Link. Anthropic’s Claude does a superb job.
Carbon Copy Cloner 6.1.7 – backup of cloud files enables backup of Apple’s sync-centric documents folder.
Link. Bundle documents don’t work because Apple hasn’t adopted the FileProvider interface they make everyone else use. I think this means it won’t work for Photos Libraries; you still need to download all images.
xt.local spam: Where it comes from, how to get rid of it
Link. “I worry that, one way or another, Salesforce is paying Google to bypass Google’s email filters”.
Current limitations on macOS virtual machines running on Apple silicon
Link. Only two OS per machine.
Huawei Mate 60 Pro – Export controls and Chinese chips.
Link. A good overview. He thinks controls help.
“the more eye-popping the chart, the more inclined you should be to check it out before believing the story it tells”
Link. Superb discussion. Great reference.
Local-First Development: “Like the shift to componentized JavaScript UI over the last decade, I believe local-first will be the next large paradigm shift for rich client apps and work its way through the application world over the next decade”
Link. How is this different from Apple’s cloud apps?
“Apple will release Sonoma as an update, rather than using the full installer for an upgrade. Don’t get caught and unintentionally become an early adopter.”
Link. Hoakley likes Sonoma and feels recent betas were solid. I’m unlikely to upgrade before 2024.
“If you sign a “5 year truce” with Russia, they will attack you in 3 years, tops”
Link. Historically pretty common everywhere but Russia more than most.
A viable alternative to 1Password: Strongbox for macOS and iOS.
Link. I trust this reviewer. I expect mjtsai will have comments. You can store locally or in iCloud.
Kagi searches the “small web” — insofar as it still exists.
Link. “small web” typically refers to the non-commercial part of the web, crafted by individuals to express themselves or share knowledge without seeking any financial gain”
Michael Tsai seems to approve. It’s $5/m but you can do a limited number of searches for free. It does seem to index my old school ad-free blogs.
Remember the Al Qaeda fortress? “ troops who finally reached the supposed “fortress” found only shallow, scattered natural caves that had housed perhaps 200 fighters”
Link. I remember the fortress sketches. Sounds like it was conflated with a Zhawar base built with CIA help during earlier Soviet occupation. NYT messed up.
“Members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices won him over to the argument that the vaccine be recommended for all Americans above 6 months of age”
Link. CDC recommendation determine if insurance pays for 64yo me.
This is a great discussion. ID specialists are not terribly worried but lean to the vaccine.
Isaacson on Musk Ukraine: “I mistakenly thought the policy to not allow Starlink to be used for an attack on Crimea had been first decided on the night of the Ukrainian attempted sneak attack”
Link. That’s what I remember reading in the NYT weeks before Isaacson’s mistake was repeated in the WSJ and became viral.
TSMC Arizona chip plant is kind of a $40 billion disaster.
Link. Taiwan is not going to keep its chip tech in Taiwan. For the usual reasons AND to keep the west committed to Taiwan’s security.
Use your damned Apple Account / Apple ID cash balance – make default payment method
Link. Somehow I have money stuck in my Apple Account, aka Apple ID account. If you want this to ever get used you need to make it the default payment method per this post.
My current payment methods are: Apple ID -> Apple Cash -> Apple Card -> Visa.
You can’t see Apple ID cash balances from the web, so if you have an unused Apple ID you’d need to create a macOS user account to view it.
“As of 2021, India manufactured 62 percent of the raw materials for drugs”
Link. China only 23%. This article tiptoes around the fact that India’s internal safety oversight is very bad. Wealthy nations rely on separate programs.
“Google spends entire Twitter’s worth of dollars every year, lighting it on fire to keep you from finding out about rivals.”
Link. Key target for antitrust. Stop the payments.
“As of Ventura 13.5.2, and probably in the first release of Sonoma, two of those five robust options for encrypting files and folders aren’t sufficiently functional for normal use”
Link.
“There are close to three women for every two men in college in this country.”
Link. Colleges now favor male applicants but fear lawsuits. “The Supreme Court gives parties more leeway to discriminate on the basis of gender than it does on the basis of race.”
I know one woman who ruled out the college I liked because it was 2/3 women.
Musk and his trans daughter: “When Musk found out, he was generally sanguine, but then Jenna became a fervent Marxist and broke off all relations with him.”
Link. I wish Musk would leave us for Mars, but this doesn’t fit the Musk transphobia narrative.
Yet another iMessage vulnerability: “become the transport for various other iOS features and Apple services, so it’s necessarily hooked deeper into the system”
Link. I’m sure there are no more iMessage security bugs.
Caber rescue: “The Turks are near the top, followed by the Hungarians, Poles, Italians and Croatians. The Bulgarians are covering the final stretch to where Mr. Dickey is.”
Link. All volunteers I expect.
Willis humiliation of Jim Jordan: “A spokesperson for Jordan’s office did not respond to a request for comment.”
Link. Jordan staffers are likely quite dumb, but even they are not dumb enough to try a response.
MinnPost ends reader comments: “of 19,000 approved comments on the site, 55% of them were made by 20 people, and 77% were made by 50 people”
Link. I suspect this is true of many sites that allow comments.
Americans rate the economy badly — for everyone but themselves.
Link. Objectively the economy is great and the Biden admin is basically genius.
I think people are genuinely frightened and unhappy, but it’s not the economy. It’s their tech environment. They just think it’s the economy.
