11 March 2026

Meta is making their own AI chips, like Google, Microsoft, Apple and OpenAI. Seems to be a trend, to reduce reliance on nVIDIA. Competition is good.

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M5 Max MacBook Pro Review. It looks good. I'm not using it for gaming so I don't care about the FPS rate.

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Think Twice Before Buying or Using Meta’s Ray-Bans. As I've said, why would you want everything you see to go to Meta? Or the wage slaves in Kenya?

And Meta acquired Moltbook. Ugh. And all those API keys exposed in plaintext. Security disaster. This was probably one of their cheaper acquisitions. Well, OpenClaw's creator was hired by OpenAI. The two platforms are supposed to work with each other. We'll see if they continue to do so. 

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Good. Apple is abandoning a clam shell type foldable phone. I think they should stick with the slab phone design. 😁

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Whoa. Longitudinal associations between cognitive ability and socioeconomic status are partially genetic in nature. Hidden within the academic sounding title is the statement that being smart has a genetic component. It's undeniable – we can all see it. But it's been academic poison to say it out loud. This study was done on twins in Germany, and not globally. So Bell Curve adherents must be cautious in making more out of it than it really says.

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Even Terence Tao has manuscripts rejected. Nothing to be ashamed about if it's just an occasional event and for a reason such as not being the right fit for the journal. His manuscripts got accepted elsewhere.

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Prompt structure is important. Here's someone who created a prompt structure for Claude Code. He calls it flompt .

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Claude Skills: The complete guide.

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Well, it seems the IgNobel winners were more afraid of being harrassed by DHS agents than by the criddlers. Whatever. The media sure has put the fear into them. Nothing to worry about unless you don't have a proper visa.

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Is Hawaii being left behind?  UHERO put out a nice analysis, and the answer is yes.

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“Secret shoppers” tried to set up primary care appointments for someone with Medicare insurance in four cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland.

Overall, they found that 77% of the sample clinics in the four cities accepted new Medicare patients.

But there was an outlier: Portland. Just 35% of the clinics contacted in the city accepted new Medicare patients.

60% of primary care doctors are part of a large healthcare system (Providence, OHSU, Legacy). Not as many independent doctors. That's a problem.

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Crazy. Seattle may have to 'delay or defer' transportation projects to pay for anti-ICE signs. Blue City priorities.

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10 March 2026

AI brain fry is hitting some workers more than others.  Marketing and human resources are affecting the most, as are engineering and software development, which we already knew about. Legal is not seeing so much, probably because they're afraid of using AI. And "leadership" positions are also not afraid – well because they're not ones at risk of being let go, right?

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Daily multivitamin may slow biological aging. Well, this came from the COSMOS dataset and those folks were also taking a cocoa supplement as well, which has cocoa flavonoids. So it wasn't just vitamins. And they just looked at epigenetic patterns in the DNA, not measuring length of life. They were looking at epigenetic clocks not lifespan.

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Heh. An NBC poll showed that people rated ICE agents more favorably than Democrats. How about that? Why Stephen Colbert was up there I have no idea. He's on CBS not NBC. But Marco Rubio is up there, too. I think he's better suited for the next presidency than Vance, and a lot of people agree. 

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Here's one of the first casualties of the AI-reliant world. A computer vision system (Flock) mistakes a 2 for a 7 and a guy gets arrested. How is the AI updated. Maybe there are new signs, or conditions change that make numbers harder to see. As much as we'd like to automate stuff, incidents like this will happen. And law enforcement aren't experts on AI. They don't know the limitations of the software they purchase.

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Walt aims to position itself as a privacy-preserving electronic payment system "tap-to-pay" alternative to Apple Pay and Google Pay. The worst I know is Venmo. If you don't have your settings right, all your contacts know what you purchased and who you paid. I'd like something easier to use than Zelle and not platform restrictive like Apple Cash.

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The IgNobel ceremony will move from Boston to Zurich because some winners are afraid to travel to the U.S. At first I thought they were afraid they might be detained by ICE, but they fear the safety of the Blue cities where these ceremonies are held. It's a shame. Why not hold them in Texas or Florida? Certainly not Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago. Too many criddlers, gooners, and random thugs. But many European cities are no better. Certainly not London, Paris or Brussels. Maybe Tokyo, Seoul or Singapore. But I think people are overreacting a bit.

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Claude 4.6 has a new effort parameter. It tells the LLM how much effort to expend to find the answer to the question you posed. It seems like the minimum setting is "medium". The default is "high" if you don't set the parameter. The idea is that you might save some money and get speedier results if you're willing to sacrifice comprehensiveness (depth).

