Link. We should know more within 6m. Ocean warning is too fast for CO2 alone.
Category Archives: share
Chinese Organized Crime Gift Card Draining.
Link. Borrow card from store, drain money, restore packaging. Card is sold to someone who is out of luck.
“Apple settled a similar card-draining class-action case in January, agreeing to pay $1.8 million. “
“a three-round debate, with GPT-4 arguing the other side, robustly lowers conspiracy theory beliefs”
Link. “GPT-4 was better able to change people’s minds during a conversational debate than other humans, at least when it is given access to personal information about the person …
… it is now trivial to build a vending machine that can engage you in discussion and be very persuasive about it.”
“International Monetary Fund called “too much red tape” one of the major impediments to reviving the German economy.”
Link. Rationalizing regulation is hard work without glory or prizes.
England joins Sweden, Finland, Norway and other EU countries in restricting puberty blocker and hormone therapy for gender dysphoria.
Link. Stated concern is only a single outcome study with a different population than current — medication to be part of clinical trials.
“Clinics worldwide reported that the increase was largely driven by patients raised as girls.”
“Unblocked aims to lighten the cognitive tax burden that software teams bear”
Link. Why is there a strange test here?
Patriarch of Russian Orthodox Church: “Kirill rose rapidly through the Church ranks in Soviet times … (net worth $4 billion)”
Link. Why am I just learning this now? I knew he was insane, but didn’t know the money.
Boeing financial engineering was a great success for 20 years. Then it killed Boeing.
Link. Maybe some companies shouldn’t be publicly traded?
Security Vulnerability of HTML Emails.
Link. “When an email is forwarded, the position of the original email in the DOM usually changes, allowing for CSS rules to be selectively applied only when an email has been forwarded.”
CSS rewrites benign email into malware vector.
“inclusionary zoning” … IZ is a policy that mandates that any new housing development has to set aside some percent of units to be “below market rate” (“BMR”)”
Link. BMR is a tax on renters and, unsurprisingly, it reduces housing availability. OTOH direct subsidies are politically toxic.
How much zero-day hacks for iPhone, iMessage, and more are worth
Link. Reassuringly expensive — but still a pittance for a nation-state.
“ if news of bird flu burgeons, expect egg prices to rise …”
Link. Inflation and disease from the perspective of ag economics
Private equity firm MultiPlan allows health insurance companies to coordinate prices and increases patient costs.
Link. “When patients see medical providers outside their plans’ networks, UnitedHealthcare, Cigna, Aetna and other insurers often send the bills to MultiPlan to recommend a payment amount.”
NYT investigation.
Printer review: “you are a printer we are all printer”
Link. Brother of course. I think they also made good coin as typewriters died.
UUID explainer: “Universally Unique Identifiers … governed by Open Software Foundation, ISO/IEC, and IETF standards.”
Link. Filled gaps in my understanding.
“Exercise withdrawal consistently resulted in increases in depressive symptoms and anxiety”
Link. Maybe I should try fentanyl? (jk but the withdrawal does suck)
Apple antitrust: Dreaming of freedom for photos.
Link. In the very unlikely event that Photos lock-in gets attention there are two fixes: Define an export format for Photo collections and make public PhotoKit APIs the only way Photos interacts with iCloud Photos.
“models are reaching around 80% MMLU accuracy at costs orders of magnitude lower than just a couple of years prior.”
Link. The scale of proposed AI facilities obscures the major reduction in cost.
Sildenafil for Alzheimer’s: In lab “drug seemed to promote the growth of neurites (the projections that neurons use to communicate with each other) and reduced the accumulation of a potentially toxic form of tau protein”
Link. Unreliable study designs suggest a 30% reduction. We will learn more soon. I’m most interested in animal model studies.
“first time since 1803 that Brood XIX, or the Great Southern Brood, and Brood XIII, or the Northern Illinois Brood, will appear together”
Link. Aliens VII. (Cicada dual emergence in Midwest). Dogs who eat too many can get obstructed.
“cicada train would reach to the moon and back 33 times”
Jedeed on Trump shockathon: “Bible … includes the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution alongside the King James version, implying (as many Christian Nationalists believe) that these three documents come directly from God”
Link. I missed the 3 Holy Documents part of this. Jedeed always has the best Trump take with the most telling details.
“Imagine dropping someone from 2010 directly into 2024. They’d lose their mind immediately; they’d go stark raving mad.” I think you’d want to go back before 9/11, say from 1998. Then they’d go mad.
“Elsevier has reportedly posted a stunning 101 expressions of concern on studies connected to Didier Raoult…” – HCQ pusher, former academic microbiologist.
Link. Sounds like a preexisting problem exacerbated by fame.
