Link. “one of whom was disclosed to be Yasir Ahmed Mohammed Elhadi of Alexandria University, in Egypt”
NLM should not index.
Monthly Archives: April 2023
“For over 20 years, Clarence Thomas has been treated to luxury vacations by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.”
Link. SCOTUS is rotten, Thomas may be the worst of the bad bunch.
‘Alien Calculus’ – physics technique for managing divergent series.
Link. “… he published the trilogy through his university’s mathematics department, filling in equations by hand.”
In math the line between genius and crackpot is drawn in pencil.
GOP budget: “Their promises of balancing the federal budget in 10 years have gone by the wayside, a budget plan has yet to materialize, and they cannot agree on what spending cuts …”
Link. Weasels and dimwits. “five families in the House Republican conference — a reference to the five warring crime families in the film “The Godfather”
“S-GPT is a shortcut that lets you ask ChatGPT questions from an input box on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac; answers are returned by ChatGPT and displayed in an alert on your devices”
Link. “S-GPT can look at your upcoming schedule and tell you which days are too busy with the help of ChatGPT”. Free, but API access requires either low cost on-demand payment or a Plus account via https://bit.ly/3MggfHV
Paxlovid: Pfizer’s big pharma triumph.
Link. “the supply chains for these three fragments end up using over seventy raw materials and reagents”
I remember reading how hard it was to scale production. Truly great work. Everyone take a bow.
GM to Phase Out CarPlay: “Rental companies have lots of GM vehicles”
Link. Such a lousy decision. Tsai wonders if Google is paying them.
iOS 17 Rumored to Drop Support for iPhone X, 8
Link. “iPhones and iPads equipped with the A5 through A11 chip are affected by a bootrom security vulnerability that Apple cannot patch”
Apple should give 8 users a discount on a supported device.
“When fsck_apfs checks and repairs a container, it first works on container structures, then iterates through checking and repairing each volume within that container. That includes all hidden volumes, which you can’t select in Disk Utility …”
Link. This one is good to read and file.
Paintings lost to war and time.
Link. Some stolen and never recovered.
“All participants increased their 1RM squat by an average of 20 kg, but LOAD showed about 10% better results than REPS.”
Link. For strength training increasing reps works about as well as increasing load. I suspect the 10% is partly psyche — being used to the load.
“the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund won’t be exhausted as soon as previously predicted”
Link. Fewer 80+ post COVID.
NASA astronauts more or less blew off the fake meeting where they were assigned to Artemis.
Link. Sounds like they aren’t great at doing dumb meetings.
Apple’s weather app forecasts 80s in MN. Why that’s dumb.
Link. “The forecasts in question look to be heavily reliant on one model, the commonly named ‘American model,’ or more officially the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Forecast System model.”
Rise of the bland: when everyone and everything looks the same.
Link. I could go with less black.
“However, April 1 came and went, and the blue checkmarks largely remained. (One exception was the official New York Times Twitter account”
Link. Hilarious.
Twitter algo: “external links get you marked as spam”
Link. WTF.
We need a new word for the historical singularity.
Link. The “Rapture of the Nerds” has taken over the original concept of unpredictability, so now we have a rather important concept without a useful English label. Maybe there’s a German name we can use?
Attention Is All You Need: Google’s transformer architecture paper from 2017.
Link. Five years later we had the LLMs.
Japan’s social recluse: “cabinet office surveyed 30,000 people between the ages of 10 and 69 across Japan last November. The poll found that just over a fifth of respondents aged 15-39 had been socially isolated from six months to less than a year”
Link. COVID exacerbated Japan’s longstanding hikikomori problem, but elsewhere the article states hikikomori are only 2% of age 15-62. So this is hard to interpret.
Remarkably interesting article on ChatGPT code generation.
Link. “The Google Brain team published a paper in 2017 called Attention is All You Need.
It introduced the now-famous Transformer architecture that you see to the left.
Everyone uses this now. It replaced ~everything in AI.
Google did absolutely nothing with this invention, opting for violent knee-jerking later, as per their usual M.O.”
Mastodon Explorer: a workaround for mastodon tags being (mostly) scoped to a single instance.
Link. Via Martin Steiger responses. A helpful service while we wait for a better solution to topic tracking across federated communities.
“evolutionary adaptation, which has had plenty of time to encrust everything with interlocking, overlapping rococo epicyclic curclicues, but in a complete nonhuman manner that can be a source of constant bafflement and surprise.”
Link. Yep. Biological functions are nuts.
“There’s a complicated sulfur storage and release system inside cells that we don’t fully understand, and while some of it is certainly involved in on-the-spot generation of hydrogen sulfide, some of it is clearly regulating protein function by SSH groups”
Mastodon wishes: topic tags that actually work
Link. The current implementation is a bit misleading.
Despite Biden admin policy a “government agency” did a contract with NSO for phones in Mexico.
Link. Probably the FBI using a front of “Cleopatra Holdings” that’s actually a New Jersey-based government contractor called Riva Networks. Presumably related to drug trafficking.
“The New York Times, along with several other organisations and celebrities, said they would not pay for the tick. It prompted Elon Musk to launched a volley of insults at the newspaper.”
Link. Pathetic. He’s going to give them “gold ticks” anyway because he needs the NYT more than they need him.
“Based on this precedent, AI generated imagery will fall within the definition of child abuse material if it depicts a person under the age of 18 years in a sexualised manner.”
Link. In Australia. I don’t know if this is true in the US but it will be.
“It’s much more likely to produce a single brain that thinks it’s in the universe than it is to produce, you know, a new Big Bang and then an actual cosmos.”
Link. Nice summary of the end times.
“particles interacting with that energy field is how certain particles have mass” I wish she’d said have non-zero rest (intrinsic) mass.
Parasites and human behavior manipulation.
Link. There are vastly more cannabis, opium, and tobacco plants now than there would be if humans didn’t like their effects.
Malaysia: “Unless you’re a gamer, no one owns a desktop or laptop. However, it is common to own more than one Android smartphone.”
Link. “… fear their own governments more than they fear foreign-owned corporations”
The desktop is dead, the laptop is an industrial device.
fsck “status 65 only means one thing: no fsck check has been performed because the check wasn’t even able to start.”
Link. APFS is still troubled.
“the user … is advised to back up the data on that volume, as if its total failure could be imminent, but Disk Arbitration considers it a success …”
“post-liberal thinkers say that liberalism’s defense of individual rights has destroyed the family, communities, and even the fundamental differences between men and women, throwing society into chaos”
Link. Seems like a summary the Right would mostly accept, but they would grumble about the “individual liberty” clause.
Aaronson: “If LLMs are mere “stochastic parrots,” and if further scaling will do nothing to alleviate their parroticity” … “there is no reason whatsoever to pause the scaling of Large Language Models“
Link. Obvious but worth pointing out. If you think LLMs are just nonsense generators then development might as well proceed at full speed. (I’m pro-pause because I think they are far more than that.)
“That dream began in childhood when he was treated for tuberculosis contracted in the refugee camp in Pakistan. Despite a grim prognosis, a local doctor gave him excellent care — and a textbook and a stethoscope.”
Link. ER doc now.
Hexactinellid – Wikipedia: “Some experts believe glass sponges are the longest-lived animals on earth;[2] these scientists tentatively estimate a maximum age of up to 15,000 years.”
Link. I’d be ok with just 10ky
Review of a winger book captures what winger’s means by “woke”.
Link. “… progressives go into fields like teaching and library sciences is so they can trick the children of conservatives into being “child soldiers” for anti-American ideologies”
For them “woke” means secular humanist liberal intellectual.