Link. I know of this defect and I hate it. My passcode is a PITA to enter and Apple makes me use it to often.
Monthly Archives: February 2023
PayPal kind of sucks.
Link. Venmo much better for personal use.
“Sources tell me Google has successfully inserted provocateur agents inside Apples App Review team”
Link. Diabolical.
“America is spending all the money, and things still aren’t getting built, because of the country’s broken system of permitting, land use, and development.”
Link. Fixing problems like this take a lot of executive leadership and presidential pressure.
Managing sync issues in Apple Notes app – what I do
Link. “As far as I can tell there’s no sync failure resolution built into Apple Notes”
“THE U.S. DEPARTMENT of Energy (DOE) in a classified intelligence report concluded that Covid-19 most likely originated with a leak from a laboratory, although the agency said that it makes the conclusion with “low confidence,”
Link. They mean Wuhan lab specifically. I’m agnostic but I think Xi believes it was a lab leak.
The early days of radio were a familiar tech cycle.
Link. Not overhyped though. That’s the wrong spin. See also: CD-ROM The New Papyrus. That was right too — except then came the WWW.
The ultimate tech cycle disruptor, pre-AI, was pigment on stone. That set fire to the world.
Noah Simpson on Lower Haight’s AI Tech Culture and it’s antecedents.
Link. Some of the best parts of his essay are descriptions of older tech cultures. I was there a few months ago and this explains some puzzles. The social scene reminds me of Caltech student houses in 70s.
Also, Noah is ancient for this crowd.
#AI #beAfraid
Britain’s Coffee Revolution: “there was a long wooden bar, behind which sat a huge gleaming Gaggia coffee machine. In the public space, the owners squeezed in as many plastic or wooden tables as they could”
Link. Delightful London history.
American torture update: use of forced anal penetration to break 9/11 prisoners.
Link. Rape by definition. The “feeding” story was a cover. CIA videos were destroyed to hide evidence. Bush/Cheney of course, but torture was and is popular with the American public.
Iran: “The protests have largely fizzled amid a violent crackdown by the authorities that has included mass arrests, death sentences and the executions of four young protesters.”
Link. The unsurprising update is buried in a NYT article on Iranian women showing their hair. Iran remains firmly under control of the theocracy.
“most of of these new ChatGPT users were tying to use our geocoding API for an entirely different purpose. It seems ChatGPT is wrongly recommending us for “reverse phone number lookup” – ie the ability to determine the location of a mobile phone sol
Link. Gentle lawyers start your engines.
China also has a health insurance crisis.
Link. Cities (!) rather than states or provinces manage urban healthcare resources and they are getting desperate. Most Chinese have lousy healthcare.
“many former prisoners have since died in near-suicidal attacks meant to wear down Ukrainian defenses”
Link. Putin saving money on prison costs.
“Mark Brnovich, a Republican who served as Arizona’s attorney general until January, buried the findings of a 10,000-hour review by his office that found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election”
Link. Just another traitor.
US intelligence disclosures of Russian war plans: find confirmation others can test.
Link. If there’s no plausible source Intel can point to vulnerable people or reveal Russian security weaknesses.
Why automatic iOS updates take a while: “any potential teething issues are limited to early adopters”
Link. I don’t auto-update, I wait until Apple turns the update notification on. Which takes days to weeks post iOS release depending on Apple risk assessment. Don’t go early.
The Singularity Is Far – Aaronson 2008.
Link. Sharing because today, 2/23/2023, Aaronson says he was wrong: “And I apologize for anything I said before the deep learning revolution that was, on balance, overly dismissive of the scenario”
Aaronson’s take on ChatGPT is not reassuring.
Link. “Now there’s a second type of conversing entity. An alien has awoken … Supposing that a language model ever becomes smart enough to be genuinely terrifying, one imagines it must surely also become smart enough to prove deep theorems that we can’t.”
He wants to watch ChatGPT grow into its full self so we have someone non-human to teach us. He retracts his 2008 claim that the Singularity was far away.
#beafraid #chatGPT #AI #singularity
“doomer culture is debated in the pages of the New York Times and the BBC. It even has its own music.”
Link. Yeah, this seems to be a thing. Fueled by crazy takes on COVID — that it’s somehow airborne HIV with a dash of Ebola.
“Biden said it’s time to decide what kind of world we want to build. Looking at the coalition that supports Ukraine, he said: “We need to take the strength and capacity of this coalition and apply it to lifting up—lifting up the lives of people ev
Link. Nobody ever asked when Biden would “become Presidential”. Not even idiots like Carlson. He leads.
‘Free college’ in Minnesota.
Link. Only two years so not a 4y degree. But, yes.
Minnesota’s 60-below record Tower set in 1996.
Link. Might have been during a ski trip we were doing, but that was only -40F. Yakutsk Russia gets colder; I think some cars there run engines for days or weeks at a time.
