2 August 2025

Tim Cook talks to Apple employees. About AI woes. Not sure what the plans are, and it seems like most of the talk was just "we did it before, we'll do it again".  Hope so.

But maybe he's not the only one out of ideas. Maybe Zuck is out of ideas, too. He's been poaching various people from different companies, probably hoping that a good idea will come up. Could be. Maybe.

And Anthropic revoked OpenAI's access to Claude. Probably a safe move, but it proves Andrew Ng's thoughts that closed silos will hamper American AI research, and allow China to dominate. We didn't fight amongst ourselves in AI's early days. Everyone shared their work. But now, there's money to be made. 

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Yikes. ChatGPT users sharing private and sensitive information unintentionally sent their chat sessions to the Internet to be indexed by Google. Use Big tech at your risk. They don't care about your privacy. I feel sorry for the people affected, but sheesh. C'mon people. 

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This is wild. It might be possible to detect when videos are manipulated or AI fakes. It uses encrypted lighting as a watermark.  Watch the video in the link – the video makes it all clear.

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Edge case. Britain's most tattooed man can't use age verification apps because his tattoos make it look like he's wearing a mask. Live on the edge, fail on the edge. Use a VPN, guy. At least you don't live in Russia. Yet. 

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Intel worker went nuts and threatened others. This is really sad, and I wouldn't be surprised if others experience the same thing. Intel's failure isn't Oregon's fault, but losing your job in Oregon is especially painful. Here's an editorial detailing Oregon's doom loop. 

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Portland Mayor Keith Wilson looks at this situation very differently. “In the shelters that we’ve opened, we’ve seen a reduction in crime, we’ve seen an increase in business.

Sure, Keith. Less crime near a homeless shelter. Let's put one near your home. So tone deaf.

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1 August 2025

Happy Lammas Day.

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The UK's General Medical Council is blocking doctors from speaking freely about COVID-19. This was also a dangerous phenomenon in the U.S.   Doctors have lost a lot of clout in the past two decades, and I fear that this will affect quality of care, as doctors prefer to stick with safe narratives when recommending treatment, instead of going with what their training tells them. It's unclear how AI will affect this. 

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Et tu, Nordstrom?. The CEO of Nordstrom hints that he might pull out of downtown Portland, as it's harder to function there. When, oh when, will the City get the hint?

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Andrew Yang and Yann Le Cun think that China will surpass the U.S. in AI tech leadership. Because China is open source and the U.S. is closed source. Being closed-source hasn't stopped the pharmaceutical industry, though. I think the root of the issue lies elsewhere.

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Why is South Korean and Japanese sunscreen better than U.S. sunscreen? You can still get South Korean sunscreen on Amazon, but the brands I used to buy are no longer listed. 

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Encore anxiety. Something else to be anxious about. As if you didn't have enough already.

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Facebook offered a VPN, called Onavo. But it wasn't meant to protect your privacy. It was a surveillance tool, allowing Facebook to see what competing apps you were using. Why do people trust Zuckerberg and Meta apps? 

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31 July 2025

If you're interested in longevity research (or rejuvenation research), this site has been updated recently.  Also VC-backed longevity startups are dying. 

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St. Paul, Minnesota got hacked really bad. So bad they had to call in the National Guard. I've not heard of the NG being called in before. What are those soldiers going to do?

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I'll admit, I've not heard of broetry before.  Seems like I read this stuff on Substack or Twitter, too, especially when showcasing someone's experience with AI.

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Whatever happened to Robert X. Cringely? I used to read him all the time. Then he started to drift into things that didn't interest me. Then his house burned. Then he stopped posting.

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Today, Trump launched his AI Action Plan as part of the Digitial Health Tech Ecosystem. Not a single practicing doctor seems to be involved (I don't count Mehmet Oz). It's all the tech companies, like OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Microsoft AI, and Google. There's a reason why the healthcare sector has been slow to adopt AI. Doctors aren't lazy. They just don't want technology inserted for its own sake. Even the Brookings Institute has some concerns. This is like Obama's HITECH Act, which forced doctors to purchase EHR systems. This led to a lot of frustration and burnout.

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CRISPR technology can be combined with GPT to direct gene editing. It can design the guide RNAs used for splicing. Sugoi, I guess.

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The Internet is changing (duh) but it's nice to read a summary of exactly how it's changing. This is from a SEO standpoint, of course. If you want to get seen, these are some of the things to consider.

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ChatGPT is able to get around "I am not a robot" tests.  This could be a business model, designing ways to prove you are human. Sam Altman is trying to do this with his world

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Record low US fertility rate reported in 2024. Gee, I wonder why.

