Link. I think maybe we can cheat and bike or run on rest days? Rest days are a problem for people who enjoy CrossFit.
Cory Doctorow got scammed: “credit unions across America were being hit by this scam, by fraudsters who somehow knew CU customers’ phone numbers and names, and which CU they banked at”
Link. If you run a good scam a hundred thousand times you can hit the right coincidences to deceive even the most alert.
“winter season has warmed more than 5 degrees on average in Minnesota since 1970”
Link. I suspect Minnesotans are secretly in favor of global warming.
Bluesky compares its federation approach to Mastodon.
Link. I think Bluesky has no equivalent to defederation and the Mastodon model of server-centric moderation.
Spotlight’s terminal utilities.
Link. Some of these seem worth exploring.
Perplexity.ai technology
Link. “RAG pairs generative AI with a “retriever” that can find and then reference specific data from a vector database, which is passed to the “generator” to produce a response.”
A lot of AI tech is open source.
“LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites”
Link. Gibson has said Neuromancer takes place in 2035.
Oklahoma enlists social warfare terrorist: “Raichik was appointed to the Oklahoma Library Media Advisory Committee by Republican schools superintendent Ryan Walters”
Link. I think the word “terrorist” is appropriate. Raichik resembles Klan publicists of a century ago. She wants to terrorize the vulnerable.
iCloud throttles data syncing based on local behavior.
Link. A reason why sync can stop working. Turning on/off doesn’t help.
Google AI creating black Nazis: “[Devs] … were just automatically adding text to every image prompt, specifying that people in the image should be “diverse” — which the AI interpreted as meaning “nonwhite”.
Link. “Ernst Renan, in his essay “What is a Nation?”, argues that intentional forgetting is an essential part of nationhood.”
Montelukast (Singulair) psychiatric side-effects get more worrisome.
Link. It’s a popular med for kids with asthma .
JavaScript Bloat in 2024: “we are shipping ~150,000 lines of code. With every website! Sometimes just to show static content!”
Link. Humanity is done. Let the AIs take over now.
Michael Tsai Apple Report 2024: “Everything on macOS, and to a lesser extent iOS, still feels buggy: the same old bugs that never get fixed, plus some new ones. Bug reports are ignored.”
Link. Only Tsai lives in my world. All the other Mac names live in a much better universe.
FedEx in league with scammers. Teaches customers to click phishing links.
Link. Defacto alliance. Also they are so dead.
OnlyFan for girls: “In 2022, Instagram launched paid subscriptions, which allows followers to pay a monthly fee for exclusive content and access.”
Link. Mothers illegally featuring their daughters under their account. Inevitable once Instagram decides d this.
How Google killed its host: “A lot of the top ranked sites for air purifiers are once-great magazines that have been bought and enshittified by private equity giants, like Popular Science”
Link. Parasites are supposed to take just enough so that the host can recover.
“Gresham’s Law: “Bad money drives out good”
Post-covid cognitive issues correlate with less secure blood-brain barrier.
Link. Needs more work but I like this theory. I suspect it’s not COVID specific.
“Campbell added that it was possible people with a tighter blood-brain barrier might be better protected from brain fog should they develop long Covid, explaining why the symptom did not arise in all patients.”
In other words a less tight BBB may be a preexisting condition (genetic?) that makes post-viral neurological dysfunction more likely. So not due to COVID but a variation that makes brain more susceptible to COVID (or other viral) injury.
“conspiring with a network of associates to traffic nuclear materials from Burma to other countries”
Link. “A U.S. nuclear forensic laboratory later analyzed the samples and confirmed that the samples contain uranium and weapons-grade plutonium.” Burma?!
For Iran.
A journalist infiltrate’s the anti-woke proto-university’s summer meetup.
Link. Students all do computer science.
CDC leaked memo on COVID isolation: sensible, needs good communication.
Link. Excellent review. The available antigen tests are probably not very helpful any more.
Get vaccinated. If vulnerable wear a good mask, if sick with a respiratory disease wear a good mask.
AI-generated muzak.
Link. I haven’t seen this in WaPo yet but it’s the obvious point of entry.
Interpol abused: “Belarus and Turkey, … have turned Interpol’s database of lost and stolen passports into a weapon to harass dissidents …”
Link. In general Interpol has responded well to abuses including oversight for bad actors. India and Russia are problematic.
As LLMs scale are new capabilities truly discontinuities or are they built from many smaller improvements?
Link. Perhaps an effective discontinuous emergence but built on many small improvements. Like human vs simian cognition.
The USB-C connector curse: “Thunderbolt 3 supports PCIe 3.0 x4 and (as a fallback) USB 3.1 Gen 2 for data connections. Thunderbolt 4 extends that with USB4 support.”
Link. “by this stage we know we’re looking for NVMe with PCIe 3.0 x4 as a minimum, over Thunderbolt 3”
Best discussion I have read. Good test of young brains but I give up.