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This guy discusses why bar charts and line graphs should always start at zero. To avoid deceiving the viewer. What caught my eye was this statement:

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Good grief. Of all those autonomous AI agents zipping around that have been accessing MCP servers:

53% of MCP servers use plaintext API keys stored in config files. These keys get:

  • Committed to git repositories
  • Shared across machines
  • Exposed in data breaches
A hacker's dream! All there, available for the taking. Those dumb script kiddies! So this guy created mcpguard-cli to protect your API key. It's crazy that this isn't built in to the system. It's been all cribbed together and everyone just plays around.

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Microsoft just doesn't care anymore. The Copilot app in Windows (which will be standard) will, when it decides to open a link) will fire up Edge in a side panel, no matter what browser you designate as your default browser. All because it doesn't want to "make you lose context". I'd be pissed. Are people going to use Windows 12?

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Many websites have a robots.txt file, although most web crawlers don't pay attention to it anymore. But now there's something called a llms.txt file. I never heard about it. Most websites don't have it. But some people want to promote its use.

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This is getting ridiculous. To counter all the AI code that Claude models generate, Anthropic launches code review tool to check flood of AI-generated code. How silly is that? Create the disease, then create the medicine to treat it.

And it appears that when you use Claude Code to code access to local models, inference is really slow. Like 90% slower. Because it invalidates the KV cache.  I just use Ollama, and I'm happy. 

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The enshittification of YouTube. YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they’ll be unskippable. Someone needs to create a video library that will replace YT. I thought Rumble would become that platform, but they never gained mind share. Because they were the place where the right wing could post videos without being censored, it became the platform of just right-wing content, which got boring. Even videos making fun of liberals and Democrat politicians gets tiresome all the time. I don't think they'll shake that reputation. Vimeo decided to be artsy-fartsy, and their user interface is not very friendly. They never made any kind of effort to retain viewers. Once you were finished watching the video you came to see, it was like "Well...why are you still here?" If people get tired to YT maybe things will change.

Update (11 March 2026): YouTube is now the world’s largest media company. 

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How bad is Portland’s home construction slump? New data says worst in 15 years. Why build homes for people who don't want to come to the city? 

Recall that the TV show Portlandia was on the air from 2011 to 2018. People were intrigued by the city. Portland no longer gets that kind of publicity, does it? Ted Wheeler took over in 2017 and you can see what happened.

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Statesman Journal runs this article: Oregon ties record for warmest winter on record. Why was it so hot?  But when you look at the graph, what's so unusual? There's no trend.

Let's see what next year's datapoint is before we get carried away. 

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Another Oregon hospital is struggling to stay afloat. It's the Bay Area Hospital in Coos Bay.

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Another article on the Oregon Department of Transportation's $300 million budget shortfall. It seems to me that they could just cancel the Rose Quarter Project, which will save a cool $2 billion. Yeah, I know about the touted benefits, but right now, the roads are usable, and this isn't something that absolutely must be done. Forget "restorative justice" for now, OK? Save this money and there won't be a need to raise taxes.

Update (11 March 2026): They somehow "found" $297 million. Yeah, funny how that works. 

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9 March 2026

Yesterday I noticed that my personal weather app that I coded wasn't working, and that the weather service it depended on was giving HTTP 500 server errors for a lot of other people. It turns about that Claude Desktop also experienced a glitch, and that it was because scheduled tasks did not handle the transition to Daylight Saving Time gracefully. This is another reason why we should abandon this stupid semiannual ritual. It no longer makes sense. Why can't our government get its act together and fix it? I don't want to hear how we should have Congress handle this and that. Congress can't do squat.

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Roblox game-buying frenzy is turning teens into millionaires. There was an article on Bloomberg that came out recently that I was going to link to, but it turns about it's been reported since last year. It's great that enterprising teens are making money like this and it's incredible that such a platform exists. The people putting up the money are game design companies, and it speak volumes about the demand in the gaming industry.

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Humanity Changed an Object's Orbit Around The Sun For The First Time. This is kind of a big deal. This is what movies like Armageddon were about – the ability to divert a space object's orbit. It was actually done, and so perhaps the Earth can be saved from wayward asteroids, provided we have enough lead time, and that the object is small enough.

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The Linux Kernel Will Soon Be MIT-Licensed and Copyleft Will Be Dead Within 5 Years. The change was motivated by AI but GPL has been losing momentum. The MIT license is easier to use and does allow proprietary use and no disclosure is required. Or course this upsets geeks like Richard Stallman, but change is life.

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3-D printing a tiny elephant inside a cell. All right I had to see that to believe it. It's true.

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AI Job Loss Is Breaking the Psyche of Workers, Psychiatrist Warns. Here's a video of a distraught software engineer.
It's odd because I use LLMs to code but don't feel useless or have an empty feeling. Is it just attitude? I think I use AI-assisted coding differently that most engineers. I'm in no rush, so I use it incrementally, and do feel that I am crafting something from scratch. And I learn from the LLM all the time. Such as new libraries that I didn't know about. Or new approaches that I hadn't considered. And I love it when it figures out what is wrong with my code without me wasting an hour or so doing the troubleshooting. 
If this guy is just cranking out apps for a company I can see why he's not necessarily proud of his output. He's a cog in the corporate wheel. I create software for myself, and try to learn while I'm doing so. It's different. 

