Link. Facebook has least bad ads of any platform I see.
Monthly Archives: April 2023
“He now has 10 customer-service employees who help him respond to fans while he talks. He still sometimes streams from his grassland yurt but also had a yurt backdrop built above his brick-and-mortar store.”
Link. China has fused live-streaming with small company retail.
SCOTUS corruption: “given top pay and treated to teaching trips abroad, and their personal needs are anticipated, from lunch orders to, in Justice Gorsuch’s case, house hunting.”
Link. Scalia Law School is a legal way to keep red justices close to red donors. Whitewashing bribes. SCOTUS is a stinking pile of corruption – like Congress.
“A new study of genetic data from a market in Wuhan, China, said the data did not support the case that the pandemic had started with illegally traded animals”
Link. The Bayesian analysis swings back to lab release.
“First Republic was worth just $650 million as of Friday afternoon, down from more than $20 billion before the March crisis, a reflection of investors’ realization that shareholders could be wiped out.”
Link. There may be immediate buyers post gov seizure. The shareholders are gonna get scalped.
“many of the effects that are ascribed to lactate are nothing more than the effects of a big bolus of sodium ions”
Link. Mice experiments used sodium lactate infusions. Finding these assumptions and disproving them is a great way to do science.
Recent changes in SSH remote access to a Mac
Link. “there’s now a separate Allow full disk access for remote users setting, but it’s under General ‣ Sharing instead of Privacy & Security ‣ Full Disk Access. And it’s now only visible if you click the little i button next to Remote Login. With this selected, you don’t need to give sshd Full Disk Access.”
“These days I’m carrying cables and adapters for USB-A, USB-C, Micro-USB, Lightning, MagSafe, and Apple Watch.”
Link. Same here but for last two.
Why GM is dropping Apple CarPlay: “… collecting surveillance data that Apple’s privacy rules don’t allow”
Link. Core of GM profit plan is to collect driver data and sell it. Similar to the smart TV industry. I wonder if they will subsidize car cost.
It’s India’s decade now.
Link. Noah has the numbers.
Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options: “Before she became CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber wrote the definitive exploration of decentralized social media networks back in 2020, and has laid out the pros and cons of nearly every approach.”
Link. I’m on Mastodon for now. Everyone is watching Bluesky.
Growing a micro-LLM with Jane Austen: “Ten minutes in, BabyGPT’s vocabulary has grown…”
Link. Great explainer. You can choose from several training sources.
“By tracing this genomic evolution over the past 100 million years, the so-called Zoonomia Project has revealed millions of stretches of human DNA that have changed little since our shrew-like ancestors”
Link. Great research and an excellent article. Link may allow free access. “… some of these shifts helped human brain cells grow for a longer period of time during childhood”
“One of the bottlenecks faced by Siri is that “top executives” at Apple are wary of Siri making major gaffes in its responses.”
Link. I actually like Siri and use it for simple tasks daily.
“in 2022, NSO Group customers widely deployed at least three iOS 15 and iOS 16 zero-click exploit chains against civil society targets around the world.”
Link. Remember when we thought it was possible to secure a complex system?
Large Language Models – evolutionary tree and selection algorithm 2023
Link. A snapshot of the state of the art. Taken from Mooler et al (GitHub, linked).
iOS App Update hangs without an error message in infinite download: a general approach
Link. Verify payment, turn off Screen Time, Restart Phone, test free app download, update an app, update all, etc.
A practical guide to LLMs.
Link. The diagram is worth keeping.
“Roberts has claimed judicial independence in order to circumvent an investigation into judicial independence.”
Link. Roberts has earned the scorn of history.
Trump campaign hired non-crazies to look for fraud: “Ken Block, founder of the firm Simpatico Software Systems, studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign in late 2020 and found they were “all false,”
Link. Curious how they found him. Love to know what they did with the results.
Five Worlds of AI: “it could be that for most jobs, humans will still be more reliable and energy-efficient”
Link. Not Aaronson’s main point but energy efficiency is pretty much all we got. Hope it’s enough.
“Just as an an entrepreneur works hard to figure out what products customers would like to buy, Tucker worked hard to figure out what monster-of-the-week Fox News viewers — and potential Fox News viewers — would fear and revile”
Link. Bit of Goebbels in Tucker but I think Noah overstates his rationality.
Legally mandated treatment for psychotic (schizophrenia) homeless: “Severe housing shortages for the mentally ill … are key questions that have yet to be answered.”
Link. Hard to succeed if there’s no housing even with treatment. Decades ago there was institutional housing of variable quality.
Gun Violence: big regional differences in US. (Reds worse, lots suicide)
Link. “… the reason the U.S. has strong regional differences is because our swath of the North American continent was settled by rival colonial projects that had very little in common, often despised one another and spread without regard for today’s state boundaries.”
“I’ll get to an important difference that sets Murdoch apart and identifies him as the most malign force in contemporary public life.”
Link. “Murdoch, Trump, Carlson …. One of them stands apart.”
