14 March 2026

Today is Pi Day. Celebrate with a look at a bunch of formulas for computing π. It's odd that there are more formulas for computing π than there are for computing e. Kind of an imbalance.

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Elon Musk's Tesla is starting a chip fab, too. So nice to be the richest guy in the world and just be able to just whip up a chip fab when you want to. Geeks with money can change the world.

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Experimental Alzheimer's drug reverses memory loss in mice by reprogramming gene activity. This time, it's an agent called FLAV-27, which is an inhibitor of the G9a enzyme, which is essential in the epigenetic regulation of the brain, because it helps to silence genes that are fundamental for neuronal development, synaptic plasticity and memory consolidation. But it inhibits G9a by preventing access to G9a by S-adenosylmethionine (SAM), which is already known as being important as an inhibitor of methylation (there's the epigenetic connection). While treatment led to cognitive recovery, it's important to note that this was in mice. Paper here.

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Hardening macOS. I saw this being recommended but it's from 2018. It says it's been updated for macOS Tahoe, though.

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DuckDuckGo is building their own search index. Good, but it's a daunting task. Maybe it will no longer be free. Will it be as good as Google? I wish they would open up their API interface.

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The Backlash Against AI Devices That Are Always Watching. I can understand this. What I can't understand is people using Google at google.com. Or using Alexa or Amazon Echo, or Google Nest. 

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RIP Dan Simmons. Why Weren't You More Famous? I've only read one novel by him: The Terror. It's really good. But what got me interested in Dan's writings was his short story The Time Traveler. What he forecasted in 2006 is coming true.

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Digg.com tried to resurrect itself and failed miserably. I never felt compelled to visit them. I was waiting for someone else to fill it with content and make it exciting. I guess everyone felt that way.

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I've taught thousands of people how to use AI - here's what I've learned. I was curious to know how he taught people AI because I am involved in that, too. He doesn't mention what he does. If he's just teaching them how to use ChatGPT, that's not really teaching AI. Any more than saying you are teaching computers by showing people how to use a spreadsheet or a word processor. They key is to find out how to start using it as a tool. As a superpower to help you get to the next level.



Because if you don't know how to make AI work for you, you could end up like these people. 
 
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Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation. Geeks don't just want money. They want tokens. Lots of tokens. And access to an A100.

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The AI boom is sucking up DRAM chips and NAND storage. Gotta make more.

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NBA Commissioner Adam Silver visits Portland as lawmakers advance Moda Center funding bill. Adam Silver gets to see Portland for himself. Was that a mistake? Letting him see the tents, the graffiti, the criddlers, the boarded up windows downtown. The general decrepitude of the city. Did they cover Gordon's Fireplace Shop as he drove in from the airport? Probably should arranged for a virtual visit instead.

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13 March 2026

Amazon is seeing the value of putting humans back in the loop as a result of the 6-hour outage last week.  Apparently it was caused by an agent getting "inaccurate advice that an agent inferred from an outdated internal wiki". This is the danger of letting agents run without supervision.

And AI agents may coordinate a slough of political crap in the months ahead as the 2026 election looms. Ugh.

Someone is offering prepaid Visa cards that agents can use so you don't run up a surprise credit card bill.

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Protonmail may not be as private as they make it sound. Someone found that one of the router hops goes through "Cloudflare.belgiumix.net (185.1.127.13) - Owner: Cloudflare, Inc. (US Entity) - Jurisdiction: US CLOUD Act". Once it goes through a U.S. node, privacy is not assured.

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FDA-Approved Seizure Drug May Stop Alzheimer’s Before It Starts. The seizure drug is levetiracetam. I'm intrigued because several nootropic drugs are also racetams, such as aniracetam, oxiracetam, phenylpiracetam. Perhaps the mechanism is related.

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How an Electrician from Kentucky Built an AI Startup with Claude. This is exactly what I mean by how AI's impact on jobs is more nuanced than replacing people. It forces people to think about how AI tools can empower you, like this electrician. I love his initiative and creativity.

