Link. Most of the books in this series are too basic, but this is interesting. No DRM.
Monthly Archives: December 2019
Apple Stops Staingate Repairs After 4 Years
Link. Years ago they sucked on repairing iMacs with heat issues
Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy.
Link. Pulitzer material.
Surveillance: “The Times concludes that in the absence of regulation, there is no hope”
Link. There is no tech fix.
“The vast majority of diseases, including many cancers, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease, have a genetic contribution of 5 to 10 percent at best.”
Link. This is misleading. Better to say our genomic models predict 5% of variation. Consumer genomics is astrology.
Face recognition: “Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men”
Link. Especially Asian. Should be banned.
“Trump and McConnell don’t want a Senate trial that includes the handful of witnesses that Democrats have demanded because Trump is flagrantly guilty of all of the corruption for which he’s now been impeached”
Link. Does any Senator, even the looniest, really believe Trump is innocent?
Democrats did well.
Link. Did their honorable duty.
China’ Internet with totalitarian characteristics.
Link. “Zuckerberg’s increasingly tragic attempts to suck up to the CCP: by …. making sure he has a copy of Xi’s arse-numbingly tedious The Governance of China on his desk when Chinese journalists visit Facebook. “
Fine tuning the gravitational universe: expansion rate matches energy sum precisely.
Link. Inflation said to explain. Maybe it stops when balance occurs?
“You have to see Cats.”
Link. Perfectly captures the spirit of our times.
Quantum advantage is woke.
Link. The Supremes to be retroactively renamed. Darwin help us all.
Time Machine: 6 Networked storage
Link. I’ve done well with Synology but I stayed with AFP.
“On 4 April 1970, a Soviet KGB team used detailed burial charts to exhume five wooden boxes at the Magdeburg SMERSH facility. Those were burned, crushed, and scattered into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe”
Link. For some reason felt compelled to read about Goebbels. Parts of the story seem weirdly familiar.
Abusing Electron Apps to Bypass macOS’s Security Controls
Link. Drive a truck through it you could.
“The com.apple.macl extended attribute is so persistent that you can’t even delete it.”
Link. How terminal gets access.
“The evidence that the President did what he is accused of doing is simply overwhelming”
Link. Its the GOP thats on trial. They will fail
Making sense of Disk Utility and disk structure in macOS 10.13-10.15
Link. diskutil apfs list, “Command-Shift-. (period or full stop) to show hidden items,“
“Crimea is part of Russia because everyone there speaks Russian”
Link. Canadians making French only official language.
Listen to Apple Podcasts with Alexa
Link. I made it default. Had to add the platform first.
Tim Cook’s Apple
Link. Mixed
“adaptive spread of light skin pigmentation in European populations only occurred later in prehistory.”
Link. Europeans had dark skin as recently as 5kya
NYT journalism fail: “The fault, at the end of the day, clearly lies with New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet”
Link. He’s doing the will of the publisher. WaPo should investigate. I bet some insiders would talk.
Who Goes Nazi? | Harper’s Magazine. 1941.
Link. Via Twitter.
“metabolism is carried out by enzymes that often increase rates by an astonishing 10 orders of magnitude or more”
Link. Reminder that the Cell is insane nanotechnology.
Shopping gets harder
Link. China’s factories desperately dumping goods
Online Murder Markets
Link. Bitcoin isn’t only good for femtanyl.
“Chinese officials are “jubilant and even incredulous” at the success of their hard-line negotiating strategy”
Link. We are ruled by idiots. House excepted.
Legal vaping augments smoking lung damage.
Link. Worse than expected
Digital estate: domains
Link. We have made arrangements
“quantum measurement is the mother of all problems”
Link. Sabine dislikes MWI. That leaves superdeterminism. Maybe they are the same thing.
“Entomologists who study cockroaches often become allergic to them. At the same time, they become allergic to most brands of pre-ground coffee”
Link. Most were familiar to me. Pretty good collection.
Fascinating article on growing pressures in a high intensity ED.
Link. So much to analyze here.
“best plan when upgrading from an earlier version of macOS to Catalina is probably not to inherit your old backups, but to start with a fresh backup set.”
Link. Caralina is quite expensive.
“Save an AppleScript as a .scpt file in Script Editor, and Apple’s own code continues to write a resource fork to the file.”
Link. AppleScript is Apple’s zombiest zombie
A mathematical rule that worked until … “At first the bound for where it would fail was astronomically large (Skewes’s number 10^10^10^964)”
Link. The very definition of exceptional.
Aveanna Hone Care for disabled: “Bain Capital LP and J.H. Whitney Capital Partners LLC” leave trail of death.
Link. Private equity firms should be taxed out of existence.
States and cities paying for new residents
Link. Immigration limits?
“It’s not really Trump who is on trial. It’s Senate Republicans”
Link. Last days of the GOP.
Octonions and the historical relationship between algebras and physics.
Link. Octonions of uncertain use, but likely the limit of algebras that describe physical universe.
“Time can be seen as an “emergent” dimension, a kind of hologram springing from the universe’s spatial correlations, which themselves seem to come from basic symmetries. “
Link. Nothing and everything happened all at once.
Bootstrapping: “Steven Weinberg showed in 1964, the existence of a spin-2 particle leads inevitably to general relativity”
Link. All new to me.
3x+1 – the dangerously seductive Collatz conjecture
Link. “Tao doesn’t entirely resist the great temptations of his field. Every year, he tries his luck for a day or two on one of math’s famous unsolved problems”
Gore-Tex Pro fabrics.
Link. Long time as the best
For frail elderly male veterans even trivial procedures have “1.5 percent mortality rate within 30 days”
Link. People can live months to years at the edge of death
“Given how well Enhanced Dictation performs with UK English, I was expecting even better performance than in Mojave. I was bitterly disappointed.”
Link. Wow. That’s awful.
“claim that the U.S. is being overtaken in talent by China thus seems vastly overblown and mostly reflects China’s gaming of the system and U.S. anxiety over the rise of a geopolitical rival.”
Link.
“Republican climate denial is rooted in the same kind of depravity that we’re seeing with regard to Trump.”
Link. It didn’t begin with Denialism, but that’s when the party left science behind.
Wallet going away.
Link. Few carry cash. Funny to read, I didn’t realize how out of sync I’d become.
iOS does not give apps access to mobile signal strength
Based on absence of apps I think this is true.
Only field test mode can show and only on iPhone. Did carriers block Apple from making this accessible? Maybe they feared consumers exposing untrue coverage claims?