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.
Afghan drought: “She has a fresh scar on her stomach from the kidney extraction, but the family’s debt is still only half paid. “They asked me for this daughter…”
Link. Afghanistan had a population explosion in 70s I think. Many trees cut down.
Prehistoric idyll: “Sausage-shaped globs found in the settlement’s murky sediment turned out to be fossils of dog and human feces, many flush with eggs from fish tapeworms and giant kidney worms”
Link. 850 B.C Britain, wetland life.
Call center nursing AI – “Hippocratic promotes how it can undercut real human nurses, who can cost $90 an hour, with its cheap AI agents that offer medical advice to patients over video calls in real-time.”
Link. Don’t worry, if this ever worked we’d be at AGI and everything would be fair game.
Oil execs say we will use oil forever and we need to stop hoping for better.
Link. They need to get oil and gas out of the ground NOW – before value crashes. So they need to say this even if they believe the 2030 prediction.
At some point somebody blinks and pumps like mad.
Learnings from social media: AI near term risks and mitigations.
Link. Nathan Sanders author. This is the best, by far, near term risk summary I’ve read. Should inform regulation. Recommended.
“One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child”
Link. Prominent in the Old Testament.
“SNAP varied greatly even among people without schizophrenia, suggesting that SNAP could be involved in cognitive differences in healthy humans”
Link. Down’s syndrome would be good to look at. The cognitive decline there is heartbreaking.
Google Scholar PDF Reader – enhanced reading of scientific papers. Chrome extension.
Link. Sounds pretty nice! It’s weird to have an interesting new product from Google.
Sonoma 14.4 discards saved file versions when file evicted to iCloud Drive.
Link. Presumably a bug.
Havana Syndrome: “intelligence analysts now believe the symptoms are most likely explained by environmental factors, existing medical conditions or stress.”
Link. Not a top secret spy tool. However there’s still possibility of a sub-group that has something different going.
“compute needed to achieve a given level of AI ability is halving every 5 to 14 months, as opposed to 24 months for Moore’s Law.”
Link. I remain persuaded by the original 1990s concept of the “singularity”.
Productivity growth of the 1990s
Link. The American 1990s were good at the time, but even better in retrospect. Stock markets did go bonkers late in the decade though.
“Claude 3 is likely to freak you out most in conversation … GPT-4 is pleasantly neutral and has the most complete feature set, and Gemini often gives the most accessible answer”
Link. Good review of current state including advantages of larger working memory.
We will learn within 6 months if progress is slowing.
“you could purchase 16,000 Sunflowers for the cost of one F-35A”
Link. USAF is fighting the last war.
Evangelicals unsurprisingly corruptible: “raunchy, outsider, boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump”
Link. Satan has always found Evangelicals easy pickings. It’s almost unsporting really.
“it’s hard to remain fiercely loyal to a figure like Mr. Trump without being changed by him”
“iCloud Links automatically expire after 30 days, but you can stop sharing them sooner.”
Link. I think the images are uploaded to storage outside the photo library.
Swedenborgian — St Paul’s Virginia Street Church “he became able to experience the afterlife while still conscious andfunctioning in this world, and had spiritual experiences daily for 29 years.”
Link. Cult was hot in the 1920s! Church is still active I think. MSP has a lot of older cults.
Human jobs in an AGI World: comparative advantage? “compute is a producer-specific constraint on AI, similar to constraints on Marc’s time in the example above”
Link. Within this context I feel like there would also a Baumol effect on labor wages.
I doubt that world will be so predictable.
Iceland: “the space between the plates is so narrow that it’s possible to reach out and touch both North America and Europe at the same time”
Link. You need SCUBA gear.
Things the NYT totally fails at: “Trump recently promised in Richmond, VA to block federal funding to any school with a mask or vaccine mandate.”
Link. Vaccine mandates are common. He’s been promising this for a year. The NYT has never mentioned it. Sulzberger is a problem.
“The proton’s core features pressures more intense than in any other known form of matter … 10 times the pressure at the heart of a neutron star”
Link. There’s a long way to the Planck length.
“researchers … exploiting a peculiar way in which pairs of photons, particles of light, can imitate a graviton… “
The creation of GPS (part of a series on map history): “everything changed on September 1, 1983 when a Korean Airlines 747 jumbo jet en route from Anchorage to Seoul strayed into Soviet airspace”
Link. Recommend read.
“universe appears to be expanding at bafflingly different speeds depending on where we look”
Link. Unexpected.
Trust loss during pandemic: “It’s sometimes hard for people to know who is a straight shooter and who is an activist.”
Link. Some physicians active on social media are heavily invested in narratives that are possible but well supported by evidence. They use dramatic publications that are not representative and they often skew results to favor their strong beliefs. They get a lot of attention. The process of knowledge consensus in science is uglier than civilians used to think.
