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 The problem is that they use Bluetooth standards that are outdated.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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26 June 2026

SpaceX plans to launch Starlink mobile service in the US. Competition is good.

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China's coal power on the rise again in 2026, reversing first-in-a-decade decline. For all that the Western world is doing to curb CO2 emissions, China is laughing at us. All the sacrifices that people are making. Most importantly, all the taxes that are collected to fund non-profits and NGOs to do...something. All negated by what China does. Why don't Al Gore and John Kerry go to China to protest? Even Greta doesn't care anymore – Palestine is her shtick now.

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Anthropic has hired an economist with . . .  interesting views on human survival. His math is simplistic and slightly off. It's actually 0.99^40 that we'll survive AI in 40 years, not exp(−.01 × 40). Close enough, though. I think it's greater than 99% chance we'll survive AI each year, but it's likely not constant, but increasing over the years, as the technology improves. But we'll also probably run out of HBM and capacitors and not have enough datacenters, so that will change the dynamics.

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This is a good example of software creep. I liked earlier versions of Soulver, the calculator with a unique and intriguing UI. However, over time it has tried to do more and more, and now, it's got all kinds of crap that I will never use, including NLP. There are better tools for those other things. Why can't it just be an easy to use calculator? I love the RLM-15CX and use it so much. Fantastic tool.

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Mullvad founder Daniel Berntsson is behind a huge donation to the populist Örebro Party, which advocates “comprehensive remigration” from Sweden. I like Mullvad even more now. I've read other news reports calling the Örebro Party "extreme far-right" just for advocating common sense policy.

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AI Broke Software's Best Trick. It really is just limited to GenAI. Unlike regular software, where you just package multiple copies of software to sell for a profit, GenAI costs the same amount of money in terms of tokens that someone has to pay for. Training a model is only good for a short period of time, and then you have to train the next improve model. And people expect it all to be free. Or maybe you can get a minority who are willing to pay some money for your AI services, but it's not like selling Windows or Office.

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Delete Doesn't Mean Deleted. Just Ask OpenAI. You gotta be careful what you type into ChatGPT. It's different from what you type into Google search. Chat is more personal and incriminating. And it can be stored for a long time. 
In the copyright case The New York Times brought against OpenAI, Magistrate Judge Ona Wang ordered the company in May 2025 to preserve and segregate chat logs it would otherwise have deleted, even the ones users had asked it to erase, and to keep doing so going forward. Then, in January 2026, District Judge Sidney Stein affirmed a separate order compelling OpenAI to hand over 20 million de-identified conversations, a sample drawn from years of ordinary logs, to the plaintiffs. Two different orders, one quiet lesson: the chats you thought were yours to delete are the company’s to keep, and a court’s to call for.
Is that enough to keep you up at night?

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I read this: M5 Ultra Mac Studio Could Launch in 2026 With Up to 768GB of RAM, which would be great but unlikely, because the world doesn't have enough consumer DRAM. And then this came out: Apple to Skip High-End M6 Mac Chips in Favor of AI-Focused M7 Line. So are they going to debut a M5 machine this year? Or an M6 machine? Or skip that and debut an M7 machine next year? And what good is a faster processor without enough unified memory to play around with?

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As SuperAgers age, they make at least twice as many new neurons as their peers. Dang, I hope I am a superager. It doesn't pay to live long if you're demented or forgetful. The mind is truly precious and it pains me to see so many people abuse their brains so much.

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...one result was very uncomfortable.

    Frequent use of sun or UV protection was associated with increased risk of all four skin cancer types.

They showed that the risk for basal cell carcinoma is 2.4 times higher, 2.3 times higher for cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, roughly 2 to 3.5 times higher for localized melanoma, and for invasive melanoma, the risk ranged from about 1.4 to nearly 4 times higher! 
What?! This is likely because of avobenzone, oxybenzone, octocrylene, homosalate, octisalate, and octinoxate. You can still find this stuff in sunscreens and there is no warning. What really got me upset is that I ordered a Korean sunscreen that was supposed to be free of this stuff, and Amazon sent over the U.S. version, which contained all the ingredients above, which I purposefully wanted to avoid by ordering the Korean stuff.

