adolph

You might find the recent Theories of Everything podcast interview [0] with Peter Godfrey-Smith interesting.

0. https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/peter-godfrey-smith-thi...

I don't think it is bizarre since a panel of lab tests are physiological indicators that may result from the various health and fitness metrics currently measured/collected by iPhone.

There are lots of tie-ins from Apple products to other services that they don't offer: like telecom, and banking. Quest seems a reasonable partner given their ubiquity. I wonder if Apple is getting a cut and/or getting a discount for consumers on this service?

Is anyone else intrigued by the $129 "panel of over 50 biomarkers, aimed at enhancing preventive health insights?" This was mentioned in the Apple Health segment. [0] I checked out Quest's website and there wasn't an obvious match. [1]

0. https://www.biopharmawatch.com/news/DGX/apple-health-app-que...

1. https://www.questhealth.com/shop-tests

I took the tethering demand as Apple chickening out from Watch doing to iPhone what iPhone did to iPod. Having used a cell plan watch for a while, I can almost do away with the full phone aside from it being a requirement to manage the watch.

One might say the same of newyorker.com:

The company, which has six trackers monitoring access to a single web page, frames privacy as a worthwhile trade-off for reading an article for free, echoing the language of the social media industry.

> wish cameras rolled constantly in cars and on body

As I understand it, there is a tough balance. Given presumptive release, always-on cams might disincline vulnerable populations whose cooperation is socially useful.

> large sticking point with most of the unions

Any change the conditions of employment desired by the employer becomes a negotiation point for a union, no conspiracy to hide misbehavior needed.

From the article, page 3:

  I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

The article isn't an explicit claim that these Christians were the Buddha, but that the story told about them is an apparent retelling of the Sidhartha story. It closes with:

  All this tells me that there’s something about our relationship with the divine and the sacred that transcends individual eras and places. A place or a festival or a story that appeals to our common senses of awe or morality or wisdom can reach people of any faith tradition. Perhaps they’ll interpret it through their own lens, of course. But in the end, isn’t that all we have?

Article specifically mentions the term "pervert glasses"

  US police and federal agents are not alone in their fear. Concern among the public and privacy experts over Meta’s smart glasses, widely dubbed “pervert glasses”, is growing. The technology enables its wearers to record people without their consent and has already been used to harass people.

Here is an interesting quick read about the Australian experience with body worn cameras (BWC). I selected it from the search results since many of the US-centric results are sourced from DoJ or similar which may be seen as less than objective.

My takeaway is that like anything, generalizations miss a lot. BWC have lead to more efficient triage of complaints against police officers that even if sustained reduce the substantial amount of uncertainty. It is an open question to what degree BWC neutrally observe police behavior which is better than anecdotes or if the presence of the observer alters police behavior to meet standards.

https://academic.oup.com/policing/article/doi/10.1093/police...

Interesting:

   Just south of the launchpad lies Bukkekjerka, a protected Sami cultural monument. Prior to Christianity, sacrifices were made within a cave facing the sea. In most recent times, for the past half-century, there has been an annual open-air church service, which attracts many from across Andøya – perhaps even some who remember or even resided in the disappeared town of Haugnes. 

https://www.cryopolitics.com/2022/10/06/on-norways-auroral-e...

I think I mis-spoke when I wrote "blame-free" because while I come from a psychological-safety inquiry perspective, the term isn't quite descriptive. The purpose of dropping "blame" is that stopping inquiry there without understanding what lead to the "bad thing" leaves a lot of valuable knowledge on the table.

This is a interesting point. I gave some thought to the nature of what was being processed. In some ways another New World agricultural product gone industrial, cocoa, brought about some companies that at a minimum rival the tobacco companies for contributions to ultra-processed foods, examples Nestle and Coca-Cola.

Like tobacco, cocoa is not an essential food and also has psychoactive components. Thus companies formed around industrializing the material must develop methods of persuasion and navigate oppositional socio-political pressure. Like the sibling comment's observation that "any more "ethical" tobacco company got out competed," the most successful were especially suited for adopting other food production lines both from an industrial-technical and a socio-political perspective.

Reading through this and thinking about the problem in a blame-free way leads me to see the tobacco companies as a through-line for product packaging optimization that transcends any specific use. "The first patented cigarette-making machine was invented by Juan Nepomuceno Adorno of Mexico in 1847." [0] This puts high volume manufacture of cigarettes right at the cusp of the second industrial revolution with improvements in "steel-making processes, mass production, assembly lines, electrical grid systems, large-scale manufacture of machine tools, and use of advanced machinery in steam-powered factories." [1]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

  Yet, our organization was hundreds of people, and the system had grown so large and complex that it had become impossible to learn how it all worked.

Which is what makes Bezos' service mandate [0] a classic exposition of Conway's Law [1].

