17 June 2025

Ever wondered how LLMs know that they've finished what they had to say and stop talking? Doesn't that require comprehension? Well, not really. We think.
Then there's this: LLMs know when they are being evaluated. Really creepy. 

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Do you have social anxiety? It might just be your gut bacteria. Man, the microbiota-gut-brain axis doesn't cease to amaze.


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An EV battery that recharges in just 18 seconds? Yeah, that would make me consider getting an EV. But not if it takes a specialized power source to achieve this.

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So who do I believe? This guy who tells me top optimize for LLMs? Or this guy, who says that people are rushing into Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)? People are using both – traditional search, as well as LLM query engines. It depends on the question. And I still don't trust AI to get my answers for me. They can miss things. But they are good for idea suggestions and to make sure you haven't forgotten anything.

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Hemochromatosis can predispose to dementia. Well, it's the less frequent H63D type, not the most common C282Y variant. It seemed that H63D variants had a more benign course, but perhaps not in all ways.

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Could there be a fifth force of nature? If so, it would be mediated by a new Yukawa particle.

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Oregon is third worst in the nation for hepatitis C deaths. Probably because so many people in Oregon are IV drug abusers, that hepatitis is rampant. I would bet that we're terrible for hepatitis B, too.

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Dumb. Looks like PERS is going to be restricted to just investing in carbon-neutral companies. Which means it may miss out on some good investments, and that someone is going to have to be paid to look over every single potential investment and decide if it's good enough to invest in. The time and dollars spent that have to go to satisfy this insane requirement. So does that mean PERS is going to invest only in solar panel companies and windmill farms? Do they still like Tesla, or is that just out of the question?

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Things are looking bleak for Providence. Bet they miss those Obamacare days, when money was just rolling in. And we still had leadership that wasn't as left-wing as it is today, and so business actually wanted to stay in Oregon.

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Seattle's affordable housing industry is in crisis mode now. Yup, one more sector that was just dependent on federal subsidies which are no longer rolling in.

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16 June 2025

Another major company is leaving Oregon – that is Tektronix. And it's now national news that Oregon is committing economic suicide. Here's WWeek, recognizing that it's a big problem for the state.

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Oregon institutes protections for geolocation tracking in teens younger than age 16.  Once in a while, Oregon legislators do something beneficial.

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Uruguay scientists have developed a drug (called SANA) that supposedly promotes weight loss without suppressing appetite. It's based on salicylates and creatine. The weight loss was about 3% at two weeks. Not a lot, and I doubt it will outsell the standard GLP-1 receptor agonists.

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Salmon Valley school superintendent in Washington says that federal subsidy cuts will be problematic for the school district. It amazes me how everything seems to be dependent on federal money. This needs to stop. The federal government shouldn't be subsidizing everything in the U.S. Can't the state take care of this?

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Well, the numbers are here at last. And it's devastating. Intel will lay off 15% to 20% of its employees, many of which will be in Oregon. Things are that bad. Gee whiz, can Oregon get some good news for a change?

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Here's an opinion about the AI hype is all about. It's a race to get the $50 trillion prize.  Meanwhile young graduates are finding it very difficult to get jobs. This is likely AI related.

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Despicable. Another company claims to fight refractory cancer, prey on hope, and take people's money. And people aren't getting any better. I don't how these people sleep or look at themselves in the mirror. This is why we have clinical trials first.

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A Harvard study showed that women who drank at least one cup of coffee daily aged gracefully and had less dementia. The effect was not seen with decaf coffee – only the real stuff. Remember though, this study was not set out to research the effects of coffee. It was an entirely different study, and so is just a retrospective subgroup analysis, which is only good for generating a hypothesis, and not for making recommendations. Still, drinking coffee is easy to do.

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Nature articles will now make public the initial acceptance letter with request to modify and publish the authors' response. Could be interesting to read. We might get some additional insights.

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Some examples of truly unusually gifted humans.

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Terence Tao discusses the hardest problems in mathematics and physics in a Lex Fridman interview.

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15 June 2025

AI education has the potential of disseminating outdated science, since large models can't be updated frequently enough. You think that's bad, try medicine, where things change so quickly.

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Those sneaky Chinese. This is how the smartest people in the world get around those pesky nVIDIA chip export restrictions. You pack the data in suitcases and send them to the United States. Then someone runs the code on the GPUs and sends the data back to China. Because there's no restriction on data, right?

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A lot of people objected to Apple's paper on the limitations of reasoning models. Large models don't necessarily live up to the hype.  Gary Marcus sums up seven main objections to the paper and knocks them down. 

