Link. These agents are not normally lethal, but of course bullets await those who flee. Russia is a particularly brutal place.
TSMC and rebellious American engineers: “Working for a Japanese company means long, unproductive hours at the office, trying to look productive for elderly, entrenched managers”
Link. “Confucian values” are not magical.
“Sometimes, the engineers said, staff would manipulate data from testing tools or wafers to please managers who had seemingly impossible expectations.”
Yeah, that seems universal.
The business of (digital) wallets.
Link. Everyone wants to avoid interchange fees. A dry topic that is worth a large amount of money.
China EV: “10-minute charge of its newest battery would give a range of 370 miles. A 30-minute full charge would give a range of 620 miles”
Link. Meanwhile US car makers only build luxury vehicles at high prices. This will end badly for them.
Microsoft sucks at security: “Microsoft has the government locked in as a customer, so the government’s options for forcing change at Microsoft are limited”
Link. Slowly, very slowly, humans begin to understand software lock-in. Even a 2nd rate LLM know this stuff.
Covid-19 update: “hospitalizations are at the lowest point since the beginning of the pandemic”
Link. Fall vaccine under development.
Walmart gives up on providing health services in selected communities
Link. “In 2021, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase ended their high-profile joint health care venture, which sought to explore new ways to deliver health care to their employees. ”
Primary care is hard.
Apple working on fix for bug causing iPhone alarms to not play sounds
Link. Burned dinner two days ago because timer completed silently.
Manton Reece: “this AI shit is real. It will change almost everything. I’m not expecting to see another truly game-changing technology for the rest of my career. This is the one.”
Link. Not another blockchain. FWIW.
As the Earth warms, what ecosystems do we save?
Link. We make arbitrary decisions but they are not wrong.
War in Africa: “Eleven countries out of 54, containing more than a quarter of Africa’s population, are at war, and mostly they are at war with themselves.”
Link. “Small but frequent wars were the price Africans paid for that rich diversity all through their history, and they are still paying it today.”
“Chinese military spending is in the same ballpark as U.S. spending, once you take price differences and off-budget items into account.”
Link. But China is way better at manufacturing.
“Students for Justice in Palestine but also others — support the overthrow of the current Israeli state and the expulsion of at least some substantial percentage of the current Jewish Israeli population.”
Link. Josh Marshall explains why American Jews should feel threatened. Hamas also has significant responsibility for 30,000 dead but that is an awkward fact.
He doesn’t get into the 20y history of Israel’s voters repeatedly enabling Netenyahu and his brutality.
Hellbikes on Ice: bike packing of the 80s recounted.
Link. Significant risk of not finishing.
T-Rex smarts: “They were more like smart giant crocodiles” than like modern monkeys.
Link.
gpt2-chatbot: “a preview of some kind of OpenAI “GPT 4.5” release”
Link. Expected but odd entry.
Meanwhile Cuba is again in a bad way and again allows private business again funded by expat money.
Link. I’ve seen this show before. The NYT article is kind of an editing mess.
Post glutides supplement stores need to replace their obesity product revenues.
Link. They need different scams.
“Financial Times today announced a strategic partnership and licensing agreement with OpenAI”
Link. And the race is on.
macOS file systems: Kernel “Virtual File System … has its origins in SunOS 2.0 of 1985 … from there to NeXTSTEP and into Mac OS X”
Link. I love this dorky stuff. I want to see a follow up just on network file systems and why we need something better.
“volfs knows nothing of directory hierarchies, so can’t enumerate files within a directory”
Balaji Srinivasan, Andreessen guru: “… imagines public screenings of anti-Blue propaganda films: “In addition to celebrating Gray and celebrating Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abuses”
Link. Rasputin is the archetype.
Blues are Libs, Reds are MAGA, and Grays are SV drones.
Also, Andreessen has had quite the journey.
Fentanyl success crushes poppy market.
Link. Guatemalan poppy workers must migrate.
“trained on the same dataset for long enough, pretty much every model with enough weights and training time converges to the same point”
Link. That’s interesting claim.
In China TikTok is Douyin: “The transaction value of shopping conducted through livestreams on Douyin exceeded $200 billion in 2022”
Link. “Douyin has become a crucial platform for the Chinese authorities to disseminate information and propaganda”
Most popular app 50+
THE UNIVERSE AS A COMPUTER, John Archibald Wheeler 1980: “May behave like a computer on occasion or in special situations”
Link. Lots of background I did not know.
“20. May represent a superficial pattern projected, in effect, on a background–or something like a program or simulation of a universe that is running on an independent and truly real computer but is not itself real or fundamental.”
How G.M. secretly sold driving data to insurers.
