Link. We spent several hundred on gerbil end-of-life care and we were not great at gerbil health.
Monthly Archives: November 2022
“Mearsheimer has followed the path of other contrarians interviewed by Chotiner in recent years: they intellectually self-immolate under the pressure of his polite prodding.”
Link. Brain rot explains their resistance to reading and their belief that they won’t disintegrate under inspection.
“What if when given instructions from people, robots could autonomously write their own code to interact with the world?”
Link. What if.
“AT&T realized it had a problem. In January 2017, the company hired the president-elect’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, paying him $50,000 a month”
Link. In America we institutionalize our corruption.
Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure have been effective at disrupting life.
Link. Ukraine cannot retaliate against Russian infrastructure. An unusual war.
Saudi: “aggressive long-term strategy to keep the world hooked on oil for decades to come”
Link. “Isn’t it terrible that the Biden administration is forcing you to buy an electric car when we could be producing biofuels right here in Iowa?”
“bputil is one of the most hazardous command tools in macOS accessible to the user. Experimenting with it is guaranteed to cause your Mac serious problems.”
Link. I remember when accidentally typing ‘c’ instead of ‘a’ destroyed all data and apps. (Format c:).
“has revealed exactly how little a Chief Executive can know, how foolishly a Chief Executive can act, and how ignorant one very rich man can be.”
Link. All CEOs are good at taking and holding power. Some have no other competencies.
[toread] Evolution of hockey and decline of the slapped: “Now, the technology allows guys to score from 30 feet,”
Link. Carbon fiber sticks. Hockey is the best game, but it’s insanely fast now.
If only I could shoot …
“Lenz had long admired Thomas Stevens, an Englishman who had made a celebrated world tour on his ordinary in the mid-1880s, devouring Stevens’s monthly travel logs published in Outing magazine.”
Link. Dies in the midst of massacres of Armenian people. Incredible times.
Teplizumab immunotherapy to slow onset Type I DM in antibody positive patients.
Link. Screening will uncover many surprises.
Effective Altruism: The New Yorker on MacAskill.
Link. Required reading for strange times.
“Starve them out, and Ukraine will have recovered almost all of its pre-February territory. That’s the point at which negotiations would finally become possible. Many different peace deals would then be available.”
Link. How the war might end. Good point on how small the armies are by historic standards.
Haldeman’s Technocracy – rule by the cognitive elite.
Link. “Joshua Haldeman was a leader of Technocracy Incorporated in Canada from 1936 to 1941 … Haldeman’s daughter Maeve gave birth to … Elon Musk”
Feedle: Blog Search with RSS Feeds.
Link. What is Google going to do with Blogger?
Iran: All the Options Are Bad.
Link. China same.
Wealth is partly imaginary: Noah teaches mark-to-market accounting.
Link. “And crypto wealth is more imaginary than most.”
Cable company: “Challenging publicly funded overbuilds is becoming one of the most important tasks we do as a company,”
Link. Overbuild is a carrier term for competition.
“If you rebooted every single $FAANG server simultaneously right now, all of $FAANG would be down for probably months”
Link. These systems are starting to resemble organisms.
“… there is another possibility: that Lyft as a company is not actually sorry for the trouble they have caused you … go to LinkedIn to see if you know anybody who works at the company.”
Link. We are going to need laws to punish tech companies using flaky algorithms to ban customers without valid appeal.
NYT panel picks 25 unusual travel experiences.
Link. Not my picks but all interesting.
“tau proteins specific to C.T.E. were distinct from those in Alzheimer’s disease and other tau-based neurodegenerative diseases”
Link.
“Rumor has it that the president—a strong supporter of Hungary’s laws restricting marriage and child-rearing to a man and a woman—expected only the ambassador to show up, not his family, and so she was stunned.”
Link. Our ambassador to Hungary brought his husband and their children.
If your kid doesn’t look like you bring legal proof when you fly.
Link. Human trafficking hysteria. My kids look nothing like me so we always had proof.
“Artemis III, in which two astronauts will land near the moon’s south pole, is currently scheduled for 2025, though that date is very likely to slip further into the future.”
