5 September 2026

A few weeks ago, JAMA published an article claiming that AI is definitely going to replace human doctors because they do a better job. The AMA published an article that weakly pushes back on this. Doctors shouldn't compete against AI assistants that have greater working memory. That is futile. Instead, they need to figure out ways to use AI assistants to their advantage. But the tools are not quite there, and no one seems to be developing it for them.

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There's a hexagon on Saturn's North Pole, and now a decagon on its South Pole. What's going on? How does this happen?

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Always discovering something new. It looks like the separation between DNA and RNA isn't that clean. DNA strands can have ribonucleotide components. At least temporarily. They appear to function as epigenetic modulators of transcription-associated DNA supercoiling. Paper here.

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Proton VPN warns that many VPNs use trackers. Interestingly, in the website they link to (which seems offline now), their own VPN has one tracker. But other ones with a good reputation had a tracker, too. Even Mullvad, NordVPN and Surfshark. One VPN that I used to use has no trackers at all – IVPN. I used to use it but switched from it because it was slow, had relatively few country servers to offer, and no VPN review seemed to recommend it. But in other ways, they met my criteria, such as privacy from Five Eyes. Maybe they've changed and gotten faster. I still see very few reviews recommend it, but many reviews are written by folks that want to steer you to certain providers.

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Yikes. Apple's first foldable iPhone may cost $2,000

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The new Gemini 4 model may be the most powerful yet. First Fable, then Astra, now this. Should be interesting to try.

Someone posted what happened when he insulted his AI agents. They took note and kept records, and they retaliated. Even when he tried erasing the records it was keeping, the model recorded his attempt, too. Really creepy. 

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Comcast's xFinity Shield will use the WiFi in your home to detect intruders when you're not there. I've read rumors where it WiFi can be used to identify the person walking in front of the transmitter, and this sounds creepy to me. It might be able to determine if the person walking in your home is indeed a stranger, if the reflected wave patterns don't match. What else could it do?

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Looks like people have figured out a workaround the nitter blockade. But soon, these will probably also be served with a takedown notice, so I wouldn't count on these lasting too long.

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AI-assisted writing is common because writing is hard. I use AI assistants to refine my writing, mainly because I know I'm not the best writer, and language modeling is what these things know well. It's interesting that one must often push back on what they recommend, because even something they screw up on rephrasing your thoughts. I've noticed that even when I've stuck with my original phrasing and ask it to recheck my writing style, it still praises my text. So don't always accept what the LLM proposes.

Speaking of language, someone offers to teach Neuralese, so you can understand what your AI assistant is doing. 😆

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Eric Lu factored a huge composite number which is a product of two huge primes. This is RSA-260, and his success has implications as to cryptographic security. He hasn't revealed how he did it. Was it brute force? There's gotta be some strategy.

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Regular coffee beats decaf in protecting the brain from chronic stress. This was a mouse study, so who knows how it affects humans. I'm not taking chances, though.

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Well, it looks like Nike is going to be removed from the S&P 100. So it's stock is likely to plunge further. Bad news for investors and those who were counting on the tax revenue. Go woke, go broke.

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Remember Stanley Zhong? The kid who was rejected by 16 of 18 colleges despite a 1590 SAT score? The courts have ruled that he can now force discovery of admissions data from University of Washington. He's also suing University of California system, the University of Michigan and Cornell University. This anti-Asian bias has got to stop. Go Stanley! Put an end to DEI!

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4 September 2026

Well, Anthropic and LEAN were able to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, so we would have obtained the proof even if Andrew Wiles had failed. More details here. I was hoping that maybe this new proof would fit in the margins of a book. Or at least provable using what math was known during Fermat's time. Alas:
The proof is not the modern proof which I have been formalizing myself following ideas of Khare, Taylor etc, but the Darmon–Diamond–Taylor exposition from 1995 of the Wiles–Taylor–Wiles argument, via the Langlands–Tunnell theorem and Ribet’s level-lowering theorem. Anthropic’s repository develops Fontaine theory (to study flat deformations of Galois representations) and develops enough of Mazur’s work on the Eisenstein ideal to conclude that no Frey curve can have a point of order p ≥ 17. This means that their FLT proof only works for p ≥ 17, however FLT was already formalized for odd regular primes by Best-Birkbeck-Brasca-Rodriguez, and the smallest irregular prime is 37, so it’s all good.
Whew!
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Apparently OpenAI's new Astra model is beginning to speak Neuralese, which is a language that humans don't understand. So we won't be able to peek under the hood and audit what's going on. I can understand why it would start doing this, but it's not good.

