15 June 2025

AI education has the potential of disseminating outdated science, since large models can't be updated frequently enough. You think that's bad, try medicine, where things change so quickly.

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Those sneaky Chinese. This is how the smartest people in the world get around those pesky nVIDIA chip export restrictions. You pack the data in suitcases and send them to the United States. Then someone runs the code on the GPUs and sends the data back to China. Because there's no restriction on data, right?

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A lot of people objected to Apple's paper on the limitations of reasoning models. Large models don't necessarily live up to the hype.  Gary Marcus sums up seven main objections to the paper and knocks them down. 

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Incredible how the geographic coordinates of the Great Pyramid of Giza are the speed of light in microns/sec N, and 10,000,000 m from the North Pole. Surely it's just a coincidence. Got those Graham Hancock/Erich von Däniken vibes.

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Is Google going to destroy the Web? Seems a bit overblown. Not destroy. Just change. If Google just kept doing what they were doing before, and just providing us with good search results, it might stick around longer. They wouldn't have made as much advertising money, but people wouldn't be criticizing as much as they do now. Google is trying to preserve its golden goose, but the bird is getting old.

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AI is making students dumb. Kinda like the Internet has made students dumb. This is one of the major threats of AI – taking away so much cognitive skills from us humans. We'll have a generation of dummies who won't know what to do without an internet-connected phone nearby.
And here's an article about a man afflicted with ChatGPT-driven psychosis. LLMs are a force multiplier for mental illness. 

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Five greatest physics lectures of all time. No excuses now. This is what the Internet was made for.

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OHSU has decided to go with Shereef Elnahal. It's interesting to think that they had a guy who was ready to take on the role (Nate Selden), but oh no, Tina Kotek had to have a nationwide search first. In the end, the just found one guy willing to take the job, and he's got no obvious advantage over Selden. Being from Harvard and the East Coast is a disadvantage, I think. Was it just that they wanted an outsider?  Just wanted to have someone else besides Selden, who was already Dean of the School of Medicine? What is the point? At least Selden was a local and already knew people. So much money wasted. Selden had been with OHSU for 25 years. What a way to treat him.

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14 June 2025

Photon transport through the entire adult human head. What a weird study to be doing. They measured light of 800 nm wavelength (in the infrared range) going through the skull, and actually detected photons on the other side. I would have thought all such light would be absorbed, but some penetrated through. What use this information has is beyond me.

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Apple has a problem. This could be huge for Apple. I don't think there will be robust sales for the new iPhone. Who really needs a new phone that doesn't really do much more than the iPhone 16, and is just thinner and more likely to bend and so, likely has an inferior battery life, I don't know for sure. And the Liquid Glass look? Seems to make text harder to see. Somehow, I don't think Steve Jobs would approve of what's going to come out.

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Google's going to implement an age assurance tool that is zero-knowledge. Do you trust Google to do this? I really don't. They can triangulate the data from so many different ways.

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Pseudomonas aeruginosa can break down hospital plastic. And this bug is not rare, especially in hospitals. So now. hospital plastic needs to be coated with antimicrobials to prevent this.

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This is how it starts. Strange neutrino pulses have been detected that emit from deep within Antarctic ice. It's aliens!

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The CEO of Scale AI is joining Meta. Scale AI hires third world workers to do all the grunge labeling work for AI datasets. They have to watch all the videos and images and classify them. Sometimes the images are NSFW and something NSFL. Well, Alexandr Wang will make his billions.
Update (16 June 2025): So Google is cutting ties with Scale AI. Can't blame them, really.

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Providence is going to lay off 134 employees. All for the usual reasons. The nurses union (ONA) claims that the Providence administration hasn't lowered their own salaries in response to their financial downturn, and Providence is not denying this. Makes me wonder how serious they think it is. Why not lower the salaries of executives, instead of firing people and making patient care that much more difficult? It's a legit point. Put some skin in the game. And Providence should get on the phone and talk to Kotek and get her to do something about Oregon's lousy economy and high crime rate. Stop businesses from leaving and stop raising taxes on everything. This way so many people won't have to be on CareOregon/Medicaid.

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13 June 2025

Girls fall behind boys in math during the first year of school. Why does this happen?

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Laptop speakers can leak audio through walls, through inadvertent radio transmission leakage. Probably not something I'll have to worry about. 

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U.S. Senators may ban pharma ads on TV networks. Boy, is their budget gonna suffer. They should ban it from radio, too.

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Sleeping in total darkness turns about to be important. Even a little bit of light can apparently interfere with deep sleep.

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In a parody article, someone wrote that Cape Breton was going to have its own time zone. Google and Meta picked it up as actual news, and started disseminating it. 

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Not good.  Intel is going to start laying off an unknown number of people in Oregon in July. This is going to hurt Oregon even more.

