11 April 2024

Too easy.  This site (udio.com) makes it too easy to create musical fast food. I suppose if you want quick and dirty music this could be useful. But, man...

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I can't believe that the FISA renewal was killed. But Speaker Johnson isn't going to let that stop him. And FBI's Chris Wray isn't happy either. Stay tuned.

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Most doctors used to own practices. Now, many do shift work for someone else. In 2012, 60% of U.S. practices were owned by physicians, according to an article in JAMA Network, and only 5.6% of docs were direct hospital employees. Now, 74% of practicing physicians work for health systems or other corporate entities.
Yup, and this is due to Obamacare changes, where it suddenly didn't make financial sense to take risk and be independent, and much better to avoid the headaches of being an independent practice by being an employed physician. Now we have physicians who are beholden to their employers, and it's harder to get an independent medical opinion on stuff, like COVID vaccines, for example.

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Camas and Eugene were voted two of the best places to live in the U.S. I can't vouch for Eugene, but Camas (apart from the eyesore paper mill) is certainly nice. But I would place Bend higher on the list, though. And in Washington, the San Juan Islands. Or Bainbridge Island. Or Port Townsend. Or Sequim.

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Lake Oswego may have to grant public access to the lake. That will result in a lot of homes losing value. We'll see litter and graffiti along the lakeshore, and maybe more theft. In today's world, with less respect for property, this is not the time to grant public access to anything.

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10 April 2024

The U.S. is losing GPS dominance to China. Soon, the world will prefer the more accurate Chinese satnav systems to our own less precise system. But hey, we have diversity, right?

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Why have so many doctors been unquestioning believers in the mRNA vax? Why do they not see with their own eyes?

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Have you paid your taxes yet?  Now the top 1% pay more than the bottom 95%. Who wants to talk about paying their fair share now?

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9 April 2024

It's true. Pregnancy is linked to faster epigenetic aging in young women. Moms sacrifice a part of their lifespan for their children. Show them some love and gratitude.

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Elon Musk predicts that the Singularity will be next year. Maybe it'll just spit out facts more accurately than humans, but smarter is something else. I think we're close, but not next year.

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Acetaminophen May Be Less Heart-safe than Previously Thought. Even 500 mg dose equivalent daily produced cardiac changes. These were in mice, though, so it's possible that we wouldn't see this in humans, but you never know.

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So why are adolescents so mentally ill? Why not all these reasons? But yeah, they sure are mentally ill, and the problem is, many of them aren't aware that they are ill.

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And here's Sweden, trying to purge themselves of Big Tech and keep their data local. I admire the sentiment, but that's going to take time and a lot of money and hard work (and smarts).

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This is evil. AI colonialism. Cash-strapped Argentines queue for eyeball scans. Selling their privacy for cash.

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We'll see. Google Translate now doesn't need human input anymore.  Hokay.

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So procrastination is genetic? Well then.

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How Google lost ground in AI. Sundar was like Bill Gates, who initially didn't understand what the Internet was all about and didn't push Microsoft to get into it initially. Boy was that painful. Sundar Pichai had AI in his hands, and he let it slip away. And here we are.

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Scientists looked at brain scans, and found that you can accurate predict age, sex, and body weight. But that's it, at least for now. But clearly gender is not something you can make up. Of course, we knew that. I'm surprised about the weight. I guess fat gets into your brain.

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A couple of scientists from Japan predicts AI will destroy the social order. Maybe, maybe not. I don't think we can say.

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Apple launches AppClips. Looks like widgets to me.

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Unhappy Firefox user. Firefox is better than it used to be, but sometimes if I want to buy things online, I have to use Safari, as transactions won't complete with Firefox, and sometimes whole modules from a page won't load. I suspect that this is due to privacy add-ons I have installed. So many sites want to infringe on your privacy before you can interact with them.

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8 April 2024

Today is Eclipse day, but it's overcast in much of the Pacific Northwest. Oh well.

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Another one bites the dust. Buffalo Wild Wings closes downtown store. Too much crime. Not enough foot traffic. Great move, Portland – shut down the parking garage instead of cleaning up the crime.  And you want Portland to recover?

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I knew it. Paxlovid doesn't work. I suspect people fell for the placebo effect.

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Most people won't be able to retire in their 60s. I think most people won't be able to retire at all. It'll be welfare for just about everyone eventually.

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The era of seamless deepfakes is approaching. If not already here. It's one more thing teens are having to deal with. As if there wasn't enough already.

