Link. Noah’s proposals to jump to 2001 levels all seem persuasive from a distance. He skirts Poland’s political and demographic issues.
Author Archives: jgordon
Researchers in children and young adults who shoot schoolchildren: “recognizing and acting upon warning signs that school shooters almost always give well before they open fire”
Link. THE only good essay on American school shootings I have ever read. From their book.
(Useful writing is most often done by domain experts with editor assistance. Journalists rarely have time to do useful writing on hard topics. Publishes in a local digital news service.)
“Cases of Kawasaki disease come in surges. Dr. Rodó and his colleagues found that surges in Japan often occurred when winds blew in from northeast China. And when those same winds reached California, cases rose there as well.”
Link. This is weird and needs confirmation. It’s not clear the high altitude microorganisms are disease related.
Rapid maturation (cortical thinning) of girl brains more than boy brains during COVID stress.
Link. This is not thought to be due to COVID directly, but rather a general stress response. Under conditions of high stress human adolescent brains may convert to adults mode faster than usual. What’s new is that the conversion is more marked in girls than boys and it’s associated with anxiety disorders in girls. It’s easy to imagine this is a primate adaptive response.
US deficit: “speaking honestly about our choices, let alone getting anything done, means certain defeat.”
Link. America needs two sane parties. One sane party is not enough.
2004 paper: The Nature-Nurture Debate and Public Policy (blank slate, tabula rosa, nature vs nurture)
Link. I dug this up because I believe 1960s progressive-liberal “blank slate” ideology was one of the great intellectual errors of the left.
It was a reaction to early 20th century eugenics and to ongoing deep and pervasive racism. But it led to a misplaced focus on college for all and fed into disastrous 1990s trade policies. It was also really dumb.
“fewer than 8 percent of high school students reported using e-cigarettes in the past month”
Link. It was about 25% a few years ago. Cigarette smoking now 1.6%. Many popular nicotine vapes are illegal Chinese products sold illegally.
(NYT confuses hemp derived/ synthetic delta-8 THC sold to teens in vape form with cannabis delta-9)
Vance: school shootings, an American thing, are a ‘Fact of Life’. Schools need more defense measures.
Link. Killer drones whir gently though the school corridors, small passages ease them by the blast door. Every word, gesture and motion is monitored. Those who have passed the four tier security cordon are tagged and routed.
Time Machine: “Copying backup stores on HFS+ was never easy, but there are currently no tools that can transfer those on APFS to another disk.”
Link. Good to know.
Russia secretly paid 3 right wing influencers 8.7 million
Link. Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin.
“paid at least $8.7 million to the top three influencers, who were not named but who appear to be Mr. Rubin, Mr. Pool and Mr. Johnson”
The US has been bad at building ships forever. History and explication. 🆓
Link. Many surprises here.
Reeder new: “The app does not integrate with RSS sync services …Reeder syncs subscriptions and other data exclusively via iCloud”
Link. I stopped reading at this point. For me this a show-stopper. It’s huge lock-in for a now subscription app. I’ll stick with Reeder Classic and look for alternatives.
Udell returns to the Community Calendar struggle, this time with LLM generated scrapers of feedless calendars.
Link. “ …. Puppeteer’s … Node-based scripts that could scrape iCalendar feeds from Python-resistant web calendars”
Even if you dread calendars the the tech Jon uses is worth the read.
“By virtue of shameless perseverance, Trump often manages to outlast most of the media’s willingness to correct any particular falsehood.”
Link. A weakness Trump understands well. Journalists are human and humans will believe most anything if it is repeated frequently and “sincerely”.
China abruptly ends international adoptions, abruptly stranding many children with disabilities.
Link. The ending was expected; the abrupt termination of adoptions in progress is a classic Xi asshole move.
Family eTrikes in the Philippines
Link. “Most … assembled locally, with parts imported cheaply from China under a no-tariff policy”.
Supposedly under 110 lbs, cost about $700US, commonly used by mothers to take children to school. Many difficult legal and regulatory issues.
“systematic review of 63 studies published between 1994 and 2022 on the connections between radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF)” finds none.
