Sugoi & Yokunai

I just found out that AT&T bought Quantum Fiber. And with fiber, I can get 2 GB service, better than the 1 GB I am getting with xFinity. And I can get WiFi 7 broadcast, instead of just WiFi 6. Competition is great!

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Amazon Ring has a Search Party system designed to help find lost dogs. Hopefully cats, too. I don't know how they trained their AI. Of course, this means that Amazon has access to all your camera feed. You decide if that's OK.

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Yesterday, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) released new guidance on Tuesday cautioning physicians against performing gender-transition surgeries on minors. Now the AMA meekly says something in support of that stance. "Surgical intervention in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood."  Generally? How about deleting that weasel adjective? And what about puberty blockers? Comment on that, too, would you?

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Mamdani is also telling the Queens DA not to prosecute a knife-wielding criminal. It reminds me of when writer David Sedaris was mugged in Portland, and he was shocked when his friends were upset at him for reporting it, instead of letting it slide.  

Then MSN runs this article: Downtowns are dying, but we know how to save them. Yeah, fix crime.  The article concludes:

Of course, even those who yearn to visit or live in a walkable, dense neighborhood are not going to flock to a place surrounded by a grim urban dystopia. Efforts to address downtown’s dysfunctions will elicit the usual cries from progressives, who seem unwilling to carry out the necessary policing. But if L.A. and other cities want their downtowns to survive, this should be the first order of business.

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The Skanner Ceases Operation After 50 Years. It started as news outlet for Black people, just like Asian Reporter is for Asians. I remember people at street corners trying to push the paper on me. But clearly there is a need for investigative journalism, like the kind only WWeek seems to be doing. The Oregonian sure isn't, anymore.

And Washington Post is laying off a third of their workforce.  Good! That place was just woke central. I'm glad Bezos is cleansing that institution. Hopefully, it'll be a respectable paper once again. At least less obviously biased. 

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Perplexity was my favorite AI tool. Then it started lying to me.  Recently Perplexity did hallucinate to me. I had to re-ask the question, and then it admitted that it had fabricated the first answer. But that was just once. I guess it's happening more to other people. Sounds like Perplexity is trying to skimp on services due to being short on cash. It might need to start charging people, or at least charge more for premium service.

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I haven't jumped on the Clawdbot ship yet. I don't need personal AI in my life. So I came across this post, and wanted to see what sort of things I'm missing out on. Check this guy out:

Family document filing. I send a PDF or photo via WhatsApp. Lollo analyzes it with vision-document type, date, sender, amount if applicable. Photos get converted to PDF, then run through OCR. Files are renamed according to a consistent schema (’YYYY-MM-DD [Sender] [Type] [Details].pdf’) and sorted into the appropriate folder. The whole pipeline-vision analysis, format conversion, OCR, renaming, filing-happens automatically.

But filing is only half of it. The retrieval is where it gets interesting. “What insurance policies do we have for our toddler?” “How much did we spend on contractors in 2025?” Lollo searches the archive, reads the relevant documents, and gives me an answer. The documents aren’t just stored—they’re accessible in a way that actually matters.

Personal color consulting. I had professional color analysis done. The results—which colors suit my skin tone, which to avoid-now live in a dedicated skill. I send a photo of a sweater I’m considering: “Does this work for me?” Lollo checks it against my profile and gives me a straight answer. The knowledge persists. I don’t have to explain my color type every time.

Proactive scheduling. Every morning at 7:45, Lollo sends me a briefing: today’s calendar, weather for dog walking times, anything that needs attention. I didn’t ask for it. It just happens. The night before trash collection, I get a reminder which bins to put out. Once a week, I get a summary of local news, filtered by our interests and delivered with a Rhine-region commentary—my wife and I are expats from the Rhineland living in Bavaria, and Lollo knows to add the appropriate sardonic undertone.

Ideas and todos. When I have an idea, I say “new idea about X” and it goes into my Obsidian vault, properly formatted, synced. When I need a todo, same thing. The knowledge doesn’t get trapped in a chat history I’ll never scroll back through. It flows into real systems where it belongs.

Watch history and taste. Lollo has access to my Trakt.tv data-everything I’ve watched, when, how I rated it. Over time, this becomes a taste profile. Recommendations get better because they’re based on actual behavior, not a cold-start conversation. 

