Sugoi & Yokunai

Sergey Brin is also leaving California due to the billionaire tax. Unclear how much of an impact it will be to California, but the more people that move out and establish another center of excellence the greater the chances that this will set off a cascade. Unfortunately, Stanford University, the source of all of the brain power and excellence, isn't moving. It's too late for the other billionaires who haven't made the move. The retroactive part of the law is the killer. 

––– 良くない–––

Do we emit light while we're alive? Sounds kinda like research that isn't going to be reproducible and will be forgotten later on.

––– 凄い –––

Are we on WiFi 8 already? My devices are still on WiFi 6E. I'd be happy with DOCSIS 4. When's that coming? Xfinity has been promising that since 2024 and it's not here yet.

––– 凄い –––

Collected Papers of Albert Einstein now available at Princeton. It'll cost you, though.

––– 凄い –––

This makes more sense. Long COVID may be fueled by inflammation and tiny clots. There may be some improvement with some of the medicinals discussed. And yeah, getting a vax booster did not help, contrary to earlier reports.

––– 良くない–––

Gemini-3-Flash is da bomb!  I've been impressed with the Gemini models. There is a preview model that has a free tier. That's the one I'm using.

––– 凄い –––

If you want to build personal agents, you don't need fancy platforms like N8N. It can be really simple with Claude and a Claude.md file which houses your instructions.

––– 凄い –––

Wow, amazing stuff you can build with just a few lines of javascript.

––– 凄い –––

Portland video journalist explores that ramifications of datacenter building in Hillsboro and North Plains. Seems like the civic leaders are trading short term gain for long term misery for citizens.

––– 良くない–––

Is America falling out of love with pizza? It's probably all the people on GLP-1 RA drugs.

––– 凄い –––

Man, is WHO chief Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus still in office? Haven't they kicked him out yet? Now he says that masks are ineffective. He wants respirators everywhere now. Yeah, fool me twice, will you?

––– 良くない–––

Apple Loses Safari Lead Designer to The Browser Company. What's going on at Apple? They're hemorrhaging people. Apple used to be the world's most valuable complany. Now Alphabet has surpassed Apple.  The company has no credible AI pathway forward. "Thinner with more pixels and emojis" isn't working anymore.  Tim Cook should step down. Enough already.

––– 良くない–––

People in Brazil are living past 110 and scientists want to know why. What's the secret to their longevity? Bad record keeping, too? Or is there really something to it?

––– 凄い –––

Interesting insights into LLMs: AI isn't just "predicting the next word" anymore. But is it truly capable of understanding?

––– 凄い –––

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Health. This is the reasoning behind it. All very noble-sounding, but the solution is not going to be what is being offered. Even Axios recognizes the privacy risk. And this article really nails it down. OpenAI doesn't really intend to replace the doctor. They really want your health records, despite what they say. It's not. a HIPAA covered entity like a real physician, so whatever you volunteer to give up is fair game to them. And it's telling that they don't offer this in Europe, where data privacy protection is strict. What does OpenAI have to hide that they can't meet European standards?

––– 良くない–––

Exercise may relieve depression as effectively as antidepressants. I've never experienced any kind of mood elevation after exercise. Just exhaustion and fatigue.

––– 良くない–––

Why sports stars who head the ball are much more likely to die of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease. Your brain is something you want to protect, as it determines more than any other organ, what kind of life you will lead. Alzheimer's disease? Parkinson's disease? If you can avoid it, why not do so?

––– 良くない–––

Familial natural short sleep. Wow, it's like a super power. Not needing as much sleep but not experiencing any ill effect. These people can probably clear their CSF of waste products more efficiently. And better memory, too! The data suggest that this is a polygenic phenotype, so inheritance is not simple. You just have to luck out.

––– 凄い –––

Japanese scientists have discovered a new large virus, the ushilkuvirus, which fortunately only attacks ameba. It sure has a pretty icosahedral shape, kinda like the head of the bacteriophage virus. 

––– 凄い –––

UCSD is really messed up.  How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission. In their desire to be a DEI school, they've really hurt the quality of what a university education is all about. It's no longer a bastion of advanced academic excellence. It's a vehicle for trying to force an fairy tale equality outcome on the hard realities of inequality.

––– 良くない–––

OHSU says they paused "gender-affirming" surgery for patients younger than 19. Note that they consider it "paused" and not discontinued. Monsters.

