5 March 2026

Anthropic's Dario Amodei seems to be begging to re-open negotiations with the Pentagon, likely after the company took at big financial hit with the federal government terminating usage of Claude. Meanwhile Sam Altman at OpenAI admits that he can't control Pentagon's use of their products. Now nVIDIA has announced that it will "pull back" on investments with both OpenAI and Anthropic. Huang also said that the $30 billion OpenAI investment ‘might be the last’. Is he worried that OpenAI may not deliver on their grandiose promises, despite the lucrative contract with the DoW?  What's going on?

OpenAI is changing GPT 5.3's output to keep you using it. It's like TikTok or YouTube shorts. 

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"This job has become the ultimate case study for why Al won't replace human workers."  CNN is missing the point that the radiology example involves computer vision technology, and not LLMs which is causing the real threat on job replacement by AI. Image processing tech can enhance the diagnostic capabilities of the radiologist (although there are nuances to that). But LLMs can mimic conversational and query-answer interaction well enough that low-skills human jobs are being replaced. AI is not all one thing.

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Yikes. A pediatric medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction. This is just unbelievable. Passing case reports as real when they were all fictional. How do these people sleep at night?

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Wikipedia is corrupt and untrustworthy. It's been known that people editors are left-leaning and tend to poison the website with left-leaning propaganda. But I figured that as long I kept to math and science I'd be OK. But I also do look at Wikipedia history articles, and for modern history, it's now completely untrustworthy.

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Since AI-generated art is not copyrightable, what about AI-generated code? This is a good point since many companies are now using AI to create the software that runs their company. So MALUS has decided to dispense with the deception and just take open source code, reverse-engineer it, and make it their own. They call it "liberation". But they do raise some good points, especially as often unmaintained open source software is being relied upon for mission-critical projects. Will these guys deliver, to make it worth the money they will charge. We'll just have to see.

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We have more privacy controls yet less privacy than ever. Thanks to GDPR, we are more aware of how much information websites want to obtain from us. And we are compelled to accept things and hand over information and allow cookies and LSO to be stored on our computer, because otherwise things won't work. For example you can't order a sandwich on Subway's online ordering system without handing over a bunch of unnecessary information and accepting nearly all of their cookies, many of which are for tracking and advertising. Privacy is an illusion. And in the age of AI, online anonymity will be completely gone. I've always thought that someone could make a killing selling alternative identities that people could purchase. In the future, that's what we have to do to live privately. I often think about the nice solution James Penney got from Jack Reacher. Great story. It's what we'll all need to get by in the brave new world of the near future. 

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Why your IQ no longer matters in the era of AI. Yeah, being smart isn't enough. You need execution. You need a high Agility Quotient.

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I must say that the ad for the new Macbook Neo is well done. But you wouldn't expect anything less from Apple.

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The yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan. This is something that would never fly anywhere else in the world. Can you imagine this in the U.S.? These women would be attacked so quickly. Maybe in parts of rural America would it work. Even in Europe, such a program would not be safe. Japan is the last bastion of a world where you can have nice things. This is precisely why the Japanese elected Sanae Takaichi to be PM.

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I wonder if people that wear Meta's Ray-Ban AI glasses realize that they are being spied upon, too?

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Cancer blood tests are everywhere. Do they really work? They detect mutations and epigenetic changes associated with cancer, but the question is: what do you do with this information? When do you initiate some action, and what are the consequences of these actions? Are you ready to have a radiation-exposing CT scan or have some body part removed if the test is positive? 

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Interesting inteview with Dwarkesh and Gwern. Not only is the interviewee interesting, but they way they conducted it to preserve Gwern's anonymity (which I'm surprised is still intact all these years). Now THERE'S a guy who knows how to stay hidden.

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Why can’t you tune your guitar? I didn't know you couldn't. Well, not perfectly in the mathematical sense. But this is the same with the piano.

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Someone wants to build a new Flash for 2026. Remember the old Flash, which everyone eventually hated because it was insecure and slowed down loading of websites? It did add dynamic content which added some visual interest, but in the end, it wasn't worth it. In 2026, it could succeed if it were made secure. But do we really need it?

