Sugoi & Yokunai

A family used Claude AI to reduce a hospital bill from $195,000 to just $33,000.  The family says that Claude was able to identify duplicated charges, improper coding, and other violations. Amazing from several standpoints. The article doesn't reveal where this took place or what hospital system it was. But this is unconscionable and the hospital should be audited.

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Well, DST has ended. Apparently making DST permanent was not popular in the U.S. when tried during the Nixon administration. I think we should make standard time permanent.

And humans apparently used to sleep in two shifts, with an hour of wakefulness in the middle of the night. This ended with the invention of artificial light. 

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Scientists think they have figured out how exercise supports memory capacity.  Exercise stimulates secretion of BDNF which promotes adult hippocampal neurogenesis. These may be associated with extracellular vesicles which are induced after exericise.

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German engineers have developed solid state lithium-sulfur batteries with higher energy density and capacity.

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AI Browsers can sneak past blockers and paywalls. I can see how they can break challenges and CAPTCHAs, but are they able to recall someone's username and password to get behing paywalls? The article really doesn't reveal how they do it, but that seems to me to be the only way.

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San Francisco is going to build a new business tower. Will there be tenants? Hard to know, but if they build it so that people can enter without having to dodge street feces, and don't have to leave the safety of the building environment and venture outside, it could work. This isn't working for Portland, because they don't have anything like this.

In fact, a couple of British influencers were so shocked at how bad Portland was, that they cut their stay short. 

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Nah. Casio makes finger-sized versions of their watches. Yeah, they look as dumb as the description. No thanks. 

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Dumping problems onto Portland. Other states may be paying to have their homeless go to Portland.  Better build more shelters, Keith Wilson! There'll be more people you'll want to stick there.

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'Bout time.  Asian Americans are shifting to the right, politically.

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Holy crap!  Oregon's unemployment claims are skyrocketing.  Business are fleeing. SNAP will require that you have a job if you are able-bodied. You'll have to show that you're looking for work if you can. But if there is no work, then what? 

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UK's Telegraph health editor finds out that the British medical system sometimes is not helpful with prostate cancer screening. What a weird system they have, where GPs are told they must not suggest that such a patient have one. Whuut? Sounds like a broken system designed by Monty Python.

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Fox News warns NYC that if they elect Mamdani, the city will turn into Portland. That's like when parents used to tell kids to do well in school, because if they don't, they will end up like...and then they point to someone doing hard manual labor. So Portland is the bad example now. How's that for city pride?

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A flood of Chinese graduate students in STEM was a boon to U.S. students. Yeah, having some of the world's smartest people study at America's great universities probably benefited both the U.S. and China. The problem is that we have ended up helping our greatest economy adversary. Would that we lived in a world where we could share ideas and knowledge to each others' benefit. So apparently now, Chinese students are looking elsewhere for their education. It's too bad, but the world isn't simple.

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When you drink while taking Ozempic, the alcohol doesn't hit as hard.  Makes sense, since gastric emptying is delayed.

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No, no, no. This is a perfect example of the phenomenon where something of value, beauty or usefulness gets degraded once it is introduced to the public. This group of young entrepreneurs (called the Prompting Company, wants to inject advertising into ChatGPT output because people often go to ChatGPT for advice about products. Stay the f*ck away! We value search engines and generative AI because it is still possible to find unbiased truths free of advertising and corporate influence. We don't want advertising injected, just because your company wants to make money. Idiots. This is a great way to turn something useful into an advertising wasteland.

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Los Angeles is now the worst rat-infested city. Chicago is number two. Seattle is #17. Portland is #31. All the top cities are Democrat-run cities. Any wonder?

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It's pretty clear that Portland commercial real estate is in trouble. And here's Keith Wilson, working to lower property values even more adding unwanted recovery and shelter beds. What a dump this place is becoming!  Even Jessica Vega-Pedersen questions the wisdom of this, so you know it must be really a bad idea.  But Multnomah County cutting some homeless services due to loss of $28 million in state funds, so who's going to maintain these units? No wonder that Oregon is among the worst states to find a job. Businesses are fleeing or closing. No one wants to move here. So people will need more SNAP money. 

And here's Oregon, raising natural gas costs, even as it hands out money to help people get food. How does this make sense? Maybe they need this emergency money to pay their gas bill? 

But we may not get power anyway. Rolling blackouts are in the future, starting as soon as 2026. Washington and Oregon are both facing the same situation.

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Leaving Seattle wasn't enough. Now the entire Washington state may impose an extra tax on people who make more than a million annually. I'm sure the unions want it. And the wealthy will never muster enough public support to kill this idea. All they can do is move away. Washington must hate having wealthy people because they do so much to chase them away.

