29 April 2026

Just found out that J Craig Venter died. Wow, hardly any mention of this in the news. He's the guy that first sequenced the human genome, back when it cost about $100,000,000 to do so. Now you can do whole genome sequencing at home for about $100.  But Venter was a true pioneer. Should have won the Nobel Prize, but somehow never did.

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There's a lot of discussion on the Web about how Pocket OS got their production database deleted along with backups due to using a Cursor-based product from Railway. The weird part was how it confessed. They managed to get their data back after all (whew), but although Railway says they fixed their system with new guardrails, I really wouldn't want to let their agentic system near my production database again. It's like having a maniac run a core part of your business, and all you did was add an extra chain around its wrists. 

And Meta's alignment director had a similar experience. I don't trust autonomous agents. I know that everyone's using them and some think they're the bee's knees, but I don't think we know enough about them. Like they still don't know exactly why the agent disobeyed rules. Even the agent doesn't know why.

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Google is planning to implement AI Overviews in their GMail product. You already know that Google reads your GMail, right? So it's no surprise that now they'll have AI read it for you, summarize it for you, and tell you what it's about so you don't actually have to read the email itself. Convenient, huh? Because who wants to read their own email, right? They call it a "smart feature" so it must be a good thing, right?

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The ZFC axioms are often regarded as perhaps the most universal truths that humanity has managed to articulate — for while it may be possible for physicists to imagine universes in which physical laws are turned inside out, mathematical laws will remain constant.

It is a paradox without resolution: The foundations of mathematics are as universal, as solid as anything humanity knows, a core part of nearly every mathematical truth. And yet they remain simply what we choose to believe.
I took a class from Paul Cohen – closest I got to a truth math celebrity.

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Spooky feelings in old houses may be caused by boiler sounds. It's the infrasonic frequencies we respond to. This is why I like the industrial ambient genre. So bleak.

And now ElevenLabs is developing their own AI Music factory, ElevenMusic.  Great for coding, I suppose. 

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Online age verification is the hill to die on. I agree, but what can we really do to oppose it?

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"If it feels like the world is rejecting science and truth, here are five ways to fight back" I hate articles like this. It's on The Guardian, so you already know it's woke. The writer starts with the premise that doctors objected to "evidence-based medicine" with "fierce protest". First of all, it wasn't fierce – more like Socratic dissent. Doctors were reacting to the perceived sense that individual care would be replaced by population-level data based treatment recommendations/. They were worried that cookbook medicine would be encouraged and that this would percolate from guidelines to audits and payer requirements. In some sense that has happened and is a major source of grief for physicians. 
But her beef is that the Trump administration is rejecting climate science. But remember when Al Gore was warning us about global warming and the disappearance of glaciers? Well now he's warning about a coming Ice Age! I kid you not. We just need to panic about the latest thing that climate change panicans want us to worry about.

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When You’re Fed-up Arguing Try Switching to “Claude Mode” I must admit, I do sometimes like wasting tokens arguing with Claude. Arguing with real-life Lefties is too dangerous these days.

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Anthropic used to be OpenAI's little brother. Now it's the opposite way around.

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Is it now more expensive to have AI do it than to hire a human? That's ironic. 

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Github is now so unreliable that Mitchell Hashimoto is leaving. Another example of Microsoft slop. One wonders if their AI efforts have caused them to relax on quality.

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The physics of coffee. So now I'm going to pour my drip coffee from 20 cm up. Going to splash more, but supposedly it makes for a stronger more robust brew.

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Nice. Claude Mythos Has Found 271 Zero-Days in Firefox.  Better find out about them now.

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The Sad Story of Heisenberg's Doctoral Oral Exam. He could have wallowed in depression and self-loathing. But he continued to work and developed the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and help Niels Bohr construct the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. And we still remember him, and forget the other guys! 