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It just amazes me that even today, this PHP date bug still is unresolved. PHP is a good example of a language that, as it grew, became disorganized, and you have all these obscure functions that never got fixed or deleted. People just created more stuff on top of it. The language needs a good cleanout.

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OpenAI will initially only release ChatGPT 5.6 to government-approved customers. I wonder if OpenAI felt that it had to have a model like Mythos, that was so good it was dangerous and too hot to handle for regular people. Maybe Google will do the same with their next Gemini model. Because if your LLM is able to be released to the public without hesitation, why it can't be that powerful, right? This is the new prestige. So powerful that the Trump administration restricts its use. Ooooo....

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There’s a ‘Trump account’ hack that can unlock decades of wealth-building for your kid. How many families will take advantage of this? Or is hatred for Trump so great that they will pass this up. Missing out on a real opportunity to get ahead.

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And then there's the Democrat way of getting more money: A new bill calls for $25 minimum wage, would that be enough in Oregon? Holy crap, this is going to kill jobs and cause companies to flee. Who can pay this money for unskilled labor? This is such a business-unfriendly state. No doubt this bill is sponsored by ignorant Lefties unfamiliar with basic economics.

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Survey says Portland has one of the worst downtowns in the world. Here's the survey – check it out for yourself. In North America, Portland was in the bottom 9 in every category, usually in the bottom 5. Dead last in terms of vitality. Are you seeing this, Tom Dundon? Forget underpasses, here's a homeless person camping out right in the street. 

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4 of 5 voters reject near $1B for Moda – even If Blazers Leave. Portland leadership has to face facts. We can't afford the Blazers anymore. The city is too poor. It would have to skimp on other core services just to help a basketball team. Tom Dundon is right. Why should he have to be the only one to pay for Moda renovation, when it's being used by others – concert perfomers, WNBA, etc. Why not hit them up for some cash? Oh yeah, then they wouldn't want to come to Portland. As Robert Kiyosaki says, the rich make money using other people's money. And the best time to make money is when you buy an asset, not afterwards. I say that it's highly likely the Blazers are going to leave Portland.

Heh, not to worry, guy. Ya won't have to worry about billionaires coming to Portland anymore! No siree!

And here's Multnomah County, still giving out needles to the homeless. Just not doing it near schools. But continuing to support the drug-using homeless lifestyle. And we wonder why the numbers just won't go down. 

Portland councilors share concerns over Mayor Wilson’s power over city budget. Gimme dats! say the socialists. 

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Portland Public Schools board passes painful $2.77 billion budget. I guess it's time to organize another strike again to get more money, right? Do it!

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25 June 2026

Medical students are using a popular research tool to pump out misleading studies. TriNetX sounds like a biomedical AI slop platform. The last thing we need in a world already immersed in trust problems.

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Louisiana man becomes first in region functionally cured of sickle cell disease. He was a beneficiary of Casgevy’s CRISPR/Cas9 technology. This is great because physicians treating sickle cell disease have one of the highest burnout rates. The article doesn't say why, but anyone who takes care of these patients probably knows. 

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HelloAI is very much like poe.com and is slightly less expensive. They don't offer as many models as poe.com, though, although you apparently get more on the paid tiers. I can find info on how many tokens each plan will give you, though. 
Lightning.ai is another platform with a similar business model, and a lesser model selection compared with poe.com. I do like the privacy of HelloAI and that their servers are located in Australia and Singapore. There is no desktop app for this, as far as I can tell. There are two Mac desktop apps which call themselves Hello AI, but they don't appear to be associated with this company at all, which is unfortunate.

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The Hotness Curve. This post has popped up on trending lists, and I link it not so much for the topic (this ronin is too old for this stuff) but for the data analysis. The way the polling results are diced and sliced to answer the questions that people would likely be interested in. Of course, ethnicity plays a major role in studies like this, and that factor is not mentioned at all. What was the ethnicity composition of the women that were displayed? Why did the author include AI-generated photos? How about the men that took the poll – do we even know anything about them? Apparently they were the author's X followers, so that a particular demographic right there. All I came away with is that if you're an AI-generated 35 y/o woman, you have a decade or so left of desirability. 🤪

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The Pizza Bakery. This is a nice way of visualizing where the bottlenecks are in vLLMs. nVIDIA makes the bakers and companies like SK Hynix make the pantry. Or at least they did until recently. Now maybe it's just Samsung and Micron?

