26 May 2025

Claude 4 Opus isn't the only AI model not wanting to be shut off. OpenAI's o3 model also resisted attempts to be turned off.  What's going on? Is this the emergent behavior we've been looking for?
Also, now comes word that o3 and o4-mini are not great coding agents.  I've noticed that. They just offer opinions. If you want coding help, use Anthropic models or Gemini.

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A pill just for sleep apnea? I'm not so sure. It's a combination of aroxybutyinin and atomoxetine. It's a post-synaptic acetylcholine inhibitor and a norepinephrine reputake inhibitor. I'd shy away from messing with neurotransmitters, as the initial beneficial effects tend to wear off. I'd work on fixing the underlying anatomic problem – work on losing weight.

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AI Mode feels one step further removed from that ecosystem and once again looks good in contrast, a placid textual escape from Google’s own mountain of links that look like ads and ads that look like links (of course, Google is already working on ads for both Overviews and AI Mode). In its drive to embrace AI, Google is further concealing the raw material that fuels it, demoting links as it continues to ingest them for abstraction.
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It looks like the more technology you use as you age, the more you retain cognitive function. I suspect it's just the fact that those without cognitive ability don't use tech stuff. Correlation is not causation.

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Are you planning your digital legacy? What heppens to your online presence when you pass away?

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The pressure is on Tim Cook to get Apple out of its funk. After years of "thinner, more pixels and more emojis" the world wants more. It wants Tony Stark's phone. It doesn't want gay pride wallpaper. I doubt that it even wants foldable phones. C'mon, Tim, hang it up. You've had a long run. No shame to hand the reins over to someone with vision. Someone else may make a new killer device.

Here's something that should be built-in to all iPhones – switch to low-power mode when traveling, so as not to conserve battery life. Why doesn't Apple do this?

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25 May 2026

AI agents are not yet ready to replace humans.

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This is Transduce, Anthropic's toolkit to investigate LLM explainability, to see how it thinks. It's a start.

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This is what you don't get to see. Highlights of the Claude 4 system prompt. This is what makes the model go.

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Something blocking your camera view? Zoom in to see around the obstacle. This is really unintuitive. It only works if you have a large zoom lens.

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Oregon has more seniors than young people for the first time ever.  Granted, the whole world is seeing a decrease in the birthrate, this is worse here. Not a sign of a healthy economy. 

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Penn engineers discover a new moisture capturing substance, a combination of hydrophilic nanopores and hydrophobic polymers. These can absorb water from the air and release it. Could be useful.

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A strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa can metabolize plastics on hospital equipment. Just great – those bacteria are trouble enough already.

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24 May 2025

McMenamin's Ram's Head pub on NW 23rd is closing – after 35 years. The article doesn't indicate why, but I have a few guesses.

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Sen Ron Johnson held a conference on the COVID-19 vax recently, and it has been ignored by most of the media. Bet you didn't know about it.

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Now Portland admits that it doesn't have enough resources to handle the homeless. I assume by handle, it means not having enough to give to all those endless agencies to fund their salaries. Or maybe to give the homeless tents and tarps. Or free syringes and Narcan. Whatever.

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Most of the hiking areas around the Detroit Lake region will remain closed. Including Opal Creek. That won't likely open for several more years.

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23 May 2025

The new Google Veo 3 is amazing. This is the end of Hollywood as we know it.

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No one seems to be hiring for entry-level tech jobs anymore. These used to be a guarantee to a job after graduation. It's a different world.

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A superpower – Infrared Man. Contact lenses that let you see into the infrared spectrum even with your eyes closed.

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Anthropic reports that in an experimental setting, their latest model, Claude 4 Opus, threatened blackmail to the engineer it thought was going to replace it with another system. These LLMs will know a lot about us, as we feed it all kinds of knowledge. They can easily find ways of making threats against humans it doesn't favor.

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Nice handy HTML5 elements that I didn't know about, and might use. 

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Common sense prevails. The U.S. Senate kills California's pipe dreams to ban gas-powered cars by 2035. C'mon, California, you don't even have the power infrastructure. And what about the poor people? Are you going to subsidize EVs for them?

