13 June 2026

Why Yann LeCun is Spending $1 Billion to Replace LLMs with JEPA. JEPA is Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture. 

JEPA...focuses on modeling the physical world through abstract representations, drawing inspiration from how humans, particularly infants, learn by observing and interacting with their environment.

You can listed to Le Cun explain it all himself in this video.

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Anthropic's Fable suddenly went offline. Supposedly the federal government didn't want it to get into the hands of foreign entities. But maybe there's an additional explanation. Apparently Fable was jailbroken by a security researcher, Pliny the Liberator. And pretty quickly, too. So if it could be done quickly, imagine what China or Russia could do. Better to take it offline for now.

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To maximize the lifespan of your Apple product, it's best to set the maximum charge at 80%. Use Apple's smart charging program to orchestrate the charging schedule.

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FDA Approves ‘New’ sunscreen ingredient bemotrizinol (PARSOL Shield) used in Europe and Asia for years. But what I'm seeing as an ingredient in the Korean and Japanese sunscreens is avobenzone. The problem is that it is often paired with ingredients such as homosalate, octinoxate, oxybenzone, and octocrylene, which are potential endocrine disruptors, with potential estrogenic stimulatory effects, and these agents are absorbed through the skin. I see that even Neutrogena sunscreen has homosalate. Two Asian sunscreens that seem to be safe are Beauty of Joseon Relief Sun: Rice + Probiotic and Round Lab Birch Juice Moisturizing Sunscreen, which you can get on Amazon.

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The Chinese are using plastic heads in their Teslas to fool the onboard AI that monitors their gaze. Tesla will probably upgrade their AI to watch out for this. Until then...

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Someone asked Claude who is most likely to be Satoshi Nakamoto. I have no basis to agree or disagree with Claude.

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General-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks. This is embarrassing. There are AI models like OpenEvidence and UpToDate Expert AI that specialize in answering medical questions. But compared with general purpose frontier models, they were inferior. That's not going to instill investor confidence, is it?

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But of course! Oregon lawmakers demand that the Feds allow mail-in voting. They need mail-in voting to win. Listen to Michael Knowles:
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Oregon's population is getting older as younger wage-earning segment move out of the state. It's not good for the state's economics to have more old people in the state. They don't bring in money and they don't spend as much. But can you blame hard working people for not wanting to stay in Oregon?

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12 June 2026

Scientists remove the extra chromosome that causes Down Syndrome. Scientists from Japan were able to use CRISPR-Cas9 technology to target just one allele of in a trisomy 9 culture of fibroblast cells. They were successful in about 13.9% compared with only 0.42% of controls. They did observe small insertions and deletions that were too small to detect on the usual G-banding staining, but the significance of these is unclear. This is a start, and should it become more effective, it could transform the lives of children with Down's Syndrome. Paper here.

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Major depression may be associated with genetic changes that can be detected in blood leukocytes. The genes involved are those relevant to synapse biology. This suggests that the cause of depression is indeed likely genetic. Paper here.

And speaking of depression, OHSU researchers link elevated brain levels of serotonin to tinnitus. The study was done in mice, so we don't know for sure if they experienced ringing in the ears, but the scientists think so. 

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Cool. A working model of the universe, in your browser.

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Oh no! Scientists found that glucosamine, a supplement taken by 40 million Americans for joint pain is associated with 25% faster progression to Alzheimer’s in people with early memory decline. Turns out that it causes glycosylation of brain tissue (similar to diabetes mellitus).

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Gwern has an idea to develop a guardian angel LLM. Interesting idea. Maybe he can market it.

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Script kiddie's agent bankrupts him. This is why I don't trust autonomous agents.

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More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing. Even in Britain, universities are closing. What could be the cause? The authors skirt around the issue. Declining birth rates. Declining international students. But how does that explain the situation in Britain? Oh, they blame far-right influence:
Universities are not popular. They are under increasing assault from the populist right as ridiculous factories of so-called “woke” ideas, and the vast debts that have been placed on young people have come to seem like less and less of a good deal as the terms have changed. Two-thirds of students tell YouGov that they think their tuition is poor value for money: only 6 per cent of voters said they wanted more university spending in one 2024 poll. The so-called “graduate premium” of higher earnings for workers with degrees does still exist, but at 24 per cent among young people it’s not what it was.
Yeah, I think the educators are not what they once were.

