20 December 2025

Keonne Rodriguez just wanted to make a privacy tool that would make trading in Bitcoin as private as trading regular money. He built Samourai Wallet. But a crypto-adverse justice system has targeted him, and now he's in prison.  President Trump is reviewing his case, and hopefully will pardon Keonne.

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Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it will cost 'hundreds of billions' to keep up with frontier AI in the next decade. Microsoft just needs to be smarter in what it invests in. Not just build datacenters and copy its competitors.

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Tesla owners are buying escape tools for when the car is disabled. Because the emergency door opener is awkward to access. But with laminate windows instead of tempered glass, it's not as easy. I wish they posted which tools they're buying. This one supposedly works, but is quite expensive. You need to be able to saw through the laminate, since it won't shatter like tempered glass.

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I can't believe Google is going to sue SerpApi, accusing them of stealing content from their web page when Google does the same thing to others. I think they're hoping that the "punishment is the process". Those on the outside might chuckle, but it's quite serious for SerpApi. 

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Great!  The EU is no longer going to ban non-EV cars after 2035. Hope they've learned their lesson.

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Is Proton leaving Switzerland? That would be wild. Hard to leave that beautiful country, but you gotta do what's necessary to protect privacy.

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Clearing Zombie Cells Eases Back Pain. It turns out that clearing out senescent cells in spinal discs helps improve back pain. But they achieved this with an agent called RG-7112, as well as o-vanillin, which is found in turmeric. Paper here. I have found turmeric to be actually effective in relieving minor aches and pains.

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California's minimum wage will increase to $16.90 starting January 1. Welcome to more inflation and the cost of everything going up a bit more. You can't just legislate wealth. But the politicians there think you can. 

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Oregon Parents Disproportionately Exempt School-Age Children From Vaccines. This is what happens when the medical profession loses trust from the public.

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Is everyone microdosing?  Crazy things that tech CEOs said in 2025.

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Washington politicians are thinking about implementing a 9% income tax applicable just to wealthy people. This is how you kill the golden goose. Pretty soon, you'll be like Oregon and have hardly any wealthy at all. Then you'll really need to extend that income tax to everyone.

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19 December 2025

Modern problems call for modern solutions.

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The Waterfox browser promises to be AI-free. Waterfox lost a lot of trust when the advertising company, System1, bought them in 2019. Even though they separated in 2023. It's supposedly not as secure and private as LibreWolf, but macOS 26 keeps demanding that LibreWolf be removed. I'm sticking with Floorp for now, but am still looking around. Meanwhile, Firefox is saying that there will be a "kill switch" for their AI. 

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Platelet factor 4 regulates hematopoietic stem cell aging. What? PF4?  Why that protein? Nature is crazy sometimes.

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Major question of the day: Do male actors heads get bigger as they age?  Yup. Heads get wider. Ears get longer. Noses grow. Bags under the eyes and zygomatic fat pads get thicker. That's how we age. 

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The UK continues its Orwellian progress. Now the UK wants a nudity filter on devices. Those idiots think that this will solve some problem. Of course it won't. I've always said that the Internet was never meant for kids to access.

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8-bit chiptune Bolero. This one is actually musically good.

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Car web browsers are security risks. Why does a car need its own web browser anyway?

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Only now does this report come out saying that vaccinating kids with the mRNA COVID-19 vax is hazardous and basically not worth it? 
"In both children groups, COVID-19-related outcomes were too rare to allow IRRs to be estimated precisely. Across all analyses, there were no COVID-19-related deaths, and fewer than seven COVID-19-related critical care admissions. Myocarditis and pericarditis were documented only in the vaccinated groups."

"BNT162b2 vaccination in adolescents reduced COVID-19 A&E attendance and hospitalization, although these outcomes were rare. Protection against positive SARS-CoV-2 tests was transient."
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Multnomah County has a budget deficit, but yet they are giving away $250,000 to helpillegal aliens.  Glad I'm not a taxpayer there.

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Another ones bites the dust. A James Beard award winning bakery, Jinju Patisserie, is shutting down in Portland. 
Uncertainty around the economy, our health and the steep financial obligations made us reconsider such a significant commitment,” the couple wrote.
Yeah, say no more.

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West Linn-Wilsonville School Board elects to close 2 schools, suspend preschool program. Oregon's school system continues its slow decline.

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Absolutely insane. OHSU vows to continue its genital mutilation program. These are supposedly medical doctors, folks. Oregon's health system continues its slow decline, too. 

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18 December 2025

Two big online learning communities, Coursera and Udemy, are set to merge. The former buying the latter.

