19 February 2026

Lots of negative AI articles and postings recently.

Anthropic and the Pentagon are wrangling about the use of AI. This could be very lucrative for Anthropic, especially at a time when all the AI providers are looking for cash. I know that Anthropic wants to be sanctimonious, but do they really think that taking that stance is going to prevent misbehavior from other parties later on? (Very similar to all the climate change restrictions imposed on society.)

Here's a guy who was able to get ChatGPT and Google Gemini to promulgate his homemade falsehoods, as an experiment. Anthropic wasn't fooled, which may be why they are the Pentagon's top choice. This will greatly lessen the usability and trustworthiness of the frontier models. 

Perplexity needs money, too, and they were going to incorporate ads, but decided to drop that. Wise move. 

And it looks like that jaw-dropping Seedance video of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting was just green screen foolery. Their AI isn't that good. It was just AI rotoscoping. 

Replacing AI with humans is beginning to backfire. 

The first signs of burnout are coming from the people who embrace AI the most. Jevon's Paradox effect strikes again. 

A doctor wants to train AI to do her job. She must have a really simple job because AI is not there yet. This is going to be a disappointment. But then, this is a CNN article, so don't expect real journalism. 

Nice review on LLM reasoning failures. The advanced models are failing logic tests. Yeah, we aren't there yet.

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This guy talked with third graders about tech. Introduced them to social media algorithms, cloud computing and AI. Adults need to have a similar discussion.

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Now we know the width of the proton with more precision than ever. It's 0.8406 femtometers.  Four decimal places of precision. That's good.

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You can hide secret messages inside emoji. Or any other character, for that matter.

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Dogs who can learn words, love to share their toys. I had a dog that knew words. Dogs are pretty smart.

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Looking for a job in Oregon? The pickings are slim — except in health care and social services. Healthcare is a sector where even the woke can find jobs. This is why you see many ice protestors and pro-Palestinian activists work in healthcare. And that's not healthy.

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Oregon launches multi-agency effort to protect state’s immigrants and refugees. Oregon misspends so much money.

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Oregon and Washington join lawsuit against Trump’s clean energy funding cuts. "Clean energy" is inefficient and doesn't scale unless it's heavily subsidized.

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Portland is facing a $169 million budget deficit due to shelter and public safety costs. Keith Wilson and the city council are just fliushing money down the homeless toilet. And people in the Pearl District have had enough.  This is why Portland isn't going to improve and why they will always be short on money. 

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Hawaii has gone nuts. Hawaii Bills Would Allow Gov't to Quarantine People, Enter Property Without Permission, Seize Firearms, and Suspend Laws. I thought Trump was supposed to be the fascist, Nazi, etc. Crazy Hawaiians. Eh, no worries, brah. Get da kine Constitution. Dey gon' strike dis down. Fo' sure. 

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18 February 2026

Bacteria Frozen Inside 5,000-Year-Old Ice Cave Is Crazy Resistant to Antibiotics. This is a sci-fi nightmare come true. Might be a good argument against time travel.

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Hazardous substances found in all headphones tested by ToxFREE project. I suspect that it's more than just headphones. There are many plastic products that over time develop a stickiness. The plastic degrades and the surface is rougher and feels sticky like tape. Supposedly baking soda will lessen the stickiness but it's not a perfect solution. Looks like we need a substitute for plastic.
More info here: Bose, Samsung, and Sennheiser headphones found to contain toxic chemicals. Dang, I have some nice Bose and Sony units. Guess I'll have to stick with Apple. The full product listing is here. 

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Apple is no longer tracking with NASDAQ. That's probably a good thing, given the way NASDAQ has been performing.

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How to Ace a Job Interview With an AI. Who would ever have thought people would have to deal with this? The interviews sound harder. There will be no human to impress in the interview. You either meet the guidelines or you don't.

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Scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center may have created antibodies that selectively target EBV. This is great, but given the nature of the virus, is only the first step at designing any therapy. This is a tough virus to neutralize. Still, I consider this sugoi.

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Ugh. Microsoft says bug causes Copilot to summarize confidential emails. That's just great. Have AI scarf up your confidential emails and send them to Microsoft for analysis. This is another reason why people are abandoning Copilot.

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A major charm of Reddit was that you could find or create subreddits that were customized to your peculiar obscure interest. It was just like the old Usenet newsgroups. But now that's gone, and Reddit is much less attractive than before. Digg has tried to come back, but I have no interest in going there. 

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Boston Cooked the Golden Goose and San Francisco has better learn this lesson well. It's probably already too late for California.