Meal planning and culinary consulting. Forget smart fridges. I tell Lollo what’s in our pantry and fridge-on the go, via voice, whenever I remember. Not everything, but ingredients that survive a week’s cooking cycle. Based on what’s actually there, it suggests dishes that match our preferences. 

Contact management. After meetings or on the go, I can quickly dictate the people I just met. Mixed with photos of business cards, LinkedIn profile links, whatever I have. From this mess, Lollo creates clean new contacts or updates existing ones. 

Sheesh. This guy needed a color consultant? My life must be so simple. I put my ideas and todos in a text file that's simple to manage.

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One-third of dementia cases are linked to non brain-related diseases. Yup, you must take care of the body, as well, or the brain will rot. 

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Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled.  

A recent article in The Atlantic reported that an increasing number of students at elite universities were claiming they had disabilities to get benefits or exemptions, which can also include copies of lecture notes, excused absences and access to private testing rooms. Those who suffer from “social anxiety” can even get out of participating in class discussions. 

What kind of student is Stanford admitting these days? They learn to grift at that school.

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The Fax Numbers of the Beast. The guy that created the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences is not your average nerd, that's for sure.

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Enormous 'mega-blob' under Hawaii is solid rock and iron, not gooey — and it may fuel a hotspot. Oh, I thought this was something new. Every Hawaii student knows about this. That's how the Islands came about. And the iron-rich lava is what makes it flow smoothly and freely, instead of explosively. So we can stand around and watch it up close. It's a rite of passage to step on the lava as it flows and get your rubbah slippah stuck.

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Women Are More Likely Than Men to Endorse Political Violence. Ah, so someone else noticed.

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"The TSA’s New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID is Illegal," Says Regulatory Expert. I don't understand. Is the TSA supposed to help keep us safe when we fly, or is it just an agency to collect money. I understand that we need ID when we fly (we should nowadays), so what does paying $45 do to make us safer?  If I'm going to be stuck in a metal tube for hours with a bunch of strangers, I'd like some assurance that there was some screening being done to check for weirdos.

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Popular Portland restaurant República closing over safety concerns, rising costs. The reasons? A "sharp decline in dining, rising costs and broader concerns about the current political and economic climate". If you can't safely eat out in the Pearl District, what does that say about the rest of Portland?

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Washington state has the third largest homeless population in America.  Now the state legislature wants to prevent cities from conducting any homeless sweeps. And to require low barrier housing in all areas. They want to turn the state into sh!t. You have to ask yourself why they would do that to their state? Look to what's going on in Fulton County, Georgia for the answer. Homeless people are Democrat gold. 

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Oregon Dems continue to scheme on how to raise state taxes that Trump cut for us. It doesn't matter if Trump is president if you live in a Blue state or Blue city.  Life will not get better. 

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Gary Marcus thinks that OpenClaw is a disaster waiting to happen. Yeah, Gary is always a Mr. Doom and Gloom, but I think he's right. The technology is powerful and has great potential, but a lot of script-kiddie types don't know what they're doing and could really wreak a lot of havoc.

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A lot of Silicon Valley techies were microdosing psilocybin or LSD. To treat depression and give 'em that creative edge. Turns out all that was placebo effect. Works as well as drinking coffee.

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California fraud is insane. It dwarfs the Somali fraud in Minnesota.

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Why AI won’t wipe out white-collar jobs. You must use the AI to help you do your job better.

––– 凄い ––– Holy cow!  People from other countries account for most of Oregon’s growth.  I would bet that they were mostly illegals that came in under the Biden administration. I can tell. It's so obvious. 

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What Really Happened on Easter Island? Recent evidence suggests that it was a prolonged drought. Not the indiscriminant cutting down of trees either.

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Is this for real? San Francisco is going to have a march for billionaires. What will the attendance be? Ten people? Who in that Blue city feels sorry for billionaires? Must be a joke.

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It’s Starting to Look Like AI Has Killed the Entire Model of College. Yup, it's true. The days of just learning a skill expecting the find someone who is willing to pay for it, is coming to an end. Instead, young people need to think about what problems there are that need solving and learn how to solve them. Become business owners instead of employees. It will take a different set of skills.

