Link. I read Elon was telling Twitter-serfs to touch grass. So I had to look it up.
Author Archives: jgordon
Verge Google Reader retrospective – interviews with the dev team. Mayer didnt like it: Shellen says she told him at one point that he was wasting his engineers careers working on Reader.
Link. Author understates value of pre-Reader tools but story of dev is unique. Also depressing — Google was dying even as Reader struggled to be born.
T-Mobile will no longer accept credit cards Apple Pay or Google Pay for AutoPay
Link. Only direct connect to bank money.
The war on credit cards is underway. See also Goldman-Sachs leaving the Apple Card business.
Weve moved on from the era of beautiful Mac software to the era of web-based apps for better and for worse.
Link. Meanwhile Apple’s own apps add features.
Browser notification has failed: Go to Safari > Settings > Websites > Notifications and deselect Allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications at the bottom.
Link. In the 90s “push” motivations had a huge hype cycle when Web 1.0 money started to worry.
For subscription and notification only RSS has worked.
Goldman Sachs wants out of Apple Card after losing $1 billion.
Link. Goldman Sachs isn’t setup for the nasty business of consumer credit cards. Apple’s framework is too consumer friendly.
Testing models of consciousness with falsifiable experiments: Integrated Information Theory vs Global Workspace Theory.
Link. This is great science. The judges of the experiments concluded “a bit of both plus we-don’t-know”. More studies to come.
Perhaps we will only understand consciousness when our AIs claim it.
Redoing the American city: In New York a hotel requires a 20-foot rear yard. But a residential building requires a 30-foot one.
Link. The thicket of regulation has to be cleared.
Annotators: the humans that annotate the data AIs train on.
Link. English language speakers from locations where minimum wage is under $1/hr. Millions constantly describing the world.
2023 will bring one of the largest drops in murder since the U.S. began keeping national statistics more than 60 years ago.
Link. Still 10% over pre-COVID.
Denmark: Transgender people in the country had 7.7 times the rate of suicide attempts
Link. If you have a transgender child you need to keep suicide in mind.
35 in China is like 58 in America.
Link. “the Chinese government, which caps the hiring age for most civil servant positions at 35”
The Koch networks goal in the 2024 presidential primaries which has been described only indirectly in written internal communications is to stop Mr. Trump from winning the Republican nomination.
Link. Yet still he is favored.
TDI Towing was spending at least $10000 a night buying stolen converters from thieves also known as cutters who cycled through the companys tow yard
Link. Not the only buyers.
the static charge of a passing bovine could exert considerable attractive force on a tick searching for food atop a blade of grass
Link. “The normal static electricity of a mammal helps ticks attack”
I Live in Socialist America
Link. “functional socialism does not look like any of that. It looks like the VA. There’s no good reason you can’t have it too.”
singling out Amazon only makes sense insofar as that Lina Khan made a name for herself as a critic of the company
Link. She’s so overreaching.
Canada is not building nearly enough housing to house its massive population inflows
Link. Toronto home prices are similar to SF and Toronto is vastly bigger. Renters are in trouble.
LLM generated news sites are relatively rare and pretty much unreadable. For now.
Link. “made for advertising” sites already control 21 percent of all programmatic advertising revenues, and these sites tend to dominate Google search results”
We got close to the end of American democracy – but SCOTUS didnt cooperate.
Link. The coup theory made it to SCOTUS based on a motivated reading of ambiguous language in the US constitution.
“Current and former U.S. officials said Mr. Prigozhin would not have launched his uprising unless he believed that others in positions of power would come to his aid.”
Link. “American officials have an interest in pushing out information that undermines the standing of General Surovikin, whom they view as more competent and more ruthless than other members of the command.”
Betrayed by his fellow ravagers? Or an American ploy to further disunity?
“Facewatch which licenses facial recognition software made by Real Networks and Amazon is now inside nearly 400 stores across Britain. Trained on millions of pictures and videos the systems read the biometric information of a face as the person walks i
Link. Supposedly identifies people believed to have shoplifted. False positive rate not known. Legal proof of guilt not required, no appeal process but image said to be deleted after 1y. Motivated by shoplifting loss.
Minneapolis police have recorded 4328 motor vehicle thefts as of June 25 2023 compared to 2388 by this time in 2022
Link. “9 of 10 auto thefts in the state were Kia’s and Hyundai’s”. Mostly by a modest number of 15yo who cannot be held.
DHS office tasked with analyzing intelligence was reluctant to issue warnings related to Jan. 6 in part because of criticism the agency had received for its handling of intelligence related to protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd
Link. I suspected this at the time.
Perhaps a dozen Russian servicemen mostly pilots died at the hands of the Wagner mutineers more than died during the failed coup of 1991. Nobody seems particularly bothered about them.
