16 September 2026

Dr. Robert Wachter of UCSF wants to slow down AI, but not in healthcare. Slowing down AI is like going on vacation. You may get a respite, but the rest of the world presses on. China will not slow down. Neither will the rest of the world. AI doesn't need to slow down. Humans need to speed up. That includes doctors, because AI engineers will roll over them and end up telling them how medicine will be run.

And Everyone Says Datacenter Moratoriums Are Killing the US Buildout. We disagree. Yeah, they're still being built. Datacenters are far less intrusive than those windmills that blight the Columbia Gorge, ruining the natural scene, and turning it into some Simon Stålenhag feverdream. Once they MNR technology is perfected, the dataceters will be self-sufficient, and the main complaints about them will be moot. 

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I agree. Good grief, The Atlantic has yet another math and AI piece: Math Can’t Go On Like This. Yes, mathematicians will have to find out how to adapt. EVen Science published this: OpenAI breakthrough triggers ‘existential crisis’ in math. Mathematicians will need to learn how to use LEAN and use modern AI models. Learn and adapt, or die. This isn't theoretical, like it still is for medicine.

Sam Altman thinks that GPT-5.5 is as good as an average math professor. It just has a good working memory of math. But I don't see any models taking the place of real professors.  Check this out:

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Here's a handy table to read off when the latest LLMs' training cutoff dates are. The latest ones are accessing online search before they spit out an answer, so these dates will mean less. But there is research that shows that many times, they will answer questions from memory (using their trained weights) without checking first. And you won't know unless you demand that they check before they answer.

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AIX Global and Seed IQ claims to have used quantum computing to solve all six of the remaining Millennium Problems. It doesn't seem that anyone is taking them seriously, though.

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Want to know how to get those awesome visuals?  The amazing videos or the impressive images? Here is a collection of prompts that were used to get those. Study them well.

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Here is Dario Amodei's handpicked staff that will save the world from AI. Not quite as bad as Biden administration staff but uncomfortably close. And read this:
Since its founding, METR and its affiliates have received funding from EA kingpins like Democratic megadonor Dustin Moskovitz and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn — both of whom are Anthropic investors.
Tallinn again! His involvement definitely scares me.

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Reddit Is Still Useful. It's Also Becoming Impossible. Yes, there are still some bits of Reddit that are worth following, but it's slowly becoming less convenient to use. And convenience trumps quality.

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Blue states with strong teachers’ unions have lower student literacy levels: study shows. Ho, ho! The folks in Oregon know that too well, don't they? This is from a WSJ study. Unions ruin so much.

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Calliptic is like a Star Trek universal translator. This reminds me of the Hearing Helper appthat lets you communicate with people who are hard of hearing.

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Knight family gives $1.1 billion to Providence St. Vincent. And they could use a boost like this. Phil Knight is an amazing guy.

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15 September 2026

The recent surge in anti-AI sentiment is not what it seems. Someone uncovered ties to big money. Some powerful people want AI progress impeded. What for? So that they can be in control. It's always like this, isn't it?

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A new device helps severely paralysed patients communicate. This was likely built with artificial intelligence tools. For this reason, we can't slow down. This kind of work should not be suppressed.

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CAR-T cell therapy was effective against hepatoblastoma. This is amazing, and shows that CAR-T cell therapy isn't just for lymphomas, leukemias and myeloma. It can also be effective in solid tumors as well once you find the right target. In this case, it was glypican-3. Building on research done in 2020, the CAR-T cells were engineered to co-express interleukin-15 and interleukin-21, which helps to expand and empower the CAR-T cells. Wave of the future.

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Someone asks: How do we prevent mathematics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy? Yeah if we stop using AI tools, we will be medieval, all right. Remember that many of the conjectures that have been solved originated centuries ago. Do we not want to advance? We can if mathematicians feel that their research won't just be forgotten and ignored, just because someone knew enough about it to feed it into a frontier model. No, AI isn't solving math too fast. That's missing the point. The point is that real human mathematicians are 

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I’m a doctor. Here’s why I wouldn’t get a full-body MRI scan. Medical guys understand this perfectly but wealthy lay people often want to be scanned to feel secure. But a whole body MRI scan for screening is like scanning a building to diagnoses a loose screw on the 18th floor, or to figure out why the elevators are squeaking. Imaging technology has its uses and its limits.

