18 December 2024

What?  Google makes more money from Windows than Microsoft? Life is strange, sometimes.

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This preprint led to this enthusiastic X post that doctors better start packing it up because AI is going to take their jobs away. Taking a look at that post, it's clear that if doctors follow the advice of o1-preview, they will bankrupt insurance companies, or be met by firm denials for several of the suggested tests.  In fact, the justifcation for some of the recommended tests is quite weak. Others have critiqued OpenAI's Strawberry model, and their findings are very interesting. OpenAI has never published on what data their models have been trained, but it's likely that they were trained on New England Journal of Medicine's CPC cases. As such, their uncanny ability to predict may be nothing more than data leakage – performing inference on data that you've already seen and have been trained on.  I, too, get the sense that this makes o1 overestimate the likelihood of very rare diseases it sees, making them seem more common than they actually are. Plus, there is this observation that if you query it again, it may give you a different answer.  We don't know how the prompts were constructed, or whether this was a zero-shot or one-shot query, but still.  But the paper does reveal that there are cases where o1 gets the diagnosis that GPT-4 missed, so what if you relied just on one LLM?  Some have suggested that doctors consult two LLMs in tandem, but has time for that?

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Scientists have discovered a protein that helps cancer cells become resistant to CAR_T cell therapy. This protein is YTHDF2, and is a N6-methyladenosine reader, and regulates antitumor functions of macrophages.  The precise mechanism of this is unclear, but blocking can lead to tumor death, and these scientists have identified an agent that can achieve this, called CCI-38. Blocking YTHDF2 enhances CAR-T cell activity. Original article here.

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MIT scientists may have found a way to magnetize antiferromagnetic materials with terrahertz light (high end of infrared, just before microwave).  Could have applications in memory storage technology.

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I remember there were high hopes that metformin was going to enhance breast cancer therapies. That hasn't panned out.  There's still hope that it has antiaging properties, and many in the field are already taking it.  We'll see.

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17 December 2024

Magnus Carlsen lives in Norway, and his 2022 tax obligation was more than he earned that year.  And we're supposed to emulate this? Is this what having "free healthcare" is supposed to be worth?  It's said that healthcare should be free, high quality and universal, but in truth, you can only have at most two out of the three. You just pick which two you want.

And here's what someone posted about their insurance denial. Yeah, sure, a lot of the time, you can treat pulmonary embolism as an outpatient, but not all the time, and a physician may want to be safe and not risk making the wrong judgment. This is what's wrong with healthcare. Don't make the patient suffer from the physician's decision.

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9 Bad Examples of Government Waste in Oregon.

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You mean it hasn't already? Google will train its AI on YouTube videos. 

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I know I'm not.  Most iPhone users uninterested in Apple AI.  I never really had a need for AI on my phone. I prefer to choose my own LLM, thank you.

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There's a website dedicated to saving Standard Time.

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Scientists at NovoNordisk have created a smart insulin, NNC2215, whose activity changes with the glucose level. Right now, the studies are only preclinical. This could be a game-changer for insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus.

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Oh, brother. Climate scientists report that the earth is warming faster than they can explain. The best explanation is that because ocean-crossing ships produce less cloud-generating emissions, there is less sunlight reflectivity, and more heat absorption. Can't win for losing.  But not a single mention of the fact that we're at solar maximum now. Nope, everything's gotta be anthropogenic, or else there's no justification for carbon taxes, right?

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16 December 2024

Text messages are definitely not really secure.  Use Telegram or Signal. 

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How they select the next Prime Minister of Singapore.
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The invention that gave rise to all those McMansions.

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Too much iron is not good for you. Well yes there are iron-storage disorders, but blood-letting? Too much of that can lead to iron deficiency. There is a happy medium. 

15 December 2024

Stablecoins could eventually grow to 10% of the U.S. money supply.  It's all fiat currency, but once enough people trust it, it'll be close to being as good as the dollar.

