Sugoi & Yokunai

Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt warns against homicidal AI robots. But yet, people will press on, because the Moloch effect is too strong.

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Trump knows he won't get the Nobel Peace Prize today. But whoever gets it is going to look awfully lame compared to Trump, and it will be so obvious that it was a political snub. Like Melania Trump not being on the cover of Vogue, but Michelle Obama was. C'mon. Einstein didn't get the Nobel Prize for his theories of relativity because the Nobel committee was anti-semitic. They finally had to give it to him for something, and so they picked the photoelectric effect, which is a lame excuse. Same thing here. So who will get it this year? Greta Thunberg? Are they going to give a joint award to al-Haddad and Netanyahu and leave Trump and Kushner out of it? Whatever it is, it will likely be a big joke, and no wonder the Norwegian government is preparing for a backlash.

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Another attempt to use AI to replace doctors falls flat. Forward AI bites the dust.

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Someone really likes the new Logitech MX Master 4. I've ordered one – it's on its way.

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Which cars get pooped on the most by birds? Turns out that it's not random. Ram truck and Jeeps are their favorites. They love to drop on brown, black and red cars. Silver cars have the least poop.

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Now there's a device that provides electrical assistance to walking.  I suppose it has its uses, especially in helping the elderly or disabled to walk again.

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Scientist claim to have developed a test for ME/CFS.  

they said the test had a sensitivity – or the likelihood of a test being positive if that patient has the condition – of 92%. It had a specificity – the probability the test will rule out negative cases – of 98%.

Impressive. Let's see how well it holds up against new cases.

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Even the Bank of England is worried about the OpenAI circle-jerk.

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Yup. Legalizing weed was a bad idea. But it's probably impossible to put the toothpaste back into the tube.

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Frog.cc looks interesting. I haven't tried it out. Looks more gimmicky than something actually useful. In my experience, developing a really useful and interesting app takes a lot of massaging and editing. This is just an interface that has a lot of the helpful prompts already in place.

I understand this. AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better, researchers discover. Just a few years ago, we thought ChatGPT was magical. Now, it's "meh". We are so quickly jaded. But yeah, we can see the flaws and limitations now. I think AI is too overextended and doesn't live up to some of the hype. 
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This is cool.  Scientists Just Reversed Alzheimer’s in Mice. They developed nanoparticles that acted on the blood-brain barrier, activating a feedback mechanism that enhanced a clearance pathway that reduced amyloid accumulation. Paper here.

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Cocoa extract can reduce markers of chronic inflammation. This study didn't show any other endpoints, however. Still, it supports other studies in favor of cocoa flavonols. This made me look up CocoaVia and I see they're still in business. I tried them once for a few months, and didn't notice any difference and stopped. Supposedly measurable benefits can be seen in a few weeks. Maybe I was just too young to notice a difference back then.

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Portland grocery stores are locking up Top Ramen because of the "bottom quintile" people. We live in a city where we can't have nice things. 

And speaking of Portland, WWeek published some of the Peacock messages that the city council chatted on recently. The city council members think that the crash in housing and property prices in the city is a good thing, because they thought the prices were too high to begin with. And also, it presents a "buying opportunity" for the city. Yeah, forget that it makes a lot of peoples' mortgages underwater, not to mention investors, and it discourages investment. They still need to collect rent to make it all pencil out. Since when is debasing people's assets a good thing. Plus, the city has no business trying to buy property. Just manage the city for pete's sake. This attitude is basically why they think nothing of trashing the city with homeless shelters and deflection centers and detox centers, not to mention graffiti and trash.

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There's an AI Agent craze right now. Everybody has a course to teach it. Let an AI Agent take control of your computer and do things autonomously. What could go wrong? Well at last, someone is sounding the alarm.  Not so fast. Security measures aren't always in place, and these things could do a lot of harm, and cause a great deal of embarrassement. This is why I refuse to use AI browsers just yet.

