Link. Will graze earth’s …. Not really. 20k miles away in 2029. But one day we may want to divert it.
Review of Biden tax plan: the good and the bad.
Link. Basic liberal analysis. I mostly agree.
Janky Apple ID Security: Apple IDs being weirdly locked
Link. Did Apple get hacked? Or is it password reuse detected? Michal Tsai roundup.
“Nvidia ranked in the top 10 among stocks lawmakers sold most in 2023.”
Link. I remember a time before stock moves best predicted by lawmaker corruption and criminal insider trading.
Feedbin custom email addresses for reading newsletters as RSS
Link. Can create or deactivate, give each newsletter unique email. They are treated as RSS documents.
“went to the Microsoft Archives, and while they were unable to find the full source code for MT-DOS, they did find MS DOS 4.00, which we’re releasing today”
Link. MT-DOS was a multitasking version not widely released.
The Rise of Large-Language-Model Optimization.
Link. Guest post, good summary of past 30y of web and the hell-web near future from a creator perspective. The good news is unless AI development stalls we only stay in the hell-web for a short time.
“40% of survey respondents said they smoked cigarettes at least weekly before starting a GLP-1 treatment, that number fell to 24% after they started the treatment”
Link. Alcohol and junk food similar. Health aside, big implications for large industries.
“NPR still has an audience of about 42 million … down from an estimated 60 million in 2020”
Link. This NYT article is a mess but the bottom line is that broadcast radio is dying and reduced commuting time hit NPR hard.
Meanwhile the news side is hamstrung by fear of offending the GOP.
“first known nitrogen-fixing organelle within a eukaryotic cell. The organelle is the fourth example in history of primary endosymbiosis”
Link. Eukaryotic cells are built from bacteria.
“nitroplast appears to have evolved about 100 million years ago”
AI Code Assistant: basically it needs a spec.
Link. This is what we used to write with the human dev team – a spec.
The final afflictions of Google Search.
Link. “Google’s finance and advertising teams … actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money”
I use Perplexity.
“Breaking up the tech monopolies is one of the best things we can do for cybersecurity.”
Link. So there’s more competition. Today MSFT can blow off the DoD.
Palantir’s Project Maven has been of little help. And … “The American-made drones that were shipped into Ukraine last year were blown out of the sky with ease…”
Link. When Google left Palantir stepped in. But the “AI” system isn’t yet worth the shells it could buy. Russia is countering fancy American tech pretty well. China sells tech to both sides. US military trying many toys even while dependent on StarLink and Musk.
Short-lived Apple failures.
Link. I remember all but the XL. Add Vision Prp to the list (the Lisa of HMD).
“number of people total in the portion of the park designated for protesters for or against Mr. Trump has never been more than two or three dozen”
Link. If America decides Trump is best forgotten the battle for the future of the GOP will be ferocious.
Levi Coffin: “Four of Coffin’s eight pallbearers were free blacks who had worked with him on the Underground Railroad”
Link. A Wikipedia story worth reading.
H5N1 comes for seal pups: “virus had killed an estimated 17,400 seal pups, more than 95 percent of the colony’s young animals.”
Link. Everyone being cautious, worried about panic mongers.
“In my flu career, we have not seen a virus that expands its host range quite like this”
APFS: Command tools beyond Disk Utility
Link. Essential reference.
Ukraine: “Many Republicans dismissed what the intelligence showed or refused to attend briefings”
Link. Tidbit from tedious article on Johnson. Also Gaetz et al saying they would never fund Ukraine despite the “deal” they promoted.
Facebook and Insta getting out of the political wars: algo and targeting changes.
Link. Algo no longer injects political posts from unfollowed. Bigger: meta not selling voter targeting to campaigns. GOP may try to force FB to restore targeting
Google Reader Shutdown Tidbits: “There have been enough infrastructure changes that the Reader codebase has rotted, and it cannot be pushed to prod anymore.”
Link. From long ago but published 2024. Google knew customers hated the shutdown and it was very unpopular inside Google.
Mac malware and misinformation in the absence of documentation.
Link. Apple forums misleading and wrong advice. Apple needs to document.
Housing crunch in EU: resident visas with real estate purchase, Airbnb: “In Spain, Chinese investors made up nearly half of visa seekers, followed by Russians”
Link. Xi and Putin mean many “mere millionaires” are desperate for a place to run — and there is vast money laundering. Similar to Canada.
[toread] Regex 101: a terse and practical reference.
Link. I copied into my Simplenote refs. Very nicely done.
