Sugoi & Yokunai

Anthropic is bleeding out. Claude Code is popular but

Anthropic is very likely losing money on every single Claude Code customer, and based on my analysis, appears to be losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars per customer.

How can you continue to operate if your product bleeds you dry? I'm glad I'm not the only one puzzled by how this works.

But if you do want to use Claude Code, check out this site, which shows you a good system prompt to use to get the best output.
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Yep, it looks like the sh*tposters were right: Gavin Newsom is going to build low-income housing in Pacific Palisades. Can't have nice things anymore, Californians. Better get used to it. 

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Grok is trash now. People are saying that before it outputs a response, it checks to make sure that what it says is consistent with Elon Musk's opinions. No one is going to trust Elon's Grok4.

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Cool. If you have a M4 Mac Mini, you can upgrade its memory with a solderless kit.

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I haven't used Spotlight since I tried it when it first came out with OSX Tiger. It was lousy and I could never find stuff. I've been looking for something like the old Magellan Navigator. But I see that Apple has been working on it. Today I noticed, however, that if I have a file called something like "my-secret-stuff.txt" Spotlight won't find it if I don't type the file extension, too. So you have to know what kind of file it is, or Spotlight will not find it.

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Some articles about gabapentin and pregabalin have come out. It can work wonders short-term, but long-term, it causes problems. Long-term gabapentin causes cognitive deficits. Paper here. Then there's a report that long-term use of pregabalin is addictive.

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There's something ironic about AI taking the jobs of employees at Indeed.com and Glassdoor.com. They'll know how to get another job, I'm sure.

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Even The Economist realizes that the European asylum system isn't working. Really? It took you that long? I think it's too late for Europe now. There's too many migrants to do a Trump-style eviction. You'd definitely need an army, and in the process of removing them, the migrants will destroy everything in the city on their way out. No more nice things anymore.

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Wow, PARP1 inhibitors may be effective in treating EBV-associated lymphomas and carcinomas. Talazoparib would make a potentially effective maintenance therapy.

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I'm not going to see James Gunn's Superman. Gunn wanted to make a political statement about immigrants in this movie. He made Kal-El's parents evil instead of protective and loving, and removed the statement about "the American Way". The SFX are cheesy and Lex Luthor was terribly miscast. There are too many side characters, causing confusion, and what the hell happened to Green Lantern? And Superman is not the invincible Man of Steel – he gets beat up quite a bit. Superhero movies need to be directed by someone like Sam Raimi, Christopher Nelson or the Russo brothers.

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Two interesting articles on EVs:

• Why Your EV Won’t Fill Up In Five. There are good reasons why won't be seeing those EVs that recharge in 5 minutes and go for 1800 miles on a single charge, anytime soon. Yeah, wouldn't that be nice? Well it would take 7.2 megawatts—per car to charge that fast. Using monster cables. Want to live next door to someone who has that installed. Better move your house to the far side of your lot.
• Why Americans Can’t Buy the World’s Best Electric Car. The Chinese have an EV called the BYD. It only exists because of generous government subsidies. Supposedly it's better than Tesla, in that it can "rotate 360 degrees in place and operate in water like a boat over short distances". It can charge in 5 minutes (but what's its range?). And it sells for $10,000. I still don't trust Chinese engineering.

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Intel CEO says it's too late to compete in AI, as the company continues to shed staff. What a metaphor for the city of Portland. I wouldn't have believed in 2000 that this would the state of Intel.  Then I read this. Wow, Pat Gelsinger was basically unavailable every Thursday so he could space out on company time.

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Nifty. Google Veo can now turn an image into a short 8 second video.

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So now vector search is passé? It was the darling of AI a couple of years ago. But similar ≠ relevant, and relevant is what really matters. So we're back to lexical search.  Man, things change so fast.

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StackOverflow is unveiling their new self. Will it bring people back again? Well, maybe the AI bots will have new things to scrape.

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Tech workers really want to work from home. They're willing to take lower pay to make it happen. But those jobs that can be done at home as likely the ones that someone else can do with AI. One person is convinced that AI will take people's jobs after all, and we'll just become project managers, overseeing someone else's work. It's a new paradigm.

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Big Pink's new buyer wants to spiff up the place and attract people to come back to the building. What he doesn't realize that it's not the interior decoration that people didn't like. It was that it was in the middle of downtown Portland, and you have to negotiate the city streets to get there. Good luck, man.

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What a waste.  Why did the city of Portland need a Chief Equity Officer? Now there's money the city can save by cutting it.

