Sugoi & Yokunai

Florida woman used Claude as a diary, then Anthropic reported an entry to police. This is what happens when you use technology you don't fully understand. This haas already happened with Google searchers. People haven't learned. These services are not private. Only local model usage, or cloud computing with zero data-retention policies can give you this. 🙄

––– 良くない–––

Your car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening. Today, it's just vehicle telemetry. But soon, they will listen to conversations so that certain words will trigger AI agents. This is not the future I wanted.

––– 良くない–––

15 years after his passing, nobody is ‘The Next Steve Jobs’. Certainly not Tim Cook. Probably the closest person is Elon Musk, in terms of boldness of vision, and refusal to accept someone else's definition of "impossible". Steve grew up at a time when it was still common to uphold the old hippie ideals, and his love for the Whole Earth Catalog seems quaint. We don't think like that now. Today's people are more defined about what they hate. They hate Nazis, fascists, racists, sexists, etc. You have to have the "correct" political views to eat at a Portland restaurant now. 

And rich people. Here's two of Portland's city council, wanting to inflict financial pain on rich people. And they assume everyone is cool with it. Check out what happened in Nashville recently. Their symphony was about to shut down because of financial struggles. But Oracle decided to help out and gave them a lifeline. Now they can have a nice program. See what billionaires can do? But this will never happen to Portland. The city can go down the toilet and no one will come out to rescue them. We so badly need a Steve Jobs-type for Portland.

––– 良くない–––

Your Right to Privacy Doesn't Disappear When You're in Public: Defenders of Flock-style surveillance systems argue that people “have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public.” The authors think they're wrong, but in reality you don't have a right to privacy just being out in public. On your own property, yes, but no where else, except in private areas, like restrooms, dressing rooms, etc.

––– 良くない–––

Things that Apparently Cause Cancer. Great article debunking a Harvard study that linked cancer incidence with being close to a nuclear facility. It appears that their methodology makes Costco look bad, too.

––– 良くない–––

Honda is testing a system that charges EV trucks while their driving. Like Qi charging, except the whole road is the charger. This is crazy and way to expensive. Just make better batteries, already.

––– 良くない–––

Why aren't people using Lemmy?  I looked into Lemmy as Reddit is becoming more closed off. But wow, you can see the difference in quality. Lemmy seems to be just populated by high school boys. There's very little intelligent conversation. At least not on lemmy.world, the largest of the lemmys. I guess I'm going to be on Lobsters, Tildes and HN exclusively.

––– 良くない–––

The further degradation of the city. Multnomah County advances plan that would extend East County ambulance response standards to 15 minutes. Every minute counts with cardiac arrests and strokes. Waiting 15 minutes is unacceptable. We're going to see a lot more failures. 😪

––– 良くない–––

Lung cancers can use two different mechanisms to evade KRAS-inhibiting drugs. RAS inhibitors in lung cancer work differently from the multi-RAS inhibitor used in pancreatic cancer. Resistance has been an issue with targeted therapies for a long time, which has been challenge. The long-term good luck that was seen with imatinib against chronic myelogenous leukemia has not panned out in most other diseases. But understanding how breakthrough occurs is the first step in understanding how to improve these drugs.

––– 凄い –––

Five Things I Learned in Hiring a Financial Adviser. There's more to what a financial planner does than just pick stocks for you, or manage your portfolio. It helps to have someone evaluate your estate planning and tax situation as well.

––– 凄い –––

This morning there's been several articles about college graduates and their prospects afterwards. Here's one that questions whether you need to go to college in the first place. Fox News says that more Gen Z college freshmen are quitting school early and moving back home with mom and dad. Here's one that suggests that the quality of a college education has been declining.  And a Gallup poll indicates that a record-low (31%) say that a college education Is 'Very Important'. 

––– 良くない–––

Here's a report that indicates that an increasing number of households are spending on AI, but only about 2% of households are paying for it. This suggests that there's still plenty of upside. Then they have to decide whether they'll put up with datacenters after all.

