Link. US Forestry Service, USDA. It’s quite good. It’s also distributed by box.com rather than a US Forestry Service site; that says something important about how the web broke bad.
Tag Archives: pinboard
A Note on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: “CHD (and Kennedy himself) were both involved in stocking anti-vaccine fears in Samoa, which directly led to a measles outbreak that killed dozens of children.”
Link. If we knew nothing of Trump his alliance with RFK Jr alone would be enough to disqualify him from any political office.
Who the f*ck remembers the Kennedys anyway?
Kubernetes Roadmap.
Link. It’s been 25y since I was close to this kind of tech. There have been changes. This is a fun catchup.
Using iPhone Apps on M-Series Macs.
Link. By the time I upgrade macOS this kind of marginal value feature is long forgotten.
“Because every state gets two senators, they also get two “free” electoral votes, votes that are unrelated to their population.”
Link. So many compromises in the US constitution.
An Anthropologist studies modern rave drug culture. 🆓
Link. “I attended a four day rave-style music festival … It offered key lessons on modern life from a sub-genre of our species: Homo ecstasticus.”
COVID as a URI: NYT on the fading practices of a pandemic.
Link. The article fails to note that home testing is almost useless now. Tests are positive too late in the disease course.
It correctly concludes that we do not know enough to make rational risk assessments.
I’m impressed that the few who do wear masks use masks that do not protect the wearer (cloth, tattered surgical procedure masks). That is fascinating.
“Mr. Kennedy has recently made headlines for decapitating a dead whale with a chain saw and strapping its head to the family minivan”
Link. I really, truly, thought that story was parody. He is perfect MAGA.
Beethoven probably did have lead poisoning – hair sample testing.
Link. Lead poisoning probably took out a lot of minds prior to the 90s. Likely still does in some parts of the world.
“We could be looking at a “VC winter”
Link. Too much money, too few fast flips. Given scaling issues AI won’t save them this year.
Fibs for a cause – the MSP riots: “Much of the destruction that occurred during the evenings of rioting, looting and arson were the work of outsiders, the state’s political leadership said.”
Link. It was what we used to call a “white lie”. I was there, it was mostly locals taking opportunities. But the lie was helpful.
Why is Thailand a chronic disappointment?
Link. Dyer: “unusually strong and united ‘establishment’ that includes the old rich, the army, the courts and a substantial part of the Bangkok middle class”
I lived there in 81. The future was bright then.
Musk using legal harassment against groups who say bad things about X.
Link. “subpoenas demand any correspondence the organizations have had with that progressive media watchdog group”
Thiel showed the way.
(Yes, people who stay on X are moral cowards.)
Lotterman: “If you [cap] rent increases, then new construction or rehabilitation slows. If you give financial aid to poor renters, but fund that with increased property taxes, rents either increase … or profitability to landlords fall.”
Link. Paywalled damnit. Why does a near-dead crap market daily have America’s only serious economics commentary?
“Stunting and tricking macOS to the point where malware can deploy fully isn’t anywhere near as easy as it was”
Link. It is now almost impossible to test 3rd party antimalware solution. This is a good problem.
Apple isn’t doing everything wrong. (Just the other things I care about)
“Mr. Gallant pushed for new shipments to Gaza to power generators needed to keep the cell networks running so that the Israeli eavesdropping could continue”
Link. More detail on how Hamas operates.
“Why you should not ignore economists”: Noah has a robust defense of economics and expertise.
Link. You could write something similar about physicians or public health or any profession that is no fun at parties.
GenAI at Amazon: “The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours.”
Link. More than half the Matodon folk I follow think modern AI is bullshit. I think they are in denial.
“Mr. Trump’s message has been particularly resonant for young men without college degrees and young men of color”
Link. Crap data, but I think there is truth here. There used to be a viable future for men who were not socially and academically gifted. Now they are redundant.
Unless, of course, we go to war with China.
New translation of Babylonian cuneiform texts on divination: “features that appeared on the right side were considered to be positive and on the left, to be negative, though what constituted right and left differed in each region of Babylonia”
Link. They believed that it was possible to avert predicted doom – so it was a perfect racket. (I suspect some knew that.)
“Most of the more than 100,000 Mesopotamian tablets in the British Museum’s collection remain undeciphered”
elinzanetant for post-menopausal hot flash and sleep disruption
Link. FDA approval pending. Novel mechanism.
“over 80% of women on the drug saw a more than 50% reduction in symptoms, … also reported fewer sleep disturbances”
“one cannot think the name “JD Vance” without picturing a shuddering and exhausted davenport”
Link. “Trump doesn’t know much — truly, he is ignorant as a chicken — but he knows that he needs Joe Biden to run against.”
Scalzi is feeling good about America’s new future.
“loose-fitting clothing may be a particularly good defense against mosquitoes, because it leaves space between the skin and clothing for thermal IR to dissipate”
Link. Based on recent research.
iPhone 16 to shoot JPEG-XL?: “JPEG XL is a royalty-free image file format created by … the committee that designed the JPEG format.”
