Sugoi & Yokunai

Grokipedia launches. I do like the table of contents on the left. One person thinks that Grokipedia just stole content from Wikipedia. I wouldn't be surprised, but I hope and expect that as time goes on, G'pedia will develop it's own distinct style. Larry Sanger has a take on this first effort. He stands astride both resources and has a balanced opinion, I think. I disagree that the public's opinion should factor into deciding what G'pedia contains. I don't have a great opinion of the general public's opinion these days. Everyone thinks their opinion should count.

Grok itself, however, is weird. I don't use it. 

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The Island Where People Go to Cheat Death. I haven't heard of Roatan or Vitalia. But it seems to be a place where the super wealthy can go crazy experimenting with all kinds of longevity experiments. Maybe they'll discover something. Maybe something will go very wrong. We shall see. Interesting that Bryan Johnson is involved in this.

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nVIDIA becomes the first $5 trillion company, just as Apple and Microsoft cross the $4 trillion valuation line. And as AI is burning through graphics cards, we're going to see continued demand for nVIDIA products.

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Google is ending their Women Techmakers program. Just as well. Time to get serious, and drop diversity crap. This isn't high school anymore.

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Why do so many Oregonians rely on SNAP benefits?  18% of Oregonians are dependent on SNAP.  That's a lot and too many. How did that happen? It's no wonder the state is going to hell and businesses are fleeing. 

Powell's Books is going to lay off 13 more employees. Wrong direction, people. We need to start hiring instead. 

And here's Washington state, where Gov Ferguson is going to allocate $2.2 million per week for those without SNAP benefits. Well, since Washington state has 590,000 SNAP households, that amounts to $4 per week. That should pay for a Top Ramen or two. 

And here's Seattle, with a budget deficit, yet they are proposing to spend $85 million on frivolous things like "$1.25 million to 'preserve the physical character, cultural heritage, and social fabric of the community formed last century in Seattle’s Central District by the direct descendants of slaves'" and "$10 million for rental assistance to city-funded affordable housing projects."

Are we still dealing with the Civil War outcomes in 2025? And if you can't afford to live in Seattle, kindly move out to where you can, like we all would do, instead of demanding taxpayer support.

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Heh. China was caught trying to steal IP. They tried to reverse-engineer ASML's DUV technology, but it was too difficult. Now they have a broken device that needs fixing. I'll bet they'll watch carefully to see how it's done.

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Peter McCullough's group agrees with RFK about the causes of autism spectrum disorder. I agree with the "multifactorial model of ASD in which genetic predisposition, neuroimmune biology, environmental toxicants, perinatal stressors, and iatrogenic exposures"

Getting a degree in computer science was supposed to be a ticket to job security and a comfortable income. Now, this is not guaranteed at all, thanks to AI. The goalposts have moved, and you need to study machine learning and artificial intelligence, and even that field is advancing rapidly.

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About 23% of people don't respond to GLP-1RA weight loss drugs. It's not clear why, but there are some theories.

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Chegg is cutting about half their workforce. I'm surprised they're still around. The rise of LLMs really hit them hard, didn't it? Why don't they fine-tune open source LLMs and market those? That's what I'd look into.

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What happens when you click the send button on ChatGPT? The workings of the transformer model for the curious.

Speaking of which, OpenAI estimates that 560,000 users of ChatGPT each week appear to have mental health emergencies. 

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LLMs a new kind of steganography. Hiding text within text, using the next word prediction probabilities.

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Microsoft joins the AI circle-jerk. A new deal, with Microsoft owning 27% of it.

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Should you think twice about pouring unwanted coffee down the drain? Worse things have gone down the drain. Lilke poo.

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Elon Musk's Grokepedia seems to be copying pages from Wikipedia. I figured this would happen. Didn't think he'd be able to write a new enecyclopedia from scratch.

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Hang on to your AirPods2 for a bit longer.  Apple's AirPods 3 doesn't handle air travel well.

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I never heard of the Even Realities G1 Smart Glasses before. This would be great for making a speech, since it could function as a built-in teleprompter.

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Amazon is going to lay off 30,000 employees. These will be mainly in California, as they have already laid off 27,000 Seattle employees. They're going all out on AI and robotics. Could be a risky move.

