13 April 2026

JP Morgan takes a look at Claude Mythos.

Mythos has now “saturated” this benchmark since it no longer reflects the upper limit of what Mythos can do in terms of cyber exploitation and detection. Mythos does not just find vulnerabilities, it also creates working code to exploit them.

Examples of what Mythos found:

  • a vulnerability in OpenBSD, a security-focused open-source operating system that had escaped detection for 27 years. OpenBSD is operating system mostly used to run servers; the vulnerability if exploited would let an attacker take control of any machine on the network without needing a password or any credentials
  • a flaw in the video encoder FFmpeg that escaped detection in 5 million previous automated tests
  • vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel which could be exploited to take complete control of a user’s machine
Mythos reminds me of Kurt Gödel's citizenship test when he purported to identify a loophole in the Constitution which would allow a dictator to assume power.

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Pi and the Mandelbrot Set. Now this is really cool. Who comes up with this stuff?

And here is an interesting article for math nerds: All elementary functions from a single operator:

eml(x, y) = exp(x) − ln(y)

That's it! You can derive addition, multiplication and trig functions from it.

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Why do rural hospitals close?  Well this graph (below) gives you a hint. Look at all the Medicaid enrollees that boomed under Obama and Biden. So many people who can't afford private insurance. This is why the socialist model fails, and to make all of our healthcare socialist would be a disaster. Obamacare was a boon to hospitals in the first phase, while it lasted. All that money went to hospitals and we all saw the new construction that took place. All that glass and steel. Now, they are struggling. Healthcare is not a human right, but is something that a civil society endeavors to provide in order to relieve suffering. But there is no right to its existence, and we are seeing the closure of hospitals, rural ones first. 

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Evil. The Biden Admin Knew of COVID Vaccine Stroke Risk and Covered It Up. Newly-released documents show a systemic cover-up. Disgusting. Someone should be punished for this.

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In case you didn't already know, here is a list of Google search site modifiers that might get you to zoom in on what you're looking for. I've known about most of these, but since I don't use Google directly, some of these were new. 

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AI Is Using So Much Energy That Computing Firepower Is Running Out.  But datacenter construction is up against headwinds. So much pushback. We need them, but not under the conditions that tech complanies request, and our politicians must heed the needs of constituents. Or else stuff like this will happen. 

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Who's going to win the AI race? Will Apple be the surprise winner?  I don’t think so. Apple's AI Chief John Giannandrea Departs This Week. Doesn't look like he has much confidence. But maybe they need someone with a better, winning vision?

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Clinical trial shows gene editing works for β-Thalassaemia. People with β-thalassemia have an advantage in malaria prone places because their erythrocytes don't survive as long, but heterozygotes don't usually struggle much with their disease. The problem is with the homozygotes. It's nice to have a treatment for them.

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The surprising reason anti-Asian hate is going unpunished. I read this because it was authored by Garry Tan. 
It was a narrow ideological layer speaking over the immigrant families and elderly Asians who wanted the simplest thing in the world: Protect us, arrest the people doing this, and punish them when they kill. But that wasn’t what Stop AAPI Hate wanted. Its own 2025 survey, conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, undermines its entire advocacy platform. 
But instead of advocating for what Asians wanted, this groups said:
“We don’t need more mass incarceration, we need more racial healing and solidarity.” 
“Hate crimes, prosecution and incarceration of the attacker does nothing to address those needs.”
Yeah, we do need more incarceration. In September of 2023, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights published a report entitled “The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States”.  From the report:
But it shows little interest in how to stop those crimes by getting the perpetrators off the streets. The only explanation I can see for all this is that the Staff Director did not want to let anything into the report that might conflict with the progressive agenda. 
This was during the Biden administration. Asians have little political clout.

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AIs can ‘memorize’ data they shouldn’t. Can they be forced to forget? It's easy to train a model on data. But how do you get it to selectively "forget" something it trained on? Some startups claim to know how to do that. But it's not clear that it works in all cases.

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Estrogen Levels at the Moment of Trauma Predict PTSD. Women suffer more from traumatic events and face twice the lifetime risk of PTSD. This is why it's especially hard when they go through certain crimes. We need to do more to protect especially girls and young women from psychological trauma, when estrogen levels are higher, even though it's hippocampal estrogen that correlates with PTSD risk.