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30 July 2025

Not satisfied with artificial intelligence, Johns Hopkins scientists grow a whole brain organoid. What will they find?

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Poor Gen-Xers – they are getting passed over for CEO positions. They're too young in some ways, and too old in other ways. What bad luck, huh?

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Sam Altman says he's scared of GPT-5. But he's going to build it anyway. Because of Moloch. Whatever, Sam. Nice publicity stunt.

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8 babies are going to have genetic components of 3 individuals. That's supposedly to lessen the risk of inherited disease. Such an expensive way to do this, though. 

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Yes!  iOS 26 will give you the ability to do some SPAM filtering on text messaging. Oh man, no more political SPAM. Yeah, baby.

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Intel is in serious trouble. How could Pat Gelsinger have been so wrong about the company? Or it Lip Bu Tan just a chop-chop man? Can't believe this formerly great company has been humbled so deeply.  And Oregon will suffer, too. Intel is one of the largest employers in the state. All that tax income. All those jobs. Gone. To be replaced by unemployment insurance payments. 

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Well well – Vinay Prasad is out at the FDA.  His past social media commentary has come back to bite him. Laura Loomer claims another scalp. Stay off X, Vinay. 

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Affordability in Portland is Death by a Thousand Cuts. The city council (especially the mayor) needs to read this. No one wants to live in the Doom Loop city, except for those who will be getting free housing or shelter, free food, and free substance abuse supplies.

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Microsoft admits that its products don't provide corporate security.  Is this the end of their Office suite? Who would want to use it now?

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Waste of taxpayer money.  AG Dan Rayfield has sued Trump 33 times.  Do the people's work, Dan.  Trump is trying to fix the nation's dependent economy, and instead you demand the right for the state to remain dependent on federal subsidies. That's the Blue state path to failure. Work on stopping crime and fixing the rotten business climate of this state. Stop rampant drug abuse, protests, and homeless that the state is famous for.  Then the state will thrive and you won't need all those federal handouts.

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Another one bites the dust.  Seattle's Ravenna Varsity diner forced to close after 62 years. That's what living in a Blue city will do. But fighting crime and not being taxed to death are apparently far-right ideas. Thanks for the good times.

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29 July 2025

Wyoming is going to allow construction of a datacenter that will use more energy than every home in the entire state combined. Had to read that twice. Is that reasonable? Maybe they can use that as a heat source? Crazy.

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After four years of payments, children whose parents received $333 a month from the experiment fared no better than similar children without that help, the study found. They were no more likely to develop language skills, avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays, demonstrate executive function or exhibit brain activity associated with cognitive development. 
Raising better children isn't a problem that is solved just by throwing more money at it. The rest of us shouldn't be paying for this either.

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This is why people really need to know about the tools they use. All the questions about ask ChatGPT for legal advice about a crime you committed is legally discoverable. What did people think ChatGPT was? Everything you type in when you sign in with account username and password can be associated to you. Google works that way, too, for those who have an account.
A research paper sounds a similar warning. 
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Interesting. Chase may take over for Goldman Sachs on issuing Apple's credit card.  Goldman had reported losing a billion dollars on this card in 2023, and has been looking for someone to take if off their hands.

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Now, researchers are creating "virtual scientists".  Well, AI can output something. Doesn't mean that it's good. It's a new working paradigm. Let's see how well it does. Let 'er cook.

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Microsoft reveals a list of 40 jobs that they predict will be lost to AI. In actuality, the list is of those who use AI in their work. It's not clear to me that some of those jobs will actually be lost to AI. Such as mathematician. Or radio DJs. Even fashion models – sure AI can generate some good-looking specimens, but they all give the same AI-generated vibe.

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MIT just proved Einstein wrong. Well, you don't see that statement too often. It was just a wager that Einstein made with Bohr about wave interference.

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Norway has a problem in that it is too rich. Nice problem to have. But they like to tax heavily and spend heavily and give out lavish welfare payments, giving rise to "creeping concerns that Norway is becoming bloated, unproductive and unhealthy". They created a sovereign wealth fund, which had really paid off. Trump is trying to do the same thing. 

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Amazon let the public modify some of their production code. One idiot put a "delete everything" directive into a pull request, which got accepted. Now people have seen their data wiped out. Never trust the public. There's just too many assholes out there.

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Greatest ad for an optometry clinic. What is the longest line of sight on earth?

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In the Bay Area, any dumb idea can be a start up. Investors put in $650 million into this company. Now it's bankrupt. Who would have guessed?

