Papering the record for appeal.
¶A band in Ukraine thought they would be welcoming Neil Young to the stage, in a bar, as a guest guitarist. The Secretary of State showed up instead.
¶“We thought, and we were messaged, that it would be Neil Young,” Mr Gorbach said on BBC Radio 4’sToday programme on Wednesday morning. However, before the gig, the band were in fact informed that they would be performing alongside Mr Blinken, with the news seemingly leaving 19.99 dispirited.
¶Strange days indeed.
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(bbc.com)
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¶“The paradigm of search for the last 20 years has been that the search engine pulls a lot of information and gives you the links. Now the search engine does all the searches for you and summarizes the results and gives you a formative opinion.”
¶AI is about to take us from the search results era to the search opinion era.
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¶Thanks to Ukranian soldiers, he is, indeed, rockin’ in the free world.
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¶Harvard’s refusal to negotiate with the protesters appears to have ended in negotiation.
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¶This is welcome news. We’re leaving for graduation on Monday…the main ceremony is next Thursday.
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¶I started the process of opening the pool over the weekend. Looks like we’ve got a minor electrical issue to deal with (didn’t have that on the bingo card). The good news is the water looks decent - I could see the bottom of the pool right after peeling the cover back. It’s covered with dirt, worms, and all sorts of other junk, of course, but seeing the bottom on day 0 is always a welcome sight.
¶I pulled the cover off and got the robot going right away, which gave me this great before and after shot.
¶Now, on t0 that electrical issue.
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¶We fixed the electrical issue in the pool, btw. And by “we,” I mean “an electrician and I.” I had to call in some help, but we found the problem. This old timer switch, which we haven’t used in years but was still in the circuit for the pump, apparently didn’t make it through the winter. We bypassed it, and all is well.
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¶Renee and I laugh about the pervasive use of ‘journey’ these days. This article about the increase in use of the word is pretty interesting.
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¶This video from Cleo Abram is the most provocative thing I’ve seen about the Apple Vision Pro. It’s a teleportation device, or at least will be once the technology improves. But here’s the key - exploration of far away lands like a Star Trek landing party won’t be its biggest impact. That will be fun and exciting, of course, but the bigger deal is the impact it will have on human relationships. Physical distance between people will become less of an impediment to human interaction. Indeed, it might become largely irrelevant. You won’t be alone even though you live three states away from your kids. Or parents. Interactions with the Apple Vision Pro will feel like actual in-person visits. So much so that we’ll think of them as such, unlike letters, phone calls, and even modern video calls.
¶And why stop with erasing the impediment of physical distance? Why not erase the impediment of time, too?
¶They look a bit ridiculous right now, but someday a future version of the Vision Pro, or a similar product, will be commonplace.
¶And it’s going to be incredible.
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¶So, smoke from Canadian wildfires appears to be an annual thing now.
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¶WWDC is going to be quite interesting this year, I think. Apple has been touting its focus on privacy lately, so an “on device” aspect to its AI feels natural. But it’s also working with OpenAI, so a connected aspect must be in play, too. Will users have options? In a global setting…at each interaction?
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¶“My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to M.I.T. and to make sure they thrive once here,” Dr. Kornbluth said in a statement. “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”
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¶OpenAI will have access to Stack Overflow’s API and will receive feedback from the developer community to improve the performance of AI models. OpenAI, in turn, will give Stack Overflow attribution — aka link to its contents — in ChatGPT.
¶Interesting. Stack Overflow is the single best repository for coding knowledge on the web. Hard to believe the company is only receiving attribution for giving OpenAI access to its mountain of content.
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(cnbc.com)
¶This year’s report is a measure of good news for the millions of Americans who depend on Social Security, including the roughly 50% of seniors for whom Social Security is the difference between poverty and living in dignity — any potential benefit reduction event has been pushed off from 2034 to 2035,” Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley said in a statement.
¶Literally the year I’ll turn 65....
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¶In 2021, Koh came across a paper that discussed how to grapple with chaotic orbits from the perspective of symplectic geometry, an abstract field of math that is generally far removed from messy real-world details. She started to suspect that symplectic geometry might have the tools she needed to better understand orbits, and she got in touch with Agustin Moreno, the author of the paper. Moreno, then a postdoctoral fellow at Uppsala University in Sweden, was surprised and pleased to hear that someone at NASA was interested in his work. “It was unexpected, but it was also quite interesting and sort of motivating at the same time,” he said.
¶This is the beauty of pure academic research – someone makes an unforeseen connection and our collective knowledge grows. You never know how people will apply your work later. Pretty neat and compelling example of the value of basic research.
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¶[L]arge language models such as ChatGPT can serve as valuable sources of information for informal caregivers, although they may not fully meet the needs of formal caregivers who seek specialized (clinical) answers. Nevertheless, even in its current state, ChatGPT was able to provide responses to some of the clinical questions related to dementia that were asked.
¶I suspect this is true for medical information on the web, too — good for most of us, incomplete for medical folks.
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¶Sodium-ion tech has received heightened interest in recent years as a more reliable, potentially cheaper energy storage medium. While its energy density lags behind lithium-ion, advantages such as faster cycling, longer lifespan and safer, non-flammable end use have made sodium-ion an attractive alternative, especially for stationary uses like data center and EV charger backup storage.
¶This is going to be interesting to watch over the next few years and decades. Battery technology is having a moment, for obvious reasons, and the Midwest stands to benefit if interest in sodium-ion technology continues to grow. There’s a giant salt mine in Cleveland that extends beneath Lake Erie and another under Detroit.
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¶I saw the first ship of 2024 (for me, at least) heading into port today. Welcome to Toledo, Manitoulin!
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¶Look at that! Rakus, the orangutan I posted about yesterday made today’s New York Times!
¶Here’s the original paper in Nature’s Scientific Reports:
¶Laumer, I.B., Rahman, A., Rahmaeti, T. et al. Active self-treatment of a facial wound with a biologically active plant by a male Sumatran orangutan. Sci Rep 14, 8932 (2024).
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¶I forget where, but I read something that characterized this new phase of the space race as the “base race,” meaning countries (presumably the United States and China) are racing to be the first to establish a base on the moon. I wonder when that will be possible - ten years? Twenty? How long until the billionaires of the day are hitching rides back and forth?
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¶Looks like we’re in for an all day soaker. Maybe all week.
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¶Three days after his wound appeared, Rakus did something that the researchers had never seen before. He ingested, chewed, and spit out bits of a nearby plant, then dabbed his wound with the resulting plant mix.
¶This is pretty remarkable. I’d really like to know if Rakus discovered the healing properties of the plant on his own, or if he learned it from another orangutan. If the latter, did the other teach him, or did he just observe the other healing his wounds?
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