Link. Musk is afraid.
‘Pinned’ Links in Apple Messages: don’t use them.
Link. Odd feature poorly implemented.
“Trump’s current antics are like a liar’s version of a fake insanity defense in which the defendant makes a spectacle of bizarre behavior to prove his case”
Link. Most lawyers do not recommend. But don’t underestimate Trump. This is what he lives for and he once had a genius for it.
Credit card fees added to restaurant bill.
Link. Credit card companies got monopoly power and abused it.
Japan’s Economy Grows at 6% Rate: “result more than doubled economists’ average forecasts”
Link. Given Xi’s attack on China Japan is ever more essential.
Ritalin shortage has atypical cause: “… a $21 billion settlement brokered between three pharmaceutical distributors and most states that placed new requirements on pharmaceutical companies to help stem the flow of controlled substances”
Link. Regulation has a cost.
“Google DeepMind has been working with generative A.I. to perform at least 21 different types of personal and professional tasks, including tools to give users life advice, ideas, planning instructions and tutoring tips”
Link. AI Guardians will be essential for at least 30% of humanity in the near term.
We don’t understand why inflation has fallen while employment has not: “America’s right has become so divorced from empirical reality that it has played no role in this debate.”
Link. Another serving of humility. It is noteworthy that all debate was among centrist or left economist, there’s no longer any rational conservative economist.
“Apple might disable your AppleID if your credit card is stolen… even if the fraudulent charge doesn’t even happen on your account.”
Link. We need lawyers. Lots of lawyers. Also, billion dollar fines. Because we created a monster.
Gaming Google by deleting archives: “algorithms are probably not intentionally designed to do that …”
Link. “… but that doesn’t mean this result isn’t an emergent property of complex algorithms and models that no one fully understands.” Tsai
I also suspect the SEO types are right.
“rising popularity of switches, especially among young people, is a major reason fewer gun violence victims are surviving in his city.”
Link. Automatic pistol conversion means shootings more lethal. In KC fewer shootings but more homicides. Boys think they are cool. 3D printing finds a market.
Fitch downgrades US Treasuries: the rules are different for America.
Link. Downgrades matter for lesser nations.
“there are about 20 times more free-floating worlds in our Milky Way than stars, with Earth-mass planets 180 times more common than rogue Jupiters.”
Link. Would be neat to visit one.
Another innocent accused of “human trafficking“ because the criteria for suspicion are really stupid.
Link. A mother’s skin color didn’t match her daughter so airline accused her of “trafficking”. This is yet another American moral panic.
“Keynes’s: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
Link. I have to memorize this one.
O’Connor Layover Agreement, St Paul MN 1900 – 1940
Link. “allowed criminals to stay in the city under three conditions: that they checked in with police upon their arrival; agreed to pay bribes to city officials; and committed no major crimes in the city” #history
St Paul was the real Gotham City.
“Dietary supplementation of citicoline for 12 wk improved overall memory performance, especially episodic memory, in healthy older males and females with AAMI” (age associated memory impairment)
Link. 2021 paper. Large effect size — maybe too large to be plausible. Several other poor quality studies positive but really needs replication.
“defaults delete com.mycompany.appname deletes all the key-value pairs within the preference file for com.mycompany.appname, leaving just the empty property list.”
Link. When preference files go bad.
A different (mouse) Alzheimer’s vaccine: “The vaccine specifically targets senescent cells that produce high levels of something called senescence-associated glycoprotein, or SAGP”
Link. New is good because we got nothing.
Garmin Forerunner 945 GPS smartwatch review.
Link. The Apple Watch is pretty useless for me, but this one I could go for. Garmin is what my bike buds prefer.
Seasonal COVID: “range of estimated deaths would place Covid somewhere between liver disease and diabetes for causes of death”
Link. July-Feb season. Find out where your masks are, get vaccinated if indicated, be ready to take Paxlovid if indicated. Still a cut above influenza.
PS. how does DM get to be a significant cause of death? DM deaths are mostly vascular and renal.
States of “greatest advantage” – “Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Iowa”
Link. Minnesota is much wealthier and more populous than the others and is the only blue state of the bunch.
Israel: “It’s not the end of democracy in Israel – the changes have at least the tacit support of a majority of Israeli Jews”
Link. “the younger they are, the more right-wing: 73% of eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds, compared to only 47% of Jews over sixty-five”
Winger pundit Richard Hanania: “… while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,”
Link. “The 37-year-old has been published by The New York Times and The Washington Post”
The NYT needs a new winger now.
Sensor Tower apps are funded by monitoring what user’s do.
Link. “three ways Sensor Tower collects usage information for apps and websites that aren’t their own: (1) ad-blocking web browser extensions, (2) screen time monitoring apps for Android and iOS, which on iOS requires access to Screen Time, and (3) the Adblock Luna VPN.”
The iOS App Store has so much crap.
