Link. Religion is a plague.
In the Netflix age it took a broadcast TV drama to bring some justice to victims of a UK bureaucracy.
Link. “However brilliant the journalism is, it maybe appeals to your intellect, to your head … drama is designed to appeal to your heart …”
The bureaucrats were righteous I am sure.
“variants that raise the risk of multiple sclerosis, for example, became steadily more common among the Yamnaya”
Link. Metabolic syndrome in Northern Europe.
Gas station and smoke shop drugs: “Tianeptine, which also appears as a concentrated powder or an ingredient in products such as Tianaa, Zaza and Pegasus”
Link. “illegally sold with claims to improve brain function and treat anxiety, depression, pain, opioid use disorder and other conditions,”
Delivered to you courtesy of Utah and Orrin Hatch.
Noah Smith’s 2024 tech predictions
Link. The battery tech review is the most interesting.
Longevity drugs for dogs.
Link. Interesting way to approach the marketplace. I’m skeptical they will be both safe and effective but the human/dog aging differences suggest room to improve.
“The ‘Auto Unlock with Apple Watch’ feature seems to be somehow related to a background system service that is also responsible for Continuity Camera”
Link. Wireless continuity camera is unreliable.
Minnesota crosswalk law: “Regardless of what the law says, “unmarked” crosswalks are effectively invisible to drivers and dangerous to pedestrians.”
Link. It’s gotten worse. Article doesn’t mention that education and enforcement stopped after riots.
“… in modern times we need to explain the Wolfram Language not just to humans, but also to AIs…”
Link. “for AIs we’re providing a variety of tools—like immediate computable access to documentation, and computable error handling”
Mathematica 14 pivots to non-human users. Wolfram is old, knows AI history, wrote an explainer on LLMs, and has no qualms about using the term “AI”.
Patient blood and tissue samples negative for known pathogens found to contain unknown pathogens and commensals
Link. The next few years should show us a lot more like this. I wonder how many hours of the year our bodies are not engaged in warfare with a virus, bacteria, rogue cell or something else. (Probably zero.)
Science vs MS: “Antibodies that are raised to the 386-405 part of the EBNA1 protein [of EBV] also recognize a particular epitope (amino acids 370-385) of a protein in human glial cells”
Link. The “kissing disease” (mono) virus needs a vaccine.
Why Iowa Went Red: “The movement of young college graduates out of Iowa and the Dakotas to the metropolises of Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul made a mark on the politics of all five states.”
Link. Iowa has great schools but MSP has far more opportunities. It hurts to lose the young.
iPhone shutter sound – why most don’t get it: “Enable Live Photo: If you’re hearing a click, you don’t have this feature turned on,”
Link. If you disable Live Photo you can mute phone but everyone would like the option to turn the damn clicks off.
Supernovae and astronomer happiness. XKCD.
Link. Ends abruptly.
“We depend on the services of Elon Musk, our CEO and Technoking, and we are worried that he isn’t getting enough sleep, if you know what we mean…”
Link. I assume a creative legal team will find many financial opportunities in Musk’s recreation.
“[worm] mitochondria function as cellular walkie-talkies, sending messages throughout the body that influence the survival and life span of the entire organism”
Link. Mitochondria have a peculiar agenda. Wildly speculative but a fun read. My mitochondria wave little white flags.
I suspect humans are already at max lifespan; this effect won’t help us.
“We all know who Donald Trump is. The question we have to answer is: Who are we?” Joe Biden.
Link. We live on the knife edge now.
“Shan offensive may have been just an action to punish local criminal families who ignored a Chinese order to shut down an operation that used enslaved Chinese-speaking Burmese to scam Chinese citizens.”
Link. It’s a big weird world.
Quicken for DOS cannot be recreated: Why we can’t have good personal finance software any more.
Link. “Today’s vendors sell our data to third parties and then market products to us. Vendors have a hard lock-in. This kind of service decay is now known as “enshittification”.
Is it possible to have too many wizards in software development?
Link. I recalled this in the context of 1980s IBM, but I wonder if it’s also true of 2024 Apple.
7 obscure and unusual writing systems.
Link. Mostly thought to represent sounds. The Inca knot language is a debatable inclusion.
NYC after COVID – ask not for whom.
Link. “Take away the holiday tourists and Midtown Manhattan feels sleepy … So many people are working from home, or not working, or not in the city anymore. There are many vacant storefronts around town, and empty building floors …”
I think the same in many cities, especially those with high housing costs. (I wonder if, conversely, Detroit is fine.) The crash in urban real estate prices is going to be painful.
YouTube: “estimated number of actual videos available: currently 13.325 billion”
Link. I was so wrong about YouTube.
Paperless (ReceiptWallet) is gone. A data extractor utility.
Link. Learn from this. All apps die and they want to take your data with them. Often a simple but inferior solution is best.
Ask me about Apple’s Aperture prosumer photo management app.
ChatGPT 4 is Artificial Intelligence.
Link. Mostly I agree, but he’s too quick to assume humans don’t themselves use something like “spicy autocomplete” in their thinking.
