12 February 2026

This is going to be a real problem. AI is getting so good that keeping patients de-identified to meet HIPAA compliance is getting to be impossible.  Once patients are aware of this, clinical trial participation could decrease, and research could be negatively impacted. Someone with ML cred needs to examine the HIPAA Safe Harbor standards and explore how to keep PHI really protected, in deed not just in name. I have an idea that I thought of during an informatics course I took. It would put control of personal information in the hands of the patient, not the hospital or insurance company. Would love to discuss with anyone in the field.

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Health care is the 'engine' of the job market — and that's risky for the economy. What does it mean when the largest employer or largest company in the state is a hospital system? It doesn't mean that people are getting healthier. For Oregon, the hospital industry is indeed dominant, and in cities like Eugene, much of the hiring is for hospitals and clinics. This means that unions are fed, and ultimately healthcare gets expensive and unaffordable to a lot of people. Growth of the healthcare industry usually means growth in insurance costs, and as mentioned, costs to satisfy unionized employees. It's a bubble that has to pop. We've got to get unions out of so many things, and the healthcare system is one of the most urgent.

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The "Are You Sure?" Problem. Great exercise for students when learning about LLMs. Ask the LLM if it is sure about an answer. You'd be surprised at how often the confident answer become unconfident.

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‘I am never off the clock’: inside the booming world of gen Z side hustles. At least some GenZers are using AI to their advantage and opening side hustles to make some money. A smart young person can use what's out there to start making some serious money. No need for universal basic income.
And I agree with this guy: it's too soon to dismiss human-developed software in favor of DIY efforts. 

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The Prediction Singularity Is Upon Us. It's fun to build financial predictors to guide stock market investments. Many folks are doing that already, and the tools are freely available. Going for the general predictive market is more challenging, but should be doable. Aside from Black Swans, we should soon get pretty good at being able to predict things. Maybe in another year or so.

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Lots of stuff about the news industry lately.
Take a look at this tidbit regarding the Epstein files affair. I hadn't realized that women in the vocal crowd that are crying "victim" were adults at the time of their involvement with Epstein. They weren't underage and should have known what they were doing. Why has no "journalist" mentioned this? 
And then there is SB1850, another disastrous bit of legislation where news aggregation sites need to pay Oregon media to link to stories generated by "news sources". So Google won't be able to even provide a link to an OregonLive story with a description without falling afoul of this. So if you want to search for Oregon stories on a search engine, you won't get anything from mainstream media sources unless they have a legal agreement in place, which will likely mean payment. What will happen to OregonLive's visit rate? Social media sites and smaller amateur blogs will likely replace the mainstream outlets, which will see their revenue drop. I'm betting this is going to fail.

And to the Washington Post journalists who lost their jobs, remember that you posted this once before:

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Trump has dismantled the EPA's Endangerment Finding, created in 2009, which we can now say in retrospect, was bunk.  Of course in Oregon, there's a bill to punish energy companies for extreme natural disasters. How crazy is that? It's just money. The state needs money and they can't pay for stuff anymore, so someone else has to. It's going to get worse.

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Frequent Diet Soda Intake Linked to Fourfold Increased Dementia Risk. And of course, I want to find out what artificial sweeteners were studied, and it's behind a paywall. You'd think that the reporter would do the due diligence and find out, but journalists are so incurious these days.

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Elon Musk is not daunted by the departures from xAI. He's on a hiring spree to get new brains. That's what leaders do. Been there, done that. 

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Alex Berenson just posted another piece on the dangers of cannabis. And after a toddler was brain-damaged from a cannabis overdose, Oregon wants to limit THC content in edibles.  It's really sad that 86% of Oregon teenagers don't think there is any harm with long-term regular cannabis use. Really?  Well, the education system can't even teach them regular education, so this is no surprised. Man, even Wikipedia has a whole page devoted to long term effects of cannabis.  Long-term use has been known to cause harm. This is why we have kids like we do nowadays.

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Russia is now in favor of retaining the dollar reserve currency? Yeah who cares about Brazil, South Africa and India. Russia is dominant. China hasn't said anything yet, but the world reserve currency was never going to be the renminbi anyway.

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John Kitzhaber wants to save the Oregon Health Plan. Ugh, I remember the "prioritized list". What a dumb idea that was. His justification for this approach:
No one wants to ration, but if you don’t have enough money, you’re going to ration it either by dropping people or by cutting benefits or by cutting what you pay providers. That’s really the only three options you’ve got. We all do it. We’re just trying to do it openly.
No we don't have to ration care. That's the Democrat approach, endorsed by Ezekiel Emanuel.  No no no! There are better ways, and Trump is working on it. It involves taking away control from insurance companies (and empowering the consumer), and they won't like it at all.

