Link. Mateusz Jurczyk, Google Project Zero. 30yo C code.
Using styles in TextEdit and beyond: “com.apple.AppKit.TextFavorites.plist is a fairly simple property list that can be manually edited”
Link. There is a lot to unpack here. (The best styles implementation I’ve seen was in Symantec MORE! @1994.)
“Infectious diseases are not good for children” – revisiting history and the “hygiene hypothesis”.
Link. It’s weird to me that most of this needs to be said but I appreciated the hygiene hypothesis update (it didn’t do well).
Caste and India’s Fascist leader.
Link. Can Gandhi win, someday, by showing that Modi does nothing for non-Brahmin?
“The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor”
Link. There is a small industry that constantly repairs broken cables. Those is their story.
Infrastructure Takeaways from Google Cloud Next 2024.
Link. AI as you might expect.
The New Axis: “Much of the War Economy in the U.S. (and its allies) will therefore be about rediscovering the manufacturing capabilities they neglected during China’s meteoric rise.” 🆓
Link. Repost but timely. Industrial policy is here to stay.
Missile defense works much better than expected even 10y ago — why did journalists miss this?
Link. “the U.S. tries very hard to hide its weapons’ true capabilities”. The semi-experts who speak loudly end up as everyone’s source.
The Demise of Email Forwarding Is Getting Closer
Link. This started to get harder 15-20y ago. Even our Google Apps personal domain emails had issues past two years so it’s bigger than forwarding.
US Government is completely dependent on Microsoft — and Microsoft security sucks.
Link. The only way to reform Microsoft would be to make all vendors liable for security failures.
Remember the girls kidnapped from Chibok school in Nigeria 6y ago? One story.
Link. Now kidnappings are routine.
macOS Dictionary: “⌃⌘D (control-command-D), a three-finger tap on a Trackpad, drag and drop, the Services menu, the Finder contextual menu, dict:/// in a browser, and Spotlight search”
Link. I did not know browser thing. I Hor Dictionary stays.
“male bonobos commit acts of aggression nearly three times as often as male chimpanzees do”
Link. The “hippie ape” is Homo sapiens. The first domesticated ape.
“The strands of DNA in a typical human cell break about 40 times a day”
Link. Tardigrades are much tougher.
India: “Swiggy’s gold, silver, and bronze rankings for its gig workforce are based on a dynamic rating system — it changes weekly depending on the quality and quantity of work.”
Link. Lose gold means no health insurance. To see the dystopian future look to India.
School shootings solved: “… Parents, school leaders and others are facing charges and civil lawsuits”
Link. Peak Americana.
“To report a suspicious SMS text message that looks like it’s supposed to be from Apple …”
Link. Apple now collects reports of SMS and email phishing attacks that impersonate Apple at reportphishing@apple.com.
IVF ruling: “forced the pro-life movement to fully examine the cultural and political implications of its position on unborn children, and pro-life Republicans blinked. They caved, almost instantly…”
Link. The author takes his life-begins-conception beliefs seriously but “recognize that many of the critics of the pro-life movement were right all along”
Dental cavities: “The fact that the first true fruits made their appearance in the late Cretaceous might go a long way to explaining why there are so few known frugivorous dinosaurs and why caries haven’t yet been documented among them”
Link. I learned things. It does turn into an ad for a deservedly interesting but unproven product.
Ransomware attacker meets Beth from HR: “Ma’am, I am a hacker. I don’t care about the law,” responds the hacker, growing even more frustrated.”
Link. Beth acquits herself well. (Though her employer may be screwed.)
“The outbreak of dengue fever that has unfolded in Latin America over the past three months is staggering in its scale — a million cases in Brazil in a matter of weeks,”
Link. There’s a better vaccine but it’s years from mass production. Usually the second infection is much worse than the first – excruciatingly painful.
Blood Deserts: “None of … walking blood banks, drone-based delivery or autotransfusion could supplant the need for traditional blood banks”
Link. Blood transfusion is a dire challenge for much of the world.
“… infuriating that macOS doesn’t offer a way to opt out of Universal Links …”
Link. It’s a frequent annoyance.
Recent Ocean Heat beyond CO2 effect: “eruption also sprayed millions of tons of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. Water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas”
Link. We should know more within 6m. Ocean warning is too fast for CO2 alone.
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.