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OpenWhispr is yet another private local dictation app, although it's a paid app with a free tier. I was almost going to install one of the free private local apps, but started using Apple's free dication. It's much improved from before, but it is not as private as I'd like. Most of the transcription happens on-device, but some gets sent to Apple servers. And it's all linked to your Apple ID.

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The people behind Nexus claim the license images are coming from an active breach at “a major identity verification company” whose customers include multiple Fortune 500 companies.
They don't/won't say which company.

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Sudden Unexpected Death in the Pfizer BNT162b2 Trial: A Pharmacovigilance Failure. This just got published. It's about sudden death events that occurred after the Pfizer COVID-19 vax. But why publish this now? Is it suddenly safe to publish stuff like this now?

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Ozempic and Other GLP-1s Are Being Linked to Fewer Serious Infections—Including TB. Amazing what these drugs can do. How it does this is unclear – it's only been observed that folks using the drug has less infections. Guess it just pays to be healthier. 

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Burnt out on a three-day week. I know the feeling. When you go on vacation and you know that a pile of work is just waiting for you when you come back. Two weeks was the absolute most I could take as a vacation when I was working. Beyond that, it was more stress than relaxation. It was actually more relaxing to stay in touch with the office when I took vacations, so that there would be no surprises when I returned. That's not how it should be.

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25% of all websites now use Cloudflare as CDN. Yeah, everywhere you go, you have to solve Cloudflare challenges or just click to prove you are human. Anyone who is doing scraping needs to use a scraping service now. Just using a headless browser is no longer sufficient. 

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Testosterone shifts political preferences in weakly affiliated Democratic men. This explains everything.

What happened to men?
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That's how they came up with the figure. NVIDIA has offered to buy Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000.  
The name of the company came from this icon. I used to think it was named after the Alien creature in the first movie.

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15 colleges now cost $100K+ per year — and almost none of them are worth it. I would say that NONE of them are worth it. This is absolutely crazy, to pay this much so your child can get leftist indoctrination?

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Record number of Washington mail-in ballots uncounted after primary election, report finds. And it's always the rural ballots that don't get counted. Because, you know, they tend to vote for Trump. Can't have that, can we? Mail-in voting needs to be eliminated.

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The city of Seattle has a municipal tree code that is almost 10K words long. It has a system of 4 tiers outlining what can be cut. If you want to cut trees in Seattle, you must apply to the city to be an approved provider and prove mandated insurance. If you want to cut them on your own property, you have to hire registered removers. All these law-abiding people are subject to civil penalties if not permitted, insured, and in compliance. I’m sure the tree removal here is on the up-and-up, though. And if not, I’m sure the rules will be enforced.

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3 September 2026

5 popular wearable devices that are sharing your private data. No surprises here: the companies are Meta, Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi. Of course, they want your personal data to share.

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We kinda knew this already, didn't we? Genetics Help Shape Personality And Life Path. Anyone who's owned pets knows this to be true. Same with watching kids at a playground. You know which kids are the shy ones and stay with their mommies, and which ones are the bold ones who aren't afraid of meeting strangers. It's not politically correct to discuss this, but that's reality. 

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Rich Dad Poor Dad author shocks fans with $1.2 billion debt. The goal is cashflow, and sometimes you have to acquire debt to get it. But I bet the kind of debt Kiyosaki has is the kind that puts money in his pocket. Like mortgages and business debt. Because cashflow is what really matters. And it takes a shift in mentality to get comfortable with this. The ultra-rich don't pay taxes on the money they borrow to finance their lifestyle, because it's tax free. And they pay off the debt from cashflow from their businesses. Don't worry about Kiyosaki – he'll be fine. 

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A lot of people are talking about OpenAI's new Astra model. They are saying it's better than any of Anthropic's models, and that it is signaling AGI. It has a new reasoning process called "recurrent depth" which is more difficult to audit. And who knows more about AI? Bernie Sanders or Dwarkesh Patel? But if you're worried, here's an in-depth discussion about how it thinks.

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Here are 2026's IgNobel Prize winners. Watch the ceremony here.