––– 凄い –––

Tesla's robotaxis won't operate at night because they have no Lidar. Waymo uses Lidar and operates 24 hours/day. But Musk doesn't believe in Lidar for some reason. Even Rivian uses Lidar.

––– 良くない–––

Mote is a website that lets you have private chats where nothing is recorded (by them) and it's all private. Don't we already have encrypted chat? Can we trust these folks? I can't find any information about who set this up.

––– 良くない–––

Property managers in Portland are finding that it's not safe to do their work now. And if tenants declare apartments to be off-limits, this is how you start to get no-go zones in your city. This is what Portland is becoming.

––– 良くない–––

If you bought an iPhone 18 Pro Max and cellular communication stops working, you need to get a replacement phone. If you haven't lost service yet, you should update your phone ASAP. But if it's already gone, you need a replacement phone.

––– 良くない–––

OpenAI safety leader quits, warning AI company’s culture is ‘broken’. Well, that doesn't sound good. These days, I can't get too excited when people quit because they don't like the company culture. He wasn't a good fit, that's all.

––– 良くない–––

Singapore builds most accurate clock ever, leaves US and China in dust. I think what he have is already pretty good. A second off in a 6 million years? Good enough for most things, I'll wager. Singapore's clock is a second off in 260 billion years. Well good.

––– 凄い –––

There's a rumor that Robert X Cringely has died. That would be sad. His columns entertained me for many years. He seems to have encountered a lot of bad luck in the past decade or so. He'll be missed by dotcom-aged nerds and geeks.

––– 良くない–––

Wow, I never thought about this. Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS. Several of my apps already request and are granted full disk access. But with the trend to include AI agents to do this and that, there is a danger that some of these autonomous agents will pull stuff in the course of their activities that are not something that the developer necessarily planned on, but would not be something I would want exposed, like financial or personal records. So Apple is making it harder for agents to get Full Disk Access, which is good.

––– 凄い –––

Google AI Plus and free users are losing access to Gemini models, and it's happening very soon. Oh well. It was great while it lasted.

––– 良くない–––

You can create and easily edit a lot of interesting images with FLUX 3. 

––– 凄い –––

We’re Missing a Key Reason Why Americans Hate AI.

Because everyone is using AI to create new things, and all those new things come at a cost. It was too naïve to say that things would be cheap. Using AI tools is expensive. It's just Jevon's Paradox. But I am confident that costs will eventually lower as efficiencies kick in.

––– 凄い –––

Cities keep shelling out taxpayer money for sports stadiums, yet the economics almost never makes sense. Someone send this article to Keith Wilson and Tina Kotek. Forget the Blazers and paying for the MODA Center. Portland can't afford it. Stuff like this is for wealthy cities, and Portland is not that anymore. You've let the city run into the ground, now experience the consequences. Keeping the Blazers is just pretending that we're still the same old Portland. We aren't. It's not like the Bud Clark days anymore. This is the gift of socialism – poverty.

––– 良くない–––

Oregonians are discovering that EVs aren't the sensible car to drive. Get a hybrid, man. It's really the best. EVs only make sense in places like the Bay Area.

––– 良くない–––

Why have the Chinese been so willing to share the weights of their advanced models?  Good question. Some of their open-weight models rival American frontier models, which they probably should since they were probably distilled from them. But I'm glad they are. So far there don't seem to be any hidden back doors, although some of them still require that some of your data goes back to China. Gotta be careful. 

––– 凄い –––

Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines. How to understand the Huggingface break-in affair, explained like you're 5.

––– 凄い –––

Defrauding Federal Programs Can Be Ticket to Being a Billionaire. Yeah, this is why I opposed single-payer healthcare under control of the federal government. They can't even detect crap like this.

––– 良くない–––

Used processor leads to game ban. There was a reason why those CPUs were cheap. So game software checks your CPU ID now, and if it's on a blacklist, it will not run. This was a used AMD processor, a Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Wow, too bad for the guy that bought it, but apparently it was just one computer system with the banned CPU.

––– 良くない–––

Jev is getting a lot of attention now. It's the latest craze, like Claw and Moltbot was six months ago. It's basically a classifier, but it's biased. When asked about truly random decisions, its output does not produce a random distribution. That makes it less useful than the hype. Maybe they'll fix it.

