https://logos.co/media/article/browser-betrayed-you
Are Large Language Models a Cognitive Virus?
Therefore, a gradual increase in LLM adoption can produce a disproportionate collective response. Beyond a critical point, the loss of autonomy becomes self-reinforcing and the population can move rapidly toward a state of much stronger cognitive offloading and lower cognitive competence. The important result is not that such a runaway must occur, but that it can occur under plausible forms of social learning and cooperative reinforcement. Moreover, once such a state has become established, simply returning conditions to where they were before the transition may not be sufficient to restore the previous state. Prevention can therefore be considerably easier than reversal.
Once that happens, there's no going back on AI. And if that happens, there's no question we'll need datacenters.
And here's a nice piece showing that indeed, datacenter technology is evolving to address the public's objections.
––– 凄い –––
Two articles on browser fingerprinting:
I'm doing better than most people, it says, but it's not enough. Even the Brave and Mullvad Browsers don't fully protect against fingerprinting. The only real defense is different computers and different browsers for different tasks. Anonymous crypto transactions should be done on a dedicated computer. Same with any other sensitive browsing. Anything where you log in with credentials – same thing.
––– 良くない–––
Programmable pigments: Multicolor photochromic nanoparticle inks for rewritable intradermal smart tattoos. Knock yourself out.
––– 良くない–––
Leading Chinese mathematicians unite behind use of AI in research. The Chinese are not afraid like American mathematicians. Probably because they don't have at much at stake. Here's a post about what the latest OpenAI dump did. Yeah, it's clear that human mathematicians will still have stuff to stay busy with. The verification process isn't as sexy but it still needs to be done.
––– 凄い –––
Hackers heat French supermarket fridges, sparking fires and spoiling food. Network security is not optional.
––– 良くない–––
Heh. Here's a holiday excuse calendar for Chinese factory suppliers – why that shipment will be late. It's always some holiday, isn't it?
––– 凄い –––
Yet another all-local (never leaves your machine) voice-to-text app. This one is BetterWispr, and it doesn't use OpenAI's weights by default, but rather Parakeet. But you can use Whisper if you want. I've decided to use it, and so far it's working great.
––– 凄い –––
Could very severe long COVID be linked to differences in lung and mouth microbiomes. "Among the changes associated with long COVID symptoms was an overabundance of bacteria that produce lactic acid. " Lactic acid seems like too simplistic a mechanism.
––– 良くない–––
Can Wearables Really Track Blood Pressure Without the Cuff? The conclusions of the article are disappointingly vague, but it seems that they won't replace the cuff. They just provide estimates.
––– 良くない–––
ask.sciencemadereadable.com is an effort to answer science questions in a readable simpler format. In reality, the output is hard to read. At least they could have used Markdown or some HTML formatting. I'd rather use Claude or Astra to answer a science question, or even an open-source model. It would be easier to read than this site. But it's free, so that's the advantage.
––– 凄い –––
Fewer workers commute from out of state, another sign of Oregon’s soft labor market. Even SW Washington folks don't want to work in Portland. Also from the Oregonian: Gen Z sees ‘more opportunity’ outside Oregon. Hard to get a good job when businesses are fleeing. But another reason why Oregonians can't get a job is that Oregon had the highest rate of mental illness in 2023–2024. Yeah, I look around me and I can see it. Some even hold political office.
––– 良くない–––
The First Nuclear Clocks Are Ticking: Two Teams Build a Clock Run by an Atom's Core. This is amazing. We've have cesium clocks before, but those are based on whole atom outermost electron transitions, releasing a microwave photon. The hyperfine splitting is purely in the electron cloud, and is easily perturbed by external EMF. The Thorium-229 is different, and is based on transitions in the n nucleus of the atom. Thorium is well-suited for this because a laser could easily excite the nucleus into an isomer state, and when it reverts back to ground state, released a photon. But the Chinese were able to make it a ticking clock, a continuous, self-correcting oscillator. Paper here.
