1 June 2026

Google planning to release millions of mosquitoes into California & Florida to help stop diseases. Why is this search engine company involved in something like this? They aren't the government. Did people have a vote on this?

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People really like Kagi search. These are recent reviews, too. I wish their API costs were lower, however. That would be my dream.

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Microsoft builds its ultimate MacBook Pro rival with the NVIDIA powered Surface Laptop Ultra. This looks like an interesting machine. I would not want to run Windows, however. Really waiting for something big to come to the Mac.

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Why so many Americans moved to the middle of nowhere. Centralia, Washington? Really? Wow, that's really getting away. I guess people are really fleeing living next to orcs and goblins.

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Kayaking in Oregon now requires permit now. This is a bummer. Nickel and diming people now. Like all those parking fees. It's crazy.

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31 May 2026

Nice to hear from Doc Seals again.  How DuckDuckGo Can Be a Hero. Some people dislike DDG because they get some of their search feeds from Bing, but Bing has come a long way since its early days and the results are quite good. Their bad rep just hasn't left them, and people still think of how it was during the Ballmer era. It's on par with the others now, and its interesting that although reviewers can't really find major differences between Google and Bing, they just can't come right out and say that Bing is a good alternative to Google. But few will ever use Bing as a verb. It's really too bad that they dropped API support.

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GammaTile is a new way of applying brachytherapy but embedding high dose radiation emitters into a polymer which you leave in the body and which eventually dissolves. This reminds me of the Gliadel wafters, which were a polymer wafer coated with BCNU chemotherapy. That treatment fell by the wayside as better treatment replaced it.

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Someone created a repository for Abstruse Goose comics, which I used to enjoy during the beginning of the century. The author has remained anonymous. We still have XKCD, though.

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Maybe this is why Meta seems to be struggling lately. This post about how the company's tech staff is overwhelmingly Chinese has caught social media attention. Doesn't sound like a place I'd want to work now.

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US healthcare still stupidly expensive, with pathetic outcomes. I was really hoping that the Trump administration was going to fix Obamacare, but it seems to have fallen lower in terms of priorities. I am very afraid that when the Democrats next take power, and they will someday, it will be turned into a completely socialized system. That will be a sad day. People believe that Scandinavia has a socialized medicine system that works, but they really don't, and the U.S. is not Scandinavia.

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Is migration into Oregon cooling again? Driver’s license data suggests a slowdown. Most immigrants are from California, and this probably accounts for why Deschutes county has become Blue. But in-migration is slowing down, which is not surprising. We're not getting the best and brightest to come to the state to work.

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30 May 2026

The Erdös unit distance problem was recently cracked by a GPT model. It's interesting that OpenAI's models are solving these math problems, while Anthropic's models are solving everything else. Is there something intrinsically "mathy" about OpenAI's models?

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Most Americans Aren't Convinced Humans Are Causing Climate Change. Agree with this – climate is changing but I've yet to be convinced that anthropocentric causes contribute very much to the overall picture. Global temperatures fluctuate much as they always have. The sun plays a much more significant role.

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The physics of espresso coffee. So much complexity in a simple coffee drink. I really like my Kinto drip system. The coffee is really good.

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Ten days with someone can make you both good buddies, but by ten months you'll be at each other's throats. I bet it varies from couple to couple. 

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The computer science algorithms behind Google and Apple Maps. Engineers have to know this stuff.

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AI billionaires brace for pitchforks. The dotcom craze was OK, because everyone was getting wealthy. This time, it's different. It's really tacky to display your wealth, like Zuckerberg displaying his Wingman and Launchpad yachts in Seattle. Especially after all the layoffs at Meta. Read the room, Zuck.

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Portland ranks near bottom of North American cities in new downtown perception survey. No surprises here. I haven't been to downtown Portland in ages. 
Among North American cities, Portland ranked last in the share of respondents who described downtown as “beautiful,” with only 3% agreeing with the statement. The city also tied St. Louis for the lowest rating on “vibrant,” at 58%.

