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.
“national discussion on the viability of the small towns that have long been a pillar of American culture”
Link. FINALLY.
I believe this is a significant contributor to Trumpism. America’s election system gives small town rural voters power and their communities have been dying since the 80s.
Young people leave for college and never return.
“participation in an oncology trial does not seem to extend a survival benefit”
Link. But it doesn’t hurt.
“When it was first observed, the Great Red Spot extended over 24,200 miles …. it has been shrinking ever since. Today, the storm stretches to 8,700 miles”
Link. There have been two, ours is bigger.
Sweetenders: Xylitol and erythritol – platelet activation is not good
Link. “reason enough to avoid both of these compounds as sweeteners, and I would extend the caution to the other sugar alcohols as well (maltitol, mannitol, sorbitol, etc.)” OTOH aspartame seems good.
“36 volunteers age 18-29 were inoculated with a wild-type SARS-CoV2 virus strain isolated from an infected patient in the UK”
Link. Immense details on immune studies of these 2021 healthy young volunteers. About 1/5 NEVER were PCR positive despite being infected; the innate immune system worked fast. (Most people who say they never got COVID are presumed to be like this. They got COVID (virus), killed it, never noticed).
“authors were also able to find a blood marker that could distinguish the sustained-infection group from those where the virus didn’t get a chance to establish itself … HLA-DQA2, whose function is not really clear yet.”
Noah techno-optimism: “Soviet America … energy revolution; Trump’s tax cuts; the Build-Nothing Country; macro data mysteries”
Link. I mostly agree. The broadband fail is my team (Dem) being stupid. America needs a GOP that is not insane.
Housing 2024: signs of market rebalancing.
Link. Lots of apartment construction and new home — in context of record prices. Signs of rebalancing.
Current COVID employee retention benefit claims largely fraud: “The unexpectedly high cost of the program has contributed to the nation’s larger-than-expected annual budget deficits”
Link. Crime on a staggering scale.
Mexico’s female Jewish scientist president lived the grad student life in California.
Link. I just wanted to write “Mexico’s female Jewish scientist president” because it blows my mind.
Biden admin fights price-fixing by United Health Group and others by promoting competition.
Link. “the use of A.I. or algorithmic-based technologies should concern us more because it’s much easier to price-fix when you’re outsourcing it to an algorithm versus when you’re sharing manila envelopes in a smoke-filled room.”
Fighting monopolies is a major responsibility of good government.
AI data centers keep coal plants online
Link. Clean energy offsets are in part an accounting trick. Microsoft fusion timeline is absurd.
These kinds of externalities are usually managed through forms of taxation.
“Swiss RE, the insurance-industry giant, said … accumulating hazards of climate change could further drive the growing market for insurance against strikes and riots”
Link. Opportunity identified.
Iran’s presidential election: a curious need to seem legitimate.
Link. Controlled by clerics yet dressed up like a democracy. It’s sort-of a joke and sort-of real.
macOS keychains – classic, iCloud and post-Sequoia
Link. A useful reference review. No big Sequoia changes found so far; just continuation of iCloud Keychain functionality.
“Kaspersky Labs … on the Entity List for their cooperation with Russian military and intelligence authorities …”
Link. As expected.
Pirate Ship: cheaper, better shipping. Free to use.
Link. “Pirate Ship has negotiated corporate-level discounted shipping rates of up to 89% off retail and passes most of those savings on to customers.”
Their profits come from the retained savings.
Tour De Gall | Vanity Fair: “The liver crumbles under the knife like plumber’s putty and tastes faintly of gut-scented butter or pressed liposuction” 2011
Link. Reputedly a famously cruel review. Link via Threads
Language and reasoning: an update.
Link. “large studies have suggested that languages have been optimized to transfer information clearly and efficiently.”
But we can do a lot of reasoning without using our unique and stable individual language network.
Metabolic syndrome: treat obesity with a glutide and the blood pressure and glucose improve.
Link. “…Patients often keep taking the obesity drugs, while many who are taking drugs they need to be healthy, like statins, abandon them …”
Physicians will increasingly start with the glutide. Speculative uses for inflammatory conditions or Parkinson’s need clinical trials.
Visual Studio Code extension security risks explained.
Link. Wouldn’t WordPress plugins have similar issues?
American torture: more details emerge in trial. 🆓
Link. A story of both American brutality and some compassion on the side. (Note CIA illegally destroyed their torture videos.)
