Link. Derek Lowe, scientist and journalist, writes his Harris endorsement. This one line stood out for me because I think we all need to get real about what we are working with and will always be working with. People are often pretty bad.

Link. In a Scandinavian sample 1/6 had active infections at time of death and that probably understates mortality. The 541AD Justinian plague killed about 40 million and contributed to collapse of Western Europe.

Link. If Bezos will do this he’ll do anything to WaPo needed to preserve his power. Much as Musk has with X. WaPo’s only hope is a new owner.

Link. As we learn more we discover that “continent” is debatable. Not surprising.

“There are basically only two major continents,” Dr. Rime said. “Antarctica and everything else”

Link. My earlier prediction that in a Musk-Vance regime Elon’s sperm would be sold in pharmacies was not well received.

Musk’s eugenics concerns do not get taken seriously. Neither do his AI concerns.

Link. “Polarization raises the stakes of politics, giving cover to any politician inclined to flout democratic norms, because almost nothing could persuade members of their party to vote for the other side”

Parliamentary systems may be less fragile.

Link. Meanwhile Blogger never changes and still works about as well as it ever did.

Link. Not bad AI performance, but not good enough. This time the humans hold, and medical imaging AI was expected to beat the wetware.

Link. Cancel today. If Bezos sells the paper you can rejoin. You are canceling the automatic renewal. Remember the hidden cancel button fakeout WaPo uses.

Link. I agree.

“an issue to which higher-education white-collar workers shamefully have turned blind eyes and deaf ears, and to which ivory-tower think tanks have tried to defuse”

Link. Example: https://bit.ly/4ffO6Mk

Link. “… has been teased by an OpenAI executive as potentially up to 100 times more powerful than GPT-4”

Next is to combine with o1.

Link. Sounds like worthy of consideration.

Link. When you cancel WaPo don’t be fooled by their hiding the second button. Scroll down. If you don’t see a cancellation email they fooled you

It cancels renewal. In case Bezos exits.

Link. Personal issues.

Link. “… In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.”

She quit her job and became a hero.

Link. Lots of times data doesn’t support a researcher’s expectations. The good ones publish. The worst one’s change the data. This isn’t as bad as changing the data, but it’s bad.

Link. Apple going Boeing.

Link. Going Boeing.

Link. HEIC looks like a dead end too. Maybe we should just do DNG RAW.

Link. Best explanation of holographic cosmologies I have read.

Internals modeled by “conformal field theory”, a variation of QFT.

Link. In a few months we should learn if any work.

Link. True that independents don’t read.

Link. More subtle than I imagined.

Link. “There are no canonical “best” XML tags that Claude has been trained with in particular, although we recommend that your tag names make sense with the information they surround.”

Should work with any LLM.

Link. Pharmacy Benefit Managers owned by CVS discriminate against local small pharmacies.

Link. Article explains how it can be funded — most often by city residents though usually the cost is hidden.

Link. Is Apple a terrible place to work now?

Link. Despair restored?

Link. Lots of illuminating commentary in this Tsai roundup.

Link. Feedbin is my fave subscription.

Link. Science fraud is supported by the publishers of Nature.

“red flags for fraud … tortured phrases … irrelevant content, irrelevant citations, meaningless gibberish, a nonsensical figure, and material recycled from other publications.”

Hard to miss. Unless you want to not see.

Link. And provides support to try to retain them. 3000 so far.

Link. Musk in particular. These are very bad people. Don’t use X.

Link. And you thought Tesla was overpriced.

Link. Space and Time as emergent rather than fundamental properties of reality. 8 essays and video. The launch page is flashy but the articles are sensible HTML. So much to love here.

Link. “Knowing he loved Oreo cookies, she showed up for her job interview with a tray of them individually wrapped, each tied with a bow.”

In her obit she mostly kept her long silence.

Link. I’ll probably restart a subscription to try this.

Link. He is fearless but even he doesn’t dare look at what happens when one combines Spaces with dual monitors with the newer windows management options. It’s a total mess.

My guess is Apple doesn’t want us to have multiple monitors but rather to wear Vision Pro headsets with vast virtual spaces.

Link. Gilliam’s movie had 12 monkeys so no worries.

There is going to be a lot of attention on this until it’s understood. The NYT headline is atypically cautious.

Link. The Econ Nobel is more like the literature Nobel than like the Physics Nobel. Noah would like ACJ’s theories to be true, but they are not falsifiable.

Link. Yeah, war crime.

Link. “read-write disk images in sparse file format will help increase free disk space, their major benefit is in reducing ‘wear’”

Link. “But does democracy really have a chance? November 2024 is the test. If Americans, knowing all they know now, having lived through a Trump presidency, still reelect Donald Trump — then it’s clear our democracy is not up to the much greater challenge of even collective climate geoengineering — much less the AI transition.”

Link. No comment

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…”

Link. Happily there is no war between nations. Regardless, it’s a useful guide to what trillions of dollars thinks.

Link. I just wrote about feeling reassured by a paper showing absence of reasoning. I hope entropix doesn’t change that.

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.

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.