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Wow, OHSU's Lawrence Furnstahl will depart in a month and a half. They're going to have to find someone else willing to take on OHSU's financial problems. Either they promote from within, or try to convince some poor slob to move to Portland. Good luck with that.

Portland Opera is facing the same difficulty. Their general manager is retiring. I haven't been to Portland Opera at all – no compelling reason. I want to see the extravagant, classical shows like I saw in San Francisco. Not modern, urban re-interpretations for hipster audiences. Call me old-fashioned.

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Even the Washington Post admits that Obamacare was never affordable. It's a socialist money-sink that depends on subsidies to operate. Trump is correct in letting it slide, but needs to put something in place that people can latch onto. This is something that was missing even with his 2017 effort.

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Timberline Lodge ticket prices will soar as insurance costs increase 586%. Holy crap!  What will the Dems blame this on? Trump's tariffs? Climate change? Palestine? Russian interference?

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When you see PISA test scores, you generally only see country-level rankings, but never a breakdown. It turns out that America's Asians outperform other Asians, and America's Whites outperform other Whites.

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Horrible, if true.

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$2 Trillion in Potential Shutdown Savings if Trump, Vought Step Up. Wow, if the Dems don't acquiesce soon, the country could save a lot of money trimming the fat.

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The Biggest Names in Tech Can't Build the AI Device You Won't Want to Buy. Heh, I didn't have to click the article to know what it was about. I agree – Jony Ive's new device is likely to join the ranks of Google Glass, Rabbit R1, Friend, and the Segway. Prove me wrong, Jony! 

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First CAR-T cells, now CAR-NK cells. I've always considered the NK cells to be the real bad boys. The trouble is, they were selective in who they targeted, and it was tough to motivate them to kill things that needed killing. But perhaps not anymore.

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Scientists discover neurons that are activated when it's time to make decisions. When the situation is uncertain, these neurons turn on, and are believed to help with the decision-making process somehow. It looks like these neurons help keep track of what decision was a good one or not, by providing the appropriate reward signal. Perhaps there is a condition associated with not having enough of these cells.

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Another reminder – ChatGPT is not private. They confirmed that the Pacific Palisades arson was the right guy not only by checking is online searches but also ChatGPT.

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It looks like the eastern part of many cities is the poor side.  Seattle is an anomaly – the eastern part has Laurelhurst and Madison Park, and if you go further east you get Bellevue and Redmond. If you go west, you get West Seattle, Queen Anne and Ballard. Only near the water do you see some affluence again in Magnolia, but even so, it's just a wee bit better. You still get the homeless around Golden Gardens and Carkeek Park and Blue Ridge ain't that nice either.  So why is this? The article presents a theory.

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CSS has 42 units now. Wow, who knew?  I learned something today.

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Holy crap! Looks like it's going to get a lot more expensive to use ambulance services in Washington County. 30% higher!

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AMD stock skyrockets 23% as OpenAI takes 10% stake. Man, OpenAI is making everybody rich, it seems. Hope this lasts.

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Avoiding Google is really difficult. You may choose not to use Google products, but when you interact with someone who uses Google, then Google finds out anyway.

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Yeah, I remember when reading immunology papers, suddenly I started seeing mentions of T-reg cells. T-regs weren't mentioned in the immunology textbook I read in the 1990s. Because that was before 2001 and the Foxp3 paper. Even so, it took a few years before the new name started to catch on. That's what this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine is all about – how T-reg cells came to be recognized.

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Invasion of privacy. Amazon's Ring system will start to use face recognition.

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OpenAI Sneezes, and Software Firms Catch a Cold. Geez, if OpenAI even looks like it might develop an app that does something similar to what you do, your stock may tank. People need to dial it back.

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Gifted children are special needs children. It's interesting that Blue state leaders are so quick to dismiss programs for the gifted, like Washington, California and now New York. And that it's Asians that suffer for it. And yet most Asians support Democrats. A political party can bomb Japan and put Japanese in internment camps, and still they vote Democrat. Make it make sense.

