6 July 2026

Is baby poop the secret to keeping your brain young?  

For decades, age-related memory loss has largely been viewed as a problem that begins in the brain. But growing evidence suggests that some of the processes shaping cognition may start much farther south — in the gut, home to trillions of microbes that help regulate everything from digestion to immunity.

A new mouse study from researchers at Stanford Medicine and the Arc Institute in Palo Alto, California, points to a surprising gut-brain connection behind cognitive aging.

Got my next startup idea!

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By increasing extracellular serotonin, SSRIs disrupt energy homeostasis and often worsen symptoms during acute treatment. Our third claim is that symptom reduction is not achieved by the direct pharmacological properties of SSRIs, but by the brain's compensatory responses that attempt to restore energy homeostasis. These responses take several weeks to develop, which explains why SSRIs have a therapeutic delay. 
Now they tell us.

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Is this what human interaction has become? It seems that some people need AI to decipher other people's communication – which may have been generated by an LLM. That's just nuts. Is this what office life has become?

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Lesson: if you want to be a black hat hacker – don't use Microsoft Windows. Hacker got snagged by his device GDID. Don't do illegal stuff.

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Great idea. Instead of falling prey to AI-powered spammers, setup a CAPTCHA and make them pay to have their spam delivered to your inbox.

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Interesting. Secret setting turns your phone into a kid-safe dumb phone.

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Music that Keeps You Focused. I had high hopes for this genre, and wished that someone figured out how to tap into the brain and maintain focus. Turns out I pay too much attention to the music, and I get distracted pursuing other music. Or I get annoyed and bored. I was a Focus@Will subscriber in the early days, but stopped listening. Focus music is very personal. What works for one person doesn't for another. For me, it's Dark Ambient or Industrial.

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Be careful when you shop at Target. They record your purchases and profile you. Amazon does it too.

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DKIM and DMARC have been upgraded. They've been useful in figuring out which emails are phishing emails. I have an extension in my Thunderbird mail client. Let's see if the newer versions improve on this.

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Well that's crap. Safari sidebar silently lazy-loads all your bookmarks. I don't want to load all my bookmarked sites every time I fire up Safari. Another reason to stay with LibreWolf.

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Android is almost dead. Or more accurately, F-Droid is almost dead. I'm in the iPhone world so I don't really care.

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Why High-Earning Families Are Leaving Traditional Schools for AI. Well, when you have "teachers" like this, it's no wonder.

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YouTube is really turning into AI garbage. It's like a mini-government. You complain and report a crime and nothing happens. Pretty soon there is too much crime to punish. People get away with no punishment. Enshittification ensues. Reminds me of....

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Anthropic is losing people's goodwill. It's true. Fable 5 answers a lot my questions with "I don't know. You shouldn't rely on me for answers. Look it up yourself." Whereas Claude Sonnet from the last version will at least give me some answer which I can verify myself. Even Felo has become lousy, repeating the wrong answer over and over when I point out an error. Perhaps, it's time to use some of the better open source models.

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Oregon lands on list of worst states to move to. 9th from the bottom, actually. But take the survey with a grain of salt, because it gave high marks to Oregon for education. I guess they haven't been paying attention. No one would mistake Oregon for being anywhere near high for education. Maybe Oregon would really rank even lower?

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5 July 2026

Google created a video short imagining how AI would have been used by America's founding fathers. Infuriating? I thought it was quite amusing.

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Here's more on that Scientific American editor-in-chief who led to downfall of that august journal. SciAm has become the Bud Light of science journals. Remember when she went on a nutty anti-Trump rant? Here's more of her social media rants. She represent all that was wrong during the Biden era. Good riddance. Will SciAm be resurrected? That would be nice, but I suspect that today's readership is not as sophisticated as those of the 1970s.

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1 in 5 adults make health decisions based on what they see on social media despite widespread mistrust. Someone opined that many people were against the mRNA vax, but now they eagerly embrace injecting peptides from China. I don't know if it's the same group of people, but no one is forcing them to inject on the threat of losing their jobs.