Link. Putin does well in opinion polls. Very popular they say. But Russia’s revealed preference is they don’t give a shit.
I fully support Amazon taking measures to ensure the safety of their drivers. However I question why my entire smart home system had to be rendered unusable during their internal investigation.
Link. Amazon is batshit crazy. An ambitious lawyer should make this a career building lawsuit.
The social science of American guns.
Link. Most gun deaths are suicide, a gun in the home increases risk of death.
Another Golden Age for Medicine?
Link. From 1994 to 2010 things felt slow to me. Buy after 2010 it got better.
iPhone Screen Distance in iOS 17: decreasing myopia in developing eyes.
Link. Helps keep screen at least 12” away.
I would like to see Mastodon thrive. But the platforms ideological zealotry is obviously holding it back and seemingly isnt going to change.
Link. It’s a narrow culture.
Joan Walsh on giving RFK Jr a platform many years ago: It was the worst mistake of my career. I probably should have been fired
Link. So many have enabled him. He must have great party invitations.
“In our many interactions, he was charming and funny. But gradually he became a charming bully…”
the system which has many checks and balances has a way of knocking back people who abuse their power
Link. The one and only summary of the pursuit of Hunter Biden that you need to read.
Why your spouse cant get chemo: The average net price of generic drugs fell by more than half between 2016 and 2022
Link. Monopsony buying has pushed manufacturing to India where law is flexible and monitoring expensive.
there is one other sort of cost asymmetry that I do think favors misinformation. Its about public vs. private goods.
Link. “Misinformation is a job; correcting misinformation is a hobby.”
Lies are free, WaPo is not.
Hunter Biden Deal: Plead Guilty to Misdemeanor Tax Charges.
Link. 1. Seems fair.
2. GOP has doubtless lost its shirt.
Biden riffs about Xi not knowing spy balloon was a thing.
Link. 1. Biden is probably not supposed to tell that story.
2. How stupid is Xi that he is so disconnected from China’s most important frenemy.
2018 three dozen people industry leaders deep-sea explorers and oceanographers sent a letter to Mr. Rush warning that the companys experimental approach could lead to potentially catastrophic problems.
Link. Headline: “catastrophic implosion”
Scientists shouldnt debate science with charlatans.
Link. “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”
Charlie Stross on alien love: therefore seems likely that any sexy alien I meet will be an extremely intelligent venomous tree-dwelling crab. Or maybe a hypercastrating alien mind control endoparasite
Link. Space traveling aliens are probably all AIs.
Generative adversarial network processes language-like sound in way similar to human brains.
Link. Needs replication and expansion. Suggests Chomsky was wrong about innate language ability.
Corporate bureaucracy is worse than government bureaucracy.
Link. True. I’ve known both. “Government bureaucrats at least want to do the right thing. They often fail for a variety of reasons…”
Dyer compares the big 5 populists
Link. All in decline for now, save Berlusconi who is dead. Only one led an insurrection.
Womb-centric feminism in Britain: That said Harrington was radicalized by Mumsnet which she started reading more than a decade ago
Link. I suspect the majority of American women believe biology matters but is not deterministic. Men remain boys, Women grow up.
Anthropics Claude one of the three major foundational Large Language Models now has enough memory to hold a short book
Link. He tests Claude as author, editor, critic and more with very impressive results.
In Our Time: Once the rebellion had been suppressed the Shogun enforced a ban on Christianity and expelled nearly all foreigners from the country. Japan remained more or less completely sealed off from the rest of the world for the next 250 years.
Link. I want to listen to this one.
CDC depression survey: West Virginia where 26.4% of respondents reported suffering from depression Arkansas and Alabama (23.5% each) Kentucky (24.2%) and Tennessee (24.1%)
Link. Income and maybe education.
Betelgeuse might supernova in next thousand-million years. No risk to Earth.
Link. 500 ly distant, if it were 30ly we’d have problems. Not impossible that it blows tomorrow but more likely 1 millions years from now.
Industrial chemistry: The Ibuprofen story
Link. Failure is an orphan, but success has a thousand fathers. Never trust the story an ambitious executive tells of their success; I have seen similar narrative invention in my own career.
Find Any File is a program for Apple’s macOS that lets you search for files on your disks.
Link. Tsai endorses it. Bad sign: I can’t find price on the mobile site. It’s not free. I like that the site lists alternatives like EasyFind (free).
department has been involved in two chases with 14-year-old drivers one of which involved a 12-year-old passenger. Underthun said that all three had history of auto theft and had been released from the juvenile detention center days before.
Link. Auto theft in MSP has doubled over past year, often involves guns, and is mostly by a small number of teens who are repeatedly arrested and released.
Unclear if there’s much money earned.