Link. Their revenue has fallen dramatically however. The death of Twitter is bringing a lot of things to a quicker ending.
LLM Python tools: “An embedding model lets you take a string of text – a word, sentence, paragraph or even a whole document – and turn that into an array of floating point numbers called an embedding vector.”
Link. Proximal vectors are expected to be semantically similar. (PS. Python may finally be the “next C”.
Google Cloud Services Outages.
Link. Fantasy uptime numbers.
“We suggest that any trustworthy general AI will need to hybridize the approaches, the LLM approach and more formal approach, and lay out a path to realizing that dream.”
Link. Doug (Cyc) Lenat’s final paper with Gary Marcus, written as he was dying.
Skip to the conclusion first. I think we will do something like this.
Douglas Lenat obit: “The project was called Cyc. He set out to define the fundamental but largely unspoken laws that outline how the world works”
Link. “In the fall, as ChatGPT captured the public imagination, Dr. Lenat and the cognitive scientist Gary Marcus began work on a new paper meant to show the new generation of researchers what they could learn from his nearly 40 years of work on Cyc. While working on the project, he had a recurrence of cancer that had first appeared in 2021.”
https://bit.ly/3LbcPVD is the short paper written as he was dying.
#AI #Cyc
Swimming in the pools of Paris.
Link. Very much my kind of tourism. #paris
Remote work around the world: “In South Korea … many workers never left their offices”
Link. Of course they never left. SK is extreme.
“an expanding pattern of what has become known as Iran’s “hostage diplomacy.”
Link. Diplomacy is doing a lot of work here. It’s cheap and effective, Russia and China like it too.
“If you’re ever tempted to buy something you see advertised on Instagram, do an image search on AliExpress first. You might find the identical product for 90% off.”
Link. You may wait months for the container to arrive though.
Jaw muscles and human evolution: “a steady stream of books and articles about human origins are still repeating the idea, nearly twenty years later.”
Link. Fun stories in human evolution never die.
“new paper just published suggests that a major bottleneck in our evolutionary history happened between 930,000 and 800,000 years ago, and points to the chromosome 2 fusion as one possible consequence”
Link. Speciation event?
“evidence that the chromosomes had fused in the common ancestors of ancestral African, Neandertal, and Denisovan populations, but also that the ancestral 2b centromere had already evolved into its humanlike nonfunctional form before these hominins diverged.”
Mexico 2014 murder of 43 students: “Just about every arm of government in that part of southern Mexico had been secretly working for the criminal group for months, putting the machinery of the state in the cartel’s hands …”
Link. Whacked out drug lord thought students were a competing group. US had text message by tap but (accurately) distrusted insanely corrupt Mexican gov and military.
“… .US domains were the worst in the world for spam, botnet (attack infrastructure for DDOS etc.) and illicit or harmful content.”
Link. GoDaddy administers for NTIA. Incompetently.
Weight loss industry clobbered by effective meds: “new-generation drugs had helped pummel earnings, down 34.7 percent year on year.”
Link. And more effective meds are coming.
“At the time of Raygen’s choosing, it will use the hot water to boil ammonia, which has a lower boiling point than water, to spin a turbine and create power.”
Link. Surplus of mid-day power. So storing heat. Not operational yet.
“San Francisco Fed has a new analysis documenting the falling college wage premium”
Link. Two theories – one is bad news.
1. The premium now requires skills beyond college.
2. Non-college wages rising
Australia: “tunnelling in Coober Pedy is so straightforward, many locals live in elaborate, luxury dwellings, with underground swimming pools, games rooms, expansive bathrooms, and high-spec living rooms”
Link. Underground town for incinerator heat.
Mass disability – dysfunctional web sites, apps for everything
Link. A recent Michael Tsai roundup made me revisit an old topic — how tech and complexity is disenfranchising everyone with an IQ under 110 or so. #massDisability
Sourcing the crazy of our times — most people can’t keep up with tech
Link. Linking to this August mastodon post because it’s so hard to find things on my instance (no search, Google doesn’t index it).
Tsai survey: tech complexity disenfranchising all but the cognitive elite.
Link. It’s not really an Old thing, it’s a cognitive skill thing. About 50% of Americans have been left behind. It’s going to get worse. #massDisability
Apple’s official guide to downloading older versions of macOS. Published July 2023.
Link. Holy cow. This has been so hard to do for years. You can maybe even download Lion. It claims Ventura will run on my 2016 Air (currently on Mojave)
Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac.
Link. Ugh. This is a blow to students especially. Visual Studio Mac was pretty nice.
Medicare drug price negotiation: the pessimist perspective.
Link. Lots of bribes will flow to GOP SCOTUS.
The Top Programming Languages 2023: Python rules, SQL is forever.
Link. “there’s now enough computing power available on a US $0.70 CPU to make Python a contender in embedded development, despite the overhead of an interpreter”
“You can still get a job today as a Fortran programmer”
OWC Thunderbolt 4, USB 4 Cables – lower cost, decent reputation.
Link. Via Mastodon. I’d buy these.
Contra The Economist, the US is truly reducing Chinese imports.
Link. Noah and the Economist do battle. He’s winning.
