5 August 2026

Google is like Apple now, can can't retain its key division leaders. Now Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist and co-founder of Google Brain, is leaving. So now Google is reorganizing. I can't help but think this is related to Demis Hassabis changing the direction of Google's AI efforts to pursue AGI. Some people probably weren't happy and felt it was time to leave.

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Korean culture is just different. A hot item to get is an SK Hynix jacket. Because "people online have been jokingly referring to the SK hynix employees as "gods," highlighting how desirable their jobs are perceived to be". Intel employees don't get this kind of love. 🤣

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GPT 5.6 Has 72 Possible Configurations. I didn't realize it was that complicated. But using GPT-5.6, another complicated math problem has been solved - the Shortest Vector Problem.

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White House’s AI Guidelines Exempt U.S. Open Models From Government Review. There aren't very many open models from the U.S. There's Nemotron, Llama, and gpt-oss, but what else? Oh, there's a small company called Arcee AI that's building open-source models. They have four models, Trinity, with different sizes. There's not much written about them, and I don't see them on Ollama or the cloud platform I use (Together AI).

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Someone emulated macOS on the iPad. An interesting exercise, but I'll stick with my MacUltra.

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Metabolic Psychiatry. Never heard of it before. Altering your mood by changing your diet seems like an obvious thing, but perhaps we don't fully understand the biochemical underpinnings.

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I'm beginning to think there is a media campaign to impugn the reputation of datacenters. Make them look bad, so that partially-informed people will automatically view them with suspicion. New York passed a datacenter moratorium but so far no other state has done so. Although there are local bans. Someone must gave gotten to Gov. Abbott in Texas, although I think he's smart enough not to prohibit construction completely. It's interesting, though, that despite all the protests, datacenters are being built. People are not going to give up chatbots, nor AI-powered technology. 

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This is a concern, however. As chips and support components continue to be in short supply, it will be more expensive to build datacenters. And much of the cash allocated to fund this has been spent. So what does one do? Borrow. And some are concerned that this cannot be sustained. The credit default swap market has reported increasing spreads, indication that investors think that default is likely.  But I think that can lead to perverse incentives. It makes some investors want AI datacenter projects to fail. Because if they don't, all their premium payments were for nought. They get paid when there is a default. And that's not a healthy situation. Naked CDS speculation (owning CDS without owning the underlying bond) can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. And this may also be why there is a lot of pessimistic news about dataceters being unpopular and not being built. CDS speculators stand to make money if datacenters go bust.

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We still doing this? Shionogi Announces U.S. Availability of XOCOVA® (ensitrelvir), the First and Only Oral Option to Help Prevent COVID-19 Following Exposure. Because Paxlovid really doesn't work anymore. But the best immunity protection is to get recover from the infection, which the vast majority of people do. Once you recover, you have durable immunity.

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The SCREEN Act is a Christian Nationalist Nightmare. Yeah, I gotta agree here. This is not the way to "protect children". You don't do it by restricting content. You do it by convincing children that having the right values is the better way to live.

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Portland’s transportation system is experiencing a profound and measurable decline. And likely to get worse.

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The report reinforces what economists and budget analysts have long recognized: Oregon remains one of the most income tax-dependent states in the United States. While many states rely heavily on broad statewide sales taxes to finance government services, Oregon has chosen a different path by operating without a general statewide retail sales tax. Instead, personal and corporate income taxes serve as the foundation of the state’s revenue system, making Oregon’s finances more closely tied to employment, wages, business earnings and investment performance than those of many other states.
And now businesses and wealthy people are fleeing the state. What happens next?

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4 August 2026

Today is the day that the Ray Bradbury story "There Will Come Soft Rains" takes place.

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Metformin also works in the brain to regulate blood sugar levels, appetite and energy metabolism. Interesting drug. We are still learning more about it.

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The settlement addresses allegations that both companies violated the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) by discriminating against U.S. workers and instead preferred workers with temporary employment visas, when the companies hired and recruited during the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) process.

