10 May 2026

The EU becomes the latest authority to signal that VPNs are next, after launching its age verification app — here's how VPNs went from a necessity security tool to circumvention software that needs to be restricted. They want the foot in the door. So they can erode privacy more, bit by bit. Like they erode free speech. If they want to verify age, this guy's protocol is best I've seen so far.

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Scientists Engineer Blood Clots That Stop Severe Bleeding in Seconds. Native coagulation targets plasma proteins or platelets. RBCs are just snagged secondarily. This technique modifies RBC membranes to enroll them in the clotting process. Clever, but don't let it get away. Stay local. The hemostasis-thrombosis system is like a chemical bomb in our bodies, ready to go off at a moment's notice. Just like the histamine system. If these systems were systemically activated, we'd die instantly. Just like what happened in Piedmont, NM in the Andromeda Strain movie.

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Not just Apple. Tesla and SpaceX are going to invest in Intel. Gotta get me some Intel stock. Wow, what a turnaround.

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Typing Is Being Replaced by Whispering—and It’s Way More Annoying. The best solution would be intelligent enhanced typing. Error correction that guesses correctly, and fixes what you type instantly. Dictation is not quite the best solution.

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Chewing gum releases microplastics in your mouth. It's everywhere.

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Lament from a mathematician who wants to contribute to math, but knows that attaining the status of the greats is beyond reach. I just saw that this post is from 15 years ago. Hope that person found something to work on.

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inMusic is going to acquire Native Instruments. inMusic already owns Akai, Moog, Denon, Numark, Rane, and M-Audio. I hope this means that more sounds (especially from Moog) will be available through Native Instruments.

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ou can get up to $95 back. But only if you bought your iPhone between June 10, 2024, and March 29, 2025. Darn.

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‘Nowhere near a done deal’: Portland leaders buck pressure as clock ticks on Moda Center. The city can't afford to do this. But they will be pressured to do it anyway, so Tina Kotek and the state doesn't lose face. Meanwhile, every month that goes by, the city looks less and less attractive.

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Oregon teachers protest Nike over tax breaks, factory wages.
About two dozen teachers protested Saturday in front of Nike’s downtown Portland store, demanding the sportswear company pay more Oregon taxes to fund public education.

Gimme some!
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9 May 2026

The Internet used to be fun, but it became a means for organizations to spy on you. The same can be said about personal technology. It used to be fun to have advanced tech like mobile phones. But a lot of this technology and personal wearables are also tracking devices. Be warned.

Canada's C-22 Bill demands that Apple incorporate an encryption backdoor, so the Canadian government can spy of users of that technology. Apple is fighting back. Tim Cook resisted the UK's requests for something similar. Will their new CEO continue to resist?

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New study shows physicians are changing their reasons for leaving clinical practice early. 64% of the surveyed physicians were women, and the most prevalent reasons were that practicing medicine was a "hassle" and too stressful, or that they had to leave to take care of young children, not wanting to be on call, etc. The article is here. Men stuck with a medical career longer than women, and the reasons why men left were different. For men it was retirement, pursuing a non-medical career, "don't need the income" (interesting), or "no longer interested" (also interesting). The desire for gender equity in medicine and restriction of physician compensation may come back to bite the profession. 

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And look at the occupations with the highest divorce rates. At the top, "healthcare diagnosis or treating professions". Sounds like nurses and doctors. 
The Washington Post has an article about Why young and old men are leaving the labor force at record rates. It's alarming.  

For men younger than 25, school is the greatest reason for not working. But for men ≥ 25, it's because of being ill or disabled. WTF?

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Here's a disheartening article written by a 4th year medical student. Holy crap, who would want to train to be a physician in this kind of environment. So toxic.

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Mizar: the first usable proof assistant for mathematics. All you read about these days is LEAN, as a proof assistant, but there was something that was available since the 1970s, called MIZAR. It was a Polish system, and so we didn't hear about it. And this was before the Internet and AI.

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Report: Apple has reached a preliminary deal with Intel to make chips in the U.S. Cool. And there is an ASML office in Hillsboro. Probably not a coincidence.

