Link. One possible cause.
“The world science fiction convention coevolved with fan-run volunteer conventions in societies where there’s a general expectation of the rule of law and most people abide by social norms irrespective of enforcement. “
Link. The esoteric and obscure Hugo Disaster of 2024 has many lessons for the world.
Pre-Industrial Societies: what was special?
Link. I liked DeLong’s brief list. I am very glad I did not live in these societies.
Stolen Device Protection for iPhone: Password access requires biometric authentication, passcode won’t work
Link. You can turn off SDP at home but not when out. There are times biometrics doesn’t work for me so I’m a bit wary of this.
Former GOP establishment leader and Never Trumper: “I wasn’t just wrong; I was completely, embarrassingly wrong.”
Link. Wrong about the GOP. It wasn’t the party he thought it was.
Gene therapy for 5% of inherited deafness in children: “one-time therapy delivers a functional copy of that gene to the inner ear during a surgical procedure”
Link. Chinese study, replicated in other centers.
“because of a mistake, the removal and re-installation of the door plug in Renton was never entered in the computer system”
Link. Boeing error. No signoff was done. Whistleblowers everywhere. Boeing workers are very angry.
Americans are working too hard.
Fani Willis and Trump Georgia prosecution.
Link. A good overview. She’s toast.
Serious bugs fixed in macOS Sonoma 14.3
Link. Might be the good release?
“we lack the infrastructure to return to a mass military, whether it’s staffed by conscription or traditional recruitment”
Link. It’s not 1939 and it’s not the Great Depression. Democracies with stable economies are not able to do mass military. See also Israel.
Canada overwhelmed by grad student immigrants, lowers visa cap by a third.
Link. “…. about 40%, of foreign students come from India, with China coming in second with about 12%…”
China I understand. Xi seems to hate Canada, but he is sending China’s finest to support Canada. India’s flow is interesting.
“Hamas’s tunnel network has been found to be far more extensive than previous IDF estimates, spanning over 300 miles in the south alone”
Link. It appears Israel did not exaggerate Hamas tunnels the way the US invented Taliban/al Qaeda tunnels.
“NYT is using the open source Ruffle as their Flash emulator”
Link. Archival Flash lives.
Bug: Ventura and Monterey updated to Sonoma unwillingly
Link. “Some macOS 13 Ventura and macOS 12 Monterey users are being upgraded to macOS 14 Sonoma after dismissing notifications that encourage an upgrade”
“what the AARO discovered was a web of governmental leaders who believed in bizarre conspiracy theories and were willing to spend taxpayer dollars on it”
Link. Congress flying saucer fans. Not all are GOP. “taxpayer money was being inappropriately spent on paranormal research at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah,”
Sonoma 14.3: Oakley likes the update.
Link. Makes me cautiously optimistic.
COU: Macintosh 128K to the M3: “With SIMD, registers are packed with more than one number at a time, and the multiply instruction works on them all at the same time.”
Link. Review of how computers got faster over the decades. Using Apple’s Accelerate library requires careful coding.
China screwed the Hugo awards. Uganda has next set.
Link. Scalzi is cautious but doesn’t leave a lot of doubt about what China did.
We can’t do international awards any more.
Boeing 1990s: “allow Boeing to follow “all the other industrial sectors in the United States to industrialization and outsourcing and globalization.”
Link. Software outsourcing killed a lot of 90s companies.
Six Reasons American Drug Prices are High. 🆓
Link. They even mention PBMs. Which need a lot more mentions.
Ackman gives whacked Biden challenger $1 Million and demands DEI policy language disappear.
Link. Gone the next day.
Billionaires lose money on news like everyone else: “The very rich find it very difficult to lose money year over year,” Mr. Doctor said, “even if they can afford it.”
Link. NYT article is quiet about NYT.
Indian courts globally kill Reuters news story about Appin — an Indian cyberhack company.
Link. Did Modi use Appin when his people hacked phones?
Bidenomics failure risks
Link. “Lack of bureaucratic state capacity
Onerous contracting requirements
Permitting, especially NEPA”
Set asides for underserved and other well intentioned restrictions have a terrible track record.
ScreenFloat 2 – macOS screenshots.
Link. I like the floating feature
New York Public Library’s Scholarly Press Backlist Revival Project: “published monographs that are neither in the public domain nor commercially available for the library to purchase or license”
Link. They are moving very carefully.
Meetup death watch begins.
Link. Bending spoons bought them. They are a scammy vendor.