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The Polar Vortex has reversed. Here's what it means.

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Avram Piltch is unhappy that the main image generative AI models depict Jews like caricatures, heavy on stereotypes. Hey, try typing in "Asian man". Many times, you'll get an image of a man with a conical hat.

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The EU has a talent shortage that's gotten worse since 2018. Nobody's got skills anymore. I'd bet the same is going on in the U.S.

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One more chart showing which states saw out-migration and in-migration.

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7 April 2024

Does listening to Marconi Union's Weightless help relieve anxiety? Doesn't do it for me, but it might for you.

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Soon, you might be able to purchase an Invisibility Shield. It's on Kickstarter, though, so caveat emptor.

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Scientists have found a way to make the Internet transmit 4.5 million times faster on fiber. Well, good.

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Even the DailyMail has heard about Mike Schmidt's poor track record as DA. Spread the word, but Portland has a ways to go before it avoids being another Detroit of Baltimore.

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CraZy. San Francisco Bill Would Let People Sue Grocery Stores for Closing Too Quickly. What's in the water down there? Do these lawmakers even listen to themselves?
And California shopping malls are disappearing. Hardly anyone goes to them anymore.

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Interesting post about why paying for identity theft protection isn't a good way to spend your money. Makes sense – they're all after-the-fact. You need to prevent problems, and the article describes what you can do.

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It's scary how precarious some mission-critical software is, being dependent on volunteer(s) to maintain something upon which everything rests. 

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A bit extreme, don't you think?  Is generative AI a waste of our time and money? Because it's sucking all the air out of the room and spewing bad things everywhere, and it doesn't adequately address social problems. Right, so let's throw it all away.

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For web designers. Nice summary of CSS logical properties.

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6 April 2024

Bad science. No, global warming isn't going to lead to economic decline.

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Thank goodness. An appeals court blocks a debt relief plan for students who say they were misled by colleges. This is one of the greatest debt transferences we've seen lately. I don't want to take on other people's wealth.

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No, Michigan mayors can't stop the solar eclipse. I know they love to legislate other things into existence, but reality can be so uncooperative.

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Cool. Mt. Etna has been blowing smoke rings. I've never seen that before.

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German domestic intelligence chief defends his efforts to police the "thought & speech patterns" of citizens, outlines the novel offence of "systematic delegitimisation of state conduct". Domestic intelligence chief? They're going back to being East Germany all over again. I'm afraid that something like this will coming to the U.S.

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The end of Geek Squad. As Best Buy implodes, the famous Geek Squad is being put away. Everything is falling apart in this economy.

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Hawaii judge strikes again. A federal judge ruled Friday that the state of Hawaii won’t have to face federal claims from a trio of federal class actions filed against it in the aftermath of the devastating wildfires in Maui that destroyed the town of Lahaina and killed over 100 people. Will anyone find justice?

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Unbelievable. A Buffalo hotel cancels eclipse reservations at the last minute without explanation. Some suspect they wanted the higher prices that latecomers were willing to pay.

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5 April 2024

The April 8 solar eclipse still doesn't look good for those in Texas and Arkansas. Your best bet might be in the Northeast, however you'll have to contend with the microclimates there, which can be unpredictable.

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Injecting hepatocytes from a diseased liver can be injected into lymph nodes to grow an accessory liver that might suffice to provide enough liver function to avoid having to have a liver transplant. This would be a major breakthrough if the technology is perfected.

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Outlook is Microsoft’s new data collection service. Don't use Microsoft's Outlook for email unless you have to. Microsoft hasn't learned after all these years. Because they don't feel that they have to. 
 
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This should have been an April 1 article.  The fine art of human prompt engineering: How to talk to a person like ChatGPT.

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Even Apple's laying off staff now. Their stock is down and they seem direction-less now, not sure how to incorporate the AI craze into their own products. They could really impress with a swarm of agents, like The Open Interpreter. That should have come from Apple.

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Vector databases. Remember when they were all the range? What happened to them? They're still around, but the field is consolidating, and the leaders are changing. It's not just Pinecone anymore.

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AI startups are a dime a dozen now. It's very much like the dotcom era.

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More on Jia Tan, and the XZ backdoor. Maybe he wasn't Chinese after all. Maybe he was Russian?

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Cardiff giants, maybe? Who were the 10 feet tall people that lived around Lovelock, NV? Why did they die out?

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AI content detectors. You never know if you might need them.