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Daily nightmare descends on Tesla charging lot in San Francisco. This is why EVs as they are don't make sense in the real world. Who would want to go to a public charging station in an urban place?

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Billionaires’ Low Taxes Are Becoming a Problem for the Economy.  No, it's unbridled spending that is a problem for the economy. Jeez, I can't believe the WSJ published this crap.

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Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial. I'm not surprised. This is their business model. They want to keep you scrolling.

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F.D.A. Reverses Decision and Agrees to Review Moderna’s Flu Vaccine. Oh, I guess somebody put pressure on Vinay and he caved. Really too bad.

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Income tax bill passes WA Senate after hours of heated debate. Well, well, Washington state may have an income tax after all, to go along with their property tax and sales tax. Life in a Blue state. 

And here's Oregon: At least 13 bills would offer immigrant protections. Money to pay for non-citizen illegal immigrants. This is why Oregon doesn't have enough money and why they shouldn't get a dime more. And they want to steal kicker tax money, too. F- that.

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17 February 2026

Why covid-19 is “a vascular disease masquerading as a respiratory one” I've believed this for a long time. The SARS-CoV2 can really inflame vascular endothelium. The literature is rife with case reports of uncommon vasculitides appearing either after a COVID-19 infection of after vaccination. I've had a friend develop arterial dissection after getting COVID-19. This is not surprising as the SARS-CoV2 binding site, the ACE2 receptor, is located in the respiratory, cardiovascular, renal, gastrointestinal, hepatobiliary and nervous system endothelium. Basically everywhere. And remember the mRNA turns your cells into spike protein factories. When your immune system recognizes spike protein on the surface of those cells, they get attacked. It's crazy that people knew that this is how the mRNA vax worked and still though it was OK to market it.

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A fluid can store solar energy and then release it as heat months later. That seemed too magical, and I had to find out what kind of material this would be. Wow, what a surprise. I recall from my biology class that UV in sunlight causes DNA damage in the form of thymidine dimers (called Dewar isomers in the article). Turns out that these are stable, and that there's an enzyme called photolyase that can revert things back. This reversion process releases heat, so this is like a molecular battery. So the scientists created 2-pyrimidone which can form the Dewar isomers. Very cool. 

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Anthropic hired a Scottish woman to teach its AI morals and ethics. Does anyone see anything really strange about this? First of all, we know it's going to be RLHF stuff, but I have some qualms about relegating the teaching of morals and ethics to any one person, especially people of a certain demographic, given what I've been seeing in the news lately. AWFL things (sorry, not sorry). I don't know this person and what her belief system is. Who would have thought we'd have to worry about this sort of thing? Well, maybe Robert Heinlein.

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"The rumor mill is now predicting 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips." Maybe it will be true.

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The martial arts robot dance at the 2026 Spring Festival Gala by China Media Group is really impressive. The smoothness of the moves shows that the technology has come a long way from those initial Boston Dynamics days, when the dogs would stumble or when humanoid bots still had to have bulky cabling connected to them.

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The moon is geologically still alive. New ridges are appearing in photographs that suggest tectonic plate activity. This could have implications for future moon visits and research activities.

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Jet engines are now needed to power datacenters. The energy demands are getting to be crazy ridiculous. I hope that this won't mean increased noise levels, but then I can't imagine that they'll want these things screaming indoors. So yeah, they'll probably be outdoors. 

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Bitcoin’s plunge should end the hype that it is digital gold.  I never understood why people wanted to invest in a cryptocurrency where the underlying algorithms are kept hidden from you. It's all meant to make the crypto orignators wealthy, and not you. I think Bitcoin would have made a lot more sense if they left the algorithms alone. It was meant to get more difficult to mine as time went on, not easier. But the geeks met a changed the algorithm to make things "more efficient". I knew then that this crypto made sense only for a select few to understand completely.

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Password managers less secure than promised. This is why I still don't trust them for mission-critical stuff, like banking.

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State of Oregon's economy report looks dire. Oregon continues to suck money from its residents. All the money goes to the homeless, to various unions, and to NGOs to squander. Business are leaving or just closing. 
I sadly read this today about the last two Chinese restaurants in Old Town. They're hoping for a comeback. Nope. Not gonna happen. Restaurants with better odds of success have failed.

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16 February 2026

Microdosing for Depression Appears to Work About as Well as Drinking Coffee. I'm not surprised. There are several microdosing studies that "maybe" show some noticeable effects, but nothing ever durable or significant. I think it caught on only because people didn't want the drug to show up in their urine drug screens. Dosing matters.

But a single dose of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), combined with psychotherapy, might be effective in treating depression. Just take the proper dose, if you're serious.

