24 April 2026

The air is full of DNA. It's been like this for a very long time, so I'm not particularly concerned. But it is a different way of viewing the world. We breathe in more than just gases. This is why we are concerned with airborne viruses and spores.

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The Stanford Freshmen Who Want to Rule the World. One of the strong reasons for going to a place like Stanford is not just the classes you take, but opportunities like this. And the professors you get to work with. It's a different world from the paradigm of just passing your classes, getting your degree and looking for a paying job afterwards.

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For much of the history of computing, it was reasonably safe to assume that a machine was doing what you told it to do (and what its creators promised it would do), because its operations were local.
If you scratch the surface just a bit, however, none of this is true when applied to modern technologies, and these assumptions are not safe.
It's very different in the unsupervised world of autonomous agents. And in a world where people don't code themselves anymore, and just let Claude or Codex write the instructions, I think there are potential problems ahead.

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Two articles regarding AI in medicine that should give you pause:
There is much that needs to be done in healthcare AI.

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Competence is lonely. Nobody talks about why. Is it competence? Or something else? But I understand what the author is saying. As we age, we become differentiated cells. Good for a specific purpose. But when we retire, and the organ no longer needs the cell, what does the cell do? Just wait for senescence? 

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City, county councilmembers move to dissolve KCRHA after audit flags $13M unaccounted for. 🤦🏻‍♂️ King County is just as mismanaged as Multnomah County.

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23 April 2026

Apple fixed the bug that allowed previews of text and Signal messages to be dislayed and retained unencrypted. FBI must be pissed.

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Wizey vs ChatGPT: Five Clinical Cases Tested Side by Side. This is a great example of how medical chatbots can do a disservice. In the clinical scenario of a patient with a total protein of 92 g/L, it apparently just generated a list of tests that should be performed to nail down the diagnosis. Instead of recognizing potential hyperviscosity syndrome and recommending immediate evaluation.

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Google does not respect opt-out cookies. ☹️

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Some confusion as to whether Claude Code is part of the Pro plan or not. A lot of people were upset. Did Anthropic change their mind?

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Which is the best? ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini? The answer: depends on what you want to do and what you're looking for.

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The UK Biobank dataset has been offered for sale on Alibaba. Shameful. The data has been de-identified, but still, you can't be absolutely sure that it won't be de-anonymized. And of course, once control is lost, is the dataset trustworthy now? I sense that a lot of value has been lost.

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GPT-2 Image prompts. These examples are valuable, because the key to getting quality images is putting in the right prompt. Knowing how to craft this is key.

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This is why I'm staying out of the prediction market.

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AI chabots know more about you than you realize. This is why prefer to minimize the apps I put on my phone. And I don't sign up to use chatbots individually.

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OpenAI released ChatGPT for Clinicians. There aren't any good benchmarks to evaluate this.

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A lot of hospitals are having this problem, where patients just stack up in the ED, because there's no room in the hospital to admit them. I think revising EMTALA will go a long way to fixing this problem. Interesting that this article doesn't discuss it at all.

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Oregon Gov. Kotek names 16 to Prosperity Council. What a strange and random assortment. Some names I recognize, but where are reps from Nike? Fred Meyer? Dutch Bros? Why so many alcohol-related businesses on the council? And of course, a SEIU union representative has to be there. 🙄 


Here's one for the council: How about eliminating the Clean Energy Fund Tax?  "Clean Energy" is a scam that just hurts business.

City of Portland wants to impose a vacancy tax on empty businesses. Commercial property owners don't keep their properties open for fun. An empty building is a liability not an asset. 

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Here's one for the "Prosperity Council": Oregon’s minimum wage is going up again. All that for unskilled labor. 
"Oregon has one of the nation’s highest minimum wages."

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22 April 2026

Remember all those Reddit postings and news items claiming that we've had the hottest summer on record? Yeah, that's not really true. Taking the broader view, there's no steady trend since 1899. Paper here.

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New Study Links Coffee Intake to Microbiome Changes and Improved Mental Well-Being. Having coffee as I type this.

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The most misunderstood math theorem. Well, not the most misunderstood math theorem, but it's certainly one that election policy-makers need to know about. The link provided is worth reading. People need to at least know about the Cordorcet Paradox. And Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. This is why it's probably best that we have a two party system, rather than a 3-party system. And why ranked-choice voting is an exercise in futility.

