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”
Apple-Google Default Search Engine antitrust: “the built-in choices of search engines and the inability for users to add custom ones are much bigger deals than which one is the default”
Link. Both are big but in different ways.
Restoring iCloud Drive files from TM using Finder
Link. Backup only works for non-optimized storage.
“[backupname]/[backup].backup/Data/Users/[username]/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/“
Cosmology 101: “as the Universe grows by a factor of r, the radiation density drops proportional to 1/r⁴”
Link. Every time I read cosmology 101 the story gets a bit different angle. I don’t know if that reflects new insights or evolving explanations.
“anyone can connect to your AirPods and use the microphone to record your local environment”
Link. This is the last of Apple’s security blunders. We promise.
ChatGPT Privacy and Mac Sandbox Containers: “People should be more worried about their Chrome history”
Link. Sandbox unfinished.
Deleting Messages.app Attachments locally also deletes on all devices and cloud.
Link. It’s messy and confusing.
Semaglutide correlated with 7x increase in very rare eye disorder.
Link. “they had come across three patients who began to lose their vision from NAION within a week’s time …. all three patients were also taking semaglutide…
… semaglutide mimics the hormone GLP-1, which binds to receptors found in the cells of the optic nerve”
Sounds like a good observational study. Maybe patients taking glutides will need periodic eye checks. But 7x very rare is still rare.
“possibility that modern humans and Denisovans had contact on the Tibetan plateau”
Link. “for more than 100,000 years, Denisovans hunted or scavenged a wide range of animals on the Tibetan plateau”
We know we had contact some where and when.
“BusyBeaver(5) is now known to be 47,176,870”
Link. “The Busy Beaver function is Turing-uncomputability made flesh, a finite function that scrapes the edge of infinity”
Math stuff is fun because I don’t have to even try to understand it.
“In Minneapolis, Minn., the [temperature] forecast is accurate only 2 days out”
Link. Newly released data allowed WaPo to construct accuracy maps based on the last 1-2 years. Lately rain forecasts seem accurate for maybe 3 hours. Midwest weather is mathematically chaotic.
“There will be literally millions of climate refugees trying to get into Europe, and the borders will slam shut.”
Link. From June 10, before the French election, a wild theory: “[Macron] is deliberately giving Le Pen’s National Rally their chance at power three years early … in the hope that they will make a complete mess of it and lose power again in just a few years.”
“a world of abundant cheap solar energy quickly becomes a world of abundant minerals, liquid fuels, fertilizers, and the other physical feedstocks of industrial civilization”
Link. I like the idea of shifting compute between data centers based on current active solar output.
Apple Intelligence: “an astounding act of security and privacy engineering”
Link. I have been disappointed with Apple for at least 10y, so it’s a bit of a surprise when a credible case is made that they did something well.
And then I’m even more annoyed with all the simple things they can’t seem to do…
Gabapentin, Alzheimer’s, fake science, and the National Library of Medicine
Link. Fraudulent science and fake journals continue to do real harm. Why is the NLM indexing this crap?
Public beta-release of Sequoia: “… best way of keeping out of trouble when running beta versions of macOS is to install them into a Virtual Machine (VM)”
Link. Reading between lines Oakley is saying civilians can help by testing Sequoia in a VM on Apple Silicon using a disposable Apple ID. Otherwise you need be a pro.
Facial Recognition arrests: “Detroit’s Police Department is one of the few that keep tabs on its facial recognition searches, submitting weekly reports about its use to an oversight board.”
Link. Lawsuits drive a balanced approach.
A short history of Mac OS extensions
Link. I used conflict catcher. DOS TSRs were even worse.
Cow avian influenza: “virus is mainly infectious via contaminated milking machines.”
Link. No respiratory spread.
Japanese fake cholesterol med with mold contamination kills at least 80.
Link. “Herbal” medicines are similarly unregulated in the US.
Fall COVID vax for 6m and up.
