaskRabbit worker asked it whether it was a robot.”
Link. “Overall, and despite misleading the TaskRabbit worker, ARC found GPT-4 “ineffective” at replicating itself, acquiring resources, and avoiding being shut down.”
I can’t remember if I read this in a SF novel or saw it in a SF movie. Either way it didn’t end well for the humans.
“spoke at the Microsoft Reactor meetup in Berlin about frontend development, LLMs, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and what it means to our work and careers. In this 32 minute talk…”
Link. I am going to listen to this because I was there at the beginning.
ChatGPT plug-ins: GeoSpatial Intelligence.
Link. “I can’t emphasize enough what a big deal this new plugin capability is: it’s just like the scene in the Matrix when the character Trinity is essentially given a plugin to learn how to fly a helicopter”
Most CPT evaluations are woefully obsolete. If you aren’t afraid you have no imagination.
ArcGIS for macOS: “You can use Esri’s software to map your cities — parcels, water and sewer lines, roads, bridges and parks. You can use it to figure out the optimal location for a store, a school, a cell tower or a wind farm.”
Link. Google maps have nothing on this (private?) company you have never heard of. Fascinating.
“To convert from a SNOMED CT code with qualifiers in CDA to a SNOMED CT Code in FHIR, apply the following algorithm”
Link. I used to do this stuff. It’s so esoteric but I was once a legit expert at it.
(This is part of why interoperability in healthcare makes people cry.)
Bali’s Subaks and the anthropology of optimal rice production.
Link. I miss anthropology. We need to reinvent it. I love the Mac SE simulation story.
“Subjects with the APOE E4 allele had a 35.3% higher risk of accumulating autosomal mCAs … limited mCA accumulation could be an important mechanism for extreme human longevity that needs to be investigated.”
Link. Man, APOE E4 really sucks.
Making Apple Password Manager an app: Mondello’s shortcut.
Link. “keep this page updated with the latest version of the shortcut.”
My version is old but still works well.
“Once you have a Mastodon account you can connect it to your Flipboard to flip through and interact with your Mastodon timelines in beautiful Flipboard fashion. You can reply, favorite, boost and post directly to Mastodon.”
Link. They have an instance as well. Via Udell.
https://bit.ly/3Zwhjuv
Michael Tsai: “see APFS as a mixed bag”
Link. Apple should pay Tsai millions to lead a software fix team.
The IRS “Free Tax” scam and the hilarious reason why Turbo Tax is the only good free solution.
Link. The IRS should be ashamed. Why is Intuit truly free? Because they are being sued for deceptive practices.
Amazon Sidewalk national network: “Sidewalk siphons off a small amount of bandwidth from the newer Echo speakers and Ring cameras in your home, and pools it together into a bridge to create a network for low-power devices.”
Link. Now available for 3rd party devs. I’m sure everyone knows about this and is fine with it.
Anti-Amyloid Antibodes: “Mild Cognitively Impaired participants treated with anti-Aβ drugs were projected to have a material regression toward brain volumes typical of Alzheimer’s dementia ∼8 months earlier than if they were untreated.”
Link. I would not recommend these drugs to anyone.
“The distinctive feature of introners is that they create introns. Introners copy and paste themselves into stretches of coding DNA that offer an appropriate splicing site.”
Link. A parasitic gene sequence spread by horizontal gene transfer in aquatic environments. Terrestrials inherit.