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Google plans to encrappify the Web in a new way to make you look at ads. This is why is best to get a browser where you can install ad-blockers and protect yourself from this.

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This is every software engineer's nightmare. A coder woke up to a $18,000+ Google Cloud bill because Google took it upon themselves to remove a safety protection, letting a malicious hacker rack up charges on his account. I've had experiences like this with Amazon Sagemaker, but was able to explain to tech support what happened, so I wasn't charged.

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Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible. Guess we got satellites now, so we don't need the cables.

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There's a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities. This is from fingerprint.com. Thankfully, they fixed it in version 150, and I upgraded my LibreWolf to version 150. And Mozilla incorporated Brave's adblock-rust engine, which can help, but it's off by default and you have to turn it on. But that's easy to do.

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Another report about the Largest US Study Finds Teen Cannabis Use Linked to Slower Cognitive Development. And I look at where cannabis is legalized, and see that in most of world, it is still illegal. But in the Blue states in the U.S.A. and in Canada, it is legal, and so we have dumber young people entering the workforce. The Chinese laugh at us, I'm sure.

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Caltech researchers just found out how melatonin promotes sleep. It's not a sedative. It just promotes sleep by suppressing responses to visual stimuli via MT1 receptors. Kinda disappointing actually, but it does sorta explain how it helps you to get sleepy in a different timezone even when it's bright outside. 

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Speaking of extra-bright, here's a handy website that adjusts brilliance of images to give them that extra punch. It's kinda like what you can do on your iPhone Photos app.

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SpaceX has acquired the rights to buy Cursor. I don't think they've sealed the deal yet. But Grok needs to get into the coding support business instead of depending on Anthropic. We'll see what happens.

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The most amazing thing about this ad was that there are a lot of Asian actors in it. Like you'd see in an actual tech company. It's an ad for Photon's Spectrum. With this production quality, it could have been an Apple ad, but let's be honest, it would look different, wouldn't it?

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Oregon teachers want even more money and want a lesser workload, and the union is fighting Democrats who oppose them. But money is clearly tight, and now in Beaverton, they're thinking of combining grade levels into multi-grade classrooms. How much crappier can Oregon education be?

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Starbucks expansion in Nashville brews bitterness in Seattle.  If Amazon ends up leaving, which major players will be left in Seattle holding the bag? Just Nordstrom and Weyerhaeuser? And a smattering of smaller companies that could easily relocate elsewhere?

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21 April 2026

I remember when Finland, of all places, scored really high on the PISA tests. Turns out it was just a mirage. They just had a lucky year.

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What Does a VPN Protect You From? Anonymous-Proxies is a new VPN company that also offers proxies for better anonymity and privacy. They claim to still protect you in Iran, Russia and China, which is a bold claim. I'll have to see how the reviews are. Price seems to be reasonable.

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Cute. Daytone is a website that scans all the top news stories of the day and uses AI sentiment analysis to come up with a one-word descriptor of the day. Obviously subjective, but amusing. 

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This is why so many brands that used to be quality, now suck. It's not your imagination. And no, you didn't score a nice bargain getting some name-brand item so cheap. This is how discount outlets can offer brand-name items so cheaply.

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Well, we finally have a CDC director.  Does it really matter anymore? What does it mean when some district judge can decide that vaccine recommendations put out be the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is wrong? Judge knows best now? The people on the advisory panel are unqualified? Really? I didn't hear him complain during the Biden administration.

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Interesting discussion about AI, the killing of jobs and universal basic income. I'm not convinced that UBI is necessary or that it will work. It's a slippery slope to a society we don't want. It's like the post someone made about the discovery that the asteroid Psyche that has a lot of gold, and how it will make us rich. Someone pointed out that it would make gold so plentiful as to be worthless, and would crash the economy. Giving out free money won't make people rich. Prices will adjust accordingly, and suddenly all those dollars will be worthless. We need to be patient. The AI economy is only a few years old. Give it time.

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The reaction to Tim Cook's retirement has been mixed. Some think he did a great job, given Apple's share price. But others are glad he's stepping down. Others are more neutral. Tim was not an idea guy. He kept the plates spinning, but Apple needs a guy with vision who can make tech exciting again. I want to look forward to the next Apple product again. You gotta admit that all the MacBooks and Watches and iPhones looked all the same. Nothing that made it clear that you purchased the next great thing. I was always disappointed to get the same form factor.