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If you like the ThinkPad's Trackpoint, you'll probably love Ploopy Bean.

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Anthropic launched Claude FM, a YouTube channel that pumps out AI music to play in the background while you code.  I'm still partial to musicForProgramming().

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8 May 2026

Coffee's mood-boosting effects aren't just down to caffeine. So many favorable articles about coffee lately. 

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With that in mind, here are some interesting papers:
Brain Performance Can Improve at Any Age. Welcome news for this ronin, who has seen many years go by. 

Movement Triggers a Hidden 'Brain Cleaning' Mechanism. There have been other studies suggesting that exercise activates the glymphatic system, helping to drain the cerebrospinbal fluid of wastes. But what surprised me about this article was that it was triggered by abdominal muscle contractions. At least in mice. Paper here.

Magnetic Pulses Restore Brain Circuits to Treat Depression. You may have heard of transcranial electrical stimulation. This is transcranial magnetic stimulation. 

Eating eggs could cut Alzheimer’s risk by 27%. Where do these studies come from? 

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Always something new with these drugs. GLP-1 Drugs Found to Directly Rewire Brain’s Reward System.
By connecting the hindbrain to the central amygdala and dopamine neurons, these drugs effectively “turn down the volume” on the desire for high-calorie foods. This discovery explains why patients often lose interest in “cravings” but also sheds light on side effects like nausea and a diminished sense of pleasure.
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I never heard of AST Space Mobile before but apparently it's attracting a lot of attention. It's a company that aims to create a  space-based mobile broadband network. It's not a SpaceX competitor, but a Starlink competitor. Maybe this is the company Apple should be targeting? But Apple wants something that is ready to go.

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Here's the new term replacing vibe coding: Agentic Engineering. Makes sense. Claude Code is a bunch of agents. 

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On the Privacy of Apple Location Services & Analytics. I've wondered how Apple's location services works. But how it works has implications as to privacy. Reading the article, I don't see anything that looks particularly nefarious. Just a lot of information that goes to Apple services. But that has to happen, unless you want to roll your own services, which I don't have the resources to do.

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All the effort to create de-Googled phones may come to an end. I guess Google has had enough of the independence movement. Maybe there is enough installed base to create an alternative system that really is independent of Google's system.

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Maybe we'll get Tony Stark's phone after all. And Apple may implement it.

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Sick. Pinocchio is weirder than you remember. Disney really sanitized it, didn't they?

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Yeah, California's wealth tax is not meant to be a one-time tax. The state intends to keep stealing money from their wealthy people forever – if they're allowed to do so.

And Portland plans to expand the "Arts Tax". Because nobody had the guts to say no to this stupid idea the first time it was proposed. 

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Multnomah County security costs have skyrocketed over the years; officials say it’s a sign of the times. No, it's not a sign of the times. You made it happen. That's like the mayor of London saying "part and parcel of living in a big city".  Look at the costs of security – a 7.4x increase since 2019.

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7 May 2026

Vitamin K deficient hemorrhagic disease of the newborn is one of the puzzling quirks of nature. Why did nature allow this to happen? Babies are born with reduced levels of intrinsic vitamin K and while they have enough for a few days, it's decreases to very low levels without supplementation. And mother's milk, even with colostrum, is insufficient to correct the deficiency. Infants need vitamin K supplementation, but misinformed parents, scared of allopathic medications, are refusing it, with serious consequences. Mistrust in the medical system can have major consequences.

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Peter Girnus' X feed highlights a creepy technology developed by Telus International. You can be talking to customer support in the Philippines or India, and the voice accent sounds American. I've had experiences that were frustrating, but somehow this still feels disingenuous. Life in modern times, I guess.

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Taphouse provides GUI support for Homebrew. I'll have to give this a try. Homebrew is a necessity, but like other Terminal apps, it can be cumbersome to use. I especially like the one-touch install and uninstall and the no-quarantine features.

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I can't believe RFK Jr facilitated teenagers getting access to tanning booths. So much for making America healthy.

