Link. Wouldn’t WordPress plugins have similar issues?
American torture: more details emerge in trial. 🆓
Link. A story of both American brutality and some compassion on the side. (Note CIA illegally destroyed their torture videos.)
The Cheney/Bush torture program was quite popular with Americans after 9/11.
Review of SMS spam filtering solutions: “I stopped when I found Nomorobo, which was the cheapest and most effective of the commercial apps. AT&T Active Armor is free but ineffective.”
Link. $20 per year. I’ve been using Junkman which does pretty well.
The best discussion I’ve seen to date. Mostly dealing with political spam — I think carriers are forbidden to block some of it.
Cosmic Dawn: discover of merging quasars supports current model of universe development
Link. “the universe has evolved via frequent mergers of galaxies, which would naturally result in many merging quasar pairs observed throughout the universe.”
Substack and the perils of principal: “I’m inches away from going back. Almost every other creator stayed”
Link. Substack. Twitter. Reddit. Most people just shrug and continue. Sometimes the bad guys win.
Africa rising: in remote regions increasingly educated women get access to discrete contraception.
Link. Nothing bad or dramatic, just continued progress. Gates foundation and UNFPA working away.
“Apple needs more technical authors and fewer engineers if anyone, including its own staff, is to get the best from macOS and its sister operating systems.”
Link. “macOS Sequoia brings radical changes that somehow escaped presentation at WWDC … lack of documentation fills me with deep and growing despair”
The Tim Cook era.
Next-Generation Apple CarPlay analysis.
Link. Smells like another product failure.
NYT investigation of Rafah strike: “Israel had failed to take adequate care to safeguard civilians.“
Link. Relevant to ICC investigations. The conclusion is deeply buried in the article.
The love of Gazans for Hamas may be overestimated by American students. 🆓 (gift link)
Link. “group and its leaders have remained broadly unpopular in the enclave. More Gazans have even been willing to speak out against Hamas, risking retribution.”
There was one election then Hamas ended elections.
India: “voters received calls from their local representatives to discuss local issues—except the leader on the other end of the phone was an AI impersonation”
Link. Lots of interesting lessons.
Facebook study: “flagged misinformation reduced intention to vaccinate by 0.05% per user, while unflagged vaccine-skeptical content reduced it by 2.3%”
Link. Flagged misinformation is not main problem now. Fox not mentioned specifically but Murdoch is a famed serial killer.
“Make headlines better” is key recommendation. Most Americans never get past the headline.
“The new Photos interface reminds me of the TV and Music stores, which are among my least favorite Apple designs”
Link. Horizontal scrolling. Damn kids.
Still more secret Harlan trips for Thomas: “revelation underlined the extent to which Justice Thomas has relied on the generosity of his friends over the years and the consistency with which he declined to report those ties.”
Link. Consistency counts for something.
Alito on US politics: “there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised”
Link. Religious things.
“Can Apple Rescue the Vision Pro?”
Link. No. Big fail. Try again in 10 years.
“today I barely use the Vision Pro at all … it sits on a shelf collecting dust.”
“modern battlefields like Ukraine are being dominated by Chinese-made products”
Link. We have relearned how quickly nations can go insane. Xi has been a catastrophe. The economic consequences will hurt everyone.
PFAS and 3M’s 90’s management failure: an externality analysis.
Link. Reminds me of Philip Morris.
“increased open research funded or fostered by government could reduce information problems.”
This was the era of stock incentives.
A National Review pundit and conservative Christian adopted a Black child. Then he found out …
Link. “they attacked us through our daughter. They pulled pictures of her from social media and photoshopped her into gas chambers and lynchings … To my shame, the racism and extremism within the denomination was invisible to us before our own ordeal …”
Wisdom hits hard.
OpenAI Voice Engine goal: “Phasing out voice based authentication as a security measure for accessing bank accounts and other sensitive information”
Link. I think Fidelity still promotes voice auth
Situational Awareness: “Leopold [Aschenbrenner] sets out his vision of how AI is going to transform civilization over the next 5-10 years”
Link. Links to free PDF that is readable on iPhone if good eyes. I’ll be browsing it.
Felonious Trump: Jedeed has the best summary and analysis.
Link. Agree on all points. Dumb crime, bad precedent, huge corruption in politics dwarfs this, GOP already insane so their threats are laughable.
Tsai’s – WWDC 2024 Wish Lists.
Link. All good things. I wish for bug fixes, I despair for Photos.app improvements.
Readdle wants Calendars 5 users to go subscription.
Link. Bit much corporate BS for basically going subscription.
Inflammatory Bowel Disease: “tweaking ETS2 to be more active could make macrophages in the lab resemble the ones seen in IBD patients.” 🆓
Link. “when they looked at the genetic make-up of IBD patients, they found that 95% of patients in their sample carried at least one copy of a specific enhancer variant that seems to boost ETS2 activity…
… MEK inhibitors, should be able to quiet down the inflammation triggered by ETS2”
If it holds up … it’s big.