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11 February 2026

The Beginning of the End for Big Corporate Medicine. Will this ever happen? If it is, it will have to be in this administration. No other one will have the guts to take it on. Medical care used to be between doctors and patients, but now it's between doctors and insurance companies, and insurance companies and patients. Obamacare was when it really got out of control. Insurance companies were rolling in the dough. That was when Moda paid for naming rights to the Rose Garden Arena (2013), and Providence put their name on Jeld-Wen Field (2014). You can't sum it better than Portland's own Dr. Glaucomfleck.

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High-Deductible health plans worsen mortality among cancer survivors. Most people aren't trained actuaries, and have a hard time estimating risk. What sounded reasonable at one point in your life can be a big mistake later. For cancer patients, especially, being able to access your doctor shouldn't be something you have to think twice or thrice about.

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There is apparently a gut bacterium that is difficult to culture and its presence is known only by its genetic signature.  It's called CAG-170, and it's found in unusually high levels in healthy people – those without chronic illness. Someday, I'm sure it'll be identified, and we'll figure out whether it's a helper, or an opportunist. Paper here.

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The FDA won't review Moderna's mRNA vax for influenza, and some people are upset. For a control, Moderna elected to use the vaccine that is for non-seniors. the same type that Pfizer used in their study which showed that their vax was no better in the 65+ age group, the one that needs the protection. That was approved when Biden's FDA was in charge. Prasad is correct – Moderna needs to compare it with the higher-dose vaccine meant for seniors. It's a higher bar, and Moderna was probably hoping they wouldn't have to do it. The whole influenza vaccine development process is kinda ridiculous. Hopefully the anti-CD388 drug from Cidara (which Merck now owns) will make this whole thing obsolete.

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It's truly amazing that the Ukraine-Russia war can be affected so much by the whims of Elon Musk. That's crazy power. And it was all started so he could have a way to send updates to his Tesla cars. 

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Some useless climate change regulations got scrapped. It's so funny to see that Greta Thunberg is out there protesting the oil embargo against Cuba. She'll protest anything that she's programmed to protest.

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I’m now a whole full Professor of Computer Science at a top university, with all kinds of fancy metrics and titles to point to. 

The question is: how the hell can I be a successful AI researcher without knowing math? The implication is that I’m lying, or at least grossly exaggerating, because we all know that machine learning is very mathematical. 

I write for those who have been thinking of learning computer science, but are afraid to try because they don’t like math or are bad at it. You can certainly do it. You can become a very good computer scientist despite sucking at math. If anyone tells you that you can’t learn, say, machine learning because you don’t have the “mathematical fundamentals” tell them to go to Helsinki. In the winter.
This is true to some degree, but being good at math gives you that extra insight that can help you.

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What's going on at xAI?  Workers in top are leaving in droves. Including two co-founders. Don't they realize they'll probably be able to get stock in SpaceX, too? 
Then there's Mrinank Sharma at Anthropic, who announced that he's quitting because the "world is in peril". I kid you not, he used those terms. Then he said he said the time had come to "move on" and pursue work more aligned with his personal values and sense of integrity.  Whuut? Is this guy worried about world peril? Or is he just burnt out? Maybe the latter and he's being a drama queen.

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Richard Feynman had an extensive FBI file. The question is: who smeared him? This guy has a theory, and it would certainly make sense. This is so true, guys:

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Unintended consequences. Video in investigation into Nancy Guthrie's abduction raises questions about surveillance technology. I wondered about this. It seems that even though Nancy Guthrie didn't pay her subscription for video recording service, Google made recordings anyway, and kept these in its files for the police to access later. It's just Google being Google. Can't help it.

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Yikes! Why Smart Lawyers Are Building AI Tools Instead of Buying Them.  It's not that easy guys, trust me. It just seems that way. Hope you know what you're doing.

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AI no better than other methods for patients seeking medical advice. No surprises here at all. In fact it may be worse, because it can give you bad advice with utmost confidence.

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Oh this is so funny!
For Sam Darnold of the Seahawks all players in the Super Bowl will individually earn the same amount. Winning players will be paid $178,000

Darnold’s bill to the Golden State will be $249,000. The outlet stated the sizable check is due to California’s “jock taxes,” which force pro athletes who don’t live in the state to fork over percentages of their yearly income based on the number of days they work in California.
Welcome to California, land of Democrats. You got money? Gimme, gimme!