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Many student loan borrowers are in for a big, bad surprise in 2025.  This may help reduce the national debt somewhat, but I suspect so many people will default. But they do need to pay it back. If their degree is not worth it to them to pay back, why should it be worth it to the rest of us?

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USNWR recently ranked the states in terms of livability, and Oregon was tenth from the bottom. The state scored poorly on crime, education, economy and opportunity.  WalletHub put Oregon at 9th from the bottom, so it's not just one publication's opinion. And here's a report that overdose deaths grew 33% in 2023, even as national rates decline.  Non-profits, which have been sucking up so much government money, are going broke.  But Portland is going to spend $300 million on climate change related projects. Oregon is gearing up to provide free health care to illegal immigrants.

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a href="https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/energy/just-a-fraction-of-the-hydrogen-hidden-beneath-earths-surface-could-power-earth-for-200-years-scientists-find" target="_blank">Hydrogen in the ground could be a source of power for 200 years. The problem is to locate the reservoirs of hydrogen and extract it, without expending too much energy in doing so. I can't believe that such a light has would avoid dissipation for this long.

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Gilded age of medicine? Not for most doctors, that's for sure.
Meanwhile, in some places in the U.S., private-equity firms now own more than half of all medical practices within certain specialties. “We are being picked clean by private equity,” a New Jersey-based radiologist said at a recent meeting of the American Medical Association.

Private-equity firms have learned that they “don’t have to make things better or make them more efficient. You can just change one small thing and make a ton more money.” They are hardly the only corporations to learn this lesson. Increasingly, health insurers, private hospitals, and even nonprofits are behaving as though they aim first to extract revenue, and only second to care for people. Patients often are viewed less as humans in need of care than consumers who generate profit.

Berwick said that his own physician’s practice had recently been acquired by UnitedHealth. One day, he asked his doctor, “Anything different now?”  “Two things,” the doctor replied. “I have to see more patients each day. And my patients have new diagnoses that I didn’t put there.”
Obamacare made it harder for independent practices to survive. So physicians have had to sell their clinics to hospitals or private equity.

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Speaking of healthcare, here's an interesting chart:

The ronin has discussed this before. Wealthier nations spend more on healthcare, because they can. it's not necessarily an indictment of the healthcare system itself, but inefficiencies and profiteering do exist.

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14 December 2024

There are people who need far less sleep than average. Several mutations have been identified in certain genes that could explain this. But what these genes do is unclear. I am not so blessed and need my sleep time, but I can get away with less for a while, before the need for sleep returns and I must nap. Short naps seem to be restorative, but there is more to it, depending on my emotional state, etc.

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A third kind of magnetism has been discovered - altermagnetism.  There's actually three other types, though: diamagnetism paramagnetism and ferromagnetism.  Anti-ferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism are just variants of ferromagnetism. But altermagnetism is different, and could have practical applications.

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Wow! I love perpetual calendars as a kid and thought they were works of genius, until I found out how regular the calendar is. But this one really takes it to the extreme, and is designed with so much thought and planning. Seeing such genius and then looking at the world today, knowing that there are a lot of people who would destroy it in an instant, in the name of some stupid cause, is really depressing. We live in the world where we can't have nice things. Even the Chapel of Bankers and Merchants is a work of art. We have truly regressed.

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How to hack an electronic road sign. I've seen this before. This is why people are able to hijack these things, and I'm surprised that they haven't improved security.

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About 1 in 7 science papers are fake.  And it's going to get worse. I read the paper mainly out of curiosity to see how the estimate was determined, and it's just a metasurvey.  No one really knows, and this is really disturbing.

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You can't trust AI-generated news headlines, even from big names, such as Apple.  This is really sad.

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Speaking of not being able to have nice things, this is an example of the Ronin's Second Law again. People wanted BlueSky to be like the old Twitter days, when left-wing viewpoints predominated. But open it up to the public, and you know there will be stuff you don't like. But they want to ban free speech, instead of just ignoring it, like adults. Welcome to the real world.  Nothing stays nice once everyone gets access. Get used to it.

