Link. “creating a system that more evenly distributes migrants and the costs of receiving them.”
Model for US?
Why we need climate COPs – even if they seem to do nothing.
Link. The foundation for when the crisis becomes obvious even to Fox.
“2020 decision to cut the sulphur dioxide content in the fuel emissions of 60,000 merchant ships from 3.5% to only 0.5% would lead to cloudless skies and a big jump in sunlight reaching the surface”
China’s bubble never popped – it just gradually deflated. 🆓
Link. “youth unemployment could be as high as 46.5 percent” This is bad news.
“The country is stuck in the ‘middle income trap’, with per capita GDP around $10,000, and nobody has a plan to do anything about it.”
Finder memory hog: caching, not memory leaks. 🆓
Link. Apple could have explained this years ago. Oakley considers whether this caching is wise but it is, after all, a feature not a bug.
YouTube channel for xkcd’s What If series. Official. Launched Dec 2023.
Link. I’m surprised it took two weeks for me to learn of this.
Why Goldman-Sachs failed the Apple Card: “any future Apple Card partner will “likely seek access to Apple’s proprietary credit card data.”
Link. Credit card companies sell your data for real money.
ChatGPT 3.5 class LLMs now run on smartphones: the world of ubiquitous AIs
Link. There’s no way to control these last-gen AIs, they are open source. As new chips and techniques evolve your dishwasher will come with an AI; and the AIs will communicate with one another, including escalating tasks when a user is dissatisfied with the local response.
Don’t worry, there’s no way to get ready for what’s coming.
Systematic literature review: “likelihood of having schizophrenia was roughly doubled in those who had cats growing up”
Link. If this is real it’s presumably due to Toxoplasma gondii though the mechanism is very unclear. We really do need to get rid of that parasite.
‘After School Satan Club’ vs state sponsored Christianity
Link. “They put us in a trick bag, and we almost can’t get out of it, using the Constitution against us.”
It’s because religious groups invaded after-school time. “public schools must open their doors to after-school religious activities on the same basis as any other after-hours activity that school policy permits.”
Lead Poisoning – focus on applesauce made in Ecuador – “lead contamination appeared to be an “intentional act.” (free)
Link. Theory – “if lead … added … either to enhance the spice’s reddish color or to add weight.”
Surprisingly this is a known problem with spices. Seems like it deserved more attention. We don’t know of children were symptomatic or if it showed up in lead screening.
tvOS 17.2 blows away customer wishlists without a warning.
Link. Typical Apple. I think they have done similar things with Map upgrades removing favorites. A smaller vendor would never get away with this sort of careless stupidity.
Hamas tunnels are real: “army previously estimated was about 60 miles long, is now believed to be closer to 250 miles long”
Link. Funded largely by aid for people of Gaza.
Korea’s Chaebol Families: “total sales of the five largest conglomerates have consistently made up more than half of South Korea’s gross domestic product in the past 15 years”
Link. Korea needs to break up the Chaebols but it’s politically impossible.
Chemo shortage: “consolidation of generic drug purchasing among a small group of very powerful health care middlemen”
Link. India: “Inspectors had discovered quality-control staff workers shredding and throwing acid on key records”
The purchasing orgs drive prices so low that only cheaters can be profitable. (Monopsony)
“Uganda, many of the presumed cases have resulted in negative tests for anthrax, raising the possibility that a second disease is circulating.”
Link. Probably a 2nd common disorder rather than new. And false negative. Anthrax outbreaks occur in this region periodically.
War in Ukraine: preserving any independent Ukraine will take European support.
Link. Besides America’s Trump dysfunction a Chinese attack on Taiwan will drain American military resources.
Noah doesn’t address Putin’s support in the EU.
Japan as fab site: low cost labor and more.
Link. A good review of modern Japanese manufacturing.
Geofence Warrants and Google reform: “Apple never collected location data that could be collected in the aggregate like this”
Link. I think FindMy location data is stored though. I’m told Apple’s “no location storage” is what Find My is disabled in Korea. The government wants that data.
Selling or disposing of a Mac is complex: “Next come third-party apps and subscriptions that need to be signed out or transferred…”
Link. Lots of odd little steps.
LLM with supervision math discovery: “FunSearch was able to come up with code that produced a correct and previously unknown solution to the cap set problem”
Link. Similar to how Q* has been described, merging LLM with a supervision system. Only the beginning …
Behold, MAGA Man.
Link. Giuliani joined a cult, and all the cultists are alike.
“the secret matrix co-processor AMX, that no one outside Apple is supposed to know about, let alone program.”
Link. “Those who switch from relying on their own code to using Accelerate often report enormous performance improvements, by a factor of ten or more.”
As a once FORTRAN coder I liked: “sub-libraries like BLAS and LAPACK, which are generic and descended from Fortran originals.”