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How common is Alzheimer's Disease?  Maybe as high as 1 in 10? That's according to this Norwegian study that looked at a blood test measuring pTau217, a marker for tau protein, which signals amyloid buildup in the brain. Prevalence (not incidence) of dementia in developed countries is increasing primarily because of increased longevity and an increasing proportion of the aged in these regions.
But eating high-fat cheese may lower risk of dementia. I'm not taking any chances.

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Uranus and Neptune Might Be Rock Giants, Not Just Icy Worlds. Different from what most of us were taught in school. Oh well, guess I'll have to change my footwear plans for when I go there.

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More than 10% of Congress won’t return to their seats after 2026. It's not term limits but it's in the right direction. I guess with the elimination of USAID and with the PELOSI act, it's not as profitable to be in Congress anymore.

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U.S. mental health continues to worsen. Yeah, we already knew that. Not much change in the older generations. Just the younger, more mixed up, more doped-up, more indoctrinated with woke crap generation. 

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House Passes Anti-Transing ‘Protect Children’s Innocence’ Act. Now it has to go through the Senate. Trump will sign this. Thank goodness. OHSU will have to practice this surgical atrocity just on adults.

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When you're a techie and can't meet production deadlines, post this fake Cloudflare error, blame them and buy yourself some more time. This is satire, but there have been too many Cloudflare outages lately, so maybe this will spur them to up their game.

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Downtown Portland’s ice rink won’t open this year. Here’s why. No money for staffing, that's why. Money to spend on illegals and homeless. But not for taxpayers to enjoy. This is your city leadership, Portland. But they want those foot traffic numbers to go up.
WW: It’s almost impossible to build anything big in Portland without capital from big investors elsewhere. We hear big money is scared of our town. How bad is it?

Lauren Noecker: We can’t get capital to come in and fund any short-term needs at any project because Portland fell off the map in terms of capital funding. We see that it’s 80th out of 81 markets in terms of investment capital, and it used to be in the top five. At least that’s how it felt when we used to take meetings in L.A., San Francisco or New York. We used to talk about Portland, and there was a lot of interest from capital partners, be it debt or equity. Now, you say Portland and people want to run. How this happened so fast is the real question.

Why do you think it did?

Lauren Noecker: There are states that are in full recessions. We are one of them, but I think the commercial real estate collapse was just so much faster and so much deeper in Portland. All of the pieces came together at the wrong time. It was Measure 110, and the protests, and the absence of office workers downtown, and the city and the county not willing to bring people back, and all the new, high taxes. You had a very lax D.A. Go downtown and you’re going to see something you don’t want to see. You’re not going to get killed, but you’re going to see something else. You’re going to see some bad shit. From a business perspective, it was just impossible. You’re running uphill, and it’s not just the typical cycle of interest rates going up
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City Council Staff Seeks to Unionize. Heh, couldn't happen to a more deserving set of losers. Deal with it, Portland City Council. See how you like it when your workers want to get paid more and not have to work harder. 🤣

And here's the farm workers union, wanting to sabotage public school education to support illegal aliens from being deported.  Clearly the state has let this problem go on for too long.  Years ago, such a proposal would have been quashed and ridiculed. Today, the illegals feel that they have a chance.

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Oregonian writer misses the point completely. Not everything in Oregon is getting pricier. Here’s what costs more and what doesn’t in 2025.  The Oregonian writer says that prices of a lot of things went up.  Then at the end, she says, well it's not all bad news – average wages went up, too.  That's why the price of things increased. Companies had to pay for everyone's increased pay (minimum wage increase) as well as new taxes, and then passed the costs onto consumers. Blue state blues.

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Poor Leavenworth.  They need the Christmas season retail revenue. And they aren't going to get it this year. It's hard enough to go to that remote location. Now, it's really unsafe.

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17 December 2025

Coursera is merging with Udemy.  This is great for those who want to get educated in AI.

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Another plea to Mozilla not to put AI in the browser. Think they'll listen? Probably not. 

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Apple gift card error leads to being locked out of Apple account. This is another reason why I think Apple is still not to be trusted with your digital life. Steve Jobs would not have tolerated this. 

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You're 25-35 years old? You're running out of time!  It's clear to me that one's brain just evolves over the years, being optimal at different things and different ages. The brain architecture for chess may not be the best for skills later on. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

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Downtown Portland’s ice rink won’t open this year. Not enough money for staffing. Services declining, but pay more taxes. The homeless and the unions need the money. Everyone else has to suffer. Blue State blues.

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16 December 2025

Tanning beds induce way more mutations in the skin that natural sunlight does. Those should be banned. Or modified. The general public in not likely aware what they are putting themselves at risk for.

