Just found out that J Craig Venter died. Wow, hardly any mention of this in the news. He's the guy that first sequenced the human genome, back when it cost about $100,000,000 to do so. Now you can do whole genome sequencing at home for about $100. But Venter was a true pioneer. Should have won the Nobel Prize, but somehow never did.
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There's a lot of discussion on the Web about how Pocket OS got their production database deleted along with backups due to using a Cursor-based product from Railway. The weird part was how it confessed. They managed to get their data back after all (whew), but although Railway says they fixed their system with new guardrails, I really wouldn't want to let their agentic system near my production database again. It's like having a maniac run a core part of your business, and all you did was add an extra chain around its wrists.
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And Meta's alignment director had a similar experience. I don't trust autonomous agents. I know that everyone's using them and some think they're the bee's knees, but I don't think we know enough about them. Like they still don't know exactly why the agent disobeyed rules. Even the agent doesn't know why.
Google is planning to implement AI Overviews in their GMail product. You already know that Google reads your GMail, right? So it's no surprise that now they'll have AI read it for you, summarize it for you, and tell you what it's about so you don't actually have to read the email itself. Convenient, huh? Because who wants to read their own email, right? They call it a "smart feature" so it must be a good thing, right?
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The ZFC axioms are often regarded as perhaps the most universal truths that humanity has managed to articulate — for while it may be possible for physicists to imagine universes in which physical laws are turned inside out, mathematical laws will remain constant.
It is a paradox without resolution: The foundations of mathematics are as universal, as solid as anything humanity knows, a core part of nearly every mathematical truth. And yet they remain simply what we choose to believe.
I took a class from Paul Cohen – closest I got to a truth math celebrity.
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Spooky feelings in old houses may be caused by boiler sounds. It's the infrasonic frequencies we respond to. This is why I like the industrial ambient genre. So bleak.
And now ElevenLabs is developing their own AI Music factory, ElevenMusic. Great for coding, I suppose.
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Online age verification is the hill to die on. I agree, but what can we really do to oppose it?
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"If it feels like the world is rejecting science and truth, here are five ways to fight back" I hate articles like this. It's on The Guardian, so you already know it's woke. The writer starts with the premise that doctors objected to "evidence-based medicine" with "fierce protest". First of all, it wasn't fierce – more like Socratic dissent. Doctors were reacting to the perceived sense that individual care would be replaced by population-level data based treatment recommendations/. They were worried that cookbook medicine would be encouraged and that this would percolate from guidelines to audits and payer requirements. In some sense that has happened and is a major source of grief for physicians.
But her beef is that the Trump administration is rejecting climate science. But remember when Al Gore was warning us about global warming and the disappearance of glaciers? Well now he's warning about a coming Ice Age! I kid you not. We just need to panic about the latest thing that climate change panicans want us to worry about.
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When You’re Fed-up Arguing Try Switching to “Claude Mode” I must admit, I do sometimes like wasting tokens arguing with Claude. Arguing with real-life Lefties is too dangerous these days.
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Github is now so unreliable that Mitchell Hashimoto is leaving. Another example of Microsoft slop. One wonders if their AI efforts have caused them to relax on quality.
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The physics of coffee. So now I'm going to pour my drip coffee from 20 cm up. Going to splash more, but supposedly it makes for a stronger more robust brew.
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The Sad Story of Heisenberg's Doctoral Oral Exam. He could have wallowed in depression and self-loathing. But he continued to work and developed the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and help Niels Bohr construct the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. And we still remember him, and forget the other guys!
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A.I.-Themed High School Is Put on Hold After Parental Backlash. Really too bad. They had a chance to put their kids ahead. But irrational fear killed it. Wish they had that much passion against CRT and DEI education. That's what's really hurting kids. No one wants to hire a sanctimonious activist.
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Why are doctors so unwilling to run tests? Here's a great example of how doctors think and why they don't just order a slough of tests at the beginning.
From the insurance side] the tradeoffs here are individual versus macro scale optimization of health outcomes + patient comfort, while optimizing and operating under constrained resources ($, limited numbers of medical machinery, limited numbers of providers, limited numbers of providers with the appropriate specialty).
The idea is that we only dedicate resources at scale to the things with high signal to noise ratio, and the highest signal is patient discomfort.
In your case, that discomfort requirement is clearly met. But that doesn’t mean jumping straight to a test is best for society as a whole -- the symptoms may resolve on their own / with medication before you’d even get the results back, the test may/may not find anything, etc.
“Do the thing cheapest/least resource intensive thing that’s likely to work first, then move on to the alternative.”
The art is determining when it's reasonable to wait a bit. That's when experience counts.
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Mayor Katie Wilson rushed away following gunfire near news conference. No better way than to let the mayor herself experience the modern Seattle experience.
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Gov. Tina Kotek’s plan for ambitious academic goals gets scrutiny, then hesitant support, from Board of Education. As I often say, Democrats don't want to solve problems. They want problems they can promise to solve. Nothing's going to happen. Things will continue to get worse.
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Someone wrote a book describing how Oregon lost its way: Oregoners. Too depressing to read.
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