Fallows is a respected senior journalist. Most don’t dare go after Murdoch.
Team blue being idiots: SF public math education fiasco.
Link. It’s nice to have my team be really stupid every so often. I get bored of dunking on team red.
Ads in the Windows 11 Start Menu and in iOS
Link. Does anyone not hate this?
Zuckerberg Buries the Metaverse.
Link. “I barely knew her”. It’s all AI now.
“Solon instituted a programme of reforms that transformed Athens’ political and legal systems, its society and economy, so that later generations referred to him as Solon the Lawgiver.”
Link. On my list. In Our Time.
“The Ice Ages were cancelled permanently about 5,000 years ago. A few million extra cattle belching methane for 3,000 years put enough methane into the air to stop the cooling trend.”
Link. I’d like a science article on this. Dyer is usually pretty good though.
Sudan: “By 2021, $3 billion of financial aid from Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia had duly arrived, and the senior military officer on the TMC pulled the plug on ‘power-sharing’ with the civilians.”
Link. A brief and clear explainer. “There are no democracies whatever in the Arab world, and military or monarchical tyrannies are the norm.”
“Musk or someone on his team deciding that Anthony Bourdain, Kobe Bryant, and Jamal Khashoggi should be branded as having paid for Twitter.”
Link. Isn’t MBS, the man who murdered Jamal Khashoggi, a Muskitter investor?
Why BuzzFeed News died: “The richest men in the world have decided that journalistic values threaten their power”
Link. Dark days.
Atogepant, a calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) inhibitor, effective in resistant migraine.
Link. Current models of migraine focus on this calcitonin mechanism but there are likely other mechanisms.
“By putting the two oscillation states of the crystal in a superposition, we have effectively created a Schrödinger cat weighing 16 micrograms.”
Link. Quantum effects at the macroscopic. A few billion times beyond prior work. Needs replication.
“macOS space management needs to be rethought, redesigned, implemented without inconsistencies or bugs, and thoroughly documented for users, support staff and developers.”
Link. I think Apple wants users to have the impression of unlimited local storage — subject to paying a monthly fee for iCloud storage. This basically makes backup impossible.
Science of relationships: “Over time, the number of weak ties more strongly predicted well-being than the number of close ties.”
Link. My CrossFit mates for example. They didn’t look at online relationships (Mastodon, etc).
In general need to be out in community to develop these.
China COVID data hiding: “Western journal editors enabled those efforts by agreeing to those edits or by withdrawing papers for murky reasons.”
Link. Xi has always acted like he thought COVID was a Chinese lab escape.
State transportation funding funding needs more money: inefficient taxes are a bad answer.
Link. The GOP is the problem so this statement in wrong: “The fault is not theirs. It lies squarely with Minnesota voters, who have brought us to our current shameful impasse.”
“in income terms, Millennials are doing fine — better than any [prior] generation did”
Link. Millenials were doing badly — in 2012. Since then there’s been a big reversal. In 10 years the enormous inheritance wealth transfer will make the Millenials the wealthiest generation by far.
A list of scientists and philosophers to follow on Mastodon. Updated daily.
Link. It’s tedious to subscribe on most iOS clients, best to use web client.
“the division between Kentucky’s cities and towns as “night and day. It’s like when you think California, and you think Florida.”
Link. The rural-urban divide is universal but may be unusually wide in America and Iran.
“the most eminent names from yesteryear’s chess—Lasker, Alekhine, Morphy among them—would not be competitive in top-level play today.”
Link. AIs rule, but fwiw they have improved their inferiors.
iPhone Recovery Key attack vector kills your iCloud access: Workarounds pending an Apple fix including Apple ID protection
Link. 1. It’s crazy that 6 digit passcode gives access to Apple Password Manager AND the ability to lock someone permanently out of their Apple ID (photos, media, software, documents, etc).
2. Use Screen Time account lock passcode to prevent setting/changing Apple ID or Recovery Key.
3. Good practice: Designate a Recovery Contact.
“If you’re a working-class person, and you see a big new shiny glass apartment tower going up a block away, it makes perfect sense to be afraid that rents are about to rise.”
Link. The “luxury” apartments are, however, not the cause of the rent increase to come.
NYC thieves prefer eBikes: “if my analog bike is safer because of it then all those mopeds in the bike lane is a small price to pay”
Link. I’ve not seen that effect here but one can hope.
Prosumer digital image management has not progressed to our advantage
Link. “All the options have Hotel California Syndrome — you can check-in but you can never leave.”
#datalock #aperture
“Safe mode is my favourite panacea when something still doesn’t work after restarting in normal mode. It can let macOS updates install without trouble, it flushes font caches so can unscramble their problems, and much more.”
Link. Allowed him to deauthorize an iTunes computer.
“agreed to serve six months in the Wagner mercenary group in exchange for a pardon and supplies of anti-viral medications”
Link. Estimate 20% of Russian prisoners are HIV positive.
Proton end-to-end encrypted password manager beta.
Link. We need a 1Password alternative.