A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
11 Rare Old Words for the Heinous and Villainous
Mixship is a rare, old word for a villainous deed. If mixship seems opaque, that’s because it sprang from an Old English sense of mix that disappeared a long time ago: Mix was a word for dung or other filth. So calling something a “mixship” was like saying “What a total pile of crap!” or “That’s BS” today.
Adrift in the South
I walk the alleyways of an urban village in Beijing, gloomy in a late-afternoon thunderstorm. My skin is sticky in the moist air. I recently turned thirty-two, and I’ve been drifting around the country for sixteen years, sixteen dreamlike years that began in China’s land of milk and honey in the early 2000s, the southern border city of Shenzhen. A growing city where tropical steam would evaporate from the asphalt roads and fill my trouser legs, soaking me through to my skin. The heat would snatch at every strand of my hair, and remembering it now pulls me against the current of time, hauls me back to the roaring years of Shenzhen, to my coming of age, the summer I turned fifteen.
Any Percent
There were skips and there were strats. Luckless didn’t have a head for strats, so he focused on finding skips. He found Ohio Truck Skip: an armored car left unlocked while the driver stopped for a pastry. Pull up, pop the back, grab a bag, peel off—easy $350K starter cash, accessible in the first days of the game. The RNG on that driver behavior was pretty good, and the pastry shop was in Zanesville, right off I-70, which made Ohio Truck Skip a favorite stop for midwest-spawned players headed east to run Wall Street strats.
The Cultural Power of the Anti-Woke Tech Bro
If, in the year 2010, someone asked you to conjure an image of the average libertarian, there’s a good chance you’d envision former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who was, for decades, the ideology’s most famous representative.
You might also think of someone entirely fictional: Ron Swanson.
U.S. Drugmakers Are Breaking Up With Their Chinese Supply-Chain Partners
U.S. drugmakers and biotechs have come to rely on Chinese partners for manufacturing, research and ingredients. Now, some of them are looking for alternatives as geopolitical tensions rise.
From big pharmaceutical companies such as AstraZeneca to small biotechnology firms like Amicus Therapeutics of New Jersey, which is looking for a non-Chinese company to supply raw materials for its rare-disease treatment, the companies say it is time to reduce China risk.
Industry officials say one consequence could be slower drug rollouts and higher costs in the U.S. because the shift takes time and money.
AI's "Human in the Loop" Isn't
AI's ability to make – or assist with – important decisions is fraught: on the one hand, AI can often classify things very well, at a speed and scale that outstrips the ability of any reasonably resourced group of humans. On the other hand, AI is sometimes very wrong, in ways that can be terribly harmful.
He Investigates the Internet’s Most Vicious Hackers—From a Secret Location
One morning in September, a hacker known as Waifu sent a message to Brian Krebs, a cybersecurity researcher investigating him. Waifu wanted to play a game.
“Here is the deal,” Waifu wrote. “Beat me 2 out of 3 in chess, and if your demand is reasonable, I would answer questions without trolling u.”
Krebs didn’t reply, but the messages kept coming in. “I would rate you FBI range in terms of HUMINT skill and capability,” Waifu wrote, using a military term for gathering intelligence from human sources. “But I really want to play you in chess.”
