AI brain fry is hitting some workers more than others. Marketing and human resources are affecting the most, as are engineering and software development, which we already knew about. Legal is not seeing so much, probably because they're afraid of using AI. And "leadership" positions are also not afraid – well because they're not ones at risk of being let go, right?
––– 良くない–––
––– 良くない–––
––– 良くない–––
Daily multivitamin may slow biological aging. Well, this came from the COSMOS dataset and those folks were also taking a cocoa supplement as well, which has cocoa flavonoids. So it wasn't just vitamins. And they just looked at epigenetic patterns in the DNA, not measuring length of life. They were looking at epigenetic clocks not lifespan.
––– 凄い –––
Heh. An NBC poll showed that people rated ICE agents more favorably than Democrats. How about that? Why Stephen Colbert was up there I have no idea. He's on CBS not NBC. But Marco Rubio is up there, too. I think he's better suited for the next presidency than Vance, and a lot of people agree.
––– 凄い –––
ChatGPT told an academician that it advised against publishing in a high impact conservative journal because it will hurt her academic career. Of course, right? But I wonder what Grok would say?
––– 良くない–––
Here's one of the first casualties of the AI-reliant world. A computer vision system (Flock) mistakes a 2 for a 7 and a guy gets arrested. How is the AI updated. Maybe there are new signs, or conditions change that make numbers harder to see. As much as we'd like to automate stuff, incidents like this will happen. And law enforcement aren't experts on AI. They don't know the limitations of the software they purchase.
––– 良くない–––
Walt aims to position itself as a privacy-preserving electronic payment system "tap-to-pay" alternative to Apple Pay and Google Pay. The worst I know is Venmo. If you don't have your settings right, all your contacts know what you purchased and who you paid. I'd like something easier to use than Zelle and not platform restrictive like Apple Cash.
––– 凄い –––
The IgNobel ceremony will move from Boston to Zurich because some winners are afraid to travel to the U.S. At first I thought they were afraid they might be detained by ICE, but they fear the safety of the Blue cities where these ceremonies are held. It's a shame. Why not hold them in Texas or Florida? Certainly not Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago. Too many criddlers, gooners, and random thugs. But many European cities are no better. Certainly not London, Paris or Brussels. Maybe Tokyo, Seoul or Singapore. But I think people are overreacting a bit.
––– 良くない–––
Claude 4.6 has a new effort parameter. It tells the LLM how much effort to expend to find the answer to the question you posed. It seems like the minimum setting is "medium". The default is "high" if you don't set the parameter. The idea is that you might save some money and get speedier results if you're willing to sacrifice comprehensiveness (depth).
––– 凄い –––
This guy discusses why bar charts and line graphs should always start at zero. To avoid deceiving the viewer. What caught my eye was this statement:
––– 凄い –––
Good grief. Of all those autonomous AI agents zipping around that have been accessing MCP servers:
––– 良くない–––
A hacker's dream! All there, available for the taking. Those dumb script kiddies! So this guy created mcpguard-cli to protect your API key. It's crazy that this isn't built in to the system. It's been all cribbed together and everyone just plays around.53% of MCP servers use plaintext API keys stored in config files. These keys get:
- Committed to git repositories
- Shared across machines
- Exposed in data breaches
Microsoft just doesn't care anymore. The Copilot app in Windows (which will be standard) will, when it decides to open a link) will fire up Edge in a side panel, no matter what browser you designate as your default browser. All because it doesn't want to "make you lose context". I'd be pissed. Are people going to use Windows 12?
––– 良くない–––
Many websites have a robots.txt file, although most web crawlers don't pay attention to it anymore. But now there's something called a llms.txt file. I never heard about it. Most websites don't have it. But some people want to promote its use.
––– 凄い –––
This is getting ridiculous. To counter all the AI code that Claude models generate, Anthropic launches code review tool to check flood of AI-generated code. How silly is that? Create the disease, then create the medicine to treat it.
And it appears that when you use Claude Code to code access to local models, inference is really slow. Like 90% slower. Because it invalidates the KV cache. I just use Ollama, and I'm happy.
––– 良くない–––
The enshittification of YouTube. YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they’ll be unskippable. Someone needs to create a video library that will replace YT. I thought Rumble would become that platform, but they never gained mind share. Because they were the place where the right wing could post videos without being censored, it became the platform of just right-wing content, which got boring. Even videos making fun of liberals and Democrat politicians gets tiresome all the time. I don't think they'll shake that reputation. Vimeo decided to be artsy-fartsy, and their user interface is not very friendly. They never made any kind of effort to retain viewers. Once you were finished watching the video you came to see, it was like "Well...why are you still here?" If people get tired to YT maybe things will change.
How bad is Portland’s home construction slump? New data says worst in 15 years. Why build homes for people who don't want to come to the city?
Recall that the TV show Portlandia was on the air from 2011 to 2018. People were intrigued by the city. Portland no longer gets that kind of publicity, does it? Ted Wheeler took over in 2017 and you can see what happened.
Statesman Journal runs this article: Oregon ties record for warmest winter on record. Why was it so hot? But when you look at the graph, what's so unusual? There's no trend.
Let's see what next year's datapoint is before we get carried away.
Another Oregon hospital is struggling to stay afloat. It's the Bay Area Hospital in Coos Bay.
––– 良くない–––
Another article on the Oregon Department of Transportation's $300 million budget shortfall. It seems to me that they could just cancel the Rose Quarter Project, which will save a cool $2 billion. Yeah, I know about the touted benefits, but right now, the roads are usable, and this isn't something that absolutely must be done. Forget "restorative justice" for now, OK? Save this money and there won't be a need to raise taxes.
––– 凄い –––