Almost 1 million US who did not file in 2020 are owed money. Deadline for filing to get it is May 17.
Link. If the system were simplified and automated then the Feds would need to pay out more.
Moths, as Darwin predicted, seem less drawn to light.
Link. “Darwin was like, ‘… maybe it’s because lights are quite new and moths haven’t quite figured it out yet’”
Pheromone traps show a light resistant moth is still plentiful, but light traps no longer work well.
USDA is trying to protect farm revenue while also trying to do public health: now H5N1 cows without symptoms.
Link. “So far … H5N1, seems only to affect lactating cows, and only temporarily”.
In symptomatic cows the milk is bad, but in asymptomatic it seems fine but has a high viral load. Unclear if sterilization is sufficient.
Fear of hurting agriculture and triggering inflation vs public health.
Murdoch buys off a crime: “civil courts, designed for two sides to settle over money, are not necessarily the best places for justice to be done when matters of principle are at stake.”
Link. Murdoch, Trump, Musk — it is rare for a billionaire to face justice.
Expired Paper License Plates: “obscure dealerships issuing tens of thousands of temporary tags”
Link. In general police are returning to stops and tickets for offenses despite risk of confrontations. In MSP we have a plague of running red lights.
“synthetic chats and media are about to become hugely popular” 🆓
Link. 💯
Police Can Force Suspect to Unlock Phone with biometric: “internalize the shortcut to hard-lock an iPhone”
Link. “squeeze the side button and either of the volume buttons for a second or so”
I set a task to remind me to practice this weekly until it’s automatic.
Five things to be optimistic about in America today. 🆓
Link. Crime, income inequality and CO2 emissions down. GDP and Millennial wealth up.
Security audit of Windows Registry: “filed 39 bug reports in the Project Zero bug tracker, which have been fixed by Microsoft as 44 CVEs”
Link. Mateusz Jurczyk, Google Project Zero. 30yo C code.
Using styles in TextEdit and beyond: “com.apple.AppKit.TextFavorites.plist is a fairly simple property list that can be manually edited”
Link. There is a lot to unpack here. (The best styles implementation I’ve seen was in Symantec MORE! @1994.)
“Infectious diseases are not good for children” – revisiting history and the “hygiene hypothesis”.
Link. It’s weird to me that most of this needs to be said but I appreciated the hygiene hypothesis update (it didn’t do well).
Caste and India’s Fascist leader.
Link. Can Gandhi win, someday, by showing that Modi does nothing for non-Brahmin?
“The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor”
Link. There is a small industry that constantly repairs broken cables. Those is their story.
Infrastructure Takeaways from Google Cloud Next 2024.
Link. AI as you might expect.
The New Axis: “Much of the War Economy in the U.S. (and its allies) will therefore be about rediscovering the manufacturing capabilities they neglected during China’s meteoric rise.” 🆓
Link. Repost but timely. Industrial policy is here to stay.
Missile defense works much better than expected even 10y ago — why did journalists miss this?
Link. “the U.S. tries very hard to hide its weapons’ true capabilities”. The semi-experts who speak loudly end up as everyone’s source.
The Demise of Email Forwarding Is Getting Closer
Link. This started to get harder 15-20y ago. Even our Google Apps personal domain emails had issues past two years so it’s bigger than forwarding.
US Government is completely dependent on Microsoft — and Microsoft security sucks.
Link. The only way to reform Microsoft would be to make all vendors liable for security failures.
Remember the girls kidnapped from Chibok school in Nigeria 6y ago? One story.
Link. Now kidnappings are routine.
macOS Dictionary: “⌃⌘D (control-command-D), a three-finger tap on a Trackpad, drag and drop, the Services menu, the Finder contextual menu, dict:/// in a browser, and Spotlight search”
Link. I did not know browser thing. I Hor Dictionary stays.
“male bonobos commit acts of aggression nearly three times as often as male chimpanzees do”
Link. The “hippie ape” is Homo sapiens. The first domesticated ape.
“The strands of DNA in a typical human cell break about 40 times a day”
Link. Tardigrades are much tougher.
India: “Swiggy’s gold, silver, and bronze rankings for its gig workforce are based on a dynamic rating system — it changes weekly depending on the quality and quantity of work.”
Link. Lose gold means no health insurance. To see the dystopian future look to India.
School shootings solved: “… Parents, school leaders and others are facing charges and civil lawsuits”
Link. Peak Americana.
“To report a suspicious SMS text message that looks like it’s supposed to be from Apple …”
Link. Apple now collects reports of SMS and email phishing attacks that impersonate Apple at reportphishing@apple.com.