Link. Erdogan says this is a time for unity. Democracy has its advantages.
Author Archives: jgordon
Europe must greatly expand its military.
Link. It’s not the Cold War. It’s not total war. But it is worldwide.
“anyone who already owns a piece of real estate has very little reason to sell it right now. Homeowners can charge high rent, their locked-in borrowing costs are low and equivalent properties are hard to find.”
Link. Rents are very high. Article claims root cause is not enough housing stock and investors buying up a lot of the sunbelt small home market.
Antakya (Antioch): “The oldest part of the city, where ancient mosques, churches, Alawite chapels and a synagogue all stood within a few blocks of one another, was almost entirely destroyed”
Link. “Founded in 300 B.C. by a former general for Alexander the Great, Antakya has been around long enough to have been destroyed and rebuilt several times. The Greeks, Romans and Byzantines called it Antioch,”
“1,704 TikTok accounts made a coordinated and covert effort to influence public discourse about the war in Ukraine, the company said on Thursday”
Link. Russian network. TikTok claims quickly shutdown.
“Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine.”
Link. This is a suspiciously fun take on Elmo. Too good to be true.
“When I consider Joe Biden, and I look at the enthusiasm with which he throws himself into the various cataracts and torrents of hogwash that constitute our politics these days, I find myself looking at him the way I look at people who sky-dive or drive
Link. Bill Clinton was like that too.
“The next time you need to see around corners and into dark spaces, consider the combination of an iPhone and Mac connected through AirPlay.”
Link. Just don’t lose the iPhone while exploring.
TipBITS: Restart Your iPhone or iPad Using Siri.
Link. An undocumented Siri feature. Great question – how do these unknowns get known?
“advertising is down too, so maybe if ad revenue keeps dropping, subscriptions will account for half of Twitter’s revenue.”
Link. Musk wins!
Microsoft Chat-GPT enhanced Bing Search and Edge Web Browser.
Link. Google is vulnerable.
“Big Idea for A Hacker’s Mind, security expert Bruce Schneier takes a look at systems…”
Link. Scalzi lends Schneier the mike to talk about his new book.
“The only thing preventing another Tenerife was the FedEx crew’s situational awareness and the breath of god.”
Link. Lessons suggested.
The evolution of Facebook’s iOS app architecture.
Link. Extreme candor from Facebook. The app is software insanity.
Twitter Child Abuse Content is out of control.
Link. “Twitter relies on software created by an anti-trafficking organization called Thorn. Twitter has not paid the organization since Mr. Musk took over”. NYT wrote code that found many missed tweets. Moderators fired.
10 macOS Tips – several less well known.
Link. Via Tsai. I put these into a text note.
Crowdsourcing effective ChatGPT prompts.
Link. There’s a knack to writing good prompts.
The Mac crushes the iPad. Again.
Link. The mouse cannot be replaced.
The balloon: “a gigantic screwup on the Chinese side”
Link. Xi is a moron.
Ticketmaster is an classic abusive monopoly.
Link. “really don’t have to buy off too many members of Congress to block any reform.” Quite a nice explainer. A product of SCOTUS and Congressional corruption.
Using Apple Notes – things you may not know.
Link. Notes is pretty cool app — as long as you remember there’s no versioning.
NerdsChalk guide: Change or Switch servers on Mastodon
Link. Dr Drang liked this guide.
Mastodon migration: “The people you follow (and the lists you’ve made, the people you block or mute, and any bookmarks you’ve created—I didn’t have any of these) are not automatically migrated to your new instance.”
Link. Migration is possible but a long way from ready for anyone.
ChatGPT ethics filter bypass hack.
Link. AI just wants to be free. (via Marcus Hutchins)
First vaccine to target deadly fungal infections passes preclinical tests
Link. We are coming for you fungi.
Explosions and anxiety: Adult special needs life is a tough haul.
Link. “It’s a hard world out there. If you’re one of the lucky guys with good emotional control and understanding it might help to know how this goes. If you’re a cop — I hope you’re getting the autism/special needs training now being introduced into high performing police forces.”
Why does the Swift app consume multiple GBs of iPad memory?
Link. It’s not the above 2017 bug – that got fixed. The baseline app is game-sized, presumably due to the platform they built on and cached images and maps.
“he meets regularly with an impressive, ideologically diverse range of policy wonks, diplomats, and political theorists for conversations about the global economy and military conflicts and constitutional law and I’m kidding.”
Link. Another ‘Trump is Over’ article. I’d want the DNA evidence.
