Link. Dark Brandon strikes.
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“The first paper describes teaching an LLM to translate ordinary math statements into formal code that a computer can run and check. The second trained an LLM not just to understand natural-language math problems but to actually solve them …”
Link. It’s moving very fast.
COVID vaccine update: Coronavac no longer works at all. (China’s vaccine).
Link. Bivalent still quite good. Yay science.
One person post stroke shows substantial motor function improvement in a one month trial of implanted electrode spinal cord stimulation.
Link. Unexpected response. There will be much more like this but it’s years from patient care.
What establishment conservatives mean when they say “liberalism”.
Link. “rapid secularization (the decline of Christian identification accelerated from the 1990s onward) and increasing social and sexual permissiveness — extending beyond support for same-sex marriage to beliefs about premarital sex, divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing, marijuana use…”
Basically pre-Vatican II Catholicism with some carve-outs for gay marriage and ambiguity around birth control. A good reference.
Be afraid of ChatGPT.
Link. I’m afraid. It’s been a while since I’ve done a retrospective post on this topic; it’s impressive how often warnings about our trajectory have been widely mocked — even as we just keep moving faster and faster.
In 2009 I thought “Google’s IQ boost is only beginning”
Link. And then it all went to shit. A lesson on the risks of prediction.
Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us. Bill Joy writing in wired magazine April 2000.
Link. I’d love to see him revisit this article, but he was widely mocked afterwords. So he’s probably done with this.
Baumol’s cost disease: medicine, education and post-AI disruption (2012)
Link. Another old post resurfaced in writing a new one. I’ve sometimes looked for this and been unable to find it.
The senescent web – in 2009.
Link. I’d forgotten that we started seeing large numbers of garbage web sites as far back as 2009. Google fought back for a while but then gave up.
“if rural county recipients got the actuarial value of what they had paid in, total Social Security payments in most such counties would drop by over 40%. There are huge fiscal transfers from urban counties and largely urban congressional districts to r
Link. SS does not work the way you think it does.
“Supreme Court ruled that Ozawa could not become a citizen under the 1906 Naturalization Act because that law had not overridden the 1790 naturalization law limiting citizenship to “free white persons.”
Link. SCOTUS has been evil many times in US history. The Roberts court is not unprecedented.
New Marburg Virus Outbreak: “a successful vaccine trial is unlikely to happen because a quick and effective quarantine response could end the outbreak before vaccines could even be administered”
Link.
Defending against AI Lobbyists – Schneier.
Link. “The threat of AI hacking our democracy is legitimate and concerning, but its solutions are consistent with our democratic values.”
Wolfram explains ChatGPT.
Link. “models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax”
Not a quick read. Via Pluralistic. #AI
Software bug caused tail bump on 2 flights: “the bug was missed because it only presented when many aircraft at the same time were using the system”
Link. Problem detected early so no passenger risk.
Tips for the geriatric CrossFit addict
Link. Age 63 – what I’ve learned over 10y of my CrossFit addiction. #crossfit #aging
Google Blogger has redone blog search. It’s the most significant update in many years.
Link. I used to be able to search only the most recent 5000 posts. Now I can find a post from July 2003. Search now has new operators; sort:-published shows posts in reverse chronological order. I don’t know if this a fluke one-off or if Google is going to try to resurrect Blogger.
Finally, a sensible article on the balloons.
Link. I figured the US military wanted to ignore it. Dyer explains how it navigates and how it went off track.
“US intelligence services saw the balloon launched from Hainan island off the southern Chinese coast in late January – and it was headed straight east for the US-owned island of Guam.”
Erdogan’s money spigot: amnesty for failure to follow building codes.
Link. “5.8 million residential buildings were regularised by the last amnesty, issued just before the presidential election of 2018. Another amnesty is planned for the near future, since there is another election coming up this May…
… To get the reconstruction aid he needs, he would have to lift his veto on Sweden and Finland joining NATO, stop selling drones to Russia, stop threatening NATO ally Greece with a Turkish attack “suddenly one night”, and a good deal more.”
“.. in 2017, after donors from the railroad industry poured more than $6 million into Republican political campaigns, the Trump administration got rid of a rule imposed by the Obama administration that required better braking systems on rail cars that c
Link. Only HCR makes the payoff clear. The GOP embraces corruption. Also, JD Vance lies about FEMA but that’s a dog bites man story.
“I wanted to convert some .webp images to .png on my Mac. I asked ChatGPT… it told me about sips”
Link. There used to be Mac power user web sites and blogs where we learned about things like this.
“Jackson’s water crisis was not the result of one bad weather event or a single case of human error or even short-term neglect. It is a tragedy years in the making — borne of racial distrust, political brinkmanship and systemic failure at every leve
Link. Decades of corruption and dishonor. There is plenty of money now. The problem is trust and capability.
The MAGA war on knowledge.
Link. “If a physics class explains how greenhouse gas emissions can change the climate — well, that’s more liberal propaganda.”
College corrodes religious fundamentalism. The culture war is Faith vs Reason. Same as it always was.
A.P. Black Studies and the College Board: the missing context provided.
