Link. Persuasive comparison.
Nigerian corruption, international arbitration, and a multi-billion dollar penalty.
Link. “For about a year leading up to the submission of P.&I.D.’s proposal, Quinn and Cahill sent Taiga and one of her daughters just a bit more than $25,000 in incremental payments.”
Basically everyone is kind of a villain. Too complex to summarize.
When Safari authentication fails (ex: access a gmail account) switch default browser to Chrome.
Link. I have had to do this.
Deflation hits China.
Link. Xi is what happens when a Trump gets unlimited power.
Post-COVID ED and hospitals struggle: “an extra hour of boarding was associated with a 16.7% increase in the odds they would require a higher level of care in the hospital”
Link. Montreal was like this in the 80s. COVID accelerated health care retirements and also increased patient volumes.
NYT has a big obit on the “Sovereign of Slide Rules”
Link. I have 3 slide rules I think. Beats looking up log tables.
“Trump wasn’t in bed with a hostile power in Russia; the Democrats were in bed with a hostile power in Ukraine.”
Link. The Reds are now completely disconnected from reality.
“Gemini Advanced is clearly a GPT-4 class model”
Link. Most useful early review by a tester.
“No one has a great definition for sentience, which is okay because LLMs are in no way sentient…”
This sentence contradicts itself.
Inventing Small Protein medicines: “it’s kind of disorienting to find it becoming a real-world technology”
Link. Science is just getting started.
As most come to accept climate change Red focus changes to slandering the scientists.
Link. A desperate rear guard action as Reds fight to preserve their lifestyle.
NYT tech reviewer finds no reason for any non-dev to buy Vision Pro.
Link. “Apple declined to provide an early review unit to The New York Times …
… I could tolerate juggling a notes app, a browser and the Microsoft Word app for no longer than 15 minutes before feeling nauseated…
…had planned to write this review with the headset before realizing I wouldn’t make my deadline…”
Snowball Earth: “Earth’s glaciation, … may have come from a global drop in carbon dioxide emissions, a result of fewer volcanoes expelling the gas”
Link. Sadly article doesn’t say why it ended.
“I knew the rim brake was dead, but I didn’t quite appreciate just how dead it was until now.”
Link. They never seem to break but it’s going to get hard to find replacement parts if they do.
How to display the hidden iCloud Books folder and edit your Books Library
Link. open ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iCloud\~com\~apple\~iBooks/Documents/
Once you open it you can use a few methods to create a desktop shortcut. Changes to files here show up in Books.app. It seems a promising way to find things in the library.
“as these models get bigger and are trained on more data, they improve on individual language-related abilities and also develop new ones by combining skills in a manner that hints at understanding”
Link. “… a mathematically provable argument for how and why an LLM can develop so many abilities… when Arora and his team tested some of its predictions, they found that these models behaved almost exactly as expected”
Researchers applied techniques from random graph theory. These models have unexpected behaviors.
We don’t know if this is how *we* “understand” but I suspect it’s something similar. We are not magical.
“Many people found it a little bit eerie how much GPT-4 was better than GPT-3.5, and that happened within a year. Does that mean in another year we’ll have a similar change of that magnitude? I don’t know. Only OpenAI knows.”
Flies solve the X chromosome problem differently: “rev up their one X chromosome so that it doubles its production of proteins. “
Link. They evolved so two X is the ideal. In humans two active X is quite bad news so women suppress one copy, but the technique has apparently bad side-effects.
Why RSS.
Link. An explainer for the young who don’t remember RSS.
2019 brain implant controls woman’s severe OCD
Link. It was done primarily for her epilepsy, she suggested doing the OCD as well. “work involved the coordination of researchers from OHSU, UCLA, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania.”
Sounds like for her controlling the OCD was even more valuable than managing her epilepsy. It’s not a complete cure though.
Male and Female Autoimmunity: “one of the drivers for these immunological changes is the presence of auto-antibodies for the Xist/protein coating”
Link. Best summary to date.
On living and working with “Nazis”.
Link. A Mastodon inspired post. “The proto-Nazis will always be with us. At least until the AIs end us all. We have to manage them to have a civilization.”
Tech job cuts: “the five companies employ 2.16 million people, 71 percent more than they had before the pandemic.”
Link. That number seems impossible, I think growth was maybe mostly Amazon. Apple’s layoffs sound covert. Microsoft is still growing.
Vision Pro Teardown by ifixit- “…the R1 uses a real-time operating system…”
Link. I think the first iPod used a non-Apple RTOS? I wonder what they are using here.
This is the most interesting VP article I’ve read.
“XMTP is a messaging protocol that implements the by-now-familiar architectural pattern of separating a decentralized, encrypted data state and persistence layer…”
Link. Although XMTP is unlikely to matter the essay is a good overview of messaging chaos.
America’s allies show frail economies. Some explanations. 🆓
Link. Mostly demographics. He doesn’t mention voters making persistently bad choices (Italy).
But why is Canada doing poorly? And Australia so well?