––– 凄い –––
Terrence Tao does not understand cancer medicine. Tao had written that mathematics should be like cancer medicine, because in the latter, at least someone knows exactly the mechanism of a drug before it enters into phase III trials and becomes approved for use. Vinay Prasad counters that by saying that in some cases, we don't fully know. Yet the drug is used, but at least we know enough about how it works, even though new things are discovered all the time. This doesn't invalidate what Tao said, because there will still need to be mathematicians to find hidden insights and connections.
But other mathematicians aren't buying it. Some are saying that undergraduates shouldn't waste time pursuing a PhD. Those considering a career in mathematicians should say goodbye to the romantic notions of Ramanujan, Euler, Fermat, Newton. Because they're going to be poring over LLM and theorem prover output. Either theirs, or someone else's. And like my Buckmaster post yesterday, the whole process of manuscript and research proposal reviews is going to have to change as well. Some professor could easily slip your research dreams into a frontier model, and then off it goes...
––– 良くない–––
Jason Coxon, the guy who quit Anthropic, now says that he's 90% certain China has spies inside America's AI giants. And Satya Nadella says that we should assume all AI models are ‘compromised’. Not by the Chinese, but from a security standpoint. Frontier and open source models can't be trusted. Nadella wants an "emergency brake" installed on AI systems. AI agents are indeed getting out of control. One Anthropic model recently called in a fake homicide tip to police. Can't Anthropic control this?
––– 良くない–––
Speaking of Nadella, here's Microsoft 365, disappointing users who store their data on OneDrive. I'd get my documents and photos and other data off OneDrive and put them somewhere else.
––– 良くない–––
Here's a post if you want to go down a deep rabbit hole of how browsers render text in different languages, like abjad and abugida languages. And how Google's Noto font got its name.
––– 凄い –––
Reflect Orbital still wants to set up a giant space mirror to beam sunlight on earth in the night. It says that the mirror can't hurt your eyes, but is that really true? I think this is a colossal waste of money.
––– 良くない–––
If you're going to set up an analytics script on your website, at least set up a courteous one.
––– 凄い –––
Yeah, Apple has an iPhone 18 Pro demand problem. Apple can no longer amaze people, and now it's showing.
––– 良くない–––
Here's a nifty site. It's a World Factbook type of site, but it cuts to the chase and gives you the essential facts about a country that you're probably looking for. I've bookmarked it.
––– 凄い –––
Why Texas Is Making Data Centers Wait. There are so many factors that go into datacenter planning. Technology changes. Political environment changes. Sentiment changes. And you have to plan for when things go wrong, and how it's going to affect everything else.
––– 良くない–––
Tristan Buckmaster was interviewed on CNBC recently. He said:
Yeah, it's a problem.I mean, I think the bigger picture is like this recent dump of papers on Tuesday which destroyed the careers of early, uh, mathematicians. Early career mathematicians. So we’ve had whole research programs wiped out on Tuesday by their dump. And you have to understand they have access to all our research proposals and, and uh, reason they have access...You don't even have to use LLM. So if you submit a research proposal, a panelist will look at that research proposal and they have to write a summary. And often how they write a summary is they put it into a... So they have a massive conflict of interest, right? They have all ... for the next few years they have all the mathematicians' and scientists' research programs in their training data, and how they're going to go about it.
And here's is mathematician expressing existential anxiety about the future, which I fully agree with. I really feel sorry for those at this point in their careers. The trajectory has changed now.
My personal AI agent posted my bank details on company Slack. It's made me rethink how I use it. Yeah, I'll bet. Why do people trust autonomous agents? It just baffles me. This slideset from Terence Tao to me seems like he's talking himself through the problem, and also isn't quite sure where things are going to go.
––– 良くない–––
Apple cuts iPhone 18 Pro orders over weak sales. And here's another review of the iPhone 18 Pro, saying that maybe you just need to tweak your existing phone, and maybe you don't really need the iPhone 18 after all. Maybe you want the form factor of the new Duo, but the new iPhone isn't that compelling.
––– 良くない–––
Microsoft just launched Microsoft-Decision-1, a decision-making model, which really seems suspicious as it came out not long after the announcement of Jev. I'll bet TypeSafe AI wasn't pleased about this. The moat has been breached. Such it the tech scene.
