Link. Post processing and tagging at indexing to facilitate retrieval.
The shape of the climate migrations: “The gates will stay firmly closed, and those outside them will die.”
Link. Climate engineering better work.
O1 “easily the biggest jump in reasoning capabilities since the original GPT-4.”
Link. I might restart my ChatGPT subscription.
This is bad news of course. Again, too fast.
Expert (but necessarily biased) advice on migrating to Apple’s password manager.
Link. I think you’d want to be on current OS. and you need an archive copy for when things go wrong. He likes the slow careful migration rather than export/import.
Note TOTP advice carefully.
LLM coding: “small army of super talented interns that never complain about anything”
Link. Fast, confident, prone to dumb mistakes, but omniscient.
LLM assisted coding seems to work best for LLM experts.
“iOS 18 includes a new feature where you can choose to require Face ID to open an app”
Link. Like your braindead banking app. This is the single best iOS 18 feature I have read of so far. I am doing this.
[AINews] o1: “For the first time ever, an LLM has been able to 100% match and accurately report what we consider to be the top stories of the day without our intervention.”
Link. Too fast.
Bryan Cantrill: “You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower”
Link. Bezos and Ellison are similar that way. It’s not personal. You are grass.
With Musk it’s personal.
Google and detecting AI products: Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).
Link. I doubt this will work quickly enough but the idea is nice.
“Vance … has made it clear that he’s sometimes willing to speak falsehoods in order to make a political point” 🆓
Link. “… a country where people can be persecuted purely for their membership in an undesirable group. Some Americans do want that. If you want that, vote for Trump”
Like Elon Musk. Any means to an end where the end is power. Or, in the case of Musk, wealth and power.
Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon carried a Hezbollah pager.
Link. Israel has been preparing to go to war with Iran for a long time.
Tsai: “seems like Sequoia breaks less stuff than other recent major releases”
Link. So Dec 24 rather than April 25 for me
Lowe takes metformin primate results seriously.
Link. “Comparing RNA-seq and proteomics profiles of the two aged groups (treatment and control) with the two younger cohorts showed that metformin treatment rolled things back from 4 to 6 years”. 3 years of metformin for middle-aged cynomolgous monkeys.
I didn’t believe this result when I first read it. China has immense science fraud problems and the effect seems much too big. Published in Cell, but not, fwiw, in Nature or Science. I still think it’s too big an effect but if true it’s kind of Nobel gimme.
TidBITS macOS update timing: “Anyone who feels trepidation about installing Sequoia could wait until macOS 15.2 comes out, likely in mid-December”
Link. I like to wait until April for macOS updates. I always hit the bugs.
American Bat White Nose Syndrome: fixes emerge.
Link. European bats are much less effected and American bats are evolving resistant traits. In the meanwhile researchers have identified several effective mitigations.
To understand the American handgun, study the Kirpan.
Link. If you think of American gun culture as a component of a proto-religion it is easier to understand and perhaps manage.
“certain brain networks, especially those involved in social and emotional processing, shrink during pregnancy”
Link. Similar to adolescent pruning of key neural networks. Suggests optimizing or locking-in some bonding behaviors that favor infant survival. (But may decrease maternal survival. )
“By the ninth week of gestation, 80 percent of 400 brain areas analyzed showed decreases in gray matter volume and cortical thickness that continued through pregnancy, with areas shrinking by 4 percent on average. Change was particularly pronounced in the default mode network, which is instrumental in perceiving other people’s feelings and perspectives.”
Moderna mRNA solid tumor “vaccine” passes phase III trial, efficacy against advanced disease.
Link. COVID accelerated this science. We will know more within a year. (mRNA original use case was cancer, not COVID)
Pfizer could have had GLP-1 inhibitors in the 90s — but leadership threw it away.
Link. Reminiscent of Xerox and the mouse. Great business school case.
“if we do detect there are models that are starting to autonomously self-improve, who are you going to call?”
Link. Nothing prepared me for the 20s as well as my childhood years wasted on 1970s science fiction.
“The group proposed that countries set up A.I. safety authorities to register the A.I. systems within their borders…
…All three are winners of the Turing Award”
Elon Musk assassination tweet: “This is the kind of post that, should it come up during a clearance review, would typically see the poster lose such privileges”
Link. If we have learned anything in the past decade it is that many people are above the law.
Python: “Pandas was built on top of NumPy and works quite well within a Jupyter Notebook”
Link. I enjoyed this overview.
Sequoia: “trying to give the user detailed instructions as to how they can be run without being blocked by Gatekeeper should now arouse the suspicion of even the most careless and inattentive”
Link. Better to invest malware resources elsewhere?
“Colombia’s Gulf Clan … pushes cocaine across the Pacific in crudely made submarines to Costa Rica’s forest-covered shores”
Link. Costa Rica fears Mexican narco-terrorism.
Photos Workbench 1.3 – fixes some annoying bugs.
Link. If you are someone who weeps every time they have to use #%^# Photos.mac this helps.
If Apple made PhotoKit less half-assed Houdah could replace all the decrepit photo asset management of Apple’s turd.
A good set of Pinboard altrrnatives via Hacker News
Link. Thanks Joe!
“conservative Baby Boomer with too much power” is the right way to model Xi”
Link. Xi might be dimmer than Trump though.
iPhone 16 Pro and JPEG-XL.
Link. We need an SLR (are there any left?) to support JPEG-XL.
Rare article on how some Gazans see Hamas: “If you want to fight Israel, you should go do that. But why are you coming to hide among the civilians?”