Just 62% of respondents said Portland is “enjoyable to walk around,” tying the city with Baltimore for the second-lowest score in that category. St. Louis ranked lowest at 58%.

Portland also ranked near the bottom on cultural identity and inclusiveness measures. Only 47% of respondents considered the city “iconic,” the third-lowest score among North American cities surveyed, ahead of only Phoenix and San Jose.

On whether downtown feels “welcoming to everyone,” Portland scored 58%, tying Baltimore for third-lowest rank.
I wonder where Seattle ranked.

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29 May 2026

Teclistamab extends remission in relapsed myeloma, with 70% progression-free at 18 months. Now this is truly remarkable, as anyone who has taken care of refractory myeloma can tell you. To stable disease at 18 months in refractory disease is incredible. Overall survival was improved as well. You still have to deal with cytokine release syndrome, but that's not unusual in myeloma, especially in people who have experienced daratumumab. But adverse events of grade 3 or 4 occurred in 84.9% of teclistamab recipients, so definitely, there is risk, as grade 4 toxicity usually lands you in the hospital at least for a while. Paper here.

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Perfect randomness realized for the first time. The standard for perfect randomness has changed over time. Now we have cryptocurrency and quantum computing, so what is considered random has to be perfect. No hidden probability distribution that can be reverse-engineered.

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I saw this article (Calling Doctor GPT: AI responses to healthcare queries are nearly 76% accurate). I saw that they were using really old LLMs, and brushed it off. We know that medical chatbots are not trustworthy to be accurate, but then this article came out which used modern LLMs (Beyond Benchmarks: Disagreement Among Frontier LLMs on Real-World Fact-Checks). Clearly, the reliability of chatbots is still less than ideal.

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New report shows annual app subscribers rarely return after they cancel. Psychologically, I'm more likely to continue using a good app if I pay once and can use it with free updates for a year or so, and then have the option to pay for a license upgrade if I want. This stikes the right balance between overly greedy developers and those who just want to be supported for their hard work.

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Blue Origin's Earth-Shattering Kaboom. By now, most people have seen the video of the Blue Origin explosion. That was huge. So huge that it may put Blue Origin out of commission for a while. Like well into 2027.

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Small colleges are hurting. One estimates that "442 of the approximately 1,700 private, nonprofit, degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States could face financial exigency within the next decade." Western Oregon, Southern Oregon and Eastern Oregon Universities as well as Portland State University are experiencing financial trouble. Enrollments are down and expenses are increasing. I'm sure many prospective students are wondering whether it's really worth it to go into debt for little return.

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I hope that mail-in voting will eventually disappear. No more cheating and post-election surprises!

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Vaccination Rates For Oregon Students Hit New Low in 2026. Trust in the medical profession is very low.

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Is Tesla's Model S Plaid a faster and more powerful car than the Ferrari Luce? That would be an embarrassement.

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“Can I just say f**k AI, f**k AI, f**k AI?” the comedian, actor, and rotating host of The Daily Show asked in his keynote speech during the Class Day celebration on Wednesday. The crowd at Tercentenary Theatre, made up of the graduating Class of 2026 and their friends and families, answered him with a roar of approval.
College kids sure love to f*ck things, don't they? But this guy gets it right.

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“Raccoons live in alleys, storm drains, garbage nights, and morally humid environments,” it wrote. “Frogs have existential agency, while raccoons have logistical agency. A frog at a VC afterparty seems like an omen. A raccoon at a VC afterparty seems like it got on the guest list … Think: alley behind a conference hotel, the loading dock of a casino, the VC afterparty where everyone is saying ‘alignment’ but meaning ‘exit liquidity’ … Alignment sounds like ethics, safety, shared goals, humanity, the future. It has dry-cleaned blazer energy … Exit liquidity is socially clammy.”
Claude would not write this. This smells like ChatGPT.

