I think helpful. Mentions CB-1 cannabinoid. Mixes idiopathic (her disorder) and secondary (OA, spine).
Most chronic pain is thought to be in the head, specifically in the brain where all pain lives. A kind of cortical malfunction.
Mouse study: Nav1.7 Sodium Channels and OA
Mouse study: “drugs that block Nav1.7 channels, including carbamazepine … provides substantial protection from joint damage and associated pain in the two models”
Very interesting but many mouse things don’t work in humans. Main appeal is we already use this drug – but it has many side-effects.
“in at least five of the 16 African countries where the service is available, a monthly Starlink subscription is cheaper than the leading fixed internet service provider”
https://restofworld.org/2025/starlink-cheaper-internet-africa/
Not including $180-$380 kit.
“The exceptionally hardy and battle-scarred canine was 11.8-years-old, having lived three times longer than the average wild wolf.”
https://gizmodo.com/yellowstones-legendary-queen-of-the-wolves-killed-by-rival-pack-2000546876
Damn. I didn’t realize wolves were so shortlived.
“Why use focus groups or poll the public when you can talk to them once, spin up an LLM based on that conversation, and then have their thoughts and opinions forever?”
Based on Google research project. Iain Banks “Culture” series explored this topic in several books that wear the guise of mere entertainment.
Orbit – Mozilla browser tool for summarizing web content.
I want this for Safari. I’ve done the copy/paste-to-Claude and I have been happy with the results.
Useful for long articles, often with human-interest threads, that I would otherwise skip. If the digest is promising I will scan the article.
Sphingomyelin binding: “chance of a broad-spectrum [RNA] antiviral therapy”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/new-antiviral-target-host-side
Years away unless need becomes desperate.
Finland’s 2020 homeless drop from 16000 to 4000 – basically fully sheltered
https://oecdecoscope.blog/2021/12/13/finlands-zero-homeless-strategy-lessons-from-a-success-story/
“building new flats by a government agency” Government built and managed apartments -> public housing is the only thing shown to work.
“Social services provide housing before other interventions that are targeted to beneficiaries’ needs”
health care?
“TIPS don’t exactly protect investors from inflation; they protect investors from the inflation the government reports“
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-real-threat-of-fake-numbers
Trump will fire civil servants until they give him the numbers he wants.
Mollick believes AI progress will advance again
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/prophecies-of-the-flood
I had hoped for more of a pause
Inscrutable AirPods noises: “Years ago, Apple was a successful company and documented how their products work. These days, Apple is struggling financially…”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/01/09/airpods-pro-beeps-and-bops
We all throw up our hands at Apple’s reluctance to document anything.
Prenatal fluoride and fetal brain: neurotoxicity concerns
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/health/fluoride-children-iq.html
This type of study is hard to interpret but they claim a dose-response curve. I’d want to see animal study data.
“For every one part per million increase in fluoride in urinary samples, which reflect total exposures from water and other sources, I.Q. points in children decreased by 1.63”
Greenland, Panama, Canada … None of that is Going to Happen.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/greenland-panama-canada-none-of-that-is-going-to-happen
Or by the time it happens all resistors are in camps. We will get lots of warnings beforehand.
“This ain’t our first rodeo. We’ve been here before and we should know that.”
Dreamhost RSS Cache Control default causes two day feed delay.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/01/08/rss-cache-control/
Via Tsai. Damn. I hope they fix this.
The Economics That Define Social Media (Gruber)
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-economics-that-define-social-media
“Providing everyone with bandwidth and software keeps expense growth arithmetic. But if you try to exert any control over how it’s used then expenses become exponential too”
I had not thought of that. AI might change the cost equation?
Bing putting on a Google mask.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/01/08/bing-google-masquerade
“It’s an exquisite dirty trick, and I’ll bet it actually works remarkably well”
This is nostalgic for those who remember 90s Microsoft. By modern culture standards it is kind of sweet.