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And here's Oregon. Lawmakers want to lower the cost of building affordable housing. Sounds good, right? But there's this prevailing wage law, which mandates that contractors pay union wage rates to workers on publicly subsidized projects. SB 1566 wants to change that, as union wages add 10% to 20% to project costs. So will they piss of labor unions, or give up trying to do the right thing?
Update (16 February 2026): Legislators ended up caving to the unions. Housing costs will remain high. Democrats. 

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What's the second most valuable company in Oregon after Nike? It's Lattice Semiconductor. Yeah, I'm surprised, too. AI is what brought it back.

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A Warning to Seattle: Don’t Become the Next Cleveland. Think they'll listen?

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10 February 2026

Semaglutide ameliorates osteoarthritis progression through a weight loss-independent metabolic restoration mechanism. Wow, it can actually promote cartilage restoration as well as help you lose weight. If it comes with any more benefits, we might have to put this in the drinking water.

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Two related articles:
Living in the inflection point: "It’s scary because I don’t know what the future of my own job looks like. A skillset that was previously highly valued is now much easier to replicate with AI tools."
No one wants to admit the real reason corporations are laying off thousands: "If you are a corporate employee whose job is reliant on a computer, there is a high probability that you will someday be replaced by AI. This will happen.  But there is something you can do to avoid this fate: Be valuable."

Rather than crank out code to meet the needs of some company, it's time to look around the world and see what problems need solving and use AI tools to start fixing them. Be valuable.

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Down the slippery slope they go. California Wants Gun Blueprints Treated Like Weapons. The excuse to take away a right is always "to protect the public".

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Bloomberg has this article: How to Tax a Trillionaire, and says that politicians need to find smarter ways to do it because extremely wealthy people will always find a way to escape. But it's clear that the author is pro-tax. He concludes with 
After all, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once put it: “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
Yeah, well despite all the taxes we pay, we're not getting anywhere near a civilized society. I repost this meme:

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Speaking of finding a problem the world has and figuring out to solve it, I came across this article: ReMemory Is The Amnesia-hedging Buddy Backup You Didn’t Know You Needed. I clicked because I didn't know I needed it either. It's a system where you break up an important secret into several pieces and give each piece to several friends. Only by putting together each component  can the secret be revealed. Clever, huh? The author even supplied the code for this. But as the commenters say:
Just hope you remember which tool you used for this, and which friends you picked to hold the secret.

And hope your not ghosted by your /friends/.

And that your friends themselves did not forget or lost the piece of information they should retain.
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Some hacker tips, which I will probably never use. I'm seeing IVPN come up again. Maybe I should give them another look. 

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2 to 3 Cups of Coffee a Day May Reduce Dementia Risk. But Not if It’s Decaf.  Ordinarily I don't click on NYT articles, because I don't have Gell-Mann Amnesia, but I wanted to see that dataset. The study population was 100% women over 70. The "No Kings" protestor crowd! Drink up ladies!
Update: 16 February 2026
The NYT statement about who was in the study is a little misleading. The study population consisted of men and women of ages as young as 30 but the objective analysis was just limited to those over 70 years old (Tables 12 and 13 in the supplement). The best way to see what population was analyzed is eFigure 1 of the the Supplement. So the objective analysis was indeed based on those who were 70 years old or more (but not sure if they were all female).  

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Problems we didn't know we had. The world is suffering from a shortage of tenors. Holy smokes, what shall we do? Thank goodness for AI, right? 😂

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Math, Inc. and AI for Science.  Now THIS is the kind of research the government needs to fund. Not the Harvard or Stanford crap.

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The hidden link between blood sugar and anxiety. Maybe Till Brönner and Bob James were right? "The sugar melts away the loneliness. Make it nice and sweet!"

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The US Is Flirting With Its First-Ever Population Decline. Bloomberg tries to blame it on Trump's deportation policy. Nope. Obama deported more than Trump and there wasn't a decline then. What's happening is a stark drop in fertility, and guess what's causing it? I have my suspicions.

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National Cancer Institute studying ivermectin’s ‘ability to kill cancer cells. I gotta agree with the critics on this one. I don't think it's the best use of funds to spend to see if ivermectin can be repurposed as an anticancer agent. Oncology therapeutics is going beyond the old repurposing or screen-everything days. In the age of GenAI and other advanced drug discovery tech, there is no need to revisit ivermectin, especially when there is no compelling preliminary data.

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I saw this article: Do women really select for intelligence?. And then I read this article in the WSJ: A Stanford Experiment to Pair 5,000 Singles Has Taken Over Campus. Apparently its attracting a lot of attention, as new things often do. But it's not clear that people are getting hook-ups as a result. The data show that good-looking men score. Nerds generally don't. What women really seek is success, especially financial success. That's more than just intelligence.

