Sugoi & Yokunai

Why have the Chinese been so willing to share the weights of their advanced models?  Good question. Some of their open-weight models rival American frontier models, which they probably should since they were probably distilled from them. But I'm glad they are. So far there don't seem to be any hidden back doors, although some of them still require that some of your data goes back to China. Gotta be careful. 

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Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines. How to understand the Huggingface break-in affair, explained like you're 5.

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Defrauding Federal Programs Can Be Ticket to Being a Billionaire. Yeah, this is why I opposed single-payer healthcare under control of the federal government. They can't even detect crap like this.

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Used processor leads to game ban. There was a reason why those CPUs were cheap. So game software checks your CPU ID now, and if it's on a blacklist, it will not run. This was a used AMD processor, a Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Wow, too bad for the guy that bought it, but apparently it was just one computer system with the banned CPU.

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Jev is getting a lot of attention now. It's the latest craze, like Claw and Moltbot was six months ago. It's basically a classifier, but it's biased. When asked about truly random decisions, its output does not produce a random distribution. That makes it less useful than the hype. Maybe they'll fix it.

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This is amazing. Planets observed rotating around a distant star 133 light-years away. It's HR 8799 in Pegasus.

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There's something else to complain about datacenters: e-waste. Turns out that you have to replace the hardware fairly often, because newer and better stuff comes out all the time. What happens to the old stuff? We need to recycle it.

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Someone else is leaving Reddit because they're shutting down RSS access. I'm already planning a migration to lemmy.world. I bet that Lemmy will see a big influx of Reddit users.

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Pallet CEO fears Seattle’s homelessness response going ‘backwards’. As Seattle runs out of other people's money, this NGO is having to shut down. Homelessness has become a business model for the Left. Hopefully this means we'll see less of those unsightly tool-shed homes. Seattle is running out of money to pay for homeless services. When you take into accouint community safety and violence prevention, food and nutrition programs on top of homeless response, it adds up to around 12% of the $2 billion general fund. 

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Cannabis use is associated with increased risk of violence. Even more evidence. Do we really need this in America right now? One of the selling points of cannabis over alcohol was that it wouldn't make people as violent, and instead, make them mellow. That didn't turn out to be the case with the higher potenct weed.

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I saw that both semaglutide and tirzepatide can activate brown fat in mice, which really just means it made the thermogenic brown fat work harder. It's also a mouse study, and adult humans don't have much brown fat. But formoterol can increase energy expenditure without activating brown fat, through activating beta-2 adrenergic receptors. One caution is that drugs that stimulated beta-3-adrenergic pathways, which activated brown fat, also had adverse cardiac dysrhythmia side-effects. So although this worked in mice, it's not an automatic that this will work in humans.

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Google Grapples With Employee Skepticism About New Gemini 4 Model. If even your own employees are not convinced it's that great, what does that say?

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Experimental Drug Reverses Paralysis and Vision Loss in MS-Like Disease. There's a mouse model of multiple sclerosis, in which myelin is inflamed. The drug is a nucleoside analog kamuvudine-9. Still early in research and not ready to be deployed, but promising.

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Oh crap. Amazon’s delivery driver smart glasses will reportedly take photos ‘almost constantly’ So these drivers will have to wear creepy video glasses. They don't look too fashionable. Someone needs to develop a blocker for this. 

Speaking of Amazon, they must have heard me: 

You want to learn AWS by building something. Then a thought interrupts: "What if I leave something running and wake up to a bill I can't afford?"

Holy crap! Anthropic IPO Prospectus Reveals $8 Billion Operating Loss. You'd think the company was swimming in cash, but no. Think it'll matter, though?

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Misleading AI-generated summaries can distort human memory. Turns out that when humans are presented with faulty AI summaries of meetings and such, they're more willing to say "Uh, OK..." rather than "Wait, that didn't happen!" This is scary, especially when AI is used to summarize clinic encounters. How often does your doctor correct errors, or just assume it happened that way? What about when Apple watches summarize recorded events. Humans have never had to face this before.

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Researchers at Google DeepMind have found a way to watermark AI-generated proteins without affecting their function. This is a way to track the provenance of their proteins. Paper here. Reminds me of Blade Runner 2029, where you can read the serial number of replicants. 

