Sugoi & Yokunai

Big day today, after the removal of Maduro yesterday. Kurt Schlichter sums up how big this impacts global affairs. China may be especially hard hit.

And this is so funny!

Download ddZjbs5og46XnMJv.mp4

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That's a good thing. New privacy laws take effect in California. I've been using DeleteMe for a long time. Works great.

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So is Jony Ive and OpenAI working on a pen? I don't think I'd be using it much, then.

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S. Korean team develops AI model for 'customized' cancer vaccine. Article is light on the details. Could be promising, but I'd have to know what the delivery system is and what the payload is, too. No mRNA vax for me.

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CHIP is still a mysterious condition that seems to be a consequence of getting older. The causes have been unclear. But now it seems that a specific genetic variant that lowers levels of a protein called Musashi2, or MSI2, seemed to be less likely to develop myeloid cancers. Maybe this will eventually get to the root cause.

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Wow! Scientists are buiding real-life tractor beams.

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This is an old article, but it's good to know which LLMs are able to recognize people in images and are not afraid to say so. Look to the Gemini models for answers. Because sometimes this ronin has a bit of prosopagnosia.

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It's interesting how one doctor (presumably) is so against the belief that lowering cholesterol with statins is a big sham, while another doctor is a firm believe in statins. I tend to believe the latter doctor, because the former doctor made some statements that are clearly wrong, like treating hypertension should be reconsidered since the reason blood pressure is high is the body's way to pump blood through narrowed arteries. That's clearly insane because you can observe hypertension in patients without much atherosclerotic disease, and it doesn't taken into account hormonal factors (e.g. renin-angiotensin or aldosterone disorders) and that hypertension can result is reflex arterial constriction to prevent damage from the excessive pressure.

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Stack Overflow is changing, to try to adapt to their falling viewership. They're trying to get people to come back by turning it into a lounge for geeks. Will they leave Discord for the new StackOverflow. I think it's been confusing to have both StackExchange and StackOverflow. I could never figure out which one had the better answers. In the era of really good LLMs who will fix your coding problems and explain stuff to you right away, it's a hard ask to get people to come back.

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Crazy. ‘Chinese Peptides’ Are the Latest Biohacking Trend in the Tech World. So injecting yourself with unknown and poorly-understood products from China are thing now among techies. All to get that special advantage. It's wild what people are willing to do to themselves.

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By blocking a protein called 15-PGDH, researchers at Stanford were able to get cartilage to grow back in aging mice.

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The Trump administration has given Oregon a significant amount of money with a goal of improving health care in rural areas, potentially including Baker County.  About $197.3 million for 2026, and the state could get a similar amount for each of the following four years. But the money has to go through the Oregon Health Authority, instead of directly through the hospital. So who knows how much money will actually be spent to fix things in Baker County?

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Yikes! Someone created a website that purports to explain your cancer medical reports to you using AI. To use it, you have to upload your medical reports. To a complete stranger. That you know nothing about. Facepalm. 🤦🏻‍♂️

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Wow. After a woman is pregnant, some of the cells from the baby's placenta break off and can stay in the mother's body for a long time. These cells may engender an autoimmune reaction, but the fact that they can persist may be of some comfort to some women, knowing that a part of their child (and its father) will always be there with her. Another reason to terminate a pregnancy due to rape ASAP, though.

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The incidence of autism as it has originally been understood, has not increased. What has changed is the inclusion of people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates in the category. Until a clear genetic underpinning is identified, there will always be this confusion. Genius is not really autism. 

Exceptionally gifted children can experience disadvantages in their social development, and that could lead to personal interaction problems in adulthood. It's tough to be the smart kid.

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More on the billionaire flight out of California. The state is about to enter the Find-Out stage of things.

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A comment on the Somali fraud case. Why the interest only now? The fraud's been going on for years! Long past time to do something.

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Sometimes just sitting and doing nothing for 30 minutes is just as good as mediation.  The key is constant focusing on the breath and getting the mind back on doing so. The more you do it, the easier it gets, but it's not supposed take effort.

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There's a deep sea yellow brick road just north of the Hawaiian Islands. Weird how it just formed there like that.

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Waste of money.

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$3.99 and worth every penny.

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Happy New Year!

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Most Americans didn't read many books in 2025. And it shows.

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Altered brain tissue microstructure and neurochemical profiles in long COVID and recovered COVID-19 individuals: A multimodal MRI study. Yikes! This is the first study of its kind that I've seen. So there are differences in the tissue microstructure and brain neurochemical levels between LongCOVID sufferers and COVID-recovered individuals. It would have been nice to know if those with LongCOVID got the vax, but since this is an Australian study, it's safe to say that the vast majority of these subjects did. Really too bad.

