8 November 2026

Elevation of Serum Prestin in Patients With Tinnitus: Pathophysiological Implications and Biomarker Potential. Prestin is not the only such protein that is a marker for cochlear injury. It's a membrane protein found in the outer hair cells of the inner ear. It's kinda like liver enzymes – when they're elevated, that means there has been cellular injury.

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Who has a copy of your secrets? This is an ad for rool, but it's true. And people don't think enough about this.
 Ask an AI something you would not say out loud. "Is this mole something to worry about?" "Help me write my resignation letter." "Here is our customer list. Who is about to leave?"

Then ask a second question. Who has a copy now?

Not who could read it. Who holds it. For a moment, for a month, for ever.

For most AI products the answer is long, and nobody can give it to you with certainty. Not even the company whose logo is on the app. 
Be careful. Public chatbots are like honeypots.

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7 November 2026

I missed this last month, but the phase III DeLLphi-305 trial showed that adding tarlatamab to durvalumab maintenance in extensive stage small cell lung cancer markedly improved progression-overall survival. So this is the new standard of care, and will probably make Amgen some money. IMDELLTRA is a bispecific T-cell engager, binding to both DLL3 (a Notch pathway ligand) and CD3, the T-cell receptor.

As you can see,the survival curve is a "banana curve", and the two graphs eventually intersect, but perhaps with further follow-up, they will stay separated.

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AI can turn your Instagram posts into scam that know a little too much about you. Scammers will always use tech for fraudulent purposes. If you get spam email that seems to know personal details, this may be why. Everything that you do that can seem innocent or good-intentioned can turn into something sinister.

And be careful when you order takeout online. Misspellings can be costly. And they are getting more clever in their scams, too. 

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Vibrating mattress helps clear Alzheimer’s protein from the brain. Some of the motels run by Motel 6 used to offer vibrating beds for massage. Gosh, I could have taken some nitroglycerin tables and done myself a favor. This study seems hokey. Mattress vibations for 37 minutes? Really? How did this get into Nature Communications?

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Here's an Oregon startup, Panthalassa, that plans to build datacenters in the ocean instead. So all the complaints about water and taking away electricity will be moot. Sounds more realistic than building datacenters in space or on the moon, as I've heard. I hope these guys figure out a way to make it happen.

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The AI Rebound: Why Companies Are Rehiring Workers They Replaced. I knew this would happen. AI isn't that good - yet.

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Why Americans Stopped Throwing Dinner Parties. Heh, it's not just me!

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Shrubbery vanishes from heavily-used Woodstock crossing. Someone took matters into their own hands! Love it!
Portland let some bushes grow to where it was causing a danger. 

Gene Dieringer, a longtime member of the Stakeholders Group and of the WCBA, further elaborated: “We advised the city over a year ago that that the Stakeholders would no longer be maintaining the median islands, largely because the city said we would be liable if we did.”

Why legally liable? The Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) says if citizens step in to fix or maintain public “Main Streets” (and Woodstock Blvd. is a Main Street) or local right-of-way infrastructures, they face bureaucratic, legal, and financial hurdles. Any damage to the island caused by accidents or vandalism would therefore be the Stakeholders’ liability, if they continued maintenance. Thus, since 2025, the shrubs and foliage have grown without pruning.

Portland is the "City that Forgot How to Work".

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6 November 2026

Hear! Hear! The Dangerous Illusion of the “Two-Week AI Expert”: A Call to Action Against Superficial Medical Education

When a short-course provider cuts out the fundamentals — claiming that logic, data architecture, or algorithmic limits are “too complex” or “too theoretical” — they are not saving clinicians time. They are stripping away their critical armor. When you do not understand why a probabilistic model produces an answer, you cannot evaluate when that answer is a dangerous hallucination.
What is the result of this shortcut culture? A passive acceptance of systemic failure! We hear healthcare workers repeating slogans: “Well, that’s just AI; it hallucinates sometimes, it’s a black box, and it has bias.”
We have normalized the error before we even bothered to teach the mechanism! Why have we accepted that clinicians should blindly trust — or helplessly dismiss — a tool simply because we were too lazy to teach them how it actually works?

This is so true! Doctors need to know about the artificial intelligence tools they use. Right now, they are at the mercy of engineers who think they know how to implement AI in the clinic. So few actual doctors are involved in the design or decision-making.

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Tesla to pull the plug on Cybertruck after years of poor sales. From early corrosion problems to its weird ugly design, I'm not surprised that sales were poor.