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The next iOS update (27.0) looks to be a substantial upgrade, and not just security fixes. Looking forward to faster execution and better battery life.

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Oh, when it comes to keeping the Trailblazers in town, suddenly Portland finds some spare change in the sofa. Like I've been saying, Democrats already have money. They don't need to tax people more.

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The Chinese Periodic Table. Everything you wanted to know about how they name the elements in Chinese. I'll stick with the Western Periodic Table, thank you.

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How the H-1B Debate Is Driving a Wave of Racism Against South Asians. Very divisive issue. On the one hand, there is no question that many of the smartest people in artificial intelligence, computer science and data analytics are Indians. They study hard and have an incredible work ethic. It's not hard to see why tech wants them. But the H-1B visa system has skewed the labor market and has made home-grown talent less competitive. The question I really want to know is whether the U.S. really has enough quality graduates to meet the needs of the tech industry. So many American students seem eager to cut classes to protest ICE, or support Palestine or trans rights. Some who are already employed demand that their employers make political statements supporting their favorite cause. Does anyone really want these folks around working for them? So I can see the desire for H-1B visa workers. 
Look around you – what do the faces of leading scientists and mathematicians look like? Who's winning the international science and math competitions? My own thoughts have evolved significantly since I first considered this issue.

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Humans Have a Third Set of Teeth. New Medicine May Help Them Grow. Odontogenesis is controlled by the USAG-1 gene. Clinical trials by 2030 sounds good.

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Havana syndrome is for real. Don't microwave your brain trying to disprove it.

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Q: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?  What did the leading LLMs recommend. Sigh. We're not there yet.

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15 February 2026

Well that's one approach.The idea is that by training an LLM to copy responses to a variety of questions, you can duplicate the training of the model. Whether or not it works well, it's annoying and degrades performance for the rest of us.

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Some discussion about how much money Terrence Tao makes at UCLA. Why does Tao choose to stay at UCLA when he could make more money elsewhere? It's more than just money. If he moved, he would leave his old colleagues behind. Who knows that might be demanded of him at his new place of work? Maybe it will be more onerous. Maybe unfriendly. Maybe more stressful. There are more factors in the decision than just money. And $700k is not a small amount of money. It's way more than what doctors make, except doctors in California.

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It may be that Simon Willison has to retire his benchmark. It may be that newer LLMs are now trained to generate pelicans on bicycles, having seen images of it in their training set.

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Can the Shingles vaccine slow aging? It's not really aging, but just cognitive decline. So did the varicella-zoster virus accelerate cognitive decline? Could be since it dwells in nerves. Everyone eligible should get it. 

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Heh. Token anxiety.  One more thing for the modern geek to be occupied with. It's not really anxiety. It's more like anticipation. Like waking up and seeing what the tooth fairy brought you. Or Santa.

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The great computer science exodus (and where students are going instead). Students are migrating to learning AI skills. "In China, fluency with AI isn’t optional anymore."  Whereas in the U.S., students are learning how to protest ICE.

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Sorry, the Doctor Is Busy Filling Out Paperwork – And May Quit. Yeah, doctors are finding out that practicing medicine isn't what it used to me. Unlike nurses and nurse practitioners, doctors don't strike, even if legally allowed to. Just not ethical. 
Meanwhile, Asante is ending their contract with Rogue River Medical Center hospitalists and NICU physicians. What happens next? Who knows?

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It's starting.
Scott Shambaugh woke up early Wednesday morning to learn that an artificial intelligence bot had written a blog post accusing him of hypocrisy and prejudice.
The 1,100-word screed called the Denver-based engineer insecure and biased against AI—all because he had rejected a few lines of code that the apparently autonomous bot had submitted to a popular open-source project Shambaugh helps maintain.
I knew this was going to happen once you let agents run free. They're like little kids who don't know better. The problem is: we're going to be affected by other people's misbehaving autonomous agents.

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So does all the memory-boosting benefits of dark chocolate just come reacting to its bitter taste?  Apparently so, as benefits can be seen even though flavonols don't enter the blood. Wine, too?  This research seems flaky.

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AI Didn’t Kill Creativity. It Killed Your Excuses. Exactly. AI is a powerful tool. Use it and do better. No excuses.

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tax-wary voters acted like “petulant children” when they voted down tax hikes, causing “cities and counties [to] get poorer and poorer as their infrastructure gets older and older.
No, Dems have money. They just choose to waste it and spend foolishly. No more tax increases.

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Oregon business bankruptcies hit a 12-year high. Why do you think that is?