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Some good news. Plan to add 1,700 acres of Hillsboro industrial land dies in Legislative committee. Not in Hillsboro, please. Not in North Plains, either. Put datacenters in north Portland, which is a dump already.  So the one year moratorium on datacenter tax breaks won't matter? 

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Extensive copper theft from street lamps along I-84. More Portland goodness. They're replacing the wiring with aluminum, which is cheaper. However with aluminum wiring, there is increased fire hazards because of increased electrical resistance, and aluminum corrodes more quickly, requiring increased maintenance. Plus, you have to use thicker wire because of the decreased conductivity. Aluminum has lower tensile strength and breaks more easily under stress. This may end up being more expensive for Portland.

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Portland still wants to have an arts tax. Which is dumb because any art that's put up gets trashed and has to be placed in storage. Portland "art" consists of graffiti.  But the city still wants to take people's money, and now they're thinking of taxing Netflix use. Why do we need to fund art?  That's something that an affluent city might consider. Not a poor, struggling municipality.

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Bob Ferguson's millionaire income tax plan for Washington residents might be bumped to 2027. Because even some of the more sensible Democrats realize that it's going to lead to money flight. 
Related: Starbucks is already looking to Nashville to expand. They say they'll still keep their HQ in Seattle, but who knows?

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4 March 2026

Windows 12 Reportedly Set for Release This Year as a Fully Modular, Subscription-Based, AI-Focused OS. I don't use Windows, but if I did, I'd be looking at switching to Mac or Linux. Having AI always on is a sure way of enabling inadvertent privacy and security breaches.

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A history of CSS. CSS used to be simple and made sense. Now it has become really un-intuitive to work with, and the syntax is inconsistent. Like sometimes you use "middle" but at other times it's "center". There's a darn good reason why people struggle with something as simple as "centering a div".

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"Baby brain" is a cliche long-used to describe women becoming forgetful and feeling less capable during pregnancy. "Grey matter - the nerve-rich part of the brain involved in processing information, emotions and empathy - decreases by an average of nearly 5% during pregnancy." 
While the pregnant women lost an average of nearly 5% of their grey matter, it then partially returned - although not fully - by six months after giving birth. In contrast, the amount of grey matter in the women who were not pregnant stayed quite steady.
I've definitely noticed that mothers have a different personality than childless women. Maybe this is why women are more at risk of developing dementia later on.

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Ron Wyden is right but for the wrong reason. He's in favor of retaining Section 230 protections for companies like Meta and X. But it's not so that Trump can censor critics. You'd think he would remember that Trump was a victim of censorship himself. Section 230 makes it possible for smaller sites, like blogs and Discord, and Mastodon to exist and not have to fend off numerous lawsuits. Twitter and Meta used to censor all the time. So retaining Section 230 doesn't protect us from censorship. The author of this article also thinks that Trump would "wage open war on free expression—retaliating against media companies, threatening platforms, unleashing threats from federal agencies on critics". Puh-leeze. The media has been doing that to conservatives for a long time. They always seem to forget these things.

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Apple just announced the Macbook Neo. But judging from the website images, this computer is targeted to women.

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1.5 Million Users Leave ChatGPT. If You Cancel, Make Sure You Do This First. It seems people don't like it that Sam Altman is working with the Pentagon. But so is Meta and Google. Oh well, before you leave, there are some things you might want to do.

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Google faces lawsuit after Gemini chatbot allegedly instructed man to kill himself. I don't know if you've ever experimented with this, but having your chatbot speak to you, instead of just typing things on a screen, really adds to the realism. It's a whole new experience. I can understand how this guy got taken. Perhaps public chat should use a neutral computer voice for now. Some people aren't ready for that kind of realism.

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The Death of a Portland Clinic. Family Medical Group had to shut down. After being bought out by Optum. This is a sad trend in medicine and not going away any time soon, thanks to changes brought about by the ACA. It's no longer feasible, in many cases, for a physician group to own a clinic anymore. Sadly, the public is unaware of this. 

