22 June 2025

What day are you most likely to die? It's your birthday.

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No need for iridium. Japanese scientist found out how to hydrolyze with manganese instead. Should be a lot less expensive.

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Hospitals are using AI to predict and avoid chaos in the ED. Sounds a bit creepy to me, and something tells me this isn't going to be broadly applicable to many hospitals. 

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EVs are supposed to save the world. What happened?  In a word, greed. EVs aren't going to work until they fix the battery charging problem. 

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Ever wondered why browser useragents all start with "Mozilla"?  Here's why.

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It looks like Southern Oregon University is going the way of Marylhurst University. More fallout from the elimination of the subsidized economy.

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The Portland Tribune is just a shell now. I was never sure what it tried to be. Another vehicle to carry advertising, I guess. It never broke any hard-hitting news. Mainly event announcements, restaurant reviews, and the occasional crime stories, etc. We have other news sites for this.

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Republican counties have a higher fertility rate than Democrat counties. No surprise there. Heh.

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21 June 2025

Good for them! Paul Mitchell, the hair product company is joining the exodus out of California to Texas.  When will the Dems learn?

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In China, the preference for male babies is now seeing the dire consequences. If you look at the usual dating apps, the market is slim for Asian males, unfortunately. I suspect that many of these Chinese males face a life of bachelorhood. The solution? Be filthy rich! That works across all languages and cultures.

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Did you know that until just recently, it was legal to send biological samples to another country, have them genetically modify it and then send it back to the U.S.? Wow, I could see some bad actors having fun with that. Well, no more. The world is no longer an innocent place, unfortunately.

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Microsoft is going to lay off more people in July, mainly salespeople. Remember the days when working for Microsoft made you wealthy?  Yeah, good times.

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I've seen recommendations to switch to glass water bottles to reduce exposure to microplastics. Turns out that you get exposed to more microplastics when you use glass bottles. At least those with a plastic cap. So what do you do? They recommend "blowing the caps with air, then rinsing them with water and alcohol, which reduced contamination by 60%".  Yeah, right.

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Andrej Karpathy has some interesting ideas on how software is changing. It's Software 3.0. It's AI as a utility like electricity. 
I read this recently:
"When ChatGPT went down for several hours last week, everyday users, students with exams, and office workers posted in despair: “If it doesn't come back soon my boss is gonna start asking why I havent done anything all day,” one person commented on Downdetector, a website that tracks internet outages. "
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An infusion of stem cells that differentiate into insulin-producing islet cells can cure diabetes mellitus type I.  The trade-off is that you have to be on immunosuppressants.

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Might look into this. You can stack Mac Minis to create your own ML cluster.  Very interesting. I might check it out. I'm reading mixed reviews, with some saying that it really doesn't make that much of a difference. I suspect that there needs to be more work done to make setting this up more useful, but Apple has a way to make their hardware sought after.

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Whole Foods is moving out of Capitol Hill in Seattle. Riots have consequences. The BLM/Antifa crowd learn that they can't have nice things. And neither can the people that live around there. 

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Anthropic's top models will "lie, cheat and steal" to achieve their goals. So what is their secret sauce to developing these bad boys?  Claude 3.5 Sonnet is so polite and courteous, you'd never think it's younger siblings would be so..conniving.

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People are upset over the quality of AI products and the loss of human jobs.  Here comes the pushback from the public. And AI is still at the early stages. Pretty soon, humans will be so dependent on AI (at least the ones that have to create things and produce stuff) that it'll be too late.

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New physics theory posits that time has 3 dimensions. And space is a secondary effect. This comes out of University of Fairbanks, Alaska, so who knows? I'll have to wait until someone more knowledgeable weighs in. At least it got published in a peer reviewed journal.

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Man, I hope no one buys Perplexity.  Certainly not Meta. Apple would be OK, but I think they'd ruin it somehow. Probably buy it and kill it, like Dark Sky.  I like it as it is. Stay independent, please.

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20 June 2025

Happy Summer Solstice!

