Link. A person is a fuzzy dot but it will resolve cars and truck beds.
New biology – The Obelisks.
Link. “small RNA species, hitherto unknown, that seem to be colonizing bacteria in the human oral mucosa and gut. These things are a bit like viroids, which are circular RNA species that are pathogens in plant species, but they have no sequence relationships with any known viroid.”
From a preprint. Remnants of the primeval RNA world? Able to cause disease?
Korea, Japan and China: Immigration needed, Africa only source
Link. “China will need at least a hundred million immigrants in the next generation just to care for [boomers, Gen X] … the only major long-term provider of immigrants for East Asia may be Africa, where birth rates have stayed high and economic growth is not keeping up.”
“There will be another chance for Russia sooner or later, and another after that if they mess it up again. And one day there will be statues of Alexei Navalny in Moscow.”
Link. Even Putin is not immortal.
CEO on OpenAI expectation reset: “In a decade, he said, it should be “pretty remarkable.”
Link. That’s better than I’d hoped. It suggests ChatGPT 5 is not looking great. (Slower is better)
Apple Support: “If your iPhone or accessory is wet”
Link. Managing the liquid warning and general wetness. Don’t use rice. (I like the drying agent packs – no rice particle problems.)
What Is a Species? “He estimates that it takes about six million years of diverging evolution for two groups of frogs to become unable to interbreed”
Link. It’s a continuum of course.
Apple’s versioning system really only works locally on macOS.
Link. Google would not have this problem but Apple is device-centric not cloud-centric.
Muse: Story of a failed tool for idea development.
Link. No mention of lock-in and exit strategies for a subscription tool. That’s a killer for me.
The most interesting part of story is the marketing experience. About mid essay.
“Can your Rivian handle the melee attacks of the Byzantine Emperor’s Catalan mercenaries?”
Link. You need a cybertruck.
Putin’s genocidal myth – Timothy Snyder: “the territories of that medieval Viking state, Kyivan Rus — much of Ukraine, all of Belarus, some of northeastern Russia by today’s boundaries — should belong to Sweden”
Link. Via Laura Jedeed’s newsletter. Read for the history of the region and the ideology of Putinism.
IRS reform: “The gains in revenue come from shifting resources away from auditing welfare recipients to targeting the wealthy…”
Link. GOP opposition understandable.
China EV avoiding import restrictions: “They have been taking advantage of a policy that allows used cars to be sold abroad without the authorization of carmakers: Traders register new cars in China …”
Link. The tsunami is coming.
Gruber: “iOS support for RCS is all about China”
Link. “when the CCP says device makers must jump to sell their products in China, Apple asks “How high?”
Helicopters good: “Nine in 10 parents rate their relationships with their young adult children as good or excellent, and so do eight in 10 young adults”
Link. As a boomer with Gen Z kids being so involved in their adult life has been mostly good but also very weird. My parents and I got along well, but I never looked to them for advice (though I should have). Our kids still haven’t turned off location sharing.
American torture and the Bali bombing prosecution.
Link. Since America can imprison foreign suspects until they die I wouldn’t consider this a refutation of the GWB torture program. Torture remains popular with many Americans.
Use an old Mac for household Time Machine backups.
Link. I use Synology for networked TM but my Monterey MacBook could do this.
iOS Assistive Access: “allows people with cognitive disabilities to use iPhone with greater ease and independence.”
Link. I don’t think my son would go for this but I might ask him to test it. I’m pleased Apple is making this effort.
Carlson, Walter Duranty of the New York Times, and Nazi broadcaster Lord Haw-Haw.
Link. Wishing to be special. To be meaningful. To be important.
“OpenAI is reportedly developing a search app that would directly compete with Google Search, according to The Information on Wednesday”
Link. Google took a bad road. They need 40 days in the desert.
“Air Canada suggests the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions.”
Link. They lost in court. But I would not be surprised if the future legal framework for an AI is an extension of corporate entity law.
China’s middle class losing faith in China: “They started leaving comments on an innocuous post about giraffe conservation on the official Weibo social media account of the U.S. Embassy in China.”
Link. Chinese stocks are falling (as happens) — and the government isn’t propping them up. Investing indirectly in US index funds.
And emigrating. To Canada, of course.
Somebody actually took the time to review Apple News. The result is as expected.
Link. Just shoot it.
How to be a successful tech consultant.
Link. “schedule a 90-minute meeting with the most senior (Individual Contributor) engineer that you have on your team… What is fucked up about this place?”
(Author has a feed that I now follow)
Gates, Nov 2023: “Android, iOS, and Windows are all platforms. Agents will be the next platform.”
Link. I think Bill Gates really does believe this. I don’t think what is coming is so predictable.
CDC faces reality: “isolation guidelines that would treat the coronavirus the same as flu and RSV, with additional precautions for people at high risk”
Link. “Workers without sick leave and those who can’t work from home if they or their children test positive and are required to isolate bore a disproportionate burden”
Aaronson on “It’s justa stochastic parrot” and “goalpost-moving” in AI. And a lot more …
Link. In the context of a talk Scott wanders all over the place – but he mirrors my thoughts on where AI-denial goes wrong. I’d have spent a bit more time on how “non-special” human cognition seems.