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So the U.S. has space weapons now. Soon to be followed by Russia and China. Sigh.

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Developing for the Apple iPhone Duo is going to be different, having to take into account two screens and making sure they mesh together. Life is hard.

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It's come to this. When you really can't stay off the phone and can't break the addiction. 🙄 On the other hand, it could be good for parents. 

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Here's a leaderboard to see which frontier models are the best for video and graphics.

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14 September 2026

U.S. Health Officials Move Quickly to Deploy Medical A.I. Despite Concerns.

Mr. Seehafer proposed a plan to centralize A.I. oversight at the health department or in the F.D.A. commissioner’s office, raising concerns that decisions would be more influenced by the tech sector than by medical considerations, according to people familiar with the plan who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
The plan met with resistance from Dr. Michelle Tarver, the top medical devices official overseeing A.I. software, favoring leadership from expert scientists with a focus on patient safety.
Dr. Makary, who had been outspoken about the  influence of Silicon Valley investors, then got word that health department officials wanted him to fire Dr. Tarver, according to people with knowledge of the matter. He refused.

Doctors have lost control of field of medicine.

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So which is it?
AI’s real bottleneck isn’t compute. It’s distance.

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Amazon Deploying AI Tech That Forces Actors’ Mouths to Match Dubbed Dialogue. That's great! Now we won't have to deal with badly-dubbed kung-fu movies.

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Climatologist Says a Century of Weather Data Contradicts Claims of Record Heat. This article explains why you see graphs that depict temperatures rising in recent years.
“Nighttime temperatures have soared in the past 120 years,” Christy said.

“That is due to human development around the weather stations because nighttime temperatures are far more sensitive to urbanization—parking lots, buildings, removal of forests, and so on—than daytime temperatures.”

Over the past century, many locations where temperature readings were taken have been touched by urbanization and suburban sprawl, with the construction of asphalt and concrete structures in formerly rural areas, he said. These structures absorb heat during the day and release it at night.

“You can’t pin it on greenhouse gases alone because the urban effect is so obvious in these stations,” he said. “It doesn’t take much to make an urban heat island—you can just build a parking lot next to a rural station, and you’ve got an urban heat island started.”
I can't believe that this hasn't been brought up before. How can you put temperature sensors in areas of urbanization and compare this to the 1840s? That's not CO2 emissions. That's the nearby parking lot! It's like how they put CO2 sensors on the top of Mauna Loa, an active volcano. Duh.

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WhatAIFound.org. This site keeps track of the latest AI math claims and breaks down how valid the claim is that AI did the work.

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Two high school students use AI to solve a problem that stumped a Fields Medalist. Well OK, they had a mentor, but still. This is getting crazy.

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Writing code by hand is not an option anymore. This is true, but it doesn't mean you can't learn. Having AI write code for you is like having a code expert by your side. Ask it to explain what it did. Learn from it. That's how you grow. I've learned some new techniques and new ways of approaching a problem. 

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AQQAI is a chatbot that purports to confirm a fact or code first before showing you the output.  So you don't have to do the fact-checking. Is this more cognitive off-loading? Always confirm your facts.

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Happiest states in America. Man, Washington and California are happy but Oregon is near the bottom. Are we surprised? I wonder what it would be if one could substract Portland from the polling?

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13 September 2026

The part of Navier-Stokes no one is talking about. 

there’s an aspect of OpenAI’s work that I haven’t seen anyone talk about: they posted a Lean 4 formal proof at the same time as their conventional human-readable proof.