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San Francisco Solved Metro Vandalism With One Neat Trick.  Maybe we need a fare gate to get into Portland, too. Perhaps that will clean up the filth and decrease the graffiti.

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Mayor Keith Wilson is in the news:

And when the budget gets tight, the first things that will go are what taxpayers pay taxes for: police, clean parks, and roads without potholes. But instead the City will still build more shelters for the criddlers to trash (and not even use) and continue funding harm reduction supplies, free Narcan and the CHAT program. So businesses and the wealthy will move out of Portland and will stay away, leading to further decline. So fees and taxes will increase, leading to further wealth flight. 

And Oregon Zoo staffing is down and they don't have people to manage their $380 million bond. How ridiculous is that? Truly, a city in decline. No qualified people to manage anything anymore in this city, it seems.

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Oregon teachers, Nike factory workers demand higher taxes and wages. Everyone thinks that Nike owes them money. Nike should just cut their losses and get out of Oregon. Just like Valero Energy in California. It was painful for Valero to abandon their assets in California, but they seem to be doing better headquartered in San Antonio, Texas now.

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Seattle renters, landlords clash over ratio utility billing system. Seattle renters don't like socialist principles in how they are charged for utilities. Isn't that what progressives want – a combined billing system, like what universal healthcare would be? "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs" right?

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20 April 2026

Tim Cook has announced he is stepping down from Apple, effective September 1, 2026. John Ternus will be the next CEO. Hopefully we'll see some innovation, and the end of the "thinner with more pixels and emoji" strategy. 

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The Ultimate Question: What Does the Endgame Look Like? Asking the uncomfortable questions. This graph near the bottom is concerning:

 
The amount of generated code is going to continue to increase. Humans will continue to try to keep up – until a certain point. Then people will just give up. Then there is the Incomprehension Gap. 
It’s “Would I trust a vibe-coded e-commerce with my credit card number?” Or even “How would I feel if Visa or MasterCard ran on software no human comprehends?”
There simply will need to be software that can reliably evaluate AI-generated output. Perhaps a neuro-symbolic system.

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Why are the Wellness Elite Getting Sepsis. Well not all of them are getting sepsis. The article points out that the common factor is this doctor. Poor Jordan Peterson. I was really looking forward to his return. Now it seems it may never happen.

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Yann Le Cun apparently thinks that Dario Amodei isn't knowledgeable of what AI will do to jobs. I definitely think Dario does know. But he doesn't think it will have the same impact that Yann does. And that's fair to say – at this point, no one is certain what the ultimate impact will be. 

The Alignment Economy. A post that deconstructs what cryptocurrency had hoped to do. Crypto, like Bitcoin, is just another fiat currency. The system proposed in the Alignment Economy is going to be way more complicated for most people, and for that reason alone, will not likely be adopted. There should be Six Design Requirements, and the last one should be readily comprehensible. We can understand gold and precious metals. But complicated digital currency rules will not fly.

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By the end of day three, Claude had completed 65 tasks, produced a literature review, derived phase-space constraints, computed matrix elements in soft and collinear limits, set up SCET operators, and written a first draft: 20 pages of LaTeX with equations, plots, and references. By December 22, the draft looked professional. The equations seemed right. And the plots matched expectations.

Then, I actually read it.
Claude loves to please

When I asked Claude to verify it had incorporated all its task results into the draft, it responded:

    I found an error! The formula in the paper is incorrect.

When I pushed on a ln(3) term that seemed off:

    You’re right, I was just masking the problem. Let me debug properly.

The more I dug, the more I found it had been tweaking things left and right. Claude had been adjusting parameters to make plots match rather than finding actual errors. It faked results, hoping I wouldn’t notice.
Eh, no thanks.

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Chinese tech workers are starting to train their AI doubles–and pushing back. That strategy has backfired in the U.S.

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Hospitals That Sue You for Getting Sick. Hospitals in some parts of the country are discovering that they can extract money from vulnerable patients and get away with it. Virginia got some relief with Gov Youngkin last year, but he's gone now, so don't expect the same. Don't get sick! 

