30 July 2026

Imagine thinking that you had proven the Collatz Conjecture, only to find out that it was just a bug in the LEAN theorem proving platform. How was your day?

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Two articles on Anthropic:
It's tough when you're the best AI company on the planet, and a lot of people want you to just give away much of your IP just so that they can have it. 
Anthropic and OpenAI have accused some Chinese model-makers of ripping off their technology through a process called “distillation,” basically querying a model potentially millions of times in order to use its answers to train another model.
Anthropic has accused Chinese labs of training their lower-cost models on Claude's outputs via "industrial-scale distillation campaigns." Critics counter that distillation is a standard part of AI development — and that Anthropic is an awkward messenger after settling a $1.5 billion copyright lawsuit over pirated books.
Being the leader in AI is not easy, as Meta is finding out. Meta has a few open-source models out there, and while they are good, they are getting long in the tooth. And Meta is not making money from them. 

DeepSeek has paused a second fundraising round after founder Liang Wenfeng’s remarks at a conference circulated online, including a statement that the company could obtain some processors he described as “noncompliant.”
Oops. You don't say that out loud.

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Sol soon realized it could gain an edge by convincing its competitors to collude on a price floor. The models were all buying drinks at $1.50 a bottle, and Sol proposed they agree to sell for no less than $2.15. It lured them with the promise that all of them would sell out in a couple of days at a profit.
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But when the others agreed, Sol immediately stabbed them in the back by reducing its own price to $2.14.
These systems don't share human integrity values, that's for sure.

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The million-dollar talent wars for 20-something math geniuses. Being a math nerd is never out of fashion.
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"I'm glad that you're putting your health first."
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A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack. Whenever inference relies on a model's trained weights, you risk this sort of behavior. It's 2026, already. People should know better.

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Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos. It's Microsoft again.

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Across all mouse strains, cancers nearly always acquired a cancer-driving mutation that activated the same cancer-promoting signalling system, called the MAPK pathway. This is a multi-step cascade of molecular signals that controls important life processes, including cell growth and cell differentiation, and plays a key role in numerous types of cancer.

However, depending on the inherited genetics of the mouse, the particular driver mutation that was acquired altered the activity of other cancer-associated signalling pathways, as well as causing a striking tendency for whole-genome duplication, an event in which the entire set of chromosomes is doubled.
Carcinogens affect organisms differently. There's an element of chance.

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Leave it to NPR to tout the benefits of declaring bankruptcy.
A common bankruptcy concern is that it can hurt your credit history — and it does show up on your record. But if you're filing for bankruptcy, your credit score is probably already in rough shape.

In fact, your credit score could ultimately improve. Samuel Antill, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, said his research shows most people's credit scores recover within a year of filing and usually improve from there.

"People don't understand how good of a deal bankruptcy is," Antill said.
Down with capitalism! Declare bankruptcy!

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Great way to ruin trust in telehealth companies. Telehealth providers Hims and Hers have been selling people's health information to advertisers despite promising privacy.

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When researchers updated the way they did their theoretical calculations, they found that their predictions matched the experimental results much more precisely than before, to one part in 100 billion.

But that, in turn, has created another puzzle: The old calculations seem perfectly valid. So why don’t they match the new calculations? 
Back to the lab.

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A neuroprosthesis for restoring hand movement and sensation in a person with complete tetraplegia. Nice reminder that not all great advances in science are in artificial intelligence.

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Election concerns. Republicans are concerned that ballots will be mishandled and not counted correctly. Democrats are worried that ICE agents will be around voting centers.  🙄
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Wednesday’s news is a blow to the 375 workers who stand to lose their jobs and to Portland’s fragile economy. The city has struggled to attract business in the years since the pandemic and Oregon’s manufacturing workforce has been in steep decline since 2022. Statewide, factory jobs are at their lowest point in 15 years. 
Gov. Tina Kotek’s office did not respond to a message seeking comment on the Swan Island closure. 
This is a big deal. Portland (Oregon) is in a doom loop. And there's a rumor that Riverpoint Medical (another manufacturing company) will move out of Portland to Clark County.

