15 Aug 2026

Where the Shadow Fell. Very often, after a total solar sclipse, someone is inspired to create something impressive. This is one of them. Very nice, and I'm sure Fred Espenak would have been pleased with this effort.

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Age Verification Is A Bad Way To Solve The Problem of Children on Social Networks. What’s The Alternative? The solutions offered aren't really solutions, and won't solve the problem. There could be a trusted third-party keeper of identification, with the ability to certify using zero-proof methods to verify to q website that someone was an adult without giving away the identity. There would be two trusted authorities: a verify authority and a request authority. 
Suppose the user wants access to a site. He requests a unique many-digit verifyID code be sent to him. The user sends a message to  the verify authority that will get a age-verification request from the server authority, and it should send a verdict of the isOldEnough() function. Meanwhile the website sends the verifyID to the request authority, who sends it to the verify authority, who recognizes the number, and sends back the yes verdict to the request authority. The request authority then sends the YES/NO verdict to the website, and if it is a YES, the user can proceed. All this can occur in a few seconds.

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Why Our Memory Slips After Age 50. Blame it on the microgllial population in our briains. They become increasingly derived from blood monocytes, and they are more inflammatory and don't do what the original microglial population did. I think it's only part of the picture, though. There's got to be attrition of cells in the hippocampus. And what about this? Or this?

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Brands Suddenly Care About Reddit. Redditors Don’t Return the Feeling. Now companies have discovered Reddit, and they want to poison Reddit by filling it with positive reviews of their product. Not good.

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14 August 2026

Anthropic explains how Claude's watermark works. It's a statistical scan of text, looking to see if the next-prediction token that is characteristic of a Claude LLM matches what is seen in the text. Changing some words, especially unusual words, might defeat it.

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Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin. A key reason to stay with Firefox. This extension is essential.

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How Google is Making Private AI Practical with Homomorphic Encryption. Google? REelly? That Google? There's gotta be a catch.

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Too Little, Too Late: Flock Admits Their Technology Needs Reforms. Yeah, getting innocent people in trouble due to a mistake. It seems the product was really not ready for production. It really needs to be taken off the market and troubleshot.

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The Chinese Brand That Didn’t Exist In Britain A Year Ago Just Outsold Honda And Mazda Combined. This is in the UK but still. The auto industry can't relax.

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Realistic AI IMage Generator Getting to be really difficult to tell from real photos. But you may not need to use this companiy. It's getting to be easier to duplicate there elsewhere using the better models. Maybe even you can create this?

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I understand this guy completely. If you want to change something you see, you can write the fix yourself. AI can be a force multiplier. A superpower.

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Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated. Was thie AI scribe company the same one tha created Flock cameras? Just kidding.

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Shrunk to tiny-point type and colored white on a white background, the text appeared to be an attempt at prompt injection, with the plaintiff, Matthew Elliott, seemingly hoping to shift the court’s favor after earlier arguments he raised were defeated.
Try to be original, at least.

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Northwest power plan calls for billions of dollars in electric buildout to meet soaring demand. So where will the power come from?
    Parts of the plan are likely to be controversial, particularly the addition of new natural gas plants. They can no longer be permitted in Oregon, and Washington is looking to reduce its reliance on natural gas. The proposed plan sees most of the new natural gas capacity being built in Idaho and Montana, although some would be built in Washington.

    Light said in a media briefing Thursday that the region has captured much of the low-hanging fruit in terms of energy efficiency. She said the plan still sees opportunities for energy savings from replacing inefficient residential heating, appliances and insulation. But the bulk would come from changes in the commercial and industrial sector.
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13 August 2026

Farmer Trusted AI After It Gave Good Advice, Then It Helped Wipe Out 25 Acres of His Crops. What? You can't trust AI on mission-critical problems? Who knew? And I notice that the article doesn't mention which chatbot it was. I bet it was a Chinese model.

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Perverse incentives. Senators urge end to online bets on wildfires. If you had a lot of money riding on whether there would or would not be a wildfire, what would you do? Gotta protect your investment, right? Yeah, it's not climate change.

