Link. True that independents don’t read.

Link. More subtle than I imagined.

Link. “There are no canonical “best” XML tags that Claude has been trained with in particular, although we recommend that your tag names make sense with the information they surround.”

Should work with any LLM.

Link. Pharmacy Benefit Managers owned by CVS discriminate against local small pharmacies.

Link. Article explains how it can be funded — most often by city residents though usually the cost is hidden.

Link. Is Apple a terrible place to work now?

Link. Despair restored?

Link. Lots of illuminating commentary in this Tsai roundup.

Link. Feedbin is my fave subscription.

Link. Science fraud is supported by the publishers of Nature.

“red flags for fraud … tortured phrases … irrelevant content, irrelevant citations, meaningless gibberish, a nonsensical figure, and material recycled from other publications.”

Hard to miss. Unless you want to not see.

Link. And provides support to try to retain them. 3000 so far.

Link. Musk in particular. These are very bad people. Don’t use X.

Link. And you thought Tesla was overpriced.

Link. Space and Time as emergent rather than fundamental properties of reality. 8 essays and video. The launch page is flashy but the articles are sensible HTML. So much to love here.

Link. “Knowing he loved Oreo cookies, she showed up for her job interview with a tray of them individually wrapped, each tied with a bow.”

In her obit she mostly kept her long silence.

Link. I’ll probably restart a subscription to try this.

Link. He is fearless but even he doesn’t dare look at what happens when one combines Spaces with dual monitors with the newer windows management options. It’s a total mess.

My guess is Apple doesn’t want us to have multiple monitors but rather to wear Vision Pro headsets with vast virtual spaces.

Link. Gilliam’s movie had 12 monkeys so no worries.

There is going to be a lot of attention on this until it’s understood. The NYT headline is atypically cautious.

Link. The Econ Nobel is more like the literature Nobel than like the Physics Nobel. Noah would like ACJ’s theories to be true, but they are not falsifiable.

Link. Yeah, war crime.

Link. “read-write disk images in sparse file format will help increase free disk space, their major benefit is in reducing ‘wear’”

Link. “But does democracy really have a chance? November 2024 is the test. If Americans, knowing all they know now, having lived through a Trump presidency, still reelect Donald Trump — then it’s clear our democracy is not up to the much greater challenge of even collective climate geoengineering — much less the AI transition.”

Link. No comment

Link. Core memory was also code.

“all the software programs in the AGC were actually encoded in the hardware using the core rope memory …

… the AGC throw error codes and reboot several times during the decent…”

Link. Happily there is no war between nations. Regardless, it’s a useful guide to what trillions of dollars thinks.

Link. I just wrote about feeling reassured by a paper showing absence of reasoning. I hope entropix doesn’t change that.

Link. “Adding a single clause that seems relevant to the question causes significant performance drops (up to 65%) across all state-of-the-art models”

Reassuring! Best news in months.

Link. “In January, lawmakers passed a law that banned the country’s centuries-old practice of breeding and butchering dogs for human consumption.”

In 2003 US families adopting Korean children were told to never mention they had a dog at home.

In 2024 Seoul baby carriages almost always held small dogs. The rate of social change in SK is astounding.

Link. “Vehicle Motion Cues is a new accessibility feature in iOS and iPadOS 18. You can activate it by opening Settings ⇾ Accessibility ⇾ Motion, or with a Control Center toggle.”

Link. “.. a very important part of the gene expression machinery in every creature with left/right symmetry in their bodies”

Link. Provincial gov appears to be running kidnap and ransom operations against Foxconn to make up for lost property revenue streams.

Link. Used in progeria research.

Link. “Dear, if you don’t know the answer, just tell him.”

Link. 600,000 or so dead Russian soldiers, but Ukraine’s losses are a bigger fraction of available bodies.

Link. I’ll give my 13 at least another year. I like the new camera but not enough to go through upgrade pain.

Link. Coronaviruses are pretty damned sneaky. We may be stuck with a yearly vaccine best timed for individual risks.

Link. Now we are starting to talk meaningful fines. I’d like to know why we can do this class of fines for banks but not, say, Google.

Link. Setting aside the “undecideds”, since the late 90s most people know how they are voting years before the election.

Link. “Police noted the 12-year-old boy had “multiple prior contacts” with the Minneapolis Police Department”

He is caught and released every few weeks. Sooner or later he will get shot.

Supposedly MN’s legal system is stymied.

Link. I think Google’s first Nobel.

Link. 22y. Oakley is disgusted by Apple documentation.

Link. Why you can’t have good things.

Link. In this case the senile orange weirdo is more correct than the elite NYT journalists.

Link. “the conspicuous absence of Maggie Haberman from that shared byline”

Via DF so free excerpt. What game is the NYT playing with Haberman?

Link. “Democratic strategists concede that the transgender attacks are taking a toll in some races”

Link. Watch this space. The MI 5 antiterrorism lead is quietly saying much of the current threat is coming from persons with mental health issues unconnected to ideology.

Link. Woodward on all the American wars. Putin portrayed as both evil and stupid.

Link. On iOS lack of competition is bad for customers.

Link. China knows everything.

Link. Useful context for the Trumpification of tech.

Who watches what is a mystery to traditional media critics:

“we all spent years basically having no idea what was going on in there and taking guidance from friends, social media, newspapers, magazines and websites — all similarly blinded.”