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Watch out! Browser extensions may be spying on you. They use your computer to surreptitiously scrape the web on behalf of its clients. The llist of extensions is here.

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Even low doses of CBD (cannabidiol), like 5 mg/kg can harm your liver. I don't use this stuff, but a lot of people think it's safe.

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Here's a nifty thing – an e-paper digital picture frame that lets you display pictures, but doesn't require an A/C outlet.

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Nice post, that basically echoes the sentiment, dance as if no one is watching. You've seen it, I'm sure. I blog, even though I'm sure no one is reading. Except you. 

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I posted this earlier, and this article is an update. Deoxyribose sugar gel is still effective in stimulating hair growth in balding mice. Still waiting for the efficacy study in humans.

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Huggingface just released this cute little robot, which hey call Reachy Mini. It could teach enterprising youth to learn Python. Here's a video of it in action.  As long as this is not a wiretap device, like Echo or Alexa.

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If you've had a kid who is now about 20 years old, you probably know Steve from Blue's Clues. Here's a very engaging interview of him by Rainn Wilson. Steve Burns gives off the vibe of Tony Stark, but a more caring and authentic version, and that's what gives him his charm. He was able to engage kids without acting like a gay uncle, as some other kids show characters do. Being Steve definitely changed him, but in a nice way, and he sounds like he had finally found himself.

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It's not official (yet) but TSA is allowing flyers at select airports (including PDX) to keep their shoes on during security checks. About time.

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Zuckerberg continues poaching AI experts – this time from the Apple foundational models group. They'll join his Superintelligence team. Being nerdy finally pays.

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Will Trump's new student loan policy make it harder to be a doctor or lawyer? I don't think so. It will shift the loans away from government and into the private sector, where it really belongs. And if you can't demonstrate that you have the potential to succeed, you won't get the loan. And a private lender will not "forgive" the loan, so you'd better make sure you make those payments.

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Nice review of how Mozilla's leadership has been failing the company. Firefox isn't dead, but the user share is steadily decreasing, for sure. I'm still not ready to abandon Firefox for Brave, as long as LibreWolf continues to work.

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Are you the bull or the farmer? Interesting parable, and probably true.

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The NYT wants your ChatGPT history – even the deleted ones. Why should the NYT have access to this? It's none of their business.

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In China, those with congenital deafness due to functional deficiency of the OTOF gene, were able to get restored hearing with just one injection of a gene delivery vector. Paper here.

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Oregon is going to hurt real bad. Specifically hospital and associated healthcare providers. It doesn't have to be that bad, but Oregon refuses to stop supporting non-citizens, and it's causing a drain on the economy that Oregon can't afford.

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A retired PSU professor says that Multnomah County had 4.5x the number of high income earners (> $500,000/yr) from 2014 to 2023. Really? Are you all seeing this? Were there that many new jobs in the county that paid that much? I don't think so. I bet that nearly all those jobs were NGO leadership positions or union leader positions that flourished under the Biden administration. All that COVID stimulus money. This has got to be bogus data.

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People don't like being force-fed AI, but Microsoft is only too happy to force it on people.

OpenAI has hired a forensic psychiatrist to see how ChatGPT is affecting people emotionally.

Microsoft says that if you are experiencing stress from getting laid off, use ChatGPT as your psychiatrist to deal with it. How thoughtful. 

This woman has a job fixing code for companies that decided to use ChatGPT instead of hiring a real software developer. These companies ended up spending more than if they did it right the first time. 

This study says that AI models display only "Potemkin understanding" and don't really know what they're saying. That's good, I suppose. 

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Scientists reverse Parkinson's disease in mice with copper supplements. Apparently there's a mutation in the superoxide dismutase gene, SOD1, that is associated with Parkinson's disease. SOD1 uses a metal, such as copper or zinc as a catalyst. In this case, they administered copper and the disease phenotype improved significantly. But it's not clear if human Parkinson's disease is mediated by the same mutation and disease process.

And a mucolytic (not yet available in the U.S.) called ambroxol, may help ameliorate Parkinon's disease dementia.

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Beware of trusting ZIP files. The file you unzip may not be the file that someone else unzips. Use 7z for compression. It's much better. I use Keka.

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Top 10 most secure phones in 2025. The iPhone 16 Pro Max is on the list. A Samsung phone is on the list, too, amazingly. 

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Several physician organizations are upset the RFK Jr fired the vaccine panel and replaced them with COVID-19 vax skeptics. They are so eager to continue to ruse.

