14 May 2026

Imagine being a business that insurance companies contract with to issue medical denials to doctors, so insurance companies can save money. That's EviCore. 

EviCore markets itself to insurance companies by promising a 3-to-1 return on investment — that is, for every $1 spent on EviCore, the insurer would pay out $3 less on medical care and other costs. EviCore salespeople have boasted of a 15% increase in denials, according to the investigation, which is based on internal documents, corporate data and dozens of interviews with former employees, doctors, industry experts, health care regulators and insurance executives. Almost everybody interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity because they continue to work in the industry.

How do these people sleep?

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Why Was the Discovery of the Jet Stream Mostly Ignored? Because the Japanese discoverer published his findings in Esperanto. 🤦🏻‍♂️ This story is interesting because Japanese WW II balloons carrying bombs drifted to the Pacific NW, and started a fire in the Siskiyou National Forest. 
Although most of the balloon bombs are thought to have gone down in the Pacific Ocean, a few remain in remote areas of the Pacific Northwest. Two forestry workers discovered one near Lumby, British Columbia, in 2014. A Canadian navy bomb disposal unit arrived and blew it to bits. Use caution when hiking.
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What will go down as the best physics of this century? Here's a few good candidates.

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The newest AI boom pitch: Host a mini data center at your home. Who knows? It might cut down on heating costs.

People Would Rather Have Nuclear Power Plants In Their Area Than AI Data Centers. Some day, they'll have both. 

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The Chinese have got us by the short and curlies. The U.S. was supposed to shut down foreign-made routers by 2027 for security reasons. But doing that will shut down America's network security system. So it's been pushed back to 1 Jan 2029. At least.

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Just what America needs, huh. Cannabis Use Disorder Strongly Linked to Major Depression, New Review Finds.

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Sleep linked to slower ageing: huge study pinpoints the right amount. Six to eight hours.

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Bitcoin trader recovers $400,000 using Claude AI after getting 'stoned' and losing wallet password 11 years ago — bot tried 3.5 trillion passwords before decrypting an old wallet backup. Yeah he was ecstatic about it. Another reason not to get stoned.

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There's a reason why some people have a policy never to negotiate with terrorists. Instructure's payment to hackers will just keep them in business doing it again. This wasn't the first time Instructure was hacked. You think they'd learn at least. They should fire their IT people.

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The myelin sheath is not just the insulator nerves. It also regulates neuroplasticity. Myelin is what makes white matter in the brain look white. 

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Yay, Portland State. Researchers at that unlikely university came up with an effective malarial agent that hits the parasite at multiple stages in its development. PSU – who would have thunk, huh?

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Diseases can spread between apartments via shared ventilation. Another reason why homeless shelters are just a bad idea.

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And here's a company that sells "authenticity" at a price. Here you can "buy" an influencer persona that will sell your product for you. Everything can be fake in the AI world.

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Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently. At first I thought this was something nefarious, but the reason for this is because websites cater to Chrome, and don't look as good on other browsers. So rather than wait for website developers to fix their websites, browsers just implement fixes quietly, and do it in a way you'd never notice, unless you were a browser nerd.

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No, CNN you are wrong. You cannot "reverse much of the damage alcohol has done to your body". Acute intoxication will fade, but damage to your brain and liver are irreversible. In fact, the attempts by the liver to regenerate are what cause cirrhotic nodularity and hepatocellular carcinoma.

I hate when opposition to the mRNA vax gets painted as opposition to ALL vaccines. Like this article by Derek Lowe, who should know better. Derek was and is a champion of the mRNA COVID vaccine. Yeah, there was efficacy data on the ancestral strain, but that efficacy rapidly petered out by the time the delta stain came on the scene, and that's what the coronavirus experts predicted what would happen all along. It's the reason why there has not been a successful vaccine against that type of virus. And Derek chooses to direct a blind eye to all the data highlighting the dangers of that vax preparation. Why there was so much censorship, as Alex Berenson experienced.  And I can't believe Derek is convinced by Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine study, which Alex debunked so well. He thinks RFK Jr just doesn't people to have vaccines at all. What crap!