Not receiving SMS two factor authentication codes for Facebook, Instagram, others: remove blocked numbers
Link. SMS authentication is easy but has risks.
Bluesky Adds RSS for public user feeds.
Link. More RSS goodness. I track Jedeed this way.
Feedbin now tries to fix broken feeds.
Link. “Visit your subscriptions page to get started. There will be a notice at the top of the page if Feedbin has detected any broken feeds it can help with”
Fixed 20 for me.
“we’ve reversed almost 40 percent of the rise in one key measure of inequality that took place during the great income divergence from 1979 to 2019.”
Link. I believe inflation made this possible.
“the gap between Black and white unemployment rates is the smallest it has been”
“previously reported increases in maternal mortality rates in the United States were an artifact of changes in surveillance. The pregnancy checkbox, introduced in the revised 2003 death certificate …” 🆓
Link. Watch this space.
Mail carriers mugged for mailbox keys: “Just 14% of attacks lead to an arrest, and even fewer attacks lead to convictions”
Link. Article doesn’t explain why low arrest rate.
7 Guiding Principles for Working with LLMs – Jon Udell
Link. The chorus technique was new to me. He uses ChatGPT and Claude to get cross-validation.
The history of KKK II – 1920s and beyond.
Link. Teen vogue has replaced Time magazine.
CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”
Link. Was HP’s fall similar?
Covid-19 research roundup: Jan 11
Link. 1. Longer delays from symptoms to antigen positive. Don’t know if infectious before antigen positive. Wait 4-5 days before testing?
2. COVID spread maybe unaffected by humidity, temperature?
3. Vaccines are great and probably worthwhile even in teens.
ooh.directory: an index of blogs
Link. Very old web – but still active. A personal index to blogs.
More on Multiple Sclerosis and EBV
Link. “Denmark, in particular, seems to have gone through some population changes so complete and drastic that genocidal conquest comes to mind”
Or a novel disease.
“Perplexity.ai … the best implementation I’ve seen of LLM-assisted search …”
Link. “Perplexity has their own search index now and is running their own crawlers, and they’re using variants of Mistral 7B and Llama 70B …”
India government failure: “The next day, he lodged a police complaint, and investigators soon filed charges. That was 26 years ago.”
Link. A complaint — that 58 people were murdered. Bihar state is probably a worst case. Lots of corruption, a government that manipulates courts and blocks reform. (India is more a coalition of states than a country so presumably varies by state.)
It’s easy to see how SCOTUS could turn into India’s massively corrupt Supreme Court.
Ecuador’s Black woman Attorney General triggered the gangs by arresting the judges and police they owned.
Link. “Ms. Salazar, Ecuador’s first Black attorney general, was appointed in 2019. She prosecuted a former president, Rafael Correa, on corruption charges the next year.”
“bfloat16 was developed as part of Google Brain, and has been adopted quickly over the last couple of years across Intel, AMD and Arm processors”
Link. I learned a lot. 30y ago BYTE magazine would have covered all this. We have no equivalent now.
“The response on Friday from the Houthis, however, was a single anti-ship missile lobbed harmlessly into the Red Sea, far from any passing vessel”
Link. Reports so far suggest very low mortality for such broad attacks.
Oakley’s free macOS utilities.
Link. A gift.
Iran faces grim choices: “neither Moscow nor Beijing came to Tehran’s rescue by vetoing the resolution. Instead they abstained, alongside Algeria and Mozambique”
Link. The Houthi are religious zealots who believe they have a divine mission. Iran’s faux-devout rulers are more pragmatic but have lost control.
CrossFit in my 65th year: Act II
Link. Starting over for a new stage of Oldness.
The misery of switching iPhones: “Many apps required re-entering login credentials, even though I let iOS use the keychain…”
Link. Tsai always describes the truth I see. It really sucks to switch phones. One reason I go 4-5 years.
“Eventually, iMessage did start working, but then a few hours later it spontaneously signed me out…”
The evolution of psilocybin – gastropod mind control.
Link. Fungi flourished when the asteroid whacked T-Rex; that’s when they deployed the psychedelics.
Gaza: “The desperate conditions in Gaza are not an inevitable by-product of war; they are in part the result of political decisions made by the Israeli government”
Link. The Economist is no friend to Hamas.
“Egyptian Red Crescent, which is responsible for aid deliveries at Rafah, is “not competent”. Corruption is rife. Lucrative goods disappear from warehouses while expired ones are delivered to Gaza”