––– 良くない–––

Tina Kotek now wants to scrap the entire transportation tax bill. Some think it's because she wants to get rid of the good parts, but I think it's because the initiative is going to appear on the November ballot alongside her re-election bid. And it'll remind people what an awful governor she is.

––– 良くない–––

Portland's gas-powered leaf blower ban is now in effect.

––– 良くない–––

We've all been there.  "It usually starts quietly. A thought arises unexpectedly, linked to something unpleasant, and the body responds before before the mind can catch up. For persons who have experienced experienced trauma or anxiety, this pattern might continue for many years." Well it may be possible to erase the impact that bad memories have with a new technique that involves planting positive memories during sleep. It's a memory editor that awakens positive memories during sleep. Paper here. 

"participants learned associations between half of the words and additional positive images, creating interference. During the following non-rapid-eye-movement sleep, auditory memory cues were unobtrusively delivered."

Does it really work? Probably not that easy but it's an interesting insight.

––– 凄い –––

Larry Page is leaving California after all. Guess he doesn't like Democrat rule that he supported after all. Wherever you go, Larry, don't bring your Democrat votes with you.

––– 良くない–––

Will Kathleen Kennedy leave the Lucasfilm division of Disney? Oh, man. It's not too late.

––– 凄い –––

Woah. Microsoft OneDrive steals and deletes your files?

––– 良くない–––

The Ralph Wiggum plug-in apparently makes your code much better.

––– 凄い –––

Oregon quietly registered non-citizens to vote — and only now admits the mess. That was a feature, not a bug.

––– 良くない–––

Oregon economist paints mixed 2026 outlook:

In terms of employment, Riccadonna said jobs are increasing in the health care and service sectors but declining in construction and manufacturing. 

Yeah, more jobs are going to sectors that require subsidies to thrive. For those jobs that actually make money, we're not seeing jobs.

––– 良くない–––

Dramatic drop in Stack Overflow questions as devs look elsewhere for help. StackOverflow is like Chegg now.  At one time, we put up with all the lousy posted answers, because that's all we had to work with. Now, those days are gone.

Here's a viewpoint by a former StackOverflow user.

––– 良くない–––

Transcranial electrical brain stimulation to treat depression has hit the mainstream. A device for home use is now FDA-approved. This is good because mental health ratings in the U.S. hit historic lows. 

I thought about this in reading that Sen Ron Wyden is in support of rescheduling cannabis to a Schedule III drug. 

––– 凄い –––

Trump Cannot Slash NIH Research Funding. As I recall, the two issues were grant funding for DEI-related projects. Under the Biden administration, including woke language was done to increase chances of getting funded, because that's what lefty grant reviewers were looking for. Of course, such verbiage is now a liability under Trump. The second issue was the high percentage of indirect costs which universities were taking to put into their slush fund. The argument about using endowment money was likely a suggestion, not a contingency to justify the decrease in funding. But I do agree that cutting back on science grant funding should be a last resort. Researchers can't help it if Democrats run the show sometimes while Republicans run it at other times. You gotta go with the flow. And they can't control indirect cost requirements either. Trump should continue funding science and focus on the much greater fraud that's going on. That will save us money!

Update (8 Jan 2026): Appeals court says that OHSU must be paid NIH money.  The 56% indirect cost figure is obscene. This is what the Trump Administration has been arguing, and rightly so. That's just abuse and indirectly hurts researchers, who end up getting penalized by working at universities which demand so much. 

––– 凄い –––

Don't wait until the last day. USPS is now postmarking letters and packages based on when they are processed at a mail facility, not when they are dropped in a box -- meaning something mailed on deadline day could receive a next‑day postmark. You can always go in and have a postal worker timestamp it for you, though.

––– 良くない–––

I just learned that in Washington state, it's a misdemeanor crime to knowingly give someone a cold and also to knowingly expose yourself to a sick person to get a cold. Gee, was there some kind of work-avoidance scam going on, or something?

––– 凄い –––

Washington has the lowest business survival rate in the nation. Wow, worse than Oregon. And it's probably due to stuff like this: Seattle in freefall under hyperwoke mayor as new order allows drug users to avoid prosecution... with homeless encampments growing in city. Mayor Katie Wilson is in competition with Mayor Zohran Mamdani to be the most incompetent and destructive mayor of a major American city.

