Link. Agree hard.
25 years of DPReview: The rise and fall of the compact camera
Link. Nostalgic for me.
Blow: “White women “surged for white nationalism.”
Link. I’m waiting for better election analyses to emerge, but I do think it’s clear that we now have a white tribe alongside all the other tribes. We’ve been going that way for at least 10 years.
Buried in a NYT article on Latino shift to Trump — one important paragraph
Link. “These voters were not necessarily poor: Many said they could afford groceries, but that higher prices left them with far less disposable income. Voters earning $20 an hour complained bitterly about being unable to take their families to the movies or on carefree outings at the mall.”
If you care about the future of American democracy look deeper at employed non-college Americans earning between $20-40 an hour. Ignore what they say. Don’t assume “inflation” is the root cause. Ask “why should they feel increasingly desperate over the past 20 years?
The Great American Rail Trail: “The old people couldn’t figure out how to turn right”
Link. Planners have learned patience. Move when progress is possible, retreat when necessary, bend with the wind. It will not finish in my lifetime.
macOS Spotlight: “check all mdimporter plugins currently installed, use the command mdimport -L”
Link. Helpful reference
Unread RSS reader: “you can define a list of custom shortcuts you want to run for selected articles”
Link. The article has several interesting links. It feels like RSS is rising from the grave – not least because of Bluesky and Mastodon support.
Reminds me of Yahoo Pipes.
Rise in child mortality during pandemic was not infections: cars, guns, suicide
Link. “Gun deaths alone accounted for almost half of the increase”
The mortality from school and sports disruption was substantial.
Tim Snyder: “Musk and Trump are together on an island of oligarchy, and one of them might well outlast the other. But it would be wrong to assume that the survivor will be Trump.”
Link. Musk is a very formidable enemy of democracy. More dangerous than Trump.
In an artificial setting ChatGPT did better than physicians with diagnosis based on case history.
Link. Case histories are not patients — much data cleaning is already done.
I loved the Jack Myers INTERNIST-1 history. QMR was the descendant I tested alongside Iliad in the late 80s, early 90s.
Haiti: “Even though the last U.N. peacekeeping force brought cholera to the country and was embroiled in sexual abuse scandals, the current situation is so desperate that the move would largely be welcomed”
Link. China and Russia won’t support UN involvement.
Pancreatic Cancer diagnosis doubled in young people — but appears to be a coding issue.
Link. The codes used in billing were for general pancreatic cancer, but the increase appears to be due to enhanced imaging and incidental discoveries of endocrine tumors that are thought to often resolve spontaneously. (Not mentioned in article – Steve Jobs died of an endocrine tumor because he refused the early surgery that would have removed it. They don’t always regress.)
Running Linkding, a Pinboard replacement, on a Synology docker instance.
Link. He modified the default Linkding UI
Trump’s agenda soberly reviewed: “The desperate, forced resettlement of 14 million ethnic Germans after World War II teaches some lessons”
Link. Lotterman is my favorite economist and he is invisible, unknown, and writes behind a paywall.
“both high import tariffs and the expulsion of 3 percent or more of our population will impose large dead-weight losses affecting all of us”
Bluesky – an explanatory overview including architectural choices
Link. The cost of running a Bluesky instance is significant — and they don’t have a business model.
“Empty too, was the rest of Google’s behemoth campus. Their numerous buildings are surrounded by beautiful, park-like pathways with no one to enjoy them but the groundskeepers”
Link. Google’s original incorporation was designed to prevent this. But Google died anyway.
“People tell me Milgram’s Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment are deeply flawed, and perhaps they are, but I know the core of them to be true”
Link. I believe this as well. Most people are what the culture wants them to be. They can be good, or nice, or kind, or they can do very bad things.
Why we need to reserve RFK Jr. outrage.
Link. There is worse to come. We will be fighting as we retreat, trying to limit damage in hope of rescue.
GT CEO pleased with new toy: “Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses.”
Link. Global tetrahedron is a flimsy facade for the Trilateral Commission.
History and the university.
Link. There is no business model for funding history research, and genuine history is rarely pleasing to authoritarians.
“Sherman, who was a much more analytical, intellectual man than Grant…” 🆓
Link. Via Jedeed. An 2014 essay on the burning of Atlanta and the residues of confederate myth.
“For the next two days we only leave our cramped nest to boil water for freeze-dried meals and hot drinks”
Link. I know people who know people who do things like this. Climbing around Greenland via kayak transport.
Copyright Infringement Link Insertion Scams
Link. Useful for people who have web sites.
OneDrive issues with Sequoia.
Link. Ouch.
Why RFK Jr will only kill a few children here and there.
Link. Fee MAGA parents will sacrifice their children once the media share the fruits of batshit crazy anti-vaxxers.
Waiting for a Photogenic Child to Die of Measles
Link. “A major outbreak seems inevitable. When it happens, I hope there will be pictures. I hope they will be heart-breaking. I hope the parents will be brave enough to admit that their lives were shattered by their own choice.”
