Link. If you don’t vote Biden you don’t get to complain about what happens to you.
“The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.”
Johnson and anxieties of Christian fundamentalists: LGBTQ but also church attendance.
Link. The church attendance is likely their greater fear. Less than 50% now, lowest ever.
“despite MailKit being an officially supported API, Mail extensions are far less reliable than Mail plug-ins were. Bug reports seem to receive no more attention than before.”
Link. Happy to wait on Sonoma until 2024.
“Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word”
Link. The establishment had resisted using the word fascist.
Occupied Ukraine: “Russia’s occupation policies have also provided economic incentives for collaborators and Russians that blend politics, business and organized crime”
Link. Russia has lots of experience with occupation. The criminal class is easy to recruit to leadership.
Aviation safety decay: “recommended changes in how the [FAA] is funded, such as more broadly shielding it from government shutdowns.”
Link. The GOP’s 30y attack on government has severely damaged the FAA, CDC, IRS, EPA and much more.
Absolute idiots. By which I meant their voters.
HRC: “a full cease-fire that leaves Hamas in power would be a mistake”
Link. In her role as former Secretary of State in the Obama administration.
“Hamas deliberately places military installations in and below hospitals and refugee camps because it is trying to maximize, not minimize, the impact on Palestinian civilians for its own propaganda purposes.”
“Microsoft built a unique rack to house Maia server boards in, complete with a “sidekick” liquid chiller”
Link. Microsoft’s AI chip.
“A GPT is a named configuration of ChatGPT that combines the following…” 🆓
Link. A readable primer.
St Paul school cybersecurity insurance: “district’s premiums grew by 98 percent between school years 2021-22 and 2022-23” 🆓
Link. Security is driving cloud migration
Catalytic converter theft funded by a rough industry
Link. Dowa Metals and Mining America an “uninfected conspirator”. Stillwater Mining sounds very suspect.
Industry theft numbers maybe 10% of reality.
Hint that gov might go after the lenders.
Google AI: “GraphCast was about 10 percent more accurate than the European model on more than 90 percent of the weather variables evaluated”
Link. More impressive: it’s way faster.
macOS bug fixes: “they need a couple of years, not a week”
Link. Technical debt.
“Hamas has been using hospitals in Gaza, including Al-Shifa, as command centers and ammunitions depots”
Link. Which is a war crime. Also, doctors can lie.
“full-term infants in the United States are more than twice as likely to die after planned home births attended by midwives as those delivered in hospitals by any providers”
Link. I delivered babies. Human birth is hard and risky for mother and infant. I have felt deep gratitude for the C-sxn.
“Negative economic sentiment may not matter as much for the 2024 election as many think, since a lot of it is coming from people who would never vote for a Democrat under any conditions.”
Link. GOP base is not connected to reality.
As of Nov 2023 Vanguard’s customer facing software upgrade is a train wreck
Link. “… infinite financial resources doesn’t mean a complex software conversion is going to do well. If you’re not a Vanguard customer you may wish to consider Fidelity instead.”
The last days of coding: “Ben and I would talk about a bit of software we wanted for the project. Then, a shockingly short time later, Ben would deliver it himself.”
Link. “GPT-4 on its own is, for the moment, a worse programmer than I am. Ben is much worse. But Ben plus GPT-4 is a dangerous thing.”
Of course humans will still code, but it will all be machine assisted. Not quite as inhuman as chess, but a step function all the same.
A 4.5 Billion Year Video Timeline of Earth in 60 Minutes
Link. Mostly boring. Especially the Hadeon lava hell phase.
“their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
Link. Trump campaign doubles down on crushing us roaches.
The men are not good: “From 2019 to 2021, Covid was the leading contributor to the widening gap in life expectancy between men and women, contributing nearly 40 percent of the difference in years lost.”
Link. The gap is now 6y in the US; in 2010 it was less than 2y. Other than COVID it’s drug overdose, suicide, accidents. COVID gap is fuzzier but women got vaccinated more.
WordPress and spambot accounts: “WordPress, by default, lets potential users create accounts instantly.”
Link. Yeah, there’s a plugin for this but, really, WordPress, what are you doing?!
Kill the Vermin: “we didn’t say we were going to kill you and if you think we said that? We’re gonna kill you” is some end-stage language.”
Link. “That’s not even a dog whistle. It’s just a whistle… Ask MAGA to cheer for the death of something abstract, like Antifa, and they’ll do it all day. Ask them to stand by while their blue-haired child gets dragged away to a concentration camp? Some people will. Plenty of them won’t.”
Great Jedeed essay on Trump channeling his inner Hitler.
If you haven’t used a gmail account in the last two years Google will delete it on Dec 1.
Link. Check your password manager.
“The ‘objective alliance’ between Netanyahu and Hamas began in 1996, after a hard-right Jew murdered Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who had signed the Oslo Accords.”
Link. Assassination can change history.
Ukraine: Stalemate
Link. Dyer explains the military context.