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Perhaps we now know how acetaminophen works. Very odd that it's been a mystery all this time. It's not a prostaglandin synthesis inhibitor, which is how I remember learning it many years ago. Quite different, actually.

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Cool. Chinese studios are going to produce AI-remakes of the famous martial arts movies by Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li. Not sure yet what they'll do, but I'm interested.

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AI chatbots can "talk dirty" if you're persist enough. DeepSeekR1 does it more readily. I wouldn't do this on a public installation, though. And I bet the Chinese encourage this, perhaps so they can use the information for blackmail. Avoid, avoid.

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Tibetan musical notation is pretty. Like art.

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Hardly anyone uses StackOverflow anymore, it seems. Too bad. StackExchange might still be used. But SO made mistakes and this led to its downfall.

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A new way of scamming people. Apparently it's possible to inject any text you want in the text box inputs, making people think phone numbers are legit.

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This YT video of Hawaiian history is depressing. Yeah, I learned about a lot of this as a kid, but the losses suffered by the native Hawaiians over the past 200 years is pretty dramatic. The Lahaina fire of 2023 was just the latest installation. Yeah, the haoles in the 1800s were greedy bastards, but the native Hawaiians needed to up their game. There's no sign that they did anything more than become activists. And now, they are so marginalized. This is what happens when you don't adapt to the new realities. There's so much in Hawaii of which to make money, but sadly the native Hawaiians have so little ownership of anything.

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Washington State patrol is using cellphone information to get speeders now.  You have been warned, I guess.

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This is why the American public distrusts the medical profession.  The American Academy of Pediatrics backs child sex changes as 'medically necessary' despite SCOTUS upholding ban. Give it up, guys!  It's not the Biden era anymore. Many people have woken up and don't believe all that woke crap anymore. Lefty doctors in groups like the AAP are going to ruin it for everyone. No one will believe you when you have something really legitimate to say, and you have no one to blame but yourself.

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MIT people keep discovering interesting things. A student has come up with a way to restore paintings without altering the underlying art. And this can be done in hours, not years.

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This should be titled The Lost Art of Slide Rules. Brings back fond memories.

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When ChatGPT went down for several hours last week, everyday users, students with exams, and office workers posted in despair: “If it doesnt come back soon my boss is gonna start asking why I havent done anything all day,” one person commented on Downdetector, a website that tracks internet outages. “I have an interview tomorrow for a position I know practically nothing about, who will coach me??” wrote another. 
Why can't people use a different LLM? Are they that uninformed?

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Yoshua Bengio thinks he has a way to save humanity from AI. It's another AI, he calls LawZero. It's an AI that watches other installations and warns humans if it detects something bad. Let's hope that it's not coaxed into some kind of collaboration.

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Medical price transparency is not working out in Oregon. I guess you can have an executive order, but that doesn't necessarily mean that companies will listen. This is the post-modern world, you know. People always test the law, and only follow it if they are punished for violations. Otherwise, forget it. We've seen that with illegal immigration and illicit drugs.

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19 June 2025

Looks like Captain Cook's ship The Endeavor has been finally located after sinking 250 years ago.

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Ah, Oregon, once again a national embarrassement.
Even Tina Kotek thinks that Portland better stop piling on the taxes, as the wealthy are fleeing the city. That's how you know it's really bad.
Multnomah County is closing their passport service. Due to budgetary concerns, of course. Portlanders pay higher tax – get even less service.
Portland toy store, Merci Milo, calls it quits. It's too expensive to operate and nobody wants to go shopping around there anymore.
It's clear that just because the federal government ousted the Democrats, when you live in a Blue state and Blue city, you still suffer a lot.

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18 June 2025

NY Times writes an article using ChatGPT to tell you what jobs you might apply for when AI takes away your current job.  Trust authenticator? Trust auditor? Escalation officer? AI personality director? C'mon.

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Things have changed considerably in the past year between Microsoft and OpenAI. Interesting that Microsoft owns GitHub Copilot but still wants access to Windsurf. Is that an admission that their own product is deficient? It's hard to maintain relationships in the dynamic, constantly changing world of tech.