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This is news to me. RFK Jr. is telling people that:
For $75 a month, under this bill, you’ll be able to get a concierge doctor who is available 24 hours a day, every day of the week, every day of the year. You won’t get a bill for it. You won’t have to file insurance claims. It’s just like old-style health care—but it’s for $75 a month.

We’re also going to allow the creation of onsite medical centers by employers—at factories, at workplaces—where workers can get treated for free. Somebody won’t have to leave work for four or five hours to get a medical checkup. They’ll be able to do that onsite.
What? Suddenly medicine is a commodity? So cheap? We're getting even deeper into socialized medicine? Do we have all these doctors now, who will be willing to work for peanuts? Or does he expect AI to step up? Or nurse practitioners? Or FMGs?

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Some folks are looking into a theory that gravity is just a manifestation of entropy.  Yeah, it's a long shot.

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Fastest way to detect a vowel in a string. Nice review of Python coding techniques.

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Sad story of a guy who convinced HP to buy Palm and WebOS, and then see it die.  Oh, what could have been. The stars really misaligned, didn't they.

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More money gets wasted going to the bloated Oregon Edu-cay-shun Department.  Meanwhile, Oregon has nothing to show for all that money. 

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12 June 2025

Using ChatGPT changes your brain – for the worse. All that cognitive off-loading. Quick, somebody let Ohio State University know. Use of ChatGPT will be required come this fall.

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It hasn't happened yet. Someone speculates on what will be AI's first big disaster. So many possibilities.

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Well shoot. Houseplants don't actually purify the air. The original story that said it did was flawed.

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Looks like Khanh Pham's crazy bill to tax Google and Meta has advanced in the legislature. I bet she thinks she's doing Oregon a service.

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Dutch Bros is officially moving their HQ to Arizona. All those jobs. All that tax base. Tsk, tsk.

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Yes, those political TikTok videos really do shape people's minds. And Trump's team makes better ones. Of course, we knew that.

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Here's a map of where inflation is the highest. What do you notice?

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11 June 2025

nVIDIA is going to build the world's first industrial AI cloud datacenter. But it's going to be built in Europe, to help European countries. What, not enough business in the United States?

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Apple introduces a haptic movie experience. OK, Apple, you can do cute small stuff like this, but how about something significant, too. You know, like what Steve Jobs would have done?

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Last year's winning optical illusions. Most of them are stuff we've already seen before. The latest entries are from 2023. The 2024 contest is underway. So late.

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A pancreatic cancer vaccine that "eradicates" disease? Why hasn't this gotten more publicity? Because, it's still early in the development phase. From the description, it seems more like cellular therapy, rather than a vaccine.

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10 June 2025

Semaglutide is linked to neovascular macular degeneration.  It's already linked to muscle and bone mass loss. But on the plus side, it may increase penis length by a several millimeters. So, worth it?

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Great article on what it's like going through a lawsuit. It's not fun, and AI can be a very helpful companion.

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Clark County schools are feeling the money pinch. Schools always seem to need money. Why is that? Wish the students' grades would reflect the investment.

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Here's Biden on sanctuary cities in 2007 when he had a few more brain cells. Obama had a message, too. It's clear. The Democrat party is not the same as it was before. Just because you were a Democrat then, doesn't mean that it makes sense to still be one today. So Trump is not some fascist dictator, just trying to enforce immigration law, unless those two were also. 

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Remember when Portland didn't call in the National Guard, so as not to "escalate" the violence?  Yeah about that.

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8 June 2025

CAR-T cell therapy may cure refractory myeloma in about a third of cases. This is the CARTITUDE-1 trial. Very nice. CAR-T cell therapy has come a long way. Dr. Carl June, still hasn't gotten a Nobel prize for this.

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GenZ is becoming a generation of slackers. That's the old term for NEETs. 
“I’m just focusing on the present because the future is depressing.” Hustling, girlbossing, or “work hard, play harder” just doesn’t quite have the same grip on Gen Z as it did on millennials starting out.  

...many Gen Zers are eyeing up easygoing jobs that don’t require regular overtime, antisocial working hours, or substantial responsibilities like managing a large team.
Others are avoiding office jobs: The hottest roles right now among Gen Z grads are in teaching, where low pay is balanced with weeks of vacation. 

At the same time as unemployment among the youth is rising, their mental health is in decline.
Until recently, being the director of an NSAID-funded NGO was a cool job. Or a homeless agency in Portland.

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Portland Mayor Keith Wilson still pledges to end homelessness by this year.  By blanketing the city with crappy tiny homes in "safe villages" all over, no doubt. Portland is clearly in a doom loop. So much white flight going on, taking their wealth with them.
And more workers in Oregon are part-timers now. There just isn't enough money to support full-timers and probably not enough business anyway.

