Link. A Mastodon inspired post. “The proto-Nazis will always be with us. At least until the AIs end us all. We have to manage them to have a civilization.”
Tech job cuts: “the five companies employ 2.16 million people, 71 percent more than they had before the pandemic.”
Link. That number seems impossible, I think growth was maybe mostly Amazon. Apple’s layoffs sound covert. Microsoft is still growing.
Vision Pro Teardown by ifixit- “…the R1 uses a real-time operating system…”
Link. I think the first iPod used a non-Apple RTOS? I wonder what they are using here.
This is the most interesting VP article I’ve read.
“XMTP is a messaging protocol that implements the by-now-familiar architectural pattern of separating a decentralized, encrypted data state and persistence layer…”
Link. Although XMTP is unlikely to matter the essay is a good overview of messaging chaos.
America’s allies show frail economies. Some explanations. 🆓
Link. Mostly demographics. He doesn’t mention voters making persistently bad choices (Italy).
But why is Canada doing poorly? And Australia so well?
Amidst Xi’s China a version of Boulder CO.
Link. The article doesn’t mention weed, otherwise more like 80s Boulder CO than anywhere else. It will be crushed soon.
“It’s not even clear who the Vision Pro is for”
Link. Other than developers willing to invest now for 2027 revenue — assuming Apple doesn’t kill the product.
xkcd: Greenhouse Effect.
Link. Powerful. Don’t miss the alt text.
NSA prepares to fight election attacks by Trump campaign.
Link. Specifically the Russian side of the campaign.
Foxconn builds iPhone facility in Tamil Nadu – “We never compare our growth with other Indian states,” he said. “We chart ourselves to the growth of Scandinavian countries”
Link. India’s states have wildly divergent economies, food, and culture.
Prison guard shortage: “Scott Walker, the Republican governor at the time, signed Act 10, a sweeping law that gutted public employees’ ability to bargain collectively with the state”
Link. Without the union wages fell behind and work conditions became intolerable. Not to mention heinous prisoner conditions.
Red voters have destroyed much of Wisconsin.
Screen Time is broken more than ever.
Link. It’s never worked reliably for me.
Before GE-disease killed Boeing it wounded 3M. McNerney as vector.
Link. “McNerney installed ‘Six Sigma,’ a regimen used at GE to measure and standardize business practices but loathed by 3M researchers as a creativity killer”
I suspect killing the “weakest” 10% every year was the worst poison.
Against Appin: “American law called the SPEECH Act that deems any foreign court’s libel ruling that violates the First Amendment unenforceable in the US”
Link. Modi’s India has delusions.
Techdirt gives Rajat Khare’s Appin hackers for hire the middle finger.
Link. Brave where others cower. Now we all know the name Rajan Khare.
Burning the world: Putin is keen, China and Iran less so.
Link. “Their ideal outcome appears to let the order fray and then let the United States expend resources to repair the damage”
US Growth exceeds all reasonable expectations.
Link. Journalists are suffering – which impacts coverage of the economy.
“China was ramping up an extensive hacking operation geared at taking down the United States’ power grid, oil pipelines and water systems in the event of a conflict over Taiwan.”
Link. We live in a glass house and we can’t make enough weapons to even supply Ukraine.
“Hackers for Volt Typhoon compromised hundreds of Cisco and NetGear routers, many of them outdated models no longer supported by manufacturer updates or security patches, in an effort to embed an army of sleeper cells that would be activated in a crisis.”
Tsai: Apple Vision Pro Review Roundup
Link. “Apple may have inadvertently revealed that some of these core ideas are actually dead ends — that they can’t ever be executed well enough to become mainstream”
Apple can afford to fail.
Lowe on the Aduhelm debacle
Link. “some members of the advisory committee that recommended against that approval resigned in protest, and Medicare later declared that they would not pay for the drug”
The FDA should review that approval the way aviation reviews plane crashes.
Worthless Alzheimer’s Drug (Aduhelm) wrongly approved by FDA abandoned by Biogen
Link. There are two others in use almost as worthless.
Infectious Alzheimer’s: “reports for over ten years that injection of human Alzheimer’s brain proteins into mice leads to AD-like pathology in mouse brains”
Link. It is an expected finding. The unexpected part is that prevalence was low, CJD is more “contagious”.
LLMs at work – year one.
Link. Interesting comments on who is using LLMs to do work.
Opioid management in Portugal vs San Francisco.
Link. Portugal’s program is amazing and SF is just a (rich) city — but the fentanyl gap is astounding and unexplained.
PS. We need a lot more journalism like this. Great work.
“cities likely to depopulate, according to this research, are Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, St. Louis, Memphis, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, Baton Rouge, Lansing, Hartford, and Birmingham.”
Link. From the map the Twin Cities (MSP) are projected to do well.
Promising new non-opioid pain med – “VX-548. It inhibits Nav1.8, temporarily blocking the protein needed for the nerves to transmit pain signals.”
Link. The research history is pretty neat. Thank you to those families.
I suspect it will be better for acute than chronic pain.