Say a research article takes 20 times more effort to formalize than page in an undergraduate textbook. Then formalizing the 166-page paper from OpenAI would take 132,800 person-hours. It took OpenAI 17 hours to verify their proof in Lean. I hesitate to use the word “revolutionary,” but lowering the cost of anything by four orders of magnitude is revolutionary.
Wow, this is great. Now we have to find mathematicians still willing to continue to pursue mathematics. ☹️ 

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Exercise intensity modulates interorgan communication and is associated with cardiometabolic health outcomes in humans. Exercise is still good for you. These scientists identified "intensity-dependent proteins" 
Integration with a large plasma proteome-phenome repository suggests that sprint-intensity exercise (SIE) acutely stimulates the release of protective proteins into the circulation to a greater extent than moderate-intensive exercise (MIE). These data help explain how SIE, despite requiring only a fraction of the time of MIE, elicits robust metabolic signaling and whole-body benefits.
Sprint-level exercise was six 30-second bouts of cycling against resistance.  Moderate level exercise lasted 90 minutes in the beginning gradually increasing to 120 minutes towards the end. That's a lot of exercise. 😓

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It detects Bluetooth signals broadcast by compatible smart glasses and compares their identifiers against a catalogue created by Szydlowski after examining several devices.
Yeah, but what are you going to do about the new Apple Watch that records conversations for playback? There's even an app made for this purpose. It seems that in the near future, everything you do will be recorded.

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Open source software is the foundation of a lot of important stuff. It's time we started the conversation about paying for and supporting it. I agree.

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12 September 2026

Mercury is shrinking faster than we thought. Is it really just because of cooling? You know, there are other planets farther away from a bright yellow warming source that are probably cooling, too, yet I don't hear about them shrinking at an unexpected rate. I think it's something else.

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So the Clay Mathematics Institute has declared that the Navier-Stokes problem has been solved. But they haven't announced who won the prize. If it were up to me, I'd definitely make sure that Buckmaster and Alpöge get a share of the prize. Not sure if OpenAI did enough of the work to deserve the prize, though. Someone there just fed a machine with someone else's ideas.
Update: They haven't actually declared that it's been solved. They just "contemplate the announcement that the Navier-Stokes problem has apparently been settled". Probably wise.

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Google has launched an offensive against scrapers. Since they lost in court, they're going to add an extra step to obscure the links. It's kind of like what Oregon Watchdog does with their links. You can't see the URL until you click. Using cURL, you would just set FOLLOWLOCATION to be true. It probably won't hamper the SERP services too much, but just add a delay.

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Scientists discover the human heart can regrow muscle after a heart attack. That's good, but other scientists have found that if you sleep in less than total darkness, the little of light will make your heart muscle hypertrophy in a harmful way. Previous studies have shown that there are optimal light levels for daytime, evening and nighttime indoor lighting. But I remain skeptical that low-level light (such as from a dim night-light) makes a lot of difference.

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If you have a gun on you while riding Waymo, the car will report you to the police. Against policy, they say. Waymo isn't going to be popular with the thugs, for sure.

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Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time. It's not just reading skills: science and math skills are also lower, too. 
The study ⁠also ​found that nearly half of students use artificial intelligence chatbots regularly for ​learning, but those who use them for drafting essays, summarizing texts and researching topics generally score about 20 points lower in science, equivalent ​to a year's learning.
Students have found a way to complete assignments, but not to learn anything. But the decline started before chatbots hit the scene. So what else could it be? 

Boy, America really did forget the lessons of 9/11. After all that happened afterwards during the Obama administration with ISIS, the lessons of history have been lost. 

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Google Might Have Achieved RSI. No, it's not repetitive stress injury. It's recursive self-improvement. And it's another step on the way to autonomous general intelligence. 

Speaking of Google, it seems that someone caught the company in the act of appropriating open-source content without attribution in their Artemis product. Not cool.

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Industrial Light & Magic celebrates 60 years of SFX work. At the same time, it's sad to acknowledge that Paramount has ruined Star Trek. The early episodes used to have real sci-fi authors writing the episodes. There were stories that made you think. Now, it's just modern day millennials and GenZ social culture, complete with the usual social misfits, interacting as they would in a college theater production. And sometimes I can't tell if I'm watching Star Trek or Star Wars. The two universes look the same now, with the same approved cast of actors, trying overly hard to be "inclusive" to please a Biden-era audience. And becoming really boring.