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GPT-5 Pro is out, and boy is it expensive!  I see that it's been added to Poe, and I'm eager to try it out on some tough problem, like a coding problem that lesser models get stuck on.

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There's going to be a Texas Stock Exchange. Y'all Street. Love it.

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Here's a guy who had the genetic mutation to get Alzheimer's disease, but he hasn't gotten it – so far. The mystery is – why not? Was it something he did? Or is the genetics wrong?

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The intrepid Kevin Dahlgren illustrates why providing housing isn't going to solve the homeless problem.

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Shocking if true. No one else is talking about this. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation might be eliminated due to the government shutdown. This is the entity that rescues failing pension programs. Like PERS. If it is eliminated, or turned over to the states, then a lot of union pensions will be in jeopardy. All those nice pensions that they negotiated for themselves could disappear. The taxpayer would no longer be on the hook for their fat retirement pensions. If money runs out, it runs out. 

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Tonight is a supermoon night.  And the skies should be clear.  😁

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This article reveals that as with Google search, what you type into ChatGPT can come back to bite you. It's not private at all.

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The Nobel Prize in Medicine was announced today, and what I notice is that two of the winners were not in academics, but in industry. Well, the Institute for Systems Biology is a non-profit research organization, co-founded by Leroy Hood who left University of Washington, along with Roger Perlmutter. Only Sakaguchi was an academic.

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Could Mark Gurman be Apple's next CEO?

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WiFi signals can detect heartbeats. This is amazing, and may aid in rescue operations, if you can detect a heartbeat even though the person isn't in direct visual range. Or the military can use it to detect hidden dangers.

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GPT-5 Pro solved two dificult math problems: Yu Tsumura’s 554th Problem and Disproving Majority Optimality.  I would love to play with GPT-5 Pro.

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This Seattle Times reporter thinks people should offer the homeless shelter where they live.  Well the owner of the Civic Hotel wanted to help out the city of Seattle but letting the homeless stay in the hotel. Well, guess what happened?  Now the hotel is ruined with meth and fentanyl residue, and the city is dragging their feet in addressing the situation. More on the story here. The hotel was pretty nice, and now it's trashed. Too bad. 

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This is what happens when you leave food for the homeless.

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Northern lights may get stronger in the  n ext two years as the sun enters a turbulent decline. Maybe I'll finally be able to see the aurora visually from my home in the Pacific Northwest, instead of just the photographic ones where people set their cameras to long exposure and see some green and purple on the horizon. That doesn't count for me.

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Jeff Bezos does think AI is in a bubble, but says not to worry. If you're not heavily invested in AI, sure, not to worry. OK, Jeff, if you say so. 

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What's going with Hillsboro?. First, it's become a datacenter dumping ground. Now it's the potential site of a lithium battery BESS. If you don't know what a BESS is, you should read up on it, especially if you live near where NW West Union Rd and Cornelius Pass Road intersect. Wow, could be a disaster for property values. And worse if the BESS catches fire. Who thought it was a good idea to locate it there?

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AI copyright conundrum.  Who owns what when AI creates something?  Especially if it's derivative. One thing that I got out of this article: save your prompts, because that may be the critical factor deciding whether you are infringing or not. OpenAI better worry about this with Sora2. I think OpenAI made a mistake releasing to the public without restrictions. This is what's causing the headache. Perhaps it would be better if they licensed it or restricted its use, and made it a paid model.

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When I was a student, I was taught that the background cosmic radio wave background was isotropic. Turns out, that's not the case. And there's a odd streak that cannot be explained. It's colder on one side and hotter on the other.

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Gone are the days when working in a Silicon Valley company made you rich. Those techies are struggling as much as everyone else. Must be hard when you see all that wealth around you. Remnants of the old dotcom years.

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Even after all these years, saturated fats can't be blamed for cardiovascular disease. Restricting it didn't make any difference in preventing cardiovascular disease or reducing mortality.

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Wow, this is unexpected.  Having a glioblastoma brain tumor causes changes in the skull and the bone marrow immune cells. That's wild. How do these changes come about? 