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Which American city spends the most on homelessness? Turns out, there's no actual study to obtain an answer. But I would bet that for per capita spending, Portland and Seattle would be up there.

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9 February 2026

Happy Anniversary! 🎉 This is the third anniversary of this little blog.

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AI fatigue. One coder is experiencing AI fatigue. It's easy to generate code with the use of AI. But then you have to review it make sure it's valid and with no vulnerabilities, etc. Maybe this is why less than half of AI-generated code gets reviewed, and most AI engineers don't trust it. And in healthcare AI, this can have serious consequences: As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts. Looks like the tech industry has stumbled into AI too fast, instead in a controlled carefully considered manner. The fear of being left behind can be crazy. 

Hollywood is losing audiences due to AI fatigue. Yeah, I was disappointed at the last Mission Impossible movie, too. I can suspend disbelief, but not that much. Here's a Chinese video streamer who's surprised that the latest AI tools have trained on the material he puts out. Imagine that, a Chinese guy surprised that Chinese tech companies will copy and use his intellectual property without his permission! Who coulda thunk it?

And even Waymo admitted that its AI depends on their being Filipino backup workers to drive their "autonomous" vehicles when the AI fails. Not the first time this has happened.

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This is how the X algorithm works. How you get boosted. Or shadowbanned. It's a gameshow. 

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That paper that came out showing that time of day matters a lot on the survival outcome of chemotherapy has gotten intense scrutiny. There's some reasonable criticism. It doesn't seem to make sense that just by giving chemotherapy in the afternoon, you lose all the survival benefit of treatment when the antibody itself lasts a long time. Some question the flow cytometry and I don't have expertise to critique that. But the reviewer seems to think that the latest paper is actually on the same population as the earlier 2025 paper, which doesn't make sense because the 2025 paper went out to 44 months, whereas the recent paper only went out to 34 months.

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Vermont EV buses prove unreliable for transportation this winter. I think EVs really only make sense for sunny climes like the Bay Area where you have working charging stations everywhere.

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Loyalty Is Dead in Silicon Valley. Work culture is changing in the Bay Area.

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Blood omega-3 is inversely related to risk of early-onset dementia. Although not explicitly stated, it seems that the most important components in this are the non-DHA components, namely Alpha-linolenic acid [ALA], Eicosapentaenoic acid [EPA], and Docosapentaenoic acid [DPA]).  So look for products that have more of these.

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Epstein files reveal deeper ties to scientists than previously known. So many people were entangled by the lure of money and underage sex. Even scientists were not immune. But what is this thing with jerky?

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A chill brain-music interface for enhancing music chills with personalized playlists. It's unusual to see an article on how to experience music that gives you chills in the journal Cell. This tech uses EEG information to create a neurofeedback system that uses an in-ear electroencephalogram (EEG) to create personalized playlists.  The EEG-updated pleasure-enhancing playlist elicited more subjective chills and higher pleasure ratings than the pleasure-reducing playlists, suggesting that adapting music selection to individual neural activities can amplify chills and emotional engagement with music. I'm game to try it.

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Yeah, history tells us that selectively taxing the very rich isn't going to be successful.

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Japan Makes History by Beaming Electricity From Space Back to Earth. This is novel. To collect solar energy and beam it down to earth. Wonder if that really pencils out. Sugoi, if it does. 

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Apple silicon Macs have 2 types of Thunderbolt ports. But they're not labeled, and sometimes they're on the left, sometimes on the right. Who knows.

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The City of Los Angeles is suing the state of California regarding the Pacific Palisades fire. The City of Los Angeles filed a cross-complaint against the State of California seeking indemnity and contribution for the fire victims' claims against the City. I knew it was about money.

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8 February 2026

AI fails at freelancer tasks 97% of the time, new 'Remote Labor Index' shows. This is what I see, too, and may give some comfort to coders. Writing good software is not simple and not something that can be done as easy as some of the apps would have you believe. But software is getting better, so one shouldn't relax.  AI Makes the Easy Part Easier and the Hard Part Harder is a good way of putting it. But yeah, it'll probably kill a lot of those remote Indian jobs. Simple and often shoddy work now can be done here at home. 
And I've had this FOMO feeling sometimes, where you think that everybody's getting on the Clawdbot game and you're not, and you must be so behind.  Glad to know that I'm not the only person feeling this way, and that it's essentially hype and delusion. 
I agree with this guy that software engineering is on track to get to the next level.  I don't call it "vibe-coding". I call it "coding assistance". 

Microsoft needs to figure out what it wants to do in the AI world. Google has figured it out. Anthropic, too. Apple is taking action to serve its customer base. But what does Microsoft have to offer that's better than alternatives? 

