Sugoi & Yokunai

Why do wet dogs shake? Turns out there's a gene that codes for that. Remove the Piezo2 gene, and they don't shake. Well, at least in mice, which shake, too. How a gene codes for shaking behavior is fascinating.

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It's not just Scientific American. The editor in chief of the journal, Science, is also woke, too. He doesn't call Trump a "fascist" but says that Trump is going to "undermine the truth for political gain".  Gimme a friggin break, Holden.

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"Thinner and more pixels". Well, looks like Tim Cook's strategy is not dead. Just when I thought iPhones were as thin as they could be, Tim proves me wrong. Someone's going to put this in a back pocket, and it's going to bend.

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A Lewis and Clark law professor speculates on what a Trump win will mean for Portland. If Portland is allowed to be destroyed in riots as it was in 2017, then it's game over for the city. Businesses will close or move out. Insurance policies will be canceled and not renewed. Buildings will be vacant, and criddlers will move in. If you thought Gordon's Fireplace Shop was bad....

New rentals at 15 year low. Builders aren't building. Gee, who could have seen that coming?

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Chegg is on its last legs. The homework answers shop is no longer relevant, due to ChatGPT.  Just like the buggy whip business.

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The M4 Pro will have performance mode, too, and the M4 Max will have 12 performance and 4 efficiency cores. Unified memory will still be maxed out at 128 GB. I'm going to get this.

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Andrej Karpathy is not impressed by those YT videos that promise to teach you a subject in 10 minutes. It's true – a lot of those videos are a waste of time. Occasionally there will be worthwhile videos that do give justice to a topic, but YT has been polluted by so many other lousy videos.

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How the brains of liberals and conservatives differ. I believe some of this. Others I don't. I'm prepared to believe that people's brains have different circuitry depending on how they grew up, what they were exposed to and influenced by. But influences on political persuasion are not that clear cut. And what about libertarians?

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Google is trying to make Jarvis, Tony Stark's AI assistant. It's just another agentic framework with a recognizable name.

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Mullvad VPN is transitioning away from OpenVPN. They think WireGuard is the way to go. WireGuard is better, iif you don't have problems generating keys, like I sometimes do. Hopefully, the wrinkles will be smoothed out.

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Google has a new TPU-based chip that supposedly rival NVIDIA's best. It's called Trillium. But there's a chip design method that is called AlphaChip that some are complaining about, saying it hasn't been verified. I don't know what the fuss is all about. I'm just happy that competition is good and that companies are working to push the limits. That gets a sugoi from me.

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Non-brain cells exhibit memory behavior, too. Let's give it good memories!

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Kitzhaber is right.  The solution to Legacy Health System's problem is not to merge with OHSU, but to get financial assistance from the state – bailout money, until they recover. That would be the best solution.

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Boy, Scientific American has become such an embarrassement. What the hell, man.

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The optimal shape for beer glasses to keep beer chilled for the longest time. Does it really matter that much? Some professors have too much time on their hands, I think.

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Even more non-citizens caught on the Oregon voter rolls. I suspect there's a lot more they don't know about or aren't telling.

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Sen Boquist laments how long it's taking for Oregon to report election results. Entire countries can get results the same day. Not Oregon. Will anyone get fired for this incompetency? Not likely.

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Oregon in the news. Ambulance strikes a bicyclist. Then charges him for the ride to the hospital.

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Some useful Mac command line utilities. Caffeinate could be useful.

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Washington launches pilot project to provide basic needs for migrants and asylum-seekers. More money going to illegals.

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More on the proposed OHSU-Legacy merger. "There seems to be a sense that this merger is a foregone conclusion..."  Yeah, that's what I sense, too. But if it doesn't happen, I doubt the Legacy system will be able to survive. And that would be a bad thing for Portland. The optimal solution would have been for Legacy to have had better leadership a while back, but that's water under the bridge now. 

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Some people really like ChatGPT search. Some people don't. Maybe for non-mission critical searchers, but not for important stuff, like research.

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Juno Cam has some nice new pictures of Jupiter.

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Teleprompter X is a teleprompter phone app. Something to consider if you need to give a speech. Probably a better look than when Kamala's celebrities had to speak.

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Ghidra is a National Security Agency's reverse engineering app.  Why they offer it on a public GitHub is not clear, but hey.