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Incredible how the geographic coordinates of the Great Pyramid of Giza are the speed of light in microns/sec N, and 10,000,000 m from the North Pole. Surely it's just a coincidence. Got those Graham Hancock/Erich von Däniken vibes.

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Is Google going to destroy the Web? Seems a bit overblown. Not destroy. Just change. If Google just kept doing what they were doing before, and just providing us with good search results, it might stick around longer. They wouldn't have made as much advertising money, but people wouldn't be criticizing as much as they do now. Google is trying to preserve its golden goose, but the bird is getting old.

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AI is making students dumb. Kinda like the Internet has made students dumb. This is one of the major threats of AI – taking away so much cognitive skills from us humans. We'll have a generation of dummies who won't know what to do without an internet-connected phone nearby.
And here's an article about a man afflicted with ChatGPT-driven psychosis. LLMs are a force multiplier for mental illness. 

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Five greatest physics lectures of all time. No excuses now. This is what the Internet was made for.

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OHSU has decided to go with Shereef Elnahal. It's interesting to think that they had a guy who was ready to take on the role (Nate Selden), but oh no, Tina Kotek had to have a nationwide search first. In the end, the just found one guy willing to take the job, and he's got no obvious advantage over Selden. Being from Harvard and the East Coast is a disadvantage, I think. Was it just that they wanted an outsider?  Just wanted to have someone else besides Selden, who was already Dean of the School of Medicine? What is the point? At least Selden was a local and already knew people. So much money wasted. Selden had been with OHSU for 25 years. What a way to treat him.

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14 June 2025

Photon transport through the entire adult human head. What a weird study to be doing. They measured light of 800 nm wavelength (in the infrared range) going through the skull, and actually detected photons on the other side. I would have thought all such light would be absorbed, but some penetrated through. What use this information has is beyond me.

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Apple has a problem. This could be huge for Apple. I don't think there will be robust sales for the new iPhone. Who really needs a new phone that doesn't really do much more than the iPhone 16, and is just thinner and more likely to bend and so, likely has an inferior battery life, I don't know for sure. And the Liquid Glass look? Seems to make text harder to see. Somehow, I don't think Steve Jobs would approve of what's going to come out.

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Google's going to implement an age assurance tool that is zero-knowledge. Do you trust Google to do this? I really don't. They can triangulate the data from so many different ways.

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Pseudomonas aeruginosa can break down hospital plastic. And this bug is not rare, especially in hospitals. So now. hospital plastic needs to be coated with antimicrobials to prevent this.

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This is how it starts. Strange neutrino pulses have been detected that emit from deep within Antarctic ice. It's aliens!

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The CEO of Scale AI is joining Meta. Scale AI hires third world workers to do all the grunge labeling work for AI datasets. They have to watch all the videos and images and classify them. Sometimes the images are NSFW and something NSFL. Well, Alexandr Wang will make his billions.
Update (16 June 2025): So Google is cutting ties with Scale AI. Can't blame them, really.

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Providence is going to lay off 134 employees. All for the usual reasons. The nurses union (ONA) claims that the Providence administration hasn't lowered their own salaries in response to their financial downturn, and Providence is not denying this. Makes me wonder how serious they think it is. Why not lower the salaries of executives, instead of firing people and making patient care that much more difficult? It's a legit point. Put some skin in the game. And Providence should get on the phone and talk to Kotek and get her to do something about Oregon's lousy economy and high crime rate. Stop businesses from leaving and stop raising taxes on everything. This way so many people won't have to be on CareOregon/Medicaid.

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13 June 2025

Girls fall behind boys in math during the first year of school. Why does this happen?

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Laptop speakers can leak audio through walls, through inadvertent radio transmission leakage. Probably not something I'll have to worry about. 

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U.S. Senators may ban pharma ads on TV networks. Boy, is their budget gonna suffer. They should ban it from radio, too.

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Sleeping in total darkness turns about to be important. Even a little bit of light can apparently interfere with deep sleep.

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In a parody article, someone wrote that Cape Breton was going to have its own time zone. Google and Meta picked it up as actual news, and started disseminating it. 

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Not good.  Intel is going to start laying off an unknown number of people in Oregon in July. This is going to hurt Oregon even more.

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This is news to me. RFK Jr. is telling people that:
For $75 a month, under this bill, you’ll be able to get a concierge doctor who is available 24 hours a day, every day of the week, every day of the year. You won’t get a bill for it. You won’t have to file insurance claims. It’s just like old-style health care—but it’s for $75 a month.

