14 July 2024

Caveat emptor.  Judge rules: You can't reasonably expect privacy if you use Google products.

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MRI scans reveal what parts of the brain get activated when one feels curiosity. It's the occipitotemporal cortex.

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Oregon should learn from this guy. The Nevada PERS system is all computer-driven, and it is beating the market.  I wonder if it just copies market investments of Congress.

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The U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that Apple did not infringe on the patent of AliveCor, and so they can start selling the Apple Watch with the ECG feature built in again.

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How do you musically notate synthesizer settings? There is no standard way, yet.

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Too bad for OHSU employees.  Somebody has to pay for Danny Jacobs' retirement money and bonus.

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13 July 2024

The Greenies will lose. Because of the need for energy to support AI and electric vehicles, energy will have to come from nuclear and petroleum-based fuels. Not to mention the continued cryptocurrency mining.

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Yesssss!  WA Supreme Court rules cities can force RVs to move. Finally, some common sense.

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Why bother following the law?  Nearly half of vehicle licenses in Portland are expired.  The continued downfall of a once-great city.

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American Dream Pizza is closing "unexpectedly". I used to go there. Another one bites the dust.

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12 July 2024

SE Portland Wells Fargo bank has to close due to safety concerns from a nearby homeless camp. How much are Portlanders going to tolerate?  And Metro is going to tax us more to fund the homelessness grift. It's a business model for a lot of people now, and you're going to fund their salaries.
And the planned sobering/deflection center won't ready until 2025. Probably because it has to be $2 million in capital improvements. Nothing but the best for our homeless. That's why we have so many – second highest in the nation. Multnomah County doesn't seem to want to actually address the problem. They will open up a drop-off center in about 50 days but will only require a referral there. Honestly, who is actually going to show up there? Portland-area officials think it's not going to last.

Update (13 Jul 2024): They moved it to 2026! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

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As the demand for power grows, the U.S. and Canada reach an agreement on hydropower, to make sure we have enough water.

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AT&T text message system has been hacked. Although only metadata was stolen, who knows what's in it? And many banks and financial institutions still send authentication codes by text message. This should stop.

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Saks OFF 5th is closing in Westlake Mall in downtown Seattle.  That means layoffs. Less foot traffic. Adjacent stores will suffer because there's even less reason to travel downtown and shop. And more unemployment and decreased taxbase for Seattle (and Washington). But what is Seattle leadership doing about it? Supplying the criddlers with drug paraphernalia, that's what.

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CHARMed molecular tools may help fight prion diseases. This is great news, as there is no treatment for these debilitating diseases.

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PDF trick. You can create deeplinks to specific pages on PDF files. 

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The final word on color wheels? What are the real primary colors? What's all that about magenta not being a real color?

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Faster-than-light is compatible with the special theory of relativity.  Since they travel faster than light, will we ever be able to detect them?

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Killing cancer cells with programmed cancer cells, Sounds great. I'd love to read the paper but it's behind a paywall.

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11 July 2024

Oregon students will have to pass a financial literacy class to graduate. Are Democrats sure they want to do this? It might convert some of them to conservativism.

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When push comes to shove. Nike slashed its sustainability workforce after a pledge to reduce its carbon footprint. No money for that nonsense.

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Medicare wants to cut doctors' pay again. And doctors complain about it. Rinse, repeat. But hey, doctor burnout is decreasing. Wait till they find out their pay is getting cut.

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Well that's good.  At least one drug no longer has a shortage problem – cisplatin. Now for the others.

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Problems beget problems.  So now the homeless are getting revenge at being swept away. They're committing arson on property to vent their spleen.  So now what, Ted Wheeler?

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Kids who get smartphones earlier are more likely to develop mental health problems. Yeah, they are given the means to leave permanent marks on their screw-ups for all to see. Even adults make mistakes.

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Arrow's Impossibiity Theorem.  This explains why messing with simple elections with multiple rounds of voting just leads to more complications.

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Python has too many package managers. Boy, I'll say. Too many times have I had to rip out my Python installations and start from scratch. Too many libraries have dependencies that clash with others when they get updated. I am so afraid to update things. Something else might stop working when something gets deprecated. Package managers and even virtual environments won't stop that from happening.

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Oncologists are struggling to deal with millennials dying of cancer. But the article doesn't address the elephant in the room.

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10 July 2024

They're making fun of us. Oregonian's willing to trade the ability to control their own thermostats for a measly $25.  Yeah, how's that working out? Really smart people are asking why they don't tell people not to charge their EVs as much instead.  Because that would make too much sense.  Because EV cars never made much sense to me.

Meanwhile, datacenters are sprouting in the Pacific NW, and that threatens the power grid, too.  Here's a tip: you don't want to live too close to a datacenter.
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Joke's not funny anymore. A California man got NULL for a license plate. His wife got VOID, so they'd be NULL and VOID, get it? Well, the joke got old fast.