And Apple is increasing prices on their hardware because of memory and storage shortages. I see that Micron and Sandisk stock is shooting up. 

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Well good to know. Your Brain Has Separate Circuits for Belly Laughs and Polite Chuckles. Wonder how this evolved.

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Chinese Supercomputer Overtakes U.S. as World’s Fastest. The LineShine is 22% faster the El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore. Musk's Colossus is up there, too, but didn't participate in these rankings.

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Films studio A24 is collaborating with Google DeepMind. Good. I hope we'll get better movies with compelling stories and less political activist actors to deal with.

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Building a website with AI can be opaque:
Claude and OpenAI are incredible tools — I use them every day. But when a non-technical person asks them to build a website, the AI gives them a developer’s roadmap. It tells them to sign up for Vercel. Set up a Supabase database. Create a GitHub account. Install Node, configure an API, deploy via CLI.

To you and me? That’s just a random Tuesday. To a 75-year-old who just wants a landing page? That is an absolute brick wall.
The author used theassistantbot.com to help her father build this site. I believe there are others that will do this, too, depending on the type of site. Maybe not automated to this degree, though.

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Portland's Moda Center renovation debate heats up as Blazers owner Dundon makes his case. Tom Dundon wants the city of Portland to pay for upgrading the Moda Center (his profit center). The implied threat is that he will take the Blazers elsewhere, and there will be no greater symbol of shame for the current Democrat leadership to be the one that lost the iconic basketball team. Whose games just a small minority attend. Dems don't want to be losers in the literal as well as figurative sense. Dundon holds the cards. So taxes and fees will just have to increase. Sorry, not sorry.

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Just yesterday after crowing about the great revenue Seattle took in last year, comes this article: Washington’s gas tax is going up, but state transportation revenue is falling short. Already falling down the other side of the Laffer curve, are we?

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24 June 2026

I knew it! Nature retracts provocative PD-1 study that tied lung cancer survival to treatment timing. Yet another Chinese paper is retracted. This one fooled a lot of people, including Eric Topol. But it never made sense that 3:00 pm would be the cutoff for efficacy. And the efficacy data for the morning group wasn't as good as previous data. Now we know – it was all bogus. I bed a lot of nursing schedulers are happy about this.

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AI models used to help diagnose medical conditions have a problem: They’re ready and willing to identify patients whose data was used to train them.
Here's the paper. If you read the paper, the real danger is nowhere near as bad as the journalist makes it out to be. It's basically a take off on references 5, 6, and 7 in the article, where Carlini et al was able to extract training data from a model. The model was old  (GPT-2) and so it's possible that things have improved. But training data is supposed to be de-identified anyway, so even if you can extract it, it won't tell you much. Unless you have some uniquely identifiable body distinction. But someone can't just take a new chest X-ray or mammogram and expect to confirm membership in the dataset. Doesn't work that way. So this paper has been hyped up. Relax.

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Poll: More than 90% of voters opposing data centers don't live near them. Interesting. If a company wants to build a datacenter in the middle of nowhere, I wouldn't want protestors for Seattle or Portland to come by to raise a ruckus. It doesn't concern them. It's a problem that may have been solved for that locale. The protestors that I've seen tend to be the most indoctrinated and uninformed people who just spew what their high school teacher or TikTok video told them. 

This is funny:
"The cleanest form of AI use is no use," Kaveh Madani, a water scientist and director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Canada. "So when you could avoid using AI, don't use it."

Don't use it for simple things. Don't use it for calculations, directions, store hours, recipes or shopping lists, which are all searches people used to do without AI, but now do it with AI and waste power and water, Luccioni said.

"Yeah, it's great. You can generate a chocolate chip cookie recipe with Claude, or you can open a damn book. Like, those still exist. You really don't need Claude." 
And don't say "Thank You" or "Please" to your LLM. They don't care and it just wastes tokens, right?

