17 May 2024

Competition is good. Google enters the text-to-video fray with Veo, that is poised to be a rival to OpenAI's Sora.

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Portland State University wants to replace their Portland Auditorium with an expensive glass-and-steel edifice. I don't know, after letting activists trash the library. I don't think Portland can have nice things anymore. They need to take New York City's approach. Repair and maintain the architecture from the Golden Age, but for new construction – make it all barebones utilitarian and nothing fancy.

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Meta's CICERO has already shown that AI is capable of being a convincing liar when it wants to be. This can't be good. So when AI is capable of second- and third-order thinking, we'll never know if we're being fooled.

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NW Natural is looking into methane pyrolysis, which turns methane into molecular hydrogen and solid carbon. It takes extremely high temperatures for this, but they say it makes sense. Sure would be cheaper to just burn the methane, wouldn't it?

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This stuff with Tina Kotek's spouse sure looks like the Cylvia Hayes situation to me. How does this allowed to just happen?

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Some success with an HIV vaccine? Researchers at Duke may have found a way to elicit broadly-neutralizing antibodies. This is just the first step, but it's progress.

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Oh-oh.  Now that Ilya Sutskever's gone, OpenAI dissolved their safety team.

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Cabel Sasser has a cautionary tale about someone selling an Apple ID badge of Employee #10. Someone's not going to be happy when they read this blog post.

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SARS-CoV2 may not have been the first bioengineered organism to be unleashed on humans. It may have been Lyme disease and Babesiosis.  So what's really going on at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center?

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Even the New York Post has recognized that Mike Schmidt has destroyed Portland. His reputation reaches out to the east. Yes "people want change".

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It seems OHSU's Chief People Officer doesn't like the people of OHSU.  They "complain" too much, it seems. Read the comments in the article. The goal was to restore trust, but it seems like the culture is getting worse. Instead, the CPO gets defensive, and it's not a good look.

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