Commercial satellite imaging: “Albedo aims to leap ahead by imaging objects as small as 10 centimeters”
Link. A person is a fuzzy dot but it will resolve cars and truck beds.
New biology – The Obelisks.
Link. “small RNA species, hitherto unknown, that seem to be colonizing bacteria in the human oral mucosa and gut. These things are a bit like viroids, which are circular RNA species that are pathogens in plant species, but they have no sequence relationships with any known viroid.”
From a preprint. Remnants of the primeval RNA world? Able to cause disease?
Korea, Japan and China: Immigration needed, Africa only source
Link. “China will need at least a hundred million immigrants in the next generation just to care for [boomers, Gen X] … the only major long-term provider of immigrants for East Asia may be Africa, where birth rates have stayed high and economic growth is not keeping up.”
“There will be another chance for Russia sooner or later, and another after that if they mess it up again. And one day there will be statues of Alexei Navalny in Moscow.”
Link. Even Putin is not immortal.
CEO on OpenAI expectation reset: “In a decade, he said, it should be “pretty remarkable.”
Link. That’s better than I’d hoped. It suggests ChatGPT 5 is not looking great. (Slower is better)
Apple Support: “If your iPhone or accessory is wet”
Link. Managing the liquid warning and general wetness. Don’t use rice. (I like the drying agent packs – no rice particle problems.)
What Is a Species? “He estimates that it takes about six million years of diverging evolution for two groups of frogs to become unable to interbreed”
Link. It’s a continuum of course.
Apple’s versioning system really only works locally on macOS.
Link. Google would not have this problem but Apple is device-centric not cloud-centric.
Muse: Story of a failed tool for idea development.
Link. No mention of lock-in and exit strategies for a subscription tool. That’s a killer for me.
The most interesting part of story is the marketing experience. About mid essay.
“Can your Rivian handle the melee attacks of the Byzantine Emperor’s Catalan mercenaries?”
Link. You need a cybertruck.
Putin’s genocidal myth – Timothy Snyder: “the territories of that medieval Viking state, Kyivan Rus — much of Ukraine, all of Belarus, some of northeastern Russia by today’s boundaries — should belong to Sweden”
Link. Via Laura Jedeed’s newsletter. Read for the history of the region and the ideology of Putinism.
IRS reform: “The gains in revenue come from shifting resources away from auditing welfare recipients to targeting the wealthy…”
Link. GOP opposition understandable.
China EV avoiding import restrictions: “They have been taking advantage of a policy that allows used cars to be sold abroad without the authorization of carmakers: Traders register new cars in China …”
Link. The tsunami is coming.
Gruber: “iOS support for RCS is all about China”
Link. “when the CCP says device makers must jump to sell their products in China, Apple asks “How high?”
Helicopters good: “Nine in 10 parents rate their relationships with their young adult children as good or excellent, and so do eight in 10 young adults”
Link. As a boomer with Gen Z kids being so involved in their adult life has been mostly good but also very weird. My parents and I got along well, but I never looked to them for advice (though I should have). Our kids still haven’t turned off location sharing.
American torture and the Bali bombing prosecution.
Link. Since America can imprison foreign suspects until they die I wouldn’t consider this a refutation of the GWB torture program. Torture remains popular with many Americans.
Use an old Mac for household Time Machine backups.
Link. I use Synology for networked TM but my Monterey MacBook could do this.
iOS Assistive Access: “allows people with cognitive disabilities to use iPhone with greater ease and independence.”
Link. I don’t think my son would go for this but I might ask him to test it. I’m pleased Apple is making this effort.
Carlson, Walter Duranty of the New York Times, and Nazi broadcaster Lord Haw-Haw.
Link. Wishing to be special. To be meaningful. To be important.
“OpenAI is reportedly developing a search app that would directly compete with Google Search, according to The Information on Wednesday”
Link. Google took a bad road. They need 40 days in the desert.
“Air Canada suggests the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions.”
Link. They lost in court. But I would not be surprised if the future legal framework for an AI is an extension of corporate entity law.
China’s middle class losing faith in China: “They started leaving comments on an innocuous post about giraffe conservation on the official Weibo social media account of the U.S. Embassy in China.”
Link. Chinese stocks are falling (as happens) — and the government isn’t propping them up. Investing indirectly in US index funds.
And emigrating. To Canada, of course.
Somebody actually took the time to review Apple News. The result is as expected.
Link. Just shoot it.
How to be a successful tech consultant.
Link. “schedule a 90-minute meeting with the most senior (Individual Contributor) engineer that you have on your team… What is fucked up about this place?”
(Author has a feed that I now follow)
Gates, Nov 2023: “Android, iOS, and Windows are all platforms. Agents will be the next platform.”
Link. I think Bill Gates really does believe this. I don’t think what is coming is so predictable.
CDC faces reality: “isolation guidelines that would treat the coronavirus the same as flu and RSV, with additional precautions for people at high risk”
Link. “Workers without sick leave and those who can’t work from home if they or their children test positive and are required to isolate bore a disproportionate burden”