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Could skin bacteria be turned into a vaccine?  Staphylococcus epidermidis seems to be suitable for something like this.

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Some people think that Apple will revive making WiFi routers again, like the Apple Extreme.  This could be interesting.  My old Airport Extremes are still working and doing fine. Great workmanship.

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13 December 2024

Oregon is number one again, and not in a good way.  The Portland Clean Energy Fund is a first-of-its-kind climate, social- and racial-justice program.  The climate change religion is one of the biggests grifts in history.  So much needless waste of money and resourced.

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Black plastic kitchen utensils aren't bad for you after all.  It was just a math error by the science reporter. The reporter who made the mistake (a Chinese person, too, ironically – thought they were supposed to be good in math) defends the report:
“However, it is important to note that this does not impact our results,” Liu told National Post. (It doesn't?) “The levels of flame retardants that we found in black plastic household items are still of high concern, and our recommendations remain the same.”
Modern journalism, right there.

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U.S. automobiles aren't getting spiffy efficient laser headlights. Why? Partly because of regulations and partly because of improvements in LED lights. Oh well.

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MediSearch just launched, as a chat-interface medical Q&A engine. Seems better than the run-of-the-mill ChatGPT, but I didn't try the Pro (paid) version.

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How does that work?  Electrons in the pentalayer graphene layer exhibit fractional charge.

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There's an independent nervous system surrounding the heart.  At least in zebrafish, in which the research was conducted.

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This is one of the reasons why drug manufacturing needs to be done in the U.S.A.  Watch out if you're taking potassium supplements!

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I've heard this before.  AI is running out of data to train on. The question is, does it have enough already? Data is always being generated but apparently it's not going directly to train new models. Could that be a good thing for humanity? Should we start being careful how much data we send?

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The Dunbar number is 4. The optimal number of people to have a good conversation is 4. Any more and it splits into two separate conversations.

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Doctors Say Dealing With Health Insurers Is Only Getting Worse.  So only now are we seeing articles like these?

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5% of all Canadian deaths are by suicide.  What a sick country.

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Something else to worry about: mirror bacteria. These are bacteria with chiral structure that renders them impervious to existing antibiotics.  But these are the very scientists working on it. They need to stop themselves!

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12 December 2024

Tori Kelly's Sleigh Ride from a couple of years ago is notable for the amazing jazz chords. This guy really brings out the harmonies – what a treat. 


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11 December 2024

Good coffee can add 2 years of life, and help you age more gracefully. Good news for the Ronin.  Already started drinking coffee again, and this will encourage me to continue.

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Moderate physical activity can make up for poor-sleep induced memory problem in the elderly. Makes sense, as exercise stimulates release of BDNF. There's already a lot of studies associating physical activity (exercise) with better cognition in the elderly.

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Scientists are fleeing Argentina because they can't get grants anymore. This is a problem with a lot of science. So much is supported by government grants. And there is so much junk science. But even good science needs support. We really need someone to figure out which science really deserves funding, but so much is political. Especially climate science, which is really more like a religion now. I kinda agree with Millei, having read some of the studies on climate change, which seem poorly done. For a country like Argentina, perhaps scientists should leave climate studies to other countries which can afford to spend money on such research that really goes nowhere (Sorry, Nature).

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Five medical breakthroughs in 2024. Actually, osimertinib has been around for a few years, and the discovery was not new to 2024. But the others were nice.

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Tokyo governor announces 4-day work week, to help with the dwindling fertility rate. I dunno, how do you make Japanese men desire Japanese women  How do you make Japanese women want to be mothers instead of "empowered" office workers?

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The quasiparticle, called a semi-Dirac fermion, was first theorized 16 years ago, but was only recently spotted inside a crystal of semi-metal material called ZrSiS. The observation of the quasiparticle opens the door to future advances in a range of emerging technologies from batteries to sensors, according to the researchers.
The universe is weirder than we realized.

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Apple's Siri is now blended with ChatGPT.  So now Siri can help with homework?  And boy, Tim Cook sure loves his emojis.  That's a feature with just about every Apple update release.