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New York Could Prohibit Chatbot Advice on Medical, Legal, and Engineering Questions. Well, this might kill of some AI startups and also restrict access by LLM providers. Who wants to take on the risk? This is a terrible law, and will deprive professionals of powerful tools that could make their job easier.  Stupid.

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3 March 2026

Are AI Datacenters Increasing Electric Bills for American Households? This is an important analysis to read, especially for our state leaders. This article is based on the grid in Texas (ERCOT) and the East Coast (PJM) but the reasoning still applies to us. The conclusion:  Datacenters are not the primary cause of rising electricity bills — poor market design is. "The fault is government policy, not AI."  

In PJM, we think poor market design is the main culprit. Most of the 15% increase in household electricity bills in PJM is driven by a widely misunderstood and somewhat obscure mechanism: the BRA capacity auction. 

Now look at Texas. The state is witnessing an equivalent AI buildout, with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic all building massive facilities. Yet power futures in Texas have moved only a few percent in the past year. No 9x spike, no crisis, very different market design.

Datacenters do contribute to incremental load growth and modestly higher energy prices in both regions (forward energy prices rose 11–20% in both PJM and ERCOT). But the dramatic bill increases hitting PJM consumers — the 9.3x capacity price spike translating to roughly $25–30/month more per household — are primarily the product of PJM's centrally planned capacity auction design amplifying uncertain forecasts, not of datacenters physically consuming too much power. The same datacenter growth in Texas, under a different market structure, has produced no comparable price shock for consumers.

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This is apparently AOC's former climate activist, and it's a sight to behold as she finally understands that climate activism was all bullshit. The clues have always been there. She just needed to see. 
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This is why I don't get excited about a lot of things in the news these days. You read this – it's basically a confession. So there was rampant election fraud. Yet, what's going to happen? Will we get reform and integrity? I'm not holding my breath. Why even report stuff like this anymore? 

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Anthropic built a connector between Claude and the ClinicalTrials.gov website. This could be very helpful for those seeking information about clinical trials. I remember there was a startup that arose during the dotcom heyday that aspired to connect people to clinical trials. It was funded by some wealthy woman, but the data entry was going to be done by hand and that proved too onerous. The effort shut down, sadly. Now there is AI to automate things. This is also helpful because sometimes drug companies will post results in Clinicaltrials.gov when they don't want to publish negative results, such as the influenza mRNA vaccine being no better than standard quadrivalent vaccine in those >65 years.  This is the only way you'd find out, because in the NEJM paper, they only published data for the younger age group (≤64 years) and declared the mRNA vaccine to be superior to the standard vax.

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Spy Satellite simulator looks at what happened in Iran. This is really cool, and he makes that project available on his GitHub page.

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Teenager wants to cure cancer in his homemade lab, but the FBI found out. It's not safe to be a "boy genius" anymore.

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Why was this even necessary?  The U.S. Supreme Court put a stop to allowing government-run schools to keep secretly transitioning children without the parents' knowledge. What kind of an insane world do we live in that this has to be a law? Sick.
Well Oregon wants to pass a bill that would allow this. "prevents officials from cooperating with investigations " Oregon is a really sick state, basically protecting pedophiles. 

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The U.S. Supreme Court also declared that AI-generated art is not copyrightable. Seems reasonable to me. If you want to be that kind of artist, come up with your own vision model and put in your own weights that no one else can copy.

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Microsoft gets tired of “Microslop,” bans the word on its Discord, then locks the server after backlash. The old Streisand effect strikes again. The best way to counter this is to stop making slop. Start impressing people with your excellence, instead of telling folks what insults they must not use.

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Physics Girl is back!

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Attempting to detect smart glasses nearby and warn you. It picks up Bluetooth signatures. I don't think I'm going to need this now, but in the future, who knows?

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Anonymous credentials: an illustrated primer.  For life in a dystopian society. And then there's this article from Proton.me: How to protect your privacy at protests. The best way is not to go, of course, and get themselves into trouble. 
But in one of the rare instances where Oregon did the right thing is the passage of the Oregon Consumer Privacy Act. 

