Looks like smoke will be back in PNW skies tomorrow. There are six plumes and smoke from them will be blowing our way.
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Other people have wondered whether Moderna's melanoma mRNA vax has been overhyped. I suspect that the pembrolizumab is doing much of the heavy lifting, They say it's more than just the checkpoint inhibitor, but their data is not available to be examined, so it's just gossip just yet.
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Hidden Hazards: Nontargeted Chemical Analysis Reveals Widespread Contaminants and Mislabeling in Personal Care and Cleaning Products. The list of products is here. This would be great to have an LLM scan ingredients of a product against this list. LLMs have made data analytics much easier for the consumer – you just tell the LLM to do the analysis, like an assistant.
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One of the drawbacks about Markdown editors is that you have to have a screen for entering the text and markup, and another screen to see the results. Like an HTML editor. There's a new editor that purports to eliminate that need - the Concept Writer. I'll give it a try, as this has been my greatest problem with Markdown. Too bad there's no free trial – you have to pay just to try it. ☹️ On the plus side, it's a one-time payment, not a subscription model.
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The Economist and MedPageToday both decry the Fauci-hate. The Economist focuses on how the deaths in the U.S. were the real problem that we should be focusing on, and says:
Dr Fauci’s private diary has exposed his vanity, his delight in every gushing appraisal by the media or some celebrity. But the diary also reveals a conscientious public servant trying to save as many lives as he could, struggling against the constraints that hobbled America relative to its peers. His summons before the Senate committee was surely intended to humiliate if not incriminate him. It should embarrass the entire country.MedPageToday says:
Fauci was communicating consensus CDC and WHO policies, not creating them. His messaging reflected evolving public health guidance.
I think it's debatable that Fauci was saving as many lives as he could. Why did he not disclose the hazard of giving the vax to pregnant women? Why did he make it difficult for any research to be conducted on stopping SARS-CoV2, such as repurposing drugs, or recommending vitamin D, encouraging diabetes and hypertension control, getting more exercise and losing weight? It was just vax, vax, vax. And not protein subunit vax, like Novavax, but just the mRNA vax. Why did he discount natural immunity so quickly, when there were studies that showed it was protective, before forcing it on healthcare staff, who had to quit if they didn't submit to the jab?
Fauci is not the "conscientious public servant" you think he is. He was arrogant, vainglorious and self-aggrandizing.
The real scandal is how the medical profession suddenly shut off their collective brains and took in the foolishness about six feet of distancing and the need for worthless masking. C'mon doctors! Why didn't you speak up about the very concerning surge in VAERS submissions? The draconian measures when in reality, the bulk of deaths occurred due to policy decisions in New York and New Jersey? Why didn't you doctors speak up about the inappropriate use of 40 cycles of PCR to make the diagnosis of COVID-19? Why didn't you speak up about BLM protests, and how they were spreading infection? Why did hospitals (like OHSU) condone TikTok doctor and nurse dancing while patients couldn't see their loved ones dying?
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Chinese Institutions Are Building AI Models Of American Voters—And Testing Political Messages On Them. Why do you think we spend time and money to do this? Purely for academic interest?
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The search for consciousness inside AI. Real consciousness is not just detecting references to related topics when prompted. I'm interested in whether signs of thought processes occur spontaneously, when no one is looking. That's consciousness.
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Optical Earth. This is what Earth looks like from space at the current moment. In case you were curious. You can't zoom in very far, as you can with Google Earth. And there is still a polar artifact. But it's the closest think to being an astronaut.
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The movie The Wicker Man, was conceived as a trilogy, and the director's sons have finished a third movie called The Wrath of the Gods. I did not see The Wicker Tree. Without Christopher Lee and without the music of Paul Giovanni, it's not the same.
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We gave nine LLMs the same PDF. Two answered without reading it. Open-source models really lag behind frontier models. The authors used pdf.engine (which seems to be the Adobe plug-in), which I've not used for PDF parsing. I've used pdfplumber, and it's worked well.
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iPhone 18 is going to introduce a new color - dark cherry. The design hasn't changed for years, since the Jony Ive days. Apple no longer dazzles.
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Turn any screenshot into a shareable link. I used to use Imgur for this, but it was cumbersome. Now there is SCREEN2LINK.
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