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SK Hynix targets $29 billion US listing as AI demand surges. The world's chip makers are Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung, and since the latter two are Korean, it's not easy to invest in them as an American. But if SK Hynix can trade on the American market, that would be great. DRAM chips are in demand. Their stocks aren't zooming mainly because the market has apparently already priced that in. But maybe they will zoom. 

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Hospital workers' phones carry deadly superbugs.  Healthcare providers must have the toughest immune systems. 

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Older tech workers are tapping out early. Yep, if you can retire, it's great to do so. The workaday world is crazy. And you can make room for all those young CS majors who need employment.

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Treating autism with Bumetanide: Identification of responders using Q-Finder machine learning algorithm. Bumetanide? That's a strong diuretic. But it also modulates GABA-ergic neurotransmission, so that's why. But there are better drugs that do this, and don't make you pee so much.

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Vibecoding is becoming a deal-breaker test for software acquisitions. That's what they say, but take a look at this: The State
of Startups 2026. Everybody uses LLMs to code. As long as you know what the LLM has done, I say it's fine.

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Chinese universities are cutting language majors to make way for AI. Screw humanities! AI is everything! 🤔

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Is Trump getting retatrutide? So what if he is. The benefits of this medication are such that more people should be getting them.

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Holy crap! Google Poised to Lose Two More Senior AI Staffers to Anthropic. Now Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are leaving. They worked on Gemini. What's going on at Google?

Google settles social medial lawsuit with teen, who also sued Meta. Teen gets money. Google gets to continue doing what it does. Sounds like a win-win, right?

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Tired of Dickovers? Me, too. But I've found that if you install uMatrix in your browser and disable scripting for main sites, you can avoid a lot of these.

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Different LLMs have differing expertise in biological sciences. This may help guide you as to what model to use for a biology type query.

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Seattle is proud that they're smashing records with tax collections this year.  It's unclear how long that might last, however. Meanwhile, Montana cut taxes and saw their revenue double. That's the way to do it.

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23 June 2026

Nvidia Touts ‘100% Reduction in Water Use’ With New Data Center Design. Yes, evaporative cooling is becoming obsolete, being replaced by dry (chilled air) cooling, dielectric (immersion) cooling and closed-loop systems. The water-propylene glycol solution mentioned in the article is part of a closed-loop system. This answers one objection. The other is energy. Here's an interesting dialog:

He's right. Fear of nuclear energy has put us back years from where we could have been today. We can solve the technologic issues to make datacenters less onerous and it could spur innovations in energy production as well, such as SMRs.
But another obstacle needs to be removed, and that is harder to fix: the power grid in the Western states. The grid needs to be updated to handle the growing demand, and electric utilities won't bother unless they get paid a lot of money. We know PNW emergy executives have the money. But until they start adding capacity, just adding power won't be the full answer. 

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Midjourney's Scanner has evoked a lot of discussion. Here's a blog post from Scott Alexander. Scott may be missing the point, but since he's usually a sharp thinker I'll chalk it up to his not being a radiologist. Here's another great piece from an engineer, who "sides with the doctors" about people getting overly scanned. 
But we're talking about an imaging modality that does not involve X-rays or require contrast like gadolinium which can remain in your body, even with the macrocyclic agents. So there is no downside to repeated examinations (except expense). It could be just what the doctor ordered to monitor a lesion that is deep and doesn't look ominous, but you're just not sure. Or it may be useful to monitor aortic aneurysms or pancreatic cysts. This technology is still new, so studies need to be done. The technology is bound to improve as well. I'm just impressed that you can get tomographic images with ultrasound like this. We used to call it "ultrasmoke" because what you saw were just acoustic echoes. So different now, with AI image processing.
I'm not saying that people should get scanned anytime they want for kicks. But in certain cases, this may be the ideal option to have. 

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ChatGPT app store falters six months after launch. I bet most people didn't even know there was a ChatGPT app store. Did you?

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Three things to watch amid Anthropic’s latest feud with the government. No doubt China is happy that Anthropic could be throttled. But yeah, we need to see what Congress does regarding American AI supremacy. I'm definitely getting nuclear energy fear vibes, and that AI technology will get unnecessarily throttled because of similar pure fear. We've already seen how scared people can be: nuclear, COVID-19, etc. Americans frighten so easily.

