Link. 70 v 60 is record breaking bipartisan agreement. I suspect the 10% diff is Blues who feel AI 2023 is just hype and will go away soon.
Monthly Archives: May 2023
Twitter valuation: “Fidelity came up with the evaluation based on a markdown of its own stake in the company.”
Link. Fidelity was that stupid?!
Minnesota banned noncompetes!
Link. Holy cow. Buried in the big bill. This is fantastic good news if true.
“DS_Store, poised there waiting to trip you up. It contains private data for the Finder, and has been quietly causing havoc since the first release of Mac OS X over 22 years ago.”
Link. I’m interested in bad designs that persist.
Cyclists subsidize street costs.
Link. Most clearly IF they own a car — which most do.
“Because Finder Comments are now saved in two places, keeping them in sync has been a long battle, and one that Apple shows no sign of winning yet.”
Link.
Michael Tsai: SwiftUI Notes Before WWDC 2023
Link. Warning: really depressing.
Elizabeth Holmes in prison: “We try to help our ladies obtain work in the factory which focuses on their strengths so they may develop additional marketable skills”
Link. “Their two young children, William and Invicta, will be able to conduct video calls with Ms. Holmes and visit her on weekends and federal holidays. Phone calls are limited to 15 minutes each, with a total of 300 minutes per month.”
“… Xi’s expectations of the young generation, mentioned “eat bitterness” five times … repeatedly urged the young people to “seek self-inflicted hardships,”
Link. “ask now what your country can do for you” would be DOA in 2023 America. This is an interesting test of modern China’s state control.
[The article is written in a personal style that is definitely not NYT standard.]
Apple’s tests of OS integrity suggest data corruption due to cosmic rays is very rare.
Link. Interesting observation.
Reds confabulate about “extremist Dem murder”.: “Then, as quickly as it swelled, the media frenzy receded. Fox Digital, the TV network’s online arm, continued to publish articles that acknowledged the more complicated story that was emerging from
Link. Believed now a drunken accident. But it served red purposes.
ChatGPT + Code Interpreter: “The Pac-Man gif above was made by having CI use an algorithm to generate a maze, convert the maze into blocks, use an algorithm to find the exit, make it look like Pac-Man and then generate a gif”
Link. The Chat UI will now interpret Python code. Would be an interesting exercise to try to replicate his exercises.
AI 2023 – how to.
Link. Instapapered.
“If you walk into Denny’s, pull out a gun and “say gimme the money,” but then you end up just getting served breakfast that means you failed.”
Link. Biden wins. Again.
OneDrive auto update from April 2023 broke support on Catalina, Mojave and probably more.
Link. Not clear if there’s a lasting fix yet. I’m sad it hasn’t been fixed by now, but maybe most of us just got the update.
“… for a variety of reasons, it is better to think of AI as a person …”
Link. Learning better prompts. Specifically an intern with vast knowledge, excellent writing skills, overconfidence, and a tendency to confabulate.
“…. Anthropic’s Claude, which is not quite as powerful, but has a longer memory and a remarkably pleasant personality…”
“Ms. Turner moved to the sleepy town of Küsnacht, Switzerland, with Mr. Bach, a German music executive whom she started dating in the 1980s”
Link. They married in 2013.
Ultrasound Pulses to mice brain can induce torpor.
Link. “the researchers identified a protein in their brain membranes, TRPM2, that appears to be sensitive to ultrasound”.
I did not know this was a thing.
NYT update on Navy SEAL training investigation.
Link. “… Rear Adm. Hugh W. Howard, was warned about the drop, he told subordinates that it was fine…”
Howard has not been held to account.
Mastodon “After using NetNewsWire to read Mastodon, I find that I prefer reading posts by account rather than mixed together in a timeline”
Link. Lists help a bit but I do like the feed reader model.
“The speed of Chinese rail construction has to be seen to be believed. Here’s a video showing work on a train station that was built in nine hours.”
Link. China power.
“The far right likes George Santos because he’s the goddamn Joker—we get what we fucking deserve. He is a living, breathing deepfake, parody beyond Hollywood’s most depraved satirical dreamings, and proof positive that facts truly do not matter he
Link. Laura Jedeed is catching up post school time.
“ChatGPT users who pay for Plus will gain access to built-in Bing search. This effectively means a way to connect ChatGPT to the internet without plugins”
Link. I don’t see it yet.
“wonderful “What did they just say?” feature (speak that to your Siri remote and the video jumps back 10 seconds or so and temporarily enables subtitles).”
Link. That’s an awesome Apple TV feature. Needs marketing.
Most of article is about how bad Max is.
Derisking China – the process is well underway.
Link. Russia will be, at best, a Chinese satellite within the Sinosphere.
““Cycling Atlas Europe,” a new guidebook detailing 350 single-day rides across the continent”
Link. I’m in.