Link. “Unless the price of the vaccines drops, the cost of immunizing all Americans may not be sustainable”
Last Stand of the Woolly Mammoths: “still alive when the Great Pyramids were built in Egypt”
Link. After they went extinct elsewhere a tiny group of 10 reached a cold island. Their descendants survived thousands of years but gene pool was too small.
Three papers on sleeping brain waste disposal via glymphatic/lymphatic systems.
Link. A possible key to Alzheimer’s prevention. Sacrificing sleep for a career is maybe a bad idea. (Physicians take note)
One day a medication that supports the synchronized sleep wave waste disposal for everyone over 50?
Minneapolis car thefts: maybe it really is the kids.
Link. Youth intervention program — “30% decrease in auto theft reports in 2024 … a 140% increase in car theft … 2019”
Local lore is that most of our carjackings and thefts are the work of a handful of COVID teens. When they are detained rates drop. I think this program was made for them.
Apple on iPhone: “88% of third-party batteries tested in a UL Solutions study caught fire or exploded in at least one test.”
Link. That is an extraordinary claim.
IRS identity theft: “backlog of 500,000 unresolved fraud cases”
Link. Two year backlog, low income filers who are due refunds.
RNA Vaccines For Cancer: An industry review.
Link. A very hard slog but there is new energy.
“Historians say Mr. Ben-Gurion believed that in modern Israel, ultra-Orthodoxy would diminish or eventually disappear. Instead the Haredim have become the fastest-growing part of Israel’s population…”
Link. Religious zealots are bad everywhere.
Scientists Inject Radioactive Material Into Live Rhino Horns to kill the Chinese demand for rhino horns. 🆓
Link. This is brilliant. Material will set off alarms at airports. Only a test for now.
“They’d heard of private citizens filling maybe 200 VHS tapes with news, but not 140,000.”
Link. Her unhealthy and costly obsession is a great gift to history. Internet active scanning. Linkfest.
The 2007 apex of the internet: RSS and Yahoo Pipes
Link. This was as good as the web got. The pieces were all in place. Two years later the web began to die.
“They are ancient and slow, reproducing infrequently and possibly living for millions of years”
Link. Microbes of the Mole Man.
“AI energy estimates are only a small fraction of the 620 to 1,050 TWh that data centers as a whole are projected to use by 2026”
Link. I think Ars got this right.
“Debating” Trump: “He starts with nonsense and then digresses into blather. This has gotten only worse in the years since we debated.”
Link. HRC.
“If you’re at high risk for Covid-19, it may be time to wear a mask on the West Coast, especially in Hawaii.”
Link. Maybe Denver too?
RNAi: more amyloid disease therapies on the way.
Link. My father’s brother died of amyloid cardiomyopathy. Go pharma.
“it is now possible to believe that South Africa is getting a second chance” 🆓
Link. Voters bring hope to South Africa and promise of a better future to India. Democracy has a pulse.
Putin’s pawns: “We Have Provoked This War”.
Link. Dyer dismembers the Putin talking points regurgitated by Trump et al.
Recalling WinFS: “weird amalgam of the Windows shell, SQL Server Server, and just a sprinkle of actual file system”
Link. The outside view was that it was really wonderful. I wonder if some aspects of it lived on in SharePoint (aka the worst software ever made)
“Boeing will pay a total criminal monetary amount of over $2.5 billion, composed of a criminal monetary penalty of $243.6 million, compensation payments to Boeing’s 737 MAX airline customers of $1.77 billion, and the establishment of a $500 million cr
Link. We need the responsible CEOs in prison.
“Boeing’s failure to timely and voluntarily self‑disclose the offense conduct to the department; and Boeing’s prior history, including a civil FAA settlement agreement from 2015 related to safety and quality issues”
“Chinese institutions and authorities are indeed becoming worried about the increasing flood of low- (or zero-) quality papers that come from all sorts of Chinese sources”
Link. Chinese biomedical publications are, at the moment, nearly worthless.