Link. Expensive and inefficient — but more certain than relying on a flaky Musk.
China: “they didn’t immediately understand why their favorite streamer would be shut down in the middle of a segment about a tank-shaped cake. So they started poking around, searching and asking questions about tanks, which led them to … learn about
Link.
“If you happen to have a 240V outlet, it gets even fancier — the stove can actually supply power to the rest of the house”
Link. Patents and licensing will be a challenge.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the eccentric resident of CDG airport.
Link. What was more-or-less involuntary became his preferred home.
“Because politics is so calcified, virtually nothing matters, but because elections are so close, virtually everything matters.”
Link. We balance on the knife edge.
What to do when your Mac has a kernel panic
Link. Save this. If you get one kernel panic you’ll get more.
You need disk utility to show at least 37GB free before updating to Ventura
Link. I’d wait for a few months.
Debugging Apple Music and iCloud Match: iCloud Status
Link. I’m seeing a few hundred bugs in my music library.
Ukraine’s railroads: a story. Read this.
Link. Nazi invasion: “Everyone else in my family who stayed in Kyiv was killed: either marched to Babyn Yar or rounded up by their neighbors and shot in the courtyard of their own building.”
Accounts of Torture From Kherson: “Several residents described being hauled off to underground torture chambers”
Link. Russia is a broken place. “Ms. Naumova 57, might seem like an unlikely freedom fighter. For her entire adult life, she has been teaching kindergarten”
“The windows of the Arctic Restaurant have no signs offering access to prostitutes—even in a lawless Yukon outpost in 1899, decorum rules out such truth in advertising—but Friedrich Trump…”
Link. 2019. The Trump and Kardashian families will merge on Reality TV.
“Neither then nor later did most Russian liberals understand that the imperial project itself was the source of Russian autocracy.”
Link. Without an empire what is Russia?
Mitch McConnell – political failure.
Link. Given geography GOP should routinely dominate Senate.
Deep brain stimulation to nucleus accumbens for binge eating disorder.
Link. Interesting idea. Will be five years before we know if it works.
“I’m spending about $250 on food every week,” woman competing in strongman event.
Link. Building and repairing muscle requires crazy amount of protein.
Liz Cheney happy with election outcome.
Link. I suspect Cheney played as large a role as youth turnout. Effect on GOP voters and independents.
“managed to persuade Republican and independent voters to support their candidates, particularly in swing states”
Link. “turnout gap between voters under 25 and those under 30 was rapidly closing.”
Check interpretations in 2 months.
Canada: “at least 11 candidates in the last federal election had been secretly funded by China”
Link. “after the hostage-taking ended, the government has been gradually building up to a more aggressive stance.”
“Larceny of all types is up 107 percent this year in Burlington compared with the five-year average from 2017 to 2021”
Link. “Bikes were a quick easy grab that fulfilled the need to take something for an adrenaline rush” Similar MSP.
“Overall, I was underwhelmed by the price and usability of Apple’s newer iPad keyboards compared to the original Smart Keyboard”
Link. Also unimpressed by current iPad lineup.
Y2K and 2038.
Link. Damn. We are halfway.
“the Quest Pro isn’t very good. It’s a device seemingly launched without plan or purpose, highlighting VR’s persistent drawbacks without making good use of its strengths — and topped off with some irredeemably bad software”
Link. Sold by Accenture?!
“…Musk’s team said he was used to going to court and paying penalties, and was not worried about the risks.”
Link. Our legal system is helpless. Fines are far too small.
“what Trump did was he brought in this big chunk of people that are now part of the party that never voted before 2016 and never contributed to any candidates”
Link. Trump’s army. He rules the GOP as long as they vote. Did they vote in midterms?
Filipowski’s DeSantis scenario seems plausible.
Economist reviews Haberman’s Trump book: “… racial politics is a zero-sum contest among tribes; that allies as well as enemies must be dominated; that everything in life can be treated as a transaction; that rapidly topping one lie or controversy with t
Link.
fediverse.info: guide to finding Mastodon communities of interest.
Link.