I mostly agree with his other points too …
GLP-1 for weight loss — a lesson in the costs of drug development
Link. Several Novo Nordisk competitors have flamed out … a good illustration of why drug development is ferociously expensive (even before marketing and all the the rest).
macOS wants to be current: “the slightest user error or bug can result in an unintended upgrade”
Link. Sounds like Apple might now be backing off a bit.
“The bottlenose’s EQ is surpassed only by a human’s, which measures 7.4 (Australopithecines – hominids that lived around 4m years ago – fall within the dolphin range: 3.25-4.72)” 2003 article. 🆓
Link. I’d not seen that comparison before.
How to Stop macOS Upgrade Notifications
Link. defaults write com.apple.SoftwareUpdate MajorOSUserNotificationDate -date “2025-02-07 23:22:47 +0000”
I don’t do these for fear of complexity and future problems.
“the AVP might currently be more like those first cell phones you had to carry around with a briefcase than the first iPhone”
Link. Persuasive comparison.
Nigerian corruption, international arbitration, and a multi-billion dollar penalty.
Link. “For about a year leading up to the submission of P.&I.D.’s proposal, Quinn and Cahill sent Taiga and one of her daughters just a bit more than $25,000 in incremental payments.”
Basically everyone is kind of a villain. Too complex to summarize.
When Safari authentication fails (ex: access a gmail account) switch default browser to Chrome.
Link. I have had to do this.
Deflation hits China.
Link. Xi is what happens when a Trump gets unlimited power.
Post-COVID ED and hospitals struggle: “an extra hour of boarding was associated with a 16.7% increase in the odds they would require a higher level of care in the hospital”
Link. Montreal was like this in the 80s. COVID accelerated health care retirements and also increased patient volumes.
NYT has a big obit on the “Sovereign of Slide Rules”
Link. I have 3 slide rules I think. Beats looking up log tables.
“Trump wasn’t in bed with a hostile power in Russia; the Democrats were in bed with a hostile power in Ukraine.”
Link. The Reds are now completely disconnected from reality.
“Gemini Advanced is clearly a GPT-4 class model”
Link. Most useful early review by a tester.
“No one has a great definition for sentience, which is okay because LLMs are in no way sentient…”
This sentence contradicts itself.
Inventing Small Protein medicines: “it’s kind of disorienting to find it becoming a real-world technology”
Link. Science is just getting started.
As most come to accept climate change Red focus changes to slandering the scientists.
Link. A desperate rear guard action as Reds fight to preserve their lifestyle.
NYT tech reviewer finds no reason for any non-dev to buy Vision Pro.
Link. “Apple declined to provide an early review unit to The New York Times …
… I could tolerate juggling a notes app, a browser and the Microsoft Word app for no longer than 15 minutes before feeling nauseated…
…had planned to write this review with the headset before realizing I wouldn’t make my deadline…”
Snowball Earth: “Earth’s glaciation, … may have come from a global drop in carbon dioxide emissions, a result of fewer volcanoes expelling the gas”
Link. Sadly article doesn’t say why it ended.
“I knew the rim brake was dead, but I didn’t quite appreciate just how dead it was until now.”
Link. They never seem to break but it’s going to get hard to find replacement parts if they do.
How to display the hidden iCloud Books folder and edit your Books Library
Link. open ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iCloud\~com\~apple\~iBooks/Documents/
Once you open it you can use a few methods to create a desktop shortcut. Changes to files here show up in Books.app. It seems a promising way to find things in the library.
“as these models get bigger and are trained on more data, they improve on individual language-related abilities and also develop new ones by combining skills in a manner that hints at understanding”
Link. “… a mathematically provable argument for how and why an LLM can develop so many abilities… when Arora and his team tested some of its predictions, they found that these models behaved almost exactly as expected”
Researchers applied techniques from random graph theory. These models have unexpected behaviors.
We don’t know if this is how *we* “understand” but I suspect it’s something similar. We are not magical.
“Many people found it a little bit eerie how much GPT-4 was better than GPT-3.5, and that happened within a year. Does that mean in another year we’ll have a similar change of that magnitude? I don’t know. Only OpenAI knows.”
Flies solve the X chromosome problem differently: “rev up their one X chromosome so that it doubles its production of proteins. “
Link. They evolved so two X is the ideal. In humans two active X is quite bad news so women suppress one copy, but the technique has apparently bad side-effects.
Why RSS.
Link. An explainer for the young who don’t remember RSS.
2019 brain implant controls woman’s severe OCD
Link. It was done primarily for her epilepsy, she suggested doing the OCD as well. “work involved the coordination of researchers from OHSU, UCLA, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania.”
Sounds like for her controlling the OCD was even more valuable than managing her epilepsy. It’s not a complete cure though.
Male and Female Autoimmunity: “one of the drivers for these immunological changes is the presence of auto-antibodies for the Xist/protein coating”
Link. Best summary to date.