Link. “Palestinians interviewed by The New York Times expressed frustration with Hamas, particularly over its practice of embedding in civilian areas”
“intelligence intercepts show that Hamas leaders have ordered their fighters to kill hostages if it appeared that Israeli troops were moving in and could potentially rescue them”
OpenAI’s “Strawberry”: “… complex planning or problem solving. It represents a huge leap in those areas.”
Link. I’ve read that while o1-preview is better at complex problems it tends to confabulate more. The good news is that at our current rate of improvement the AI impact will be more of a vast economic disruption precipitating a brewing “mass disability” socioeconomic crisis rather than the end of humanity. At least for the next 10 years.
Israel’s attack on Syrian arms plant used drones in coordination with special forces.
Link. “Israeli drones attacked Syrian troops who rushed to the scene”
‘Garbage Time’ in China – minuscule unrest among the “petty bourgeois intellectuals.”
Link. PBI is the Chinese Lib.
The End Times have come for the Pinboard.in bookmarking service
Link. “That’s ominous, but more importantly Pinboard is a one person show and that person is no longer responding to support emails. Maciej is no longer active on social media that I know of.”
PS. This post was authored and shared from Pinboard. Irony is eternal.
“for roughly a third of those incorrect responses, the model’s chain of thought showed that it knew the answer was incorrect but provided it anyway”
Link. OpenAI’s o1-preview.
Coca in pre-industrial Europe
Link. “The Ca’ Granda crypt includes some 2.9 million bones distributed among 14 brick-lined chambers…
The remains of two people showed evidence of cocaine ingestion”
Neanderthal hints: EU 50kya didn’t travel or mix much, 10 days and 50,000 years
Link. It might suggest that they did not like each other … and genetically this isn’t a great strategy. It might have been a part of why the Neanderthal did not survive. But OTOH, sapiens was having a day …
“In the salivary glands, the insect-only virus protein still went to the cell bottom, but the other protein often moved to the top of the cells”
Link. Viruses are the real problem solvers. (Any resemblance to machine learning mechanisms is not at all coincidental.)
The autonomous vehicle scam: “fake it till you make it”
Link. “By creating the illusion of complete autonomy, companies can fuel interest in their technology and raise the billions of dollars they need to build a viable robot taxi service.”
They use remote monitors. Far from commercially viable. But like Siri. Musk takes this approach to an extreme
Peak oil?
Link. I was a Peak Oil fanboy 20y ago. But now investors are concerned we have too much oil. If true more excitement awaits.
“Were we living in the year 1225, our lives would’ve overlapped with those of Leonardo Fibonacci, Francis of Assisi, Rumi, and Thomas Aquinas, as well as both Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan.”
Link. A map of overlapping lives of the famous. Catnip for me. #history
“Poland … income levels are actually similar to America’s in 1991”
Link. Noah’s proposals to jump to 2001 levels all seem persuasive from a distance. He skirts Poland’s political and demographic issues.
Researchers in children and young adults who shoot schoolchildren: “recognizing and acting upon warning signs that school shooters almost always give well before they open fire”
Link. THE only good essay on American school shootings I have ever read. From their book.
(Useful writing is most often done by domain experts with editor assistance. Journalists rarely have time to do useful writing on hard topics. Publishes in a local digital news service.)
“Cases of Kawasaki disease come in surges. Dr. Rodó and his colleagues found that surges in Japan often occurred when winds blew in from northeast China. And when those same winds reached California, cases rose there as well.”
Link. This is weird and needs confirmation. It’s not clear the high altitude microorganisms are disease related.
Rapid maturation (cortical thinning) of girl brains more than boy brains during COVID stress.
Link. This is not thought to be due to COVID directly, but rather a general stress response. Under conditions of high stress human adolescent brains may convert to adults mode faster than usual. What’s new is that the conversion is more marked in girls than boys and it’s associated with anxiety disorders in girls. It’s easy to imagine this is a primate adaptive response.
US deficit: “speaking honestly about our choices, let alone getting anything done, means certain defeat.”
Link. America needs two sane parties. One sane party is not enough.
2004 paper: The Nature-Nurture Debate and Public Policy (blank slate, tabula rosa, nature vs nurture)
Link. I dug this up because I believe 1960s progressive-liberal “blank slate” ideology was one of the great intellectual errors of the left.
It was a reaction to early 20th century eugenics and to ongoing deep and pervasive racism. But it led to a misplaced focus on college for all and fed into disastrous 1990s trade policies. It was also really dumb.
“fewer than 8 percent of high school students reported using e-cigarettes in the past month”
Link. It was about 25% a few years ago. Cigarette smoking now 1.6%. Many popular nicotine vapes are illegal Chinese products sold illegally.
(NYT confuses hemp derived/ synthetic delta-8 THC sold to teens in vape form with cannabis delta-9)
Vance: school shootings, an American thing, are a ‘Fact of Life’. Schools need more defense measures.
Link. Killer drones whir gently though the school corridors, small passages ease them by the blast door. Every word, gesture and motion is monitored. Those who have passed the four tier security cordon are tagged and routed.
Time Machine: “Copying backup stores on HFS+ was never easy, but there are currently no tools that can transfer those on APFS to another disk.”
Link. Good to know.
Russia secretly paid 3 right wing influencers 8.7 million
Link. Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin.
“paid at least $8.7 million to the top three influencers, who were not named but who appear to be Mr. Rubin, Mr. Pool and Mr. Johnson”