That could explain why checkpoint inhibitors don't work well for high-grade brain gliomas.

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Going through the menstrual cycle "exert(s) powerful behavioral, structural, and functional effects through actions on the mammalian central nervous system".  This is something men have always suspected was true. 😉

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If your Lyft driver spews progressive political crap on your during the ride, and you complain to Lyft, don't be surprised if you can't use Lyft again.  

But don't worry, Gavin Newsom just signed a law giving Lyft and Uber drivers the ability to unionize. So, don't be surprised if both companies pull out of California.

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Seattle Times uses the Democrat line that it's Trump's tariffs that are making it different for business to survive. No, it's not the tariffs. It's the high taxes, high minimum wages, and high energy costs that are raising the prices of everything. 

Portland is seeing this too, with the disappearance of low-cost jobs. Only higher cost jobs have increased, because with minimum wage increases, everyone's pay increases. But that doesn't mean it's good for the local economy.

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EZH2 inhibitors may halt triple negative breast cancer spread. Tazemetostat is already approved for the treatment of follicular lymphomas, so if it works to inhibit metastatic spread of triple-negative breast cancer, it would be easy to implement.

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Up to Date is going to implement a chat query interface to their electronic text book. What took them so long? This is going to cut into OpenEvidence's market. Competition is good.

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Japanese scientists think they know the secret to the Venus Fly Trap's rapid trigger mechanism. It's way more complicated than I though. These plants can count the number of hairs that are touched, for one thing.

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OpenAI’s H1 2025: $4.3b in income, $13.5b in loss. Is this really true? How can they operate like this? Smells like the dotcom era, when people ignored reality because there was a promise of great wealth that could be generated somehow.

Speaking of OpenAI, it's LLMs are caste-biased when it comes to Indian people. Now more Indians are entering tech, but they can't leave behind all the caste baggage from the old country.

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Pathetic.  Downtown Portland businesses have to leave signs that fake support for BLM and Antifa so they won't get vandalized. The contumacious run the city. Citizens just suffer in silence.

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Wells Fargo is laying off 50 from its downtown office. In typical fashion, the media doesn't report why. Probably didn't even ask.

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One in six Oregonians use SNAP. Didn't realize it was that high. The national average is only 1 in 8. Oregon has the 4th highest SNAP usage in the nation. But with the new changes, that will lessen. A lot of people won't qualify anymore. Gotta start earning your money now.

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Why iRobot’s founder won’t go within 10 feet of today’s walking robots.

"My advice to people is to not come closer than 3 meters to a full-size walking robot," Rodney Brooks writes in a technical essay titled "Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity" published on his blog last week.

He would know.

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OpenAI's new Sora2 makes it so that you can't trust any video anymore. To demonstrate, they created a fake video of Sam Altman getting arrested for shoplifting.

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AI causes reduction in users’ brain activity.  Well, I kinda already knew that, but this caught my eye:

Gallup Poll: Americans' Trust in Media at Record Low.  Because the mainstream media no longer just presents the news. It presents opinionated viewpoints on select news topics. For example, watch this interview with Dana Bash. Her lack of objectivity is so obvious.

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Lesbian couples have a high divorce rate – 41% of female couples had divorced within ten years, compared to 27% of male couples and 22% of different-sex couples. At least in Finland, where the study was conducted. Why is that?

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Wow. The Arc spacecraft aims to deliver cargo anywhere in the world in an hour.  Our planet just became smaller.

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Blocking a protein called Ant2 makes T-cells more effective in anticancer cell therapy.  Paper here. Apparently inactivating Ant2 normally inhibits ATP synthase activity and NAD+ regeneration. But Ant2 knockout mice bypassed this roadblock, which led to increased mitobiogenesis and anabolism. So blocking Ant2 led to improved adoptive T-cell therapy.

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I keep reading about all these breakthroughs in extending the capacity of EV batteries, but these never seem to make it to the market. When are we going to see practical EVs?