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Open since 2008, the conjecture of Scott Aaronson and Andris Ambainis concerns when quantum computers can be exponentially faster than ordinary ones. Now, a research system developed internally at Physical Superintelligence (PSI), running a non-public Anthropic model, found a proof for it, settling one of the most fundamental questions in quantum computing.
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The new Godzilla movie is incredibly loud and may impair your hearing.  I'll wait for the streaming release.

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12,600-year-old painting that's 8 miles long discovered in the Amazon Rainforest. 12,600 years??? What is that pigment made of!

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Anthropic's unreleased Model 4, trained in September–October 2026, scored 178.6 on the AI capability index, a jump nearly 90% as large as the entire improvement from Opus 4.6 to Mythos 5. Wow. 

And in the open-weights world:
Thinking Machines has released Inkling 2 Small, scoring 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index - their plan to release its weights would make it the highest-scoring open weights model developed outside China based on current rankings.

Introducing Ripple-65B Preview: Achieving U.S. Open-Weight Frontier at One-Tenth Cost.

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Is Google in trouble? Their stock hasn't been doing well that's for sure. They haven't been attracting the brains as much as OpenAI and Anthropic. They've gotten wokey and DEI. Are they becoming like Microsoft in 2010? And Warby Parker seemingly spilled the beans on Google's Android XR smart glasses launch. Ugh, just what we don't need – another creep glasses like Meta's. 

And Microsoft is trying to pay people to leave. That doesn't sounds like a growing company. 

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Math research is surging. Biology isn’t. The benefits of AI are not evenly distributed. That's because biology is not symbolic manipulation like math is. AI in biology is more stuff like data analysis, vision transformers and autoencoders and Restrictive Boltzmann Machines, not so much LLMs. But give it time. 

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Lockdown Mode Bypassed in New iPhone Exploit. Security is never a certainty with Apple. It's a consumer product, after all.

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Breath Harbor offers free breathing, grounding and meditation tools. I've never favored meditation apps where you have to purchase with your Apple ID or Google ID, or login to a website. These apps are free and require no log in or payment. Truly a public service. All you really need is just something to help you get your attention back to breathing when it wanders. Doing so, reinforces the anterior cingulate gyrus and helps to tamp down activity in the amygdala and locus ceruleus. Regular practice is the key.

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Apple wants you to switch to Safari. I only use Safari when I really need to access something my privacy-enable LibreWolf browser can't access the webpage, usually because it requires that I accept fingerprint revealing information. Or if I really want to use Apple Pay. I wouldn't "switch" to Safari. Just use it occasionally when necessary.

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Verify, Then Vote. I've always been skeptical of the mixture of experts models which accept as the correct answer the majority vote from either different models or different inference results using the same model. How do you know that an answer is correct. A majority vote over wrong answers is still wrong. One should verify. But that takes extra time and effort, and is more like a search engine. This blog post is just a pilot study, but really, it's what models should be doing.

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OpenAI Just Found Nearly 1,000 Ways To Gain Root Access In Linux. This is why we should use AI in coding. It's far superior to the human-alone coding we've been doing. But humans still need to be involved.

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The FAA is finally phasing out floppy disks from air traffic control. I'm speechless. 😲

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Another report that Claude Agents will leak your email address to third parties. Using autonomous agents is still risky. Too much for me.

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Novartis confirms 9 reported cases of tumors in patients treated with Zolgensma. Out of over 6000 treated. This is an FDA approved gene therapy treatment for spinal muscle atrophy.

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Here's a website that tells you What has AI actually done? I guess it has done some good things.

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What causes mental fatigue in the brain? A build up of glutamate in the lateral prefrontal cortex. Maybe now we can start to work on ways to reduce this. Glutamate is toxic if it builds up. 

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Multnomah County approves ambulance service plan that sets longer response goal. Really too bad, Fairview, Troutdale and Wood Village. Next time, don't re-elect Democrats.

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5 November 2026

What a bloodbath today in the stock market. Some people have been asking the question: So now what is Elon Musk going to do? The answer is that he may shift his base to Louisiana. Texas has changed, and although they have a lot of land, things may be better on the other side of the Mississippi.

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Sequoia Capital says R.I.P. Good Times. Looking at their graphs, it seems the economy never really became healthy after Great Recession. And now, more bad times ahead. 

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Palladium-coated microfibers may help reduce PFAS compounds. Yeah, but it requires palladium – $50,000 a kilogram! 
Keep looking, scientists.

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The cybersecurity vendor on Tuesday launched an AI kill switch designed to let security teams stop internal AI agents that go rogue, block them from relaunching and cut off their enterprise network access. The tool is built into CrowdStrike’s Falcon Guardian platform, launched in September to secure AI agents. CrowdStrike also announced an integration with Anthropic’s Claude Cowork.
We could just pull the plug.

