Link. MSP minimum is $15/h. It’s a bigger negative impact than I’d expected. State wide unemployment remains very low.
“same lineage of people settled in Japan, which could help explain similarities in prehistoric arrowheads and spears found in the Americas, China and Japan”
Link. Across the land bridge. “genetic link between Native Americans and Japanese people, particularly the indigenous Ainu.”
Heart Reports: enhanced iOS reports exportable as PDF
Link. One time $4 to buy unlimited export and it’s family shareable. I have found some minor bugs but overall it’s well worth the price.
Apple Health XML to CSV Converter: runs on browser, creates external reports
Link. macOS Numbers could not process correctly but Excel did. Since schema varies by data type my conversion produced 20 different output files (vs. creating a sparse matrix). Note usual Excel import issues with strings it thinks are numbers.
Chimpanzee language: snake is an important word.
Link. It always starts with the snake.
Google leak: “At the beginning of March the open source community got their hands on their first really capable foundation model, as Meta’s LLaMA was leaked to the public….”
Link. “A tremendous outpouring of innovation followed … barely a month later, and there are variants with instruction tuning, quantization, quality improvements, human evals, multimodality, RLHF …”
I for one welcome. #beafraid
Ultimate List of Bikepacking Straps
Link. The web is not dead yet.
Passkey concerns – Tsai round-up
Link. I love being a later adopter.
“Ukraine’s military said that it shot down all 35 drones, including 30 over Kyiv.”
Link. Russian terrorism thwarted.
Norway previews EV future.
Link. Surprisingly unsurprising.
“You know why the recipe blogs all have 2,000 words of copy before the actual recipe? The Google robot wants it that way.”
Link. Google is a plague.
“after 20 long minutes, the medical team got a pulse” -> she’s mostly recovered.
Link. It’s local media and story is almost certainly not medically accurate — but that’s a hell of a recovery.
Higher HTN in Black Americans: “key factors statistically mediating the racial difference for both men and women included Southern diet score, dietary ratio of sodium to potassium, and education level. Among women, waist circumference and body mass inde
Link. “Southern diet” is just bad.
Protein glues (thalidomide and more) – “The idea that some tiny molecule could bring two big protein surfaces together in a productive manner when they didn’t really show binding before”
Link. Unexpected biochemistry.
“China (and Russia) started Cold War 2 … if we choose to back down, it doesn’t mean going back to the world of 2015. That world is now gone forever.”
Link. An analysis of the road ahead.
“Sometimes there are simply bullies in this world, and someone has to stand up to them, even if that someone is no saint themselves.”
Tucker Carlson’s and the Christian Right: “… the temptations — including the will to power and the quest for vengeance — that plagued the Christians of the past still plague the Christians of today.”
Link. Righteousness is a vice.
“A reminder about gun massacres in the USA … in 1979 the Cleveland Elementary School shooting was so shocking that people wrote songs about it … Yesterday (May 6th) there were THREE comparable spree shootings in the USA: the day before that there we
Link. Americans don’t care enough.
Did China Help Vancouver’s Mayor Win Election? (No)
Link. China pays a lot of attention to Canada in general and Vancouver in particular. But he won by a landslide. So this is kind of a dumb headline.
Econ policy context: “recent idiotic report from the Motley Fool, an investment advice publication. In breathless terms the article noted that the M2…”
Link. MF is just terrible.
AI Free Rider’ problem described.
Link. There is no hope of significantly slowing AI development.
We can treat mouse model glioblastoma with a novel drug delivery method.
Link. Surgery + Paclitaxel + CD47 antibody + cavity filling gel. Many years from human trials but I don’t think we’ve had anything this promising before. I’ve lost 3 friends to glioma.
FDA approves fecal microbiota transplantation pill for C Difficile prophylaxis.
Link. Dramatic improvements in clinical trials.
A post-COVID encephalopathy anecdote – since improving.
Link. Nothing showed on MRI but her relative recovery argues against a coincident dementing disorder. Hope she gets entered into a registry/study.
“Nauru decided to one-up the offshore accounts and offer corrupt kingpins the privilege of an offshore bank instead. For $25,000, anyone on the planet could set-up their own entirely independent financial institution, housed in a server on Nauru.”
Link. Awesome story.
Airbnb developments including “rooms”.
Link. My Airbnb experiences have been fun. But I have weird ideas of fun.
AI with hyperdimensional vector computing.
Link. Augments neural networks.
Natural Chemistry Oddities: “Two terpenoid fragments joined up at opposite sides of a (counting. . .) nineteen-membered ring is not something I’d have come up with any time soon. Why the plant has chosen to do so …”
Link. Evolution scrounges.
