Link. “Weeks after the Tiananmen crackdown, in July 1989, Xi hiked into the backcountry with a straw hat and walking stick.”
Author Archives: jgordon
Robocall carriers face doom: cutoff from national voice network.
Link. Akabis, Cloud4, Global UC, Horizon Technology Group, Morse Communications, Sharon Telephone Company, SW Arkansas Telecommunications and Technology
Zelle is a bank run scam.
Link. Don’t use it.
“virtually every Twitter employee I’ve spoken to in the last six months has told me that he or she plans to leave if Mr. Musk takes over.”
Link. “There was already no escaping Mr. Musk. Now, looking away will be truly impossible.”
Recovering Google Workspace: A Detective Story
Link. Very clever moves. The key vulnerability was a lapsed domain (of course). Several Google flaws made it harder. “always be your own administrator. And if you’re a professional or friend setting something up for someone, give that person agency to solve problems without being dependent on you”
COVID vaccination in US: “By late 2021, the Hispanic rate was higher than the white rate, and the Black rate was almost as high as the white rate, according to the C.D.C. As a result, the racial gap in death rates has also disappeared.”
Link. Helps unvaccinated are now MAGA whites.
“You’d think if the labor market were really tight, we’d see employment top out and real wages go up,”
Link. The unemployment rate is now a misleading statistic.
“‘Without me, they married me,’” she said.”
Link. Lyman residents on Russia.
Carter is 98.
Link. In wheelchair now. He is not immortal. Wife a nimble 95.
Hydrogen returns: “As electrolyzers drop in cost, green hydrogen will fill in many of the nooks and crannies of decarbonization that solar, wind, and batteries can’t reach.”
Link. Always bet on the engineers.
When the GOP abandoned democracy: “senators wanted to know why they should remove him. After all, he was giving them the judges they wanted and permitting them to run the country as they wished”
Link. Trump’s first impeachment crimes seem even worse now.
What to read to understand Xi Jinping | The Economist.
Link. Absolutely nothing useful in this article. Hope CIA has more.
“What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be.”
Link. The road to power requires a lot of massage.
“now-governor of Florida Ron DeSantis was one of the 67 House Republicans who voted against a $9.7 billion federal flood insurance assistance package for the victims of Hurricane Sandy”
Link. He’s such a slimeball.
“successful mass employment of GMLRS by Ukraine has proven the validity of the US Army’s AirLand Battle doctrine of the 1980s.”
Link. Lessons of war.
“the Roman Empire, existed between 27 BC and 476 AD. The Byzantine Empire lasted from 395 AD until 1453 AD.”
Link. Byzantine phase of Empire lasted twice as long as Roman phase. Never thought of it that way.
UMN: “Assaults around the university have more than tripled, with 37 so far this year compared to 10 in 2021”
Link. U has restarted MPLS PD relationships and sidelined progressive students.
Hemp-derived delta-8 is often contaminated due to sloppy synthesis.
Link. They don’t quite follow pharma practices.
“the spacecraft sent back a series of photographs of the asteroid, Dimorphos, as it approached at more than 14,000 miles per hour.”
Link. Planetary defense begins. One of those historic moments with a wee little article.
“injectable PrEP to be a huge success, nearly eliminating women’s risk of contracting H.I.V., and to be 88 percent more effective than the daily pill.”
Link. Depot Med q2m.
“This procedure of inventing particles and then ruling them out has been going on so long that there are thousands of tenured professors with research groups who make a living from this.”
Link. When do we call a timeout on particle physics?
Factory Jobs: “pharmaceutical plants, craft breweries and ice-cream makers”
Link. Not, so far, vehicles or phones or restoring.
“more than 300 Chinese companies making E.V.s, ranging from discount offerings below $5,000 to high-end models that rival Tesla”
Link. Prices much lower than US.
“Zangara tried to shoot the president-elect Franklin Roosevelt in Miami, and succeeded mainly in killing Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago”
Link. History is like this.