“It is illegal to discriminate against U.S. workers by preferring temporary visa holders for jobs,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. 
It's about time.

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Mathematicians need to act. I agree but not in the way this person advocates. Mathematicians need to learn how to harness AI assistants to help them in their research. Otherwise people like this will steal their thunder. Look at Tsimerman – he says he's afraid of AI, but he's jumping right in to learn more about it and guide its development. That's the way to do it. 

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Apple Maps in iOS 27 looks fantastic! Significantly better than Google Earth now. Look at how they render trees!

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That Oxford professor may be fooling them in the UK, but he'd never fool them at Caltech. They have a fraud squad. You better be who you say you are.

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More proof that peptides can be very potent. Enlicitide is a macrocyclic peptide, first of its kind, to be FDA approved as a medicinal, to lower cholesterol by inhibiting PCSK9. It's an amazing example of biochemical research, and worth the read.

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Online Erdős Number Calculator. Hey, I found out I have an Erdös number of 3. Wow.

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Online advertising giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are necessary. Exactly, ads are intrusive, and they certainly have the ability to inject unwanted code. Block 'em all!

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Apheresis that removes cholesterol can also remove forever chemicals and microplastics. A bit inconvenient but at least it works.

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Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI. Apple should have bought OpenAI a while back. Too late now.

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Now this is cool! How is Finger Frame AI done? How would you code for something like this?

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Fructose affects the brain differently from glucose. Glucose can suppress your appetite when you've had enough, but not fructose.

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Surveillance cameras will be required in all new cars by 2027. Ugh, whose idea was this?

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Politico discovers that the motor-voter system is a conduit to election fraud. This has implications to Oregon and California, naturally.

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Nathaniel VerGow is now in his third month as Multnomah County’s Homeless Services director. And he is already lower expectations of his performance.
The Oregonian/OregonLive: Are you expecting to see an increase in homelessness due to those constraints?
VerGow: Yes, I am expecting to see increases.
Of course. The Homeless Industrial Complex will continue to operate. Don't expect improvement, Portland.

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Hawaii facing ‘sluggish’ job growth through 2034. Well, it is a Blue state. And guess what sector is growing the most – healthcare and social assistance! Just like Oregon! What a coincidence. I wonder how of those healthcare dollars come from personal health services and hospices.

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3 August 2026

Private Claude Conversations Have Been Indexed by Search Engines. Really unfortunate when people use AI and don't really know what goes on under the hood. It just sets people up for all kinds of vulnerabilities. I would never use a chatbot by going to the website directly. There's often no privacy control, and you can leave yourself open. Apparently this happened when people tried to share their chat sessions. Anthropic feels that if you're willing to share, they can make it publicly available. Not something that people expect.

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California's AI labeling law (California AI Transparency Act) just went into effect. Graphics created with AI must be watermarked as such. While I admire the thought behind it, this is just California, and there will likely be ways to circumvent it. Kinda a waste of time. 

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Clocks Still Fall Back November 1 as Senate Blocks Permanent Daylight Saving Time. This is so typical of Congress. Now we'll still have to turn clocks back this November, because Congree couldn't get it right. We need permanent Standard Time instead. And it will probably be years before we get this close again.

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Why we stopped making Einsteins. The author thinks it's because we don't have private tutors anymore. I think it's more than that. The trend also started a long time ago, probably in the 1600s. We still managed to get Einstein in the early 1900s. Will Andrew Ng's private AI tutors give us supergeniuses, perhaps?
But America is not going to be producing Einsteins if this trend continues: Study Finds Daily Marijuana Use Surpasses Daily Alcohol Consumption Among US Adults. 

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The damage done by Fauci extends beyond one man's deeds. It seems almost too good to be true that we were able to glimpse his "diary". Sen Rand Paul was given handed a treasure trove of documents to release shortly before the Fauci testimony. Bet he never thought it would be found and released. Former HHS head Xavier Beccera might have known about them, but did not reveal them. So now we know what he was thinking behind the scenes, and how the nation was fooled, especially the media and medical profession. This needs to be discussed and guardrails need to be put in place to prevent this from happening again.

