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.
iPhone 16 Pro and JPEG-XL.
Link. We need an SLR (are there any left?) to support JPEG-XL.
Rare article on how some Gazans see Hamas: “If you want to fight Israel, you should go do that. But why are you coming to hide among the civilians?”
Link. “Palestinians interviewed by The New York Times expressed frustration with Hamas, particularly over its practice of embedding in civilian areas”
“intelligence intercepts show that Hamas leaders have ordered their fighters to kill hostages if it appeared that Israeli troops were moving in and could potentially rescue them”
OpenAI’s “Strawberry”: “… complex planning or problem solving. It represents a huge leap in those areas.”
Link. I’ve read that while o1-preview is better at complex problems it tends to confabulate more. The good news is that at our current rate of improvement the AI impact will be more of a vast economic disruption precipitating a brewing “mass disability” socioeconomic crisis rather than the end of humanity. At least for the next 10 years.
Israel’s attack on Syrian arms plant used drones in coordination with special forces.
Link. “Israeli drones attacked Syrian troops who rushed to the scene”
‘Garbage Time’ in China – minuscule unrest among the “petty bourgeois intellectuals.”
Link. PBI is the Chinese Lib.
The End Times have come for the Pinboard.in bookmarking service
Link. “That’s ominous, but more importantly Pinboard is a one person show and that person is no longer responding to support emails. Maciej is no longer active on social media that I know of.”
PS. This post was authored and shared from Pinboard. Irony is eternal.
“for roughly a third of those incorrect responses, the model’s chain of thought showed that it knew the answer was incorrect but provided it anyway”
Link. OpenAI’s o1-preview.
Coca in pre-industrial Europe
Link. “The Ca’ Granda crypt includes some 2.9 million bones distributed among 14 brick-lined chambers…
The remains of two people showed evidence of cocaine ingestion”
Neanderthal hints: EU 50kya didn’t travel or mix much, 10 days and 50,000 years
Link. It might suggest that they did not like each other … and genetically this isn’t a great strategy. It might have been a part of why the Neanderthal did not survive. But OTOH, sapiens was having a day …
“In the salivary glands, the insect-only virus protein still went to the cell bottom, but the other protein often moved to the top of the cells”
Link. Viruses are the real problem solvers. (Any resemblance to machine learning mechanisms is not at all coincidental.)
The autonomous vehicle scam: “fake it till you make it”
Link. “By creating the illusion of complete autonomy, companies can fuel interest in their technology and raise the billions of dollars they need to build a viable robot taxi service.”
They use remote monitors. Far from commercially viable. But like Siri. Musk takes this approach to an extreme
Peak oil?
Link. I was a Peak Oil fanboy 20y ago. But now investors are concerned we have too much oil. If true more excitement awaits.
“Were we living in the year 1225, our lives would’ve overlapped with those of Leonardo Fibonacci, Francis of Assisi, Rumi, and Thomas Aquinas, as well as both Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan.”
Link. A map of overlapping lives of the famous. Catnip for me. #history
“Poland … income levels are actually similar to America’s in 1991”
Link. Noah’s proposals to jump to 2001 levels all seem persuasive from a distance. He skirts Poland’s political and demographic issues.
Researchers in children and young adults who shoot schoolchildren: “recognizing and acting upon warning signs that school shooters almost always give well before they open fire”
Link. THE only good essay on American school shootings I have ever read. From their book.
(Useful writing is most often done by domain experts with editor assistance. Journalists rarely have time to do useful writing on hard topics. Publishes in a local digital news service.)
“Cases of Kawasaki disease come in surges. Dr. Rodó and his colleagues found that surges in Japan often occurred when winds blew in from northeast China. And when those same winds reached California, cases rose there as well.”
Link. This is weird and needs confirmation. It’s not clear the high altitude microorganisms are disease related.
Rapid maturation (cortical thinning) of girl brains more than boy brains during COVID stress.
Link. This is not thought to be due to COVID directly, but rather a general stress response. Under conditions of high stress human adolescent brains may convert to adults mode faster than usual. What’s new is that the conversion is more marked in girls than boys and it’s associated with anxiety disorders in girls. It’s easy to imagine this is a primate adaptive response.
US deficit: “speaking honestly about our choices, let alone getting anything done, means certain defeat.”
Link. America needs two sane parties. One sane party is not enough.
2004 paper: The Nature-Nurture Debate and Public Policy (blank slate, tabula rosa, nature vs nurture)
Link. I dug this up because I believe 1960s progressive-liberal “blank slate” ideology was one of the great intellectual errors of the left.
It was a reaction to early 20th century eugenics and to ongoing deep and pervasive racism. But it led to a misplaced focus on college for all and fed into disastrous 1990s trade policies. It was also really dumb.
“fewer than 8 percent of high school students reported using e-cigarettes in the past month”
Link. It was about 25% a few years ago. Cigarette smoking now 1.6%. Many popular nicotine vapes are illegal Chinese products sold illegally.
(NYT confuses hemp derived/ synthetic delta-8 THC sold to teens in vape form with cannabis delta-9)
Vance: school shootings, an American thing, are a ‘Fact of Life’. Schools need more defense measures.
Link. Killer drones whir gently though the school corridors, small passages ease them by the blast door. Every word, gesture and motion is monitored. Those who have passed the four tier security cordon are tagged and routed.
Time Machine: “Copying backup stores on HFS+ was never easy, but there are currently no tools that can transfer those on APFS to another disk.”
Link. Good to know.