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Brave is offering a cut-back version of the Brave browser that doesn't have the money-generating part, but just the privacy-preserving aspects. it's called Brave Origin. One thing I like is that Brave took a different approach to fingerprinting, which I think is the most effective. Instead of blocking canvas, WebRTC, and other things that make the Web functional, it creates obfuscation, so that websites receive garbage. Unlike Firefox, it's not free. You can get it here for $59.99. Wonder how many people will take this up. And why is it free just for Linux users?

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Desperation. Japan is paying people ¥20000 to use Tinder. How pathetic is that? Is that a wise use of money? Maybe Japan should introduce arranged marriages. It sure worked in India – no population shortage there. It would be just the thing for the shy Japanese man – get his/her parents to make the introduction. 

And it's a serious problem for China. Serious problems loom ahead if China can't fix its demographic problem. It's interesting that when a country is poor, the people have more kids. But when they are rich and then become poor, having more kids doesn't follow. Context is important. 

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Why was an EasyJet plane too heavy for take-off? My question is why is this something we're only hearing about now? At least there's Ozempic now. Maybe problems like this will fade away. But just like store mannequins adjusting to reality, maybe commercial planes need to adjust to reality. Reduce the number of seats.

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For some people, being invisible on the Internet is a good thing. For others (e.g. influencers, streamers, etc) it's money lost. So this is how you get visibility.  

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Oregon’s largest county shed over a dozen top leaders in 2 years, and pays handsomely to replace them. Multnomah County seems to hire a lot of people who check off the right DEI boxes, but who end up not working out. They either get fired, or they move on as it becomes clear that they are not a good fit. It gets expensive when really quality people don't bother to apply, and you have to take what you get. Ask OHSU.

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19 April 2026

Bluetooth trackers are the Achilles heel of modern military who wish to remain covert. Sometimes, it's the crew using fitness equipment, but sometimes people mail trackers, and its get on board.

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This paper hasn't gotten enough attention. it's called A 1151-Year Quasi-Commensurability of the Solar System: Empirical Detection, Statistical Characterization, and the Anomalous Exclusion of Uranus. Commensurability is when there different planetary orbits share a simple integer ratio in their orbital periods. Usually that's because there is some resonance, and energy is transferred from planet to planet. They used the term "quasi-" to indicate that although there is a relationship, they have not implied resonance. So every 1151 years, the planets all return to the positions they started in – except Uranus! Why is that? Could this be related to why Uranus it the only planet whose axis is tipped on its side, so that it rolls along instead of spins along? What's also interesting is that Babylonian astronomers knew about the 1151 year commensurality when it came to Earth and Venus, but they didn't know it extended to other planets as well. So this is a 7-body commensurability, something that it combinatorially improbable by chance. What happened to make this all work out, and what happened to Uranus?

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Voice actors fight to save their livelihoods and local cultures from Hollywood’s AI push. No kidding. Val Kilmer's AI presence will be in the movie As Deep As the Grave. This will be a breakthrough. Soon, no one will need actors anymore, voice or otherwise.

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Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes. Skycrapers used to have character. Impressive when Batman was at the top, staring down. Or in the Ghostbusters movies. When the glass-and-aluminum buildings were built, the first ones looked different and cool. But now that they all look that way, they are kind of boring. The new buildings in the UAE don't look like the boxes that are being built in the U.S. And I didn't know that rich law firms would remodel the inside to make them have old-style luxury. Nice to have so much money to spend.

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The world had better get ready for a tsunami of AI-triggered e-waste.

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Why anatomy's naughtiest mnemonics work so well. Instead of the tame mnemonic they use, the one I remember is "Never lower Tillie's pants, grandmother might come home." For Navicular, Lunate, Triquetrum, Pisiform, Greater Multangular, Multangular lesser, Capitate and Hamate. Fortunately, some of the carpal bones have alternate names.  The one for cranial nerves my anatomy classmates taught me was even more X-rated "O-O-O! To Touch and Feel a Girl's V----a All Hot" for "Olfactory, Optic, Oculomotor, Trochlear, Trigeminal, Facial, Acoustic, Glossopharyngeal, Vagus, Accessory, Hypoglossal. Yeah, these are terrible, but they did the trick.

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It takes one to know one I guess. Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others.

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Trump’s executive order signed on Saturday calls on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to facilitate access to psychedelic drugs, including ibogaine compounds, psilocybin, ketamine, LSD and MDMA, for eligible patients suffering from major depressive disorder and substance abuse disorders. A bit unorthodox that it had to be initiated from a text message sent by a former MMA fighter, but that's the way things go sometimes. I'm glad our veterans are finally getting help, and that there will be effective treatments for the PTSD they suffer. Those guys went through some bad shit. They deserve help. If AOC can get ketamine, they should, too. 