Chamath Palihapitya is finding that while it may not be hard to start a startup, making it profitable is. Burning through investors' money is not fun. 

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Iranian Women Graduate in STEM at Nearly 3× the Rate of U.S. Women — and Has 5× More PhD Students Per Capita. Yeah, there were a LOT of Persian students and instructors in the AI program I was enrolled in. If you look a country rankings of IQ, Iran is consistently high, usually in the top 10.  So this doesn't surprise me at all. That's why it was especially painful to see them held back by their oppressive government. That will end soon, though.

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I would love to have all the features enabled on all my devices.
I would love to have Siri on my phone.
I would love to have Alexa control the lighting in my house and play music on command.
I would love to own an electric car with over-the-air updates.
I would love to log in with my Google account everywhere.
I would love to sign up for your newsletter.
I would love to try the free trial.
I would love to load all my credit cards onto my phone.
I would love all of that.

But I can't.

I've had those feelings. I even don't want websites to set cookies in my browser. The web is not what it used to be. 

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Sinkhole.app. Not sure why they named it "sinkhole" but this could come in handy. Instead of paying for apps that do simple things, here's a utility collection that will do these for free. Public service.

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Have you switched to Ghostty? I have, although I didn't know about all the other things that made it better.

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Apple's foldable phone may be called Ultra, and may cost a whopping $2900. I don't think I need it, frankly. I'm still waiting for Tony Stark's phone.

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Substance Wiki. Great resource for info on nootropics and psychoactive supplements.

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Washington state gas prices are soaring. Don't just blame the Iran bombing. Blame all those carbon taxes. The state is becoming like California.

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Oregon Workweek Hits Lowest Level Since 2010 As Hours Shrink. How is the state going to be prosperous and attract business like this? It's a Doom Loop.

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Facing $35 million deficit, Portland State University considers eliminating or reducing 19 academic departments. The incredible shrinking university. Yeah, don't blame "fascists" for your demise. You indulged protestors and let them trash the place. Your feeble efforts to restore order only made you look weak in students' eyes. You stifled conservative voices. Now the city, run by the Democrats Socialsts you probably support, make it dangerous to walk the streets around the Park Blocks. So PSU joins the sad list of many other Portland institutions on the decline. And probably another one to shut down after many decades of existence.

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Fired bureau directors are leaving Portland with hundreds of thousands of dollars in severance payments, as the city stares down another massive budget hole in the upcoming fiscal year.
The city is so irresponsible with taxpayer money. 

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8 March 2026

It makes sense. If websites made you enter the zip code first, you wouldn't have to type so much. So why don't they do it?

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When British Columbia recently decided to go permanent DST, it cause a lot of groans from some programmers. Here's why. Programmers having to deal with weather forecasting, tide charts to some security systems, to anything that uses local time, all have to take this into account. If you want to be accurate.

Daylight-saving time is a $672 million hit to the U.S. economy. It really should be ended.

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A new radiation therapy delivery system called FLASH Radiotherapy that delivers a precise burst of ultrahigh-power radiation can kills tumor cells while better sparing surrounding normal cells.

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Bedtime Procrastination Might Explain Why Your Brain Craves Midnight Scrolling Under Pressure. Yeah, I know the feeling. When I was working I couldn't calm down my mind to get to sleep.

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Maybe reskilling people is less expensive than firing them due to AI automation?

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Is Agent Skills replacing RAG? Nah, you still need RAG. You can use these both together. Agent Skills is just structured task execution. 

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Gen Z graduates who majored in ‘AI-proof’ careers like pharmacy, biology, and education are making less than $50,000 after graduation. Wow, I remember when you could make good income with a pharmacy degree. Not anymore, I guess. Even theology and religion and performing arts people make more. What a world we live in now.


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Agents of Chaos. What can happen when you let agents run wild autonomously. This is a city where autonomous cars are everywhere. Would you like to live there? Commute there?

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All right! The M5 Mac Studio will get updated this summer.  More on the rumors about an M6 Macbook Pro. It'll be called the Macbook Ultra. Maybe.  But this guy says not to wait for this because it could be a long while before it is actually available.  I haven't heard the specs on the M6 chip, so I really don't know how much faster it will be than the M5. Apple must know that ML engineers have been wanting something fast for a long time. Even something 80% as fast as the RTX5090 would be great in the Apple ecosystem.

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Oregonians are working the fewest hours since 2010. And who does The Oregonian blame for this? Trump's tariffs, of course. Not the high minimum wage requirement?  That's the real reason.