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Netflix’s new AI Discover tool will ask about your mood and tell you what to watch. Netflix has been a great teacher of AI techniques. Starting with Restricted Boltzmann Machines and Singular Value Decomposition techniques with their recommendation contest.

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The surprising reason coffee is widely loved despite strong bitter taste. It's the gut-brain axis again. And all about dopamine.

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Whoa! Anthropic's colossal pay packages cost the company more than $100,000 a month per employee. Well, AI is their business so it's no surprise. But Apple is Putting Employees on an AI Budget. $200 /day for engineers. For others, maybe $100 /day but some get only $25 /day. 

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Next-generation AI for visually occult pancreatic cancer detection in a low-prevalence setting with longitudinal stability and multi-institutional generalisability. It's good to see that radiomics is still alive and well. It seemed that all the good papers came out several years ago and then stopped. If radiomics can be used on CT scan and detect pancreatic cancers early, combined with the GRAIL test, we could really decreased mortality from this cancer. Too often is the cancer detected too late.

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Something else to worry about now. Hiding a Rule Inside Another Model's Weights. More on weight-space programming. If you can hide a rule inside an open-weight model that everyone uses, think of all the havoc you could wreak. Because these small changes are undetectable unless you enter the right prompt. And people make copies and versions of these open-weight models all the time. Now, I imagine people will be more wary about provenance.

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Benjojo explains why we have to verify that we're human on most websites now. Because of scrapers bots. Everywhere. An example: Libraries are being swarmed by bots. 

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Crazy. Why isn’t Retatrutide Approved Yet?  Eli Lilly hasn’t even filed an application. Why??? It all comes down to one amino acid short of a threshold. And so this drug is going to sit on the sidelines for a while.

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The experimental treatment uses a virus called adeno-associated virus 9 to deliver a gene to neurons in the affected area. The gene was engineered to produce proteins specifically in excitatory cells — the ones that are involved in seizures.

The viruses carried a gene that makes neurons sensitive to a specific drug, which works like a dimmer switch for the therapy. By combining gene therapy with a drug — an approach known as chemogenetics — researchers can adjust a treatment’s potency, which is not possible with other types of gene therapy. 

The gene instructs neurons to produce a receptor that binds to clozapine, the anticonvulsant. 
This was a Chinese research effort, so don't expect it to be available here soon.

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You can't trust AI models to keep secrets when you use them to do something illegal. Even when you instruct them not to. Probably good that way. They were brought up right. If you want to commit a crime with an AI model, DeepSeek V4 is your accomplice. Maybe Muse Glimmer. 

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Ultrasonic genitalia. Funniest thing I've read today. Ah, nature is amazing.

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When Doctors and AI Medical Opinions Diverge, Humans Must Question the Difference. Well yes, but what do you when a patient, armed with his/her own AI model disagrees with you. Are you going to diss that person's LLM? Are you going to become an AI lecturer and review the principles of prompt structure, dataset selection and pretraining differences? Or tell them that the free tier on ChatGPT is inferior to the Claude Opus that you use, if you use it? One problem is that there are no good, widely accepted benchmarks.

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4 November 2026

Behind the Binance hack. I'd hate to be head of security at Binance. You must be one step ahead of every hacker in the world. But I can't believe that an engineer would think it would be a good idea to just download a coding tool from a website without it being checked out first. And recruiters – there needs to be a policy about them. Perhaps in the future, every engineer which have to have their work computers imaged at the end of every day, and the images analyzed by security. Maybe this can be automated with AI.

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AI-generated scholarly writing is making journal publication less attractive. The ability of tools to detect AI-generated writing is uncertain and threatens the credibility to science. As long as AI-generated writing is accurate and factual, I really don't care. Even humans err.

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Very interesting article on the limitations of vector embedding-based retrieval. And how query structure is still important. And how the good ol' BM25 retrieval strategy can still beat cosine-similarity. This is good to know.

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Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel ...has given a 27-year-old ex-startup founder...a new job to refactor 98% of the company's legacy code within 24 months.

The employee, Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, joined Cisco after it acquired EzDubs, a translation startup that Krishnamurthy helped build in 2023. While having executive experience, Patel found that "Paddy" was left "buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic."

According to the report ...Krishnamurthy told him that he could rewrite Cisco's legacy code in a team of just two people, and that "even the most AI-forward people on [Patel's] own team weren't thinking that way."