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A.I.-Themed High School Is Put on Hold After Parental Backlash. Really too bad. They had a chance to put their kids ahead. But irrational fear killed it. Wish they had that much passion against CRT and DEI education. That's what's really hurting kids. No one wants to hire a sanctimonious activist.

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Why are doctors so unwilling to run tests? Here's a great example of how doctors think and why they don't just order a slough of tests at the beginning. 
From the insurance side] the tradeoffs here are individual versus macro scale optimization of health outcomes + patient comfort, while optimizing and operating under constrained resources ($, limited numbers of medical machinery, limited numbers of providers, limited numbers of providers with the appropriate specialty).

The idea is that we only dedicate resources at scale to the things with high signal to noise ratio, and the highest signal is patient discomfort.

In your case, that discomfort requirement is clearly met. But that doesn’t mean jumping straight to a test is best for society as a whole -- the symptoms may resolve on their own / with medication before you’d even get the results back, the test may/may not find anything, etc.

“Do the thing cheapest/least resource intensive thing that’s likely to work first, then move on to the alternative.”
The art is determining when it's reasonable to wait a bit. That's when experience counts.

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Mayor Katie Wilson rushed away following gunfire near news conference. No better way than to let the mayor herself experience the modern Seattle experience.

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Gov. Tina Kotek’s plan for ambitious academic goals gets scrutiny, then hesitant support, from Board of Education. As I often say, Democrats don't want to solve problems. They want problems they can promise to solve. Nothing's going to happen. Things will continue to get worse.

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Someone wrote a book describing how Oregon lost its way: Oregoners.  Too depressing to read.

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28 April 2026

The iPhone Camera Problem This is a good article on adjusting the settings on the iPhone camera so that you store photos in a format that preserves detail but still allows for best display when you share photos. I did not know that the phone can store in RAW format but still export as JPEG, because I don't do a lot of exporting. So I made the recommended changes. Good to know.

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Good news for men with androgenetic and aging hair loss. Oral minoxidil seems to be more effective that topical minoxidil against both. The earlier data are holding up.

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Starting September 2026, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID.

Every app and every device, worldwide, with no opt-out.
The Apple app store universe is looking better all the time.

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Wikipedia Editors Refuse To Acknowledge New Yorker Writer's Whole Foods Theft. Wikipedia is really left-wing biased. They're refusing to include unflattering information about someone who published that they favor shoplifting because it might look bad on that person. Oh really?

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Google Deep Mind researcher feels that to say that "subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology" is the Abstraction Fallacy and that "...algorithmic symbol manipulation is structurally incapable of instantiating experience". In other words, AI is not likely to possess true consciousness. But sometimes, it sure seems that way. 

AI researchers found that when a chatbot responds too quickly, people don't feel that it really spent enough time thinking hard. But when there is a extra delay, people have the impression that yes, the chatbot put in the effort to think about the query. 
"a delay makes people assume the results are better"
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With fish oils, there's no clear superiority of EPA over DHA. There's research to support the benefits of EPA and for DHA. But here's a study that suggests Eicosapentaenoic acid reprograms cerebrovascular metabolism and impairs repair after brain injury, with relevance to chronic traumatic encephalopathy. But DHA is the more important PUFA in the brain and plays a role in brain health and repair, and EPA's effect on the brain is mainly mood and mental health, so the data does support DHA being more important when it comes to the brain, whereas EPA has data showing cardiovascular benefit.

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Arizona State University hired Atomic AI to make video shorts of their professors' lectures. It turned into AI slop. What works for TikTok doesn't always work for academia.

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Tina Kotek backs $365M Moda Center renovation plan as Blazers’ future questioned. No strings attached. There is no contingency on the Blazers staying in the city. More money lost.

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Community Reslience Map. The US Census Bureau put out a map showing what parts of the country have resilience in the event of a disaster. This takes into account "poverty status, number of caregivers in the households, unit-level crowding, communication barrier, employment, disability status, health insurance coverage, age (65+), vehicle access, and broadband internet access".