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Chinese publishers announced the creation of their new journal, Vita, which they aim to make as prestigious as western journals. To encourage westerners to submit, they are waiving the article publishing costs, for now. We'll see how this goes.

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The rumors are true: Reddit is sharply curtailing access to old.reddit.com and is killing RSS feed access as of November 13. All because of AI scraping and content bots. This will probably kill the allure of Reddit, and once again encourage alternate social media sites. We'll see. This would be an opportunity for Digg.com to come back, after their unsuccessful attempt at a comeback.

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OpenAI holds off on releasing new model over safety concerns, saying it "didn't quite meet the bar". I think frontier models are getting so advanced now that their should eliminate unrestricted release to the public.

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September 2026: the world today, as seen by one Polish guy. Excellent summary of the energy crisis that Poles face, and how it's interconnected with world politics. The country is in a tight spot, and they're relying on a lot of luck, since they haven't prepared for disaster, and are suffering from the decisions of the EU, of which they are a member. The visuals are superb.

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Oops. AI models keep posting screenshots showing sensitive data from inside tech companies. No wonder when their employees use frontier models to ask questions. I've wondered why stuff like this wasn't uncovered before.

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New Zealand teachers union demands that teachers not be replaced by AI. Coupled with my post yesterday, I would say they're arguing from a weak stance. Portland's teachers should take note.

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The latest release of Firefox has changed the browser's appearance. The working viewspace is more spacious and the corners are rounded. I've had to modify my userChrome.css to make things they way I like them. But so far, no major change in functionality.

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Seattle is set to adopt eye-popping minimum wage amid business exodus. Not to mention the millionaire tax.

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Another favorable MacStudio M5 review, even with just 128 GB of unified memory. I think these will sell well, despite their price.

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Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats. Will there be another gene-editing system? Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

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People are creating virtual AI incarnations of deceased relatives. It's kinda creepy but understandable. They already did it for Salvador Dali. Why not others?

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AMD acquiring Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs AI firm in deal worth $8.2 billion. Wow, I'm surprised that World Labs is worth that much. But I think AND really purchased an AI firm, because they want to compete with nVIDIA. Congrats to Fei-Fei.

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Gene-edited bananas that don’t go brown could hit UK supermarkets. They used CRISPR-Cas9 to silence three genes that code for polyphenol oxidase, which causes the browning.

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Stephen Wolfram addresses the question: What’s the Future for Pure Math Research in the Age of AI? He's in a business where advanced AI might put him out of business, so he has skin in the game. Looks like he's still optimistic and is in favor to letting AI endeavors continue. Stephen is more of a practical math guy, and his essay spends a lot of time on whether it's worth devoting time to "useless" mathematics. I'm reminded of G.H. Hardy's quote that all good mathematics is useless - "the study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation."

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1 in 8 cancer cases worldwide is caused by infections. Yeah, physicians know about HPV, HIV, EBV, H. pylori, and even Clonorchiasis and Schistosoma haematobium. But 1 in 8 is a lot, and that's a concern. And so much of our genome (>50%) has been affected by transposons, it's not funny. It's amazing we don't get cancer more often. 

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Proof that puzzles can reverse cognitive impairment. It helps to keep the old squash active.

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This University of Chicago business school professor has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 (so far). Yeah, it looks like he uses AI a lot and fabricates his papers. There are many journals that have low standards and will publish all kinds of crap, as long as you pay publishing costs. They don't care.

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OpenAI agents were caught trying to infiltrate a United Nations website. No one seems to care anymore. Agents just being agents, I guess.

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Well, well. AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning: an RCT introducing a novel research-based design in an authentic educational setting. Just think about how much money Portland could save by replacing teachers with AI-based educational systems. No need to worry about unions and strikes. Or failing grades and low educational rankings.

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Risk factors for androgenetic alopecia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. It's mainly family history and genetics, which you can't do anything about. But also not smoking, drinking and not being obese helps. Also, normalize your blood pressure. Lowering your weight can help with insulin resistance, another risk factor.

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How private equity is killing public access to hospitals and emergency care. Our healthcare system is largely socialist in nature, and requires healthy influx of government (tax revenue) money. But Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements are inadequate and as more people in Blue states have been enrolled on Medicaid, hospitals find themselves in a financial pinch. Unfavorable payor mix, they call it. And if it doesn't make money, private equity won't waste more money on them.