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The California Billionaires Tax explained. What a rip-off this is. Imagine knowing that California's government, finally learning that Margaret Thatcher's famous statement was true, have now resorted to theft. Some of the tech wealthy have left. Peter Thiel has reportedly set up an office in Miami, FL on 25 December, so as to avoid the retroactive reach of the law. It's actually just deserts for folks like Larry Page, who used Google to try to make Donald Trump lose the election. How you like Democrats now, Larry? And this is a one-time tax, they say. In a few months, it'll be spent, and the state will be back to the same position it was. But Larry and his fellow billionaires will still be poorer. 

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52 bits of trivia. I didn't know about Apple's sneakiness. Heh.

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Yeah I've noticed this. Web browser developers have stopped blocking popups. This browser extension has really helped, though.

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Could we have room-temperature superconductivity? Maybe, if this discovery holds up.

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"That student was convinced that having a diploma would actually hurt his chances of getting funded." Being a college dropout is now considered cool when you want to get investments for a startup.  Crazy times.

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Jeff Bezos is so rich that when he moved from Seattle to Miami, it shook Washington’s entire budget; now, the Evergreen State has $1 billion less to spend on K–12 education and childcare. And of course, Redditors think he should be paying his fair share, whatever that means.  Guess he paid enough so that his departure is having FAFO ramifications for Washington state.

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Happy New Year's Eve!
We made it.

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AI showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be ready to pull plug, says David Bengio. This is actually old news, and people have been talking about this for some time. I'm actually involved in a research study that will hopefully shed some light on this. Can't say much more now.

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How Easy It Is to Steal Your Data with a Chrome Extension. It's not just AI chat conversations that can be stolen, but any information that is typed in when a malicious Chrome extension is active. This is another reason (and a good one) not to use the Chrome browser. Use something else!

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You Fund This. The creator of the Gab chat app created this lookup tool. You can see what your tax dollars are supporting. Andrew Torba recently announced it in response to the incredible Somali fraud scandal.

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Over 50% of Heart Attacks in Younger Women Aren't From Clogged Arteries. So if it's not just atherosclerotic plaque in many cases, then what is it from? Well there still is atherosclerotic thrombosis as a cause (47%), but it turns out that there's a lot of supply-demand mismatch, where there isn't enough blood flow to areas with high demand (34%). This is like in the lung, where ventilation-perfusion mismatch can drop your blood oxygenation capacity significantly. Men can have this, too, but not as much. There there are spontaneous intimal dissections of the coronary arterry endothelium that happens way more in women. Why is that? No one knows.

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Congrats to the hard workers who collected signatures to put the gas tax initiative on the ballot next November. Until then, there are no taxes, but the rumor is that Kotek and the Dems are convening to try to ramrod something else.

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CRISPR Breakthrough Could Rewrite Future of Genetic Disease Treatment. I remember attending a lecture given by Dr. Jennifer Doudna after she won the Nobel Prize. Now instead of just editing genes, we can edit epigenetic elements, such as on histones and CpG islands. Truly, her breakthrough discovery has made a huge difference in genetics.

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The comments in this article are revealing. It's about how state tax laws are appealing to private equity investors. But many of the commenters decry investors wanting to keep their own money. "Why can't it taken away by the government so they can spend it?"
they cry. I don't understand some people. So it's greed to want to keep your own money, but it's not greed to demand a share of others' earnings? Crazy.

Then there's California, which seems to be going forward with their unrealized gains tax on billionaires. The bill is obviously written by people who know nothing about finances.

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When Waymo's robot taxis get stuck, a secret army of humans comes to the rescue. 

Heh, the world is not ready yet to discard human labor.

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Americans hate AI? It's more like most Americans don't really understand AI. Or don't want to understand AI. Because if you do, there are opportunities.

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Blue State blues. New business model drops in Seattle.  And Katie Wilson hasn't even assumed office yet. Oh boy.

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Portland office sales will drive millions in property tax losses: year in review. This statement me chuckle:

New owners of downtown buildings won’t have negative equity, shorthand for when borrowers owe more money on a property than it’s worth, also known as being “upside down” on a mortgage. 

What makes you say that they won't have negative equity? We're not at rock bottom yet.

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And Seattle no longer tops big cities for share of tech workers.  And there goes the wealth. It's no longer worth it to work in Seattle.

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Hmmm. AI Is Causing Layoffs, Just Not in the Way You Think. The thesis is that companies had overhired and they had planned to lay off people but didn't have a reason. Now they use AI as a cover to streamline. Is that true?

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Local LLMs are how nerds now justify a big computer they don't need. Nah. I need it for when I train ML models or run large open source models with many billions of parameters. No quantization for me, baby. Unless I have to, of course.

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South Korean astrophysicists think the universe will end in a Big Crunch.  Well, I'm not changing my weekend plans.

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Sam Altman is hiring someone to worry about the dangers of AI. That person is responsible for:

“Tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm. You will be the directly responsible leader for building and coordinating capability evaluations, threat models, and mitigations that form a coherent, rigorous, and operationally scalable safety pipeline.”

Oregon really wants to cheat, I guess. The requirements for being eligible to vote in the state are so relaxed now. Anyone, I mean anyone, can register to vote, if they really want to. This state is so screwed up, in so many ways, it's beyond belief. There's no way they're going to let anyone but a Democrat win.