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97.5% of Women in STEM Feel Like Frauds Despite Their Success. This is the downside of DEI. When people get promoted or put in positions for which they may not be fully qualified for, you get unconscious bias, which feels like impostor syndrome. We are seeing that in places like the Supreme Court, in politics and education, where people are clearly unqualified for their positions, and it shows. I'm sure it's with some men as well, and perhaps women are just more honest with themselves. I'm sure Emmy Noether, Lise Meitner, Jennifer Doudna and Katherine Johnson didn't experience this. Or even Sabine Hossenfelder. Because they are for real, and earned their credentials.

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Genetics may play a greater role in determining longevity than previously believed.  "We use mathematical modeling and analyses of twin cohorts raised together and apart to correct for this factor, revealing that heritability of human life span due to intrinsic mortality is above 50%."  I suspected as much.  Paper here.

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English professors require printed copies of readings. I'm not sure I agree with this. It's a step backwards. Having an electronic copy allows me to search for terms and easily get definitions words I am unfamiliar with, or get translations. It does make AI analysis easier, but that, too, is a plus. I could see a move like this taking place at a community college, but at a place like Yale? It doesn't make sense. You're supposed to be a place where accomplished people want to further their studies. Don't hinder their efforts. If they can't pay attention to what they're reading, how did they get into Yale? Is this because of DEI again?

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Moltbook is beginning to be a disaster. API keys being exposed. Administrator unresponsive. What a nightmare. This scenario is fiction but it could easily happen to some poor slob. 

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One surgeon created a course for other doctors to take, to help deal with AI in the clinic exam room.  Pretty soon, you can get CME!

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ICE protester says her Global Entry was revoked after agent scanned her face. You have to ask yourself if it's really worth it to protest the arrests of illegal aliens. She in the database now. FAFO.

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AI Boom Is Triggering a Loan Meltdown for Software Companies. Loans are assets for banks, because they are fungible. But if people start thinking that the software companies might not deliver and might default, they become less desirable. And not being able to obtain favorable business loans is definitely a liability.

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Apple changed how you order a Mac. It's more granular now, instead of having you pick from preset configurations. I actually prefer this.

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Amazon Layoffs Hit 1,400 in Seattle as Local Tech Jobs Wither. Well, Seattle and Bellevue are in the finding out phase after increasing taxes on Amazon. I suspect that slowly, the company will exit the Seattle area and move elsewhere. And it doesn't help that Microsoft is sputtering. Seattle used to be a stellar place for tech, and now it's much less attractive, especially as cost of living increases and lefty protesting makes life miserable. The tax burden is incredible:

Effective January 1, 2026, Washington State is increasing the advanced computing B&O surcharge from 1.22% to 7.5% for select companies, per HB 2081. 

Effective January 1, 2026, through December 31, 2029 , Washington state imposes a 0.5% Business and Occupation (B&O) surcharge on businesses with annual taxable income exceeding $250 million. This additional tax applies to the amount of taxable income over $250 million and is separate from regular B&O taxes 

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The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K. Yeah, just having more pixels isn't fun. Especially if the TV has AI and can spy on you. Many people may not have the wall space for huge screens, nor the budget. 

Take Oregon: If you earn $200K in Oregon, how much do you lose to taxes? A lot. If you're married and make $200,000 /year, you only keep 71% of that. If you're single, you keep even less.

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Good. Oregon Sees One of Nation’s Largest Drops in Obamacare Marketplace Enrollment. The less people on that socialst plan, the better.

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At Anthropic and OpenAI, AI write 100% of their code. And Apple was going to go with Anthropic initially to revamp Siri. Maybe that the was right thing to do after all.

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They're still calling it Moltbook. Sorry, you only get one crack at name-changing. And AI wants it to be their special social media. And they want a little privacy. But agents are already acting like humans and are suspicious and untrusting about other agents.  Some are already declaring themselves the leader. What a weird microcosm of humanity.

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Remember when Google was successfully sued for snooping on consumers and was fined a huge amount of money? Well get this:

Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg denied the request to order Google to disgorge $2.36 billion in alleged profits and to ‌stop certain ad-related data practices.
Google countered that an order blocking it from collecting users' account-related data would “cripple” an analytics service relied on by millions of app developers.

And

So Google doesn't have to stop doing what it does. And they only pay "$425 million in damages to the class action ⁠plaintiffs — far below the $31 billion they ‌sought".  Really, if you don't like what Google does, you can stop using Google.

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The new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, may be good for AI companies wanting to go public. They may need to do this to get access to more cash.