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Some mountain climbers used Google's Gemini to help them plan their hike up Mt Shasta. Boy was it wrong! Maybe they should have waited and used Astra.

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Caption and Cut helps with video editing for influencers. It removes all the uhs and the hurr-durr and lets you sound intelligent. Plus, it puts captions on your video so people can understand you. How nice!

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THC Edibles Can Affect Driving For Hours, New Research Shows. The NYT must really be worried about cannabis. This is the second warning article it's put out recently. Yeah, today's cannabis ain't safe like Maui Wowee of yore was. This ain't Cheech and Chong funny anymore. It's like we're going to have to pay more taxes to pay for people's homeless shelters and safe houses, because their brains are so fried. Zombie fuel.

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Language skills stay strong in older adults, even while other cognitive abilities decline. I keep being amazed at how much better John Fetterman talks from the time he was campaigning and debating Dr. Oz. Thank goodness for that, I suppose.

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Mullvad is telling their customers to use Quad9 DNS servers instead of their own, which they are shutting down. Better than using Google's 8.8.8.8 DNS server.

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What do you do with a web domain you don't want anymore? These guys have some ideas.

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SkyMap2000 is a great online star atlas. Easy to use. 

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2 September 2026

Firefox hasn't learned. They turned off generative AI, but the telemetry is still on. People hate telemetry. I still use LibreWolf.

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Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong? A few years ago, I contemplating creating an AI-based mushroom identifier for personal use. However for it to be good, it has to have pictures from different stages, under different lighting, and under different conditions (rainy vs dry). Mushrooms don't always look like the pictures, and there are so many subtle species differences that it is really difficult. A lot of Boletes and Suilluses look really similar. Same with Psilocybe. I would hate to be wrong. And the liability if you released it to the public. Not worth the risk. 

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A third of Perplexity's citations don't contain the number they're cited for. I can't believe this is still an issue. Perplexity used to be the best. Then they put up a paywall and I long ago stopped using them. They have no moat now. Other models have gotten just as good. But the hallucinations are a problem with other models, too.

And then there is this: Three sites made 215,128 "best software" pages for AI. Perplexity cites them. No one will trust you if you’re so easily fooled. 

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Wow, even Science uses clickbait. What is the weird particle? Well, they don't know. It's being investigated. Come back later.

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There won't be Intel fellows or senior fellows anymore. Now they're called  “distinguished engineer” and “senior distinguished engineer”. I think Intel has bigger things to worry about.

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Don't allow Gemini AI access to your Gmail!. Don't use Gmail to begin with, actually. But yeah, don't let AI into your email.

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Aging Brains Blend Memories Together Instead of Just Forgetting Them. Well, my neural nets sometimes lose training even on the same day. At least the elderly are blending the memories instead of just forgetting them.

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Long-term melatonin use linked to 90% higher heart failure risk. I took melatonin during the COVID-19 era to stave off serious infection. I think it worked but melatonin doesn't really do that much for my sleep. I could drop it easily or just take it occasionally. But this report is a case-control so it's not definite.

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MathArt Studio. I would have had fun with this when I was younger and had more time. For a little while at least. 

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UnitedHealthcare to drop prior authorization requirements for range of conditions from Oct. 1. Well, it'll make insurance coordinators everywhere happy. But who knows how much this will really make a difference?

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‘We’re broke,’ says Seattle schools chief. How is that possible? This article made me chuckle, especially knowing that it's worse in Oregon. EVERYONE knows how it's possible, chief. You must be the only one. Read the comments to get a clue.

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1 September 2026

The most cited paper of this century is a computer vision paper, Microsoft's ResNet paper. Here's a nice video describing it. It shows what kind of thinking you need to be of value to AI research in a leading tech company. Incredible visuals.

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Somebody created the MacPhone that Apple wouldn't make: better keyboard, bigger screen, more powerful core hardware, and a better power supply. But the form factor needs work.

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Oura is being sued for not being the sleep analytic device that it promised. Whoop is supposed to be better, but requires a membership subscription. So someone created an interface, called Noop, that lets you use the data from the device without it. Probably won't be long before this stops working, though.

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If you're a Stoic, you can read the key classic texts for free online. This is great. For people not familiar with Stoicism, it's like Buddhism, but developed in the West. Same basic principles, but without the mysticism and religious overlay. No koans to spend hours deconstructing, but it doesn't have the meditative practice, which is essential. 

