Nuclear fusion is now a reality. I used to see articles where they'd say "we're close" or "we think we see net energy output, but we're not quite sure". Now, it's apparently reproducible and beyond doubt. We're on our way.
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Zorin OS 17 Has Arrived. I never heard of Zorin before. It's an alternative OS you can load on your Mac. Like Cydia for your iPhone.
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Don't feel Christmas-y this year? You aren't the only one. The best part of Christmas for me as a child was that everyone seemed a little happier. I saw more smiles and people were nicer to me. It used to be the "hap- happiest time of the year".
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Oregon extends domestic partnerships to all couples regardless of sex in 2024. This is that slippery slope Lars Larson talked about after approval of gay marriages. But I suppose it could lead to an interesting tax strategy. For example, if you're a single parent and want to bequeath something to your unmarried child, you could enter into a domestic partnership, and then when you die – no estate tax! Slippery slope.
Feeling sleepy while driving? It could be the CO2 in your car. It's amazing how quickly it builds up to impactful levels, especially when there are three people in the car.
Nobody knows what’s happening online anymore. The Internet has become so fragmented now. Everybody has retreated to their own Mastodon instance, or Lemmy, or Discord, or whatever. Teens are on TikTok. Much of the rest are still on X/Twitter. There's not as much of a town square anymore. That's life.
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The price of being successful. In an internal meeting, Nvidia's CEO addressed a question about employees in 'semi-retirement' mode as unusual tension grows. Heh. Unforeseen issues. This is the "problem" Microsoft had during the dotcom era. Everyone got rich and suddenly they didn't want to work so hard.
Math team.Brings back memories. This is a rite of passage for many Asian kids but also geeks in general, and you gotta wonder if there is a better way. Especially as the reward for all of this (getting into an elite school) is far less attractive today than it was before. With forced vaccinations, having your conservative voice silenced by the woke Left, who are not just your dorm mates, but your professors. Plus the debt. Harry is the real winner in this story – because he followed his own path.
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59% of non-citizens are on welfare. Just as we suspected. We gotta have some control over how much of the world's poor we have to support, or we will go broke.
Bird Electric Scooter Company is going bankrupt. The scooters were everywhere. But vandals would just dump them in the river nearby. Never understood how they thought they could make money.
Self-censorship is on the rise. It's probably OK if some people kept their opinions to themselves, but the problem is that certain factions don't self-censor, and it ends up that the Internet is increasing filling up with hateful filth, while other valid opinions get canceled. Sometimes this results in tragedy.
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PopSci thinks that health misinformation is rampant. What do they consider "misinformation" you ask? It's people who doubt the benefit of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, of course. What irony. Total lack of self-awareness.
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Here's an interesting take on Europe, as being a part of the world that lately hasn't added much innovation to the world, but merely wants to regulate everything new that comes their way.
I call this Providerism: the
ability to ignore political-economic reality because everything is
provided for you, and the underlying mechanics and costs are abstracted
away. Europeans may not be consumerists, but they are hardcore
providerists. Growing up, virtually every consumer good I interacted
with was made in Japan or made in China, and in 18 years that never gave
rise to more than 15 minutes of conversation. The goods that you want
appear from far away in your local store: they are provided. And if you
fall on hard times and cannot afford these goods? The state will provide
the basics. If you’re 22 and don’t know what to do, the state will
provide more time and will provide a master’s degree. Or two. And if
there is war, the state will call NATO, and NATO will provide defense.
How fitting: the European Commission assembled around an iPad. On the back, in fine print, it will read: Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.
There is no European iPad. There is no European computer. There is no
European search engine. There are only European consumers, to whom
things are quasi-magically provided, and so they regulate the providing
and consumption of those things.
Europe is falling behind. It largely missed the internet and
personal computing booms, and now it sits in danger of missing the
coming AI boom. Today’s Europeans are not yet poor — they are still
living off the prosperity created by prior generations, and that enables
their passive consumption7 — but tomorrow’s Europeans may be.
Some in Congress think we should emulated Europe in many ways (looking at you, Bernie). Parts of Europe are becoming very dystopian. Only those with great wealth can escape it. But for how long?
Some people are working hard to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to meet the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C. Recently, someone came to my door wanting to know if I wanted to donate money to help farmers reduce their CO2 emissions. He didn't realize that farmers actually use CO2 generators to help their crops grow. Kids are not getting the education they need.
GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 aren't going to replace doctors anytime soon. The chatbots answered correctly just 21% to 41% of the time, although in another 27% to 29%, the accuracy of the answers could not be established, for some reason. At least, the bot did not do any harm, according to the researchers. Again, it's important to remember. These chatbots don't necessarily provide you with the correct answer. Just what a correct answer would probably look like, given the information fed into it.
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This should have happened sooner. Google made it more difficult for police to conduct reverse location warrants. Location data will only be held for a shorter time (still unspecified). This was just privacy invasion, and that it would aid the police is not good enough reason to justify it. Not the way things have been going with J6 and other politics.
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Evil. Sober man in Hawaii get arrested for DUI even though he is sober, so because "these DUI checkpoints are often federally-funded, and the overtime hours
they provide are paid for by state and federal agencies, rather than
the police departments carrying out the patrols". And now the guy has that on his record, and has to explain it away every single time. What corruption.
This link was supposed to help the novice to learn meditation. But it's way too complicated. I'd be surprised if anyone learns from this. The process is not too complicated, actually. The trick is to keep doing it, until you can do it effortlessly and regularly.
I'll recognize climate change as an emergency when the elites start treating it as such. Until then...
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Concerns about N1-methylpseudouridine and frameshift mutations are picking up steam. This is a great Substack article on this topic. A bit technical, but if you've had a high school background, it's within your grasp. It's interesting that McKernan (the plasmid guy) predicted this back in 2021! The article suggests a potential link to Creutzfeld-Jakob disease through the formation of amyloid. This is very troublesome. This vax needs to come off the market NOW! It is very troubling that the FDA still deems it fine to remain on the market. Talk about looking the other way.
Chatmail. Seems like a good idea. Fast, secure, etc. But you have to send messages to other people enrolled in the program, or else you don't see any benefit. But maybe if too many people join, it won't be fast anymore. I'm going to wait on this one.
Lots of hype recently about transparent wood. I suspect it's going to have limited usage.
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Microsoft will soon overtake Apple in 2024. Apple seems to have run out of ideas. They can't make their phones any slimmer, and can't make the bezels any smaller. And making pixel density more dense is pointless, even if feasible. And there is little interest in another set of emojis. Form factor hasn't changed in years. Computers are still gray rectangles, just like the day Steve Jobs died.
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Electric eels can genetically modify neighboring fish! Electroporation, that's how. I did experiments with that before. But electric eels can do it in the sea. But what DNA are they modifying fish with? Environmental DNA! Apparently the sea is filled with it. And who knows what it will do to fish? Very strange.
There's a lot of publicity around this Portland Police Association survey of folks of whom 55% were Democrats. Of these 56% would leave Portland if they could. It's interesting that 21% thought Portland leadership was on the right track.
Holy crap, this is big. This came out in September, but I missed it. A combination of two monoclonal antibodies cures symptomatic rabies. Cures! Rabies is a disease that previously we could only try to prevent from happening, with urgent vaccination. But once established, you were never really sure it wasn't going to emerge later. And symptomatic rabies was universally fatal. Why wasn't this all over in the news?
