Jamison Foser on the Obsequiousness of The Washington Post Spiking Ann Telnaes’s Cartoon
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/01/05/fozer-wapo-obsequiousness
Link to: https://www.findinggravity.net/p/no-jeff-bezos-is-not-obeying-in-advance
“In 2023, China burned more coal than the rest of the world combined — 56 percent”
https://toosimple.substack.com/p/china-peak-coal
In many ways, coal is the Party’s biggest, dirtiest secret. Long read.
Migrating my microblog publishing from Pinboard to Raindrop.io
https://tech.kateva.org/2025/01/migrating-my-microblog-publishing-from.html?m=1
Technical fixes, tips and findings — all based on my personal experience. Mostly macOS and iOS.
“starting with a spec created through collaboration with o1, then saving that as a SPEC.md Markdown file and adding that to Cursor’s context”
https://bit.ly/3W5xHmS
Zohaib Rauf describes a pattern I’ve seen quite a few examples of now: engineers who moved into management but now find themselves able to ship working code again (at least …
WaPo “rejected a cartoon depicting The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump”
Link. Ann Telnaes resigned. WaPo is dead under Bezos. Cancel your subscription renewal.
“If we replaced every atom in the universe with a universe the size of ours, it would still be orders of magnitude away from making the monkey typing likely to succeed”
Link. Infinite monkeys can type anything. But infinity is a big number. In some models of the multiverse however …
(The AI comment is obviously dumb. Also this is not a serious paper.)
NEJM report of A(H5N1) teen course: ECMO needed but antivirals worked. 🆓
Link. Now we can truly say COVID isn’t worse than (some) influenza. Note renal injury is not unique to COVID. Case study is short and easy to read.
“OpenRSS is a free service that builds open RSS feeds for various sites”
Link. Nonprofit. RSS is back.
On DOGE and government efficiency: bad software, bad regulations, underfunded commitments and more
Link. There are ways to dramatically improve government efficiency. They will cause many to lose good jobs that they cannot replace and they may increase government spending while reducing revenue that flows to politicians.
Eve of Destruction – a visit to Taiwan
Link. All the world’s powers will soon be ruled by moronic and deluded villains. Noah even starts to turn on his payors, though he doesn’t use Musk’s name.
Modern schizophrenia management: intensive intervention helps but expense limits benefit.
Link. At 10y time-limited benefit not sustained. We desperately need to understand the pathophysiology and we need something like an AI guardian.
“movement promotes “targeted attacks, mass killings and criminal activity” and has “historically encouraged members to engage in self-harm and animal abuse”
Link. “No Lives Matter is an offshoot of the broader “accelerationist” movement, which seeks to accelerate radical social change through sabotage and violence”
LLMs 2024: “LLM prices crashed, thanks to competition and increased efficiency”
Link. Energy costs will fall quickly. This is essential reading for anyone interested in humans.
“The average household with at least one family member on a GLP-1 is spending about 6 percent less on groceries each month within six months of adoption”
Link. GLP-1 economics. We don’t yet know how sustained the appetite effects will be however.
Issues with backing up Contacts Notes and Lists in Sequoia.
Link. It seems quite a mess. Backup is getting harder to do, allegedly iCloud contacts restore omits lists and notes.
“owners of ultrawide 5K2K monitors is to avoid buying M4 Macs until the problem is fixed”
Link. Weird bug
“Children with cystic fibrosis are no longer automatically eligible for the Make-A-Wish Foundation because a new drug works so well that these kids are now expected to have an essentially normal lifespan.”
Link. See also: HIV summer camp closed due to lack of HIV+ kids.
“Google has an offer that is basically a franchise and you have ability to get Google searches out but you also have to get Google ads”
Link. Kagi CEO has ideas on how to manage the Google tire fire. (Via Tsai)
Why China’s productivity slowed down 2022 (2022)
Link. Noah only mentions corruption at the start and in the context of research fraud. I suspect that is a much bigger factor than he admits.
America has also become very corrupt.
Tesla share price is now a measure of America’s corruption.
Link. Big bet that Musk will take power.
China’s coming depression: Xi is as stupid as Trump.
Link. Americans at least consciously chose to be ruled by idiots.
Fentanyl variants post China: “If the rabbits survive beyond 90 seconds, the drug is deemed too weak to be sold to Americans”
Link. China is finally restricting raw ingredients to Mexico. So cartels are developing new variant opioids tested on animals and humans.