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Because of all the people moving out of Oregon, the National Reapportionment Planning Project is going to dock Oregon one electoral college vote. Great job, Tina Kotek for making Oregon so crazy people want to leave.

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Lattice Semiconductor will lay of 14%. More reduction of tax base and more taking unemployment insurance pay.

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Rep. Dwayne Yunker is not happy with OHSU Board of Directors hiring Steve Stadum as interim president. Steve is not his daughter, and I think that argument is weak. But OHSU really needs stop messing around. There's a lot of lost ground it needs to recover. Yesterday was Danny Jacob's last day. The faculty need to see a reason to stay, and it needs to come soon.

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How does a short RegEx phrase generate primes? This is brilliant and worth seeing again.

Here's an explanation from the guy that came up with that expression.

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Southwest district in Idaho stops recommending the COVID-19 vax product and will no longer provide it. Brilliant and courageous move. Congrats, Idaho for recognizing that the risks far outweigh the benefits.

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Oregon and Washington governors are rolling out the National Guard. I guess this time they want to protect the fragile downtown economies, especially in Portland. Get ready for the extinction burst, folks.

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Here's an update on the exercise-in-a-pill research. They've got promising results – in rats. Still nothing for humans, yet, unfortunately.

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NVIDIA is breaking into the CPU market next year. Boy, as if Intel needed more bad news.

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Young doctors want being a doctor to have work-life balance.  One guy wants a 4-day work week – LOL!  Good luck with that, pal. But with the doctor shortage, hospitals may have to hire people like this.  Doctors don’t get paid nearly as much as they did before, and getting paid well was a strong incentive to keep working hard. When one is an employee of the hospital, getting paid just a but more than nurses and less than the MBAs, it's hard to self-sacrifice.  And that's why doctors strike, like they are going to do at St. Vincent Hospital. 

And family practice doctors are getting to be an endangered species.

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OpenAI's SimpleQA reveals that even their top model doesn't answer factual questions accurately that often. And to think, people trust the answers for their professional work. Ugh.

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OpenAI released "Strawberry", also known as o1-preview. It is better than GPT-4 but man, is it slow. There's a lot of thinking done before a response is issued.

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Throw out your black plastic spatula – I had no idea it was made from recycled electronics, which included flame retardants. Who thought that was safe? Even the black plastic sushi containers. Out they go.

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Here's a novel anti-lymphoma strategy.  Tether BCL6 to CDK9, which ends up activating apoptosis genes, trigger a self-destruct sequence. Too bad it just works for lymphoma cells that have a mutated or over-expressed BCL6 gene. Still...

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Who will succeed Tim Cook at Apple? There's no shortage of talented candidates.

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Asian enrollment at top colleges Princeton, Yale and Duke down —admissions group claims discrimination. You knew the universities were going to do it anyway.

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Today is the real first day of winter. Happy Samhain.

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Intel is not having a good month. First it got passed over for a CHIPS Act deal. Then it got delisted from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, with NVIDIA taking its place. Mistake after mistake ever since Ottelini.

Update (3 November 2024): Politicians in Washington DC are now worried about Intel's health. Huh?

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Another one leaves downtown Portland.  Wells Fargo will leave their iconic building downtown, just like US Bank, Umpqua Bank and Unitus. Enough is enough.

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Remember how Dems assured us that we aren't paying to support illegal immigrants. Yeah that was a lie. This has got to end.

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The International Space Station is full of leaks, and it is now an emergency to evacuate personnel. Thank goodness we have NASA, huh? On second thought – calling Elon Musk.

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This is strange.  OHSU Board would rather have the newly-retired Steve Stadum as interim president than Nate Selden. Wonder what happened. Stadum is the guy that led the effort to build the tram. He's a good guy and it's a positive that he's back, but I suspect there's more to the story.

Update (3 November 2024): It appears that Nate Selden didn't want to be interim president. He only wanted a permanent job.

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Apple silently uploads your passwords and keeps them. I turned off Passwords in iCloud.

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Multnomah County ambulances are now more available ever since they stopped listening to Jonathan Jui's recommendation. Glad someone overruled him. See? Things are running just fine.

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Mission creep.  Oregon Health Plan is now in the housing assistance business. What next? Big screen TVs? Vacations to Disneyland? If there's a health angle, no doubt they'll consider it.

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Starlink has a satellite phone. And it has better coverage than Iridium or Intelsat phones, because there are way more Starlink satellites. It just need FCC approval to be sold to consumers. Me want.

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