25 May 2024

More on the Windows Recall feature, which is being called a "privacy minefield".  Happily, I'm not a Windows user.

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Scientists have figured out how to thaw frozen brain tissue, such that it retains "normal function". They only tested it on organoids, not on intact brains, so don't get excited.

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AI headphones will let you focus on the speech of just one person in the crowd. Kind of like parabolic microphones.

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Aeromine Technologies plans to install bladeless wind turbines on the tops of as many roofs as they can.  Still ugly, but less so than the giant propellors. At least it won't kill birds.

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I thought this was a joke. How to NOT give someone mental illness.  Seems that the young these days are prone to this kind of mass hysteria.

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24 May 2024

UCLA medical school found to have severely compromised their standards to let black applicants in. And if you refuse a minority physician, you are judged racist. This is how unconscious bias starts – and perpetuates.

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Cannabis tops alcohol as America's drug of choice. Getting dumber and dumber. And more psychotic. Just what we need. /sarc.

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Google's AI-assisted search results now cites The Onion!  Garbage-in, garbage-out.

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The world's top chip makers can flip a kill switch, should China invade Taiwan. The companies are ASML and TSMC. China will not get the crown jewels.

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California is crazy. After Learning Her TA Would Be Paid More Than She Was, This Lecturer Quit. Lefty policies, while trying to correct inequities, seems to always do it the wrong way, which leads to more problems. Everyone wants more money, and there are so many unions vying to get more money for their members. If you are not a union member, you will be taken advantage of. Eventually it leads to absurdities, like the one in the article.

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Google Search is getting to be a joke now. They've ruined their brand. Inserting AI into the mix has only led to trouble.

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More on the Greater Idaho story.  Maybe it'll happen.  On Tina Kotek's watch.

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23 May 2024

Why did the cardiac arrest survival odds decrease in 2023?  Dr. Jonathan Jui blames it on fentanyl. But is that really true? No, it's not, and now his office says that "the intention [of the statistics] is training not formal reporting". Whatever that means. Yet he refuses to change the standards, and

ambulance service is in a crisis because of standards that require two paramedics on each ambulance, rather than one paramedic and one less-trained emergency medical technician. Those critics, including the county’s ambulance provider, American Medical Response, say the staffing requirement has made it impossible to field as many ambulances as the Portland area needs, contributing to slow response times. During a cardiac arrest, rapid treatment is essential for survival.

He's digging his heels in.

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Maxine Dexter won over Susheela Jayapal, but apparently her policies are not very different. Yeah, Oregonians are so fed up – they've decided to vote for another progressive.

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CNBC ridicules Americans who think we're in another recession.  Fools. Don't they believe the manipulated numbers issued by the BLS?  “America has the best economy in the world,” they quote Biden, without any commentary or rebuttal. Don't believe your lying eyes, America.

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Sign of the times.  Seattle's Pacific Place mall sells for steep discount.  Follow the money.

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Biden cancels $7.7 billion in debt. One man shouldn't control this much money. Not only is this unfair, but it worsens inflation even more for everyone.  All just for votes.

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Federal judge dismisses lawsuit brought by doctors and a basketball legend about "pandemic rules that restricted doctors from speaking out against “the mainstream COVID narrative". This should have gone on.

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And the Kaiser system is calling out for doctors who were fired due to vaccine requirements to come back and be re-hired.  Looks like they're short on doctors now. I imagine other healthcare systems are short as well.  Too bad.

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Looks like Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega-Pedersen has had enough of East Portland, and so has moved to the west side. Can't live with the consequences of her own policies.

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22 May 2024

Anthropic publishes paper showing insights gained on how one of their mid-size models thinks internally as it processes prompts. This is not so much of a mystery as is computer vision. We know that these chatbots operate by treating LLMs as Markov chains. But it's not so clear with convolution and pooling.

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Hawaii is a lousy state to own electric vehicles. You can charge at home, but when you're out and about, it's very risky. EVs are appropriate for just a few select areas. Places that are affluent, where people respect property, and where the commute is short. For the rest of America, especially those who aren't affluent themselves, it doesn't make sense.

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And electric grids "creak" as AI demand soars. NVIDIA needs electricity as do other chip makers. AI companies want access to a lot of electricity. Tech companies that operate data centers definitely need electricity.  EV owners want access to cheap electricity (or else why bother?).  Where's it all going to come from?

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What the hell. Is Biden going to enact race-based tax reform?

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Portland's got plenty of these. Smoking fentanyl linked to toxic brain damage in first reported case. There's a lot of brain-damaged folks walking around. Surprised this hasn't been noted earlier.

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First step in the right direction. Mike Schmidt looks to be defeated. He'll still be around until Jan 2025, though.

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Another report on C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS). It may be a great comet.  Fingers crossed.

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Microplastics were found in all human testicles from autopsy samples from 2016.  Dogs, too.  We're being poisoned.