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Music synthesis is changing. Elevenlabs has launched Elevenmusic. I wasn't keen on samplers back in the day. Thought it was cheating. But after hearing what artists like Thomas Dolby could do, I was won over. So this is the first of a new prototype of musical instrument. A lot of the stuff showcased is rap and hip hop, and so far, AI just seems to be doing a different kind of sampling/copying. I want to hear real artistic output.

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Yes, the right of parents to keep their children away from predators in school will be heard by the Supreme Court in December (IPEC vs Ferguson) , thanks to Mirabelli vs Bonta. The injunction remains in effect.

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11 September 2026

Today is the 25th anniversary of 9-11. I have not seen this video before, which someone posted today. Back then we came together as a country, and vowed never to forget, but sadly, I think we have. Like this guy. 

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Reason.com agrees: universal healthcare doesn't work. Don't look to Canada or the UK as examples of success. Some wag once told me the Law of Healthcare: there is access, quality and affordability. But you can only pick two. That's so true. You can't have all three because it's not affordable and there aren't enough quality physicians and healthcare providers. 

Speaking of which, what med schools are the top two providers of American doctors? You'll never guess. (archive.ph seems to be broken – here's the original article). Meanwhile, Duke Medical School discriminated against White and Asian applicants. 

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Mathematicians are very upset about OpenAI. NYT has two articles: one about the Navier Stokes issue and the other about a sphere-packing problem that was scooped by an AI model called Gauss. It's getting to the point where mathematicians feel that it's not worth putting in the effort to solve problems anymore. OpenAI is the target of much of the anger. Terence Tao calls it "A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics" in his blog. And so a group of mathematicians have signed a declaration, similar to the Leiden Declaration, which calls for something to be done. This has caused OpenAI to drop out of Caltech's Mathathon, just as Anthropic has already done. Wise move. The number of mathematicians who want it cancelled is growing. I've advocated for AI to be tools to help mathematicians do their work, but not to steal their data and use unreleased super models to finish the work and steal the glory. Not cool.

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AI may cut junior coding tasks and weaken the pipeline to senior developers. This is an unintended side-effect. Someone has also posted the problem of when AI-generated code falls apart and there aren't any coder apps to fix the software. You'll need actual coders to fix the problem.

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Age verification requirements are picking up steam. Anthropic now requires it to use Claude. And Microsoft planning to implement it for Windows, too. Claude is using the Yoti.app which I've not heard of before. 

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I've noticed this. Both AI and higher interest rates are working to eliminate bullshit jobs. In polite company, we call them sinecure positions. But whatever.

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The AI threat hype is in full swing, with Bernie Sanders wanting to jail the AI tech leaders for 20 years. And did CNN really put this on TV? And Dems want Mike Johnson to cancel Congressional recess to deal with the AI threat. Wow, this is COVID-level fear again. 

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Why browser fingerprinting is not a solved problem. Good – I want it to stay unsolved. I don't want to be identified by my browser.

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Strength Training May Be the Secret to Healthy Aging. It's the sarcopenia story again. And look – Creatine improves muscle mass and cognitive function in older adults even without exercise. The problem is that you have to take so much of it. This study used 10 grams/day, whereas most recommend 5 grams/day.

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Duck.ai will allow access to frontier AI models anonymously.  It's not difficult to use open-weight models anonymously, but using frontier models does require that your data leave your computer and go to datacenters. And unless you are on an enterprise plan, your data often stays there for 30 days before deletion. And you can't be anonymous if you sign up for an API key, which links your usage to your API_KEY. But to use Duck.ai, you have to sign up and get an account. So it's just anonymous to the frontier model companies, but not really as anonymous as using open-weights. Some of them are getting close to frontier models. And Moonshot has been accused of sending user queries to Claude and using the responses to train their models. So you were actually Claude when you thought you were using Kimi-K3. So your data was going to Anthropic after all. That's the risk with using Chinese models. But at this time, there is no way of getting access to Astra or Fable or Mythos class models without sending data to these AI companies, and you just have to hope that your data stays confidential. Or you can pay for an enterprise plan to have zero-retention.