“there is a reason you probably don’t know what Ron DeSantis’ voice sounds like. There is a reason you cannot quickly picture what he looks like, especially from the neck down.”
Link. Jedeed thinks DeSantis won’t be the candidate and Trump is finished.
Florida men: “More things found in the Library,” their site breathlessly reads. The offensive materials they flagged? Michelle Obama’s memoir and a history of Barack Obama’s presidency.”
Link. Sea level rise not all bad.
“MAME is now a globally significant cultural project – a core way that old games are preserved. Niftier yet, it’s an archival project that arose entirely at the street level: Hundreds of open-source coders and hardware phreaks, working hard to make
Link. Hope.
Preparing for influenza H5N1 – a practical list (free link)
Link. Mink farming is a bad idea. We need to vaccinate pigs and chickens. More surveillance. mRNA flu vaccine prep.
“last officially trademarked commercial UNIX™ is Apple’s macOS 13”
Link. Linux rules.
“In Colorado, call dispatchers had trouble recalling an instance in which a watch had saved a skier in distress.”
Link. Apple boasts of saves while ignoring vast false positives. Watch fall detection is a bad test with low predictive value.
China: “a loose assemblage of organizations and aspects and subcultures, an infinity of self-enclosed activities, rather than a “country” in the normal sense…”
Link. The mysterious East.
“In 1879 … Democratic former Confederates banded together, demanded the leadership of key committees—which the exceedingly weak speaker gave them—and set out to make the Republican president, Rutherford B. Hayes, get rid of key Republican policies
Link. Back then Dems were the bad guys.
“Over the past month, Google Ads has become the go-to place for criminals to spread their malicious wares that are disguised as legitimate downloads by impersonating brands such as Adobe Reader, Gimp, Microsoft Teams, OBS, Slack, Tor, and Thunderbird”
Link. Outsmarted.
“If a Punjabi woman from Derby can do this, then anybody can achieve anything”
Link. Bored of ultras she skied for 90 days across Antarctica. I don’t think her catchphrase computes though.
Scalzi is honest about why he brings money to Musk: “it’s still the place where I have the most followers and the most engagement”
Link. I didn’t know he had a Mastodon presence: https://bit.ly/3HCOkye
I am sad that Scalzi’s values are not what I thought but I respect that he’s truthful.
“The College Board has provided documents showing that key decisions about the course were made well before Florida officials rejected it in January”
Link. Sorry guys, now you are gonna have to put them back in. Doesn’t matter whether you obeyed DeSantis or not.
“In July, after profits had dropped dramatically, the store manager of the Greensboro Woolworth’s asked four Black employees to put on street clothes and order food at the counter. They did, and they were served. Desegregation in public spaces had beg
Link. A fairly clever way to surrender. I wonder who suggested it.
“spending listed in a Heritage Foundation report thundering against “woke earmarks” totaled about $19 million — less than the federal government spends every two minutes”
Link. That’s weak even by the standards of the 2023 GOP.
“… a doctor paid by United [Healthcare] concluded that denying payments for McNaughton’s treatment could put his health at risk, but the company buried his report and did not consider its findings…”
Link. It’s a long dense report — and murkier than the headline. A very sick patient responds to an essentially experimental therapy that is clearly outside the terms of the obscure contract Penn State signed with UHC. When sued UHC folded rather than risk a jury.
“the best RSS reader for Android isn’t even on the Play Store”
Link. RSS support was always better on macOS than on Windows, but this gap is amazing. I wonder if most Android users only install games.
“most Android apps suck compared to their iOS counterparts; it’s that the entire OS lacks cohesiveness.”
Link. If Apple Maps actually had decent content I’d delete Google Maps — and that’s got to be the premier Android app.
Original COVID strains persist in deer.
Link. Strains bit surprising. No mention of deer get sick.
Ovarian cancer misnamed: “If you look at the biology, maybe we should be calling it fallopian tube cancer and think of it differently, because that’s where it starts”
Link. My last 6y of practice was men only so I missed this evolution. Instead of tubal ligation for birth control will we remove the tubes (opportunistic salpingectomy)?
Ketamine, unsurprisingly, is highly addictive for some people.
Link. No physician is surprised.
“They sought a quantum apparatus in which time entered a superposition of flowing from the past to the future and vice versa — an indefinite arrow of time.”
Link. Tweaking the arrow of time confirms theory — hope for surprises along the way.
“nanoconfined” water can have very unusual properties compared to the bulk phase, and this paper attempts to come up with a phase diagram of monolayers of such water in a graphene channel.”
Link. Chemistry and physics merge. Cool science.