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Gen Z men want kids. Gen Z women have questions. Modern society is so messed up. Humans can't accomplish simple biology now. 

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Kyoto University Hospital launched the first human trial of an experimental drug named TRG-035. The initial safety study enrolled 30 adult males who were each missing at least one tooth. Developed by biotech startup Toregem BioPharma, the drug blocks a specific protein that acts as the body’s molecular off-switch for tooth development.
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Scientists accidentally discover sea cucumber with 'tissue immortality'. Why is it that all of nature's creatures with regenerative superpowers like this have to be ugly? Like Deadpool.

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Anthropic reaches valuation of $965bn, beating OpenAI to become world’s most valuable AI firm. So different from a couple of years ago. Now, it seems that all OpenAI does it get embroiled in lawsuits. GPT models don't generate any excitement anymore. We look forward to the next Claude model. Or some Chinese model.

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Functional recovery of the adult murine hippocampus after cryopreservation by vitrification. Well, if we can't solve the challenge of storing our memories in some LLM, then maybe we can freeze our brains instead?

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28 May 2026

Is Microsoft ditching OpenAI for Anthropic? I think Microsoft is just hedging its bets. I would. OpenAI is no longer the recognized leader. It's Anthropic. They've got the best models. Today, they released Claude 4.8 Opus. Early users like it. Gonna give it a try. Claude 4.7 was already great as a coding assistant. 4.8 still has 1M token context window. Can't wait to see what this can do.

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Oura Ring 5 has been released. This one is smaller than the last version, and can monitor blood pressure now. It also measures nighttime breathing patterns, so it can check for sleep apnea, which is quite common. A lot of people are put off by the subscription, but that's life.

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Earlier this week, AIR Capital analyst Pierre-Olivier Essig said the Luce looks like a "mix between a Honda Accord EV and a Tesla."
Ouch.

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Various LLM smells. Some examples of AI writing styles:

Way too many punchlines

  • "Humans trust symmetry because it feels like intelligence made visible."
  • "The Tiger fit the story. Jin-yong fit the physics."
  • "Symmetry becomes a trap."

Consecutive short sentences

  • "Yet the tilt is not an accident. It is the shape of the optimum."
  • "Then AlphaEvolve arrived. It had no preference for symmetry. No aesthetic prior. No instinct to preserve harmony."
  • "These examples are not decorative. They form a distributed argument."

"X is the Y of Z"

  • "Cringe is the visible signature of moving along a gradient you chose."

"it's not just X, it's Y"

  • "solutions that do not merely satisfy the constraint but satisfy the aesthetic instincts"

Yeah, we've seen this. It's like Linked-In speak.

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Not everyone likes Google's new search strategy. It's rough being a business that depends on Google searches. And I can't believe that Google AI still has tokenization problems. Geez man, we've solved that years ago already. Try to keep up!

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Their breakthrough pushes superconductivity to 151 Kelvin (minus 122°C), beating a record that stood for more than 30 years.
Still way too cold. That's why this isn't making mainstream news. 

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Thoth app for ADHD and autism. This kind of app is really what should be developed for medical transcription. Instead of the not-so-private app that doctors are forced to use. (Yeah, I know, HIPAA rules, etc. But still.)

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The laser device that blasts mosquitos is still around. I didn't realize Photon Matrix is a Chinese device now.  Lowell Wood couldn't get enough interest in the U.S. so the company is Chinese now. Watch the video of it in action – quite cool.

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Inside the Collapse of Providence Health Plan.  One thing I've noticed is that many companies tend to think that in order to get good leadership, you have to do a national search and import from the outside. How many times have we seen that fail. In Oregon. In Portland. At OHSU. And here, Providence Health Plan. To me it says something about Oregonian insecurity. 
I would never have dreamed that this company would collapse. I feel bad for the people in the company, who are now out of a job.

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Mayor Katie Wilson’s policy adviser leading her most ambitious project to shelter 4,000 people resigned Wednesday morning, the mayor’s chief of staff confirmed.
Jon Grant’s exit comes weeks after Wilson replaced her chief of staff and in the wake of a deteriorating relationship between her office and the Seattle City Council.