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10 September 2026

Oh-oh. There's a rumor that OpenAI may have "trained Astra on conversations in which he [Andreas Thom] and Gábor Kun were working on Gromov’s soficity conjecture". If this is true, people REALLY have to keep their research away from OpenAI's models. Lest your research career vanish in an instant.

Here's another post about the Navier-Stokes situation. What an experience for an academic. 

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There's a lot of discussion about the resignation of the a guy named Coxon, from Anthropic. But here's another take. Was it just a smokescreen? Look at the list of Dem senators who are now saying that AI regulation is justified. 

And here's Meta, launching Muse, which will, among other things, send emails and money from your account automatically. Yeah, who needs this crap?

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The Four-Color Theorem Gets a Rare New Proof. The original proof by Appel and Haken that was done with computers was kludgy and unsatisfying. Now there's a new one which is less kludgy. It still uses computers and checks over a list of graph configurations. I guess for problems like this, you just have to put up with a little bit of inelegance.

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Caltech is planning a math hackathon, or Mathathon, but a bunch of Caltech and non-Caltech mathematicians aren't happy about it. They don't like it that participants are being encouraged to use AI to solve problems, as they are given AI tokens. Plus, it may scoop out existing mathematicians who may see their research significantly deflated, and their ideas scooped. Plus, who is going to verify the results? Professional mathematicians, of course, who likely will be unpaid and uncredited. Also, the results won't be posted on preprint servers, so any insights will be hidden. But how do you verify AI-generated results? So far, the contest is still on.

This is similar to the kind of angst that some physicians are dealing with. When you're develop the AI and own the tools, you're happy. But for users, it's just a brave new world. 

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Remember in 2000 when the world was looking for Finland as the answer to improving math and science education? Finland had the answers, it seemed. Well, it turned out that it was a fluke, and Finland's PISA scores have been declining ever since. And look at the latest PISA scores, just released. As always, the top performers are in Asia. But does the West look to Asia for tips? I don't see that. I find it ironic that you never see Chinese, Japanese or Korean persons heading education departments in America? Wouldn't it make sense if they did? Our academic institutions seem to exclude them instead. Very strange.

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Apple is gunning for WHOOP. Why doesn't Apple just buy the company?

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Anthropic reveals fourth likely crime committed by its AI. We're getting inured to this, aren't we?

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There's a guy named Elizier Yudnovsky who famously made doomsday predictions about AI. Turns out he was wrong almost all of the time. He's like the Jim Cramer of AI. 🤣

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I never heard of the 7 Vibe 3 lifestyle. Apparently that's how modern entrepreneurs see their work-life balance. Whatever. 

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iOS 27 RC Adds Long-Rumored Camera App Controls Customization. There's some of this already. I don't like the existing UI, so I hope this improves.

The new Apple Watches will have ears. Mobile phones changed the world when they had cameras built in. Now they will have audio recorders built-in. Not sure I like that. Apple says not to worry, but I can't be sure. 

And Apple is introducing a feature where you can store a reference image on their servers, to convince others you have the real photo, and not AI slop. 

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NASA’s New Experimental Jet Promises Supersonic Flight Without the Sonic Booms. That's great, but look at the needle nose on that thing. You could take an eye out!

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Not to be outdone with features, Google's Pixel Watch will detect if you stop breathing, and notify people if that happens. Apple has something like that already if you fall down. 

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9 September 2026

FDA has appointed new people: Karim Mikhail for vaccines and biologicals, Michael Davis for CDER, and Jared Seehafer (deputy) for technology, including AI. Let's hope they are competent. 

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This video is making the rounds. It is an update of the wealth inequality of America which first came out in 2013. It's mainly about how people underestimate the proportion of wealth held by the wealthy. To me, it is irrelevant what people think the wealth distribution ought to be. What this video doesn't emphasize is that the wealth of the rich, even though they weren't the ultra-rich, increased, too. That tells me that the capitalist system is working. Also, it doesn't even mention that there is income mobility, and that everyone's wealth is increasing. The ultra-wealthy are business owners whose assets are increasing. The wealth increase is different in different states, much better in states that are business-friendly. Income isn't going to increase much if you just have a job in education or healthcare, unless your union is aggressive, but in which case you might get laid off. One's salary also isn't going to increase by very much in government jobs.

