7 October 2025

AMD stock skyrockets 23% as OpenAI takes 10% stake. Man, OpenAI is making everybody rich, it seems. Hope this lasts.

––– 凄い –––

Avoiding Google is really difficult. You may choose not to use Google products, but when you interact with someone who uses Google, then Google finds out anyway.

––– 良くない–––

Yeah, I remember when reading immunology papers, suddenly I started seeing mentions of T-reg cells. T-regs weren't mentioned in the immunology textbook I read in the 1990s. Because that was before 2001 and the Foxp3 paper. Even so, it took a few years before the new name started to catch on. That's what this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine is all about – how T-reg cells came to be recognized.

––– 凄い –––

Invasion of privacy. Amazon's Ring system will start to use face recognition.

––– 良くない–––

OpenAI Sneezes, and Software Firms Catch a Cold. Geez, if OpenAI even looks like it might develop an app that does something similar to what you do, your stock may tank. People need to dial it back.

––– 良くない–––

Gifted children are special needs children. It's interesting that Blue state leaders are so quick to dismiss programs for the gifted, like Washington, California and now New York. And that it's Asians that suffer for it. And yet most Asians support Democrats. A political party can bomb Japan and put Japanese in internment camps, and still they vote Democrat. Make it make sense.

––– 良くない–––

GPT-5 Pro is out, and boy is it expensive!  I see that it's been added to Poe, and I'm eager to try it out on some tough problem, like a coding problem that lesser models get stuck on.

––– 凄い –––

There's going to be a Texas Stock Exchange. Y'all Street. Love it.

––– 凄い –––

Here's a guy who had the genetic mutation to get Alzheimer's disease, but he hasn't gotten it – so far. The mystery is – why not? Was it something he did? Or is the genetics wrong?

––– 凄い –––

The intrepid Kevin Dahlgren illustrates why providing housing isn't going to solve the homeless problem.

––– 良くない–––

Shocking if true. No one else is talking about this. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation might be eliminated due to the government shutdown. This is the entity that rescues failing pension programs. Like PERS. If it is eliminated, or turned over to the states, then a lot of union pensions will be in jeopardy. All those nice pensions that they negotiated for themselves could disappear. The taxpayer would no longer be on the hook for their fat retirement pensions. If money runs out, it runs out. 

––– 凄い –––

6 October 2025

Tonight is a supermoon night.  And the skies should be clear.  😁

––– 凄い –––

This article reveals that as with Google search, what you type into ChatGPT can come back to bite you. It's not private at all.

––– 良くない–––

The Nobel Prize in Medicine was announced today, and what I notice is that two of the winners were not in academics, but in industry. Well, the Institute for Systems Biology is a non-profit research organization, co-founded by Leroy Hood who left University of Washington, along with Roger Perlmutter. Only Sakaguchi was an academic.

––– 凄い –––

Could Mark Gurman be Apple's next CEO?

––– 凄い –––

WiFi signals can detect heartbeats. This is amazing, and may aid in rescue operations, if you can detect a heartbeat even though the person isn't in direct visual range. Or the military can use it to detect hidden dangers.

––– 凄い –––

GPT-5 Pro solved two dificult math problems: Yu Tsumura’s 554th Problem and Disproving Majority Optimality.  I would love to play with GPT-5 Pro.

––– 凄い –––

This Seattle Times reporter thinks people should offer the homeless shelter where they live.  Well the owner of the Civic Hotel wanted to help out the city of Seattle but letting the homeless stay in the hotel. Well, guess what happened?  Now the hotel is ruined with meth and fentanyl residue, and the city is dragging their feet in addressing the situation. More on the story here. The hotel was pretty nice, and now it's trashed. Too bad. 

––– 良くない–––

5 October 2025

Northern lights may get stronger in the  n ext two years as the sun enters a turbulent decline. Maybe I'll finally be able to see the aurora visually from my home in the Pacific Northwest, instead of just the photographic ones where people set their cameras to long exposure and see some green and purple on the horizon. That doesn't count for me.

