Link. I had no idea who he was. Useful orientation.
Monthly Archives: December 2022
“to give the malware a fighting chance of success, I reduced security, disabled SIP, and disabled the security assessment policy subsystem”
Link. It’s hard to infect a fully updated Mac.
“the list of accomplishments for this Congress rivaled that of the 1960s’ Great Society and the 1930s’ New Deal.”
Link. Often with limited but critical GOP support.
Mastodon custom viewer: “is there a way to transform foreign status URLs into instance-relative status URLs?”
Link. Multiple instances has consequences.
Laura Jedeed 2022: “Started in the actual psych ward and ended with a New Republic cover story”
Link. Her fans wish she’d dial it back a bit.
Fixing SMB File Sharing in Ventura: “turn off File Sharing, reboot my computer, and then turn on File Sharing again”
Link. Ventura is a bug-fest. I’ll consider upgrade next spring.
Shortcut for Adding Settings > Passwords to Home Screen or Dock.
Link. Ricky Mondello is a senior Apple engineer in the passwords/passphrase project.
As good polling slowly dies crap polling fed a fake red wave narrative.
Link. Nobody answers the phone but journalists desperately need something to write about.
In MN Walz was suddenly “at risk”. We sent him money. He won by a big margin. We could have sent it elsewhere.
“the Clovis point is unique to North America. It appeared widely across the continent beginning about 13,400 years ago, near the end of the LGM.”
Link. Review of science of human arrival in Americas. Probably multiple arrivals but end of large mammals 11kya seems a marker.
Working around macOS networking failures with Transmit.
Link. Apple has no pride.
macOS Ventura is disappointingly buggy.
Link. Mojave was ok.
O. J. Simpson: “On December 14, 2021, Simpson was released from parole early for good behavior”
Link. His murders could not be considered.
“Because there are more Covid infections than flu infections each year, more Americans are likely to die from Covid even if the death rate is similar.”
Link. Set aside the complete mess of “long COVID”. Then for the immune COVID risk is comparable to flu risk, but there is a lot more COVID out there.
(I wear mask when boarding/leaving airplane seat.)
3.5 million missing workers: “a large number of the missing workers, roughly two million, have simply retired.”
Link. Pando accelerated expected changes. In demographics and other areas. Good news for under 50.
“Melania Trump stopped the firing out of concern for the stories Harleth could tell about the Trump family, but he was let go just before Biden’s inauguration”
Link. Every day we need to thank the space angels for Biden.
“The company has skipped payments to KPMG, an accounting and consulting firm that had been working on matters related to compliance with the Federal Trade Commission”
Link. Musk. “often interrupts meetings seemingly at random, talking for long stretches”
Biden: “How did he become the most transformative, consequential foreign policy president in at least three decades?”
Link. I was happy with not-Trump. I did not expect him to be so good at the job.
Pixelfed: Open source platform for photo and video sharing, part of the ActivityPub Fediverse.
Link. Instagram appears to be afraid of them.
Webb Telescope – early science. (NYT, free link)
Link. Double the conservative resolution expectations.
Metaverse is ahead of demand (or lost in a hopeless direction.)
Link. Sad to say I didn’t think of the NFT angle. Porn is obvious market but sounds like child predators could also be early adopters.
Tesla: “I’ve heard rumors Bill Gates has made a lot of money these days shorting the company’s stock.”
Link. That would be funny.
Semaglutide for teens: “teens who took the drug lost an average 14.7% of their initial body weight over a year’s time, while those on placebo gained 2.7% on average.”
Link. Very expensive now but competition is coming. We now have weight loss medications; when the price falls they will be very popular.
December 28: the Lakota massacre at Wounded Knee.
Link. A short and brutal retelling.
“Lashansky said she is believed to be one of the oldest people in the world living with Type 1 diabetes”
Link. I wonder if she had some residual function as well as extraordinary discipline. She predates modern therapies. Her instincts were better than the early medical advice she received.
The Great Southwest Meltdown Of 2022: an industry expert review.
Link. Lousy IT, high risk routing, terrible employer. But the root cause is: “federal government has given airlines a liability shield”
bird.makeup – put tweets into your mastodon timeline.
Link. Most use it for announcements or broadcast tweets. I use feedbin for this.
