Link. And there is no way to test the correct code. (I suspect every “family” or “child” thing Apple does is hard to test — even by Apple.)
School absences (away 10% or more) almost double pre-COVID.
Link. Mirrors remote work but students do poorly. Similar increase rich and poor. School violence decreasing but not absences. Many contributing factors including staying home for colds, large increase in anxiety disorders, and absence begets absence.
Economic malaise: housing shortage?
Link. NYT searching for economic anxiety reasons land on housing shortage with Phoenix as an example.
That actually makes sense. It’s very severe in Canada so not only US. This was predicted after the 2010 real estate crash but may be exaggerated by migration boom.
Red states get money from blue states: the details.
Link. One factor is red states do less for not-elite so depend more on federal programs.
Treating mouse model Alzheimer’s with stem cell transplant changed microglia and appeared to slow disease.
Link. Sept 2023 but I missed it then. Requires wiping existing so not great.
Boeing’s Quality Problems: “Boeing’s work force went through a major turnover because of the coronavirus pandemic.”
Link. The quality problems are old but people loss was a last straw. Accelerated retirement likely hurt many companies.
FileVault Recovery Key: “check using fdesetup validaterecovery that the Recovery Key is correct whenever it’s changed”
Link. Recovery Key scares me.
ECMO CPR is a lot better than conventional CPR. Available only to high tech trauma centers.
Link. Rural America will not be able to do this short of 2045 level robotics.
Security Vulnerability in Saflok’s RFID-Based Keycard: Assume your hotel lock can be opened.
Link. I agree with Schneier. This won’t be fixed … unless there is a rape/murder related to it.
CoPilot: “I don’t get the value of it as an AI chat assistant or as an omni-search for my organisation … zero value from it for PowerPoint and Excel”
Link. I suspect Apple’s AI integration will also disappoint. It’s too early.
“ChatGPT is more “generally” useful. There is pretty much nothing I’ve thrown at it in the last month or so that it hasn’t helped me with.”
The Atlantic: Building Techtopia.
Link. In the 70s I liked to drop in on cults. These SV utopias feel much like that, but perhaps even more the communes of a few years before. If I were not ancient I’d try to crash their party.
“attackers are exploiting a bug in the online Apple ID password reset process”
Link. Yikes. Needs urgent fix.
Dinosaurs dreaming
Link. “EEG studies of sleeping ostriches have found REM-like activity in the brainstem … in modern birds, as in mammals, this REM-like activity takes place primarily in the more recently developed forebrain.”
Platypus also brainstem.
Highest tech secure voting: “hand-marked paper ballots, which are optically scanned”
Link. I wonder if we will do more paper input in other domains. Paper is easy to modify and very secure. In most domains AI can read and interpret.
(MN ballots are optical scanned)
China attacks: “malware found in U.S. infrastructure appeared to be intended for use if the United States were coming to the aid of Taiwan”
Link. Kill TikTok.
APFS: “maximum in practice is 255 characters …. maximum total path length is 1024 characters…”
Link. macOS undocumented. It’s possible to hit the path limit if you are verbose.
“only 25 to 30 of more than 160 Chinese electric car brands are likely to remain financially viable by 2030”
Link. These things are apparently easy to make in China. Many going bankrupt, customers angry about FALLING prices. They would clobber US brands.
“That UI improvement never came, and nearly 30 years later, Plummer’s temporary solution is still in use in Windows 11 today”
Link. Everyone in software has a story about a temporary solution.
“DOJ’s arguments come down to various forms of lock-in …”
Link. A sober review without schoolchild mockery and with legal knowledge.
Apple will claim the lock-in is both of: 1. Not real (look how many switch!) 2. Accidental side-effect of good things. (IMHO Apple is guilty as sin.)
They should look at photos.
“A Boeing senior manager also recently told the LA Times he would “absolutely not fly a Max airplane.”
Link. Maybe he regrets saying that now, and maybe he’s not that senior, but it does leave an impression. (Could also be a misquote.)
Hans Jónatan: life of a biracial Danish slave and Icelandic freeman.
Link. Incredible. Needs to be theater.
Persuading ChatGPT Code Interpreter that it can compile C code.
Link. “One of the infuriating things about working with ChatGPT Code Interpreter is that it often denies abilities that you know it has.
I’ve found it to be quite resistant to compiling C code in the past. Here’s a prompting sequence trick…”
I have given up on predicting the future.
Rare brain disorder uniquely affects facial perception in people not otherwise psychotic. 🆓
Link. A form of hallucination. There are a variety of hallucination syndromes without psychosis. They are gllitches in brain structure and function.
First Pig Kidney Transplant in patient with survival chance
Link. Genetically engineered pigs: “Pigs carry retroviruses that may infect humans, and the company also inactivated the pathogens.”
NYT had to search to find someone who objected. PETA of course.
German economic model struggles, strikes add further disruption.
Link. Putin’s madness, China’s export surge, aging population, perverse tax structure. I’d add excessively rigid macroeconomic policies.