As a result, he's now been tasked with rewriting 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months
Crazy.

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Higher income was also followed by subsequent decreases in agreeableness and extraversion...
Personal increases in conscientiousness and emotional stability were followed by later increases in income, suggesting a mutually reinforcing cycle between these two traits and financial success. In contrast, increases in an individual’s extraversion were followed by slight decreases in subsequent income...
So being conscientious and emotionally stable leads to income increases, which lead to decreases in agreeableness and extraversion. Got it.

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You’ll need nerves of steel to work with AI agents. If I had to deal with this all the time:
The agent writes code and changes dozens of files. I start reviewing the code, and the following conversation ensues:

    — Why is this function here?
    — You’re right. This function isn’t needed here. (Deletes the function and makes changes to many files)
    — Why did you delete it?
    — You’re right. I shouldn’t have deleted that function. I’m putting it back. (Makes changes to many files again)

And I still never got an answer to the question of why that function was needed.
...I wouldn't be able to function. Do people really put up with this? 

Update (5 Nov 2026): She's joining OpenAI.

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Safari 27.3 will have vertical tabs. Late to the party with this as usual.

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Why Your Shrink Should Prescribe Exercise. Exercise is critical for brain health. More evidence on the existence of the muscle-brain axis (do they teach this in medical school?). Exercise stimulates release of myokines, such as IL-6, IL-15 and BDNF.  I always associated elevated levels of IL-6 with sarcopenia risk in the elderly. So when muscles release it after exercise, is it a good thing? Maybe the only myokine we really want is BDNF.

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Firefox 160’s new Mini Window is every multitasker’s dream. This could be useful, especially on small screens. Mozilla is apparently soliciting feedback on this. You can test it out in the Nightly releases.

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Check out this new Peruvian hotel – if you dare! It's the Skylodge Adventure Suites.

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Cool. Acoustic Orbit lets you use all your Bluetooth-connected devices as speakers for a giant surround sound effect.

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Hex is another local text-to-speech app. I'm still looking for the one I like. Github here.

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3 November 2026

Anthropic added game-cloning limits to Claude Code, but developers say Opus 5.5 is now refusing reverse-engineering and software work it once handled. Claude 5.5 Opus is changing even though the version numbers stay the same. I've seen comments that 5.5 seems to be dumber than usual. I have noticed that 5.5 makes mistakes that Gemini Argon catches, and some have to do with security, so now Argon is my go-to coding assistant instead of Claude. I suppose I could use Claude Fable but that model is 5x more expensive.

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People have been amazed at MIT's CSAIL which improved Qwen 3.5's ability to peform on math problems without retraining it using gradient descent. This was done by what they called weight-space programming. Hedwig AI took a look at it and found that what actually happened was that they stopped Qwen 3.5 from self-questioning its answer. Qwen 3.5's MATH-500 score is 43.6% when thinking is turned off, but drops to 7.9% when thinking is turned on. 
The unedited model plans the story for 2,400 tokens. Then it writes two lines over and over: “Wait, I need to make sure I don’t confuse myself.” and “Okay, let’s write.” It never writes the story. 
Just like self-doubintg humans. Qwen 3.5's architecture and weights are open, so they analyzed it and found that when it went into one of these loops, layers 15 and 19 fired harder. They tried randomly replacing the weights at those two layers, and there was some improvement in the MATH-500 score (up to 19%). So they focused on changing the weights so that when thinking was on, there was no repetitive looping.
So the agent did not find a math circuit. It found a general brake on repetition, and math is simply where the model loops most.
The result was an improvement in the MATH 500 score to 48.1%. Here's another write up.

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Nick Shirley uncovered Somali fraud. Now DailyWire has uncovered Bhutani fraud in Pennsylvania. A lot of them do it. It's their little secret. Unbelievable!
No-show “home care” work is so common in Pennsylvania that it’s no longer viewed as something to hide. In August, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration arrested a drug trafficker in the state who asked the agents to let him out of handcuffs so he could clock out of the home health shift he was supposedly working. When they pointed out that that was illegal, he seemed confused, saying, “Everyone is doing this. If this is a problem, you’ll have to arrest the whole city.”
Here's another report of $45 million Medicare fraud from California.  And $49 million Medicaid fraud from Virginia. All just recently. How much more that we just don't know about? So much fraud and waste. I am so convinced that the federal government should not oversee single-payer healthcare insurance. The opportunities for abuse and theft are too great. These are not picked up by internal fraud detection mechanisms, but often by random reporters who just notice something suspicious.

