Link. They got a really puny fine.
“Thermocrinis, a group of bacteria species that loves heat and converts chemicals to energy, made up more than 60 percent of the microbes at Old Faithful”
Link. Extremophiles get cool names.
WaPo: “Ryan, who served Ronald Reagan and was a believer in access to power…”
Link. Ryan is the publisher and he’s an idiot.
Calcific tendinitis of the shoulder induced by an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19: A case report.
Link. “shoulder injury related to vaccine administration’ (SIRVA) is characterized by shoulder pain and limited range of motion after intramuscular injection of a vaccine into the deltoid muscle of the shoulder”
I think I got this! It’s a thing I’m prone too but it came and (mostly) went in 1 week.
Tip: Don’t do #crossfit while your biceps muscle is really sore from Moderna’s mRNA vaccine adjuvant.
Embeddings in AI: “The location within the space represents the semantic meaning of the content, according to the embedding model’s weird, mostly incomprehensible understanding of the world.”
Link. We communicate with the Oracle by sending a matrix incantation.
“if I want to find related articles for a given article, I can calculate the cosine similarity between the embedding vector for that article and every other article in the database, then return the 10 closest matches by distance.”
“Apple probably makes more money from featuring Google search in Safari than from all of its non-iPhone hardware products combined.”
Link. Why Eddy Cue fibbed.
Why you never want to touch anything to do with the Apple ID.
Link. You really don’t want to change your password.
Apple Services: “a house of cards that even people who are paid to understand it simply don’t”
Link. He had the two Apple ID problem (iCloud vs iTunes). The Apple digital store and Apple email/storage worlds are only loosely coupled. Payment/subscription services cross both so they can break in unique ways. (Now add in Parental Controls, etc).
Apple Again Hikes Prices for Its Media Services
Link. Nobody should pay for Apple News standalone. Some big increases in the list.
Inside the GOP: “They openly refer to their various factions as The Five Families — a reference to warring Mafia crime families”
Link. The GOP has no direction and no goals — except power, wealth, and opposition to Dems.
NYC after COVID: Employment is back, but for non-college income is down.
Link. “Many of the retail jobs are unlikely to return, as online shopping and automated kiosks continue to shrink the sector”
COVID accelerated changes. Might explain some opinion polls if this is more widespread.
“sometimes you just want a stiff drink, and the 23mm road tire is a neat whiskey in a wine cooler world”
Link. I like that line. It’s a bike nerd thing. #bicycling
“James Catalano, a 62-year-old Fresno, Calif., man, to one year in prison for sending the “harrowing messages,”
Link. James Catalano, a 62-year-old Fresno, Calif., man, to one year in prison for sending the “harrowing messages,”
1Password attackers got into internal employee system: “conducted initial reconnaissance with the intent to remain undetected for the purpose of gathering information for a more sophisticated attack.”
Link. 1Password is a rich prize for a nation state.
IEA “global demand for oil, natural gas and coal will peak by 2030”
Link. But the production industry is now consolidating. 2030 is very soon. Expect lots of fun and excitement.
Perhaps Exxon is betting Africa will burn a lot of oil.
“Jamaica has lost about 10 percent of its teachers in just the last two years.”
Link. “United States, Canada and Britain, as schools in those countries step up recruiting of foreign educators to address increasingly severe staff shortages.”
This is also how US manages shortages of nursing and medical staff.
“Safari is run from a Cryptex, so only appears for the active boot volume group.”
Link. The Finder deceives.
“Enforcing environmental regulation via judicialized procedural review has had devastating consequences on America’s ability to build the thing we need.”
Link. We need to help American government bureaucrats.
“Wegovy’s net price is about half of its list price, Ozempic’s is nearly two-thirds lower and Mounjaro’s net price is nearly 80 percent lower than its list price.”
Link. The list price is a cruel fiction in the US – real only for those who pay cash. Prices are falling quickly.
A restaurateur reflects on different business models.
Link. His current model sounds like a smaller staff, less time to dine. The $20 price he quotes doesn’t include his 15% surcharge (plus tip) so price hiding is part of the package.
Noah Simpson’s expounds at great length on his flavor of “techno-optimism”
Link. I’m a Noah fan and mostly agree with his overall take, but he has an unfortunate tendency to defer to Musk and Andreessen (mostly by muting criticisms).
Unlike Andreessen this is worth a read.
First double-blinded placebo controlled study of ketamine for depression finds no difference from placebo.
Link. Clever design: “Their study involved 40 people with major depressive disorder who were scheduled for routine surgery that required the use of general anesthesia.”
The placebo effect is not nothing.
“Old cars were pushed into the bottom of the crystal-clear waters in abandoned mining pits … The Cuyuna Range’s 32 mines peaked mid-century…”
Link. 300000 visitors a year to ride the beautiful mountain biking trails. Nature works fast. Lots of state money imspired locals made it possible.
Meta ad ban: “he tried advertising a course on Python and Pandas a few years ago which was blocked because a dumb algorithm thought he was trading exotic animals”
Link. Justice does not scale.
A rant against disc brakes on road bikes.
