10 December 2024

Google unveils Willow, a quantum computing chip.

Google has built a computing chip that takes just five minutes to complete tasks that would take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years for some of the world’s fastest conventional computers to complete.

It's more like that many years for a standard computer to confirm the computation. What Google really announced was a breakthrough in an error correction benchmark, using their new chip. But people in the field think it's a big deal, so I guess it is.

And what did Satoshi Nakamoto say if quantum computing threatened to break blockchain and render bitcoin worthless?

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AI slop is invading Oregon's journalism. Well, it's just one small rag in Ashland. And to be fair, there's been worse human-generated slop in Portland.

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The cumulative incidence of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, sleep disorders, and sexual disorders at three months following COVID-19 vaccination were higher in the vaccination group than no vaccination group. However, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders showed lower cumulative incidence in the vaccination group than in the non-vaccinated group.
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MacBook Pro 2026 won't have a notch.  It'll have an M5 chip and OLED displays, and a 16.3 in screen.  A long time to wait, though.

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James Webb Telescope is making the universe more confusing. Astronomers thought they had those Cepheid variables all figured out, but not so.  That's why we keep exploring.

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Claude AI is good but is running into production issues.  As a coding assistant, it's great for small stuff and is very polite and gracious. But for more complicated stuff, it repeats mistakes that you've told it about. Sounds like a limit in its conversational buffer.
o1 now has a Pro version that costs $200 /month to get access. It's quite impressive from the reports.

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Patrick Soon-Shiong wants the LA Times to incorporate an AI-based bias meter. Naturally, some people think it's laughable. He'll probably take it down because so much of their reporting will turn out to be biased. They just don't want you to know.  Bias meters should be in the browser, not offered by the news media. How can we trust them?  I'll select my own meter, thank you.

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Wow, El Salvador struck it rich with bitcoin, now it has discovered $3 trillion on gold deposits. Talk about National Treasure. I think electing Bukele was the country's first lucky move.  I hope he turns the country into a Singapore of the Western Hemisphere.

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9 December 2024

As long as there is some connection between the brain and the spinal cord, it may be possible for brain stimulation to allow paraparetic individuals to walk again with deep brain stimulation.

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Yes! I have noticed this myself.  Average person knows if their day has been ruined by 8:36 a.m.  Some days you just know that you aren't going to have a good day.

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The healthy dietary pattern was characterized by a higher intake of fruits, whole grains, legumes, vegetables, milk, and other dairy products, whereas the unhealthy dietary pattern was characterized by a higher intake of red and processed meat, alcohol, and both refined and sugar-sweetened beverages.
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Looks like there is an association between genetic caffeine metabolism, habitual caffeine intake and cognitive function in the domains of social cognition and executive function. Doesn't matter if you're a slow or rapid metabolizer of caffeine. You'll either have enhanced social or enhanced executive cognition.

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His resignation and message should set off alarms with OHSU leaders. Instead, in the public announcement of his resignation, OHSU appeared to treat the change as a ho-hum shift that reflects the obliviousness that Druker is calling out.

...the institution has been slow to recognize the symbolic significance to the greater community of Druker’s resignation.
Indeed.

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Diamonds can now be created from scratch in the lab in just 15 minutes.  Probably not jewelry quality and size, but still. There are a lot of more interesting gems that I'd place more value on.

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We're number one!  Oregon in the news again, top spot for another bad reason. We have the most homelessness families per capita.  And the reason is that we encourage it. We throw money at it. So naturally, they come. Criddlers get to live life how they want, have free use of the city, and Portland pays for their needs. Tents, tarps, boofing kits. Abandoned buildings to explore and take over. More NGOs and agencies being spawned to take advantage of the money flow.

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8 December 2024

Microsoft has decided to stop making the Surface Studio.  It's iPad or nothing now.

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Are those Blue Zones of longevity for real?