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Another article that calls for letting physicians seek mental health without the stigma. As before, nothing will happen, and medical boards will still query healthcare providers as to whether or not they sought help for stress and burnout, and whether they are taking psychoactive medications. Being a doctor is very stressful, and this is one profession where you can get dinged if you seek help.

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Good for them! Crook County just agreed to join Greater Idaho.

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21 May 2024

Google's AI search summary results page is going to feature ads. Because it's Google, that's why. I think they're lost and don't know what to do now that everyone has access to AI.

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Well, I wouldn't go this far in characterizing Sam Altman, but the "Sky voice" incident is telling.  This shows you the moral framework of the guy who is directing much of the effort of LLM artificial intelligence now, and this is how he makes decisions. If you get in the way of his objectives, he will go around you. Is this a factor in why his safety team quit in droves?
Update (22 May 2024):

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Memory is so difficult to figure out, and there are so many theories as to how it operates. Now, a researcher feels that "sharp wave electric ripples" help consolidate memories and tag which ones are important for storage. Speculation, of course, but an intriguing theory. 

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Which countries have the happiest people? Here is the table, compiled by the World Happiness Report. Countries in northern Europe are the happiest, no surprise.  They can have nice things. War-torn and poor countries in Africa make up the bottom.  It's interesting that the wealthy Asian countries fall in the middle. They can have nice things, too, but somehow that's not enough to make them happy.

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Speaking of not having nice things, thieves are stealing the cables of EV chargers for their copper.  It just so happens the copper prices are hitting record levels. And in Biden's economy, people are doing what they have to do to survive. 

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Canada legalized cannabis, so now hospitalizations for seniors for cannabis intoxication have tripled. This ain't your grandpa's cannabis, you know.

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Why Portlanders are moving to Clark County.  The reasons are obvious. DA Mike Schmidt and Ted Wheeler, you have no power here.

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When should Oregon be able to block medical mergers?  Ordinarily, I would say that the state should stay out of this. Although nationwide the number of physicians employed by hospitals or hospital systems is only 41%, there is also private equity, which wasn't included. I think the number is higher in the Portland area, which is really too bad.  Should OHSU merge with Legacy? Will Legacy survive without it?

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Here's a nice story about the work of Vietnamese emigré, Bùi Tường Phong and Pixar's Toy Story. He created the Phong shading and reflection algorithms. The only thing is that his last name is Bùi because he apparently said so. Phong is actually his middle name.

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The French created a stamp to celebrate the baguette, and if you scratch it, you can smell the scent of baguettes.

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What do they have in common?  Childhoods of exceptional people. Some of them anyway. Many of them were homeschooled or privately tutored. You can't beat one on one teaching.

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University asks students to develop AI that is trained on their material. Students develop this. Then the University suspends them because the AI encourages cheating. Crazy.

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No more Apple stickers with your purchase.  One thing less to enjoy.

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Negativity bias.  When you only remember the negative things, especially when they concern you. So true.

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20 May 2024

OpenAI is losing employees. What's going on? The dissatisfaction seems to stem from Altman.

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Is it that easy? Apparently adding a simple option to your search query eradicates all the cruft from Google's search results. Just append "&udm=14" to the end of your query string. Gone are the Knowledge Panels and the ads.

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The Man Who Destroyed Portland. That could be one of a couple of men, but the New York Post gives the distinction to Mike Schmidt. His reputation is known nationally.

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Who thought this was something people would want? Windows will soon take regular snapshots of everything you do on your computer, so that you can search for stuff later on. Who knows what will be done with those snapshots. Will they go to Redmond? Is it going to use to train an AI model? It's very creepy, and given the ethics of corporations, I would avoid this completely. But who really knows if it's being shut off even if you click on that option?  More here.

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This graph has been making the rounds lately. This is why people feel that they've been financially stagnant these past four years. Because it's true.

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I thought we were supposed to emulate the Canadian healthcare system.

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19 May 2024

Is privacy worth it?  I know how this guy feels. It's an arms race to keep up with all the ways entities want to invade your privacy on the Internet (and elsewhere). Sometimes it seems like too much energy. But that's what they want. Don't give up. Make 'em work a little harder.

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safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products
Because that's where the money is.

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Over 50 years of climate change warnings. We've heard them all.

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Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain. This is re-establishing connections, especially in the dorsal column. Which is good that there doesn't need to be input from the brain. It's like the patellar reflex, which doesn't involve the brain at all. As it shouldn't.  And the research team is very international, I notice.
it is theoretically possible that AI research can develop partial or potentially alternative forms of consciousness that is qualitatively different from the human...
We can't expect AI to act like a human with "our" type of consciousness. It may develop and manifest before we recognize it as such.

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Ex-CDC director says it's high time to admit 'significant side effects' of COVID-19 vaccines. High time was 3 years ago. Where was this guy back then? Oh yeah...

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Interesting theory that excess levels of glucose can lead to higher levels of methylglyoxal, which inhibits the BRCA2 gene, which can lead to increased cancer development. So sugar is indeed bad for you, especially if you are a carrier of a mutated and dysfunctional BRCA2 gene.