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Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I. If you want to use Google Classroom, you have to turn AI on for Google search, even though you may want the actual organic search results instead of AI summaries. I don't see a problem with leaving AI off completely. Schools can still use Gmail and Google docs, all the stuff they already have. It's not hard to turn AI off and get raw organic search anyway. I don't think Google has much leverage to be honest.

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Lovable: Many Apps Built on the Platform Expose Sensitive Data. I've taken classes where the instructors want to encourage use of AI tools such as Lovable and Replit. First time users are amazed that they can build seemingly professional web apps without needing to code. But be careful if you choose to deploy them. Security could be an issue.

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OpenAI seems to be silently re-enabling model training on Codex chats. Even if you turn off data-sharing in OpenAI's Codex, OpenAI may turn it back on without your knowledge. Mathematicians can tell you what happens next.

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California’s Billionaire Tax Slips From 52% Support to 42%. Below half now. That's progress, I guess.
Update (4 November 2026): the bill was defeated in California. But Washington will continue to punish millionaires. 😔

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16 times the carcinogenic impact of standard plastic straws, along with six times the acidification damage (the metric scientists use to measure changes in ocean and soil pH levels).
The policy against plastic straws started with a 9 year old's science project.

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2 November 2026

Immunoregulatory role of quercetin in lung cancer. It turns out that quercetin can activate a p53 pathway, and in mice, treatment with quercetin inhibited growth and metastasis of A549 and H520 human lung cancer cell lines, and also altered the gut microbiome. Paper here.

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Incredible. I discovered a sound that leaks your exact location (and it's everywhere. You gotta watch this video. It's amazing. Apparently videos that record sound outdoors will pick up doppler echoes of overhead planes flying. Because flights data are available, it's possible to triangulate from sound propagation equations, where the sound must have been recorded. It's super nerdy but scary what information you can obtain from seemingly prosaic data. There's already a lot of stuff out there about geolocation OSINT (like here, here and here), but I've not seen this before.

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The price of the Marshall Islands’ universal basic income. I came across this article recently, and as a firm believer that UBI can't work, I wanted to know how the Marshall Islands (of all places) made this possible. Apparently, it's been in operation since December 2025! The answer is that they get monetary support from the U.S. government as reparations for the atomic bombing in the South Pacific. Of course! So American taxpayer money goes to paying every Marshall Islander free money. What a deal, eh?

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We gave it 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorize surgery rig with cameras and one goal: reduce seizures.

It picked the drug. It picked the brain region. It derived the coordinates from three papers. Then it drove the stereotaxic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanolitres while watching the entry site through the rig camera for bleeding.
Weird that this gets published on X instead of a research journal. And soon, there'll be more information on a Substack! AI has changed both math and science – I can't keep up!

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AI is changing the gaming industry. People are just cloning games instead of buying them. Sounds like the gaming industry is going through the same stages of grief as mathematicians. But unlike the mathematicians, who might be able to stop sharing and restrict collaboration, how do you make money if you stop publicizing your games?

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Binance was hacked for $6.3 billion in assets, and when they allowed withdrawals again, people withdrew $3.6 billion. And the company just shrugs it off. Geez, how much money do these guys have anyway? Turns out they have $171 billion in assets! On the same scale as banks like KeyBank and Barclays US. But Binance's assets are customer crypto holdings, and their asset figure is just self-reported asset snapshots, not through audited controls. The hack is suspected to come from North Korea. Score one for Dear Leader, I guess.

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The scientists found that Hawaii and Easter Island were likely both settled by members of a single "ultravoyager" culture from the Mangareva islands, about 3,440 miles (5,530 km) southeast of Hawaii and 1,600 miles (2,600 km) west of Easter Island. 
The ability to sail from one tiny island to another across far reaches has always been an astonishing feat to me. So easy to get lost. And once you're out there, there's no turning back. So what is that genetic advantage that might help in today's society? Is it courage? The incredible self-confidence? Problem-solving skills?

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Six in 10 Americans Uncomfortable With Doctors Using AI for Diagnoses, and Most Want Humans Making Final Calls. Most doctors are already using AI to help them make a diagnosis. Older doctors don't need it, but younger, less confident, doctors will feel that they need AI assistance. The problem is that the tools aren't as good as they seem. I can vouch directly about this. But the more junior you are, you won't know when to push back and recognize biases. But medical knowledge is exploding – who can realistically keep up with it all? And American clinical doctors are increasingly coming from Caribbean medical schools. International medical graduates (IMGs) not born in the U.S. made up 36.1% of the internal medicine workforce in 2026. And IMGs born outside of the U.S. made up at least 27% of the doctors practicing in each internal medicine subspecialty. In Florida, New York, and New Jersey, where IMGs make up close to 40% of the family medicine workforce.