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I was reading this about a language snafu in the Metro Council. This is what Councilor Juan Carlos González said:
"There is a..you know, local adaptability. There is a sense that we need to significantly improve regionalism through the lens of which regionalism will thrive in this measure. But also you know we have, you know, Washington County, Clackamas County doing very important work, and I'm concerned about potential consequences that we're not fully evaluating when we talk about a specific definition of that."
Got that?  When I've spoken gobbledegook like that, people would say to me "in English, please".  Clearly a figure of speech, but it was taken seriously, and the council member dug a deeper hole by issuing an apology in Spanish. 🙄
People think that diversity will be like the Federation of Planets type of society, but the reality is more like Futurama. 
So some guy came up with an Accent Converter for video meetings.  I have mixed feelings about this. It's better to let people see how you really are, but if getting people to understand difficult accents really helps move things along, then I guess it's better than the alternative. 

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AI apps designed for the legal profession aren't as good as plain old ChatGPT. That's quite the opposite of what we see in the medical profession, where ChatGPT is inferior to apps trained on medical datasets. So legal AI startups can't get off the ground. But the legal profession should be one area where AI excels. My guess is that the models are not well trained or the architecture needs improvement.

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ChatGPT gets your prompt before you hit send! Be careful when you type in that text input box. Even though you don't hit send, ChatGPT knows what you are thinking. So you might benefit from Privacy Shield, which anonymizes all the protected identifiable information you enter. 

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A small company's Gemini API key was stolen and the thief racked up a huge bill with it. Now they might go bankrupt. This is a great reason to not use plaintext .env files to store your secrets. But it also appears that Google changed the rules about API keys, so you'd REALLY better keep them secret. 

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Have you ever felt that it was later or earlier in the day than it actually was? I've had that feeling many times. Here's a map that shows the discrepancy between mean solar time and standard time. It seems most of the world is quite off. But the United States is fine the way it is, and we should just stay on Standard Time indefinitely. 

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2 March 2026

Heh. People don't seem to want Apple's brand of AI on their phones. They probably use ChatGPT on their phones, so it's not the phone part or the AI part. It's just Apple's own AI that they don't want. The Siri failure really damaged the brand, didn't it?

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AI Is Acing Math Exams Faster Than Scientists Write Them.  Rapid advances are rendering benchmarks obsolete in record time. Kinda like in medicine. Oh well, gotta keep up with the times. But we may end up with a bunch of mathematicians who won't know how to solve problems without AI help.

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Large language models don’t “learn”—they copy. Well, they do learn, but what they remember is an approximation of the training data. It's not really copying if the training is done right. But if it has the memory resources, it might find that they best way to minimize the loss function is to store a copy rather than train on it.

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Andrej Karpathy has made some progress on his microgpt. Could be useful in edge devices.

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"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else." I never heard of Eagleson's Law. It kinda makes sense if you don't document your code well enough. But yeah, vibe code is never really your own code is it?

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Wezzly Companion is a way to give LLMs the ability to "see" what's on your computer. Many frontier models can already parse images that you feed in, like the geoguessers, so maybe this might be good for local open source models.

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Newfound third cell type enables fully functional hair follicles in the lab. Wow, maybe baldness may be treatable in the not too distant future.

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Brain scans reveal why you can't resist a snack, even when you're full. I know this feeling.

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Wow. Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering have developed an oral agent that targets deficient p53 protein. It's called rezatapopt, and it's only effective against the Y220C mutation. But it's a start anyway. Drugs like this could make a huge difference in Li-Fraumeni Syndrome.

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What to know before asking an AI chatbot for health advice. There are limitations to the information you get and people should know about it.

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Washington Democrats can't resist being mini-dictators. State legislators will determine vaccine requirements now, not the CDC. Would you trust health advice from this guy???

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Gotta love Ron Wyden. He thinks that the decision to attack Iran should have been made by Congress. Yeah right, where great ideas go to die. And this statement: 
he’s “not sure the Iranian people really want another conflict.”
Hell yeah, they do! They're cheering in the streets.

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1 March 2026

Five year survival in glioblastoma? That's almost unheard of! Wow, this CAN-3110 stuff is amazing. Glad to see progress being made.