34 trillion national debt: “To the extent that debt is a problem, that’s a reflection of political dysfunction, mainly the radicalization of the G.O.P.”
Link. “It’s a political problem, not an economic crisis.”
France, Feb 6 1934: “When a parliamentary commission was established to investigate the events of Feb. 6, Republican Federation leaders sabotaged the investigation at each step”
Link. Great history with usual eerie parallels but I’m most interested in why it only surfaces now.
“Modi’s whole point is that he is not an ordinary person: he is the Chosen One, although God has not let Modi in on his grand plan.”
Link. Modi is a loon.
Breaking the RoboForm Password Manager: “If you knew the date and time and other parameters, you could compute any password that would have been generated on a certain date and time in the past.”
Link. There are no bugs in 1Password happily.
Incompetent Israeli gov influence operation on Twitter: “ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, was used to generate many of the posts”
Link. “FakeReporter, an Israeli misinformation watchdog, identified the effort in March …
… accounts with profile photos of Black men posted about being a “middle-aged Jewish woman.” …
… On its LinkedIn page, Stoic has promoted its ability to run campaigns backed by A.I … [later removed]”
Targeted specific NY legislators. I wonder how good the posts were.
“Apple Watch shipments declined 19.1% year over year while hearables including AirPods and Beats declined 18.8% during the quarter.”
Link. The Watch is not a good product. Battery life is too short for a sports watch. (Vs Garmin). I suspect most sold are no longer worn — and word gets out.
AirPods decline is interesting though.
Swift at 10: “less ambitious project that actually tried to be Objective-C without the C, rather than a more static mega language”
Link. He likes much of Swift. A careful and fair review after his usual roundup.
“We therefore call upon advanced AI companies to commit to these principles”
Link. Won’t happen but whistleblower protections could be expanded to cover notification of health risks including AI risks.
Cruise ship: “My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall”
Link. Some people like cruise ships. They should not read this.
“nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available”
Link. “There were 3.9 million websites in China in 2023, down more than a third from 5.3 million in 2017,
China’s web is dying too.
“An estimated 77 million Americans have a criminal record of some kind”
Link. Even if it’s 50 million that is insane.
Trump’s Apprentice con: “I signed an expansive nondisclosure agreement that promised a fine of $5 million and even jail time if I were to ever divulge what actually happened. It expired this year.”
Link. I signed an expansive nondisclosure agreement that promised a fine of $5 million and even jail time if I were to ever divulge what actually happened. It expired this year.
“Although very few programs are out-and-out fake, there is deception at play in every single reality program”
“The average webpage on the internet is so random and terrible it’s not even clear how prior LLMs learn anything at all.”
Link. Aka the “Common Crawl”. The ad-funded web is toast.
“the 1862 Morrill Act, perhaps the most economically momentous legislation in our history, required states to establish land grant colleges”
Link. Great essay on the economics of education and a new MN Dem benefit.
“Learn how to request your health insurance claim file, which can include details about what your insurer is saying about you and your case.”
Link. “Visit our free Claim File Helper tool, where you can generate a PDF of your request letter”
Propublica.
Modern LLM training: human experts employed to generate content that’s not on the web
Link. Proprietary sadly.
Inside the Decision to Kill Iran’s Qassem Soleimani
Link. A very bad man killed.
Pizza glue: Google discovers the web it built and fed on is shitty now.
Link. “there wasn’t much out there on the web that answered those queries … “data void” or “information gap,” these glaring holes of high-quality content that Google searches for ended up being filled with satirical content”
The information rich web was destroyed by Google’s business model.
Kagi is profitable, becomes public benefit company.
Link. “With Kagi, for the first time in history of search engines, you are the customer and everything is built around you and your needs alone.”
“Apple now requires that the MacBook Pro be mailed in to Apple for battery replacement”
Link. Really stupid
Weird sec Anglerfish Rule the World: “the dark zone amounts to more than 97 percent of the planetary space inhabited by living things”
Link. Puny humans.
Tsai roundup, tech monopolies: “the Apple-Google duopoly must provide APIs that allow third parties to thrive” is the real thing the EU should’ve focused on.”
Link. Photos.mac should use only PhotoKit API. SOMEBODY could do a FAR better version of Photos.mac
iCloud Limits: “Total number of places in Favorites: 100” (Apple Maps)
Link. I have over 100 Google Maps “favorites”
WW III: Russia and China, led by mad emperors, prepare to end the West.
Link. Taiwan and Estonia. The west does not have the capacity to deter. (If I were Taiwan I’d build nuclear weapons.)
LLM “training” and user data: how can static models learn?
Link. The models are static data so they don’t learn from user data — but user engagement may be used to tune interaction layers outside the models. It’s obscure.