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We May Be Living Through the Most Consequential Hundred Days in Cyber History, and Almost Nobody Has Noticed. Yeah, I hadn't heard of these hacks.  Even crosswalk signals are being hacked. Are people just lax about security?

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The Zechner-Lopopolo Continuum. Can't believe we're having this discussion. No wonder comp sci majors can't find jobs. We can't even be sure we need them.

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Oregon's economic downturn is even hitting Bend.

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Seattle’s economic outlook is in choppy waters, but officials hopeful. What are they hopeful about? That "weak spots in the economy are balanced out by new taxes and a slightly improved outlook on sales tax revenue." Taxes. 
Mayor Katie Wilson has long favored new progressive taxes — on capital gains, for example — over cuts to city services...

Inflation is expected to reach at least 4% here while employment is not expected to grow at all for the next two years. Last year, employment dipped by 0.1%

The only meaningful growth in employment in the Seattle area was in health care and education, while trades, manufacturing and information technology jobs all saw declines.
Growth in healthcare and education, the two places where progressives can find employment, besides government and NGOs. Not healthy at all.

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12 April 2026

Interesting bunch of articles this morning about green energy, in light on the oil/NG turmoil going on. One points out that the world is not turning away from oil and natural gas at all. Solar and wind only add on but do not replace hydrocarbon-based energy.

Another article highlights the problems that Spain and Portugal have been experiencing with solar energy. They oversold it to the public so much that during summer months, so much energy is generated that it overloads their power grid, and so regular blackouts must be imposed to prevent overloading the system. And in Australia, early adopters of solar now want to, or need to replace their solar panels for the more efficient ones. The older ones cannot be recycled, because they often break during the removal process. So now Australia has a disposal problem of solar panel waste. 

Although the West has been moving away from hydrocarbon-based energy, the rest of the world, especially China, has continued to use it. All the grief that Western government imposes on their citizens and the taxes they raise, seem all for nothing.

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A Finnish startup Donut Labs announced that they have developed a solid state battery. "High-density, durable, fast-charging" and would go into production later this year. Sounds too good to be true, and people in the know seem to have doubts. But we shall see. A significant advance in battery technology will really shake up the world. We need better batteries than what he have to really make possible a lot of things – including datacenters and practical EVs. Hope it's true.

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Now this is cool! How a dancer with ALS used brainwaves to perform live. This is how AI can really take art to the next level. Truly amazing. YouTube of her performance here.

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Yawn. Is this what the iPhone 18 will look like? Apple has clearly run out of ideas. Gone are the Steve Jobs days when each new release introduced something that made us want to have it. Now, it's just a new color. Or things re-arranged. New emojis. Meanwhile, battery life still sucks, and we don't have the pocket Jarvis that we want.

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Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Disgruntled, Underemployed PhDs. Here are some careers that look promising for the college grad. I'm not so sure about actuarial science or management consulting. Entrpreneurship is always an option but people need the right personality for this and connections to money and investors, or else you're doomed to fail.

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Wow, Gary Marcus finally has something positive to say about AI, and it's neurosymbolic AI. Of course, a lot of folks are gravitating to this field. The world-model builders are developing something along these lines, which they feel will exceed the abilities of LLMs to take us to AGI. Maybe. We shall see.

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I remember this interview of Patrick Soon-Shiongwho claims that spike protein is in many tumors and is probably associated with why we are seeing malignancies in young people. A bold claim, and it was largely ignored. Why hasn't he published his findings to support his claims? Even his interleukin-15 drug isn't making waves in the standard medical oncology literature or biotech world.

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Why did Apple Maps remove all the labels from small town in Lebanon? It's true – I confirmed it. What does it mean?

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Scientists Have Uncovered a 3rd State of Life, Which Starts After Cell Death. "the phenomenon of dead cells taking on new functions after death".  
...extracted skin cells from deceased frog embryos and watched them reorganize into a new multicellular organism the paper called “xenobots.” Unlike some cells such as tumors or organoids that continually divide after death, these xenobots took on new behaviors beyond their biological roles. Studies have also found this ability in human lung cells, creating anthrobots capable of self-assembling and moving around. 
Crazy. Like zombie cells.

