23 December 2025

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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22 December 2025

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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New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University Medical Center investigators, with co-authors across additional US centers, report greater cognitive worsening at 78 weeks with valacyclovir than with placebo among adults with early symptomatic Alzheimer's disease and herpes simplex virus (HSV) seropositivity.
"Researchers were uncertain about the reasons for the observed effect." Paper here.

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21 December 2025

Winter Solstice today.

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Crazy. It must have been wild a couple of days ago when the power went out in downtown San Francisco, and all the Waymo cars stopped dead in the streets blocking traffic. We're not ready to have autonomous cars driving around.

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Another article on how tech billionaires want to build their own cities. This is been done over and over throughout the years. It'll never work, and a lot of money will be spent for nothing. I don't expect California Forever will go anywhere. Don't build in California, for starters. You have to do it outside of Democrat control.

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Medical Mystery Prize. Upon reading the patient clinical history, it appears that the patient has avoided standard medical evaluation, and has self-diagnosed and self-treated with supplements. The panel of "biomarkers" also suggests that the person has seen a naturopath rather than a regular medical practitioner. I'm not seeing the standard evaluative protocol I'd expect. Who knows what this person has?

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Our brains have four stages of cognition. The age borders are probably not precise, but the idea is sound. I have noticed that I don't think like I did earlier in my life. I seem to synthesize things better. Memory is probably not as sharp as fact recollection as before, but one wonders if that isn't because one has had to memorize a lot more facts than earlier in life. Can the brain recall it all? The memory is there, most of the time. You know if the recollection is correct or not. It's just the ability to recall. My ability to understand the speech mannerisms of the GenZ folks is low. Can't stand the speech fillers. And yes, my tolerance for BS is really low. And I do care less about other people's opinions. I am really becoming a crotchety old man – just like in the stories.

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There was a power outage at NIST recently, and now the world's atomic timekeeper can't issue the standard time. They had a standby generator, but all it did was just issue the incorrect time, so they'll have to disable it.  They hope to get things fixed soon.  Update (2025-12-21): No worries. "There are redundancies in place." Only the Boulder location was affected. 

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Mayo Clinic just closed 6 rural Minnesota health clinics. More closings may follow. I've read on social media that somehow the Trump administration is to blame. This report is careful not to say that. In reality, it's likely that this happened because of a shortage of doctors and decreasing patient volumes in the rural clinics.  Rochester is not that big of a city, and physician salaries are generally higher in major cities than in places like Rochester. Plus, patient population is decreasing in the rural areas, making it not worthwhile to staff those clinics, even as doctors didn't really want to work there anyway. This is going to be one of many instances of the healthcare industry contracting, as our local hospitals realize.

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Is tramadol more harmful than beneficial? This paper would suggest that it is. 
Tramadol may have a slight effect on reducing chronic pain levels (low certainty of evidence) while likely increasing the risk of both serious (moderate certainty of evidence) and non-serious adverse events (very low certainty of evidence). The potential harms associated with tramadol use for pain management likely outweigh its limited benefits.
The potential harms included "higher proportion of cardiac events and neoplasms" although this was just a meta-analysis.

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Ah, Microsoft.

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20 December 2025

Keonne Rodriguez just wanted to make a privacy tool that would make trading in Bitcoin as private as trading regular money. He built Samourai Wallet. But a crypto-adverse justice system has targeted him, and now he's in prison.  President Trump is reviewing his case, and hopefully will pardon Keonne.

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Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it will cost 'hundreds of billions' to keep up with frontier AI in the next decade. Microsoft just needs to be smarter in what it invests in. Not just build datacenters and copy its competitors.

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Tesla owners are buying escape tools for when the car is disabled. Because the emergency door opener is awkward to access. But with laminate windows instead of tempered glass, it's not as easy. I wish they posted which tools they're buying. This one supposedly works, but is quite expensive. You need to be able to saw through the laminate, since it won't shatter like tempered glass.

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I can't believe Google is going to sue SerpApi, accusing them of stealing content from their web page when Google does the same thing to others. I think they're hoping that the "punishment is the process". Those on the outside might chuckle, but it's quite serious for SerpApi. 

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Great!  The EU is no longer going to ban non-EV cars after 2035. Hope they've learned their lesson.

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Is Proton leaving Switzerland? That would be wild. Hard to leave that beautiful country, but you gotta do what's necessary to protect privacy.

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Clearing Zombie Cells Eases Back Pain. It turns out that clearing out senescent cells in spinal discs helps improve back pain. But they achieved this with an agent called RG-7112, as well as o-vanillin, which is found in turmeric. Paper here. I have found turmeric to be actually effective in relieving minor aches and pains.

