Link. It’s a short time series but that sounds about right.
“FinCen reports that the number of check fraud cases has exploded since 2020, nearly doubling from 2021 to 2022.”
Link. Checks are still used for many business transactions but retail checks are disappearing fast.
History: “To physically return all the checks, the government maintained a special fleet of planes that each night flew canceled checks around the country. ”
Cash may make a comeback?
Tsai roundup: Apple Passwords App in Sequoia and iOS 18
Link. I really want to replace 1Password. We are getting closer.
Visual Programming: “we should also be able to jump into a diagram tool, draw a state machine there and execute it the same way we execute text code”
Link.
“poison experts tested five different brands sold in gas stations and smoke shops and found that three of them contained either psilocybin or psilocin”
Link. Brave new world.
What if Vance is sincere: “He is an adult convert to Catholicism …”
Link. The people I read tend to be de facto secular humanists who don’t take religious docctrine seriously. Being. mad for power is quite consistent with being a religious zealot.
The closing web and AI harvesting: “… companies, who have treated the internet as an all-you-can-eat data buffet for years”
Link. “Eventually, if you take advantage of the web, the web will start shutting its doors
Talking about Google here, who has been a parasite on free content for 13 years.
Microsoft down: “The economic and legal penalties for such massive outages can be so minimal that companies are not motivated to make more fundamental changes.”
Link. Obvious to anyone paying attention, but this rarely gets said so clearly in the media.
“nearly a third of Americans have no objection to military rule or an authoritarian leader”
Link. “it’s about feeling safe and cozy in a world that’s changing too fast for their liking”
In the 70s we called this “Future Shock”. There were books.
React at 10: a retrospective. 🆓
Link. A very accessible discussion. I learned things.
COVID summer 24: “I am surprised by how early this summer wave is (typically, we see it later in the summer) and how high infections are getting.” 🆓
Link. Paxlovid isn’t worth much.
Early details of how prions are communicated and how they act as a contagious disease. 🆓
Link. It’s like watching a horror movie. One day we will put a stake in this thing
DDOS 2024: “Google Cloud was slammed by more RPS in two minutes than Wikipedia saw traffic during September 2023”
Link. 7% net traffic is malign.
Google only indexes brand domains now.
Link. I’ve noticed this over the past few years. Google no longer indexes my Google Blogger posts. I suspect running Google ads helps. Otherwise you need to be a brand domain (Reddit, etc).
Feedle: search a repository of blog topics with results as an RSS feed.
Link. Web service, free pending a business model. Example of results:
I’m testing it out. Similar to PubMed search to RSS.
“Germany is already at war — not a war of its own choosing, but one that it cannot choose to avoid.”
Link. Noah claims that even if Trump loses the United States can barely stand up against China, and cannot handle both Russia and China. It’s Germany or Europe will fail.
iOS 18 adds new ‘Recovered’ album to the Photos app
Link. Similar to the feature pulled from iOS 17.5 but now with a proper UI and security cautions. Aperture had a similar feature, but Aperture was known for corrupting its database. I’m very curious how many lost things we’re going to find.
Consciousness studies: Propofol produces unconsciousness by destabilizing sensory system feedback and this inducing a chaotic network collapse.
Link. The reboot process should be interesting too.
Why I blog — from Jan 2011
Link. I wrote this 13 years ago. It’s still pretty much the same story — but I don’t write for the GoogleMind now. The GoogleMind was dying even was a wrote that post. I write for the AIs now.
Dyer against the “great man” theory of history – assassinations don’t matter?
Link. He didn’t mention Rabin. As usual I am in the murky middle, but if I had to rule I would say he’s practicing a form of wishful thinking.
Edging around the periphery of the Riemann hypothesis
Link. “… for some complex numbers, the zeta function is equal to zero … in 1859, Bernhard Riemann conjectured that all the zeros are concentrated on two lines.”
The article is about a proof away from the core hypothesis, but the author does a great job of explaining the Riemann hypothesis for non-mathematicians.
The joy of analytics: “Maury’s …there are few individuals who made such an enormous contribution to global prosperity”
Link. Changed shipping routes by data mining ship logs around 1840.
End of software support for the Fujitsu (Ricoh, PFU) ix500 document scanner
Link. The single machine desktop app still works for now, but the iOS app is mostly dead and there’s no future replacement.
Economic rationalization of Columbia’s cocaine industry leaves some rural areas with nothing.
Link. Similar story with Afghan opium.
There is no longer a viable economic strategy for rural areas anywhere.
Noah writes the case against seizing wealth.
Link. “The wealth of America’s billionaires was estimated at around $5.2 trillion in 2023, while federal government spending was about $6.4 trillion”
He ignores the sociopolitical consequences of wealth asymmetry. These days Noah writes what tech billionaires like to read – but the essay is still worthy.
Canada’s skilled immigration boom: “…grew by almost 1.3 million people last year … a 3.2 percent growth rate”
Link. A huge success — but also very disruptive. It’s not surprising that a cap has been added.
