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.
IVF ruling: “forced the pro-life movement to fully examine the cultural and political implications of its position on unborn children, and pro-life Republicans blinked. They caved, almost instantly…”
Link. The author takes his life-begins-conception beliefs seriously but “recognize that many of the critics of the pro-life movement were right all along”
Dental cavities: “The fact that the first true fruits made their appearance in the late Cretaceous might go a long way to explaining why there are so few known frugivorous dinosaurs and why caries haven’t yet been documented among them”
Link. I learned things. It does turn into an ad for a deservedly interesting but unproven product.
Ransomware attacker meets Beth from HR: “Ma’am, I am a hacker. I don’t care about the law,” responds the hacker, growing even more frustrated.”
Link. Beth acquits herself well. (Though her employer may be screwed.)
“The outbreak of dengue fever that has unfolded in Latin America over the past three months is staggering in its scale — a million cases in Brazil in a matter of weeks,”
Link. There’s a better vaccine but it’s years from mass production. Usually the second infection is much worse than the first – excruciatingly painful.
Blood Deserts: “None of … walking blood banks, drone-based delivery or autotransfusion could supplant the need for traditional blood banks”
Link. Blood transfusion is a dire challenge for much of the world.
“… infuriating that macOS doesn’t offer a way to opt out of Universal Links …”
Link. It’s a frequent annoyance.
Recent Ocean Heat beyond CO2 effect: “eruption also sprayed millions of tons of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. Water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas”
Link. We should know more within 6m. Ocean warning is too fast for CO2 alone.
Chinese Organized Crime Gift Card Draining.
Link. Borrow card from store, drain money, restore packaging. Card is sold to someone who is out of luck.
“Apple settled a similar card-draining class-action case in January, agreeing to pay $1.8 million. “
“a three-round debate, with GPT-4 arguing the other side, robustly lowers conspiracy theory beliefs”
Link. “GPT-4 was better able to change people’s minds during a conversational debate than other humans, at least when it is given access to personal information about the person …
… it is now trivial to build a vending machine that can engage you in discussion and be very persuasive about it.”
“International Monetary Fund called “too much red tape” one of the major impediments to reviving the German economy.”
Link. Rationalizing regulation is hard work without glory or prizes.
England joins Sweden, Finland, Norway and other EU countries in restricting puberty blocker and hormone therapy for gender dysphoria.
Link. Stated concern is only a single outcome study with a different population than current — medication to be part of clinical trials.
“Clinics worldwide reported that the increase was largely driven by patients raised as girls.”
“Unblocked aims to lighten the cognitive tax burden that software teams bear”
Link. Why is there a strange test here?
Patriarch of Russian Orthodox Church: “Kirill rose rapidly through the Church ranks in Soviet times … (net worth $4 billion)”
Link. Why am I just learning this now? I knew he was insane, but didn’t know the money.
Boeing financial engineering was a great success for 20 years. Then it killed Boeing.
Link. Maybe some companies shouldn’t be publicly traded?