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California's minimum wage will increase to $16.90 starting January 1. Welcome to more inflation and the cost of everything going up a bit more. You can't just legislate wealth. But the politicians there think you can. 

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Oregon Parents Disproportionately Exempt School-Age Children From Vaccines. This is what happens when the medical profession loses trust from the public.

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Is everyone microdosing?  Crazy things that tech CEOs said in 2025.

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Washington politicians are thinking about implementing a 9% income tax applicable just to wealthy people. This is how you kill the golden goose. Pretty soon, you'll be like Oregon and have hardly any wealthy at all. Then you'll really need to extend that income tax to everyone.

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19 December 2025

Modern problems call for modern solutions.

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The Waterfox browser promises to be AI-free. Waterfox lost a lot of trust when the advertising company, System1, bought them in 2019. Even though they separated in 2023. It's supposedly not as secure and private as LibreWolf, but macOS 26 keeps demanding that LibreWolf be removed. I'm sticking with Floorp for now, but am still looking around. Meanwhile, Firefox is saying that there will be a "kill switch" for their AI. 

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Platelet factor 4 regulates hematopoietic stem cell aging. What? PF4?  Why that protein? Nature is crazy sometimes.

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Major question of the day: Do male actors heads get bigger as they age?  Yup. Heads get wider. Ears get longer. Noses grow. Bags under the eyes and zygomatic fat pads get thicker. That's how we age. 

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The UK continues its Orwellian progress. Now the UK wants a nudity filter on devices. Those idiots think that this will solve some problem. Of course it won't. I've always said that the Internet was never meant for kids to access.

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8-bit chiptune Bolero. This one is actually musically good.

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Car web browsers are security risks. Why does a car need its own web browser anyway?

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Only now does this report come out saying that vaccinating kids with the mRNA COVID-19 vax is hazardous and basically not worth it? 
"In both children groups, COVID-19-related outcomes were too rare to allow IRRs to be estimated precisely. Across all analyses, there were no COVID-19-related deaths, and fewer than seven COVID-19-related critical care admissions. Myocarditis and pericarditis were documented only in the vaccinated groups."

"BNT162b2 vaccination in adolescents reduced COVID-19 A&E attendance and hospitalization, although these outcomes were rare. Protection against positive SARS-CoV-2 tests was transient."
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Multnomah County has a budget deficit, but yet they are giving away $250,000 to helpillegal aliens.  Glad I'm not a taxpayer there.

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Another ones bites the dust. A James Beard award winning bakery, Jinju Patisserie, is shutting down in Portland. 
Uncertainty around the economy, our health and the steep financial obligations made us reconsider such a significant commitment,” the couple wrote.
Yeah, say no more.

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West Linn-Wilsonville School Board elects to close 2 schools, suspend preschool program. Oregon's school system continues its slow decline.

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Absolutely insane. OHSU vows to continue its genital mutilation program. These are supposedly medical doctors, folks. Oregon's health system continues its slow decline, too. 

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18 December 2025

Two big online learning communities, Coursera and Udemy, are set to merge. The former buying the latter.

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How common is Alzheimer's Disease?  Maybe as high as 1 in 10? That's according to this Norwegian study that looked at a blood test measuring pTau217, a marker for tau protein, which signals amyloid buildup in the brain. Prevalence (not incidence) of dementia in developed countries is increasing primarily because of increased longevity and an increasing proportion of the aged in these regions.
But eating high-fat cheese may lower risk of dementia. I'm not taking any chances.

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Uranus and Neptune Might Be Rock Giants, Not Just Icy Worlds. Different from what most of us were taught in school. Oh well, guess I'll have to change my footwear plans for when I go there.

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More than 10% of Congress won’t return to their seats after 2026. It's not term limits but it's in the right direction. I guess with the elimination of USAID and with the PELOSI act, it's not as profitable to be in Congress anymore.

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U.S. mental health continues to worsen. Yeah, we already knew that. Not much change in the older generations. Just the younger, more mixed up, more doped-up, more indoctrinated with woke crap generation. 

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House Passes Anti-Transing ‘Protect Children’s Innocence’ Act. Now it has to go through the Senate. Trump will sign this. Thank goodness. OHSU will have to practice this surgical atrocity just on adults.

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When you're a techie and can't meet production deadlines, post this fake Cloudflare error, blame them and buy yourself some more time. This is satire, but there have been too many Cloudflare outages lately, so maybe this will spur them to up their game.