But some students are finding a way to get the university education they dreamed of, even if they don't go in through usual channels.

And here's Oregon: Most of Oregon’s State Teacher Prep Programs Still Get an F in Reading Instruction. Take a look at the teachers. Whoa, they sure don't look like the teachers I had when I was growing up. 😬

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In pursuit of beauty, Chinese women take unapproved measures with unexpected consequences. Those Chinese doctors should be jailed for this. How do they live with themselves?

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Oregon pulls out of Great American State Fair in Washington, D.C. Most of the poll takers do not support Kotek's decision. How petty our leaders are. 🙄

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11 June 2026

New GLP-3 drug significantly slashes both weight and blood sugar levels in Phase III trial. This drug is retatrutide. GLP-3 is shorthand for the fact that it is an agonist of three enzymes: glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), gastric inhibitory polypeptide (GIP), and glucagon. So it beats drugs like tirzepatide, which only inhibits two enzymes: glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) and gastric inhibitory polypeptide (GIP). And it's better than semaglutide which only inhibits glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1). So it's the most effective agent, but it's not yet FDA-approved.

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Some had wanted Meta to add a red light on its glasses signaling that the camera was on, and recording people, but now it appears that Meta has decided to pull facial recognition code from its smart glasses. I can't believe Zuck would do that, and suspect that he has something else up his sleeve.

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Why You Should Say 'No' to Being an Organ-Donor. I'm an organ donor. What should be done is to appoint someone to be one's medical power of attorney who can be trusted to make the right decision. People still need a adequate supply of donors, and I would not want to stop being a donor just for this unlikely scenario.

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Can’t Pay Medical Bills? Trump Officials Suggest Getting a Loan. OK, while most of Trump's policies are so much better than the last guy's, I am baffled by this suggestion. I have written to the Trump administration with ideas on how to revamp the healthcare industry. People need an alternative to Obamacare, and although insurance executives might not like it, there is a way to lower prices and improve quality of care for just about everyone. No, it is not universal healthcare, which actually would make things far worse. My idea is not an original one, and I heard about it from reading this book. We need to leverage competitive forces to make healthcare entities fight for the business of the consumer, rather than have the powerless consumer be beholden to what insurance companies want. Doctors have long lost the battle, and are but pawns in the system as patients. I wish Trump and his advisors would listen.

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No, Dr. Brian Druker is not an ivermectin shill.

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COVID-19 was a scammer's dream, wasn't it?

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And Google is worried about agents running wild and breaking stuff. Even Simon Willison was shocked at what Claude Fable was able to do on its own. Not to mention racking up a bill with Anthropic.

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The Trump administration has had enough of electoral cheating, and since some Blue states won't turn over voter rolls, while still expecting to participate in federal elections that will affect the entire country, Trump is having the postal system not be partisan to their scams, and will not deliver ballots. I think this is a great idea. Blue states can defraud their own citizens if they want, but they will not scam the entire nation.

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The UK is taking a page from Korth Korea's playbook. Phones will have to have a government app installed that will enable tracking and snooping.

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Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital. The ability to think persistently, solving a problem to the end, is going to be the new human capital. Well, it always was, until DEI made thinking unnecessary. But yeah, a person able to stick to solving a problem will be valuable indeed.

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Here's a collection of useful tools that you might use. It's too-ly.eu. It's mainly for web developers.

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10 June 2026

Voyager is a fascinating tool – like Star Trek come true. You can call people in other countries, and through Translate GPT, get instantaneous translation. This should get more publicity. Of course, it uses token costs, so I can understand why these guys don't want too much traffic.

