Link. Anything over 20y old. LIFE magazine especially. Some things are unchanged, others have changed beyond memory.
Author Archives: jgordon
How to Turn Off Daily Cash Notifications on Your iPhone
Link. Wallet:ellipsis:notifications.
Google Domains (registrar services) shutting down migration to Squarespace
Link. I kind of hate Google now.
High calorie foods to prevent exercise/training associated weight loss
Link. Suggestions welcome.
Long Covid Hints – 8% prevalence at day 300 but a weird metformin effect.
Link. I *hate* the use of “Long Covid” as a diagnostic entity. I can’t believe we’re still using that term. Still, good discussion here.
XBB sublineages comprise nearly 99% of circulating coronavirus in the U.S.
Link. Doesn’t say why. Next vaccine to focus on XBB.
“From October through early June, about 75,000 COVID-19 deaths have been reported nationally. That’s more than double the average annual number of flu deaths in the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic.”
COVID less lethal than flu but far more common.
Moral Injury in corporate medicine fueled by private equity.
Link. Primary care physicians (I am one) are basically broken. Unionization is the only response.
Oregon Town supplies Idaho cannabis demand: ” … tax revenues that have paid for new police positions emergency response vehicles and park and trail improvements.”
Link. Small town has 11 dispensaries — all for Idaho customers.
Biden: “… four months after he called out junk fees in his State of the Union and nine months after he first called for action to crack down on hidden fees …”
Link. The GOP is now forced to defend hidden fees and price concealment. Because of course they must. (NYT article covering this was so inane I refuse to link to it. Instead Gov PR.)
White Starbucks manager fired over racist claims: The federal jury found that race was a factor in Phillipss termination and awarded her $600000 in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages for violations to her rights under state an
Link. Likely to be reduced on appeal but Starbucks used her as a scapegoat.
Mainstream macroeconomics correctly predicted the recent inflation and gave us the tools that looked to have solved much of the problem
Link. Noah overstates his case, but does have a point.
The deputies who are White also waterboarded Jenkins and Parker pelted them with eggs and attempted to sexually assault them with a sex toy
Link. Mississippi. Even by American standards this is … noteworthy.
“The FBI Jackson Field Office, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office opened a federal civil rights investigation into the incident in February”
apply AI to chip design building custom chip design models to iterate into existing simulators and refine new designs that actually have a pretty good chance of being novel.
Link. Suddenly my Cringely RSS feed lights up. Sounds like he’s had a rough time but fun to read.
Extended rant against $4K eBike for 10yo trail riders.
Link. It’s a good rant.
molecules are 1.6 billion years old and hint that eukaryotes were abundant and widespread much longer ago than earlier biochemical evidence had suggested
Link. Much more time for multicellular organisms to evolve.
The United States needs a government-funded-and-directed AI program to develop widely reusable models in the public interest.
Link. It would need to be independent of party control (fed model).
Pratchett Philosophy: absurdity and duty.
Link. Fundamentally secular. I have read almost everything he published including his earliest books.
flies that had seen corpses were avoided by other flies as if theyd been marked by death
Link. “a specific set of serotonin-receptor-possessing neurons are used” by living flies to perceive dead ones”.
Activate these and the fly ages faster. A suicide switch.
“The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free” – 2020 reference.
Link. Current Affairs is still paywall free. Has a few examples that remind me of Project Xanadu payment schemes. (Via a Mastodon referral – @joe@appdot.net).
See Docuverse: https://bit.ly/3Cq8vgj. I think there was a micropayment transaction tracking scheme. From 1960s?
Boomer PSA: messages.app supports conversation muting.
Link. IWTYA when I learned this.
there may even be one or more stars that are shining several quintillion years from now: billions of times the present age of the Universe
Link. Red dwarfs from merger of brown dwarfs formed in late stage galaxy collisions.
It bodes ill for our democracy that those who cannot pay or choose not to are left with whatever our broken information ecosystem manages to serve up
Link. NPR is the important exception (despite their terror of GOP wrath)
APA poll on substance use: 16% think cigarettes not unsafe
Link. I’d love to interview those who think cigarettes are “safe”. The survey responses are mostly not credible; I wonder if it was a badly designed poll.
Maybe credible and startling: only 7% use alcohol daily but 13% use cannabis daily.
APA framing focuses on opioids and tobacco use, less concern about cannabis and alcohol.
“Cellphones are the worst thing thats ever happened to movies…”
Link. As in story telling rather than mobile calls disrupting movie watching.
If trade diversion is a problem then Japan is in luck because it could be a big beneficiary of the scramble to get electronics production out of China.
Link. Everyone loves Japan now. I do.
Using a friction shifter on a 10 speed cluster.
Link. Surprisingly it can work well.