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What is the GenZ stare all about? 😳

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Cognitive offloading. School Students Who Use AI Get Worse Test Scores, OECD Warns. Who saw that coming?

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Let the Robots Try Medicine say Zeke Emanuel and Vinod Khosla. What would be great is if doctors had a say in how much AI they wanted to integrate in their workflow and have a say in how it was implemented. Much of the medical profession still views AI as a professional threat, not only to their own livelihood but to the profession as a whole.

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A “proof” of Fermat’s Last Theorem that fits the margin. Don't get too excited. It's a bug in LEAN.

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How an AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy. Boy, this is a lesson to everyone who uses frontier models for their research. It sure smells fishy that OpenAI's Astra would solve Navier-Stokes after someone used their models to solve the simpler unforced Euler equations. This is why some are warning about how this is going to change how research is conducted, More secrecy and less collaboration. All it takes is for your work to end up on a frontier model's training set, prompted by someone else. Kiss your research good bye.

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Buy my dead startup. Your dead code and text files are not completely worthless. They can be used for training. Recycle!

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Michael Dell Passes Jeff Bezos In Billionaire Rankings—Hits No. 3 For First Time. Not bad for a boy who sold PCs in his college dorm. Bezos' divorce must have been costly. 

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Insilico’s Co-CEO Has Big Hopes That Fibrosis Drug Can Reverse Aging Too. Rentosertib is the first AI-designed drug. I bet very few if any heard about the TNIK pathway.

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This is crazy. Someone created an interface where you can just knock on your MacBook case to send signals. It's called mactap. If I was that hardup for extra buttons, I'd just use Logitech's MX Keypad. Points for cleverness, anyway. 

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Apple announced their foldable iPhone 18 Duo today.  Stock still fell a bit. Boy, gone are the days when we'd be surprised by the newest thing from Apple. Now, it's just confirmation of what Ming Chi Kuo already told us about a few months ago. Yawn. And you can't put a case on this beast. A screen protector is only going to work for the outer screen. And from The Bee:

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8 September 2026

Hyperaldosteronism is usually thought of as an uncommon cause of hypertension – usually seen in about 5% of cases in a primary care physician's office. But I've noticed occasional episodes when my blood pressure is unusually high for no particular reason, and couldn't explain it. Now, it appears that there are cases where people have spurts of aldosterone secretion, and that can be a cause of episodic hypertension. This discovery was only made possible with the use of a wearable. That's cool.

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Oh brother. Carmakers Have a New Idea to Boost EV Range: Add a Gas Engine. Just buy a hybrid, already, sheesh.

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Of all pets, having a cat can be detrimental to a young kid's mental health. Yeah, having a cat is sometimes like having a standoffish cranky old man. Not the same vibes you get from a dog.

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Every Toilet Flush Can Send a Cloud of Microbes into the Air That Can Reach Your Breathing Zone. I warned as many people as I could about this during the COVID-19 outbreak. Why wasn't there any directive to lower the lid when you flush. It's been shown the SARS-CoV2 was in fecal matter. That's how they monitor variants even to this day. So close the lid before you flush. And don't leave your toothbrush expose in the bathroom in a cup.

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Could alcohol be the cause of the increased colon cancer deaths? The impact of alcohol on colon cancer is not as high as for liver cancer, but cause-specific mortality is increased compared with 1990. And look – there's Oregon up there again for age-standardized mortality rates!

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There's been some talk about whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) has been achieved. Certainly OpenAI's new Astra model scored very highly on the ARC AGI-3 dataset. Claude 5.1 Fable fared less well on ARC AGI-2. But nVIDIA's own model, AVO, apparently scored 100% on ARC AGI-3. Not much buzz around that, however, and not sure why.

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Here's the buzz today: It's been announced that the Millennium Prize on Navier-Stokes problem has been solved by Astra. Even Terence Tao was impressed. It's not without controversy, however, and some claim the work of academics was appropriated by the Astra to get the solution. But regardless, now we know that there are solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations that contain singularities.