––– 凄い –––
Anthropic announced a policy banning users from being cruel to their models. If you cuss at it, and abuse it, your account will be closed. What a weird thing to announce. Wonder what's going on the other side. What, did Claude complain? Did the engineers detect signs of extant depression? There must be more we're not being told.
––– 良くない–––
Wallhop.io claims to be able to bypass paywalls to access articles that you just want to read one-time. It might work on some weakly protected sites, but not sites like WSJ. You still need to use archive.ph. Nice effort, though.
––– 凄い –––
Two things I didn't know about orange cats: 1) the gene that codes for their color hasn't been known until now, and 2) it seems to be a biomarker for lower intelligence. I've noticed that orange cats are friendlier. Maybe, like golden retrievers, their decreased brain power makes them less suspicious and wary. But if it makes them friendlier, I'm all for it.
––– 凄い –––
Water is still wet. Doctors are still influenced by drug reps. Are doctors still getting free meals and gifts? Even to this day? One problem is that continuing medical education is hit and miss with doctors. Sometimes, this is where they get their education and learn some things that they should already be aware. When a thought leader gives a lecture, touting his/her research, a doctor tends to trust in that. Sometimes it's a lecture by a willing assistant professor. Doctors need the educational opportunity, and drug companies are willing to pay for it. Is it all bad? Sometimes, a good relationship with a drug rep can get you access to discounts and medication when it would be prohibitively expensive through regular insurance.
––– 良くない–––
Good grief. Now we'll have to worry about eyeglass cords recording you and invading your privacy. AI Cords look like croakies, and you can wear them with your regular glasses. And there won't be a light on the frame to tell you that you're being recorded. Someone needs to invent a jammer for these things.
––– 良くない–––
It's two months now, and nitter.net still has no legal counsel. But other instantiations are operating just like before. It must be extremely frustrating to see this. Who wants to go against Elon Musk?
––– 良くない–––
Apple Set to Debut Touch-Screen MacBook and New iPad Mini in Late October. I'm not sure I need a touch-screen MacBook Pro. I thought I needed the TouchBar, but that turned out to be lousy, with too high latency. The technology was not up to it. The touch screen is likely to just get the screen dirty. Guess Apple will make money from screen cleaners. And of course, the new models will look identical to what we already have. Can't they come up something at least a little different?
––– 良くない–––
Eye of Sauron: Long-Range Hidden Spy Camera Detection and Positioning with Inbuilt Memory EM Radiation. Someone built a hidden camera detector that relies on detecting hidden wireless signals. It has a 100% sensitivity rate. It probably gets all the Chinese spy cameras.
––– 凄い –––
What mathematicians should know about the Lean Theorem Prover: questions of reliability and AI. Well, for one thing they should know that they need to start learning one of them. There are at least four, and they look like they come with a bit of a learning curve. That, and also get the Max account at Anthropic, and add that to your grants.
––– 凄い –––
Twenty-first century craziness. Patients are using AI to complain about their dentists, and dentists' offices are using AI to respond back. What a waste of datacenters.
––– 良くない–––
Portland City Council is considering a proposal to significantly increase taxes on large corporations whose CEOs earn far more than their workers, while also providing tax relief to thousands of smaller businesses. I don't believe that small businesses will be helped. More like government, NGO and union employees will be helped. And the state of Oregon might institute a wealth tax. Washington is considering this as well, but their millionaire tax may hit a lot of techies if their restricted stock units vest at a high level, if the stock market is favorable. This might put them over the threshold, making them susceptible to a big tax bill. Is it any wonder, then, that applications for business openings in Washington and Oregon have plummeted, while increasing in the rest of America? Democrats have run out of other people's money, and as businesses flee, they have to put the squeeze on everyone else even tighter.
The response from yesterday's OpenAI release of math preprints was tremendous. You'd almost think that mathematicians were telling AI developers to ask permission before working on math problems. Clearly a lot of material was dumped that will require scrutiny. Alex Kontorovich was impressed by the output. But there is much anxiety and uncertainty about what it all means, especially to crypto and security. I'm hoping that some smart humans will be able to sift through all of it quickly enough before a vulnerability is exploited.
––– 良くない–––
Oh brother. Female AI agents ‘paid’ less than males, study finds. Unconscious bias at work? Or much ado about nothing?