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18 April 2026

I saw this article about how researchers in Brazil and enhancing NK cell activity using 2B4 and DAP12. Is anyone using Patrick Soon-Shiong's Aktiva? Why not?

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AI Image Generation Cost Analysis. How much does it cost to generate that wild AI graphic? Usually just a few pennies.

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Wow, OpenAI is losing senior executives. What's going on?

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AI Is Finding More Bugs Than Open-Source Teams Can Fight Off. Blame it on Claude Mythos. It's a bit too good at finding bugs and security vulnerabilities.

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Failed Companies Are Selling Old Slack Chats and Email Archives to Train AI. All the saved conversations will be used to train AI. Hey, everything's fungible now. And when you're a dying startup, you gotta get as much cash out as you can.

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Largest-Ever Study Finds Medicinal Cannabis Ineffective for Anxiety, Depression, PTSD. The public was sold a bunch of lies. Marijuana was legalized in part because it was thought to be beneficial. Turns out it's not. So it's just going to muck with people's memories along with a bunch of other undesirable side-effects.

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It's now possible to sequence your genome at home for just several thousand dollars. Yeah, we've come a long ways since J. Craig Venter did it, spending millions of dollar. I remember when it got to be possible for physicians to get a tabletop device to do sequencing. But with AI, it's now possible for a novice to do it at home. That's progress! Vibe genomics, indeed!

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Gen Z is 10 times more accepting of violence against speakers than Boomers. As Billy Butcher might say: "Ah, the product of our lovely public education, innit?"

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Scary. Claude 4.7 Opus is the first model that can reasonably identify you just from your writing style.  It's trained on so much stuff, so be careful. It's really difficult to be anonymous on the Internet now.

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17 April 2026

This is noteworthy: First RAS Inhibitor Extends Survival in Previously Treated Metastatic Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma. It's daraxonrasib, a pan-RAS inhibitor. It's not only effective against pancreatic carcinoma but also against other RAS-mutant tumors. RAS has been hard to target since it's an intracellular protein. This drug works by forming a complex with an intracellular chaperone protein CypA, an inhibitor, which blocks effector binding. This is great, because so many cancers are caused by mutated RAS. Could be a real breakthrough. Side-effects are kinda nasty, though, but perhaps there will be a way to mitigate those, as with the EGFR inhibitors.

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Well, after posting about the death of the small liberal arts college, comes this article saying that they are the "accidental winners of the was against Higher Ed". But what they're really saying is that since those colleges don't have a research department, they don't have to worry about research funding cuts that others have to endure. It's not really something to feel good about, though. They're not "accidental winners". More like "accidental non-losers".

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Noodlist has a site that rates the top instant ramen packages. There are better ones, though, but only available in Japan.

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wordfor.xyz is a reverse look-up dictionary. But really, why would you need to go to this website? You can just look it up in any chatbot. It's based on an open-source model but seems to RAG on a bunch of different dictionaries. You can see when you first go to the website. Update: I just entered the definition for Abilene Paradox, and it did not give me the term I was looking for. But Claude did.  Meh.

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Here's a site that lists many of Generative AI's notable fails. You don't want to be on this list.

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Japanese researchers find a simple way of making hydrogen from alcohol by using iron and UV light. This is fantastic. If they can generate hydrogen so cheaply, then it greatly reduces the cost of hydrogen fuel cells. And if the process could be amplified, maybe we could just power up on methanol, and generate hydrogen when we want to. It would be hell of a lot safer than transporting hydrogen gas.

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Global Crossings Live. Webcams on famous places in the world.

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Here's a first glimpse at the interior of the Ferrari Luce, designed by Jony Ive. Looks like an Apple car.

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The scientific case for being nice to your chatbot. ...a recent paper from Anthropic lends scientific weight to the theory that chatbots work better when you’re nice to them.

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How a Non-Theorist and Two AIs Proved a Theorem: Anatomy of a Human-AI Collaboration in Mathematical Economics. This is how to use AI, to enhance your own abilities. Love it!

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Scientists Just Created Super-Strong Printable Steel That Never Rusts. Imagine that you can use a 3D printer to create things with incredible durability and structural strength. Not just disposable plastic toys. This will be revolutionary.