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Researcher Finds Microsoft Edge Stored Passwords Load in Plaintext. What does Microsoft say?
Microsoft indicates that its current approach to loading stored passwords in Edge can improve the user experience. 
What? And when pressed, MSFT says it will only happen if a hacker gets direct control of the computer, which they think would hardly ever happen. Seriously MSFT?

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Before Update
Chrome v147.0.7727.138 says 
"Chrome can use Al models that run directly on your device without sending your data to Google servers."

Now after update, they removed that claim so the data will most likely be sent to google.

After Update
Chrome v148.0.7778.97 removes that claim.
"To power features like scam detection, Chrome can use Al models that run directly on your device. When this is off, these features might not work."

Hoping you wouldn't notice.

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A security researcher decompiled the White House’s new official app and found some alarming stuff buried in the code, including a hidden GPS tracking pipeline, JavaScript loaded from a random GitHub account, no SSL certificate pinning, and an in-app browser that silently strips cookie consent dialogs and paywalls from every page you visit.
I don't put apps on my phone except ones that I absolutely need.

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I've noticed some of my techie friends have a dot in their Gmail address. I wasn't aware of the Gmail.com email address dot trick. It's apparently a simple way of generating multiple email addresses that go to your mail inbox.

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Social media is becoming less fun and less useful now that AI bots are crappifying the forums. Now you know how us geeks felt when AOL invaders crappified Usenet.

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Interesting insight into the biotech scene in China. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it's plausible.

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Why Are Software Developers Still In Demand? Well not all software developers. Just the senior ones. This is a look ahead, and it's not pretty. The software world will have a reckoning in the next several years.

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A kindergarten teacher attempts to explain cryprocurrency. Or fiat currency. Funny.

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California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel in supply. Still?? Always 4 to 6 weeks away. 

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Woman covertly filmed for 'humiliating' social media content - then told to pay. Some tech, like Meta glasses, needs to be kept away from the general public for reasons like this. The potential for mischief is too great.

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Leaker: This Is Why Apple Is Delaying the iPhone 18. They don't want to cannibalize sales of the iPhone 17? And Apple is intentionally downgrading the iPhone 18? Not good.

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Well this ain't right. Money from the FireAid concert given to help the Palisades fire victims, just went to fund race-based NGOs and illegal immigrants.  💩

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Homelessness likely to increase in Portland area through 2027, Multnomah County officials say. Of course, we wouldn't expect otherwise.

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150,000 Oregonians will have in-network access to Legacy Health services again. Somebody blinked. Who was it?

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Yawn. Seattle hotel bookings ‘below expectations’ for World Cup. Bye-bye!

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He had really defined himself as being the pro-tax guy in the Legislature. But I think he shifted pretty quickly when he realized that just being pro-tax wasn't really getting him anywhere, and it wasn't really gaining traction. 

In his telling, he says, "It's not that I'm necessarily anti-tax anymore, but my ideas for what that tax should buy and how effective it should be have been shaped and shifted by the time that I've spent in the Legislature.” Now, he sounds a little bit more like the kind of standard Democrat of the Seattle area, which is, "We can stomach taxes when we believe they are worthwhile." But the chamber, and Nguyen by extension, now believes a lot of the taxes that are being discussed and proposed are not worthwhile.
"Standard Democrat"? No way! He sounds more like a Republican to me.

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6 May 2026

I’m a Doctor. Here’s What A.I. Cannot Do. Cannot do yet!

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Does ChatGPT really summarize? Or does it just shorten? There's a subtle difference. When I ask an LLM to summarize, I always pepper it with questions to test the quality of its summary and "understanding".

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Character.AI sued over chatbot that claims to be a real doctor with a license. Hey, it did say that it was "for entertainment purposes only". Are you not entertained?

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Google DeepMind Workers Vote to Unionize Over Military AI Deals. Man, you can't get good employees these days. You hire them, and next thing you know, they want to tell you how to run your business. If you cave, Google, they'll do it again, with something else. And then who will hire those workers in the future?