Familial Clonal Hematopoiesis in a Long Telomere Syndrome
Link. “familial clonal hematopoiesis syndrome that was associated with a range of benign and malignant solid neoplasms. The risk of these phenotypes was mediated by extended cellular longevity”. Trade longer cell life for higher neoplastic risks; this is something that was widely expected.
American supplements – pharmacologic activity, unknown effects.
Link. America: “… we have a huge industry that provides all sorts of pills, extracts, creams and what have you, things that all of that industry’s customers treat as medical substances, but which don’t really have to show evidence safety or efficacy before being sold.”
“The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved GSK’s vaccine for the respiratory syncytial virus, or R.S.V., for adults who are 60 and older”
Link. I’ll be in line.
“a new breed of knockoff purses has come onto the scene from China — boasting shockingly good quality and slipping through customs gates like sand through a sieve.”
Link. No jury would convict.
China now censors poverty references and “bans sad videos of old people, disabled people and children”.
Link. The homeless are disappeared.
“the angle of the bench press doesn’t much affect the upper pectoral muscles, but the angle definitely affects the lower pec muscles.” Decline wins by a lot.
Link. Surprising result.
Feinstein is doing a Ginsburg.
Link. She has to go. Now.
WaPo poll shows trans attacks likely to work for GOP — esp limits on child hormone use.
Link. Dems will mostly try to change the subject.
AI model programming: “Mojo is a brand new language that’s designed to take full advantage of MLIR. And also Mojo is Python.”
Link. Tsai is disappointed with the state of Swift.
“The workers’ negotiators also want Apple to adopt a tipping system, letting patrons offer gratuities in increments of 3%, 5% or a custom amount for in-store credit-card transactions.”
Link. I hope they memory hole this demand super fast.
Gruber translates Ford CEO laughter at GM CarPlay block: “I can’t believe our good fortune that GM is doing this”
Link. I wonder if Ford will use GM’s dumb move in commercials. Some subtle dig at the end of the usual cat stuff.
“At the right of that line is an ⓘ button: click on it to see the dialog above, allowing you to uninstall that RSR”
Link. Apples emergency updates are easy to undo.
“The termite king, performing his marital duties, helps his mate produce as many as 15,000 eggs each day.”
Link. This is a great science article. Many great lines.
“The unemployment rate for Black Americans reached its lowest point on record in April, at 4.7 percent, and the gap between the unemployment rates of white and Black people was also the smallest ever measured.”
Link. The jobs report is basically relentless good news for America. Which is bad for Trump. So the GOP must destroy America to save it from democracy.
“telomere lengths seemed constrained to a narrow range, indicating there is a price to pay for very long or very short telomeres.”
Link. Human lifespans may be as long as biology can make them with only a 20% variation in aging rates (vs dogs, 500%)
We should study telomeres in dogs.
“Two days after my thoughts were published in an article by Wired, we found out that all the campaigns under our Google AdWords account were suspended – without prior warning”
Link. Google has Muskitis. This time attacking Opera/Vivaldi. Perhaps Google fears their core business is dying.
MH ED visits under 18: “From 2011 to 2020, the figure rose from 4.8 million to 7.5 million, the team found, a period in which the overall number of pediatric E.R. visits fell.”
Link. Pre-COVID. Some might be better insurance. Paywalled so can’t see details. Deserves better coverage and I hate medical journal paywalls.
Multiple Apple ID Accounts – the issue finally rises to the surface.
Link. Thank you MJ Tsai! This has been a problem for me for over 10 years, but I thought it was uncommon. Turns out it’s common amongst Mac geeks. So many problems. Most recently … https://bit.ly/422Wskf
BAND: advertising based group coordination, app only
Link. No web views, calendar has a feed. Our mountain bike trail group is using it.
Siri fights at Apple are weirdly detached from what user’s care about.
Link. Why can’t Siri give me the Apple Music playlist I created? Like Tsai’s correspondents I just want Siri to do the simple things it weirdly can’t do. I don’t need Siri to be ChatGPT.
Brave Search no usingTailcat rather than Bing.
Link. “Their own index, based on Tailcat, is working better than DuckDuckGo/Bing for me now. Hopefully, Apple will add built-in support to Safari.”
I wonder if Apple will buy them.
Bugs related to having different iCloud service and media accounts – Gruber example.
Link. I’ve had LOTS of issues over years from having split accounts. Interesting that many Apple insiders have had the same problems and that some kind of fix is pending. (But not purchase transfer).
“I can’t imagine anybody ever even thinking of using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge,” Trump said.
Link. The guy has said everything but this one was particularly funny.