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How AI ate your RAM. I was reading this story in the context of the dropping stock prices of chip manufactures, especially the ones making DRAM chips. A Korean company, SK Hynix, announced that they were moving away from High Bandwith Memory chips for datacenters and making cheaper DRAM components. But companies like Micron make DRAM chips, so why is their stock taking a hit? Makes no sense to me.

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My Reddit RSS feeds have been glitchy lately. Now I know why.

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Weather Replay is a time machine for the weather. You can replay the weather from days past. Relive storms. So much time to waste. 

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Why are young people getting cancer at an earlier age? This paper suggests that it could be related to their biologic age advancing faster than their chronologic age. They define biologic age looking at Levine's PhenoAge, which is defined by rather crude blood  measurements: albumin, alkaline phosphatase, creatinine, C-reactive protein, glucose, mean cell volume, erythrocyte distribution width (RDW), leukocyte count and lymphocyte ratio. Nothing like gene expression, epigenetic markers, telomeric lengths or mutation frequency. So are people aging faster? What's driving it?

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Health board apologizes for phishing staff with with bogus vacation day. Well, there's a way to fix that, isn't there?

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AI and Math: State of the Art. Nice infographic on the advances made by AI in the world of advanced math.

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Could less caffeine be the smarter performance enhancer? Scientists find a surprising sweet spot. Aiming for peak physical performance, you don't have be jittery to get the most out of caffeine. Two double espressos before a run will make you run faster.

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Google’s online dominance is showing signs of cracking in AI era. I mentioned the departure of Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer and AlphaFold's John Jumper. People are noticing that Google is not what it used to be.

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Good news: FDA approved a new sunscreen ingredient after many years. Bad news: the same regulatory culture that caused the delay remains firmly in charge. It's the federal government. Things are so political there, and we still only have an acting head (Kyle Diamantas), who is not a medical person. Congress won't approve anyone that Trump wants, who will really be effective. It's always got to be some compromise.

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Portland’s cost of living is ballooning as city tax, fee increases pile up. Residents feel the pain. Well, when the affluent flee the city, someone has to pay the salaries of the City Council, and the homeless services, and the attorney fees, and the maintenance and upkeep of their lavish offices. While citizens get less law enforcement, less use of their parks, less enjoyment of the city, and more crime, graffiti and Antifa protests (although that's died down of late).

Four electric Amazon delivery vans torched at SW Portland EV shop. What about muh climate? All that smoke and toxic fumes. Can't have nice things in Portland.

Why Oregon Drivers Continue Paying More at the Pump Even as Gas Prices Fall Across America. These articles appear over and over again, and state the same factors. Just be glad we're not southern California. 

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Medicare AI program made them suffer in pain. Now this is something I object to, and consider it a wrong application of AI. Apparently Medicare is paying a third-party tech company called Virtix Health to handle approvals, and they get paid based on how much money they save Medicare. So what do you think they'll do? Deny as much as they can, of course. This is yet another reason why I we should NOT have Medicare for all. The government should NOT be in the healthcare insurance business. Because they do stupid stuff like this. The federal government wasn't created for this, and it's so inefficiently run.

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22 June 2026

Mullvad vs The Great Firewall. Mullvad doesn't just use QUIC obfuscation. It also has the Shadowsocks protocol as well. However neither of these is foolproof, and if the government even suspects that you are using a VPN, your connection will be terminated. The blog post is a bit too complimentary. It's an arms race – let's see who wins. 

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It’s Never Too Late: Practical Tips for the Over-50 Encore Career Seeker. This ronin thinks 50 is still very young. You're as old as how you think.

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Good riddance, Tim. I can certainly understand this fellow. Clearly there was a change in how one viewed Apple after Steve Jobs was no longer around. We stopped being amazed at new products. We just hoped they wouldn't suck. And we hoped we would finally get what was already available on competitors devices, am I right? Tim was the operations guy, not the vision guy. Remember when Steve Jobs said “A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them”. That's the kind of guy Apple needs to helm the company.