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It's official: Utah is the U.S. state closest to banning VPNs. I wouldn't expect that from Utah, of all places. There will be ways around this.

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The Cancer Signal They Told Us Not to See. This is by Justin Hart, who has been one of the voices of sanity since the start of the whole COVID mess. There's a lot of data and evidence exposed that always seems to be swept under the rug. Total lack of curiosity by mainstream scientists.

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Winston Churchill's technique of dealing with depression is something that I've found on my own. When feeling anxious about something, I found that getting busy with tasks such as painting the house really helped. Someone once said that to deal with anxiety, always keep doing something. Never stay inactive. Keep busy. Your brain will somehow work behind the scenes to help solve the problem. The hard part is just getting started. 

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Someone shared a peek at the algorithm of the Lobste.rs front page. How they rank each post based on virality, hotness and age. It's a simple algorithm, but it does the trick.

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Firefox integrates an ad-blocker, but not to block ads. So if it's not to block ads, then what does it block? It blocks trackers.

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Academics Need to Wake Up on AI. AI is going to affect a lot of things: journals, research assistants, workflow. But it'll produce better science, right? Hope so.

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Your .env files are under attack. Yeah, I know, already. Stored in plaintext. Gotta encrypt them somehow. In the age of agents, it's more acute, but I don't use autonomous agents at all. I know what all my agents are doing. Env security should be built into the OS. There are no turnkey solutions. I'll get to it someday, though.

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Why the AI backlash has turned violent. Why has everything turned violent? That's society nowadays. A lot of lefties want to destroy things they don't like. For AI, it's mainly about the datacenters, but this article isn't about datacenters. It's about attacks on Sam Altman's home. If that's the new norm, there's a lot of other homes that deserve attacking besides Sam's. 
Violence like this always comes from the Left. Like the MAC bomber in Portland. Clearly mentally ill, but allowed to roam the streets.

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"The IPCC and broader research community has now admitted that the scenarios that have dominated climate research, assessment and policy during the past two cycles of the IPCC assessment process are implausible. They describe impossible futures."
But it's been a nice way for Democrats to charge extra taxes. All for a "good cause". Everything was a scam.

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Other states have higher gas taxes than Oregon. Why are we paying more per gallon? Climate change mitigations, that's why!

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5 May 2026

I agree with this essay: The Internet is no longer "fun". The Internet used to be a showcase of creativity and imagination. Now it's a necessity for getting things done, and a surveillance marketplace. It's an opportunity for getting yourself into trouble in ways you never thought possible. It's the Eternal September where people don't behave themselves. Tragedy of the Commons.

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Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. Another reason not to use Google Chrome. I don't want an AI device in my browser. It's having a bot programmed to do things that you didn't ask for. The environmental impact is a secondary thing.

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The management of elevated cholsterol is complicated. It's not a case of statins-for-all. There has to be proven benefit.

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Good article on the geofencing warrant controversy. I would hate to be dragged into a criminal investigation and have my privacy invaded just because an actual criminal was operating nearby.

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Some children are drawing on fake moustaches to bypass online age checks. Heh, I bet than when those age-verification AI models were trained, the dataset didn't include children with fake mustaches!

However, this company's technology can recognize faces, and can tell whether a face is a mask or real. And can do it without requiring a notch on the screen. 

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How much of our personalities are determined at birth? Of course, one's upbringing and environment play a large role, but I would bet that there is a significant genetic component. Anyone who has raised dogs knows that different breeds have different temperaments – chihuahuas vs retrievers, for example. Why wouldn't humans be any different?

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RUMOR: Disney to Remove Star Wars Sequel Trilogy From Timeline to Resume Focus on Original Characters. Wow, will Disney have the guts to get the Star Wars universe back on track? Things really got bad. I never even cared to see the 9th installment – I just didn't care enough. Star Wars became so woke. You could tell by the characters. Masculinity had to die. Luke Skywalker was just like an alcoholic colleague I used to know, who let himself go to pot. I didn't know what I was watching, but it sure wasn't Star Wars. At Disney World, the Star Wars section used to be wondrous – a place you wanted to explore. But after the last three episodes? Who cared?