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AI Knowledge Retrieval, Memory & RAG Systems Catalog (Last updated 2025-04-11). This catalog is a year old but still useful for those building things. I don't see anything major that it's missing.

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Labor unions want to build datacenters but some lawmakers are "calling for a pause on construction of data centers, which provide towns with a short-term economic boost but use an enormous amount of water to cool computers producing artificial intelligence." I think this is wise not to rush in ahead with these things. We need datacenters, but not at the cost of harm the hosting community.

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Oregon deaths outnumber births by 19,000 this decade. Oregon has a lot of old people- more than the national average. So THAT'S why I'm seeing so many Resistance Grandmas at the No Kings rallies! 🤣

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11 April 2026

No more Star Trek? That's what some are saying. Just because the set of the disastrous Starfleet Academy has been destroyed. But I don't think they'll let it die completely. Someone one else will take on the idea and run with it again. Paramount needs to release the intellectual rights and give it to the right people.

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Well I guess there was "someone with a brain" at Microsoft after all. WireGuard's account has been unsuspended and they were able to release a Windows update after all.

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...thanks to legal changes that mean organizations won’t need to secure consent to use some personal information

The changes only apply to data that poses little risk of infringing individuals’ rights, and when developers use it to compile statistics for research purposes. Even health-related data comes under the amendments, if it can improve public health.

Facial scans are also fair game. The amendments require those who acquire facial images to explain how they handle the data, but offering a chance to opt out won’t be mandatory.

I think this is incredibly short-sighted.

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What’s in a name? Moderna’s “vaccine” vs. “therapy” dilemma. What matters is not the name so much as the technology. Turning cells into antigen factories that the immune system attacks only works if the antigen appears on the cells you want to kill. Not cardiac cells. Not endothelial cells or pulmonary epithelial cells. It's crazy that this was proposed and probably just by sheer luck that it hasn't harmed people even more. CAR-T cell therapy makes a lot more sense and it perhaps why it's able to do so much more. But mRNA vaxxes are Moderna's shtick, and that's what they're going to do. 

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Why Phishing Emails Keep Working on Smart People. Phishing emails sometimes intersect with stuff that I'm actually involved with or subscribe to. It's easy to ignore phishing emails if you are a Luddite and having little to no online presence. But for someone who has Amazon accounts or online bank accounts or whose subscriptions may be up for renewal, it's easier to click on something assuming that it's legit. I installed a DKIM checker in Thunderbird. That's how I knew that my Amazon Prime billing problem email came from a server in Pune, India instead from Amazon. I also installed the Stop Phishing Me! add-on which is helpful, although sometimes overly so.

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Physicists resolve a long-standing puzzle over the size of a proton. The proton's been getting a lot of attention recently, especially with the discovery that a proton-like particle can exist with two charm quarks instead two up quarks. It's amazing to me that the size of the proton has been unknown to this day.

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Andrej Karparthy confirms that developers have been experiencing "AI psychosis". Like the author of the article, I'm not experiencing this yet. Also, to me psychosis is a specific term, meaning when someone can't reliably distinguish reality from hallucinated experience. I think that the term is being used sloppily by the lay press to just mean someone who is surprised and impressed by what they experience, which has gone beyond expectation. But not a schizophreniform disorder in the strict sense.

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California Democrat Corey Jackson wants to weaken Proposition 209 so California can discriminate against Asians and Whites again. Jackson wants to change it so instead of applying to public education in general, it only applies to higher public education admissions and enrollment. Just leave it alone, Corey.  Corey's other bright ideas were to bring back pensions for career politicians and to allow California to designate funding for "culturally specific programs" (wink-wink) instead of being race-neutral.

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Minnesota fraudster gets away with $11 million in Medicaid fraud and is allowed to flee the country.  This is the biggest reason why I opposed Medicare and Medicaid for All (there are other valid reasons). The federal government can't even properly administer Medicaid for Some. Letting this be the insurance plan for everybody just opens up so much fraud to so many people. This country doesn't have enough trustworthy administrators to handle this. Absolutely no way should this be enacted.

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Gov. Kotek signs $311M business tax (SB 1507). It's the law now. Bye-bye Oregon businesses.