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The enthusiasm regarding the capabilities and usefulness of large-scale AI in health care is understandable. Nevertheless, the massive environmental, economic, and social costs should be considered while developing and using them. Improving the performance and clinical value of AI without overlooking its costs is important for balancing the sustainability of large-scale AI and its usefulness in health care.
People are already complaining about how much datacenters spew out in pollution. Wait until the healthcare industry starts getting seriously involved.  Yikes!

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iOS 27 features we didn’t see onstage. Minor things, mainly UI changes. Just when I started learning where all the camera app controls were, I probably have to relearn them.

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The first and unsurprising observation is that being useful on these tasks requires your agent to have context, which means: relatively unrestricted access to your private data. You know about your invitees’ availability because they texted it to you. You know about Mike’s allergy because you’ve talked about it with him or jotted it down somewhere. (This could mean iMessages, email, contacts, or personal notes.) Re-entering all of this data into an agent would be annoying and time consuming and the whole point of an agent is to save you time. The winning personal assistant doesn’t win just because it’s smart: it wins because it “already knows” the things you need it to know, like a personal assistant who sits next to your desk.

Allow me to dig into the details just a bit deeper. The agent might scan your messages database to learn the parameters needed to schedule your dinner. Or, in a more token-efficient system, it might read your messages continuously and store a “memory” that distills useful facts that it might need later. Both can be functionally equivalent, but one produces an artifact that may be highly sensitive. And keep in mind that the set of facts that might be useful is very broad. For example, Mike’s allergy is one of those facts. But there are many others. For example, the private conversation you had where you discovered that Mike was having an affair is potentially another fact that could be stored or accessed by a system. Memory or not, this data will all be within the agent’s view, and you’ll have to hope that it knows which one to operate on.
All of a sudden, the AI agent knows about your confidential text messages and incorporates that into its memory, and things you might regret having sent once is not part of the agent's permanent memory. OpenClaw can leak your secrets, too.

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We see Siri not as a separate chatbot, just an unintegrated place you go and chit-chat, but rather as an integral, conversational tool that you use in the moment, deeply integrated into your experience.
Who needs this stuff, really? This is just like when doctors have AI software foisted upon them that they don't really need.

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Speaking of doctors, here's a radiology article where they looked at AI models. They refer to early models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet as a vLLM. I did a double-take. That model is not a vLLM (virtual LLM). I think what the authors are thinking of are multimodal LLMs. And the abbreviation for vision LLMs is VLM.

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GLP-1s appear to protect against cancer. Researchers are trying to figure out how. This is actually not a new observation. I suspect that by getting people to lose weight, cancer risk declines. But what mechanisms are involved are still worth exploring.

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There's a lot of online postings about Claude 5 Fable, which is the consumer version of Mythos. Someone thinks they have found the leaked system prompt. And Fable will apparently balk when you use the word "cancer" in your user prompt. Violates guardrails, or something like that. Biosecurity risk, they call it.

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Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers. So now what will Google do? Guess they'll have to redirect the user to the underlying website after all, instead of keeping them on the Google site with their AI-generated summary, so you don't have to actually go to the website and give them traffic.

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New research links even low alcohol consumption to cancer, heart disease, and premature death. You might be able to still have some alcohol, though. One drink of wine or one beer daily might be OK. Two drinks – definitely not. The less, the better.

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First Human Receives Experimental Therapy to Reverse Cellular Aging. The drug is ER-100, which is an adenovirus vector that delivers genes coding for the Yamanaka factors, Oct4, Sox2, Klf4. The adenoviral vector is activated with intravenous doxycycline. Sounds cool, but it sounds too simplistic. Can't believe that reversing age will be that simple. We'll see. 

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The consequences of relying on AI for accurate news. What happened was that users eventually lost the ability to distinguish between real and fake news.

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SignalTrace will add iPhone, AirPod, and Smartwatch Trackers to License Plate Readers. Holy crap! You'll need to turn your car into a Faraday cage. This is like Flock on steroids.

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The Nerdy Escorts Cashing In On Silicon Valley’s AI Boom. We call it prostitution – Silicon Valley nerds called is VaaS (vagina as a service). Makes sense. Boy, the money those girls can make! But I bet a lot of their clients are H-1B visa holders! 🤣 Money is money, though.

