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.

––– 良くない–––

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.

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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.

––– 良くない–––

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. 

––– 凄い –––

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?

––– 凄い –––

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?

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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.

––– 良くない–––

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.

––– 良くない–––

4 May 2026

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

3 May 2026

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

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

"And then, for whatever reason, sort of over the last four or five years, we've seen this shift where entrepreneurship is now villainized. And it's an unfortunate and sad shift in what otherwise has been a phenomenal place to run businesses."
––– 良くない–––

Obama-backed $2.2B green energy 'boondoggle' leaves taxpayers on the hook. This situation is crazy. California's Ivanpah is expensive, inefficient and its tech is obsolete. But they can't dismantle it because it would be disruptive and costly. And they still owe $730M to $780M on the $1.6B federal loan they took out to build it. Thanks, Obama.

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

The fall of Portland, Oregon.

––– 良くない–––


2 May 2026

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

1 May 2026

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

And when we let the government control how cars are made, we'll get this:
––– 良くない–––

Oops. Claude Code's Entire Source Code Got Leaked via a Sourcemap in npm. This is not the first time Anthropic has experienced these code leaks. What's going on? They need to tighten security protocols.

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

30 April 2026

Researchers in S Korea have developed a drug, KDS12025, that if given early on after a stroke, can inhibit formation of hydrogen peroxide, which triggers neuronal death. This might be able to preserve movement after stroke. In mice, it "reduced collagen accumulation, prevented the formation of the glial barrier, preserved neuronal function, and restored motor performance". Sounds promising.

––– 凄い –––
Verifying your age in a privacy preserving manner. I like this idea. Let's say you need to verify your age to a website, but don't want to reveal your identity. Suppose the government has a service where after you do through a verification process, such as at ID.me, it generates a Selective Disclosure JSON code. You send the encrypted identifier to the website, and the website sends the identifier to the government site, and gets back only the part that says

["rZEHHTVlchLBWEOX4jYZXg","age_over_18",true]
["9Y833-G9mjCz39Wmd2JdgQ","age_over_21",true]

Then they know that you are over 18 or over 21, and age verification is achieved, without the website knowing your identity. It's going to take a neutral third party. This code can have an expiration time, so it can't be re-used and must be regenerated each time. I think this could work.

––– 凄い –––

Nice Rubik Cube solver. Only takes 21 moves – "God's number" or something like that.

––– 凄い –––

I'm seeing so many of these postings now:
A lot of folks in the tech world are getting tired and becoming strangely philosophical. Never saw this during the dotcom era when there was joy and energy everywhere. Now, there's a lack of it.

––– 良くない–––

These days, a college education at some schools is so dumbed-down that if it takes you 4 years to get a degree, you're slacking and wasting precious time. Schools are worried about reputational damage? Should have thought of that earlier, before implementing diversity policy. Colleges that are, in effect, like community colleges, will experience this. Real universities, places of advanced learning and research, will not be affected.

––– 良くない–––

Convicted former Harvard scientist rebuilds brain computer lab in China. Well, he's burned his bridges, for sure.

––– 良くない–––

Copper theft leaves Seattle’s Taproot Theatre scrambling to survive. Bet those theater folks voted for Democrat Katie Wilson, though. Can't have nice things anymore.

––– 凄い –––

Ray Kurzweil thinks we'll achieve age-reversal in a few years. I don't think so. Wishful thinking. Ray is 78.

––– 良くない–––

Portland City Council spends time on the really important matters – whether restaurants should be able to serve foie gras.

And Mayor Keith Wilson offers a paltry $100,000 so that grocery stores return to the bad neighborhoods they fled.

––– 良くない–––

29 April 2026

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

––– 良くない–––

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

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

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

––– 凄い –––

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

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

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

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

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

28 April 2026

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

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

––– 良くない–––


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

––– 良くない–––

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

AI researchers found that when a chatbot responds too quickly, people don't feel that it really spent enough time thinking hard. But when there is a extra delay, people have the impression that yes, the chatbot put in the effort to think about the query. 
"a delay makes people assume the results are better"
––– 凄い –––

With fish oils, there's no clear superiority of EPA over DHA. There's research to support the benefits of EPA and for DHA. But here's a study that suggests Eicosapentaenoic acid reprograms cerebrovascular metabolism and impairs repair after brain injury, with relevance to chronic traumatic encephalopathy. But DHA is the more important PUFA in the brain and plays a role in brain health and repair, and EPA's effect on the brain is mainly mood and mental health, so the data does support DHA being more important when it comes to the brain, whereas EPA has data showing cardiovascular benefit.

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

27 April 2026

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

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

––– 凄い –––


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

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––


26 April 2026

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 凄い –––

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

––– 良くない–––

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

––– 良くない–––