“If Ukraine had collapsed in 2022, the situation of the West would have been dire. China would have looked at a country the size Texas falling to Russia. Why not go for Taiwan?”
Link. Joe Biden was President so the world continues for now.
How to Learn Unfamiliar Software Tools with ChatGPT. Udell.
Link. I’ve been doing this. Works well for me but I do not require perfection. Jon shows how to work around ChatGPT errors and get it to self-correct.
The Data Breach “Personal Stash” Marketplace.
Link. Children trade data breach files but some age out into real consequences.
Starting with iOS 17 Apple’s own user guides are not available as ePub
Link. I’m one of the 7 people who liked having the ePUB version on my phone. Even though it was almost impossible to find in Apple’s truly truly awful book store. Apple stopped publishing them.
“does fermion doubling present a fundamental obstruction to simulating QFT on a lattice … and therefore, to simulating physics on a computer at all?”
Link. I love this stuff. #physics #computation
Fake science industry thrives on bribes to editors “special issue” fake journals.
Link. Lots of other bribes too. India especially but not only. I don’t know how much impact these papers have; some are promoted up by lay enthusiasts but legitimate researchers will just ignore them.
The First Self-Amplifying mRNA Vaccine (Japan): “(ARCT-154) uses mRNA that codes for replicase proteins lifted from the Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus”
Link. Watch this space.
A clever survey measures how confidence is related to actual knowledge of science.
Link. Yeah, the most confident often have a little knowledge. Those who know a little are not confident, those who know a lot have doubts.
The wrong and confident tend to be anti-science, male, middle-aged, and of intermediate education.
Ordinary people from Assyria onwards: “the several hundred members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shot and killed 38,000 Jews.”
Link. Your neighbors can share food one day and shoot you the next. Humans are like that.
“Somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the battalion refused to participate in these killings”
The roughly “15%” exception shows up in many historical settings.
“Some surveys such as the Household Pulse Survey may contact you via text message. The Household Pulse Survey uses the number 39242…”
Link. The text message comes with a link to click on (census.gov). It’s presumably legitimate but it’s madness to encourage people to click on a message link like this.
Both my wife and I have gotten these.
TidBITS does DMA: “while Apple will never allow adult-rated apps in the App Store, they will be permissible in app marketplaces.”
Link. My favorite summary to date
“harness the transformative potential of advanced technologies and artificial intelligence to empower individuals with developmental disabilities”
Link. I think this is an older business that’s pivoting to AI. It’s one of the few sites I’ve seen that is tracking the concept of an “AI Guardian”.
Bike blogger rants on carbon frames: “Steel! They should all be made from steel.”
Link. I enjoy my weird old carbon XC mountain bike. OTOH I think he’s right that carbon is way more fragile and problematic than most riders admit. OTOH carbon is not that hard to repair and I suspect carbon bikes will become much cheaper than steel bikes. OTOH he’s not entirely sincere.
#bike #bicycle
Trigger Mac diagnostic screen dump: “Control-Option-Command-Shift-Period”
Link. Most obscure key combo I recall.
British Library slowly recovers from Oct 2023 ransomware attack.
Link. Nobody can do restores. Unclear if they paid.
How did Congress fund the Manhattan Project? “Only seven lawmakers in the entire Congress had any idea that they were approving $800 million — the equivalent of $13.6 billion today — to create a weapon of mass destruction”
Link. Serious research inspired by the movie. Filed under “expediting production.”
“Brian Paré, 38, pleaded guilty to lighting 14 fires in the Chibougamau area of Quebec between May and September 2023”
Link. CO2 denialist he supported conspiracy Canada was setting fires to support CO2 restrictions. (100% chance of mental illness, probably schizophrenia)
New Hampshire trails kill another very experienced solo hiker.
Link. Weather got bad fast and he made a bad choice on familiar ground.
Modi’s power came from the destruction of a mosque. Now massive Ram Temple stands there.
Link. America’s Christian nationalists want to emulate Modi.
Dana Farber research fraud: “some published by Dana-Farber’s chief executive, Dr. Laurie Glimcher, and its chief operating officer, Dr. William Hahn.”
Link. People who commit scientific fraud are likely over-represented in positions of power and influence.
Science vigilantes fight crime in PubPeer.
After $5 million bounty F.B.I. Recovers Remains of Cydney Mizell, an aid worker abducted and killed in Afghanistan 2008.
Link. “The agents also returned the personal journals Cydney kept during her time in Afghanistan.”
“Blue whales have long been known to mate and reproduce with fin whales … blue whales can be a good 25 feet longer and as much as 85 tons heavier.”
Link. Sounds a bigger gap than Sapiens and Neanderthal.
“though the hybrids aren’t sterile, they mate only with blue whales.” (I think they mean “have offspring” rather than mate.)
“Antechinuses engage in suicidal reproduction, a biological phenomenon called semelparity that has been observed in other marsupial species”
Link. Males sacrifice sleep for copulation as they near death. Common in fish.
“The North Korean government seemed to be especially fixated on the U.S. military’s departure from Afghanistan in August 2021”
Link. Why is NK abruptly more reckless and aggressive? Are they betting on Trump?