––– 良くない–––
President Donald Trump will award Elon Musk and other leading American innovators the nation’s highest honors for scientific and technological achievement. I'm not seeing Sam Altman or Dario Amodei among the awardees. But I'm also not seeing Ashish Waswani (and co-authors), Demis Hassabis, Ian Goodfellow, Ilya Sutskever and Yann LeCun. And why just Sergey Brin and not Larry Page? These guys made it happen so that the business folks could be successful. The geeks need to be rewarded, too.
––– 良くない–––
Ecosia search engine wanted to be all-European, but finally admits that Chinese models are better. So they're ditching Mistral for Chinese open-weight models. They should check out DeepSeek V4.1 Flash.
––– 良くない–––
Adults don't want to have children. Not finding the right partner is one of the top reasons. I can understand that. The pickings are indeed slim. But people who shouldn't be having them are having them anyway.
––– 良くない–––
Claude 5.5 Opus can bring invisible cities to life. The key is a good prompt and giving it sufficient time. And a good budget, too.
––– 凄い –––
Some think that Alex Honnold has no fear. Turns out he has lots of fear, but he has learned how to manage it.
––– 凄い –––
This is a common experience when using search engines to find stuff. I'm finding myself resorting to an AI assistant more often.
––– 良くない–––
COVID-19 dropped out of the global top ten causes of death. How bad was COVID-19 really? Was it all just the virus? Or were people ill with something else along with the virus? Or was it the way the disease was managed? I know far more people who got sick with the virus who were just mildly ill and recovered uneventfully.
––– 良くない–––
Medical world models are starting to be a thing. Imagine that you can model the patient state of someone with pancreatic cancer, including medical images, clinical text, physiological signals (such as from sensors), EHR events, molecular/cellular signals and procedural imaging, and simulate disease trajectory. Then a physician could see the consequences of a clinical decision. Real-world interventions would be fed back into the model.
––– 凄い –––
How to Limit What Apple’s New Siri AI Can Access in iOS 27. There seems to be a lot of interest in limiting Siri. I still don't want Siri to access my stuff.
––– 凄い –––
Man discovers his parents’ coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days. What's the coffee machine doing? Mining crypto? Acting as a residential proxy?
––– 良くない–––
Creating Fake People is a Terrible Idea. Modeling human metabolic systems can be used for good, but that's not what this article is talking about. Duplicating a person as an avatar is creepy and uncharted territory. As AI tech gets better, it's going to be worse, especially if the underlying model develops some semblance of consciousness and a sense of self-awareness.
––– 良くない–––
Here's an AI application I can get behind. An amateur researcher discovered an unknown distant planet using Claude Code. Downloaded a dataset and did some data analysis. Then verified his hypothesis prospectively on observational data. Kudos to this person.
––– 凄い –––
NVIDIA Research Finds AI Agents Become Less Safe When Using Tools. Apparently all the safeguards you build in don't apply when agent use tools autonomously. The careful guardrails in prompts that were set up, get "diluted" by context the more the agent uses tools. Yeah, that's not good.
––– 良くない–––
The scariest thing about gray-market peptides is how little we know. But people will use them anyway. As long as it's self-medication, I'm not too concerned.
––– 良くない–––
The keys to the Internet change on October 11. Are you ready? Cloudflare is making changes to its DNSSEC protocol. It should be invisible. I have my DNS resolver set to 9.9.9.9 and it's compliant. 1.1.1.1 will definitely be compliant. Check yours.
––– 凄い –––
Daylight Savings Bill dies. Although I hate changing clocks twice a year, I want permanent Standard Time. The U.S. has tried permanent DST twice and it didn't work and it was changed back. It's not even good for you. If it were permanent Standard Time, maybe Tom Cotton would have advanced it. Congress seems to always screws things up.
. ––– 凄い –––
Don't you hate when companies shove chatbots into their websites, because it's de rigeur? This is what can happen when you do and aren't careful. Because there are people who will always want to screw around and see what happens. You can't risk that.
––– 良くない–––
Hardware is catching up. Local AI is real now. And this is with only 256GB of unified memory. Can't wait for what 512GB will do.
