Link. No comment
Apollo navigation: “one module of core rope memory took three months for someone to weave”
Link. Core memory was also code.
“all the software programs in the AGC were actually encoded in the hardware using the core rope memory …
… the AGC throw error codes and reboot several times during the decent…”
Anthropic CEO imagines a world after modestly superhuman AI.
Link. Happily there is no war between nations. Regardless, it’s a useful guide to what trillions of dollars thinks.
“If entropix is indeed allowing the LLM to not simply replicate reasoning steps, then maybe this really is the key to deeper reasoning”
Link. I just wrote about feeling reassured by a paper showing absence of reasoning. I hope entropix doesn’t change that.
“current LLMs cannot perform genuine logical reasoning; they replicate reasoning steps from their training data”
Link. “Adding a single clause that seems relevant to the question causes significant performance drops (up to 65%) across all state-of-the-art models”
Reassuring! Best news in months.
“one out of every four families in South Korea has a pet” (usually a dog)
Link. “In January, lawmakers passed a law that banned the country’s centuries-old practice of breeding and butchering dogs for human consumption.”
In 2003 US families adopting Korean children were told to never mention they had a dog at home.
In 2024 Seoul baby carriages almost always held small dogs. The rate of social change in SK is astounding.
iOS 18 motion sickness fix
Link. “Vehicle Motion Cues is a new accessibility feature in iOS and iPadOS 18. You can activate it by opening Settings ⇾ Accessibility ⇾ Motion, or with a Control Center toggle.”
MicroRNA Nobel. 🆓
Link. “.. a very important part of the gene expression machinery in every creature with left/right symmetry in their bodies”
“Since January, there have been 77 incidents in which Taiwanese have gone missing in mainland China”
Link. Provincial gov appears to be running kidnap and ransom operations against Foxconn to make up for lost property revenue streams.
“microscopy technique that can simultaneously sequence an individual cell’s DNA and pinpoint the location of its proteins with high resolution”
Link. Used in progeria research.
Calvin’s Dad was an early LLM.
Link. “Dear, if you don’t know the answer, just tell him.”
Russia continues to send its men to die in Ukraine for the greater glory of Putin
Link. 600,000 or so dead Russian soldiers, but Ukraine’s losses are a bigger fraction of available bodies.
iPhone 13 Pro to iPhone 16 Pro: a photo-centric review.
Link. I’ll give my 13 at least another year. I like the new camera but not enough to go through upgrade pain.
Coronavirus vaccine and shortlived plasma cell mediated resistance: “Could the limited durability of neutralizing antibody responses be due to the widely spaced structural nature of the spike protein itself …”
Link. Coronaviruses are pretty damned sneaky. We may be stuck with a yearly vaccine best timed for individual risks.
Canada’s TD bank was money laundering for gangs — and got a $3 billion fine and other penalties.
Link. Now we are starting to talk meaningful fines. I’d like to know why we can do this class of fines for banks but not, say, Google.
“It drove me a bit nuts when my own research showed that people didn’t want politics in their feeds.”
Link. Setting aside the “undecideds”, since the late 90s most people know how they are voting years before the election.
“Six children, ages 11-14, were arrested on Tuesday after three armed robberies and two crashes on Interstate 94”
Link. “Police noted the 12-year-old boy had “multiple prior contacts” with the Minneapolis Police Department”
He is caught and released every few weeks. Sooner or later he will get shot.
Supposedly MN’s legal system is stymied.
The 2024 Chemistry Nobel explained: we skipped all the physics.
Link. I think Google’s first Nobel.
“Whichever type of disk image you want to create or maintain, DropDMG should be your first choice”
Link. 22y. Oakley is disgusted by Apple documentation.
Cybercrime center: “Iceland is an attractive place for proxy services largely because of its robust privacy laws”
Link. Why you can’t have good things.
“He seems confused about modern technology, suggesting that “most people don’t have any idea what the hell a phone app is”
Link. In this case the senile orange weirdo is more correct than the elite NYT journalists.
NYT finally decides to point out Trump is kind of senile. (Via DF 🆓)
Link. “the conspicuous absence of Maggie Haberman from that shared byline”
Via DF so free excerpt. What game is the NYT playing with Haberman?
GOP attacks on trans athletes plays well with mothers.
Link. “Democratic strategists concede that the transgender attacks are taking a toll in some races”
“13 percent of those being investigated by MI5 for involvement in terrorism are below the age of 18.”
Link. Watch this space. The MI 5 antiterrorism lead is quietly saying much of the current threat is coming from persons with mental health issues unconnected to ideology.
US tells Russia to cancel their dirty bomb false flag operation. “Don’t do it,” he said to Shoigu. “I understand,” Shoigu replied.”