And then this Japanese study just got published, linking the mRNA vax to rapid progression of pancreatic cancer. Gee, don't you think we should stop producing this vax and do some investigating?

And I'm tired of all the panicky news about the new variant.

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The comic Sally Forth ripped off a Calvin and Hobbes plot, and no one noticed at the time. Blatant.

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Comparing calculators. Looks like the iOS calculators can't handle edge cases, whereas Android calculators can. Of course one can use Wolfram Alpha, which is really accurate, and can do a whole lot more. Many iOS calculators can't handle the edge case discussed in the article. The best calculator for casual calculations (because Wolfram's format is too unwieldy) is the HiPER calculator. For now, it's my go-to calculator. Very nice. 

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Incredible video of ball lightning. It looks like a science fiction scene from a Benson and Moorhead film. Why don't I get to see stuff like this?

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This is what the tech world is turning into. Rene Turcios is a vibe coder, and he's been winning hackathon contests, even though he doesn't know how to code.  It's a new world indeed. And someone asks: How Do You Teach Computer Science in the A.I. Era? You must teach the new tools, too, or else your graduates will be behind.

Then you look at Microsoft, laying off a lot of engineers. Is that a wise move? Some would disagree.

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This guy think Geoff Hinton shouldn't have been awarded the Nobel Prize. I don't agree. Hinton came up with a lot of insight surrounded neural networks, and autoencoders, which led to Generative Adversarial Networks. But I do agree that the Nobel Committee should consider other pioneers, too, especially the guys that developed transformers – what a difference that made! But the Nobel Prize only guys to three people at most. That could be a problem, although it's just an arbitrary limitation.

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What to do and what not to do when you wake up in the middle of the night and can't fall back to sleep easily.

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A 17 girl in the Bahamas proved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture. Her name is Hannah Cairo. Now THIS is the diversity I favor. Diversity should be something you celebrate when it happens, but not something that you try to manufacture when it doesn't exist.

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Clarifying tech jargon.  A lot of terms are used inaccurately, as their usage has changed the original meanings over time. Here's how to correct that.

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Here's someone who gets it: Portland needs to embrace growth. Nobody is encouraging it. Oregon construction jobs are decreasing. 

That's exactly what's happening.

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A mutation in the FasL gene could explain why humans are more prone to cancer than chimpanzees. The Fas gene is involved with programmed cell death.

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Why is there no life on Mars? It could be the presence of carbonate materials which absorb CO2. Funny that Mars having low CO2 levels is a threat to life, while on Earth activists think that too much CO2 is a threat to life.

The Mauna Loa CO2 atmospheric level tracker will be shut down.  It never made sense to me to put a CO2 tracker on top of a non-extinct volcano that may be spewing out CO2 levels, as well as being on an island with active volcanoes that can emit CO2 itself. It would make more sense for it to be on a remote island with no innate CO2 source. Plenty of islands available northwest of Kauai. 

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There is now evidence that adult brains can form new neurons. This was believed to be the case before, but now there is histologic proof of neuronal precursors.

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Cool. Someone created a LIDAR-guided device that shoots down mosquitos with lasers.

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This is how some stores can track your every move – with Bluetooth beacons. It may be a greater problem with iPhones. Sure, you can turn off Bluetooth, but it's inconvenient to do this every time you enter a store.

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People are reporting the ChatGPT can diagnose illness that elude doctors.  And ChatGPT isn't even the best medical LLM. The problem is that we don't know how accurate these reports are. It's certainly not routine to test for MTHFR mutations, and there are other ways to test for vitamin B12 deficiency. Was that done?

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Happy Independence Day!

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Copper wire thieves are making some street lamps go dark. Some are on highways. Enough with this crap, already!

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Tina Kotek continues to support illegal immigrants' children. Calls them "marginalized students". Why are they marginalized, Tina? Maybe there's a reason?

All Tina knows what to do is spend federal money. Oregon is so dependent on this, that when it runs dry, Oregon is out of options. Tina has never given a thought to, you know, grow Oregon's economy. Make Oregon a place to invest. Instead, businesses are leaving. 

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Another amazing discovery from Chinese scientists: a new "water battery". High energy density, long lifespan, and excellent safety performance – what's there not to love? Let's do it!

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Asian scientists hide prompts in their papers so that AI reviewers give them positive reviews. Hidden prompts in white ink or miniscule size tell LLMs to only say nice things about the research. This should be easily countered; just tell your LLM to ignore what's in the paper.