“… solar power is cheaper than most other ways of generating electricity — even when you factor in energy storage. Natural gas and wind are the only real competitors.”
Link. Krugman beats the same drum. It’s not hard to fix CO2 emissions now and the fix comes with economic growth.
“The instincts of the Biden administration — to use industrial policy to scale up renewables — are correct, and the inherited intuition from the debates of 2010 is out of date.”
“In more than a dozen interviews, people who identify as Dalits described various encounters with caste-based bigotry in the United States, in the form of wage theft, housing discrimination, mistreatment in the workplace and social exclusion.”
Link. Odd to see the word bigotry in use again.
“China’s car industry has quadrupled exports in just three years, surpassing Japan this year as the world leader.”
Link. Mostly gas powered. China’s switch to electric means ICE cars are dumped on Russia and other markets.
“Shipyards up and down the Yangtze River, with thousands of workers, clang and rattle from dawn until far into the night.”
“Apple is expanding Communication Safety to cover video and photos, turning it on by default for all child accounts, and integrating it into AirDrop, the Photo picker, FaceTime video messages, and Contact Posters in the Phone app.”
Link. Apple is more serious about addressing this than they are about most things.
Idaho idiocy a gain for MN: “Dr. Cooper left St. Luke’s in April for Minnesota … “the risk was too big for me and my family.”
Link. Crazed abortion law. Don’t live in a red state. Don’t study at red state schools.
“In a 2018 ruling against the city of Boise, Idaho, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said that cities could not enforce local laws against outdoor camping if they didn’t offer enough shelter beds for people living on the street.”
Link. Only binds the 9th circuit, hits SF most. The article is poorly written but I think the problem is:
1. SF doesn’t have enough shelter beds
2. The beds they do have are not fully occupied
3. It’s neither sensible or feasible to create more empty beds to meet 9th district ruling.
“Growl and Notification Center in previous macOS versions (before Big Sur) worked better than what we have now.”
Link. I like the theory that Apple can’t retain their skillful devs. So we get newbies.
Another wealthy person discovers American jails are hellish.
Link. Bankman-Fried is at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center after violating bail terms. I wonder if he didn’t understand the American jail.
Alan Turing proof of the of algorithm insufficiency explained.
Link. Almost comprehensible.
Ponesimod for MS may enhance microglia function in mouse-model Alzheimer’s.
Link. Microglia target is good and existing approval makes it easier to study in humans.
Vanguard’s switch to brokerage accounts ended their small investor friendly automated purchases
Link. “The days of John Bogle are long past.”
Video processing 2023 – redoing a 1905 video.
Link. Short demo and very well done.
Damn Interesting: “We’re not going to post things on Twitter X anymore.”
Link. Their revenue has fallen dramatically however. The death of Twitter is bringing a lot of things to a quicker ending.
LLM Python tools: “An embedding model lets you take a string of text – a word, sentence, paragraph or even a whole document – and turn that into an array of floating point numbers called an embedding vector.”
Link. Proximal vectors are expected to be semantically similar. (PS. Python may finally be the “next C”.
Google Cloud Services Outages.
Link. Fantasy uptime numbers.
“We suggest that any trustworthy general AI will need to hybridize the approaches, the LLM approach and more formal approach, and lay out a path to realizing that dream.”
Link. Doug (Cyc) Lenat’s final paper with Gary Marcus, written as he was dying.
Skip to the conclusion first. I think we will do something like this.
Douglas Lenat obit: “The project was called Cyc. He set out to define the fundamental but largely unspoken laws that outline how the world works”
Link. “In the fall, as ChatGPT captured the public imagination, Dr. Lenat and the cognitive scientist Gary Marcus began work on a new paper meant to show the new generation of researchers what they could learn from his nearly 40 years of work on Cyc. While working on the project, he had a recurrence of cancer that had first appeared in 2021.”
https://bit.ly/3LbcPVD is the short paper written as he was dying.
#AI #Cyc
Swimming in the pools of Paris.
Link. Very much my kind of tourism. #paris
Remote work around the world: “In South Korea … many workers never left their offices”
Link. Of course they never left. SK is extreme.
“an expanding pattern of what has become known as Iran’s “hostage diplomacy.”
Link. Diplomacy is doing a lot of work here. It’s cheap and effective, Russia and China like it too.
“If you’re ever tempted to buy something you see advertised on Instagram, do an image search on AliExpress first. You might find the identical product for 90% off.”
Link. You may wait months for the container to arrive though.
Jaw muscles and human evolution: “a steady stream of books and articles about human origins are still repeating the idea, nearly twenty years later.”
Link. Fun stories in human evolution never die.
“new paper just published suggests that a major bottleneck in our evolutionary history happened between 930,000 and 800,000 years ago, and points to the chromosome 2 fusion as one possible consequence”
Link. Speciation event?
“evidence that the chromosomes had fused in the common ancestors of ancestral African, Neandertal, and Denisovan populations, but also that the ancestral 2b centromere had already evolved into its humanlike nonfunctional form before these hominins diverged.”
Mexico 2014 murder of 43 students: “Just about every arm of government in that part of southern Mexico had been secretly working for the criminal group for months, putting the machinery of the state in the cartel’s hands …”
Link. Whacked out drug lord thought students were a competing group. US had text message by tap but (accurately) distrusted insanely corrupt Mexican gov and military.