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.”

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.

Link. Mostly boring. Especially the Hadeon lava hell phase.

Link. Trump campaign doubles down on crushing us roaches.

Link. The gap is now 6y in the US; in 2010 it was less than 2y. Other than COVID it’s drug overdose, suicide, accidents. COVID gap is fuzzier but women got vaccinated more.

Link. Yeah, there’s a plugin for this but, really, WordPress, what are you doing?!

Link. “That’s not even a dog whistle. It’s just a whistle… Ask MAGA to cheer for the death of something abstract, like Antifa, and they’ll do it all day. Ask them to stand by while their blue-haired child gets dragged away to a concentration camp? Some people will. Plenty of them won’t.”

Great Jedeed essay on Trump channeling his inner Hitler.

Link. Check your password manager.

Link. Assassination can change history.

Link. Dyer explains the military context.

Link. Absolutely fascinating. American capitalism at its finest.

“More than 3 million creators now post around the world on OnlyFans, which has 230 million subscribing “fans”

The natural market for Apple’s Vision Pro and AI de-aging tech.

Link. Years late I put some social media thoughts into a blog post, only to learn ChatGPT4 has been “thinking” about this.

Link. Brilliant visionaries who got the right opportunity at the right time and citizens who voted wisely. We are still undoing the freeway disasters .. but the parks are superb.

Thank you Horace William Shaler Cleveland. #msp

Link. Wicked even by the standard of most scams. How was it not caught sooner?

Link. My best finance app was Quicken for DOS. Been downhill ever since. We are back to spreadsheets now.

Link. Of course you can.

Link. If you use TM you *must* read this. Migration Assistant. Finder. Least of all the TM GUI.

Link. WTF. Did you know that?

Link. Accident my ass. The 25 million dollar fine is nothing for Apple. It should have been a billion.

Link. I have 2 tags: Active and Important. Tags work on network shares. They can scope search. I love this type of article with actual use cases.

Link. One may infer that Apple threatened to sue Amazon’s ass. A deal was made.

Link. Gruber does Spatial Video with the Vision Pro. I suppose I’ll have one eventually.

Link. Excellent read on the cultural use of Science Fiction literature.

I mourn the loss of the original meaning of singularity- best presented in SF by Vernor Vinge but others have done well with it. (Charles and I disagree a bit on this.)

Link. “The form factor of a pin, so that it must be moved whenever you add or remove a layer of clothing, seems like a disaster.”

Glasses made more sense in that respect. Maybe a pet drone that follows us around …

Link. US State Department human rights report flagged SK abuse of slander and libel laws to attack journalists.

Link. They were in retreat in many states even before the rout. I think they were undone by their easy success, they dropped the mask too quickly. A case of catastrophic success, similar to GOP abortion “win”.

Link. “binding energy between two particles in a nucleus [is affected by] their spins”

Link. Drag and drop to trash. Weird this persists.

Link. “Between 1971 and 2018, global space powers, including the United States, Russia, Japan and Europe, crashed more than 263 space objects in the uninhabited region of the ocean around Point Nemo. “

Link. In human lice. Consistent with land bridge crossing 23kya.

Link. “Chamberlain doesn’t have to worry about competition, because it is owned by a private equity fund that “rolled up” all of Chamberlain’s major competitors into a single, giant firm…”

Doctorow taught me a lot with this one.

Link. The author of this essay is way more polite than my title, but internally she seethes.

“It is predicated on a sanitized version of disability in which there is no such thing as severe cognitive impairment.”

They are f* on another plane of reality. It drives parents of cognitively disabled adults to despair.

Link. “ The company is using over a billion gallons more water than it had in past years to help keep its data centers cool.”

Hell of a gamble.

Link. Hamas feared irrelevance; the dull burden of governance. They thought war might save them, and Israel had shown they would pay any price to free a hostage. Then they succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

Link. “Subsequent research has shown that most bacterial species have a diverse set of satellite-helper systems, like that of P4-P2. But viral satellites are not limited to bacteria…”

Most of this is over last 10y.

Link. “No, it is really important, and you are great at this and can do it, I know you can! (A new paper shows the AI responds to emotional pleas — LLMs are weird — and it seemed to work here)

Link. Nobody can say they didn’t know.

Link. Keep this ref to share in 2024.

Link. Extensive New Yorker profile of China under the Emperor’s heel. It’s ugly.

Many will want to emigrate to Canada — the country Xi hates most.

Link. There’s a tsunami of new meds headed our way over the next decade.

Link. “deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide happen everywhere, they’re happening disproportionately not in liberal big cities but in left-behind rural regions”

It’s the rural where the GOP lives and rural really does suck. They aren’t making that up.

Link. The wealth isn’t just a tax evasion illusion, it’s real. A fascinating story.

Link. “apparent rampant stimulant use at FTX” does deserve more attention — I gather stimulant/cognitive drug use is popular among SV types who are too young to remember how it turns out. Stimulants are a great way to send someone on the edge over the edge.

SBF does seem a tragic figure to me — as are many crooks big and small. I wonder what story he’ll tell after a few years in prison.

Link. From 2009 but I don’t think there’s much better since. Exercise can cause weight loss assuming some dietary control — but it’s a LOT more exercise than most people imagine.

Greater amounts of PA (>250 min wk(-1)) have been associated with clinically significant weight loss.

Link. Not original design but the model “knows things”.

Link. Israel has no moral authority any more. Hamas deserves to be destroyed. Biden’s approach is probably the best the US can do.

Link. Republican? Maybe if you have a time machine.

Link. “All Seasons Press, which published Meadows’ memoir The Chief’s Chief in 2021, is seeking nearly $3 million in damages”

Link. They were warned.

Link. Not a shock.