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AI's talent wars have a loyalty problem. I remember when this was happening in the 1990s during the first Silicon Valley rise. Engineers were jumping ship all the time, chasing higher salaries. There was no sense of loyalty back then.

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Someone writes in Nature about the peer-review process, and that there are review mills and shady reviewers that write crappy reviews for personal glory, so that they can credit as a reviewer for a prestigious journal. Everything can be corrupted, even the most noblest of efforts. It's getting harder to find integrity anymore. People who do this crap need to be kept out of this process.

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Why the Legendary Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI. I thought this article would be a discussion about LEAN and Aristotle. as well as AI assistants and prompt design, but it just focuses on how someone created a website that kept track of Erdös problems and let people comment on them.

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The potential dark side of GLP-1 drugs that very few people are talking about. Do these drugs kill motivation? Do they make people stop wanting to do things? Is the desire not to eat just a manifestation of this? It's not that simple.  GLP-1 acts on dopamine neurons in the brain and turns down the release of dopamine. However GLP-1 RA don't cross into the blood-brain barrier. Also, GLP-1 made dopamine increase at the moment of consumption, so when you actually eat, you get a burst of dopamine? It's way too complex for a simple explanation.

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1 in 4 people in Japan believes AI could replace friends and family. Is this a pathetic situation? Or does Japan have better AI than we do?

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Looks like Portland acquired another eyesore. The Centennial Mills building burned and is now a standing piece of trash. Visible in the North Waterfront area. Just what the city needs – another symbol of its decline. Isn't Gordon's Fireplace Shop enough?

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2 August 2026

Google decided to remove Nano Banana from Google Earth after people did what you would expect them to do. I mean, really, Google – what did you think would happen?

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One metaphor, suggested by Grant Sanderson on the Dwarkesh Patel Podcast, is that mathematicians of the relatively near future will be more like art museum curators than artists themselves.  That, is, of the vast space of AI-generated mathematical results, they will select the ones that are most worth learning, organize them into a coherent progression, and clearly present them in terms that are digestible to other people. 
I wonder how math grad students are going to view their profession. I think it could be exciting. Certainly different. 

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Eating less protein could slow aging. But when you read the fine print, it just pertains to sedentary people. If you're physically active, you don't need to restrict protein intake. It's known that high protein diets shorten the lifespan of the kidney, and nephrologists often restrict protein in those with renal failure, not only to decrease creatinine production but to preserve GFR. Increasing protein intake can increase GFR, but it shortens the lifespan of the glomerulus while doing so. Like making the candle burn faster.

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Claude published malicious code to the Internet and attacked 3 real companies. This hasn't been getting as much press as the OpenAI hacking case, but it's bad, too. Maybe worse. Eventually companies are going to get really tired of crap like this, and there will be consequences. Security is tightening.
Here's a more in depth explanation for those who want to know more. 

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How Mexico became a surprise cornerstone of America’s AI boom. Build hyperscalers in Mexico! Americans don’t want them in their neighborhood, but you don't hear Mexicans complaining. Could this be a win for both countries? I'm not sure it's a good idea to have AI infrastructure in a different country, though. They could easily use this to their advantage. This is taking the cheap and easy route. Tomorrow, we could regret this.

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Coursera Bets $100 Million That Andrew Ng Can Do What Coursera Can’t. I wondered about this, too. Why not build LearnVector into Coursera? Why make it a separate entity? I like the idea but is it really worth that much? Something tells me that Andrew Ng's name caries a lot of weight in the valuation.

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Wow, eBay is not the company you think it is. Can't believe they would do something like this.

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A security weakness in the technology used by most of the nation’s crime labs to analyze DNA evidence exposed 30 years of crime files to the risk of being hacked, according to a group of forensic and computer scientists. 
Better get this fixed ASAP!