  All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
  Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

0. https://gist.github.com/kislayverma/d48b84db1ac5d737715e8319...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

There is a financial product known as malpractice insurance in which the outsized cost of a malpractice case is spread out over a risk pool of people with similar risk exposure.

In any case, this cost is not directly part of the "hospital's" cost of service since the surgeon is most often a semi-independent contractor who bills the patient "professional charges" that are separate from the hospital's "technical charges."

I remember the Econtalk episode with the co-founder, "Keith Smith on Free Market Health Care" [0]

0. https://www.econtalk.org/keith-smith-on-free-market-health-c...

Last I checked Takeout is a single zip file. Once you have a photo repository of a certain size, that approach becomes difficult, no?

> So congestion revenues are essentially arbitrage?

There are significant capital costs to moving power. As I understand it, an example within the US is the relationship between the regional transmission operator (RTO) SPP and MISO, who have overlapping territory. In order for move power between certain areas of SPP, it travels over MISO lines. This eats into MISO capacity. As a result the two RTOs are working on a joint project.

https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news...

> the attackers had card-sniffing malware installed on every single cash register

Part of the attack was physical, aka skimmers. I still remember the relatively elegant inspection tool blogged by Target Tech on HN 3 years ago:

Target's EasySweep – Simplifying Skimmer Detection: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36788831

> give everyone an RSA keypair

Effectively this allows the keypair issuing government (and thus whoever collects breach data) the ability to impersonate you. Seems like a terrible idea.

Another interesting aspect to this story is the flow of value from US Treasuries to gold.

  Total gold held by central banks globally was valued at approximately $4tr at 
  the start of 2026, surpassing, for the first time, the roughly $3.9tr in US 
  Treasuries held by the same institutions. This marked a reordering of reserve 
  asset preferences with significant long-term implications. [0]

0. https://www.investing.com/analysis/why-central-banks-are-bri...

> They didn't make their GPUs for crypto.

Sure they did and still do. They did a good job of managing the bubble but participate in the market nontheless. Read the above article: Nvidia has promised that its new lineup of cryptocurrency mining GPUs, called CMP for short, won't impact the supply of GeForce graphics cards for PC gamers. . . Since these cards are destined for mining rigs they will also lack video outputs. That may mean the resale value is diminished, which has been one reason why miners prefer gaming graphics cards.

Or take it from the horse's mouth [0]:

  NVIDIA Cmp Hx
  Dedicated GPU for Professional Mining

0. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/

Which makes it a Exempli gratia of "an organization that was primed to recognize and pounce on the next big thing." In addition, they also recognized early on some of the weaknesses of crypto-mining as an industry and limited their exposure while making a pivot to the next thing.

> an organization that was primed to recognize and pounce on the next big thing

e.g.: previous crypto hype-cycle

https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-cmp-graphics-card-availabilit...

It seems as though Pluto's primary problem is "clearing the neighbourhood." Given Pluto's orbit travels closer and further from the sun than Neptune, does Neptune also have the neighborhood clearing problem since it has not cleared Pluto?

  In celestial mechanics, "clearing the neighbourhood" (or dynamical dominance) 
  around a celestial body's orbit describes the body becoming gravitationally 
  dominant such that there are no other bodies of comparable size other than 
  its natural satellites or those otherwise under its gravitational influence.[0]
  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood

  The origin of OK is disputed; however, most modern reference works hold that 
  it originated around Boston as part of a fad in the late 1830s of 
  abbreviating misspellings – that it is an initialism of "oll korrect" as a 
  misspelling of "all correct". This origin was first described by linguist 
  Allen Walker Read in the 1960s.
  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK

The article source for the 17B gallons is a Congressional Research Service report and its source is a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report. Both are interesting reads. The 17B number is an estimate. Here are some of the inputs:

  * reported numbers of server deliveries
  * power draw per server
  * average utilization based on various workloads, including a Llama 70B 8 node training run
  * mix of data center cooling types
  * do math to get to 66B liters, which rounds down to 17B galoons

0. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R49057#fn10

1. https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energ...

You might find the recent Theories of Everything podcast interview [0] with Peter Godfrey-Smith interesting. Godfrey-Smith is the author of "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness," which is a great read to delve further.

Two other interesting aspects of cephalopods:

  * Make many more changes to RNA than other invertebrates [2]
  * Have only one type of light sensing cell in eyes, so may detect color by chromatic aberration

0. https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/peter-godfrey-smith-thi...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_...

2. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/octopus-squid-rna-editin...

3. https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/07/05/weird-pupils-let-octopu...

the pissoir . . . the greatest concession most of them made to privacy was a little iron screen separating the user from the street.

Look at the photos in the article, they weren't enclosed stalls. Its elegant in a way, just a couple feet of opaque material that wraps the beltline of a central aiming point. Basically as good as going on a tree but without people getting uptight.