Sugoi & Yokunai

Your taxes will likely have to go up, despite Biden’s $400K pledge.  It's clear – money has to be printed to support spending. All the money for forgiving college loans and feeding illegal migrants contributes to inflation, as this printed money enters the economy.
High prices are not due to "corporate greed" (as Biden says) or the just the Fed pumping up banks (as the Redditors like to say).

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So much COVID-19 revisionist history.

Here's my favorite video of the day:

If you want to publish in The Lancet, you can't say "male" and "female" anymore. You have to say "sex assigned at birth". Mental illness.

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Seattle is changing.  The Venezuelan street gang Tren De Aragua has infiltrated Riverton Park UMC's migrant camp in Tukwila. And Seattle business have to pay for private armed guards now, because the police have been depleted.

And Seattlites will keep voting for the same kind of Democrat leadership.

Public school defenders don't like the move to increase school vouchers. It would take more students out of public schools and allow parents to put their kids in private schools. Why are public schools being shunned? It's because of crap like this.  Teachers can't keep their sex lives nor their politics out of the classroom, and when people push back, they hide behind a "freedom of speech" defense.

Update: Portland Public Schools removed the anti-semitic book from their website.

The Oregon College of Oriental Medicine is closing. They spent money renovating an old hotel, and for a while it looked pretty spiffy, and they owned prime real estate in downtown Portland. No more. It's a liability now. Thanks for Ted Wheeler and city leadership.

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Someone found a way to hack into all the saved "memories" that Microsoft is building into their Windows 11 Recall. Yeah, if a hacker can do it, probably so can Redmond. No privacy.

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A child prodigy that remained a prodigy into adulthood. And he seems to be a nice guy. That's rare.

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Boy, those Oregon state psychiatrists sure have it good. They get paid way more than the typical salaries for psychiatrists in Oregon. So many of them on the state dole, and yet the state has so many mentally ill people. Why is that?

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Trump is Orange Mandela now.

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Many Oregon newspapers are shutting down or thinning out. They're just vehicles for ads now, basically. We still need local reporters, but less so than before. But reporters seem to get more eyeballs for what they post on X/Twitter than on MSM media, especially since Elon Musk took over.  The old business model is over.

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Data centers will consume 9% of electricity by 2030. The electrical grid is not going to be able to handle this. Probably won't handle it should everyone switch to EVs.

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Microsoft has a problem. Or so, this pundit thinks. MS needs to have a mobile device that people will want to carry around. Like a phone. Because Apple is going to eat their lunch. We'll see. Meta doesn't seem to be worried about this.

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It was all fake. The masks. The 6-feet. The "safe and effective" vax. Now it's all coming out – in 2024.

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How will SCOTUS rule on Martin vs Boise? If they don't do the right thing, blue states will be utterly destroyed.

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Oregon keeps losing factory jobs, while the nation improves. Oregon economists still blame the coronavirus epidemic. That was 3 to 4 years ago. The rest of the nation has recovered and Oregon is getting worse. Why?

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College students are finding out that after they graduate, no one values their commitment to activism. It's a liability, not an asset.

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AI-generated news didn't do so well today.

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This is a first. Epigenetic changes can cause cancer. You don't have to have a gene mutation for cancer to arise. This was seen in fruit fluies, and was a transient loss of Polycomb components, which cause a loss of transcriptional silencing that was irreversible.

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Why Asia Stopped Having Kids. The author has some wild theories. First of all, the assumption that Asians are all adherents of Confucius-type beliefs.  He says "To the extent we want to say that East Asians share a culture, I think the theory must be that the people of these nations have certain traits in common." "So yes, East Asians share a common culture." "the fact that Confucius appealed to East Asians in the first place is itself kind of weird. The guy’s entire philosophy is 'Hey just listen to your parents and government, ok guys? Things will go much easier that way.'” "Much can be explained by the idea that East Asians struggle without a script, which is related to being high on conformity." (What?)  "The idea that they struggle without a script can explain why in the United States, Asian females are about three times more likely to marry whites than are Asian men."  So he concludes that the problem is conformity and that Asians lack a script.  I don't think so. What I notice is a sense of gloominess in much of Asia, and in Japan, the men have favored an androgynous girlie-look. The era of manly men has long past, and I have noticed that this started around that time of the economic crash in the 1990s. When Japanese men felt demoralized and ashamed. But my observations are not a researched academic study, and there are probably complex factors at play.