27 May 2026

Scientists say they’ve reversed brain aging with a simple nasal spray. 

The therapy relies on microscopic biological particles called extracellular vesicles (EVs). These tiny structures naturally transport genetic material between cells. In this case, they were loaded with microRNAs, molecules that help regulate important biological processes in the brain.

"MicroRNAs act like master regulators," Narayana said. "They help modulate and regulate many gene and signaling pathways in the brain."

Researchers delivered the EVs through a nasal spray, allowing the treatment to bypass the brain's protective barrier and travel directly into brain tissue.
The secret sauce is in the microRNAs.  "According to the researchers, the therapy suppressed inflammatory systems such as the NLRP3 inflammasome and the cGAS-STING signaling pathways, both of which are strongly linked to aging related brain inflammation." Paper here.

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Websites have a new way of tracking you. If you surf other websites at the same time, your disk access patterns can give you away. Of course, they all have to use this technique, and there needs to be a central data collection repository for this to be useful. 

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Just say NO to AI note takers. I don't care how safe or private they claim to be.

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Google is losing its core search business. I'm reading about more people switching to Kagi search as well. What about Bing search?

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US law enforcement warns of “anti-tech extremism” as AI hatred grows. America is rapidly becoming a society where violence is acceptable if you disagree with something.  Soon, it can be said that a democratic republic is not suitable to govern America.

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Dysfunction in a nutshell. Portland leaders launch fast-track renaming of César E. Chávez Boulevard. Why must Portland name a city street after a California labor union leader? Or California farmers? Or anything regarding California? No input from people who live on the street. Breaking their own rules to rush this through.

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Los Angeles mansion tax backfired. LA needs Spencer Pratt so badly. Portland needs to learn from this.

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Seattle Redditors unhappy about EV charging station vandalism. Out of control, they say. But hey, defund the police. Support "harm reduction". And f*ck ICE, who just wants to remove criminals, right?

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26 May 2026

The new electric Ferrari Luce bombed. It would be like if Jack Daniels unveiled a new line of soft drink. Or if Harley-Davidson released an electric bike with pastel colors. Or when Jaguar marketed gay, instead of a cool vehicle. Same vibe. The interior looks like an Apple product instead of a sports car.

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Our broken healthcare system. Anthem BCBS recently announced this new payment plan they developed with a fintech company called Paytient. It appears that Anthem is offering patients a no-interest loan for their healthcare expenses, kinda like Klarna, but there is no extra interest cost. The fintech gets paid by Anthem. So what does Anthem get out of this? Clients will not avoid care and will adhere to their medication prescriptions more compliantly. Members will be happier and will stick with Anthem and their quality metrics will be higher. Bad debt will be reduced. It's shocking to find a company that actually cares enough to help their clientele this way. But if the healthcare system were done the right way, it wouldn't be necessary to even come up with this solution.

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Foldable iPhone Reportedly Facing Mass Production Issues. Looks like a lot of consumer tech is being stalled. There are shortages of RAM chips, slowing everything down. I wasn't really looking to get one of these anyway. At least not yet.

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Free Auto Caption Generator. Someone's offering a free video captioning service, that is supposedly private. Bookmarking it anyway. 

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Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public. Looks like they'll release it after all. Now what?

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Revenue Forecast Undermines Case for Tax Hikes  Revenue projection looks sunnier. But still anemic. They'll raise taxes anyway.

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25 May 2026

The political polarization of health outcomes in the USA. It's getting harder for a conservative to find quality dependable healthcare when many of the nurses employed are batshit crazy, and some of the doctors as well. It's leading to trust issues and may result in fundamental changes in the healthcare structure. What good is medical practice when half of patients would rather trust AI output?