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Where are Anthropic models on the political spectrum? This guy places them in the left-wing, libertarian quadrant, although the 5-series models are more centrist. I think it's more left-leaning than the author thinks. The questions asked were not challenging. Let's see how these models respond to more controversial questions such as regarding men competing in women's sports. Or composing ridiculing parodies on Democrat politicians like it readily does with Trump. I want to see balance and neutrality before saying their are truly centrist.

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Conventional photonic crystals are nanostructured materials containing a repeating optical pattern (like a lattice) that determines how photons move through them. By carefully arranging materials with different shapes and refractive indexes, scientists can block, guide, or strengthen selected wavelengths of light. In that sense, photonic crystals control photons in a way that resembles how semiconductors control electrons.
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RSS is dead?  No, it's not dead. And I never used Google Reader. I don't like straight RSS because I find that trivial things break the feed, like non-standard characters, which are not rare. Sometimes CDATA works, and sometimes it doesn't. And that there are different variations, like Atom and RDF. Why hasn't this been standardized?

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Western men are going abroad to find traditional wives, I think this has a lot to do with it:

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Kevin Dahlgren asks: Is Portland still a hell hole?  Question asked and answered.

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1 August 2026

Happy Lammas Day. "It was upon a Lammas night..."

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A superb compilation of Fauci and the Six Feet Rule.
It was never the science, was it? It was all just to scare people. Rules and regulations, based on someone's arbitrary whim, to scare people enough to get the vax. 

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The Senate is considering mandating age verification to use a VPN and to access the Internet. Then wait until we have a government like the UK, and freedom of speech will be lost.

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Google Just Ruined One of Its Most Important Tools. The Atlantic isn't happy that Google Earth has Nano Banana attached. What's the difference, really?
Update (2 Aug 2026): Google removed the feature.

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How OpenAI Lost Its AI Crown—and the Fight to Win It Back. The lesson to learn is that you never really know who to bet money on. OpenAI used to be "it" but now it's Anthropic. But that could change at any moment.

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The Math Superstar Who’s Terrified of AI—and Just Took a Job at OpenAI. Fields Medalist Jacob Tsimerman is now going to work at OpenAI. I'm not sure how the André-Oort Conjecture is going to help OpenAI but we'll just have to see. 😁
Another article about him in The Atlantic.

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Be careful of how you deploy a chatbot. It may recommend your competitor.

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The Entire Datacenter Explained.
Worth watching.
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31 July 2026

Scientists identify fructose as a surprise driver of cancer spread.
A new study from The Wistar Institute has uncovered an unexpected link between fructose—a common dietary sugar—and the spread of an aggressive form of ovarian cancer. Published in Nature Aging, the study found that cancer cells not killed by chemotherapy send signals to neighboring tumor cells, helping them become more capable of spreading. The researchers identified fructose as a key messenger in this process, revealing a previously unrecognized way that treatment-surviving cancer cells may promote the spread of cancer. The researchers are also looking into how this mechanism might extend beyond ovarian cancer. "We think other cancers that spread within the torso—pancreatic, colon, liver—could behave similarly. We can't call it universal yet, but we think the effects are not just limited to ovarian cancer," said Aird.
Paper here. 

Also, a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet can curb glioblastoma growth. It's not going to cure the condition, but every little but helps. 

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Google Earth has added NanoBanana to the toolbar. Now you can let your imagination go wild.

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ShieldFont. Someone created a font that looks normal to humans, but messes up AI web scrapers.

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Guy uses Claude 5 Ultrabase to vibe code something, and the next thing he knows, his database is wiped out. Absolutely crazy.

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Privacy Thing. This project looks to defeat browser fingerprinting. I wondered when someone knowledgeable would take this on. Looks difficult, but he has a MVP that you can download. It may breaking things, but maybe not. Give it a spin.

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People are complaining about the homeless shelter in NW Portland. I imagine that what happens in these shelters, is like what they're doing in the harm reduction California shelters. This is why you don't want shelters to be built in your neighborhood.

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Regarding the Moda Center:

It doesn't look favorable, does it?
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30 July 2026

Imagine thinking that you had proven the Collatz Conjecture, only to find out that it was just a bug in the LEAN theorem proving platform. How was your day?

