Link. Nothing dramatically new here, but a nice summary of the open questions being actively studied. Building airplanes did help us understand the flight of birds.
Tag Archives: pinboard
All the dinosaur shapes.
Link. This is dino-kid bliss.
Myanmar hell: women professionals turn to sex work as civil war continues.
Link. I was thinking the other day I had not heard much of Myanmar lately. I wondered if it was doing better. It sounds more like Haiti.
Phi-4 LLM and why synthetic data is now preferred to web
Link. “each token generated by a language model is by definition predicted by the preceding tokens”
“The LA Times isn’t really a newspaper anymore — it’s a vanity rag.”
Link. NYT can take the LA Times market if they want it.
microsoft/markitdown: Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown.
Link. Markdown is the de facto text format for AI.
Siri’s ChatGPT Integration is a disaster.
Link. Adam is polite but this is a genuine trainwreck.
Vermont GOP drift is interesting.
Link. Republican gov voted Harris. Reps still dem but interesting shift. Not all bad.
Gemini 2.0 Flash: “being able to have an audio conversation with a capable LLM about things that it can “see” through your camera”
Link. Handy for an unsighted person navigating the world.
“recognized the potential for a planet-wide catastrophe if a mirror cell escaped containment”
Link. Left handed enantiomer proteins can’t be degraded by existing life corms.
“all plants in the world would be unable to detect these bacteria”
Fermi paradox resolved.
MacOS 15.2 Audio Bug Fixes
Link. These don’t affect me but fixes are a good sign for 15.2 in general.
A classification of “AI Skepticism”
Link. I like the categories but I dislike the framing. This is anyone who isn’t delusional (“AI will fix us”). He may also omit those of us who fear massive disruption.
DOGE is a clownshow – here’s why
Link. I didn’t remember the GRACE commission. Reagan was bad but compared to Trump he’s a shining city on the hill.
K doesn’t mention the Gore National Partnership for Reinventing Government. I think considered a failure too.
If they wanted to do something they could address gov software issues. But Musk is an idiot.
AI enhancement – techniques review
Link. The industry seems to use the word “scaling” to mean enhancement, even when “more data” is not the key.
I can’t judge how correct the assertions are but I appreciated the scope of the analysis and the range of methods in play.
Google Willow QC – the expert speaks.
Link. Great discussion. I thjnk several journalists covered this well
“Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whose name means Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, is a former affiliate of Al Qaeda”
Link. “ … been involved in trafficking the synthetic stimulant captagon.”
The civil war resumes and Turkey vs Kurds
Quantum computing looms.
Link. Still can’t do anything useful. Breaking traditional encryption may be decades yet. But it is coming.
Academic publishers making the AI play
Link. They are ruthless bastards with lawyers, they understand their interests, and they have a moat. I have wondered if they will win in the end.
America as “Trumpomuskovia”
Link. Not new but a good summary. The great puzzle is Putin’s magnetic power over Musk, Sachs and Trump. The lesser puzzle is Vance’s role.
AI good for: “Work where you are an expert and can assess quickly whether AI is good or bad”
Link. This is what I have personally found as well.
“Using the AI as a companion when reading, because it allows you to ask infinite questions.”
I use it during lectures this way
“Reviews for the apps Bigo Live, Gaze, Superlive and Tango mentioned parents sexually exploiting their children,”
Link. Apple’s app reviews are a sewer, so it is likely nobody there monitors them. But it is likely the vendors do read them. So they knew.
Bigo Live is gone but Boho Live is there and comes up with same search term.
Mpox in Congo: “Soon staff members began to fall ill as well; two nurses each lost the vision in one eye after severe cases of mpox.”
Link. Fortunately RFK jr will lead the ongoing response.
Very brave health care workers.
“The daytime electrical current is barely strong enough to power a single lightbulb”
Cheney responds to Trump jail threat: “ the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history”
Link. A fighter.
Olivia Troye’s response to Patel threat: a Monty Python meme.
Link. There are people with spine.
“The case of the last German Emperor is a sharp warning against the human impulse to over-rationalize events.”
Link. Everyone wants a story but history is often one damned thing after another.
“Gabbard’s support of Assad was so well known…”
Link. Trump is demented.
“paid-for news is becoming an extreme niche for a very small part of the overall population”
Link. It appears to be a trend that started in the 1960s.