––– 凄い –––

Jeff Bezos does think AI is in a bubble, but says not to worry. If you're not heavily invested in AI, sure, not to worry. OK, Jeff, if you say so. 

––– 凄い –––

What's going with Hillsboro?. First, it's become a datacenter dumping ground. Now it's the potential site of a lithium battery BESS. If you don't know what a BESS is, you should read up on it, especially if you live near where NW West Union Rd and Cornelius Pass Road intersect. Wow, could be a disaster for property values. And worse if the BESS catches fire. Who thought it was a good idea to locate it there?

––– 良くない–––

AI copyright conundrum.  Who owns what when AI creates something?  Especially if it's derivative. One thing that I got out of this article: save your prompts, because that may be the critical factor deciding whether you are infringing or not. OpenAI better worry about this with Sora2. I think OpenAI made a mistake releasing to the public without restrictions. This is what's causing the headache. Perhaps it would be better if they licensed it or restricted its use, and made it a paid model.

––– 良くない–––

When I was a student, I was taught that the background cosmic radio wave background was isotropic. Turns out, that's not the case. And there's a odd streak that cannot be explained. It's colder on one side and hotter on the other.

––– 凄い –––

Gone are the days when working in a Silicon Valley company made you rich. Those techies are struggling as much as everyone else. Must be hard when you see all that wealth around you. Remnants of the old dotcom years.

––– 良くない–––

Even after all these years, saturated fats can't be blamed for cardiovascular disease. Restricting it didn't make any difference in preventing cardiovascular disease or reducing mortality.

––– 凄い –––

Wow, this is unexpected.  Having a glioblastoma brain tumor causes changes in the skull and the bone marrow immune cells. That's wild. How do these changes come about? 
This also abolished the survival benefit of the checkpoint inhibitor anti-PD-L1, by reducing activated T cell and increasing inflammatory neutrophil numbers.
That could explain why checkpoint inhibitors don't work well for high-grade brain gliomas.

––– 良くない–––

Going through the menstrual cycle "exert(s) powerful behavioral, structural, and functional effects through actions on the mammalian central nervous system".  This is something men have always suspected was true. 😉

––– 凄い –––

If your Lyft driver spews progressive political crap on your during the ride, and you complain to Lyft, don't be surprised if you can't use Lyft again.  
But don't worry, Gavin Newsom just signed a law giving Lyft and Uber drivers the ability to unionize. So, don't be surprised if both companies pull out of California.

––– 良くない–––

Seattle Times uses the Democrat line that it's Trump's tariffs that are making it different for business to survive. No, it's not the tariffs. It's the high taxes, high minimum wages, and high energy costs that are raising the prices of everything. 
Portland is seeing this too, with the disappearance of low-cost jobs. Only higher cost jobs have increased, because with minimum wage increases, everyone's pay increases. But that doesn't mean it's good for the local economy.

––– 良くない–––

4 October 2025

EZH2 inhibitors may halt triple negative breast cancer spread. Tazemetostat is already approved for the treatment of follicular lymphomas, so if it works to inhibit metastatic spread of triple-negative breast cancer, it would be easy to implement.

––– 凄い –––

Up to Date is going to implement a chat query interface to their electronic text book. What took them so long? This is going to cut into OpenEvidence's market. Competition is good.

––– 凄い –––

Japanese scientists think they know the secret to the Venus Fly Trap's rapid trigger mechanism. It's way more complicated than I though. These plants can count the number of hairs that are touched, for one thing.

––– 凄い –––

OpenAI’s H1 2025: $4.3b in income, $13.5b in loss. Is this really true? How can they operate like this? Smells like the dotcom era, when people ignored reality because there was a promise of great wealth that could be generated somehow.

Speaking of OpenAI, it's LLMs are caste-biased when it comes to Indian people. Now more Indians are entering tech, but they can't leave behind all the caste baggage from the old country.

––– 良くない–––

Pathetic.  Downtown Portland businesses have to leave signs that fake support for BLM and Antifa so they won't get vandalized. The contumacious run the city. Citizens just suffer in silence.