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This is what happens when you don't pay down your loan. Average student loan debt increased in first half of 2024 in Oregon. How does that happen? People stopped paying during COVID-19 and just figured it would suddenly go away by itself. Well, it hasn't. What are the rest of us supposed to do about it?

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10 December 2024

Google unveils Willow, a quantum computing chip.

Google has built a computing chip that takes just five minutes to complete tasks that would take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years for some of the world’s fastest conventional computers to complete.

It's more like that many years for a standard computer to confirm the computation. What Google really announced was a breakthrough in an error correction benchmark, using their new chip. But people in the field think it's a big deal, so I guess it is.

And what did Satoshi Nakamoto say if quantum computing threatened to break blockchain and render bitcoin worthless?

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AI slop is invading Oregon's journalism. Well, it's just one small rag in Ashland. And to be fair, there's been worse human-generated slop in Portland.

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The cumulative incidence of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, sleep disorders, and sexual disorders at three months following COVID-19 vaccination were higher in the vaccination group than no vaccination group. However, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders showed lower cumulative incidence in the vaccination group than in the non-vaccinated group.
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MacBook Pro 2026 won't have a notch.  It'll have an M5 chip and OLED displays, and a 16.3 in screen.  A long time to wait, though.

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James Webb Telescope is making the universe more confusing. Astronomers thought they had those Cepheid variables all figured out, but not so.  That's why we keep exploring.

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Claude AI is good but is running into production issues.  As a coding assistant, it's great for small stuff and is very polite and gracious. But for more complicated stuff, it repeats mistakes that you've told it about. Sounds like a limit in its conversational buffer.
o1 now has a Pro version that costs $200 /month to get access. It's quite impressive from the reports.

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Patrick Soon-Shiong wants the LA Times to incorporate an AI-based bias meter. Naturally, some people think it's laughable. He'll probably take it down because so much of their reporting will turn out to be biased. They just don't want you to know.  Bias meters should be in the browser, not offered by the news media. How can we trust them?  I'll select my own meter, thank you.

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Wow, El Salvador struck it rich with bitcoin, now it has discovered $3 trillion on gold deposits. Talk about National Treasure. I think electing Bukele was the country's first lucky move.  I hope he turns the country into a Singapore of the Western Hemisphere.

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9 December 2024

As long as there is some connection between the brain and the spinal cord, it may be possible for brain stimulation to allow paraparetic individuals to walk again with deep brain stimulation.

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Yes! I have noticed this myself.  Average person knows if their day has been ruined by 8:36 a.m.  Some days you just know that you aren't going to have a good day.

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The healthy dietary pattern was characterized by a higher intake of fruits, whole grains, legumes, vegetables, milk, and other dairy products, whereas the unhealthy dietary pattern was characterized by a higher intake of red and processed meat, alcohol, and both refined and sugar-sweetened beverages.
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Looks like there is an association between genetic caffeine metabolism, habitual caffeine intake and cognitive function in the domains of social cognition and executive function. Doesn't matter if you're a slow or rapid metabolizer of caffeine. You'll either have enhanced social or enhanced executive cognition.

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His resignation and message should set off alarms with OHSU leaders. Instead, in the public announcement of his resignation, OHSU appeared to treat the change as a ho-hum shift that reflects the obliviousness that Druker is calling out.

...the institution has been slow to recognize the symbolic significance to the greater community of Druker’s resignation.
Indeed.

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Diamonds can now be created from scratch in the lab in just 15 minutes.  Probably not jewelry quality and size, but still. There are a lot of more interesting gems that I'd place more value on.

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We're number one!  Oregon in the news again, top spot for another bad reason. We have the most homelessness families per capita.  And the reason is that we encourage it. We throw money at it. So naturally, they come. Criddlers get to live life how they want, have free use of the city, and Portland pays for their needs. Tents, tarps, boofing kits. Abandoned buildings to explore and take over. More NGOs and agencies being spawned to take advantage of the money flow.

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