Link. I was so wrong about YouTube.
Paperless (ReceiptWallet) is gone. A data extractor utility.
Link. Learn from this. All apps die and they want to take your data with them. Often a simple but inferior solution is best.
Ask me about Apple’s Aperture prosumer photo management app.
ChatGPT 4 is Artificial Intelligence.
Link. Mostly I agree, but he’s too quick to assume humans don’t themselves use something like “spicy autocomplete” in their thinking.
Human thinking is not magical.
Microsoft’s MedPrompt article: ChatGPT4 for solving medical problems.
Link. “We believe the general paradigm of combining intelligent few-shot exemplar selection, self-generated chain of thought reasoning steps, and majority vote ensembling can be broadly applied to other problem domains”
They are vague about how they package MedPrompt, I suspect it’s going to be a commercial product.
ChatGPT-4 in medical work: “we show how the composition of several prompting strategies into a method that we refer to as “Medprompt”…
Link. “Surpasses 90% on MedQA dataset for the first time
Achieves top reported results on all nine benchmark datasets in the MultiMedQA suite”
Some naive folk still think ChatGPT4 won’t be used by physicians in patient care.
#AI #medicine
Canada finds students: “82 percent of students at Northern College in Timmins are foreign nationals, mostly from India.”
Link. A bit cold, but far fewer shootings.
“goal of attracting 1.45 million immigrants between 2023 and 2025”
Worse than Germany (at war): Japan’s early 20th century brutality was born of deep racism, worship of the Emperor, and a vile culture.
Link. A different evil from the Holocaust, but similar racism and cruelty.
All cultures can go this way. We see the modern American seeds in Trumpism and the fallen GOP.
“Wargames have repeatedly shown that the U.S. will run out of critical munitions only eight days into a high-intensity conflict with China over Taiwan”
Link. The United States, and Taiwan, need to spend much more on the US military …
“Ukraine is expending between 110,000 155mm shells per month…Even after doubling shell production, the U.S. produces only 28,000 per month…”
Operation Triangulation Details
Link. Everyone wonders if the backdoor was engineered and by whom.
The psychology of the con: “if you accept something as true and you don’t question it anymore, then all kinds of bad decisions and bad outcomes can flow from that” 🆓
Link. “contrarianism might be one of the most overrated signs of intelligence or cleverness” They are easy to fool.
“it’s hard for you to bet better than to pay attention to the credentialed experts”
A journalist tests their 20yo PhD thesis for plagiarism using a costly tool. Is it true everyone does it?
Link. Initially 75% plagiarized but after the required analysis it fell to 0%.
Giant Viruses Are Weird.
Link. Nice review of the weirdness. Very active research area.
Exercise and Prostate Cancer: “12% increased risk of prostate cancer”
Link. Exercise extends lifespan and reduces much cancer risk – except melanoma and prostate CA.
I suspect it’s increased testosterone levels. Or a statistical anomaly.
Florida’s fruitcake surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, goes full anti-COVID vax
Link. DeSantis might get nervous — he will be blamed for Florida’s Covid deaths to come.
“nation-state stuff, absolutely crazy in its sophistication. Kaspersky discovered it, so there’s no speculation as to the attacker.”
Link. US, Russia, China, Israel – so many suspects.
“By 2063, researchers estimate AI could do the job of … an AI researcher”
Link. That is reassuringly far off. In particular, I’ll be dead.
Sizing COVID: “Covid is still claiming at least 1,200 lives per week .. about one-third the toll this time last year and one-eighth that in 2021.”
Link. Smaller but not gone.
macOS Photos.app lethal bug: non-repairable library corruption when click on Shared Album changes for standalone library, “The library could not be opened”
Link. “This is only a dull hatred because Apple’s Aperture migration fiasco killed my hate glands.”
“unshakeable composure displayed by the flight attendants combined with the high level of cooperation among passengers” 🆓
Link. Overhead baggage stayed closed.
“A subsequent January 1 complaint brought the number of plagiarism examples up to 47. This covered about half of all Gay’s published work”
Link. From the New Republic.
“For years it’s been clear that Harvard … treat plagiarism as a minor offense when it’s committed by faculty or administrators and a major offense when it’s committed by undergraduate”
Gaza hospital: “American intelligence agencies obtained information that Hamas fighters had evacuated the complex days before the multiday operation, destroying documents and electronics as they left, the senior intelligence official said.”