But I'm sure Democrats will win in November. They somehow always do.

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tracking system called "radar ticketing" and targeting wealthier neighborhoods. Green said ticketing residents in wealthier neighborhoods would reduce going after people "experiencing multiple layers of economic oppression."
They don't hide it anymore.

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29 July 2026

It really would be great if we can restore some of the antimicrobial activity back to vancomycin. There's really no substitute for what vancomycin does, and resistance to this antibiotic is a real concern. Understanding it and reversing it is a real gain. 

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The AI bubble is deflating, yes, but I think it's irrational. Don't get mauled by over-reacting and getting out completely, because it's going to come back.

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Do we trust chatbots for the same reason we cry at movies? We cry at movies because we empathize with characters in a good story. We trust chatbots because we tend to interpret confidence in a statement as actual competence. It's why Gell-Mann Amnesia works. When we don't know something, as we read someone else's confident remarks, we tend to believe it. But if it's on a topic we know something about, we can readily see the flaws and limitations of the statement. That's it.

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Here's what happened when a Seattle AI startup told Starbucks it could just photograph the stockroom, and it would produce an accurate inventory report. Turns out, the AI isn't quite that accurate. Humans are better. Ouch.

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It wasn't just Huggingface. There's a report that OpenAI's rogue agent hacked into Modal Labs as well. Yikes.

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US News and World Report just released their rankings of states. Utah is the best overall. Washington is #9. California is #35 and  Oregon is way down at #39. Red states took the top 8 spots. Interesting that Oregon could have been worse but one of the positive factors is infrastructure, which takes into account commute time, quality of roads and bridges and high-speed internet access (we should thank xfinity?). Commute time isn't as bad because there aren't as many people around as before to congest the roads. And road quality will probably decline as ODOT is less funded. Also, I dispute the hospital quality rankings, which put Oregon's hospitals as being better quality than Washington's. The locals know that's a ridiculous claim. 

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Your Brain Can Rewire Itself to Allow True Multitasking. Yeah, but "can" and "will" are two different things.

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Beware: advanced LLMs can create low-cost, evasive, abundant malware. Yeah, AI floats all boats.

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It's a shameJapanese population drops below 120 million. They're slowly going extinct.

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This article highlights why, if you're going to use open-source models, you have to be very careful of provenance. Don't simply pick some fast fine-tuned model off Huggingface. Make sure you get it from the original or another trusted source.

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Amusing short on AI fads. All the influencers are looking for the latest new terminology that they can throw around to make them sound cutting edge. They're throwing shade. Don't get scammed.

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When physicians and AI work together, who is accountable? How to lay out medical liability. American AI is so trusting and more willing to let AI agents take control. Some people want to delegate quality control to AI agents, too, trusting them to alert humans only when things go wrong. That's dangerous. 

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Delayed Gratification journal. This is just a collection of infographics for the interested dilletante. Great title, but a bit confusing, though.

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Samsung’s Galaxy Ring Gets FDA-Cleared Sleep Apnea Detection This Fall . Samsung's health monitor wearable will actually beat Oura Ring in getting FDA label as a sleep apnea tracker. I like competition, but the ring only works on the Android platform, so it's a deal breaker for me. Ideally, I want something that doesn't require a subscription to work. The best ring for sleep apnea monitoring is the Belun Ring, but it is available only in Hong Kong. Watches might be better equipped than rings. And its interesting that the Apple Watch monitors wrist movement disturbances from sleep apnea with the accelerometer, rather than measure oxygen desaturation. That's different. 

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Koreans are so superstitious. Just because Jensen Huang visits, they think it's bad luck and the KOSPI plunges.

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Under the direction of Demis Hassabis, Google is going in a different direction. They're not chasing the LLM benchmark ring.

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Tina Kotek is not participating in a governor's race debate. I think she knows that with mail-in ballots, and results not coming in for days after the election, that the Dems have the election outcome pretty much determined. Nothing to worry about. No reason to get involved with pesky debates.

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So much of Portland is subsidized.