“The modern descendants of OpenDoc’s software components are the large API libraries provided in macOS, many of them with the suffix Kit.”
Link. Must read history of cloud work.
Singham and Code Pink: American non-profits working to further Xi’s thought.
Link. American progressives falling into the old trap of Mao and Stalin.
Why do people get better at sports across generations?
Link. Better equipment, more money, training, better techniques, more people.
“I’m going to try and give you the last few years of LLMs developments in 35 minutes.”
Link. Another summary.
Multimodal medical AI: “how to graft a state-of-the-art medical imaging foundation model onto a conversational LLM”
Link. The next generation AIs integrate different AI approaches.
“semiclassical physics fails for extremely complex experiments involving unthinkable numbers of steps and incomprehensible lengths of time”
Link. Semiclassical is, I learned, the basis of quantum gravity work in the absence of a better model.
“advice of counsel doesn’t fly if the lawyers themselves were in on the crime”
Link. Trump’s primary defense is gone. He has spent a lifetime criming in plain sight. He leaves a lot of evidence.
“I don’t think 1,000 soldiers can solve the problem in Haiti, especially coming from Kenya, because they don’t speak French”
Link. Kenya will do it, but nobody wants Kenya. France can’t given its history. Canada is being very very quiet.
From 130 million 10 years ago: “30 million fewer households get ESPN today than in 2013. ESPN has consistently raised its affiliate fee to offset this decline…”
Link. ESPN will go streaming once it can get around contracts. Maybe end of cable model.
How homogeneous is Japan? “the ethnicity we casually refer to as “Japanese” is formally known as “Yamato”.”
Link. A rerun worth rereading.
Facebook analysis: “False news articles were low overall, but the articles deemed false were overwhelming consumed by conservatives.”
Link. Conservatives love false stories. Anything that increases accuracy will deeply offend conservatives. The cognitive dissonance is immense.
macOS Photos.app SQLite query for “best Pelican”
Link. The best thing about Photos is the accessible (undocumented) database.
“osxphotos project by Rhet Turnbull. It’s a well designed and extremely actively maintained Python tool for accessing the Apple Photos database”
Guardian journalist takes Greyhound bus from Detroit to LA, has odd affection for dystopian hellscape.
Link. WHY would anyone do this?! One correction — it’s not just city centers. There’s basically no inexpensive motel/hotel lodging in America now.
Noahpinion: Best US economy since 90s, Biden due some credit.
Link. He has reasonable guesses as why polling lags reality.
Nematodes frozen for 46,000 years easily revived and reproduce.
Link. Cryobiosis.
Apple latest screwup: Ventura’s lost Location Services
Link. “Apple now seems to delegate most pre-release testing and checks on macOS to third-party beta-testers, and depends on their reporting of issues using Feedback.”
That is horrible and feels true.
China malware infiltration: “discovery of the malware has touched off a series of Situation Room meetings in the White House in recent months”
Link. Long expected. This may be why Google is redoing admin policies for their Cloud devices (Google Apps, etc).
Hockey in the 80s: “A friend of mine died a couple years ago. He played hockey in the morning, died at night. You can’t do it better than that.”
Link. These guys would win against much younger players. No mention of our Duluth legend who was 99 or so when he stopped to die.
Fixing Eero performance issues – try removing a device.
Link. Our video calls were poor quality. Removing one of our 3 Eeros helped. Presumably a problem of software quality and too many devices for our home. Two devices covers the territory with less switching.
Bluesky individualized feed algorithms
Link. They call it a “custom feed” but it’s basically a tool for building modified algorithms for what you see and when.
Google merges tokens for movement with language tokens into an integrated model for robotics
Link. “Google’s new robotics model, RT-2 incorporates movement tokens … “into the same training data as the language model … RT-2 can learn to guess how a robot’s arm should move to pick up a ball or throw an empty soda can into the recycling bin.”
“Electronic Frontier Foundation announced it planned to award notorious pirate captain Alexandra Elbakyan for her work providing scientific knowledge free to the world through the notorious shadow library Sci-Hub.”
Link. Very notorious.
Florida Black History Standards authors: “… William Allen, a professor emeritus at Michigan State who served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights under Ronald Reagan”
Link. I suspect the standards are not as bad as presented in my social media feeds — clumsy, desperately trying to make the US look less bad than it actually was and is, but not quite as bad as my team makes them out to be.
Tsai on Stack Overflow: “… they could have been profitable at a smaller size, but they grew way too much and got rid of unique features people liked, such as the jobs board.”
Link. The Curse of the Valley. It’s not enough to deliver a good product that generates a reasonable profit.
Lone Star Tick: “anywhere from 96,000 to 450,000 people in the U.S. have contracted a red meat allergy from ticks since 2010”
Link. Not common but not rare; some/many get better. It’s such a weird disorder; there’s got to be more bizarre immune dysfunctions like this that we haven’t begun to name.