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Wow, once your private GitHub repo turns public, information is scarfed up 6 minutes. People watch for these things.

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A Proof on the Computational Complexity of the Traveling Salesman Problem: Why P ≠ N P. Someone claims to have found proof of this Millennium Prize problem. Such a short proof. Two pages? Can't be that easy, right?

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Some scientists are upset that there is now some oversight over what research gets approved for funding. Sure, some research that sounds like it might be pointless does sometimes lead to major advances. But that's not the kind of silly pointless research that is being cut. It's the DEI woke stuff.  

Speaking of which, I saw this article recently: Over 1 in 250 Natal Girls Were Taking Testosterone By Age 17 in Oregon, From 2016 to 2023. The proponents still think it's rare, but admit that it has increased over the years. But the graphs tell the story. Here's one:

Cleveland Clinic has decided to end pediatric gender-affirming care, just as Texas Children's Hospital did last month. This is one of the main reasons why the public holds the medical profession in low regard (the other reasons being the COVID vax and saying that "white supremacy is a lethal public health issue"). Monstrous.

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Seattle is going to ban datacenters for a year. They already have datacenters in the Belltown area.

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PacificSource Health Plans laying off 130 amid rising health care costs. Without continued federal government support, Obamacare is collapsing.

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Typical Portland household could pay extra $700 annually with latest tax, fee hikes. So glad I don't live in Portland.

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9 June 2026

Apple Investors Give Lukewarm Reaction to New Siri, AI Platform. Articles about yesterday's WWDC are still coming out, and the tone seems to be one of disappointment. People are not buying Apple's grand promises about how good Siri will be. Apple Foundational Models are designed to be edge-device LLMs, although they do have some cloud-based frontier models. Apple is looking to duplicate that vision capabilities of Google's models. Or maybe they're just ways of tapping into Google's Gemini models?

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OpenAI plots biggest ChatGPT overhaul since launch. What will they do?

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Microsoft Hacked to Deliver Malware to Claude and Gemini Users. If You Use Claude or Gemini, This Microsoft Breach Means Your Data Is at Risk. This credential-stealing worm is called Miasma. Fortunately I don't use coding assistants like Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor, of VS Code. But this is the second time since May for Microsoft.

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Datacenters are heat and emissions polluters. We kinda knew that, but perhaps not to this extent. We do need datacenters, but rules need to be followed.

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CSS needs to be revamped badly. Here are some of the bad and good parts of CSS. I never heard of a CSS Reset before, but apparently something like this is necessary just to make sure that the actual code is going to behave as expected.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declines Warren’s request to testify at AI hearing. Maybe this will start a new trend.

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Wall Street Is Rushing to Fund the AI Bonanza in Every Conceivable Way. Is this the dotcom boom again? Gary Marcus, of course, thinks that this AI gold rush is insane, and not backed up by the math. Well, the math in one situation is not exactly the same in another, but there will be some investment interest. 

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How Costco sells such cheap gas. Volume sales. That's all.

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The Seven Habits That Lead to Happiness in Old Age. Yes, this is the truth. To this, I would add weight training. Lift weights and maintain lower extremity strength. Sarcopenia is a real danger. There's something about having muscle that makes a difference in old age.

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8 June 2026

Apple announced macOS 27 Golden Gate today. Seems more like 26.6 update than a major update. Nothing really new. Looks like others felt the same way. The revamped Siri with AI didn't impress. Here's some behind the scenes about AI Siri, and the personalities clashing to take control of the project. I'll dutifully update my computers, as usual, but not really looking forward to anything new that's going to make my workflow any better. Maybe finally Spotlight search will work. It's crap right now, and can't find anything useful. 

I didn't know that it was possible to sneak in an email message into a chat stream with Verizon and T-Mobile. Hackers and phishers were using that loophole to steal information. That loophole has been fixed.