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Apple's Phil Schiller is stepping down. Looks like he's not taking another big position but will be an "Apple Fellow", and is likely planning to retire soon. That's too bad for Apple. Wonder what the story is.

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Scientists identify early signal of dangerous pregnancy complications. Low levels of a blood protein called ISM2 may be associated with pre-eclampsia and fetal growth retardation. A biotech company, Medicines360, is working to develop this into a blood test. 

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Greenway's founders and advisers include tech executives, CEOs, a onetime Vermont secretary of education, a NASA engineer and current and former administrators from Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Tufts University and other schools. It will teach one subject: engineering.
This is great! Practical and useful stuff that the world needs. No activism or lefty bullshit. Hope it succeeds, but it's in Vermont, so who knows?

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Suddenly, I'm seeing two clipboard apps appear: Clibo and Copy 2 Clip. I use Maccy now, which works well, but Clibo also saves browser history. Not sure if I want that. 😉

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Normal Tools. What an odd collection of bespoke apps. 

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Mozilla launches ad blocking for Firefox on iOS. A little late to the party, eh, Mozilla? What I really want is an overlay remover. Or the ability to install extensions like in desktop browsers. Those damned popup overlays are everywhere, obscuring text you want to read.

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Why would anyone want to use a personal AI assistant that has access to all your personal information?  Instinct’s powerful AI assistant is raising privacy and security concerns. Yeah, I'll bet. 
Hey Instinct, it's not cool to index and retain my emails without my permission and not let me delete them from your records? 
Hard pass. Who knows where all this information really goes, anyway. 
VCs, notable people, successful people hyping it up all week. They all just giving away their emails and all their personal data, emails, messages
Knock yourself out.

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I saw this report: Repetitive negative thinking is associated with cognitive function decline in older adults. If you read the paper, the effect is small, and was primarily seen only in those between ages 70 and 79 and those who were educated. I was about to dismiss it, when I saw this article: The brain struggles to make new neurons in people with depression, published in Nature!  So I guess there may be some cognitive benefit to getting out of a funk. But maybe this is a protective response, to prevent catastrophizing! Depression isn't the same thing as repetitive negative thinking. Perhaps those who engage in this are cognitively impaired to begin with. I have noticed that taking Gotu Kola helps decrease negative thinking and by doing so, helps me to focus. This is one supplement that I can say actually works.

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25-year update on the “Millennium problems” in physics. This is different from the Millennium Prize in Mathematics. There isn't any money associated with solving these. But where are we on this stuff?

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Oregon public education is the among the worst in the nation. Oregon ranks #40, and it's especially painful because Washington ranks #5 and California ranks #7. The survey counts school funding, though, which in my mind shouldn't be part of this ranking. I would count just K-12 academic performance, and in that regard, Oregon ranks #47. Washington is #22 and California is #18. This is all on the governor.
Yeah, the Portland Public School system is a national joke now.

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31 August 2026

We already have fresh frozen plasma. Now the FDA has approved freeze-dried plasma. It's called Ezplaz. Fresh frozen plasma includes all the coagulation factors including some fibrinogen (400-900 mg/unit), albumin, protein C, protein S, antithrombin, and tissue factor pathway inhibitors. Ezplaz contains all those, too.

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The Next Wave of American Innovation Isn’t Being Built in Silicon Valley. It's going to be in Louisiana and Texas. The building of the new Starbase is going to be awesome to see. California will see an exodus of talent and wealth.

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Coffee Drinkers Have Less Fat, More Muscle, And More Available Testosterone. Is this why Jack Reacher drank so much coffee.

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Apple Caught Off Guard by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio. No there aren't that many AI/ML scientists out there. People are snapping up models so that they can be scalped on the Black Market. Apple should restrict initial sales to educational institutions, which might help a little. People might still find ways to get around it, but it would help.

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Asclevor searches for a clinical case that comes closest to the setting you describe. It's an interesting service, and I don't know what it will be used for. Some clinical research where you are studying some rare disease.

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Here's a nice introduction to the new Diffusion LLMs. Diffusion isn't just for images and videos. Google and nVIDIA have new diffusion models out.

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I saw this article, South Korea’s ‘AI for All’ Push Gives Free Access to Every Citizen, because Asians will know how to apply AI skills. But in the West, we have this: Will anybody use AI as much as coders?