––– 良くない–––

Lawmakers call to help secure rural health funding. 2026 is really when we see the socialist model destroying the healthcare infrastructure. So much of healthcare has depended on federal government subsidies which only serves to drive up costs. When vendors know that the customer has really deep pockets, costs of everything goes up, and that's what's been happening. Now more of the country is on poorly-reimbursed Medicaid programs and nurses and hospital staff are more expensive to afford. Rural hospitals are the most vulnerable and are the canary in the coal mine. We need a complete overhaul.

––– 良くない–––

I saw this report on Fox Business and almost spit my coffee. Apparently Oregon tops the nation in "highest percentage of in-migration" which is 65%. Wow!  The place where people were heading, though, was Eugene-Springfield. Huh? The reasons for in-migration were "tech and healthcare". Well there is no tech sector in that area - certainly not enough to move the needle.  There is healthcare, but only one hospital in Eugene and a few clinics. PeaceHealth is the largest employer there and McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center is in Springfield nearby. Another large employer is University of Oregon, and so maybe it's more educational administrative bloat and union hires. Then there are the school districts - more union hires. It's not really healthy that the biggest employers in the state are hospitals and schools. These don't make money like businesses, and all rely ultimately on government subsidies. Even in Portland, the largest employers have been OHSU and Providence.

Yeah I see that Optum needs physicians in Corvallis and Eugene. 

––– 凄い –––

Jaana Dogan, Google Gemini's tech chief, confesses that rival Anthropic's Claude was able to generate code for software that accomplished much of what her team had been working on for over a year.  It's refreshing to read someone's candid assessment of the state of GenAI and implications for the tech sector. It's amazing but also sobering. 

––– 凄い –––

Polymarket has a new worry. Apparently three possible insider bets predicted Maduro's downfall this past weekend. If the predictions market is open to insiders, what does it mean for the platform? They may have to make some hefty payouts someday. I predict there are going to be some new rules on bets you can place.

––– 凄い –––

Biotech company, Cidara, thinks they have a universal influenza vaccine, which targets CD388. This certainly beats the WHO's cumbersome existing method of convening representatives from different countries and voting on what antigens to target. Such an unwieldy system.

––– 凄い –––

Now this is what AI was made for – decoding your cat's meow. We can have stuff like this until model API key subscriptions costs become more expensive. For now, enjoy!

––– 凄い –––

Not good.  40 million people turn to ChatGPT for health care every day. Not the right tool for that purpose, but for most people it's good enough, I suppose.

––– 良くない–––

‘Moral injury’ is now officially recognized as mental health condition. Oh well, another excuse to stay home from work. We are such a weak society. It's a good thing WWII happened when it did. If it happened today, we'd lose.

––– 良くない––– The Oregonian editorial board wants to make 2026 the year of Oregon's comeback. I chuckled at this statement: "Oregonians should carefully consider candidates’ records and demonstrated competence when they vote." No, Oregonians just look for the "D" and vote for that.

––– 良くない–––

The LLM you use to get your news and assess legality can be biased more than you might think. Another reason why one shouldn't make legal decisions just based on what a GenAI model says.

––– 良くない–––The memes were right. Here are Democrats in Portland defending the former dictatorship in Venezuela. Looks like No Kings policy is not for Venezuelans. If Trump were to cure cancer, the Democrats would be for it.

Download OI0JPHuE90p8dlLF.mp4

––– 良くない–––

The successful Venezuelan take down of Maduro has given new hope to Iranian protestors.

––– 凄い –––

Having had a C-section increases risk of a rare condition called placenta accreta spectrum, where the placenta does not detach from the uterine wall upon delivery. One more thing that obsteticians need to be concerned about.

––– 良くない–––

Looks like hominids were walking upright as far back as 7 million years ago. This implies that the evolution of modern man took place over a longer period of time. Walking upright frees the hands, and promotes the development of the opposable thumb and the ability to build things.

––– 凄い –––

CMS is going to propose a new health insurance paradigm for Medicare, promoting preventive measures to improve health. This would be great if it allowed one to save money. They're calling it MAHA ELEVATE.

––– 凄い –––

Someone created a model called Pocket Brain which allows one to use LLMs even offline without an Internet connection. I don't see how this is different from using a local open source model, likle Ollama which can already do that. I do this all the time. No need to download an app for this.

