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.
Author Archives: jgordon
“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
“… 3,300 types of brain cells, an order of magnitude more than was previously reported. The researchers have only a dim notion of what the newly discovered cells do.”
Link. Our understanding of the brain is going backwards. The more we learn the more we know nothing.
“The results were described in 21 papers published on Thursday in Science and several other journals…
“… the genes that make humans distinct [from chimpanzees] are involved in building the connections between neurons …”
The state of AI 2023.
Link. “Can you detect AI writing? No.”
Feels like a good summary. It ain’t going away.
“Hamas achieved what is sometimes called catastrophic success…”
Link. Hezbollah and Iran appear to have been surprised.
History: when dial-up ISPs collapsed.
Link. I didn’t realize how bad it was…
Using GPT-4 to generate synthetic children’s stories to train tiny language models.
Link. ChatGPT training its replacements. Many workers can sympathize.
“researchers settled on a training data set containing roughly 2 million stories … networks with fewer layers but more neurons per layer were better at answering questions that required factual knowledge; conversely, networks with more layers and fewer neurons per layer were better at keeping track of characters and plot points”
“As part of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma, your Apple ID is automatically assigned a passkey that can be used for iCloud and Apple sites.”
Link. And if Apple decides to terminate your Apple ID for unspecified acts against Apple?
Ketamine Nasal Spray for treatment resistant depression: encouraging results.
Link. Early days but may represent real progress. These are severe cases, perhaps with psychotic (delusional) features.
Firefox testing machine learning tool to identify fake reviews.
Link. Amazon and Apple could do this. It’s interesting they don’t.
Price hiding: secret hotel and resort fees.
Link. Airbnb now discloses fees. Another reason to avoid hotels.
“United States has collected multiple pieces of intelligence that show that key Iranian leaders were surprised by the Hamas attack in Israel”
Link. I thought Iran had planned it.
Machine learning for rapid assessment of brain tumor genetics – while surgery is underway.
Link. “Their deep learning system, called Sturgeon, was first tested on frozen tumor samples from previous brain cancer operations. It accurately diagnosed 45 of 50 cases within 40 minutes of starting genetic sequencing.”
“She has explained a driving force behind the gender inequity that remains in the American work force: Employers have begun paying disproportionately more for long, inflexible hours.”
Link. I wouldn’t call the 1970s a “quiet” revolution though.
Exercise vs antidepressants for depression: both work but people are better at taking meds.
Link. “only 52% of the participants in the running group fully adhered to the program, compared to 82% of those on antidepressants, despite exercise being the preferred choice for most.”
In the real world we would use both.
Insulin Sensitivity and Associative Learning: “GLP-1 agonist increased the impaired-insulin-sensitivity group’s learning rate, but it decreased the learning rate in the non-insulin-sensitivity-impaired control group”
Link. A particular kind of learning common to all animals. Watch this space.
Thomas wants to remove libel protection from American media so his masters can sue them.
Link. The slimiest justice in a hundred years.
Google Cloud DDoS attack near 400 million requests per second.
Link. “The most recent wave of attacks started in late August and continue to this day, targeting major infrastructure providers including Google services, Google Cloud infrastructure, and our customers.”
State actor? Esp Russia?
“Mr. Feeney gave anonymously to universities, medical institutions, scientific endeavors, human rights groups, peace initiatives and scores of causes…”
Link. Of his billions he kept two million to live on until he died. Sounds like he didn’t spend much of that.
1918 flu killed “1.3 and 3 percent of the world’s population. Covid, in contrast, killed 0.09 percent of the population”
Link. And COVID mortality skewed much older. Measured as “years of life lost” 1918 flu pandemic was maybe 60-80 times worse than COVID.
And COVID rocked the modern world.
Two very messed up women killed a man who stopped to help them in a botched carjacking.
Link. The sentencing fills in what happened. Malice yes, but also mental health issues and a lot of stupid.
“by calling for a commission of experts, Rep. Spartz implicitly acknowledges tax increases are part of what we need. That honest facing of reality is a major step forward.”
Link. Spatz is House GOP Tea Party, so this is political humor.
It’s hard to distinguish post COVID fatigue or cognitive disorders from effects of other common viruses.
Link. Common viral infections are much more impactful than we used to think. COVID has let us study these effects on a huge population.
The brain is often impacted.