Software engineer with 15+ years of experience, worked for Microsoft, Tableau and Google.
New Yorker (since 2022).
Memes enjoyer, part-time vegetarian, nano-influencer.
Scientists have been publishing climate models since ~1970.
A good way to evaluate their skill is to compare what they expected to happen in the years after the model was published to observed climate changes.
It turns out most models were pretty spot-on:
"Have you said thank you, even once?"
Trump administration takes first anti-abortion move on world stage
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/24/trump-administration-anti-abortion-00200587?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Health Care @health-care-politico
@Urban_Hermit well, there’s hope to reduce harm in 2 years, but yeah
“Sec of State Marco Rubio issued new guidance halting spending on most existing foreign aid grants for 90 days. The order, which shocked State Dept officials, appears to apply to funding for military assistance to #Ukraine.
…Except Israel & Egypt.”
Emptywheel:
“ #Trump just cut off Taiwan and Ukraine.
But not Egypt, which may have sent Trump $10M in 2017 and has a history of bribing others”
😬
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/24/state-department-foreign-aid-pause-00200510
Alternative headline: Google had trouble selling Gemini so they're making everyone pay for the AI features whether they wanted it or not.
It's okay to turn off the news.
You were never meant to carry the burden of the entire world.
New York starts enforcing $15 broadband law that ISPs tried to kill
Fresh off court victory, NY says low-income plans must be available Wednesday.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/new-york-starts-enforcing-15-broadband-law-that-isps-tried-to-kill/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
Michelle Obama has more decency and common sense than most elected politicians. I've always admired her, but I admire her even more for refusing to be anywhere near him. I wish more Democrats would finally forget about norms and treat these people the way they deserve to be treated. #Politics #Democracy #USpol https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/us/politics/michelle-obama-trump-inauguration.html?unlocked_article_code=1.pE4.OudT.71UdVHz_zOfk&smid=url-share
Look up from your phone. Good. Good. Do it again.
Wow! Biologists seem to have discovered an entirely new kind of life form. They're called 'obelisks', and you probably have some in you.
They were discovered in 2024 - not by somebody actually seeing one, but by analyzing huge amounts of genetic data from the human gut. This search found 29,959 new RNA sequences, completely different from any known. Thus, we don't know where these things fit into the tree of life!
Biologists found them when they were trying to solve a puzzle. Even smaller than viruses, there exist 'viroids' that are just loops of RNA that cleverly manage to reproduce using the machinery of the cell they infect. Viruses have a protein coat. Viroids are just bare RNA - it doesn't even code for any proteins!
But all known viroids only infect plants. The first one found causes a disease in potatoes; another causes a disease in avocados, and so on. This raised the puzzle: why aren't there viroids that infect bacteria, or animals?
Now perhaps we've found them! But not quite: while obelisks may work in a similar way, they seem genetically unrelated. Also, their RNA seems to code for two proteins.
Given how little we know about this stuff, I think some caution is in order. Still, this is really cool. Do any of you biologists out there know any research going on now to learn more?
The original paper is free to read on the bioRxiv:
• Viroid-like colonists of human microbiomes, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.20.576352v1.full
I see just one other paper, about an automated system for detecting obelisks:
• Tormentor: An obelisk prediction and annotation pipeline, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.30.596730v1.full
There's also a budding Wikipedia article on obelisks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelisk_(biology)
Hat-tip to @metaweta.
kremlin earned €3B in tax from EU companies
Plenty of Western retail and tobacco companies stayed in russia after its full-scale invasion of #Ukraine.
Read more here https://www.politico.eu/article/kremlin-russia-earned-e3-billion-from-eu-company-tax/
The United States has imposed sanctions on Bidzina Ivanishvili, Russia's billionaire collaborator helping the Kremlin take over the government in #Georgia 🇬🇪 🇪🇺
https://www.state.gov/sanctioning-georgian-dream-founder-bidzina-ivanishvili/
WTF? 😳 OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment: Suchir Balaji, 26, claimed the company broke copyright law. Balaji helped gather and organize the enormous amounts of internet data used to train the startup’s ChatGPT chatbot. Information he held was expected to play a key part in lawsuits against the OpenAI https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/12/13/openai-whistleblower-found-dead-in-san-francisco-apartment/