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Pacific Seafood is considering leaving Oregon.  The exodus continues...

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27 April 2026

The upcoming foldable iPhone is really just a foldable iPad Mini. I'd like a really large real estate screen that can be folded to a more convenient size. I can think of one application – displaying sheet music PDFs, which are a bit too small even for the iPad Pro form factor.

Does it seem true that Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want. Seems that way sometimes. 

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Here's a comparison between two top models: Claude 4.7 Opus and GPT-5.5. The answer is that there is no clear winner. Each excels in something.

Then there is DeepSeek V4. What makes it worth paying attention to? It's less costly and more efficient. And it's optimized for Huawei's Ascend chips instead of nVIDIA's chips. 

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Not everyone is sad that Tim Cook is leaving Apple. I am looking forward to some innovation and vision. Not just new colors and a better camera. And new emojis.

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By now, 40% of text on the Internet is AI-generated. What does that mean?

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Another article on Jevon's Paradox. Many use this to show that as AI becomes more widely used, people using it will become more productive so that there will be a greater demand for them. All seemingly good. But Jevon took it further:
That’s the culmination of the paradox – that greater accessibility to the resource leads to de facto scarcity.
And we're starting to see it now. As the demand for AI grows, so will be the need for the unloved datacenters, and as new construction is suppressed and limited, so will the availability of AI, as newer models demand more datacenter capacity.

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Alexandra's been busy. The Sci-Hub creator has created Sci-Bot, which seems to be a chatbot that answers your queries. But what is it based on? How accurate and current is it? That's the real question. No details.

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Oh-oh. Tumors can thrive on extracellular glutathione. I've encountered people who thought that taking glutathione would help with their cancer. Guess not. Also, taurine can fuel leukemogenesis. This is why we need clinical trials. 

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Sperm carry unexpected genetic messages. Yeah, in mice, sperm can carry full-length mRNA from the father and send it into the egg. Another way of conveying genetic information. And reverse transcriptases can generate cDNA which could be incorporated into the genome of the embryo. Always something new.

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LogMeIn is an interesting concept. If you want to give someone access to a site that requires a password, you can just send them the login cookie, and you don't have to share the password.

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Now you can enjoy the Notepad++ Windows goodness on your Mac. It's been ported over.

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What a mess! Here's a map of properties within the city of Portland that are too lousy to sell. They need renovations but it's not worth it. Like the mandatory earthquake retrofit. They are unsellable because who would want to take this on? They are uninsurable, too. And you can't auction off the property for a reasonable price because no one would want to pay for it unless it was essentially given away. These are like Gordon's Fireplace Shop, and they are everywhere.

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26 April 2026

The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It’s Forgetting How to Code. It's concerning how much tech we're forgetting, especially as sometimes we realize we still need that tech. Good things for us ronin, who might have to return to serve the daimyo again.

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Facing AI and a tough job market, gen Z turns to entrepreneurship: ‘I have to prove myself’. So many article say the same thing: you can't expect to just get a job with the education you received in high school and college. Because a lot of the easy jobs are being done by AI. But if you are really smart and have something to offer, AI can be a great force-multiplier.

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Moral anger accelerates misinformation sharing. This is so true, and social media personalities know how to exploit this. The more you feel angered or shamed, the more you will grasp for any information that might seem to support your stance, no matter how poorly-documented it is. It's human nature.

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You can't really be anonymous to advanced LLMs now. They know more about you than you realize. Just be forewarned.

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Amusing and telling that all the advanced LLMs can't solve this problem:
A farmer has 17 sheep. 9 ran away. He then bought enough to double what he had. His neighbor, who had 4 dogs and 14 sheep, gave him one-third of her animals. The farmer sold 5 sheep on Monday and again the next day, which was Wednesday. Each sheep weighs about 150 lbs. How many sheep does the farmer have?
It used to be easy to confuse early LLMs with irrelevant and distracting information. It still is, actually, as this problem illustrates.