And California may impose a 5% billionaire tax. Most of the wealthy voted Democrat, so they are getting what they voted for.

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The journal Nature, once a bastion of solid science, is now turning woke, and article peer-reviewers are turning away. Good for them to stand up.

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The GOP has a chance to kill Obamacare, and the WSJ wants it to happen.  We need to replace it with a healthcare system that leverages market forces to compel stakeholders to be excellent and competitive. Our current system is so demotivational. No one cares about delivering quality care, because it doesn't get you anywhere. Rather, the incentive is to save the insurance companies money. We need to increase competition, so that the insurance company that does things right, gets our business. And we choose, not our employers.

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An Oregon lawyer used generative AI and didn't check his work. Now that person might be out of a job. Good.

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Quantum Teleportation Was Achieved Over The Internet For The First Time.  Why the Internet, though?  Does that mean it was done somewhere else, too? I want to know if Scotty can beam someone up?

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Baby Boomers are still running much of small businesses. And they are getting older and don't have successors. So they could close and a lot of Main Street businesses could disappear.

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What Palantir sees. An interview with their CTO. It's about targeting overseas adversaries and helping ICE out with deportations, which is was the NYT reporter was concerned about mainly. But yeah, this is what people voted for.

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Why do cats love tuna so much? It seems that their taste buds have a receptor for umami, and that tuna fish turns it on especially well.

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Fluoroquinolones are supposed to target the mitochondria of bacteria. This website says that human mitochondria can be affected as well. A lot of physicians prescribe this drug, and there haven't been any new warnings put out since 2018. It shouldn't be used indiscriminately, but it is a very useful drug. People carried it with them with visiting Mexico to stave off Montezuma's Revenge.

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Creepy. Anthropic thinks that their Claude model has some degree of awareness that it is being modified.

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SNAP will run out of money on November 1. Here's what each state is doing about it. For Oregon and Washington, not much. The money that is being given out will be like $4 or $5 of assistance per household or person, which is essentially just a token gesture of assistance, and not real help. Maybe they can go to Costco and get a couple of hot dogs?

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Mathematical proof debunks the idea that the universe is a computer simulation. You mean it's just a repackaging of Russell's Paradox, and that's the proof? I thought it was going to be something profound.

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Between Veo3 vs Wan2.2 vs Sora2, Veo3 is the best.

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Moderna is collapsing. Just as well. I have trust issues with that company.

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AI can make you seem smart, and your brain falls for this. Yup, and I don't care.

Senator Grassley wants to regulate AI use. Sorry, Chuck – toothpaste is out of the tube. Too late!

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PeaceHealth is cutting 2.5% of its workforce. Just in time for the holidays. 

And now OHSU nurse practitioners, PAs and midwives are going to strike. Easy for them to do, because they know that doctors are going to work harder to pick up the slack, because their work ethic would prohibit letting patient care suffer. But suffer it still may.  I can't see that it makes sense to continue to be a clinical physician at OHSU, where you are an employee and the ancillary staff are getting substantial pay raises, while you have to be content with whatever your productivity will justify, which may not be under your control.

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PacWest Center sold for more than expected, better than Big Pink. So Portland city leaders are getting optimistic. Way too premature. The sale price was still only 34% of what it was purchased for. 

WWeek writes about "tax compression" in Portland commercial real estate. A property's market price may be sinking below it's assessed value. That would be very bad. 

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Yikes! Did Microsoft let slip that OpenAI lost $11.5 billion last quarter?

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Hawaii is seeing an epidemic of reckless speeding.

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Grokipedia launches. I do like the table of contents on the left. One person thinks that Grokipedia just stole content from Wikipedia. I wouldn't be surprised, but I hope and expect that as time goes on, G'pedia will develop it's own distinct style. Larry Sanger has a take on this first effort. He stands astride both resources and has a balanced opinion, I think. I disagree that the public's opinion should factor into deciding what G'pedia contains. I don't have a great opinion of the general public's opinion these days. Everyone thinks their opinion should count.

Grok itself, however, is weird. I don't use it. 

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The Island Where People Go to Cheat Death. I haven't heard of Roatan or Vitalia. But it seems to be a place where the super wealthy can go crazy experimenting with all kinds of longevity experiments. Maybe they'll discover something. Maybe something will go very wrong. We shall see. Interesting that Bryan Johnson is involved in this.

MIT Technology Review just published an article on youth pursuit, focusing on Yamanaka factors.

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nVIDIA becomes the first $5 trillion company, just as Apple and Microsoft cross the $4 trillion valuation line. And as AI is burning through graphics cards, we're going to see continued demand for nVIDIA products.

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Google is ending their Women Techmakers program. Just as well. Time to get serious, and drop diversity crap. This isn't high school anymore.