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7 June 2025

I'm interested to see what Apple's WWDC 2025 will reveal. A new look/theme for sure. But I don't expect much in the AI department. I doubt Siri will improve, unfortunately. Unlike most geeks in the Bay Area, I don't want my phone to automatically book reservations at my favorite restaurant and schedule cab service to pick me up. Or make plane reservations and reserve a rental car. I just want Siri to tell me where the nearest location of a place is. As it is, it doesn't do that automatically based on where I am. It makes mistakes.

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College Students Are Using ‘No Contact Orders’ to Block Each Other in Real Life. What a sad world we live in now. We'd rather interact virtually instead of in real life. And some college kids feel that they have to block people from trying to interact in real life.

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Meta is invading your privacy in a new way. Bottom line: Don't use Meta and Yandex apps. Don't use an Android phone. Don't use the Chrome browser. Better yet, just stay off Meta/Facebook period.
Update (10 June 2025): Good explanation of the exploit here.

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Japanese scientists have invented a plastic that dissolves in sea water.  One might cause a lot of mischief with this. Just sayin'.
Update: here's a better article.
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MIT scientists again. With a new kind of magnetism. It's called p-wave magnetism. Unlike Harvard or Columbia, MIT actually does useful stuff.

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Another report touting the life-extending benefits of metformin. This has been shown before, and it's nice to see that the effects have been confirmed.

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There's a way to deliver gene therapy through the airway into the lungs.  The agent is called AAV.CPP.16. It may be a useful way to deliver therapy for interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, among other things.

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Seattle is so crappy that next year's Microsoft Build developer conference will not be held in Seattle.  After this year's attendees complained about urban decay, open-air drug use, and numerous tents lining the streets. Seattlites have become accustomed to all that crap and filth, but that doesn't mean the rest of the country has to put up with it, too.  Now you all know what living in a Blue City is like.

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I've often wondered about this. Remember when schools used Apple computers and software. Then suddenly they switched to Google products. Now our kids are under surveillance. There is a hidden privacy crisis in education technology. But of course, the people in charge of purchasing are not likely tech-savvy, and don't know enough to select the best products. All those Chromebooks using Google Docs. Not good. 

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6 June 2025

Silicon Valley Is Starting to Pick Sides in Musk and Trump’s Breakup. Yesterday's acrimony between Trump and Elon was unfortunate and revealing. Many predicted this would happen some day. I think that the event has made Trump realize that he cannot put all the nation's eggs in the Elon basket. The U.S. needs to revitalize NASA and develop its own satellite Internet system. We cannot be subject to the whims of an unpredictable guy like Elon. This is now a matter of national security.

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A man on a NY subway was caught using ChatGPT as an online girlfriend.  He was foolish to do so in public, and to use a public chat system. But the availability of online companionship is alluring, no doubt. Reading the commentary is revealing.

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What do you do with a kid who loves math? The author says there are three ways: math olympiad training, standard curriculum but faster, or do it your own way. Although the latter is the least stressful, I'm not sure you advance as far that way. There's so much to learn, and most kids won't realize this, and proceed at a slow pace. The ideal way would be to do the standard curriculum but faster, and be able to stop and take a break when you want to. This is like exercise. Math Olympiad training is like martial arts. (Martial Math, I like to say.)

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What Apple is predicted to reveal at the upcoming WWDC.  Not much stuff that I would actually use. We still won't have Tony Stark's phone. Looks like the overall "look" will change. We'll see.

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OHSU has one candidate for the President's position, since the other candidate decided to withdraw.  He's a Harvard man, and worked for Biden, so he's got those going against him 😁. Maybe he'll bring an East Coast work ethic to Oregon. I wonder why a guy like this would want to leave a good position and take on a struggling Oregon hospital. Does he love challenges that much? I also wonder why the other person dropped out. I guess Dr. Elnahal will get the job by default.

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Are you upset at the word "oriental"? I'm not. Who cares?

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Make power-hungry data centers pay for their own power. Sounds reasonable to me. Why shouldn't they?

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Parking in downtown Portland is going to increase from $2.20 to $3.60. More fees and taxes, despite getting less for your money.
Portland Metro told the City Council that they can't just raise taxes without voter approval. And Steve Novick just laughs. "Voter approval?? We don't need no steenkin' voter approval."  Or something like that.

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How's' Obamacare working out for you?  More Oregonians are skipping medical care because of costs.  
Someone wisely said that for healthcare, there is affordability, quality and availability.  But you can only pick two.  I agree. 
The ACA prioritized availability and thought affordability and that quality would remain the same. Alas, over time, quality deteriorated.
Before the ACA, insurance companies were seeing the high costs, which they didn't like. But with Obamacare, they are happier because less people are using the system, because it's no longer affordable. And they can deny care, because they are now the gatekeepers, not the doctors or the hospitals.

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