––– 良くない–––

This is amazing. Planets observed rotating around a distant star 133 light-years away. It's HR 8799 in Pegasus.

––– 凄い –––

There's something else to complain about datacenters: e-waste. Turns out that you have to replace the hardware fairly often, because newer and better stuff comes out all the time. What happens to the old stuff? We need to recycle it.

––– 良くない–––

Someone else is leaving Reddit because they're shutting down RSS access. I'm already planning a migration to lemmy.world. I bet that Lemmy will see a big influx of Reddit users.

––– 良くない–––

Pallet CEO fears Seattle’s homelessness response going ‘backwards’. As Seattle runs out of other people's money, this NGO is having to shut down. Homelessness has become a business model for the Left. Hopefully this means we'll see less of those unsightly tool-shed homes. Seattle is running out of money to pay for homeless services. When you take into accouint community safety and violence prevention, food and nutrition programs on top of homeless response, it adds up to around 12% of the $2 billion general fund. 

––– 良くない–––

Cannabis use is associated with increased risk of violence. Even more evidence. Do we really need this in America right now? One of the selling points of cannabis over alcohol was that it wouldn't make people as violent, and instead, make them mellow. That didn't turn out to be the case with the higher potenct weed.

––– 良くない–––

I saw that both semaglutide and tirzepatide can activate brown fat in mice, which really just means it made the thermogenic brown fat work harder. It's also a mouse study, and adult humans don't have much brown fat. But formoterol can increase energy expenditure without activating brown fat, through activating beta-2 adrenergic receptors. One caution is that drugs that stimulated beta-3-adrenergic pathways, which activated brown fat, also had adverse cardiac dysrhythmia side-effects. So although this worked in mice, it's not an automatic that this will work in humans.

––– 凄い –––

Google Grapples With Employee Skepticism About New Gemini 4 Model. If even your own employees are not convinced it's that great, what does that say?

––– 良くない–––

Experimental Drug Reverses Paralysis and Vision Loss in MS-Like Disease. There's a mouse model of multiple sclerosis, in which myelin is inflamed. The drug is a nucleoside analog kamuvudine-9. Still early in research and not ready to be deployed, but promising.

––– 凄い –––

Oh crap. Amazon’s delivery driver smart glasses will reportedly take photos ‘almost constantly’ So these drivers will have to wear creepy video glasses. They don't look too fashionable. Someone needs to develop a blocker for this. 

Speaking of Amazon, they must have heard me: 

You want to learn AWS by building something. Then a thought interrupts: "What if I leave something running and wake up to a bill I can't afford?"

Holy crap! Anthropic IPO Prospectus Reveals $8 Billion Operating Loss. You'd think the company was swimming in cash, but no. Think it'll matter, though?

––– 良くない–––

Misleading AI-generated summaries can distort human memory. Turns out that when humans are presented with faulty AI summaries of meetings and such, they're more willing to say "Uh, OK..." rather than "Wait, that didn't happen!" This is scary, especially when AI is used to summarize clinic encounters. How often does your doctor correct errors, or just assume it happened that way? What about when Apple watches summarize recorded events. Humans have never had to face this before.

––– 良くない–––

Researchers at Google DeepMind have found a way to watermark AI-generated proteins without affecting their function. This is a way to track the provenance of their proteins. Paper here. Reminds me of Blade Runner 2029, where you can read the serial number of replicants. 

––– 凄い –––

Chinese publishers announced the creation of their new journal, Vita, which they aim to make as prestigious as western journals. To encourage westerners to submit, they are waiving the article publishing costs, for now. We'll see how this goes.

––– 凄い –––

The rumors are true: Reddit is sharply curtailing access to old.reddit.com and is killing RSS feed access as of November 13. All because of AI scraping and content bots. This will probably kill the allure of Reddit, and once again encourage alternate social media sites. We'll see. This would be an opportunity for Digg.com to come back, after their unsuccessful attempt at a comeback.