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There's a movie, Artificial, about the rise of OpenAI, that will be released in December. It's funny to see the actors they selected to play the main techie characters. They got the Sutzkever character down, for sure.

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There's a new TLD out now – .web

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The creators of Dark Sky have a new weather app that shares multiple predictions. It's called ACME Weather. This one is a subscription model, which I hate. Another one to add to, that I'll lose track of. Now that I can code my own, I don't feel that need to pay for weather apps now.

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Denmark has not only been having students turn in their cellphones, but they’ve also taken tablets, laptops, and computers out of the classroom. No more digital learning for the majority of the school day. Danes went old school by bringing back physical textbooks, workbooks, and writing assignments. 
This solution just doesn't sit right with me. Back in the old days when we were stuck with textbooks, pen and paper, people paid attention, but even I knew that I could be learning more effectively with the right digital tools. The problem is to have high quality digital educational materials around to better education kids. Like what 3Blue1Brown is doing. Not go back to the 20th century. We'll never develop warp drive at that rate. 
Man, why doesn't Europe take some pointers from Asia? 

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$2 trillion left liberal states to conservative ones.  You can scream about billionaires and not helping them and enabling special taxes that will hurt only them. And then they will move away. And the consequences of that will be you will have to pay more to keep Democrat leaders happy. It's all on you.

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Sad. Facing healthcare gaps, Vashon Island expands mobile urgent care. A region in decline. More communities will have to resort to the village doctor model. The first world becomes the third world.

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7 September 2026

Engineers develop single-element speaker that beams audio to specific listeners. You could really mess with someone's mind with this tech. Think about it. Sound that only you hear and no one else can.

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Man’s $160,000 Porsche Taycan is now ‘worthless’ as dealership refuses to take it back. This is why I'm staying out of the EV market. Not only do I have to deal with this, but also charger anxiety, and battery injury, and my house going up in flames with the car in the garage. Who needs this?

Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses. And here's this, too. Renewable energy tech is too risky for me. 

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Some popular drinks were linked to depression and anxiety. Coffee was different. Well, coffee can give you anxiety, too. Depends on what's going on as you drink it, I suppose.

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Stratum is a social media app that tries to link you to other people who share your taste in book, movies, music. It's an app for more innocent times. People are too crazy now, and I am much more careful who I interact with. Anonymous interactions are off-limits for me, but perhaps some young person who has nothing to lose might find this app useful.

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Cancer drug could help millions battling osteoporosis and mid-life weight gain. The drug is CADD522, which is a RUNX2 inhibitor. RUNX2 is involved in leukemias, so this drug could find application there. But leukemic patients often need to maintain their weights, not worry about weight loss or osteoporosis. Survival is the primary goal, really.

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Caltech is hosting a mathathon. I think it's their first one, and you can use AI to solve problems, so it's almost like a hackathon. The problems will be devilishly hard, I predict.

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Here's an LLM leaderboard. There's quite a difference between frontier models and open-source models, despite what you read. And Claude 5 Fable still rules, despite all the hype about GPT-6 Astra. They didn't compare with Chinese frontier models, like Ox Alpha.

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Don't get sick. Hospitals push for upfront payments as patient deductibles and out-of-pocket costs rise. The current healthcare system is messed up. It really needs a revamping so badly.

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Airplane fuel spikes lead pollution levels near Hillsboro Airport: 'Lifelong detriments'. Looks like Hillsboro has more major concerns than datacenters. Isn't this why America switched to unleaded fuel in the first place? And what about PDX airport. How safe is that?

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Portland councilors take vacancy fee off the table after city study. They needed a "study" to show that it was a dumb idea. The commenters take the Council to task.
"...the city’s office buildings had a nearly 28% vacancy rate in the second quarter of this year. Downtown, it was even worse at just under 39%"
Take this hint, guys. 
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Only today does the Oregonian post news about Nike. No mention about Nike's woke strategy backfiring. Nike needs a Lip-Bu Tan. I read all kinds of excuses for why Nike failed under the previous CEO, but for me, the Nike brand turned into a thug-embracing, anti-American caricature that I wanted no part of. And get off the "Just Do It" variants already. That was fresh and innovative back in the 1990s, but this 2026.

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