Covered by ice for 14million years, Lake Enigma has “ultrasmall bacteria belonging to the superphylum Patescibacteria”
Link. The article doesn’t mention an energy source.
“The number of people who get paid from the U.S. Treasury but work for private businesses and nonprofits is now more than three times as large as the entire on-payroll federal civilian workforce”
Link. The real opportunities are in shifting work away from contractors and back to federal bureaucrats.
(Oh, and fix federal software contracting.)
“Before he has even taken office, Trump has faced down two of the country’s most prominent newspapers, inducing them to back off longstanding, well-reasoned editorial opposition.”
Link. It can take quite a while for dead trees to fall over.
“The decision by the agency’s leaders to keep its own investigators in the dark raises new questions about WADA’s response to repeated incidents of possible doping by Chinese athletes.”
Link. I think all the questions have been answered.
Bezos on Trump love: “You’ve probably grown in the last eight years …He has, too.”
Link. Pick one:
A. Bezos is an idiot.
B. Bezos is scared.
C. Bezos believes Trump is weak and confused and can be manipulated by the oligarchs who will rule now.
Wolf Warriorism: China’s disastrous attempt at aggressive discourse is over
Link. A unique perspective. It’s weird we don’t have more like this.
Mapping the universe’s Gravitational Wave Background
Link. We have come a long way very quickly.
Pandemic revisionism
Link. Things mainstream physicians thought were wrong at the time:
1. Masking when outdoors (I think was effectively ignored).
2. Confusion about what cloth masks were good for (reduce transmission from sick people) and when they were low value (protecting the wearer).
3. Failure to clarify what ages were at risk early on (came a bit later) and the case for school closures prior to vaccination (staff risk and kid spread).
Today we still see young people wearing cloth masks outdoors and few wearing effective masks when boarding airplanes.
Ironically what persists most ow
A non-specialist analyst view of what Perplexity does — including its search engine.
Link. Some of this search work reminds me of Alta Vista.
“Over the last two decades, an average of 28 percent of workers had large [earnings] increases and 28 percent had large [earnings] declines each year” 🆓
Link. This is different. I like the “musical chairs” analogy.
“Thunderbolt 5 is still at an experimental stage, and may take some time before it realises its potential.”
Link. We are not missing out. Yet.
“in an extended war of production, there is no guarantee that the entire world united could defeat China alone” 🆓
Link. I’ve not seen a rebuttal of this theme that Simpson has been pushing for a few years.
University of “Michigan had spent roughly a quarter-billion dollars on D.E.I. since 2016 … Fifty-six percent of that amount went to salaries”
Link. Significant though it’s a big place. The DEI staff don’t come across well in the article.
“In 2022, men made up only 42 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds at four-year schools, and their graduation rates were lower than women’s”
Link. Women are better suited to the post-industrial world. A meditation on the broken SecSef nominee.
“U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers”
Link. Telecom security is broken and cannot be fixed.
Finland approach to propaganda and deception is to teach recognition to children.
Link. The GOP relies on lies, so this could only happen at the state level in the US.
“clean up old kernel extensions on your Mac”
Link. macOS should have had an uninstaller long ago. This is something I need to do.
Link resolution in the broken web – embed a fallback search string in the URL
Link. “If that characteristic string were a part of the HTML for the URL then when that URL fails a client could automatically search with that string. Often the target would be found.”
No rights reserved!
Where Drugs Come from – government funded science and industry (Derek Lowe)
Link. A key reference for discussions about the cost of development and the evils of big pharma.
“concrete evidence that brain microbiomes do exist in vertebrates”
Link. It’s likely that there are bacteria and viruses that live in our brains. Which makes an infections component of brain disorders and brain aging more interesting.
“Bluesky is now the home of the posting “middle class,” the really interesting people in specialized fields who talk about their work to others in their field, and to a general audience”
Link. The intellectual class.
“Biden learned the right lesson: no one gives a fuck about norms. It’s unquestionably true that Hunter Biden wouldn’t be in this position if not for his dad”
Link. Our plane has no fuel and we are going to crash.
Team Biden freed Uyghurs as part of hostage deal 🆓
Link. Amidst the coming chaos, a reminder of what we had and perhaps will have again one day.