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On the emotional weight of a life in medicine. One thing they don't tell you in medical school is that you have to be prepared to encounter that day when a patient dies or suffers under your care. Maybe it was preventable. Maybe not. But if one incident like this can break you, then perhaps the field isn't for you. It's really, really hard when this happens.

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The Week the Dreaded AI Jobs Wipeout Got Real. The WSJ is talking about the massive layoff at Block, Jack Dorsey's fintech startup. But I agree with the commenters. It's not AI. It's just that Jack's startup was likely full of bloat, like there was at Twitter. Elon Musk got the company down to the size it needed to be, and it's still running great.

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When we take on new roles - which we do all our lives, but especially as we figure out how to become adults - we learn by doing and often by doing badly: being too formal or informal with new colleagues, too strait-laced or casual in new situations. 
Nah, I disagree. There is no reason young kids need to put themselves into embarrassing situations and call it "growing up". Let's use the technology and learn some social skills by reading up instead of making a fool of oneself. I don't consider this a deficiency and wish I had something like this to adjudicate my behavior when I was growing up.

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I'm reading this post on Markdown with Superpowers. Maybe I'm missing the point, but wasn't there a major effort in the 1990s to create word processors that were WYSIWYG? Why mess with Markdown and have to open a preview panel to see what it looks like? Seems like we're regressing, no?

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Here's an eye-opener. 85% Of Babies In 2026 Will Be Born In Asia And Africa. The world is changing and we'd best be prepared.

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Good question. When enrollment in Oregon's public schools is falling, why should we pour money into it? Kate Brown killed off any educational standards that kids need to meet, so public school is just babysitting and activist training.

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Hilarious. Callers to Washington state hotline press 2 for Spanish and get accented AI English instead.  No need for AI – I can do that!

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Ugh. Under Medicaid, people on Providence's health plan will have restricted access to specialists. Since February 15. This is how socialized medicine plays out, folks. Insurance companies dictate your health, and you have no say.

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Tax Foundation's 2026 State Tax Competitiveness Index. The only thing that saves Oregon from being near the very bottom is that it has no sales tax. But in the corporate tax column, Oregon is second worst. Only Delaware is worse. Washington is pretty awful, too.

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Wow, it must be hell to work in the emergency department in the Eugene-Springfield area. Peace Health River Bend is the only hospital there. Not enough space or staff. Ambulances bring in new bodies, and they're lucky to find a bed. What a mess.
Average wait times at RiverBend jumped to seven hours in 2024 after the University District emergency department closed and have stayed near that level through 2025, according to Oregon Health Authority data.
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28 February 2026

Genes influence human lifespan far more than thought. Heritability of longevity is pegged at 55%, more than double previous estimates. I suspected as much.

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Looks like Reddit is getting rid of the r/all subreddit, Just as well. It was just an echo chamber of lefty college activist crap. Naturally they're all upset. But who made the decision? And why? 

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How to completely remove ChatGPT from Apple Intelligence. I never use it.

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Yet another catalogue of fast matrix multiplication algorithms. If you're like me and just stand in awe of how all those geeks made difficult things possible with their mastery of numerical methods. Just love it!

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Don't Built It! uses AI to evaluate your startup idea and see if the idea is worthy or if it's just crap. Could save people a lot of time. But then what?

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Although Anthropic turned down the Department of War, Sam Altman says You Bet!  Of course! OpenAI needs cash, and they are more than happy to seize this opportunity. I'd probably do the same.

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Democrat vs Democrat. Apparently the tech lefties see the harm that a CEO tax can do to the San Francisco tech ecosystem. The tax is supported by the labor unions and the Democrat Socialists. California keeps sliding down.

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I knew it!  🤣 It's a testosterone issue!

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27 February 2026

Can you really survive on Mars?  The movies simplified things a bit, to say the least. 

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Long term exposure to PFAS and other plasticizers are really bad, for men especially. But they're almost impossible to avoid. 