Link. “giving up annual revenue in the low millions”. GM made puny money. I wonder who authorized the hit on GM customers.
Bad software and sales practices were part of the low return scam, but GM hid data use from everyone. A lesson for other purchases.
Apophis approaches, swarms of probes prepare.
Link. Will graze earth’s …. Not really. 20k miles away in 2029. But one day we may want to divert it.
Review of Biden tax plan: the good and the bad.
Link. Basic liberal analysis. I mostly agree.
Janky Apple ID Security: Apple IDs being weirdly locked
Link. Did Apple get hacked? Or is it password reuse detected? Michal Tsai roundup.
“Nvidia ranked in the top 10 among stocks lawmakers sold most in 2023.”
Link. I remember a time before stock moves best predicted by lawmaker corruption and criminal insider trading.
Feedbin custom email addresses for reading newsletters as RSS
Link. Can create or deactivate, give each newsletter unique email. They are treated as RSS documents.
“went to the Microsoft Archives, and while they were unable to find the full source code for MT-DOS, they did find MS DOS 4.00, which we’re releasing today”
Link. MT-DOS was a multitasking version not widely released.
The Rise of Large-Language-Model Optimization.
Link. Guest post, good summary of past 30y of web and the hell-web near future from a creator perspective. The good news is unless AI development stalls we only stay in the hell-web for a short time.
“40% of survey respondents said they smoked cigarettes at least weekly before starting a GLP-1 treatment, that number fell to 24% after they started the treatment”
Link. Alcohol and junk food similar. Health aside, big implications for large industries.
“NPR still has an audience of about 42 million … down from an estimated 60 million in 2020”
Link. This NYT article is a mess but the bottom line is that broadcast radio is dying and reduced commuting time hit NPR hard.
Meanwhile the news side is hamstrung by fear of offending the GOP.
“first known nitrogen-fixing organelle within a eukaryotic cell. The organelle is the fourth example in history of primary endosymbiosis”
Link. Eukaryotic cells are built from bacteria.
“nitroplast appears to have evolved about 100 million years ago”
AI Code Assistant: basically it needs a spec.
Link. This is what we used to write with the human dev team – a spec.
The final afflictions of Google Search.
Link. “Google’s finance and advertising teams … actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money”
I use Perplexity.
“Breaking up the tech monopolies is one of the best things we can do for cybersecurity.”
Link. So there’s more competition. Today MSFT can blow off the DoD.
Palantir’s Project Maven has been of little help. And … “The American-made drones that were shipped into Ukraine last year were blown out of the sky with ease…”
Link. When Google left Palantir stepped in. But the “AI” system isn’t yet worth the shells it could buy. Russia is countering fancy American tech pretty well. China sells tech to both sides. US military trying many toys even while dependent on StarLink and Musk.
Short-lived Apple failures.
Link. I remember all but the XL. Add Vision Prp to the list (the Lisa of HMD).
“number of people total in the portion of the park designated for protesters for or against Mr. Trump has never been more than two or three dozen”
Link. If America decides Trump is best forgotten the battle for the future of the GOP will be ferocious.
Levi Coffin: “Four of Coffin’s eight pallbearers were free blacks who had worked with him on the Underground Railroad”
Link. A Wikipedia story worth reading.
H5N1 comes for seal pups: “virus had killed an estimated 17,400 seal pups, more than 95 percent of the colony’s young animals.”
Link. Everyone being cautious, worried about panic mongers.
“In my flu career, we have not seen a virus that expands its host range quite like this”
APFS: Command tools beyond Disk Utility
Link. Essential reference.
Ukraine: “Many Republicans dismissed what the intelligence showed or refused to attend briefings”
Link. Tidbit from tedious article on Johnson. Also Gaetz et al saying they would never fund Ukraine despite the “deal” they promoted.
Facebook and Insta getting out of the political wars: algo and targeting changes.
Link. Algo no longer injects political posts from unfollowed. Bigger: meta not selling voter targeting to campaigns. GOP may try to force FB to restore targeting
Google Reader Shutdown Tidbits: “There have been enough infrastructure changes that the Reader codebase has rotted, and it cannot be pushed to prod anymore.”
Link. From long ago but published 2024. Google knew customers hated the shutdown and it was very unpopular inside Google.
Mac malware and misinformation in the absence of documentation.
Link. Apple forums misleading and wrong advice. Apple needs to document.
Housing crunch in EU: resident visas with real estate purchase, Airbnb: “In Spain, Chinese investors made up nearly half of visa seekers, followed by Russians”
Link. Xi and Putin mean many “mere millionaires” are desperate for a place to run — and there is vast money laundering. Similar to Canada.