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Of course, it's NPR. 5 million have dropped ACA insurance after Trump and the GOP let prices skyrocket. Such biased reporting. They call it the ACA, not Obamacare, because it's failing. The federal government really has no business being America's medical insurance provider. Obamacare only worked because the federal government was underwriting it, and since the fed has deep pockets, prices of everything went up accordingly, because the market could bear it. So it wasn't Trump that let prices skyrocket. It was the fact that taxpayers were paying for everything, so prices jacked up. What the Trump administration needs to do is to convince insurance companies to compete with each other for the individual's business, instead of what he have now. Where employers select the health plan for their employees, who have to take it or leave it.

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MacBook Pro overhaul. One will have to pay more to get less than expected. Or wait until next year for the real upgrade, which will cost about as much as an economy car.

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Two economists have sharply different takes on the recommendations by Gov. Tina Kotek’s Prosperity Council. I think Eric Fruits is right on the money. Oregon is in a doom loop.

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4 July 2026

Happy July 4th Semiquincentennial!

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Megalodon.jp is a Japanese archival service, similar to archive.today. It doesn't require having to check a box to prove that you're not a robot. You use it just like archive.today. To read a website that might require a subscription or login, you could preface the URL with https://archive.ph. Instead you preface the URL with https://mastodon.jp.

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Scientists discover a surprising link between vitamin C and brain health. A Japanese study found that those with lower vitamin C levels had less gray matter in their brains. The study was funded by KAGOME which makes a variety of health food products, so take that into account.

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Scientists at Northwest University created a shape-shifting liquid that transforms into an energy-rich gel that stores power for months. It's called ANI-MV. Not much details about this, but the paper is here. Seems like it's more for energy storage at the cellular level than something that would apply to the energy grid.

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Russia buys gasoline from India to tackle shortages. Russia's oil is medium-sour crude, which should be suitable for gasoline. But damage to refineries is what did it. And at a time of seasonal demands. Little Ukraine has hurt the great bear. This is also why the United States can't produce enough gasoline for the nation, despite American oil being light sweet crude. Our refineries are geared for imported oil from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela, which goes into making diesel, heating oil, bunker oil, asphalt, and motor oil. With cracking, heavy crude can go into making gasoline, But due to difficulty in getting environmental permits and the large capital costs involved, the U.S. hasn't built new refineries since the 1970s. As a result, U.S. production is at max capacity, and refining capacity has actually decreased over the past few years. So people squawk about gas prices, but when it comes to voting, they don't want to expand capacity. And here we are.

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These 10 Portland restaurants and bars have closed in the past two months. What gives? Oh, it's just the ongoing collapse of downtown Portland, that's all.

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3 July 2026

A hematoma, supplemented with special peptides, can heal early stage osteoarthritis. This is interesting since I've always been under the impression that blood in the joints can be harmful, and that repeated episodes, such as in hemophilia, can lead to synovial thickening and scarring. But if you add these special peptides, you get benefit. 

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Other people are reporting that the re-released Claude Fable is not the same as before. The consistent use of the word "nerfed", however, makes me think that these reports are just copies of the same original report, and that it's just one or two persons' opinion parroted everywhere.

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My Students Hate AI. But They Can’t Stop Using It. Once they have tasted power, there's no going back. This is why I have no doubt that AI investment will continue. There's a few hiccups, with datacenter pushback, but there is no question that AI will continue and progress.
But an increasing number of AI users are learning that the free models are crap. Yeah, you gotta pay if you want the best performing models. That free ChatGPT looks lame now, doesn't it?

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Some has already created a browser add-on that bypasses age-verification requirements that some websites request. It works by responding to the age-verification popup by automatically sending the callback to the website that the verification has been succesful. Arms race!