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Amazing statistics. The U.S. added 1000 millionaires daily last year. Net worth rose 11% in the U.S. last year. Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan led last year for individuals with a net worth of $100,000 to $1 million, accounting for 28.2%, followed by Western Europe with 25.4% and North America with 20.9%.  Over 80% of adults in the UBS sample had a net worth of under $100,000. Overall, about 1.6% registered a net worth of $1 million or more. How did you fare?

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Who knew that Honda was in the rocket business?

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What will it take to break up Google?

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What does Criag Federighi think about the iPad? He seems to really like it. And here's some example of what iPadOS 26 will be able to do.
And what does Apple think about Siri? It seems Apple is admitting defeat on this. They know they can't catch up.

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Pope Leo takes on AI. I agree with the commenters. Although Pope Leo is a math major and more tech savvy than Francis, he is way over his head. I am not convinced he could contribute much to the discussion.

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Did you know that the brain also produces insulin? Makes sense, I guess, as insulin drives glucose into the cell.

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A deep dive into Google's Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Google seems to be doing everything it can to keep you from actually visiting the web pages it scrapes data from.

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Sam Altman thinks we've already entered the early stages of the Singularity. Hard to say. It's like entering the event horizon of a black hole. You won't know when you've crossed it.
Sam Altman also reports that Meta is trying to steal his employees by offering really high signing bonuses. Like $100 million. Wow, nice job if you can get it.

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Obamacare already ruined physician practices. It promised great things. They should have called it the Unaffordable Care Act. Now it's clear that it can't survive without ongoing federal subsidies, like much of Democrat promises. You can't legislate quality medical care. Eventually the money runs out. The government shouldn't be running our healthcare industry anyway.

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What the hell? After all China did to the world with COVID-19, many (most?) countries view China more favorably than the U.S.

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This is how it starts.  MIT has developed an AI model that is always learning and never sleeps. Baby steps to the AI takeover, I think.

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Oregon ski resorts can't get liability coverage now. Can nothing in Oregon work anymore?

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17 June 2025

Ever wondered how LLMs know that they've finished what they had to say and stop talking? Doesn't that require comprehension? Well, not really. We think.
Then there's this: LLMs know when they are being evaluated. Really creepy. 

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Do you have social anxiety? It might just be your gut bacteria. Man, the microbiota-gut-brain axis doesn't cease to amaze.


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An EV battery that recharges in just 18 seconds? Yeah, that would make me consider getting an EV. But not if it takes a specialized power source to achieve this.

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So who do I believe? This guy who tells me top optimize for LLMs? Or this guy, who says that people are rushing into Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)? People are using both – traditional search, as well as LLM query engines. It depends on the question. And I still don't trust AI to get my answers for me. They can miss things. But they are good for idea suggestions and to make sure you haven't forgotten anything.

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Hemochromatosis can predispose to dementia. Well, it's the less frequent H63D type, not the most common C282Y variant. It seemed that H63D variants had a more benign course, but perhaps not in all ways.

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Could there be a fifth force of nature? If so, it would be mediated by a new Yukawa particle.

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Oregon is third worst in the nation for hepatitis C deaths. Probably because so many people in Oregon are IV drug abusers, that hepatitis is rampant. I would bet that we're terrible for hepatitis B, too.

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Dumb. Looks like PERS is going to be restricted to just investing in carbon-neutral companies. Which means it may miss out on some good investments, and that someone is going to have to be paid to look over every single potential investment and decide if it's good enough to invest in. The time and dollars spent that have to go to satisfy this insane requirement. So does that mean PERS is going to invest only in solar panel companies and windmill farms? Do they still like Tesla, or is that just out of the question?

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Things are looking bleak for Providence. Bet they miss those Obamacare days, when money was just rolling in. And we still had leadership that wasn't as left-wing as it is today, and so business actually wanted to stay in Oregon.

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Seattle's affordable housing industry is in crisis mode now. Yup, one more sector that was just dependent on federal subsidies which are no longer rolling in.

