Link. Won’t happen but whistleblower protections could be expanded to cover notification of health risks including AI risks.
Cruise ship: “My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall”
Link. Some people like cruise ships. They should not read this.
“nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available”
Link. “There were 3.9 million websites in China in 2023, down more than a third from 5.3 million in 2017,
China’s web is dying too.
“An estimated 77 million Americans have a criminal record of some kind”
Link. Even if it’s 50 million that is insane.
Trump’s Apprentice con: “I signed an expansive nondisclosure agreement that promised a fine of $5 million and even jail time if I were to ever divulge what actually happened. It expired this year.”
Link. I signed an expansive nondisclosure agreement that promised a fine of $5 million and even jail time if I were to ever divulge what actually happened. It expired this year.
“Although very few programs are out-and-out fake, there is deception at play in every single reality program”
“The average webpage on the internet is so random and terrible it’s not even clear how prior LLMs learn anything at all.”
Link. Aka the “Common Crawl”. The ad-funded web is toast.
“the 1862 Morrill Act, perhaps the most economically momentous legislation in our history, required states to establish land grant colleges”
Link. Great essay on the economics of education and a new MN Dem benefit.
“Learn how to request your health insurance claim file, which can include details about what your insurer is saying about you and your case.”
Link. “Visit our free Claim File Helper tool, where you can generate a PDF of your request letter”
Propublica.
Modern LLM training: human experts employed to generate content that’s not on the web
Link. Proprietary sadly.
Inside the Decision to Kill Iran’s Qassem Soleimani
Link. A very bad man killed.
Pizza glue: Google discovers the web it built and fed on is shitty now.
Link. “there wasn’t much out there on the web that answered those queries … “data void” or “information gap,” these glaring holes of high-quality content that Google searches for ended up being filled with satirical content”
The information rich web was destroyed by Google’s business model.
Kagi is profitable, becomes public benefit company.
Link. “With Kagi, for the first time in history of search engines, you are the customer and everything is built around you and your needs alone.”
“Apple now requires that the MacBook Pro be mailed in to Apple for battery replacement”
Link. Really stupid
Weird sec Anglerfish Rule the World: “the dark zone amounts to more than 97 percent of the planetary space inhabited by living things”
Link. Puny humans.
Tsai roundup, tech monopolies: “the Apple-Google duopoly must provide APIs that allow third parties to thrive” is the real thing the EU should’ve focused on.”
Link. Photos.mac should use only PhotoKit API. SOMEBODY could do a FAR better version of Photos.mac
iCloud Limits: “Total number of places in Favorites: 100” (Apple Maps)
Link. I have over 100 Google Maps “favorites”
WW III: Russia and China, led by mad emperors, prepare to end the West.
Link. Taiwan and Estonia. The west does not have the capacity to deter. (If I were Taiwan I’d build nuclear weapons.)
LLM “training” and user data: how can static models learn?
Link. The models are static data so they don’t learn from user data — but user engagement may be used to tune interaction layers outside the models. It’s obscure.
“theory of elite overproduction says, basically, that the educated elites whose career expectations can’t be satisfied will respond by getting mad at wider society and fomenting unrest” 
Link. Noah pivots from Twitter stupidity to his pet theory. I share it because I agree with the idea that we have a worldwide glut of cognitive talent — and it’s getting worse.
Likely related to too much money chasing too few opportunities.
GPT-5 is further away than most say: “OpenAI’s next model will not arrive for another nine months to a year or more…”
Link. We get a breather — even if the LLM tech hasn’t plateaued.
Hidden cameras and travel: “… smoke detectors, USB power adapters, AC outlets, clock radios, tissue-box holders …”
Link. Airbnb bans them. Amazon sells them.
TidBITS suggests detection methods. None seem practical to me.
Iron 60 show Supernova debris smacks earth every million years or so.
Link. “… sun sits near the middle of what’s called the Local Bubble … inflated by supernovas in the Scorpius-Centaurus … timeline fits well with the iron 60 peaks observed in ocean sediments”
“…. Gu, who left Apple a year ago to join AI startup Imbue, where he said he can work on equally ambitious projects but at a more measured pace. “
Link. So a year ago Apple was panicking about LLMs.
Four Singularities for Research: “scientific publishing system was not made to support AI writers writing to AI reviews for AI opinions for papers later summarized by AI”
Link. Intelligent and balanced discussion.
India: “We brought ladders and bedsheets from our houses. I carried infants in my hands from the fire and brought them down”
Link. Many parts of India exist in a unique blend of modern and medieval — with lots of dysfunction on the side.
“In 2006, Canadian homes received seven letters a week on average. Last year, that figure was two.”
Link. Post offices are dying everywhere.