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The big banks are worried that there is a global wealth transfer going on, and that the younger recipients of this wealth are not putting it into their banks. Smallest violin time?

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The next Macbook Pro might cost $10,000? That's crazy.

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Kotek opts Oregon out of Trump program offering up to $1,700 in education tax credits. So great is her hatred for Trump that she's willing to toss Oregon under the bus. Rep Lucetta Elmer agrees. If you can't provide what's best for Oregon because of partisan hatred, then you need to quit.

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2 July 2026

Should you buy now or wait? Should you snag the latest hardware now, with compromised memory capacity and suboptimal bandwidth, or wait for later better models which cost a lot more? I'm going to wait to see what I can get with the M5 Ultra archecture. I'll settle for Chinese DRAM is that's what it takes.

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Anthropic's Fable 5 came back on line yesterday, but it is not the same Fable as before. What did they do to Fable?

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The Wealth of the Richest People in AI. So different from the Fortune 500. A lot more Chinese names, and Anthropic dominates the field. No Google or Microsoft and very few from OpenAI. This is an eye-opener.

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A Chinese grad scholl dropout is calling out fellow academics over fraud. Good for him. More of this needs to be called out.

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Does the brain prefer the printed word over the screen-displayed word? I don't think it's how the text is presented. It's more the context. Holding a book and turning the pages than reading something on a screen. They way the title is phrased, though...

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GPT-5.6 cheats so much its testers couldn’t measure it. Everybody seems to use Claude to code. I'll sometimes use Gemini, which has not disappointed me. Does anyone use GPT to code?

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There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists. Reading this nice summary of what the DSA is all about, I see TONS of mott-and-bailey fallacies. "We only want to fix roads." "We just want health care." Sure, that's the retreat – the mott. But boy, wait till you see the bailey!

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1 July 2026

India's Tata Electronics hit by cyber breach claiming to expose Apple, Tesla trade secrets. Steve Jobs used to keep a tight lid on Apple secrets. Since production was moved to China, those days are gone. And now we see that even when production is moved to India, secrets leak.

Apple ‘Hide My Email’ Vulnerability Reveals Peoples’ Real Email Addresses. This is precisely why I don't trust Apple with mission critical security. I never backup on iCloud. Apple screws up security time and again. 

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The real story behind the collapse of the Boy Scouts of America. This one hits hard. I was a Boy Scout and it was the best thing. You learn a lot of self-reliance and survival tactics. Boys need to interact with other boys in a constructive way. The video doesn't call it out exactly but pedophiles really killed the Scouts. I wish that boys had the support, leadership and role models to guide them, especially today, more than ever.

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You thought Flock cameras were a problem? Your Kids’ School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle. Around kids, we need heightened surveillance.

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Someone thinks that O'ahu needs to be blanketed with even more solar panels. The North Shore is already blighted with unsightly windmills. Guess they haven't finish uglifying Hawaii.

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Someone created a cell that can undergo division (cytokinesis). It duplicates its DNA and then divides. It doesn't have all the organelles it needs to be a real cell, but one step at a time.

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Oregon's spot at the National State Fair, is a poster and an empty chair. Sums up Tina Kotek very well.

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Another person grifts money off of the City of Portland. DEI hire, doesn't work out, leaves with generous severance. And get this:
In October 2001, the City Council tweaked the program, which now allows up to a year’s salary and helps the city avoid any potential litigation. Reporting in recent years by The Oregonian/OregonLive has repeatedly shown that five- or six-figure severance packages are, with few exceptions, pro forma when a top official is forced out of City Hall.

“They are beneficial to both the city of Portland and employees,” Michael Jordan, then the city’s chief administrative officer, told the newsroom in 2022. “Such agreements ensure that we attract high-quality job candidates to lead complex, sensitive and political projects on behalf of the community.”
Oh yeah, we've been getting high-quality job candidates, haven't we?  