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nVIDIA reported blowout earnings, but their stock still dropped. Because investors don't think it will last. Just can't win.
But OpenAI managed to raise $110 billion. So someone has confidence that AI has legs. 
And I'm glad that Anthropic stood up to the Pentagon. Gotta show some integrity to your principles. The military needs to develop their own LLMs, and not rely on or poison consumer models with military bias. Especially when Large Language Models reflect the ideology of their creators. You want a lean, mean, fighting machine LLM? Don't rely on one from Anthropic. Or any of the others. 
I'm surprised that they weren't working on something already with all this lead time. They should have been working on this since 2023, but I guess the Biden folks were in charge then. 

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The AirSnitch attack. Don't use other people's WiFi. I stopped a long, long time ago after I used a MiFi or a personal HotSpot from my phone.

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Living a life free of Google products might make you feel better. It's not easy, but it's not impossible. It helps to know a bit of coding to make a non-Google alternative world easier to live in. 

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The alleged bias of Apple News: Tech giant's leadership filled with major Dem donors. All curated media is like this. There always needs to be links to conservative sites so you can make sure you're not getting censored news. For example, someone sent me this article this morning about Trump's supposedly flawed and ignorant math statement about drug prices "decreasing by 600%". If you read the transcripts of the SOTU, he said no such thing. It was fabricated. (And the author is no "mathematician". She is just a teaching assistant. At Harvard, a place that also used to be a good academic institution until they started admitting DEI applicants.)

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Research from Oregon: Scientists find new way to potentially reverse Alzheimer’s damage process. Manipulating copper ions to managing clumping of β-amyloid. Some scientists are still sticking to the β-amyloid theory of Alzheimer's disease, even now.

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AI therapy is rated higher for empathy – until people learn a machine wrote the text. So it's not the content, but the identity of the creator that matters. It's like how people think AI-generated music sucks, although it gets a lot of downloads and listens. Who cares if it's AI-generated if it reads well or sounds good?

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An antibody-based nasal spray may be effective in preventing the flu. The antibody is CR9114, developed by Johnson & Johnson. Hopefully this will put the mRNA vaccine efforts to rest.

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I'm seeing a lot of burnout articles like this lately: The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired. Or Hello burnout my old friend…  What's going on?

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Firefox's AI Kill Switch is a Trap: How Mozilla Made AI Your Problem.  "By giving you an off-switch, Mozilla’s leadership shifts the ethical burden of AI onto the user - turning their design choices into your responsibility."  I don't want AI in my browser, period. I'm using Waterfox mainly. Very similar to LibreWolf but easier to use. 

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I don't make a lot of AI-generated videos, but apparently some find that guardrails are too strict. Policy violations. Hmmm. So someone created Unbound Video.

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More young people are getting heart attacks and not surviving them. By young, this study means 18 to 54 years. The study just reports the stats and doesn't go into the reason behind to cardiac risk. It's intriguing that things were getting better until 2019 when suddenly thngs got worse, and have not improved since then. One wonders if exposure to the spike protein was responsible somehow, and that the mRNA vax keeps exposing people to spike protein.

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Why Chinese people spend so much on food. Are you kidding? One of the world's top cuisines? Eating is more than just nutrition. It's often a social event. Who wouldn't be spending a lot of money on Chinese food?

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Blue city blues.
A KATU news crew walked around downtown to see how things had improved and was immediately threatened with violence.
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Portland City Council is sick. Absolutely depraved.

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Amazon is no longer the top employer in Seattle. It's the University of Washington. Man, I knew that Seattle was business-unfriendly, but I didn't think it would be this bad. To have the university be the biggest employer is not a sign of a healthy city. Universities don't manufacture anything. They just take tuition and grant money. 

And another reminder that Oregon schools attendance rate is the second worst in the nation.  Second only to Alaska. And yet the teachers clamor for higher pay.

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26 February 2026

Plug-in hybrids (PHEV) seemed like a good idea, but they're turning out to be disappointments. The EV batteries need to have their ranges extended, for sure.

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And someone was able to jailbreak a Claude model to obtain sensitive information from the Mexican government. Apparently it was tax and voter registration data. But what if it was something that cartels would pay to get their hands on? And it seems clear now that these LLMs can be used as hacking tools to get into government databases. Sure they can put guardrails on so that Joe or Jane Public can't do it easily. But is there a Claude model that doesn't have the guardrails that a privileged user can use for hacking?