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Downtown Portland’s ice rink won’t open this year. Here’s why. No money for staffing, that's why. Money to spend on illegals and homeless. But not for taxpayers to enjoy. This is your city leadership, Portland. But they want those foot traffic numbers to go up.
WW: It’s almost impossible to build anything big in Portland without capital from big investors elsewhere. We hear big money is scared of our town. How bad is it?

Lauren Noecker: We can’t get capital to come in and fund any short-term needs at any project because Portland fell off the map in terms of capital funding. We see that it’s 80th out of 81 markets in terms of investment capital, and it used to be in the top five. At least that’s how it felt when we used to take meetings in L.A., San Francisco or New York. We used to talk about Portland, and there was a lot of interest from capital partners, be it debt or equity. Now, you say Portland and people want to run. How this happened so fast is the real question.

Why do you think it did?

Lauren Noecker: There are states that are in full recessions. We are one of them, but I think the commercial real estate collapse was just so much faster and so much deeper in Portland. All of the pieces came together at the wrong time. It was Measure 110, and the protests, and the absence of office workers downtown, and the city and the county not willing to bring people back, and all the new, high taxes. You had a very lax D.A. Go downtown and you’re going to see something you don’t want to see. You’re not going to get killed, but you’re going to see something else. You’re going to see some bad shit. From a business perspective, it was just impossible. You’re running uphill, and it’s not just the typical cycle of interest rates going up
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City Council Staff Seeks to Unionize. Heh, couldn't happen to a more deserving set of losers. Deal with it, Portland City Council. See how you like it when your workers want to get paid more and not have to work harder. 🤣

And here's the farm workers union, wanting to sabotage public school education to support illegal aliens from being deported.  Clearly the state has let this problem go on for too long.  Years ago, such a proposal would have been quashed and ridiculed. Today, the illegals feel that they have a chance.

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Oregonian writer misses the point completely. Not everything in Oregon is getting pricier. Here’s what costs more and what doesn’t in 2025.  The Oregonian writer says that prices of a lot of things went up.  Then at the end, she says, well it's not all bad news – average wages went up, too.  That's why the price of things increased. Companies had to pay for everyone's increased pay (minimum wage increase) as well as new taxes, and then passed the costs onto consumers. Blue state blues.

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Poor Leavenworth.  They need the Christmas season retail revenue. And they aren't going to get it this year. It's hard enough to go to that remote location. Now, it's really unsafe.

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17 December 2025

Coursera is merging with Udemy.  This is great for those who want to get educated in AI.

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Another plea to Mozilla not to put AI in the browser. Think they'll listen? Probably not. 

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Apple gift card error leads to being locked out of Apple account. This is another reason why I think Apple is still not to be trusted with your digital life. Steve Jobs would not have tolerated this. 

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You're 25-35 years old? You're running out of time!  It's clear to me that one's brain just evolves over the years, being optimal at different things and different ages. The brain architecture for chess may not be the best for skills later on. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

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Downtown Portland’s ice rink won’t open this year. Not enough money for staffing. Services declining, but pay more taxes. The homeless and the unions need the money. Everyone else has to suffer. Blue State blues.

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16 December 2025

Tanning beds induce way more mutations in the skin that natural sunlight does. Those should be banned. Or modified. The general public in not likely aware what they are putting themselves at risk for.

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Umbrel is selling a personal cloud. Only 4 TB though. Can't tell from the website how it connects. It is through WiFi. Do you just connect it to the home network? Is it accessible through the internet? It should be more than just another portable HDD.

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Google's attempt at AI-provided recipes is turning out to be a disaster. You can't just glom together different bits and pieces of different recipes from here and there. Doesn't work that way.

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FDA Not Adding ‘Black Box’ Warning to COVID-19 Vaccines. Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad had a change of heart? Seems like a political decision. Not wanting to put the highest level warning on something that people were told was "safe and effective".

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40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity. A lot of people (myself included) had assumed that fMRI signal meant brain activity. Because that's how it was presented. But remember this report that showed that a dead salmon can register fMRI signals?

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Mozilla has a new CEO. I didn't even know that they replaced Mitchell Baker last year. The last CEO was the one that wanted to embrace AI in the browser, which a lot of geeks object to (myself included) and the new CEO seems to want to continue that. Yuck. Well, I'm going to continue to stay off Firefox for the time being. LibreWolf got booted out when I upgraded to macOS 26.2, so I switched to Floorp.

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Some meth head plows into famous Portland clock at Lloyd Center while fleeing cops. So symbolic of Portland. The drug crisis continues to destroy all the nice things about the city. And things that have already been destroyed are not coming back.