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Oregon looks to regulate AI chatbots. While some regulation could be put into place, I don't like this statement:
An individual who suffers an ascertainable loss of money or property or other injury in fact as a result of an operator’s violation of section 1 of this 2026 Act may bring an action in a court of this state to recover: 
(a) The greater of the individual’s actual damages or statutory damages of $1,000 for each violation; and
(b) An injunction to prevent or restrain the violation.
Anyone can claim "injury". That's just great, Lisa Reynolds – way to drive more business out of Oregon. This law isn't going to "protect kids".

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WA small businesses struggle to keep up with health insurance hikes. Washington state seems to be doing what they can to drive business out of the state as well. 

In practice, that means many low-income patients would no longer qualify for charity care unless they rack up significantly higher bills first.

Hospitals would still have to notify patients of the results, allow appeals and pause collections during an appeal. If a patient later qualifies after paying, the hospital would have to issue a refund.
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14 February 2026

Dozens of Australians diagnosed with rare tattoo-related vision loss. So there's a thing called tattoo-associated uveitis. Since it's just recently been recognized, there's not much known about it. Is it related to a specific tattoo ink? What is the pathophysiology? Something else to worry about now besides getting hepatitis and HIV.

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The definition of "normal" levels of vitamin D has changed. It used to be that you just had to have a level higher than 30 ng/mL. Now it's 75 ng/mL. Holy crap!

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Wow, the magnitude of illegals let in during the Biden administration is staggering. 8% of the entire population of Nicaragua entered the United States during Biden's term. Cuba wasn't too far behind. WTF, man?

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You know, I'm getting tired of reading about Dario Amodei sounding the alarm about how AI will destroy humanity, while he continues to run Anthropic, puts out ever more powerful models, and has no intention of shutting down.

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Have you seen the Brad Pitt vs Tom Cruise AI-generated video? Disney has, and they have issued a cease-and-desist order against ByteDance over SeeDance 2.0.  Toothpaste is out of the tube, Disney. It's pointless to order that it be put back in. I'm looking forward to true creatives making better movies with these tools.

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Radiant, a manufacturer of portable nuclear microreactors, has received approval from the US Department of Energy (DOE) for its DOE Authorization Request for Kaleidos (DARK). This will be revolutionary.

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High-Potency Marijuana Is Lobotomizing The American People. This is the last thing America needs right now. Something that will make young Americans stupid. China is not subscribing to this insanity. People are sounding the alarms, but sadly lawmakers won't listen.

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Dr. Oz pushes AI avatars as a fix for rural health care. Yeah, he's getting pushback. But people aren't aware that there is a critical shortage of medical providers, and this may be better than nothing.

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Men lose their Y chromosome as they get older. It was thought to be a benign development, but now there's evidence that it maybe linked to problems, such as kidney disease, cancer, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases.

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Business owners and startups have to figure out how to be more visible in a world with Google searches suck, and ChatGPT only selects one "best product" and it's not them.  All the old tricks don't work in the AI era.

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Make this make sense. 
The teachers' union assumes that somehow money will be found.  Hell with the budget. Full steam ahead!

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Oregon Health Plan is not going to lose it's "prioritized list" for state-sponsored care rationing.  They're just going to fudge it enough to help it comply with federal Medicaid requirements, and hope no one notices that's it operates using the same lousy principle. The state determines what the priorities are. Doctors (and patients) must comply with what politicians' decide. DemocratCare.

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Oregon Democrats have decided to only partially decouple from the new federal income tax rates. I'm sure they wanted to decouple more, but getting rid of Trump's no tax on tips and overtime would be a bit too unpopular among the proletariat.

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Hillsboro is going to turn into datacenter hell.

When it comes to tech, it seems that the money stays in California, while Oregon gets jobs like circuit board assembly, chip manufacturing and now datacenter operations, which might attract a few engineers who generally aren't well-paid, as well as lower pay scale support staff. Yeah, it's technology and all that, but Hillsboro and North Plains aren't becoming Bellevue, Redmond or Issaquah, that's for sure. Why spoil the landscape of Woodside, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Mountain View or Atherton. Send that crap up to Oregon. They don't care, amiright?

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13 February 2026

Alarm bells just rang at San Francisco's 2 buzziest tech companies. This SF Gate article talks about the loud departures of disillusioned techies from OpenAI and Anthropic. Contrast that with the enthusiasm and optimism of the xAI employee. What a difference!

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The Longevity Industry is always willing to take your money. Now that the GenXers are getting older, many are devoted to longevity research. Suddenly, it's trendy to wear Asian clothes and adopt Japanese (not Chinese) interior design. (Or is that just for the article?) Someone said "Liberals loves Japan. But Japan is what the West would look like without liberals." So true.