––– 良くない–––

Wells Fargo is laying off 50 from its downtown office. In typical fashion, the media doesn't report why. Probably didn't even ask.

––– 良くない–––

One in six Oregonians use SNAP. Didn't realize it was that high. The national average is only 1 in 8. Oregon has the 4th highest SNAP usage in the nation. But with the new changes, that will lessen. A lot of people won't qualify anymore. Gotta start earning your money now.

––– 凄い –––

3 October 2025

Why iRobot’s founder won’t go within 10 feet of today’s walking robots.

"My advice to people is to not come closer than 3 meters to a full-size walking robot," Rodney Brooks writes in a technical essay titled "Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity" published on his blog last week.
He would know.

––– 凄い –––

OpenAI's new Sora2 makes it so that you can't trust any video anymore. To demonstrate, they created a fake video of Sam Altman getting arrested for shoplifting.

––– 凄い –––

AI causes reduction in users’ brain activity.  Well, I kinda already knew that, but this caught my eye:
...but its effects continue, negatively affecting mental activity in future work.
You mean it lingers? Yikes.

––– 良くない–––

Gallup Poll: Americans' Trust in Media at Record Low.  Because the mainstream media no longer just presents the news. It presents opinionated viewpoints on select news topics. For example, watch this interview with Dana Bash. Her lack of objectivity is so obvious.

––– 良くない–––

Lesbian couples have a high divorce rate – 41% of female couples had divorced within ten years, compared to 27% of male couples and 22% of different-sex couples. At least in Finland, where the study was conducted. Why is that?

––– 良くない–––

Wow. The Arc spacecraft aims to deliver cargo anywhere in the world in an hour.  Our planet just became smaller.

––– 凄い –––

Blocking a protein called Ant2 makes T-cells more effective in anticancer cell therapy.  Paper here. Apparently inactivating Ant2 normally inhibits ATP synthase activity and NAD+ regeneration. But Ant2 knockout mice bypassed this roadblock, which led to increased mitobiogenesis and anabolism. So blocking Ant2 led to improved adoptive T-cell therapy.

––– 凄い –––

I keep reading about all these breakthroughs in extending the capacity of EV batteries, but these never seem to make it to the market. When are we going to see practical EVs?

––– 凄い –––

And here's another breakthrough regarding solar panels. An organic semiconductor film greatly improves charge efficiency. It would be nice not to have to blight our landscape with ugly solar panels. Let's put these in action instead of them just being in the research lab. We're never going to have access to this tech if we buy all our solar from China. 

––– 凄い –––

Perplexity's Comet browser is free to everyone now. I still don't trust AI browsers, and am going to wait this out. I think these are way to intrusive. Why give up security and privacy just so that a browser can schedule your next plane reservation for you, or summarize the websites you browse?
And already there's a security risk with a name: Cometjacking.

––– 良くない–––

Yup. This is indeed Portland – the city of childless hipsters. That's why they all think Portland is safe. It's just that the destruction isn't complete. Take a look at this statistic: Metro Portland Office Vacancy Rate Hit Record 26.6% in Third Quarter. Wow, there's so little business activity in the city. So what with the mayor and the city council do to keep maintain the revenue stream? Guess.

––– 良くない–––

2 October 2025

Taiwan isn't going to move chip fabrication to the U.S.  And why would they?

––– 良くない–––

So many Portland bars are closing recently. Here are some recent ones. It feels like during the Obama years, when the only establishments that thrived were strip joints, tattoo parlors and cannabis stores. But now, even cannabis stores aren't thriving.

––– 良くない–––

Irony lost. Portland-area artists invited to turn garbage into masterpieces. Plenty of material to work with, that's for sure.

––– 凄い –––

Oura Ring is going to partner with the Pentagon. It's going to be a War Department wearable. That's turning a lot of people off, but it's turning me on, actually. I toyed with the idea of getting one, but the subscription put me off. I wasn't convinced it was that good, but if the military thinks it's good, then perhaps it's worth a look.