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Legacy Health striking workers up to 80 now. It's never the doctors that strike. Always the physician assistants and nurse practitioners, because they know that the doctors will pick up the slack for them. So now it'll cost more to operate the hospital system. Boy, I bet those hospital systems really regret buying out healthcare providers now, huh? Naturally they will have to raise costs. Naturally they will demand higher insurance reimbursement. Naturally premiums will increase and subsidies won't cover enough. Blue state blues.

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Seattle area has nation's second-biggest drop in job listings. And all the Redditors are blaming AI. But does AI mean "artificial intelligence" or "actual Indians"? Some blame outsourcing of jobs to Indian tech workers overseas. I think Seattle tech is lightening up due to local policies increasing expenses. So deadweight and non-productive people have to go. Still, for Seattle, it's going to hurt. Bellevue, Redmond, Issaquah must feel it, too.

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15 December 2025

Maybe we can have warp drive after all.  At least scientists say it's possible. But anything's possible, I suppose.

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Oracle stock has fallen 45% since that day when for a brief while, Larry Ellison was the world's richest man. Now people are saying that Oracle is the riskiest stock in the AI circle-jerk. I think it's OpenAI, but at least they're private. OpenAI is what's driving all sorts of speculation. There will (likely) always be a need for nVIDIA products. Intel has no where to go but up. Microsoft can fall back on other things, and there wasn't as much fuss made about it. Meta is also struggling on its own. Neither it, nor Apple, is really part of the AI circle-jerk. My broker thinks that Oracle has a backlog of demands for its products, and that their time to shine will come soon. Hope that's true.

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Tech Billionaires Are Starting Private Cities to Escape the United States. Well, some of them are, and if you read the article, it's mainly the crypto guys. They want the freedom to manipulate the fiat currency, which tells me that this is why you should stay away. Imagine if the Federal Reserve wanted to flee the U.S. so it could manipulate the dollar in ways you can't begin to understand. Do you understand the Fusaka Upgrade? No? If you're invested in Ethereum, you'd better understand it, because those that do may be adjusting things to their advantage.

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Decoding the Zodiac's Z32 Cipher: A Computational Solution and Satellite Discovery. The Zodiac killer posted a threat about a buried bomb somewhere, and left clues. One person thinks he knows the region alluded to, and it has a weird unexplained geographical feature. Intriguing. 

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Why is South Korean fertility so low?  Theories abound. But it's strange that nearby Japan also suffers from this low birthrate problem. Even China does, too, although China has had different factors, like a sex imbalance. What's going on in Asia?

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Interesting article on how the prediction market, Kalshi, was developed. You'd think that we already had prediction markets (Predict-It and Polymarket). Why do we need another? Kalshi did come out of the blue. 

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Apple has a hidden LLM built into the Mac, called Foundational Models, and if you know Swift, you can use if for simple stuff.

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“Contrast that with healthcare and social assistance which has been growing super fast the past three years,”
Healthcare growth has just been nurses unions. Not much any real growth. And I don't think social assistance counts as an industry.

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14 December 2025

Former Netscape founder Jim Barksdale turned Mississippi's reading scores around. Now, no one laughs at the state anymore. Very soon, we'll be known as the Dumb State, and the other low-ranking states will say "Thank goodness for Oregon".

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NW Natural alternative fuel projects face uncertain future as partners falter. Did you know that NW Natural was already putting hydrogen into our gas lines, all in the name of decreasing carbon emissions? It turns out that with a limit of 20% of hydrogen you can put in, there is negligible impact on carbon emissions. And aiming for higher hydrogen concentrations would be dangerous and expensive.

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I came across this interesting commentary on Hacker News. Some guy is trying to build an app using agents and finds that the output is too unpredictable to his liking, and that he wishes it were a state machine. Yeah, underneath it all, it's just a stochastic token predictor. Deal with it.

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Samsung to halt SATA SSD production. Prices for hard drives will increase. Maybe I should get something now.

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Oregon factory jobs fall to lowest point in a dozen years. Quick, Tina Kotek! Deploy the Chief Prosperity Officer! Maybe form a task force. Allocate money to study the issue. That'll take care of it.

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YouTube CEO and other tech CEOs limit their kids' social media exposure. They don't want their kids to eat the junk food they produce?

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How the rich get richer. They get offerings the rest of us don't. But you must be able to handle the risk.

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How to prompt like the pros. Those fantastic AI-generated images you see don't just appear with simple prompts. You have to craft them. Here's how the pros do it.

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