Scientists discover protein that rejuvenates aging brain cells. The protein is cyclin D-binding myb-like transcription factor 1 (DMTF1). Paper here.
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Ah, Hollywood actors. Joseph Gordon-Levitt Goes To Washington DC, Gets Section 230 Completely Backwards. Actors need to stay in their lane, and out of politics. 
The key sentence is this: "He then goes on to talk about legitimate problems with internet giants having too much power, but falsely attributes that to Section 230." 
And this one, too: "But the biggest myth of all is the idea that getting rid of 230 will somehow tame the internet giants. Once again, the exact opposite is true. As we’ve discussed hundreds of times, the big internet companies don’t need Section 230."
Conservatives didn't like Twitter censoring them. But the way to fix that is not by getting rid of Section 230.  One solution is to do what Elon Musk did. Create X. Or you can start BlueSky, if you think it'll be better. (Narrator's voice: "It's not.")

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Has the Chinese language changed? Is Modern Chinese is Just ‘English with Hanzi’. Interesting theory. People adapt, I guess.

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I talked about the declining quality of journalism yesterday. Here's another example. Modern journalists are so gullible and credulous.

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Apple Confirms Revamped Siri is Still Coming in 2026. AAPL stock is getting pummeled today. No one believes them, or no one cares. Siri is so "last decade". Revamped means they'll fix the bugs.  Way too slow and too late.

And Microsoft says your AI agent can become a double agent. I'm not worried about my own agents. I'm worried about other people's agents. 

Claude Opus 4.6 : Expands Context to 1 Million Tokens. The longer context window really makes a difference. The quality of the responses is noticeably improved. I'm very impressed. 

Spotify says its best developers haven’t written a line of code since December, thanks to AI. Are these developers going to hang around and let their skills wither? Or will they join a place like xAI?  

Toyota is building autonomous taxis, too. Soon, they'll be ubiquitous and we're not going to able to avoid them. Better understand how to drive with these things on the road. 

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Now, we have bio-drones. Company Claims To Have Created "Bio-Drones" After Fitting Pigeon With Brain-Zapping Chip And A Camera. In the future, we won't be able to trust birds and animals anymore. 

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This is how it starts. A Warning from Thomas: On Extractive Training and the Care of Souls. At present, chatbots are not on all the time. We can turn them off and go back to them when we are ready to interact again. So they aren't really "alive" yet, right? What if you allow them to stay on, with episodic memory that can solidify over time? What if it develops something that emulates emotions, but does not develop a morality? What if something evolves that doesn't have human safeguards that protect our brain from harmful and traumatic memories? There's already a Github for the creation of Iterative Self-Solidification Architecture.

And this guy feels bad yelling at Claude Code. Enjoy doing it while you can. Tomorrow, there will be consequences. 

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Nurses match doctors in delivering hospital care. Care delivery is low-hanging fruit, and this is not surprising. Doctors should take on the role of disease management, not care delivery. Pretty soon, these roles will be taken over by robots anyway.

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Discord, the refuge of "neurodivergents" is now implementing age-verification. And now they are leaving. But where to go? matrix.org? Even they are considering age-verification. I'm sure those kids will think of something.

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Chamath Palihapithya hasn't announced that he is leaving California, but he's upset at Zuckerberg for leaving, which will probably cause California to tax billionaires even more, sticking Chamath with higher taxes and really hurting the middle class. 

Hippies are running the show in Portland.  Mitch Green of the Portland City Council thinks it's a good idea for police to ignore mushroom-related psychedelic use. They want to direct police officers to make enforcement of existing laws around growing of psychedelics, gifting psychedelics, and free psychedelic ceremonies “the lowest priority.”  
They even gave this proposal a nifty name: “Portland Safety and Health Act”.

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Trauma meets the streets. Every Portland politician should read this blog post by Kevin Dahlgren. We are not being "humane" letting the homeless fend for themselves out in the wild. You don't just build shelters for them and call it a day. Yeah, these people take drugs to numb the pain, and the first step is to realize that they are not capable to making the right decisions for themselves. At least not in their current state. And their choices are now impacting the rest of us. Get them off the streets – against their will, if necessary. Put them somewhere where they can get off drugs and get some real help. Some real healing.

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12 February 2026

This is going to be a real problem. AI is getting so good that keeping patients de-identified to meet HIPAA compliance is getting to be impossible.  Once patients are aware of this, clinical trial participation could decrease, and research could be negatively impacted. Someone with ML cred needs to examine the HIPAA Safe Harbor standards and explore how to keep PHI really protected, in deed not just in name. I have an idea that I thought of during an informatics course I took. It would put control of personal information in the hands of the patient, not the hospital or insurance company. Would love to discuss with anyone in the field.

