Sugoi & Yokunai

Ugh. Sweden’s Digital ID System Hacked, Public’s Data Sold on Dark Web. This is why I distrust government to hire the best tech people for their grand schemes. The article is light on mentioning who was responsible for developing the BankID.

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A Simple Injection Could Help the Heart Heal Itself After a Heart Attack. OK, if you're going to inject something into people and target the heart, an mRNA vector may be the right method. As long as you don't make the payload SARS-CoV2 spike protein and give people myocarditis, as did the COVID vax.

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Interesting. Ambulance and taxi drivers were least likely to get Alzheimer's disease in the United States from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2022. This is an old study, but still interesting. The authors think that it might be their "frequent navigational and spatial processing".

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Spectre I purports to be a device that will emit an inaudlble signal that will prevent electronic listening devices from eavesdropping. Will it really work? Might be hard to verify. Ah, what a world we live in now.

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CoopVPN is a new VPN that is based off the open-source LEAP VPN.  VPNs are getting very popular now, and real privacy is likely to require one of these bespoke VPNs or a roll-your-own VPN. But not everyone has the resources to do this. I don't know these guys, though, and I don't have any Android devices to test this. But I'll bookmark this and see how they develop over time.

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Ah, natsukashii! Remember when we used to get the news this way? This is Netscape News. Brings me back to 1999. I had an account and tailored my page just they way I liked. It was fantastic.

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iOS 27 will feature a revamped Siri. This app has been a forgotten entity. I guess Apple finally decided to turn its attention there.

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Oh brother. All those microplastics studies that we've been panicking about – they might be overestimates because the researchers' latex and nitrile gloves shed them, too.

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The Porsche Diffusion. Interesting insight into groupthink as amplified by social media. I was thinking about all those No Kings protestors I saw yesterday, mindless parroting the same propaganda that everyone else says, Because it's the latest thing.

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The Impact of Dating Apps on Young Adults: Evidence from Tinder. So what is the impact?

Hot studs got more, basically.

The stay-at-home boyfriend is now an economic trend as more women than men go to work. More men are dropping out of the work grind, for some reason. What could be the cause of that? I also saw these two graphs:

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This Company Tricked ChatGPT Into Naming Their Boss the “Sexiest Bald Man Alive”. When you use a public chatbot model, it isn't directly trained with your responses. Your responses will get saved, but what companies do with that information is not clear. So how do you trick ChatGPT to say what you want it to?  This is how you do it. Clever.

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Some thoughts about the inadvertent revelation about Claude Mythos. Whatever it is, cybersecurity companies stocks are really down. Like Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Zscaler, SentinelOne, Cloudflare, and CyberArk. I sold the ones I owned, and will wait until Anthropic reveals the model in April. Maybe nVIDIA will see some uptick. 

AI companies lick their chops as FCC proposes forcing call center onshoring. This is good. I found it hard to understand the accents of some of the foreigners on the other end, and I'm not sure they always understood what I was saying. But yeah, AI will probably take over because it's probably not possible to get good quality human call center staffing here at the rates they'll demand. 

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Speaker Mike Johnson is appalled at what was in the DHS funding bill that the Senate passed to the House.  Which includes:

“'The contents printed under the headings of this bill, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border security operations under the heading of US Customs and Border Patrol and Protection shall have no force or effect for purposes of this act and amounts specified in the final bill under the subheading border security operation, and under the heading U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and under the headings of US Immigration and Customs enforcement, in the Department of Homeland Security shall be...ZERO.’”

In this era, you cannot excuse yourself and say that the bill was too huge and no one can read it. You can run the bill though a summarizer LLM and get the highlights. There is no excuse for passing this off. Really irresponsible. 

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CSS continues to do what used to require Javascript.  It makes for an interesting webpage, but some of this gets abused by advertisers and makes it harder for blocking apps to get rid of annoying use cases.

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Apple really, really wants you to upgrade your iPhone and iPad.  The security risks are unusually high, it seems.

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Nine observations from carbon dioxide monitoring. Places where you are most likely to breathe in other people's air. Doctors' offices, elevators and public transportation are the worst. Wow.

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Roman Catholic Churches See a Surge of New Converts. It's not just Catholism. It's other orthodox religions, too. Very interesting.

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What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?! Surprisingly, the answer is not zero. OId people have a lifetime of experiences to share, but their ability to turn it into a marketable and interesting story does diminish with age.

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85% of Oregon is in drought conditions. Still think it makes sense to build a datacenter out in eastern Oregon?

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Bye, Oregon. Horizon Air will close Medford base, move pilots and flight attendants to other cities. Oregon keeps losing.

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Here are Oregon’s highest-income counties — and those that earn the least. It's clear that Oregon is not a wealthy state. We don't have a lot of rich people. But on the up side, it's not likely that Oregon lawmakers will float a millionaire or billionaire tax. Because it won't make a difference.

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