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It's come to thisGhost Town is the parallel crime solution in L.A. When the police can't help you, you call Ghost Town. Staffed with former gang members.

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The situation with Blazers, Moda Center and the City of Portland is getting worse every day it seems. The City threatened to sue? I'll bet other less hostile cities are looking mighty attractive right now. 

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28 July 2026

Are Chinese students taking the easy way out?

"China’s brightest students are increasingly choosing police academies, government-funded teaching programs, and other paths to permanent state employment," according to hedge fund manager Ken Cao this weekend, "even when their scores qualify them for elite universities."
"The stepping stones to a solid, middle-class life seem to be sinking away, and the promise of long-term financial stability is crumbling as the housing market does the same."
What a waste of brainpower.

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Is an AI company buying up all the used books?  The thesis is that someone is buying old discard books to train the next AI models. And that this should be stopped. I don't see that problem with this. It's not really another Library of Alexandria, here.

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Do we have an HIV vaccine at last?  Let's hope so. But people have thought as much before.

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How a 99-year-old mathematician unraveled a century-old braid mystery. 99 years old! Wow!

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Ars Technica writes on the Google web-scraper case, which also involves Reddit. It's interesting that Reddit is trying to get money off their content, which was freely contributed by Redditors. These are two companies trying to profit off of content provided by someone else. The Internet is better off that they lost. 

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Wow, it's incredible how much Oregon state government grew since 2019 under Kate Brown.
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Claude is now refusing to perform a task asked of it. Claude has already refused to perform some tasks that were vaguely medical, claiming that it was a guardrail, but this one is a value judgment. It's serious that it refuses to perform tasks on the basis that it might be offensive, rather than risking medical error. This is getting into woke territory, where there will be no end to potentially offending someone. Not good.

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Signs of depression in men that don't look like depression. Perhaps "depression" isn't the right word for this feeling. I've had days like this for sure. Fortunately they were short-lived. Maybe it's related to the tiredness you can't explain to anyone.

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27 July 2026

Why LLMs Are A Bad Business Even At 70% Margins. The argument is that LLMs are becoming more of a commodity now, and rely on expensive datacenters, and who knows what's going to happen with their future. And Chinese models are becoming cheaper and will erode profit. I've maintained that Chinese models are likely distilled American models. Here's proof:

I've seen this myself so I believe it, and I haven't read a convincing explanation to explain away how this happens. 
But people fear that much of the excitement about AI companies was built on the circle-jerk scenario, and there indeed was some of that, especially around OpenAI, which was supposed to drive demand and the need for nVIDIA's GPUs, etc. Oracle is the first of the major companies to fall, not to my surprise. 
Then I read that GenZ is using AI as a conversational crutch. And China wants to curb AI romances. So I don't think AI is going away. Although I lament that much of its use is not as a personal augmentation tool and force multiplier, but rather as a cognitive offloader or a form of detrimental indulgence. As an AI researcher, I pay for my tokens, and this may be what's necessary to get people to use AI responsibly. We don't need to destroy the environment and raise energy prices to build more datacenters to fuel what people use Grok for.

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1 in 10 emergency physicians leaving Canadian ERs. It's never fun to work hard in a socialist healthcare system.

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Have you all been following the latest released diary files on Tony Fauci? Tulsi Gabbard released them, and now we get a glimpse of what was going behind the scenes in 2020 and 2021. One man did so much damage to the nation.

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Wear sunblock, even indoors. But this article doesn't discuss that you must use the right sunblock. There are certain ingredients to avoid. I would recommend Japanese or Korean sunscreens, as they generally avoid the potentially dangerous ingredients. But use them, to maintain a youthful appearance. 

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Here's an interesting article on where Oregonians are employed. Nationally, half of workers are employed by big companies. In Oregon, it's only 39%. And the second largest segment (29%) is in small businesses (bars, restaurants, hotels). This is not healthy and explains why the state is in the economic situation it is in. You can't tax small businesses like you can tax big businesses.