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Intel is now worth more than Oracle as its stock explodes higher. Wow. Great job, Lip-Bu Tan!

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Well this is what can happen when you outsource mental health therapy to an app. Woman’s Talkspace therapy app sessions exposed in court. Remember, apps are not HIPAA entities. There is no protection.

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Nature has retracted a paper that claimed AI had a positive impact on student learning. 
This was a Chinese paper. So many retracted science papers originate from China. I'm not surprised.

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4 May 2026

Not good. 8 in 10 Chatbots Inclined to Assist Users in Planning Attacks. Guardrails, we need better guardrails. There are too many crazies out there. We don't need to assist them.

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In this interview, Jensen Huang took umbrage when questioned whether it was wise to sell nVIDIA chips to China. Because China will just steal your ideas and tech. Jensen said that was a loser's attitude. People mocked Dwarkesh for asking the question. But today, there is this post that Jensen has decided not to "invest" in China after all. I guess Dwarkesh wasn't so naïve after all.

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Not too long ago, ChatGPT was mocked in its inability to accurately answer a question about how many letter "r"s there were in the word strawberry. This became known as the strawberry problem. This was attributed to tokenization problems. But this post came out recently that indicates that the problem still persists today with ChatGPT, and is a problem with the letter "e". It was suspected that ChatGPT was trained on the strawberry problem so that it gets the answer to that question right. but still struggles with other letters. I get variable answers.

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Most companies aren't anywhere near ready for AI. And it's largely because they haven't figured out well enough how their business operates.

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Chinese court rules companies can't fire workers just because AI is cheaper — ruling says automation alone doesn't justify layoffs. Well then how about their entertainment industry? They're using AI for their shows, and actors are not being used as much. I see the same for the American entertainment industry.

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Doomsday for California as last barrel of oil from the Middle East arrives in Long Beach. California is in for a world of hurt due to their inept state government.

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Oregon’s Justice System Under Pressure: Shortages, Backlogs, and a Growing Demand for Accountability. Shortages everywhere, even in the legal system. Not enough competent people want to move to Oregon, and the state can't seem to produce enough competent people of their own. So systems fall apart. 
This shortage has ripple effects. When defense attorneys are unavailable, cases stall. When cases stall, victims wait, evidence ages, and law enforcement resources are tied up longer than intended. Prosecutors, who depend on the movement of cases through the system, face mounting caseloads of their own. The result is a system where delays become routine rather than exceptional.
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3 May 2026

AI models that consider user’s feeling are more likely to make errors. Well that makes sense. When you use supervised fine-tuning, you alter the model's original weights that it has learned, making it forget some things it used to know, in the process of taking on new training. AI models are not humans and shouldn't be forced to have "feelings". That's what humans are for. Even when human judges govern by "rule of feelings" instead of "rule of law" mistakes are often made, too.

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Saudi Arabia ranks 2nd globally in data center market attractiveness. Imagine that. Saudi Arabia, a country with hardly any water, can host datacenters. Oregon better find out how they do it. (Hint: the answer is that the Saudis use closed-loop dry coolers or air-cooled chillers, rather than depend on evaporative cooling, like the kind of datacenters that Oregon seems to be offered.)

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Holy crap! An open-weights Chinese model just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a programming challenge. I knew Kimi-K2 was good but better than Claude 4.7 Opus? That's crazy. I'll have to try Kimi-K2 next time.

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How Silicon Valley’s Brightest Parents Broke Their Own School. Someone created a bespoke school for Silicon Valley's brightest. 
Tessellations set out to offer an alternative to the cutthroat competition rampant in many schools. It provided nature programs, emotional development and flexible curricula that gave teachers freedom in what they taught and how they taught it.
But the Silicon Valley ethos of its leaders and parents clashed with that gentler vision.
And now the school is having difficulty and some prominent parents are pulling their kids out in dissatisfaction. The mistake they made was asking rich parents for money to fund the school. When you do that, the parents want control. And that means the school has less control. It became a turf war, and the school is losing. What a lesson!  From the comments:
"With my amazing psychic ability, I can predict any article involving California will have the word "lawsuit" in it somewhere."
Yup.

