Link. This framing had not occurred to me. He can’t withdraw without changing careers.

I won’t read much of it but I’m glad he does this. And I now feel the pain.

Link. A short essay by Jon Udell about taking out the AirPods.

Link. Discovery changed understanding of australopithecus LESS than I’d thought. We also no longer think of Lucy as a human ancestor.

Link. Bidenomics had the right goals and largely succeeded in the near term — but it was politically unhelpful.

Future help to the “left behind” will be based more on politics than on effectiveness.

Link. “This supernatural thing is imaginary” but “that supernatural thing is a world religion” is a hard sell.

Societies changing very quickly there.

Link. More productive but more cognitively demanding, requiring yet more cognitive gifts, accessible to fewer people.

Link. Much more inside analysis than I usually see about the lost world of China. It is tempting to believe they won Twitter only to be left with the MAGA.

Link. Don’t worry about Tulsi. Russia and China have all our secrets already.

Link. We need to get away from Apple’s App Store

Link. ‘/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0’, cmd-drag to desktop. Restore every few months to update Office.

Link. I have been waiting for somebody to do this.

“De Vries estimated how much energy would be used if all of the servers delivered in 2023 were running at full capacity. It came to around 5 to 10 TWh; a tiny fraction of the 460 TWh that is used for all data centres, transmission networks and cryptocurrency.”

Link. ChatGPT bot honeypot to make typical scams uneconomical.

Link. When Musk activated Weapon X.

Link. Agree hard.

Link. Nostalgic for me.

Link. I’m waiting for better election analyses to emerge, but I do think it’s clear that we now have a white tribe alongside all the other tribes. We’ve been going that way for at least 10 years.

Link. “These voters were not necessarily poor: Many said they could afford groceries, but that higher prices left them with far less disposable income. Voters earning $20 an hour complained bitterly about being unable to take their families to the movies or on carefree outings at the mall.”

If you care about the future of American democracy look deeper at employed non-college Americans earning between $20-40 an hour. Ignore what they say. Don’t assume “inflation” is the root cause. Ask “why should they feel increasingly desperate over the past 20 years?

Link. Planners have learned patience. Move when progress is possible, retreat when necessary, bend with the wind. It will not finish in my lifetime.

Link. Helpful reference

Link. The article has several interesting links. It feels like RSS is rising from the grave – not least because of Bluesky and Mastodon support.

Reminds me of Yahoo Pipes.

Link. “Gun deaths alone accounted for almost half of the increase”

The mortality from school and sports disruption was substantial.

Link. Musk is a very formidable enemy of democracy. More dangerous than Trump.

Link. Case histories are not patients — much data cleaning is already done.

I loved the Jack Myers INTERNIST-1 history. QMR was the descendant I tested alongside Iliad in the late 80s, early 90s.

Link. China and Russia won’t support UN involvement.

Link. The codes used in billing were for general pancreatic cancer, but the increase appears to be due to enhanced imaging and incidental discoveries of endocrine tumors that are thought to often resolve spontaneously. (Not mentioned in article – Steve Jobs died of an endocrine tumor because he refused the early surgery that would have removed it. They don’t always regress.)

Link. He modified the default Linkding UI

Link. Lotterman is my favorite economist and he is invisible, unknown, and writes behind a paywall.

“both high import tariffs and the expulsion of 3 percent or more of our population will impose large dead-weight losses affecting all of us”

Link. The cost of running a Bluesky instance is significant — and they don’t have a business model.

Link. Google’s original incorporation was designed to prevent this. But Google died anyway.

Link. I believe this as well. Most people are what the culture wants them to be. They can be good, or nice, or kind, or they can do very bad things.

Link. There is worse to come. We will be fighting as we retreat, trying to limit damage in hope of rescue.

Link. Global tetrahedron is a flimsy facade for the Trilateral Commission.

Link. There is no business model for funding history research, and genuine history is rarely pleasing to authoritarians.

Link. Via Jedeed. An 2014 essay on the burning of Atlanta and the residues of confederate myth.

Link. I know people who know people who do things like this. Climbing around Greenland via kayak transport.

Link. Useful for people who have web sites.

Link. Ouch.

Link. Fee MAGA parents will sacrifice their children once the media share the fruits of batshit crazy anti-vaxxers.

Link. “A major outbreak seems inevitable. When it happens, I hope there will be pictures. I hope they will be heart-breaking. I hope the parents will be brave enough to admit that their lives were shattered by their own choice.”

Might as well assign the journalist team now. A good reminder that humans are not actually very rational. And an example of how news is made or unmade.

Link. Book review – sounds excellent!

“historians are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that natural forces in some way circumscribe human agency.”

👆Truth! It’s a longstanding academic failure. Historians deserve this dig.

Link. A hard subject to research. Some of the schedule packing involved school sports which may have unrelated ADHD benefits.

Overall the result will not surprise many with ADHD. If you can’t get anything done then add another activity …

Link. Gift link. Long article on the 50y pivot to complex peptides from venoms developed into meds.

Also a reminder that the next hugely effective med may come to us from work started 50y ago. (Though things are moving much faster now)

Link. Good news: humanity gets a reprieve.
Bad news: we live our reprieve under the heel of Elon Musk.

Link. Lots of context in this Quantas article on debate, judgement, and AI safety.

Link. Musk is definitely Gillian.

Link. “maybe better software won’t help. After all, 40% of users couldn’t do relatively simple software tasks. Maybe the problem is human cognitive limits.”

Link. The claiming bit might be new. For me TM is a secondary backup so I have wiped and started over.

Link. The hematuria comment got my attention.

It would be good to know why it took 30y to figure out the training was unwise. (Hint: football remains popular)

Link. Most interesting description of elliptic curves I have read.

Link. Similar to free storage which now is only a probabilistic approximation.