––– 凄い –––

Sort of a nice problem to have. Japan has a problem that so much money and real-estate that is held by the elderly with symptoms of cognitive decline, who don't have the resources to manage their money and avoid being scammed. It'll be around $5 trillion USD worth of assets. It's spawning a new industry. One has to be very sensitive about this, of course.

––– 良くない–––

Could mass just derive from hidden dimensions? Physicists are still pondering stuff like this. Wonder what Sabine Hossenfelder has to say.

––– 良くない–––

Bluesky is not living up to Lefty hopes. It's full of anti-Trump hatred and identity politics. Anyone would just get sick of it after a while. Just a miasma of hate and nothing constructive to offer.

––– 良くない–––

Big day today, after the removal of Maduro yesterday. Kurt Schlichter sums up how big this impacts global affairs. China may be especially hard hit.

And this is so funny!

Download ddZjbs5og46XnMJv.mp4

––– 凄い –––

That's a good thing. New privacy laws take effect in California. I've been using DeleteMe for a long time. Works great.

––– 凄い –––

So is Jony Ive and OpenAI working on a pen? I don't think I'd be using it much, then.

––– 良くない–––

S. Korean team develops AI model for 'customized' cancer vaccine. Article is light on the details. Could be promising, but I'd have to know what the delivery system is and what the payload is, too. No mRNA vax for me.

––– 凄い –––

CHIP is still a mysterious condition that seems to be a consequence of getting older. The causes have been unclear. But now it seems that a specific genetic variant that lowers levels of a protein called Musashi2, or MSI2, seemed to be less likely to develop myeloid cancers. Maybe this will eventually get to the root cause.

––– 凄い –––

Wow! Scientists are buiding real-life tractor beams.

––– 凄い –––

This is an old article, but it's good to know which LLMs are able to recognize people in images and are not afraid to say so. Look to the Gemini models for answers. Because sometimes this ronin has a bit of prosopagnosia.

––– 凄い –––

It's interesting how one doctor (presumably) is so against the belief that lowering cholesterol with statins is a big sham, while another doctor is a firm believe in statins. I tend to believe the latter doctor, because the former doctor made some statements that are clearly wrong, like treating hypertension should be reconsidered since the reason blood pressure is high is the body's way to pump blood through narrowed arteries. That's clearly insane because you can observe hypertension in patients without much atherosclerotic disease, and it doesn't taken into account hormonal factors (e.g. renin-angiotensin or aldosterone disorders) and that hypertension can result is reflex arterial constriction to prevent damage from the excessive pressure.

––– 凄い –––

Stack Overflow is changing, to try to adapt to their falling viewership. They're trying to get people to come back by turning it into a lounge for geeks. Will they leave Discord for the new StackOverflow. I think it's been confusing to have both StackExchange and StackOverflow. I could never figure out which one had the better answers. In the era of really good LLMs who will fix your coding problems and explain stuff to you right away, it's a hard ask to get people to come back.

––– 良くない–––

Crazy. ‘Chinese Peptides’ Are the Latest Biohacking Trend in the Tech World. So injecting yourself with unknown and poorly-understood products from China are thing now among techies. All to get that special advantage. It's wild what people are willing to do to themselves.

––– 良くない–––

By blocking a protein called 15-PGDH, researchers at Stanford were able to get cartilage to grow back in aging mice.

––– 凄い –––

The Trump administration has given Oregon a significant amount of money with a goal of improving health care in rural areas, potentially including Baker County.  About $197.3 million for 2026, and the state could get a similar amount for each of the following four years. But the money has to go through the Oregon Health Authority, instead of directly through the hospital. So who knows how much money will actually be spent to fix things in Baker County?

––– 凄い –––

Yikes! Someone created a website that purports to explain your cancer medical reports to you using AI. To use it, you have to upload your medical reports. To a complete stranger. That you know nothing about. Facepalm. 🤦🏻‍♂️

––– 良くない–––

Wow. After a woman is pregnant, some of the cells from the baby's placenta break off and can stay in the mother's body for a long time. These cells may engender an autoimmune reaction, but the fact that they can persist may be of some comfort to some women, knowing that a part of their child (and its father) will always be there with her. Another reason to terminate a pregnancy due to rape ASAP, though.

––– 凄い –––

The incidence of autism as it has originally been understood, has not increased. What has changed is the inclusion of people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates in the category. Until a clear genetic underpinning is identified, there will always be this confusion. Genius is not really autism. 