Apple is screwing up on passkeys: “This should have been addressed on day one. 1Password can’t import/export, either”
Link. Can’t back up, can’t import/export, have to use only one service, can’t move between services. Plausible stories of Apple bugs deleting them.
We all asked about these things 2y ago. Now they are yet another lock-in tool.
“Narendra Modi’s government threatens American citizens and permanent residents who dare speak out on the declining state of the country’s democracy.”
Link. Modi will rule India until he dies.
Oregon Federal Prison fails basic standards for healthcare and dentistry.
Link. The best guide to a nation is the state of its prisons. Every member of Congress should be obliged to spend one week a year in a federal prison.
Note they shunted witnesses to other similarly miserable prisons.
Keep your seatbelt when flying: “he had broken his neck while his wife, Vicki, had broken her back”
Link. One dead. Everyone hit the ceiling. Try not to pee.
AI skeptic risk: “Clifford Stoll’s notorious 1995 guest column in Newsweek where he declared the internet to be a passing fad …”
Link. I remember reading that and thinking Stoll was way off base, but 2024 AI is harder to evaluate. Over the next 5y it could be merely immensely disruptive and enable new advances in harm and control.
Oakley shows Apple the bug in their Sonoma Intel Help Window code.
Link. When your Help window disappears. The public reveal may shame Apple into a fix.
NYT documents crimes of Raziq, the US backed Afghan police chief who tried to rule Kandahar and died by assassination.
Link. Same as every other war.
“LLMs exhibit behaviour that is consistent with the outputs of mentalistic inference in humans”
Link. We are not magical.
“importance of systematic testing to ensure a non-superficial comparison between human and artificial intelligences”
Tsai: Apple Updates Silently Enable iCloud Keychain
Link. Maybe Apple is not the most devoted protector of our credentials.
Cognitive science of aliens: “the team identified millions of features—a sort of Rosetta Stone to decode Claude’s neural net”
Link. The term “concepts” is used. The Golden Gate Bridge was an entry point.
Aaronson after end of safety team: “the OpenAI folks I met were invariably smart and earnest and dead serious about the mission of getting AI right for humankind.”
Link. He mostly met Ilya people and they lost out. But of those he saw I’m sure there was truth to this.
(Aaronson is always sincere but not always 100% perceptive however.)
macOS: “Pressing control-command-d (⌃⌘D) while hovering over a link in Safari opens a popup window containing a preview of the linked web page”
Link. Sonoma only?
“B. germanica evolved from the Asian cockroach, somewhere in India or Myanmar around 2,100 years ago as human settlements bloomed…”
Link. “They reached Europe, where they would get their name, only 270 years ago…”
Kind of like dogs evolved from wolves but much more recently. Now displacing all lesser cockroaches. Might make good pets.
Fluoride Exposure in the Womb Could Lead to behavioral issues?
Link. Animal studies concerning.
Olds finding work: “… translations, classes, and tutoring on platforms like Workana, Freelancer, and Babelcube”
Link. Lots of capable people stuck in low wage countries.
Hertz’s Tesla debacle: “Expensive maintenance that the company didn’t account for spooked the company enough to start to sell off its fleet”
Link. Used high mileage Teslas are even worse new Teslas.
ChatGPT in “4o” mode is kind of a cheat: headline features omitted.
Link. I wondered where they were. OpenAI is probably struggling/worried.
Reliable source: macOS Sonoma 14.5 is good.
Link. Validates my current habit of doing macOS updates in June.
Energy costs of carrying a proto-human are 96% for mother’s body: “50 pints of … Cherry Garcia ice cream”
Link. Calories too easy to get in much of the world but in non-humans is a survival issue. Surprise is how little baby assembly requires.
Genetic profile with rapid gastric emptying has much better response to glutides.
Link. Though weight loss still 10% without this gene. Needs validation.
Maciej on NASA’s Artemis mission: “Artemis calls the agency’s competence as an engineering organization into question”
Link. He’s been quiet for a while. He wrote this a year or two ago.
“the Nozickian libertarian perspective on media regulation looks increasingly untenable and self-defeating”
Link. From past comments I believe Noah is framing the case for what we once called “propaganda”.
“The potential for Alito to destroy our country in order to restore Trump to the presidency has continued.”
Link. Just another deluded idiot yearning for a strongman.
Europe’s culture war: “pits the forgotten living “nowhere” in industrial wastelands and rural areas who see immigrants as threats to their livelihoods against the prosperous connected global citizens living in the “somewhere” of the knowledge econ
Link. It’s a pithy line — though not easily falsifiable. I think it’s true though, and it’s the same war in America. I usually guesstimate that 30-40% of citizens are effectively disabled from middle class life.