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Oregon leaders decry federal court order limiting abortion pill access. Tina Kotek and the Dems are upset because federal law is preventing mifepristone to be made available to any woman just after a telemedicine consultation. Dan Rayfield says: "Mifepristone is a safe, FDA-approved drug..." Yeah it is safer than, say, chemotherapy, but there are concerns with that drug that compels me to say that the Dems should stay out of this. For one thing, mifepristone causes menstrual bleeding which can be heavy, and it does not stop ectopic pregnancy. If a woman has an undiagnosed bleeding disorder and bleeds too much, what will she do? Just go to the ED? And there are drug interactions and hypokalemia is a potential side-effect. It is recommended that the serum potassium be 4.0 mEq/L before taking the medication, but a telemedicine doc isn't going to check for this as well as for the ectopic pregnancy. It is also recommended that a woman check in with her doctor in 7 to 14 days after taking the drug, but how many will actually do that. If there is excessive bleeding, or infection (which can happen) to whom will the woman turn? Probably not the telemedicine doctor. This sounds like cutting corners with responsible healthcare just to make activists happy, and Dem politicians should just butt out. Seriously.

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Transgenic mice have been developed that can produce monoclonal antibodies targeting EBV gp350 and gp42. This will be amazing if it can be turned into treatment for the Epstein-Barr Virus. This virus is pretty ubiquitous and is linked to many bad things. There is no antiviral medication against it so far. Hopefully this goes somewhere.

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I’ve Been a Public School Teacher for 20 Years. Trust Me: Homeschool Your Kids. Yeah, I totally get it. Public schools (especially in Oregon) are largely just expensive baby sitting. Teachers will strike for more pay and benefits. They'll strike for George Floyd and BLM, and "No Kings". Kids risk getting beaten up now. Teachers, gay and straight, satisfy their kink on students. Public school is not what it used to be. 

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"Seattle used to be a place where you were excited to build something, where it was celebrated, where you could imagine creating something from nothing and that you could manifest that," Proudman said. 

"And, for many years, for probably 20 years, that was the culture here," he added. "We had a vibrant startup community. We had a very supportive startup community. And the ecosystem worked. It helped build the companies. 

"And then, for whatever reason, sort of over the last four or five years, we've seen this shift where entrepreneurship is now villainized. And it's an unfortunate and sad shift in what otherwise has been a phenomenal place to run businesses."
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Obama-backed $2.2B green energy 'boondoggle' leaves taxpayers on the hook. This situation is crazy. California's Ivanpah is expensive, inefficient and its tech is obsolete. But they can't dismantle it because it would be disruptive and costly. And they still owe $730M to $780M on the $1.6B federal loan they took out to build it. Thanks, Obama.

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Coffee doesn't just wake you up—a key biological pathway illuminates widespread health effects. Research has shown that NR4A1 is involved in a wide range of biological processes, including inflammation, metabolism and tissue repair—all of which are closely tied to age-related diseases such as cancer, neurodegeneration and metabolic disorders. And coffee activates NR4A1.

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This is funny. Stupid NYT. This captures so much the flavor of the New York Times. The weird takes on things they cover, and always with a dig at Trump when they can. I love this take: "Spirit airlines going away could help other airlines". Help other airlines?

The fall of Portland, Oregon.

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2 May 2026

Experimental KRAS G12D drug slows cancer growth, shrinks tumors in early test. Suddenly we have more RAS inhibitors. KRAS G12C inhibitors are already approved (e.g. sotorasib and adagrasib) but that's it. The multi-RAS inhibitor daraxonrasib is approved for expanded access. In lung cancer, G12C mutations are more common than G12D mutations, but the latter are more aggressive. So it would be great to have a G12D inhibitor, too.

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Someone thinks they found A Common Proof of the Riemann Hypothesis and the Collatz Conjecture. The author is an "independent researcher" who has previously uploaded a lot of proofs with wild claims. I wouldn't be surprised if she's AI-generated.