TikTok: “exactly the kind of influence campaign which, in the hands of a foreign adversary in a moment of national peril, could sow chaos and discord and division”
Link. TikTok demonstrated its power to algorithmically target children. US Representatives were impressed.
Also, the House GOP has more capable people than I had imagined.
“… Modi used law enforcement agencies to extort businesses into filling its coffers”
Link. India’s corruption is institutionalized.
Apple’s very expensive App Store security -> scam Bitcoin Wallet
Link. “… app was previously reported at least 12 days ago as a scam but its still up there, #1 search result.”
I hope the EU makes applesauce.
Gluteal pain in discogenic sciatica — role of the “piriformis”?
Link. Why not both?
Biden advice to a boy who stutters – after Trump: “But remember — look at me — you’re smart, you’re handsome, you know what you’re doing.”
Link. Biden’s childhood experience with bullies is helpful here. I hope Trump continues to mock Biden’s stutter. I think it will not serve Trump well.
“High growth and large decline in inequality have combined to eliminate poverty in India for the PPP$ 1.9 poverty line.”
Link. There’s immense poverty still, but it’s not the India I saw in 1982. The world improves.
Tsai: “Neither Apple nor Google has a monopoly, as normally defined, but there’s not enough competition to make them do right by customers and developers.”
Link. When switching costs are prohibitive vendors achieve competition free zones.
Regulators should focus on reducing switching costs. Ex: Photo Library migration with lossless edits managed, metadata preserved.
“Many cartoonists work in a hybrid of old and new: they draw in black ink, scan, and then digitally apply color and lettering.”
Link. Essay based on a book about cartoon art. For cartoonists the big tech breakthrough was not the stylus, it was the scanner.
“national office market lost $664.1 billion in value from 2019 to 2022”
Link. Look for a huge construction boom as fairly new office buildings are demolished to create residential spaces and parks.
CrossFit box on 9th floor? Climbing gym in the elevator?
If the mobster is president: “placing a bad tax bill in the same category as internment camps for undocumented immigrants undermines the case against internment camps”
Link. Organizing a non-violent and persistent national campaign to salvage American democracy. We can do better than Hungary.
Or we can reelect Joe Biden. Which is much better for everyone, including conservatives.
Viktor Orban of Hungary: a primer on how to destroy a democracy.
Link. GOP darling. The voters of Hungary did not love their democracy enough. Orban won the final fair election in Hungary.
I don’t think Americans are much smarter, but even 1% smarter may suffice.
The evolution of mitochondrial and related cellular apoptosis.
Link. Bacteria may commit suicide so their kin can feast on the corpse. Rather like children.
Also mitochondria are likely not only bacterial symbiont in eukaryotic history.
ALS Drug Fails: “patient advocacy groups took victory laps after Relyvrio was approved, and they were a big part of the pressure that made the FDA reverse its initial correct decision”
Link. Desperation does not make good choices.
Roku hacked, data use for fraudulent charges, 2 month notification delay. Never buy Roku.
Link. Don’t buy anything from Roku and never give any TV access to your WiFi.
Fidelity Investments Life Insurance complete data beach via Infosys McCamish
Link. “names, states of residence, Social Security numbers, bank accounts and routing information, and dates of birth were obtained during the breach.”
McCamish is probably how Fidelity outsources risk so their deep pockets are safe. I hope the lawsuits are able to breach that firewall. I look forward to future loss of all assets.
Manage your Mac’s battery for endurance and lifespan
Link. Just let the OS handle it. You can leave it plugged in. BUT stored devices need charging every 6m.
Desktop & Documents Folders in iCloud Drive: evaluation.
Link. Howard didn’t see technical bugs but some of the processes terrify users. He doesn’t mention impact on local network share.
macOS Sonoma 14.4 USB bug: “If you have not installed the 14.4 update yet, you should wait until Apple issues an update to fix this problem”
Link. In a just world Apple would need to give customers a report on how this passed QA.
“aside from chimps and humans, researchers have found clear evidence of menopause in only five species — all of them whales”
Link. For most animals evolution favors dying once eggs stop. In menopause species selection extends life beyond egg failure. Male lifespan extension is presumably a side-effect and they don’t live as long.
“Female elephants … stay fertile into their 60s”
“international network of online groups that have targeted thousands of children with a sadistic form of social media terror”
Link. “seek out children with mental health issues and blackmail them into hurting themselves on camera,”
If 1/100,000 of humanity is this broken that’s 80,000 people worldwide. They have always been with us, but enabling technologies give global reach and relative impunity. The same enabling technologies provide a rich pool of vulnerable people.