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AI-generated text found in 14% of all biomedical abstracts last year. This isn't too surprising, since LLMs are good for polishing text. As long as the content is AI-generated, I see nothing wrong with this. LLMs can help to express ideas more clearly. Ketanji Brown-Jackson could have used AI to help her formulate her dissent. Really. I say "no big deal" to this.  

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Palantir is teaming up with Xfinity to allow someone to spy on your movements in your home using WiFi signals. Time to find another ISP.

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Usually, one does not have to worry about overdosing with water-soluble vitamins. But apparently this is not true with vitamin B6 (pyridoxine). Excessive dosing can lead to neurotoxicity. This is ironic because doctors used to prescribe a trial of pyridoxine to treat neurotoxicity. Ironic.

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White male writers are vanishing. I noticed this when browsing for horror fiction, which is my favorite. I love M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, August D'Erleth, E.F. Benson, L.T.C. Rolt, Ramsey Campbell and Robert Aickman. But lately, when I visit bookstores, there are very few contemporary horror writers who are men. I think men write better horror than women, as the latter tend to focus on emotions and mental stability issues than supernatural occurrences or ancient mysticism. There is only Stephen King and Laird Barron, and none of these are to my taste. King seems to write about aliens or sick human beings doing crazy things, which Barron does as well. What's going on?

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Oregon is no longer paying for homeless camp cleanup along the freeways. Well guess what kind of hot mess Portland is going to look like now? Portlanders pay higher taxes, and just get crap in return.

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After laying off 9000 workers, Microsoft wants 14,181 H-1B visas. Do you think that's right? What about American tech workers? What is the deal? Are there no enough hire-worthy Americans? Is that what this is all about? Or do they just want cheap Indian labor?

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A short video on Washington state's stupid EV credit program, care of Jay Inslee. The climate change industry is just one big grift.

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How embarrassing and cringe. Maxine Dexter with a group of Dem doctors trying to advocate for Dem policies – and no one pays attention to them.

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AI can detect hidden lung tumor better than doctors. This is not new, and is just one study where a model trained on a dataset beat a test group of doctors. It doesn't mean that it would beat doctors reading CT scans and chest X-rays in other hospitals or clinics. AI isn't that versatile yet. It's only a start.

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Increased sedentary behavior is associated with neurodegeneration and worse cognition in older adults over a 7-year period despite high levels of physical activity. Sounds dire, right? The subjects for this test were those in the legacy and expansion cohorts of the Vanderbilt Memory and Aging Project (VMAP), and although some of these over 50 subjects had no evidence of baseline cognitive impairment, others were allowed into the study with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). So already we're talking about those more at risk of dementia. It doesn't inquire as to what kind of activities the sedentary cohort were occupied with. Was it just resting and watching TV, or were they reading books, solving problems or engaged in high cognitive skill activities? Remember, this study showed that exercise wasn't enough to prevent dementia. That's why I'm skeptical.

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What a nightmare. Many homes that weren't burned to the ground in the Palisades and Eaton fires are now full of toxic levels of lead, copper, arsenic and beryllium. And what about the fire retardant chemicals? 

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IBM laid off 8000 employees because of AI automation, but hired them back in other positions, because they needed human creativity there. Good news, I suppose, if this isn't just an isolated phenomenon. Will other companies also recognize the need for human creativity? I wouldn't have considered IBM to be a company that needed creativity, to be honest.

Microsoft is laying off more people. Doesn't any division there need some imagination?  😂

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Hey, I'd watch the heck out of this!

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Oh crap. Disney is planning on rebooting the entire Indiana Jones franchise. No doubt to update it with more minority, gay, transgender or girlboss characters. Maybe have Rachel Zegler as Indy's love interest. Leave it alone, Disney. Please.

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The NYT doesn't like that Vinay Prasad recommended against the COVID mRNA vax product. Naturally they quote some pro-vax "experts" who decry this decision. Vinay has guts to do this. I'm glad that someone is finally demanding that we put a stop to the now ineffective and completely unnecessary and potentially deadly jabs. Go Vinay!

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A new interstellar object has been identified zipping through the solar system.  It's moving too fast to be studied. Could be a comet. Hope it's not an alien – we're not ready.

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What?!  Nightmares Linked to Faster Ageing and Premature Mortality. I thought it was just lactose intolerance from cheese. But faster aging? Maybe people have to ask for some prazosin after all.

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Electrical stimulation of the frontal lobes makes you better at math.  Step aside, Terrance Tao, here I come.

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FaceTime in iOS 26 will freeze your call if someone starts undressing. I wonder at what point does it kick in.  It's all to protect children, they say. Yeah, but....

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