Link. Makes it very unlikely cell phone or AirPod use increases glioma risk.
Snow Leopard: “there were “no new features” between the initial releases of Leopard on October 26, 2007 and Lion on July 20, 2011.”
Link. Four years of technical debt payoff. Now it would be 6 years.
Kagi has Perplexity rival.
Link. I’ll try this.
In Support of SB 1047: “The world where AI regulation like SB 1047 makes the most difference is the world where the dangers of AI creep up on humans gradually, so that there’s enough time for governments to respond incrementally, as they did with prev
Link. California still leads.
Modern Mac folders: “Library comes only from the Data volume, … in the path Library/Apple/System/Library are some components that should appear in the main System/Library.”
Link. Browsing these folders is like exploring Rome — modern atop ancient.
“There are two places that mounted volumes are listed in the Finder: the hidden top-level folder Volumes, where Macintosh HD is just a link back to the root complete with its merged volumes, and in System/Volumes, where what’s shown as Macintosh HD is in fact not the merged volumes, but only the Data volume”
“officials have warned some economists not to draw public comparisons between China’s problems and the collapse of Japan’s debt-fueled property bubble in the 1980s”
Link. “ In July, China’s unemployment rate among 16- to 24-year-olds jumped above 17 percent, from 13 percent in June”
Xi will lash out. Because he is an idiot.
“I’m a bit frustrated at how few people are talking about how the Biden administration finally did something about America’s industrial weakness, after so many years of inaction.”
Link. NYT can’t cover this because that would be unfair to Republicans.
(Putin’s Sulzberger tapes must be awesome.)
Asshole Paxton – “Aggressive prosecutions for alleged election fraud crimes that upend lives but result in few cases that go to trial and end in a conviction”
Link. Texas voters are responsible for this sadistic asshole.
“where’s my goddamn bliss? This is not, as the Buddhists say, a skillful question”
Link. Fun review of 3 days at meditation camp.
“the very unusual vagus nerve. The longest nerve in the body …. issuing commands to our organs and receiving sensations from them”
Link. We know much more about it than 30y ago
“Creating a separate class of effectively tax-exempt earners would create large incentives to find ways to transform wages into tips”
Link. The only useful economics writer in America.
“[Harris] anti-price-gouging laws … one of the stupidest ideas to come down the pike in decades.” It’s really dumb and if the GOP were not insane I’d ponder alternatives.
Dialysis is lousier than we thought: “Over three years, older [VA] patients with kidney failure who started dialysis right away lived … 77 days longer than those who never started it.”
Link. US doesn’t do peritoneal much. We way overdue to switch. But we knew it was a lousy therapy — just not this lousy.
It’s only good as a bridge to transplant. The glutides should make transplant more viable for more people.
“Desmond’s belief that poverty hasn’t fallen relies on the official poverty measure, which updates its definition of “poor” over time…”
Link. If progressives keep fighting the last war we will miss what is happening now.
iOS Trackpad Mode for editing text: “… to scroll while moving the insertion point, touch and hold in the text and then pull down (or push up) while keeping your finger down.”
Link. Damn. I had not tried holding the spacebar while scrolling with another finger.
But then try shift tap.
How cells think.
Link. Lots of feedback loops, all analog computing.
In college E Coli learn how to implement “sliding mode control”, a control method for nonlinear systems”
“Chesterton’s fence” is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.”
Link. Dates to early 20th century. Software developers understand this well but I’d not seen the term used before seeing it in a blog post.
“Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking.”
Link. “each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”
Puny revenues, but they expect the upside to be a lot bigger.
“Those who want a TV without an Internet connection have few options.” If you don’t connect your TV to the net you can use Apple TV (though it will do its own monitoring). I think the article forgot to note some of these TVs don’t work without a net connection.
Apple is seeing issues with NAND (iPhone storage) wear.
Link. They are restricting “Live Activities” because of wear issues. I wonder if this manifests as device instability or shrinking storage or ??
Why ABLE accounts for disabled persons have been an utter failure.