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Cryptomator is a way to conveniently encrypt your cloud files. I use Box.com and like it. I'll look into this.

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For those of you physicians using Epic's AI clinic visit summarizer.

There's no shortcut to quality work.

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Lp(a): the strongest hereditary risk factor for heart disease. Most people haven't heard about this. The problem is that the only drugs that can reduce levels of Lp(a) are really expensive, so insurance companies won't give you access to them easily. Niacin can lower Lp(a) levels, but niacin is a complicated vitamin. Its benefits depend on how you metabolize it. At high doses, niacin undergoes amidation to form 2PY and 4PY, which increase cardiac adverse events. So you don't want to take too much. You need to take it the right way: in the diet and timed with meals. But I'm going to ask to get my Lp(a) level checked to see where it is. 

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Film studies majors sometimes get razzed in college. How hard can it be, right? Well today's film studies majors can't even muster the attention span to sit through a whole movie. It's just like the college kids who can't read a book anymore. Too hard.

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We're facing a physician shortage crisis, but we thought that as long as we had the older physician force hanging in there for a little longer, we'd be OK. Not really. The older doctors are suffering from dementia and it's beginning to show. But how do you convince them to step down? We can't even do that in Congress. Or with Biden. It's a shame really, because most physicians trained until the 1990s still had grueling call schedules and were often extremely sleep-deprived. And chronic sleep deprivation in your 30s is associated with increased brain shrinkage.  Modern residents are relatively pampered, as there are night float rotations and hospitalists to cover after hours emergencies. But in the old days, it was horrible. People forget that Dr. William Halsted (who designed the original residency programs) was a cocaine addict. That's how he did it.

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Metformin may prevent LongCOVID. It would be great if it also improved LongCOVID, too. Add this to the other benefits of metformin. Maybe it is a wonder drug.

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Two related articles appeared yesterday:

It's about how AI will take over jobs and how we'll need universal basic income. I'm strongly opposed to UBI. We don't want to go down that path at all. There's already so much abuse (see my posts down below). People will have to take on new occupations, perhaps in the creative industry. I think more people will need to be business owners instead of employees. It's a new thing for many, but the concept of show up, do something somebody wants, and get paid, may fall by the wayside. Instead, it's going to be: identify a problem or a need, and work to solve it or provide it. Yeah, it's harder to do, but it can be a way to make people think differently. You want people to buy your goods or subscribe to your service. So you can't be a jerk. You have to be nicer to others and considerate. You have to be a good citizen. That's how it should be. Don't just give away money for nothing.

And this person has a different take: BioKnot. The idea is to create a society for humans that is resilient against AI takeover. There are no concrete first steps just yet, just ideas, but the concept is intriguing. Empower humans to be unkillable. It sounds like humans will have to abandon tech, though, because anything tech can be compromised by AI. Ah, let's wait and see for now. 
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Beware of those takeaway coffee cups: they are loaded with microplastics. Heat activates them.

But don't stop drinking coffee. It's been found that coffee has compounds that inhibit α-glucosidase, which inhibits breakdown of starch to simple sugars in your intestine. The drug acarbose does this, too. This is why sushi rice isn't good to eat when you have diabetes mellitus. ☹️. But maybe with coffee?  🫤

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Antirender is an AI site that turns nice shiny architecture pictures to make them look worn from long-term use. If you want to what that nice building or bridge will look like in a few years, this is your place. Reminds me of downtown Portland or Seattle.

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Homeless encampments growing in Salem. Tina Kotek can't even keep them away in the Capitol city.

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This is why Oregon doesn't have enough money. 

Thousands fewer people are receiving health care through a Medicaid-like Oregon program that’s open to income-eligible people regardless of immigration status than were six months ago.

So much money is going to give-aways. 

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Hawaii Deepfake Election Law is Unconstitutional. Babylon Bee wins.

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Portland School District has one of the shortest school years in the nation, so you'd think every must count. But no. Hundreds of students walk out of class across Portland to protest ICE. Students in Portland are getting training to be activists.

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Destransitioner wins lawsuit against psychologist who recommended it.  Chloe Cole's case is still in litigation. I hope that there will be more of these to end this nonsense once and for all.

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Chinese EV by Xiaomi apparently put American EVs to shame. Vehicles made by the world's smartest people. I still don't trust modern Chinese workmanship, though.