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Oregon Live has an article about "The saddest Portland restaurants closures of 2025". But they avoid any talk about WHY these restaurants are closing. Yeah, Oregonian – try being journalists for a change. Do some journalism for a change. Because we're going to see more of these. 

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Who knew that kratom had anticancer properties? It's due to mitraphylline.  But it's only present in minute amounts in the plant, so don't expect using kratom to protect you.

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Ph.D.s Can’t Find Work as Boston’s Biotech Engine Sputters. This article describes a guy from Hong Kong who comes to Boston, goes on welfare while he gets his chemistry degree, then because he can't find a job, will move back to China. What did America gain from this? Why did American taxpayers have to pay to train Chinese scientists? Is that right?

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Households with NO INCOME. How can society function with so many people who have no income? Some people need to start supporting themselves. What a joke welfare has become.

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Medical breakthroughs in 2025. I vaguely remember some of these.

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You can make up your own HTML tags. I did not know this. Could come in handy, I suppose.

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AI contributions to Erdős problems.  Note that the models that were most associated with success were Aristotle. GPT-5 also had some success but not as much as Aristotle. Off-the-shelf models aren't as optimized. Aristotle isn't just a single transformer. It uses the transformer to parse the input, but mainly relies on a Monte Carlo Graph Search strategy, the LEAN proof assistant (which is C++ based, not Python), and a lemma-based informal reasoning system where theorems are broken down into lemmas which are proved individually leading to proof of the entire theorem.

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Joke. California dropped their suit against the Trump administration for withholding money that was going to fund their failing high-speed rail system.  Instead, they're going to seek private investors.  Private investors? 🤣😂

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The health care industry expected to see Oregon’s greatest job growth over next decade. But what is the healthcare industry in Oregon? It's not a burgeoning cancer or cardiology research center industry, or growth in hospitals offering cutting edge care. No, it's more nursing homes and social assistance. That seems to be what Oregon is good for – providing assistance to people, and the state certainly seems to have a lot of people ready to receive it. Take a look this collection of charts dealing with Oregon.  The state sure is high on providing food stamps.

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New laws that will take effect starting January 1. It's great that gas taxes won't go up as the state legislators and governor wanted. It's great that evicting squatters will be easier, but that's just restoration of common sense. But erase medical debt from credit reporting makes no sense at all. Debt is debt and needs to be counted. Telemarketing crackdown is not strong enough. The other stuff is going to affect just a relative few.

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I still remember when introducing nurse practitioners and physician assistants was going to help save clinics and hospitals money. How's that working out, Legacy?  Real doctors don't strike, and these APPs know it. They know that they can shirk work, and real doctors will pick up the slack while they hit the picket lines.

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Portland is a failure, and this interview highlights it. The city looks the other way as illegal drugs are freely available, screwing up people's lives. No building housing is NOT the solution.

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Is this the first public look at the foldable iPhone? Steve Jobs would have been livid about this, and phone calls would have been made. It doesn't seem that Tim Cook is bothered by this at all. We already knew about things like the Dynamic Island and the camera configuration of the phone before release. We still wanted new phones, but it was nice when there was anticipation and pleasant surprise. Seeing this, I am convinced that this first attempt at the foldable iPhone isn't for me. 

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Clever. How China is persuading people not to smoke in public restrooms.

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Will Japan's 'fire horse' curse strike again in 2026? Supposedly women born during the Fire Horse year will murder their husbands. How did this superstition get started. Apparently from Chinese astrology. But maybe it was popularized from a Kabuki drama. Who knows? Japanese people are one of the most superstitious people I know.

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Theobromine in chocolate is linked to lower biologic age. On top of other known benefits. I just renewed my supply of CocoaVia supplements. Better to be safe.

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Sanjay Gupta claims he never said that vaccine prevents transmission. There is actually video proof that he did. It's not just him, of course. Others did too. Never again.

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Merry Christmas!
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The HTML Elements Time Forgot. I remember some of these. I still use <frameset>. It's still useful. Don't remove useful things.

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Well shoot. Salesforce regrets firing 4000 experienced staff and replacing them with AI. I suppose at least some of them wouldn't mind getting rehired.

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Older Americans Quit Weight-Loss Drugs in Droves. Talking about GLP-1 receptor agonists, of course. Why are they quitting? Expense in many cases. Intolerance in other cases. Too bad.

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You may finally be able to change your old, embarrassing Gmail address. I think a lot of people just got a new email account.

Speaking of email addresses, Certisfy is suggesting that a .gov email address can allow one to get age-verification for sites that require it. We shouldn't let this take hold. Privacy and anonymity should be a right. 

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A Pittsburgh "liberal" finds out that he's actually a Portland conservative.

Download Pittsburgh_liberal.mp4

You see, in Portland, liberals have evolved further along:

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Portland Term of the Year: “Doom Loop”. City leaders don't want to hear that term. But it's true that the city is in it.

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