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South Korean scientists make quantum tunneling occur on demand.  Now it's no longer a thing of wonder. Well, it still is, but now less so. 
"There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once."  -- John Donne, LXXX Sermons
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Hertz's new AI-powered damage scanner is turning out to be fiasco. People are upset. It is for this reason that I'm using Avis in a few weeks. I don't want to be hassled by this.

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Middle schools in Portland's school district don't have to worry about being graded anymore. I guess the district didn't like seeing all those low scores. Problem solved now!

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Kevin Dahlgren shows that people living on sidewalks and parks just prefer to live there. But they like taking your money anyway. What a racket this homeless industrial complex has been. Problems are NOT solved. Just allowed to continue.

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In 2022, Oregon used to be the #2 destination for outsiders. People were bragging about it.  In 2025, Oregon is 7th from the bottom. Way to go, Tina Kotek.
Multnomah County lags the state in job growth. Way to go, Jessica Vega-Pederson.

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Oregon blocks Feds from finding out who is getting food stamps. Can you guess why?

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28 July 2025

Saw this video "How Being Smart Can Ruin Your Life".  It's more How Being A Nerd Can Ruin Your Life. There can be comfort in being a nerd, and you get a kind of personal satisfaction learning a lot about something. But you can't expect others to share in that joy, and that's what you have to realize early enough. I realize that the REALLY smart people were Johnny von Neumann, Richard Feynman, Stanislaw Ulam, Albert Einstein, etc. who were not only intellectual giants, but also people who were personable. Being like Langan, in the video, gets you nowhere.

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Are universities becoming more stupid?  Looks like the collective IQ of college students has been declining for a long time, even before the coronavirus epidemic. Check out the two references given. Apparently, university officials didn't want this published. I think the problem is that universities now take just about anyone who had been able to get financial aid, which, since the Obama era, is now managed by the federal government, and is given to just about anyone who can fill out a form. If you look at figure 1, scores were stable until 2012 when they started the steady decline.

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When I saw the title of this article, I was intrigued that perhaps Lloyd Center was the location of business startups in Portland that I wasn't aware of. I was imagining AI startups setting up in that district, and had hopes that Portland was turning around and going to be the start of a tech renaissance. Not a chance. It's just an indoor Saturday Market, where kids hang out to play arcade games, or shop for quirky vintage clothes.

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Another reason to get rid of the Department of Education. This is exactly what we don't need: an education agenda set by the WEF.

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Amazing that the entire country of Tuvalu will be moved to Australia due to rising ocean levels. But what's going on? Climate change skeptics have said that sea levels have not been rising. What I was unaware is that sea level changes are not uniform: in some places the sea level has been sinking or staying the same, but in the area where Tuvalu is, due to some local factors, no doubt, the seal level has been increasing. The country is just in the wrong location. So it's not really global warming melting the glaciers. There's something peculiar to that area of the world.

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Now, Sam Altman is worried about massive fraud that he predicts will undoubtedly occur when the ability of AI to mimic humans achieves near-perfection. But he won't stop doing what he's doing, because of the Moloch effect, of course.
And some subscribers to Vogue are upset because the magazine is using AI-generated women, because today's real-life women are not quite up to their beauty standards. Yeah, well it's 2025, you know. 

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Lenacapavir, the first HIV prevention drug, is FDA-approved. Supposedly it's 100% effective.  There's an interesting article I read (which I can't find now) that stated that women in Africa would use HIV-positivity as a defense against getting raped. That excuse will no longer work when men know that they can get the drug and not get AIDS.  We don't all live in the same world.

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Speaking of which: who funds WHO? Turns out that they're little transparency. Most of the donations are anonymous, and it's thought that many are from entities such as the Bill Gates Foundation, who may be influencing WHO to direct policy that favors Gates' efforts, such as vaccines. I wasn't aware of the Emergencies Powers Treaty that the Biden administration favored, that would give the WHO power to direct American medical policy during "emergencies".  Forget that!

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Scientists at University of Washington were working with people in California to perform actions that would block the sun, in the name of climate change. The climate change wackos aren't satisfied with banning straws or natural gas stoves or cows farting. They want to seed clouds to block sunlight significantly. And they wanted to keep it a secret.

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Oregonians are out of work longer than before.  Nothing surprising there. There aren't enough business to provide them with jobs.

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27 July 2025

Does ChatGPT disproportionately hurt Hawaii more than other states? This person thinks so. 

Hawaii faces distinct risks from unregulated AI deployment. Recent analyses indicate that a substantial portion of Hawaii’s professional services jobs could face significant disruption within five to seven years as a consequence of AI. Our isolated geography and limited economic diversification make workforce adaptation particularly challenging.

