Link. Lots of insider info. “Binance is going to be slowly ground into a very fine paste.”
“The World Health Organization has formally requested that China share detailed information about a recent increase in respiratory illnesses”
Link. Nobody trusts Xi, including his subjects.
Using Calibre and DeDRM Plug-In to remove Adobe DRM from Google Play .ascm ePUB files (Update 2023)
Link. This was first published in 2013 but I updated it for Monterey and later. It’s not a perfect description of the current process but it’s the best I’ve seen.
“buying and holding the entire market through low-cost index funds — is probably the best bet for most people.”
Link. I’ve read this for 40y and it worked for us. Though I have more SP500 than whole market. New study confirms ancient advice. But Vanguard is not what it was …
“Egypt has plenty of problems, sure, but it just doesn’t look like a hopeless basket case to me.”
Link. IOW: not Nigeria or Pakistan. Noah continues contrarian positivity.
“We call these Structured Prompts. They are like AI programs that let other people benefit from what you learned and explored.”
Link. … aaaanddd they are almost obsolete. But for a few weeks they were a thing.
“start with giving the AI an identity (you are an expert, friendly teacher who helps students with complex topics)…”
Another Finder memory leak in Sonoma (an old one)
Link. “Finder’s memory climb to over 1 GB. … closing it doesn’t free that memory up, even days afterwards. The only way to return the Finder’s memory use to anything approaching normal is to relaunch it from the Force Quit Applications dialog.”
“Ten-a-day was Hamas’s bottom line for the deal, because it thinks the Israelis will find it politically impossible to start the war up again in mid-December …”
Link. Dyer makes Hamas seem more calculating than I suspect it is.
Noahpinion year in review: “2023 was, in some sense, the year America discovered India…”
Link. A surprisingly good year for America.
Thanksgiving 2023 – Sean Carroll: “This year we give thanks for a feature of nature that is frequently misunderstood: quanta.”
Link. His list of past TG subjects is a good reading assignment
OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of Altman firing. 🆓
Link. “… Q* … could be a breakthrough in … autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.”
At present just does basic arithmetic and takes a lot of computation.
I wasn’t entirely honest when I “joked” about ChatGPT5. I like their AGI definition.
Douthat compares populist movements across democracies.
Link. As a conservative anti-trumper he plaintively hopes the left gets whackier and the right accepts democracy.
Personal AI: “Your primary GPT will continually improve as you chat, picking up on details and preferences to tailor its responses to you.”
Link. Mine tells me where to point the antenna it asked me to build.
Long-Term Care Insurance Failure.
Link. “Insurers counted on policy lapse rates — people giving up their policies or defaulting on payments — of about 4 percent annually. The actual lapse rate was closer to 1 percent.”
LTC needs to be a lot cheaper. Or just do a pandemic every five years.
Stellate ganglion block for post-COVID disorders of taste and smell.
Link. Weird. I’d wait for confirmation.
“Jimmy Carter knew almost immediately that he would marry the woman he had just gone to the movies with for their first date”
Link. She turned down his first proposal.
“Singapore recently instituted a system of mandatory long-term care insurance for those born in 1980 or later”
Link. Even in Singapore expenses fall on families. (Dementia care)
How to legally attack a hospital.🆓
Link. If used by combatants a hospital can be legally attacked — within guidelines.
Omicron biology. 🆓
Link. “In August, a variant called BA.2.86 emerged with a host of new mutations — likely the result, once again, of evolution taking place in an immunocompromised person.”
By “immunocompromised” they mean “probably HIV”. It’s easy to understand why the cautious term. People living with HIV can change evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic.
“[vaccine] development will slow down as governments stop paying for genetic sequencing of new variants”
“unable to discover what the limit for path length is in APFS; Internet rumour claims that could be as short as 1,024 UTF-8 characters, although other modern file systems have declared maxima of more than 32,000.”
Link. I wonder if that limit is Azure related; I think iCloud stores can be Azure.
When a new Mac fails .. Apple repair can be abysmal … and data recovery is not possible.
Link. Ric Ford gets hit. (Macintouch)
“its replacement motherboard was used, not new, showing unexpected and heavy SSD wear”
When Apple broke my iPhone they replaced it with a refurb with a screen issue.
The Atlantic has the best OpenAI summary.
Link. “In conversations between The Atlantic and 10 current and former employees at OpenAI, a picture emerged of a transformation at the company that created an unsustainable division among leadership” (Should be free article link)
PS. Do not care for “zealous doomers” as a way to describe people worried about what AI tech will bring.
“Starlink satellites are critical to deterring China because they are far more resistant to Chinese efforts to disable them than the Pentagon’s own communications satellites.”
Link. This seems like it should be a story rather than an aside.
Basel 3: “This rant is prompted by recent propaganda from Goldman Sachs alerting the world about threats small businesses face from proposed new capital adequacy standards for banks” 🆓
Link. Astroturf campaigns infuriate an economist.
“Within Israel, the rapid growth of the Haredi Jewish population was clearly altering the character of Israeli democracy”
Link. The Haredi focus on family size. I think they effectively limit the secular education of women; that’s the best way to achieve that goal.
I think a similar dynamic happened in Iraq but I have never found data. Too sensitive.
Demographics is not destiny but it’s powerful.