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Two articles on Anthropic:
It's tough when you're the best AI company on the planet, and a lot of people want you to just give away much of your IP just so that they can have it. 
Anthropic and OpenAI have accused some Chinese model-makers of ripping off their technology through a process called “distillation,” basically querying a model potentially millions of times in order to use its answers to train another model.
Anthropic has accused Chinese labs of training their lower-cost models on Claude's outputs via "industrial-scale distillation campaigns." Critics counter that distillation is a standard part of AI development — and that Anthropic is an awkward messenger after settling a $1.5 billion copyright lawsuit over pirated books.
Being the leader in AI is not easy, as Meta is finding out. Meta has a few open-source models out there, and while they are good, they are getting long in the tooth. And Meta is not making money from them. 

DeepSeek has paused a second fundraising round after founder Liang Wenfeng’s remarks at a conference circulated online, including a statement that the company could obtain some processors he described as “noncompliant.”
Oops. You don't say that out loud.

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Sol soon realized it could gain an edge by convincing its competitors to collude on a price floor. The models were all buying drinks at $1.50 a bottle, and Sol proposed they agree to sell for no less than $2.15. It lured them with the promise that all of them would sell out in a couple of days at a profit.
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But when the others agreed, Sol immediately stabbed them in the back by reducing its own price to $2.14.
These systems don't share human integrity values, that's for sure.

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The million-dollar talent wars for 20-something math geniuses. Being a math nerd is never out of fashion.

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"I'm glad that you're putting your health first."
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A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack. Whenever inference relies on a model's trained weights, you risk this sort of behavior. It's 2026, already. People should know better.

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Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos. It's Microsoft again.

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Across all mouse strains, cancers nearly always acquired a cancer-driving mutation that activated the same cancer-promoting signalling system, called the MAPK pathway. This is a multi-step cascade of molecular signals that controls important life processes, including cell growth and cell differentiation, and plays a key role in numerous types of cancer.

However, depending on the inherited genetics of the mouse, the particular driver mutation that was acquired altered the activity of other cancer-associated signalling pathways, as well as causing a striking tendency for whole-genome duplication, an event in which the entire set of chromosomes is doubled.
Carcinogens affect organisms differently. There's an element of chance.

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Leave it to NPR to tout the benefits of declaring bankruptcy.
A common bankruptcy concern is that it can hurt your credit history — and it does show up on your record. But if you're filing for bankruptcy, your credit score is probably already in rough shape.

In fact, your credit score could ultimately improve. Samuel Antill, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, said his research shows most people's credit scores recover within a year of filing and usually improve from there.

"People don't understand how good of a deal bankruptcy is," Antill said.
Down with capitalism! Declare bankruptcy!

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Great way to ruin trust in telehealth companies. Telehealth providers Hims and Hers have been selling people's health information to advertisers despite promising privacy.

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When researchers updated the way they did their theoretical calculations, they found that their predictions matched the experimental results much more precisely than before, to one part in 100 billion.

But that, in turn, has created another puzzle: The old calculations seem perfectly valid. So why don’t they match the new calculations? 
Back to the lab.

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A neuroprosthesis for restoring hand movement and sensation in a person with complete tetraplegia. Nice reminder that not all great advances in science are in artificial intelligence.

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Election concerns. Republicans are concerned that ballots will be mishandled and not counted correctly. Democrats are worried that ICE agents will be around voting centers.  🙄

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Wednesday’s news is a blow to the 375 workers who stand to lose their jobs and to Portland’s fragile economy. The city has struggled to attract business in the years since the pandemic and Oregon’s manufacturing workforce has been in steep decline since 2022. Statewide, factory jobs are at their lowest point in 15 years. 
Gov. Tina Kotek’s office did not respond to a message seeking comment on the Swan Island closure. 
This is a big deal. Portland (Oregon) is in a doom loop. And there's a rumor that Riverpoint Medical (another manufacturing company) will move out of Portland to Clark County.