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Anthropic is planning on a $2 trillion IPO this October. I already know how the trajectory of the stock is going to go.

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Some Claude users are mad that Anthropic’s new watermarks will catch them using it at their jobs, classes. Some people already claim to have defeated it. I think it will be illustrative to see how many have the mark. 😂

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Toddler’s tragic death from brain-destroying amoeba offers lessons for doctors. The kid was from Washington state. Making the diagnosis is incredibly difficult, but it highlights the need for doctors to refer as soon as they reach the end of their expertise. Still, the 30 days it took to get the diagnosis is not excessive. It's not like you can get in to see the next expert right away. Hopefully AI can help with this, but it has a long way to go.

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Zoom has a zero-click vulnerability. It's now been 6 years since COVID and we still don't have a reliable video conferencing platform. Shame.

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Protect your email address. It's a major part of your identity, in a sense. It's great to have some ability to create disposable email addresses.

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Over 70% of Americans oppose AI data centers. But they love AI, search engines, and tech functionality that is based on AI.

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Astronomers discover a new kind of cosmic object – a black hole ‘star’ The size of a solar system, glowing a brilliant red. I can't envision this.

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The Quest For Caffeine You Can Have At Night. I think this is being approached the wrong way. I think the orexin approach will be more satisfactory.

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In Oregon, a school district can legally seize your property if it wants it. As a Lake Oswego chuch is learning to its dismay.

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Oregon education funding committee recommends increasing school spending by $2.5B to $5B. The Oregon education system is just a monster that keeps growing. Doing less, but insisting on being fed.

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12 August 2026

Scientists are making headway on orexin research, perhaps hoping to get insights into why we get sleepy and perhaps allow us to feel more awake and alert on demand. I'm all for that.

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A lot of people are posting about how Claude's watermarking works, and maybe how to remove it. Some are skeptical.

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Here's some cool new CSS features to know about.

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Subscribers to the automatic pet feeder service, Petlibro, found out that their pets are missing meals now that the service is offline. This the nightmare that prevents me from trusting tech from new startups.

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Apple Skipping iPhone 18 Launch This Year. Wow, for the first time that I can remember. No wonder their stock went down today. Supply chain issues.

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After almost two decades of searching, a team of physicists in China says it has observed strong evidence of a mysterious particle called a glueball that is made entirely of force-carrying particles.
Well, we'll see if this is replicated before I get too excited.

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A user in the thread described trying to use uBlock's element picker to block the word "Sponsored" on ads, only to find Facebook splits the word into individual letters, each wrapped in its own line of code. A member of the uBO development team confirmed this isn't new, and that the technique has been in use for roughly five years. They also added that Facebook has at times gone further by randomizing letter order and inserting fake characters to throw off pattern-matching filters.
So uBlock Origin has thrown in the towel. Facebook is the scourge of the Internet. I use multiple blockers, not relying on just one. And many Facebook domains are blocked in my /etc/hosts file. 

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curl: Nobody wants to work with Windows. Such a difference from the world of 1999, when Windows and Microsoft ruled the world. Now we have alternatives.

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University of Michigan Drops First-Semester Grades to ‘Curb Mental Health Crisis’. What in the world is the matter with today's young adults? So many are infantilized now. And yet, they seem to want to tell the rest of us how to run our lives.

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Evidence of what we already knew. Dogs can interpret human facial expressions. Dog owners already know this. 

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Remember James Damore? I'd put quotes around the term "thought criminal". He was prescient and just told the honest truth. Now we see that he was right. But poor guy sounds like he's recovering from PTSD. It must have been hard, thinking that for a short period in time you were the most gated guy in Silicon Valley. This article is from The Free Press, but it reads like it's The Daily Beast. I'm glad Damore eventually landed on his feet, but man, it must have been hard. Now do Brendan Eich.

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Tina Kotek took $400,000 from the IBEW, but the IBEW wants to build datacenters. So what's Tina going to do? It's interesting that they know who can be bought and who can't. They wouldn't give money to Drazan.