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Epic Pencil lets you annotate on your screen, like you can in apps. Could be handy during video conferencing.

And hush makes you realize how commoditized voice transcription is now. The app uses OpenAI's open source whisper API model, which they made public in 2022 under the MIT license. So there is no "dictionary" like there was in voice dictation apps of the olden days. It needs Apple's metal GPU API to make it run with reasonable latency, but it may still be long enough to be annoying (~6 sec). Everything stays on the machine. It's all local. And it doesn't have Apple 60 second time limit. It's push-to-talk once you install it and works everywhere. Whisper is said to be more accurate than Apple's dictation anyway.

Free-Scene solves a problem that I've had with AI videos, namely that they are too short. You can just capture a single short scene. Yeah, I could use iMovie to stitch videos together, but this app does it for you. Input the prompt and it will create a single video with all the individual videos stitched together. 

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It's sad how people have abandoned StackExchange. It's a ghost town now.

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What happened to the car designed for women, by women? I thought this was going to be an article that would just ridicule "the car designed by women, for women". But actually some of the ideas are good and make sense. I don't like the plain, minimal design approach, though. The exchangeable seat covers makes sense, but it's much better to have seats that are just easier to clean. But this car sure gets its looks from Volvo than Jony Ive.

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If you're a web designer and want to capture the look that your target audience would expect to see, this website is for you. It's called who are you?  It captures the look and feel of some many websites that cater to different interests.

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Oops. A major microplastics finding went out the window. Lesson: check controls first before publishing.

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Oregon enables students to skip state tests and it’s undermining improvement. Well, you can't improve what you can't measure.

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Laika's Wildwood teaser portrays a Portland that doesn't exist anymore. No homeless tents. Safe to drink from Benson Bubblers. Saturday Market and Burnside plaza is filled with nice things. You can't have this world if you don't want to come down hard on crime and drug use, and continue to endorse harm reduction and shunting your economy to supporting the criddler lifestyle.

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Even the Metro Chamber of Commerce opposes expanding the Arts Tax. People are saying it should just be eliminated completely. It's not 2012 anymore. Art isn't a priority. The people can spend the money more wisely.

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Propser Portland tells the city that they want their Old Town property back. Revitalization ain't going to happen.

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Portland is about to close nearly 450 shelter beds, as homelessness rises. It was a waste of money.  Can you believe that there is a "sober section of the Reedway Safe Rest Village"? What's the rest – the wasted section? The fentanyl section? Good grief.

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13 May 2026

Google is launching GoogleBook, a laptop with Gemini AI built-in. I'll pass. 

But Google is also "re-imagining" the mouse pointer. It's using AI to predict the context of the mouse pointer to interpret your voice command properly. This is getting closer to the technology seen in the old Corning video A Day Made of Glass. Hard to believe that was made 15 years ago, which the iPhone was still in its ascendancy.

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This is the Gillian Tett article that is making the rounds. I just found out about it recently.

Ouch. I guess the fears were true. People can pass the tests and get their degree, made possible by chatbots, but they lack the skills that the degree is supposed to signify that they possess.

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All the demons hiding in your AIs. I wasn't aware of this, but with the frontier models, there does appear to be a tendency for them to be attracted to certain topics. So much so that Codex for GPT-5.5 had to explicitly tell the LLM not to focus on such topics. Some are relatively benign but some are disturbing. What is the origin of this behavior? They are called demons or attractors, but whatever they are, people don't talk about them much. It's just swept under the rug. The Loab attractor is intriguing, and would make a great horror story, except that you'd have to explain it first, and that would away much of the punch. People would just think it was too outlandish to be plausible. The Wikipedia article on Loab is even more disturbing. 

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It's good to see that the prevalence of dementia has been decreasing over the years. The data is from northern Europe. Hopefully it reflects efforts to improve brain health. But whatever it is, it's better than the alternative. 

