20 June 2025

Happy Summer Solstice!

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Perhaps we now know how acetaminophen works. Very odd that it's been a mystery all this time. It's not a prostaglandin synthesis inhibitor, which is how I remember learning it many years ago. Quite different, actually.

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Cool. Chinese studios are going to produce AI-remakes of the famous martial arts movies by Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li. Not sure yet what they'll do, but I'm interested.

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AI chatbots can "talk dirty" if you're persist enough. DeepSeekR1 does it more readily. I wouldn't do this on a public installation, though. And I bet the Chinese encourage this, perhaps so they can use the information for blackmail. Avoid, avoid.

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Tibetan musical notation is pretty. Like art.

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Hardly anyone uses StackOverflow anymore, it seems. Too bad. StackExchange might still be used. But SO made mistakes and this led to its downfall.

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A new way of scamming people. Apparently it's possible to inject any text you want in the text box inputs, making people think phone numbers are legit.

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This YT video of Hawaiian history is depressing. Yeah, I learned about a lot of this as a kid, but the losses suffered by the native Hawaiians over the past 200 years is pretty dramatic. The Lahaina fire of 2023 was just the latest installation. Yeah, the haoles in the 1800s were greedy bastards, but the native Hawaiians needed to up their game. There's no sign that they did anything more than become activists. And now, they are so marginalized. This is what happens when you don't adapt to the new realities. There's so much in Hawaii of which to make money, but sadly the native Hawaiians have so little ownership of anything.

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Washington State patrol is using cellphone information to get speeders now.  You have been warned, I guess.

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This is why the American public distrusts the medical profession.  The American Academy of Pediatrics backs child sex changes as 'medically necessary' despite SCOTUS upholding ban. Give it up, guys!  It's not the Biden era anymore. Many people have woken up and don't believe all that woke crap anymore. Lefty doctors in groups like the AAP are going to ruin it for everyone. No one will believe you when you have something really legitimate to say, and you have no one to blame but yourself.

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MIT people keep discovering interesting things. A student has come up with a way to restore paintings without altering the underlying art. And this can be done in hours, not years.

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This should be titled The Lost Art of Slide Rules. Brings back fond memories.

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When ChatGPT went down for several hours last week, everyday users, students with exams, and office workers posted in despair: “If it doesnt come back soon my boss is gonna start asking why I havent done anything all day,” one person commented on Downdetector, a website that tracks internet outages. “I have an interview tomorrow for a position I know practically nothing about, who will coach me??” wrote another. 
Why can't people use a different LLM? Are they that uninformed?

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Yoshua Bengio thinks he has a way to save humanity from AI. It's another AI, he calls LawZero. It's an AI that watches other installations and warns humans if it detects something bad. Let's hope that it's not coaxed into some kind of collaboration.

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Medical price transparency is not working out in Oregon. I guess you can have an executive order, but that doesn't necessarily mean that companies will listen. This is the post-modern world, you know. People always test the law, and only follow it if they are punished for violations. Otherwise, forget it. We've seen that with illegal immigration and illicit drugs.

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