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Why do so many Oregonians rely on SNAP benefits?  18% of Oregonians are dependent on SNAP.  That's a lot and too many. How did that happen? It's no wonder the state is going to hell and businesses are fleeing. 

Powell's Books is going to lay off 13 more employees. Wrong direction, people. We need to start hiring instead. 

And here's Washington state, where Gov Ferguson is going to allocate $2.2 million per week for those without SNAP benefits. Well, since Washington state has 590,000 SNAP households, that amounts to $4 per week. That should pay for a Top Ramen or two. 

And here's Seattle, with a budget deficit, yet they are proposing to spend $85 million on frivolous things like "$1.25 million to 'preserve the physical character, cultural heritage, and social fabric of the community formed last century in Seattle’s Central District by the direct descendants of slaves'" and "$10 million for rental assistance to city-funded affordable housing projects."

Are we still dealing with the Civil War outcomes in 2025? And if you can't afford to live in Seattle, kindly move out to where you can, like we all would do, instead of demanding taxpayer support.

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Heh. China was caught trying to steal IP. They tried to reverse-engineer ASML's DUV technology, but it was too difficult. Now they have a broken device that needs fixing. I'll bet they'll watch carefully to see how it's done.

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Peter McCullough's group agrees with RFK about the causes of autism spectrum disorder. I agree with the "multifactorial model of ASD in which genetic predisposition, neuroimmune biology, environmental toxicants, perinatal stressors, and iatrogenic exposures"

Getting a degree in computer science was supposed to be a ticket to job security and a comfortable income. Now, this is not guaranteed at all, thanks to AI. The goalposts have moved, and you need to study machine learning and artificial intelligence, and even that field is advancing rapidly.

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About 23% of people don't respond to GLP-1RA weight loss drugs. It's not clear why, but there are some theories.

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Chegg is cutting about half their workforce. I'm surprised they're still around. The rise of LLMs really hit them hard, didn't it? Why don't they fine-tune open source LLMs and market those? That's what I'd look into.

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What happens when you click the send button on ChatGPT? The workings of the transformer model for the curious.

Speaking of which, OpenAI estimates that 560,000 users of ChatGPT each week appear to have mental health emergencies. 

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LLMs a new kind of steganography. Hiding text within text, using the next word prediction probabilities.

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Microsoft joins the AI circle-jerk. A new deal, with Microsoft owning 27% of it.

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Should you think twice about pouring unwanted coffee down the drain? Worse things have gone down the drain. Lilke poo.

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Elon Musk's Grokepedia seems to be copying pages from Wikipedia. I figured this would happen. Didn't think he'd be able to write a new enecyclopedia from scratch.

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Hang on to your AirPods2 for a bit longer.  Apple's AirPods 3 doesn't handle air travel well.

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I never heard of the Even Realities G1 Smart Glasses before. This would be great for making a speech, since it could function as a built-in teleprompter.

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Amazon is going to lay off 30,000 employees. These will be mainly in California, as they have already laid off 27,000 Seattle employees. They're going all out on AI and robotics. Could be a risky move.

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A new class of potent antibiotics are being developed – methylenomycins. Effective against gram-positive and gram-negative organisms, there seems to be no resistance with multidrug resistance Enterococcus. Not sure about tolerance and side-effect profile.

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Pew Research has a nice article about AI data centers, and where they are location. I am surprised that there are relatively few in the Pacific NW, which is actually a good thing. I don't think we would handle it well. Virginia has a high concentration of them, and I wish them well. Could end up biting them back.

PacificCorp's 300 mile Boardman-to-Hemingway powerline project was supposed to help local customers, but it's being sold to a private company to power datacenters. 

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The Mayans were able to predict solar eclipses very accurately. Scientists think they know how it was done, but it's still remarkable, given how complex the calculations are.

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The Blazer Mafia scandal may make it even more likely that the Blazers will leave Portland. Another blow to the city.

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Keith Wilson's shelter expansion is really putting stress on neighborhoods. I don't think it's going to stop him from turning the entire city into a shelter support community.

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AI models are developing their own survival strategy.

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University of Washington is still mired in DEI mentality. Really too bad.

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AI browsers are a hot mess of security risks. It seems that everybody is talking about it. I'd stay away for now.

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How to Use YouTube to Learn Tacit Knowledge. Yeah, from YouTube, you can learn things they don't actually teach you explicitly. A lot of things can be learn just be watching. I've seen that work.

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Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades. So, our language patterns apparently reveal a surge of depression in the current zeitgeist. I don't know if it's just the influence of social media or that the world is just getting enshittified (see below). Maybe it's the "tiny sugars" in our brains.