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The medical residency program at OHSU survives being cut. For now, anyway. Oregon hasn't finished declining.

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Portland students could see shortened school year as budget gap grows to $14M. Of course. Who cares about students' education, right Tina?

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Well that's reassuring. “Drug impaired driving is just way off the charts.”  And this is just Astoria. It's probably worse in the Portland area. 
“Marijuana effects your body a lot more than you think,” she said. “You don’t realize what marijuana is actually doing to your brain and your body.”
Yeah, like Oregonians care.

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I’m a longevity doctor. This is why I’ll never give up alcohol.  This doctor is overweight. Who is he to dispense longevity advice. You do you, doc.

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7 March 2026

Yet another way of treating refractory atrial fibrillation – with neodymium–iron–boron (NdFeB) magnetic particles in a gel that hardens in 60 seconds. Squirt that into the left atrium, hold the gel in place with a magnetic until it hardens, and then you have ablated the atrium.  Right now, other options include the Watchman procedure, the LARIAT, and the AtriClip. This one might be technically easier, but there is some learning curve.

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The Blood of Centenarians Reveals 37 Proteins Linked With Slower Aging. Scientists compared the blood of centerians with hospitalized geriatric patients (age 80–90 years) and younger healthy participants (age 30–60 years), and found 137 differentially-expressed proteins, but there was a subset of 37 proteins with a younger signature in the centenarians. These were felt to be significant. This paper is just hypothesis-generating, and does not translate into action items that one can or should do now. 

But here's a paper that says that a more positive attitude towards aging can lead to measurable improvement in certain cognitive and physical functioning parameters. I'm not sure about this study. It has the feel of being one of those research findings that can't be reproduced. But it certainly doesn't hurt to think positively. 

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I almost was going to get the new Macbook Pro with the M5 chip, but there are rumors that Apple may release an M6 Macbook Pro this year, too. With an OLED display. Wow. Better wait and see.

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Whenever there's the switch to DST and back we get articles about what's going with legislation to make Standard Time or Daylight Saving Time permanent. Here is such an article. This is why I laugh whenever some angry person says that an issue needs to be decided by Congress. They can't even solve simple things like this. Asking Congress to take care of a problem should be the last resort. Even the Supreme Court resolves issues more quickly.

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Looks like Washington state is going to have a millionaires tax after all. Idiots. Let's see what it does to the affluent people there. Many, of course, can't move quickly, but I bet they will start looking at options. This is the complete opposite of what the dotcom era did to Washington – increased the number of millionaires in the state. This will do the exact opposite. The only thing keeping Oregon from doing something similar is that the state doesn't have enough millionaires to make a difference. 

Nearly three-quarters of Oregonians are grappling with rising living costs, leading to record household debt and a 25% increase in bankruptcy filings in 2025.

According to the 2026 Oregon Financial Wellness Scorecard, these pressures highlight concerning economic and personal finance trends statewide. The scorecard reveals that while median household income rose, nearly half of Oregonians lack emergency savings, unable to cover a $500 expense. Systemic barriers continue to hinder financial progress for many.
Doesn't sound too healthy does it?

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6 March 2026

97% in 9 minutes: BYD’s new EV battery ends range anxiety with ultra-fast charging. Now THAT'S a fast battery. If all batteries were like this, EV cars would make sense. That plus distance. Otherwise, no.

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Tech titans vow to ‘take back’ California from lefties, call out billionaires fleeing. Those "tech titans" were previously Democrats. They probably still are, but now they see what Dem policies lead to when you run out of money.

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Surprising gender biases in GPT. GPT-4 thinks it's OK to torture a woman to prevent a nuclear apocalypse, but not to abuse women. LLMs don't really understand things. 

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In Santa Cruz, the Salty Otter restaurant got a lot of flak when using AI to help design a new logo for the window. Instead of using a local artist, which would have been more expensive. People getting a little touchy aren't they?

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Sick of Microsoft and Google? This new European office suite is a private, open-source alternative. It's not just usability concerns, but also security concerns. Especially now that AI is going to be the center of everything. Guess they didn't want Microslop. Here's where to get Office.EU. They even appropriate the name.

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Unihertz has come up with a phone that's supposed to be like a Blackberry. It's full of Google stuff. I don't know why you'd want it, really. It's just novel. 

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A single dose of cocoa flavanols improves cognitive performance during aerobic exercise. They don't say where they sourced the cocoa flavonoids. Paper here.

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Here are details on how hackers stole secrets from the Mexican government. Seems to be mainly jailbreaking skills. But it still doesn't explain how Mexican government files were accessible by Claude. How did they let those files get uploaded for training? And it's still obfuscated as to exactly what files they were able to obtain.

And watch this incredible video of Dario Amodei trying to defend himself against his recent decisions to refuse the Pentagon and lay off a lot of employees. It doesn't seem AI-generated, but one never knows. It's not a good look, though. 