Link. They found some of the problems with ABLE accounts. Ones they missed:
1. The state vendors offer crappy high cost products with crappy software. Big players don’t want this low revenue business.
2. You can’t f* get money out when appropriate because the software is so bad
3. The oversight is the usual “you are a crook and we will get you” set of impossible burdens.
4. NOBODY, including expert accountants, has much confidence about what will trigger an audit.
Kagi calls for Google search reform — and explains how Google works: “The Advertiser Index is the largest in the world for online advertising, covering over 90% of the advertisers globally” 🆓
Link. “separating the Search Index from the other two indexes and make the Search Index available to competitors”
Deloitte’s crappy benefits software found to deny thousands their Medicaid and disability benefits in Tennessee.
Link. Deloitte made money. Deloitte subcontractors made money. Tennessee saved money. What’s not to like?
This “one secret trick” is widely used across all state and federal governments.
Left Behind: the German edition.
Link. Old industrial Germany, rural France, rural America, rural England. All the same. The capable young leave, opportunity has left, lots of old people slowly leaving feet first.
Demographics and economics grind away.
“He did not realize that this position went too far even for the social conservatives to whom he was trying to pander, and he quickly reversed himself.”
Link. Trump would be pro-infanticide if it gave him power.
Evangelicals “staying quiet and sticking by him, hoping that what he is saying now is just an act to get elected”.
“In California, under Proposition 47, someone could steal multiple times and be charged only with misdemeanors”
Link. Article doesn’t say if any other states do that. In CA it’s going to be reversed so that repeated misdemeanors allows felony charge.
“death rate from all causes was lower among subjects taking Wegovy, a very rare finding in clinical trials of new treatments”
Link. “result suggests that lower life expectancy among people with obesity is actually caused by the disease itself, and that it can be improved by treating obesity.”
Settling the question about whether obesity is more like a disease or more like a trait.
“These systems, then, learned to associate my name with the demise of a prominent chatbot. In other words, they saw me as a threat.”
Link. No need to be concerned.
“a version of Meta’s Llama 3 … gave one user a bitter, paragraphs-long rant …. The chatbot’s diatribe ended with: “I hate Kevin Roose.”
“Crypto … accounts for almost half of corporate spending on political action committees this cycle.”
Link. I would not have guessed half. Mostly funding Trump of course.
Anthropic’s Prompt Engineering Interactive Tutorial: “… scrub your prompts for typos and grammatical errors … it’s more likely to make mistakes when you make mistakes, smarter when you sound smart, sillier when you sound silly …”
Link. If I’m searching a medical topic I use the formal medical terminology.
“The C.I.A. provided intelligence to Austrian authorities that allowed them to disrupt a plot that could have killed thousands of people at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna this month.”
Link. “within my agency and others, there were people who thought that was a really good day for Langley”
“the fastest-shrinking regions were the orbitofrontal cortex and other parts of the brain that have expanded the most over the past few million years.”
Link. Both humans and chimps have 17 brain regions. Some are similar size but a few are much larger in humans. They include decision-making systems that that get crappy in middle-aged humans.
There’s a hint these age faster than other regions. The result sounds squishy and nobody knows why — maybe we ask too much of these hacked together innovations.
“Among the billions of pions produced, the STAR researchers identified just 16 antihyperhydrogen-4 nuclei.”
Link. The most expensive substance on earth.
Apple replacement iPhone banned from SnapChat because iOS DeviceCheck framework showed it was a refurb previously owned by a bad actor.
Link. “DeviceCheck lets apps check certain device data that will “persist across app deletions, reinstalls, factory resets, and even device transfers between users.”
I hate that Apple gives me a refurb when they trash my device during a battery replacement.
In which I declare my expert judgment on AI 2024.
Link. “The shifting discourse, and especially the apparent LLM technical limitations, mean I’m back to being in the murky middle of things. Where I usually sit. Somehow that compels me to write down what I think.”
Tree Owners Manual: the online version
Link. US Forestry Service, USDA. It’s quite good. It’s also distributed by box.com rather than a US Forestry Service site; that says something important about how the web broke bad.