“The Economist seems to be picking random data points about countries importing more stuff from China, and just assuming, without evidence, or in direct contradiction of the evidence…”
YABW. (Yet another Biden win)
Chinese influence campaign: “The Chinese campaign struggled to reach people and attract attention, Mr. Nimmo said. Some posts were riddled with spelling errors and poor grammar, while others were incongruent, such as random links under Quora articles.”
Link. The real story here is why they didn’t do a better job.
“the operation published a 66-page research paper falsely claiming that Covid had started in the United States”
The party line is that COVID came to China via frozen food. Which is so dumb, but they started with it and have to stick with it.
Canadian Facebook users don’t care if news isn’t there.
Link. Canadian politicians keep digging. Can’t stop ….
Honda Element: Adding CarPlay to an old car.
Link. He chose “Sony XAVAX1000, 6.2-inch media receiver. Simple, clean design with an actual knob. I think it’s discontinued but Best Buy had one.”
macOS: “Software Update settings are in urgent need of revision, to protect users from inadvertently falling behind with updates to important security components.”
Link. You kind of have to accept automatic update.
“Take the oft-repeated idea that more troops were sent to quash the Luddites in 1812 than to fight Napoleon in the Peninsular War in 1808. Utter nonsense …”
Link. Historical myths proliferate, especially when they fit a culturally fashionable frame.
“… it should perhaps be a requirement to upload to some public repository the photographs or transcriptions of any cited archival sources that are not otherwise freely accessible online…”
School ventilation: “In May, [CDC] recommended that there should be five so-called air changes — the equivalent of replacing all the air in a room — per hour.”
Link. “Schools that combined better ventilation with filtration had 48 percent fewer cases …. A large study of schools in Italy … ventilation systems or devices that deliver clean air had an at least 74 percent lower risk of infection than students in classrooms with open windows.”
There’s a ton of unsent rescuer money, about 20% schools need spending to achieve standards. I wonder if spending rules are too complex or have legal risk to staff.
Qakbot Botnet unhack: Windows malware from … 2008.
Link. 2008! I assume runs on old versions of Windows.
macOS Proxy Icons (window tile icons): how and why.
Link. I didn’t know they existed until recently. Old tech.
System Settings/Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Show Window Title Icons
SanDisk Extreme SSDs, sold by Western Digital, are prone to catastrophic data loss
Link. It’s scary out there.
“Calm down. We’ll be fine no matter who wins.” Kathleen Parker, 2016.
Link. To my knowledge she’s never acknowledged how wrong she was. This piece should never be forgotten.
Includes the line “Not even Republicans are eager to follow Trump’s lead.”
“Baker was recommending a story condemning “tribalism,” when what we are really seeing here is the vitriol of an authoritarian movement and the increasing condemnation from those who are appalled by it.”
Link. Sometimes one tribe is really f*cked up and the other tribe is not.
“Every major electoral outcome since Trump’s win in 2016 has been at “surprising” odds with the consensus mainstream predictions … every one of the “surprises” has been in an anti-Trump, pro-Democratic direction”
Link. The New York Times has a Trump addiction. The reality is he loses elections.
Webb Space Telescope: The new Ring Nebula
Link. All the standards will get a Webb version.
LK-99 “superconductor”: “… the entire initial report was bungled and that there is no superconductor therein.”
Link. Where bungled is a generous term.
“Micro.blog hosting: when you have a paid subscription, we continue to host your blog forever even after you cancel and stop paying”
Link. If you don’t have a blog home definitely check out micro.blog.
“while Passwords settings, and its equivalent in Safari, give access to passkeys stored in the iCloud Keychain, Keychain Access doesn’t even admit to their existence”
Link. Apple is determined to turn macOS into a kind of cache and sync system for iCloud content.
“two short paragraphs are sufficient to list the sum total of all the nothing that the BRICS organization has so far succeeded in doing. “
Link. The emperor is naked.
How good apps become malware: selling out to criminals.
Link. The money is hard to resist; just don’t ask too many questions.
This time it was “NightOwl”
Naomi Klein (author, journalist) decides Naomi Wolf’s (author) crackpottery is too much.
Link. Klein mainlines all the battiness she can find – what drove Wolf mad?
“She is getting everything she once had and lost – attention, respect, money, power.”
Klein has written a book about Wolf’s derangement and the role of social media celebrity.
“I’ve left China for almost two years, but the fear has not left me.”
Link. The long claw of Xi pursues China’s heroes into Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Mao but with far more power.
“pairing facial recognition technology with an eyewitness identification should not be the basis for charging someone with a crime”
Link. A strong resemblance is likely, so the eyewitness agreement adds little.
Because of the scope of image search the false positive rate is substantially higher than in a typical selection. Police are as bad as doctors at understanding test characteristics
“For $17 on Taobao, a Chinese e-commerce site, a vendor is selling fabricated employment offers from a manufacturing firm affixed with a company seal and registration number.”
Link. Xi commands employment for the young.
WordPress 100 year domain and site plan.
Link. Oddly interesting
Microbes that live in tumors: “several research teams have cast doubt on three of the most prominent studies in the field, reporting that they were unable to reproduce the results.”
Link. The original articles were big wins for the authors with prestige pubs. Retractions may come but it’s possible the errors were a combination of honest mistakes and cognitive confirmation bias.