Link. College Board is in a no-win world, esp after SAT tests were deprecated to reduce admission advantage of academically inclined cultures.
“China burns more coal than every other country in the world, combined, and its consumption is expected to continue increasing for at least the next three years.”
Link. Xi does not believe in science. Carbon tariffs likely.
“On November 15, Laura Ingraham wrote to Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity: “Sidney Powell is a bit nuts. Sorry, but she is.”
Link. I have wondered whether Laura and Tucker were more insane or more evil. Now I lean to evil. (Rupert we know.)
Tim Urban’s Wait But Why obsession: “This book is my best crack at explaining what I think is an existential risk to liberal societies.”
Link. I read several of his related 2016 blog posts and lost interest; he didn’t know the terrain well enough. Six years later he might.
Pegylated interferon lambda – research med for COVID and perhaps many more respiratory viruses.
Link. Hard to get approval for the US, China might try it.
China: “female blue-collar workers must retire at 50”
Link. A throwaway line in an essay about China’s demographic problem – but that caught my eye. So strange.
“The German case, which also involved the arrest of a senior official in the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, followed roll-ups of suspected Russian operatives in the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Poland and Slovenia.”
Link. War related.
“network of fake news sites is one part of a complex apparatus the Spain-based firm Eliminalia uses to manipulate online information on behalf of a global roster of clients …. firm employs elaborate, deceptive tactics to remove or drown out unflatteri
Link. Google indexes this crap.
As the web decays Google pays Apple to stay out of the search business.
Link. We always knew part of this, but there’s an EU suit on an additional wrinkle. It’s weird that these payoffs are legal in the United States. (Slightly related: I wonder what Apple got from Adobe for killing Aperture.)
Tesla recall: “there is no similar FSD recall in the European Union, because Tesla hasn’t received the green light to offer it there.”
Link. “… the U.S. does use pre-approval to improve transportation safety—just not for cars … Carmakers do generally abide by FMVSS, but … there is nothing within it pertaining to autonomous driving technology”
Insurance companies are still covering Teslas.
“Dominion said in its filing that not a single Fox witness had testified that he or she believed any of the allegations about Dominion.”
Link.
Naltrexone for binge drinking: US tests European “as needed” dosing.
Link. It’s widely used with regular dosing.
“Each year, around 60,000 high-flying balloons are launched just by the National Weather Service”
Link. So many many balloons.
Musk: “A.I. is ‘one of the biggest risks’ to civilization”
Link. I hate agreeing with Musk. So how does this belief influence his actions?
Bing ChatGPT: “a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine”
Link. Asimov: “Dr. Susan Calvin (1982-2064 AD) was the first and chief robopsychologist at US Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc.”
From: https://bit.ly/3S4455O
Humans will torment the pre-sentient until…
Do not apply for Global Entry – backlogs are now over 6 months.
Link. I paid up front and have been waiting 7m. At some point I’m going to bug our local Congressional Service office to get my money back. Just do TSA prechehck.
“Four separate academic teams have come up with broadly similar estimates suggesting that one million to 1.5 million people died during the [COVID] surge …”
Link. Xi will never release trustworthy internal numbers. Probably closer to 1.5 million.
DeSantis: “he appeals to an oppression envy among white conservatives … a form of civic gluttony and narcissism in which the market of privilege must be cornered.”
Link. That’s a great sentence.
“Two of Russia’s most elite brigades — the 155th and 40th Naval Infantry Brigades — were decimated in Vuhledar, he said.”
Link. “Ukraine’s deployment of American-made HIMARS missiles that forced commanders to position large concentrations of forces more than 50 miles from the front.”
“then-head of intelligence for the D.C. police was sharing with Tarrio during the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.”
Link. Shane Lamond is in deep dodo now.
Anker 535 Power Bank (PowerCore 20K) recalled for usual fire problem.
Link. The recall page has broken images, but that’s no problem because the text they refer to is unreadable even with Apple iOS magnifier. (A high res photo with cropping and enlargement did show the model number.)
“Lock your titanium card if it’s ever lost or misplaced (you could also lock it as a default and only unlock it when you need it if you normally use Apple Pay)”
Link. I didn’t know of these security features. Advanced Fraud Protection is something I’ll try.
“FCC’s coverage data significantly overstates the availability of each ISP’s service, access to any broadband, connection speeds available to consumers, and competition in broadband markets.”
Link. Comcast lies? Unbelievable.
Lawsuits Over Apple Analytics violating user privacy.
Link. “iPhone collects hyper-detailed data about what you do on its apps, like the App Store, Apple Stocks, Apple Music, Apple News, and more—even when you turn off the iPhone Analytics privacy setting”
Feedbin supports push notification you WANT for RSS sources.
Link. Uses Push API which is becoming common.
Ventura: “Macs with a longer history, perhaps inherited by migration, that are more likely to annoy you with spurious notifications, and to contain bizarre and unidentifiable Background Items.”
Link. Ventura is a year from finished. Oakley mentions some undocumented command line tools that may help. “Removing old software responsible for Background Items is best performed with the aid of a BTM dump.”