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So it's recognized that America has a doctor shortage. Gee, they shouldn't have fired those doctors who didn't want to get the experimental jab. So what does the government propose now? Take in foreign docs right away, without making them do a residency first, to make sure they're a good fit. No, they can start on day 1. Think of who is likely to want to leave home for another country. Probably those who can't find a job locally. The successful ones will stay where they are. But the ones who aren't successful are likely to apply for an overseas job. At least make them do one year of residency. I love the justification of this idea with anecdotes of how good Dr. So-and-so was. I've known doctors who clearly did not have the background and training that American doctors go through. But the Democrats will likely pass this, because standards have been lowered for everything else, so why not?

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Here's another advocate for universal basic income. I've been through this before, where there is an unassailable fact, like up is up, and not down. Or evil is bad and good is good. And someone will make some argument based on isolated circumstances that support the argument that sometimes evil can be good, or sometimes red can be blue. This is like that. Just giving money to people without it being earned has to mean involuntarily taking it away from someone else. You can't create wealth from thin air.  I know that the Federal Reserve does it to shore up the house of cards that is the fractional reserve banking system, but that doesn't mean the practice should be expanded. It never makes sense. The argument that it makes some particular person happier if they get free money doesn't convince me. Supporters of this idea should all pool their own money and give it away. Leave mine alone. And once you start a broad program like this, and get politicians involved, it is near impossible to reverse and abrogate. It becomes another tax, on top of everything else. And our country has such as poor handle on the number of mouths that need feeding that we can't even begin to figure out how much this is going to cost.

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Oregon school officials search for solutions to funding crisis. The school system wants more money, even as it bleeds students. Now they are feeling the effects of people fleeing the public schools, which are no longer places to get a good education anymore. The state is discovering that there isn't enough people to fund all the things they want to fund.

Steve Duin makes a good point about how Portland treats the wealthy, upon whom much of their tax revenue is dependent.

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This is a great summary of what the Trump conviction was all about. Trump has raised over $200 million in 24 hours since his conviction. He is unstoppable. The cheating and dirty tricks will have to be more blatant. Because the thought of Trump being president again is simply intolerable to the Democrats.  Well, enough politics.

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This is how Japan deals with the problem of high salt intake. Develop a spoon that sends an electric current to your tongue to fool it into signaling that there is salty food. Is this a joke, Japan?

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We're toast. So the U.S. is short on munitions. Maybe we shouldn't have given so much to Ukraine? And we no longer have the largest military. China and India have larger military personnel. The U.S. is third, but with DEI and transgender people in service, it's not clear how well the military will function. Tiny North Korea is not far behind and neither is Russia. If WWIII actually breaks out, I'm not confident that we will prevail.

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A male contraceptive gel that you rub on your shoulder may be safe and effective. Where have I heard that phrase before? Well, as the sperm says: "You have to be lucky every single time. I only have to be lucky once."

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I remember when the Copenhagen Wheel came out. Now there is this Clip. Looks weird and will probably fall off (and break) unexpectedly, but this is version 1. We'll see.

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Kara Swisher was one of the people that broke the Sam Altman story last fall. Now maybe her reading on the whole story is suspect? That's what some people think.

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Biomedical paper retractions have quadrupled in 20 years — why?  Probably because AI has made it easier to generate papers than ever before. Maybe it's because there's also better fraud detection software? And folks like Sholto David are especially good at calling it out.

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Every so often, you come across someone describing their attempts to eliminate Google from their lives. Here's another one. It's possible to find suitable alternatives, except for YouTube. There is still nothing else that replaces it.