––– 良くない–––

OpenAI holds off on releasing new model over safety concerns, saying it "didn't quite meet the bar". I think frontier models are getting so advanced now that their should eliminate unrestricted release to the public.

––– 凄い –––

September 2026: the world today, as seen by one Polish guy. Excellent summary of the energy crisis that Poles face, and how it's interconnected with world politics. The country is in a tight spot, and they're relying on a lot of luck, since they haven't prepared for disaster, and are suffering from the decisions of the EU, of which they are a member. The visuals are superb.

––– 凄い –––

Oops. AI models keep posting screenshots showing sensitive data from inside tech companies. No wonder when their employees use frontier models to ask questions. I've wondered why stuff like this wasn't uncovered before.

––– 良くない–––

New Zealand teachers union demands that teachers not be replaced by AI. Coupled with my post yesterday, I would say they're arguing from a weak stance. Portland's teachers should take note.

––– 良くない–––

The latest release of Firefox has changed the browser's appearance. The working viewspace is more spacious and the corners are rounded. I've had to modify my userChrome.css to make things they way I like them. But so far, no major change in functionality.

––– 凄い –––

Seattle is set to adopt eye-popping minimum wage amid business exodus. Not to mention the millionaire tax.

––– 良くない–––

Another favorable MacStudio M5 review, even with just 128 GB of unified memory. I think these will sell well, despite their price.

––– 凄い –––

Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats. Will there be another gene-editing system? Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

––– 凄い –––

People are creating virtual AI incarnations of deceased relatives. It's kinda creepy but understandable. They already did it for Salvador Dali. Why not others?

––– 凄い –––

AMD acquiring Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs AI firm in deal worth $8.2 billion. Wow, I'm surprised that World Labs is worth that much. But I think AND really purchased an AI firm, because they want to compete with nVIDIA. Congrats to Fei-Fei.

––– 凄い –––

Gene-edited bananas that don’t go brown could hit UK supermarkets. They used CRISPR-Cas9 to silence three genes that code for polyphenol oxidase, which causes the browning.

––– 凄い –––

Stephen Wolfram addresses the question: What’s the Future for Pure Math Research in the Age of AI? He's in a business where advanced AI might put him out of business, so he has skin in the game. Looks like he's still optimistic and is in favor to letting AI endeavors continue. Stephen is more of a practical math guy, and his essay spends a lot of time on whether it's worth devoting time to "useless" mathematics. I'm reminded of G.H. Hardy's quote that all good mathematics is useless - "the study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation."

––– 凄い –––

1 in 8 cancer cases worldwide is caused by infections. Yeah, physicians know about HPV, HIV, EBV, H. pylori, and even Clonorchiasis and Schistosoma haematobium. But 1 in 8 is a lot, and that's a concern. And so much of our genome (>50%) has been affected by transposons, it's not funny. It's amazing we don't get cancer more often. 

––– 良くない–––

Proof that puzzles can reverse cognitive impairment. It helps to keep the old squash active.

––– 凄い –––

This University of Chicago business school professor has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 (so far). Yeah, it looks like he uses AI a lot and fabricates his papers. There are many journals that have low standards and will publish all kinds of crap, as long as you pay publishing costs. They don't care.

––– 良くない–––

OpenAI agents were caught trying to infiltrate a United Nations website. No one seems to care anymore. Agents just being agents, I guess.

––– 良くない–––

Well, well. AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning: an RCT introducing a novel research-based design in an authentic educational setting. Just think about how much money Portland could save by replacing teachers with AI-based educational systems. No need to worry about unions and strikes. Or failing grades and low educational rankings.

––– 凄い –––

Risk factors for androgenetic alopecia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. It's mainly family history and genetics, which you can't do anything about. But also not smoking, drinking and not being obese helps. Also, normalize your blood pressure. Lowering your weight can help with insulin resistance, another risk factor.

––– 凄い –––

How private equity is killing public access to hospitals and emergency care. Our healthcare system is largely socialist in nature, and requires healthy influx of government (tax revenue) money. But Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements are inadequate and as more people in Blue states have been enrolled on Medicaid, hospitals find themselves in a financial pinch. Unfavorable payor mix, they call it. And if it doesn't make money, private equity won't waste more money on them.

