Link. Current LLMs may be most useful for writing code. The cost of writing a GPT-3 class LLM is less than a new car and they run on smartphones. Nobody is talking about how to get beyond GPT-4.

Link. Oakley is keen on the M3.

Link. By “mainstream media” he means WaPo and NYT. He is absolutely correct.

If our democracy does those two papers and their publishers will have blood on their hands.

Link. A paeon to a movie that started small and became huge.

Link. 2022, probably reopened post-COVID

Link. We didn’t worry about climate change, just nuclear war.

Link. Hardcore computer science work.

Link. Goal is to add 500k homes without changing the look and feel of NYC.

Link. HCR writes the obituary.

“today’s Republicans advocate a strong government that imposes religious rules on society”

Link. Protosterol molecular “fossils” can last billions of years but were thought bacterial. Gap filled.

Link. No Homo erectus though.

Link. I’m a Stross fan but I think Noah has the better argument.

Link. Good to know.

Link. COVID research is teaching us that many diseases are more harmful than we thought. COVID just happened all at once in large numbers.

“after adjusting for multiple testing, only loss of smell was significantly more common at 18 months”

Link. 2024 optimism.

Link. ChatGPT is involved. Via Charlie Stross a master hacker shows off.

Link. Sometimes the stereotype has a basis.

Link. “Apple-only ADJUST TrueType font instruction. This instruction had existed since the early nineties before a patch removed it.”

Link. Suicide is higher. Hypochondriasis is a mental health disorder and they flock together.

Link. Free link. The only useful article on the war I’ve seen. The tunnel systems do seem to be real and extraordinary.

Even is the survey is unreliable Hamas is likely less popular than I had expected. I wonder if they acted from desperation.

Link. “Substack nets me a little over $7000 a year … that’s 7 months of rent for me and a significant percentage of what I make in a year”

If you free subscribe now you will be notified of her new home.

Link. Private equity is a plague.

Link. Reducing lung damaging aerosol emissions may be shifting projections to the high end.

Link. It’s a good list but I think the “human extinction” thing is dubious and/or misleading.

“US citizens or permanent residents with permanent disabilities can get a free lifetime pass to US National Parks (and other federal lands).”

Link. TikTok should be killed.

Link. Vet care got more expensive and less available, unsterilized dogs had puppies. Many adopted with little dog experience. Shelter stress is abating now.

“Taking dogs on temporary outings or fostering them for a night or two can increase their odds of adoption by up to 1,400 percent … organizations are often able to provide financial or material assistance so households don’t have to surrender their pets.”

Link. I didn’t realize Apple collaborated with Parallels. At the moment this is mostly of interest to devs; Windows 11 ARM on Apple silicon is far too slow to be useful.

Link. Jon Udell makes the case for small communities.

Link. The Korean War stalemate is unlikely to be repeated for many reasons.

Link. Musk aims to fix that bug. Such an idiot.

Link. The placenta uses a heightened local immune response strategy to protect the vulnerable infant. Other tissues do not seem to do this, but …

“chronic low-level inflammation in the brain may keep infections under control”

Link. The main reason to upgrade to Sonoma is a secret.

Link. A simple model but insightful.

Link. But anything more specific is imagination. We can’t say much about growth or any change over time.

Link. Because Biden won.

Link. They got caught because the false positives were disproportionately Black but the root problem was incompetence. We should expect the same incompetence everywhere.

Link. Between 2000 and 2021. Higher than I’d have guessed. Shifts probability COVID was an escape. (Bayes of course)

Link. It went surprisingly well.

Link. Another day, another assassination. This time a particularly deserving person.

Link. So much is coming out. I’m sure there is even worse we’ve yet to hear.

Link. They bought DejaNews long ago. Sad but unsurprising.

“Much of the content being disseminated via Usenet today is binary (non-text) file sharing, which Google Groups does not support, as well as spam.”

It’s time to bury Usenet.

Link. “creating a system that more evenly distributes migrants and the costs of receiving them.”

Model for US?

Link. The foundation for when the crisis becomes obvious even to Fox.

“2020 decision to cut the sulphur dioxide content in the fuel emissions of 60,000 merchant ships from 3.5% to only 0.5% would lead to cloudless skies and a big jump in sunlight reaching the surface”

Link. “youth unemployment could be as high as 46.5 percent” This is bad news.

“The country is stuck in the ‘middle income trap’, with per capita GDP around $10,000, and nobody has a plan to do anything about it.”

Link. Apple could have explained this years ago. Oakley considers whether this caching is wise but it is, after all, a feature not a bug.

Link. I’m surprised it took two weeks for me to learn of this.

Link. Credit card companies sell your data for real money.

Link. There’s no way to control these last-gen AIs, they are open source. As new chips and techniques evolve your dishwasher will come with an AI; and the AIs will communicate with one another, including escalating tasks when a user is dissatisfied with the local response.

Don’t worry, there’s no way to get ready for what’s coming.

Link. If this is real it’s presumably due to Toxoplasma gondii though the mechanism is very unclear. We really do need to get rid of that parasite.

Link. “They put us in a trick bag, and we almost can’t get out of it, using the Constitution against us.”

It’s because religious groups invaded after-school time. “public schools must open their doors to after-school religious activities on the same basis as any other after-hours activity that school policy permits.”