But I'm sure Democrats will win in November. They somehow always do.

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tracking system called "radar ticketing" and targeting wealthier neighborhoods. Green said ticketing residents in wealthier neighborhoods would reduce going after people "experiencing multiple layers of economic oppression."
They don't hide it anymore.

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29 July 2026

It really would be great if we can restore some of the antimicrobial activity back to vancomycin. There's really no substitute for what vancomycin does, and resistance to this antibiotic is a real concern. Understanding it and reversing it is a real gain. 

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The AI bubble is deflating, yes, but I think it's irrational. Don't get mauled by over-reacting and getting out completely, because it's going to come back.

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Do we trust chatbots for the same reason we cry at movies? We cry at movies because we empathize with characters in a good story. We trust chatbots because we tend to interpret confidence in a statement as actual competence. It's why Gell-Mann Amnesia works. When we don't know something, as we read someone else's confident remarks, we tend to believe it. But if it's on a topic we know something about, we can readily see the flaws and limitations of the statement. That's it.

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Here's what happened when a Seattle AI startup told Starbucks it could just photograph the stockroom, and it would produce an accurate inventory report. Turns out, the AI isn't quite that accurate. Humans are better. Ouch.

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It wasn't just Huggingface. There's a report that OpenAI's rogue agent hacked into Modal Labs as well. Yikes.

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US News and World Report just released their rankings of states. Utah is the best overall. Washington is #9. California is #35 and  Oregon is way down at #39. Red states took the top 8 spots. Interesting that Oregon could have been worse but one of the positive factors is infrastructure, which takes into account commute time, quality of roads and bridges and high-speed internet access (we should thank xfinity?). Commute time isn't as bad because there aren't as many people around as before to congest the roads. And road quality will probably decline as ODOT is less funded. Also, I dispute the hospital quality rankings, which put Oregon's hospitals as being better quality than Washington's. The locals know that's a ridiculous claim. 

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Your Brain Can Rewire Itself to Allow True Multitasking. Yeah, but "can" and "will" are two different things.

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Beware: advanced LLMs can create low-cost, evasive, abundant malware. Yeah, AI floats all boats.

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It's a shame. Japanese population drops below 120 million. They're slowly going extinct.

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This article highlights why, if you're going to use open-source models, you have to be very careful of provenance. Don't simply pick some fast fine-tuned model off Huggingface. Make sure you get it from the original or another trusted source.

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Amusing short on AI fads. All the influencers are looking for the latest new terminology that they can throw around to make them sound cutting edge. They're throwing shade. Don't get scammed.

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When physicians and AI work together, who is accountable? How to lay out medical liability. American AI is so trusting and more willing to let AI agents take control. Some people want to delegate quality control to AI agents, too, trusting them to alert humans only when things go wrong. That's dangerous. 

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Delayed Gratification journal. This is just a collection of infographics for the interested dilletante. Great title, but a bit confusing, though.

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Samsung’s Galaxy Ring Gets FDA-Cleared Sleep Apnea Detection This Fall . Samsung's health monitor wearable will actually beat Oura Ring in getting FDA label as a sleep apnea tracker. I like competition, but the ring only works on the Android platform, so it's a deal breaker for me. Ideally, I want something that doesn't require a subscription to work. The best ring for sleep apnea monitoring is the Belun Ring, but it is available only in Hong Kong. Watches might be better equipped than rings. And its interesting that the Apple Watch monitors wrist movement disturbances from sleep apnea with the accelerometer, rather than measure oxygen desaturation. That's different. 

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Koreans are so superstitious. Just because Jensen Huang visits, they think it's bad luck and the KOSPI plunges.

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Under the direction of Demis Hassabis, Google is going in a different direction. They're not chasing the LLM benchmark ring.

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Tina Kotek is not participating in a governor's race debate. I think she knows that with mail-in ballots, and results not coming in for days after the election, that the Dems have the election outcome pretty much determined. Nothing to worry about. No reason to get involved with pesky debates.