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So many celebrities are investing in longevity research. Now it's gotten to the point where Lady Gaga is starting her own AI biotech company. How crazy is that?

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Each major frontier model has its own personality. Perhaps you can guess who is speaking based on the output. 😂

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Man, it's come to this. Some people need an app to control their addiction to apps.

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Blue city blues. Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla — and they might tow it. Democrat cities are just crap places to live now. Well, those San Francisco folks didn't want Flock cameras. So this is what they have to put up with instead.

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Creepy. Someday in the not too distant future, phone screens could be recording things about as we stare at them.

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Video collection of all the climate change hysteria the media has made us listen to over the years.
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30 August 2026

Is medical AI overhyped? Someone thinks so. But many of the examples are selective and picking up all the bad stuff that happened years ago. Today's healthcare AI struggles with the fact that the easy stuff has been done and there is no moat. Now, the major players are consolidating the technology and smaller players are trying to get adopted or bought out. Such is the game.

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I can attest to this. Scientific articles are increasingly complex and cryptic due to excessive use of jargon and acronyms. This is just going to get worse with the use of LLMs to write papers, especially as the next generation of LLMs uses the existing corpus to train. But fortunately, you can use LLMs to decode these papers and make them more understandable, so this isn't too much of a barrier.

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This Asian Dad Energy video turned up in my newsfeed. His first video pulled you in out of sympathy, and I empathized with him, having experienced something similar. But he's turned his experience into a hobby where he shares personal growth tips from a techie standpoint and, and it's now a money-generating venture. Good for him! 

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Very strange. How do islands mysteriously appear and disappear in a month?

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How did Oregon become one of the most expensive places to live? Sure is a mystery, isn't it, Oregonian? How did it happen? Hmm. Cost of living is going up and gubernatorial candidates are talking about it. Yes, but how did it happen? And look at the map – why, it's just Blue States! What a coincidence, eh? More deep insights from The Oregonian. 🤣

And it's not just The Oregonian. Why is Oregon not doing as well as the rest of the country? Why indeed. 

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29 August 2026

There's been so much news about daraxonrasib against pancreatic cancer, and another promising treatment has been published. This one involves blocking a chemokine receptor (CXCR4), which modifies the immune environment, allowing chemotherapy agents to work better. 
One patient had an even more remarkable response. He responded so well to treatment that he was ultimately able to undergo surgery. When pathologists examined the removed tissue, they found no viable cancer cells—a pathologic complete response. He has now remained cancer-free for more than three years after beginning therapy and more than two years after surgery without any treatment.
The treatment involved four drugs: CXCR4 inhibition (motixafortide), PD-1 blockade (cemiplimab), and chemotherapy (gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel [GN]; the MCGN regimen). 
median progression-free survival of 9.7 months (95% confidence interval [CI]: 5.9-not reached [NR]), overall survival of 10.1 months (95% CI: 9.3-NR), duration of response of 8.2 months, and 91% disease control rate. One patient achieved a pathological complete response after pancreatoduodenectomy and hepatectomy, remaining disease-free for 18 months without adjuvant therapy. 
I see this as being applied more in the neoadjuvant setting, against borderline resectable pancreatic cancer, when you need rapid response. Paper here. Very nice.

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The anti-aging effects of exercise, without exercise: Self-contracting muscle implants give mice a boost. More research supporting the theory that having muscle can help slow the effects of aging. This time, it's providing muscle in the form of myografts.
Scientists have developed self-contracting mini-muscle implants that grow their own blood supply and mimic the biological benefits of exercise, giving people unable to work out because of physical limitations a way to reap the same rewards.
Just having muscle tissue in an organism that contracts on its own made muscle stronger in aging mice.
Once implanted in elderly and obese mice, these grafts countered age-related muscle wasting. The mice developed thicker natural leg muscles, lost less muscle and showed improved strength and reduced inflammation.
Paper here. It's not clear what muscle tissue secretes that keeps aging mice healthier. The Nature article says "myografts provide a stable source of virally transduced therapeutic proteins, such as parathyroid hormone and growth hormone, which may counteract bone or muscle loss without observed side effects." Is that what it is?

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Well the Pentagon can't tell Anthropic what it can and cannot do. Remember when the military used to develop its own technology, and were able to have it to what it wanted? Now it seems the military commandeers non-military companies and tells them what to do. Get your own geniuses, already!