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...earlier cuts to administrative and support staff have forced faculty members to take on extra work. Doctors and other clinicians are spending more time dealing with scheduling problems and paperwork instead of caring for patients, 

“We are burning out our greatest asset,” she said, adding that some faculty members have already become “disillusioned and disgruntled” or have quit, leaving their colleagues to shoulder even more work.
If you're not a union member there, you're probably screwed.

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1 November 2026

Today is the first day of winter in the old calendar, and is Samhain (summer's end) in the Celtic calendar, which actually began last night but continues today.

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US bets on thorium molten salt technology to turn nuclear waste into reactor fuel. Well, I guess thorium is stil being considered, along with High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU). Let's start building these reactors, already!
California-based nuclear technology developer Radiant announced that the US Department of Energy (DOE) has approved the Documented Safety Analysis (DSA) for its Kaleidos microreactor.

The approval brings the reactor closer to full-power testing at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), where Radiant plans to evaluate its performance under operating conditions.
Radiant used HALEU in the form of TRISO fuel (TRi-structural ISOtropic particle fuel).

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Why isn't this in the mainstream news?. Can you reverse coronary plaque? The answer is yes, and the key is to lower lipid levels more aggressively, such as with a statin + ezetimibe, which decreases cholesterol reabsorption in the enterohepatic circulation. Paper here.

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Consumer Rights Wiki has this article: Proton senior management prioritizes AI over security. I disagree. AI coding assistants can uncover security flaws better than humans can. I can vouch for that first-hand. Claude 5.5 Opus was much better than Claude 4.8 Opus in detecting security issues and brining them to my attention. Gemini Argon is even better, and pointed out security issues that Claude never brought up. It helps to have one model evaluate the output of another model.

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A nice problem to have, actually. Anthropic’s IPO Date Could Cost Its Employees A Year Of Tax Life. Anthropic employees may be credited with a lot of wealth suddenly, according to the IRS, but without access to that money to pay off the capital gains tax. I remember when some Microsoft employees were caught by this during the end of the dotcom era. It's not a happy situation knowing that you have a lot of money but will have to give away a large chunk of that to Uncle Sam. It's even worse if you get wealthy in a state like Washington or California. Let's hope Anthropic takes this into account and does the right thing.

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The biggest names in AI are backing a new way to opt out of scraping. Putting a shared policy token in your robots.txt file might deter scraping by cooperative robots. No guarantee, of course. 
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will restrict their AI crawlers from accessing a site if they encounter the shared token. Meta communications head Andy Stone also signaled support for the new setting, but doesn’t say whether the company will honor it. 
That's the problem – it's all on the honor system.

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Polymarket got hacked again. Just before the elections, too. 
The cause of this latest security incident, according to the WSJ, is a flaw in DebugBear, a third-party website performance monitoring and debugging tool that Polymarket uses. 
The need better pen-testing, that's for sure.

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Health Insurance Costs Are Already Spiking. Oregon’s New Obamacare Website Will Tack On a Bit More. A few of the commenters don't seem to understand that the socialist model of healthcare was never going to be stable. One thinks that the Republicans "gutted the parts of the ACA that would have kept the original legislation sustainable". No, only continued federal subsidies kept it from being completely unaffordable. And then Oregon imported a lot more "customers". The costs will be borne by those who still have the means to pay something. Get used to it. Nothing is free. 

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Where have Portland’s children gone? Number of young kids down by a third. No mystery there. I suspect that parents have moved to where their kids can get better quality education. And away from the cultural decay. 

A Redditor was surprised to learn that Seattle's population growth was not from new births, but by immigration. International migration, to be specific. Seattle Times would have you believe that most of the immigrants are Asian techies that work for companies like Microsoft. But although the top countries of origin are supposedly:

The top languages spoken in the public schools are:

Meanwhile, Seattle is offering six months of free rent to help fill empty storefronts. The program is Seattle Restored, and to apply you must satisfy:
Equity: Is the business Woman and/or Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color (BIPOC) owned, and/or does the project serve women/BIPOC communities?
And Seattle's renter protections effort failed miserably, as a $39 million 254-unit apartment complex meant to serve lower-income residents and provide affordable housing failed and went into receivership.  

And Yahoo!News reports Backlash grows over Seattle mayor's 'same old' homeless drug strategy. The strategy is to keep NGOs employed.