“Hard disks using APFS normally remain usable for a year or more when they store files that don’t get changed very often”
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/01/09/why-use-apfs/
Synology TM uses sparse image, often HFS+. I think mitigates fragmentation problem. But eventually need to wipe and redo. Backup fails.
Python virtual environment explained.
https://thenewstack.io/why-every-python-dev-needs-virtual-environments-now/
Even if you use an IDE with env support this helps understanding.
Paying Trump protection money: “opening set of bribes to a corrupt regime … as such, they offer good value for money”
Corruption disables nations.
H5N1 Update: “130,674,361 poultry— a big reason why eggs are hard to find and expensive” 🆓
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/h5n1-update-january-7
Happily COVID left us with a much improved public health system. (Oh, wait, that’s on Earth-2)
“H5N1 is something to watch, but don’t let it take up too much headspace yet”
HMPV in China: RSV-like virus identified 2001 causing more pneumonia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/health/hmpv-virus-china.html
The article doesn’t say why the virus is spreading more now. Often we don’t know. Probably common here but we don’t test for it. Nobody trusts China however.
US hits demographic cliff expected since Great Recession
https://hechingerreport.org/the-impact-of-this-is-economic-decline/
College tuition falling, many closing, international students down, fewer seek college.
“The proportion of high school graduates who are Hispanic, nationwide, is expected to rise from 26 percent to 36 percent by 2041”
Editing Contant/List relationship broken in macOS Sequoia
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/477085/contacts-app-misbehaving-in-sequoia-on-m1-imac
I have the same problem except I can’t change any Contact List relationships. I’m going to try the latest macOS (secret) update and if that doesn’t work it sounds like we need to rebuild the Contacts database from iCloud. (May be related to my migration from Monterey)
Nature open access: Differences in misinformation sharing leads to politically asymmetric sanctions
Link. Oct 2024. Same thing happened with IRS years ago. There were more audits of conservatives because they lied more — but that was politically intolerable. So GOP clobbered the IRS.
What Enron and the .com boom tells us about OpenAI
Link. One of the best critiques I’ve read. I appreciated the view of PE culture; I am sure that has not changed.
Phishing-assault coordination via Telegram targeting U-Haul customers.
Link. Also – “cryptocurrency hackers had partnered with teams of home invaders, who would break into known crypto-owners’ homes, beat and threaten them, and then retrieve the victim’s crypto wallet, allowing their accounts to be drained of funds”
Kevin Drum makes the case for America’s ability to build despite our regulatory environment.
Pinboard (jgordon) https://jabberwocking.com/yeah-america-can-still-build-stuff/
I am sure he is wrong about government software. Still, it is a good counterpoint to Noah et al.
“America’s political elite appeased a bully, the American people endorsed that strategy, and now America’s economic elite is falling all over itself to appease the bully some more.”
Jan 6 is the day the music died.
from Pinboard (jgordon) https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/my-extremely-brief-take-on-january
via IFTTT
“change rage is real, and trying to argue people out of it rarely succeeds. Which is why fighting negative externalities should, where possible, leave the way people live more or less untouched.”
This is so familiar to anyone who has worked on pedestrian safety, bicycle paths and the like. It is, sadly, very true about climate change mitigation.
A loved one with a cognitive disability reacts to any new thing with NO. (It can take him 1-2 days to process, when left alone he may quietly change his mind.) I have learned that many of his traits are far more common that I once thought.
from Pinboard (jgordon) https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lessons-from-new-yorks-congestion
via IFTTT
“AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO2e per page of text generated compared to human writers, while AI illustration systems emit between 310 and 2900 times less CO2e per image than their human counterparts”
AI energy use is not a good hill to die on.
from Pinboard (jgordon) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x#ref-CR21
via IFTTT
“Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) think the world’s reflective cloud cover has shrunk in the past two decades by a small but significant amount” 🆓
Jamison Foser on the Obsequiousness of The Washington Post Spiking Ann Telnaes’s Cartoon
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/01/05/fozer-wapo-obsequiousness
Link to: https://www.findinggravity.net/p/no-jeff-bezos-is-not-obeying-in-advance
“In 2023, China burned more coal than the rest of the world combined — 56 percent”
https://toosimple.substack.com/p/china-peak-coal
In many ways, coal is the Party’s biggest, dirtiest secret. Long read.