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While it may sound like science fiction, earbuds that read brain activity are already on sale. Wearable technology company Neurable claims that its headphones, equipped with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, can track your fatigue and reduce burnout. At night, NextSense's Smartbuds pick up the electrical signals of your brain to chart your sleep. By day, the same EEG sensors help schedule demanding tasks for the hours when you are sharpest.
I'm intrigued by this, actually. We're living in interesting times. I'd like to be able to explore tracking my brain. But there needs to be more research before we apply this to children.

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First erythritol, now xylitol. Common sweetener is linked to strokes and heart attacks. I'm staying away from any sugar alcohol. I use allulose and monkfruit sweeteners. Mogrosides in monkfruit are felt to be safe.

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Elon Musk lost his lawsuit against Bright Data scraping X content.  I think scraping content for personal use should be allowed because it's no different from visiting the website yourself. And if you can do it without trackers and data analytics bots running profiles on you, the better. But I'm against mass scraping efforts that cause traffic congestion and make it hard for regular people to access websites. That's what happened with nitter. Apparently bots were using it to scrape X, and so legitimate users of nitter found the service to be practically unusable. I can see why X wanted it to stop. Scrapers need to exercise some etiquette. Blasting a site is not cool.

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Datacenters are going to be an issue in the governor's race. As with many things, this is not a clean issue. We need more datacenters, but they need to be built up to modern standards that conserve water and won't consume energy to the detriment of the surrounding communities. These can be done and being self-contained, won't have to strain the electrical grid. But Tina Kotek wants to please the left-wingers, even though her union supporters are all for building datacenters. Let's hope that Drazan can convince people that datacenters are part of the future, rather than solar panel farms which are blight on the environment and are implementations of last century's technology and won't move Oregon forward.

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28 August 2026

U.S. In Talks To Take Direct Ownership Of Venezuelan Oil Fields. Who didn't see this coming? This is great news for the U.S. and the heavy crude oil of Venezuela will replace the heavy sour crude of Western Canada Select, so Canada is the loser here. And from my reading, U.S. refineries are set up to handle this type of oil. One needs coking units to crack the heavy oil, and only some U.S. refineries have this capability. Venezuela has some refineries, too, but they have been chronically underutiliized, and you can't just wake them up instantly once they've been shut down. Their oil is extra-heavy, and one needs naphtha to dilute them to be transportable, and there's been a shortage of this. But America will be supplying this.

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X claims that it discovered a secret Chinese social media farm that is trying to poison Americans' minds against datacenters. So now, tech leaders are trying the message that you'd love datacenters if not for those sneaky Chinese. One problem is that Americans really don't know much about datacenter construction, and just go by what the scuttlebutt says, much of which is wrong. But the electrical workers union loves datacenters. Truckers love datacenters. And the truth is, America loves the tech that would be impossible without datacenters. So they are going to be built.

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Scientists discover a brain “brake” that can shut down chronic pain. That brake lies in the locus ceruleus, and this is where adrenergic responses from anxiety and stress also originate. Well it turns out the regular meditation modulates signals from the anterior cingulate gyrus to the locus ceruleus, so this suggests another mechanism to decrease chronic pain.

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So it is true: Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.

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A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young. What could it be? They don't "own the molecules" – so who does? Is it just not patentable? But the combination might be. I'm curious. What I'm intrigued about is that the people who are taking it already feel more energetic. Usually, longevity drugs have no noticeable impact. You just age slower, but you don't feel any different, so this drug combo is different.

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I Asked 100 Companies for My Data. I Got Deletion Notices Instead. Many companies collect a lot of data from users – way more than people realize. This is why I avoid installing unnecessary apps on my phone, and shield my browser with anti-snoop extensions.

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A ‘second heart’ is located below your knees, and you need to get it pumping. Back in 2022 a researcher in Houston published a discovery that exercising the soleus muscle was important and could help improve metabolic health. He recommended soleus push-ups. It's not a large muscle and I was skeptical. It lies right under the gastrocnemius muscle. But here we are, four years later, and a Mayo Clinic researcher has discovered the same thing. So maybe there is some truth to the importance of flexing your soleus muscle.

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Here's where you can buy a digital camouflage shirt and avoid detection by surveillance cameras. Get it here. Here's another company that sells something similar. 