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16 June 2025

Another major company is leaving Oregon – that is Tektronix. And it's now national news that Oregon is committing economic suicide. Here's WWeek, recognizing that it's a big problem for the state.

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Oregon institutes protections for geolocation tracking in teens younger than age 16.  Once in a while, Oregon legislators do something beneficial.

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Uruguay scientists have developed a drug (called SANA) that supposedly promotes weight loss without suppressing appetite. It's based on salicylates and creatine. The weight loss was about 3% at two weeks. Not a lot, and I doubt it will outsell the standard GLP-1 receptor agonists.

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Salmon Valley school superintendent in Washington says that federal subsidy cuts will be problematic for the school district. It amazes me how everything seems to be dependent on federal money. This needs to stop. The federal government shouldn't be subsidizing everything in the U.S. Can't the state take care of this?

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Well, the numbers are here at last. And it's devastating. Intel will lay off 15% to 20% of its employees, many of which will be in Oregon. Things are that bad. Gee whiz, can Oregon get some good news for a change?

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Here's an opinion about the AI hype is all about. It's a race to get the $50 trillion prize.  Meanwhile young graduates are finding it very difficult to get jobs. This is likely AI related.

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Despicable. Another company claims to fight refractory cancer, prey on hope, and take people's money. And people aren't getting any better. I don't how these people sleep or look at themselves in the mirror. This is why we have clinical trials first.

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A Harvard study showed that women who drank at least one cup of coffee daily aged gracefully and had less dementia. The effect was not seen with decaf coffee – only the real stuff. Remember though, this study was not set out to research the effects of coffee. It was an entirely different study, and so is just a retrospective subgroup analysis, which is only good for generating a hypothesis, and not for making recommendations. Still, drinking coffee is easy to do.

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Nature articles will now make public the initial acceptance letter with request to modify and publish the authors' response. Could be interesting to read. We might get some additional insights.

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Some examples of truly unusually gifted humans.

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Terence Tao discusses the hardest problems in mathematics and physics in a Lex Fridman interview.

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15 June 2025

AI education has the potential of disseminating outdated science, since large models can't be updated frequently enough. You think that's bad, try medicine, where things change so quickly.

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Those sneaky Chinese. This is how the smartest people in the world get around those pesky nVIDIA chip export restrictions. You pack the data in suitcases and send them to the United States. Then someone runs the code on the GPUs and sends the data back to China. Because there's no restriction on data, right?

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A lot of people objected to Apple's paper on the limitations of reasoning models. Large models don't necessarily live up to the hype.  Gary Marcus sums up seven main objections to the paper and knocks them down. 

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Incredible how the geographic coordinates of the Great Pyramid of Giza are the speed of light in microns/sec N, and 10,000,000 m from the North Pole. Surely it's just a coincidence. Got those Graham Hancock/Erich von Däniken vibes.

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Is Google going to destroy the Web? Seems a bit overblown. Not destroy. Just change. If Google just kept doing what they were doing before, and just providing us with good search results, it might stick around longer. They wouldn't have made as much advertising money, but people wouldn't be criticizing as much as they do now. Google is trying to preserve its golden goose, but the bird is getting old.

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AI is making students dumb. Kinda like the Internet has made students dumb. This is one of the major threats of AI – taking away so much cognitive skills from us humans. We'll have a generation of dummies who won't know what to do without an internet-connected phone nearby.
And here's an article about a man afflicted with ChatGPT-driven psychosis. LLMs are a force multiplier for mental illness. 

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Five greatest physics lectures of all time. No excuses now. This is what the Internet was made for.

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OHSU has decided to go with Shereef Elnahal. It's interesting to think that they had a guy who was ready to take on the role (Nate Selden), but oh no, Tina Kotek had to have a nationwide search first. In the end, the just found one guy willing to take the job, and he's got no obvious advantage over Selden. Being from Harvard and the East Coast is a disadvantage, I think. Was it just that they wanted an outsider?  Just wanted to have someone else besides Selden, who was already Dean of the School of Medicine? What is the point? At least Selden was a local and already knew people. So much money wasted. Selden had been with OHSU for 25 years. What a way to treat him.

