13 May 2024

Talk about bad timing. An online education company, called 2U, was started in 2018, and once had a market cap of $5 billion.  Due to increased competition and rising costs, the company became non-competitive, and is now worth only about $30 million.  And today, OpenAI released the multimodal GPT-4o, which can do online education really well, as seen in this video with Sal Khan.  Looks like it's time to shut down.

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Chronic loneliness can affect the brain like a type of stress.  And it can lead to dementia. Boy, as if we didn't have enough factors for this.

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Time-restricted eating is a diet idea that was promoted to help people lose weight. You would fast for a limited period during the day, then eat without restriction for the remaining hours. The TREAT study and a later study showed that it doesn't help you lose weight, although you might lose weight if you are diabetic.  And now this study shows that on this diet plan, you have a increased risk of death.  A 91% increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease! 

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Always have a backup. Things could have been worse for UniSuper Pension Fund members.  Google Cloud accidentally deleted their $125 billion account.  Luckily they had a backup account with another provider, and so the information was not lost.  Whew!

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Techies in the Bay Area were told to return to their offices. So many of the top talent quit instead.  Meanwhile in India, it got so hot that many of them were more than happy to go back to air-conditioned offices.

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What took her so long?  Melinda Gates is resigning from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  But an organization called the "Bill Gates Foundation" has less appeal.

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Singapore is a model nation. It's wealthy and full of really smart people. So I think the Prime Minister is worth listening to.
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This is how Ronald Reagan dealt with "mostly peaceful" protestors.
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An Australian government wanted to power to censor information on X/Twitter from the world. The hubris of some people. Fights not completely over yet, though.

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Oregon hospitals are struggling to hire enough nurses to comply with the staffing law that was passed last August. If they don't have enough nurses, they will have to decline hospital admissions. Remember, when they were campaigning for the law, the slogan was "Safe Staffing Saves Lives".  Yeah, but being turned away from hospital care risks lives, too.  So they're hiring green nurses, straight out of school.  Yikes!

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