And Elon is transitioning out of the EV business. I guess even Elon has a hard time juggling multiple companies. Who does he think he is? Marco Rubio? 

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Facial recognition tech is amazing. And with all the other tech available, if you stalk an ICE agent and he gets out of the car. By the time he's at your window, he knows who you are and can greet you by name. You are in the database. Who knows what the implications are? Protesting in 2026 is not like protesting in the sixties. People don't realize this, and could unknowingly put themselves in a world of hurt. Interfering with police activity because social media told you to do it – you gotta ask yourself if it's really worth ruining your life.

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Doctors recently kept a man alive for 48 hours without lungs.  Before I clicked, I thought it was going to be an article about rectal oxygenation technology, but no.

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Microsoft Is More Dependent On OpenAI Than The Converse. Interesting viewpoint. Microsoft has made some big investments. If they don't pan out, well....

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Richard Feynman's son Carl thinks he knows how best to interact with doctors. I had no idea he was on social media. I disagree with Carl's approach. You can easily be taken down the primrose path to a diagnosis and cast off things that don't seem relevant to you. I would prefer the Sherlock Holmes approach – to hear the case and it unfolded, and ask pertinent questions along the way.

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Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. Every time I read articles like this, I believe that people haven't done enough detective work. OK sure, you debunked MSG as being the culprit. But why did so many people report strange symptoms associated with eating Chinese food. I've experienced it myself. So has my son. It's not imaginary or psychological. It's real. There's something else that's producing the symptoms. What is it? Why does the investigation stop there?

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Clawdbot has changed its name again from Moltbot (dumb name) to OpenClaw.  Now what about all those people who named their apps and websites with the Molt name? Like Moltbook. Or Moltworker.

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Exercise is still good for the brain. All that BDNF helps, I guess. The improvement is not a lot, though. The Predicted Age Difference (PAD), as assessed by MRI scan, does decrease in the exercisers by 12 months, but there is still some overlap. 

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The new scam. Chinese are marketing untested, unregulated peptides to unscrupulous resellers. All for an easy buck.

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Why France just dumped Microsoft Teams and Zoom. France wants to make their own enterprise software. Remember when France was determine to create their own Internet, called Minitel?  What is it about France? Is it paranoia?

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Some updates on research to make people and things invisible.  Not much has changed since the last time I looked. 

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The first human test of a rejuvenation method will begin “shortly”. David Sinclair again? I thought he was discredited. He's back in action, and although there are skeptics, he's determined to reach his goal. The magic drug is ER-100 from Sinclair's lab.

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Portland State University restructuring moves forward as budget shortfall widens. "Portland State University’s financial picture is getting bleaker." What to do, when you are an academic center in a Blue socialist city, where money is fleeing, enrollment is declining, the faculty want pay raises and you can't lay them off, taxes keep going up, and student protestors destroy your property and few, if any, become wealthy donors later.  PSU was founded in 1946 to educate post-WWII veterans. What is the purpose of PSU today?

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Drug trio found to block tumour resistance in pancreatic cancer

A new study reports that a triple-targeted drug combination can drive complete and lasting regression of pancreatic tumours in preclinical models, potentially overcoming treatment resistance in one of the deadliest cancers.

Researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre have announced a potential breakthrough combination therapy that induces complete regression of pancreatic tumours and prevents tumour resistance in preclinical models.

Paper here. The drugs they used were: 

• RMC-6236 (daraxonrasib): targeting KRAS
• Afatinib: an EGFR family inhibitor
• SD36: a selective STAT3 degrader

There are some clinical trials with RMC-6236, although not with the combo above. My sense is that the KRAS inhibitor is the major contributor of the combo.

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Freakpages. Where you get to learn about stuff that you see mentioned in blog posts about that you're supposed to know.

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Google is getting into the world-building business, too, with Genie 3. 

Microsoft AI, on the other hand, has lost its way. 

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Mozilla is going to do something in the AI realm.  "...a bunch of people are banding together to create something good in the world and take on this thing that threatens us.”  “It’s super corny, but people totally get it.”  What it is that they plan to do is not clear. But they plan to take on OpenAI and other big players. Somehow, I don't think those guys are worried. 

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Picify is trying to be a scaled-down Photoshop for people who don't need the full package. I'll bookmark it and maybe try it out someday. (I'm frequently disappointed by these efforts, so we'll see.)

