26 September 2024

OpenAI is going through some interesting times.  One writer says "The Mask is coming off" but what's under the mask is still not clear. Just that Sam Altman wants to consolidate power in OpenAI. Then there's this article that Altman has undergone a psychological change since starting regular doses of psychedelics. No longer anxious, he's "very calm" now, whatever that is. He takes a microdose every other week, probably because of tachyphylaxis. So one of the more powerful tech companies is run by a regular druggie. Fifty years ago, people like this would have been laughed out of the system, but like other outrageous things we are exposed to today, we brush it off. Almost accept it as normal. And people still throw money at this company. When I was a kid, I read about the dangers of unbridled AI, but never thought it would happen this way. I always imagined that sane and clear-headed people would recognize the dangers and stop AI in its tracks.

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Whaat??? The European Patent Office is siding with some German company saying that Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier don't have a patent on CRISPR-Cas9 after all because "a European technical appeals board, which ruled that the duo’s earliest patent filing didn’t explain CRISPR well enough for other scientists to use it and doesn’t count as a proper invention". WTF? Not well enough? It hasn't stopped MIT Broad Institute from understanding it, and filing a patent of their own.  I suspect that patent office has been bribed. No one doubts that the two scientists were the true discoverers of that system.

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Can't make this stuff up. A high-profile paper about ways to improve the rigor of research papers has been retracted after critics attacked its own rigor.  Don't seek to lecture others, etc. etc.

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If your AI does the crime, you'll do the time, warns DoJ.  I'm sure they'll use this rule selectively to go after certain companies that just happen to be, uh, out of compliance. Sure. This will discourage a lot of innovation in the AI world. Not sure if Sam Altman would care, though.

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Starbucks closes another downtown store. Of course, the union is upset. But what can you say...?

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Who woulda thought it?  Medford, OR has the highest proportion of divorced people in the nation. Wonder why?

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25 September 2024

Interleukin-11 is a key player in age-related decline. It's probably not that simple, but it is important to identify key factors along the way.

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Who decides what geographic places get named? The Board on Geographic Names, of course.

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When someone shows you a flaw in your system, don't dismiss it without checking it through. Johann Rehberger tried to tell OpenAI that there was a way to permanently poison the memory of ChatGPT. They dismissed him. So he put that vulnerability into action. Now ChatGPT informs you when memories are updated, and you have to check it periodically to make sure it hasn't been poisoned.
LLM users who want to prevent this form of attack should pay close attention during sessions for output that indicates a new memory has been added. They should also regularly review stored memories for anything that may have been planted by untrusted sources. OpenAI provides guidance here for managing the memory tool and specific memories stored in it. Company representatives didn’t respond to an email asking about its efforts to prevent other hacks that plant false memories.
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If you have a digital book and a print book, reading comprehension is better if you read the print book.

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Firefox tracks you until you unless turn you off their "privacy-preserving" feature. But even if you turn it off in the Settings page, it's still on.  You must go into the about:config page and turn these to false:

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24 September 2024

Always something new. Hundreds of Mysterious Nazca Glyphs Have Just Been Revealed. Wow, these guys made it look easy. It's conceivable that people were recruited to do this a few times, but hundreds of them? What was the purpose?

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Oh man. I just discovered that two great jazz legends passed away: Bennie Golson and Shaun Martin. Shaun passed away last month but I just found out.  My mind always enters a peaceful place when I listen to Park Avenue Petite.  And check out Martin's happy Yellow Jacket and his improv skills. I get vibes of Josef Zawinul, Warren Bernhardt, Greg Phillinganes...  Such a loss.

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23 September 2024

The amount of money that generative AI startups are asking in Silicon Valley is staggering.  It's an order of magnitude higher than what the typical ask was back in the dotcom era. So why aren't we feeling rich? Probably because the money hasn't been spent yet, and the number of geeks who could stand to see the money is a lot smaller. This isn't just building websites.
But then the cost of artificial intelligence is declining rapidly. So why are the major players asking for so much money? Because they want people to buy the dream, the promise.

Remember DevinAI? That was the generative AI app that was going to code all your projects? Turned out to be a dud. It was all hype, and overpromises like that will make everyone skittish about spending multiple billions.

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This is an important video and shows how easily our phones can be hacked.