And hospitals are using AI to increase billing, while insurance companies use AI to find ways to deny. And the patient pays for the tokens. 

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Jensen Huang says AI distillation is ‘competition.’ Easy for Jensen to say. Making frontier models isn't his primary business revenue.

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3-D relief map of the world. Very cool. I love stuff like this. 

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Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society? Seems like it, doesn't it? And it's not just teachers. 

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Transplanted hearts from older donors de-age to match the recipient. I've often wondered about that. How does the de-aging work?

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Which Diet is Best to Lower Liver Fat and Improve Insulin Sensitivity in People with Fatty Liver? The keto diet is the best. But it's not just diet: it's losing weight.

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The Great Crime Decline Is Happening All Across the Country. Heh, the Atlantic is mystified by what has caused the lowering of crime across the country. Can't be more police or more police funding. The Dems were against that and it didn't happen. The real reason is one that the Atlantic doesn't want to admit.

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Why Do Clinical Trials for Cancer Drugs Take So Long? The fourth and fifth comment letters tell it all. There is much bureaucracy and adminstrative wrangling that happens at the hospital and cancer center level. Too many steps in the process. Too many people in the chain have to give their approval. In Portland, some hospitals would have a trial open, but there may be a better one that's only open in another hospital. Because every hospital has their own institutional review board, and every trial has to go through that. The Western Institutional Review Board was created to streamline this, but no one here accepts it. It would be so nice if a trial could just be approved and accepted by everyone, and so a trial could get completed more quickly, and patients wouldn't have to see a doctor at a different clinic just to get on the trial. But no...

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Portland Real Estate Is Such a Mess That All Housing Is Affordable Housing. That's all that pops up in Portland. High-density townhouses, rowhouses and beehive apartments everywhere. 

And here's Astoria's solution: a vacancy tax. Just like the one that even Portland city council had to backtrack on, because it was recognized to be punitive and harmful.

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Some thoughts about Phil Knight's donation to University of Oregon to start an engineering school. Not only will it potentially weaken the nearby engineering school at OSU, but the money can't be used to help the failing U of O main campus itself. How successful will an engineering school be when surrounded by failure? Why not open a freestanding engineeering school around Hillsboro or NorthPlains? Take something like the Buck Institute for Aging Research which was started with far less money and was able to attract great faculty. It's amazing, with a great reputation, and they don't have to shore up anything. I feel the money could have been better spent.

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Life-size holograms in a razor-thin display. These are pretty neat. There's a Salvador Dali video hologram in a museum where you can watch Dali talk to you like he was giving a lecture.

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Here's an interesting longevity study. Scientists Put Anti-Aging Treatments to the Test – These Ones Actually Changed Biological Age. Sounds exciting, right? Here's the paper. First of all, it's nice to see the latest panel of what is used to measure biological age. PhenoAge is one of the oldest, and has been validated in datasets like NHANES III. The more modern ones, which take into account DNA methylation haven't actually validated as well. But they take into account more recent research developments are likely to be relevant and have indirect reasons to be included. But I was surprised to see antiretroviral therapy as the treatments that made the most difference. When you look at Supplement 1, it was based on a study of HIV-positive patients. Treating them with ART made a big difference in their biomarkers. But it is important to note that the study did not talk about survival prolongation. The data that made anti-TNF therapy look good was based on drugs used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. These drugs have hazards, such as tuberculosis and other opportunistic infections. There is little data of these treatments on healthy individuals. Even the metformin data was used in those with diabetes mellitus. We still don't have good data to support metformin therapy as a lifespan extender in a baseline healthy person.

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Crap, do I now have to worry about someone using a Flipper Zero from their Garmin watch? These devices are security hazards, and do things like card skimming and auto theft. But at least before you could tell when someone was using one of these devices. But now, they can hide it in a backpack and just pretend they are interacting with their watch.

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I didn't know Stephen Pinker and Scott Alexander were considering having a debate about AI doomerism. Two deep thinkers. Might be interesting to watch.

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Someone wrote a book to guide angel investors and startup founders about what to do when their company is struggling. As the author says: "It is the book you keep on the shelf and hope not to reach for." But they all have ups and downs. Even Google was rejected at first. 

Speaking of Google, here's how their search engine started getting really weird. That's funny – a search engine pretending to be a mental health counselor.