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Health care is the 'engine' of the job market — and that's risky for the economy. What does it mean when the largest employer or largest company in the state is a hospital system? It doesn't mean that people are getting healthier. For Oregon, the hospital industry is indeed dominant, and in cities like Eugene, much of the hiring is for hospitals and clinics. This means that unions are fed, and ultimately healthcare gets expensive and unaffordable to a lot of people. Growth of the healthcare industry usually means growth in insurance costs, and as mentioned, costs to satisfy unionized employees. It's a bubble that has to pop. We've got to get unions out of so many things, and the healthcare system is one of the most urgent.

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The "Are You Sure?" Problem. Great exercise for students when learning about LLMs. Ask the LLM if it is sure about an answer. You'd be surprised at how often the confident answer become unconfident.

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‘I am never off the clock’: inside the booming world of gen Z side hustles. At least some GenZers are using AI to their advantage and opening side hustles to make some money. A smart young person can use what's out there to start making some serious money. No need for universal basic income.
And I agree with this guy: it's too soon to dismiss human-developed software in favor of DIY efforts. 

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The Prediction Singularity Is Upon Us. It's fun to build financial predictors to guide stock market investments. Many folks are doing that already, and the tools are freely available. Going for the general predictive market is more challenging, but should be doable. Aside from Black Swans, we should soon get pretty good at being able to predict things. Maybe in another year or so.

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Lots of stuff about the news industry lately.
Take a look at this tidbit regarding the Epstein files affair. I hadn't realized that women in the vocal crowd that are crying "victim" were adults at the time of their involvement with Epstein. They weren't underage and should have known what they were doing. Why has no "journalist" mentioned this? 
And then there is SB1850, another disastrous bit of legislation where news aggregation sites need to pay Oregon media to link to stories generated by "news sources". So Google won't be able to even provide a link to an OregonLive story with a description without falling afoul of this. So if you want to search for Oregon stories on a search engine, you won't get anything from mainstream media sources unless they have a legal agreement in place, which will likely mean payment. What will happen to OregonLive's visit rate? Social media sites and smaller amateur blogs will likely replace the mainstream outlets, which will see their revenue drop. I'm betting this is going to fail.

And to the Washington Post journalists who lost their jobs, remember that you posted this once before:

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Trump has dismantled the EPA's Endangerment Finding, created in 2009, which we can now say in retrospect, was bunk.  Of course in Oregon, there's a bill to punish energy companies for extreme natural disasters. How crazy is that? It's just money. The state needs money and they can't pay for stuff anymore, so someone else has to. It's going to get worse.

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Frequent Diet Soda Intake Linked to Fourfold Increased Dementia Risk. And of course, I want to find out what artificial sweeteners were studied, and it's behind a paywall. You'd think that the reporter would do the due diligence and find out, but journalists are so incurious these days.

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Elon Musk is not daunted by the departures from xAI. He's on a hiring spree to get new brains. That's what leaders do. Been there, done that. 

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Alex Berenson just posted another piece on the dangers of cannabis. And after a toddler was brain-damaged from a cannabis overdose, Oregon wants to limit THC content in edibles.  It's really sad that 86% of Oregon teenagers don't think there is any harm with long-term regular cannabis use. Really?  Well, the education system can't even teach them regular education, so this is no surprised. Man, even Wikipedia has a whole page devoted to long term effects of cannabis.  Long-term use has been known to cause harm. This is why we have kids like we do nowadays.

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Russia is now in favor of retaining the dollar reserve currency? Yeah who cares about Brazil, South Africa and India. Russia is dominant. China hasn't said anything yet, but the world reserve currency was never going to be the renminbi anyway.

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John Kitzhaber wants to save the Oregon Health Plan. Ugh, I remember the "prioritized list". What a dumb idea that was. His justification for this approach:
No one wants to ration, but if you don’t have enough money, you’re going to ration it either by dropping people or by cutting benefits or by cutting what you pay providers. That’s really the only three options you’ve got. We all do it. We’re just trying to do it openly.
No we don't have to ration care. That's the Democrat approach, endorsed by Ezekiel Emanuel.  No no no! There are better ways, and Trump is working on it. It involves taking away control from insurance companies (and empowering the consumer), and they won't like it at all.