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But yeah, a lot of things are getting enshittified. Including websites. Maybe it's the effect of AI. But this is a natural process for when you introduce something nice into the world. Once the public gets a hold of it, quality deteriorates and it's no longer a nice service or the mind-enhancing, mood-enhancing thing it once was. If Cory Doctorow can get credit for the word "enshittification" perhaps I can get credit for the phrase "epimethean" after Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. Epimetheus represents carelessness and regret on hindsight when actions have unintended negative consequences that harm mankind.

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Idiots. A greenie in California bought a hydrogen-powered Toyota, but now can't find a hydrogen outlet nearby that will let him refuel. The best part is, he still owes money on the car. Yeah, not using the car also decreases CO2 emissions. Do these liberals think at all? I can't believe these guys were willing to let themselves be publicly identified. 

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Public servce: if you're going to have an MRI scan, don't take vitamin C before or each oxalate-rich foods. In practice, however, most MRI centers in Portland don't use contrast agents that use linear gadolinium contrast agents, but use macrocyclic agents, like Dotarem.

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The supplement PQQ can decrease fat accumulation and decrease obesity progression. PQQ stimulates mitochondria biogenesis, so perhaps that's how it works. 

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Where are we on making Daylight Saving Time permanent? The answer is nowhere close to making it happen. Politicians can even do something as simple as making this change, although they were able to turn it on in 1966. Politicians were different then. Things got done.

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Speaking of frogs in boiling water, I don't know how people living near the ICE building put up with the crap night after night. In times past, people would be storming City Hall. Now, people just take it, and complain only to reporters.

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Someone who previously worked for Gavin Newsom makes a veiled threat to San Francisco governance that if they resist building dense towers with affordable housing units built-in, instead of keeping density low, there will be consequences! Enshittify your city! Or else!

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Japan’s Okada Museum Forced to Sell Works to Settle Founder’s $50 M. Legal Bill. On the auction block: Hokusai's "Great Wave off the coast of Kanagawa".  Wonder who will buy it.

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Do you believe it? Violent crime plummets 36% in downtown Seattle, lowest since 2017.  I sure don't think so, when I visit. Maybe there's more policing around the Market, to save tourism, but the rest of Seattle is going to crap, especially the I-District and Ballard, Northgate.

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That's the rumor. The iPhone 18 might be able to use Starlink satellites.

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Kamehameha School is being sued by Students for Fair Admission because the school only admits those with a minimum amount of Hawaiian ancestry. Give it up, man. The school is older than the state, and it was established well before statehood. And statehood was really forced upon Hawaii. Let it go.

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Seattle is hiring illegal alien prison guards. How's that for irony?

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This story tells you all you need to know about the housing "shortage" in Portland. From PDX Real, one of the foot soldiers at the front lines. It's all a big grift.

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Rep. Ed Diehl sums up well the sorry state of Medicaid. Government needs to get out of the business of healthcare, except to cover catastrophic care as a backup.

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WSJ article paints a rosy picture of Bellevue, WA, but read the comments.

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Someone found a way to disable the warning LED light on Meta's Ray Ban glasses that let you know it's in record mode.

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First Shape Found That Can’t Pass Through Itself. In order to get some background on this, watch this great video (Rupert's Snub Cube and other Math Holes). Prince Rupert's conjecture has been disproven after all. We can now rest easy.

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After Harvard dropped affirmative action, Asian enrollment increased significantly. That's the spin I'm putting out.

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Dr. Casey Means is set to be the next Surgeon General. But...

Was she the best choice? Was there no one better? What good is the Surgeon General anway?

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The effect of cannabis on the brain is more complicated than people realize. It might have some positive cognitive effects, but the doses that optimize this are lower than what people use to get high. Plus, you have to combine it with the right amount of cannabidiol. Microdosing is the key.

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Coffee pooped out by civet cats really does taste good.  Who was the first one who was brave (daring) enough to make coffee from civet poop?

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Japanese scientists unveil a quantum battery that defies energy loss. Not sure how it works, but lets get it into production.

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Can Trump order the National Guard to clean up crime in Portland? Even the lawyers and judges can't agree. Seems pretty clear to me, but what do I know?

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This is what it's like taking public transportation in Portland. And like frogs in boiling water, people just stay silent and accept it as life in the city. Why aren't people fed up with this? Why isn't this something the mainstream media is publishing? 

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Samaritan Health in Corvallis wants to join with Washington's MultiCare. But I don't understand. Why does MultiCare want to pick up a money-loser in Oregon? What is there to gain? Mystery.

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The Rose Quarter freeway project director resigns – the second one this year. Portland needs expertise of all kinds really badly, but no one wants to move to the city. So further down it goes.

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