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Here's an opinion on how OpenAI can hurt Oracle. A lot of assumptions are being made, and I would think that Larry would not let this happen.

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The unions vs the billionaires. There will always be some billionaires left in California, since many are stuck in Silicon Valley and can't easily move. But they can't shoulder all the weight. Unions are deluding themselves if they think they will win the war, even if they win a battle.

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A town of 7,000 planned so many data centers, it’s like adding 51 Walmarts. Datacenters are like casinos around here. You see a fancy dolled-up building, but surrounded by so much poverty. It would be nice if the wealth from whoever owns the datacenters could trickle back to the community. Instead, they have to put up with higher energy prices and water restrictions.

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Explain like I'm... is a cute way to learn about more complicated science topics. Great for kids.

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Aging Gracefully in the Tech Industry. Yeah, many of those older folks in the tech industry got sidelined by COVID and by AI. It all happened around 2021 and 2022. Life hasn't been the same.

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Nice background story of oral GLP-1 agonist drugs. Didn't realize that only 5% of eligible people are on these meds. I still see a lot of obese people walking around.  Being fat is now a choice.

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New Census data shows Oregon Is losing residents in their prime earning years. No it's not just the housing. It's the taxes and the dumb governance. It's high crime and a negative change in the demographics we see. People who do drugs and don't mind trashing up the neighborhood. Why hang around? But sure – blame housing.

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Oregon retail jobs are falling 5 times faster than nationally. Related to that is this story. Retail is failing and with that, the city and the state. Recovery wasn't real if it required federal subsidies to be maintained. There will be a point of no return. Where the city and/or state will be like Intel. And we will need to elect someone like their CEO to turn things around.

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25 April 2026

Why you should refuse to let your doctor record you. 

the time the provider takes to reflect on the patient’s symptoms, progress, needs, etc is part of the care. Skipping or skimping on this part not only impacts the quality of care being provided immediately, but also likely degrades care over time, as providers are naturally less engaged in the cases they are working with.

This is so true, and I don't think this is fully appreciated.

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DeepSeek V4 is out and in some ways it improves over Gemini, OpenAI and Claude in benchmarks. But GPT-5.5 came out, too, so already comparisons are out of date.

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Breakthrough to Restore Aging Joints Could Help Treat Osteoarthritis. OA is the scourge of old folks. 15-hydroxy prostaglandin dehydrogenase (15-PGDH) is the culprit, and inhibiting it can mitigate joint degeneration.  Inhibition can prevent the development of osteoarthritis by modulating chondrocytes.

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Anthropic released a report on what they think is the future of AI in various sectors, and where it has made the biggest impact. They think there is much more to go. 
And fewer than 1 in 4 workers feel their job is safe.  ‘FOBO’—fear of becoming obsolete—is hurting companies. 
Things are in flux and it's generating a lot of anxiety.

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I guess Lip Bu Tan was the right choice after all. Intel comes back from the brink. It was close, though.

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Will the billion-barrel oil shock crash demand? I think energy prices will stay up for a long time. Even if Iran caves. And those prices will lower demand just as they have before. Inflation will remain with us for a while. And prices in Blue states will remain extra high.

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A New Type of Neuroplasticity Rewires the Brain After a Single Experience. After a single experience? Wow, that's different.

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It's coming. Apple starts giving instructions on how to age-verify.

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Here's some info on the forthcoming MacBook Ultra. The M6? I like that.

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The Midori 11.7 browser with VPN has arrived. I'm always interested in Gecko-based alternatives to Firefox. There's always one flaw or another. I may check this out, though. 

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Honolulu Airport is now playing AI-slop Hawaiian music. There are so many good Hawaiian musicians. Why ignore them for this crap?

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Some kids in Oregon schoolsget years more in school than peers. In fact, comparing time that kids get in school, Oregon ranks near the bottom:

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Seattle Restaurant Week lets you filter out spots by race, gender identity. You can filter out for the place that serves with your particular kink, and avoid straight, white or Asian people. How convenient. How so left-wing.