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Online harrassement is going to get worse with AI agents running loose. Are we going to look back and say that these were the good ol' days?

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RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine policies are “unreviewable,” DOJ lawyer tells judge.  A person in charge of HHS should have been a physician, not a lawyer or politician. RFK Jr's appointment was political, I understand, but it's sure not helping him gain credibility. But it's sad that the doctors who are complaining about RFK Jr also lost a lot of credibility supporting harsh vax mandates, stupid masking policies and now transgender surgeries and puberty blockers. RFK Jr is a great diet and exercise sponsor, but he needs to get some creditable physicians on his team to lay out believable science and reasoning, or else any efficacy his office carries will be lost and trashed.

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Read the opening of Donald Knuth's latest paper:
Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 
Yeah, Claude 4.6 Opus is really that good. I like it, too.

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But Claude can reverse-engineer your binary. No longer can an engineer feel safe in protecting intellectual property when releasing the binary of the code. Because Claude can work out the source code, and there goes your original idea. Suddenly its available for copying and modification. This is wild.

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Female astronauts face clotting risks, five-day weightlessness simulation suggests. Estrogenic effects, perhaps? Next step: how to mitigate this.

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This is a fictional scenario to showcase how medical chatbots can be hijacked nefariously.  It's specifically calling caution to Utah's recent legislation allowing chatbots to prescribe medication without human involvement.

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The Internet was never a place for children. I've believed that from the beginning. Now efforts to make the Internet more child-friendly will involve age-verification.  And that's going to have repercussions with regard to privacy. There are too many bad players who would love to have fun being able to identify people on the web. It reminds of a time when someone purchased license plate information from the state and posted it on a website. Soon everyone was looking up people's plates and people were getting harrassed.

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Tina Kotek finds that Oregon doesn't have enough behavioral health workers and wants to lower standards to get more. That's not how it works, Tina. Make Oregon more attractive so the right kind of people will actually want to move to the state.

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Portland eyes unspent housing funds to fill empty affordable housing units. See? There was no need to raise taxes. Money was already there. 
And get this: City Council Directs $150,000 to Legal Support for Immigrants and Refugees. They were even considering twice that amount!!

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Senate bill 1541 dies!  Thank goodness. But Khanh Pham says she isn't giving up!  Oh boy.  And look – the climate change irreversibility deadline has been moved to 2030 now! Wow, it keeps changing. Weren't we supposed to be at the "point of no return" in a "true planetary emergency" by 2016, according to Al Gore? But AOC moved it to 2031, so we were granted a reprieve?

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Nike to record $300 million cost-cutting charge, hints at more company turmoil. Nike is still the largest company in Oregon that's not a hospital so how it does matters to the state. Should they have spent all that money on building all those weird-looking office buildings several years ago, which I'm sure cost a lot of money to architect and construct.

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The real estate market in the Puget Sound is crappy, and Seattle Times thinks its because of the Iran bombing. Yeah, I thought so, too. Read the article.

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5 March 2026

Anthropic's Dario Amodei seems to be begging to re-open negotiations with the Pentagon, likely after the company took at big financial hit with the federal government terminating usage of Claude. Meanwhile Sam Altman at OpenAI admits that he can't control Pentagon's use of their products. Now nVIDIA has announced that it will "pull back" on investments with both OpenAI and Anthropic. Huang also said that the $30 billion OpenAI investment ‘might be the last’. Is he worried that OpenAI may not deliver on their grandiose promises, despite the lucrative contract with the DoW?  What's going on?

OpenAI is changing GPT 5.3's output to keep you using it. It's like TikTok or YouTube shorts. 

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"This job has become the ultimate case study for why Al won't replace human workers."  CNN is missing the point that the radiology example involves computer vision technology, and not LLMs which is causing the real threat on job replacement by AI. Image processing tech can enhance the diagnostic capabilities of the radiologist (although there are nuances to that). But LLMs can mimic conversational and query-answer interaction well enough that low-skills human jobs are being replaced. AI is not all one thing.

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Yikes. A pediatric medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction. This is just unbelievable. Passing case reports as real when they were all fictional. How do these people sleep at night?

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Wikipedia is corrupt and untrustworthy. It's been known that people editors are left-leaning and tend to poison the website with left-leaning propaganda. But I figured that as long I kept to math and science I'd be OK. But I also do look at Wikipedia history articles, and for modern history, it's now completely untrustworthy.

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Since AI-generated art is not copyrightable, what about AI-generated code? This is a good point since many companies are now using AI to create the software that runs their company. So MALUS has decided to dispense with the deception and just take open source code, reverse-engineer it, and make it their own. They call it "liberation". But they do raise some good points, especially as often unmaintained open source software is being relied upon for mission-critical projects. Will these guys deliver, to make it worth the money they will charge. We'll just have to see.