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14 June 2025

Photon transport through the entire adult human head. What a weird study to be doing. They measured light of 800 nm wavelength (in the infrared range) going through the skull, and actually detected photons on the other side. I would have thought all such light would be absorbed, but some penetrated through. What use this information has is beyond me.

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Apple has a problem. This could be huge for Apple. I don't think there will be robust sales for the new iPhone. Who really needs a new phone that doesn't really do much more than the iPhone 16, and is just thinner and more likely to bend and so, likely has an inferior battery life, I don't know for sure. And the Liquid Glass look? Seems to make text harder to see. Somehow, I don't think Steve Jobs would approve of what's going to come out.

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Google's going to implement an age assurance tool that is zero-knowledge. Do you trust Google to do this? I really don't. They can triangulate the data from so many different ways.

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Pseudomonas aeruginosa can break down hospital plastic. And this bug is not rare, especially in hospitals. So now. hospital plastic needs to be coated with antimicrobials to prevent this.

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This is how it starts. Strange neutrino pulses have been detected that emit from deep within Antarctic ice. It's aliens!

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The CEO of Scale AI is joining Meta. Scale AI hires third world workers to do all the grunge labeling work for AI datasets. They have to watch all the videos and images and classify them. Sometimes the images are NSFW and something NSFL. Well, Alexandr Wang will make his billions.
Update (16 June 2025): So Google is cutting ties with Scale AI. Can't blame them, really.

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Providence is going to lay off 134 employees. All for the usual reasons. The nurses union (ONA) claims that the Providence administration hasn't lowered their own salaries in response to their financial downturn, and Providence is not denying this. Makes me wonder how serious they think it is. Why not lower the salaries of executives, instead of firing people and making patient care that much more difficult? It's a legit point. Put some skin in the game. And Providence should get on the phone and talk to Kotek and get her to do something about Oregon's lousy economy and high crime rate. Stop businesses from leaving and stop raising taxes on everything. This way so many people won't have to be on CareOregon/Medicaid.

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13 June 2025

Girls fall behind boys in math during the first year of school. Why does this happen?

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Laptop speakers can leak audio through walls, through inadvertent radio transmission leakage. Probably not something I'll have to worry about. 

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U.S. Senators may ban pharma ads on TV networks. Boy, is their budget gonna suffer. They should ban it from radio, too.

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Sleeping in total darkness turns about to be important. Even a little bit of light can apparently interfere with deep sleep.

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In a parody article, someone wrote that Cape Breton was going to have its own time zone. Google and Meta picked it up as actual news, and started disseminating it. 

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Not good.  Intel is going to start laying off an unknown number of people in Oregon in July. This is going to hurt Oregon even more.

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This is news to me. RFK Jr. is telling people that:
For $75 a month, under this bill, you’ll be able to get a concierge doctor who is available 24 hours a day, every day of the week, every day of the year. You won’t get a bill for it. You won’t have to file insurance claims. It’s just like old-style health care—but it’s for $75 a month.

We’re also going to allow the creation of onsite medical centers by employers—at factories, at workplaces—where workers can get treated for free. Somebody won’t have to leave work for four or five hours to get a medical checkup. They’ll be able to do that onsite.
What? Suddenly medicine is a commodity? So cheap? We're getting even deeper into socialized medicine? Do we have all these doctors now, who will be willing to work for peanuts? Or does he expect AI to step up? Or nurse practitioners? Or FMGs?

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Some folks are looking into a theory that gravity is just a manifestation of entropy.  Yeah, it's a long shot.

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Fastest way to detect a vowel in a string. Nice review of Python coding techniques.

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Sad story of a guy who convinced HP to buy Palm and WebOS, and then see it die.  Oh, what could have been. The stars really misaligned, didn't they.

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More money gets wasted going to the bloated Oregon Edu-cay-shun Department.  Meanwhile, Oregon has nothing to show for all that money. 

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