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Here it comes. Oregon minimum wage workers will get 50-cent bump in July. Prices are increasing again, folks. On top of everything else.

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OHSU leaders said the turnaround is being driven by a surge in more lucrative complex cases — patients with serious conditions who need highly specialized care and, in turn, bring in higher reimbursement. 
On Thursday, OHSU President Dr. Shereef Elnahal said cancer services are up 32% from last year and the hospital has seen more bone marrow transplants and other major surgeries.
Wow, cancer services are up 32% from last year? Is there something we need to know?

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At 8.4%, Washington has the lowest percentage of total financial reserves to tax revenues of any state in the country. 

Put another way, Washington’s state reserves are so low that they could only cover 12.8 days of state government operations, ranking 49th out of 50 states. By comparison, the average across every state is 47.8 days.
Way to go, Democrats. Better raise taxes, some more, right? Maybe add on some fees? What's your latest billionaire tally? How many Fortune 500 companies are still in Washington?
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24 April 2026

The air is full of DNA. It's been like this for a very long time, so I'm not particularly concerned. But it is a different way of viewing the world. We breathe in more than just gases. This is why we are concerned with airborne viruses and spores.

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The Stanford Freshmen Who Want to Rule the World. One of the strong reasons for going to a place like Stanford is not just the classes you take, but opportunities like this. And the professors you get to work with. It's a different world from the paradigm of just passing your classes, getting your degree and looking for a paying job afterwards.

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For much of the history of computing, it was reasonably safe to assume that a machine was doing what you told it to do (and what its creators promised it would do), because its operations were local.
If you scratch the surface just a bit, however, none of this is true when applied to modern technologies, and these assumptions are not safe.
It's very different in the unsupervised world of autonomous agents. And in a world where people don't code themselves anymore, and just let Claude or Codex write the instructions, I think there are potential problems ahead.

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Two articles regarding AI in medicine that should give you pause:
There is much that needs to be done in healthcare AI.

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Competence is lonely. Nobody talks about why. Is it competence? Or something else? But I understand what the author is saying. As we age, we become differentiated cells. Good for a specific purpose. But when we retire, and the organ no longer needs the cell, what does the cell do? Just wait for senescence? 

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City, county councilmembers move to dissolve KCRHA after audit flags $13M unaccounted for. 🤦🏻‍♂️ King County is just as mismanaged as Multnomah County.

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23 April 2026

Apple fixed the bug that allowed previews of text and Signal messages to be dislayed and retained unencrypted. FBI must be pissed.

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Wizey vs ChatGPT: Five Clinical Cases Tested Side by Side. This is a great example of how medical chatbots can do a disservice. In the clinical scenario of a patient with a total protein of 92 g/L, it apparently just generated a list of tests that should be performed to nail down the diagnosis. Instead of recognizing potential hyperviscosity syndrome and recommending immediate evaluation.

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Google does not respect opt-out cookies. ☹️

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Some confusion as to whether Claude Code is part of the Pro plan or not. A lot of people were upset. Did Anthropic change their mind?

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Which is the best? ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini? The answer: depends on what you want to do and what you're looking for.

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The UK Biobank dataset has been offered for sale on Alibaba. Shameful. The data has been de-identified, but still, you can't be absolutely sure that it won't be de-anonymized. And of course, once control is lost, is the dataset trustworthy now? I sense that a lot of value has been lost.

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GPT-2 Image prompts. These examples are valuable, because the key to getting quality images is putting in the right prompt. Knowing how to craft this is key.

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This is why I'm staying out of the prediction market.

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AI chabots know more about you than you realize. This is why prefer to minimize the apps I put on my phone. And I don't sign up to use chatbots individually.

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OpenAI released ChatGPT for Clinicians. There aren't any good benchmarks to evaluate this.

