Featured Links - February 13, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A birdless bay on a blustery afternoon

• Twitter is getting rid of its free API tier. That's a nightmare for accessibility activists. Yet another way in which Musk's ham-handed management of Twitter is screwing with people's lives.
• How to tell if your cats are playing or fighting—and whether it’s a problem. "Reciprocity is the key. And occasional squabbles don't mean your cats hate each other."
• Scientists discover receptor that blocks COVID-19 infection. "The receptor sticks to the virus and pulls it away from the target cells." This could be very good news if the research is confirmed and can be developed into a drug. 
• ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. "OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?" The article is by Ted Chiang, the award-winning science fiction author who wrote the story that become the movie Arrival. 
• Single interferon injection halves severe COVID outcomes, trial shows. "A phase 3 randomized, controlled trial finds that a single injection of an experimental antiviral treatment slashed hospitalizations and emergency department (ED) visits among high-risk COVID-19 patients when given soon after symptom onset."
• Our Digital History Is at Risk. "Many have now seen how, when someone deletes their Twitter account, their profile, their tweets, even their direct messages, disappear. According to the MIT Technology Review, around a million people have left so far, and all of this information has left the platform along with them. The mass exodus from Twitter and the accompanying loss of information, while concerning in its own right, shows something fundamental about the construction of our digital information ecosystem:  Information that was once readily available to you—that even seemed to belong to you—can disappear in a moment."
• The Origins of Covid-19 Are More Complicated Than Once Thought. Scientists used painstaking research, genomics, and clever statistics to definitively track two distinct strains of the virus back to a wet market in Wuhan.