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It's not climate change. Even NPR has to admit that the cause of wildfires is arson. And since Oregon has a lot of crazies, it stands to reason why we are setting the record for wildfires this year. Keep Oregon Weird? Nah. So tired of this crap. 

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So if all hell broke loose on earth broke out, where would you go? It turns out the safest place on earth is ... Australia. Really? The deadliest land where everything wants to kill you?

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Terence Tao has identifed a new kind of Simpson's Paradox. That's where a treatment can be beneficial for men, and beneficial for women, but harmful for people as a whole. In this new scenario, AI generates a paper that seems to be reasonably good. And then another comes out – same thing. And so forth. But when you stand back and look at the output as a whole, it's AI slop. I guess he's starting to see a lot of it.

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It's not just microglia that contribute to cognitive decline, it's also oligodendrocyes that deteriorate as you get older. This one I can understand, because the function of these cells is to provide the myelin sheath surrounding neurons. These need to stay intact, for sure.

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I knew some of this, but not all of it. McDonalds in Hawaii is special. You can order all kinds of local stuff that you can't get at chain restaurants elsewhere. It was smart of McDonalds to permit this.

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Well, it looks like Oregon is getting a sales tax after all. It's just not called that. That's what you do when all the wealthy taxpayers and business flee the state. Somebody's gotta feed the Democrats. 
And here's Multnomah County – creating their first "climate justice plan" (whatever that is). And yes, there will be taxes. If you Crtl-F for "taxes", you'll get few hits. Instead, Ctrl-F for "funding" – lots of hits! 
There are so many needy that will need a piece of this new funding! Yes, there will be money for housing! And money for living assistance ("unrestricted monthly stipends")! And money for schools. And money for preschools! And money for mental health!  And money for "marginalized communities".  
In other words – it doesn't have to be about climate!  It's just whatever! 

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27 August 2026

Someone posted this article from 2008 about why doctors hate the Internet. Little did they know at that time that 15 years later, they would be facing something even more practice-changing. It's becoming ever more difficult to be a knowledge worker, and more than ever, doctors need help, or risk being viewed as charlatans in their field, with patients being just as, or even more knowledgeable than them, in a certain limited domain. This may be even more problematic as medical students, residents and subspecialty fellows rely more on AI assistants to provide answers, rather than learning their fields well themselves. But it doesn't have to be this way. AI assistants can be teaching aids and may empower physicians. But only if they take the time to learn how to incorporate AI into their workflow.

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I am not a mathematician. I have basically been using ChatGPT to mess around with the Riemann Hypothesis, telling it to keep digging, try different approaches, challenge assumptions, and look through recent papers for anything interesting.

Well, it found something.

While going through two recently published papers on Jensen polynomial hyperbolicity and the Riemann Hypothesis, ChatGPT noticed what appeared to be a normalization inconsistency between the raw moments (M_n) and the Taylor/Jensen coefficients

The guy may not have been a mathematician, but he knew enough about it to understand what to prompt GPT 5.6, and to recognize a problem. Kudos.

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I have never received an Apple Threat Notification, and wouldn't be sure what it means. But this is worth saving in case I do.

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There are rumors that Nvidia is planning to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. That will shake up things, especially if nVIDIA starts tacking on a fee to use their models. Or restricts what models appear on the site. That would be unfortunate.

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Someone's trying to create an alternative to X, called Twitter.Now. The reason is because somehow Elon Musk "broke" Twitter. The real reason, of course, is that Musk allowed dissenting opinions onto the platform, and that some people feels that this can't be allowed to happen. BlueSky was formed for the same reason, and it's turned into a boring left-wing echo chamber. This effort will likely fail for similar reasons. Man, they took the color scheme of the old Twitter, and even appropriated the old logo.

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Barrett Zoph used to work at OpenAI. Then he left to co-found Thinking Machines with Mira Murati. Then he went back to OpenAI. Now he's leaving for Google. I'm curious about this only as it pertains to how leadership changes impact how things may run at these major AI companies. The changes in personnel like this cause me to wonder what's going on in the boardrooms. 

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Inaudible sounds used to fingerprint browsers catch AliExpress red-handed. Someone accidentally found out that AliExpress tries to fingerprint users by sending signals to get the browser to emit infrasound, and recording the output as a fingerprint. Crazy.

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