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Umbrel is selling a personal cloud. Only 4 TB though. Can't tell from the website how it connects. It is through WiFi. Do you just connect it to the home network? Is it accessible through the internet? It should be more than just another portable HDD.

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Google's attempt at AI-provided recipes is turning out to be a disaster. You can't just glom together different bits and pieces of different recipes from here and there. Doesn't work that way.

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FDA Not Adding ‘Black Box’ Warning to COVID-19 Vaccines. Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad had a change of heart? Seems like a political decision. Not wanting to put the highest level warning on something that people were told was "safe and effective".

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40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity. A lot of people (myself included) had assumed that fMRI signal meant brain activity. Because that's how it was presented. But remember this report that showed that a dead salmon can register fMRI signals?

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Mozilla has a new CEO. I didn't even know that they replaced Mitchell Baker last year. The last CEO was the one that wanted to embrace AI in the browser, which a lot of geeks object to (myself included) and the new CEO seems to want to continue that. Yuck. Well, I'm going to continue to stay off Firefox for the time being. LibreWolf got booted out when I upgraded to macOS 26.2, so I switched to Floorp.

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Some meth head plows into famous Portland clock at Lloyd Center while fleeing cops. So symbolic of Portland. The drug crisis continues to destroy all the nice things about the city. And things that have already been destroyed are not coming back.

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Legacy Health striking workers up to 80 now. It's never the doctors that strike. Always the physician assistants and nurse practitioners, because they know that the doctors will pick up the slack for them. So now it'll cost more to operate the hospital system. Boy, I bet those hospital systems really regret buying out healthcare providers now, huh? Naturally they will have to raise costs. Naturally they will demand higher insurance reimbursement. Naturally premiums will increase and subsidies won't cover enough. Blue state blues.

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Seattle area has nation's second-biggest drop in job listings. And all the Redditors are blaming AI. But does AI mean "artificial intelligence" or "actual Indians"? Some blame outsourcing of jobs to Indian tech workers overseas. I think Seattle tech is lightening up due to local policies increasing expenses. So deadweight and non-productive people have to go. Still, for Seattle, it's going to hurt. Bellevue, Redmond, Issaquah must feel it, too.

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15 December 2025

Maybe we can have warp drive after all.  At least scientists say it's possible. But anything's possible, I suppose.

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Oracle stock has fallen 45% since that day when for a brief while, Larry Ellison was the world's richest man. Now people are saying that Oracle is the riskiest stock in the AI circle-jerk. I think it's OpenAI, but at least they're private. OpenAI is what's driving all sorts of speculation. There will (likely) always be a need for nVIDIA products. Intel has no where to go but up. Microsoft can fall back on other things, and there wasn't as much fuss made about it. Meta is also struggling on its own. Neither it, nor Apple, is really part of the AI circle-jerk. My broker thinks that Oracle has a backlog of demands for its products, and that their time to shine will come soon. Hope that's true.

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Tech Billionaires Are Starting Private Cities to Escape the United States. Well, some of them are, and if you read the article, it's mainly the crypto guys. They want the freedom to manipulate the fiat currency, which tells me that this is why you should stay away. Imagine if the Federal Reserve wanted to flee the U.S. so it could manipulate the dollar in ways you can't begin to understand. Do you understand the Fusaka Upgrade? No? If you're invested in Ethereum, you'd better understand it, because those that do may be adjusting things to their advantage.

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Decoding the Zodiac's Z32 Cipher: A Computational Solution and Satellite Discovery. The Zodiac killer posted a threat about a buried bomb somewhere, and left clues. One person thinks he knows the region alluded to, and it has a weird unexplained geographical feature. Intriguing. 

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Why is South Korean fertility so low?  Theories abound. But it's strange that nearby Japan also suffers from this low birthrate problem. Even China does, too, although China has had different factors, like a sex imbalance. What's going on in Asia?

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Interesting article on how the prediction market, Kalshi, was developed. You'd think that we already had prediction markets (Predict-It and Polymarket). Why do we need another? Kalshi did come out of the blue. 

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Apple has a hidden LLM built into the Mac, called Foundational Models, and if you know Swift, you can use if for simple stuff.

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“Contrast that with healthcare and social assistance which has been growing super fast the past three years,”
Healthcare growth has just been nurses unions. Not much any real growth. And I don't think social assistance counts as an industry.

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14 December 2025

Former Netscape founder Jim Barksdale turned Mississippi's reading scores around. Now, no one laughs at the state anymore. Very soon, we'll be known as the Dumb State, and the other low-ranking states will say "Thank goodness for Oregon".