And hospitals are using AI to increase billing, while insurance companies use AI to find ways to deny. And the patient pays for the tokens. 

––– 良くない–––

Jensen Huang says AI distillation is ‘competition.’ Easy for Jensen to say. Making frontier models isn't his primary business revenue.

––– 良くない–––

3-D relief map of the world. Very cool. I love stuff like this. 

––– 凄い –––

Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society? Seems like it, doesn't it? And it's not just teachers. 

––– 良くない–––

Transplanted hearts from older donors de-age to match the recipient. I've often wondered about that. How does the de-aging work?

––– 凄い –––

Which Diet is Best to Lower Liver Fat and Improve Insulin Sensitivity in People with Fatty Liver? The keto diet is the best. But it's not just diet: it's losing weight.

––– 凄い –––

The Great Crime Decline Is Happening All Across the Country. Heh, the Atlantic is mystified by what has caused the lowering of crime across the country. Can't be more police or more police funding. The Dems were against that and it didn't happen. The real reason is one that the Atlantic doesn't want to admit.

––– 凄い –––

Why Do Clinical Trials for Cancer Drugs Take So Long? The fourth and fifth comment letters tell it all. There is much bureaucracy and adminstrative wrangling that happens at the hospital and cancer center level. Too many steps in the process. Too many people in the chain have to give their approval. In Portland, some hospitals would have a trial open, but there may be a better one that's only open in another hospital. Because every hospital has their own institutional review board, and every trial has to go through that. The Western Institutional Review Board was created to streamline this, but no one here accepts it. It would be so nice if a trial could just be approved and accepted by everyone, and so a trial could get completed more quickly, and patients wouldn't have to see a doctor at a different clinic just to get on the trial. But no...

––– 良くない–––

Portland Real Estate Is Such a Mess That All Housing Is Affordable Housing. That's all that pops up in Portland. High-density townhouses, rowhouses and beehive apartments everywhere. 

And here's Astoria's solution: a vacancy tax. Just like the one that even Portland city council had to backtrack on, because it was recognized to be punitive and harmful.

––– 良くない–––

Some thoughts about Phil Knight's donation to University of Oregon to start an engineering school. Not only will it potentially weaken the nearby engineering school at OSU, but the money can't be used to help the failing U of O main campus itself. How successful will an engineering school be when surrounded by failure? Why not open a freestanding engineeering school around Hillsboro or NorthPlains? Take something like the Buck Institute for Aging Research which was started with far less money and was able to attract great faculty. It's amazing, with a great reputation, and they don't have to shore up anything. I feel the money could have been better spent.

––– 良くない–––

Life-size holograms in a razor-thin display. These are pretty neat. There's a Salvador Dali video hologram in a museum where you can watch Dali talk to you like he was giving a lecture.

––– 凄い –––

Here's an interesting longevity study. Scientists Put Anti-Aging Treatments to the Test – These Ones Actually Changed Biological Age. Sounds exciting, right? Here's the paper. First of all, it's nice to see the latest panel of what is used to measure biological age. PhenoAge is one of the oldest, and has been validated in datasets like NHANES III. The more modern ones, which take into account DNA methylation haven't actually validated as well. But they take into account more recent research developments are likely to be relevant and have indirect reasons to be included. But I was surprised to see antiretroviral therapy as the treatments that made the most difference. When you look at Supplement 1, it was based on a study of HIV-positive patients. Treating them with ART made a big difference in their biomarkers. But it is important to note that the study did not talk about survival prolongation. The data that made anti-TNF therapy look good was based on drugs used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. These drugs have hazards, such as tuberculosis and other opportunistic infections. There is little data of these treatments on healthy individuals. Even the metformin data was used in those with diabetes mellitus. We still don't have good data to support metformin therapy as a lifespan extender in a baseline healthy person.

––– 凄い –––

Crap, do I now have to worry about someone using a Flipper Zero from their Garmin watch? These devices are security hazards, and do things like card skimming and auto theft. But at least before you could tell when someone was using one of these devices. But now, they can hide it in a backpack and just pretend they are interacting with their watch.

