97% in 9 minutes: BYD’s new EV battery ends range anxiety with ultra-fast charging. Now THAT'S a fast battery. If all batteries were like this, EV cars would make sense. That plus distance. Otherwise, no.
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Tech titans vow to ‘take back’ California from lefties, call out billionaires fleeing. Those "tech titans" were previously Democrats. They probably still are, but now they see what Dem policies lead to when you run out of money.
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Surprising gender biases in GPT. GPT-4 thinks it's OK to torture a woman to prevent a nuclear apocalypse, but not to abuse women. LLMs don't really understand things.
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In Santa Cruz, the Salty Otter restaurant got a lot of flak when using AI to help design a new logo for the window. Instead of using a local artist, which would have been more expensive. People getting a little touchy aren't they?
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Sick of Microsoft and Google? This new European office suite is a private, open-source alternative. It's not just usability concerns, but also security concerns. Especially now that AI is going to be the center of everything. Guess they didn't want Microslop. Here's where to get Office.EU. They even appropriate the name.
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Unihertz has come up with a phone that's supposed to be like a Blackberry. It's full of Google stuff. I don't know why you'd want it, really. It's just novel.
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A single dose of cocoa flavanols improves cognitive performance during aerobic exercise. They don't say where they sourced the cocoa flavonoids. Paper here.
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Here are details on how hackers stole secrets from the Mexican government. Seems to be mainly jailbreaking skills. But it still doesn't explain how Mexican government files were accessible by Claude. How did they let those files get uploaded for training? And it's still obfuscated as to exactly what files they were able to obtain.
And watch this incredible video of Dario Amodei trying to defend himself against his recent decisions to refuse the Pentagon and lay off a lot of employees. It doesn't seem AI-generated, but one never knows. It's not a good look, though.
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Online harrassement is going to get worse with AI agents running loose. Are we going to look back and say that these were the good ol' days?
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RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine policies are “unreviewable,” DOJ lawyer tells judge. A person in charge of HHS should have been a physician, not a lawyer or politician. RFK Jr's appointment was political, I understand, but it's sure not helping him gain credibility. But it's sad that the doctors who are complaining about RFK Jr also lost a lot of credibility supporting harsh vax mandates, stupid masking policies and now transgender surgeries and puberty blockers. RFK Jr is a great diet and exercise sponsor, but he needs to get some creditable physicians on his team to lay out believable science and reasoning, or else any efficacy his office carries will be lost and trashed.
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Read the opening of Donald Knuth's latest paper:
Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6
Yeah, Claude 4.6 Opus is really that good. I like it, too.
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But Claude can reverse-engineer your binary. No longer can an engineer feel safe in protecting intellectual property when releasing the binary of the code. Because Claude can work out the source code, and there goes your original idea. Suddenly its available for copying and modification. This is wild.
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Female astronauts face clotting risks, five-day weightlessness simulation suggests. Estrogenic effects, perhaps? Next step: how to mitigate this.
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This is a fictional scenario to showcase how medical chatbots can be hijacked nefariously. It's specifically calling caution to Utah's recent legislation allowing chatbots to prescribe medication without human involvement.
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The Internet was never a place for children. I've believed that from the beginning. Now efforts to make the Internet more child-friendly will involve age-verification. And that's going to have repercussions with regard to privacy. There are too many bad players who would love to have fun being able to identify people on the web. It reminds of a time when someone purchased license plate information from the state and posted it on a website. Soon everyone was looking up people's plates and people were getting harrassed.
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Tina Kotek finds that Oregon doesn't have enough behavioral health workers and wants to lower standards to get more. That's not how it works, Tina. Make Oregon more attractive so the right kind of people will actually want to move to the state.
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Portland eyes unspent housing funds to fill empty affordable housing units. See? There was no need to raise taxes. Money was already there.
And get this: City Council Directs $150,000 to Legal Support for Immigrants and Refugees. They were even considering twice that amount!!
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Senate bill 1541 dies! Thank goodness. But Khanh Pham says she isn't giving up! Oh boy. And look – the climate change irreversibility deadline has been moved to 2030 now! Wow, it keeps changing. Weren't we supposed to be at the "point of no return" in a "true planetary emergency" by 2016, according to Al Gore? But AOC moved it to 2031, so we were granted a reprieve?
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Nike to record $300 million cost-cutting charge, hints at more company turmoil. Nike is still the largest company in Oregon that's not a hospital so how it does matters to the state. Should they have spent all that money on building all those weird-looking office buildings several years ago, which I'm sure cost a lot of money to architect and construct.
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The real estate market in the Puget Sound is crappy, and Seattle Times thinks its because of the Iran bombing. Yeah, I thought so, too. Read the article.
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