Link. Similar story to an Alzheimer’s drug that was approved and doesn’t work.
NYT speculates that military blast exposure guidance is wrong.
Link. The speculation is plausible but the data seems limited.
“Apple appears to be engaged in refactoring the XNU kernel into a central micro-kernel with its protected exclaves.”
Link. Sifting Sonoma clues.
iCloud Drive in Sonoma: “iCloud Drive saves changed files at the file, not block, level … if one byte is changed in a file, then that whole file is resynced by copying it up to iCloud.”
Link.
GOP base is tired of Woke.
Link. The Woke were easy prey. Boriinnng. But what’s next?!
(Team Lib: We can start teaching history again. But keep your head down until November.)
Female Genital Cutting: “… Somalia, where an estimated 99 percent of women have had their clitoris excised”
Link. Since 2016 30 million more women have been surgically traumatized. Indonesia is 55% of girls.
In confidential surveys 2/3 of men and women in households where a woman was cut oppose the practice. In Djibouti and Sierra Leone more men than women are opposed.
Childhood trauma and adult psychiatric illness in identical twins.
Link. ” …. those who reported one or more trauma in childhood — physical or emotional neglect or abuse, rape, sexual abuse, hate crimes or witnessing domestic violence — were 2.4 times as likely to be diagnosed with a psychiatric illness as those who did not…
… 52 percent [risk increase] for each additional adverse experience.”
I would have bet the effect would be far smaller. This is mind boggling.
Aperture will launch on an M2 Air running Ventura 13.6.3 and will browse an old Aperture Library
Link. It won’t run on Intel Monterey. It never occurred to me it would run on Apple Silicon Ventura.
iOS 17.4 lets budgeting apps access Apple Card, Cash, and Savings data
Link. Maybe one day we can have good personal finance software options. I suspect Intuit will be unhappy.
“Elephants have 29 genes for TP53. Together, they may aggressively quash cancerous cells.”
Link. Big animals have more cells so more cancer so better anti-cancer. Learnings from wooly mammoth re-creation and stem cell experiments.
Haley the heir apparent: “She’s going to drop down to kiss ass when she quits, like she always does.””
Link. I love that quote. It’s so true. She has and she would; she’s a party pro.
But Haley gets money because GOP donors believe Trump is a loser. They hope he falls. Somehow.
“the “Stop Woke Act” prohibits trainings in workplaces, public schools, colleges and universities that could lead someone to feel guilty or ashamed about the historic actions of their race or sex”
Link. Slowly converging on the consensus that “Woke” means truthful history.
NYT analyzes bicycle deaths.
Link. Rise in deaths is mostly increased ridership, but new eBike riders are having fatal crashes without help from vehicles. Right hook by a truck is most dangerous situation overall.
Review of China’s World: “in Chapter 13 he suggests that China escaped the Black Death because of the efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine”
Link. A Chinese establishment economist unwittingly exposes the unsavory and often dumb beliefs of China’s elite.
Lower income Americans see higher inflation as well as higher wages.
Link. Food inflation has less effect on wealthy. Even allowing for differential inflation wages win so far.
UN report on pig butchering scams: “… scam industry in one country in the region may be generating between USD7.5 and USD12.5 billion, which is half his country’s gross domestic product (GDP)”
Link. Looked for this based on John Oliver show. The country is not identified in report but Oliver said Cambodia. Their GDP is (only) 30 billion. More 1/3 than 1/2 but still stunning.
Why is SK childless? Dyer blames an ultra-fast technological transformation of a medieval culture.
Link. Specifically intensely Confucianist and patriarchal. It’s a plausible theory.
In the Seoul I saw the baby carriages mostly held lovely and happy doggies. I also saw signs of rebellion against the competitive conformity.
Does Ezekiel Emanuel still plan to refuse medical treatment after 75?
Link. “Emanuel’s partner does not agree with his plan, and “she would like me to consider preventative measures like a flu vaccine . . . We are in discussions,”
via Mark on Mastodon. I was looking for an update! I’m with Ezekiel on this but probably age 78 or 80 rather than 75.
Immigration, wages, and inflation. 🆓
Link. A good critique of a Krugman hypothesis. The claim that wage suppression is limited to immigrant jobs feels absurd. The management claim is interesting.
Pharma monopolies and Senators asking dumb questions.
Link. Given the state of the GOP unwinding the monopoly is best done in the shadows — with periodic public moves.
US using every trade trick to block Chinese EVs.
Link. Feds believe Chinese EVs will crush US auto industry unless stopped. Keeps cost of new cars high.
Iranian Vote: “In the capital, Tehran, the turnout was estimated at 11 percent”
Link. Protest boycott.
It is interesting that they don’t fake the vote numbers.
Ezekiel Emmanuel 2014 Atlantic essay on taking measures to be dead at 75 – without euthanasia. 🆓
Link. I believe he is not entirely sincere — a due date of 75 is too early and not being brilliant seems insufficient cause. OTOH for me 85 is the target and stopping preventive care is a part of hitting that number.
“In 2022, there were just three gun killings in all of Japan”
Link. One line in an essay on Japan in recession but I kind of got stuck on it.
COVID-specific guidelines gone, CDC guidance for ALL respiratory diseases.
Link. I approve.