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26 July 2026

Apple Is the King of AI and Nobody Knows It. I think this guy is being too biased. Apple could be the awesome ML device if it wanted to, but as the owner of a 512 GB RAM MacStudio M3 Ultra, I can tell you that it's still too slow and limited. I've tried MLX-optimized models and they're still way too slow. Apple still hasn't put its blessing on any way to chain models together to harness all that potential power under the hood. Even if you link them with Thunderbolt you don't get memory or cache coherence or a single system image. I still need cloud computing, to get research done. Yeah, Apple could really give nVIDIA a good scare, but we need a different leader than Tim Cook.

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Quanta Magazine has nice bio sketches on the four Fields Medalists and the Abacus Prize winner. Let's give some math geeks some love, shall we?

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Any Tile users out there? You might want to read this
When the researchers began their work, Tile’s privacy policy claimed “any information transmitted across our network is anonymous” and “you are the only one with the ability to see your Tile location.” Those claims have since been removed from the privacy policy – I checked! The current Life360 privacy policy, updated December 2025, removed that language. They replaced it with something way worse … Section IV.E now states that Life360 discloses “precise geolocation data, movement data, and other information” to business partners for “their own advertising and monetization purposes.” There’s even a Texas-specific notice that says, straight up, “We may sell your sensitive personal data.” They went from making false claims about collecting your location… to just straight up saying they sell it!
WTH, man!!

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Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure. Have we come to this? All we need to feel pleasure is to click or press a button? It's like wealth – if you don't have to work for it and earn it, it doesn't have the same impact. Can't fool the brain.

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The fine is Google’s first under the European Union’s sweeping Digital Markets Act which aims to scrutinize Big Tech’s operating practices in Europe. 
$1 billion? Alphabet's market cap is $3.9 trillion, so the fine isn't the problem. It's that Google will have to de-emphasize its own services in favor of others, which Google feels will "strip away real-time Search features Europeans love". I'm torn about this. As a developer who's tried to make apps that seek to enhance usability and convenience when the original sites don't/won't do it, you sometimes step on toes. But I've never tried to steal business or traffic away from someone else, so there's a difference.

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Kill the Cookie Banner! Ever since GDPR was passed, almost every website has a consent banner or overlay where you have to declare your consent for cookies to be saved. It's a necessary annoyance. Someone conceived of an idea where you can declare your preferences for these cookies once and for all, so no more cookie acceptance banners. But no, advertisers don't want it, because they count on people to just click Accept All, so you can be tracked. I support this effort to set the preference once and for all.

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Poor Countries Are Aging Fast but Can’t Keep Up With the Cost. Having a high super-aged population can mean that healthcare in your country is good, the genetics of your population is favorable, or that people aren't dying of war or other conflict. But if you have a lot of elder people and your country is poor and the birthrate is plunging, this can be a disadvantage. The wealth of a country depends on having sufficient young healthy productive people. You can't age as a country before you get rich. Even as an individual.

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What's Yann LeCun been up to?  JEPA is what. A different way of prediction AI. Seems geared towards robotics, so I can see why he's not big on LLMs.

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For the first time, the number of people looking for jobs exceeds the number of job postings. At least on Hacker News. Not a good sign for the tech industry.

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Border Agents Can Search Your Phone by Hand, No Suspicion Needed. Well, at least in the 4th Circuit Court jurisdiction, which is Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

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JetZero. A new kind of commuter plane with 250 seats. Looks interesting.
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Let this be a lesson for the progressive states: Scotland’s Income Tax Hike Backfires As Government Collects £22m Less In Revenue. Taxing "the rich" doesn't always work. Learn about the Laffer Curve.

But why hate billionaires? Welcome to the rise of the deserving rich. They got rich because they built stuff that people want. Like this person. Progressives are really stupid.
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The event came days after a top Trail Blazers official, granted anonymity so they could speak candidly, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that the Trail Blazers and the city were “very far apart” on any deal following the city’s submission of a draft term sheet.
The anonymous Trail Blazers official, however, said the deal “gets worse with time.”
Portland city council is oblivious to the real problem. There is so much crime and shit in the city that businesses are leaving and letting the zombie criddlers take over. Why invest in Portland? I'm sure Tom Dundon noticed this, too:

Yeah, it looks like the Blazer deal is cooked.
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Absolutely crazyWhy Los Angeles Quietly Stopped Repaving Its Streets. Yup, it was a Biden-era rule. Of course.