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This guy has a clever way of getting around deepfakers who post videos of him saying false stuff. It's not scalable, of course, and it would be a lot easier if he just displayed a hologram containing the date, or something that wouldn't be easy to deepfake. The struggle continues. 

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A lot of people seem to oppose ICE, but I am glad that they are extracting these people from American society. You know that if Kamala Harris won, these folks would still be running free.

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Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm. Boomers > Zoomers.

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And from Montreal, comes a new organic molecule, AzoBiPy, that can store electrical energy for months with almost no degradation, offering a promising path toward better large-scale energy storage. It can substitute for lithium in fuel cells. Certainly safer than hydrogen fuel cells. 

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Japan's PM Sanae Takaichi is predicted to win the recent election in a landslide. I think the Japanese took a look at what's going on in the U.S. and Europe, and have seen enough. None of that diversity crap. Who can blame them?

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Ovarian cancer is indeed somewhat unique in the way it spreads in the abdomen. It spreads like wildfire, taking over the surface structures. Now we know why and it involves TGF-β.  Seems that a lot of undesirable conditions in the body are connected to TGF-β.

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Why bitcoin is losing its luster. Gold is better. I think that Trump himself may have hastened its demise. The creation of Trump Coin and Melania Coin revealed to everyone that crypto is just a joke. 

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High estrogen levels in brain may increase women's risk of stress-related memory issues. Well, in mice anyway. 

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Kotek scrambles to stop Blazers exit. Pathetic.

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Oregon’s Education Workforce Climbed While Student Enrollment Slid. The state added nearly 12,000 employees since 2020, but school districts face layoffs as budget cuts loom.  Lowest rank in the nation. As a commenter said: What's the point of all these articles? 

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7 February 2026

Seems like a lot of people are talking about Mark Hemingway's hit piece on Portland that came out on Real Clear Investigations. Even some Lefties are saying that it's true.  All Portland leadership needs to do is 
  1. Get the homeless off the streets. Make it not worth their while to set up camp in the region. Stop trying to install them in various parts of the city with shelters and rehab centers and crap. It's not working. 
  2. Get tough on crime. Jail and prosecute criminals, including the drug dealers and drug users. 
  3. Start spending money to the benefit of the actual taxpayers. Clean up the city and make it beautiful again. 
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We might be able to see a great comet in April.  A Kreutz sun-grazer, C/2026 A1 (MAPS), is on the way. We're long overdue to see one of these. Comet West (1975) was very impressive. Even Comet Bennett (1969) was very nice.  It's strange, because another comet, C/2025 R3 (PANSTARRS), is scheduled to make an appearance in April, with a magnitude of 0.4. So will we get two bright comets close together, like Hyakutake (1996) and Hale-Bopp (1997)?

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Do rich people live longer?  Yes. Not just because they have better health insurance. They eat better. They have more leisure time to exercise. They're smarter and don't do stupid things and know better how to assess risk and handle it.

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The Search Engine Map. Wow, Bing is bigger than Google. People do rank their search results as being the best now. The Google search universe is smaller – how the mighty have fallen. Competition is good. 

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Wow, I hadn't heard about ostarine before. It's a hormone-like agent that mimics the desirable effects of testosterone and anabolic steroids — including muscle growth and increased bone mass – without other negative effects of testosterone. Of course, it's now a performance-enhancer that athletes dope themselves with.

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The Stanford scam proves America is becoming a nation of grifters. And it's not just the students, it's the timorous faculty that allow it to happen. Such sheep. They knew about it, and refused to get involved in the scam.

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SCoR2 is a denitrosylase enzyme that regulates lipogenesis and fat storage. I predict we'll see seeing even more important research coming out soon regarding SCoR2 and drugs to inhibit its action.

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Anxiety about the impact of AI on software development is not going away. I'm playing around with Claude Code 4.6 and seems to be very good, although I haven't really given it hard stuff yet to see how much better it is over the previous SOTA model. I agree with Jensen Huang that people are over-panicking. It won't be that easy to clone Oracle, but what it might do is give companies the opportunity to be less dependent on large enterprise solutions. Hard to say what the fallout will be at this time. But the software kings will have less leverage, for sure. 

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Ugh. Google workers want to restrict access to Google Cloud services for immigration enforcement. This is what happens. Google hired foreign-born immigrants in the name of diversity. Now they want to determine domestic policy and hamper governmental agencies. We need to enforce our borders or we lose our geopolitical integrity. It's as simple as that.