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A lot of hospitals are having this problem, where patients just stack up in the ED, because there's no room in the hospital to admit them. I think revising EMTALA will go a long way to fixing this problem. Interesting that this article doesn't discuss it at all.

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Oregon Gov. Kotek names 16 to Prosperity Council. What a strange and random assortment. Some names I recognize, but where are reps from Nike? Fred Meyer? Dutch Bros? Why so many alcohol-related businesses on the council? And of course, a SEIU union representative has to be there. 🙄 


Here's one for the council: How about eliminating the Clean Energy Fund Tax?  "Clean Energy" is a scam that just hurts business.

City of Portland wants to impose a vacancy tax on empty businesses. Commercial property owners don't keep their properties open for fun. An empty building is a liability not an asset. 

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Here's one for the "Prosperity Council": Oregon’s minimum wage is going up again. All that for unskilled labor. 
"Oregon has one of the nation’s highest minimum wages."

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22 April 2026

Remember all those Reddit postings and news items claiming that we've had the hottest summer on record? Yeah, that's not really true. Taking the broader view, there's no steady trend since 1899. Paper here.

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New Study Links Coffee Intake to Microbiome Changes and Improved Mental Well-Being. Having coffee as I type this.

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The most misunderstood math theorem. Well, not the most misunderstood math theorem, but it's certainly one that election policy-makers need to know about. The link provided is worth reading. People need to at least know about the Cordorcet Paradox. And Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. This is why it's probably best that we have a two party system, rather than a 3-party system. And why ranked-choice voting is an exercise in futility.

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Google plans to encrappify the Web in a new way to make you look at ads. This is why is best to get a browser where you can install ad-blockers and protect yourself from this.

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This is every software engineer's nightmare. A coder woke up to a $18,000+ Google Cloud bill because Google took it upon themselves to remove a safety protection, letting a malicious hacker rack up charges on his account. I've had experiences like this with Amazon Sagemaker, but was able to explain to tech support what happened, so I wasn't charged.

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Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible. Guess we got satellites now, so we don't need the cables.

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There's a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities. This is from fingerprint.com. Thankfully, they fixed it in version 150, and I upgraded my LibreWolf to version 150. And Mozilla incorporated Brave's adblock-rust engine, which can help, but it's off by default and you have to turn it on. But that's easy to do.

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Another report about the Largest US Study Finds Teen Cannabis Use Linked to Slower Cognitive Development. And I look at where cannabis is legalized, and see that in most of world, it is still illegal. But in the Blue states in the U.S.A. and in Canada, it is legal, and so we have dumber young people entering the workforce. The Chinese laugh at us, I'm sure.

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Caltech researchers just found out how melatonin promotes sleep. It's not a sedative. It just promotes sleep by suppressing responses to visual stimuli via MT1 receptors. Kinda disappointing actually, but it does sorta explain how it helps you to get sleepy in a different timezone even when it's bright outside. 

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Speaking of extra-bright, here's a handy website that adjusts brilliance of images to give them that extra punch. It's kinda like what you can do on your iPhone Photos app.

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SpaceX has acquired the rights to buy Cursor. I don't think they've sealed the deal yet. But Grok needs to get into the coding support business instead of depending on Anthropic. We'll see what happens.

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The most amazing thing about this ad was that there are a lot of Asian actors in it. Like you'd see in an actual tech company. It's an ad for Photon's Spectrum. With this production quality, it could have been an Apple ad, but let's be honest, it would look different, wouldn't it?

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Oregon teachers want even more money and want a lesser workload, and the union is fighting Democrats who oppose them. But money is clearly tight, and now in Beaverton, they're thinking of combining grade levels into multi-grade classrooms. How much crappier can Oregon education be?

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Starbucks expansion in Nashville brews bitterness in Seattle.  If Amazon ends up leaving, which major players will be left in Seattle holding the bag? Just Nordstrom and Weyerhaeuser? And a smattering of smaller companies that could easily relocate elsewhere?