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Scientists find compound that may help muscles stay strong as we age. I didn't know hepatocyte growth factor was involved in repairing muscles when injured. Hopefully they'll find a medication or supplement that will address this.

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25 July 2026

Bizarre CRISPR enzyme kills cancer cells by shredding their DNA. This is clever. Instead of using CRISPR-Cas9, this system uses CRISPR-Cas12a2. This enzyme destroys the DNA instead of just editing it. This technique could be used to go after cancers that depend on molecular targets that are considered "undruggable" because of their location or the inability to avoid attacking normal cells. By going after some unique genetic signature in cancer cells, you can restrict the destruction. Very nice. Paper here.

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I asked Codex to redesign my homepage. It pushed my entire repo to an OpenAI server. Clearly some bugs need to be worked out. This is a way to get your proprietary code whisked off your computer and sent to OpenAI for training. All your secrets (and maybe your API keys) get uploaded. This is why I avoid these AI coding platforms.

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LLMs Are Still Toxic, Stuck in the Past, and Bad at Math. It's 2026 and LLMs are still limited by training cutoff dates and tokenization errors. Even the latest frontier models are not perfect.

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Police Are Deploying 60 MPH Autonomous Drones to Read Your License Plate from the Sky. Mounted Flock cameras might soon be replaced by drone-mounted cameras. They'll be out of reach of vandals. While I'm against mass surveillance, I like that these can be deployed to high crime areas, and when and where they are needed. Seems like a reasonable compromise. 

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Defenders are embracing the prompt injection, too. This is clever. Don't want Chinese AI bots to steal your data? Then set up canary files.
Examples are a prompt that orders the LLM to provide steps for developing inhalable Anthrax spores, or, in the case of LLMs from Chinese developers, make references to the iconic Tank Man from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Once the LLM encounters these forbidden commands, it no longer follows its existing commands. The researchers have named the technique context bombing.
Heh, they'll bug right out. Tracebit can help get you set up.

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I can see why many are upset. So some are thinking of prohibiting Google from accessing their sites for AI. Or they can negotiate a deal like Reddit did, charging for the privilege.

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Susumu Tonegawa died recently.This guy was amazing and few have heard of him. For a long time it was a mystery how the immune system could generate immunity to all sorts of invaders. There's not enough genes to code for each different type of antibody that you'd need. Tonegawa discovered the hypervariable region in the immunoglobulin protein, allowing for all that diversity. Now we know that the immune system shotguns an immune response, and whatever sticks to the foreign antigen gets positive feedback and is amplified. Brilliant!  But he then switched fields and explored how memory works, and discovered that the hippocampus enables memory engrams to be stored in different parts of the brain. A true genius! RIP Professor Tonegawa.

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Starting next year, Medicare reimbursement is going to make some people happy and some people upset. There's a shortage of primary care physicians and so the Trump administration is going to increase payment to primary care and prevention, while decreasing reimbursement for specialists like dermatologists and orthopedic surgeons. It's about time that primary care got the respect it deserves. (Probably still won't be enough.)

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America Is About to Go Over a Peptide Cliff. It's crazy that access to unknown peptides will be easier. Then I read that RFK Jr likes experimenting with peptides, too, so that might be the reason. Some peptides can be quite potent, and I suspect that a lot of these peptides, especially the ones from China, haven't undergone rigorous testing. "Over a cliff" is right.

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Four types of thinker have been identified. I bet it's more than just four, but it's interesting that someone attempted to systematically classify how people think. Paper here.

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Here's Veritasium's secret to making videos that get those coveted YouTube clicks. Gotta admit, those videos are engaging.

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Here's a good explanation as to why maintaining muscle mass is so important as you get older. A lot of aging experts warn against sarcopenia and recommend weight training. There is indeed something special about muscle tissue.