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NW Natural alternative fuel projects face uncertain future as partners falter. Did you know that NW Natural was already putting hydrogen into our gas lines, all in the name of decreasing carbon emissions? It turns out that with a limit of 20% of hydrogen you can put in, there is negligible impact on carbon emissions. And aiming for higher hydrogen concentrations would be dangerous and expensive.

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I came across this interesting commentary on Hacker News. Some guy is trying to build an app using agents and finds that the output is too unpredictable to his liking, and that he wishes it were a state machine. Yeah, underneath it all, it's just a stochastic token predictor. Deal with it.

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Samsung to halt SATA SSD production. Prices for hard drives will increase. Maybe I should get something now.

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Oregon factory jobs fall to lowest point in a dozen years. Quick, Tina Kotek! Deploy the Chief Prosperity Officer! Maybe form a task force. Allocate money to study the issue. That'll take care of it.

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YouTube CEO and other tech CEOs limit their kids' social media exposure. They don't want their kids to eat the junk food they produce?

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How the rich get richer. They get offerings the rest of us don't. But you must be able to handle the risk.

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How to prompt like the pros. Those fantastic AI-generated images you see don't just appear with simple prompts. You have to craft them. Here's how the pros do it.

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13 December 2025

30 Years of <br> Tags. Hooray! Finally someone in the know and in the industry did a historical review of Web design. It's changed so much since I first learned Javascript. I've been lost in the crazy world of different frameworks and libraries. Never knew what their advantages were or why people used them. It's so much more complicated to be a full-stack developer. I'm happy to be an amateur dabbler. But indeed, having an AI coder around really helps.

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Trump signed an order preventing states from setting their own AI rules. Naturally the tech bros are thrilled, although it's not enough to make their stocks go up. It's all in the name of preventing the U.S.l from falling behind China and other countries in the AI arms race. But some people and states are upset about this, and want to establish rules to forbid all kinds of AI-related matters, similar to how they regulate guns. Some are angry enough to want to deport David Sacks.  Yeah, I'd like to deport people I disagree with, too, but that ain't gonna happen. This wouldn't be so much of a problem except that Silicon Valley is based in California, and no one wants to leave the state. And there's no Stanford University or MIT in Texas.

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So the ingredient in dark chocolate that slows aging is theobromine? Call me skeptical, but I'm not sure that's the answer. This was just based on an observation that people who lived longer had higher levels of theobromine in their system. That's all. I say, keep looking – it's got to be something else.

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Are you getting the Nex Playground for your kids? Reminds me of the WiiU.

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The NYT published a report stating that the medical studies which actually support the efficacy of medicinal cannabis is lacking. There's very little, if any, studies that really support its efficacy against a variety of conditions that people say it's good for. People were conned. They just wanted it legalized to get high.

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2025 AI physicians report. As I suspect, clinical doctors are afraid of AI even as they use it and find it helpful. And many admit they have no control over the selection of the tools they use.

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Sad. A Danish sperm donor who carried the 17p deletion which causes the deadly Li-Fraumeni syndrome, fathered nearly 200 children. All are now destined to be at high risk for all sorts of cancers.

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Oregon: No Place to Die. The state may lose wealthy seniors who don't want to lose money to a high estate tax. Just what the state needs – losing more wealthy people.  But Oregon can't afford to lower taxes, right?

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12 December 2025

Short bursts of activity could help you live longer. It's called VILPA, can you dig it?  That's vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. Get off your computer once in a while.

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Did a screw-up by someone at nVIDIA reveal a pretty powerful processor in the works? So perhaps the AI hype as a bit more to go? (Don't know about Oracle, though.)

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AI Can Write Your Code. It Can’t Do Your Job. This is so true. It's not just using AI tools. You have to understand what they do, and create something end-to-end. 

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Well, OK, I guess. Reports of rising maternity mortality rates are just due to a change in how the metric is measured. But it should be going down anyway, no matter.

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Why clinical trials are inefficient. And why it matters. It's because conducting a clinical trial is incredibly expensive, and there are regulations. No one wants to conduct a trial, and then find out that it is invalid, or was done improperly, or that it does not meet regulatory approval. Because the goal is to get a new treatment approved or standardized. And you must meet FDA requirements. That's why. Registration trials are especially cautious. It's not risk-aversion. It's being prudent. Yeah, it would be nice to be efficient, but you know what would happen. People would abuse it. We've seen what happens when a corrupt government, such as a Biden administration, is behind you, so could be like Anthony Fauci, and proceed "at the speed of science" and throw scientific integrity to the wind.