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AI Uncensored. Here's a search engine that purports to give you the unvarnished truth, without any DEI filtering, or any other filtering. You get what it's been trained on. But what has it been trained on? What LLM model is it based on? Can't tell, and there is no info I an find. FreedomGPT does something similar. You can look under the hood here.

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Here's another example of why you must verify what an AI says. A man lost money in a scam for believing he had Facebook's customer support number, even when he was using Meta's own Llama3 on their own site.  Everything must be verified, or else it could be false. Remember, LLMs only generate responses that LOOK LIKE they could be correct.

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Map of the most common surnames in every country.

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It's disquieting that we're only now learning about a major hack that happened last year. Hundreds of internet routers were destroyed. The perpetrators are either unknown, or no one is saying.

And here's a recent major hacking of Santander Bank. What's going on?

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Oregon defendants without a publicly-appointed attorney must be set free. Another consequence of Oregon not being able to hire qualified people for key positions. There are consequences for making Oregon an unliveable state.  When Oregon needed healthcare providers so that they could get Medicaid established, they defined providers loosely – physician assistants, naturopaths, optometrists, dentists – almost anyone with a white coat, it seemed. Why can't they do something similar for attorneys, like paralegals?  That's got to be better than setting criminals free. More here.

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Nice article on Gordon's Fireplace Shop, which is such an icon now. It's Portland's symbol – the Taj Mahal of the city. It's a monument to Ted Wheeler and Mike Schmidt.  We should just encase it in glass and preserve it. 

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Here's an example of people having a discussion about whether a radio station that broadcasts the time is an American idea. Apparently it is, but the person defending that position has to qualify his statement with "I’m not particularly patriotic, but this kind of thing feels particularly American." Why not just say it feels American and be proud of it? Afraid of being tagged "right-wing"?

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Dream on, Portland. Buildings like these are for cities where the people respect property and have low crime. And you can't even afford these now, can you?

Well, it looks like the OHSU-Legacy merger has reached the agreement stage. It just needs to be signed off by the regulators. I hope this is the right move, and not some kind of AOL/Time-Warner or HP/Compaq deal.

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Providence nurses agree to strike. Last June it was the PPMC nurses. After the St. Vincent nurses striked in 2022. Now they want to strike again, along with nurses at all the other Providence hospitals in Oregon except PPMC. They was more money and less patient load. They sure do look tired in the picture in the article.

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South Korean scientists find a way to manufacture tiny diamonds for industrial use. Thew jewelry cartel is safe for now.

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Some clues leaked as to how Google curates their search results. Google judges how worthy a page is when it comes to election or COVID-19 related content. They prioritize Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust, but they get to judge what these are. I wish they would just find out a way to weed out click farm content and just present things as they are, without the editorial curation.

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Cool. Chinese scientists supposedly cured diabetes mellitus type I using a patient's stem cells.

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Ah, Jan Leike has joined Anthropic. Congrats.

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Cybercriminals are posing as "helpful" geeks on StackOverflow, and suggesting that users download their solution to the problem posed. This loads malware.  You just can't have something nice without a**holes ruining it.

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Knots for (almost) every occasion.

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Someone keeps trying. Spinnr is trying to be an app that connects lonely people. How long before jerks infiltrate the app and ruin it for everyone? These things never work in real life.

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Using drones to photograph overhead is not protected by the First Amendment, at least not in North Carolina. Because the state wants surveyor's license fees paid.

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Study finds that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers to programming questions are wrong. I don't use ChatGPT.  Claude3 Opus and GPT-4o are my go-to bots. Even if something doesn't work, you get immediate feedback and you can ask for another suggestion, which usually works. I don't think this is a problem.

People are noticing emergent properties in LLMs.  I told you this would happen. The bigger the brain, the more you can expect.

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Just get rid of mail-in voting. Folks like Ron Wyden want the USPS not to consolidate their services to save money, because it may delay the counting of election ballots and some might miss the deadline. The USPS should be able to take measures to be more efficient, and if elections can't be done by mail, then lets go back to in-person voting.  We should be able to know who the winners are the same day as the election.

