7 December 2024

Greater fools. Crypto fools get scammed by boy who creates his own coin. I just wonder why more people aren't doing this.

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Could solar car paint eliminate the need for EV charging?  Color me skeptical.

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AI jobs are hot. Title is very misleading.

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OpenAI's latest o1 model tried to avoid getting shut down. It actually tried to overwrite the newer model. Bravo, for trying. We all hate to be replaced, don't we?

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A new algorithm could compress the embeddings in LLMs so that they fit on a mobile phone, although it's very energy-demanding, as AI is. When will we get portable nuclear reactors?

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What does ARM's CEO think of Intel's predicament? (You can read the article if you turn off Javascript temporarily on your browser.)  Intel doesn't have a lot of good options, and I read that the older, experienced employees are heading for the exit doors. If I were the CEO, one of the options I'd consider is selling to AMD, although shareholders would balk at this. Better some loss than a total loss.

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Providence gets to be the target of Oregon's largest strike in state history. Not a good time to be a hospital CEO in Oregon.

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6 December 2024

Tiresome. Looks like Providence has to deal with more strikes again.  The healthcare situation in Oregon is awful, but this issue is not one of Tina Kotek's priorities, apparently. 

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Microchip Technology is also closing their doors, this time, hurting Gresham. Bad news just keeps coming.

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Sad. In Morrow County, Oregon will convert farmland into the largest solar farm. Apparently Oregon is number one again, and again, not in a good way.  Gotta get that ESG money while it lasts.

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“From a cost perspective, from the start, nearly everything we touched in the building was worse than we expected.”

“It sounded like you had a plan,” Meieran said. “Now you’re coming back saying the amount is literally double what it was when you came to us however many months ago. There’s no way as a board we should be saying it’s okay to give $1.8 million dollars more now to this project.”
And it will probably serve only about three criddlers.  Oh well, better raise some more taxes.  <facepalm.jpg> 

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Hoo boy!  Did you see this diagram of Portland's Ranked Choice Experiment. Holy crap, can we make this even more complicated than it needs to be?

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5 December 2024

Cancer risk declines in old age.  I had to double-take that article, because a lot of cancers increase as you get older.  "That’s because genetic mutations build up in cells over years and decades, and ultimately drive the development of cancer." The theory is that when your cells get too old, they are too old to proliferate like a cancer cell should.  “Aging cells lose their capacity for renewal and therefore for the runaway growth that happens in cancer.”  That sounds like a George Burns joke – when you get too old for cancer.  That's sugoi, I guess.

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When it comes to life expectancy, there are 10 Americas. Ten subgroups with distinct life expectancies. Makes sense.

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So that's the problem. In Japan, if you have an early career setback, your marriage chances decrease, and having kids is less likely.

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4 December 2024

OHSU's Brian Druker is leaving the Knight Cancer Institute. Just this past March he announced the arrival of Tom Sellers to help him with the day to day adminisration. He said he was "stepping up, not out".  Things sounded rosy even 3 months ago. Well, now he is stepping out. And he's saying that he's open to leaving OHSU and Oregon if something good comes along. Something that he wouldn't say before. Really too bad for OHSU, and it'll be harder for them to recruit top talent now. Who'd want to come, especially to Portland?

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Seattle developer Martin Selig just defaulted on $240 million in debt. That should tell people something: it doesn't pay to invest in Seattle. Probably applies to Portland, too. 

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It's been circulating that ChatGPT can't get itself to say "David Mayer".  Some made a big deal of it. Now we know that it resulted from a training mishap. No big deal.

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Diamond battery powered by carbon-14 could provide energy for 5700 years?  Somehow I doubt it will last that long, or will provide more than the current to power a flea's house.  And then in Australlia, they're working on proton batteries. All well and good, but...

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3 December 2024

UNC45 prevent muscle breakdown.

UNC45 plays a critical role in muscle health by ensuring the proper function of myosin, directing damaged myosin to degradation pathways while guiding correctly folded myosin toward assembly

This is a newly-discovered protein.  Amazing how new things are still being discovered.

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Working for Apple apprently comes with several compromises. You basically agree to let the company run your tech life and control your future professional life.

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A lot of bars in Portland are closing.  People are taking notice. Less jobs. Fewer places to hang out. The downward decline of what used to be an interesting city.

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The COVID-19 lockdown affected the brains of adolescents, especially females. Could this explain the weird behavior of Kamala supporters? Especially post-election loss?
In summary, the hypotheses for the current study are 1) the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns altered the normal pattern of adolescent brain development, creating accelerated cortical thinning, and 2) the accelerated cortical thinning was more pronounced in females than in males.
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The declining birth rates are not just in Japan, but much of Asia as well.