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A Simple Carbonated Water Drink Choice Helps Gamers Stay Focused For Hours. The drink is Asahi Wilkinson Sparkling Water, which is a heavily carbonated water from a spring in Takarazuka, Japan. So what's causing the focusing effect? The carbonation? The minerals? Placebo? It's notable that a couple of the authors "are also employees of the company, which stand to benefit if sparkling water does indeed get a higher profile". Yeah, perhaps some bias. I'll get a couple of bottles from Uwajimaya and see if it makes me more focused. The study subjects drank 500 mL over three hours. I can do that. Paper here.

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The subjects in the water study above were gamers. I saw this article: Gamers’ Worst Nightmares About AI Are Coming True. AI efforts are restricting availability of RAM chips.

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Prompt engineering was last year. Now we have to worry about context engineering. But this is exactly what Claude Skills is supposed to help with. Automated contextual prompting. GraphRAG seems to be another approach.

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Amen!  Donald Knuth has a style guide on how to write mathematical papers well, in a way that facilitates understanding, instead of the terse, recondite style of writing that math professors have a perverse fondness for.

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Portland lawmakers want to raise wages for ride-hailing drivers.  Trying to legislate wealth again. Did they not learn from what happened in Seattle when this stunt was tried with food delivery workers?

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Well, well.  Even though the legislature passed it, the mandatory prevailing wage rule was ruled illegal for state consrtruction projects.  Finally, a sane mind prevailed.

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Public cash is going to be used to renovate the Moda Center. Unbelievable. "100% public financing"
At least Paul Allen contributed to the building of the Moda Center. But it's expected that Portland must cover ALL the renovation expenses or the new owner will take the Blazers elsewhere. Portland can't afford this, but they'll pay anyway.The new owner, Dundon, may look at Portland's tax policies, business-unfriendly policies, decline of city businesses, causing a decline in jobs, causing a decline in personal income, causing less money for leisure activities and a decline in ticket and merchandise sales, and decide to go elsewhere anyway. He's keeping mum until the deal is sealed at the end of the month. 

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Washington state revives the marriage penalty. Not exactly, What's being penalized is the double-income situation, not marriage per se. Couples where only one is the bread-winner won't suffer a penalty.

It's no surprise that downtown Seattle remains crappy. Don't blame COVID anymore. It's Dem policies. 

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Cost of renovating the Abernethy Bridge more than triples. Everything ODOT predicts is way more expensive than predicted. Don't put them in charge of renovating the MODA Center.

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The administration also wrote that it would deny funding to counties that “facilitate racial preferences,” that “use a definition of sex other than as binary in humans” or that distribute “drug paraphernalia … under the pretext of ‘harm reduction.’”

Several Portland area homeless services programs would be at odds with these guidelines. 
I'll say.

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12 March 2026

Does AI Autocomplete Covertly Shift Human Opinions? This paper presents evidence that it has. If you've ever used a chatbot to suggest ideas, it can be quite persuasive in presenting selective facts that support a stance. I've often challenged a few of the major chatbots on their opinions and present opposing evidence. The response is always "You raise excellent points" and acknowledges that there is another side to an point position. Another recent paper suggests that most of the major chatbots express the same answer to many topics that are open-ended and don't have a single factual answer. If these chatbots were able to function like Community Notes does on X, then that might be helpful, but given the lefty-bend of the employees that staff AI companies, I am not heartened. It's probably another mind-wash.

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Impressive. OPPO is a smartphone maker that has finally solved the crease problem in foldable phones. I don't know if Apple has approached these guys to license their technology. Very nice. But I still want something like the phones in Corning's A Day Made of Glass and A Day Made of Glass 2. Of course, all that glass wouldn't last a day in Portland. 🙄

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Heh. How to tell if you're dealing with an AI robocaller. They're sounding more realistic every day.