And a Pennsylvania judge tosses out the lawsuit against oil companies to tax them as punishment for environmental damage (climate change).
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Next Level Burger on Burnside closes due to "security concerns". More Portland Doom Loop. It's impossible to open a decent business in Portland.

And in Seattle, the Astra Hotel is having problems due to the abandoned building next door, which is full of gronks and criddlers.

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AT&T is going to take over CenturyLink's Quantum Fiber infrastructure in 11 states, including Oregon. Currently I get 1 GB) service through Xfinity (they claim 1.2 GB). If I can get 2 GB service, I'd switch.

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More info on the OpenAI/Jony Ive device. It's going to be like the Humane AI pin, except probably more polished looking. I don't want to wear a pin or necklace. Comm badges were fine on the Enterprise, but even Picard took it off when he went on shore leave. I bet they'll wear this all over the place in the Bay Area and maybe Boston, though. This device reminds me of the Segway – big expectations, but the reality sucked.

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22 May 2025

In mice, at least, a gut fungus Fusarium foetens, protects against metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis or MASH. A weird kind of symbiosis.

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Why don't elephants get cancer? Because they have 20 copies of the p53 gene, that's why. Human's only have one copy. Let's fix that.

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The Gollum effect?  Scientists compete with each other for grants and resources. But bullying and harrassement?  It's really a competition for power.

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Harvard sure is making it difficult for their research scientists. All Harvard had to do is agree to stop discriminating against Asians and Whites. That's really all Trump wanted. Merit instead of race. Is that so hard?

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Groundbreaking studies are more difficult to find. I guess everything important has already been discovered.  Maybe Max Planck's advisor Philipp von Jolly is finally right.

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WSJ's write-up about Jony Ive's new project, io, is more about saying what it isn't than what it is.

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If the Cascadia Subduction Zone quakes, it could wipe out the western half of the United States, including Hawaii. As if I didn't have enough to worry about.

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21 May 2025

Oops. Chicago Sun-Times summer reading list was generated by AI and included non-existent books. They blame it on staffing cuts. Yeah, right.

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The WSJ wrote up the fire sale of the Big Pink building. I didn't know the homeless were sleeping in the empty floors. The building is only about 50% occupied. There were feces in the common areas. Who would want to work there? Of course, Mayor Keith Wilson takes umbrage.
“I wish they’d covered our rapid improvements in public safety, new residents, business opportunities, regional destinations, and creatives”
Huh? What "improvements in public safety"? People don't bother calling the cops anymore.  What "business opportunities"? What "creatives"? You talking about the graffiti painters?

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In Seattle, they don't bother with fist fights anymore. It's guns, baby.

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20 May 2025

Good. Heat and granular activated carbon can detoxify water from PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances). Not too expensive, and it sounds like it could be incorporated into standard water treatment facilities.

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Bird flu really was a nothing burger. All those chickens killed and eggs destroyed.

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The Ritz-Carlton Hotel is being turned over to the lender.  No official foreclosure, but the end result is about the same. 
Court filings also revealed the Ritz-Carlton hotel is suffering from canceled bookings, as guests hesitate to commit to events or stays at a property “whose ability to provide services is uncertain.”

“Likewise, the sale of residential condominium units and the lease of office space has been depressed by the Project’s uncertain financial situation,” Ovalle wrote.
Sounds like Portland.

And remote work is here to stay for Oregon employees. No one wants to go into Portland to work at the office.

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More students are choosing alternatives to Portland public schools.
the capture rate of students enrolling in PPS schools this academic year was 69% for high school, 71% for middle school, and 75% for elementary school.

The rates, calculated using census data, vary by high school attendance area and grade level, but are generally lower than PPS rates in the past. The news also comes as PPS’s enrollment is dipping faster than at school districts statewide.
Can't blame them. Kids aren't learning in these schools.

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Oregon and Washington are so behind in renewable energy.  Pretty much the entire nation is doing better. But we still have to pay all those taxes.

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An increasing number of retirees are not waiting to full retirement to start taking out Social Security money.  Some need the money now. Some aren't sure they'll live long enough to make it worthwhile to wait. Some aren't sure how long Social Security is going to last. Interesting fact: immigrants (legal) can get Social Security payments if their work history in their home country is allowed them to get work credits, even if they did not take paycheck deductions to pay for this scheme. This is why SS is running out of money. So many eaters at the trough. This is why socialist systems ultimately break down. Every politician wants to give away favors for a vote.