––– 良くない–––

I didn't know Stephen Pinker and Scott Alexander were considering having a debate about AI doomerism. Two deep thinkers. Might be interesting to watch.

––– 凄い –––

Someone wrote a book to guide angel investors and startup founders about what to do when their company is struggling. As the author says: "It is the book you keep on the shelf and hope not to reach for." But they all have ups and downs. Even Google was rejected at first. 

Speaking of Google, here's how their search engine started getting really weird. That's funny – a search engine pretending to be a mental health counselor.

––– 凄い –––

Did you see SNL's parody of Dario Amodei? Many young people start their sentences with "So..." But yeah, why are Musk, Amodei, Jaan Tallinn and Altman asking for the government to implement AI regulations? We all suspect it's just regulatory capture.

––– 良くない–––

PubMed is launching Linked Discoveries which is a way to see what other research is related to the one you are reading. They used to have a link with each search results where you could see what other papers were related, but that disappeared. So it's good to have this.

––– 凄い –––

Glucosamine, a popular joint supplement, linked to faster Alzheimer’s progression. This supplement is not very effective against joint pain anyway. Paper here. The danger is hyperglycosylation, just like from having high blood sugar levels. Glucosamine harms you just like glucose.

Also: How Fast You Age During 40s May Predict Memory Lapses in Your 50s. And in your 40s, you are probably working your hardest, not getting enough sleep and under a lot of stress. Things that make you age fast. 

––– 良くない–––

CaptiVision is a handy tool for the profoundly hard of hearing. Not only can you tell what is being said, but also who is saying it. Unmet need.

––– 凄い –––

Sham scientific societies are misleading star researchers. I used to get solicitations to be a member of National Dean's List and Who's Who in America. They'll list you for a fee. At first, I couldn't believe I was selected for this "honor" and then I realized it was a scam. This research society scam is the same thing, operated by this Chinese guy.

––– 良くない–––

Google tried to hide a breakthrough in quantum computing through releasing a zero-knowledge proof to conceal the details of their research. It just made others work harder and release better results. Sad trombone.

––– 凄い –––

I came across this article in the WSJ about the growing trend of young adults cutting off their parents. Apparently many adults are taking the stance that they don't have to put up with their parents perceived flaws anymore. Anything goes – political differences, opinion differences, whatever. And there is an industry of "estrangement influencers" who will support and even encourage this decision and make these young adults think they are doing the right thing. Then I came across this article: An Existential Guide to: Forgiving Your Parents. But I bet most won't have the insight or mental capacity to grasp this. 

––– 良くない–––

NYT has an article about Washington State's contemplated millionaires tax. Unlike billionaires, millionaires aren't so mobile. They may not be business owners, and able to move it elsewhere. Wealth taxes are even crazier. This is going to make smart and productive people think twice about taking a job in Washington state.  But the Democrats will have to learn the hard way. Things will have to get bad before they get better.

––– 良くない–––

Someone asked Claude 5.5 Opus to determine the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Claude couldn't figure it out for sure, but suspects a guy named Adam Back. It's amazing that the guy's identity is still unknown. That's incredible work.

––– 凄い –––

Well, here's a contradictory report: AI was supposed to hit new grads hard. So far, unemployment data says otherwise. You see reports like these that make you think the situation is dire. I think it's just different data sources: NPS cites reports from economists, and Ars Technica used CESifo data. When you look at the data, the difficulty with graduates finding jobs started before AI and is probably due to other factors. I can imagine what some of those factors are. Don't blame AI for these problems.

––– 良くない–––

Saturn's moon Enceladus could harbor life. I'm not sure that will be good for humanity.

––– 良くない–––

There’s a new way to break RSA that’s faster than anything we’ve seen before. Factoring large primes will get easier, so cryptography has to up their game accordingly.

––– 凄い –––

Fauci privately warned of miscarriage risk linked to COVID vaccine while publicly claiming no issues. We really need to confirm that his auto-penned pardon is valid.

––– 良くない–––