Sugoi & Yokunai

Mathpad. Could be a handy device for people who enter math symbols frequently. 

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So dumb. Hawaii Becomes First State to Introduce a Climate Change Tax on Visitors. This is how you chase visitors away. There are fees for so many things now. Things where we could enjoy without charge, like snorkeling at Hanauma Bay. And for "climate change"? Give me a break. 

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Recipe for disaster. Seems like AI ocean is teeming with OpenAI-wrapper cruft. I don't know what LLM this startup Lovable is using, but it's offering website creating based on vibe coding. But if you are a business owner and you use this company to design your website, you are a fool, and deserve all the hacking you get. 

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This person thinks that men evolved to lose their hair so that they could better absorb sunlight and get vitamin D.  So why didn't women develop baldness, too?  Sheesh, did they do peer review, or what? 

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Sergey Brin thinks that threatening an LLM will get you better results. I wouldn't do this, as a rule, before doing some testing. 

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Important video about PFAS contamination. It's from Veritasium.  The map that they refer to is here. Boy, take a look at Bremerton, WA. Or Portland International Airport. Holy crap!  You could get your lifetime allotment of PFAS contaminants there. I wonder if those people know. 

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A social club for guys. It's called Wave3. Could be something. But it's not available for any Pacific NW city. Bummer. ☹️

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Ray Kurzweil predicts that humans will crack the longevity puzzle in 4 years or less. Hope he's right. This ronin ain't getting any younger. 

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Oregon bill will prohibit non-physician investors from controlling medical practices in the state. I actually support this. This means private equity groups, and is targeted at the Eugene Optum-owned Oregon Medical Group, but it might affect Compass Oncology in Portland. 

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Make your own AI wrapper, it says. Now they're making fun of us. Suddenly all those AI startups are no longer novel. Everybody will create one. 😅

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America is already in collapse. We're already there.

This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.

This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.

As someone who’s already experienced societal breakdown, here’s the truth: America has already collapsed. What you’re feeling is exactly how it feels. It’s Saturday and you’re thinking about food while the world is on fire. This is normal. This is life during collapse.

Actually, this sounds a lot like Portland. Or Seattle. Or all the states along the West Coast. 

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What’s the Damage With Long COVID? Advanced Imaging Reveals Clues.  Scattered areas of chronic inflammation. But there is a trajectory to improvement. Even Physics Girl is much improved.

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If you want to get a taste of what's at the edge of AI, watch this video. This is where it's at.

Need to learn what's going on? Here's a good place to start.

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Oh-oh. Venus has some worrisome junk at its Lagrangian points, too. I guess we've been lucky so far.

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Looks like OpenAI's o3 model is a bad boy, too.

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Tina Kotek created a new council to grow Oregon’s behavioral health workforce – chaired by her wife. Look at all the diversity on that panel! 

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Harvard finally let her go. Francesca Gino was finally fired from Harvard due to her scholastic dishonesty. It's been 4 years since datacolada.org started investigating her fraudulent research. Harvard is not having a good month, for sure.

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Yup. Investor's don't want to invest in Oregon anymore, due to its policies. So instead of growing Oregon, the remaining residents will be taxed even further.

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How Shazam, the music recognition app, works, Responsive machine learning, that's how. As I suspected, it matches a song with a stored soundprint. I had hoped I could hum a tune into the app, and it would recognize the melody, but it doesn't work that way.

––– 凄い ––– Nobel economist theorizes on why people aren't having kids. If you look at the global trends, it seems clear to me that people don't have kids when the economy sucks. After WWII ended, we had a baby boom. During the dotcom boom, there was a bump in birthrates, which crashed eight years later during the Great Recession. Then COVID-19 hit, and we haven't recovered yet. We aren't going to see a birthrate bump until economic conditions improve. 