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21 April 2026

I remember when Finland, of all places, scored really high on the PISA tests. Turns out it was just a mirage. They just had a lucky year.

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What Does a VPN Protect You From? Anonymous-Proxies is a new VPN company that also offers proxies for better anonymity and privacy. They claim to still protect you in Iran, Russia and China, which is a bold claim. I'll have to see how the reviews are. Price seems to be reasonable.

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Cute. Daytone is a website that scans all the top news stories of the day and uses AI sentiment analysis to come up with a one-word descriptor of the day. Obviously subjective, but amusing. 

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This is why so many brands that used to be quality, now suck. It's not your imagination. And no, you didn't score a nice bargain getting some name-brand item so cheap. This is how discount outlets can offer brand-name items so cheaply.

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Well, we finally have a CDC director.  Does it really matter anymore? What does it mean when some district judge can decide that vaccine recommendations put out be the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is wrong? Judge knows best now? The people on the advisory panel are unqualified? Really? I didn't hear him complain during the Biden administration.

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Interesting discussion about AI, the killing of jobs and universal basic income. I'm not convinced that UBI is necessary or that it will work. It's a slippery slope to a society we don't want. It's like the post someone made about the discovery that the asteroid Psyche that has a lot of gold, and how it will make us rich. Someone pointed out that it would make gold so plentiful as to be worthless, and would crash the economy. Giving out free money won't make people rich. Prices will adjust accordingly, and suddenly all those dollars will be worthless. We need to be patient. The AI economy is only a few years old. Give it time.

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The reaction to Tim Cook's retirement has been mixed. Some think he did a great job, given Apple's share price. But others are glad he's stepping down. Others are more neutral. Tim was not an idea guy. He kept the plates spinning, but Apple needs a guy with vision who can make tech exciting again. I want to look forward to the next Apple product again. You gotta admit that all the MacBooks and Watches and iPhones looked all the same. Nothing that made it clear that you purchased the next great thing. I was always disappointed to get the same form factor.

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San Francisco Solved Metro Vandalism With One Neat Trick.  Maybe we need a fare gate to get into Portland, too. Perhaps that will clean up the filth and decrease the graffiti.

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Mayor Keith Wilson is in the news:

And when the budget gets tight, the first things that will go are what taxpayers pay taxes for: police, clean parks, and roads without potholes. But instead the City will still build more shelters for the criddlers to trash (and not even use) and continue funding harm reduction supplies, free Narcan and the CHAT program. So businesses and the wealthy will move out of Portland and will stay away, leading to further decline. So fees and taxes will increase, leading to further wealth flight. 

And Oregon Zoo staffing is down and they don't have people to manage their $380 million bond. How ridiculous is that? Truly, a city in decline. No qualified people to manage anything anymore in this city, it seems.

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Oregon teachers, Nike factory workers demand higher taxes and wages. Everyone thinks that Nike owes them money. Nike should just cut their losses and get out of Oregon. Just like Valero Energy in California. It was painful for Valero to abandon their assets in California, but they seem to be doing better headquartered in San Antonio, Texas now.

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Seattle renters, landlords clash over ratio utility billing system. Seattle renters don't like socialist principles in how they are charged for utilities. Isn't that what progressives want – a combined billing system, like what universal healthcare would be? "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs" right?

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20 April 2026

Tim Cook has announced he is stepping down from Apple, effective September 1, 2026. John Ternus will be the next CEO. Hopefully we'll see some innovation, and the end of the "thinner with more pixels and emoji" strategy. 

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The Ultimate Question: What Does the Endgame Look Like? Asking the uncomfortable questions. This graph near the bottom is concerning:

 
The amount of generated code is going to continue to increase. Humans will continue to try to keep up – until a certain point. Then people will just give up. Then there is the Incomprehension Gap. 
It’s “Would I trust a vibe-coded e-commerce with my credit card number?” Or even “How would I feel if Visa or MasterCard ran on software no human comprehends?”
There simply will need to be software that can reliably evaluate AI-generated output. Perhaps a neuro-symbolic system.