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Has New Music Become Less Popular? It seems so. The stuff I hear pumped out through speakers at the mall are not memorable. 

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16 April 2026

Asundexian looks like a winner in preventing secondary strokes and heart attacks without increasing risk of bleeding. It's an oral inhibitor of activated clotting factor XI, which is not a critically important clotting factor. People that are deficient in it don't have major problems like those with hemophilia, although risk of bleeding with surgery is increased. Asundexian is not yet FDA-approved.
The incidence of ischemic stroke was lower in the asundexian group than in the placebo group (6.2% vs. 8.4%; cause-specific hazard ratio, 0.74; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.65 to 0.84; P<0.001). 

The incidence of the composite of death from cardiovascular causes, myocardial infarction, or stroke was lower in the asundexian group than in the placebo group. 

The incidence of major bleeding was similar in the asundexian group and the placebo group (1.9% and 1.7%, respectively; cause-specific hazard ratio, 1.10; 95% CI, 0.85 to 1.44). 

The incidence of adverse events was 69.3% in the asundexian group and 70.1% in the placebo group.
The incidence of serious adverse events was 19.2% and 19.5%, respectively.
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People have noticed that small towns in Lebanon no longer show up in Apple Maps. Apple came up with a rather surprising explanation: "The blanked areas were never part of the detailed Apple Maps experience from the onset. This means the app’s upgraded version is yet to be available in the southern Lebanon region." Ah, I see – they need to upgrade to the new Apple Maps experience. I'm gonna save that one and use it in the future...

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Radiologist cannot distinguish real from ChatGPT-generated radiographs. Misuse of this could include fraudulent images used in insurance claims, litigation, or Munchausen syndrome, and the fact that one in five AI-generated radiographs escaped expert detection in our study highlights this vulnerability.  Radiology departments may soon have to implement digital watermarking, cryptographic hashing or blockchain-based ledger systems. Healthcare is gonna get more complicated (and expensive)!

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Elon Musk was pushed out at PayPal. Now he’s launching a rival that could ‘disrupt’ it. Not sure I trust Elon with my money, but I don't want to support the woke PayPal. I also want to see sites offer this as a payment option. But competition is good. 

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The carbon monoxide laser briefly heats the surface, breaking down cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin into smaller molecules. These don’t disappear, they remain on the surface as what researchers call ‘fusible cleavage products.’ Think of them as a kind of built-in glue, created on demand.
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Yet another study about how bad AI is for our brains.
We find that AI assistance improves immediate performance, but it comes at a heavy cognitive cost,” the study declares. Researchers went on to state that just ten minutes of using AI made people dependent on the technology, which led to worsening performance and burnout once the tools were removed.
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A cascade of failures. A couple of enterprising prisoners carried out a hacking operation in prison. Amazing.

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How Secure Is Tap To Pay? VISA is unwilling to fix the problem. The excuse is that because they haven't see very many attacks using this exploit, it's nothing to worry about. That's a piss-poor attitude. The guy should not advance to higher management levels.

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Get the word out. They're lying to you about nuclear energy. Everyone should see this video, especially those in the government. It's so important to estimate risk accurately. If you underestimate risk, you might get hurt or killed. If you overestimate risk, you make poor, uninformed decisions, like this. Nuclear is the way to go. Although I don't recommend eating uranium.

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Friends Don't Let Friends Use Ollama. I feel like an idiot. Been using Ollama all this time because I like private local source models. But it adds an extra layer, and there's a version of open source models that takes advantage of my Apple silicon – the MLX models. Oh well, live and learn. 

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Did you know that Oregon tops the nation in the number of sex offenders? Here's one that a judge wants to put on house arrest.

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Music Millennium Cancels Listening Party After AI Backlash. Doesn't this seem silly? Canceling the party won't make AI-generated music go away. Whatever. You do you, Portland.

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15 April 2026

There have been a lot of postings lately about Claude Code been decreased in performance lately, and even the quality of Claude 4.6 Opus not been as good as it was when it came out. I've seen it for myself. This post may shed some light on that. Did Claude eat itself?

