Link. 100 million is a tap on the little finger for them.
Cryptex story is a tour of cybercrime 2024: “unlimited cashouts,” a globally coordinated cybercrime scheme in which crooks hack a bank … use cloned cards at cash machines”
Link. I was a minor cybercrime fighter in 1990s Japan for the early Internet version of carding.
Meta Connect 2024: “the race to bring AR glasses to market is clearly on”
Link. There is a name for what happens when technology cycles get too tight to predict.
“It was so tough in the before times, when you had to act as though you were a person … Of course, you weren’t a person, not really”
Link. I’d love to know what Trump’s white woman base thinks of his protection.
“cracked down with arrests and detention for children as young as 10”
Link. We need the legal right to take their phones and computers for a month and suspend their cell coverage. Detention should be reserved for children who use guns in crimes. (Twin Cities has an infamous 12yo)
“Robots have taken over online gambling and they’re transferring wealth from uneducated poor people to corporations and wealthy hustlers”
Link. We lost this battle preemptively. Back when states started lotteries.
“stronger Higgs field makes the elementary particles vibrate at higher frequencies, thus raising their masses”
Link. Quantum field theory slides into popular science.
Quantum Computing and cracking crypto: “today the message needs to be: yes, unequivocally, worry about this now”
Link. Aaronson was my “go to” skeptic of impending encryption doom. He always said it was far away. And now it’s maybe not.
Scottish pub: “The Old Forge: perhaps the most remote pub on the mainland, lying at the end of a multiday wilderness hike through craggy mountains and glistening lochs”
Link.
Olivia Nuzzi: “The flaws in her work were on display for all to see. The flaws of her character were plain. The callousness and shallow worldview and meangirling were always there.”
Link. “journalists spent the better part of a decade protecting her, coddling her, encouraging her to write gossip and call it “news,”
Rural collapse and low credential legal immigration: “the number of declining places has accelerated in recent years. It now includes big swathes of the Great Plains, the Midwest, the Deep South, and the interior of the Northeast”
Link. The children of Twin Cities Hmong immigrants are now well represented in our medical schools.
Musk capitulates: “Brazil’s Supreme Court took $2 million from Starlink in Brazil to cover fines it had issued against X.”
Link. Brazil shows the way.
“Musk had made confronting Justice Moraes one of his pet issues this year, at times posting repeatedly about the judge, insulting him, calling for his jailing and vowing to defy his orders”
“potential of statins in the treatment of osteoarthritis”
Link. Some suggestion they decrease OA. If you are on the lipid fence might consider.
“On your left” vs ding: the cyclist’s dilemma.
Link. We have many shared bike trails. I don’t ding and I don’t do “left”. I go off trail to pass at such a distance collision is impossible. Most don’t seem to notice me and I practice my singletrack skills.
“… Kentucky, overdose deaths dropped by more than a third between April 2023 and March 2024”
Link. Down 10% nationally over a year, biggest drop ever. Naloxone helps. Users seem smarter about managing fentanyl; I wonder if the fentanyl demographic is getting older. Post-COVID effect? Impossible to know why…
UAE using “… Red Crescent … as a cover for its secret operation to fly drones into Sudan and smuggle weapons to fighters”
Link. Vile and unsurprising.
“The slacker culture that prevailed from the late 1980s through the early 2000s was a glorious thing.”
Link. I did degrees in 78, 82, 86, 91, 94 and I’m doing a UMN class now. Undergrads now are way more keen, intense, and stressed.
I think students know we have too much worldwide talent for too little demand, that modern life is chaotic, technology is moving too fast, rural collapse is giving us Trump, and now AI is coming. Econ numbers miss this.
Naomi Kritzer Hugo wins: “Better Living Through Algorithms and The Year Without Sunshine, both free and online.
Link. She lives a few miles from me, so our local celebrity. Probably better known locally for her election guides.
Four thieves vinegar collective and DIY meds: “… a joke. A show. Performance art. A cartoon.”
Link. Lowe is not impressed. So dumb.
CAR-T treats severe autoimmune disorders in a small safety trial.
Link. These are horrible diseases and now there is hope.
“.. outdoor raccoon latrine on your property, the CDC recommends … setting it ablaze … specifically, a personal flamethrower”
Link. Raccoon stool increasingly contains a parasite that destroys human brains. Flamethrower need varies based local incidence.
Perplexity is saving my linguistics classmates
Link. “My question compulsion is still there, but LLMs are saving everyone. I set up a linguistics “collection” in Perplexity with appropriate prompts; now I type my questions into my phone (allowed in class). I get the answer with Perplexity and spare my classmates.”
“LLMs … are highly general purpose technology for statistical modeling of token streams.”
Link. Not at all language specific, much more general than that. Presumably including applications not yet public.
Anthropic Contextual Retrieval: “take each chunk at indexing time and expand it using an LLM” to provide additional context in the isolated indexed chunk”
Link. Post processing and tagging at indexing to facilitate retrieval.
The shape of the climate migrations: “The gates will stay firmly closed, and those outside them will die.”
Link. Climate engineering better work.