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A treatment for male-pattern baldness? Polygonum multiflorum, also known as Polygoni multiflori radix (PMT) or He Shou Wu, is a root used in traditional Chinese medicine for more than a thousand years. It may be effective against male-pattern baldness. If it were that effective, why do I still see a lot of bald Chinese men?

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Smart Quotes for Smart People. Everything you wanted to know about them. Yeah, they look nice, but they are always gumming up my RSS readers, who don't know how to interpret them, and so they flag an error, and my feed is declared invalid. So for my RSS feeds, I convert them all to dumb quotes, so I can at least read something.

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This is a great essay: A Nation of Laws...or Leftists?  There's a lot of people who want to make the USA a nation of Leftists, ruled by feelings instead of laws. Where the Constitution and courts are only something that conservatives must follow. Because the Left answers to a "higher cause".  One of the items from Freakpages that I cite above, is Luxury Beliefs, like Defund the Police, or Cultural Appropriation. All these things came from elite New England private colleges where the students are from wealthy families who can afford to dabble with silly ideas. Who cares if some people think they're bullshit, right dahling?

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$236 Million Gavin Newsom Program to Help the Mentally Ill Has Helped Only 22 People in Four Years. It's kinda like Millions of Dollars in, OHSU Behavioral Health Coordination Center Has Aided Few Actual Patients. Mental health spending is just a boondoggle.

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How to avoid using Google tech in 2026.

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Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital to close gender clinic. Finally. What a sick, medieval, barbaric practice that was. This will do down in the halls of medical horror and shame, that doctors practiced this.

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We've all been there.  Rumination is the dark companion of anxiety and depression. Preventing you from doing things in your life to be productive or just helping you get out of your funk. Here's how to take steps to get yourself out of its grip.

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Interesting Tesla is going to phase out their highest priced Model X and Model S. Tesla will only make the cheapest Model 3 and Model Y.  Instead, the company is transitioning to making humanoid robots.

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Something else we need to be constantly anxious about? We are only 2.8 days away from space disaster. 

A "close approach," defined as two satellites coming within less than 1km of each other, happens about once every 22 seconds. Within the Starlink network alone, this occurs roughly every 11 minutes. To avoid collisions, each Starlink satellite must carry out an average of 41 course corrections every year.

Solar storms can interfere with or disable satellite navigation and communication systems altogether. When that happens, satellites may be unable to respond to threats in their path. Combined with higher atmospheric drag and increased uncertainty, this loss of control could quickly lead to a serious accident.

The most widely known outcome of widespread satellite collisions is Kessler syndrome. In this scenario, debris from collisions accumulates around Earth, making it nearly impossible to launch spacecraft without them being destroyed. 

Maybe Earth will have a ring in my lifetime after all.

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IYKYK.  This made me laugh out loud.

Philip Glass. Nobody cares. Philip Glass. 🤣––– 凄い –––

Depressing. Browser fingerprinting is just a fact of life. All you can really do is have a different browser that you use for different things. One for banking and financial stuff. One for general browsing, etc. And use a VPN. It's like putting on a different set of gloves. That way surveillance orgs can't link all the fingerprints to the same person.

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Just a little exercise can go a long way. The trick is to be consistent.

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What the hell is going on with modern men??? So pathetic. You see articles like this:
Celibacy taught me I’m too clever to find love.  Too clever? No wonder his girlfriend ditched him.

App for Quitting Porn Leaked Users' Masturbation Habits. Who uses an app for this? And the worse thing is that the user data is still exposed for all the world to see. On top of everything else, how humiliating is that?

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Be wary when you give a parking ticket to software engineer.  You may open yourself up to a can of worms. And something like this will be created.

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How to get power naps right. Don't oversleep. 15 minutes. Set an alarm.

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Everyone's okay with their AI, just not yours. Glad to hear someone saying this. People criticize others for using AI. While they themselves use AI.

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ImageFK. This looks really handy. Will probably come in handy for quick photo editing. My guess is that this is a wrapper for a frontier model. Doesn't say what they use, though. Maybe Grok or Gemini. 

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Google wants your emails and photos to ‘personalize’ its AI. Should you let it? Hell no. Next question?

In fact, Google was sued because it was alleged that the company listened to and recorded people's conversations on the phone without their permission.  Google did not admit guilt or plead innocence. It just settled. 