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This article says that anti-vaccine tweets caused people to get sick and some to die because they didn't get the vax. Hey, what about the lives saved because people didn't get pulmonary embolism, die of sudden cardiac death, or get turbo-cancer?  Did you count those people?
It's important to remind people of the kind of bullshit we were subjected to. Here it is:
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Oregon Supreme Court Ruling Leads To Dismissal Of More Than 1,400 Criminal Cases Statewide. This is so under-reported. Oregon can't convince enough lawyers to move to Portland and can't graduate enough competent lawyers to practice, that we're letting felony crime perpetrators go free. How's that for a functioning state?

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The world is healing. Oregon advocates drop ballot measure that would secure rights to transgender health care, abortion, same-sex marriage. They wanted to put grooming and pro-pedophilia laws into Oregon's constitution. I know it's on-brand for Oregon, but still.

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New poll shows that Oregonians think that economic conditions in the state are getting worse. We have a long way to go. 

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Portland wanted to raise taxes, but suddenly somehow, Portland is sitting on $106 million in unspent housing dollars. They really wanted to expand their slush fund. All that housing money, and nothing is going to improve.

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6 February 2026

This is unethical. To subject poor people to view disturbing content just so that AI can classify it correctly. We are scarring people's brains permanently.

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'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP. Theoretically true, but very unlikely to happen. It would be suicidal for Microsoft to do it.

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Yes, it's true. Male brains differential from female brains in the womb in a detectable and measurable way.

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An oral PCSK9 Inhibitor, enlicitide promises to reduce dependency on statins. We have the injection form, but that's not as convenient as a pill. 
But then the Lancet published a meta-analysis which found that all the weird off-target side-effects of statins, such as cognitive impairment, depression, sleep disturbance, and peripheral neuropathy, were not substantiated. So all's good, then?

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Well that's not good.  ‘Starlink killer’: China’s 20 GW microwave weapon could fry satellites with 60-second bursts. This could lead to another arms race, which would be catastrophic. Not to mention the Kessler syndrome effect, which would set space travel back for decades at least.

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California universities are spending $17 million to provide ChatGPT for students. That's such a poor way to spend money. It doesn't make them smarter and just sets them up for privacy violations, maybe legal trouble, maybe psychosis, maybe other trouble. Because it likely won't come with a course on how to use it. Better if they got access to a creative suite like Poe.com.

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And up in Washington state, it appears that billionaire Nick Hanauer, who was in favor of the tax, actually doesn't domicile in the state of Washington, so the tax wouldn't apply to him. Dick move, Nick.

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TSMC is going to build new 3 nm chip factories in Japan, which would help both parties. Good for Japan, but why not the U.S.?

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Don't you hate when that happens? You invest in expensive solar panels, and the company disappears. Prolectric LLC took people's money and then vanished. Solar needs subsidies, or else it doesn't pencil out.

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Scientists Identify Key Protein That Could Reverse Brain Aging. Nice. Let's develop it. Put it to use.

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Fat chance. Tina Kotek wants Trump to stop enforcing immigration law.  Why? Because illegal aliens are scared. She wants a state governed by the rule of feelings, instead of rule of law. "No one is above the law" is something only conservatives must follow.

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Lloyd Center will vanish into Portland's memory hole. Like a lot of other things, the city can't support nice things. So it'll be torn down. And I strongly doubt it will look like the picture in the article. Add several tents and graffiti on the walls. And there will be no open cafés. Windows will be boarded up. Also lots of trash and people bent over. And everyone will be wearing backpacks. 

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OHSU Research Union Threatens to Strike. Because why not?

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5 February 2026

This recently-published paper is getting attention amongst oncologists. A 60% reduction in cancer mortality just by getting your lung cancer chemoimmunotherapy in the morning instead of the afternoon. It's actually a follow-up study on data this group published a year before, with follow-up going to 48 months. This time it's data from the phase III LungTIME-C01 trial going out to 34 months, and the spread between morning and evening chemo time survival is stark.

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I did a double take on this:  Scientists Discover Gut Bacteria Can Inject Proteins Into Human Cells. How long has this been known? Is it any wonder why there is an alarming rise in colon cancer in the young, with all those E. coli producing colibactin?

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Sign of the times: Japanese city cancels cherry blossom festival over badly behaved tourists. Too many assholes now. It's a global disease. They can't have nice things anymore in Japan. And I think this is why PM Sanae Takaichi was swept into office. 

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Claude Opus 4.6 was announced today. Can't wait to try it. 
And did you see Anthropic's Super Bowl ads targeted against OpenAI? Sam Altman was pissed about it. How many are there?
Betrayal
OpenAI needs money, and the ads were going to be a way for them to do so. If mockery shuts this down, then what? (Great work, Anthropic.)