China have of Feds: “DHS board issued sweeping recommendations that Microsoft revamp its security practices”
Link. US Gov was awful at security so they outsourced to MSFT. Which turns out to be awful too.
“Sonoma has broken the SMB/Samba-based networking mount procedure for Time Machine restores, and no one had found a solution”
Link. This has not gotten much press.
Quantum computing continues to progress
Link. Slowly but consistently
LLMs are not just big regression models: “double descent” instead of overfitting.
Link. I learned a few things.
The future of our routine exponential economic growth — from 2021.
Link. The Economist did this well in their 2000 Millenium issue. This predates the LLM jump.
The Fermi Paradox applies.
A journalist who crashed landed at National Enquirer describes the Trump industry there.
Link. “also quieted my conscience by continuing to drink heavily, every night”
Some of story is explaining how he landed in Pecker-hell but there is lots of interesting background on how lies are made and the truth hidden. Including finding “experts” who will say anything.
Free swim lessons for urban youth overwhelmed by demand.
Link. Open to all but motivation is to reduce drowning risk for black youth. More unmet demand than expected, normally $130 or so. I believe finding instructors is hard, facilities close due lifeguard lack.
“Transit Is Still the Best-Designed Transit App on the iPhone in 2024”
Link. It’s rare to see a review like this — across transit apps.
Google Cognito Scam exposed.
Link. Is it lying if nobody believes you?
Amazon ‘Just Walk Out’ Checkouts relied in 1000 people in India acting as remote monitors. Now too $$$.
Link. Don’t scratch your butt while shopping.
Israel bombing Iranian Embassy complex building in Syria likely consistent with international law.
Link. Embassy protection rule only applies to a host nation and the self-defense case is strong for attack in Syria.
Schneier on xz Utils Backdoor: ” believe this kind of operation has been successful in the past”
Link. “It’s reminiscent of Solar Winds, although (1) it would have been much, much worse, and (2) we got really, really lucky.”
What a crazy situation.
“shaking down lobbyists and foreign governments with exorbitant rates for ads on Truth Social seems like a much better grift than running a hotel across the street from the White House”
Link. He is past his prime but he is still very good at corruption.
Avian flu: A sensible update.
Link. It’s been a long time coming and it will likely get to us one day. Happily we have some relevant experience and a vaccine if needed.
Why Trump laughs at gag orders: “imposed $15,000 in fines on the former president when he ran afoul of that order”
Link. Might as well be 15 pennies.
Using Apple’s iCloud Passwords with Chromium browsers and Apple extension.
Link. Describes how to reenable address and CC auto-entry.
Economic effects of Baltimore bridge collapse for US and Baltimore: trivial.
Link. There is lots of redundancy even now.
“the I-35 collapse does not show up in any statistics as a hit to state or metro output, employment or incomes”
“The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people, we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a segment of our readers”
Link. Cleveland Plain Dealer has far more courage than the NYT.
“The increase has created African communities in the unlikeliest places in the French-speaking province of Quebec”
Link. Quebec birth rates plummeted in the 70s. Language laws effectively limited immigrant sources to French Africa and Haiti. Quebec has always been sociologically fascinating.
XKCD Periodic Table
Link. Every high school science class needs this on the wall.
“… 5 gigawatts of power. It’s considered crucial to OpenAI training and operating new, more advanced AI models than ChatGPT-4. Stargate could launch as soon as 2028.
Link. Colossus is a better name.
Why subscription expirations notification can be wrong: Apple’s store code doesn’t support family sharing.
Link. And there is no way to test the correct code. (I suspect every “family” or “child” thing Apple does is hard to test — even by Apple.)
School absences (away 10% or more) almost double pre-COVID.
Link. Mirrors remote work but students do poorly. Similar increase rich and poor. School violence decreasing but not absences. Many contributing factors including staying home for colds, large increase in anxiety disorders, and absence begets absence.
Economic malaise: housing shortage?
Link. NYT searching for economic anxiety reasons land on housing shortage with Phoenix as an example.
That actually makes sense. It’s very severe in Canada so not only US. This was predicted after the 2010 real estate crash but may be exaggerated by migration boom.
Red states get money from blue states: the details.
Link. One factor is red states do less for not-elite so depend more on federal programs.
Treating mouse model Alzheimer’s with stem cell transplant changed microglia and appeared to slow disease.
Link. Sept 2023 but I missed it then. Requires wiping existing so not great.
Boeing’s Quality Problems: “Boeing’s work force went through a major turnover because of the coronavirus pandemic.”
Link. The quality problems are old but people loss was a last straw. Accelerated retirement likely hurt many companies.
FileVault Recovery Key: “check using fdesetup validaterecovery that the Recovery Key is correct whenever it’s changed”
Link. Recovery Key scares me.