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Girls in Tech is shutting down. Oh well. Maybe the founder will do Asians in Basketball. 

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This investor thinks a lot AI is just hype. I agree – a lot of it is opportunistic hype. But not all. Meanwhile, the AI candidate that was aimed to be mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming, has had its OpenAI connection severed. Oh well, there's always local models and RAG.

Oregonians are wary of AI, but aren't really sure what the dangers are. And many feel that politicians should regulate it. Yeah, sure. I think that the best people to regulate AI are those in AI masters programs. They know enough about the technology to be able to judge what it can and cannot do, and they don't have investments or conflicts of interest that would prevent them from doing the right thing. Everyone else might be compromised because they have their fingers in some pie. But politicians? No. Andrew Ng agrees.

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WWeek has an article on the Grants Pass vs Johnson ruling, and that the ball is back in Oregon's court. And that Tina Kotek was the sponsor of HB3115 which is keeping Oregon cities from getting rid of those tents and RVs on the streets. What is Tina doing? Besides still trying to her spouse on the payroll?  Meanwhile another downtown homeless fire. Seattle, too.

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Idiots in charge. Being on time is a white supremacy value. So says the dean of Duke Medical School.

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This report is making the round on social media. Kids that got the COVID-19 vax product are more likely to die. Not just a little. A lot.
For COVID and non-COVID deaths combined, the rate was 6.39 per 100,000 PY among unvaccinated children and 289.02 per 100,000 PY for triple-vaccinated children.
Shouldn't we at least pause the vaccine until we know for sure that this can explained away like Reuters thinks?

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What's really going on inside those LLMs? We still don't know, but here's a discussion about diving into the problem and finding out.

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A lot of thought goes into designing climbing ropes. Don't use the one designed for glaciers when rock climbing. See, I learned something.

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Another blood substitute. Erythromer. Hope this one works.

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9 July 2024

Security for me, not for thee. Portland defunds police, but beefs up their own security. Sounds fair, right?

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Javascript can really weigh a website down. But the ways to mitigate this are onerous. Too much trouble for what its worth, I think.

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Privacy-protecting AI. The best way is still to build it on your own computer. But this is not for everyone, obviously.

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Mike Bloomberg is making Johns Hopkins Medical School a (almost) free thing. Well that's nice. But let's hope that it's given to meritorious students, and that someone doesn't do any DEI bullcrap on the admissions. So far, it doesn't seem that way.

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Boy, who wants to go to downtown Portland anymore?

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8 July 2024

This blog post on personality basins, using language so familiar in the AI world, is very intriguing. There is a lot of similarity in how brains train, whether biologic or artificial.  The author links to Scott Alexander's blog post about Trapped Priors.  In that blog, there is this interesting insight:

Suppose you are a zealous Democrat. Your friend makes a plausible-sounding argument for a Democratic position. You believe it; your raw experience (an argument that sounds convincing) and your context (the Democrats are great) add up to more-likely-than-not true. But suppose your friend makes a plausible-sounding argument for a Republican position. Now you're doubtful; the raw experience (a friend making an argument with certain inherent plausibility) is the same, but the context (i.e. your very low prior on the Republicans being right about something) makes it unlikely.

Still, this ought to work eventually. Your friend just has to give you a good enough argument. Each argument will do a little damage to your prior against Republican beliefs. If she can come up with enough good evidence, you have to eventually accept reality, right?

But in fact many political zealots never accept reality. It's not just that they're inherently skeptical of what the other party says. It's that even when something is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, they still won't believe it.

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The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals says that doctors can sue when punished for expressing views about the COVID-19 illness that were against the government narrative. In a world where doctors are now just commodities, to obey the will of their employers or the government, this is a breath of fresh air. 

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Until recently, ChatGPT on the Mac stored conversations in plain text. This is what happens when you offer something like AI to the public, without consumer protection.

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If you're using TextEdit on the Mac, stop immediately.  You might be disclosing more than you realize.  I can't tell if Apple patched this 2019 vulnerability.

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California is just crazy. No other way to describe it.

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Washington’s Secretary of State (SOS) has removed a residency requirement for registering to vote enshrined in the state’s Constitution. Just one person decided to scrap something in Washington's constitution. Because it conflicted with a federal ruling. Why is it that Oregon claims that state law (HB 3115) hamstrings it from clearing homeless camps. Just change it, like Washington state's SOS did.

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The Lahaina fire exposed how many Mexican migrants there are in the state. Hispanics are now the fastest growing ethnic group currently at 11%.  Also, Hawaii is seeing a surge in demand for SNAP and EBT benefits, and cannot keep up.

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7 July 2024

It may now be possible to recycle close to 100% of solar panel materials. That would be very nice. Paper here.

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There's a Change.org petition to blow up the Nehalem whale.  Some people value spectacle more than anything else.