Might as well assign the journalist team now. A good reminder that humans are not actually very rational. And an example of how news is made or unmade.
“all highly virulent Y. pestis strains had their origin in the Tien Shan mountains,’ in modern Kyrgyzstan” 🆓
Link. Book review – sounds excellent!
“historians are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that natural forces in some way circumscribe human agency.”
👆Truth! It’s a longstanding academic failure. Historians deserve this dig.
ADHD in adolescents and young adults: some benefit from a packed schedule.
Link. A hard subject to research. Some of the schedule packing involved school sports which may have unrelated ADHD benefits.
Overall the result will not surprise many with ADHD. If you can’t get anything done then add another activity …
Venom and drug research: Gila monster to GLP-1 in 80s and much more. 🆓
Link. Gift link. Long article on the 50y pivot to complex peptides from venoms developed into meds.
Also a reminder that the next hugely effective med may come to us from work started 50y ago. (Though things are moving much faster now)
AGI recedes again: “If quantization fails, then also sparsification fails, and other efficiency mechanisms too. If this is true, we are close to optimal now.”
Link. Good news: humanity gets a reprieve.
Bad news: we live our reprieve under the heel of Elon Musk.
“Irving and Christiano worked with Dario Amodei (who in 2021 formed Anthropic with his sister Daniela) on using debate in natural language systems”
Link. Lots of context in this Quantas article on debate, judgement, and AI safety.
“Let us consider Oligarchs’ Island on the basis of Gilligan’s Island.”
Link. Musk is definitely Gillian.
Mass disability measured: in 2016 40% of OECD workers could not manage basic technology tasks
Link. “maybe better software won’t help. After all, 40% of users couldn’t do relatively simple software tasks. Maybe the problem is human cognitive limits.”
Migration assistant: claiming Time Machine backups
Link. The claiming bit might be new. For me TM is a secondary backup so I have wiped and started over.
Navy’s speed boat crews developing CTE: “all the guys would have blood in their urine”
Link. The hematuria comment got my attention.
It would be good to know why it took 30y to figure out the training was unwise. (Hint: football remains popular)
“The [elliptic] curve’s equation, when written as y^2 = x^3 + Ax + B, has values of A and B that are each over 60 digits long.”
Link. Most interesting description of elliptic curves I have read.
% CPU in Activity Monitor: “what’s shown as 100% could be anything between 27-100%”
Link. Similar to free storage which now is only a probabilistic approximation.
What the GOP can do given the dependence of red states on federal money and the dependence of American food on immigrant labor.
Link. They can do what Musk wants.
Why we torture LLMs with arithmetic.
Link. AGI. Because logic/reasoning.
I’m following this blog now. Nice summary of the state of play.
Chinese students do a polite and patriotic version of a “Critical Mass” bike lark and the party ends the ride
Link. Uncontrolled student group activities are very worrisome in China.
“Cuneiform evolved from proto-cuneiform, a precursor script composed of simple symbolic pictographs that gradually incorporated syllabic elements.”
Link. New research shows precursors to proton-cuneiform. Reading seems to require an angular gurus, but the AG could not possible have developed in 8000. Reading leveraged things that evolved for another purpose.
“I wonder how much it stings to be reminded that all the money in the world cannot buy dignity.”
Link. Oligarchs bend the knee.
“There may not be enough years available to me to ever get over watching huge numbers of my fellow citizens voting so enthusiastically for a vengeful, ignorant, authoritarian asshole”
Link. After the popularity of the Bush/Chemey torture program in 2001-2003 I had no illusions about our collective nature.
Chaos times: American oligarchy
Link. 5 grim consolations.
Russia is at war with NATO: “plot had been part of a test run with the ultimate goal of putting explosive devices on planes bound for the United States and Canada”
Link. Canada too!
“plot had been part of a test run with the ultimate goal of putting explosive devices on planes bound for the United States and Canada”
“GRU, increasingly reliant on criminal proxies, often hired over the internet, to carry out acts of sabotage … “think the Russian intelligence services have gone a bit feral”
“Music is no longer in Apple’s DNA. They just don’t care.”
Link. First Apple came for the photo geek. But hardly anyone looks at pictures, so fine.
Then Apple came for the music listener. But hardly anyone listens to music, so fine.
I’m surprised Final Cut Pro is still a thing.
Alexa failed too: “… we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer …”
Link. For me Siri is more useful.
“Reuters report from last week that discovered various researchers connected to the Chinese military had availed themselves of Meta’s Llama 2 AI model”
Link. The future is hard to predict, except when it’s inevitable.
Mudsills before Musk and Thiel
Link. “The “Mudsills” were dull drudges whose work produced the food and products that made society function. On them rested the superior class of people, who took the capital the mudsills produced and used it to move the economy, and even civilization itself, forward. The world could not survive without the inferior mudsills, but the superior class had the right—and even the duty—to rule over them.”
Heather Cox Richardson
The story of a Neanderthal remains in an Italian cave.
Link. Neat example of the struggle between preservation and discovery. Researchers desperately want to try for DNA.