Today is April Fool's Day, but everything I post today is serious. I'll say that at the outset, because some of it is unbelievable.
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ChatGPT acts as a “cognitive crutch” that weakens memory, new research suggests. I am reminded of something that Socrates said around 370 BC:
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And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.Yeah, Socrates never wrote anything down. His teachings were recorded by Plato, his student. He felt that writing things down would have a harmful effect on the intellect. Like math teachers being worried about calculators.
Handy. ProPublica created look-up to determine the country of origin for generic prescription meds
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This made me laugh. Sharks Are Testing Positive For Cocaine And Caffeine in The Bahamas. Someone snarked that it came to their attention when they noticed an uptick in shark productivity.
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The Cathedral and The Bazaar got an update. The Cathedral is the private, cloistered place where proprietary software is developed. The bazaar is where open source software is developed, often publicly inspectable. The new addition is the Winchester Mystery House, where you take the knowledge and the tools and build something special just for you, and not necessarily useful to anyone else.
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AI server farms heat up the neighborhood for miles around. This may be a nothing burger. It may be useful in some instances. But it appears that datacenters waste a lot of energy. Heat is usually unproductive and wasted energy. It would be great if someone found a way to turn it into something useful.
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Reaction videos for sale. Everything is fake. Here's a company that sells fake "reaction videos" that you can buy and put on your TikTok feed or whatever, to make it look like genuine reactions to your product, or your...whatever. I guess this is away some GenZers can make some money. Only the looksmaxxed ones, though. No uglies, it seems.
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Maybe better than the carbon-14 batteries I mentioned earlier, are these nickel-53 batteries. Disposal of these will be tricky, I imagine.
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Memory solutions. There's this product called Blue Hearts, which is code in a module that contains a JSON file (and presumably other files) that contain all the interactions you have had with a model. You plug it in and instantly the AI model knows everything you want it to know.
Another developer made Agentscreator, which is to help agents learn (remember) why an architecture was developed that way it is, and avoids it from having to start from scratch. These are but two recent examples of trying to impart LLM-based assistants with some sort of memory.
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Apps like Sora, Veo and SeeDance let you create videos just by entering prompts. Why not for music? Someone developed Producer which does the same thing. Early attempts will undoubtedly be crude (and unlistenable), but I anticipate that with time, some truly interesting things can be created.
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There's been a lot of discussion about Anthropic's leaked source code for Claude Code CLI. Like here. And here. And here. Although the leak was an embarrassement for a company that supposedly aims to help keep AI secure, it was a revelation in how the company operates. It's very similar to Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Palantir. It wants to scrape every bit of data you give it for training. And it endeavors to keep itself secret (undercover.ts). It stays on, autonomously, and works while you sleep. What it could discovery when used by the military is scary, considering who might acquire that information.
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Remember that video that described how an open source maintainer almost let a hacker modify a critical dependency and insert a vulnerability that could take down the Internet? Well a version of it actually happened when a North Korean hacker managed to insert code into the axios dependency. Anyone who used "npm install" during a certain period of time (before it was removed) got infected with the coorupted version of axios. The problem is that AI agents are running autonomously and many can and could have used npm install. That's the real scary part.
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21st Century Problems. This story is almost unbelievable. Like an April 1 post. Why would anyone make their life and work dependent on Google? Putting the only copies of important documents on Google Drive? Insane.
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Oops. Providence Health Plans outsourced themselves to a Silicon Valley company, which couldn't deliver. "It's a whole new experience" they said. Now they're catching hell for it.
Two elevators that allow cyclists and people with mobility challenges to use the pedestrian bridge over train tracks in Southeast Portland are both out of service. A Portland Bureau of Transportation spokesman says the north and south elevators that people ride to reach Bob Stacey Crossing, which allows pedestrians and bicyclists to traverse both Union Pacific train and MAX light rail tracks are down due to vandalism. The elevators are important for people who have mobility issues and cannot climb the stairs to reach the crossing. Because both elevators are down, affected individuals must walk 13 blocks when a train is present and six blocks when no train is running. The north elevator has been down for six weeks. A lag in securing the right glass panel delayed the typical repair timeline by weeks, bureau spokesman Dylan Rivera says, but the bureau expects the repair to happen as early as next week. As for the south elevator, Rivera says someone smashed one of the glass doors March 23.
Why would any home builder want to invest in construction in Portland?
WWeek has an article on Multnomah County's ineptitude in dealing with crime. Washington County may be better, but that doesn't mean it's great. Hardly anyone seems to get caught and pay for their crimes. So it happens again and again.
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Nearly three-quarters of Oregonians are feeling increasing cost of living pressures, contributing to record household debt and a 25% jump in bankruptcy filings in 2025. Those are among the takeaways from the 2026 Oregon Financial Wellness Scorecard, which spotlights key economic and personal finance trends across the state.
East Portland has far fewer grocery stores than the rest of the city — and is slated to lose another one. Grocery Outlet is pulling out. They've had enough of the shoplifting, too.
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Legacy Health's contract with Regence BlueCross terminated; members may be out of network. The existing health insurance system worked because private insurance reimbursement was generous enough to make up for the fact that Medicare and Medicaid was poorly reimbursed. That's why payor mix was so important. But now Oregon has so many Medicaid patients that the private insurance payments are not enough. Something has to give. This is the wrong business model for healthcare. The Golden Rule of Medicine is that he who has the gold, rules. Well, patients don't have the gold. Neither do today's doctors. Now the hospitals don't have the gold either. And no, socialized medicine is not the answer.
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