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The amount of tokens you consume does not correlate with productivity. Very true. It's nice to brainstorm and explore with LLMs, and that doesn't necessarily correlate with output, or quality thereof.

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The Crystal That Could Destroy All Medicine. Another great Veritasium video, this time on polymorphs. What a fascinating problem. It reminds me of Ice-IX in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. 

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How to build a cancer vaccine, and whether they will work this time.  Deep dive into the vaccine creation process: what targets to select and how best to approach the problem.

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Gen Z Koreans turn to ‘dopamine sites’ for quick comfort. What a society they've become, where young adults have to do that to calm themselves. I dunno, maybe the Koreans are on to something. Or maybe they're just crazy? Can't be certain.

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We run an AI companion company. You probably shouldn't use it every day. Speaking of societal problems, an AI companion company has to tell people not to use their product everyday. Go find a human. And yet, some will ignore this.

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Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land. Like in eastern Oregon, where farmers already have to struggle to ensure adequate water. Why? Who approves this?

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Back in 2024, The Economist posted this: Why you should never retire. But now, they post this: How to retire at 30. So what changed?

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DeepSeek Made AI Cheap. Now It Needs Billions to Keep It Cheap. Just because you made something, doesn't mean that it's worth having around. All those brilliant Chinese engineers created a subsidized model that they probably distilled from a larger, ultimately American model. It was cheap for a reason. But now what?

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Oregon progressives notched 2 upsets in last month’s election. "Dr. Tammy" wins after election day. What happened in California with Spencer Pratt and Steve Hilton is happening in Oregon, too. Weird how it happens, huh?

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Oregon's economic forecast looks dismal. We're following the path blazed by California. And did you see Washington's Office of Financial Management. Such "diversity".

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7 June 2026

Semaglutide Found To Slow Biological Aging in Landmark Human Trial. The two studies that gave rise to headlines like these are only in HIV-positive patients. 

People living with HIV frequently experience accelerated biological aging, even when the virus is well controlled with modern antiretroviral therapy. Researchers believe chronic inflammation and persistent immune system activation play important roles.
According to lead author Michael Corley, PhD, semaglutide appeared to counter some of those effects
So it's not the same thing as saying that "Ozempic slows down aging".

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Oops! This is a big error. 
Hundreds of scientists in many labs have been using a totally wrong antibody simply because its target has a similar name to the gene they wanted to study. The really shocking part is that this wrong antibody miraculously produced exactly the “right” results in their hands. Well, maybe not miraculously. A triumph of the will, one could say. 
So embarrassing. Scientists were essentially caught making up results. Because they apparently thought they were working with an antibody against p16.
I always wondered why scientists could get away with calling a protein a name based on its dalton weight. Oncologists still refer to an oncoprotein as p53. And take pains to separate head and neck cancers based on whether they are positive or negative for p16. This kind of laziness or sloppiness was bound to get people in trouble. And I guess it finally has.

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The Best Red-Light Therapy for Hair Growth. Is this a joke? The pictures are suggestive, but I gotta better control data to know for sure. You can't compare a shaved head from one where you let your hair grow. I wish it were that easy. 

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Loss of Prefrontal Cortical Higher Cognition with Uncontrollable Stress. Yeah, we knew that chronic stress makes you lose prefrontal cortex mass. Chronic lack of sleep will do that, too. Catecholamine release is really bad, and perhaps that is why some recommend taking a beta-blocker when you receive high-stress producing bad news. It may prevent PTSD development later. And as always, everything is worse when it happens to you when your older. And prazosin really works against PTSD-nightmares and even daymares.

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ASML invites Elon Musk to internal tech event, prompting employee backlash. Guys, remember. You were hired to do some work. No one cares about your political opinions.

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Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search. There's always been a way to manipulate search, and now there's a way to manipulate AI results. But we already knew that. I've posted about this before. Sometimes you can't trust was a chatbot says. Do your own research. 

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The NewYorker reports: For the Nation’s Birthday, Making It Harder to Become an American. No, the Trump administration isn't making it harder to BE an American. It's making it harder to FAKE being an American. We all know people want to come to the U.S. so that they can take advantage of generous social welfare. Seems like all we hear about these days are more cases of fraud. Welfare fraud, Medicaid fraud, NGO fraud.