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Why we should vaccinate wild animals. This seemed at first like a whack-o notion, but think about it. What would it be like if we didn't have to worry about rabies, which is truly nasty, and basically incurable? As long as we don't go overboard with this concept, it could make sense. But if vaccinations are anything like they are for humans, you're never going to practically vaccinate animals. There's just no way.

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Some Electricians Think Building Data Centers Is for Sellouts. This article sounds like a persuasion article. It wants to make prospective datacenter builders think twice. I am still in the camp that as much as the public hates datacenters, they love AI more, and will put up with building more datacenters. I strongly doubt that the world can go back to the old days.

Take this app, for example. They make you think you need AI help just to be yourself?

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Thank goodness the appellate court killed this law, which would enable kids to change their sex without informing parents. What a loony state.

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The other Portland’5 theaters have all had steep dropoffs. Attendance at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall last year was down by 28% from its peak seven years earlier. The 300-seat Winningstad Theatre is drawing half as many people as it did in 2018.

“People are willing to come back and see commercial shows,” Lembo said. “They’re less willing, for whatever reason, to come back and hear the symphony.”

The same goes for other nonprofit arts organizations. The Oregon Children’s Theatre shut down operations last year as attendance fell and it lost the support of the Kaiser Permanente Educational Theatre program. That left a big hole in the Portland’5 schedule that Lembo said it’s still working to fill.
Who wants to risk going downtown anymore?

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Residential proxies are valued by web scraping companies like Bright Data and OxyLabs. Having access to them costs money, and I've often wondered how sites that offer residential proxies convinced regular folks to allow their home networks to be proxies for web scraping services. Who would agree to such a contract? Well now I know how they do. It's through people's Smart TVs. Of course!

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I link to this article not because of its content, but because of the special web design that explains things so well. I wish many educational websites would use a format like this to explain math or science concepts. Really spiffy.

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I saw this blog post about AI's PR problem. It's because college students blame AI on why they aren't getting paid as much with their bachelor's degree. The author cites this blog post doing a more detailed comparison of salaries. Here's what he said:

Median usual weekly earnings of workers with a high school degree only:

2000: $968

2025: $980

Median usual weekly earnings of workers with a bachelor degree only:

2000: $1,587

2025: $1,580

Median usual weekly earnings of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher:

2000: $1,705

2025: $1,747

These were corrected for the difference in cost of living, and the CPI(2025)/CPI(2000) is about 1.87.
Now, FRED is not really the place to look to get accurate salary stats. You need to go to the BLS site. Here's what it says:

So the actual 2025 weekly median salary for bachelors degree for men only is actually higher: $1,833. For men who go on to get an advanced degree, it's $2,298.  The FRED website that looks at only the high-achievers with only a bachelors degree (ninth decile) shows a median salary of $3,421 in 2025! It was only $1623 in 2000, and that was equivalent to today's $3,035.
So what this suggests to me is that AI is not holding everybody back.
The easy jobs are not paying as well (because AI can do it just as well or better). But if you are trained to do more complex tasks, you will stay get paid well. The low-hanging fruit jobs are gone. Hope you paid attention in school.

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21 June 2026

I remember when Midjourney was just another image generating AI app, like StableDiffusion and FLUX.

But they've branched into healthcare, and now they have an amazing device called Midjourney Scanner. Watch the video in the tweet. Ultrasound tomography is now a thing. One doctor was initially skeptical, but now sees that this could really change management of incidental lesions of uncertain significance. Studies are necessary to confirm this strategy but it certainly looks promising.

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What does it take to retire comfortably now? It's more than a million. You need $1.46 million now. And that's the low figure, assuming no surprises. 

Someone writes: I make good money. Why do I still feel like this? Looks like Robert Kiyosaki needs to write another book, or reissue his Rich Dad, Poor Dad books. You won't actually be "rich" until you get off the rat race and have income that is completely from passive sources. Only then you will feel rich. Just having a high income is not enough. 

But just having a million no longer impresses. The ‘Mass Affluent’ Are Losing Their Allure for Wealth Managers Navigating AI. That's right, if you only have a million in fungible assets, you just get an AI wealth manager. Human wealth managers are for the really rich. Such is inflation. 