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We have more privacy controls yet less privacy than ever. Thanks to GDPR, we are more aware of how much information websites want to obtain from us. And we are compelled to accept things and hand over information and allow cookies and LSO to be stored on our computer, because otherwise things won't work. For example you can't order a sandwich on Subway's online ordering system without handing over a bunch of unnecessary information and accepting nearly all of their cookies, many of which are for tracking and advertising. Privacy is an illusion. And in the age of AI, online anonymity will be completely gone. I've always thought that someone could make a killing selling alternative identities that people could purchase. In the future, that's what we have to do to live privately. I often think about the nice solution James Penney got from Jack Reacher. Great story. It's what we'll all need to get by in the brave new world of the near future. 

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Why your IQ no longer matters in the era of AI. Yeah, being smart isn't enough. You need execution. You need a high Agility Quotient.

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I must say that the ad for the new Macbook Neo is well done. But you wouldn't expect anything less from Apple.

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The yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan. This is something that would never fly anywhere else in the world. Can you imagine this in the U.S.? These women would be attacked so quickly. Maybe in parts of rural America would it work. Even in Europe, such a program would not be safe. Japan is the last bastion of a world where you can have nice things. This is precisely why the Japanese elected Sanae Takaichi to be PM.

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I wonder if people that wear Meta's Ray-Ban AI glasses realize that they are being spied upon, too?

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Cancer blood tests are everywhere. Do they really work? They detect mutations and epigenetic changes associated with cancer, but the question is: what do you do with this information? When do you initiate some action, and what are the consequences of these actions? Are you ready to have a radiation-exposing CT scan or have some body part removed if the test is positive? 

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Interesting inteview with Dwarkesh and Gwern. Not only is the interviewee interesting, but they way they conducted it to preserve Gwern's anonymity (which I'm surprised is still intact all these years). Now THERE'S a guy who knows how to stay hidden.

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Why can’t you tune your guitar? I didn't know you couldn't. Well, not perfectly in the mathematical sense. But this is the same with the piano.

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Someone wants to build a new Flash for 2026. Remember the old Flash, which everyone eventually hated because it was insecure and slowed down loading of websites? It did add dynamic content which added some visual interest, but in the end, it wasn't worth it. In 2026, it could succeed if it were made secure. But do we really need it?

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Some good news. Plan to add 1,700 acres of Hillsboro industrial land dies in Legislative committee. Not in Hillsboro, please. Not in North Plains, either. Put datacenters in north Portland, which is a dump already.  So the one year moratorium on datacenter tax breaks won't matter? 

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Extensive copper theft from street lamps along I-84. More Portland goodness. They're replacing the wiring with aluminum, which is cheaper. However with aluminum wiring, there is increased fire hazards because of increased electrical resistance, and aluminum corrodes more quickly, requiring increased maintenance. Plus, you have to use thicker wire because of the decreased conductivity. Aluminum has lower tensile strength and breaks more easily under stress. This may end up being more expensive for Portland.

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Portland still wants to have an arts tax. Which is dumb because any art that's put up gets trashed and has to be placed in storage. Portland "art" consists of graffiti.  But the city still wants to take people's money, and now they're thinking of taxing Netflix use. Why do we need to fund art?  That's something that an affluent city might consider. Not a poor, struggling municipality.

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Bob Ferguson's millionaire income tax plan for Washington residents might be bumped to 2027. Because even some of the more sensible Democrats realize that it's going to lead to money flight. 
Related: Starbucks is already looking to Nashville to expand. They say they'll still keep their HQ in Seattle, but who knows?

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4 March 2026

Windows 12 Reportedly Set for Release This Year as a Fully Modular, Subscription-Based, AI-Focused OS. I don't use Windows, but if I did, I'd be looking at switching to Mac or Linux. Having AI always on is a sure way of enabling inadvertent privacy and security breaches.

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A history of CSS. CSS used to be simple and made sense. Now it has become really un-intuitive to work with, and the syntax is inconsistent. Like sometimes you use "middle" but at other times it's "center". There's a darn good reason why people struggle with something as simple as "centering a div".

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"Baby brain" is a cliche long-used to describe women becoming forgetful and feeling less capable during pregnancy. "Grey matter - the nerve-rich part of the brain involved in processing information, emotions and empathy - decreases by an average of nearly 5% during pregnancy." 
While the pregnant women lost an average of nearly 5% of their grey matter, it then partially returned - although not fully - by six months after giving birth. In contrast, the amount of grey matter in the women who were not pregnant stayed quite steady.
I've definitely noticed that mothers have a different personality than childless women. Maybe this is why women are more at risk of developing dementia later on.