The Cheney/Bush torture program was quite popular with Americans after 9/11.
Review of SMS spam filtering solutions: “I stopped when I found Nomorobo, which was the cheapest and most effective of the commercial apps. AT&T Active Armor is free but ineffective.”
Link. $20 per year. I’ve been using Junkman which does pretty well.
The best discussion I’ve seen to date. Mostly dealing with political spam — I think carriers are forbidden to block some of it.
Cosmic Dawn: discover of merging quasars supports current model of universe development
Link. “the universe has evolved via frequent mergers of galaxies, which would naturally result in many merging quasar pairs observed throughout the universe.”
Substack and the perils of principal: “I’m inches away from going back. Almost every other creator stayed”
Link. Substack. Twitter. Reddit. Most people just shrug and continue. Sometimes the bad guys win.
Africa rising: in remote regions increasingly educated women get access to discrete contraception.
Link. Nothing bad or dramatic, just continued progress. Gates foundation and UNFPA working away.
“Apple needs more technical authors and fewer engineers if anyone, including its own staff, is to get the best from macOS and its sister operating systems.”
Link. “macOS Sequoia brings radical changes that somehow escaped presentation at WWDC … lack of documentation fills me with deep and growing despair”
The Tim Cook era.
Next-Generation Apple CarPlay analysis.
Link. Smells like another product failure.
NYT investigation of Rafah strike: “Israel had failed to take adequate care to safeguard civilians.“
Link. Relevant to ICC investigations. The conclusion is deeply buried in the article.
The love of Gazans for Hamas may be overestimated by American students. 🆓 (gift link)
Link. “group and its leaders have remained broadly unpopular in the enclave. More Gazans have even been willing to speak out against Hamas, risking retribution.”
There was one election then Hamas ended elections.
India: “voters received calls from their local representatives to discuss local issues—except the leader on the other end of the phone was an AI impersonation”
Link. Lots of interesting lessons.
Facebook study: “flagged misinformation reduced intention to vaccinate by 0.05% per user, while unflagged vaccine-skeptical content reduced it by 2.3%”
Link. Flagged misinformation is not main problem now. Fox not mentioned specifically but Murdoch is a famed serial killer.
“Make headlines better” is key recommendation. Most Americans never get past the headline.
“The new Photos interface reminds me of the TV and Music stores, which are among my least favorite Apple designs”
Link. Horizontal scrolling. Damn kids.
Still more secret Harlan trips for Thomas: “revelation underlined the extent to which Justice Thomas has relied on the generosity of his friends over the years and the consistency with which he declined to report those ties.”
Link. Consistency counts for something.
Alito on US politics: “there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised”
Link. Religious things.
“Can Apple Rescue the Vision Pro?”
Link. No. Big fail. Try again in 10 years.
“today I barely use the Vision Pro at all … it sits on a shelf collecting dust.”
“modern battlefields like Ukraine are being dominated by Chinese-made products”
Link. We have relearned how quickly nations can go insane. Xi has been a catastrophe. The economic consequences will hurt everyone.
PFAS and 3M’s 90’s management failure: an externality analysis.
Link. Reminds me of Philip Morris.
“increased open research funded or fostered by government could reduce information problems.”
This was the era of stock incentives.
A National Review pundit and conservative Christian adopted a Black child. Then he found out …
Link. “they attacked us through our daughter. They pulled pictures of her from social media and photoshopped her into gas chambers and lynchings … To my shame, the racism and extremism within the denomination was invisible to us before our own ordeal …”
Wisdom hits hard.
OpenAI Voice Engine goal: “Phasing out voice based authentication as a security measure for accessing bank accounts and other sensitive information”
Link. I think Fidelity still promotes voice auth
Situational Awareness: “Leopold [Aschenbrenner] sets out his vision of how AI is going to transform civilization over the next 5-10 years”
Link. Links to free PDF that is readable on iPhone if good eyes. I’ll be browsing it.
Felonious Trump: Jedeed has the best summary and analysis.
Link. Agree on all points. Dumb crime, bad precedent, huge corruption in politics dwarfs this, GOP already insane so their threats are laughable.
Tsai’s – WWDC 2024 Wish Lists.
Link. All good things. I wish for bug fixes, I despair for Photos.app improvements.
Readdle wants Calendars 5 users to go subscription.
Link. Bit much corporate BS for basically going subscription.