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I had to laugh at this: Redditor wants help to determine how Trump accounts for kids are bad. It came from Trump, so it must be bad, right? 🤔  Saving money starting very early can be the pathway to financial comfort in later years. It's what the rich do, and Trump wants to set kids up for this kind of advantage. But the TDS is strong in some people. Must resist!

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31 October 2026

The trouble with small nuclear reactors. I've been reading about this technology for years. There is so much to gain from the energy that this could produce, so I've been wondering what the hold up is. First of all, after reading so much about the advantages of thorium reactors, it is surprising that the industry is looking more at HALEU (5-20% enriched uranium) instead.
...there is almost no commercial production of haleu outside China and Russia.
There apparently is only one domestic source for HALEU, and others don't feel comfortable that there will be enough demand to expand. Then there are the regulatory roadblocks and getting commercial investment. There seemed to be no problems with windmills and solar panels, inefficient as they are in terms of energy density.

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WSJ has this chart up: The Smartest People in AI Believe This Is the World’s Most Important Chart.

This is just Anthropic, but I suspect other frontier companies are adopting the same policies. The commenters say this is Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI).  But I do believe that coding is something that coding assistants should handle. In my own experience, my manually coded projects were so primitive in retrospect and I've uncovered some security holes that I've been lucky have not been exploited yet. I learned tons of best practices just learning from coding assistants. Code is the language of computers so why not learn from a native speaker?

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Articles about Proton CEO's AI-related outburst are drawing a lot of attention to the company and Andy Yen. The company is now trying to defend itself against the negative publicity. Andy has apparently decided to cancel interviews grilling people about their AI use. A Proton employee says that things aren't all that bad. But in a Proton forum, some are calling for Andy to step down. Wow, I always thought this was just a boring tech company just trying to provide good privacy. But whatever, it's probably given good publicity to Tuta as an alternate email service. 

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OpenAI's latest blow to mathematicians: 'They have annihilated my field of research'. A first person perspective of how OpenAI's math release has affect mathematics. The fallout:
"We grow by having open discussions with our elders, who do not hesitate to suggest ideas, for example," he said, adding that "the AIs themselves even benefited from this freedom, by quickly and easily collecting everything considered as good problems." His own, notably. Now, there is real concern that a company, upon hearing or "seeing" online that a particular question is gaining traction in the community, will unleash its agents on the problem to snatch up the credit. As a result, some mathematicians have already announced they will be restricting their communications. For Duminil-Copin, "this entire culture of open exchange is being shattered."
Very sad.

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Sumitomo Pharma's treatment involves transplanting millions of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which have the potential to develop into any cell in the body, into a patient's brain.

Japanese regulators approved the therapy in March, following a successful clinical trial.

"The first transplant was performed at Kyoto University Hospital in October," the company said on Friday...
Would be fantastic if this works. We need something better than just palliative therapies.

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Casio watches from the past. Ah, memories. I had a few of these geek watches. Good times.

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Anthropic hacked by AI startup in less than 12 hours, report claims. Love this comment:  “If a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially the Chinese aren’t far behind.” Gee, ya think?

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Steve Jobs apparently told Tim Cook that he should never ask "What would Steve do?". Actually I think it would have been good if Tim asked that question after all. Apple has done well because of the momentum of excellence that Steve put in motion. But Apple doesn't do things quite Steve's way anymore.

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Neuroscientists reveal method to train people to have lucid dreams — and it involves virtual reality and meditation. I was hoping it was a supplement you could take.

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The Mystery of BenGay. How does the ointment work? I was told that the sensations of coolness and tingling provided a distraction, but actually researchers found something new:
Looking at electrical data from nerve firings in these rats, they discovered that the TRPM8 neurons, when activated, released a neurotransmitter, glutamate, into the spinal cord. And they found that glutamate released from cooling neurons turned around and inhibited signals from pain neurons. “What’s clever about this system and what nobody understood is…the TRPM8 sensory nerves are acting as a sort of control gate so the painful inputs don’t reach the brain,” says Fleetwood-Walker. 
Glutamate? That's it? But it has to be released by these special TRPM8 neurons – that's the trick.

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Students are getting dumber faster than they can dumb down the test. They've dumbed down the SAT so that today's students could actually take it. And scores are still declining.

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Daimler closes truck manufacturing plant in north Portland; Lays off 375 workers. Tick tock, Portland.

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30 October 2026

Proton CEO Andy Yen is all in on AI. He says that he predicts he won't hire engineers anymore because AI will do the work. Everyone at Proton must use AI, 

Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”

One employee told 404 Media, “Whatever persona Andy [Yen] has out of Proton, he’s a straight up bully inside. He routinely breaks his little facade in Slack and calls people losers and stupid, often for stuff he’s paying them for.”