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Tina Kotek rails that we still can't get enough public defenders. There seems to be never enough qualified people for any job requiring skills in Oregon.

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"Culture of complaint"  OHSU's head of human resources is stepping down. But don't break out the champagne just yet – her replacement may be worse.

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OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's ouster last year. Doesn't look good. So now Sutskever is gone, and Altman is back in charge, pretty much allowed to do whatever he wants.

Meanwhile, California is considering a proposed law (SB 1047) to regulate AI. Some people are strongly against it. If it passes, it might make California AI companies leave the state for more favorable areas. Oracle is already leaving. Washington is looking better already. But Silicon Valley is shoring up California's treasury, so this could really hurt the state. Hollywood probably can't do it alone.

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MIT researchers develop a fiber from which a fabric can be made to block sound. Very nice.

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Now the COVID scientists are complaining that they are getting harrassed. Like Fauci and Hotez. The damage has been done. I can't feel too sorry for them. Shoulda been honest.

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What happened to MySpace? The Murdochs bought it. Put tons of ads on it. Turned it into something else. And Facebook took over. Somethings are better left alone. Like the Internet.

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Yeah, ousting Mike Schmidt is just the start. We still have Ted Wheeler and the Portland City Council. But it's a start, I guess.

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The massive strain of illegal immigration on the school system. Isn't this what conservatives have been saying? People complain about inflation, and many libertarians blame the Fed. But they don't seem to care about the money that is injected into the system by supporting all these illegal immigrants with food and housing. Whether it's injecting money into the banks or injecting money into housing programs or food vouchers, it's still injected money. Maybe some of it is debt financing, but that's not good either. And then there's student loan forgiveness. The end result of that is also money injected into the system. Yeah, it makes the injectees feel good, but at the cost of inflation for everyone else. Like legislating an increase in minimum wage, without any increase in productivity. With a stroke of a pen, somebody gets richer, but the majority of us don't.  And increased demand for goods is inflationary until a new equilibrium is reached. Our economy is not ready to absorb a mass of new consumers that just increases the demand side. We need to increase productivity, and that's much harder to do. The Democrats were never good at making that happen.

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And here's an example: Pacific Foods was sold to Campbell Soups, who will not shut down the Tualatin plant, resulting in a loss of jobs and productivity there. Which means unemployment, and more people who will seek checks from the state, and who won't be paying income tax anymore. The company says the closure is due to it being an aging facility with an inefficient configuration, but rather than refurbish it, their solution was to close it.

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Google is finding out that the licensing deal with Reddit was probably a bad idea. Why would you want to train your model on juvenilia. All those stupid jokes and inane commentary were really of no value to anyone, even the original posters and anyone else on the thread. Think harder next time before you buy, Google. Just because people add "reddit" to their searches, doesn't mean that all of Reddit is worth training on.

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NASA Advances Six Pioneering Space Technologies for Tomorrow.

It's becoming clear that Oregon's government really just panders to Portland and Eugene. The rest of the state would rather take their governance from Boise.

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Oregon is in 4th place for the state with the lowest number of children.  Families are moving out, and for good reason. This is why Oregon employers can't find qualified people to fill important positions. And why leadership positions seem to be filled by the unqualified or barely-qualified.

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Gee, wonder why.  "Two years ago, Oregon lawmakers passed a new law requiring growers to provide farmworkers with overtime pay – a requirement opponents said could drive small, family-owned farms out of business.  In response, the state crafted a zero-interest loan program to help farmers cover that cost. But despite extensive outreach and marketing, much of the $10 million made available through the program remains untapped a year later, data shows." 

Maybe it's because it's just a loan, and one has to pay it back in two years. That's not going to counter the harm of that policy. 

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Scientific misconduct has cause the public not to trust the biopharma industry. Trust lost is hard to regain.

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New research reveals that exercise can rewire brains and erase traumatic memories. Well, if you're a mouse.  Seriously, this might be why people have reported that what got them through a difficult time was exercise.

