Sugoi & Yokunai

Two elevators that allow cyclists and people with mobility challenges to use the pedestrian bridge over train tracks in Southeast Portland are both out of service. A Portland Bureau of Transportation spokesman says the north and south elevators that people ride to reach Bob Stacey Crossing, which allows pedestrians and bicyclists to traverse both Union Pacific train and MAX light rail tracks are down due to vandalism. The elevators are important for people who have mobility issues and cannot climb the stairs to reach the crossing. Because both elevators are down, affected individuals must walk 13 blocks when a train is present and six blocks when no train is running. The north elevator has been down for six weeks. A lag in securing the right glass panel delayed the typical repair timeline by weeks, bureau spokesman Dylan Rivera says, but the bureau expects the repair to happen as early as next week. As for the south elevator, Rivera says someone smashed one of the glass doors March 23. 

Nearly three-quarters of Oregonians are feeling increasing cost of living pressures, contributing to record household debt and a 25% jump in bankruptcy filings in 2025. Those are among the takeaways from the 2026 Oregon Financial Wellness Scorecard, which spotlights key economic and personal finance trends across the state.

President Pezeshkian: “I want to be involved in the negotiations with the U.S. Without a quick deal, our entire economy will collapse in 3 weeks.”

IRGC chief Vahidi: “That’s exactly why you can’t be involved. You’ll give up everything for a deal.”

After the call ended, the report says the Iranian president told his companions he feels like a ‘hostage’, “I’m unable to resign, I cannot make my own decisions, all I can do is read from a script I’m given” 

Channel 14 concludes its report by saying that the IRGC is effectively running the country now.

The problem is that “writing code” was never the point. The conversation most people are having right now is about AI writing code. The conversation we should be having is around what software engineering looks like when software engineers don’t have to write code. But behind that is another question, which both sides arguing about code are ignoring: the structural question. If AI handles the work that used to train engineers, where does the next generation of engineers come from?

We report three findings that challenge prevailing assumptions about how these systems process and integrate visual information. First, Frontier models readily generate detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces, including pathology-biased clinical findings, for images never provided; we term this phenomenon mirage reasoning. Second, without any image input, models also attain strikingly high scores across general and medical multimodal benchmarks, bringing into question their utility and design. In the most extreme case, our model achieved the top rank on a standard chest X-ray question-answering benchmark without access to any images. Third, when models were explicitly instructed to guess answers without image access, rather than being implicitly prompted to assume images were present, performance declined markedly. Explicit guessing appears to engage a more conservative response regime, in contrast to the mirage regime in which models behave as though images have been provided. These findings expose fundamental vulnerabilities in how visual-language models reason and are evaluated, pointing to an urgent need for private benchmarks that eliminate textual cues enabling non-visual inference, particularly in medical contexts where miscalibrated AI carries the greatest consequence. 

There is an equally big problem at the top of the Tualatin Water system.  Scoggins Dam is an earthen dam and is not safe.  Period.  If we have a major quake and it breaks, thousands of homes will be destroyed, and an untold number of people will die.  There are approximately 60 billion gallons of water behind that dam. 

The full-scale launch of Tinder led to a sharp, persistent increase in sexual activity, but with little corresponding impact on the formation of long-term relationships or relationship quality

Dating outcome inequality, especially among men, rose, alongside rates of sexual assault and STDs.

A patent granted to Google on January 27, 2026 titled “AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user” describes a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google's machine learning model thinks they should see instead.

This isn’t a feature announcement, it’s a patent, meaning Google has legally protected the ability to do this. Whether and when they deploy it is a separate question, but the direction is unmistakable – your website may soon be optional.

we find pronounced cooling roughly coincident with the Plio-Pleistocene Transition (around 2.7 million years ago), and steady temperatures across the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (1.2 to 0.8 million years ago). Comparisons with a recent global sea surface temperature compilation3 show broad consistency in long-term cooling but important differences at the Plio-Pleistocene and Mid-Pleistocene transitions. We suggest that the different trends in surface temperature and mean ocean temperature during these intervals are related to a redistribution of heat between the surface and subsurface via changes in deep water formation and upwelling.

Under the old policy, San Francisco "tried to achieve equity not by raising the floor, but by lowering the ceiling," Thomas S. Dee, a Stanford University economist told the Times. "It’s a problem we see nationally," he continued.

Relative to placebo, cannabis increased susceptibility to false memories and detrimentally impacted verbal memory (immediate, delayed, working), visuospatial memory (immediate, delayed), event-cued prospective memory, source memory, and temporal order memory. There were no significant differences between the moderate and high dose groups.

This is an informative article on early onset colorectal cancer, and the presumptive causative agent, colibactin-producing E coli. The website name is kinda morbid, though. I've never seen this graph, though. What happened in 1994?