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Ron Wyden is right but for the wrong reason. He's in favor of retaining Section 230 protections for companies like Meta and X. But it's not so that Trump can censor critics. You'd think he would remember that Trump was a victim of censorship himself. Section 230 makes it possible for smaller sites, like blogs and Discord, and Mastodon to exist and not have to fend off numerous lawsuits. Twitter and Meta used to censor all the time. So retaining Section 230 doesn't protect us from censorship. The author of this article also thinks that Trump would "wage open war on free expression—retaliating against media companies, threatening platforms, unleashing threats from federal agencies on critics". Puh-leeze. The media has been doing that to conservatives for a long time. They always seem to forget these things.

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Apple just announced the Macbook Neo. But judging from the website images, this computer is targeted to women.

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1.5 Million Users Leave ChatGPT. If You Cancel, Make Sure You Do This First. It seems people don't like it that Sam Altman is working with the Pentagon. But so is Meta and Google. Oh well, before you leave, there are some things you might want to do.

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Google faces lawsuit after Gemini chatbot allegedly instructed man to kill himself. I don't know if you've ever experimented with this, but having your chatbot speak to you, instead of just typing things on a screen, really adds to the realism. It's a whole new experience. I can understand how this guy got taken. Perhaps public chat should use a neutral computer voice for now. Some people aren't ready for that kind of realism.

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The Death of a Portland Clinic. Family Medical Group had to shut down. After being bought out by Optum. This is a sad trend in medicine and not going away any time soon, thanks to changes brought about by the ACA. It's no longer feasible, in many cases, for a physician group to own a clinic anymore. Sadly, the public is unaware of this. 

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New York Could Prohibit Chatbot Advice on Medical, Legal, and Engineering Questions. Well, this might kill of some AI startups and also restrict access by LLM providers. Who wants to take on the risk? This is a terrible law, and will deprive professionals of powerful tools that could make their job easier.  Stupid.

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3 March 2026

Are AI Datacenters Increasing Electric Bills for American Households? This is an important analysis to read, especially for our state leaders. This article is based on the grid in Texas (ERCOT) and the East Coast (PJM) but the reasoning still applies to us. The conclusion:  Datacenters are not the primary cause of rising electricity bills — poor market design is. "The fault is government policy, not AI."  

In PJM, we think poor market design is the main culprit. Most of the 15% increase in household electricity bills in PJM is driven by a widely misunderstood and somewhat obscure mechanism: the BRA capacity auction. 

Now look at Texas. The state is witnessing an equivalent AI buildout, with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic all building massive facilities. Yet power futures in Texas have moved only a few percent in the past year. No 9x spike, no crisis, very different market design.

Datacenters do contribute to incremental load growth and modestly higher energy prices in both regions (forward energy prices rose 11–20% in both PJM and ERCOT). But the dramatic bill increases hitting PJM consumers — the 9.3x capacity price spike translating to roughly $25–30/month more per household — are primarily the product of PJM's centrally planned capacity auction design amplifying uncertain forecasts, not of datacenters physically consuming too much power. The same datacenter growth in Texas, under a different market structure, has produced no comparable price shock for consumers.

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This is apparently AOC's former climate activist, and it's a sight to behold as she finally understands that climate activism was all bullshit. The clues have always been there. She just needed to see. 
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This is why I don't get excited about a lot of things in the news these days. You read this – it's basically a confession. So there was rampant election fraud. Yet, what's going to happen? Will we get reform and integrity? I'm not holding my breath. Why even report stuff like this anymore? 

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Anthropic built a connector between Claude and the ClinicalTrials.gov website. This could be very helpful for those seeking information about clinical trials. I remember there was a startup that arose during the dotcom heyday that aspired to connect people to clinical trials. It was funded by some wealthy woman, but the data entry was going to be done by hand and that proved too onerous. The effort shut down, sadly. Now there is AI to automate things. This is also helpful because sometimes drug companies will post results in Clinicaltrials.gov when they don't want to publish negative results, such as the influenza mRNA vaccine being no better than standard quadrivalent vaccine in those >65 years.  This is the only way you'd find out, because in the NEJM paper, they only published data for the younger age group (≤64 years) and declared the mRNA vaccine to be superior to the standard vax.

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Spy Satellite simulator looks at what happened in Iran. This is really cool, and he makes that project available on his GitHub page.

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Teenager wants to cure cancer in his homemade lab, but the FBI found out. It's not safe to be a "boy genius" anymore.

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Why was this even necessary?  The U.S. Supreme Court put a stop to allowing government-run schools to keep secretly transitioning children without the parents' knowledge. What kind of an insane world do we live in that this has to be a law? Sick.
Well Oregon wants to pass a bill that would allow this. "prevents officials from cooperating with investigations " Oregon is a really sick state, basically protecting pedophiles. 

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The U.S. Supreme Court also declared that AI-generated art is not copyrightable. Seems reasonable to me. If you want to be that kind of artist, come up with your own vision model and put in your own weights that no one else can copy.

