2 July 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1 July 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 June 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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29 June 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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28 June 2026

Happy Tau Day!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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27 June 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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26 June 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...one result was very uncomfortable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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25 June 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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24 June 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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23 June 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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