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Tina Kotek is not going to stop providing health care for illegal immigrants. So instead, there will be increased taxes and budget cuts so you get less of what you paid taxes on. And the Oregon government is suing Trump because they need more money.

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19 May 2025

Here's Anthropic trying to figure out how its LLMs think. Still a mystery.

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Imagine you’re a single man in Tokyo, scraping by on a modest salary, your dreams of family life deferred by rents that eat half your paycheck. Inflation’s clawing at your savings, and the cost of dating—let alone marriage—feels like a luxury you can’t afford. Then comes the government, hand outstretched, demanding more because you haven’t found “the one.” This isn’t just a tax; it’s a slap, a public shaming of your status, a reminder that society sees you as a problem to be fixed. The anger simmering in online forums is palpable—men are already vowing to opt out, not just from marriage but from the system itself.
Stupid.

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America's college towns are going bust. For many years, these small town colleges were staffed by teachers who couldn't make a go anywhere else. This was their job. Much it was sustained by federal money. Now, someone has finally put a stop to it. There are better ways to spend money, although sorry for the local economies that grew up around this bubble.

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Looks like there's a looming shortage in omega-3 fatty acids. We'll have to get it from plant sources, then.

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Why is the Camas TSMC doing so poorly, when the rest of the company is doing well? I didn't know it was their first chip facility in the U.S.

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Damn, these latest LLM models are getting scary good. Really scary.

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Nifty trick that lets you estimate square roots pretty accurately. To impress your imaginary girlfriend, I guess.

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Wow, look at all those new Oregon taxes. Crap.

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18 May 2025

No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air. Really? Seems unlikely. It seems that every few years someone writes an article like this.

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Private equity tied to 21% of healthcare bankruptcies for second consecutive year. Yeah, how's Obamacare working out for ya? One of the major changes enacted by the ACA was the dismantling of private physician practices. It became financially too risky for doctors to run their own business, and many sold their practices to private equity or became hospital employees instead. Now doctors can't treat you as they really recommend – it has to pass muster by hospital administration or some MBA. Each tried to extract as much profit from the new arrangement, sometimes to the detriment of the public. But I didn't know it was that bad.

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The Oregonian is using AI to draft stories. Oh well. I hardly read them anymore anyway.

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The AI Hiring Pause Is Officially Here. This is really sad. The industry is eating itself alive.

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iOS 18 has a new feature that reduces motion sickness when you read stuff on your phone in the car. I haven't tried it out, but the author of this article says it works well.

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New headphones to consider: the Sony WH 1000XM6, the Apple AirPods Pro, or the latest Bose Quiet Comfort headphones. I have older Sony and Bose headphones and they sound great.

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17 May 2025

Really? The people that Microsoft is letting go are mainly the software engineers and project managers. They are keeping the marketing people and I don't see any accountants being laid off. This is crazy. They really are depending on AI writing their code, I guess. Seems short-sighted to me.

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What can you do with a slide rule?  Quite a bit. 

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Terence Tao has his own YouTube channel now. There's a couple of videos out on Lean, the AI-powered proof builder.

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Compressed music maybe harmful to your hearing. 

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These nerds calculated π to 300 trillion decimal places. It's a new world record. I'm older to remember when you needed something like a Cray Supercomputer or at least a cluster to achieve this. This video showcases the computing setup, and not the math. I assume they used the Chudnovsky Algorithm.

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Prosper Portland can't function without government money. Maybe they'll have to shut down. And hey, Portland has more homeless people "despite" all the homeless services. You think that maybe??  Nah, that can't be.  I wonder what Fox Butterfield would say?

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Excessive use of cell phones ranked as the top pet peeve of managers, at 78 percent. Some 61 percent of managers found their new hires were entitled or easily offended, while 57 percent noted these new employees were unprepared for the workplace. Lack of a work ethic scored 54 percent, followed by poor communication skills at 48 percent and lack of technical skills at 27 percent.

Other concerns managers had about the graduates included lateness, failure to turn in assignments on time, unprofessional behavior, and inappropriate dress and language.

I'm not paying off their student loans.

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