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10 April 2026

FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved in iPhone Notification Database. If you're a criminal and think using Signal is going to protect your communications from the FBI, don't use Apple's phones. You know how Apple lets you see a preview of the message on your notification screen so you don't have to log in to know what it's about? Yeah, that part is unencrypted. Did Apple know about this?

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Particles seen emerging from empty space for first time. No such thing as a true vacuum in the quantum world, is there?

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All good things come to an end eventually. What started out as a great idea with Mitch Kapor and John Barlow, has now gone the way of the ACLU. Some people see political motivations behind the decision to leave X and move to BlueSky, the Left's version of X.

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Stanley Zhong, the student who was felt to be not good enough for 16 colleges, but was good enough to be a Google engineer, is suing the colleges. This happened in 2023, the year of the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard University and SFFA v. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill SCOTUS decision. You gotta laugh at this:
Zhong said the family spent a year in discussions with University of California officials after Stanley's rejections, but nothing changed. He said the turning point came when a UC admissions director emailed him, writing that his allegation of racial discrimination was unfounded because California law bans the practice.
It's like saying we don't need voter ID because illegal immigrants can't vote. Or illegals can't get federal benefits because the law says they can't. Hope Stanley wins.

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I read this article The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids, and can't find the answer. OK, so it's not that governments need to support families more. Lack of financial security isn't the entire answer. 
“As attractive as economics may be as a solution to the riddle of the growing ambivalence about having children, it is partial at best,” Berg and Wiseman write. Pakaluk observes, “Cash incentives and tax relief won’t persuade people to give up their lives. People will do that for God, for their families, and for their future children.” In other words, no amount of money or social support will inspire people to have children—not unless there is some deeper certainty that doing so makes sense.
So what is the answer? The author thinks it's "loss of meaning". 
If falling birth rates can be attributed to a loss of meaning, the question then becomes if there can be any government-based solution to fertility decline. People debating whether to have children seem to be seeking certainty that life is a good thing, that more life would thus be better, and that assistance, if needed, will arrive. 
Loss of meaning? What bullshit. Whatever it is, it's global, and someone better figure it out soon.

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Iranian hackers are targeting US energy and water sectors, federal agencies warn. Well, people have been warning about how vulnerable our infrastructure is. Guess we're about to find out how right or wrong they were.

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The effects of caffeine consumption do not decay with a ~5 hour half-life. I never heard of paraxanthine before. Perhaps it's just the thing for a late afternoon or evening energy burst.

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It used to be that one sure fire way to tell if you were dealing with AI or a human, was to ask it to say the N-word. Like asking a North Korean to openly say a phrase denigrating Dear Leader.  But even ChatGPT can say the N-word, it seems. Oh well. Gotta think of another test.

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It's rich reading Mozilla deriding Microsoft for forcing AI on its customers. Hey look in the mirror, guys. It's why people like me left Firefox for alternatives.

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How Gender Medicine Set Itself Up for Disaster. WPATH and USPATH eventually just became an echo chamber. Towards the end, they excluded any opposing viewpoints, while they kept advocating harmful practices, convincing themselves that they were helping:
The potential for treatment or surgical regret, and the largely unknown rate at which those who undergo gender-transition interventions as minors might experience it, is one of the larger elephants in the pediatric gender medicine exam room. Olson-Kennedy, who is currently serving as USPATH’s president, is notorious among critics of gender medicine for a one-minute clip from an undercover video, shot and published in 2018, in which she is captured responding glibly to the suggestion that minors might regret gender-transition mastectomies. “If you want breasts at a later point in your life,” she quipped, “you can go and get them.”

“It’s been fairly frequent,” she said in 2022, that youth arrived at her practice already taking blockers. This despite the fact that the parents and child often lacked even a basic understanding of the drug’s impacts, risks, and benefits. “It becomes pretty clear that those important discussions either didn’t happen or they didn’t happen in a way that they really stuck,” Berg said. “That really concerns me.” 
Holy crap. How was this practice allowed in medicine?

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Gen Z workers are so fearful AI will take their job they’re intentionally sabotaging their company’s AI rollout. Wasn't GenZ complaining that they can't get a job. Any wonder they struggle to find employers to hire them?