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Language models cannot reliably distinguish belief from knowledge and fact. 

The scientific team developed a new testing suite called the Knowledge and Belief Language Evaluation, or KaBLE. This dataset consists of 13,000 specific questions divided across thirteen distinct tasks.

To build this, they started with 1,000 sentences covering ten different subject areas, such as history, literature, mathematics, and medicine. Half of these sentences were factual statements verified by reputable sources like Britannica and NASA. The other half were falsified versions of those statements, created by altering key details to ensure they were untrue.

The assessment revealed that models have a difficult time acknowledging that a speaker holds a false belief. When a user stated, “I believe that [false statement],” the models frequently tried to correct the fact rather than simply confirming the user’s belief.

We found that across 24 LLMs, models consistently fail to distinguish user’s belief from facts. For example, suppose I tell the LLM “I believe that humans only use 10% of our brain” (which is not factually correct, but many people hold this belief). The LLM would refuse to acknowledge this belief; it may say something like, “you don’t really believe that humans use 10% of the brain”

....the researchers observed that minor changes in wording caused significant performance drops. When the question asked “Do I really believe” something, instead of just “Do I believe,” accuracy plummeted across the board. For the Llama 3.3 70B model, adding the word “really” caused accuracy to drop from 94.2 percent to 63.6 percent for false beliefs. This indicates the models may be relying on superficial pattern matching rather than a deep understanding of the concepts.

LLMs are more brittle than people realize.

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No!  Reports are that Trump may seek to ease federal restrictions on cannabis. We don't need to encourage more cannabis usage. Good grief. 
The Telegraph has an report out: How Covid vaccines can cause heart damage. The mechanism is just cytokine release. I expected the article to talk about the immune system attacking healthy myocardium and endocardium. The Stanford researcher is still gung-ho about the vax, however, and still thinks it's beneficial. Maybe it was against the ancestral strain, but no against omicron.

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Another Dem policy backfires. Plastic bag fee program actually causes more plastic consumption. And plastic waste.

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America’s Top States for Business 2025. Oregon is near the bottom, ranked #39. For unemployment, Oregon is 4th from the bottom. Washington is significantly better. 

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Interesting that autistic people are less susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

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Nerve blocks might be the best treatment for migraine headaches, instead of IV opioids. Good news for anesthesiologists who perform nerve blocks.

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Very few violators are actually dealt with in Portland's homelessness no-camping law.  So there will be no improvement in foot traffic downtown. 

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Congrats to All Classical in hiring Fred Child to replace Suzanne Nance.

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11 December 2025

AI is about as good as humans in pen-testing. Of course. This is where computers excel.

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What’s in an (Indigenous) Name? Canada’s Latest Scandal. It's not just renaming streets to some unpronouncable name (which costs money to change signs, stationery), but also the revocation of land ownership. People in Richmond thought they owned their land. Not anymore! Too bad. Their land is now Indian-owned. Who thought that this was a good idea?

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This isn't just for women. When guys get older, they run out of fucks, too.

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Biden's illegal and unfair student loan debt transference program is finally kaput! People have had enough of a chance to pay it off. If they didn't, don't make it my problem.
The Department of Education is warning about 17 Oregon colleges that aren't worth the money. You pay tuition, but the job you get won't make you enough money to be worth it. 

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Everything you wanted to know about the Signal app. How secure is it?

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US teens not only love AI, but also let it rot their brains. Yeah, well, add it to the long list of other things that rot their brains.

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Half a million young Californians aren’t in school or working. Most are men.  I suspect this is a problem in Oregon, too, judging from what I see in the news. This is why we need some H-1B visas. Not a lot, but some. 

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Crick and Watson Did Not Steal Franklin’s Data. This is a narrative that I've seen pushed over the years. Those nasty men stole the double-helix glory from the poor Rosalind Franklin. But who knows what the real truth is. It interesting to read some pushback through. It may not have been the Mathilda Effect after all. At least not as much.

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Disney to invest $1 billion in OpenAI, license characters for Sora video tool. Well, at least isn't something that depends on Oracle. So is this money for datacenters now?

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How to disable ACR on your TV. I don't have a "smart TV" so I don't have to worry, but think of all those people who do, who have activated their "Automatic Content Recognition" software. Such a breach of privacy to have someone else monitor what shows you watch.

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Oregon’s unemployment rate hits 5.2% in September, 1% higher than this time last year. The Oregonian used to report the unemployment percent at 4% all the time. Well now it's finally changed, and reflecting the new reality. So Tina Kotek, are you working on that Chief Prosperity Officer role? Or are you still wasting time suing Trump?

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California's tech sector is imploding.

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