jgordon : s   45665

“The response on Friday from the Houthis, however, was a single anti-ship missile lobbed harmlessly into the Red Sea, far from any passing vessel”
Reports so far suggest very low mortality for such broad attacks.
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3 hours ago by jgordon
Oakley’s free macOS utilities.
A gift.
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3 hours ago by jgordon
Iran faces grim choices: “neither Moscow nor Beijing came to Tehran’s rescue by vetoing the resolution. Instead they abstained, alongside Algeria and Mozambique”
The Houthi are religious zealots who believe they have a divine mission. Iran’s faux-devout rulers are more pragmatic but have lost control.
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7 hours ago by jgordon
CrossFit in my 65th year: Act II
Starting over for a new stage of Oldness.
s  crossfit 
8 hours ago by jgordon
The misery of switching iPhones: “Many apps required re-entering login credentials, even though I let iOS use the keychain…”
Tsai always describes the truth I see. It really sucks to switch phones. One reason I go 4-5 years.

“Eventually, iMessage did start working, but then a few hours later it spontaneously signed me out…”
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9 hours ago by jgordon
The evolution of psilocybin - gastropod mind control.
Fungi flourished when the asteroid whacked T-Rex; that’s when they deployed the psychedelics.
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9 hours ago by jgordon
Gaza: “The desperate conditions in Gaza are not an inevitable by-product of war; they are in part the result of political decisions made by the Israeli government”
The Economist is no friend to Hamas.

“Egyptian Red Crescent, which is responsible for aid deliveries at Rafah, is “not competent”. Corruption is rife. Lucrative goods disappear from warehouses while expired ones are delivered to Gaza”
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yesterday by jgordon
Houthi and Yemen backgrounder: “above all, they believe fervently that God is on their side”
Religion is a plague.
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yesterday by jgordon
In the Netflix age it took a broadcast TV drama to bring some justice to victims of a UK bureaucracy.
“However brilliant the journalism is, it maybe appeals to your intellect, to your head … drama is designed to appeal to your heart …”

The bureaucrats were righteous I am sure.
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yesterday by jgordon
“variants that raise the risk of multiple sclerosis, for example, became steadily more common among the Yamnaya”
Metabolic syndrome in Northern Europe.
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2 days ago by jgordon
Gas station and smoke shop drugs: “Tianeptine, which also appears as a concentrated powder or an ingredient in products such as Tianaa, Zaza and Pegasus”
“illegally sold with claims to improve brain function and treat anxiety, depression, pain, opioid use disorder and other conditions,”

Delivered to you courtesy of Utah and Orrin Hatch.
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2 days ago by jgordon
Noah Smith’s 2024 tech predictions
The battery tech review is the most interesting.
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2 days ago by jgordon
Longevity drugs for dogs.
Interesting way to approach the marketplace. I’m skeptical they will be both safe and effective but the human/dog aging differences suggest room to improve.
s  dog 
2 days ago by jgordon
“The ‘Auto Unlock with Apple Watch’ feature seems to be somehow related to a background system service that is also responsible for Continuity Camera”
Wireless continuity camera is unreliable.
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2 days ago by jgordon
Minnesota crosswalk law: “Regardless of what the law says, “unmarked” crosswalks are effectively invisible to drivers and dangerous to pedestrians.”
It’s gotten worse. Article doesn’t mention that education and enforcement stopped after riots.
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2 days ago by jgordon
“… in modern times we need to explain the Wolfram Language not just to humans, but also to AIs…”
“for AIs we’re providing a variety of tools—like immediate computable access to documentation, and computable error handling”

Mathematica 14 pivots to non-human users. Wolfram is old, knows AI history, wrote an explainer on LLMs, and has no qualms about using the term “AI”.
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3 days ago by jgordon
Patient blood and tissue samples negative for known pathogens found to contain unknown pathogens and commensals
The next few years should show us a lot more like this. I wonder how many hours of the year our bodies are not engaged in warfare with a virus, bacteria, rogue cell or something else. (Probably zero.)
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3 days ago by jgordon
Science vs MS: “Antibodies that are raised to the 386-405 part of the EBNA1 protein [of EBV] also recognize a particular epitope (amino acids 370-385) of a protein in human glial cells”
The “kissing disease” (mono) virus needs a vaccine.