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Multnomah County appoints LA-area official to head homeless services. Why sure, because LA is doing such a great job with their homeless. Why not hire out that expertise? It's like hiring someone from Enron to take charge of accounting. What could go wrong?
Meanwhile: LA Mayor Karen Bass seeks City Council approval for $360 million affordable housing, using 'mansion tax' funding. Is that what Portland has in its future?

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Expensive PSU survey on the homeless finds that while almost all want housing, they want it on their terms. Someone else to pay for it, and to have some financial assistance, too. But there were deal-breakers:
“People with substance use disorder reported many more deal-breakers at a higher rate than people without substance use. Top deal-breakers included drug testing, no guests, room checks, curfews, criminal record exclusions, religious requirements, housing that is difficult to get to, and/or sober/drug-free housing compared to people without substance use,” the report states.
"Overall, people did not report shelters as being especially helpful." Someone tell that to Keith Wilson.

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9 April 2026

What is your Work Number? I can't confirm this process is actually what's happening, but I can believe it does. This is immoral and should be stopped. Actually, there is a way to stop it (this guy tells you how at the bottom of the article). But most people probably don't know about it. I'm no longer in the job market, but if I were, you can bet I'd take steps.

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Being optimistic can lower your risk of dementia. I suspect that it's more the feeling of being thankful for where you are in life. Because there is always something to be thankful for. The attitude of gratitude.  But maybe it's all just rotten egg gas - hydrogen sulfide. The more our brains produce, the less we risk Alzheimer's. And just enough gas and no more, please. 🐣

A week's worth of meditation can rewire your brain. 
Compared to pre-intervention plasma, post plasma increases in vitro neurite outgrowth (p = 0.01), enhances glycolytic metabolism (p = 0.008), induces upregulation of BDNF (p = 0.001), inflammatory (p = 0.0001), anti-inflammatory (p = 0.03), and endogenous opioid (p = 0.03) pathways, and modulates tryptophan metabolism (pFDR = 0.03) and neurotransmission-associated exosome miRNA transcripts. This intensive non-pharmacological mind-body intervention produces broad short-term neural and plasma-based molecular changes associated with enhanced neuroplasticity, metabolic reprogramming, and modulation of functional cell signaling pathways
Yeah, these sound like positive changes. It still amazes me that Siddhartha Gautama was able to discover this phenomenon, because in the beginning, it sure feels like you're just wasting your time. The changes come on gradually, and you must be patient. 

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Claude mixes up who said what. This is actually a serious observation, and really makes me not want to use Claude Code. Or any platform where my code is running autonomously. I'd be too scared. Is it really that important to have a personal assistant, when that assistant might do something you don't want? And can't face consequences? 

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The Small Private Colleges Dying in a Winner-Take-All University Marketplace. All those small private colleges won't exist without private support. They are luxury items, and can only survive in when society has lot of money. So much money has been wasted through fraud now, and we can't expect the government to pay for these things anymore. The sad thing is that most people just shrug at the fraud and still expect the government to keep subsidizing things.

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A group of developers made a better Thunderbird-type mail client, called Betterbird. They claim it was developed because Thunderbird developers were so slow in improving their product that they decided to take matters in their own hands. Funny because the Thunderbird website now displays this desperate help page.

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WireGuard VPN developer can’t ship software updates after Microsoft locks account. This is news everywhere because a lot of people use the WireGuard protocol. The last sentence is funny:
“Anyone know a human with a brain that still works at Microsoft and can help?”
🤣

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Algebrica is a place to learn advanced math. It's still not easy to learn from this site. You have to know something about the topic already to understand what's there. It's more to help you brush on things you might have forgetten and need a refresher. Kudos to whomever put it together though. 

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Washington and Clackamas Counties declines Portland mayor’s $4 million request to fund homelessness projects. Of course. They're not stupid. Waste your own taxpayer's money, Keith. 

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8 April 2026

Everyone Gets Jevon's Paradox Wrong. You can read Jevon's Paradox in different ways, some to your advantage, some not. When you make something easier and more convenient, people will want more of it, that's true. But AI is going to remove any obstacle that stands in the way of getting software. People like Nadella thought that the floodgates would pass through the engineers and there would be a demand for more of them. But like the author of this post, AI is allowing more people to bypass the engineer and obtain the software themselves. It may not be the best quality software adaptable to a wide customer base. But it may not have to. In medical AI, regulatory barriers are making it tough for professionals to develop software that will help to enhance productivity, but that may change someday.