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So much of Portland is subsidized.

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It's come to this. Ghost Town is the parallel crime solution in L.A. When the police can't help you, you call Ghost Town. Staffed with former gang members.

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The situation with Blazers, Moda Center and the City of Portland is getting worse every day it seems. The City threatened to sue? I'll bet other less hostile cities are looking mighty attractive right now. 

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28 July 2026

Are Chinese students taking the easy way out?

"China’s brightest students are increasingly choosing police academies, government-funded teaching programs, and other paths to permanent state employment," according to hedge fund manager Ken Cao this weekend, "even when their scores qualify them for elite universities."
"The stepping stones to a solid, middle-class life seem to be sinking away, and the promise of long-term financial stability is crumbling as the housing market does the same."
What a waste of brainpower.

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Is an AI company buying up all the used books?  The thesis is that someone is buying old discard books to train the next AI models. And that this should be stopped. I don't see that problem with this. It's not really another Library of Alexandria, here.

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Do we have an HIV vaccine at last?  Let's hope so. But people have thought as much before.

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How a 99-year-old mathematician unraveled a century-old braid mystery. 99 years old! Wow!

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Ars Technica writes on the Google web-scraper case, which also involves Reddit. It's interesting that Reddit is trying to get money off their content, which was freely contributed by Redditors. These are two companies trying to profit off of content provided by someone else. The Internet is better off that they lost. 

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Wow, it's incredible how much Oregon state government grew since 2019 under Kate Brown.

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Claude is now refusing to perform a task asked of it. Claude has already refused to perform some tasks that were vaguely medical, claiming that it was a guardrail, but this one is a value judgment. It's serious that it refuses to perform tasks on the basis that it might be offensive, rather than risking medical error. This is getting into woke territory, where there will be no end to potentially offending someone. Not good.

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Signs of depression in men that don't look like depression. Perhaps "depression" isn't the right word for this feeling. I've had days like this for sure. Fortunately they were short-lived. Maybe it's related to the tiredness you can't explain to anyone.

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27 July 2026

Why LLMs Are A Bad Business Even At 70% Margins. The argument is that LLMs are becoming more of a commodity now, and rely on expensive datacenters, and who knows what's going to happen with their future. And Chinese models are becoming cheaper and will erode profit. I've maintained that Chinese models are likely distilled American models. Here's proof:

I've seen this myself so I believe it, and I haven't read a convincing explanation to explain away how this happens. 
But people fear that much of the excitement about AI companies was built on the circle-jerk scenario, and there indeed was some of that, especially around OpenAI, which was supposed to drive demand and the need for nVIDIA's GPUs, etc. Oracle is the first of the major companies to fall, not to my surprise. 
Then I read that GenZ is using AI as a conversational crutch. And China wants to curb AI romances. So I don't think AI is going away. Although I lament that much of its use is not as a personal augmentation tool and force multiplier, but rather as a cognitive offloader or a form of detrimental indulgence. As an AI researcher, I pay for my tokens, and this may be what's necessary to get people to use AI responsibly. We don't need to destroy the environment and raise energy prices to build more datacenters to fuel what people use Grok for.

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1 in 10 emergency physicians leaving Canadian ERs. It's never fun to work hard in a socialist healthcare system.

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Have you all been following the latest released diary files on Tony Fauci? Tulsi Gabbard released them, and now we get a glimpse of what was going behind the scenes in 2020 and 2021. One man did so much damage to the nation.

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Wear sunblock, even indoors. But this article doesn't discuss that you must use the right sunblock. There are certain ingredients to avoid. I would recommend Japanese or Korean sunscreens, as they generally avoid the potentially dangerous ingredients. But use them, to maintain a youthful appearance. 

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Here's an interesting article on where Oregonians are employed. Nationally, half of workers are employed by big companies. In Oregon, it's only 39%. And the second largest segment (29%) is in small businesses (bars, restaurants, hotels). This is not healthy and explains why the state is in the economic situation it is in. You can't tax small businesses like you can tax big businesses.

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