––– 凄い –––

As Jane Goodall passes way, we also say goodbye to the myth we all learned years ago that the genetic makeup of humans and chimps differs by only 1%.  Not true. More like 14% to 15%.

––– 凄い –––

Work is not school. This is so true:

Managers will claim they are, and we want to believe them. But the reality is that the best don’t always rise. At least not as easily or automatically as we think they should.

Sometimes they do. But often, what gets rewarded isn’t performance but proximity to power, timing, perception, and political usefulness.

I didn't learn this until too late. It's who you know, not what you know. And as Trump always said, "presentation matters".

––– 良くない–––
Managers, read this. Distracting software engineers is way more harmful than most managers think. Don't disturb the flow for dumb meetings. 

––– 良くない–––

"It could even allow same-sex couples to have a genetically related child."
Antonio Gramsci was right: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

––– 良くない–––

Anti-Aging Breakthrough: Stem Cells Reverse Signs of Aging in Monkeys. I never heard of the FoxO3 protein before.

––– 凄い –––

1 October 2025

Doctors still outperform AI in the emergency department.  Nurses, however...

However, the AI model did outperform nurses when it came to identifying the most urgent or life-threatening cases, with both better accuracy and specificity.

Don't tell Oregon nurses.

––– 凄い –––

Diversity is not their strength. Munich shuts down Oktoberfest because of too much diversity. How much are those guys going to tolerate. Diversity already ruined a Christmas Market last year.

––– 良くない–––

Washington state minimum wage will rise 2.8%, from $16.66 per hour to $17.13, on Jan. 1.  Lowest quintile policies again, which will affect everyone.

––– 良くない–––

Readers response to Providence hospitals operating in the red. After all the years of predatory behavior, there's no much sympathy for them. People tend to focus on executive salaries, which is not the problem. One problem is that the nurses are expensive. Yet they need the nurses, and because of they are in short supply, they have leverage. The reason why they can't get more nurses is that vry few want to move to Oregon, and Portland specifically. And their COVID policy of firing the unvaxxed is coming back to bite them. The other problem, of course, is the high Medicaid representation. Because Oregon is so poor now. Yeah, Dem policies are to blame ultimately.

––– 良くない–––

A recent report suggests that for the elderly, at least, serum vitamin B12 levels should be higher than the current normal. Lower levels correlated with dementia.

––– 凄い –––

30 September 2025

Chain reaction. Now what teachers' salaries have been raised, the amount that the public schools system needs to contribute to their PERS pensions has also increased. Which is going to stress the school budget even more. And Rex Kim, too, heh.

––– 凄い –––

The finding of a million year old skull in China, Yunxian 2, makes it more likely that ancient Asian hominids contributed to the human development, rather than just Africa. I am curious – the skull was discovered in 1990, and only now are we hearing about this? Paper here.

––– 凄い –––

Simon Willison really like Claude 4.5 Sonnet for coding, and calls it "the best coding model in the world". I can vouch for that. I used it earlier today and it fixed a coding problem that another model helped me put together. This is my new favorite, too.

––– 凄い –––

A growing number of U.S. adults report cognitive disability. Especially young adults. What could it be? You think maybe legalization of cannabis was a bad idea?

––– 良くない–––

Wow. The owners of The Bravern in Bellevue has defaulted. Bad news that even Bellevue can't keep office commercial real estate busy. I recall when it was the center of so much wealth and power. Twenty years of Democrat management have destroyed it all, along with Seattle. Really a shame.

––– 良くない–––

29 September 2025

Why warm countries are poorer.  This is a similar take as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. Warmer countries do have a disadvantage, it seems. The brain doesn't function as well when it is too hot.

––– 凄い –––

We have 23 pairs of chromosomes, compared with the 24 chromosomes of chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans, because chromosome 2 fused with another chromosome to become a larger chromosome 2.  This seems to have happened fairly recently, between 400,000 and 1.5 million years ago, around the time when there was a severe reduction in the population of hominid ancestors. Related?