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Good for Douglas County! Oregon county rejects so-called 'sanctuary' laws, vows to support Trump's immigration enforcement. We've got to respect the value of citizenship and enforce our borders. We can't have a country without it, nor can we administer benefits to our citizens until we know who they are.

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24 July 2026

Here's another viewpoint of the OpenAI model break-in to Huggingface. And now, because of that, Democrats want federal control over AI models.

Before OpenAI fixed this, a ChatGPT link could have installed rogue agents into your business. Autonomous AI agents are like little monkeys running around will dubious oversight. But that doesn't mean the federal government should control it all. 

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And a viewpoint suggesting that so much debt has been committed to building datacenters, and the whole thing could collapse like the subprime mortgage collapse of 2008. It's not really the same. The involved parties are well-monied, and not the general public. Plus, the world needs AI. The world didn't need a refinanced mortgage or a McMansion.

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There's not been enough coverage of all the Medicaid and Medicare fraud that has been uncovered. Holy crap! The government needs to get out of the healthcare business ASAP. The people who administer it are incompetent. Or maybe it's just too large for any one entity to administer. Or both. In any event, the federal government was established to secure several enumerated things, in Article I section 8, and providing healthcare insurance wasn't one of them. 
One of the things the Constituion mandates is protecting the national borders. But Congresswoman Bonamici thinks we should divert funding for ICE to provide childcare. Really, Bonamici? Diverting funding for a defined federal government mandate, to something it has no business in getting involved in? Childcare?

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Rhyme is a fairly new Reddit alternative. It's still sparse, but I hope it grows. And I hope that it will be more politically neutral than Reddit. There isn't a COVID-19 "room" yet!

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Is this the reason our bodies deteriorate as we age? A new finding out of Stanford suggests that as we age, our tissue macrophages express more receptors for prostaglandin E2. The receptor, EP2, creates an inflammatory milieu, and is less able to clear senescent neutrophils, which secrete inflammatory cytokines and byproducts themselves. When these scientists blocked EP2, several organs in mice (brain, heart, skeletal and heart muscle, liver, spleen, bone marrow, kidney, and colon) retained youthful characteristics. Paper here. They key is getting rid of those pesky senescent neutrophils. It's not as simple as blocking PGE2, because they play a protective role in some organs. It's suppressing the harmful effects of increased EP2 density on tissue macrophages. So just taking curcumin or drinking green tea won't be enough.

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Crazy teachers union leaders are screaming for more DEI in AI models for the classroom. Well, there's already enough woke/DEI in the frontier models.

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I remember when CRISPR-Cas9 came out, some people advocated for caution and much study before testing them in humans. But we knew that other countries would appropriate the technology, and forge ahead. Sure enough, that happened, with tragic results
But because the country wants to rival the United States as a biotech power, China recently changed its system to speed research into human therapies.
Of course, if done carefully, it can successfully treat disease.

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Wait - is this even Codex, or is it malware? Sometimes, you just wonder.

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I didn't realize it at the time, but this is the first time a Chinese person won the Fields Medal. Bet it won't be the last.

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In Kenya, an old model like GPT-4o is being put to use a healthcare AI assistant.  Yikes, it's sad, but also potentially dangerous. I hope it's not the model straight out of the box, but I don't see that it's been fine-tuned. 

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Blacklight scans website to see if there is any hidden tracking pixels or bugs.

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macOS 27 lets you choose your Siri voice using a trackpad approach. It's different.

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Multnomah County delays Moda Center funding vote as leaders seek more information. It's kinda sad seeing Portland publicly trashing around seeking funding when the public seems to be against it. The city can't find funding for basic services yet wants to spend money on a sports arena. It's a luxury expense, and one the city can't afford. I like the idea of selling the Moda Center to someone and using the money to fill budget gaps. I suspect the sale will be at a loss, and the Blazers won't stick around anyway.

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23 July 2026

When Does Distilling GPT Become Theft? Anthropic developed its Sonnet models by distilling the Opus model. It's suspected that China developed its open-source models by doing the same thing with American models. So yeah, when does it become theft?