Link. Woodward on all the American wars. Putin portrayed as both evil and stupid.
“Safari is the only major browser that consistently ships bugs this nasty, and especially the only one that leaves them there for years.”
Link. On iOS lack of competition is bad for customers.
“Verizon, AT&T, and the other companies whose networks were breached were — and remain — required by law to provide the back doors that the Chinese hackers exploited.”
Link. China knows everything.
Longish NYT essay on Netflix scale and mass media.
Link. Useful context for the Trumpification of tech.
Who watches what is a mystery to traditional media critics:
“we all spent years basically having no idea what was going on in there and taking guidance from friends, social media, newspapers, magazines and websites — all similarly blinded.”
Musk “… looks like Grima Wormtongue pledging fealty to a liege-lord he plans to betray.”
Link. Trump’s poodle is weird.
“Playing sound to Trichoderma harzianum, a green microscopic fungus … led to growth rates seven times as fast …”
Link. Gene studies to define mechanism pending. Bacteria also respond to sound. Environmental signals.
Talking to plants suddenly less woo.
Lessons from Paris Olympics: Russian attacks combine technical and propaganda components.
Link. They will try to hack US election, fail, but use disinfo to claim they succeeded. Then Trump etc.
Yazidi Woman held 10y by ISIS: “… the Israeli authorities learned of her existence, confirmed it with Americans and planned the rescue operation…”
Link. “She was returned to her family in Iraq”
“Many of the enslaved Yazidis were sold in slave markets in Syrian cities…”
Hal shrugged: “YouTube replied and said, We’re sorry we did this, and we’ve reinstated your channel …. Except they’ve removed six of my videos as violating their Terms and Policies.”
Link. This is why Facebook Business site notification scams claiming Page deletion work so well. It’s absolutely plausible.
Parasitic roundworm TGF-beta mimic med accelerates scar-free healing in a mouse model.
Link. Something is likely to come of this.
2020: Autism spectrum heterogeneity: fact or artifact?
Link. One of my favorite autism papers of the past 20years. The low value historic diagnostic criteria make researching “autism” almost a waste of time.
Foreign workers in Japan – beyond 3-5y.
Link. Regional small businesses (small town?) economies have no alternatives. Mostly Vietnam and Philippines. For now.
Fly brain mapped and virtualized.
Link. “One circuit, researchers found, stops the flies by blocking the walking commands, and a second stops a fly by stiffening its leg joints”
About 6500 types of brain cell. We have only identified 3300 or so in humans.
(In the SF story this is the basis for next gen killer drones)
Pinning iCloud Drive in Sequoia: “you have to unpin the folder, which in turn unpins every file (and folder) within that folder, leaving you to manually pin the files you do want to pin, in batches of no more than ten at a time”
Link. Apple’s shame capacity is limited.
Cassava Alzheimer’s med: “numbers appear to have been cooked at every level. It appears that an honest, competent look at the data would have shown that the drug did not work at all.”
Link. Just buy an index fund.
“Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggested that Hezbollah had to chart its own way forward”
Link. Iran fears a war with Israel would end the ruling party — and Russia can’t help.
“The gossamer crust was pushed skyward by the buoyant mantle sea … Everest gained up to 165 extra feet in the blink of a geologic eye”
Link. Poetic journalism, cool science.
“Lebanese soldiers — who are loyal to the Lebanese government and not allied with Hezbollah — withdrew from a number of military posts in the country’s south to avoid confrontations…”
Link. Hezbollah is not loved everywhere in Lebanon.
“supporters of Hezbollah appeared to be lashing out at Syrian refugees, whom they suspect of providing targeting information to Israel”
Link. A view from Lebanon. Hezbollah was not loved by all.
Plant intelligence without the woo.
Link. They are solar powered computers.
Trump’s Hitlerian Month.
Link. The venerable net rule is dust now. Trump talks like Hitler. That is simply true.
Mondello: “I recently contributed two new quirks to the Password Manager Resources open source project”
Link. Mondello is a net hero. Interesting to see how things work.
Quebec government effectively fines McGill (and Concordia) universities for continuing to use English.
Link. I was born there long ago, lived through FLQ era, did MD at McGill. I did not expect McGill to thrive.
Somehow the NYT fails to mention immigration and (extremely low) birth rates. This is a political cheap shot but the real fear is immigrant families may speak English at home and the kids go to McGill.
“the Cure for Sickle Cell story is not as clearcut as one might have thought”
Link. Patients are not lining up for bone marrow transplants.
OpenFreeMap: “New free map tile hosting service from Zsolt Ero”
Link. Dedicated people.
NIST says no more “name of first pet”
Link. Maybe implemented around the time AIs monitors have to vouch for human users.