When macOS Recovery fails: next steps.
Link. Bookmark this for when things get real bad.
Race in South Korea – the story of half-black Insooni.
Link. Insooni, born in 1957, is an entertainer entrepreneur. This is a very Korean story of endurance with relentless effort within a medieval Confucian culture undergoing radical transformation.
Coronavirus future: focus on “immune compromised”
Link. I assume by “immune compromised” they mean HIV infected persons. HIV infection accelerates coronavirus evolution in ways new to human history. We need that seemingly impossible HIV vaccine.
iPhone – Apple Diagnostics for Self Service Repair.
Link. Anyone can use. Especially for used device. Put in diagnostic mode, enter serial number.
Michael Tsai: “I think existing law is lacking. iPhone is probably not a monopoly in the traditional sense. But it’s obviously not Nintendo, either”
Link. Yes. The lock-in, castle, Hotel California monopoly is the fundamental problem. Apple has a wide array of deep moats. You can always enter but you can never leave.
The AI “Mirror Test”
Link. Ok, scratch that off the list of weird new world.
GPT-4 is arguably weakest of this group. Until we see 4.5 at least.
American aviation 2024: “There’s not anything unusual about the recent spate of incidents—these kinds of things happen every day in the industry”
Link. Flight attendants have stories. I do suspect Boeing’s problems are real however.
Haiti’s pseudo-apartheid: “History is a burden everywhere, but in Haiti it’s a curse.” Dyer. 🆓
Link. Haiti had the most brutal slavery that was under European control. (Some Ottoman slavery was similar.)
The best short explainer of the world’s most persistently dysfunctional nation.
A Vinge tribute by Noah Smith.
Link. He makes the case for Vinge’s excellence.
Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market
Link. Impressive and likely quite risky journalism. Oklahoma, California and NYC (Flushing) are big players. Chinese workers coming north from Mexico?
I wonder if they operate in Vancouver. (Legalization with high tax rates)
Five reasons the media treats MAGA-GOP as though it were a sane party. 🆓
Link. “ law firm Clare Locke has … professionalized the art of slowing down stories with legal threats and demands for preservation of documents …
… magazines, whose audiences long ago moved online and who now rely heavily on the businesses they cover…”
By far the best “why broken” article I’ve seen.
“in 2022, a team of Google researchers showed that asking language models to generate step-by-step solutions enabled the models to solve problems that had previously seemed beyond their reach” 🆓
Link. “line of research that uses [very esoteric] complexity theory to study the intrinsic capabilities and limitations of language models.”
This article is also the best LLM primer I have read. Quanta is amazing.
PS. People who say we understand LLMs are wrong.
Random notes on moving employer sponsored 401K and other pre-tax IRA funds into a rollover IRA
Link. Things you can only learn by doing.
Gordon’s Notes: Geriatric CrossFit: why you should both love and respect the deadlift
Link. If your discs are inadequate exchange weight for reps.
California struggles with the right of actively psychotic schizophrenic adults to make very unhealthy decisions.
Link. Ultimately is a question about extending guardianship-like options beyond the formally disabled.
As a lib I necessarily see it from both sides.
“As everybody knows, you’re supposed to put the tire label on the drive side of the bike”
Link. “the logo on the hub should oriented so that it’s legible from the saddle, and the logo on the rim should be legible from the drive side of the bike”
I did not know, though most of my tires are directional so there’s no need to check the label.
“Trump owes this money because he fraudulently misrepresented the value of his assets, and now apparently no one will accept those assets as collateral.”
Link. Meanwhile commercial real estate values have cratered.
macOS Sonoma 14.4 update bugs: 3 known
Link. I can live with them but I’m still on Ventura.
Life for ancient iPads: “you can manually download your own root certificate – and iOS lets you install it without complaint”
Link. iPads last a long time.
“insight of 20th century Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar that liberalism is primarily concerned with eradicating fear as the great impediment to human freedom”
Link. Book review “History of Liberalism”. For the libs among us.
Extreme SCUBA and breathing Hydrogen: “If you’re breathing that mix when it’s burning,” Clarke told the group, “it’s going to be a very unpleasant dive.”
Link. Commercial divers use chambers for weeks of compression and decompression, but hobbyist cave divers do insane things.
Typical hobbyist experiment: “His dog observed from outside the pool fence; his wife was out.”
“What’s going on with Canada’s economy? It’s not clear.”
Link. This needs more attention. It’s weird.
Nvidia GTC: “both NVswitch and Infiniband switches have built-in processing power to efficiently perform operations like centrally averaging the output of all the GPUs”
Link. Fun tech article on Nvidia roadmap.
“Ten percent of people aged 18 to 29 reported being the victim of a financial scam, compared with 9 percent of people 65 and older”
Link. Elder breakpoint is probably 75+ though. Lonely people are key target, key technique is to induce anxiety.
DNA STR segments gather the molecules that debate eukaryotic gene expression.
Link. A kind of algorithm. Reminds me of the braking system of a 1930s freight train. Emergent control likely with conflicting signals.