O1 “easily the biggest jump in reasoning capabilities since the original GPT-4.”
Link. I might restart my ChatGPT subscription.
This is bad news of course. Again, too fast.
Expert (but necessarily biased) advice on migrating to Apple’s password manager.
Link. I think you’d want to be on current OS. and you need an archive copy for when things go wrong. He likes the slow careful migration rather than export/import.
Note TOTP advice carefully.
LLM coding: “small army of super talented interns that never complain about anything”
Link. Fast, confident, prone to dumb mistakes, but omniscient.
LLM assisted coding seems to work best for LLM experts.
“iOS 18 includes a new feature where you can choose to require Face ID to open an app”
Link. Like your braindead banking app. This is the single best iOS 18 feature I have read of so far. I am doing this.
[AINews] o1: “For the first time ever, an LLM has been able to 100% match and accurately report what we consider to be the top stories of the day without our intervention.”
Link. Too fast.
Bryan Cantrill: “You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower”
Link. Bezos and Ellison are similar that way. It’s not personal. You are grass.
With Musk it’s personal.
Google and detecting AI products: Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).
Link. I doubt this will work quickly enough but the idea is nice.
“Vance … has made it clear that he’s sometimes willing to speak falsehoods in order to make a political point” 🆓
Link. “… a country where people can be persecuted purely for their membership in an undesirable group. Some Americans do want that. If you want that, vote for Trump”
Like Elon Musk. Any means to an end where the end is power. Or, in the case of Musk, wealth and power.
Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon carried a Hezbollah pager.
Link. Israel has been preparing to go to war with Iran for a long time.
Tsai: “seems like Sequoia breaks less stuff than other recent major releases”
Link. So Dec 24 rather than April 25 for me
Lowe takes metformin primate results seriously.
Link. “Comparing RNA-seq and proteomics profiles of the two aged groups (treatment and control) with the two younger cohorts showed that metformin treatment rolled things back from 4 to 6 years”. 3 years of metformin for middle-aged cynomolgous monkeys.
I didn’t believe this result when I first read it. China has immense science fraud problems and the effect seems much too big. Published in Cell, but not, fwiw, in Nature or Science. I still think it’s too big an effect but if true it’s kind of Nobel gimme.
TidBITS macOS update timing: “Anyone who feels trepidation about installing Sequoia could wait until macOS 15.2 comes out, likely in mid-December”
Link. I like to wait until April for macOS updates. I always hit the bugs.
American Bat White Nose Syndrome: fixes emerge.
Link. European bats are much less effected and American bats are evolving resistant traits. In the meanwhile researchers have identified several effective mitigations.
To understand the American handgun, study the Kirpan.
Link. If you think of American gun culture as a component of a proto-religion it is easier to understand and perhaps manage.
“certain brain networks, especially those involved in social and emotional processing, shrink during pregnancy”
Link. Similar to adolescent pruning of key neural networks. Suggests optimizing or locking-in some bonding behaviors that favor infant survival. (But may decrease maternal survival. )
“By the ninth week of gestation, 80 percent of 400 brain areas analyzed showed decreases in gray matter volume and cortical thickness that continued through pregnancy, with areas shrinking by 4 percent on average. Change was particularly pronounced in the default mode network, which is instrumental in perceiving other people’s feelings and perspectives.”
Moderna mRNA solid tumor “vaccine” passes phase III trial, efficacy against advanced disease.
Link. COVID accelerated this science. We will know more within a year. (mRNA original use case was cancer, not COVID)
Pfizer could have had GLP-1 inhibitors in the 90s — but leadership threw it away.
Link. Reminiscent of Xerox and the mouse. Great business school case.
“if we do detect there are models that are starting to autonomously self-improve, who are you going to call?”
Link. Nothing prepared me for the 20s as well as my childhood years wasted on 1970s science fiction.
“The group proposed that countries set up A.I. safety authorities to register the A.I. systems within their borders…
…All three are winners of the Turing Award”
Elon Musk assassination tweet: “This is the kind of post that, should it come up during a clearance review, would typically see the poster lose such privileges”
Link. If we have learned anything in the past decade it is that many people are above the law.
Python: “Pandas was built on top of NumPy and works quite well within a Jupyter Notebook”
Link. I enjoyed this overview.
Sequoia: “trying to give the user detailed instructions as to how they can be run without being blocked by Gatekeeper should now arouse the suspicion of even the most careless and inattentive”
Link. Better to invest malware resources elsewhere?
“Colombia’s Gulf Clan … pushes cocaine across the Pacific in crudely made submarines to Costa Rica’s forest-covered shores”
Link. Costa Rica fears Mexican narco-terrorism.
Photos Workbench 1.3 – fixes some annoying bugs.
Link. If you are someone who weeps every time they have to use #%^# Photos.mac this helps.
If Apple made PhotoKit less half-assed Houdah could replace all the decrepit photo asset management of Apple’s turd.
A good set of Pinboard altrrnatives via Hacker News
Link. Thanks Joe!
“conservative Baby Boomer with too much power” is the right way to model Xi”
Link. Xi might be dimmer than Trump though.