Sugoi & Yokunai

How many minerals are required to build an EV battery?  It's more than just lithium.

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Volcanic activity under Yellowstone is "on the move".  Well, they've been saying that for a while now.  Others think it's not a concern.

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Why is U.S. healthcare so dysfunctional? Because it's based on the socialist model, instead of the competitive capitalist model, that's why.

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City of Portland Projects a $27 Million Budget Shortfall, but It Will Balloon to Much More.  More taxes and fees in the future. And more homeless:

Looks like the U.S. is already cutting carbon dioxide emissions substantially. So why do we need to act like we're not?

Happy New Year!
Yeah, we made it.

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Brave Care did not make it, however. It started in 2019, which in retrospect was the worst possible year to start something like that. It meant well, and was going to be a disruptor. But it's hard to start your own ecosystem and be the only member of that system. You have to have other partners, and that's where many efforts like this fail. You eventually have to interact with the outside world: with insurance plans, with hospitals, and pharmacies. And their inefficiencies will eventually bring you down, because to survive requires an extraordinary staff of doctors, of which few exist anymore. I could have told them that, but they wouldn't believe me.

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Telemedicine was always an expedient, not the direction which healthcare should go.  Amazon One is finding this out. You can't cheap out on doctors. Telehealth needs to be used sparingly, and only when there is no human physician available.

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Quixotic makes software that will deliberately send LLM scrapers a corrupted version of your website when they come by to scrape. This is one way to fight back and protect your content.

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What is the secret of happiness? Scientists are going to try to find out, but that's the wrong approach. I think that how we define happiness changes as we age. Slowly, what makes you happy is better appreciation for what's going well with your life.

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Japanese scientists discover an AMP-kinase activator, HPH-15, that works better than metformin in reducing blood glucose levels and fat accumulation.  It also decreased hepatic fibrosis.  The study is preclinical though, so it's too early to determine if this will be a diabetic option.

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Fugh. Seattle restaurant prices are going up in 2025 since tip credit is expiring. It seems that people are not likely to tip as well. This is not a good time to be in the restaurant business, or to work as a waiter or waitress.

Providence nurses are striking after all.  Yeah, hospitals have some cushion, but to spend it down to nothing is not good business. Nurses want more money and less stressful working conditions, but quality employees are not easy to come by. Meanwhile, Providence is training temp nurses again. It's going to be expensive for everyone. Not a good time to be ill.

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The South Atlantic Anomaly is changing shape. What's going on?

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The Axial Seamount volcano is swelling and is likely to erupt in 2025. It's right off the coast of Washington and Oregon. Will it be as gentle as it was in 2015?

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Yeah, this is a common occurrence in the learning process of using LLMs to code. It's not that simple.  You still have to have coding skills.

We don't need fewer engineers in the AI era - we need engineers who can debug AI-generated code.

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I've been reading about the H-1B visa controversy going on. Here's a thread that shows why the H-1B visa system needs to be overhauled and reduced.  On the other hand, tech CEOs may be facing this when looking for new hires:

So if you were a young American looking for a job in tech today, would you want to make sacrifices to be an expert only to get mediocre pay? How about if you were a bright immigrant from a poor country, and this was a way to make more money than you ever could back home, and even send remittances?  The difference in commitment and dedication to the job is why tech CEOs want H-1B hires. I'm convinced Americans could do the job, and they should be properly compensated.  And it's clear that Americans do want the job – they're just being ignored.

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Oregon is in the top rankings, but for all the wrong reasons.

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Apple analyzes your photos in the Photos app. This is to provide you with a feature you didn't ask for. You can turn Enhanced Visual Search off, however.

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Cancer risk can actually decreased past the age of 80. This is because older cells express NUPR1 protein, which induces a functional iron deficiency.  This restricts cell growth, even cancerous growth.  NUPR1 may be present to prevent ferroptosis, which is iron-induced programmed cell death.  The interactions are complex, and this has implications for proposed therapies that are dependent on leveraging ferroptosis.

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Can LLMs Accurately Recall the Bible.  This is a nice lesson in how well you can rely on LLMs to look up information. If you can't trust it on the Bible, how can you trust it for other information?

And here is an app (Chorus) that lets you compare the responses of a few of the top LLMs, to see how closely they agree.  Sometimes the errors are glaring. 