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A new class of potent antibiotics are being developed – methylenomycins. Effective against gram-positive and gram-negative organisms, there seems to be no resistance with multidrug resistance Enterococcus. Not sure about tolerance and side-effect profile.

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Pew Research has a nice article about AI data centers, and where they are location. I am surprised that there are relatively few in the Pacific NW, which is actually a good thing. I don't think we would handle it well. Virginia has a high concentration of them, and I wish them well. Could end up biting them back.

PacificCorp's 300 mile Boardman-to-Hemingway powerline project was supposed to help local customers, but it's being sold to a private company to power datacenters. 

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The Mayans were able to predict solar eclipses very accurately. Scientists think they know how it was done, but it's still remarkable, given how complex the calculations are.

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The Blazer Mafia scandal may make it even more likely that the Blazers will leave Portland. Another blow to the city.

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Keith Wilson's shelter expansion is really putting stress on neighborhoods. I don't think it's going to stop him from turning the entire city into a shelter support community.

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AI models are developing their own survival strategy.

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University of Washington is still mired in DEI mentality. Really too bad.

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AI browsers are a hot mess of security risks. It seems that everybody is talking about it. I'd stay away for now.

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How to Use YouTube to Learn Tacit Knowledge. Yeah, from YouTube, you can learn things they don't actually teach you explicitly. A lot of things can be learn just be watching. I've seen that work.

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Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades. So, our language patterns apparently reveal a surge of depression in the current zeitgeist. I don't know if it's just the influence of social media or that the world is just getting enshittified (see below). Maybe it's the "tiny sugars" in our brains.

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But yeah, a lot of things are getting enshittified. Including websites. Maybe it's the effect of AI. But this is a natural process for when you introduce something nice into the world. Once the public gets a hold of it, quality deteriorates and it's no longer a nice service or the mind-enhancing, mood-enhancing thing it once was. If Cory Doctorow can get credit for the word "enshittification" perhaps I can get credit for the phrase "epimethean" after Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. Epimetheus represents carelessness and regret on hindsight when actions have unintended negative consequences that harm mankind.

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Idiots. A greenie in California bought a hydrogen-powered Toyota, but now can't find a hydrogen outlet nearby that will let him refuel. The best part is, he still owes money on the car. Yeah, not using the car also decreases CO2 emissions. Do these liberals think at all? I can't believe these guys were willing to let themselves be publicly identified. 

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Public servce: if you're going to have an MRI scan, don't take vitamin C before or each oxalate-rich foods. In practice, however, most MRI centers in Portland don't use contrast agents that use linear gadolinium contrast agents, but use macrocyclic agents, like Dotarem.

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The supplement PQQ can decrease fat accumulation and decrease obesity progression. PQQ stimulates mitochondria biogenesis, so perhaps that's how it works. 

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Where are we on making Daylight Saving Time permanent? The answer is nowhere close to making it happen. Politicians can even do something as simple as making this change, although they were able to turn it on in 1966. Politicians were different then. Things got done.

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Speaking of frogs in boiling water, I don't know how people living near the ICE building put up with the crap night after night. In times past, people would be storming City Hall. Now, people just take it, and complain only to reporters.

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Someone who previously worked for Gavin Newsom makes a veiled threat to San Francisco governance that if they resist building dense towers with affordable housing units built-in, instead of keeping density low, there will be consequences! Enshittify your city! Or else!

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Japan’s Okada Museum Forced to Sell Works to Settle Founder’s $50 M. Legal Bill. On the auction block: Hokusai's "Great Wave off the coast of Kanagawa".  Wonder who will buy it.

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Do you believe it? Violent crime plummets 36% in downtown Seattle, lowest since 2017.  I sure don't think so, when I visit. Maybe there's more policing around the Market, to save tourism, but the rest of Seattle is going to crap, especially the I-District and Ballard, Northgate.

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That's the rumor. The iPhone 18 might be able to use Starlink satellites.

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Kamehameha School is being sued by Students for Fair Admission because the school only admits those with a minimum amount of Hawaiian ancestry. Give it up, man. The school is older than the state, and it was established well before statehood. And statehood was really forced upon Hawaii. Let it go.