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Scientists Create “Trojan Horse” Weight Loss Drug That Supercharges Results. This addition is PPAR-α inhibitors, which are already used to lower elevated triglyceride levels. This approach uses lanifibranor a pan agonist, active on PPAR-α/β/γ receptors. Supposedly enhances the weight loss effect.

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The DEI Business Case Is Falling Apart. That's great. DEI was built on a falsehood.
Much of the modern enthusiasm for diversity as a performance enhancer traces back to a series of influential reports published by McKinsey. These reports claim that companies with more racially and ethnically diverse executive teams earn higher returns. Their charts, rankings, and headlines have been repeated in boardrooms around the world. But when researchers attempted to reproduce the findings using transparent data from the S&P 500, the alleged advantage of diverse executive teams largely disappeared.

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Marathons and ultramarathons may be linked to colon cancer. This is crazy! Why would running predispose to colon cancer?

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai says graduates booing AI will shape its future — and live with its consequences. Google CEO thinks that today's graduates are going to be tomorrow's AI pioneers. Well, not everyone. CEO of Big Machine Records, Scott Borchetta tells booing graduates: "Hey, like I said, you can, you can hear me now, or you can pay me later."  I love in this video how protesting college kids hold protest signs and do their activist dance, as they do for all their protests. In the end, it won't matter – for them.

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Why young academics are leaving academia. Turns out that jobs in academia are decreasing. Graduates have to go out into the real world and get real jobs.

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Amazon is selling a wearable, called Bee. It looks like a roving Hermes Agent with voice interface, hooked up to either WiFi, or a local SSD, that you wear on your wrist. Not something I want.

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Look what Seattle residents have to do to combat drive-by shootings in their neighborhood. Yeah it's not legit and they'll probably have to take it down, but maybe the city will finally do something. Nah.....

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Bad idea.  Pike Place Market is going to allow alcohol in the market.  Really dumb move.

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24 May 2026

WiFi signals can identify you with near-perfect accuracy. I posted something about this before. You’re basically walking around in a radar field, and sensors can detect the pattern from the way things bounce off you. If you're really that nervous you could get EMF blocking clothing from Faraday Clothing.

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WSJ has an article on hiking leg enhancers that let you e-hike, as they call it. Still has kinks to work out, but it may come in handy some day. And when the price comes down.

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The Replacements: How US Helps Foreign Workers Take American Jobs. Yeah, college kids have a bigger threat than AI. Unlike AI, foreign workers are not force-multipliers.

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Looks like a LOT of people fled Democrat states last year. Yup. As Democrats tried to reinforce their anti-Trump governments, people voted with their feet.

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Wearing EEG electrodes can be a problem due to hair. But a new thermoreversible biogel may help.

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Psilocybin cuts nerve pain for weeks and boosts gabapentin efficacy in mice. Neuropathic pain is one of the toughest pain types to alleviate. Medicines that lessen its severity often make you sleepy. It really would be nice to have something that really works. Besides suzetrigine.

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This is a great take on what Late Night shows have become over the years. Peter Girnus posts have been showing up a lot lately as more people discover his unique style.

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Nearly every other password can be cracked in under a minute, and three out of five take less than an hour. Computing power has increased so much recently. For financial stuff, you absolutely really need 2-factor authentication.

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Did amphetamines help Erdős? I'm sure they did. Look at his productivity boost right after 1970 when he first started taking them. Then you can see where he began to experience tachyphylaxis. Happens all the time.

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Micropublishing is a place to publish biology research findings that are too small for a regular paper. But you want to get your findings out there. And it's indexed by PubMed, which is nice.

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Stanfards must be getting bad in academia. Who is a professor and who is a hobo?  These days, they're letting a lot of poseurs be college professors so I'm not surprised. And these are all men. There's some women professors who have been mistaken as homeless, too. 

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Sometimes you want a spreadsheet to do some quick forecasting, but you don't want to open Excel for it. QuickSheet is a mini light-weight spreadsheet tries to do that. From the comments, it's got kinks to work out. I've been using TableEdit but this app was created for older macOS versions, and I get a warning that future versions of macOS won't support it. There's no upgrade, however. The app is free so you get what you pay for, I guess.