“Disk Utility in Ventura 13.4 reaches new heights in version 22.6. I’m delighted to report that you can now check and repair almost every APFS volume you might wish.”
Link. Almost. Still, progress after many years of fail.
120kya: “In southern Africa, people from Stem1 and Stem2 merged, giving rise to a new lineage that would lead to the Nama and other living humans in that region. Elsewhere in Africa, a separate fusion of Stem1 and Stem2 groups took place.”
Link. The second fusion was diaspora source. “The DNA of the Mende people showed that their ancestors had interbred with Stem2 people just 25,000 years ago.”
“every one of us has known a friend, a co-worker, or an Uncle Ned who was previously personable, but now rants about how George Soros controls the weather. This is currently the vital center of the Party of Lincoln.”
Link. The lunatic’s party.
“You are going to get old and eventually die. The government isn’t.”
Link. “Why government borrowing isn’t like a personal loan.”
DoorDash adds secret surcharges, allegedly more for iPhone than Android.
Link. I don’t use businesses that do secret charges unless I have no other choice.
“First flown in 1976, the F-16 “Fighting Falcon” …”
Link. Over 50y old but obviously much enhanced. Cheap by weapon standards.
“Ukraine’s air defenses intercepted 29 of 30 missiles fired at Ukraine overnight”
Link. Allied air defense systems are really good.
Greek coast guard dumping refugees in engineless rafts on the Aegean.
Link. This time they got caught. NYT assembled the evidence.
“The Greek authorities often use a fax message to tip off their counterparts to the presence of stranded migrants in Turkish territorial waters.”
iOS 16.5 now available: “Fixes an issue where Screen Time settings may reset or not sync across all devices”
Link. We had this. Screen Time may be Apple’s buggiest software. I suspect its hard to test.
“Assistive Access is the closest Apple has come to an interface designed specifically for people with disabilities or elders—an option that Android has offered via its support for alternative launchers”
Link. I’m very pleased to read this. Does anyone else remember SimpleFinder from macOS classic?
“ChatGPT gets hired at L3 [level 3] when interviewed for a coding position,” an internal note, divulged by the news outlet, reads. PC Magazine notes that such a position comes with an average annual salary of $183k”
Link. No worries, it’s just statistics.
“… Bobby Fischer vibes from Musk — a genius, yes, but descending into conspirational hateful madness”
Link. Isaac Newton kind of did same but Musk is no Newton.
Gruber runs a sanity check on GM’s cyber service business.
Link. They have gone insane. Run!
GPT relationship training for incels: “the central way that GPT-4, as “Emily,” failed to give Quinlan the practice he needed in this conversation, was by always responding in the same upbeat, vaguely therapeutic tone”
Link. GPT-4 voice is definitely therapist. This is an odd but interesting essay.
Microsoft AGI paper: “Making A.G.I. claims can be a reputation killer for computer scientists. What one researcher believes is a sign of intelligence can easily be explained away by another”
Link. Humans want to believe they are magical. That they are ineffable. That they have souls. That nothing else can think.
Foolish humans.
“Biden is the first president that’s reducing the need to get a college degree since World War II,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian.”
Link. About half of the world is either temperamentally or cognitively unsuited to an academic degree. It took Dems way too long to admit that.
Progressive wins Chicago mayoral race: “beat Paul Vallas, a far more conservative and well-funded Democrat”
Link. Surprised me, I thought safety issues would favor Vallas.
Identifying the state of your Mac: “only way to determine whether it has happened is to connect the Mac using an appropriate USB cable to another Mac running Apple Configurator 2, which should then connect to the Mac that’s in DFU mode”
Link. This is a great series.
Simpson on pre-AI tech change 1990-2020.
Link. Future Shock indeed. Also small things add up. A 2023 Camelback hydration bag is wildly different from a 2000 bag (I have both) — even though they do almost identical things.
The Developer Guide to Migrate Across Galaxies: “I once left a comment in an article about COM in CodeProject.com saying that you could actually use COM in Mac OS X”
Link. If you know anything about coding and are Old this is a fun read.
Pandoc: convert document formats.
Link. No, not the old ones like WordPerfect or the truly old and obscure like MORE 3.1. But many others.
Family Sharing Verification Code not Received bug (2020)
Link. I’ve got this bug too. It took some work to get to the step where my son’s device claims a verification code was sent — but none was received. I’ve yet to try the fix of adding a credit card then removing it. Seems like an old bug.
“A group of conservative operatives using sophisticated robocalls raised millions of dollars from donors using pro-police and pro-veteran messages.”
Link. It was all a scam. A legal scam. Not too different from what GOP routinely does.
“… 37-year-old Republican consultant from Wisconsin named John W. Connors, a central figure who appears to connect all five nonprofits.”
Does polar bear fur have useful optical properties?
Link. It has to be white, but beyond that the optics are murky.