Apple’s guide to new iOS 16 features might be the best guide.
Link. I’ve seen lots of articles on iOS 16 new features, but I like the official Apple Overview and “All New Features” the best.
Apple’s official guide to finding the iOS 16 user guide on web and ePUB.
Link. Funny there’s not a direct link to the ePUB version of the guide. The new features chapter is always worth a scan.
EJ Dionne: “Forgive me for noting that conservatives seem to believe that the rich will work harder if we give them more, and the poor will work harder if we give them less.”
Link. Via Twitter. Saving for future reference.
Incel online “community”: 406 users, some obsessive.
Link. A lot of press for a tiny number of posters. Likely most or all have psychiatric disorders.
General Putin may be Ukraine’s best friend.
Link. Spectacular incompetence.
Selenium biology arrives.
Link. Might be some medicines in there.
Modified herpes virus for cancer has promising early results.
Link. Oncology is having a golden age.
Women freezing eggs at 38: “The overall chance of a live birth … 39 percent”
Link. Most think odds are much better.
Stable Diffusion Based Image Compression: “The main algorithm of Stable Diffusion, which generates new images from short text descriptions, operates on this latent space representation of images”
Link. Data transmission across optic nerve is lossy.
NYT on latest Iran protests: the government is good at brutal suppression.
Link. Can Iranians stop going to mosques or is that illegal?
Inflation and crime: more demand for cheap goods drives more theft.
Link.
A geek born of the web wants the universal library back.
Link. I feel his pain, I don’t share his hope. We torched our Alexandria.
“docile raccoons were more likely to learn how the devices work”
Link. Management strategies drive evolution of nerd raccoons. Treacherous researchers favor raccoon supremacy.
Dark Brandon defeats monkeypox.
Link. Magnanimous in victory he has rings for the GOP leadership.
“I was excited to have rotating photos on my Lock Screen, but in practice it’s been really frustrating.”
Link. In the early days iPad would easily show rotating images on the lock screen and it was marvelous. Maybe 8y ago.
iCloud doc local store: “browser now lists the contents of ~/Library/Mobile Documents, which is the local root for the iCloud virtual file system”
Link. “what the Finder does is synthesise the contents of its iCloud Drive folder from any user folders you have created, document folders for third-party apps, and those for Apple’s special apps like Numbers.”
COVID continues to evolve within the immune deficient, but we still call variants Omicron.
Link. Decided to only rename variant if requires significant change in management. Will need yearly vaccine.
“fastest growing” black hole in the last 9,000 million years”
Link. Galaxy merger likely. We’ve scanned enough of the observable universe to think this might be GOAT.
“However good it is at making other kinds of art, AI seems really, really good at making horror art.”
Link. Bodes.
Finding and using Apple’s secret installers for Safari and more.
Link. URLs can be found in a macOS file.
“I was CEO of Fog Creek when we decided to sell FogBugz, and if I knew the difference between what we were told ahead of the deal and what happened after, I never would have approved it.”
Link.
Monterey: “Reports of disk image corruption have grown steadily worse, especially since the introduction of APFS, and especially when the disk image is hosted on NAS storage”
Link. SMB plays a role I think; might be the macOS team’s biggest longest failure.
Carbon Copy Cloner panics with SMB bugs in Monterey 12.3.
Link. Monterey SMB is really bad.
“Trump’s goal here is to sustain the conflict until such time as Jim Jordan can save him”
Link. His lawyers and his judge can spout gibberish and win.
“Jay Wallace, Fox’s president and executive editor, took a direct action overriding the decision desk in hopes of avoiding further criticism from Trump supporters”
Link. Nobody really considers Fox a legitimate news source.
“Compared to similarly matched control patients who weren’t taking the drug, VA patients on spironolactone for other conditions reported greater reduced alcohol use afterward.”
Link. Kudos CPRS/VistA, VA’s electronic health record.