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Mozilla had a head start on all the other tech companies. Why did it not thrive?  I still think the ouster of Javascript creator and Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich in 2014 for specious reasons, was a major reason for its downfall. Brendan has done well enough afterwards, but probably could have done more for Mozilla if he stayed. Waste of talent.

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ShotGlass looks to be a great video screen capture app that I'll probably download.

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Everything tech eventually gets sleazified. Some browser extensions exist just to collect and sell your data. This is an add for LayerX, which purports to protect you from this. I wish they listed all the apps they knew about that were bad players.

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How embarrassing. Beware what you tell your AI chatbot. It’s not a shrink – it’s a snitch. How many people don't know this already?

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Alzheimer's disease drugs don't do very much. And yet they cost a lot. Profit for the drug companies.

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The New York Times Got Caught Using AI Hallucinations in Its Reporting. Yes, this is a very big deal, and shows how far the once-great newspaper has fallen. Enshittification happened there, too.

Back then, however, academic dishonesty was constrained not only by codes of conduct but by the amount of effort it required. A student who wanted to cheat had to go to the trouble of finding someone who would let them copy their answers.
The internet and the shift to doing work on computers rather than by hand dramatically lowered the barriers to cheating. 
So now, there will be proctors during in-person exams.
Yeah, Princetonians weren't necessarily more honorable. It was just that nobody wanted to let someone else benefit from their efforts. 

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40%-plus of Portland residents are considering moving. If it weren't for low-interest mortgages that some people want to hang on to, it would be higher.

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And Seattle-area prices jump nearly 5% from a year ago. And of course, Seattle Times blames it all on Trump. Of course.

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Starbucks cuts more jobs in Seattle. 61 more corporate jobs cut. And they still say they aren't moving their corporate HQ from Seattle. Yeah, right. Still think the rumors are "like, super-overblown", Mayor Bye-Bye?

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12 May 2026

Survival of Patients Diagnosed With Cancer During the COVID-19 Pandemic. You can tell that the authors struggled for the right wording. They didn't want too sound to harsh on the doctors or policy makers, who may already harbor suspicions that they did the wrong thing. Those were dark times for cancer patients. Treatments were delayed and rescheduled. We see now that much of the fear was overblown. How can we learn from all of this, and strive for a more measured and informed response to pandemic threats like this. 

Today, Dr. Marty Makary resigned as FDA Commissioner. He's going to be replaced by...a lawyer? If Makary opposed fruit-flavored vapes, why was he overruled? It's too bad because he was a sane voice against the mRNA vax. Maybe Big Pharma pushed him out.

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Harvard Study Finds Wind Turbines Will Cause More Warming Than Emissions Reductions Would Avert. The Harvard study came out in 2018 – why are just finding out about it now? The study also found that 
...the cooling impact of reducing emissions would be very small. U.S. temperature reductions from lowering our domestic emissions would be around 0.2 to 0.4°F (around 0.16°C) by 2100.

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Ice cream isn't what it used to be. More enshittification. What was surprising is that Häagen-Dazs is now considered premium ice cream. I remember when ice cream snobs looked down on it. But it's actually more true to the original than Tillamook ice cream, a local favorite. And now I have another reason to avoid Ben and Jerry's ice cream, besides their politics.

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Have you noticed geeks walking around with half-opened laptops? Here's why. They're running agents. This is getting out of hand, no?

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Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems may have a connection to zero-knowledge proofs. I saw Amit Sahai's name in the article. He did a nice video some time ago explaining the mechanics of zero-knowledge proofs to where you could understand them.

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It finally happened. Coursera and Udemy have completed their merger. This is a great way to educated about a lot of stuff. Hope this makes their offerings even better.

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I thought this was a joke. Some Swedes are promoting a program where you can get doctors to "prescribe Sweden", that is, a short stay in the country to relax and escape. If they're going to do this, they'd better reverse their immigration policy, which is rapidly ruining the Swedish culture and experience. Pretty soon, it won't be any different from staying in downtown Portland or Seattle, which would be a lot cheaper.