Michael Tsai summarizes Ventura bugs he’s seen.
Link. Wait on it.
Pavel Antov, Russian Lawmaker Who Slammed Putin’s War, Dies in Window Fall
Link. “He later edited his post, calling the initial version a “misunderstanding” and “technical error” and stressing that he had “always supported the Russian president.”
“for the first time in Nicaragua’s history, the small nation of 6.5 million is a major contributor to the mass of people trekking to the U.S”
Link. Ortega usual idiot authoritarian. “10 percent of Nicaragua’s population leaving in the past four years”
“Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”
Link. Santos is the GOP rep Long Island deserves.
Tesla and Bitcoin have things in common.
Link. Prices disconnected from reality.
China is suffering from COVID.
Link. “Officially, seven people have died from the virus since pandemic rules were relaxed on Dec. 7 … crush of hearses outside a crematory in Beijing to the overflow of yellow body bags at some funeral homes.”
Boston University explains the ethics of leaving Musk’s Twitter.
Link. I’ve been disappointed but not surprised by the rationalizations for staying. Especially by those who have the tech confidence to go elsewhere.
“Carlson’s rant carried a more hateful edge than usual, a kind of shrill fury.”
Link. Carlson senses power slipping away. Are the Murdochs ghosting him?
COVID China: “absence of direction at a moment of crisis has made the public question the legitimacy and the credibility of the Chinese Communist Party”
Link. We expected COVID would beat China. We did not expect the Party to go AWOL. WTF is up with Xi? These are weird days in China.
Bicycle Thru Axles: “If the quick release is tightened properly …, these locknuts can support any normal load …. except for the loading from a front disc brake.”
Link. Fat (winter trail) bikes are possible because of front disc brakes and thru axles. We couldn’t do them in the 90s.
ActivityPub W3C recommendation Jan 23 2018
Link. Relatively readable. Been a long time since W3C made waves.
Automatic CEO Matt Mullenweg: “Tumblr first has to deal with the waves of new users coming in right now from Twitter but that support for “interop and activitypub” were due to come “ASAP.”
Link. If they can really do interoperability with Mastodon I’d be interested. No date.
macOS plea: “give us back our logs”
Link. The logging data flow is excessive. I wonder how iOS does.
Gmail event integration enables google calendar spam.
Link. Happy accident or exploit? In gCal settings turn off automatic event creation. (More AI always means more spam.)
“Few would guess that only 22% of St. Paul school revenue comes from the property taxes that have just risen.”
Link. I did not know that. This article needs to be widely read especially in high school.
“hundreds of thousands of internet censors … haven’t gotten guidance on what to allow and what to delete”
Link. China’s COVID chaos. First China has to invent a narrative that makes Xi seem less stupid.
Fish sort-of sleep.
Link. It’s a form of required rest but very different from terrestrial sleep.
“when a glass frog falls asleep, almost all of its red blood cells retreat into its liver. They hide in the organ and allow the frog to achieve near invisibility while it rests.”
Link. Our blood would clot if we stored it somewhere.
Trump case shows GOP has destroyed much of US tax system. “increasingly unable to crack down on wealthy taxpayers who push the legal limits to lower their tax bills”
Link. 7 trillion dollars. It’s easy to audit minions, very hard to audit the powerful. Another way GOP is ending America.
“Mr. Mohler was part of a precariously narrow but consequential slice of the electorate that went against its own voting history”
Link. White men who voted for democracy rather than the GOP candidate.
A taxonomist explores archives of the NYT.
Link. I worked in a distant medical relative of this. I get their work. A library science specialty. Interesting perspective pre-AI.
“1973 where a group called the Ethical Culture Society set up a meet and greet with Frankenstein’s monster for kids, as an alternative to sitting on Santa Claus’s lap.”
“When Heilongjiang Province reported five Covid cases in early December, one online commenter remarked that he knew all of those cases personally”
Link. Testing how credulous the people are. “In Yulin, the authorities ordered pharmacies to ration ibuprofen”
Tesla “PE ratio of 38, which is ridiculously high for a profitable automaker, but ridiculously low for an object of religious veneration”
Link. Share price will fall another 50%.
Migrating a Mastodon Account
Link. Most users won’t be able to do this and even geeks lost a lot in migration.