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Doctors, This Is Why Our Patients Are Using ChatGPT. This article is written by an ED physician. For now, ChatGPT can sound like it's offering sound medical advice, but this may change in the future, as the advice gets outdated, as it is as good as its training cutoff date, which is a year or so ago. But as doctors become in shorter supply, people will turn to Dr. Chat for medical advice. AI isn't helping the medical profession the way it was envisioned. For doctors, it does their charting for them, although in a way that may not help them remember what exactly happened during that visit. When you don't write your own notes, something definitely is lost.

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For folks that can't exercise, whole body vibration can help decrease sarcopenia. I'll bet it feels good, too.

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If you iPhone is stolen, expect to get really nasty calls from phone thieves who want your password so they can unlock the phone, erase it, and sell it on the black market. Here's what Apple recommends:
the company advises owners to put it into Lost Mode; remotely erase the device; and keep the device on the “Find My” list to prevent it from being set up for a new user.
The time to prepare is NOW, before you lose your phone. Make sure you can see your iPhone in Find My on your computer.

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23 May 2026

Polish Nobel literature laureate Tokarczuk sparks controversy after admitting using AI. Nothing wrong with that, from my standpoint. AI can be a force multiplier, and give you ideas, as well as cleaning up clumsy text. Carry on, Olga.

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Data centers could actually be good for your hometown. It really depends on the type of data center that gets built and the deal you negotiate. Sure it can bring in new jobs and stimulate the local economy, but not all types of data centers will do that. Places like Oregon need the brains part of tech, not the factory drudge parts. That's why Washington and California are wealthy, because they have all the higher-level engineers, while Oregon has mostly the engineers that oversee manufacturing and data center operations. We're not seeing wealthy towns like Kirkland, Issahquah, Woodinville or Redmond.

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'The vibes are young male vibes': Why prediction markets attract a certain type. The kinda guys that like to gamble. That trade in crypto and the latest hustles.

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Hijacking Large Audio-Language Models via Context-Agnostic and Imperceptible Auditory Prompt Injection. If you interact with your LLM agent through an audio or voice interface, you have something else to worry about – inaudible signals. 

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I let an AI agent loose on my network — it owned my supply chain in 12 minutes. I don't why people post these. It's almost like "I let a raging Hereford bull loose in my house – it tore everything up in 12 minutes."

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A favorite VPN used by European and Russian hackers is taken down. About time. But they'll move on.

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Another guy loses his primary care physician. He wants a post-primary healthcare. It sad that many people view primary care as just check-up and triage engines. Primary care is a specialty in itself, and is probably inadequately compensated. There are so clinical updates to be aware of. Blood pressure and cholesterol recommendations change every few years. Same with optimal weight goals. Vitamin D levels. PSA monitoring. etc, etc. This blogger just want to be able to check his labs frequently and use AI to interpret them himself. But AI isn't going to remind him to get his recommended colonoscopy sooner because colon cancer statistics have changed. Bottom line: we still need good primary care physicians, and they shouldn't be treated like low on the totem pole professionals. But the practice should adapt to the world of wearables and technology. Not necessarily by resorting to telemedicine, but by creating more enhanced physicians that meet the needs of people. It's getting harder to find doctors like this.

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Here's a mini-review of Sci-Bot, the latest from Aleksandra Elbakyan. I stopped using Sci-Hub when it stopped indexing modern articles. I didn't use Sci-Net because I couldn't contribute, and it required sign-in. Sci-Bot suffers from lack of content. Great idea, but not quite as useful as it should be.

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The Making of Indian Statistics. I'm linking this webpage because it has a very unique webpage design, and I don't get impressed by very much these days. Kudos to the webpage designer.

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Deschutes County Commission Goes Democrat For the First Time In Three Decades. The influx of Californians into Bend has finally impacted the local politics. Shame.

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