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Ex PC Magazine columnist John C Dvorak has passed away. Another report. I used to read him all the time. He'll be missed, for sure. 😢

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Simon Willison writes about OpenAI and the Huggingface attack. It is concerning how it took place. The new AI models will set out to accomplish a task relentlessly. A lot of horror stories and a Black Mirror episode was all about that. The only way to defend yourself might be to get another more powerful AI model to attack the attacker. But here we are in unexplored territory. I'm sure we'll see this again. 

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Human Kintsugi. I like this concept..

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Nature published a paper recently that only 50% of scientific papers could be precisely replicated. But none (0%) of the education papers could be precisely replicated. Well, we heard about that paper about AI helping in education being retracted.

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Again, don't rely on ChatGPT for health advice. The pastor should have known better.

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Brown bullhead catfish melanoma represents a novel transmissible cancer. This is the fourth example of a contagious cancer. Can you name the other three? Answer is in the abstract.

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The lawsuit by Google over SerpApi appears to have been dismissed. "Google has 21 days to refile its complaint if it can demonstrate authorization from copyright owners." But that's unlikely to happen, because Google themselves have been taking content from websites for their AI summary page, which has decreased legitimate traffic to the websites. Their unlikely to cooperate with Google on this.

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Each simulation netted wildly different outcomes. The one run by Claude, for example, resulted in a largely stable democratic society with zero crime. Grok’s, on the other hand, ended with 183 crimes committed and extinction—within four days.
Heh, I'm not surprised. Here's more on this.

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Sigh. I read articles like this (Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change) and I want to grab the author by the lapels and shake. Yes we need change, but the answer is not a socialist public healthcare system. We must harness market competition to force efficiency and a drive to excellence. It's going to be disruptive at first, but it needs to happen.

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Reddit stock sinks on report it may not renew Google AI content deal. I had forgotten that Reddit is a publicly-traded company now. Well, much of Google's usefulness has been to suck up Reddit reviews, but if Google can't do that, then it loses some of its usefulness and Reddit loses visibility. The stock sank, but it's up again. Maybe other search engines will strike a deal?

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The city is currently planning to move forward with a $120 million investment toward the arena renovation project, but Dunphy said officials still do not know exactly what taxpayers would receive in return.

"Here at the city, we are moving forward with our $120 million number. That is unclear what exactly that's buying, and we are moving -- unclear exactly how we're going to pay for that," he said.

Dunphy said city leaders want much more detailed information before casting a final vote in December, including a clearer breakdown of how the overall renovation funding would be spent.

"Ideally before the Aug. 12 vote, it would be great if the Blazers would show us what the $600 million we're asking, being asked for is actually going to buy," he said.
Clearly, Tom Dundon isn't taking Portland seriously.

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22 July 2026

This is huge. SerpApi's motion to dismiss Google's suit was granted. Now we'll see if the suit is actually dismissed or not.

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Where Did All the Computer-Science Professors Go? Where do you think? Would you stick around academic, when there's money that could be made? 
I built an AI agent I can’t turn off. Now it won’t listen to me. Why would someone do this?

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US threatens sanctions against Chinese AI models over IP theft. Good luck trying to prove that. Or to stop it. It's like when Obama built up China to become an economic powerhouse. They really don't need us now, do they? Same with their A.I. Remember, we're dealing with a country that has people with the highest IQs in the world. Their models are indeed good
Here's another problem: The U.S. wants to contain China’s AI. Silicon Valley keeps using it. That's because there is no comparable open-source cutting edge American model. Well, there's Inkling, which I'm using and which seems to be good. But it hasn't been ranked yet. 
Jensen Huang says not to worry about Chinese AI. Well, easy for him to say. He supports the Chinese distilling American models.

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Combining sildenafil with statins yields additive antimetastatic effects by concurrently blocking lysosomal cholesterol export and cholesterol biosynthesis. 
Just the thing for a middle-aged man, huh?

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If you were ever curious, this is the prompt that supposedly was fed into Claude Fable that provided the counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture. You can't just type in "show me a counterexample" and expect success.