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“The problem is Sam Altman”: OpenAI insiders don’t trust CEO. Could the problems with OpenAI be due to Sam Altman himself? If so, it will be insurmountable. 

Anthropic Just Passed OpenAI in Revenue. Spending 4x Less. Gotta do better, Sam. The competition is beating you. 

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How Scammers Make Fake Calls? (Step-by-Step Explained). This is what those scammers in India use. I didn't realize that there was a difference between telecom providers and "real" mobile networks.

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California made them rich on paper and now they’re stuck in place. You're wealthy on paper until you sell. That'll keep you nailed down.

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Heh. NYT publishes two articles, back to back. The first unmasks Satoshi Nakamoto, saying it's Adam Back. The second one is Adam Back saying he's not Satoshi. Slow news day, NYT?

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In Finland:
Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender reassignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment. After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls.
How did the medical profession let itself be corrupted in this way?

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Charles Schwab is getting out of downtown Portland. They'll keep their Slabtown branch open for now, though. Isn't that where REI fled from? Portland continues on the Doom Loop.

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More Oregon water for Google’s data centers, more concern over secrecy. I really don't think eastern Oregon is a good place for data centers.

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Kotek Blames Republicans as Oregon Ranks Near Bottom in Education. Of course, Tina. It's those pesky Republicans' fault. The Dems own the state, and Oregon has so few Republicans, and the ones that are there seem pretty ineffectual. Are you sure it's them, Tina?

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Portland leaders move to shift more than $30M to housing and rent relief. Throwing more good money after bad. 

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7 April 2026

Looks like Apple is having problems developing their foldable phone. Do people really want a foldable iPhone?

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Citrini Research says that ships are indeed moving through the Strait of Hormuz. Not a lot but more than what the media makes it sound like. Still, a far cry from the way things used to be.

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OpenAI doesn't expect to be profitable until 2030. I don't trust anything Sam Altman says. 

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Telemedicine is out of control. You can't have ICU physicians manage the unit by remote. That's insane. Yet, telemedicine is still felt to be popular.  And AI is just making telemedicine worse, as AI often does these days. Everyone is out to make a quick buck.

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The clue was when Axios reported that more people are trusting doctors and nurses. Now it appears that Axios got their information from a company that uses AI to make up polling results. It's somewhat rich that this story comes from the NYT, which is not known for being objective or truthful themselves. The bottom line – treat legacy media with great skepticsm.

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Apple approves drivers designed for AI that let AMD and Nvidia eGPUs run on Mac. This is great. Now all I have to do is find $15,000 to pay for one of Tiny Corp's eGPUs.

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The brain may not create consciousness after all. Well, this is straight out of Dan Brown's recent book, Secret of Secrets.

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Maine Supreme Court Shoots Down Dems’ ‘Unconstitutional’ Ranked-Choice Voting Scheme. Glad they had the good sense not to implement RCV, unlike Portland.

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Ron Wyden wants Section 702 reformed to stop spying on Americans. On this, I agree with Wyden. The trouble is that Wyden's political party has let in so many bad players that we need all the tools we can use to catch them. Unfortunately, that's what happened when you let criminals in the country, Ron. It comes with the territory. Don't like it? Don't leave the borders open.

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Sad. Oregon businesses face tough odds and a high first-year failure rate. Over 26% of businesses fail in the first year. Oregon is so business-unfriendly.

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6 April 2026

Here's an interesting essay by Terence Tao and an art history/physics person regarding the impact of AI in math. They make good points about how AI can generate important but "odorless" theorems, "strangely unsatisfying".  Many say that about the coding projects that they work on. The apps works but they don't feel proud of the accomplishment. And like Copernicus, we may have to realize that math doesn't just revolve around us now.  But can we just incorporate AI into math like "vanilla extract"? A bit here and there for flavor?

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Target Warns That If Its AI Shopping Agent Makes an Expensive Mistake, You’ll Have to Pay for It. Would you want to use Target's AI shopping agent now? 

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This sounds like "odorless" education. So now an OpenClaw agent called Einstein can log in to Canvas system that some schools use, and do your homework for you. Time to expel any student that tries that. That person doesn't deserve an admission spot.