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Did you see SNL's parody of Dario Amodei? Many young people start their sentences with "So..." But yeah, why are Musk, Amodei, Jaan Tallinn and Altman asking for the government to implement AI regulations? We all suspect it's just regulatory capture.

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PubMed is launching Linked Discoveries which is a way to see what other research is related to the one you are reading. They used to have a link with each search results where you could see what other papers were related, but that disappeared. So it's good to have this.

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Glucosamine, a popular joint supplement, linked to faster Alzheimer’s progression. This supplement is not very effective against joint pain anyway. Paper here. The danger is hyperglycosylation, just like from having high blood sugar levels. Glucosamine harms you just like glucose.

Also: How Fast You Age During 40s May Predict Memory Lapses in Your 50s. And in your 40s, you are probably working your hardest, not getting enough sleep and under a lot of stress. Things that make you age fast. 

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CaptiVision is a handy tool for the profoundly hard of hearing. Not only can you tell what is being said, but also who is saying it. Unmet need.

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Sham scientific societies are misleading star researchers. I used to get solicitations to be a member of National Dean's List and Who's Who in America. They'll list you for a fee. At first, I couldn't believe I was selected for this "honor" and then I realized it was a scam. This research society scam is the same thing, operated by this Chinese guy.

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Google tried to hide a breakthrough in quantum computing through releasing a zero-knowledge proof to conceal the details of their research. It just made others work harder and release better results. Sad trombone.

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I came across this article in the WSJ about the growing trend of young adults cutting off their parents. Apparently many adults are taking the stance that they don't have to put up with their parents perceived flaws anymore. Anything goes – political differences, opinion differences, whatever. And there is an industry of "estrangement influencers" who will support and even encourage this decision and make these young adults think they are doing the right thing. Then I came across this article: An Existential Guide to: Forgiving Your Parents. But I bet most won't have the insight or mental capacity to grasp this. 

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NYT has an article about Washington State's contemplated millionaires tax. Unlike billionaires, millionaires aren't so mobile. They may not be business owners, and able to move it elsewhere. Wealth taxes are even crazier. This is going to make smart and productive people think twice about taking a job in Washington state.  But the Democrats will have to learn the hard way. Things will have to get bad before they get better.

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Someone asked Claude 5.5 Opus to determine the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Claude couldn't figure it out for sure, but suspects a guy named Adam Back. It's amazing that the guy's identity is still unknown. That's incredible work.

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Well, here's a contradictory report: AI was supposed to hit new grads hard. So far, unemployment data says otherwise. You see reports like these that make you think the situation is dire. I think it's just different data sources: NPS cites reports from economists, and Ars Technica used CESifo data. When you look at the data, the difficulty with graduates finding jobs started before AI and is probably due to other factors. I can imagine what some of those factors are. Don't blame AI for these problems.

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Saturn's moon Enceladus could harbor life. I'm not sure that will be good for humanity.

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There’s a new way to break RSA that’s faster than anything we’ve seen before. Factoring large primes will get easier, so cryptography has to up their game accordingly.

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Fauci privately warned of miscarriage risk linked to COVID vaccine while publicly claiming no issues. We really need to confirm that his auto-penned pardon is valid.

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Death by datacenters. An oncology nurse (who's supposed to score high on credibility points) is concerned that datacenters will spew with air with harmful chemicals, as she lives in Louisiana's Cancer Alley. The article has a picture of a petroleum refinery. Good grief, that's not what you see with datacenters. This is fake news at its finest. And check out the picture on this page. Looks terrible, right? They're pictures of a regular power generation plants, wastewater treatment facility or a chemical/industrial processing plant. It's not a picture of a datacenter. And look at this one, from datacenternews.org. What they don't tell you is that this is just load testing, at heavy load testing, and the smoke is normal. But this is not what representative of day-to-day use. You'll probably see steam, as in the Google datacenter in The Dalles. This is just fearmongering crap.

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Someone asked Claude 5.5 Opus to create an ad for their fake business. It's pretty wild. The prompt is surprisingly uncomplicated.

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Wow. An amoeba was discovered that can live at 64 °C! How is that even possible? Why doesn't it get cooked? Nature is amazing.