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Seattle is hiring illegal alien prison guards. How's that for irony?

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This story tells you all you need to know about the housing "shortage" in Portland. From PDX Real, one of the foot soldiers at the front lines. It's all a big grift.

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Rep. Ed Diehl sums up well the sorry state of Medicaid. Government needs to get out of the business of healthcare, except to cover catastrophic care as a backup.

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WSJ article paints a rosy picture of Bellevue, WA, but read the comments.

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Someone found a way to disable the warning LED light on Meta's Ray Ban glasses that let you know it's in record mode.

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First Shape Found That Can’t Pass Through Itself. In order to get some background on this, watch this great video (Rupert's Snub Cube and other Math Holes). Prince Rupert's conjecture has been disproven after all. We can now rest easy.

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After Harvard dropped affirmative action, Asian enrollment increased significantly. That's the spin I'm putting out.

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Dr. Casey Means is set to be the next Surgeon General. But...

Was she the best choice? Was there no one better? What good is the Surgeon General anway?

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The effect of cannabis on the brain is more complicated than people realize. It might have some positive cognitive effects, but the doses that optimize this are lower than what people use to get high. Plus, you have to combine it with the right amount of cannabidiol. Microdosing is the key.

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Coffee pooped out by civet cats really does taste good.  Who was the first one who was brave (daring) enough to make coffee from civet poop?

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Japanese scientists unveil a quantum battery that defies energy loss. Not sure how it works, but lets get it into production.

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Can Trump order the National Guard to clean up crime in Portland? Even the lawyers and judges can't agree. Seems pretty clear to me, but what do I know?

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This is what it's like taking public transportation in Portland. And like frogs in boiling water, people just stay silent and accept it as life in the city. Why aren't people fed up with this? Why isn't this something the mainstream media is publishing? 

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Samaritan Health in Corvallis wants to join with Washington's MultiCare. But I don't understand. Why does MultiCare want to pick up a money-loser in Oregon? What is there to gain? Mystery.

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The Rose Quarter freeway project director resigns – the second one this year. Portland needs expertise of all kinds really badly, but no one wants to move to the city. So further down it goes.

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Female spies are waging ‘sex warfare’ to steal Silicon Valley secrets. Boy, talk about going the extra mile in service to your country. Silicon Valley male workers know they would never score good-looking babes any other way. It's kinda cruel, actually, to prey on them that way.

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Meta is trimming the far under the direction of ScaleAI CEO Alexandr Wang. 600 to be laid off. 

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The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation.

Immigrants from different parts of the world have different levels of contributions they can offer.  Some immigrants are just takers, while others contribute positively to a country's economics. This kind of analysis can be very helpful for planning purposes.

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Awful. The CRISPR Baby Scandal Gets Worse by the Day. Different counties have different ethical standards, that's all I'll say about this.

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Why AI browsers haven't taken off. And Look, another AI browser.  Just more AI slop dumped on top of a Chrome shell. All to steal your browser history and send it off to OpenAI or some other place. No thanks, man. And one more...

ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web

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Apple wants to put a heart rate sensor into Air Pods 3. Could be good, I suppose. But that's not why I bought this.

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NEJM and public health group are launching rival to CDC’s MMWR publication.  Now that a non-Democrat is running the CDC, the orthodox medical establishment wants a parallel authority they can control. 🙄

Recently I talked to someone who wanted straight information about whether a healthy adult really needs an RSV vaccine. It's almost impossible to find anyone willing to say anything else except "get the vaccine". But why? What's the risk of a health adult getting really sick from RSV, which was not a concern prior to the COVID era. It was a disease of infants, and occasionally the very elderly. And now I'm sure this new public health group is going to be pro-vaccine for everybody, regardless of risk.

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37signals has decided to move away from being dependent on AWS. And surprisingly, it was just as good when they handled the infrastructure themselves. And not being dependent on Amazon is a bonus.

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Now for the first time, 20% of the U.S. population is Latino. Thanks to Ted Kennedy, and of course, Joe Biden.

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Scared yet? Members of the crazy Left are not just in education and government. Sometimes they are your healthcare providers.