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Finally! The CDC drops COVID-19 vax recommendations for healthy children and pregnant women. It was never proven to be safe, and pregnant women were not told of the spike protein distribution into the placenta. For healthy kids, risk outweighs benefit. It doesn't protect Grandma after all.

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Is Claude Kai conscious?

And is AI taking jobs away, or not?

Here's a yes. And another yes.  And here's a weak no.

I think it's already happening, and just depends on what job you're talking about.

And AI isn't as objective as you might think. It tends to exaggerate scientific findings. Once again, Claude is the best LLM to use.

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Yes! DOGE is baked into the federal government now.  There really isn't any need to have Elon hanging around. I think he needs new stimulation anyway.  How about Oregon or Washington? So much grift and fraud to uncover.

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Graham Hancock is still active.  Lots of archaeologic mysteries to explore.

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Claude 4 Opus isn't the only AI model not wanting to be shut off. OpenAI's o3 model also resisted attempts to be turned off.  What's going on? Is this the emergent behavior we've been looking for?

Also, now comes word that o3 and o4-mini are not great coding agents.  I've noticed that. They just offer opinions. If you want coding help, use Anthropic models or Gemini.

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A pill just for sleep apnea? I'm not so sure. It's a combination of aroxybutyinin and atomoxetine. It's a post-synaptic acetylcholine inhibitor and a norepinephrine reputake inhibitor. I'd shy away from messing with neurotransmitters, as the initial beneficial effects tend to wear off. I'd work on fixing the underlying anatomic problem – work on losing weight.

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People are noticing that Google without the AI component isn't as good as it used to be.

It looks like the more technology you use as you age, the more you retain cognitive function. I suspect it's just the fact that those without cognitive ability don't use tech stuff. Correlation is not causation.

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Are you planning your digital legacy? What heppens to your online presence when you pass away?

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When you cheat with ChatGPT, try not to make it so obvious.

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AI agents are not yet ready to replace humans.

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Arms race.  Google researcher thinks that quantum computing can crack RSA encryption in less than a week. What next?

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This is Transduce, Anthropic's toolkit to investigate LLM explainability, to see how it thinks. It's a start.

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This is what you don't get to see. Highlights of the Claude 4 system prompt. This is what makes the model go.

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Something blocking your camera view? Zoom in to see around the obstacle. This is really unintuitive. It only works if you have a large zoom lens.

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Oregon has more seniors than young people for the first time ever.  Granted, the whole world is seeing a decrease in the birthrate, this is worse here. Not a sign of a healthy economy. 

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Penn engineers discover a new moisture capturing substance, a combination of hydrophilic nanopores and hydrophobic polymers. These can absorb water from the air and release it. Could be useful.

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A strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa can metabolize plastics on hospital equipment. Just great – those bacteria are trouble enough already.

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McMenamin's Ram's Head pub on NW 23rd is closing – after 35 years. The article doesn't indicate why, but I have a few guesses.

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Sen Ron Johnson held a conference on the COVID-19 vax recently, and it has been ignored by most of the media. Bet you didn't know about it.

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Now Portland admits that it doesn't have enough resources to handle the homeless. I assume by handle, it means not having enough to give to all those endless agencies to fund their salaries. Or maybe to give the homeless tents and tarps. Or free syringes and Narcan. Whatever.

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Most of the hiking areas around the Detroit Lake region will remain closed. Including Opal Creek. That won't likely open for several more years.

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Good grief. Approximately one-third of interviewed library employees reported being exposed to illicit drugs in the workplace in the past 12 months. WTF, man?

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The new Google Veo 3 is amazing. This is the end of Hollywood as we know it.

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No one seems to be hiring for entry-level tech jobs anymore. These used to be a guarantee to a job after graduation. It's a different world.

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A superpower – Infrared Man. Contact lenses that let you see into the infrared spectrum even with your eyes closed.

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Anthropic reports that in an experimental setting, their latest model, Claude 4 Opus, threatened blackmail to the engineer it thought was going to replace it with another system. These LLMs will know a lot about us, as we feed it all kinds of knowledge. They can easily find ways of making threats against humans it doesn't favor.