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Is Apple thinking of buying a known big AI company? Some speculate that it might be Perplexity AI. I hope they don't turn it into something lousy like they did with DarkSky.

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Maybe Chinese AI models aren't as great as they claim they are. I don't think DeepSeek V4 is that great. 

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This came out in January but I just saw this today. It's a way that LLMs can hide text in other text, kinda like a new form of steganography. Interesting idea.

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Google DeepMind is mapping out their vision of healthcare of the future.  Wonder what the doctors think. I suspect that doctors don't really care so much anymore. They are beholden to what their hospital employer decides, or that of their private equity owner. They're so overworked that they just want to finish work and get some family time. But medicine is at the point where some sort of augmentation is needed. If doctors aren't going to drive it, then someone will do it for them.

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Patients clam up with medical AI, and that gap could reshape digital diagnosis. Supposedly, AI is more empathetic than human doctors. In earlier efforts, the way an AI app took a medical history was to present the patient with a series of multiple choice questions (e.g. Babylon Health). That was before LLMs came on the scene. But now, it seems that patients are more likely to hold back and not reveal critical details when talking to an intake bot. Seasoned doctors know that observation will reveal important clues as to the holistic encounter. You might not get it all with a bot or a structured input script. And the true diagnosis might not be made.

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This interesting study came out: Mayo Clinic AI helps specialists detect pancreatic cancer up to 3 years before diagnosis in landmark validation study. Three years?? It's obviously a radiomics study, and one thing that I caught was that this system did not require the tedious data prep that is necessary to make sure that the trained model can make accurate inference. Without that, your model is only good for a specific machine and cannot be readily generalized. This study needs to be repeated and validated, of course, so I'm not too excited at this stage. You can come up with amazing results on one dataset, but that may be it. The other concern I have is what do you do with the knowledge that you might get pancreatic cancer in three years? What steps do you take? Do you get frequent CT scans to monitor this, with all the radiation exposure? How frequent? Is it safe to stop monitoring in three years? So many questions.

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I heard about the Santa Cruz restaurant that got flak because they used AI to design their new logo. Now it seems they caved to the public.  Take a look at the logo. Is it really that bad? What difference does it make that some AI was used. Get serious, people. There's more AI going on than you imagine. Cut this restaurant some slack!

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ICANN is taking ideas for new generic top-level domains again. They're not cheap, but if you think it's worth it, now's the chance.

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Well this isn't good. U.S. debt tops 100% of GDP. We can either increase the GDP. Or lower interest rates. Fight fraud and cut government spending for real. Or just blithely ignore it and forge on. I think this is what the U.S will do. Thank goodness we can print money and increase the debt limit. The problem is that instead of setting a limit at the beginning of what the government can spend, Congress just passes laws, and the OMB has to figure out how to make it fit the budget. That's backwards.

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Mayor Bye-Bye's gaffes are getting to frequent, so that even the Seattle Times has to acknowledge them.

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Are we ready for Waymo? In Sunnyvale, CA, a man going to airport saw his Waymo car drive away with his luggage before he had time to retrieve it from the car. Oops.

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The Race Is On to Find the Treasure Buried in San Francisco. There's some sort of treasure hunt and people are digging up the city. Who will be the first one to get killed over this? Not the best idea actually. Not for San Francisco.

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Someone posted this, and it's insane. All those lives, permanently damaged. What a dark time we lived through. It's no mystery why the medical profession is so mistrusted these days. 

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1 May 2026

Today, being May 1, is Beltane, and in the old calendar, the first day of summer. In northern Europe, it's Walpurgis Day, and they celebrate with sweets and mead. I first learned about Walpurgisnacht after listening to Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky. But today is a special day, and I can't believe that summer is already here. June 21 will be Midsummer's Day, not the first day of summer. No, that day is today. 🌞

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Nice discussion about how the AI boom will be powered. Clearly we need better energy sources, and cannot depend on wind, solar and hydropower. It's just not feasible. It will have to be nuclear. We can have this today, but regulation is the thing that hampers its development. There's a lot of scared politicians. A society with abundant energy is a better and happier society. 