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How Websites Actually Know Where You Are. I thought I was safe just using a VPN, but websites now check your timezone, and some (like NordVPN) will state that you are in the Icelandic timezone even though you set your exit node city somewhere else. And that's the giveaway that you're using a VPN. Check out your setup here.

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Morale is really bad at META. Never knowing when you might get canned. Surrounded by coworkers who don't speak English and exclude you. And your keystrokes are tracked.

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Humans May Soon Be Able to Regrow Body Parts—Including Fingers and Limbs—Thanks to a Groundbreaking Serum. This would be great. 

And a drug called ABS-201, which targets the prolactin receptor may allow bald people to regrow hair.

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20 June 2026

Nobel prize winner John Jumper jumped from Google to Anthropic. That's the second person to leave after Noam Shazeer. What's going on at Google? It seemed like they had gotten back their mojo.

Here's more on that FDA-approved sunscreen ingredient, bemotrizinol. Since reading about sunscreens as a result of this, I am truly surprised that the FDA has allowed the endocrine disrupter, homosalate, to be included in sunscreen ingredients without a warning. Women with a history of breast cancer might want to avoid using products that contain this ingredient, for example.

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Doctordle is a wordle like game where you have six chances to guess the current diagnosis in a clinical vignette, where clues are revealed little-by-little. This might be a way to test some of the medical AI tools. 

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Wet coffee grounds turned into high-grade solid fuel in just 90 seconds. It would be nice to be able to turn used coffee ground into a solid fuel source. You have to expend energy and expense to do this, so really the overall savings are questionable.

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A Trillion Dollars Isn’t Worth It If You Have to Be Elon Musk. Very true. Even the lives of many billionaires isn't worth it. Shrewd investing can make you a multi-millionaire. But to be a billionaire requires owning your own business and the stresses that go along with it. You must tolerate risk and put in considerable personal sacrifice and effort to achieve success, which not everyone achieves. Musk has no real family life in the conventional sense, and must take drugs to keep himself going. The title of the article should be "if you have to live like Elon Musk". The author of the article gets some things wrong. Musk does not "actively keep other people in poverty". And like so many people who don't know some of the wasteful uses USAID money was spent on. It's been said the foreign aid is "money going from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries". The USAID was a jobs program for activists, with only a fraction going to fight poverty. I suspect that one of the reasons that protests have been fizzling is that the money supply is running dry.

This tweet sums up what USAID was really all about:

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Why people might ditch their smartwatches for something simpler. I think the real reason is that they're tired of having to charge their watches so frequenly, like a phone. A watch should just work.

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Hospitals that took on Medicaid are now suffering for it. Remember when states were pressured to take on Medicaid patients? Many saw the Medicaid expansion for what it was. But Obama wanted it, and it was eventually going to be the only way illegal aliens could get medical care. And it only worked with massive federal support. Now, states like Oregon are suffering because that federal aid is being withdrawn because it's unsustainable. It may be painful, but it's the only way to compel Democrat states to change their behavior.

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Of course. Putin is into the longevity craze. Why wouldn't he? And he's using his daughter to do the science. The author hopes that some good science will come out of it, but I think that's very unlikely.

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This is incredible. Exosome therapy to treat burns is the way to go! Even better than spray on skin.  Here's the doctor who pioneered this technology. What an amazing result.

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What a waste. Gangsta AI will submit queries to 9 LLMs to increase the likelihood of getting the answer you're looking for. But odds are that you don't really need to query that many LLMs at once. It's a big waste of tokens, and in light of the backlash against datacenters and the desire for energy conservation, is this really wise? Concern has even been raised that when healthcare really implements generative AI full scale, the effects on energy consumption might not be sustainable. 
We've made inference into a commodity when it actually isn't. The cost is hidden, but it's there. Nothing is free. 

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Lars Larson makes a good point. Law-abiding citizens have to observe burn bans, but law enforcement happily ignores the homeless. It's like during the coronavirus epidemic – we had to wear masks and stay home, and six feet apart, etc. The homeless were exempt. They can do what they want, wherever and whenever they want.

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Multnomah County – national laughingstock. Over woke policies. Nobody takes Oregon or Portland seriously anymore. They're a punchline.

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Gabe Newell is leaving Washington for Florida. Mayor Wilson says "Buh-bye". 

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