We’re also going to allow the creation of onsite medical centers by employers—at factories, at workplaces—where workers can get treated for free. Somebody won’t have to leave work for four or five hours to get a medical checkup. They’ll be able to do that onsite.
What? Suddenly medicine is a commodity? So cheap? We're getting even deeper into socialized medicine? Do we have all these doctors now, who will be willing to work for peanuts? Or does he expect AI to step up? Or nurse practitioners? Or FMGs?

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Some folks are looking into a theory that gravity is just a manifestation of entropy.  Yeah, it's a long shot.

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Fastest way to detect a vowel in a string. Nice review of Python coding techniques.

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Sad story of a guy who convinced HP to buy Palm and WebOS, and then see it die.  Oh, what could have been. The stars really misaligned, didn't they.

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More money gets wasted going to the bloated Oregon Edu-cay-shun Department.  Meanwhile, Oregon has nothing to show for all that money. 

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12 June 2025

Using ChatGPT changes your brain – for the worse. All that cognitive off-loading. Quick, somebody let Ohio State University know. Use of ChatGPT will be required come this fall.

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It hasn't happened yet. Someone speculates on what will be AI's first big disaster. So many possibilities.

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Well shoot. Houseplants don't actually purify the air. The original story that said it did was flawed.

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Looks like Khanh Pham's crazy bill to tax Google and Meta has advanced in the legislature. I bet she thinks she's doing Oregon a service.

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Dutch Bros is officially moving their HQ to Arizona. All those jobs. All that tax base. Tsk, tsk.

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Yes, those political TikTok videos really do shape people's minds. And Trump's team makes better ones. Of course, we knew that.

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Here's a map of where inflation is the highest. What do you notice?

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11 June 2025

nVIDIA is going to build the world's first industrial AI cloud datacenter. But it's going to be built in Europe, to help European countries. What, not enough business in the United States?

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Apple introduces a haptic movie experience. OK, Apple, you can do cute small stuff like this, but how about something significant, too. You know, like what Steve Jobs would have done?

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Last year's winning optical illusions. Most of them are stuff we've already seen before. The latest entries are from 2023. The 2024 contest is underway. So late.

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A pancreatic cancer vaccine that "eradicates" disease? Why hasn't this gotten more publicity? Because, it's still early in the development phase. From the description, it seems more like cellular therapy, rather than a vaccine.

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10 June 2025

Semaglutide is linked to neovascular macular degeneration.  It's already linked to muscle and bone mass loss. But on the plus side, it may increase penis length by a several millimeters. So, worth it?

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Great article on what it's like going through a lawsuit. It's not fun, and AI can be a very helpful companion.

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Clark County schools are feeling the money pinch. Schools always seem to need money. Why is that? Wish the students' grades would reflect the investment.

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Here's Biden on sanctuary cities in 2007 when he had a few more brain cells. Obama had a message, too. It's clear. The Democrat party is not the same as it was before. Just because you were a Democrat then, doesn't mean that it makes sense to still be one today. So Trump is not some fascist dictator, just trying to enforce immigration law, unless those two were also. 

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Remember when Portland didn't call in the National Guard, so as not to "escalate" the violence?  Yeah about that.

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8 June 2025

CAR-T cell therapy may cure refractory myeloma in about a third of cases. This is the CARTITUDE-1 trial. Very nice. CAR-T cell therapy has come a long way. Dr. Carl June, still hasn't gotten a Nobel prize for this.

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GenZ is becoming a generation of slackers. That's the old term for NEETs. 
“I’m just focusing on the present because the future is depressing.” Hustling, girlbossing, or “work hard, play harder” just doesn’t quite have the same grip on Gen Z as it did on millennials starting out.  

...many Gen Zers are eyeing up easygoing jobs that don’t require regular overtime, antisocial working hours, or substantial responsibilities like managing a large team.
Others are avoiding office jobs: The hottest roles right now among Gen Z grads are in teaching, where low pay is balanced with weeks of vacation. 

At the same time as unemployment among the youth is rising, their mental health is in decline.
Until recently, being the director of an NSAID-funded NGO was a cool job. Or a homeless agency in Portland.

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Portland Mayor Keith Wilson still pledges to end homelessness by this year.  By blanketing the city with crappy tiny homes in "safe villages" all over, no doubt. Portland is clearly in a doom loop. So much white flight going on, taking their wealth with them.
And more workers in Oregon are part-timers now. There just isn't enough money to support full-timers and probably not enough business anyway.

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