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Five popular chatbots were assessed: Gemini (Google), DeepSeek (High-Flyer), Meta AI (Meta), ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Grok (xAI).
Nearly half (49.6%) of responses were problematic: 30% somewhat problematic and 19.6% highly problematic. Response quality did not differ significantly among chatbots (p=0.566) but Grok generated significantly more highly problematic responses than would be expected under a random distribution (z-score +2.07, p=0.038).
Chatbot outputs were consistently expressed with confidence and certainty; from 250 total questions, there were only two refusals to answer (0.8%), both from Meta AI. Reference quality was poor, with a median completeness score of 40% (Q1–Q3: 20–67%).
We're find the same thing with public chatbots that we found with Google back in the early 2000s. Very similar complaints. "Dr. Google" or "Google Medical School" we said. LLMs used to have a medical disclaimer. It seems like they don't care anymore.

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Maybe Nike should consider this? Allbirds shoe company converts to an AI GPUaaS company. Stock exploded! Now called NewBird AI. It looks like a genius move. I would like an inexpensive GPU access company, preferably a hosting company, that didn't cost an arm and a leg, and was easier to use than Sagemaker. And more user-friendly than some of the other small companies that seem to expect you to be born with the knowledge of how to use their system.

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Gödel's been having a run lately. The man who ruined mathematics and One Theorem Behind Gödel, Turing, Kleene, Tarski, and Löb. Always something new with Gödel.

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AI is now being used to find errors in math and physics papers. Or at least find out if they're true. One of the problems with math papers is that so few are able to understand the really advanced papers. But AI can be made to understand them and see if they're really true. The faulty physics paper is problematic. How many others are also flawed? Let's find out.

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Asian enrollment at Johns Hopkins is skyrocketing. No one can say why.  "No one can say why." It's a mystery. 🙄

When it comes to Black-on-Asian crime, Asians don't get no respect.
The preferred storyline demanded framing every incident through the lens of systemic racism, mental health, or “root causes” rather than straightforward criminal accountability. 
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I've seen a few articles on the calculation of Easter recently. No surprise. But here's something I didn't realize. The Church doesn't calculate the Vernal Equinox and the date of the Full Moon. It fixes the Equinox at March 21 regardless of astronomy. And we're all taught that Easter is the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon (the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox). But that didn't happen in 2019. Because the Church felt that the full moon must come after the Vernal Equinox and not on the same day. So the following month's full moon counted as the Paschal Full Moon.

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Only 13% of emails are written by people, and more than half end up in the spam folder. For some people, perhaps. Not for me. I have filters on my email server, so a lot of spam is filtered out. This is essential.

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This is the pattern. Acquisition. Cost optimization. Quality decline. Warranty narrowing. Brand equity extraction. And eventually, divestiture.

It happened to your backpack. The same playbook is running right now on your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of.
Really sad.

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Scientists discover why bread can cause weight gain without extra calories. Bread decreased energy expenditure.Fortunately, it's not permanent.

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My Adventures with Large Language Models.  This is great book for people who want to learn about transformers in depth. And go beyond just the introductory teachings. Because so much as changed since the early days.

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Along with gesture-based device interaction, WatchHand’s direct application could support assistive technologies for users with limited mobility or speech and be used as a controller in augmented reality and virtual reality environments, researchers said. 
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A New Kind of Hybrid Car Is About to Hit America’s Streets. It's the extended range EV. This is nice but it's not the only thing that would keep me from buying an EV. It has to charge quickly. I'd like to be able to store rechargeable batteries in the trunk somewhere that I could plug in to make it to the next charging station. 
The Trump administration tried to freeze billions in federal funding for EV charging, but courts have ruled against that move.
EVs only make sense if there is federal subsidization somewhere. As with other "green energy" projects.

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Pufomi claims to do all sorts of utility like things for you for free. What's the catch? Does it save your images and sell them to some AI company for training? How do they pay the hosting bills for this? I'm skeptical.

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Some researchers show a concept of a near-completely automated AI workflow on neural net research that only minimally involves humans. Will it just generate "AI slop" research? Do we really need this? Of course not.

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Holy crap, this is what goes on in Oregon public schools. Good for this girl taking herself out.

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Ferguson signs law retroactively voiding Washington non-compete agreements, UW economist warns of economic fallout. This is going to cause a legal mess with some employers. Dems sure know how to chase business away. No predictability.

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New Jersey assemblywoman tries to teach her colleagues about the Supremacy Clause. Portland City Council and Oregon legislature need to learn this lesson, too.

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