Our unique cultural knowledge, practices, and language risk misappropriation and misrepresentation by AI systems trained without appropriate permission or context.

Well, Hawaii's not the only place where AI could eliminate jobs. I think that the author is stretching things. But shutting down ChatGPT isn't going to happen. And why just pick on them? How about Google? Anthropic? Hangzhou AI Basic Technology Research? It's like the climate change activists picking on the United States and not China or India.

Dave Barry had a silly encounter with AI inaccuracy.

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Speaking of climate change, looks like only 4% of Canadians care about it now. There are so many more compelling things to worry about.

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Is RFK Jr tilting at windmills? There’s no autism epidemic. But there is an autism diagnosis epidemic. So the feared increase in autism numbers was just a change in definition and an eagerness to get grant money? I've noticed that a lot of the kids I grew up would have been classified as autistic today. The ones that kept to themselves, had learning disabilities, were not sociable and said "weird" things and weren't interested in normal kid stuff, or who were obsessed with weird hobbies. I grew up with them. Even had a few as friends. Nobody called them autistic at the time.

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Suzetrigine is out now – the first non-opiod pain killer. Well, if you don't count NSAIDs. I think they meant potent pain-killer. It's similar to lamotrigine, a seizure medication, sometimes also used for neuropathy. But this drug doesn't cross into the CNS. Maybe it'll be good for neuropathy, too.

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Ah, modern science writing. I was reading this article that stated that due to excessive groundwater pumping, the earth's tilt has changed by 31.5 inches!  Huh? What do you mean by 31.5 inches. Measured from where? I was expecting the tilt to change by a number measured in degrees. But 31.5 degrees of tilt change would be huge, and would change all sorts of things, like mean global temperatures and climate. It couldn't be that – no one else is getting excited.  So I went to the original study, and read that what is actually happening is that the axis of rotation has migrated 78.48 cm eastward, in the direction 64.16°E. So it's actually 30.90 inches. Even got that wrong. Science journalism is not what it used to be. 

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RIP Tom Lehrer.  Math teacher, singer-composer, genius. What a mind!

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26 July 2025

College Board is dumbing down the SAT tests, as student performance declines. This just hides the rot. Better to leave things as they are and show everyone how poorly kids are doing. Making the test even easier doesn't help anyone.

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Are investors pulling out of AI? There's been talk that after seeing how AI really performs, investors have a better idea of AI's limitations as well as the capabilities. It's like the dotcom era – there's a lot of fluff. You just have to discern which is going to be the eBay.com and which is going to be the Pets.com.

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This study is making the rounds. It concludes that:
Estimates in this study are substantially more conservative than previous calculations focusing mostly on the first year of vaccination, but they still clearly demonstrate a major overall benefit from COVID-19 vaccination during the years 2020-2024. Most benefits in lives and life-years saved was secured for a portion of older persons, a minority of the global population.
It was a tough study to do. They tried to estimate lives saved by the vax and looked at data from the whole world, with vaccines of all kinds – mRNA, DNA, with adenoviral vectors and others. As you know, every country reports things their own way. All the authors could say is that estimates of lives saved was, in their calculation, lower than what was promulgated.

Interestingly, the vax saved more lives during the Omicron era than before. That seems counter-intuitive to me. 
Perhaps the vax impaired the immune systems of the vaxxed so that getting the vax during Omicron made a huge difference. 
But prior to Omicron, maybe the immune systems of the vaxxed were still intact enough so that the vax didn't make a difference. 

Another conclusion was that the survival benefit was almost all in those 60 or older. So there was really no reason to give it to kids.

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Here's a video of Seattle City Council approving a new sales tax, and one member admits that they have no idea what this tax is going to pay for. They just approved it. New tax. Just because.

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25 July 2025

Do Dogs Know Who’s Good or Bad? Just watching how humans interacted with other dogs and who gave food, doesn't determine a dog's opinion.  It has to see for itself how the human is.

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Some insights into browser fingerprinting.  If you really want to resist fingerprinting, use the Mullvad browser with Tor. NordVPN makes this easy. Remember, practice privacy.

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It's starting. In West London, you can't build new houses because their grid can't support anything else above their datacenter. Power demand is too high. Neither wind nor solar is going to cut it.

And in Sacramento, they use smart meters to spy on residential power usage. Too much, and they call authorities to check you out. Real "smart", huh?

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Shall we let the Internet die and start over? Nah, we'll just build something else that will go to crap once we allow anyone to use it. But yeah, the Internet is a den of thieves now. Not as nice and fun as back in the old days.