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6 June 2026

A Hidden Virus Found in Gut Bacteria Is Linked to Colorectal Cancer. Colibactin-producing E coli has been linked to colon cancer. But there is evidence linking B. fragilis to colon cancer, too.  But people without cancer can have E coli and B fragilis, too. In the case of B fragilis, researchers found that those with colon cancer were twice as likely to have this virus within the bacteria as those without cancer. It's not definitive, but suggestive, and could be a clue.

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AI models can inherit a taste for murder. It seems that through the process of distillation, teacher models can transfer a trait to suggesting murder to the student models – something called "subliminal learning". You can't see it in the training data itself. It's just somehow present in the embeddings. It is known that LLMs can hide messages in their weightings. This is yet another indication that LLMs are not completely trustworthy.

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It's not been easy to beat pembrolizumab. The title of this article doesn't make sense. What they are really saying is that efforts to improve upon pembrolizumab have not been as straightforward. Even the bispecific antibodies, like ivonescimab, haven't been that much better.

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Mullvad is offering Mailvad, an anonymous email service. Who will use it? Should this be made available to a world where there are so many people who would use this for nefarious applications without a moment's hesitation?

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Never let AI plan your marketing campaign. Starbucks in South Korea found out the hard way. Oof.

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Google is quietly laying off staff in its cloud division. This seems like an odd thing for Google to do. Supposedly it's because they want to focus on AI but cloud computing has been one of their main offerings.

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Bitcoin cracks $60,000, sinking to lowest level since October 2024. Seems like from what I've been reading that the crypto world is moving on to other things. The latest "craze" is perpetual futures, and the new hot thing is Hyperliquid. Another way to lose a lot of money if you don't know what you're doing.

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Scientists revive activity in frozen mouse brains for the first time. First, just the hippocampus. Now, the whole brain.

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Woman gets a religious exemption from using AI at work. Oh brother.

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Google is letting social media stars customize their search result page. Selling out. This will be the next "must-have".

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Amazon engineers in Seattle slam employer for building AI data centers while laying off 30,000 staffers. I think Amazon is looking to move away from Seattle. It's a shame that they built that nice headquarters. Oh well, those were different times. South Seattle was going to be transformed into another Redmond. Now, it's more of an empty shell, with zombies strolling around and tents not too far away. The Left much prefers a dystopian city. They hate clean streets and nice buildings. They must deface things, so that they feel comfortable in ugliness and filth.

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5 June 2026

How the body creates reliable antibodies out of biological chaos. This is really cool. I bet a lot of people don't think about how the body produces antibodies that bind to antigens that we get exposed to. The immunoglobulin gene has a high mutation rate in the hypervariable region, and produces a huge variety of antibodies, hoping that at least one will be the desired antibody that binds to the target antigen. If one is a tight fit, the B-cell will internalize the antigen, digest it, and present a piece of it on the surface for a T-cell to have a look. Costimulatory molecules stimulate the T-cell to secrete cytokines that cause the B-cell to proliferate and the lymph node follicle to expand. Well that's what these scientists got to observe first-hand. Amazing to see it all play out, just as it's supposed to.

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A drug called GRWD5769 is a member of a new class of drug, called ERAP1 (endoplasmic  reticulum aminopeptidase 1) inhibitors. By inhibiting ERAP1, immunotherapy drugs like cemiplimab were made effective again.  This is great because when immunotherapy stops working, there isn't much that can be done to halt progression of head and neck cancers. But this might be effective in other areas where there is squamous cell carcinomas.

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I've posted about new myeloma treatments before, but what this article highlights is that advances in the treatment of myeloma are starting to be developed outside the United States. It seems that the advances are coming from China now. China is becoming the leader of cell-based therapeutics. The graph in the article stops in 2020. Wonder what it looks like now.