Link. Finally. Lossless mode too. I suspect compression is computationally expensive.
“Telling AI to perform tasks and not make stuff up is the new programming.”
Link. Welcome to the greatest show on earth.
“employers had overstated job growth by about 28 percent per month, especially in industries like hospitality and professional services”
Link. Recession yet?
The reality of the “successful” YouTube channel
Link. It’s a lot of work and much of it is luck.
The Smart Telescope scene.
Link. Not the telescopes we knew.
Stross: “the public understanding of fiction itself is changing, and with it, the types of fiction which are commercially (or even socially) viable going forward”
Link. I liked the phrase “pale, male, and stale”.
He’s responding to readers who dislike the hard boundaries of the traditional novel.
Cash For Published Errors: “The peer review system has been overloaded to the point of breaking down for quite a while now”
Link. Money for stats class!
What’s Really Going On in Machine Learning? Wolfram speculates.
Link. He’s not always a reliable narrator, but I don’t believe people who claim it’s all quite simple.
AirTag used to catch mailbox thieves.
Link. Likely effective.
“Diamond Shruumz … markets the chocolates … as containing psychedelic drugs but doesn’t say what’s in them…”: 145 sickened, 2 dead.
Link. They contain lots of odd chemicals, some psychoactive, but the poisonous one has yet to be identified. America is a weird place.
“The most plausible explanation to date is if the muscimol was accompanied by another Amanita chemical called ibotenic acid…”
“Trump’s reactions lately are so unhinged, so hysterical, that they could pass for one of those scenes in a soap opera where a drunken dowager finds out that her May-December romance is a sham.”
Link. Tom is praying for a GOP collapse that leads to a reformed party. (He is Republican by preference)
US is 5y behind on housing needs and is still falling further behind.
Link. Population growing, presumably due to immigration as birth rates are low. Subsidies for builders and optimize law and bureaucracy.
“Mill owners said that the workers had always been paid that way and that changing the practice would jeopardize their businesses by making it easier for workers to leave.”
Link. Indentured servitude in India with coerced hysterectomies grabbing attention.
I love the honesty of the above quote. . US employers say similar things about their non-compete agreements.
Oklahoma Bible mandate going nowhere.
Link. Schools ignore the idiot and even GOP is turning on him.
“Applying an A-level attestation, which is the highest level of trust attributed to a phone number, only to a call where Lingo Telecom itself has provided the caller ID number to the party making the call”
Link. I suspect there are a lot of seedy telecom players in the US.
US State North Korea travel advice: “Discuss a plan with loved ones regarding care/custody of children, pets, … funeral wishes, etc”
Link. Clarity
“OpenAI announced a partnership with Ars Technica parent company Condé Nast to display content from prominent publications”
Link. One way or another money will flow into content production.
“… Associated Press, Axel Springer, The Atlantic … “
Micropayments elsewhere in the multiverse but never here.
The evolving right wing take on CO2: “Thiel’s response is a full 17 seconds of stammers before admitting: “It’s possible climate change is happening.”
Link. Thiel is quite dim, but this is an illustration of what I think is happening among the weird.
China censorship focus now includes “feminist propaganda”.
Link. This restriction appears in context of a new online game. Perplexity thinks it’s a new formal restriction.
Curious.
Why Apple modem is so hard: “Radio chips have to support not only current and previous generations of each standard, but also every single variation of each in current use”
Link. That’s quite a moat.
Hints that dark energy is inconstant.
Link. The article is a bit confused. If the results hold-up theorists have many explanations. Some of them seem similar to the old cyclic universe model. Anthropic principal not mentioned.
4 children who stole a Kia shot by another driver
Link. “two of the five minors in the car were arrested less than two weeks ago”.
The residential school facilities for juvenile offenders were all closed in the past 20 years in favor of something mysterious.
Harris housing policy resembles Singapore success. (free)
Link. Noah answers the (dumb) GOP criticisms and explain the balancing act.
Brother toner recycling program halted. (for now?)
Link. “… Due to unforeseen circumstances with our shipping partner, prepaid shipping label printing is currently unavailable … we’re focused on getting the program back up and running as soon as possible.”
Over the past 10 years their toner recycling has gotten harder to use. I suspect it will not return. Instead almost everyone will dump their Brother toner into the garbage.
What a crappy world we live in.
“ a delirious, post-surgery Musk triumphantly announced that he had finally bridged the gap between man and machine, and that the toaster was pregnant with his child”
Link. Onion.
“CalSAWS, Gainwell, and Deloitte staff needed to add additional testing and monitoring to assess the site as customers experience it …”
Link. Interpretation left to the reader. Basically these companies play the gov game, do shit work, don’t care, and are protected by the bureaucracy they helped build.
“networks and devices folks use to access public support … in the tail of the device price, age, and network performance … the consistently falsified assumptions of frontend’s lost decade have played out disastrously.”
Link. A four part series. Superb work.