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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31 March 2024

Memories are formed by breaking and reforming DNA strands. I always thought it was nitric oxide and NMDA receptos, reinforcing certain pathways. Or the virus-like ARC protein. Guess, we really don't know, do we?

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I think so. Is social media behind teen mental illness?

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Uh-oh. "informed consent has been quietly revoked just 77 years after it was codified in the Nuremberg Code." The DHS and FDA made last-minute changes to weaken informed consent laws when the risk is felt to be "minimal-risk". Of course, they determine what is considered minimal-risk. I'd bet more "look the other way" science is in the works.

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Birth Rates Are Plummeting in Most Nations. Except Africa and the Middle East. Those areas are still enjoying a birth rate that is more than just replacement numbers. Is Europe prepared for this?
Look at the countries that have the highest fertility rates.

Now look at the top countries in how much of the population got COVID vaccinations:

I'd say those countries did just fine not getting jabbed. Maybe this is why their fertility didn't get affected like that of Europe and the Americas.
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Nice helpful graphic for the upcoming (April 8) solar eclipse.

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Major security breach found in some Linux distros. And it was discovered because a Microsoft techie noticed an anomaly as he was playing around. Andreas Freund, you are a hero.

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Cocoa prices are going up a lot, after shortages are seen for the third year in a row. Hoard chocolate now!

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Where people moved to, as they fled Oregon. Kinda silly to move to Washington or California, if you ask me. Idaho, Texas, Florida or Arizona make more sense to me.

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30 March 2024

Things are moving so fast. Open AI has a custom voice cloning model, but in an unusual moment of ethical hesitation, they aren't going to release it to the public just yet. Well, that's certainly kind of them, but who knows how long the embargo will last.

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Testing the main AI Chatbots. What they won't tell you. Guess what? They're all afraid to tell you certain things because of, you know, goes against the narrative. And they don't want to trigger you with stuff that might trigger violence. Because we all live in the era of violence against speech we don't like, right?

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Plaid Pantry employees don't feel safe anymore, and don't want to take bottle returns at night. Can't blame them. They're so vulnerable.

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This is creepy. This AI app shows you in scenarios that you may never get to enjoy - because you have metastatic cancer (they call it secondary, for some reason). This could generate profound grief and sadness. Or maybe even anger. And maybe some will be triggered to go out and blame someone, because they feel that someone should pay for their not being to enjoy these moments.

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Ah, Lena, we'll miss you. After all these years, IEEE suddenly gets cold feet. Sheesh. Just use her head, already. So how about men? Will that trigger the snowflakes, too? You want to know why male engineers are happy without diversity? Because they would have to walk on eggshells now.

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No Evidence COVID-19 Vaccines Stopped Transmission When Authorized, Confirms Liberal Canadian Government. Yeah, for this, people had to lose jobs, or get jabbed against their will. All for nothing. Many of us knew this, or were at least skeptical enough to doubt that the vax should be mandatory. But the scared liberals wouldn't have it.

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We may have to have a negative leap-second. Because the earth is spinning faster. What's the opposite of leap?

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This is going on in Oregon. The attack on small farms.
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29 March 2024

CBD products don’t ease pain and are potentially harmful.  Well, well, CBD doesn't really lessen pain, and it may be harmful as well. And everyone was convinced that CBD was beneficial. Power of the placebo, is what it was.

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Oh-oh. Now that people have played around with chatbots, they're realizing that chatbots aren't really as accurate and trustworthy as it seemed. They were just really good and imitating coherent speech. But you had to double check their work. And they would hallucinate. I think people haven't learned how to use them. What you prompt them with is critical. But many of the ChatBots refuse to answer questions that might go against the left's narrative. Only Grok answered all questions. The others refused.
NYC's AI Chatboot tells you to break the law. Why not, breaking the law is OK in NYC anyway.

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Did you know that the NIH held the patents for the mRNA vax? And you thought it was all the geniuses at BioNTech, Pfizer and Moderna. No it was developed by the DoD, and licensed to the pharmaceutical companies. This is why they wanted everyone to get the jab. See it now? Now they want BioNTech to pay up, and they can't. Even Novavax has to pay $80 million/year until 2028 to Gavi, and no one is even using their product anymore. Womp, womp.

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The Francis Scott Key Bridge is estimated to take 10 years to rebuild. Incredible. They must have consulted with California or Hawaii. The bridge is never going to get rebuilt until they have a new mayor. Not the DEI one.

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Multnomah County lost 14 people/day in 2023. That's 5110 total. Doesn't seem like much, but it's probably the one's who could afford to leave. And just about everyone else in the neighborhood saw gains instead. That's an increase in the tax base.

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Ah, I remember when McCormick and Schmick's was one of Portland's top seafood restaurants. Now they've closed all their Portland locations, and is only in Tigard. Portland can't have nice things anymore.

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Biden wants every federal agency to have an AI chief. Why not just have one to oversee everybody. Now you have a multitude of conflicting policy and an expansion of the government. Just what we need – more government. Here'a an example: Even The Most Well-Meaning Internet Regulations Can Cause Real Harm. You don't need more well-meaning but dumb politicians making life more difficult with their ill-thought out legislation. 

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The Unintended Consequences of Academic Leniency. Guess what, grade inflation only encouraged truancy. You can't get something for nothing, I guess.

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This could come in handy. An AI tool can give you an approximate geographical location of an image. Like a geo-guesser.

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How Meta/Facebook intercepts your web traffic.

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28 March 2024

The Pentagon has a Silicon Valley problem. Several, actually. For one thing, many in the Valley don't want to work on anything that might help the war machine. The second is that they're depending on A.I. which isn't quite smart enough to rely upon for military purposes, and it showed. Plus, our enemies know how to defeat it.

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Amazon One is gearing up to use palm recognition technology to authenticate you. Those who give up security for convenience deserve neither security nor convenience. -- Ben Franklin, probably.

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More than half of chickenpox cases are misdiagnosed. More than half? Really?

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Emergency rooms are hell now. In some areas, they've turned into a jungle. Like an urban MASH unit. What happened? And why can't things get back to the way they were?

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It's been a little over a year since we've been introduced to ChatGPT. How are things now? Not so good as we thought. There have been some dazzling things, for sure, but a lot of overblown hype. And already, performers are being replaced by A.I.

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27 March 2024

That's wild. About 34% of Americans have never heard of ChatGPT.

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All of a suddenly, fusion drive technology is here. I must have been asleep.

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Speaking of sleep. Two nights of broken sleep can make people feel years older. I believe it. I think the way you age is that when you are sleep deprived and look like crap in the morning, you eventually stay that way all day into the next day, then that's your new permanent until you are sleep deprived again. That's my theory and I'm sticking with it.

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But human brains are getting larger, and that's supposedly good for dementia outlook, but it gives us more time to lose brain matter, I guess.

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A.I. could take away 8 million jobs in the UK alone. Bet that's similar to that in the U.S.  Women and younger workers are expected to get hit the hardest.

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The Polar Vertex is spinning backwards. Man, doesn't anything work right in the Biden era?

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Scientists have found several parts of the brain that come online early, and then die out early (last in, first out), leading to age-related and Alzheimer-related dementias, as well as schizophrenia. The most significant modifiable risk factors for degeneration in the LIFO network were diabetes, traffic-related pollution (nitrogen oxides) and alcohol.

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