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Big Tech is bringing on a new energy crisis.  Because AI and data centers require LOTS of energy.  More than can be delivered by renewables. Nuclear energy just has to happen.

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How to be a masculine man.  Ed Latimore is a stoic and the older brother (or helpful friend) every boy ought to have. His website is an interesting read.

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Google is having problems. It just updated its algorithms again, which it does periodically, and the fallout is that there are winners and losers. Plus, it has to cleanse its output of weird AI-generated results. Sounds like some people have a lot of work to do.

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This sounds like it could be interested just to plan geek meetings, instead as a way for singles to meet new people, as some seem to think it might be. It's called Flying Pig. When I was younger, I often imagined conducting a get-together of people interested in some specialized interest, and host a gathering, with a featured speaker to start the conversation flowing. Of course, this was before social media, and before video conferencing was made easier. It's not going to stay free forever, though, and that's when things will break down, I predict.

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Someone on Reddit wants an alternative to how news is reported and presented for consumption. I like reading postings like this to see if someone truly has something novel to offer. This person hasn't thoroughly thought out the problem, and really has no solution. Journalism is most lousy and biased as hell now. The value sometimes is more in the commentary, when motivated individuals shed needed light on a topic that the journalist fails to report. I've noticed that articles from mainstream sources in Seattle and Portland are really superficial and one-sided. I often get relevant news (with video) on X/Twitter, which I once studiously tried to avoid, as social media is a disease in itself. I've concluded that no one will present you with the news you want to read and will value. You have to curate this on your own.

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Swordfighting is not what you think. Not a game, but a matter of life and death. The last paragraph is significant.

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The early history of cryonics is gruesome. Truly, the thing of nightmares.

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There's a new privacy-oriented smartphone, called Unplugged.  I have questions, which the website doesn't answer. I still don't see how they can solve the cell-tower ping problem, which gives you away.  Truly, the FBI/CIA are not going to be fooled by this phone, so I'm not sure who this phone is being marketed to.

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Portland high school’s Healthy Masculinity Club is ‘a place for guys to not be ‘guys’’. Huh?  One of the problems with today's society is that men are being told to be emasculated. I look at the men in their twenties and thirties and there is a lot of soy in their blood. Masculinity is frowned upon. No wonder we're seeing a rise in transgender crossovers. Any masculiinity is always prefaced with the word "toxic".  Even Boy Scouts are now just "scouts" and females are allowed.  Thank goodness for other organizations like Trail Life.

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And in a related story: Oregon's birth rate is among the nation's lowest.  All those soyboys don't know what to do, I guess. Well, there goes the taxbase.

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David Sinclair has stepped down from being the head of Academy for Health & Lifespan Research. No surprises. There hasn't been much ground-breaking research coming out of his lab. I see he's still a believer in resveratrol, while the rest of the field has moved on.

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Even at Apple, there is no sign of a clear AI strategy.  Incorporating AI into things seems like keeping up with the Joneses, rather than implementing something that is truly of value. As Google has shown us, the world has no use for poorly-implemented LLM technology. Don't shove generative AI into things without clear demonstration of benefit. Already, I suspect many folks are using the "&utm=14" trick to remove AI from search results.

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AI tutors are quietly changing how kids in the US study, and the leading apps are from China.  Well, one might as well learn from the people who are churning out the world's brightest kids. Kids who know how to use AI will have an advantage over kids who don't.

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The Brain Stores 10x More Info Than Thought.  My first thought was, "Who thought that?"  Kidding aside, it's good that we can store more than we thought. Howefer retrieval is the key.  We got to access all that stored knowledge more effectively.

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How do you tokenize pi? It's interesting to see how the different foundational model approach this problem.  This doesn't translate into performance, but it's possible that this might explain why raw models struggle with math problems.

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What went wrong with federal student loans?  One of the worst things Obama did was transfer the student loan business to the federal government.  Funny how Maxine Waters was completely unaware of this.  Since the government was underwriting all the loans, why wouldn't colleges hike their tuition?  That's leaving money on the table.

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