“EV claims currently make up just 2 percent of the total volume of automobile-related claims that the firm handles. However, they account for about 10 percent of the company’s costs.”
Link. Batteries expensive, expertise limited. Insurance rates for EVs will rise.
“Seven years have passed since the day I almost jumped in front of the train, and I know a lot more about suicide now than I did at 23.”🆓
Link. Suicide is often impulsive and contingent. Interruptions and delays are life and death. Guns in reach are a very bad idea.
“There’s a retired police officer who has walked more than 600 people back from the ledges of the Tojinbo cliffs in Japan”
COVID accelerated end of rural hospitals: “The exodus began with the nursing staff. Many left in the first months of the pandemic for higher-paying urban hospitals …”
Link. California is going to extend coverage to undocumented and increase Medicaid reimbursement. This facility will likely reopen — for a time.
It’s very expensive to maintain a modern healthcare facility and rural areas are poor. They are also red, so it puts their GOP reps in a weird spot.
American values survey 2023: it’s as bad as expected.
Link. Doesn’t address patriarchal values. I believe rise of educated women has been a major societal stress in America.
Otherwise about what you’d expect. Authoritarian drift, favor violence, Murdoch’s success, etc.
“the Roaring 20s are just getting started”
Link. Noah makes the case for a disinflationary boom — the roaring 2020s.
A good antidote to the usual despair. He makes a good case.
“insiders say that disagreements had emerged over the speed at which Altman was pushing for commercialization and company growth, with Sutskever arguing to slow things down.” 🆓
Link. Best free coverage so far.
The Economist on the greatest threat to civilization in 2024: “Mr Trump’s claim to have won the election in 2020 was more than a lie: it was a cynical bet that he could manipulate and intimidate his compatriots, and it has worked.”
Link. If you don’t vote Biden you don’t get to complain about what happens to you.
“The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.”
Johnson and anxieties of Christian fundamentalists: LGBTQ but also church attendance.
Link. The church attendance is likely their greater fear. Less than 50% now, lowest ever.
“despite MailKit being an officially supported API, Mail extensions are far less reliable than Mail plug-ins were. Bug reports seem to receive no more attention than before.”
Link. Happy to wait on Sonoma until 2024.
“Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word”
Link. The establishment had resisted using the word fascist.
Occupied Ukraine: “Russia’s occupation policies have also provided economic incentives for collaborators and Russians that blend politics, business and organized crime”
Link. Russia has lots of experience with occupation. The criminal class is easy to recruit to leadership.
Aviation safety decay: “recommended changes in how the [FAA] is funded, such as more broadly shielding it from government shutdowns.”
Link. The GOP’s 30y attack on government has severely damaged the FAA, CDC, IRS, EPA and much more.
Absolute idiots. By which I meant their voters.
HRC: “a full cease-fire that leaves Hamas in power would be a mistake”
Link. In her role as former Secretary of State in the Obama administration.
“Hamas deliberately places military installations in and below hospitals and refugee camps because it is trying to maximize, not minimize, the impact on Palestinian civilians for its own propaganda purposes.”
“Microsoft built a unique rack to house Maia server boards in, complete with a “sidekick” liquid chiller”
Link. Microsoft’s AI chip.
“A GPT is a named configuration of ChatGPT that combines the following…” 🆓
Link. A readable primer.
St Paul school cybersecurity insurance: “district’s premiums grew by 98 percent between school years 2021-22 and 2022-23” 🆓
Link. Security is driving cloud migration
Catalytic converter theft funded by a rough industry
Link. Dowa Metals and Mining America an “uninfected conspirator”. Stillwater Mining sounds very suspect.
Industry theft numbers maybe 10% of reality.
Hint that gov might go after the lenders.
Google AI: “GraphCast was about 10 percent more accurate than the European model on more than 90 percent of the weather variables evaluated”
Link. More impressive: it’s way faster.
macOS bug fixes: “they need a couple of years, not a week”
Link. Technical debt.
“Hamas has been using hospitals in Gaza, including Al-Shifa, as command centers and ammunitions depots”
Link. Which is a war crime. Also, doctors can lie.
“full-term infants in the United States are more than twice as likely to die after planned home births attended by midwives as those delivered in hospitals by any providers”
Link. I delivered babies. Human birth is hard and risky for mother and infant. I have felt deep gratitude for the C-sxn.
“Negative economic sentiment may not matter as much for the 2024 election as many think, since a lot of it is coming from people who would never vote for a Democrat under any conditions.”
Link. GOP base is not connected to reality.
As of Nov 2023 Vanguard’s customer facing software upgrade is a train wreck
Link. “… infinite financial resources doesn’t mean a complex software conversion is going to do well. If you’re not a Vanguard customer you may wish to consider Fidelity instead.”
The last days of coding: “Ben and I would talk about a bit of software we wanted for the project. Then, a shockingly short time later, Ben would deliver it himself.”
Link. “GPT-4 on its own is, for the moment, a worse programmer than I am. Ben is much worse. But Ben plus GPT-4 is a dangerous thing.”
Of course humans will still code, but it will all be machine assisted. Not quite as inhuman as chess, but a step function all the same.
A 4.5 Billion Year Video Timeline of Earth in 60 Minutes
Link. Mostly boring. Especially the Hadeon lava hell phase.