Amidst Xi’s China a version of Boulder CO.
Link. The article doesn’t mention weed, otherwise more like 80s Boulder CO than anywhere else. It will be crushed soon.
“It’s not even clear who the Vision Pro is for”
Link. Other than developers willing to invest now for 2027 revenue — assuming Apple doesn’t kill the product.
xkcd: Greenhouse Effect.
Link. Powerful. Don’t miss the alt text.
NSA prepares to fight election attacks by Trump campaign.
Link. Specifically the Russian side of the campaign.
Foxconn builds iPhone facility in Tamil Nadu – “We never compare our growth with other Indian states,” he said. “We chart ourselves to the growth of Scandinavian countries”
Link. India’s states have wildly divergent economies, food, and culture.
Prison guard shortage: “Scott Walker, the Republican governor at the time, signed Act 10, a sweeping law that gutted public employees’ ability to bargain collectively with the state”
Link. Without the union wages fell behind and work conditions became intolerable. Not to mention heinous prisoner conditions.
Red voters have destroyed much of Wisconsin.
Screen Time is broken more than ever.
Link. It’s never worked reliably for me.
Before GE-disease killed Boeing it wounded 3M. McNerney as vector.
Link. “McNerney installed ‘Six Sigma,’ a regimen used at GE to measure and standardize business practices but loathed by 3M researchers as a creativity killer”
I suspect killing the “weakest” 10% every year was the worst poison.
Against Appin: “American law called the SPEECH Act that deems any foreign court’s libel ruling that violates the First Amendment unenforceable in the US”
Link. Modi’s India has delusions.
Techdirt gives Rajat Khare’s Appin hackers for hire the middle finger.
Link. Brave where others cower. Now we all know the name Rajan Khare.
Burning the world: Putin is keen, China and Iran less so.
Link. “Their ideal outcome appears to let the order fray and then let the United States expend resources to repair the damage”
US Growth exceeds all reasonable expectations.
Link. Journalists are suffering – which impacts coverage of the economy.
“China was ramping up an extensive hacking operation geared at taking down the United States’ power grid, oil pipelines and water systems in the event of a conflict over Taiwan.”
Link. We live in a glass house and we can’t make enough weapons to even supply Ukraine.
“Hackers for Volt Typhoon compromised hundreds of Cisco and NetGear routers, many of them outdated models no longer supported by manufacturer updates or security patches, in an effort to embed an army of sleeper cells that would be activated in a crisis.”
Tsai: Apple Vision Pro Review Roundup
Link. “Apple may have inadvertently revealed that some of these core ideas are actually dead ends — that they can’t ever be executed well enough to become mainstream”
Apple can afford to fail.
Lowe on the Aduhelm debacle
Link. “some members of the advisory committee that recommended against that approval resigned in protest, and Medicare later declared that they would not pay for the drug”
The FDA should review that approval the way aviation reviews plane crashes.
Worthless Alzheimer’s Drug (Aduhelm) wrongly approved by FDA abandoned by Biogen
Link. There are two others in use almost as worthless.
Infectious Alzheimer’s: “reports for over ten years that injection of human Alzheimer’s brain proteins into mice leads to AD-like pathology in mouse brains”
Link. It is an expected finding. The unexpected part is that prevalence was low, CJD is more “contagious”.
LLMs at work – year one.
Link. Interesting comments on who is using LLMs to do work.
Opioid management in Portugal vs San Francisco.
Link. Portugal’s program is amazing and SF is just a (rich) city — but the fentanyl gap is astounding and unexplained.
PS. We need a lot more journalism like this. Great work.
“cities likely to depopulate, according to this research, are Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, St. Louis, Memphis, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, Baton Rouge, Lansing, Hartford, and Birmingham.”
Link. From the map the Twin Cities (MSP) are projected to do well.
Promising new non-opioid pain med – “VX-548. It inhibits Nav1.8, temporarily blocking the protein needed for the nerves to transmit pain signals.”
Link. The research history is pretty neat. Thank you to those families.
I suspect it will be better for acute than chronic pain.
“If Ukraine had collapsed in 2022, the situation of the West would have been dire. China would have looked at a country the size Texas falling to Russia. Why not go for Taiwan?”
Link. Joe Biden was President so the world continues for now.
How to Learn Unfamiliar Software Tools with ChatGPT. Udell.
Link. I’ve been doing this. Works well for me but I do not require perfection. Jon shows how to work around ChatGPT errors and get it to self-correct.
The Data Breach “Personal Stash” Marketplace.
Link. Children trade data breach files but some age out into real consequences.
Starting with iOS 17 Apple’s own user guides are not available as ePub
Link. I’m one of the 7 people who liked having the ePUB version on my phone. Even though it was almost impossible to find in Apple’s truly truly awful book store. Apple stopped publishing them.
“does fermion doubling present a fundamental obstruction to simulating QFT on a lattice … and therefore, to simulating physics on a computer at all?”
Link. I love this stuff. #physics #computation