30 June 2026

$22,000 Per Hour: Assistants Use a Legislative Loophole to Outearn Surgeons. There are a lot of examples of how politicians passed laws unaware of what they were unleashing. Marijuana legalization laws are like that. Here's another. The No Surprises Act, passed in 2020, was supposed to protect people from surprise medical bills. But it created an arbitration system, where healthcare professionals, if they think they aren't getting paid fairly, can go to an arbitrator to change the price – which insurance companies pay. The problem is that arbitrators have been deciding to pay surgical assistants HUGE amounts of money, way more than the actual surgeon their assisted. It's now widely abused. In one case, the surgeon got paid $1843 for a procedure, but the assistant was able to grab $50,456!

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Now with Widget AI you can build iOS widgets just by describing what you want.

Yeah someone lamented that the current crop of engineers will be the last to know how things actually work. 

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IBM claims world’s first sub-1 nanometer chip technology Who needs ASML, right?

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Sebastian Raschka already put out a book on How to Build an LLM from Scratch. Now he has a book on How to Build Reasoning Models from Scratch.

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If you have no self-control, you can buy a $60 device that prevents you from accessing your social media apps while you enjoy nature outside. It's called Brick. It's pretty sad that people have to spend money on stuff like this. 

Speaking of spending money, some 60-somethings can't retire because they have too much student loan debt. I simply don't understand how people get themselves in this position. Like the 70+ guy with the lawyer kid who won't help out his dad. He has to live in his son's multilevel home to save money, while he continues to work to pay off his son's student loans.

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Here's a comparison between the DGX Spark vs Mac Studio & Halo. Apple has a clear opportunity to make money off the AI boom by selling hardware that will outpace nVIDIA's offerings. Why they don't is beyond me.

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There's a whole industry designed to help influencers maintain the illusion of being wealthy. How to set up your fake rich image. In the early Internet days, there was a saying "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." Now, it's "No one knows you're not really wealthy."

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Cornerstone University launches ‘100%’ smartphone business degree. Heh, and it's as good as the paper it was printed on.

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There's a Reason Women Aren't Swooning Over AI Like Men Are. I can understand this. AI is taking over jobs mainly held by women, for one. It's also used to create misogynistic images of women. And it reflects that pro-male biases that are present on the Internet in general. 
Maybe that's why this Berkeley "AI professor" wants to decelerate AI research.

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Ferrari's marketing boss quits after Luce debacle. Ferrari cars are supposed to make you think of sleek, wealthy, action-oriented Italian men, right? The Luce makes you think of...a Japanese city car, maybe? This car would never have come out of Lamborghini.

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29 June 2026

A master gene that switches on human development has been discovered. During embryogenesis, some of the cells become the placenta, some of them become the yolk sac, and some become the organism itself (epiblast), When the NANOG gene was inactivated in mice, the yolk sac did not form. But in human embryos, the organism did not form. Thus NANOG is an important gene in enabling enbryogenesis in humans. Paper here.

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Google has announced a new CAPTCHA that requires that you use the camera and let is scan your hand.  Already people have found out that you can bypass it with a stock photo.

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Universities are studying how they lost the public’s trust. Gee, it's such a mystery isn't it? 🤣

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Another article: Why are there more top grades at university? ChatGPT is to blame. OK, OK, we know, already. Students cheat.

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Jimmy is an note conversion tool that converts your document to Markdown format. Markdown just isn't going away.

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Articles like these come up now and then. VPNs are not useless. They are required when you are at the airport or using public WiFi. It's good to get reminders that these don't give you complete anonymity and you do need to make sure you select a reputable provider. Using a proxy helps, but even that's not foolproof. You'll still be subject to fingerprinting, and this is where browser like Brave and Mullvad are helpful. I just wish Firefox would take this more seriously.

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iPods are making a resurgence thanks to people who want simpler uncomplicated tech. The problem is that they use Bluetooth standards that are outdated.

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If you use Microsoft OneDrive for your backup, you better read this. What crap.