Sex work and OnlyFans – wealth and fame for a few young women. 🆓
Link. Absolutely fascinating. American capitalism at its finest.
“More than 3 million creators now post around the world on OnlyFans, which has 230 million subscribing “fans”
The natural market for Apple’s Vision Pro and AI de-aging tech.
AI and special needs adults: The AI Guardian is in sight
Link. Years late I put some social media thoughts into a blog post, only to learn ChatGPT4 has been “thinking” about this.
How the Twin Cities became a network of parks and trails.
Link. Brilliant visionaries who got the right opportunity at the right time and citizens who voted wisely. We are still undoing the freeway disasters .. but the parks are superb.
Thank you Horace William Shaler Cleveland. #msp
Arizona addiction treatment scam exploited Native peoples.
Link. Wicked even by the standard of most scams. How was it not caught sooner?
Personal finance apps: “personal finance apps, which typically rely on data aggregators (Plaid, Finicity, etc) to connect to tens of thousands of financial institutions to aggregate the necessary financial data.”
Link. My best finance app was Quicken for DOS. Been downhill ever since. We are back to spreadsheets now.
“you can tell ChatGPT, “Create a TextExpander Snippet that generates a random number between 1 and 20.”
Link. Of course you can.
Time Machine in Sonoma: How to restore from a backup. 🆓
Link. If you use TM you *must* read this. Migration Assistant. Finder. Least of all the TM GUI.
Time Machine restore: “Use Migration Assistant to transfer files from your Time Machine backup to your Mac”
Link. WTF. Did you know that?
Apple caught cheating on foreign worker hiring programs.
Link. Accident my ass. The 25 million dollar fine is nothing for Apple. It should have been a billion.
Finder tags: “Tagging important files that are needed regularly”
Link. I have 2 tags: Active and Important. Tags work on network shares. They can scope search. I love this type of article with actual use cases.
“Apple sent “hundreds of thousands of take-down notices” to Amazon to reduce counterfeits, and the company conducted test purchases on Amazon that “consistently returned high counterfeit rates”
Link. One may infer that Apple threatened to sue Amazon’s ass. A deal was made.
“The Vision Pro experience is highly dependent upon foveated rendering …”
Link. Gruber does Spatial Video with the Vision Pro. I suppose I’ll have one eventually.
Stross lecture: “TESCREAL stands for “transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism (in a very specific context), Effective Altruism, and longtermism.”
Link. Excellent read on the cultural use of Science Fiction literature.
I mourn the loss of the original meaning of singularity- best presented in SF by Vernor Vinge but others have done well with it. (Charles and I disagree a bit on this.)
Humane Ai Pin – Tsai’s roundup of the wise
Link. “The form factor of a pin, so that it must be moved whenever you add or remove a layer of clothing, seems like a disaster.”
Glasses made more sense in that respect. Maybe a pet drone that follows us around …
SK president turns authoritarian.
Link. US State Department human rights report flagged SK abuse of slander and libel laws to attack journalists.
“Moms for Liberty seemed to have already realized their brand had become poisonous.”
Link. They were in retreat in many states even before the rout. I think they were undone by their easy success, they dropped the mask too quickly. A case of catastrophic success, similar to GOP abortion “win”.
Why don’t neutrons bind together and create neutronium? 🆓
Link. “binding energy between two particles in a nucleus [is affected by] their spins”
“Install macOS … ” ghost installer on launchpad 🆓
Link. Drag and drop to trash. Weird this persists.
Spacecraft cemetery: “Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, otherwise known as Point Nemo” 🆓
Link. “Between 1971 and 2018, global space powers, including the United States, Russia, Japan and Europe, crashed more than 263 space objects in the uninhabited region of the ocean around Point Nemo. “
“researchers found a close genetic link between Honduras and Mongolia”
Link. In human lice. Consistent with land bridge crossing 23kya.
“How did a giant company like Chamberlain come to this enshittening juncture, in which it felt empowered to sabotage the products it had already sold to its customers?”
Link. “Chamberlain doesn’t have to worry about competition, because it is owned by a private equity fund that “rolled up” all of Chamberlain’s major competitors into a single, giant firm…”
Doctorow taught me a lot with this one.
“Minimum wage” disability activists are bonkers.
Link. The author of this essay is way more polite than my title, but internally she seethes.
“It is predicated on a sanitized version of disability in which there is no such thing as severe cognitive impairment.”
They are f* on another plane of reality. It drives parents of cognitively disabled adults to despair.
Microsoft AI: “Microsoft has even investigated using nuclear microreactors” 🆓
Link. “ The company is using over a billion gallons more water than it had in past years to help keep its data centers cool.”
Hell of a gamble.
“Hamas traded a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, for more than 1,000 Palestinians, including Mr. Sinwar, a prison leader who had been involved in the negotiations”
Link. Hamas feared irrelevance; the dull burden of governance. They thought war might save them, and Israel had shown they would pay any price to free a hostage. Then they succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.