Russia secretly paid 3 right wing influencers 8.7 million
Link. Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin.
“paid at least $8.7 million to the top three influencers, who were not named but who appear to be Mr. Rubin, Mr. Pool and Mr. Johnson”
The US has been bad at building ships forever. History and explication. 🆓
Link. Many surprises here.
Reeder new: “The app does not integrate with RSS sync services …Reeder syncs subscriptions and other data exclusively via iCloud”
Link. I stopped reading at this point. For me this a show-stopper. It’s huge lock-in for a now subscription app. I’ll stick with Reeder Classic and look for alternatives.
Udell returns to the Community Calendar struggle, this time with LLM generated scrapers of feedless calendars.
Link. “ …. Puppeteer’s … Node-based scripts that could scrape iCalendar feeds from Python-resistant web calendars”
Even if you dread calendars the the tech Jon uses is worth the read.
“By virtue of shameless perseverance, Trump often manages to outlast most of the media’s willingness to correct any particular falsehood.”
Link. A weakness Trump understands well. Journalists are human and humans will believe most anything if it is repeated frequently and “sincerely”.
China abruptly ends international adoptions, abruptly stranding many children with disabilities.
Link. The ending was expected; the abrupt termination of adoptions in progress is a classic Xi asshole move.
Family eTrikes in the Philippines
Link. “Most … assembled locally, with parts imported cheaply from China under a no-tariff policy”.
Supposedly under 110 lbs, cost about $700US, commonly used by mothers to take children to school. Many difficult legal and regulatory issues.
“systematic review of 63 studies published between 1994 and 2022 on the connections between radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF)” finds none.
Link. Makes it very unlikely cell phone or AirPod use increases glioma risk.
Snow Leopard: “there were “no new features” between the initial releases of Leopard on October 26, 2007 and Lion on July 20, 2011.”
Link. Four years of technical debt payoff. Now it would be 6 years.
Kagi has Perplexity rival.
Link. I’ll try this.
In Support of SB 1047: “The world where AI regulation like SB 1047 makes the most difference is the world where the dangers of AI creep up on humans gradually, so that there’s enough time for governments to respond incrementally, as they did with prev
Link. California still leads.
Modern Mac folders: “Library comes only from the Data volume, … in the path Library/Apple/System/Library are some components that should appear in the main System/Library.”
Link. Browsing these folders is like exploring Rome — modern atop ancient.
“There are two places that mounted volumes are listed in the Finder: the hidden top-level folder Volumes, where Macintosh HD is just a link back to the root complete with its merged volumes, and in System/Volumes, where what’s shown as Macintosh HD is in fact not the merged volumes, but only the Data volume”
“officials have warned some economists not to draw public comparisons between China’s problems and the collapse of Japan’s debt-fueled property bubble in the 1980s”
Link. “ In July, China’s unemployment rate among 16- to 24-year-olds jumped above 17 percent, from 13 percent in June”
Xi will lash out. Because he is an idiot.
“I’m a bit frustrated at how few people are talking about how the Biden administration finally did something about America’s industrial weakness, after so many years of inaction.”
Link. NYT can’t cover this because that would be unfair to Republicans.
(Putin’s Sulzberger tapes must be awesome.)
Asshole Paxton – “Aggressive prosecutions for alleged election fraud crimes that upend lives but result in few cases that go to trial and end in a conviction”
Link. Texas voters are responsible for this sadistic asshole.
“where’s my goddamn bliss? This is not, as the Buddhists say, a skillful question”
Link. Fun review of 3 days at meditation camp.
“the very unusual vagus nerve. The longest nerve in the body …. issuing commands to our organs and receiving sensations from them”
Link. We know much more about it than 30y ago
“Creating a separate class of effectively tax-exempt earners would create large incentives to find ways to transform wages into tips”
Link. The only useful economics writer in America.
“[Harris] anti-price-gouging laws … one of the stupidest ideas to come down the pike in decades.” It’s really dumb and if the GOP were not insane I’d ponder alternatives.
Dialysis is lousier than we thought: “Over three years, older [VA] patients with kidney failure who started dialysis right away lived … 77 days longer than those who never started it.”
Link. US doesn’t do peritoneal much. We way overdue to switch. But we knew it was a lousy therapy — just not this lousy.
It’s only good as a bridge to transplant. The glutides should make transplant more viable for more people.
“Desmond’s belief that poverty hasn’t fallen relies on the official poverty measure, which updates its definition of “poor” over time…”
Link. If progressives keep fighting the last war we will miss what is happening now.
iOS Trackpad Mode for editing text: “… to scroll while moving the insertion point, touch and hold in the text and then pull down (or push up) while keeping your finger down.”
Link. Damn. I had not tried holding the spacebar while scrolling with another finger.
But then try shift tap.
How cells think.
Link. Lots of feedback loops, all analog computing.
In college E Coli learn how to implement “sliding mode control”, a control method for nonlinear systems”
“Chesterton’s fence” is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.”
Link. Dates to early 20th century. Software developers understand this well but I’d not seen the term used before seeing it in a blog post.
“Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking.”
Link. “each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”
Puny revenues, but they expect the upside to be a lot bigger.
“Those who want a TV without an Internet connection have few options.” If you don’t connect your TV to the net you can use Apple TV (though it will do its own monitoring). I think the article forgot to note some of these TVs don’t work without a net connection.
Apple is seeing issues with NAND (iPhone storage) wear.
Link. They are restricting “Live Activities” because of wear issues. I wonder if this manifests as device instability or shrinking storage or ??