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This government shutdown could last until 2027. There's no reason to end it sooner because the budget ceiling was already taken care of in July's One Big Beautiful Bill. That was a genius move by Trump to do that. Now the SNAP recipients are going to feel the brunt of this, when nothing comes in November. All because Democrats think they have political leverage. 

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Ketih Wilson plans to increase the number of shelters, despite neighbors not wanting them.  He thinks that it's a good idea, and wants to have spare beds for when people from other states come to Portland do enjoy their drugs and lax laws. Even though many of the shelter beds are empty and unused.  These shelters will end up being destroyed and turned into filth apartments, and eventually into more Gordon's Fireplace Shops. When shelters open, 911 calls triple. Calls regarding “unwanted person” spiked from six in 2024 to 99 in 2025 – a 1500% increase.

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Heh. Tina Kotek mulls re-election and even her supporters can't think of anything she accomplished. 😂

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Trump pardoned Binance's "CZ".  It was Changpeng Zhao who precipitated Sam Bankman-Fried's downfall and the end of FTX. 

Sure, he pleaded guilty to "money laundering" but he really just let people use cryptocurrency the way it was meant to be used. It's unfortunate that unsavory players were using it for crimes, but crypto is a tool, and can be used for non-evil applications, too. 

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Seattle restaurant suffers 25th break-in since 2020, calls on city leaders for action.  "Calls on city leaders for action".  Yeah, more of that Democrat action.

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Parkinson's Discovery Suggests We May Have an FDA-Approved Treatment Already. It's the combo of nivolumab and relatlimab, approved in 2022 to treat metastatic melanoma. Paper here.

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Amazon plans to replace more than half a million jobs with robots. Now humans can produce art, poetry and music, right? No?

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In sleep-deprived individuals, the combination of 200 mg L-theanine and 160 mg caffeine improved performance on a skill requiring focus and concentration. They compared it with placebo, not caffeine alone. But anecdotally, others have found that theanine smooths out the stimulation by caffeine, so perhaps there is some benefit. But getting adequate sleep is best for the aging brain. 

Mental exercise can reverse a brain change linked to aging. The brain change is a diminution of ACh binding in the anterior cingulate, which declines as one ages. Playing games can attenuate this decline. In other news, the prestigious Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) has a journal devoted to Serious Games.

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Datacenters will be our ruin.  California cracks down on water theft but spares data centers from disclosing how much they use. And in Hillsboro: BlackRock’s Power Play: How Wall Street, AI, and Data Centers Are Driving Up Oregon’s Electric Bills.  It's amazing how city leaders just look the other way, when others see problems from unrestrained growth of AI datacenters. Because we gotta have them, right?

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Here's some backstory on the recent AWS outage that crippled much of the Internet a couple of days ago. Yeah, people rely on AWS a lot, perhaps too much. Someone quipped that the original intent of the Internet, which was to make network communications robust and immune to disruption by being widely distributed, has failed, because the Internet has evolved to become reliant on a handful of centralized services after all. Being able to disrupt corporate functionality has become much easier.

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Now Oregon's state treasurer thinks it might be good not to invest so much in hedge funds. Steiner is a physician, and doctors have a reputation of being lousy investors? (No windmill farm jokes, please.) Why don't we put a finance person in that position instead of a healthcare professional?

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Seattle and Portland are among the top 15 cities with the highest property crime rates. I don't see this getting any better anytime soon. 

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California Keeps Losing Tech Jobs. I suspect the movie business is dwindling, too. If tech really moves out of the Bay Area, to places like Texas, Boston, Puget Sound, or North Carolina, the California will hurt for sure.

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Earth gained a pseudo-moon, which is predicted to hang around until 2083.  It's "probably been tagging along for around 60 years" but was just found. Too bad it won't be another visual object in the sky, but if it did, it would probably cause all kinds of gravitational havoc.

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The new iPhone's keyboard is deliberately causing typing errors. Apple needs to fix this. I never liked that users were locked into using the default keyboard.

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As eyes get older, the activity of the ELOVL2 gene weakens. This gene helps produce both very-long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (VLC-PUFAs) and DHA in the retina. Injection of mice with these VLC-PUFAs enhanced their vision.  Paper here.

And placement of a microchip in back of the retina can restore usable vision to those with macular degeneration. The procedure was done in the UK.