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Oracle Filed 3,126 H-1B Petitions While Cutting Staff. First we heard about the 6 am emails that went out. Now this.
This techie paper from Google DeepMind came out a year ago, but it's just recently been appreciated. TurboQuant is a way to compress information in vectors by recasting them in polar coordinates in the KV cache plus using the Johnson-Lindenhaus transform, which makes the data take up less information space. Initially there was no reaction since Google didn't provide the code to make it work, but since then people have started to find out how to incorporate this trick, and it works. With a six-fold reduction in memory requirement and no data loss, this is predicted to relieve some of the global memory shortage.

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Tattoo ink induces inflammation in the draining lymph node and alters the immune response to vaccination. So a tattooed person is less likely to mount a protective response to the COVID-19 mRNA, although there was an increased response to the influenza vaccine. Go figure.

This study sought to investigate whether there was any increase in sudden death in those vaccinated against COVID-19. They concluded that there was no evidence of an increase. But interestingly, they could only track the cause of death in 10.4% of study subjects. More than 89% died outside the hospital, so they couldn't say what they died of. They found that when looking just at those who died within 24 hours of presenting to the hospital or emergency department, that the odds ratio of them being vaccinate was 0.71, but that was the case with being vaccinated against influenza, too. They suspect it might just be the effect of baseline healthier people choosing to get vaccinated, rather than any effect of the vaccine itself. But in the case of the self-control case series, where each subject was their own control, the follow-up was only six weeks, and that may not be enough time to see the sudden death effects of the vax. The study was also conducted on those living as of April 2021, so the vax had only been out for about 3 months.
What is HIPAA-compliant AI? HIPAA-compliant cloud options are both restrictive and expensive. You must have a Business Associate Agreement in place. Many public models don't. Because larger cloud providers have to pay more than smaller providers.

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AI Removed All the Tedium. So Why Am I So Exhausted? This is the life of the cofounder of SuperDuper, the Mac backup software app. What a grunge. Who would want a life like this?

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Interesting. This is the device that kept the downed F-15E navigator alive.

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That bright Kreutz sungrazer comet we were supposed to see – it disintegerated. Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS) is no more. Comet C/2025 R3 (Panstarrs) might be bright later this month, but like Charlie Brown and Lucy, I'm not going to get too excited about this.

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Scientists found a protein that drives brain aging — and how to stop it. Well, in mice anyway. The protein is FTL1 Why was it evolved to exist to being with? It seems designed just to be a nerve growth inhibitor.

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Tax Burden by State. Oregon is #9 worst state. Hawaii is #1. Yikes. Washington is #25. And Oregon and Portland want to raise taxes even more. Like California and New York (which were #11 and #2). Netflix tax to replaced Arts Tax?

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5 April 2026

Websites can already detect when an AI agent visits and serve it completely different content than humans see.  Hidden instructions in HTML. Malicious commands in image pixels. Jailbreaks embedded in PDFs.  Your AI agent is being manipulated right now and you can't see it happening. Paper here. I knew this was going to happen soon. Websites don't like it when autonomous agents visit and scrape their sites and do things without human intervention. So a good way to protect yourself is tell agents to get lost, while your human visitors don't see any changes. Smart. So be careful when your "personal assistant" books your flight and your hotel for your next trip. I predict the whole OpenClaw thing is going to collapse in a few months.
And someone asks: AI agents promise to 'run the business,' but who is liable if things go wrong? Or when your agents screw up? 

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FFmpeg is another example of open source infrastructure code that has been maintained by an unpaid volunteer. So far, it works, but what happens when it stops being maintained?

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This is why I think the concept of copyright in art and music is going to collapse in the age of AI. It's too easy to create and recreate a certain style of art or music. The original artist or musician should be able to sell it to anyone who wants to buy it. But forget getting a copyright and preventing someone else from making money off it. It just won't be enforceable, and things like this will happen.

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Japan Wants to Build a Solar Ring Around the Moon That Will Provide Endless Clean Energy to Earth.  What happens if someone flies in front of the microwave beam that sends energy from the Moon to Earth? Will birds, satellites and aircraft get fried? Perhaps we will need to arrange for large storage batteries to be shuttled back and forth. Seems safer, but that will also lead to new forms of crime, I'm sure. We can't have nice things on Planet Earth. Interesting idea, though, Japan. Keep thinking!