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Oregon made a $2.9 billion mistake in 2023. We're just finding out about it now. And no one will get fired.

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This is a problem with academic publishing. Reviewing other scientist's manuscripts is an unpaid job.  So who gets to do it? And how well is the job done?

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Firefox Privacy checklist. Things you can do to tighten down security.

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A new generation of kids are growing up thinking that ChatGPT is the fountain of truth. Nope. It's the fountain of what looks like it could be truth.

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In early 2023, the government introduced Bürgergeld (citizens’ benefit), which works like an unconditional basic income. With the state paying rent and other benefits, transfer payments for a family with two children in a city such as Munich, where housing costs are particularly high, can be as much as 3,400 euros per month.

At the same time, illegal work increased sharply in Germany. That’s because the combination of citizens’ benefit, for which no work is required, plus a few hours of undeclared work often means people have more money in their pockets than they would after 40 hours of hard work.

The paradox: while there are 2.7 million unemployed people in Germany, for companies it is extremely difficult to find employees. Many restaurants, for example, can no longer find enough workers and the number of insolvent restaurants increased by 27 percent last year.
Sounds like what's happening in the U.S.  And it will get worse if we have universal basic income.

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Yes, you should be worried about AI taking your job - but not in the way you might think. The real threat isn’t AI itself, but rather your colleagues who can use it effectively.
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6 July 2024

There is (at the time of this typing) a live fundraising YT video for Physics Girl, who has ME/CFS. I liked the interview with her physician, Dr. David Kaufman, who provided what is probably the latest on defining what LongCOVID is. Towards the end of the interview is a strong indictment against how medicine works in the U.S., where physicians have 15 minutes to interact with a patient. That's not enough interaction time for some diseases, and is not how medicine is supposed to operate. This is because of the corporatization of medicine, where doctors are employees of some large organization, instead of the independent practitioners they used to be.  This person even goes as far as saying that doctors are trained to think critically. That's just based on her medical school experience, and her lack of such development shouldn't be generalized. Doctors are certainly trained to think critically. But they just don't have time now.

Then, there's Thailand, which has a better healthcare system.  Their life expectancy is significantly higher than regional counterparts, and is even slightly longer than that of the U.S. The reason is that they focuses on distribution of care throughout the rural areas, where it is needed. Much of healthcare is a delivery issue – getting medicines and healthcare personnel to the people that need it. In the U.S. so much time and effort is spent developing formal healthcare plans, and incorporating the plan into a complex system which is integrated with a complex insurance reimbursement program that allows the system to continue to function. So much money and effort is devoted to maintaining the system, than to actual patient care. Note that Dr. Kaufman says that he operates outside the insurance system, allowing him to practice the way he does. That works for some situations, such as his telemedicine practice, but doesn't work for more complex and technologically involved areas such as surgery or oncology. You need some kind of insurance program or risk-sharing arrangement for things like this. But for primary care, availability and care delivery is probably most of the battle.

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Oregon can't have nice things. So we have a heat wave, and a pool gets shut down because someone pooped in the pool. And an American Airlines flight is diverted because an Oregon man exposed himself and peed in the aisle.

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Good for Hermiston. Petition to legalize cannabis sales falls short.

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Microsoft is working to stop the Skeleton Key jailbreak. It's hard to stop this generative AI jailbreak when one doesn't really understand completely how generative AI really operates. Yes, you can lower hyperparameters like temperature, but by increasing predictability, chat becomes less creative and more like a playback device.

But some are worried that AI is progressing so quickly that we only have about 8 years of life as we know it. It's interesting that in other countries, AI is already taking away many jobs, more so than we see in the U.S. 

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Washington state is seeing an "alarming" surge in EBT scams.  Another example of Democrat "solutions" that beget more problems.

This will be fun to watch. Many Chinese millennials are now quitting their jobs without anything to fall back on.  "Naked resignation" they call it.  Hey, Chinese hippies – I haven't seen those before.

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Glaze, and other solutions to prevent AI from stealing the work of artists, has been cracked. It's an arms race, and now new algorithms need to be developed to protect artists' IP.

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Signal stores its encryption keys in plaintext. I find it hard to believe that this is accidental. I'm already off Signal.

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5 July 2024

Fascinating video by Nick Zentner on the history of the great rivers of the Pacific Northwest.


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Memories erased by lack of sleep can be restored by medications.  At least in mice. With roflumilast, an asthma medication, and vardenafil, also known as Levitra.

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AI can read your mind, at least in terms of imagery recall. This may just be supervised learning on a defined target set, but I'm not completely sure. Can't access the original research article. 

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$504 million allocated to create a dozen tech hubs?  Are you kidding me?  I'm not even sure this would completely fund even one tech hub, much less a dozen.  Who budget this? All it will pay for is office space and stationery. What a joke.

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OPB says that hiking in Oregon may be racist.

I certainly never felt that way. So what do they propose to change this?

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