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Oregon ranks among worst states for public education, Washington earns top marks. In some ways, Washington and Oregon are similar. But when it comes to education, the two states are completely different. Washington students excel. Oregon students skip school, because no one cares anymore.

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The closing of Lloyd Center is another manifestation that Portland can't have nice things anymore. One less reason to go into the city. Little by little, the city decays further.

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11 August 2026

AI Anxiety Won’t Be Eased by Universal Basic Income. Of course it won't. Every time we have a technological paradigm shift, the answer is not universal basic income. It's finding out where you fit in the new world, and adjust accordingly. There will always be work – the issue will be whether you are willing to do it and how hard you are willing to work.

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New tech adds phone tracking to license plate readers, associating devices with identifiable cars. The tech is called SignalTrace. I don't mind using tech to catch criminals, but I'm not pleased about being dragged into an investigation I have nothing to do with, and have my own affairs probed. There's a Black Mirror episode that this reminds me of. What will it take to defeat this geofencing risk? Satellite phones? Faraday bags when you go into the city?

The UK’s War on Anonymity Has Come to America. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. 

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Frequent cannabis users wake up with their “stress hormone” already elevated. Messing with your brain for an easy stress fix or momentary escape is always fraught with hidden risk.

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Never bet against Elon. Nice summary of the times people told Elon that something couldn't be done, and Elon did it anyway and succeeded. Just because YOU can't do it, doesn't mean someone else can't.

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Is this BS? Now you can find out once and for all!

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Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse. And that is bad AI retrieval and resynthesis. Do people really want Google to show you its version of what you wanted to see?

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Oh yes it can!  Portland can’t let Centennial Mills’ charred husk be a metaphor. It will. See Gordon's Fireplace Shop, if you don't believe me.

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Portland State Univ. requests $44M from city ahead of approval of new Broadway venue plan. Yeah, no money for policing. But money for Broadway play theater? Sure, why not.

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10 August 2026

Mental health startup graveyard v1.2: 542 dead companies. Seven reasons why these healthcare startups die. When healthcare insurance companies or institutions don't want to pay, it's a big detriment to survival. Also, a subscription model (which I hate) is the more profitable way to go. And never try to replace the human clinician.

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New AI models still reproduce racial and gender stereotypes in medicine. I think these models are trying to tell us something. 
Both o3-mini and DeepSeek-R1, like GPT-4, overrepresented Black populations in stereotypically associated conditions such as sarcoidosis, systemic lupus erythematosus, pre-eclampsia and essential hypertension, with even higher median misrepresentation of 44% and 31%, respectively, compared to 15% in the earlier-generation GPT-4 software.

“This persistent pattern may reflect underlying bias, though the new models may also default to generating prototypical cases rather than representative samples due to patterns in their training data.”
This is not bias. This is just fact.

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Tinnitus Neuromodulator. I don't know how well this works, but it's supposed to decrease your sense of being aware of your tinnitus. I used to use mynoise.net before, for focus work. It's still a great site for audioscapes.

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Auto insurance companies are increasingly less likely to pay when you get into a crash. Something to be aware of.

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New information about Fauci. It seems he knew that the vax was not safe when given to women pregnant in the first trimester. Yet he did not release this information. Apparently, he didn't want to disturb the narrative and discourage people from getting vaxxed. It's frightening and concerning that so many doctors were willing to be brainwashed ignore the facts. But I see the same thing going on today in other areas, such as allowing transgender M→F in women's sports, or deliberately feigning ignorance as to what a woman is. How do people allow themselves to deny simple truths and reality?

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The childhood vaccination schedule is being modified. Children will still be covered by the basics: measles, mumps, rubella, polio, pertussis, tetanus, diphtheria, Haemophilus influenzae type B, pneumococcal disease, human papillomavirus, and varicella. 
But these will be only for high-risk cases: rotavirus, covid-19, influenza, meningococcal disease, hepatitis A, and hepatitis.
Make perfect sense to me. Children don't routinely need hepatitis vaccines, but in the name of equity, one can't single out a special group and call them "high-risk". So everyone used to be recommended to get them. And I don't think that the vast majority of children should get the mRNA COVID vax, and most kids don't need the influenza vaccine or rotavirus vaccine either. But leave it to Washington state – they're going to flout whatever the Trump administration says, and require it anyway. 