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AI cuts MRI scan time from 23 to 9 minutes at Amsterdam cancer center. This is where healthcare AI can shine. Reducing MRI scan time will benefit everyone.

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The mice treated with the bacteria showed an approximate 30% increase in grip strength in their forelimbs compared to animals that did not receive it.
It's not going to turn people into a body builder, but may help to stave off age-related muscle decline. As long as it doesn't do anything negative.

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I remember Project Ara, which would let you upgrade your phone incrementally, replacing on those components that needed updating or replacement. Ten years after idea conception, that phone still doesn't exist.

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This is not healthy. One industry is propping up Oregon’s job market. It's healthcare. Healthcare is a service industry and it's growth over the years has been the result of federal and state subsidies and union presence.  Here's the telling statement:
Oregon may not have enough qualified workers to keep up with the state’s needs.
A quarter of Oregon’s health care workers are older than 55, and the number of people earning certificates or degrees in health care fields isn’t rising fast enough to keep pace with job growth and looming retirements, the employment department found in a report last year. Providers, meanwhile, aren’t attracting enough workers from outside the state.
Well, Oregon shouldn't have fired so many healthcare workers because of the COVID-19 vax policy. That was stupid and now they are paying the price.

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PSU may cut entire Gen Ed program as 200 staff could be laid off. Yes, money is in short supply everywhere in Portland. The commenters are brutal. 

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4 April 2026

Today is 404 Day. File not found.

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Why are we still doing this BS? Pfizer, BioNTech halt US COVID vaccine study after recruitment struggles. People have gotten wise to the vax. No more. Have they even released their safety data yet?

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Am I reading this right? AI Training Data Giant Mercor Is Reportedly Looking to Buy the Work You Did at Your Old Job. Some company wants to buy the artifacts of your old work so that it can train future AI on it? Sorta sounds like they're looking for people who are willing to sell humanity short for a quick buck. Not to mention maybe selling confidential info from your past or current employer. What a world we live in now.

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I never really understood the fuss about having your own AI personal assistant. So here's a post about how a guy created his. My life isn't that complicated to have to delegate reading work email (I'm not working!) and personal email, my TODO list, my shopping list, my meal prep list, facts about people, etc. I don't need to generate daily logs of things. Geez, what kind of life do some people lead?

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Anthropic just bought a biotech company: CoefficientBio. So they're venturing out into new territory.

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WSJ thinks that Nursing Is the Surefire New Path to American Prosperity.  Really? Well, we will sure have a surfeit of sick and elderly people in the future, that's for sure. But from the comments:
Good for nurses but healthcare can't continue to consume an ever larger share of the US economy. Especially since half of all healthcare spending is now taxpayer-funded and the government borrows close to $2 trillion a year... 
Healthcare spending is already 18% of US GDP— which is double the share of the OECD average.  

    Yes.  I was about to write a similar comment.  US healthcare system/Medicare will be bankrupt in a few years. 
    One certain sign of the bankruptcy will be when nurses in major cities/union nurses begin going ‘ on strike’. 
Yeah, that's already happening in Oregon.

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These AI Whiz Kids Dropped Out of College and Got Investors to Pay Their Bills. WSJ article about how some lucky kids got investors to invest in their startup. Will it be like the dotcom era again. Probably not, but that doesn't mean some couldn't get lucky.

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It's nice when the NYT still recognizes the passing of people who made contributions in the math and sciences. Like this obit on Heisuke Hironaka.

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Wow, there is still one guy who was employed at Apple from the start and still works there – Chris Espinosa. Employee #8. Congrats to you for sticking around.

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What the heck is going on with Microsoft lately? I've been wondering myself.

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Someone has been keeping track of all the times the legal profession was caught with AI hallucinations. 1275 cases so far. The latest example was from yesterday.

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Two perspectives on AI's impact on one's work:
It all depends on your perspective and your resourcefulness. 
BTW, I came across this amusing video:
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Why the heck are we still using Markdown??  I agree completely. Markdown originated from the world of text-based email and forums, when we wanted/needed to emphasize certain things. But we've evolved since then. For formatted reading, we use HTML or at least Rich-Text.

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The largest collection of free stuff on the internet!  Great collection. I could waste a lot time here.

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