Like polio late viral infection may cause more disease than early childhood infection.
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3 days ago by jgordon
Why Iowa Went Red: “The movement of young college graduates out of Iowa and the Dakotas to the metropolises of Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul made a mark on the politics of all five states.”
Iowa has great schools but MSP has far more opportunities. It hurts to lose the young.
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4 days ago by jgordon
iPhone shutter sound - why most don’t get it: “Enable Live Photo: If you’re hearing a click, you don’t have this feature turned on,”
If you disable Live Photo you can mute phone but everyone would like the option to turn the damn clicks off.
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4 days ago by jgordon
Supernovae and astronomer happiness. XKCD.
Ends abruptly.
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4 days ago by jgordon
“We depend on the services of Elon Musk, our CEO and Technoking, and we are worried that he isn’t getting enough sleep, if you know what we mean…”
I assume a creative legal team will find many financial opportunities in Musk’s recreation.
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4 days ago by jgordon
“[worm] mitochondria function as cellular walkie-talkies, sending messages throughout the body that influence the survival and life span of the entire organism”
Mitochondria have a peculiar agenda. Wildly speculative but a fun read. My mitochondria wave little white flags.

I suspect humans are already at max lifespan; this effect won’t help us.
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4 days ago by jgordon
“We all know who Donald Trump is. The question we have to answer is: Who are we?” Joe Biden.
We live on the knife edge now.
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5 days ago by jgordon
“Shan offensive may have been just an action to punish local criminal families who ignored a Chinese order to shut down an operation that used enslaved Chinese-speaking Burmese to scam Chinese citizens.”
It’s a big weird world.
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5 days ago by jgordon
Quicken for DOS cannot be recreated: Why we can't have good personal finance software any more.
"Today's vendors sell our data to third parties and then market products to us. Vendors have a hard lock-in. This kind of service decay is now known as "enshittification".
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5 days ago by jgordon
Is it possible to have too many wizards in software development?
I recalled this in the context of 1980s IBM, but I wonder if it's also true of 2024 Apple.
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5 days ago by jgordon
7 obscure and unusual writing systems.
Mostly thought to represent sounds. The Inca knot language is a debatable inclusion.
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5 days ago by jgordon
NYC after COVID - ask not for whom.
"Take away the holiday tourists and Midtown Manhattan feels sleepy ... So many people are working from home, or not working, or not in the city anymore. There are many vacant storefronts around town, and empty building floors ..."

I think the same in many cities, especially those with high housing costs. (I wonder if, conversely, Detroit is fine.) The crash in urban real estate prices is going to be painful.
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5 days ago by jgordon
YouTube: “estimated number of actual videos available: currently 13.325 billion”
I was so wrong about YouTube.
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5 days ago by jgordon
Paperless (ReceiptWallet) is gone. A data extractor utility.
Learn from this. All apps die and they want to take your data with them. Often a simple but inferior solution is best.

Ask me about Apple’s Aperture prosumer photo management app.
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5 days ago by jgordon
ChatGPT 4 is Artificial Intelligence.
Mostly I agree, but he’s too quick to assume humans don’t themselves use something like “spicy autocomplete” in their thinking.

Human thinking is not magical.
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5 days ago by jgordon
Microsoft's MedPrompt article: ChatGPT4 for solving medical problems.
"We believe the general paradigm of combining intelligent few-shot exemplar selection, self-generated chain of thought reasoning steps, and majority vote ensembling can be broadly applied to other problem domains"

They are vague about how they package MedPrompt, I suspect it's going to be a commercial product.
s  medicine  AI 
6 days ago by jgordon
ChatGPT-4 in medical work: "we show how the composition of several prompting strategies into a method that we refer to as “Medprompt”...
"Surpasses 90% on MedQA dataset for the first time
Achieves top reported results on all nine benchmark datasets in the MultiMedQA suite"

Some naive folk still think ChatGPT4 won't be used by physicians in patient care.

#AI #medicine
s  medicine  AI 
6 days ago by jgordon
Canada finds students: “82 percent of students at Northern College in Timmins are foreign nationals, mostly from India.”
A bit cold, but far fewer shootings.

“goal of attracting 1.45 million immigrants between 2023 and 2025”
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6 days ago by jgordon
Worse than Germany (at war): Japan’s early 20th century brutality was born of deep racism, worship of the Emperor, and a vile culture.
A different evil from the Holocaust, but similar racism and cruelty.

All cultures can go this way. We see the modern American seeds in Trumpism and the fallen GOP.
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7 days ago by jgordon
"Wargames have repeatedly shown that the U.S. will run out of critical munitions only eight days into a high-intensity conflict with China over Taiwan"
The United States, and Taiwan, need to spend much more on the US military ...