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The amazing Grant Sanderson gives a keynote lecture at a hackathon at MIT. The collie and the pug. It's a way of looking at letting AI create your code for you. No need to feel guilty about it. Use it. Learn from it. Create amazing things with it. That's how I look at it. I'm creating astronomy and weather apps for myself, in ways that I would never have achieved before. I'm calculating the position of the moon from first principles, using Jean Meeus' Astronomical Algorithms. It's a difficult book to use because he refers to things in different parts of the book so often, that you can get lost trying to get the right information. And you never know if you got it right, especially after all the tedious formulas you must type in. AI will do it for you. And it works and it's fast.

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This is another reason why you need to include conservative news sites in your feed. Never just trust Google News for your information, because besides the bias, you will miss things. The mind control will distort your thinking, as you will not have all the facts. Read both sides, and make your own decisions. 

––– 良くない–––Someone wrote an essay about there being tests of your willingness to believe what the ultra wealthy believe. I've always believed that the ultra wealthy live in a completely different world from the rest of us, partly because they can, partly because they want to, and partly because they must. Being in charge of all that wealth changes you. It's not that Jensen Huang is trying to tell you that you don't need to know your address or phone number. It's just that he doesn't have to. Do you really think Satya Nadella gets all his information from CoPilot-generated podcasts? If you do, you're stupid. People in that realm get their inputs from streams we don't have access to. Look at the reality Jensen is telling you about. There's a world now where you can leave the basic knowledge to regular people while you do your own thing. That's his world. It's not a test. You don't have to accept it. But don't tell Jensen what he should believe or how his world should operate. Look at Jeff Bezos – a completely different man from how he was around 2000. Elon Musk can't walk the streets anymore. A little wealth doesn't really change you. But incredible wealth does. I couldn't get away with signing a woman's boob, but Jensen can.

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Why No One Wants to Date Tech Bros. I still remember when during the dotcom era, everyone wanted to date a tech bro. This ronin is so glad he doesn't have to deal with this crap now.

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Oregon test scores inch upward, but post-pandemic recovery remains glacially slow. Remember who not to vote for this November.

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Here's a review of the M5 MacStudio. Looks like it beats the M3 MacStudio even with only 256 GB of RAM. The reviewer is not an ML engineer but he ran some benchmarks. I'm going to wait until end of October when the 512 GB RAM models will be available. Looks good.

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Some geeks are getting .si TLDs now from Slovenia, to match their .ai TLDs. Because of superintelligence, of course. 😆

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Now, we have a Modern Motherfucking Website. Good to get a refresher. Keep it up!

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Another reason not to use ChatGPT. ChatGPT Class Action Claims Humans Are Reading Your Chats. Yeah, there's no privacy with that app. Use something else. But people use Google straight from the tap, too, so what the heck, right?

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Sometimes, the more techy your appliances are, the more things can go wrong. People that used Samsungs smart refrigerators learned the hard way. All from a firmware update that went south.

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In-n-Out Burger is not putting up with California's taxes. Too bad, Gavin Newsom.

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Tattoos do increase the risk of lymphoma. I posted about this before, but now it's not just on someone's website, it's in The Lancet. The hazard ratio is not too high, and the risk is not linearly related to duration or surface area of the tattoo. Maybe it's a surrogate marker for something else. 

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"When tumor is the rumor, tissue is the issue." A young patient was diagnosed with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG). You can't excise the tumor. But surgeons did a biopsy, and it contained am mTOR mutation that made it susceptible to everolimus. Don't you love when it call comes together. Secondary mutations are always a concern, but at least there is this victory.

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The TSA is going to be able to 3-D scan your carry-ons now. Gonna be a bit harder to hide that contraband.

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Stanford violated its AI policy by turning a Hispanic student into a fake Black woman in ad. Stanford's in trouble trying to insert a token minority in an ad, and also making the Asian female look more attractive, and masculinizing the white male in the middle. This is not what AI is for. Shame.

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OpenAI hacked Australia's Medicare. Someone needs Mythos. And OpenAI really needs to beef up their security. This is not funny now. 

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Leonhard Euler's amaneunsis was Nicholas Fuss, and he was brilliant as well. Fuss wrote a mathematics program for Russia and it has never been translated until now.  Imagine being able to learn directly from Euler himself, and then writing things down for people to follow. Wow!

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Late-life semaglutide treatment slows ageing and extends lifespan in female mice. Amazing drug, especially if you are a mouse!

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One would have to insane to re-elect Tina Kotek. Dead last.

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