“People with respiratory illnesses may resume daily activities if they have been fever-free for at least 24 hours without the aid of medications and if their symptoms are improving …. guidelines apply to Covid, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, among other respiratory ailments …”
5 days mask etc for ALL respiratory viruses. No testing.
Building (or buying) a Forever Bike.
Link. I need to start storing my 76 Raleigh International in the bedroom. I fear it will become fashionable.
macOS login password: “absolute maximum of fifty attempts in total before access to the internal Data volume is permanently barred, and that Mac has to be restored in DFU mode”
Link. Ten failures and need to go to recovery mode.
Nvidia CEO: “The time otherwise spent learning to code should instead be invested in expertise in industries such as farming, biology, manufacturing and education”
Link. Maybe he meant agricultural research?
Hungary and NATO: Orban is an asshole and many Hungarians like that.
Link. We have Senators like him.
Xi’s totalitarian techno state: “it wants to rule all the ethnically Chinese people in the world.”
Link. Thesis is social networks and smartphones enable the techno-authoritarian state, especially China.
Extracting core concepts from OCR of scanned sample examination PDF – Feb 2024
Link. I could only get the PDF OCR to work on Google Drive. The overall result was mostly interesting as a baseline to compare to 2025.
Immigration surge explains why US avoided recession that hit wealthy nations.
Link. GOP blocks immigration reform to hurt Biden but a vigorous economy helps Biden.
“Uber … expects to make $1 billion from ads in 2024. Almost 30 percent of Instacart’s revenue last year came from ads…”
Link. A good review of the adpocalypse. WTF clicks on these things?! It can’t be all bots.
Meanwhile the geek elite use AI to bypass search ads ….
Krugman on the anger and despair of white rural Trumpian America.
Link. I’ve lived in small towns as they went Red. For a time the hope was remote work but there are too many better locations. The jobs won’t come back.
“The work went essentially unread for years, although it would eventually help secure him a share of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics.”
Link. Writing an obscure paper that nobody reads and then winning part of a physics Nobel must give some retrospective satisfaction.
“If I asked a researcher to read through all my papers and summarize major themes, including illustrative quotes, it would take days. The AI did it in less than a minute.”
Link. Gemini 1.4 can hold about 750,000 words in memory at once.
“Researchers gave the five hundred or so available pages of reference material on a language with 200 speakers (and so with no real online presence) to Gemini and to a human translator. They found that the AI was able to learn the language about as well as the human could, from the same documentation”
Details on the Putin-Trump scheme to frame Joe Biden with Smirnov’s fake testimony.
Link. That one flopped but there will be more. Both Trump and Putin are desperate and have huge resources. Of course they couldn’t do it without GOP voters.
[toread] Lorenz Raichik interview – she brought the rope.
Link. “At the end, I was like … wow, she is not going to have an ounce of footage to work with.”
Raichik did the video! Was hoping to trap Lorenz. Alas, Lorenz is a pro and Raichik is not bright.
“In the end, it was a masterful interview by a skilled and prepared journalist.”
Mona 6 for Mastodon – a review
Link. It’s the power user client. (I can’t compare to Ivory – Mona works for me so I have limited motivation to try a relatively costly alternative.
“First up is the ability to remove posts from your home timeline if they are part of another list you created. ” – this is a new Mastodon feature but may vary depending on server version.
The 21 Laws of Muscle: “If you train HARD, taking the same number of rest days as you have training days will give you shocking results”
Link. I think maybe we can cheat and bike or run on rest days? Rest days are a problem for people who enjoy CrossFit.
Cory Doctorow got scammed: “credit unions across America were being hit by this scam, by fraudsters who somehow knew CU customers’ phone numbers and names, and which CU they banked at”
Link. If you run a good scam a hundred thousand times you can hit the right coincidences to deceive even the most alert.
“winter season has warmed more than 5 degrees on average in Minnesota since 1970”
Link. I suspect Minnesotans are secretly in favor of global warming.
Bluesky compares its federation approach to Mastodon.
Link. I think Bluesky has no equivalent to defederation and the Mastodon model of server-centric moderation.
Spotlight’s terminal utilities.
Link. Some of these seem worth exploring.
Perplexity.ai technology
Link. “RAG pairs generative AI with a “retriever” that can find and then reference specific data from a vector database, which is passed to the “generator” to produce a response.”
A lot of AI tech is open source.
“LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites”
Link. Gibson has said Neuromancer takes place in 2035.
Oklahoma enlists social warfare terrorist: “Raichik was appointed to the Oklahoma Library Media Advisory Committee by Republican schools superintendent Ryan Walters”
Link. I think the word “terrorist” is appropriate. Raichik resembles Klan publicists of a century ago. She wants to terrorize the vulnerable.
iCloud throttles data syncing based on local behavior.
Link. A reason why sync can stop working. Turning on/off doesn’t help.
Google AI creating black Nazis: “[Devs] … were just automatically adding text to every image prompt, specifying that people in the image should be “diverse” — which the AI interpreted as meaning “nonwhite”.
Link. “Ernst Renan, in his essay “What is a Nation?”, argues that intentional forgetting is an essential part of nationhood.”
Montelukast (Singulair) psychiatric side-effects get more worrisome.
Link. It’s a popular med for kids with asthma .