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NASA tests AI medic for astronauts too far from Earth to call a doctor. They're not using OpenEvidence or any of the other commercial offerings.

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Two journal articles by Max Planck were retracted. And no one can figure out why.

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21st century problems. Poor sleep caused by anxiety about sleep tracker reports. C'mon people!

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Squish is like Ollama for Macs that run on Apple Silicon. It seems to be wicked fast. Unlike when I use Huggingface's mlx-lm models with Ollama, which is glacially slow. Going to try this out.

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Another reason to avoid going to downtown Portland. Portland to raise parking meter rates again. Someone's got to pay for all those homeless tent and needle giveaways. And the socialists' salaries.

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Oregon lets school districts self-certify they follow key rules without providing any proof. Oregon education is a joke.

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28 June 2026

Happy Tau Day!

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More clarity on the Mac Ultra situation. So we might see a M5 Ultra MacStudio later this year. But the M7 Ultra MacStudio won't come until 2028. I had given up on using ope-source models on my M3 MacStudio, and was limited to smaller models. I've played around on Ollama Cloud, but the $20 /month subscription model is too pricy. I'm going to switch to pay-as-you-go on Fireworks AI.

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How to create a macOS Golden Gate USB install drive. I should do this for every OS, but there always seem to be more important things to do. The last time I had to create a Sequioa install drive, and it was not smooth. There was a glitch, and I needed an arcane command to fix it. Thank goodness for Claude.

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Another one. Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown University: ‘Academic integrity is at risk’. This year is the first year graduates have been able to use chatbots every year they were in college. We're going to see if we have extraordinary grad students and knowledge workers. Or fakers who can't deliver.

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It's starting. San Francisco bar patron refused service after speaking out against face-scanning tech. This is exactly what opponents of facial scanning have been worried about. It's not just for age verification. It's to start a database on you, that will be circulated around to others. And you may find yourself locked out of something because of it.

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Give Me 14 Minutes And I'll Destroy Your Procrastination Forever. I've found this to be true many times. Sometimes I hesitated to do something that I felt was unpleasant, but once I started, I couldn't stop. I had to continue to completion. You just need to start and your mind will want to continue and then you'll finish. It reminds me, in a way, or Marcus Aurelius' comment: "Never fear the future. You will face it, if you must, with the same weapons of reason and logic that serve you today."

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The greyforce isn't "retiring". 'Retirement' is a dirty word for boomers, who aren't leaving the workforce. This ronin feels the same way. I'm having so much fun being a masterless samurai, than I was under the power of the daimyo. And get this: Ford hired AI and sacked humans. It backfired badly. 
Ford has admitted to rehiring hundreds of human workers after its aggressive AI adoption strategy backfired.
The US automaker hired over 350 veteran engineers, referred to internally as “gray beards”, over the past three years in order to address mistakes made by automated systems.
Yeah, the greyforce had to come back in to save the day.

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A more in depth look at Oregon's slow economic growth. This is actually from May, but I happened to come upon it today. The chart is enlightening:

The main growth is in healthcare and social assistance. This is because of the powerful unions and the continued support of non-profits. Retail trade has disappeared. And there is far less manufacturing, construction and wholesale trade, stuff which adds real growth and jobs, instead of just services.

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I saw this article about the closure of a birthing center in Portland. The city and county might have helped to keep them open. But money continues to flow towards "homeless causes" which just gets wasted. The tents that are given to the homeless are just thrown away

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Oregon's plans to help the struggling workers by raising minimum wage is only going to help about 4% of workers. Because not many make minimum wage. But it might cause employers to have to raise pay for others to adjust for this. Some folks might get go as a result, as employers can no longer afford them.

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Puget Sound Energy bill has skyrocketed. The question asked is "Can anything be done about it?" The answer is, of course, yes – it will get worse, as the state pushes everyone to switch to electric power, putting more stress on the grid. Instead of sticking with a potentially cheaper source of energy like natural gas. Natural gas prices experience short-term fluctations – look at how much the price went up under Biden. But overall, the price of natural gas has remained fairly constant. Electricity prices, however, continue an upward climb.