China is 2nd largest source. Xi hates Canada for a reason.
AT&T Snowflake Data Breach – Tsai roundup.
Link. A $4 billion dollar AT&T fine might change someone’s behavior. But there will be no consequences in the US of course.
Anendophasia: humans vary widely in their internal monologues / commentaries.
Link. ‘Participants with weak inner voices did worse at … Verbal memory …”
Not much new — it’s a short summary. Not having an inner voice may have other advantages.
This is a rather sensitive topic as it edges into the fun future-field of comparative consciousness (human, animal, AI)
Sharing an iPad with “Family Sharing” and a unique “Family” Apple ID.
Link. “Family Sharing for adults means every family member’s purchases go first to the Apple Cash balance purchaser’s account, next to the Organizer’s payment method.”
Alzheimer’s amyloid meds: “clear case that the efficacy of lecanemab and donanemab is unimpressive and the the evidence for harm to patients is much more solid than the evidence of any noticeable benefit”
Link. Very expensive though.
Hotelling’s Theory: “owners of nonrenewable resources will only produce basic commodities if doing so can yield more than could be earned from available financial instruments”
Link. Via a Mastodon comment. This deserves to be better known.
See: Peak Oil.
Hamas guard of Israeli hostages was also a Gaza journalist.
Link. “writing regular dispatches for The Palestine Chronicle, a U.S.-based online publication”
The tunnels were real. Hospitals were Hamas bases. Administrators were Hamas. Gaza journalists were Hamas Some caregivers were Hamas.
I haven’t seen anyone who denied these things admit they were wrong.
Review: Ricoh ScanSnap iX1600
Link. I have Fujitsu earlier version. ScanSnap owns the home office document scanner business.
Russia started assassination plan against German arms supplier CEO
Link. Bit of a desperation move?
“time’s flow is a consequence of entanglement even for objects on large scales”
Link. Everything everywhere all at once.
Page and Wootters mechanism, 1983.
The human “evolutionary bottleneck”? Never happened.
Link. Moderns left Africa 250,000 y ago.
Why is kernel_task taking so much CPU? Blocks any runaway processes by occupying the CPU.
Link. I did not know this. So if you see that happening I guess you try to cool your Air …
Gordon’s Notes: The LLM service I will pay for — call Social Security for me
Link. “I want to give my Agent the social security and medicare data it is likely to such; case number, my SSN, my phone, etc. I want it to call social security using my voice and sit on hold for days, weeks, years until someone accidentally answers. Then it begins the conversation while paging me to swap in …. with a text summary of current discussion and a timer to join in 5…. 4….. 3…. 2…. 1…”
Targeting Tau with TTCM2 – “a single dose of this antibody in the mouse model reducing the amount of pathological tau and increasing cognitive function in the mice”
Link. Bit of good luck in this one.
Peak Oil 2025.
Link. Not the Peak we were excited about 20y ago.
Ibuzatrelvir coming, Paxlovid leaving. (2025 if goes well)
Link.
“Twelve years ago, while leading a climb in Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California, I made a costly mistake and plunged 40 feet onto the unforgiving rock.”
Link. Author tells of eAssist handcycle adventure. I saw one such sessioning a singletrack downhill in Bentonville.
“new law that will require people selling copper scrap metal in Minnesota to obtain a license from the state and to attest that the material was obtained legally”
Link. Worked for catalytic converter theft.
Gaza aid: “Full flour bags can be seen strewed along the side of the road, seemingly of little interest to the looters.”
Link. Gaza now has cheap abundant flour but a cigarette costs $30. So Egyptian-Gaza gangs hide cigarettes in flour bags then associates loot the trucks and dump the flour.
“Next-Gen CarPlay is dead on arrival. Too late, too complicated, and it doesn’t solve the needs of automakers or customers.”
Link. Tim Cook should retire now. It’s gonna get ugly.
Engst: “why I’m largely unperturbed by AI and much of the hand-wringing that seems to permeate coverage of the field”
Link. Same with me. My ad-free 15k or so blog posts and 60K microblog posts are open for anything to read or reuse. I don’t care. I wrote to share.
Apple Intelligence is 2025 at earliest: “That all sounds good, but when are they going to fix the basics?”
Link. I think the reason Apple doesn’t document things any more is because so much of it isn’t ready to be documented. I would not be shocked if Apple has something of Boeing’s disease.
Telecom vendors using LLMs honeypots to suck money from phone scams.
Link. This is clever. It’s been a theme of near future SF in recent times. The LLM answers the phone and then ties up the scammers while doing analytics on techniques.
Rogan’s economic idiocy drives sensible man insane.
Link. Life expectancy is basically quantum field theory. Don’t even try to understand it.
Rogan is achingly dumb, but there is big money in dumbness.
Refugees from war and warming: “The accidents are back there in the Sahara. It is full of Eritrean bodies. There you will find bones and skulls of dead people.”
Link. Perhaps twice as many die on land as at sea.
“estimated 90 percent of women and girls traveling along the Mediterranean route were raped”