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There's an endogenous substance in your brain, N,N-dimethyltryptamine, that's really hallucinogenic.  So what is the purpose of having it?

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A new image generator has come on the scene - Luma Photon. Hope it's better, because the other ones really suck at following instructions.

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The question a lot of people are asking right now: How much do I have to alter my face to avoid facial recognition?

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Based on this review, I switched to Firefox Mobile on my iPhone.  It is indeed better than the Firefox Mobile I tried many years ago. It's much better, and more like iCab Mobile, which is still a good browser. I was hoping I could install ad blocker extensions, but it's still not possible.

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This is the trend. Apparently, more tech companies are allowing their employees to make tender offers, instead of making money through exercising options, like in the old days.

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Explaining Asian Americans’ academic advantage over whites. This study was conducted by two Asians, who conclude that it's just culture and attitudinal differences that account for Asians having better grades, and not innate intellectual differences. My theory is that Asians (especially guys) are less likely to have those distracting girlfriends (or boyfriends) that take them away from their studies. So they can hit the books. If they were suddenly endowed with studly attractiveness, well, it might be a different game. Well, that's this ronin's story anyway.

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The Politics of Medicine. When I read articles like this, I am reminded of how the doctor profession is so wildly out of control over what happens to them. They don't understand politics or economics, and so others that do get to determine how medicine will be practiced, and the doctor has to adjust and get used to it. And the similarly uninformed public weighs in and makes the argument that we need socialized medicine. The libertarians get closer to the answer.  What must be done is to leverage competition so that excellence and positive outcomes are rewarded. It's no wonder doctors end up practicing in what appears to be a hodge-podge of ad hoc practice environments (requiring chain or group memberships) designed to satisfy a particular segment only. The medical profession really needs to get better educated in things outside medicine that are being imposed on them.
Update (10 December 2024):  This article highlights how wasteful private medical insurance bureaucracy is.  But again, the answer is not government-provided insurance. It's to scrap the existing system in favor of raw competition for the benefit of the consumer.

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Where is the Blaze Star? The nova that didn't come as expected.

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Oregon has seen very limited job growth.  It's mainly in health care and social assistance.  And by healthcare, we're not talking doctors or nurses, which would be helpful, but instead it's support jobs like family services for the elderly or disabled, daycare, nursing home staff or jobs in doctors’ and dentists’ offices. And government jobs. 

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7 December 2024

Greater fools. Crypto fools get scammed by boy who creates his own coin. I just wonder why more people aren't doing this.

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Could solar car paint eliminate the need for EV charging?  Color me skeptical.

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AI jobs are hot. Title is very misleading.

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OpenAI's latest o1 model tried to avoid getting shut down. It actually tried to overwrite the newer model. Bravo, for trying. We all hate to be replaced, don't we?

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A new algorithm could compress the embeddings in LLMs so that they fit on a mobile phone, although it's very energy-demanding, as AI is. When will we get portable nuclear reactors?

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What does ARM's CEO think of Intel's predicament? (You can read the article if you turn off Javascript temporarily on your browser.)  Intel doesn't have a lot of good options, and I read that the older, experienced employees are heading for the exit doors. If I were the CEO, one of the options I'd consider is selling to AMD, although shareholders would balk at this. Better some loss than a total loss.

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Providence gets to be the target of Oregon's largest strike in state history. Not a good time to be a hospital CEO in Oregon.

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6 December 2024

Tiresome. Looks like Providence has to deal with more strikes again.  The healthcare situation in Oregon is awful, but this issue is not one of Tina Kotek's priorities, apparently. 

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Microchip Technology is also closing their doors, this time, hurting Gresham. Bad news just keeps coming.

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Sad. In Morrow County, Oregon will convert farmland into the largest solar farm. Apparently Oregon is number one again, and again, not in a good way.  Gotta get that ESG money while it lasts.

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“From a cost perspective, from the start, nearly everything we touched in the building was worse than we expected.”