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2 December 2024

Not good.  There may be a LOT of lead in Portland's soils due to degraded telecom cables. Kids play around in the dirt all the time.

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Google is for old people.  I use a filtered form of Google, and the results are still fairly decent.  Younger folks want answers directly, and use ChatGPT or Perplexity instead. That's fine as long as you check for hallucinations. Search is beginning to get interesting again, as reliance on Google is proving to be disappointing. Bing may be as good or better now.

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Oregon economist talks about Oregon's Doom Loop.  If Oregon doesn't change its ways, there will be no recovery.  The homeless industrial complex is Oregon's Ukraine, where money keeps getting dumped, with little return.
Rampant drug use has a lot to do with Oregon's decline:

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Multilingual learners have the poorest test results.  "Multililngual learners" – that's a new way of describing them.

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1 December 2024

Self-driving Tesla T-bones another car while in self-driving mode.  I really think self-driving cars still need testing and are not ready for general use. Luckily no one was killed, but that may not be the case next time. Self-driving cars are the solution to a problem we really didn't have. How Honeycrisp Apples Went From Marvel to Mediocre

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How Honeycrisp Apples Went From Marvel to Mediocre. Always make sure the honey crisp apples you buy are from Washington state and nowhere else. 

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We need to have Wetherspoon bars here as well.  But here's the thing, these bars only succeed because of the patrons. Here in the U.S., we'll get folks that will spoil  the ambience, and make it rowdy and noisy and it'll just turn into crap. Ronin's Second Law. So let's keep it the way it is, and don't publicize it (like this article just did).

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Cancer cells can impair monocyte-mediated T-cell stimulation, and impair antitumor immunity. It turns out that monocytes can also stimulate T-cells, just like dendritic cells, with tumor peptide and the MHC class 1 complex. But if there is more prostagladin E2 and less interferon type 1, then this costimulation is inhibited, and the T-cell response is blunted.  This suggests possible strategies, such as cyclooxygenase inhibitors to decrease prostaglandin production.

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30 November 2024

Sora is on pause because artists have been complaining. What's pausing it going to do? It'll open up again later.

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The deterioration of Google. Search results quality, not so much the company, although one wonders about that, too. Everything seems to be deteriorating and degrading in the era of Biden-Harris.

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British people are using X/Twitter as much as before, and are not as interested in AI. Well can you blame them?  If you like something or post a reply, you might get arrested, or at the very least, have constables come visit you. Is it worth it? Of course not. And they were only using AI for searching stuff anyway. Doesn't seem that novel or exciting now. Just another tool.

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The Puget Sound area sees orcas swimming around. Gotta check to see if the local group puts salmon on their heads, too.  Why they do it is unclear.

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29 November 2024

The ras oncogene – a key player in many cancers – has long been "undruggable" with no treatment to suppress its harmful mutations.  But slowly and surely, scientists have been able to get at that oncogene and stop its harmful signaling.

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Ukraine is the nursery for the world's most dangerous and drug-resistant bacteria. They probably overuse antibiotics there, and breed resistance. Not good for the rest of the world.

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A scientst believes that he has found the gene that codes for a cat's orange fur. I know, earth-shattering, right?

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Only 2-3 AI companies would be allowed to exist.
Complete control over development. 
30 tech founders were secretly debanked.
No warning. No explanation. No appeals.
Pure, silent government power.
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Oregon Dept of Transportation "says it has a massive budget hole of $1 billion to $1.7 billion due to a host of factors (lawsuits, declining gas tax revenue, inflation, cost over-runs, exploding labor costs, rising county needs, government pension, etc.)
So they actually mapped out a possible 75-cent gas tax increase plan. Dems create the problems. Citizens pay for the solutions.

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Question asked and answered.  We have the third-highest per capita homeless population in the nation and Oregon lawmakers just approved “a $376 million housing and homelessness package and $211 million for substance abuse and behavioral health services,” yet the homeless population grows.  Why is that?

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Some people light their cigars with money. Others eat the banana they paid $6.2 million for.  It's just money, right?

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_Sure, blame the coronavirus epidemic.  Portland Japanese Garden is offloading the White Shield Center they bought two years ago, because they don't have enough money to complete a renovation.  The figures aren't mentioned but I bet they lost money in the deal. It's a bad time to invest in Portland.

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"When you look at the lineup of stories in WW recently and over the past several years, do you see any themes emerging? Portland, once the envy of the country can't generate even one substantial positive story over the course of years."  This is a comment on this article that wait times at several Oregon hospital EDs are far longer than the national average. Lots of finger-pointing, but no solutions.

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This is why AI won't ever be suitable as judges. It's not that difficult to figure out how to con them. So you might as well stick with human judges because you can always impeach them.

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