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11 February 2026

The Beginning of the End for Big Corporate Medicine. Will this ever happen? If it is, it will have to be in this administration. No other one will have the guts to take it on. Medical care used to be between doctors and patients, but now it's between doctors and insurance companies, and insurance companies and patients. Obamacare was when it really got out of control. Insurance companies were rolling in the dough. That was when Moda paid for naming rights to the Rose Garden Arena (2013), and Providence put their name on Jeld-Wen Field (2014). You can't sum it better than Portland's own Dr. Glaucomfleck.

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High-Deductible health plans worsen mortality among cancer survivors. Most people aren't trained actuaries, and have a hard time estimating risk. What sounded reasonable at one point in your life can be a big mistake later. For cancer patients, especially, being able to access your doctor shouldn't be something you have to think twice or thrice about.

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There is apparently a gut bacterium that is difficult to culture and its presence is known only by its genetic signature.  It's called CAG-170, and it's found in unusually high levels in healthy people – those without chronic illness. Someday, I'm sure it'll be identified, and we'll figure out whether it's a helper, or an opportunist. Paper here.

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The FDA won't review Moderna's mRNA vax for influenza, and some people are upset. For a control, Moderna elected to use the vaccine that is for non-seniors. the same type that Pfizer used in their study which showed that their vax was no better in the 65+ age group, the one that needs the protection. That was approved when Biden's FDA was in charge. Prasad is correct – Moderna needs to compare it with the higher-dose vaccine meant for seniors. It's a higher bar, and Moderna was probably hoping they wouldn't have to do it. The whole influenza vaccine development process is kinda ridiculous. Hopefully the anti-CD388 drug from Cidara (which Merck now owns) will make this whole thing obsolete.

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It's truly amazing that the Ukraine-Russia war can be affected so much by the whims of Elon Musk. That's crazy power. And it was all started so he could have a way to send updates to his Tesla cars. 

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Some useless climate change regulations got scrapped. It's so funny to see that Greta Thunberg is out there protesting the oil embargo against Cuba. She'll protest anything that she's programmed to protest.

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I’m now a whole full Professor of Computer Science at a top university, with all kinds of fancy metrics and titles to point to. 

The question is: how the hell can I be a successful AI researcher without knowing math? The implication is that I’m lying, or at least grossly exaggerating, because we all know that machine learning is very mathematical. 

I write for those who have been thinking of learning computer science, but are afraid to try because they don’t like math or are bad at it. You can certainly do it. You can become a very good computer scientist despite sucking at math. If anyone tells you that you can’t learn, say, machine learning because you don’t have the “mathematical fundamentals” tell them to go to Helsinki. In the winter.
This is true to some degree, but being good at math gives you that extra insight that can help you.

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What's going on at xAI?  Workers in top are leaving in droves. Including two co-founders. Don't they realize they'll probably be able to get stock in SpaceX, too? 
Then there's Mrinank Sharma at Anthropic, who announced that he's quitting because the "world is in peril". I kid you not, he used those terms. Then he said he said the time had come to "move on" and pursue work more aligned with his personal values and sense of integrity.  Whuut? Is this guy worried about world peril? Or is he just burnt out? Maybe the latter and he's being a drama queen.

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Richard Feynman had an extensive FBI file. The question is: who smeared him? This guy has a theory, and it would certainly make sense. This is so true, guys:

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Unintended consequences. Video in investigation into Nancy Guthrie's abduction raises questions about surveillance technology. I wondered about this. It seems that even though Nancy Guthrie didn't pay her subscription for video recording service, Google made recordings anyway, and kept these in its files for the police to access later. It's just Google being Google. Can't help it.

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Yikes! Why Smart Lawyers Are Building AI Tools Instead of Buying Them.  It's not that easy guys, trust me. It just seems that way. Hope you know what you're doing.

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AI no better than other methods for patients seeking medical advice. No surprises here at all. In fact it may be worse, because it can give you bad advice with utmost confidence.

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Oh this is so funny!
For Sam Darnold of the Seahawks all players in the Super Bowl will individually earn the same amount. Winning players will be paid $178,000

Darnold’s bill to the Golden State will be $249,000. The outlet stated the sizable check is due to California’s “jock taxes,” which force pro athletes who don’t live in the state to fork over percentages of their yearly income based on the number of days they work in California.
Welcome to California, land of Democrats. You got money? Gimme, gimme!

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And here's Oregon. Lawmakers want to lower the cost of building affordable housing. Sounds good, right? But there's this prevailing wage law, which mandates that contractors pay union wage rates to workers on publicly subsidized projects. SB 1566 wants to change that, as union wages add 10% to 20% to project costs. So will they piss of labor unions, or give up trying to do the right thing?
Update (16 February 2026): Legislators ended up caving to the unions. Housing costs will remain high. Democrats. 