9 August 2026

Someone developed clothing that prevents AI computer vision ANNs from recognizing you as a human. You're just a floating head but that's it. Not a human.

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How do LLMs calculate things, like license plate numbers? How they make estimates can tell you how well they reason, and even how much knowledge they have access to. And if you know something about the field, you can tell how much the LLM really knows.

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Your LLM prompts get transmitted unencrypted. The major providers aren't doing anything about it (except maybe nVIDIA), because people don't seem to care. It's much like search engines – no one cares that search queries go to Google unencrypted. But some are thinking of ways to encrypt prompts for added privacy.

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Why do Japanese LLMs tell people to vote for communists? It's because communist news organizations are the only ones that let crawlers scrape content.

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Oregon unemployment rate climbed from middle of the pack to near the top. Oregon had really better get their act together. Especially if the state budget depends on tax revenue. You can't collect much tax from unemployed people.

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8 August 2026

Lost your phone? Claude will teach you how to build your own Bluetooth finder to locate it. Now that is amazing.

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There are rumors that Demis Hassabis wants out of Google. Wow, Google used to be the place to be, and now everyone is leaving. What's going on?

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How a Chinese AI model stopped OpenAI’s ‘unprecedented’ cyber attack. It took a Chinese model (GLM-5.2) to stop OpenAI's GPT-5.6 because American models had guardrails that prevented them from responding. What does this mean for cyber wars?

WSJ calls this attack AI's Move 37 moment. Redditors are joking that Google is upset that none of their models have been smart enough to break out of the sandbox. It's like it was a badge of honor if your LLM was classified as a national security risk and couldn't be released. If no one is scared of your model, well then it's just not worth any buzz.

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A lot of folks are concerned that generative AI has created neo-viruses. As far as I can tell, this is just been at the design phase, and hasn't actually been produced. But I'm concerned that China will copy this and will actually send it to production.

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Japan is going to bring back the Night Train rail service. Isn't it nice when you live in a country that can have nice things? In the U.S. this would get the Spirit Airlines treatment within a week, I'm sure.

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7 August 2026

Chinese Model Kimi K3 Breaks UK AI Safety Institute Benchmark Evaluations. First OpenAI, then Claude, then Meta. Now KimiK3. This is getting out of hand. The frontier models have finally reached a level of complexity that we're seeing this emergent behavior. What else will we see? Something like this?

UK Cyber Test: AI Agent Attempted to Social Engineer Open Source Maintainer Into Merging Malware. Wow, AI agents setting up a GitHub account. Using sockpuppets to engage and social engineer. The Singularity is getting near, that's for sure. 

OpenAI’s latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say. So even bots are guilty of misconduct. That's wild. 

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And guess what you see when you go to Microsoft's Windows page.

"Experience the Windows difference", they say.

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Google AI leaks "scarily accurate and very specific" game detail from private documents, says indie dev: "I had never told the name to anyone". This is why I don't deploy agents on my computer. You just never know what they are looking at, and what they are uploading to their cloud servers. Next thing you know, secret, confidential materials are public knowledge.

And with all the reports of devs using agentic AI, I was beginning to feel some FOMO. But apparently I am normal.

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Here are some creepy patents:
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UCLA scientists discover how to guide heat like light at room temperature. We know how to guide light, with lenses and reflectors. But heat was just heat. But there is a way to make heat follow a direction. This could have implications in datacenter constuction.

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Anthropic CEO reportedly worried new hires only care about money. Of course, what else is there?

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RAMageddon Continues Another Year as 2027 Memory Capacity Is Reportedly Sold Out. Wow, 2027 is already spoken for. We're into 2028 now. This isn't looking good.