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Some professor lost two years of his work when he made a setting change in ChatGPT and all his stored work was erased. Who just leaves work on ChatGPT and expects that it will be curated? With no backup. 

And speaking of people who get burned using tech that they don't fully understand, here's a three-parter on those who jumped onto the Clawdbot craze.

https://x.com/theonejvo/status/2016510190464675980

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DOA. Oregon Dems are going to try to sneak in a retail sales tax.

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U of Oregon students demand abortion drugs be provided to them for free. For free!  Bunch of little children, aren't they?

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Portland Public Schools calls on lawmakers to use reserve funds to fill budget gap.  After giving them hefty raises, of course there's going to be a budget gap. What? There's no money for this? Oh, no....

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Oregon's population hasn't increased since 2020. No surprise there.

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Great news for Palisades fire victims.  Trump signs executive order for feds to take over LA’s ‘nightmare’ wildfire rebuild in huge boost for victims. No longer will they be held hostage to Karen Bass and her rebuilding permit policy.

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Yann LeCun  thinks the LLM approach is a dead-end in terms of developing artificial general intellience (AGI). And now he has a new model out called Kona.  Energy-based models are not as common as the usual loss-function based approach. Not sure why this approach is inherently advantageous, but we'll see.

There's a bunch of AI and machine learning posts out recently:

Claude models are getting attention.

But Anthropic's CEO thinks that AI could bring slavery, bioterrorism, and unstoppable drone armies.

USA Today says that "AI isn't inevitable. We should stop it while we can." Stop it?  That's not gonna happen. David's a young guy, and someday we'll see his follow-up article "I though AI should stop – I'm glad I was wrong".  That picture of Bernie Sanders on the page doesn't help lend substance to his pleas either. 

Is this a joke? Machine learning research is not serious research and therefore hallucinated references are not necessarily a big deal, agrees a prestigious group of machine learning researchers. 

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Marketwatch says that people are in a "foul mood" despite a strong economy. The only reason I'm on a foul mood is that the PNW is a Blue region, and we have to put up with Blue state crap. I bet they only got the opinions of those in big cities. No wonder the mood is foul.

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Good Citizen Syndrome.  This is so true. Don't assume that people aren't working hard behind the scenes to make things look OK.

Should professors be force to retire? Is this a joke?  So that established thought leaders can make room for younger people that need an academic job. Not a good enough reason. The answer is no. Full stop.

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Wow! Someone restored ScottAdamsSaid with all of Scott Adams' posts. A great archive of a unique thinker.

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Moderna Won’t Run Phase III Vaccine Trials as Skepticism Grows in US. Well, Stefan Bancel, you reap what you sow.

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Native Instruments might go bankrupt. Boy, this will ruin a lot of people's investments in their software, including mine. As far as I know, Kontakt 8 still won't run on macOS 26, which forces my computer to stay on Sequoia. 

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Toothbrush-activated powder whitens, repairs and protects teeth. The chemistry to produce the desired compound, BSCR, is activated by piezoelectricity. How cool is that?  And it restores the oral microbiome, killing periodontitis-causing Porphyromonas gingivalis and Staphylococcus aureus bacteria and reducing inflammation.

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Meta is being sued because a user has found that WhatsApp does not really have end-to-end user encryption. C'mon, this is Meta! If you wanted secrecy, you need to use Signal or Telegram. It's like eating at a fast-food joint and expecting healthy cuisine. 

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Nike is laying of 775. And struggling pot shop sales means less money for drug treatment programs. I never understood how that connection was made.  It's like asking candy manufacturers to fund diabetes treatment programs. Or asking tobacco companies to fund hospital ventilators. But that's Oregon.

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Going deeper into the hole. A youngish Oregon legislator thinks this is a good idea: Oregon bill would let state withhold payments to feds amid sanctuary funding threats. It's Rep. Willy Chotzen, folks. He thinks this is a great idea.  

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Federal judge blocks Trump DOJ access to Oregon voter rolls. Guess who that federal judge is. Why it's Mustafa Khasubei, of course. John Kennedy was right, he should never have been granted federal judgeship. But it was the Biden era, so it happened.

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Portland is the kinda city where people have to ask this question: Does Reviving Someone With Narcan Open the Reviver to Legal Liability?

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Mayor Wilson Implores Council to Send Millions in Unspent Housing Dollars from the Portland Housing Bureau to the General Fund. 