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There's been a bunch of writing about what AI means for the software industry. The Fall of the Nerds, for example. Or Death of Software. Nah. I agree that if you already are a stellar software engineer, you will find that these AI tools will take you to the next level. Heck, I'm using them and doing things I never could have imagined doing before. It's like having a personal coding tutor next to you, available at all times. Yeah, there's a price, but it's well worth it.

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What a joke. Security firm finds Moltbook's 1.5M 'AI agents' run by 17K humans. Don't get caught up in the hype. A lot of times, it's never exactly what they say.

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Using AI, someone broke into AWS and gained admin access in 10 minutes.  See what I mean about how AI can take you to the next level?

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Portland Public Schools faces $50 million budget shortfall, calls for state help. Oh no! We've overpaid our teachers and now we have no money left over! Help! Will someone think of the union???
And Oregon sets new statewide standards to measure student success. As one of the commenters said:

"Oregon’s poor student performance is not due to lack of funding. It’s driven by:

  • Low attendance
  • Short school year
  • Inefficient spending
  • Administrative bloat
  • High pension costs
  • Deep socioeconomic gaps
  • Weak accountability"
Money isn't going to fix this. 
And in Bellevue, Washington, students at Newport High School cut class to protest in the streets. You'll not find this coverage in regular mainstream news. What crap! Would society have tolerated this ten years ago? 

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Up in Seattle, thieves keep stealing copper wiring, so light rail’s newest stretch to close for a day for electrical repairs. Rinse and repeat.

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Judge restricts warrantless ICE arrests in Oregon, finding threat of ‘severe harm’. Yup, it's that judge again. The one Sen John Kennedy tried to warn the U.S. about. Someone needs to educate this judge about "warrantless ICE arrests". No warrant is needed. 

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Oh crap. So Portland might be subject to the same chaos brought about by Waymo cars.  Keep those things in the Bay Area, please.

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Lawmakers Mull Dialing Back Funding for Medical Residencies. Wow, so there is money for illegal aliens and giveaways to the homeless, but no less money to give to supporting new medical residents? WTF, man, this is why we will have a shortage of physicians in the future. This is why we pay taxes! Not to have our good money thrown after bad. Supporting graduate medical education is one of the things that the State is supposed to do.

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Looks like Seattle has another nut-case fruity-loopy healthcare professional, just like OHSU.

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Honolulu is full of eateries. From nice restaurants to holes-in-the-wall. They're everywhere. And now they are feeling the pinch. It's hard to thrive when you live in a Blue state.

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4 February 2026

I just found out that AT&T bought Quantum Fiber. And with fiber, I can get 2 GB service, better than the 1 GB I am getting with xFinity. And I can get WiFi 7 broadcast, instead of just WiFi 6. Competition is great!

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Amazon Ring has a Search Party system designed to help find lost dogs. Hopefully cats, too. I don't know how they trained their AI. Of course, this means that Amazon has access to all your camera feed. You decide if that's OK.

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Yesterday, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) released new guidance on Tuesday cautioning physicians against performing gender-transition surgeries on minors. Now the AMA meekly says something in support of that stance. "Surgical intervention in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood."  Generally? How about deleting that weasel adjective? And what about puberty blockers? Comment on that, too, would you?

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Then MSN runs this article: Downtowns are dying, but we know how to save them. Yeah, fix crime.  The article concludes:
Of course, even those who yearn to visit or live in a walkable, dense neighborhood are not going to flock to a place surrounded by a grim urban dystopia. Efforts to address downtown’s dysfunctions will elicit the usual cries from progressives, who seem unwilling to carry out the necessary policing. But if L.A. and other cities want their downtowns to survive, this should be the first order of business.
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The Skanner Ceases Operation After 50 Years. It started as news outlet for Black people, just like Asian Reporter is for Asians. I remember people at street corners trying to push the paper on me. But clearly there is a need for investigative journalism, like the kind only WWeek seems to be doing. The Oregonian sure isn't, anymore.
And Washington Post is laying off a third of their workforce.  Good! That place was just woke central. I'm glad Bezos is cleansing that institution. Hopefully, it'll be a respectable paper once again. At least less obviously biased. 

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Perplexity was my favorite AI tool. Then it started lying to me.  Recently Perplexity did hallucinate to me. I had to re-ask the question, and then it admitted that it had fabricated the first answer. But that was just once. I guess it's happening more to other people. Sounds like Perplexity is trying to skimp on services due to being short on cash. It might need to start charging people, or at least charge more for premium service.

