Sugoi & Yokunai

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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Happy Christmas Eve. This year, things seem more muted and less enthusiastic than at times past. Tough living in a Blue State. 

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Gut bacteria may play role in bipolar depression by directly influencing brain connectivity.  How is gut bacteria affecting our minds. Seems ridiculous that this could happen, but there's too much evidence of this to deny.

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🤣 When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates. The "Karen protocol". Hey, if it makes you feel better...

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Ori is a modern umbrella. A bit pricy, and I'd hate to lose it. Or have it break. I would actually like the umbrella in The Kingsman.

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Legacy of Kate Brown.  Oregon has fallen two places in the nonpartisan Tax Foundation’s State Tax Competitiveness Index, dropping from 33rd to 35th, the state’s lowest ranking in the widely followed index in at least 20 years. Oregon has fallen an astounding 28 places since 2019, when the state ranked 7th.  We're not going to climb out of this until we stop having DEI governors.

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Any amount of regular weed use is bad for teens. America has enough stupidity and craziness. We don't need thinks to make us crazier and stupider.  

Our study found that any amount of cannabis use at all may put kids at risk of falling behind in school, and the kids using most often may have the greatest risk," said lead researcher Dr. Ryan Sultan, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University. 
"A few 'harmless' joints can snowball into real academic consequences," he said in a news release. "Teens using it regularly often struggle to focus, miss school and may lose interest in their future plans."

The last thing Oregon needs – to have kids that can't perform well in school.

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Alzheimer's disease can be reversed in animal models to achieve full neurological recovery.  What did it involve? Raising NAD+ levels. They restored NAD+ balance by administering a now well-characterized pharmacological agent known as P7C3-A20. I guess I can try to do the same thing with pterostilbene and nicotinamide riboside supplements.

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What do Americans think about AI?  It's compliicated.

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Veritasium creator, Derek Muller, contemplates the future of his YouTube series. 

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Yikes! It looks like whoever was in charge of redacting the Epstein files did a poor job. Using Python code, it's possible to unredact some of the files, since the original text is still there, just covered up with an overlay.  The DOJ really is incompetent. Or was this intentional?

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X/Twitter is reporting rumors that Trump may pardon Edward Snowden. Rumors have been swirling on this for a long time. But I do think it's time to forgive Snowden. Much of what he said was true, and the world didn't end. I think he did us a favor.

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China is undercutting the kimchi market, and South Koreans are not happy.  China will copy and undercut anything.

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Apparently Microsoft plans to replace every line of C and C++ with Rust by 2030. Well, it's not my company, so they can do what they want.

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IP Check. Is your home network compromised? Use this tool to find out.

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Cool. The NIH is publishing the 4D Nucleosome, which adds the time dimension to the mix, so you can see how things unfold.

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Novo Nordisk's oral version of semaglutide was FDA approved. Hopefully we'll see further reduction in the prevalence of obesity. I want things to get back to how they were in the 1970s. Boy, were people thin then.

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Grok has a phone number that you can send text messages to. If that's your pleasure.

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Now one can create AI-generated math visualizations – with AxisY. I haven't played around with it, because you need to set up an account with them first. Maybe I'll do that later.

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More Portland stupidity. Even the homeless mock the city's efforts to supply drug paraphernalia to the homeless. WTF, man! These are from the NGOs that get funded from government grants. This needs to stop. What a waste of money.

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Governor Kotek expands mental health services with $65M funding. Has anyone noticed any improvement in the state's mental health? I sure haven't. The number of crazies running around is about the same. This money is just going to pay for the salaries of agency employees at their ineffective government job. While Trump cuts the fat at Washington DC, Tina adds to it.

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Google wants to study your online habits; what it wants to track. Participants in their Device Usage Study will likely be a specific isolated demographic than the rest of us. I'd never participate. But that's just me.

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Laid Off After 25 Years in Tech: The Anxiety, Sacrifice, and Reality No One Talks About. Very poignant video of a mid-40s software engineer who just got laid-off from a job with a large tech company. It's the same struggle between working hard and having a home life with your family. Now he has time, but suddenly pulling out of Big Tech is jarring. What should you do for the rest of your life? He's a bright guy, and there are certainly people in worse positions than him, but still, I hope he finds a satisfactory solution. 

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Always on Top is like the old Afloat app. It's great, and could really help out with my workflow. There's no free trial, though. You gotta pay and request a refund if you don't like it.

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We've come to this now.  AI Bathroom Monitors? Welcome To America’s New Surveillance High Schools. This is in Beverly Hills, in Southern California. There's really a compelling case to get out of the public school system.

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It's so easy to spread AI misinformation.  Make up stuff, and AI will suck it up and spread it around.

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Trump AI czar David Sacks starts to worry the industry. No, Politico has it backwards. David Sacks is worrying Democrat governors who want to regulate, regulate, regulate. And now they can't because of this ruling. We can't have 50 different AI rules, just like we can't have 50 different Internet rules. I think Sacks is right, and those in the tech industry support this.

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Tiny Lab-Grown Spinal Cords Could Hold the Key to Healing Paralysis. Hopefully this will lead somewhere.

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Nobody wants to eat lab-grown meat. C'mon.

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Valacyclovir is associated with faster cognitive decline. 

"Researchers were uncertain about the reasons for the observed effect." Paper here.

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