"Ukraine is expending between 110,000 155mm shells per month…Even after doubling shell production, the U.S. produces only 28,000 per month…"
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7 days ago by jgordon
Operation Triangulation Details
Everyone wonders if the backdoor was engineered and by whom.
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7 days ago by jgordon
The psychology of the con: “if you accept something as true and you don't question it anymore, then all kinds of bad decisions and bad outcomes can flow from that” 🆓
“contrarianism might be one of the most overrated signs of intelligence or cleverness” They are easy to fool.

“it's hard for you to bet better than to pay attention to the credentialed experts”
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7 days ago by jgordon
A journalist tests their 20yo PhD thesis for plagiarism using a costly tool. Is it true everyone does it?
Initially 75% plagiarized but after the required analysis it fell to 0%.
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8 days ago by jgordon
Giant Viruses Are Weird.
Nice review of the weirdness. Very active research area.
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8 days ago by jgordon
Exercise and Prostate Cancer: “12% increased risk of prostate cancer”
Exercise extends lifespan and reduces much cancer risk - except melanoma and prostate CA.

I suspect it’s increased testosterone levels. Or a statistical anomaly.
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8 days ago by jgordon
Florida’s fruitcake surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, goes full anti-COVID vax
DeSantis might get nervous — he will be blamed for Florida’s Covid deaths to come.
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8 days ago by jgordon
“nation-state stuff, absolutely crazy in its sophistication. Kaspersky discovered it, so there’s no speculation as to the attacker.”
US, Russia, China, Israel - so many suspects.
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8 days ago by jgordon
“By 2063, researchers estimate AI could do the job of … an AI researcher”
That is reassuringly far off. In particular, I’ll be dead.
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8 days ago by jgordon
Sizing COVID: “Covid is still claiming at least 1,200 lives per week .. about one-third the toll this time last year and one-eighth that in 2021.”
Smaller but not gone.
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9 days ago by jgordon
macOS Photos.app lethal bug: non-repairable library corruption when click on Shared Album changes for standalone library, "The library could not be opened"
"This is only a dull hatred because Apple's Aperture migration fiasco killed my hate glands."
s  bug  apple 
9 days ago by jgordon
“unshakeable composure displayed by the flight attendants combined with the high level of cooperation among passengers” 🆓
Overhead baggage stayed closed.
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9 days ago by jgordon
“A subsequent January 1 complaint brought the number of plagiarism examples up to 47. This covered about half of all Gay’s published work”
From the New Republic.

“For years it’s been clear that Harvard … treat plagiarism as a minor offense when it’s committed by faculty or administrators and a major offense when it’s committed by undergraduate”
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10 days ago by jgordon
Gaza hospital: "American intelligence agencies obtained information that Hamas fighters had evacuated the complex days before the multiday operation, destroying documents and electronics as they left, the senior intelligence official said."
Unsurprisingly the staff lied. (Probably wise, they'd have been killed otherwise).
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10 days ago by jgordon
Compounding pharmacies are selling risky versions of semaglutide (Ozempic).
They are on the border of illegal. Article explains the chemistry.
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10 days ago by jgordon
MPLS crime: “… car jackings are nearly cut in half”
Car jackings have stayed up even as other violent crime fell. So this is great news.
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10 days ago by jgordon
Evolution - from rapid small changes emerges long term stability.
Reconciling “living fossils” with short term rapid adaptation.
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10 days ago by jgordon
“Exchange students, particularly from China, are often targeted in virtual kidnapping cases”
Scammers convince them their families will be harmed unless they disappear … then tell parents they have been kidnapped. Prosecution near impossible. Humans need AI guardians.
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10 days ago by jgordon
2024 - the ship of Theseus
XKCD classic
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11 days ago by jgordon
US history: “The past was worse, and conflict has always been the norm.”
The early 90s were pretty good (after Fall of Iron Curtain + PC payoff) but the 70s were really bad. Before that - all bad. (And 90s were when GOP died)
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11 days ago by jgordon
Mutants On Demand: “numerous strains of ornamental plants and food crops derive from deliberate radiation-induced mutations” 🆓
Fascinating essay.
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12 days ago by jgordon
AI in 2023: the good and the limited.
Current LLMs may be most useful for writing code. The cost of writing a GPT-3 class LLM is less than a new car and they run on smartphones. Nobody is talking about how to get beyond GPT-4.
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12 days ago by jgordon
Apple silicon: “version 3 is definitely the Mac you’ve been waiting for”
Oakley is keen on the M3.
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12 days ago by jgordon
Reich is pissed at WaPo and the NYT: “Again and again, the mainstream media have drawn a false equivalence between Donald Trump and Joe Biden”
By “mainstream media” he means WaPo and NYT. He is absolutely correct.