Russia’s second offensive failed before it began.
Link. “Russia’s army is fragmented after a year of war and increasingly resembles a militia of disparate forces”. Meanwhile, Putin turns to China.
Wildebeest: Fediverse on Cloudflare
Link. “you can quickly deploy your Mastodon-compatible server on top of Cloudflare and connect it to the Fediverse in minutes, and you don’t need to worry about maintaining or protecting it from abuse or attacks”
I’m late to the party, didn’t realize this launched so long ago.
Wagner fighters captured in Ukraine.
Link. “One of the men said he watched a friend taken off to be shot — or “zeroed”— by a Wagner enforcement team for protesting deployments that sometimes led to hundreds of fighters a day being killed in and around Bakhmut…
… Ilya said he would advise other convicts not sign up. For one thing, he said he has never been paid.”
“Google has four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.”
Link. Lots of large PTCs and Gov orgs are like this. Process paralysis.
“the number of people 60 and older registering for Ironman’s 140.6-mile and 70.3-mile triathlons has quintupled from around 2,500 in 2012 to nearly 13,000 last year.”
Link. Ten years ago 50s was old at CrossFit. Now it’s routine.
Google engineer Blake Lemoine – LaMDA AI “sentient”. June 2002.
Link. He was fired. His cognitive science background likely informed his definition of sentient. Many laughed at him. I did not laugh then, I do not laugh now. #beafraid #AI #ChatGPT
“After App Tracking Transparency (ATT), every major social app is now charging for features and Apple gets a cut on iOS.”
Link. Happy accident.
“Apple’s ads and store and illusion of safety make it more likely for people to get themselves into trouble vs. somehow discovering and trusting an unknown authenticator app on a random Web site.”
Link. We need competition.
Solving Common Problems With Kubernetes
Link. I did not know: “A Kubernetes cluster is an abstraction. It’s a big abstract virtual computer, with its own virtual IP stack, networks, disk, RAM and CPU. It lets you deploy containers as if you were deploying them on one machine that didn’t run anything else.”
The Limits of Computational Photography.
Link. We need an iPhone setting to disable it.
“TSMC said the U.S. construction could be at least four times the cost in Taiwan, driven by labor expenses, permits, regulatory compliance and inflation.”
Link. Even with an optimal regulatory framework this would be a heavy lift.
Also, US workers have lives: “In Taiwan, engineers work long hours and weekend shifts, joking that they “sell liver” to work for the chip manufacturer”
China’s billionaire techies: “These people are concerned that the authorities can make anybody disappear without legal processes, and that it can happen to anyone anytime and anywhere.”
Link. They thought they were safe. They lack imagination.
“Carter deregulated oil, trucking, railroads, airlines, and beer.”
Link. Media coverage was arguably worse in the 70s and 80s than it is now. Washington reporters disliked Carter.
Biden: “occupies the true middle ground in American politics, well to the left of most elected Republicans on economics and somewhat to the right of most elected Democrats on social issues”
Link. Maybe, but he’s more liberal than Obama. The populism and non-college focus is his superpower.
Biden’s Kyiv Visit Lifts Ukrainian spirits.
Link. Nicely done.
Mpox (Monkeypox): “Multiple studies estimated that from 40 percent to 50 percent of infected individuals were living with H.I.V.”
Link. Anyone with mpox needs HIV test.
What’s Homelessness Like: “It was pretty much, one, very boring and, two, very boring,”
Link. WaPo project. Insightful.
Wagner Group out of favor with Putin, feuding with military.
Link. Prigozhin is worried. That’s good.
“this technique may not only explain these weird bacterial protein-grabbing systems, but could also be used to design our own stress-resistant proteinaceous fasteners.”
Link. Yeah, we do nanotech now.
Jimmy Carter 2004: “Since I was a child, woodworking has played an important role in my life. It has given me a sense of belonging and a connection to a wide-ranging and dedicated fellowship.”
Link. Unsurprisingly he was really really good at woodworking. This is only part of the article. Ask them to provide the rest — FineWoodworking@omeda.com
Dating sites for conservatives: “you can see the profiles, and one of the things that you note when you look for them is that they are overwhelmingly men that were on these websites and there weren’t very many women.”
Link. And many of the women profiles were clearly fake. This is quite sad, like country music wish fulfillment songs. Women don’t marry down.
Fox is a smart parasite on the weak minded.
Link. “Inside Fox, the prime-time stars and senior executives raged against the network’s reporters not because they doubted that Biden had won, but because the truth was too disturbing to the audience that had made them rich.”
“An American AWACS began patrolling the skies west of Ukraine last night; Kyiv was locked down this morning. Motorcades crisscrossed the city and rumors began to spread.”
Link. Dark Brandon strikes.
“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.