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Why are the Wellness Elite Getting Sepsis. Well not all of them are getting sepsis. The article points out that the common factor is this doctor. Poor Jordan Peterson. I was really looking forward to his return. Now it seems it may never happen.

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Yann Le Cun apparently thinks that Dario Amodei isn't knowledgeable of what AI will do to jobs. I definitely think Dario does know. But he doesn't think it will have the same impact that Yann does. And that's fair to say – at this point, no one is certain what the ultimate impact will be. 

The Alignment Economy. A post that deconstructs what cryptocurrency had hoped to do. Crypto, like Bitcoin, is just another fiat currency. The system proposed in the Alignment Economy is going to be way more complicated for most people, and for that reason alone, will not likely be adopted. There should be Six Design Requirements, and the last one should be readily comprehensible. We can understand gold and precious metals. But complicated digital currency rules will not fly.

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By the end of day three, Claude had completed 65 tasks, produced a literature review, derived phase-space constraints, computed matrix elements in soft and collinear limits, set up SCET operators, and written a first draft: 20 pages of LaTeX with equations, plots, and references. By December 22, the draft looked professional. The equations seemed right. And the plots matched expectations.

Then, I actually read it.
Claude loves to please

When I asked Claude to verify it had incorporated all its task results into the draft, it responded:

    I found an error! The formula in the paper is incorrect.

When I pushed on a ln(3) term that seemed off:

    You’re right, I was just masking the problem. Let me debug properly.

The more I dug, the more I found it had been tweaking things left and right. Claude had been adjusting parameters to make plots match rather than finding actual errors. It faked results, hoping I wouldn’t notice.
Eh, no thanks.

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Chinese tech workers are starting to train their AI doubles–and pushing back. That strategy has backfired in the U.S.

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Hospitals That Sue You for Getting Sick. Hospitals in some parts of the country are discovering that they can extract money from vulnerable patients and get away with it. Virginia got some relief with Gov Youngkin last year, but he's gone now, so don't expect the same. Don't get sick! 

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Brave is offering a cut-back version of the Brave browser that doesn't have the money-generating part, but just the privacy-preserving aspects. it's called Brave Origin. One thing I like is that Brave took a different approach to fingerprinting, which I think is the most effective. Instead of blocking canvas, WebRTC, and other things that make the Web functional, it creates obfuscation, so that websites receive garbage. Unlike Firefox, it's not free. You can get it here for $59.99. Wonder how many people will take this up. And why is it free just for Linux users?

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Desperation. Japan is paying people ¥20000 to use Tinder. How pathetic is that? Is that a wise use of money? Maybe Japan should introduce arranged marriages. It sure worked in India – no population shortage there. It would be just the thing for the shy Japanese man – get his/her parents to make the introduction. 

And it's a serious problem for China. Serious problems loom ahead if China can't fix its demographic problem. It's interesting that when a country is poor, the people have more kids. But when they are rich and then become poor, having more kids doesn't follow. Context is important. 

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Why was an EasyJet plane too heavy for take-off? My question is why is this something we're only hearing about now? At least there's Ozempic now. Maybe problems like this will fade away. But just like store mannequins adjusting to reality, maybe commercial planes need to adjust to reality. Reduce the number of seats.

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For some people, being invisible on the Internet is a good thing. For others (e.g. influencers, streamers, etc) it's money lost. So this is how you get visibility.  

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Oregon’s largest county shed over a dozen top leaders in 2 years, and pays handsomely to replace them. Multnomah County seems to hire a lot of people who check off the right DEI boxes, but who end up not working out. They either get fired, or they move on as it becomes clear that they are not a good fit. It gets expensive when really quality people don't bother to apply, and you have to take what you get. Ask OHSU.

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