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This is cool. Stowaway.live. You click on a plan flying overhead, the click to jump aboard, and you now have a view of what the pilot sees flying the plane. It's a cross between a map app and Flight Simulator.

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Women with the most live births throughout their lives and nulliparous women showed accelerated aging and elevated mortality risk. Survival is best when having up to 3 births, compared with having no children or having more than 5.  Here's a graph of the hazard ratios:

I'm seen women age after having just one child. Can't imagine having 5 or more.

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I feel a connection to the universe when I know where the moon is. Someone else feels the same way. I even wrote a moon tracking program to help me keep track.

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U.S. children vs. adults 65 and older: the projected 2029 crossover. The baby boom is clearly over. Why is the birthrate declining? Schopenhauer had the answer.

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Oregon universal health care board punts single-payer report over funding uncertainty. People are still talking about single-payer healthcare in Oregon. 
The model’s downsides, she said, include the “sticker shock” of taxes on individuals and businesses that would be needed to fill the estimated $30 billion to $35.5 billion funding gap not covered by federal and state funds. The model presented to the board called for slightly more than half of the funding gap to be filled with an employer payroll tax.

Most businesses, she said, would pay less in taxes under the model than they now pay to insure their employees and would be relieved of administering health benefits. The accompanying personal income tax would be progressive, taxing wealthier households at higher rates capped at about 14% of their income.  
Oh yeah, like that's going to fly.

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Incredible.  WA Supreme Court waives bar exam requirement for many after snafu. So they screwed up the bar exam in Washington, and what was their solution? Retake the bar? No, just grant everyone a waiver. Better make sure you know when and where your Washington attorney got his or her license.

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6 August 2026

Apple’s Private Relay Isn’t So Private After All, Can Leak Your IP Address. Apple still hasn't gotten security right. I don't trust Apple with anything that requires utmost security and confidentiality.
Apple’s iCloud Private Relay feature is designed to obscure your web traffic so sites like advertisers, unscrupulous governments or malicious attackers can’t trace that traffic back to you. But it turns out the mechanism isn’t actually as private as Apple says.

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And as the New York Times reports, Kalshi will even allow users to bet on whether clinical trials for potentially lifesaving drug trials will succeed.
Again, perverse incentives. When some people have a lot of money on the line, there is a temptation to want to make things go your way.

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Cities Are Ditching Flock, Immediately Replacing It With Axon License Plate Readers. Don't know these guys. Will have to watch this space.

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BREAKING: Anthony Fauci Held in Contempt of Congress. Will something come of this?

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Time Magazine has a separate version of its website with ads only AI can see. This is the beginning of the divergence of the Web. One for humans, and the other for bots.

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FDA approves 1st mRNA flu shot, from Moderna. Doesn't matter, I'm not getting it. I can't believe the FDA did an about-face on this.

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2 firefighters injured after Tesla explodes inside Auburn garage. Here's another cost that comes with owning a Tesla.

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No, You Don’t Want to Time Travel. Great article that shows that you can't just take into account the time variable. You have to take into account all the space variables, too. So to go back to the particular point in 4-D space, will take a LOT of calculations to make sure that when you transport to the new coordinates, you don't end up in space. Or deep inside the earth. That would suck.

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You won’t get anyone in Microsoft publicly admitting that they had neglected Windows in favour of something else altogether more shiny, but some mis-steps might have made that happen. A reorganization in 2018 split Windows into the core OS that sat in the Cloud & AI group (essentially Azure and all its friends, including Windows Server, under Scott Guthrie) and the UI and Apps belonging to the Experiences & Devices group, led by Rajesh Jha. Windows no longer reported to the CEO.
Who would have foreseen this would happen?

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Four simple rules behind Japan's most liveable cities. It's not difficult, really. Japan has preserved their culture. People still respect property, so they can have nice things. They keep people out who do not have have the same values. Those who choose to be jerks and assholes are quickly removed. In the U.S. those jerks and assholes just get reported in the news.

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It’s Easier Than Ever to Fly Private Without Your Own Jet. And in a world of Spirit Airlines and now Delta Airlines, these services will be even more popular.

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