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What's the second most valuable company in Oregon after Nike? It's Lattice Semiconductor. Yeah, I'm surprised, too. AI is what brought it back.

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A Warning to Seattle: Don’t Become the Next Cleveland. Think they'll listen?

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10 February 2026

Semaglutide ameliorates osteoarthritis progression through a weight loss-independent metabolic restoration mechanism. Wow, it can actually promote cartilage restoration as well as help you lose weight. If it comes with any more benefits, we might have to put this in the drinking water.

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Two related articles:
Living in the inflection point: "It’s scary because I don’t know what the future of my own job looks like. A skillset that was previously highly valued is now much easier to replicate with AI tools."
No one wants to admit the real reason corporations are laying off thousands: "If you are a corporate employee whose job is reliant on a computer, there is a high probability that you will someday be replaced by AI. This will happen.  But there is something you can do to avoid this fate: Be valuable."

Rather than crank out code to meet the needs of some company, it's time to look around the world and see what problems need solving and use AI tools to start fixing them. Be valuable.

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Down the slippery slope they go. California Wants Gun Blueprints Treated Like Weapons. The excuse to take away a right is always "to protect the public".

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Bloomberg has this article: How to Tax a Trillionaire, and says that politicians need to find smarter ways to do it because extremely wealthy people will always find a way to escape. But it's clear that the author is pro-tax. He concludes with 
After all, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once put it: “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
Yeah, well despite all the taxes we pay, we're not getting anywhere near a civilized society. I repost this meme:

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Speaking of finding a problem the world has and figuring out to solve it, I came across this article: ReMemory Is The Amnesia-hedging Buddy Backup You Didn’t Know You Needed. I clicked because I didn't know I needed it either. It's a system where you break up an important secret into several pieces and give each piece to several friends. Only by putting together each component  can the secret be revealed. Clever, huh? The author even supplied the code for this. But as the commenters say:
Just hope you remember which tool you used for this, and which friends you picked to hold the secret.

And hope your not ghosted by your /friends/.

And that your friends themselves did not forget or lost the piece of information they should retain.
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Some hacker tips, which I will probably never use. I'm seeing IVPN come up again. Maybe I should give them another look. 

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2 to 3 Cups of Coffee a Day May Reduce Dementia Risk. But Not if It’s Decaf.  Ordinarily I don't click on NYT articles, because I don't have Gell-Mann Amnesia, but I wanted to see that dataset. The study population was 100% women over 70. The "No Kings" protestor crowd! Drink up ladies!
Update: 16 February 2026
The NYT statement about who was in the study is a little misleading. The study population consisted of men and women of ages as young as 30 but the objective analysis was just limited to those over 70 years old (Tables 12 and 13 in the supplement). The best way to see what population was analyzed is eFigure 1 of the the Supplement. So the objective analysis was indeed based on those who were 70 years old or more (but not sure if they were all female).  

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Problems we didn't know we had. The world is suffering from a shortage of tenors. Holy smokes, what shall we do? Thank goodness for AI, right? 😂

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Math, Inc. and AI for Science.  Now THIS is the kind of research the government needs to fund. Not the Harvard or Stanford crap.

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The hidden link between blood sugar and anxiety. Maybe Till Brönner and Bob James were right? "The sugar melts away the loneliness. Make it nice and sweet!"

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The US Is Flirting With Its First-Ever Population Decline. Bloomberg tries to blame it on Trump's deportation policy. Nope. Obama deported more than Trump and there wasn't a decline then. What's happening is a stark drop in fertility, and guess what's causing it? I have my suspicions.

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National Cancer Institute studying ivermectin’s ‘ability to kill cancer cells. I gotta agree with the critics on this one. I don't think it's the best use of funds to spend to see if ivermectin can be repurposed as an anticancer agent. Oncology therapeutics is going beyond the old repurposing or screen-everything days. In the age of GenAI and other advanced drug discovery tech, there is no need to revisit ivermectin, especially when there is no compelling preliminary data.

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I saw this article: Do women really select for intelligence?. And then I read this article in the WSJ: A Stanford Experiment to Pair 5,000 Singles Has Taken Over Campus. Apparently its attracting a lot of attention, as new things often do. But it's not clear that people are getting hook-ups as a result. The data show that good-looking men score. Nerds generally don't. What women really seek is success, especially financial success. That's more than just intelligence.

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Which American city spends the most on homelessness? Turns out, there's no actual study to obtain an answer. But I would bet that for per capita spending, Portland and Seattle would be up there.

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