Link. Unsurprisingly the staff lied. (Probably wise, they’d have been killed otherwise).
Compounding pharmacies are selling risky versions of semaglutide (Ozempic).
Link. They are on the border of illegal. Article explains the chemistry.
MPLS crime: “… car jackings are nearly cut in half”
Link. Car jackings have stayed up even as other violent crime fell. So this is great news.
Evolution – from rapid small changes emerges long term stability.
Link. Reconciling “living fossils” with short term rapid adaptation.
“Exchange students, particularly from China, are often targeted in virtual kidnapping cases”
Link. Scammers convince them their families will be harmed unless they disappear … then tell parents they have been kidnapped. Prosecution near impossible. Humans need AI guardians.
2024 – the ship of Theseus
Link. XKCD classic
US history: “The past was worse, and conflict has always been the norm.”
Link. The early 90s were pretty good (after Fall of Iron Curtain + PC payoff) but the 70s were really bad. Before that – all bad. (And 90s were when GOP died)
Mutants On Demand: “numerous strains of ornamental plants and food crops derive from deliberate radiation-induced mutations” 🆓
Link. Fascinating essay.
AI in 2023: the good and the limited.
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.
Apple silicon: “version 3 is definitely the Mac you’ve been waiting for”
Link. Oakley is keen on the M3.
Reich is pissed at WaPo and the NYT: “Again and again, the mainstream media have drawn a false equivalence between Donald Trump and Joe Biden”
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.
“The Princess Bride stays the same. You change. What you get out of the film is little bit different, each time.” 🆓
Link. A paeon to a movie that started small and became huge.
Retail on a cliff: “It’s exhausting to have to climb back down and up again to use the toilet, so we try not to drink too much water.”
Link. 2022, probably reopened post-COVID
The windowless sky scraper: “… rural switching stations, located every 150 miles or so, entered through blast-resistant doors and stocked with rations, wastewater treatment systems, and decontamination showers..”
Link. We didn’t worry about climate change, just nuclear war.
Truly private database searching: “evaluate such an expression by preprocessing it, creating special, compact tables of values that allow you to skip the normal evaluation steps”
Link. Hardcore computer science work.
“New York could add dwellings for well over a million people” 🆓
Link. Goal is to add 500k homes without changing the look and feel of NYC.
Nikki Haley craven bullshit: “It was the death knell of the Republican Party” 🆓
Link. HCR writes the obituary.
“today’s Republicans advocate a strong government that imposes religious rules on society”
“stem- and crown-group eukaryotes likely lived together for hundreds of millions of years … during a period that geologists call the Boring Billion”
Link. Protosterol molecular “fossils” can last billions of years but were thought bacterial. Gap filled.
“modern humans reached central Brazil prior to the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago”
Link. No Homo erectus though.
In defense of science fiction.
Link. I’m a Stross fan but I think Noah has the better argument.
Facebook marketplace scams: “likely these people would have sent a phishing link … disguised as communication from Zelle”
Link. Good to know.
“severe COVID-19 negatively affects brain health, but no more so than pneumonia, heart attack, or other critical illnesses.”
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”
US 2023: “economic data started beating forecasts …. and then beat them again, and then again, and then again” 🆓
Link. 2024 optimism.
“Running this gives us a nice 40 GB file which contains all 4.2 billion comparisons needed to determine if any 32 bit number is even or odd”
Link. ChatGPT is involved. Via Charlie Stross a master hacker shows off.
Mississippi sheriffs are movie villains: “27 claims do not appear to have led to a state investigation, including accusations of rape, brutal assault and retaliation against sheriffs’ enemies.”
Link. Sometimes the stereotype has a basis.
Description of a nation-state level iOS attack is remarkably readable.
Link. “Apple-only ADJUST TrueType font instruction. This instruction had existed since the early nineties before a patch removed it.”
“people with hypochondriasis were significantly more likely to die from any cause than people without hypochondriasis (a death rate of 8.5 versus 5.5 per every 1,000 person years)”
Link. Suicide is higher. Hypochondriasis is a mental health disorder and they flock together.
“Support for Hamas in Gaza since the war started has risen to 42 percent, from 38 percent, the poll reported.” 🆓
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.
Laura Jedeed, who needs the money, is moving off Nazistack anyway.
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.
“in the three years after a private equity fund bought a hospital, adverse events including surgical infections and bed sores rose by 25 percent among Medicare patients when compared with similar hospitals”
Link. Private equity is a plague.