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Here's an opinion about PhDs and academia. I never viewed it this way but it kinda is true in a way.
A degree, especially a PhD, is like a badge, a shiny sticker that says, “I’m educated.” But here’s the kicker – this badge might not make you more productive or happier. In fact, less time in school and more time in the real world could be the real recipe for success.

Imagine if we recruited professors not just for their academic credentials but for their real-world achievements. People who’ve actually built things that work, could revolutionize how we teach software engineering or entrepreneurship. But we’re not there yet. We’re still caught in a system that values form over function, prestige over practicality.

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22 September 2024

Happy Autumnal Equinox.  This is the middle of autumn, not the start.

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Remember in the movie Elysium there's a machine that scans you and immediately determines what wrong? Well, the guy that founded Spotify (Daniel Ek) is trying to create something similar. It's called the Neko Body Scan.  You still need blood tests and a grip strength test, and the results go to a human to interpret, but it's a start, I suppose.

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Joe Hisaishi isn't concerned that AI-generated music will replace him. I agree. All it will do is sample bit and pieces of his music, and try to stitch it together. Listeners will probably be more confused and amazed.

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Good! The FTC is suing pharmacy benefit managers for making insulin expensive. They are the scourge of healthcare, and should be eliminated.

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Nice article on ScaleAI, which creates the sweat shops of the AI world. We all need labeled data, and companies are willing to pay for it. So ScaleAI takes advantage of the poor in third-world countries to sit and label data all day for low wages. It can be viewed as exploitation, but no one seems to be complaining.  Someone's gotta do it.  Those data aren't going to label themselves, you know.

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The pager/walkie-talkie attacks have changed the world. There goes globalism.  But even domestically manufactured electronics could be sabotaged, although it's probably easier to do in a third-world country. 

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The Internet has a dictionary server, a remnant of the old days. Like the author, I'm surprised it still works.

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20 September 2024

Remember when in 2020 there was a study that claimed that newborns with Black doctors had half the mortality rate of those who had White doctors? There was a lot of hoopla surrounding it, with Cori Bush demanding more diversity in medicine. Well someone took that data and repeated the analysis but this time correcting for low birth rate, and the disparity in mortality rates was no longer seen. Someone should have raised concerns when the original study showed that there was no correlation with the mother's race, and that the bias was increased at hospitals where there were more black babies delivered. Is it plausible that White doctors were more biased against Black babies but not their mothers, or that at hospitals with more Black babies that those would be locations where more biased doctors would practice? One obvious flaw was that in the first study, the authors were not physicians. They were in business administration, health policy, electrical engineering or labor economics. A real doctor would likely have pointed out flaws in the study design.

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Unfortunate. Interest in Long COVID seems to be disappearing. Or maybe it's the vaccine, and they don't want to say so. Or can't bear to think about it since they probably got vaxxed, too.

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Someone created the ultimate high school math cheating device – a TI-84 (one of the few allowed to be used to take tests) that can connect to the Internet and access ChatGPT.  Still seems like a lot of work.

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What the F do we need a vice president for?  Biden's cabinet meeting is being run by his wife.  And the Cabinet members play along like everything's just fine. The country is f*cked up.

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19 September 2024

CRISPRkit.  Roughly 18 years after Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier's groundbreaking discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system, it's now packaged as a kit.  "Making gene editing accessible for everyone, everywhere".  Such is the progress of science, I guess.

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Brazilians can access X/Twitter again. With the help of Cloudflare, which Brazil can't ban, because too many vital services depend on it. That's the beauty of the Internet. You can't easily ban information access like you could with the regular press.

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Pregnancy changes a woman's brain. Husbands notice this too often. After the wife gets pregnant, you find yourself married to a different person. Who wants to treat you as a child, too. Shame.

In nearly 80% of the regions of Dr Chrastil's brain, the volume of grey matter - tissue that controls movement, emotions and memory - decreased by about 4%, with only a small rebound after pregnancy.

But there were increases in white-matter integrity - a measure of the health and quality of connections between brain regions - in the first and second trimesters, which returned to normal levels soon after birth.

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The SARS-CoV2 virus didn't do as much damage as government policies. And no where does it show more than in New York.  This revelation is just disgusting. It was all a scam, and people fell for it.