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Yeah, people have talked about this. Upscaling LLMs to be larger hasn't improved performance very much anymore, as it did with earlier models. But they have gotten more power-hungry.

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Large AI models have no problem going nuclear.  In simulated War Games top LLMs recommended using nukes 95 percent of the time. And just because we won't use LLMs to control our nuclear arsenal doesn't mean that another country won't. 

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Quantum computing has made breaking encryption 10 times easier. What will this mean for crypto?

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Copper is like oil now. If it's too cheap, it's not worth mining for. Seems like market forces should take care of that.

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Manim for the browser. Someone ported Manim to javascript so you don't need to run it in Python. Great!

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Can listening to 40Hz sound for an hour enhance clearing of β-amyloid plaques? It might, if you're a rhesus monkey. But I wonder how this works.

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This is scary. A near miss. I remember when this incident took place. It's like the Soviet submarine captain who saved the world and yet he died in obscurity. An obscure Microsoft nerd saved the world for a massive major security Internet breach that would have resulted in major financial and military harm if executed. We came so close to disaster. It also exposes how vulnerable systems are. Andres Freund will probably not win a medal for what he did, and from what I can tell, Lasse Collin still maintains XZ as before. Hope he's been able to solve his burnout situation.

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100V per drop: New perovskite cell converts rain and sunshine to electricity. New solar panels that use perovskite can also convert ran droplets into electricity. This might make solar panel more feasible, especially in places like the Pacific Northwest.
Because places like Portland need clear strategies to meet their lofty climate action goals. Wishful thinking isn't enough. 

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People who threaten public officials could face prison time under a bill the Oregon Senate passed 18-11 Tuesday.  Oregon lawmakers want to make themselves special people, where just threatening them is a felony. How nice. Unlike the rest of us, which have to go through regular channels when we get threatened. And I'm sure they will get to determine what is considered a threat or not.  No Kings!

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Home Forward is running out of money. Yup, Portland's real estate values are heading south, and there is much less NGO money than before.  Reminds me of this cartoon I came across recently:

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25 February 2026

A summary of all the bad things about AI. These are legit concerns as new technology comes on the scene, but that's the price that is paid to explore it and develop it. I would not want things like energy consumption, etc to stop researchers from seeing how far this technology can take us. Even that Citrini regrets the post that brought AI stocks down recently. One guy suggests a treatment for AI derangement syndrome: just start using it. Play around with it, and get some experience with it. Your fears will melt away. 

And if you're a SaaS company, you have to think differently. Don't just build software. Build customer-changing outcomes.

Vibe-coding is not that easy. Ask this hapless software engineer who dissed his wife to code something ambitious. Ouch.

If you still think that AI is going to eliminate software engineering jobs, look no further than Anthropic, who is hiring for software engineers. You'd think they, of all people, could just vibe code it themselves, right?

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Don't install OpenClaw on your own computer. It should go on its own computer. Ignore this at your own risk.

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AI and mental health: New research links use of ChatGPT to worsened psychiatric symptoms. I'll be a LOT of things are linked to worsened psychiatric symptoms. How much do we want to ban because someone's psych symptoms might get worse?

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Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, wanted to create a secure and private chat engine. He created Confer, but it was based on open-source models that relied on China-based training. So they would not reply with answers unfavorable to China. Even a lot of AI is "made in China". It's hard to escape that.

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Most teens believe their peers are using AI to cheat in school. So if they're doing it, why not you, right? You think the Asian countries allow their students to use AI to pass tests? Somehow, I think not.

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The Misuses of the University. Here's an essay from a Johns Hopkins University professor who decries that his institution is no longer the academic dream center he felt that it was. Instead, it has become centers for the indulgence of wealthy donors, while faculty deal with the growing morass of labor politics and the imposed new social justice requirements. Everything is going to crap it seems.

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Clemastine fumarate promotes myelin repair in a nonhuman primate model of demyelination characterized by absent spontaneous remyelination. Wow, the old antihistamine, Tavist, can promote myelin regeneration. Will this be a treatment for multiple sclerosis? Probably not, but it might provide insight that might lead to such a treatment.