Migrating my microblog publishing from Pinboard to Raindrop.io
https://tech.kateva.org/2025/01/migrating-my-microblog-publishing-from.html?m=1
Technical fixes, tips and findings — all based on my personal experience. Mostly macOS and iOS.
“starting with a spec created through collaboration with o1, then saving that as a SPEC.md Markdown file and adding that to Cursor’s context”
https://bit.ly/3W5xHmS
Zohaib Rauf describes a pattern I’ve seen quite a few examples of now: engineers who moved into management but now find themselves able to ship working code again (at least …
WaPo “rejected a cartoon depicting The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump”
Link. Ann Telnaes resigned. WaPo is dead under Bezos. Cancel your subscription renewal.
“If we replaced every atom in the universe with a universe the size of ours, it would still be orders of magnitude away from making the monkey typing likely to succeed”
Link. Infinite monkeys can type anything. But infinity is a big number. In some models of the multiverse however …
(The AI comment is obviously dumb. Also this is not a serious paper.)
NEJM report of A(H5N1) teen course: ECMO needed but antivirals worked. 🆓
Link. Now we can truly say COVID isn’t worse than (some) influenza. Note renal injury is not unique to COVID. Case study is short and easy to read.
“OpenRSS is a free service that builds open RSS feeds for various sites”
Link. Nonprofit. RSS is back.
On DOGE and government efficiency: bad software, bad regulations, underfunded commitments and more
Link. There are ways to dramatically improve government efficiency. They will cause many to lose good jobs that they cannot replace and they may increase government spending while reducing revenue that flows to politicians.
Eve of Destruction – a visit to Taiwan
Link. All the world’s powers will soon be ruled by moronic and deluded villains. Noah even starts to turn on his payors, though he doesn’t use Musk’s name.
Modern schizophrenia management: intensive intervention helps but expense limits benefit.
Link. At 10y time-limited benefit not sustained. We desperately need to understand the pathophysiology and we need something like an AI guardian.
“movement promotes “targeted attacks, mass killings and criminal activity” and has “historically encouraged members to engage in self-harm and animal abuse”
Link. “No Lives Matter is an offshoot of the broader “accelerationist” movement, which seeks to accelerate radical social change through sabotage and violence”
LLMs 2024: “LLM prices crashed, thanks to competition and increased efficiency”
Link. Energy costs will fall quickly. This is essential reading for anyone interested in humans.
“The average household with at least one family member on a GLP-1 is spending about 6 percent less on groceries each month within six months of adoption”
Link. GLP-1 economics. We don’t yet know how sustained the appetite effects will be however.
Issues with backing up Contacts Notes and Lists in Sequoia.
Link. It seems quite a mess. Backup is getting harder to do, allegedly iCloud contacts restore omits lists and notes.
“owners of ultrawide 5K2K monitors is to avoid buying M4 Macs until the problem is fixed”
Link. Weird bug
“Children with cystic fibrosis are no longer automatically eligible for the Make-A-Wish Foundation because a new drug works so well that these kids are now expected to have an essentially normal lifespan.”
Link. See also: HIV summer camp closed due to lack of HIV+ kids.
“Google has an offer that is basically a franchise and you have ability to get Google searches out but you also have to get Google ads”
Link. Kagi CEO has ideas on how to manage the Google tire fire. (Via Tsai)
Why China’s productivity slowed down 2022 (2022)
Link. Noah only mentions corruption at the start and in the context of research fraud. I suspect that is a much bigger factor than he admits.
America has also become very corrupt.