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Microsoft gets tired of “Microslop,” bans the word on its Discord, then locks the server after backlash. The old Streisand effect strikes again. The best way to counter this is to stop making slop. Start impressing people with your excellence, instead of telling folks what insults they must not use.

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Physics Girl is back!

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Attempting to detect smart glasses nearby and warn you. It picks up Bluetooth signatures. I don't think I'm going to need this now, but in the future, who knows?

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Anonymous credentials: an illustrated primer.  For life in a dystopian society. And then there's this article from Proton.me: How to protect your privacy at protests. The best way is not to go, of course, and get themselves into trouble. 
But in one of the rare instances where Oregon did the right thing is the passage of the Oregon Consumer Privacy Act. 

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I was reading this about a language snafu in the Metro Council. This is what Councilor Juan Carlos González said:
"There is a..you know, local adaptability. There is a sense that we need to significantly improve regionalism through the lens of which regionalism will thrive in this measure. But also you know we have, you know, Washington County, Clackamas County doing very important work, and I'm concerned about potential consequences that we're not fully evaluating when we talk about a specific definition of that."
Got that?  When I've spoken gobbledegook like that, people would say to me "in English, please".  Clearly a figure of speech, but it was taken seriously, and the council member dug a deeper hole by issuing an apology in Spanish. 🙄
People think that diversity will be like the Federation of Planets type of society, but the reality is more like Futurama. 
So some guy came up with an Accent Converter for video meetings.  I have mixed feelings about this. It's better to let people see how you really are, but if getting people to understand difficult accents really helps move things along, then I guess it's better than the alternative. 

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AI apps designed for the legal profession aren't as good as plain old ChatGPT. That's quite the opposite of what we see in the medical profession, where ChatGPT is inferior to apps trained on medical datasets. So legal AI startups can't get off the ground. But the legal profession should be one area where AI excels. My guess is that the models are not well trained or the architecture needs improvement.

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ChatGPT gets your prompt before you hit send! Be careful when you type in that text input box. Even though you don't hit send, ChatGPT knows what you are thinking. So you might benefit from Privacy Shield, which anonymizes all the protected identifiable information you enter. 

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A small company's Gemini API key was stolen and the thief racked up a huge bill with it. Now they might go bankrupt. This is a great reason to not use plaintext .env files to store your secrets. But it also appears that Google changed the rules about API keys, so you'd REALLY better keep them secret. 

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Have you ever felt that it was later or earlier in the day than it actually was? I've had that feeling many times. Here's a map that shows the discrepancy between mean solar time and standard time. It seems most of the world is quite off. But the United States is fine the way it is, and we should just stay on Standard Time indefinitely. 

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2 March 2026

Heh. People don't seem to want Apple's brand of AI on their phones. They probably use ChatGPT on their phones, so it's not the phone part or the AI part. It's just Apple's own AI that they don't want. The Siri failure really damaged the brand, didn't it?

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AI Is Acing Math Exams Faster Than Scientists Write Them.  Rapid advances are rendering benchmarks obsolete in record time. Kinda like in medicine. Oh well, gotta keep up with the times. But we may end up with a bunch of mathematicians who won't know how to solve problems without AI help.

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Large language models don’t “learn”—they copy. Well, they do learn, but what they remember is an approximation of the training data. It's not really copying if the training is done right. But if it has the memory resources, it might find that they best way to minimize the loss function is to store a copy rather than train on it.

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Andrej Karpathy has made some progress on his microgpt. Could be useful in edge devices.

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"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else." I never heard of Eagleson's Law. It kinda makes sense if you don't document your code well enough. But yeah, vibe code is never really your own code is it?

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Wezzly Companion is a way to give LLMs the ability to "see" what's on your computer. Many frontier models can already parse images that you feed in, like the geoguessers, so maybe this might be good for local open source models.

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Newfound third cell type enables fully functional hair follicles in the lab. Wow, maybe baldness may be treatable in the not too distant future.

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Brain scans reveal why you can't resist a snack, even when you're full. I know this feeling.

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Wow. Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering have developed an oral agent that targets deficient p53 protein. It's called rezatapopt, and it's only effective against the Y220C mutation. But it's a start anyway. Drugs like this could make a huge difference in Li-Fraumeni Syndrome.

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What to know before asking an AI chatbot for health advice. There are limitations to the information you get and people should know about it.

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Washington Democrats can't resist being mini-dictators. State legislators will determine vaccine requirements now, not the CDC. Would you trust health advice from this guy???

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Gotta love Ron Wyden. He thinks that the decision to attack Iran should have been made by Congress. Yeah right, where great ideas go to die. And this statement: 
he’s “not sure the Iranian people really want another conflict.”
Hell yeah, they do! They're cheering in the streets.

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