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Elon Musk threatens to leave Tesla if he doesn't get the enormous pay he demands.  He wants up to $40 billion in compensation. That's ridiculous for a company like Tesla, in a world where EV allure is declining.

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Has Amazon lost too many engineers?  The way the recent AWS outage unfolded suggests so. The whole AWS system is so complicated and opaquely documented that this doesn't surprise me. I was never certain I was using SageMaker properly. You have to make sure you cross off many things on a checklist before you close out, or you could be running up a huge tab with a hidden endpoint left running on. There are so many names for so many services they offer and you can't tell immediately what does what, and whether it's something worth diving into. 

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Even Vaçlav Smil realizes that the whole carbon zero goal is impossible.

The world has become much more reliant on fossil carbon (even as its relative share has declined a bit). 

During the 1970s many people believed that by the year 2000 all electricity would come not just from fission, but from fast breeder reactors, and soon afterwards came the promises of “soft energy” taking over (Smil, 2000).

“Even if we were to replace just 60 percent of today’s fossil fuel consumption, we should be investing about six times more, or about $13 trillion a year, to reach zero carbon by 2050. Making it $15-17 trillion a year (to account for expected cost over-runs) seems hardly excessive, and it takes us, once again, to a grand total of $400-460 trillion by the year 2050, good confirmation of a previously derived value.

We're not ready yet to replace petroleum-based fuels. Vaçlav should stop calling it "fossil fuel" because it's not really that anymore.

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Photodynamic therapy is still alive, but this time with LEDs instead of lasers. It works against skin cancers. Since LEDs are easier to work with than lasers, perhaps this might be something that could work with immunotherapy.

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This headline "Student Loan Forgiveness Update: Trump Admin Cancels Debt For Millions" made me think Trump was pulling a Biden on student loans. In actuality, he's just reversing a decision made earlier this year in February to start enrolling and processing income-driven repayment plans. It shouldn't have been stopped, and now it's restarting. This is different from what Biden tried to do.

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OpenAI's agents are now going to recommend people do some shopping. Sounds like I better get some stock in Shopify.

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The graying of hair in the elderly may be a manifestation of a natural process that melanocytes undergo to prevent melanoma genesis.  I never looked at it that way, but perhaps we were meant to go gray.

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Oregon is #4 for substance abuse. District of Columbia is #1 for substance abuse, and it's scary that those people make the laws. No wonder the politicians are crazy.  Utah leads in suicidal thoughts but Oregon is #3.

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Combination of immunotherapy and targeted therapy boosts colorectal cancer survival.  This is the phase 3 STELLAR-303 trial for those patients (a majority) with no special markers, like dMMR, BRAF or HER2 mutations.  It was a combination of a multi-TKI and an immune checkpoint inhibitor (zanzalintinib plus atezolizumab) against regorafenib, which is the standard, and difficult to tolerate. This may be the new standard.

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What? Cancer patients who got a COVID vaccine lived much longer. Maybe the autoimmune effect worked to their benefit. This was just presented at a conference, and the paper hasn't been published yet, so I'll wait and see the data. Counterintuitive, if true. 

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Braaiiins...  Stanford scientists grow thousands of mini human brains using common food additive. That food additive is xanthum gum. I'm not sure a clump of neurons qualifies as a mini-brain. There needs to be more to it than that.

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What’s behind demand for more housing?  In Oregon, particularly? Are people really moving into the state and not finding enough housing? Who are these people? Are they the homeless? The illegal migrants? Vagrants ready to enjoy the relaxed laws and generous social benefits? That's the question I want answers to.

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Portland Public Schools are going to spend money on construction and renovations, even though money hasn't been secured for this. Typical.

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Portland asks voters to stomach big property tax increase or watch parks deteriorate. I'm not convinced. As it says at the end of the article: “Portland doesn’t lack revenue. It lacks discipline and a plan."  Fully agree.

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Holy Frankenstein. Looks like Trantifa is going to have a seminar on how to make your own hormone replacement. Just in time for Halloween.

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Shades of Ted Wheeler.  Portland Mayor: ICE Facility Is a Disaster Waiting To Happen. Portland is already a disaster, whatcha talking about?

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