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There is now talk that Section 230 will no protect Google. For a long time, Google has depended on that law to shield it from legal liability, the argument being that Google only displays search results, and does not actually produce any falsehood or harmful information. But now with AI, Google is indeed potentially generating falsehoods and misleading information. These are showing up in their Gemini demo. If AI-generated information is the default, then one can argue that Section 230 no longer applies.

Well, Google is apparently declaring the end of the Web. Probably something it helped destroy. I like the comment by Jeff Cunningham. So very true, as the Internet has been infiltrated by bots and privacy-invading trackers and ad-revenue supporting networks that sell your information to data brokers. And traditional sites we used to visit for news and entertainment and community, have been replaced by social media giants.

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We don't just want an AI-powered personal assistant, we want a private one. That's the rub.

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18 May 2024

Dem solutions beget more problems. Since the Dems made it so that mail-in ballots use business mail to return ballots, the USPS wants to hold onto them for counting so they know how much to bill. Which means that counting will be delayed until they finish and send the ballots over for vote counting.

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38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible. I would have guessed higher.

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How to meditate when you can't seem to do it. The zen masters all say "Just sit".

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“Outrageously” priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care. This wasn't on my bingo card ten years ago. Only rich obese are going to be able to get access. But diet and exercise are still free.

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Looks like Washington state is going to elect another Democrat to replace Democrat Jay Inslee.

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A lot. How Much Research Is Being Written by Large Language Models?  Some truly embarrassing stuff.  Does no one edit anymore?

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Can AI perceive emotion?  They can be trained on facial expression labeled datasets. But that isn't really understanding emotion. Even we humans (especially those with autism) struggle to correctly interpret facial expression.

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Google employees aren't happy with their salary. So what's new? Although these numbers look high, remember that these techies live in the Bay Area, and with California's taxes and fees, money can disappear quickly.

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No!  Geoff Hinton thinks we'll need some sort of universal basic income.  Bad idea. You do what you want in the UK, but leave the U.S. out of it. Money unearned is never a good idea. Even Alaska struggles to achieve this. Stay in your AI lane, Geoff.

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Why the Internet is boring. Is it boring? Depends on what you want and what you do? It can be a time-waster, sure. I know what I want to do, so it's not boring. Like life, it's what you make it.

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17 May 2024

Competition is good. Google enters the text-to-video fray with Veo, that is poised to be a rival to OpenAI's Sora.

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Portland State University wants to replace their Portland Auditorium with an expensive glass-and-steel edifice. I don't know, after letting activists trash the library. I don't think Portland can have nice things anymore. They need to take New York City's approach. Repair and maintain the architecture from the Golden Age, but for new construction – make it all barebones utilitarian and nothing fancy.

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Meta's CICERO has already shown that AI is capable of being a convincing liar when it wants to be. This can't be good. So when AI is capable of second- and third-order thinking, we'll never know if we're being fooled.

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NW Natural is looking into methane pyrolysis, which turns methane into molecular hydrogen and solid carbon. It takes extremely high temperatures for this, but they say it makes sense. Sure would be cheaper to just burn the methane, wouldn't it?

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This stuff with Tina Kotek's spouse sure looks like the Cylvia Hayes situation to me. How does this allowed to just happen?

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Some success with an HIV vaccine? Researchers at Duke may have found a way to elicit broadly-neutralizing antibodies. This is just the first step, but it's progress.

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Oh-oh.  Now that Ilya Sutskever's gone, OpenAI dissolved their safety team.

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Cabel Sasser has a cautionary tale about someone selling an Apple ID badge of Employee #10. Someone's not going to be happy when they read this blog post.

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SARS-CoV2 may not have been the first bioengineered organism to be unleashed on humans. It may have been Lyme disease and Babesiosis.  So what's really going on at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center?

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Even the New York Post has recognized that Mike Schmidt has destroyed Portland. His reputation reaches out to the east. Yes "people want change".

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It seems OHSU's Chief People Officer doesn't like the people of OHSU.  They "complain" too much, it seems. Read the comments in the article. The goal was to restore trust, but it seems like the culture is getting worse. Instead, the CPO gets defensive, and it's not a good look.

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16 May 2024

Portland officials took $5 million, meant to create more affordable housing, and instead used it to cover bureaucratic costs. We even have the bureaucracy. It's just there it incur costs.

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Oregon, Washington and Nevada saw double digit increases in drug overdose deaths in the past year. Even California wasn't that bad. There's been an 18-fold increase in fentanyl deaths alone in Portland since 2019.  This is one reason why Portland has lost population for the third year in a row.  People are going to Hillsboro and Happy Valley.

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That teacher who calmly helped a student figure out for himself why JK Rowling is not a bigot, just got fired. 

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Why math is set to be revolutionized by AI.

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EcoHealth Alliance was suspended from getting federal funds.  It's 2024 – what took them so long?

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What gives? iOS 17.5 was found to restore NSFW pictures that were thought to have been deleted years ago. This is really creepy. Those photos that you think are deleted, are still there somewhere on Apple's servers.

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