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28.16% of adults claim to have at least one intimate or romantic relationship with an AI.
Adults 60 years and older are more likely to consider intimate relationships with AI as not cheating.
More than half of Americans claim to have some kind of relationship with an AI system.
ChatGPT is the #1 AI platform adults feel they have a relationship with, Amazon’s Alexa is #3, Apple’s Siri is #4, and Google’s Gemini is #5.
Oh my. All those intimate conversations attached to user IDs, recorded and trained upon. People are that...crazy. 🤦🏻‍♂️ If you must, use local-hosted LLMs, folks! Open-source models are dying to meet you!

Oh, and sometimes, those "AI girlfriends" aren't really AI. They're just paid actors, who can be grossed out by reading what you type in. Yuck.

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Here's another example of someone who was arrested because of a poorly trained computer vision system. A Tennessee grandmother spent 6 months in jail falsely accused of a crime in a different state. Having written an AI facial recognition app myself, I know how difficult these systems are. People age. They may sport different hairstyles. Men may have tonsorial variations. Women can really look different with make-up (as many men can attest to). People can wear glasses. Different lighting can change appearances. Then there can be differences in head tilt. Facial recognition could be a start of an investigation, but it shouldn't be used as the sole reason for imprisonment. But law enforcement personnel aren't AI experts. They rely on software procurers to recommend what to purchase. This is really unfortunate. 

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Colon cancer deaths are the leading cause of cancer deaths in those younger than age 50.  In men only, actually. Breast cancer deaths are still the highest in females in that age group. 

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Unbelievable. A 3.1 mm magnet that is about as strong as a large industrial magnet. It uses a ceramic superconductor called REBCO (rare earth barium copper oxide). This could have applications such as in MRI scanners.

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Interesting take on how AI may not actually kill off jobs. It analogizes with the fact that ATMs didn't eliminate bank teller positions as was predicted. In fact, there were more bank tellers after these were introduced. But later on, bank teller positions did decrease, but it was due to the mobile phone – something that was not anticipated. I feel the same way. Companies are slow to figure out that you will still need engineers. But it is true that jobs that can easily be automated are going to be reduced significantly. The job skills that will be sought after in the future will be recalibrated.

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Nostalgia. A collection of essays with the same theme: The Internet used to be fun. It still is, but in a different way. It's also far less private, so while you're having your fun, be more careful. It's sort of like this artlcle about why computers are not automatically making people smarter. Computers, like the Internet, like AI, are just tools. They have and will make smart people more productive and smarter. But in the hands of people who just want to be entertained, the tech will very effectively numb your mind.

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Maybe the loss of memory that occurs with aging is due to bad gut bacteria? Well, at least in mice.

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OpenUI is a webapp that can create apps for you. Try the playground. I used their weather app template to create a weather app. I can do that already with my AI tools. When you have something that just gives you the code, with no input from you, there is no learning. I like that I can design my own app, with my own features. And since I build it a step at a time and see it come to fruition and watch it grow, I learn something.

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Nearly 1 in 5 house hunters want to relocate. Top places to flee from are: Los Angeles (topping the list), followed by New York City,  San Jose-San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago. I read a comment someone posted that real estate agents in the Seattle area are seeing a burst of activity as people want to move away from the area. 

And what's a living wage? Nowhere in the United States is the minimum wage as high as the living wage. Yet folks like Bernie Sanders think that all jobs should pay a living wage. That's unrealistic, but Bernie has never had a real job in his life, so he wouldn't know.  Minimum wage in Seattle, Burien and Tukwila is already more than $20 /hour, and some lawmakers want to raise it further. Which is why the living wage there has increased to $30 /hour, and will keep increasing.

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Phil Knight gave $1 million to Chris Dudley's gubernatorial campaign. Chris is a very nice guy and would make a great governor, but this is Oregon, and there are so many headwinds. Phil should have given him more – like $5 million to really move the needle, not just give him parity with Christine Drazan. Go big or go home!

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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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