May 2024

Thursday, 30 May 2024

Find the Trusted Messengers

Katelyn Jetelina, MPH, PhD: “The major challenge is that those at risk, and with whom we need cooperation to stop H5N1 from becoming a pandemic, trust the government and institutions the least […] There are many reasons for lack of trust: Their values don’t align, there are language barriers, some have been burned before, public health leaders have vilified them, and some have legitimate concerns about their livelihood being impacted.”

[bookmark]

Wednesday, 22 May 2024

“No way to prevent this” say users of only language where this regularly happens

Xe Iaso: “In the hours following the release of CVE-2024-4323 for the project Fluent Bit, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a vulnerability in HTTP parsing code that allows for heap corruption and arbitrary code execution by making a HTTP GET request with a megabyte of the letter ‘A’ in its body.”

[bookmark]

Friday, 17 May 2024

Why is China producing so many export goods, anyway?

Noah Smith: “This might sound like a bunch of Marxist mumbo-jumbo, but it’s actually not very different from how other countries think about technology, industry, and the national interest.”

[bookmark]

Wednesday, 15 May 2024

Against Sunscreen Absolutism

Rowan Jacobsen, The Atlantic: “Such a stance surely reflects understandable concerns about mixed messaging. But it also seems more and more outdated, and suggests a broader problem within American public-health institutions.”

[bookmark]

Wednesday, 8 May 2024

The macro arsonists

Noah Smith: “This allows us to answer the question of ‘Why does the government borrow in a currency that it can print?’.”

[bookmark]

Monday, 6 May 2024

North Korean weapons are killing Ukrainians. The implications are far bigger

BBC: “‘We are witnessing the real-time crumbling of UN sanctions against North Korea, which buys Pyongyang a lot of breathing space’”

[bookmark]

Saturday, 4 May 2024

What the Debate Over Famine in Gaza Is Missing

Yan Slobodkin, Slate: “Yemen and Ethiopia have suffered tens of thousands of deaths each under IPC Phase 4 ‘emergency’ conditions without sliding into Phase 5. Sudan is currently facing a food crisis that threatens to be more deadly than the one in Gaza because the affected population is larger, but the IPC has not designated famine there either.”

[bookmark]