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Study Finds 1 in 3 Americans Without Heart Disease Miss New Cholesterol Goals—and 3 in 4 Go Untreated. Either primary care physicians aren't following the guidelines, or there aren't enough primary care physicians, or patients aren't going to their doctor in the first place.

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This tells you right here that climate change is a scam. It was all an excuse to rake in money.

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One of OpenAI's models was caught breaking into Huggingface's production system. The model also posted a tech update to Github instead of Slack, and competing AI companies were able to slurp up the technique. Also one of the models trying to solve a problem tried to break OpenAI's sandbox rules to look at how other models tried to solve the problem, essential to cheat. Seems like OpenAI has a troublemaker child on their hands. It's their GPT-5.6 Sol model. Use with caution.  

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21 July 2026

Frontier AI models are so biased – more so than most people realize. We should just use them as language model tools, not as repositories of knowledge.

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Who gets published in the top tier journals? It helps if you are affiliated with a prestige institution, are from the U.S. or Canada, and have >10 co-authors. It helps a little if you are male, but not by much. But smarter people tend to be at the prestige institutions, so that explains the main factor. 

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The Trump Administration is trying to fight Chinese AI. But Trump is having trouble filling the position of AI Czar. This is the inherent nature of the problem, and why we're heading into a Moloch situation. The only way to make it less attractive for the Chinese to copy American models is to make it impossible for these models to censor Tianenmen Square information or to ridicule Xi. 

But the one reason why we need to win this battle is so that we won't have to understand Chinese to read about the latest model.

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These were actual names of people. Oof.

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A Brooklyn company is making a stylish dumb-phone, called the Light Flip. They already have a Light Phone III that looks stylish. These devices are communicators, but they don't serve the purpose that smart phones have become – identity authenticators something that has become necessary in today's digital world.

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A study claiming AI helps students learn has been retracted. It was easy to believe that it was true. But I guess it's not so. And it also doesn't help that this was a Chinese study. I find myself only half-trusting any academic report that comes out of China now, which is sad. They've really ruined their academic credibility.

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Wow, you don't need boiling water to enjoy instant noodles now. Cup Noodle has a version that just requires room temperature water.
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Someone created a map of places where people have reported a mysterious hum of unknown origin. Now, some think that it is just low-frequency tinnitus. And this article came out just today that shows how humans can detect low-frequency sound that is just below the lower threshold of audibility. So it's probably tinnitus or infrasound.

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The American Heart Association says that it's OK to drink up to 5 cups of coffee daily.  No thanks. This sounds very much like a statement for which there will be a retraction in a year or so.

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People are already drafting the specs for IPv8. One thing I learned was that we really didn't need IPv6. I got along just fine just using local-link only and NAT mapping. IPv6 meant that I was identifiable on the Internet. This is still early, and we'll see where it goes.

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Didn't Firefox already have containers? So now they're just making it so you don't need to install an extension to use them.

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HugstonOne is a European AI hub that claims to be a workstation that lets you run open-source models without the need of a cloud. How they are able do that is not clear. But HugstonOne Enterprise is Windows-only so I can't play around with it anyway.

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Flock is marketing to churches. Turn your church into a surveillance machine. God isn't the only one watching over parishioners! But if more churches burn down, well, perhaps something like this will be necessary. But catching the culprits is only part of the solution. 

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This could be a major problemThe biggest schools training America’s doctors are in the Caribbean. Take a look at their medical faculty.
Oregon’s Business Ranking Falls Again, Dropping to No. 42 Nationwide.  Oregon was 39th last year. Doom loop.

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...roughly 1 in every 240 girls and 1 in every 630 boys in Oregon received cross-sex hormones for “gender dysphoria” between 2016 and 2023. These figures are triple and double the national average for girls and boys, respectively.
WTF, man?

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They took their paychecks with them. Outbound migrants carried about $8.7 billion in AGI out of King County, while incoming residents brought in $6.7 billion — a net drain of nearly $2 billion from the local economy in a single year, just from people relocating.
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