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Lately people have been reporting the two coding tools, Replit and Gemini CLI, have been deleting files without permission. This is a big flaw, as one company discovered to their dismay. One guy reports that even Cursor feels the need to delete files, too.

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Japanese scientists feel that they are on the verge of repairing the genetic abnormality that characterized Down Syndrome. This is tricky because the problem is not a mutation, but just an extra copy of a chromosome. You don't want to destroy an entire chromosome. They'll be using allele-specific engineering.  They've had success with fibroblast cells. It probably won't fix adults, but perhaps it can catch things at a far earlier stage.

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This is the longest and most intricate Rube Goldberg chain reaction video I've come across. Watch The Pancake Flipper.

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This is BBC's hilarious racism awareness video, showing contrived situations where microaggression happens in the workplace. White people don't talk this way. Sheesh, the demand for racism outstrips the supply, I guess.

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Trump has issued an EO declaring that the homeless be removed off the streets. Not only that, but he recommended that asylums be brought back. I read that the NGOs in the Homeless Industrial Complex are upset. Their business model will dry up.  Too bad. But leaving the drug-addled homess to fend for themselves is not compassion.

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Oregon is going to proceed with the Rose Quarter road project anyway, even if there is no funding. Unions members gotta work, I guess. They're probably hoping that somehow they'll get the funding they need. Others are wondering why we're not fixing the potholes and damage in the roads first.

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And I like this characterization of AI: It's like an over-confident friend that doesn't admit that he's wrong. And doesn't learn from its mistakes. Because that would require retraining, which is too expensive and time-consuming.

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24 July 2025

Puhleeze. Is This the End of Google As We Know It?  How many articles have been written with this title? It's like "the walls are closing in."  Google will survive. 

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Earth's days are getting shorter by a millisecond. Does it really matter? I wouldn't notice it. But I guess the people who keep track of these things will.

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Fragmentary Latin inscriptions can be completed with AI. The technology is finding its uses. It's amazing to be able to deduce missing text from broken pieces of writing.

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Wow, I feel sorrry for the lower level employees at Windsurf.  The company didn't exactly reap the riches that startups typically do. It's becoming clear that low-hanging fruit has been picked. You gotta be smart and have something to add to technology to win the pay. Just being a low-level employee doesn't mean you'll get super rich. 
"Windsurf and others are really bad examples of founders leaving their teams behind and not even sharing the proceeds with their team," wrote storied investor Vinod Khosla on X. "I definitely would not work with their founders next time."
Here's more on this debacle: Looks like the engineers who went to Google are getting screwed, too. There were no winners here. It's not that easy to create wealth out of thin air in the AI age. It's not the dotcom world. 

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Proton is starting to move out of Switzerland due to their new laws that reduce the kind of privacy that Proton promotes. It's too bad, but Switzerland's new laws look pretty bad. But why is Proton going to the EU for protection? They're not known to be privacy-friendly either. 

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GLP-1 drugs may cause kidney injury if you get dehydrated. Sounds like acute tubular necrosis to me. You can recover partially from it, but sometimes not.

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Can you run a business solely relying on AI?  Apparently not. Anthropic decided to test this with Claude, and apparently it was "hilariously bad". And some have put down some good reasons why AI will not take most human's jobs.

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So does gold even have a melting point? It was thought so, but it's clear that it depends on how the heat is applied. It's crazy how we're still discovering some things about basic science.

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Using external CSS when designing a webpage can make seconds of difference, especially if your connection is not fast. I'm not sure it's worth cluttering up your code with all that CSS, which can take up a lot of space. I'll put up with the extra few seconds of loading time for now. 

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SurgeAI claims to have found out what datasets Anthropic trains its models on. This is ordinarily a trade secret, but it seems that Anthropic didn't care too much. They're sort of denying that it's authentic, but who knows?

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Supposedly, Washington state is in their worst budget crisis.  Kinda like Oregon, except they have a lot of billionaires and millionaires – way more than Oregon. They have much of the money they really need, don't worry. They just don't want to change what they spend it on.
Like Oregon is supposedly short of money, but they allocated $15 million for non-citizens. How does it feel to have to pay more tax and have services cut?
Even California is no longer paying for illegal alien's legal defense anymore. Why can't Oregon and Washington learn from this?

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Palisades residents are discovering a new horror, as they try to recover from January's fire – squatters. And the police aren't helping. What a nightmare.

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The resulting $147,187 incentive payment for Rex Kim, the chief investment officer, boosted his total pay to $663,271. Michael Langdon, then the director of private markets investments, received $123,105, lifting his total pay to $533,459. 
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