Link. Cable disk brakes are rare but have best of both worlds. Otherwise, yeah, disc brakes are a mistake for most road bikes. #bicycling
“Biden has done amazingly well under the pressures of his times—and been amazingly pooh-poohed by the press”
Link. Competence does not get clicks.
East Asians have most Neanderthal DNA.
Link. “Neanderthals were not fully wiped out by our own species; rather, they were slowly subsumed by Homo sapiens through episodes of interbreeding.”
“Hamas checked the report, understood it was an Islamic Jihad rocket that had misfired, and decided to launch a global media campaign to hide what really happened.”
Link. Israeli military and US intelligence.
“Cassava says that they have a drug candidate (Simufilam) for Alzheimer’s, but there’s good reason to believe that there are serious problems with that claim.”
Link. “Thirty-four papers by Cassava-associated scientists have come under scrutiny for research irregularities, and this led to a petition filing to the FDA asking that the company be investigated and their clinical trials halted”
Fraud.
“Apple has today been granted a patent for using Vision Pro (or variant) to see out of an Apple Car (or other self-driving vehicle) without windows”
Link. I blogged about his years ago – before the Vision Pro…
Explosion at Anglican Hospital in Gaza
Link. “American officials have said that multiple strands of early intelligence indicate that the blast was caused by Palestinian fighters…”
“The Ahli Arab Hospital was previously hit by an Israeli strike on Oct. 14”
Sure, Trump Is an Authoritarian Grifter, but at Least He’s Three Years Younger Than Biden – McSweeney’s
Link. “… you see the source of my indecision. A corrupt, deranged narcissist who has given voice and energy to right-wing terrorism pulling this country apart? Or a genial lifetime public servant with a steady hand on the tiller of government?”
2023 – a year in AI: “I can say I need you to research SQLite triggers and figure out how this would work, and by the time I get home from walking the dog, I’ve got hundreds of lines of tested code with the bugs ironed out”
Link. We need a public version of Vinge’s “Fast Times at Fairmount High”
Fraud in science: China’s fake crystallographic data.
Link. Hundreds of fake papers published in fake journals with fake structures published in real databases. Science doesn’t know what to do with the stream of fraud from China, India and a few other nations.
“Replenishing tryptophan or serotonin (through treatment with serotonin precursors or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor [SSRI] antidepressants) in patients with neurocognitive long-COVID symptoms reversed memory loss in mice.”
Link. Intriguing. Needs confirmation.
NOT unique to COVID. May be be general viral effect and play a role in common depression.
You can’t search for an album by name in Apple Photos.
Link. Just so you know. It can’t be done. PowerPhotos doesn’t seem to support it either. I’m so disgusted with Apple …
“a bug in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 that causes devices to shut off at night and restart in the morning”
Link. Apple still hasn’t started red notification dot nags pushing uses to go to iOS 17. I think that’s a sign.
Marc Andreessen’s manifesto: “philosophy does not mean writing down all the random thoughts you had when smoking that bundle of weed the night before the deadline.”
Link. Wow. He’s getting roasted. I wonder what Noah Simpson (well known techno optimist) will say. Andreesen may be a decent dev and schmoozer, but he’s kind of dumb.
Sonoma Animated Wallpapers Block Screen Sharing Login
Link. “I’ve changed to static desktop pictures on the Macs that I use with Screen Sharing”
Sonoma’s changes to iCloud Drive may stop Time Machine backups.
Link. Don’t enable macOS file cloud sync feature.
“Chinese state media is airing programs about how an attack on Taiwan would proceed, and the Chinese military has released an animation depicting an attack plan.”
Link. Maybe we should be doing more home vegetable gardens.
4 Best Ways to Start Reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
Link. Small Gods is the one I also recommend starting with. Mort second. Guards! Guards! But really anywhere.
Multi-modal prompt injection image attacks against GPT-4V
Link. “clearly there are ways to encode text in images that are invisible to the human eye but can be read by GPT-4V.”
Whole Earth Index
Link. A nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications. These are awesome. Experience the 1970s.
“Novo Nordisk … will stop a trial studying Ozempic to treat kidney failure in diabetes patients ahead of schedule because it was clear from an interim analysis that the treatment would succeed.”
Link. Blockbuster +. Marvelous if holds up.
“as Google’s search result quality deteriorates — but their ability to monetize their search monopoly remains strong — Apple looks bad too.”
Link. Eddy Cue basically lied in court.
“Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups have long used hostage-taking tactics to coerce massive concessions.”
Link. An expert analysis of Hamas hostage taking in historic and international context.
iOS Safari exploit: does Apple do basic security testing?
Link. “the exploit targeted a very basic buffer overflow vulnerability in unused IPC support code for a disabled feature … A simple fuzzer targeting the IPC layer would likely have found this vulnerability in seconds.”
iPhone Recommendations for Senior Citizens (and special needs adults)
Link. Good recommendations. All apply to adults of any age with cognitive disabilities.
“If you encounter iCloud Drive sync problems, here’s a list of things to try, from least to most disruptive”
Link. Don’t use iCloud Drive sync for large amounts of data