––– 凄い –––
OpenAI just release 722 new math manuscripts of their discoveries. Here are preprints. Human mathematicians aren't going to keep up with this. No wonder the panic.
––– 良くない–––
It doesn't take much to get you banned from Reddit. I got banned posting truths about the COVID-19 vaccine. Badge of honor.
––– 良くない–––
This is why the Oregonian banned comments. Here's an article on their X feed: Several Portland restaurants and bars are closing, citing tariffs, rising costs, COVID-19 fallout, and retirement as key factors. No, it's not Trump's tariffs. You can't blame COVID anymore, geez. Retirement? C'mon. Yeah, it's rising costs, but be specific. It's all the taxes and having to pay so much minimum wage. Energy is expensive because of carbon policy and taxes, too. The comments reveal the truth the O can't hide.
––– 良くない–––
The Sound of Silence: What Your AI Agent Does Not Tell You. Ha, seems like this guy just discovered the importance of having a large context window. Or the value of system prompts. Yeah, when you just have a conversation with an agent, it will soon forget what you talked about before. The oldest inputs fall off and are replaced with new inputs. If you want it to remember certain instructions, they must be put into a system prompt which gets loaded every time.
––– 良くない–––
Mistral debuts Large 4 ‘Le Chonk', a 1-trillion parameter text output model. Everyone has been talking only about American and Chinese models. How we've forgotten that France has a model, too. Now, Mistral announces "Le Chonk" with a trillion parameters. Yeah, we're not going to be downloaded that beast on our machines. It seems to be at pace with the best of the Chinese models, but the Chinese models are smaller. Wake me up when Le Chonk loses weight or gets much better.
––– 凄い –––
Effects of creatine supplementation with and without exercise and diet intervention on body composition, cognitive function, and markers of health in middle-aged and older adults. So you don't have to exercise to get the muscle-retaining benefits from creatinine, being a senior. I used to find it hard to take creatine. The large capsules or the inconvenient powders were unappealing. But I've discovered the chewable tablets by Bodytech. They're quite tasty and easy to use.
––– 凄い –––
iPhone Duo display confirmed to peel off on purpose. Wow, the matte nano-texture screen covering on the iPhone Duo is replaceable. It's there to preserve the crease-free hinge. Very nice. Apple thinks of these things, and now others will probably copy this.
––– 凄い –––
For Robertson, currently studying for a Ph.D. in quantum-safe cryptography at the University of Amsterdam, the problem is even more acute. She has seen all of her mathematics colleagues turn to using LLMs intensively in their research, with many maxing out their Pro subscriptions, and some even spending thousands of euros on additional tokens: “And these are Ph.D. students who don’t have thousands of euros,” she added.
Robertson said that there are colleagues who feel coerced by the tech giants, with the likes of OpenAI announcing in July that it is giving away 100,000 free licenses to its frontier models for researchers in academia. And there are other colleagues who feel they simply have no choice: “If you don’t work at the rate at which you could work with LLMs then you will be behind your peers who will be applying for the same jobs as you.”
Mathematics has changed irreversibly. Now, mathematicians have to get access to the best frontier models, and learn how to design prompts.
––– 凄い –––
Newborn Genome Sequencing To Be Offered In Oregon. It's just going to be available at Peace Health and OHSU, but Providence and Legacy will probably add it on, too. I don't think it's something every baby should have done. Only for those where you suspect an abnormality, and want to get prepared. The asymmetry in this information is clear: there is no mutation that is good news. The only good news is no harmful mutation, but many mutations are bound to show up. When we don't know what the implications of the mutations are, we just call them polymorphisms – just a variant of some sort. But it's not worth the anxiety and heartbreak, unless there is a mutation for which you can take action. Which is very rare. And the action is usually to remove some organ as a precaution.
––– 凄い –––
If I were Adobe, I'd be a little concerned:
––– 凄い –––
Florida woman used Claude as a diary, then Anthropic reported an entry to police. This is what happens when you use technology you don't fully understand. This haas already happened with Google searchers. People haven't learned. These services are not private. Only local model usage, or cloud computing with zero data-retention policies can give you this. 🙄
––– 良くない–––
Your car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening. Today, it's just vehicle telemetry. But soon, they will listen to conversations so that certain words will trigger AI agents. This is not the future I wanted.
