Link. Scroll to the list of events. Even the web didn’t move this quickly.

Link. The flip side of being able to send money internationally. Even bigger than ransomware and fentanyl.

Link. “In 2022, they regained 2.3 years of those years”. Other groups have regained 80% of lost LE as of 2022 as COVID recedes (for now).

Many would like to know why they did so poorly.

Link. Demand less, OPEC considers production cuts.

Link. No notification

Link. Author works at Google but I’ll vouch for the misery of the iOS experience.

Link. Heroic effort to explain a very technical paper. Recommended for those who make confident statements about the near future.

“Anthropic’s interpretability team announced that they successfully dissected of one of the simulated AIs in its abstract hyperdimensional space.”

Link. An old Favorite may resolve to what’s now a transient internal OneDrive store because files aren’t really files any more and I have a headache now.

Link. Similar to playing football — which is legal but a bad idea.

Link. I have seen the term “catastrophic success” applied to the Hamas attack.

Link. During brief detentions thefts drop. Rates still increasing though armed carjackings are down.

Link. Noah on OpenAI board coup. I find myself wanting to defend the EA board, I think Noah is right about the big picture.

Link. Eliminating fraud would eliminate too much legal activity.

Link. Lots of insider info. “Binance is going to be slowly ground into a very fine paste.”

Link. Nobody trusts Xi, including his subjects.

Link. This was first published in 2013 but I updated it for Monterey and later. It’s not a perfect description of the current process but it’s the best I’ve seen.

Link. I’ve read this for 40y and it worked for us. Though I have more SP500 than whole market. New study confirms ancient advice. But Vanguard is not what it was …

Link. IOW: not Nigeria or Pakistan. Noah continues contrarian positivity.

Link. … aaaanddd they are almost obsolete. But for a few weeks they were a thing.

“start with giving the AI an identity (you are an expert, friendly teacher who helps students with complex topics)…”

Link. “Finder’s memory climb to over 1 GB. … closing it doesn’t free that memory up, even days afterwards. The only way to return the Finder’s memory use to anything approaching normal is to relaunch it from the Force Quit Applications dialog.”

Link. Dyer makes Hamas seem more calculating than I suspect it is.

Link. A surprisingly good year for America.

Link. His list of past TG subjects is a good reading assignment

Link. “… Q* … could be a breakthrough in … autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.”

At present just does basic arithmetic and takes a lot of computation.

I wasn’t entirely honest when I “joked” about ChatGPT5. I like their AGI definition.

Link. As a conservative anti-trumper he plaintively hopes the left gets whackier and the right accepts democracy.

Link. Mine tells me where to point the antenna it asked me to build.

Link. “Insurers counted on policy lapse rates — people giving up their policies or defaulting on payments — of about 4 percent annually. The actual lapse rate was closer to 1 percent.”

LTC needs to be a lot cheaper. Or just do a pandemic every five years.

Link. Weird. I’d wait for confirmation.

Link. She turned down his first proposal.

Link. Even in Singapore expenses fall on families. (Dementia care)

Link. If used by combatants a hospital can be legally attacked — within guidelines.

Link. “In August, a variant called BA.2.86 emerged with a host of new mutations — likely the result, once again, of evolution taking place in an immunocompromised person.”

By “immunocompromised” they mean “probably HIV”. It’s easy to understand why the cautious term. People living with HIV can change evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic.

“[vaccine] development will slow down as governments stop paying for genetic sequencing of new variants”

Link. I wonder if that limit is Azure related; I think iCloud stores can be Azure.

Link. Ric Ford gets hit. (Macintouch)

“its replacement motherboard was used, not new, showing unexpected and heavy SSD wear”

When Apple broke my iPhone they replaced it with a refurb with a screen issue.

Link. “In conversations between The Atlantic and 10 current and former employees at OpenAI, a picture emerged of a transformation at the company that created an unsustainable division among leadership” (Should be free article link)

PS. Do not care for “zealous doomers” as a way to describe people worried about what AI tech will bring.

Link. This seems like it should be a story rather than an aside.

Link. Astroturf campaigns infuriate an economist.

Link. The Haredi focus on family size. I think they effectively limit the secular education of women; that’s the best way to achieve that goal.

I think a similar dynamic happened in Iraq but I have never found data. Too sensitive.

Demographics is not destiny but it’s powerful.

Link. Batteries expensive, expertise limited. Insurance rates for EVs will rise.

Link. Suicide is often impulsive and contingent. Interruptions and delays are life and death. Guns in reach are a very bad idea.

“There’s a retired police officer who has walked more than 600 people back from the ledges of the Tojinbo cliffs in Japan”

Link. California is going to extend coverage to undocumented and increase Medicaid reimbursement. This facility will likely reopen — for a time.

It’s very expensive to maintain a modern healthcare facility and rural areas are poor. They are also red, so it puts their GOP reps in a weird spot.

Link. Doesn’t address patriarchal values. I believe rise of educated women has been a major societal stress in America.

Otherwise about what you’d expect. Authoritarian drift, favor violence, Murdoch’s success, etc.

Link. Noah makes the case for a disinflationary boom — the roaring 2020s.

A good antidote to the usual despair. He makes a good case.

Link. Best free coverage so far.

Link. If you don’t vote Biden you don’t get to complain about what happens to you.

“The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.”

Link. The church attendance is likely their greater fear. Less than 50% now, lowest ever.

Link. Happy to wait on Sonoma until 2024.

Link. The establishment had resisted using the word fascist.

Link. Russia has lots of experience with occupation. The criminal class is easy to recruit to leadership.

Link. The GOP’s 30y attack on government has severely damaged the FAA, CDC, IRS, EPA and much more.

Absolute idiots. By which I meant their voters.