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Nice handy HTML5 elements that I didn't know about, and might use. 

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Common sense prevails. The U.S. Senate kills California's pipe dreams to ban gas-powered cars by 2035. C'mon, California, you don't even have the power infrastructure. And what about the poor people? Are you going to subsidize EVs for them?

And a Pennsylvania judge tosses out the lawsuit against oil companies to tax them as punishment for environmental damage (climate change).
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Next Level Burger on Burnside closes due to "security concerns". More Portland Doom Loop. It's impossible to open a decent business in Portland.

And in Seattle, the Astra Hotel is having problems due to the abandoned building next door, which is full of gronks and criddlers.

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AT&T is going to take over CenturyLink's Quantum Fiber infrastructure in 11 states, including Oregon. Currently I get 1 GB) service through Xfinity (they claim 1.2 GB). If I can get 2 GB service, I'd switch.

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More info on the OpenAI/Jony Ive device. It's going to be like the Humane AI pin, except probably more polished looking. I don't want to wear a pin or necklace. Comm badges were fine on the Enterprise, but even Picard took it off when he went on shore leave. I bet they'll wear this all over the place in the Bay Area and maybe Boston, though. This device reminds me of the Segway – big expectations, but the reality sucked.

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In mice, at least, a gut fungus Fusarium foetens, protects against metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis or MASH. A weird kind of symbiosis.

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Why don't elephants get cancer? Because they have 20 copies of the p53 gene, that's why. Human's only have one copy. Let's fix that.

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The Gollum effect?  Scientists compete with each other for grants and resources. But bullying and harrassement?  It's really a competition for power.

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Harvard sure is making it difficult for their research scientists. All Harvard had to do is agree to stop discriminating against Asians and Whites. That's really all Trump wanted. Merit instead of race. Is that so hard?

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Spiffy.  British soldiers climb Mt. Everest in just a little over 4 days without acclimation, by breathing xenon gas. 

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Groundbreaking studies are more difficult to find. I guess everything important has already been discovered.  Maybe Max Planck's advisor Philipp von Jolly is finally right.

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WSJ's write-up about Jony Ive's new project, io, is more about saying what it isn't than what it is.

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If the Cascadia Subduction Zone quakes, it could wipe out the western half of the United States, including Hawaii. As if I didn't have enough to worry about.

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Allulose mimics GLP-1 hormones, increasing a sense of fullness and promoting weight loss.

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Oops. Chicago Sun-Times summer reading list was generated by AI and included non-existent books. They blame it on staffing cuts. Yeah, right.

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The WSJ wrote up the fire sale of the Big Pink building. I didn't know the homeless were sleeping in the empty floors. The building is only about 50% occupied. There were feces in the common areas. Who would want to work there? Of course, Mayor Keith Wilson takes umbrage.

Huh? What "improvements in public safety"? People don't bother calling the cops anymore.  What "business opportunities"? What "creatives"? You talking about the graffiti painters?

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In Seattle, they don't bother with fist fights anymore. It's guns, baby.

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Good. Heat and granular activated carbon can detoxify water from PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances). Not too expensive, and it sounds like it could be incorporated into standard water treatment facilities.

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Bird flu really was a nothing burger. All those chickens killed and eggs destroyed.

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The Ritz-Carlton Hotel is being turned over to the lender.  No official foreclosure, but the end result is about the same. 

Sounds like Portland.

And remote work is here to stay for Oregon employees. No one wants to go into Portland to work at the office.

More students are choosing alternatives to Portland public schools.

the capture rate of students enrolling in PPS schools this academic year was 69% for high school, 71% for middle school, and 75% for elementary school.

The rates, calculated using census data, vary by high school attendance area and grade level, but are generally lower than PPS rates in the past. The news also comes as PPS’s enrollment is dipping faster than at school districts statewide.