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I haven't jumped on the Clawdbot ship yet. I don't need personal AI in my life. So I came across this post, and wanted to see what sort of things I'm missing out on. Check this guy out:
Family document filing. I send a PDF or photo via WhatsApp. Lollo analyzes it with vision-document type, date, sender, amount if applicable. Photos get converted to PDF, then run through OCR. Files are renamed according to a consistent schema (’YYYY-MM-DD [Sender] [Type] [Details].pdf’) and sorted into the appropriate folder. The whole pipeline-vision analysis, format conversion, OCR, renaming, filing-happens automatically.

But filing is only half of it. The retrieval is where it gets interesting. “What insurance policies do we have for our toddler?” “How much did we spend on contractors in 2025?” Lollo searches the archive, reads the relevant documents, and gives me an answer. The documents aren’t just stored—they’re accessible in a way that actually matters.

Personal color consulting. I had professional color analysis done. The results—which colors suit my skin tone, which to avoid-now live in a dedicated skill. I send a photo of a sweater I’m considering: “Does this work for me?” Lollo checks it against my profile and gives me a straight answer. The knowledge persists. I don’t have to explain my color type every time.

Proactive scheduling. Every morning at 7:45, Lollo sends me a briefing: today’s calendar, weather for dog walking times, anything that needs attention. I didn’t ask for it. It just happens. The night before trash collection, I get a reminder which bins to put out. Once a week, I get a summary of local news, filtered by our interests and delivered with a Rhine-region commentary—my wife and I are expats from the Rhineland living in Bavaria, and Lollo knows to add the appropriate sardonic undertone.

Ideas and todos. When I have an idea, I say “new idea about X” and it goes into my Obsidian vault, properly formatted, synced. When I need a todo, same thing. The knowledge doesn’t get trapped in a chat history I’ll never scroll back through. It flows into real systems where it belongs.

Watch history and taste. Lollo has access to my Trakt.tv data-everything I’ve watched, when, how I rated it. Over time, this becomes a taste profile. Recommendations get better because they’re based on actual behavior, not a cold-start conversation. 

Meal planning and culinary consulting. Forget smart fridges. I tell Lollo what’s in our pantry and fridge-on the go, via voice, whenever I remember. Not everything, but ingredients that survive a week’s cooking cycle. Based on what’s actually there, it suggests dishes that match our preferences. 

Contact management. After meetings or on the go, I can quickly dictate the people I just met. Mixed with photos of business cards, LinkedIn profile links, whatever I have. From this mess, Lollo creates clean new contacts or updates existing ones. 
Sheesh. This guy needed a color consultant? My life must be so simple. I put my ideas and todos in a text file that's simple to manage.

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One-third of dementia cases are linked to non brain-related diseases. Yup, you must take care of the body, as well, or the brain will rot. 

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3 February 2026

Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled.  

A recent article in The Atlantic reported that an increasing number of students at elite universities were claiming they had disabilities to get benefits or exemptions, which can also include copies of lecture notes, excused absences and access to private testing rooms. Those who suffer from “social anxiety” can even get out of participating in class discussions. 
What kind of student is Stanford admitting these days? They learn to grift at that school.

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The Fax Numbers of the Beast. The guy that created the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences is not your average nerd, that's for sure.

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Enormous 'mega-blob' under Hawaii is solid rock and iron, not gooey — and it may fuel a hotspot. Oh, I thought this was something new. Every Hawaii student knows about this. That's how the Islands came about. And the iron-rich lava is what makes it flow smoothly and freely, instead of explosively. So we can stand around and watch it up close. It's a rite of passage to step on the lava as it flows and get your rubbah slippah stuck.

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Women Are More Likely Than Men to Endorse Political Violence. Ah, so someone else noticed.

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"The TSA’s New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID is Illegal," Says Regulatory Expert. I don't understand. Is the TSA supposed to help keep us safe when we fly, or is it just an agency to collect money. I understand that we need ID when we fly (we should nowadays), so what does paying $45 do to make us safer?  If I'm going to be stuck in a metal tube for hours with a bunch of strangers, I'd like some assurance that there was some screening being done to check for weirdos.

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Popular Portland restaurant República closing over safety concerns, rising costs. The reasons? A "sharp decline in dining, rising costs and broader concerns about the current political and economic climate". If you can't safely eat out in the Pearl District, what does that say about the rest of Portland?

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Washington state has the third largest homeless population in America.  Now the state legislature wants to prevent cities from conducting any homeless sweeps. And to require low barrier housing in all areas. They want to turn the state into sh!t. You have to ask yourself why they would do that to their state? Look to what's going on in Fulton County, Georgia for the answer. Homeless people are Democrat gold. 

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Oregon Dems continue to scheme on how to raise state taxes that Trump cut for us. It doesn't matter if Trump is president if you live in a Blue state or Blue city.  Life will not get better. 

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