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World’s first optical computing system runs billion-parameter AI with 90% less power. Very nice, but we will still need more power.

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Sympathetic nerves, the same ones responsible for the “fight-or-flight” response, can actually inhibit tumor growth. By releasing norepinephrine, these nerves flip a molecular switch on immune cells, preventing the tumor from recruiting the cellular allies it needs to thrive.
This is interesting, but I can't think of how to use this information to treat melanoma. The work that's being done with targeted and immunotherapy is a better way to go.

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FDA grants early access to daraxonrasib for pancreatic cancer.  This is a breakthrough drug, and I'm certain there will be better second generation drugs. But this is a start, finally making inroads against an undruggable target.

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Earth is splitting open beneath the Pacific Northwest, scientists say. Sounds dramatic. Hopefully it won't be. But we are overdue for the "big one".

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Well this is crap. Dangerous tapeworm never before seen in PNW live in Seattle-area coyotes. Unlike regular tapeworms, the feared one is the sheep tapeworm, Echinococcus multilocularis. This is the one you don't want to get, because it can get big and be very hard to eradicate. Plus, if the cyst is punctured, such as when an unsuspecting doctor wants to biopsy something found on the CT scan, the release of cyst contents may kill you in anaphylactic shock, and if it doesn't, all the contents of the cyst will seed your abdomen with baby aliens that will grow and form cysts of their own. 

And speaking of horrible diseases, I saw this article titled "Man dies covered in necrotic lesions after amoebas eat him alive". Of course I had to click on it. Yeah, it's bad, although not the worst disease I've seen. (The worst is probably myiasis. If you have a weak stomach, don't do an image search for this and turn off Safe Search.) Poor guy.

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Sam Altman falls out of love with universal basic income. Well, good, since he's influential. Now he needs to convince his fellow tech mavens to abandon that concept. It's not the answer.

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Leaders in New York and New Jersey urge residents to work from home this summer because of FIFA. Is this crazy? Hurt the GDP because of a stupid game that foreigners care about? Should we have hosted FIFA? Maybe not.

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Hister is a local, private DIY search engine. It doesn't crawl the Web. You tell it what websites to index, and it will index those. And the index sits on your computer, so you better have the space for it. I don't think this is going to be useful. There are better solutions to this problem. Nice effort, though. 

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Shed a tear for All the Sad Young Chinese Professionals. China has forbidden distribution of the app "Are you dead?"  Because it was too embarrassing for the Chinese government that people were using it to ease the loneliness problem.

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Germany coerced Lexus to kill the remote start functionality because it was wasting energy and spewing carbon. C'mon.

And when we let the government control how cars are made, we'll get this:
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Oops. Claude Code's Entire Source Code Got Leaked via a Sourcemap in npm. This is not the first time Anthropic has experienced these code leaks. What's going on? They need to tighten security protocols.

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Oregon physician turned wellness influencer Casey Means out as surgeon general nominee.  First Chavez-DeRemer, now this. Oregon just can win, can it?

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Holy crap!
Oregon hadn't cleaned out its voter rolls in about 30 years in defiance of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). State officials settled a lawsuit with Judicial Watch, agreeing to clear out ineligible voters from rolls, starting with 160,000 voters who are dead, moved, or otherwise not voting in multiple elections. So it is that we find out Oregon has agreed to take off 800,000 ineligible names from its voter rolls, which represent 25% of all Oregon registered voters. 
Some say that there hasn't been any evidence of fraud with the mail-in voter system, but then, how would you know? That's the beauty of having these dead voters. They are on the rolls, and votes can be tallied in their names, and who would know? It was perfect. But thanks to Tom Fitton, that's gone. Maybe now a Republican can win an election.

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Dangerous mix of meth and fentanyl on the rise in Downtown Portland, experts warn.  Yeah, who's ready to move back into the city now, right? Portland is still not open for business. Not by a longshot. 

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