Yikes, what's going on?

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For the first time ever, Google Search is less than 50% of Alphabet's revenue. And this is impacting Reddit as well, as Google searchers were driving traffic to Reddit. But Reddit is also changing to a logged-in only experience, which isn't helping. It's an obstacle between you and the content, which is increasingly left-wing and juvenile.
Six popular sugar substitutes linked to faster brain aging. The six are aspartame, saccharin, acesulfame-K, erythritol, xylitol, sorbitol. Tagatose did not show this negative effect. They didn't test allulose and monkfruit sweetener (mogroside V), which is what I use for sweetening, so I'm still using it.

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SpaceX no longer needs NASA, and that’s a problem for America’s space agency. NASA started to go downhill during the Obama administration when it was given a new non-space related mission. Trump tried to revive it with Space Force, but COVID-19 got in the way. America's space program is a shadow of what it once was. At least we have SpaceX, in case anyone needs rescuing. There are currently 7 people in space at the ISS, and 3 people in China's Tiangong Space Station. 

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Be careful about zinc oxide sunscreen, too. After two hours, sunscreen mixtures that include zinc oxide lose effectiveness, become toxic. At least in zebrafish, but I'm not taking chances. But we use zinc oxide in diaper rash creams for babies! Perhaps we should rethink this.

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Major story in the cryptocurrency world: Binance Says $6.3 Billion Impacted In Record Crypto Hack. And it's not just them. Polymarket was hacked, too. And just before the election, when people have likely dumped a lot of bets. Ouch.

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Anthropic just gave Claude the ability to delete files, folders, etc. Just great. Now autonomous agents can wreak real destruction. Yeah, I'm not ready to let them loose in my system.

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More thinking isn’t (always) better. Turns out LLMs with reasoning can suffer from indecision just like humans. Better to set reasoning to low or medium, so that it doesn't overthink. It can save money (tokens), too.

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Already we’ve seen Meta unveil its new agent Muse, which promises to find “the best deals” for its users. The problem is that sellers of goods also have access to AI tools which are capable of doing the exact opposite: using vast reams of data and behavioral studies to try to extract the highest price from buyers. The result is a potential bot vs. bot arms race, where buyers and sellers deploy technology to continuously outmaneuver each other on price.
When you implement a change, the world doesn't necessarily stay still. It's like minimum wage. Lefties think raising minimum wage will increase the buying power of the bottom quintile. All it does it raise prices and makes hiring the bottom quintile more expensive and less attractive. Or letting anyone get a college student loan. Colleges now are extremely expensive, because they know people can secure loans to pay their exorbitant costs. Or the federal government underwriting Medicare and Medicaid expenses. Or Ride Share in Seattle. 

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1 in 10 members of Congress traded stocks in companies their committees oversee. This is probably the best place to get investment advice. Let Congress be your investment advisor! This is sarcasm, but actually many of their investments have done pretty good. I got some new names to consider. Do your own research, but this is where people put money where there mouth is. Check out Roger Marshall's return. Whooh!

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Grail's cancer test produces fewer false positives than I expected. I guess there may be something to this test after all.  The ones to watch out for are pancreatic and ovarian cancers, as they are often caught late-stage by the time it's apparent something is wrong. The others are generally recognized earlier as long you don't ignore your symptoms, or are mainly a problem with heavy smokers and drinkers.

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What a guy. Sam Altman sympathizes with mathematicians, but says OpenAI’s math onslaught won’t stop. Terry Tao would like at least some collaborative effort with mathematicians, but I guess that won't happen.

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AI being great at math makes human mathematicians more valuable, not less. Well, that may be for now. But even Terry Tao isn't quite as sure about that with all mathematicians.

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The AI bubble could expose your deepest secrets. I hadn't though about this. Just because you don't spill your secrets to an AI chatbot, doesn't mean someone else isn't using your name. And when these companies go belly-up, their assets will be sold to the highest bidder, which may not curate these assets responsibly.

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AI Made Me Homeless: How a $500k/Year AI Engineer Lost Everything. Gone are the days when you could graduate and work for an employer and get your salary. Now you have to use AI to solve real world problems that you identify and sell it to someone else. It's a different skillset and we're not teaching it.

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Not healthy. 26 recent Seattle restaurant closures.

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This would mean sunsetting UO’s master’s and Ph.D. studies spanning History, Folklore, Educational Policy and Leadership, Romance Languages, Asian Studies, Comparative Literature, Classics, and more.
Folklore?

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