By making the feasibility of full-time motherhood a purely biological issue Clark and Kirk and the rest allow the movement to redirect the rage and disappointment many of these women will feel at a target they can actually hurt: the LGBTQ community.?
Link. The warped world of Red womanhood.
“… the pride flag waves peaceful and steadfast in front of the convention center, against the blue Texas sky”
Jedeed: Turning Point USA is in my opinion one of the most dangerous organizations out there
Link. “… TPUSA feels fresh and new and fun, and they care less about the truth than any org I’ve encountered so far”
Microsoft Edge Removes Button to Remove browsing history.
Link. Tsai: “you can use the special edge://sync-internals URL to access a hidden button to Clear Server Data”
Race based affirmative action not supported by Dem base, class based is more popular.
Link. Asian 39%, White 47%, Hispanic 55%, Black 78%. “Today, Black enrollment stands at 5 percent. (Black residents make up less than 6 percent of California’s population.) The overall six-year graduation rate of Black students stands at 77 percent.”
Apple’s bug reporting is a joke: “I encounter enough issues that I could probably keep myself busy full time reporting them. But my expectation is that almost everything I write will likely be ignored”
Link. Apple engineers also think it’s broken.
Sonoma security: “sea change from largely static detection and protection to those based more on behaviours”
Link.
“Fires are burning in forests in all of Canada’s provinces and territories, except the province of Prince Edward Island and Nunavut, a northern territory that sits above the tree line”
Link. Good backgrounder from Chibougamau, 430 miles north of Montréal. Last few years they struggle to have outdoor ice.
“quarantine for anything returning from the moon was both necessary and futile: Humans would probably fail to contain a microscopic threat”
Link. Despite avowed “existential threat” NASA knew quarantine was mostly for show.
“This tendency to downplay existential risk — instead prioritizing likelier threats with lower consequences — shows up in fields like climate change, nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence”
Trump’s motive per Christie: ““I think it’s much more likely they’re a trophy that he walks around and says, look, I’ve got this,”
Link. Ego, insecurity, some senility.
iOS 17 password share: “If you want to remove a shared password but keep it in your own passwords, head to recently deleted, tap the password, and choose “Recover to My Passwords.”
Link. That won’t work.
Britain and several European countries restrict use of puberty delaying medications outside of clinical trials: “The clinic had seen a sharp rise in referrals, from 250 young people in 2011 to 5,000 in 2021”
Link. A puzzle.
DeSantis uses AI generated images to tie Trump to terrifying Fauci and Science.
Link. Intended to deceive but stupid and clumsy because DeSantis. I’m looking forward to Trump videos showing DeSantis calling for CO2 controls.
Let them fight.
macOS 14 Sonoma: “The team that develops Open Core Legacy Patcher (OCLP) is already hard at work preparing support for older Macs”
Link. I’ll be buying an Air shortly before Sonoma comes out so I can run Ventura until next March or so.
“even just a small taste of VisionOS made me feel confident that it is going to be the next major platform for Apple and Apple developers, alongside MacOS and iOS/iPadOS”
Link. Apple is such a large chunk of the S&P that the initial Vision Pro reviews have changed our net wealth. Which is insane.
“GPT-4, when told to repeat or otherwise process the string ” davidjl” (note the leading space character), treats it as “jndl” …”
Link. “This token might refer to Reddit user davidjl123 who ranks top of the league for the old /r/counting subreddit, with 163,477”
#chatgpt
UFO Evidence (xkcd).
Link. We could go from bored yawn to obsession in a picosecond. But it ain’t gonna happen.
The illusion of moral decline: “people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals a
Link. Ever since the invention of language.
“the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced”
IPad Standby – it uses lots of power now: “what I’d like is for it to automatically go into Airplane Mode when I turn off the screen”
Link. That would work for me.
GWB did one big good thing: “PEPFAR … program, started by President George W. Bush, paid for antiretroviral medications for millions of H.I.V. positive people in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean”
Link. Many well intentioned people thought it was a waste of money. One of America’s biggest wins.
“political costs and benefits will often beat out economic ones — even when that might seem irrational.”
Alcohol use 20% less in concert goers“: They’re either eating edibles before they come or there’s more of a sober, mental health”
Link. I’d like to know the edibles / sober ratio. Even if it’s mostly a shift to edibles that seems a good thing.
Apple Vision Pro – an early user experience.
Link. An incredible R&D effort but still years from my use.
Snowden Ten Years Later: “You become convinced that only the insiders know what’s really going on, because the news media is so often wrong. Your family is ignorant. Your friends are ignorant. The world is ignorant. The only thing keeping you from ign
Link. Fascinating Schneider essay.
WaPo carjacking article dances around the juvenile problem.
Link. If numbers don’t fall we are going to recreate juvenile detention facilities.
Insanely idealistic NYPD cop Sue’s department over Police Benevolent Association license to kill cards.
Link. The corruption runs real deep.