If our democracy does those two papers and their publishers will have blood on their hands.
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12 days ago by jgordon
“The Princess Bride stays the same. You change. What you get out of the film is little bit different, each time.” 🆓
A paeon to a movie that started small and became huge.
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12 days ago by jgordon
Retail on a cliff: “It's exhausting to have to climb back down and up again to use the toilet, so we try not to drink too much water."
2022, probably reopened post-COVID
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12 days ago by jgordon
The windowless sky scraper: “… rural switching stations, located every 150 miles or so, entered through blast-resistant doors and stocked with rations, wastewater treatment systems, and decontamination showers..”
We didn’t worry about climate change, just nuclear war.
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13 days ago by jgordon
Truly private database searching: “evaluate such an expression by preprocessing it, creating special, compact tables of values that allow you to skip the normal evaluation steps”
Hardcore computer science work.
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13 days ago by jgordon
“New York could add dwellings for well over a million people” 🆓
Goal is to add 500k homes without changing the look and feel of NYC.
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13 days ago by jgordon
Nikki Haley craven bullshit: “It was the death knell of the Republican Party” 🆓
HCR writes the obituary.

“today’s Republicans advocate a strong government that imposes religious rules on society”
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13 days ago by jgordon
“stem- and crown-group eukaryotes likely lived together for hundreds of millions of years … during a period that geologists call the Boring Billion”
Protosterol molecular “fossils” can last billions of years but were thought bacterial. Gap filled.
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13 days ago by jgordon
“modern humans reached central Brazil prior to the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago”
No Homo erectus though.
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14 days ago by jgordon
In defense of science fiction.
I’m a Stross fan but I think Noah has the better argument.
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14 days ago by jgordon
Facebook marketplace scams: “likely these people would have sent a phishing link … disguised as communication from Zelle”
Good to know.
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14 days ago by jgordon
“severe COVID-19 negatively affects brain health, but no more so than pneumonia, heart attack, or other critical illnesses.”
COVID research is teaching us that many diseases are more harmful than we thought. COVID just happened all at once in large numbers.

“after adjusting for multiple testing, only loss of smell was significantly more common at 18 months”
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15 days ago by jgordon
US 2023: “economic data started beating forecasts …. and then beat them again, and then again, and then again” 🆓
2024 optimism.
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15 days ago by jgordon
“Running this gives us a nice 40 GB file which contains all 4.2 billion comparisons needed to determine if any 32 bit number is even or odd”
ChatGPT is involved. Via Charlie Stross a master hacker shows off.
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15 days ago by jgordon
Mississippi sheriffs are movie villains: “27 claims do not appear to have led to a state investigation, including accusations of rape, brutal assault and retaliation against sheriffs’ enemies.”
Sometimes the stereotype has a basis.
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15 days ago by jgordon
Description of a nation-state level iOS attack is remarkably readable.
“Apple-only ADJUST TrueType font instruction. This instruction had existed since the early nineties before a patch removed it.”
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16 days ago by jgordon
“people with hypochondriasis were significantly more likely to die from any cause than people without hypochondriasis (a death rate of 8.5 versus 5.5 per every 1,000 person years)”
Suicide is higher. Hypochondriasis is a mental health disorder and they flock together.
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16 days ago by jgordon
“Support for Hamas in Gaza since the war started has risen to 42 percent, from 38 percent, the poll reported.” 🆓
Free link. The only useful article on the war I’ve seen. The tunnel systems do seem to be real and extraordinary.

Even is the survey is unreliable Hamas is likely less popular than I had expected. I wonder if they acted from desperation.
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16 days ago by jgordon
Laura Jedeed, who needs the money, is moving off Nazistack anyway.
“Substack nets me a little over $7000 a year … that’s 7 months of rent for me and a significant percentage of what I make in a year”

If you free subscribe now you will be notified of her new home.
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16 days ago by jgordon
“in the three years after a private equity fund bought a hospital, adverse events including surgical infections and bed sores rose by 25 percent among Medicare patients when compared with similar hospitals”
Private equity is a plague.
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17 days ago by jgordon
“Scientists’ computational models offer a range of projected temperatures, and 2023’s heat is still broadly within this range, albeit on the high end.”
Reducing lung damaging aerosol emissions may be shifting projections to the high end.
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17 days ago by jgordon
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