Category Archives: share

Used for items shared via ifttt from Pinboard

If you give up an airplane seat – so many nasty games airlines play

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/travel/frontier-volunteer-voucher.html

“Be wary of anything a gate agent promises you verbally, and always politely try to get a receipt or other written evidence. Ask to watch as the agent enters your information, and take a picture of the screen and the agent — with consent. Favor cash over vouchers, which are nearly always time-limited, and ask for a complimentary hotel room if your substitute flight isn’t until the next day”

“Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 69,000 claims in 2023 regarding financial fraud involving crypto, resulting in more than $5.6 billion in reported losses”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/magazine/crybercrime-crypto-minecraft.html

Half of all US fraud losses. Article provide details on one major case.

“thieves are generally young and cavalier and sometimes leave a trail of clues in their wake … Minecraft servers into a cesspool for budding cybercriminals…”

One of the kids almost got his parents killed.

“more liberal-minded Chinese, having overcome the initial shock at actions that reminded them of their own authoritarian government, are applying their creativity to Washington”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/business/china-trump-vance.html

Bring it! Mostly AI generated content but I appreciate the sentiment. I suspect Xi will kill it —too much is applicable to him.

Musk mockery must burn him — as Tesla dies in China.

“Mr. Vance is now known as “the eyeliner man” on the Chinese internet.”

Glioblastoma 1 person trial: “the 17-month mark there is no evidence by brain imaging of any recurrence of the tumor”

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https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/new-glioblastoma-treatment

Pretreatment with immunotherapy cocktail then big surgery then radiotherapy and chemo.

Yes, for glio 1 survivor is meaningful. (In old days glio was called “benign” because it doesn’t metastasize. I think that usage stopped)

DOGE: “lawyers, statisticians and other high-ranking agency officials are being sent from the Baltimore headquarters to regional offices to replace veteran claims processors who have been fired”

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https://www.reuters.com/world/us/100-days-doge-lots-chaos-not-so-much-efficiency-2025-04-24/

But of course they don’t know the software or processes. On the bright side they will learn what needs to be fixed — if we ever have a competent President again.

Musk is a curse.

A decent review of fat reduction strategies for athletic persons.

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https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/how-to-train-while-losing-weight/

Evidence based review. This didn’t get enough focus though: “Meaningful increases in energy expenditure can require up to two to three times the current Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans.”

You can lose fat with exercise but it’s way more exercise than most will ever consider (or be physically able to do or sustain).

Answer Engines work well now – without reasoning delays (AI assisted search-based research).

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https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/21/ai-assisted-search/

[Adam Engst calls them “answer engines” (AE) and that is a great term]

“I’ve been throwing all kinds of questions at [search enabled] ChatGPT (in o3 or o4-mini mode) and getting back genuinely useful answers grounded in search results.”

Search-based research has worked in Perplexity for me for about a year. They really don’t get enough credit. The new chatGPT answer engine is much faster though.

A key contributor is ability to search academic refs including the once ignored Allen Institute for AI’s Semantic Scholar.

Legacy Google Search is a relic, legacy Big Publishing is “suddenly” very powerful, and the pivot of ad budgets to Answer Engines is going to accelerate search engine death.

Managing the incredibly annoying Apple Wallet notifications on Sequoia.

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https://tech.kateva.org/2025/04/managing-incredibly-annoying-apple.html

Apple Notifications have degenerated into bad design interacting in bad ways. I think the most critical setting is disabling display of iPhone notifications in macOS Sequoia (specifically Apple’s incompetent macOS Notification Center).

At the moment I’m trying to kill them all. Then I can try to resurrect anything I care about.

K interviews Nathan Tankus: The world of finance under Musk-Trump attack.

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https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/nathan-tankus-part-ii

Our civilization, and the world of money that runs it, is insanely complex. Musk has delusions of omnipotence and Trump is deeply weird — and both are dumping garbage into poorly understood and very stressed mechanisms. Don’t assume the bond market will save us.

You need to join a Tesla Takedown.

Lifetime prevalence of “psychosis”: white/asian 9.7%, Black/Latino 14%”

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https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1280253/full

“individuals of recent African or Afro-Caribbean descent are more susceptible to experiencing psychosis … Black and Hispanic participants in this study had lower overall rates of mental illness.”

I came across this in a “Harper’s Index” pop-sci thing and didn’t believe it. Turns out this is a consistent worldwide finding, prev of schizophrenia diagnosis 2 to 4 times! higher. Likely a mix of cultural norms, some substance effects, and how people label their own mental states. There is keen interest in environmental stress effects. (I suspect white/asian are better able to deny/ignore delusional states.)

Bike helmets in the Netherlands: “nearly two-thirds of cyclist road deaths were attributed to head injuries”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/world/europe/bicycles-helmets-dutch.html

We have data on death, but brain injury is far more likely. Basically bicycling has significant injury risks, some can be mitigated. Hair is a big issue everywhere, esp with cultures, genders and people for who artful hair is important.

Homo naledi remains deep in an obscure cave system: “What today’s cavers can do is not a good guide to what a smaller species, better adapted and practiced at climbing, might have done.”

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https://johnhawks.net/weblog/how-homo-naledi-got-into-the-dinaledi-chamber/

One may speculate that for them it was a very secure place to visit or live in.

There are probably other similar spaces we would need to explore via bots.

“Trump is claiming the power to ignore the due process of the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, declare someone is a criminal, kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country, and then claim that there is no way to get that person back.”

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https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-13-2025

Move over Nazi, MAGA is here.

“Bukele has been offering to hold U.S. citizens”

Gotta learn more Spanish.

“Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game.

DOGE scam: “One of the group’s largest claims … involves canceling a contract that did not exist”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/us/politics/doge-contracts-savings.html

“the contract … was actually canceled when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president. The third-largest savings that the group claims comes from a canceled grant to a vaccine nonprofit … it had actually been paid in full, so the savings was $0”

DOGE itself is fraud and abuse. Musk is a con man. Join a Tesla Takedown.

90s Globalization (China Shock): “Standard economic theory held that the people and places hit by those losses should have adapted relatively quickly.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/economy/tariffs-trump-china-shock.html

THIS! One of my pet theories is that 1990-2020 globalization and IT exceeded a speed limit — a limit on how quickly a socioeconomic system can adapt.

And our society crashed and burned.