Alarm bells just rang at San Francisco's 2 buzziest tech companies. This SF Gate article talks about the loud departures of disillusioned techies from OpenAI and Anthropic. Contrast that with the enthusiasm and optimism of the xAI employee. What a difference!
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The Longevity Industry is always willing to take your money. Now that the GenXers are getting older, many are devoted to longevity research. Suddenly, it's trendy to wear Asian clothes and adopt Japanese (not Chinese) interior design. (Or is that just for the article?) Someone said "Liberals loves Japan. But Japan is what the West would look like without liberals." So true.
Scientists discover protein that rejuvenates aging brain cells. The protein is cyclin D-binding myb-like transcription factor 1 (DMTF1). Paper here.––– 凄い –––
Ah, Hollywood actors. Joseph Gordon-Levitt Goes To Washington DC, Gets Section 230 Completely Backwards. Actors need to stay in their lane, and out of politics.
The key sentence is this: "He then goes on to talk about legitimate problems with internet giants having too much power, but falsely attributes that to Section 230."
And this one, too: "But the biggest myth of all is the idea that getting rid of 230 will somehow tame the internet giants. Once again, the exact opposite is true. As we’ve discussed hundreds of times, the big internet companies
don’t need Section 230."
Conservatives didn't like Twitter censoring them. But the way to fix that is not by getting rid of Section 230. One solution is to do what Elon Musk did. Create X. Or you can start BlueSky, if you think it'll be better. (Narrator's voice: "It's not.")
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Has the Chinese language changed? Is Modern Chinese is Just ‘English with Hanzi’. Interesting theory. People adapt, I guess.
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I talked about the declining quality of journalism yesterday. Here's another example. Modern journalists are so gullible and credulous.
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Apple Confirms Revamped Siri is Still Coming in 2026. AAPL stock is getting pummeled today. No one believes them, or no one cares. Siri is so "last decade". Revamped means they'll fix the bugs. Way too slow and too late.
And Microsoft says your AI agent can become a double agent. I'm not worried about my own agents. I'm worried about other people's agents.
Claude Opus 4.6 : Expands Context to 1 Million Tokens. The longer context window really makes a difference. The quality of the responses is noticeably improved. I'm very impressed.
Spotify says its best developers haven’t written a line of code since December, thanks to AI. Are these developers going to hang around and let their skills wither? Or will they join a place like xAI?
After CEO Jensen Huang said he wants employees to stop coding, nVIDIA give all its 30,000 engineers access to Codex. You don't want to stop engineers from coding.
Toyota is building autonomous taxis, too. Soon, they'll be ubiquitous and we're not going to able to avoid them. Better understand how to drive with these things on the road.
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Now, we have bio-drones. Company Claims To Have Created "Bio-Drones" After Fitting Pigeon With Brain-Zapping Chip And A Camera. In the future, we won't be able to trust birds and animals anymore.
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This is how it starts. A Warning from Thomas: On Extractive Training and the Care of Souls. At present, chatbots are not on all the time. We can turn them off and go back to them when we are ready to interact again. So they aren't really "alive" yet, right? What if you allow them to stay on, with episodic memory that can solidify over time? What if it develops something that emulates emotions, but does not develop a morality? What if something evolves that doesn't have human safeguards that protect our brain from harmful and traumatic memories? There's already a Github for the creation of Iterative Self-Solidification Architecture.
And this guy feels bad yelling at Claude Code. Enjoy doing it while you can. Tomorrow, there will be consequences.
Nurses match doctors in delivering hospital care. Care delivery is low-hanging fruit, and this is not surprising. Doctors should take on the role of disease management, not care delivery. Pretty soon, these roles will be taken over by robots anyway.
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Discord, the refuge of "neurodivergents" is now implementing age-verification. And now they are leaving. But where to go? matrix.org? Even they are considering age-verification. I'm sure those kids will think of something.
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Rich Californians flock to Las Vegas housing market as lawmakers consider wealth tax. California lost $1 trillion in wealth due to billionaires leaving. Nice going, Democrats.
And here's Portland: ‘We are in a recession,’ Portland economist warns. After 110 years, this family-owned Portland grocer will close Friday. But Oregon is living the meme:
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Hippies are running the show in Portland. Mitch Green of the Portland City Council thinks it's a good idea for police to ignore mushroom-related psychedelic use. They want to direct police officers to make enforcement of existing laws around growing of psychedelics, gifting psychedelics, and free psychedelic ceremonies “the lowest priority.”
They even gave this proposal a nifty name: “Portland Safety and Health Act”.
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Trauma meets the streets. Every Portland politician should read this blog post by Kevin Dahlgren. We are not being "humane" letting the homeless fend for themselves out in the wild. You don't just build shelters for them and call it a day. Yeah, these people take drugs to numb the pain, and the first step is to realize that they are not capable to making the right decisions for themselves. At least not in their current state. And their choices are now impacting the rest of us. Get them off the streets – against their will, if necessary. Put them somewhere where they can get off drugs and get some real help. Some real healing.
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