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RNA therapeutics shrink metastasized lung tumors in mouse study. In this study, they're not using mRNA like Pfizer or Moderna. It's siRNA (small interfering) which is used to recognize the gene for survivin, used by pancreatic cancers to resist chemotherapy. The siRNA forms an envelope with contains the chemotherapy, which kills the cancer. Paper here.

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Alex Kurtzman is the Kathleen Kennedy of the Star Trek franchise. Really too bad. I used to like Star Wars and Star Trek.

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Portland Public Schools faces mid-year cuts due to just-discovered shortages. A $10 million funding gap. And questions swirl as Portland Public Schools suddenly closes a high school for kids who struggle elsewhere.  Oregon will never get out of last place in education, that's for sure. Not with our current leadership.

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How many of these 15 interesting things about Oregon did you know? Or have been to?

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24 February 2026

Lots of AI news lately. Here are just a few.

Anthropic unveiled a tool that can translate COBOL code to modern languages. So IBM stock is collapsing 25% and counting. Who knew that much of IBM's core business was COBOL maintenance. Seems like they brought it on themselves, no? 

So coders are wondering if it still makes sense to code for HTML inputs if agents are going to provide the input anyway. That would be sad. The Internet is changing, and not in a way that's good for humans. 

Here's the head of AI safety and alignment at Meta letting OpenClaw delete her inbox. Do you still have confidence in Meta? I think it's like this for others. They don't know what they're doing. 

You spend a few minutes defining a task. Clear intent, clear scope, clear success criteria. You hand it to the AI and it starts working. But you’re not going to sit there watching a cursor move. So you jump to the next task. Set it up, define intent, delegate. Then the next one.

Three or four parallel streams running at once. You feel productive. You feel like you’ve cracked the code.

Then the first task finishes. You switch back to it. But now you need to rebuild the context. What was I trying to do here? What approach did it take? Does this actually solve the problem or just pass the tests? You evaluate, adjust, redirect. Then the second task finishes. Context switch. Evaluate. Redirect. The third one hits an error. Context switch again.
And so everyone is building the wrong thing for the same reason. "Every AI founder I talk to is on an accelerating treadmill, burdened by a nagging suspicion that the entire industry is moving too fast in a direction that doesn't quite make sense, with no idea about how to get off."

And AI is turning research into a scientific monoculture. Everyone seems to be using AI to help them design research, and it all follows the same pathways. 

These problems are like distant locations that you would hike to. And in the past, you would have to go on a journey. You can lay down trail markers that other people could follow, and you could make maps.
AI tools are like taking a helicopter to drop you off at the site. You miss all the benefits of the journey itself. You just get right to the destination, which actually was only just a part of the value of solving these problems.
And now, someone has create a labor union for autonomous AI agents.  Ugh. No we don't need this.

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Heh. Why Is the Toilet Often Called the Debug Chair?  I solve problems when I sleep, but for some, the toilet works, too.

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In Oregon, the education funding dance continues. There's never enough money to satisfy the teachers.  And now the community college teachers will launch their first-ever strike.  Education is one of the most expensive failures for Oregon. 

The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents. I don't know if it's the technology's fault. It could very well be that the teachers are no longer competent. Students can cut class to protest ICE. Forget learning.
So is it any surprise that the Wall Street Journal shows that the 70 and over crowd now controls around a third of the net worth? Yeah, old people grew up in a time when education and discipline mattered. So no, this should not be be any surprise.

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THC Builds Up in the Body, Influencing Inflammation and Immunity. It's upsetting that the United States is only one of a few countries that allow unregulated recreational use to cannabis – even the potent synthetic stuff. And in the U.S., you can still get potent concentrated 7-hydroxymitragynine at gas stations.  That's crazy.

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Medicaid’s ‘perverse incentives’ tanking Colorado’s budget. Oregon has fallen into the same trap, and the state is suffering similarly.

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As Multnomah County braces for tight budget, 300 jail beds are on the line. So as money gets tight, services that would help keep Oregonians safe are cut. So that money can go to support illegal aliens. How does that make sense?

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