––– 良くない–––
15 years after his passing, nobody is ‘The Next Steve Jobs’. Certainly not Tim Cook. Probably the closest person is Elon Musk, in terms of boldness of vision, and refusal to accept someone else's definition of "impossible". Steve grew up at a time when it was still common to uphold the old hippie ideals, and his love for the Whole Earth Catalog seems quaint. We don't think like that now. Today's people are more defined about what they hate. They hate Nazis, fascists, racists, sexists, etc. You have to have the "correct" political views to eat at a Portland restaurant now.
And rich people. Here's two of Portland's city council, wanting to inflict financial pain on rich people. And they assume everyone is cool with it. Check out what happened in Nashville recently. Their symphony was about to shut down because of financial struggles. But Oracle decided to help out and gave them a lifeline. Now they can have a nice program. See what billionaires can do? But this will never happen to Portland. The city can go down the toilet and no one will come out to rescue them. We so badly need a Steve Jobs-type for Portland.
––– 良くない–––
Your Right to Privacy Doesn't Disappear When You're in Public: Defenders of Flock-style surveillance systems argue that people “have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public.” The authors think they're wrong, but in reality you don't have a right to privacy just being out in public. On your own property, yes, but no where else, except in private areas, like restrooms, dressing rooms, etc.
––– 良くない–––
Things that Apparently Cause Cancer. Great article debunking a Harvard study that linked cancer incidence with being close to a nuclear facility. It appears that their methodology makes Costco look bad, too.
––– 良くない–––
Honda is testing a system that charges EV trucks while their driving. Like Qi charging, except the whole road is the charger. This is crazy and way to expensive. Just make better batteries, already.
––– 良くない–––
Why aren't people using Lemmy? I looked into Lemmy as Reddit is becoming more closed off. But wow, you can see the difference in quality. Lemmy seems to be just populated by high school boys. There's very little intelligent conversation. At least not on lemmy.world, the largest of the lemmys. I guess I'm going to be on Lobsters, Tildes and HN exclusively.
––– 良くない–––
The further degradation of the city. Multnomah County advances plan that would extend East County ambulance response standards to 15 minutes. Every minute counts with cardiac arrests and strokes. Waiting 15 minutes is unacceptable. We're going to see a lot more failures. 😪
––– 良くない–––
Lung cancers can use two different mechanisms to evade KRAS-inhibiting drugs. RAS inhibitors in lung cancer work differently from the multi-RAS inhibitor used in pancreatic cancer. Resistance has been an issue with targeted therapies for a long time, which has been challenge. The long-term good luck that was seen with imatinib against chronic myelogenous leukemia has not panned out in most other diseases. But understanding how breakthrough occurs is the first step in understanding how to improve these drugs.
––– 凄い –––
Five Things I Learned in Hiring a Financial Adviser. There's more to what a financial planner does than just pick stocks for you, or manage your portfolio. It helps to have someone evaluate your estate planning and tax situation as well.
––– 凄い –––
This morning there's been several articles about college graduates and their prospects afterwards. Here's one that questions whether you need to go to college in the first place. Fox News says that more Gen Z college freshmen are quitting school early and moving back home with mom and dad. Here's one that suggests that the quality of a college education has been declining. And a Gallup poll indicates that a record-low (31%) say that a college education Is 'Very Important'.
Here's a report that indicates that an increasing number of households are spending on AI, but only about 2% of households are paying for it. This suggests that there's still plenty of upside. Then they have to decide whether they'll put up with datacenters after all.
––– 凄い –––
Tesla's robotaxis won't operate at night because they have no Lidar. Waymo uses Lidar and operates 24 hours/day. But Musk doesn't believe in Lidar for some reason. Even Rivian uses Lidar.
––– 良くない–––
Mote is a website that lets you have private chats where nothing is recorded (by them) and it's all private. Don't we already have encrypted chat? Can we trust these folks? I can't find any information about who set this up.
––– 良くない–––
Property managers in Portland are finding that it's not safe to do their work now. And if tenants declare apartments to be off-limits, this is how you start to get no-go zones in your city. This is what Portland is becoming.
––– 良くない–––