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Anxiety Is Making You Dumber. I used to think that being anxious was the price you pay for being vigilant. But after a while, your brain forgets how to step back and put danger into perspective. Then you lose the ability to assess things critically as they should be. An anxious mind always fears the worst, and forgets that much is still controllable.

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Asian vs Asian. I recently posted an article about how the engineers at Meta are, to a large extent, Chinese. They stick together, socialize together and according to the article, exclude Whites. Well now a Chinese professor at Southern Methodist University School of Business is suing that he is being excluded from tenure and promotion by an Indian department chair.  I've seen that happen where I worked. I suspect it's going on in governments positions in Portland and Oregon, and not about race, per se, but other characteristics. People hire those that they feel they can get along with, and are not threatening.

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I knew it!  Scientists have long said we can’t multitask. A new study says we can. I can walk and chew gum.

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What is the relationship between cannabis use and testosterone levels in men? The data suggest that right after use, testosterone levels are higher, but with long-term use, levels decline.  But there are many variables, and it's not clear that there is a close relationship. Today's cannabis is different from cannabis from years back, I'm sure. Legalization has encouraged the development of more potent strains.

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Sad. OHSU shelves long-promised expansion of newborn ICU. Things seem to be contracting up on the Hill.

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Seattle's US Bank center is selling at huge loss.  A 54% loss from when it was purchased. Blackstone is taking the hit and is getting out. Good for them. Katie Wilson says Bye!

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Portland General Electric announced Wednesday it plans to increase rates by 29% for large load users like data centers. Meanwhile, the utility’s residential and commercial customers will see a slight decrease in their rates. Yeah, I don't mind paying for AI datacenters (if they don't suck up needed local resources), but I don't support datacenters for crypto mining.

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Man, Oregon is always the worst in any survey, it seems. Now, Sharp rise in Oregon State Hospital’s seclusion of patients pushed state to worst-in-nation status.
In 2024, Oregon held psychiatric patients in seclusion across public and private hospitals at the highest rate in the country.
Can Oregon, you know, just not suck at something for a change?

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4 June 2026

Japanese Break Bandwidth Record: 450 Tbps On A Single Standard Fibre Pair. I still remember when before 2000, people were claiming that 2400 baud or 4800 baud was the theoretical limit of how fast we could transmit information. They claimed it was a physical limit, like the speed of light. Then someone came out with 9600 baud modem, then 19200 baud, and so it went. Glad we didn't give up the effort. 🤣

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Cutting a photon in two creates an infinite swarm of particles. My first reaction was "What!??" but it turns out this is just theory. They haven't actually split a photon. But yeah, photons are weird.

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‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments. Yeah, I'll bet he laments. Pretty soon there will be so many bots that Cloudflare's latency will be long (and maybe will jam its servers with so many requests).

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"Stop scanning QR codes, you dolts" QR codes are like shortened links. You have to trust that all that's happening is that you are being taken to a new link. That may not be the case. Plus, when you see a QR code from far away, NEVER scan it. It may not be real.

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Typical Feynman. He even worked out an algorithm for eating out at restaurants at an unfamiliar city.

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As AI gets better, it reveals an empty promise. Here's something that almost no one talks about.
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,” and so-on and so-on until the grandchildren can enjoy painting and poetry. So, ideally, after we slog through pre-transcendence, AI will make us all theater kids.

Nobody is working less, they’re just earning less. And as more AI-related companies reap trillions in valuation, the current US regime is looting the social safety net — the kind that must exist if we’re all going to become out-of-work theater kids. 
SNAP abuse and fraud need to be cut. No question there. But the impact of AI on the workforce is a completely separate matter. That's not on the administration that companies are finding less need for humans to do rote work. If you don't want AI to be used to book your next flight or to summarize your emails, then don't use these services. I don't.

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Why Are Men So Bad at Making—and Keeping—Friends?  There's no advocate for the common now that Jordan Peterson is out of commission. It's easier to just communicate online than meet in person. It's harder to find activities to share. And as we get older, friends leave us, and it gets harder to meet new friends.

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You’ll never guess who made the first wireless telephone. I didn't know that either.

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