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Depending on whether someone has connections or specializes in a particular line of research, one engineer can earn $500,000 a year, while another may earn $50 million. A Google scientist making more than $600,000 said he was anxious about not being able to afford an apartment located in a good school district. He wasn’t married, and didn’t have a child. But he was still worried. “Others are making millions, and I want that, too,” he told me. 
Holy crap.

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A drug called tofersen can help some patients with ALS. Tofersen is an antisense oligonucleotide of a mutated superoxide dismutase, SOD-1, commonly associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It has to be administered intrathecally.

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Digg is now trying to be an AI news aggregator company. Give it up, already. News aggregators are so yesterday. Besides, news is personal. I may not like the news feeds they select to get their news from. The company is clearly adrift.

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Shock poll: 59% Portlanders dislike Kotek. Just imagine what the numbers would be outside of the Blue cities. 

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11 May 2026

Garry Tan is CEO of Y Combinator, and he recently described a peripheral brain that he created from OpenClaw and Hermes Agents. He obviously put a lot of work into it, but what struck me was the amount of stress he must be going through. He doesn't go into detail regarding his "hard period" but it made be wonder what people are going through these days. How many need therapists to get through the day? His Gbrain tool that he crafted seems to be even better than a therapist. He uses frontier models as his LLM, and I wonder what precautions he has taken about how his content is being handled on the other side. But the drive to create a "thing" that understands you well is elemental. We all strive to find that something or someone.

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Claude Mythos found a CVE (common vulnerability and exposures) in FreeBSD dating back to around 2000. It was not detected and was copied over and over, until being detected now. This is scary. 
FreeBSD’s CVE was caused by human negligence in the early 2000’s.

But, in 2026, decades-old flaws are being baked directly into our systems faster than ever. LLMs, as they configure our environments and write new code, regurgitate the same insecure patterns they were trained on.

Advanced models don't need to be highly creative to shut down a company or a power grid. They just need to act as powerful pattern-matchers, spotting and exploiting the legacy bugs that weaker AI models carelessly copy-pasted into the environment.
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“Before the meeting even starts,” he told DealBook, “when I see that A.I. note taker pop up, I’ll just say: ‘Hey, Mike, Jim, Barbara, I see the A.I. note taker popped up. I’m going to turn it off and kick it out of the meeting.’”

This happens more and more. “Everybody and their mother is using these things,” Gifford said. “Executives are using them, boards are using them, nonexecutive businesspeople are using them.”
This software already got a hospital into hot water.

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Daraxonrasib in Previously Treated Advanced RAS-Mutated Pancreatic Cancer. The clinical trial that excited pancreatic cancer oncologists was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.  When given as second-line therapy, almost everyone saw stable disease or tumor shrinkage as seen in this waterfall plot.

And look at that overall survival – wow! Ordinarily, the median survival with second-line chemo is 6 to 8 months. In this study it was 15.6 months. Incredible.

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Scientists Prolong the Life of Mice With Invisible Energy Fields, New Study Shows. This seemed kinda fringe at first, but it got published in Cell, so it may be something. I can't access the article, so I don't know the details of the electromagnetic field switch.

Or maybe the secret of youth is in poop. Yes, poop from young mice reverses signs of age-related decline in older mice. No need for plasma donations, maybe.

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Robot Dogs Are A Security Nightmare. Oh boy, people need to watch this video. We use stuff from China all the time, but when it comes to AI tech, we really need to watch out. These AI robot dogs may be the foothold that some nefarious force uses to eventually cause some real havoc. An innocent firmware update in the future, and all hell could break loose. We really need to have tech expertise in the federal government. 

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10 May 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Apple promised a smarter Siri, but a lawsuit says it didn’t deliver—and you can get up to $95 back. But only if you bought your iPhone between June 10, 2024, and March 29, 2025. Darn.

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

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

Gimme some!
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9 May 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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8 May 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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7 May 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hoping you wouldn't notice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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6 May 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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5 May 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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