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And here's another breakthrough regarding solar panels. An organic semiconductor film greatly improves charge efficiency. It would be nice not to have to blight our landscape with ugly solar panels. Let's put these in action instead of them just being in the research lab. We're never going to have access to this tech if we buy all our solar from China. 

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Perplexity's Comet browser is free to everyone now. I still don't trust AI browsers, and am going to wait this out. I think these are way to intrusive. Why give up security and privacy just so that a browser can schedule your next plane reservation for you, or summarize the websites you browse?

And already there's a security risk with a name: Cometjacking.

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Yup. This is indeed Portland – the city of childless hipsters. That's why they all think Portland is safe. It's just that the destruction isn't complete. Take a look at this statistic: Metro Portland Office Vacancy Rate Hit Record 26.6% in Third Quarter. Wow, there's so little business activity in the city. So what with the mayor and the city council do to keep maintain the revenue stream? Guess.

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And in Seattle, homeless encampments are up in record numbers.

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The Army has developed a weapon that flies like a drone in the beginning, but once it sights its target, it turns into a missile. What a nightmare of a weapon.

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Taiwan isn't going to move chip fabrication to the U.S.  And why would they?

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So many Portland bars are closing recently. Here are some recent ones. It feels like during the Obama years, when the only establishments that thrived were strip joints, tattoo parlors and cannabis stores. But now, even cannabis stores aren't thriving.

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Irony lost. Portland-area artists invited to turn garbage into masterpieces. Plenty of material to work with, that's for sure.

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Oura Ring is going to partner with the Pentagon. It's going to be a War Department wearable. That's turning a lot of people off, but it's turning me on, actually. I toyed with the idea of getting one, but the subscription put me off. I wasn't convinced it was that good, but if the military thinks it's good, then perhaps it's worth a look.

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As Jane Goodall passes way, we also say goodbye to the myth we all learned years ago that the genetic makeup of humans and chimps differs by only 1%.  Not true. More like 14% to 15%.

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Work is not school. This is so true:

Managers will claim they are, and we want to believe them. But the reality is that the best don’t always rise. At least not as easily or automatically as we think they should.

Sometimes they do. But often, what gets rewarded isn’t performance but proximity to power, timing, perception, and political usefulness.

I didn't learn this until too late. It's who you know, not what you know. And as Trump always said, "presentation matters".

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Oh my God. Scientists make embryos from human skin DNA for first time. 

Antonio Gramsci was right: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

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Here's Why the Apple Watch and Mac Mini Are No Longer Advertised as 'Carbon Neutral'.  Who TF cares?

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Anti-Aging Breakthrough: Stem Cells Reverse Signs of Aging in Monkeys. I never heard of the FoxO3 protein before.

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Doctors still outperform AI in the emergency department.  Nurses, however...

However, the AI model did outperform nurses when it came to identifying the most urgent or life-threatening cases, with both better accuracy and specificity.

Don't tell Oregon nurses.

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It seems everyone is talking about the OpenAI-Oracle-nVIDIA circle jerk.

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Diversity is not their strength. Munich shuts down Oktoberfest because of too much diversity. How much are those guys going to tolerate. Diversity already ruined a Christmas Market last year.

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Washington state minimum wage will rise 2.8%, from $16.66 per hour to $17.13, on Jan. 1.  Lowest quintile policies again, which will affect everyone.

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Readers response to Providence hospitals operating in the red. After all the years of predatory behavior, there's no much sympathy for them. People tend to focus on executive salaries, which is not the problem. One problem is that the nurses are expensive. Yet they need the nurses, and because of they are in short supply, they have leverage. The reason why they can't get more nurses is that vry few want to move to Oregon, and Portland specifically. And their COVID policy of firing the unvaxxed is coming back to bite them. The other problem, of course, is the high Medicaid representation. Because Oregon is so poor now. Yeah, Dem policies are to blame ultimately.

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A recent report suggests that for the elderly, at least, serum vitamin B12 levels should be higher than the current normal. Lower levels correlated with dementia.

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