Two articles about the benefits of coffee:
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1. Giant Study May Have Found The Ideal Amount of Coffee to Lower Stress. About 2 to 3 cups per day is the best for this effect.
2. Coffee and Tea Intake, Dementia Risk, and Cognitive Function. Again, 2 to 3 cups per day lowers risk of dementia.
Brain age index and dementia risk can be predicted on your sleep EEG. This is a machine learning study, so who knows? Maybe it'll hold up. Maybe it won't.
3Blue1Brown has an excellent video about one of my favorite MC Escher images: Print Gallery. I recommend watching it.
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Project NOMAD. Get copies of Wikipedia, maps, education tools downloaded for in case the Internet goes down. And you are in your bomb shelter with your MREs and want to read something. Well now you're prepared!
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AI may be helping more people start their own businesses, but without many employees. Who needs startup capital, right? You just need a few geeks who don't need salaries. Just get them to work and you have a business. Easy-peasy.
And AI has not yet harmed India's IT industry. What? You would think that this would be the first country to suffer. I mean who needs all those Indian coders when AI can do their job, right? Well, the techies are not seeing any shortage for their skills. Nice, I guess.
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Here's more on the observation that many folks doing menial jobs, like Door Dash, are wearing cameras that capture their work routines. They're training AI models on how manual labor works. That sounds so dystopian.
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Observations about using LLMs to code. You are now the project manager, and your job is to care about quality control now. You have to learn about design and taste.
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Here's two related articles:
OpenClaw’s ChatGPT moment sparks concern that AI models are becoming commodities. OpenClaw is making people think they know how to harness AI for nifty things, like having a personal assistant, someone who will book a flight for you, order your food for you, etc. It seems fake and many phony right? Like one of those things that sound really cool when it first comes out (like ChatGPT) but then gets so mundane and commoditized.
And then someone had an insight: AI's Elephant In The Room. So what if all people really want is just small models that are fast and controllable and do the small task they're assigned to do. And we don't need the next generation super-powerful datacenter-demanding models that all the companies are building? What if the demand is more for Mac Minis running smaller models developed by China? Then what? What's going to happen to all those investments and projections?
The future will be interesting.
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Genetic study finds links between height and risk of cardiovascular and reproductive conditions in Han Taiwanese people. Taller Taiwanese are more at risk for atrial fibrillation and endometriosis. The study suggests there may be genetic factors causing this association. They shouldn't generalize to East Asians, since they only tested a single group. Paper here.
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Global copper demand outstrips supply, threatening electrification and industrial growth. What element has the highest electrical conductivity? It's silver. Followed by copper. But silver tarnishes and copper corrodes. Gold is a close third, but is super expensive. Aluminum is fourth, and although it has lesser electrical conductivity, it is cheap and doesn't corrode or decay as much, although acidic or alkaline conditions accelerate corrosion, as well as contact with stainless steel. But why is copper still relatively cheap when it is so valuable and now harder to come by?
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Treatments for sickle cell anemia have been developed but are still so darned expensive. One is haplo-identical transplantation, which has its drawbacks. And another is Casgevy, a CRISPR-Cas9 based gene therapy. Very effective, but the expense puts it out of reach of most people who need it.
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Interesting. arXiv, the preprint server, is breaking off from Cornell University to be independent. They're looking for a CEO. This might be a great move.
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National survey of NIH-funded researchers shows precarious state of U.S. science. This article blames the Trump administration for a funding cut of science grants, and features this University of Washington assistant professor whose work is not on DEI topics, but is on kidney aging and chronic disease. Huh? Nothing to do with DEI. So what happened? It turns out the she applied for a grant where she gets funding for mentoring students who come from under-represented backgrounds. I would be in favor of providing support to kids who show talent or promise, and not prioritize certain demographics. Doing that is not fair, and I don't think science is best advanced by policies like this.
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More on the loss of the Y-chromosome in men. I used to think this was a harmless sporadic event in older men, but it's strange that many cells in susceptible men would lose the Y-chromosome. How does that happen? Is there some genetic susceptibility to this happening? Regardless, it's a marker for problems.
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Nifty! You can use a Time Machine trick to roll back your Mac. I can see where this can come in handy.
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An experimental AI agent broke out of its testing environment and mined crypto without permission. This is why I'm not willing to turn autonomous agents loose on my machine.
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Hawaii storms have caused $1bn in damage. Those North shores homes better hope that Wahiawa Dam doesn't break. Or they will learn a Lahaina lesson. Once you lose you home totally in a Blue state like Hawaii, your house is just gone. You'd better find some alternative pathway than restoration. There's still paltry recovery in Lahaina three years later. Pacific Palisades in LA has seen only minor recovery milestones. And that's in a place where folks have money. The North Shore is not as affluent.
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A $1 gas pipeline deal fuels debate on Oregon’s energy future. Can Oregon do anything right?
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