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Some Chinese scientists identified proteins associated with brain aging. Interestingly, levels of these proteins seems to peak at three distinct ages: 57, 70, 78 years. However, the protein elevations decrease back to baseline after surging. If the spikes reflecting brain aging, wouldn't you expect the levels to stay elevated?  Could these protein level changes indicate something else? 

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We knew that AI was going to derail efforts to get tech companies to net zero on their carbon footprint.  But it's also decreasing the quality of power by introducing harmonic distortion in the AC current.  This could cause problems for some older appliances.  Proximity to data centers is a major factor, and this is important since Hillsboro is going to be site of at least one data center.

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Mathematician Reveals Strange New Enigmas for Time Travelers.  Apparently if you are able to travel back in time, your memories will be erased when you return to the present. A lot of the predictions about what will happen with time travel seems like speculation.

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Geoffrey Hinton ups his prediction that AI will render humanity extinct in the next thirty years. I personally don't think so. We're already seeing some degradation of AI quality.  Google has inadvertently revealed some progress with Jarvis, its next LLM model.  They've done poor jobs lately that I'm not that excited about what they've done. Gemini has been a disappointment.

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But there is an AI song maker. I haven't given it a whirl, but I think this will be good mainly for making political short videos by the meme makers. Nothing likely to generate catchy tunes that make the top 100, but at least you own the rights.

––– 凄い ––– A new federal report shows that Oregon's homelessness rate increased by 18% compared with the year before.  It's interesting when you compare Vermont and New Hampshire, virtually the same region of the U.S. Vermont has a relatively low homelessness rate compared with Oregon, but NH is doing much better per capita, and the contrast is conspicuous especially compared with New York, Connecticut, and Maine.

How did the Enigma Machine work?

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New report projects number of Oregon high school graduates will decline almost 20% by 2041.  Seems to me like we don't need to spend a lot more in education, huh?

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Why Portland is screwed in three headlines. The leadership really sucks. Climate change is such a grift.

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The REM Speed Stick is a new way for the cool kids do urban travel.  It is not am anti-perspirant.

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Not just me, then.  Academic writing is indeed getting harder to read. All those scientists are using those five-dollar words.

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Just what we need – more ways for people to become mentally ill. Psilocybin usage is associated with higher risk of mental illness.  It's "rapidly growing in popularity" and sparking a “psychedelic renaissance”.  Oh boy, we have enough crazies as it is.

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Star Trek Discovery has been declared non-canon. I never watched it, and don't really care. There's really no Star Trek in it anymore. It looks like a Disney-approved science-fiction knock-off populated by token DEI characters.

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Merry Christmas!
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Not good.  One-third of all adults don't know how to delete personal data on their devices, and give them up for recycling with identifying data intact.

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There's a charter school in Arizona that will be taught 100% by AI.  Humans will be around just to handle troubleshooting issues with the computers, but not to supplement teaching. Some are saying that's it likely to be better than existing public school education.

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Tired of those crappy Forbes.com product reviews that always shows up near the top of searches? Apparently Forbes is, too, so they're firing the freelancers who write it.

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Is Apple still squabbling with NVIDIA or are they collaborating? Hard to tell in this article.  It would be nice if they collaborated, although competition is still good.

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AI has had its razzle-dazzle phase. Now developers are looking to pursue more meaningful AI pursuits, than just creating eye-candy and toys for entertainment.  About time.

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Could dark matter be fermions pushed into the fifth dimension?  It's an interesting theory and that's what some are positing.

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You can recreate Windows famous Pipes screen saver in your browser.  Nostalgia!

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The Black Spatula Project. This is great. It's based on the wacko Seattle activist/scientist who published a study on a now-delisted journal, stating that black plastic spatulas were toxic, only to have the conclusion based on a math error. Nonetheless, she insisted that despite the mistake, the study's conclusion "still stands".  Huh?  Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Now a group wants to debunk other fake-science studies, and out them.

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Happy Christmas Eve!

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Everyone's talking about Vertex's new non-opioid pain medication, VX-548 (suzetrigine), which prevent pain signals from reaching the thalamus. It doesn't eliminate pain, only cuts it by half.  It's action is on peripheral nerves.

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Coffee and tea are linked to lower incidence of oral cancer.

Did quantum physicists discover negative time? Well, you have to read the article. It's how you define it.

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Two disturbing healthcare insurance postings:

Saturn is losing its rings.  But don't worry – it will take about 300 million years for them to disappear.

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