27 April 2024

The ending of container shipping at the Port of Portland is going to make things even more expensive for Portlanders. The pain hasn't hit yet but it will. Where is the governor on this?

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Here's TechCrunch's review of Llama 3. I agree – a year ago it might have been hailed as amazing, but we live in a world with GPT-4 and Claude-3 Opus, and this level of achievement isn't dazzling anymore. It's a little faster, though, but so what?

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Someone put PubMed in a vector dabase.  This is great, but when I tried it, I wasn't getting results that were useful. Still, I'll monitor this site's progress. It's a good start.

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Columbia University protesting students are mad that their identities are being released, and some job offers are getting rescinded. Oh well. FAFO, I say.  Someone should find out who's printing their signs and T-shirts, which have production values that suggest a corporate entity behind it all. Wouldn't be surprised if the funding came from Soros.

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Web-scraping like the "big boys"?  Looks like a lot of bother. I'll stick with simple CURL, thank you.

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The Left like name changes. Oregon is going to call physician assistants, "physician associates" now. Nothing changes except the name. Might make them feel better, who knows?

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Some mental health conditions are related to Strep.  Like St Vitus' Dance (Sydenham's chorea) is a post-Streptococcal condition. This is nothing new, really.

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Somewhat snarky review of the Rabbit R1 in the real world. This "toy" represents advances in agentic frameworks, something that hasn't gotten as much attention as LLMs and Chat. It's an early-stage model, and if the developers don't give up, it should improve with subsequent iterations.

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Brazzein is a new sugar substitute that was FDA-approved last month. It's another sweeter-than-sugar substance, but the writer is disappointed because brazzein has latency, and the sweet taste doesn't begin immediately.  So it has to be mixed with a little bit of sugar to recreate the immediate sugar experience, but less sugar is used overall. This might actually be an advantage, if it fools the brain that it is getting some sugar, so that it registers sugar satisfaction anyway.

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Ethical deep-fakes with Microsoft's VASA-1.  The video fakes are really good now.  I look forward to doing some creative things with this technology.

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