Human thinking is not magical.
Microsoft’s MedPrompt article: ChatGPT4 for solving medical problems.
Link. “We believe the general paradigm of combining intelligent few-shot exemplar selection, self-generated chain of thought reasoning steps, and majority vote ensembling can be broadly applied to other problem domains”
They are vague about how they package MedPrompt, I suspect it’s going to be a commercial product.
ChatGPT-4 in medical work: “we show how the composition of several prompting strategies into a method that we refer to as “Medprompt”…
Link. “Surpasses 90% on MedQA dataset for the first time
Achieves top reported results on all nine benchmark datasets in the MultiMedQA suite”
Some naive folk still think ChatGPT4 won’t be used by physicians in patient care.
#AI #medicine
Canada finds students: “82 percent of students at Northern College in Timmins are foreign nationals, mostly from India.”
Link. A bit cold, but far fewer shootings.
“goal of attracting 1.45 million immigrants between 2023 and 2025”
Worse than Germany (at war): Japan’s early 20th century brutality was born of deep racism, worship of the Emperor, and a vile culture.
Link. A different evil from the Holocaust, but similar racism and cruelty.
All cultures can go this way. We see the modern American seeds in Trumpism and the fallen GOP.
“Wargames have repeatedly shown that the U.S. will run out of critical munitions only eight days into a high-intensity conflict with China over Taiwan”
Link. The United States, and Taiwan, need to spend much more on the US military …
“Ukraine is expending between 110,000 155mm shells per month…Even after doubling shell production, the U.S. produces only 28,000 per month…”
Operation Triangulation Details
Link. Everyone wonders if the backdoor was engineered and by whom.
The psychology of the con: “if you accept something as true and you don’t question it anymore, then all kinds of bad decisions and bad outcomes can flow from that” 🆓
Link. “contrarianism might be one of the most overrated signs of intelligence or cleverness” They are easy to fool.
“it’s hard for you to bet better than to pay attention to the credentialed experts”
A journalist tests their 20yo PhD thesis for plagiarism using a costly tool. Is it true everyone does it?
Link. Initially 75% plagiarized but after the required analysis it fell to 0%.
Giant Viruses Are Weird.
Link. Nice review of the weirdness. Very active research area.
Exercise and Prostate Cancer: “12% increased risk of prostate cancer”
Link. Exercise extends lifespan and reduces much cancer risk – except melanoma and prostate CA.
I suspect it’s increased testosterone levels. Or a statistical anomaly.
Florida’s fruitcake surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, goes full anti-COVID vax
Link. DeSantis might get nervous — he will be blamed for Florida’s Covid deaths to come.
“nation-state stuff, absolutely crazy in its sophistication. Kaspersky discovered it, so there’s no speculation as to the attacker.”
Link. US, Russia, China, Israel – so many suspects.
“By 2063, researchers estimate AI could do the job of … an AI researcher”
Link. That is reassuringly far off. In particular, I’ll be dead.
Sizing COVID: “Covid is still claiming at least 1,200 lives per week .. about one-third the toll this time last year and one-eighth that in 2021.”
Link. Smaller but not gone.
macOS Photos.app lethal bug: non-repairable library corruption when click on Shared Album changes for standalone library, “The library could not be opened”
Link. “This is only a dull hatred because Apple’s Aperture migration fiasco killed my hate glands.”
“unshakeable composure displayed by the flight attendants combined with the high level of cooperation among passengers” 🆓
Link. Overhead baggage stayed closed.
“A subsequent January 1 complaint brought the number of plagiarism examples up to 47. This covered about half of all Gay’s published work”
Link. From the New Republic.
“For years it’s been clear that Harvard … treat plagiarism as a minor offense when it’s committed by faculty or administrators and a major offense when it’s committed by undergraduate”
Gaza hospital: “American intelligence agencies obtained information that Hamas fighters had evacuated the complex days before the multiday operation, destroying documents and electronics as they left, the senior intelligence official said.”
Link. Unsurprisingly the staff lied. (Probably wise, they’d have been killed otherwise).
Compounding pharmacies are selling risky versions of semaglutide (Ozempic).
Link. They are on the border of illegal. Article explains the chemistry.
MPLS crime: “… car jackings are nearly cut in half”
Link. Car jackings have stayed up even as other violent crime fell. So this is great news.
Evolution – from rapid small changes emerges long term stability.
Link. Reconciling “living fossils” with short term rapid adaptation.
“Exchange students, particularly from China, are often targeted in virtual kidnapping cases”
Link. Scammers convince them their families will be harmed unless they disappear … then tell parents they have been kidnapped. Prosecution near impossible. Humans need AI guardians.
2024 – the ship of Theseus
Link. XKCD classic
US history: “The past was worse, and conflict has always been the norm.”
Link. The early 90s were pretty good (after Fall of Iron Curtain + PC payoff) but the 70s were really bad. Before that – all bad. (And 90s were when GOP died)
Mutants On Demand: “numerous strains of ornamental plants and food crops derive from deliberate radiation-induced mutations” 🆓
Link. Fascinating essay.