We think at 10bps and “we sift about one bit out of every 100 million we receive”
Link. Very low power. Our AIs use rather more
Why so much “autism”? Start with “broadening parameters of the spectrum”
Link. Mild kudos for at least hinting at the truth that the DSM definition of “autism” is an impenetrable roadblock to research and understanding.
President Musk’s first win: preserving Tesla factories in China.
Link. “The word for this is oligarchy”
Explaining ARC (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus) evaluation of AIs.
Link. I don’t believe the “average human” score.
“the fact that Democratic presidents pushed trade policies that destroyed millions of good paying jobs for non-college educated workers is not really in dispute.”
Link. I would like an example of a 1990s economics pundit warning about who would be hurt by free trade.
Revolutions in human affairs: generally disastrous. 🆓
Link. Lots of analysis, examples and references. The goal of a sober democracy is to understand and mitigate the pressures that produce revolution.
I like the comment about growing food.
“Trump could have carried on with his aura of invincibility and uncrossable authority through the beginning of his term if Musk wasn’t such a goddamn idiot.”
Link. Jedeed shines in this analysis of President Musk’s facepalm to old man Trump.
Cloud Platforms described.
Link. Marketing for Nitric but I appreciated the overview. I haven’t seen this in one place before.
BYTE magazine would have done this well.
AI progress: more data vs more thinking
Link. “bottlenecks for impact are the pace of product development and the rate of adoption, not AI capabilities.”
A thoughtful overview.
UK legislation and blogs: “The blog will continue to exist. However the comment threads may be closed for good after March 14th”
Link. Discussions will have to occur on a regulated platform.
Gruber on why Bezos should sell WaPo: “… Jeff Bezos would be portrayed by the actor who played the cowardly lawyer snatched on the can by the T-Rex in Jurassic Park”
Link. WaPo is dead unless Bezos leaves it.
OpenAI o3: “at least one OpenAI programmer could still beat the system”
Link. Coders don’t need to worry, uber is still hiring.
(1. Development is much more than coding, but a lot people like to code. 2. Ask not for who the bell tolls.)
The Oligarchs: “… include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Charles Koch, Jeff Yass, Ken Griffin, and Rupert Murdoch.”
Link. The stupid is strong.
“slowing solid tumor growth was considered enough of a reason to be optimistic, and it really wasn’t”
Link. Die they must.
“All intuition about AI capabilities will need to get updated for o3”
Link.
Welcome to the 119th Congress: “that was still a ridiculous CR. I knew it was in trouble as soon as I saw the Member pay raise provisions”
Link. What you need to know.
Canine arthritis drug may have neurological toxicity: “Librela contains monoclonal antibodies that block the activity of nerve growth factor”
Link. I have so many questions. The article doesn’t explain why it is supposed to work and why it doesn’t kill every dog.
This is for when all else fails.
AI Engineering Primer.
Link. Later versions cover negotiation, pleading, and flattery.
Encyclopedia Britannica is doing quite well really.
Link. Content is rising.
“Do not use SMS as a second factor for authentication”
Link. If China wishes it can read the SMS.
“Johnson’s attempt at appeasement failed. Within hours, the pseudo president-elect had kneecapped Johnson.”
Link. Do we call Musk P2 or P1?
“o1-preview demonstrates superhuman performance [emphasis mine] in differential diagnosis, diagnostic clinical reasoning, and management reasoning”
Link. Not yet reviewed paper.
‘Murder Hornet’ WA invasion contained for now.
Link. Not hopeless after all.
Biology 2024 “… they discovered that a neural circuit in the brainstem dials the levels of inflammatory molecules up and down”
Link. Neuroimmunology had a brief moment in the 80s but the tools were not ready.
“ LUCA … metabolized hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide, had a rudimentary immune system, and likely lived in a microbial ecosystem”
Physics review 2024
Link. A solid year of discovery.
Semaglutide may increase risk rare blindness disorder 2-3x (NAION)
Link. Weird vascular event. We have to assume true of all GLP-1. No mechanism so we don’t know if triggered by direct drug effect or weight loss, glycemic control.
Collapse of confidence in US courts.
Link. Not as large as collapse in Myanmar, Venezuela or Syria. Dems are correct about SCOTUS and MAGA believe what Trump says.