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27 June 2026

AI glasses are helping students in test-obsessed Asia cheat in exams. If these kids know the stuff and are just using AI to fill in details or confirm right answers, then we're doomed. If those kids really don't know the material and are using AI just to pass the tests, then Asia is in trouble. Right now, the glasses are still nerdy and thick, but soon they will be more subtle and harder to detect. Like special contact lenses that pick up WiFi or Bluetooth signals. Someday.

There have been more articles like this recently:
AI is degrading the value of a university degree

SearcX is starting to look good again. All the major search engines are embracing AI answers are becoming enshittified. Even DuckDuckGo, pulling in an AI answer, stated that Trump died of rabies, because DDG pulls in search results from Bing and perhaps Google. You can host your own SearX instance, or just use a public one. Pick on in the U.S. and pick one that only uses IPv4, to preserve anonymity. Then off you go.
Unruky is another privacy-oriented search engine, that offers its source code for inspection. But it's a subscription model and is not free, which puts me off. I'm still not yet sold on paid search, like with Kagi. Here's their scare page as to why you need it. There are other alternatives, which don't cost money. 

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iOS 27 Makes the Shortcuts App Much Less Intimidating. This would be great. Shortcuts is such a non-intuitive app to use, especially if you only use it once in a great while. I waste so much time each time I want to use it, trying to figure out how to make the connections work. I'm sure it all made sense to the nerd who designed it.

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Here's a neat service, called linkinseconds. You upload a PDF file, image, or HTML page and get a shareable link to it in seconds. It's like Imgur, but for everything. I can't find how long the link lasts. But it does have analytics so you can see who viewed your file.

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AI Burnout Hits Silicon Valley as Output Surges 100 Times. Apparently a lot of folks are running their Claude agents constantly, over the weekend, cutting into family time. All the while scared of the next layoff announcement. What a life. 
And this columnist is unsure of the AI economy. Lots of spending, but where's the ROI? And are we going to build enough datacenters? With all the component shortages? And all the anti-datacenter sentiment? Clearly we need GenAI – at least the students do. So how will it all be paid for?

Asia doesn't seem to be worrying about these things. They reportedly have a Mythos-grade model that they will release soon, called Tulongfeng. So weird that China didn't have anything like this, until the U.S. had a Mythos. Now suddenly they do, too. Very strange.

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Scientific American has been acquired by LabX Media Group, which holds Discover Magazine, IFLScience, and a number of other science publications. I used to read SciAm regularly as a kid. This was back when it was aimed at educated individuals at the college level. Their math and computing articles were great. Remember this book? It would never get released today! SciAm got taken over by people who dumbed it down and made it woke. I don't recognize it anymore.

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Cool. This Device Takes Photographs With a Single Atom. The single-atom camera, uses optical tweezers and lets you see things that an electron microscope can't, like the workings of quantum computers.

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Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, got banned by his own staff. Sorry, but I couldn't help but chuckle. This is a microcosm of socialism isn't it? Someone creates something of value. Then others come and think they know how to run it better, and they take over and the original creators are shut out. Learn a valuable lesson, Larry.

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This is a great reason why I am firmly against universal care run by the federal government:  Sec. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Oz have just announced OVER *ONE MILLION* PEOPLE are on Obamacare with NO Social Security number. The fraud has been going on for years. 
Meanwhile: Millions drop Obamacare health coverage after subsidies expire and costs rise. Like solar power and EVs, it only pencils out if there are federal subsidies. Take those subsidies away, and the whole thing collapses. (I'm not talking about federal subsidies to folks like Elon Musk, who use it to build businesses. Not to just use it to pay off debt.) Medicaid money was also used to fund political campaigns, too.  Yeah, "Medicare for All" will be the ultimate corruption. 

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