“When we supervise GPT-4 with a GPT-2-level model using this method on NLP tasks, the resulting model typically performs somewhere between GPT-3 and GPT-3.5.”
Link. In OpenAI’s near future humans are the weak intelligence supervising the superhuman intelligence.
“We are launching a $10 million grants program for graduate students, academics, and other researchers to work on superhuman AI alignment broadly.”
macOS Sonoma 14.2 still has those ancient Finder memory leaks.
Link. We need Gruber to do some careful embarrassment.
Spike email Magic AI: “Using LLM, you can send emails in your native language, have the message translated before they are sent, and vice versa as someone responds.”
Link. Transparent quality translation alone is going to disrupt the world.
Stolen Device Protection is kind of mandatory (iOS 17.3).
Link. I’ll give it a month or two post release but then – definitely.
Google Drive – shockingly they lied about the unlimited storage.
Link. One week notice of a purge. Google is drunk and dysfunctional. They desperately need a new CEO.
Standard ebooks feeds with a Patreon donation.
Link. A nice perk and also supports a noble cause. Quality free EPUBs of public domain books prepared with love. (I posted on them 6y ago)
Social Network 2023: Threads has won.
Link. X is gone. Bluesky ain’t gonna fly. Mastodon will survive as a nerdy niche alongside Threads — but only on instances that don’t block Threads.
“Russia has lost 87 percent of the total number of active-duty ground troops that it had prior to launching its invasion of Ukraine”
Link. This seems … impossible. Even for Russia. Did it have a tiny army?
Aaronson responds to critiques of his wrong 2009 AI prediction.
Link. I wrote a blog post at the time critiquing his 1000y estimate. I thought 2080 was more likely. I didn’t think 2028.
He is way too sensitive though.
A newly identified hormone, GDF15, causes hyperemesis gravidarum.
Link. Key researcher had a personal agenda. Likely years from a therapy but basic science will help in many areas.
Metformin increases GDF15 which may account for some drug intolerance.
Crawling out from COVID: making twin cities transit useable again
Link. The smoking (meth, etc) and other drug use on local transit killed ridership. It’s good to see a consensus approach emerging.
Apple Diagnostics for Self Service Repair – iPhone and M-Macs.
Link. A nice addition, especially for iPhones.
Case reports of CAR-T therapy success for autoimmune disorders including SLE.
Link. “unclear how much of this success is due to the CAR-T therapy as opposed to the chemotherapy”
Lots more work to do.
Best Space Images of 2023
Link. “This visualization of the CEERS (Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey) deep field flies you through ancient galaxies”
“in war, symmetry and proportionality are unrelated”
Link. The legality of a war act is not what most people think. Hamas has many war crimes, Israel is not so simple.
Goose Bay again welcomes stranded passengers: “Everybody was super, super, super nice.””
Link. I’ve been there. Very very remote.
Tsai on Journal: “I don’t think any app should ship without export functionality.”
Link. Hard core data lock. You’d have to be crazy to use it.
“you should only read reviews from people who love bikes, but if you truly love bikes it’s almost impossible to review them” 🆓
Link. He’s mostly right — bikes are all pretty good.
“Threads … is going to be the mass-market replacement choice for the former Twitter”
Link. Scalzi compares the big 3 (Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky) from a business reach perspective. I agree.
Test scores decline across world: “There are actually a lot of studies measuring the impact of smartphones on student learning, and the consensus is that it’s bad”
Link. I think also quite bad for young woman friendships.
iCloud Shared Photo Library vs. Shared Albums in Photos
Link. A shared library is intended to be deleted after use … “When a Shared Library is deleted, any participant (including the host) who was involved for more than one week automatically gets a copy of every photo”.
Mobile Passport Control app): speed reentry to US (also Canadian passports)
Link. Has good ratings on iOS App Store. One phone can serve family.
It’s a bit odd in that you set it up beforehand but then it expires and you redo it?
Threads to Fediverse: “project is proceeding more or less as planned, and there are no major obstacles”
Link. This will be amazing to watch and experience.
“dengue infections appear to have dropped by 94 to 97% in the cities where the Wohlbachia mosquitos were well-established”
Link. Grand slam home run. He doesn’t explain why Wohlbachia makes mosquitoes resistant to viruses.
macOS Sonoma 14.2 Update: installers, IOSW, links, references.
Link. Mr Macintosh.
“Conquest has returned to our world.” 🆓
Link. The end of Pax Americana.
“Epic’s lawyers said Google had deleted some internal chat messages that may have been relevant to the case”
Link. Juries do good work.
“U.S. and Ukrainian strategists did not initially realize how much more Russians were strengthening their defenses.”
Link. “Russia’s use of a variety of drones, including Chinese-made commercial drones, that fundamentally changed the nature of mechanized maneuver warfare.”
Russia’s hold is strong and Trump looms.