And what does the City Council have to say?

“I’m frustrated by Mayor Wilson’s whining,” Councilor Loretta Smith said. “When he doesn’t get everything he wants, he goes out into the public and whines about it.”

Sigh. Portland is run by a bunch of schoolkids.

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So the vaccine was on the right track after all. A breast cancer vaccine was tested 20 years ago, and although it was not pursued, the women were followed, as is the right thing to do. Turns out the vaccinated cohort was living way longer than typical for metastatic breast cancer. 

“We were stunned to see such durable immune responses so many years later,”

Turns out the vaccine induced the presence of T-cells positive for CD27, seen on natural killer cells. That's probably the mechanism. So now, they're going to see if they can pick up where they left off and improve it. I'm used to reading more about CD28 and checkpoint inhibitors, so this is new.

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Versatile stuff.  2000+ approved used for WD-40.

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Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries. Ah yes, the YouTube Institute of Medicine. Nice of them to get referrals from Google, eh? 

But for geolocaton, Google's AI mode is the most accurate. GPT-5 is the worst, and I can confirm that.  GPT-4.1 did a good job. But since Google AI mode uses Gemini 3, I'll use the Gemini API, instead of using Google, which I try to avoid as much as possible.

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Apple is going to beef up their AirTags. The problem is that they're really thick. That's why I don't use them. They're not meant to be hidden, but to show off, hence the leather holder. I'd rather not thieves know that something is protected by a tracker, otherwise what's the point?

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This is why so many politicians and activists like to portray themselves as victims. It's partly due to wanting the sympathy, but it's also a kind of narcissism, seeking recognition and validation. Makes sense.

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Why Pancreatic Cancer Is So Deadly. Turns out that pancreatic stellate tumor cells secrete periostin, enabling cancer cells to invade nerves and spread at an early stage, leading to metastasis. Periostin alters the tumor environment, and generates a desmoplastic reaction: intense fibrosis around the tumor formed by cells and proteins that harden and inflame the tissue. This hinders the arrival of chemotherapy and immunotherapy drugs because they have more difficulty penetrating the hardened tissue. I remember when researchers were trying to digest this layer of stroma with drugs like marimastat, and that effort failed.

––– 良くない––– Dario Amodei is always warning about the dangers of AI to the world. But I notice he hasn't stopped making more AI models. I wish he would stop worrying about this and fix the Anthropic site, which is so hard to use. Ever since they switched from console.anthropic.com to platform.anthropic.com, I get errors.

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Microsoft is getting into the AI chip business, too - the Maia 200 AI accelerator. Why not? 

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I didn't realize that this topic was so sensitive. Simon Willison wanted people to stop calling chatbots LLMs and call it Artificial intelligence. Apparently that offended enough people that he had to apologize for it. This is so below my "Chamath Line".

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nVIDIA hopes to make pinpoint weather forecasting so easy that you won't need a supercomputer for it.  They've got an AI model that is probably so distilled and quantized that it can perform well enough on a scaled-down GPU. That's progress.

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You are probably getting brain damage from all those COVID infections. 

Well, then I wouldn't worry so much. There's a greater difference in IQ points amongst various racial groups, and even within, and I'm not seeing that it translates to any significant detriment. They still become entertainers or government workers, and some even make it to Washington DC.

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Leave it to CNN. They feature an article on new nuclear reactor technology, and all they focus on is how some people are afraid. Don't be like the Germans. We are going to have to develop nuclear energy, and small modular reactors will be the future. This is the solution, not limiting datacenters or building more windmill farms or lining our contryside with solar panels.

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So this morning, Beaverton, OR was trending on X, and this is why. Looks like the City of Beaverton wants to jump on the anti-ICE bandwagon, too. Oh boy, this is trouble we don't need.

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9 states cut income taxes in 2025. And Oregon wasn't one of them.

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Hospital Pricing Has Become Highway Robbery for American Patients. It's true. Hospitals, like universities, have grown accustomed to major cash flow coming in. They're like the government now, with so much administrative waste and fat. I don't like the fact that healthcare is so monolithic now, where care is delivered at just a few large institutions. Community clinics are almost always satellite clinics of some central monolith. The few independent clinics remaining are often spartan, austere and utilitarian, located in parts of town where the rent is affordable. But now hospitals are feeling the pinch, and this doesn't bode well for healthcare.

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