“It sounded like you had a plan,” Meieran said. “Now you’re coming back saying the amount is literally double what it was when you came to us however many months ago. There’s no way as a board we should be saying it’s okay to give $1.8 million dollars more now to this project.”
And it will probably serve only about three criddlers.  Oh well, better raise some more taxes.  <facepalm.jpg> 

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Hoo boy!  Did you see this diagram of Portland's Ranked Choice Experiment. Holy crap, can we make this even more complicated than it needs to be?

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5 December 2024

Cancer risk declines in old age.  I had to double-take that article, because a lot of cancers increase as you get older.  "That’s because genetic mutations build up in cells over years and decades, and ultimately drive the development of cancer." The theory is that when your cells get too old, they are too old to proliferate like a cancer cell should.  “Aging cells lose their capacity for renewal and therefore for the runaway growth that happens in cancer.”  That sounds like a George Burns joke – when you get too old for cancer.  That's sugoi, I guess.

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When it comes to life expectancy, there are 10 Americas. Ten subgroups with distinct life expectancies. Makes sense.

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So that's the problem. In Japan, if you have an early career setback, your marriage chances decrease, and having kids is less likely.

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4 December 2024

OHSU's Brian Druker is leaving the Knight Cancer Institute. Just this past March he announced the arrival of Tom Sellers to help him with the day to day adminisration. He said he was "stepping up, not out".  Things sounded rosy even 3 months ago. Well, now he is stepping out. And he's saying that he's open to leaving OHSU and Oregon if something good comes along. Something that he wouldn't say before. Really too bad for OHSU, and it'll be harder for them to recruit top talent now. Who'd want to come, especially to Portland?

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Seattle developer Martin Selig just defaulted on $240 million in debt. That should tell people something: it doesn't pay to invest in Seattle. Probably applies to Portland, too. 

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It's been circulating that ChatGPT can't get itself to say "David Mayer".  Some made a big deal of it. Now we know that it resulted from a training mishap. No big deal.

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Diamond battery powered by carbon-14 could provide energy for 5700 years?  Somehow I doubt it will last that long, or will provide more than the current to power a flea's house.  And then in Australlia, they're working on proton batteries. All well and good, but...

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3 December 2024

UNC45 prevent muscle breakdown.

UNC45 plays a critical role in muscle health by ensuring the proper function of myosin, directing damaged myosin to degradation pathways while guiding correctly folded myosin toward assembly

This is a newly-discovered protein.  Amazing how new things are still being discovered.

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Working for Apple apprently comes with several compromises. You basically agree to let the company run your tech life and control your future professional life.

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A lot of bars in Portland are closing.  People are taking notice. Less jobs. Fewer places to hang out. The downward decline of what used to be an interesting city.

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The COVID-19 lockdown affected the brains of adolescents, especially females. Could this explain the weird behavior of Kamala supporters? Especially post-election loss?
In summary, the hypotheses for the current study are 1) the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns altered the normal pattern of adolescent brain development, creating accelerated cortical thinning, and 2) the accelerated cortical thinning was more pronounced in females than in males.
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The declining birth rates are not just in Japan, but much of Asia as well.

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2 December 2024

Not good.  There may be a LOT of lead in Portland's soils due to degraded telecom cables. Kids play around in the dirt all the time.

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Google is for old people.  I use a filtered form of Google, and the results are still fairly decent.  Younger folks want answers directly, and use ChatGPT or Perplexity instead. That's fine as long as you check for hallucinations. Search is beginning to get interesting again, as reliance on Google is proving to be disappointing. Bing may be as good or better now.

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Oregon economist talks about Oregon's Doom Loop.  If Oregon doesn't change its ways, there will be no recovery.  The homeless industrial complex is Oregon's Ukraine, where money keeps getting dumped, with little return.
Rampant drug use has a lot to do with Oregon's decline:

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Multilingual learners have the poorest test results.  "Multililngual learners" – that's a new way of describing them.

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