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In an American City Business Journal survey, Portland ranks 2nd to last in city vitality. Yet another thing Portland is getting fame for.

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Some good news. Princeton scientists unveil another fusion reactor breakthrough. Apparently, using a liquid lithium coating was the trick. The goal was to stabilize plasma, so there's no information about fusion duration, or energy out vs energy in, which we usually look for. Stil...

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4 April 2024

Seattle closes gifted and talented schools because they had too many white and Asian students, with consultant branding black parents who complained about move 'tokenized'. And look at that smug picture of Chandra Hampson.

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JAMA Open Network thinks that vaccine injuries happen mostly in red states because there are more VAERS reports originating there.  Filling out VAERS forms is an onerous task, like applying for a loan or refinance. If you're a vax believer, knowing you got the vax yourself, how eager would you be to fill those out?  The AMA is such a woke organization. I would never join that group.
Then this came out – the CDC hid 780,000 adverse vax reports that came out just after the rollout. What the hell? Is deception and lack of transparency a Blue state thing?

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An inside look into the Boeing executive culture. The infestation of DEI is sickening, and explains a lot of why the company has been having problems.

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Taiwan actually fared relatively well after their magnitude 7.4 earthquake. Portland would not likely fare as well. There's a list of unreinforced concrete buildings to avoid, at the link.

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Everything's going the wrong way in Portland. Multnomah County’s Cardiac Arrest Survival Rate Dropped 19% Last Year.

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How do you get an AI to answer a question it’s not supposed to? There are many such “jailbreak” techniques, and Anthropic researchers just found a new one, in which a large language model (LLM) can be convinced to tell you how to build a bomb if you prime it with a few dozen less-harmful questions first. They call the approach “many-shot jailbreaking”.
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Is this why Stable Diffusion has become so lousy? Much worse than DALL-E. The company has run out of money.

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Google considers charging for AI-powered search. But this guy has been able to use the open-source SearXNG engine to make a local LLM-powered interface, like Perplexity. No OpenAI or Google API key necessary. And it's private. This could change how we do search. No fees to Google.

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World's oldest man dies, aged 114. He lived in Venezuela, not in a Blue Zone. I'm gonna see if I can get some aguardiente and check it out.

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Time for some graphs:
Lower than average. Oregon school performance:

No one wants to be in the City of Portland. How many people have left Oregon in the past few years?

How depressing. Percentage of people in the world on antidepressants:

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3 April 2024

Inhibiting UDP-diacylglucosamine pyrophosphohydrolase LpxH may lead to a new class of sulfonyl piperazine antibiotics. This is definitely needed, as bacteria are getting resistant to everything we throw at them.

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Why young men and women are drifting apart. In short, changing cultural expectations. This is something our ancestors never had to deal with.

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Guess how many people fess up to taking naps while at work? Try 46%. You heard right.

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Hats off to Oregon lawyers who feel that the Oregon Bar is overbearing. The Ninth Circuit is willing to hear their arguments again, and lately (since several are Trump appointees), they've been more conservative, and less likely to tolerate Oregon's Bar association blaming Trump for "white nationalism" whatever that is.

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Oh-oh. Looks like the eclipse path predictions might be a little off. They've been using an older, narrower arc-diameter figure for the sun. The newer figure makes the band of totality significantly narrower.

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The moon might have its own timezone. Apparently there's already a clock there, so in the future, it won't have to get its time signals from earth, where clocks run slower, due to the increased gravitations field of earth.

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Microsoft, the security vendor that the government buys from, is getting reamed due to security breach of government emails. This happened last year, but the scolding is being done just now. Security is just damned hard.

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2 April 2024

Plants really do scream – we just can't hear it. And I'm glad about that.

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You thought GPT-4 aced the bar exam? Think again.

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This is what happens when you don't fully understand the tech you are using. Google to delete search data of millions who used 'incognito' mode. You are not incognito in incognito mode. It just doesn't save traces of your search and online activities on your own computer. You were never invisible to Google.

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Google Street View can tell, from how your house looks on the street, what the risk of cardiovascular disease is. This is like radiomics. A bit far-fetched, but I can see how an A.I. model can be trained to detect this. But I bet it won't generalize.

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More like the Fab Two. The number of rising tech stocks has dropped, and the term "Magnificent Seven" no longer holds.

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If it's Boeing, I'm not going. Yet another Boeing mishap. What next?

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Only in Japan.  Everyone will be named Sato by 2531.

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