Obesity Accelerates Cognitive Aging. Perhaps it might be more accurate to state that obesity is just associated with cognitive aging. It could be that whatever slows your brain, makes you prefer passive entertainment instead of active and mind-stimulating activities. Just losing weight, such as with a gastric bypass procedure, won't suddenly make you smart.
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World leaders want American AI. They just don’t want America to be able to turn it off. Such is power. But giving access to a powerful tool like Fable (or Mythos) to everyone would be foolhardy. There is a risk that financial systems might be taken down or classified and compromising information might be hacked and revealed, risking security. There are bad people out there. We're at the point, where such power needs to be granted selectively. America felt this way when no one else had nuclear capability. Now very evil and corrupt states have it. Remember, you may not know what to do with powerful technology, but someone else probably does.
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These are the results of a CNN poll. How embarrassing it must be for them that people watch Fox News more than they watch CNN or NPR. And Newsmax has as much viewership as NYT, ABC, NBC or even BBC. CBS didn't even rate! I thought it interesting that Joe Rogan has more viewership than the legacy talking heads. I never heard of Aaron Parnas or Heather Cox Richardson.
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Well it turns out the muscles can send an antidepressant signal to the brain through a protein called apelin. Exercise-induced increases in skeletal muscle-derived apelin enhance hippocampal plasticity via apelin and its receptor APJ signaling. Wow, a muscle-brain axis. Always something new.
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A paper came out recently that showed that a hobbled LLM was still able to pass a benchmark Q&A multiple choice test, but when it came to answering the same question in a different context, it couldn't offer the right answer. Sure enough, a study came out showing the medical LLMs that aced medical examination tests still performed poorly in the clinic. Real patient care is different.
Nonetheless, a report was published showing that MIRA (Medical Intelligence for Reasoning and Action) and Google's AMIE (Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer)—perform at least as well as physicians. The datasets they used were curated clinical conversations taken from EHR interactions. Not quite the same as putting it in action in real life.
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The AI startup Subquadratic launched with a $29 million investment to produce an amazing 12 million token context window model promising faster inference and better accuracy due to their proprietary architecture which scales at less than quadratic order. They apparently use sparse attention, and this is but one of many architectures that have been developed to beat quadratic scaling. This is one to follow.
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Simon Willison thinks that GLM-5.2 is probably the most powerful text-only open weights LLM. It has a 1 million token context window. We'll see – I've been disappointed at the hyper around Chinese models, so I'm skeptical. It's in Ollama, so I can give it a try. Uh, on second thought, maybe I won't.
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Elon Musk predicts a Chinese 'Fable-class' AI by Q1 2027, prompting Tsinghua University's Jie Tang to say it will arrive sooner. I don't doubt Elon – the Chinese are good at copying. They probably had their copying machines on the day it was made available.
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Brave is offering a paid minimal browser called Origin that contains all the privacy protections but without the ad revenue stuff. It's $60 though. Is it worth it? One thing that Brave does better than the rest if fingerprint protection. Instead of having to cut back on the extensions you use and try to be as vanilla as possible, Brave takes the approach of randomizing certain parameters when you access a website to make it look you're someone else each time. But $60? And I can't use my necessary Firefox add-ons? Nah, I'll pass.
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Bryan Johnson is selling his longevity-promoting supplements and medicinals online. This is the guy that was doing home blood exchanges with his young son, so he's definitely, unconventional. Much of the stuff consists of diabetic medications, but I'm surprised that he includes the SGLT2 inhibitors, like Brenzavvy and Jardiance. Man, if you get Fournier's syndrome just because you wanted to stay young-looking, is it worth the risk?
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Google Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer leaves for OpenAI. Oh well, that's the tech world. People change jobs all the time.
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Your PC Might Soon Demand Proof of Age Before Letting You Browse. This was bound to happen sooner or later. Because some people can't behave themselves. Someone will make a lot of money setting up alternate identities for people. Like in Minority Report.
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I can't believe that some people are still using Apple's Time Capsule. Apple's Time Machine software is useful, but it's slow. The times when you need to use a backup drive is rare for most people, so many don't buy anything more fancy. But it's nice to have that peace of mind. Do it, Apple, and upgrade this software.
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California seeks to allow kids to 'divorce' their parents without cause. The state continues to be a fountain of moral depravity. There was a time when crap like this would be laughed at, and the sponsor thoroughly ridiculed. But today, people are too afraid to speak up.
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Portland Public School is so incompetent, that it can't even properly fire incompetent teachers. And no one will be fired for this.
And Oregon education officials recommend repealing, replacing compulsory school attendance rules. Oregon education is a joke.
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While the initial budget pitched by Mayor Keith Wilson proposed cuts to Portland Police, Portland Fire & Rescue and Portland parks, councilors were able to include $3 million for urban forestry, and save some police support staff positions and a Portland fire engine.
They also restored $2.5 million to Portland Street Response, Project Ceasefire, and summer Free for All programs.
Cuts to Police, Fire & Rescue and Parks, but money for NGOs and "street response". And "free" shit. Why are Portlanders getting for their tax money?
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Downtown Seattle lost 30,000 jobs, billions in office value since 2020 payroll tax. Good going, Seattle.
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