Exceptionally gifted children can experience disadvantages in their social development, and that could lead to personal interaction problems in adulthood. It's tough to be the smart kid.

––– 良くない–––

More on the billionaire flight out of California. The state is about to enter the Find-Out stage of things.

––– 良くない–––

A comment on the Somali fraud case. Why the interest only now? The fraud's been going on for years! Long past time to do something.

––– 良くない–––

Sometimes just sitting and doing nothing for 30 minutes is just as good as mediation.  The key is constant focusing on the breath and getting the mind back on doing so. The more you do it, the easier it gets, but it's not supposed take effort.

––– 凄い –––

There's a deep sea yellow brick road just north of the Hawaiian Islands. Weird how it just formed there like that.

––– 凄い –––

Waste of money.

––– 良くない–––

$3.99 and worth every penny.

––– 凄い –––

Happy New Year!

––– 凄い –––

Most Americans didn't read many books in 2025. And it shows.

––– 良くない–––

Altered brain tissue microstructure and neurochemical profiles in long COVID and recovered COVID-19 individuals: A multimodal MRI study. Yikes! This is the first study of its kind that I've seen. So there are differences in the tissue microstructure and brain neurochemical levels between LongCOVID sufferers and COVID-recovered individuals. It would have been nice to know if those with LongCOVID got the vax, but since this is an Australian study, it's safe to say that the vast majority of these subjects did. Really too bad.

––– 良くない–––

The California Billionaires Tax explained. What a rip-off this is. Imagine knowing that California's government, finally learning that Margaret Thatcher's famous statement was true, have now resorted to theft. Some of the tech wealthy have left. Peter Thiel has reportedly set up an office in Miami, FL on 25 December, so as to avoid the retroactive reach of the law. It's actually just deserts for folks like Larry Page, who used Google to try to make Donald Trump lose the election. How you like Democrats now, Larry? And this is a one-time tax, they say. In a few months, it'll be spent, and the state will be back to the same position it was. But Larry and his fellow billionaires will still be poorer. 

––– 良くない–––

52 bits of trivia. I didn't know about Apple's sneakiness. Heh.

––– 凄い –––

Yeah I've noticed this. Web browser developers have stopped blocking popups. This browser extension has really helped, though.

––– 良くない–––

Could we have room-temperature superconductivity? Maybe, if this discovery holds up.

––– 凄い –––

"That student was convinced that having a diploma would actually hurt his chances of getting funded." Being a college dropout is now considered cool when you want to get investments for a startup.  Crazy times.

––– 良くない–––

Jeff Bezos is so rich that when he moved from Seattle to Miami, it shook Washington’s entire budget; now, the Evergreen State has $1 billion less to spend on K–12 education and childcare. And of course, Redditors think he should be paying his fair share, whatever that means.  Guess he paid enough so that his departure is having FAFO ramifications for Washington state.

––– 良くない–––

Happy New Year's Eve!
We made it.

––– 凄い –––

AI showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be ready to pull plug, says David Bengio. This is actually old news, and people have been talking about this for some time. I'm actually involved in a research study that will hopefully shed some light on this. Can't say much more now.

––– 良くない–––

How Easy It Is to Steal Your Data with a Chrome Extension. It's not just AI chat conversations that can be stolen, but any information that is typed in when a malicious Chrome extension is active. This is another reason (and a good one) not to use the Chrome browser. Use something else!

––– 良くない–––

You Fund This. The creator of the Gab chat app created this lookup tool. You can see what your tax dollars are supporting. Andrew Torba recently announced it in response to the incredible Somali fraud scandal.

––– 凄い –––

Over 50% of Heart Attacks in Younger Women Aren't From Clogged Arteries. So if it's not just atherosclerotic plaque in many cases, then what is it from? Well there still is atherosclerotic thrombosis as a cause (47%), but it turns out that there's a lot of supply-demand mismatch, where there isn't enough blood flow to areas with high demand (34%). This is like in the lung, where ventilation-perfusion mismatch can drop your blood oxygenation capacity significantly. Men can have this, too, but not as much. There there are spontaneous intimal dissections of the coronary arterry endothelium that happens way more in women. Why is that? No one knows.

––– 良くない–––

Congrats to the hard workers who collected signatures to put the gas tax initiative on the ballot next November. Until then, there are no taxes, but the rumor is that Kotek and the Dems are convening to try to ramrod something else.

––– 凄い –––