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18 September 2024

Oregon could have had in-person voting, but the bill to enact this died in committee due to the inaction of Senate President Rob Wagner. Instead, Oregon lets illegals vote.

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"The Justice Department should immediately call in the beginning investigation of the medical boards and the collusion between the pharmaceutical industry and the medical boards that are delicensing these physicians who actually try to heal patients and try to treat them."
Apparently this could happen under a Trump administration. All those wrongs will be addressed.

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This is ridiculous. Holographic cancer doctors will be used for patient interaction. So patients have to arrange for a complicated setup just to get medical care. Who has money to pay for this? Remember, nothing is really free. Will this improve care? What's wrong with direct visits? Oh, we don't have enough doctors now? What happened?

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Mitochondrial dysfunction may underlie some autism spectrum disorders. So many ways the body can go wrong. Are humans that fragile now?

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Always discovering something new.  There a new blood group, AnWj, in which AnWj-negative patients must receive blood from AnWj-negative donors.

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17 September 2024

Today is Chuseok – Korean Thanksgiving.

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Just what America needs - more dementia. There appears to be an uptick in dementia, and the suspicion is that it's COVID-19. Funny, if you look at the graph, it's just the younger folks. I suspect it's not COVID-19 but something else that afflicted the younger set selectively. Like alcohol and drug use. Depression. Disruption of social connections.

And SwissRe is confirming excess mortality in the post-COVID era. I thought the vaccines were supposed to have prevented that.

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Larry Ellison has dystopian ideas for Oracle. 

"The police will be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching and recording everything that's going on," Ellison told analysts. He described police body cameras that were constantly on, with no ability for officers to disable the feed to Oracle. 

Even requesting privacy for a bathroom break or a meal only meant sections of recording would require a subpoena to view - not that the video feed was ever stopped. AI would be trained to monitor officer feeds for anything untoward, which Ellison said could prevent abuse of police power and save lives.

"Save lives". It always starts that way, doesn't it?

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Even with Altman removed, there’s little to suggest the Safety and Security Committee would make difficult decisions that seriously impact OpenAI’s commercial roadmap. Tellingly, OpenAI said in May that it would look to address “valid criticisms” of its work via the commission — “valid criticisms” being in the eye of the beholder, of course.

In an op-ed for The Economist in May, ex-OpenAI board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley said that they don’t think OpenAI as it exists today can be trusted to hold itself accountable. “[B]ased on our experience, we believe that self-governance cannot reliably withstand the pressure of profit incentives,” they wrote.

And OpenAI’s profit incentives are growing.
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Nobel Prize winner has to retract 13 of his papers. And this is in cancer research. At Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering, too. Not a good look.

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Amazon wants workers to go back to work, but the workers aren't having it.  Why? This is one of the reasons:
Flexibility gives people more energy and more chances for individual self-expression, growth and subsequent creativity. This violet-glitch due to covid gave us a glimpse of an alternative lifestyle and we see a utopian world that can become real forever.
Yeah, well I don't think Amazon cares much that you can't self-actualize at the office. If you can't work, then you gotta find someone else who is willing to buy what you have to sell.

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Is ChatGPT getting better at math? Some think so.

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Scientific American makes a political endorsement for the second time in history. Some people think that this means science is on Harris' side. Well, remember that their first ever endorsement was for Biden. How'd that turn out?  SciAm should stay in its lane. Avoid politics and stick to science. No matter how hard you want to trumpet your personal ideology. We don't want to hear it.

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Intel is trying to downsize and is even looking to split the company into independent factories with their own governance.  What a bad time for Hillsboro, which cleared a bunch of land for Intel. There's apparently no one else to use that land. All that revenue-generating farmland, now all gone. And for nothing.

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This is exactly why you don't hear as much news about vaccine injuries. It's only due to brave reporters like this guy, who are willing And then there is Francis Collins, so obsessed with immunizing against misinformation, making sure that only his version of the "truth" goes out. After all the lies about "safe and effective", how can we trust medical authority anymore?

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Misinformation poses a smaller threat to democracy than you might think.  It's so nice to read a contrasting and calming rational voice to counter the rapid media voices and politicians. All the efforts to counter misinformation ends up being verschlimmbesserung.

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