––– 凄い –––

Do No Harm has a ranking of medical schools that espouse DEI and woke principles, as well as MCAT scores and average GPA, and gives them a grade based on this. Guess where OHSU ranks?  University of Washington School of Medicine didn't do so well either. Man, even University of Hawaii had higher MCAT scores and GPA.

––– 良くない–––

Ugh no. Trump seems to be touting the benefits of cannabis for seniors.

––– 良くない–––

If you use the Brave browser, you should read this.

––– 良くない–––

Oregon employers have eliminated more than 11,000 jobs since the start of 2024, a historic wave of mass layoffs that matches the worst days of the Great Recession. And this time, there are no subsidies being given out. The Blue states will have to rethink their strategy of refusing to work with the federal government.

––– 良くない–––

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is out, and blam, it's already offered on Poe.com. Wow!

––– 凄い –––

28 September 2025

Hank Green has a video where he takes a deep dive into the "autism is increasing" data, and finds that it is indeed very messy.  Welcome to science, Hank. Much of it is very much like this, which is why doing meta-analyses can make you tear out your hair. He concludes that it's simplistic to say that all autism has been increasing. Much of it is due to diagnostic shifting and changing criteria. Hank doesn't explore much the causes of autism, except to quickly mention factors such as parental age, premature birth and maternal diabetes. A good effort, though, but my reaction is like that meme: "First time?"

––– 凄い –––

South Korean paper shows that a year after getting the mRNA COVID vax, the incidence of certain cancers increases. There an increase in cancers of the thyroid, gastric, prostate, colon, lung, and breast. And if you got boosted, the risk really goes up for pancreatic and gastric cancers. Koreans get a lot of gastric cancer anyway, so that has to be factored in. And they got mainly the Pfizer product.

––– 良くない–––

AI is really impacting the job prospects of newly-minted software engineers. Suddenly, companies want experienced talent, not just having taken some courses on how to code. AI has got to be in the curriculum somehow, and universities need to revamp their courses, or their graduates are going to come out unprepared and at a disadvantage.

––– 良くない–––

Looks like Logitech is coming out with the MX Master 4, which looks nice. It's predicted to be announced in the U.S. in two days. At this point, I'm not sure I really need it, but we'll have to see what is really new. The new extra button is intriguing.

––– 凄い –––

They built a country which works so well, it has tamed the utter chaos that historically defined most of our forebears’ lives and given us all a neat, packaged life. A life which most of us can live formulaically, sleepwalking through it without doing a single brave thing. You are, of course, still expected to work hard, but we hold the honour of being the first immigrant nation to have so thoroughly self-domesticated, to have ourselves doused the ambition which ferried the droves of hungry poor, desperate and begging for better lives.
Yeah, Singapore did all the right things, and has a very nice, wealth nation. But it did this by copying and just having a citizenship that followed the rules, not by innovating and developing top industries. 
We Singaporeans are so smart, we know that the safest way to get a return on our investment is to see what everyone else is doing, and to do it better. We're so numerate, we know instinctively that starting something new has a lower risk-adjusted EV than working hard as an investment banker/consultant/lawyer/doctor/software engineer, and with a far higher Sharpe ratio too.
Nothing wrong with that.

––– 凄い –––

She Sent Her iPhone to Apple. Repair Techs Uploaded Her Nudes to Facebook.  Ugh, this happened in Oregon. When you must turn in your phone or computer to a repair shop, create a new user and switch to that user, and then send the device in. That way all your confidential data is inaccessible. Never just send it in unlocked.

––– 良くない–––

Nice review on the history of longevity prolongation efforts by infusion of youthful blood-derived products. It's apparently already possible to slow aging by a noticeable and measurable degree. But the methods are crude and the exact mechanism by which it happens is unclear. Once we figure out how to do it, then the ethical issues will need to be dealt with. And it's still not clear if these longevity manipulations might have an undesireable side-effect, such as cancer promotion.

––– 凄い –––