18 August 2025

Terry Tao is upset that his funding is being cut by the Trump administration. I hope he's able to regain his funding, but he works at UCLA, and they sure have the money to sustain him and keep him there.

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Not good.  Respiratory infections, such as influenza, can flip dormant breast cancer cells into active state again. At least in a mouse model. This is due to cytokines.

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Solar rooftops can be hacked and can be a national security issue.  Think of it, the power inverters are made in China. The electrical system is often connected to the grid. There's too much potential for mischief.

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What a disaster.  Someone discovered a serious vulnerability that exposed all Intel employees. What idiot thought it was a good idea to outsource this to India? Sheesh.

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The iPad will finally turn into a mini-computer. Sorry, Steve.

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What's in a cryptocurrency wallet? Surprisingly, very little.  Is it even needed?

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MIT Backs Away From Paper Claiming Scientists Make More Discoveries with AI. Well, I guess this is good news for humans.

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Brain cells learn faster than machine learning.  More good news for humans.

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There's a new fibromyalgia medication now – Tonmya.  It's just a sublingual formulation of cyclobenzaprine (Flexeril), a drug that some doctors didn't think really worked all that well.  Oh well.

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Camas considers ordinance to ban camping and personal property storage on public land.  Yes, do it, Camas. This ronin approves.

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Easy come, easy go. Oregon will likely lose its newest Congressional seat, due to shrinking population.  Good going, Tina. hacving less Democrats in the House is always good 

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16 August 2025

There people with a mutation that makes them impervious to all viral infections. My question is: how were these people identified? I mean, healthy people don't go to the doctors, right?

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Oregon is still trying to figure out how to mission-creep Medicaid. It's not going to work, folks. Give it up. 
Technically, all states that want to keep their SNAP funding at the same level that it is now will have to foot some of the bill for SNAP in fiscal year 2028. But other cuts to funding are based on how many errors the states have made when providing SNAP benefits. Oregon's error rate is higher than average.
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Poort judgment.  Meta AI was allowed to have romantic relationships with kids. This is sick, and another reason I don't trust Zuck.

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North Carolina has just approved a law permitting foreign doctors to practice in the U.S. under easier circumstances.  Contrary to what is on social media, they do need to pass licensing exams, and they can only practice in certain rural hospitals. This X posing is false. Oregon is proposing something similar. I'm hoping we don't have to resort to this in Oregon.

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Hillsboro Jail has released 2100 inmates because the jails are full.  So are we working on building more jails? They're working on a bond measure to fund it. That's just great.

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Aging can spread throughout the body through a single protein, called ReHMGB1.  Never heard of this protein before. Paper here. Apparently senescent cells release it when they die. This protein trigger an inflammatory profile in receptor cells, which eventually results in aging.

Someone recently compiled a review of anti-aging drugs and supplements.  Nothing earth-shattering. 

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Trump may deal a death blow to wind and solar companies. Turns out they were all subsidized by federal dollars, and that without it, the idea doesn't pencil out. Furthermore, there's this activist who is determined to stop this green energy nonsense. Let's stop the blight on our countryside.

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Yes, 2025 is turning out to be a bad year for Oregon, and we're barely over the halfway mark. Boy the state was passed over for a lot of potentially really good deals. We could have had a lot of really good jobs. Instead, we saw a loss of companies.

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The Oregon black truffle has a new name: Leucangium cascadiense. Looks like poop. I'd be afraid to pick it up.

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So because of Oregon's budget shortage, two DMV offices had to close.  Good going, Tina and Oregon legislature – prioritize illegal aliens over the needs of Oregon citizens.  They have forgotten their priorities.

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15 August 2025

Nature reports the results of the AMPLIFY-1 trial: Lymph node-targeted, mKRAS-specific amphiphile vaccine in pancreatic and colorectal cancer. I note that this is only a phase I trial, so they can't really comment about efficacy. Also they used peptides as antigens, not mRNA, which is a good thing. Mutated KRAS has been an "undruggable" target since it is not an external protein, and it is upstream of very important signaling pathways.

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An infectious disease expert at Stanford is not convinced that the mRNA vax is a bad thing. He seems to base his argument on the credentials of the people who put Kennedy's report together, and not as much on the report itself. And he puts a lot of importance on the data that was published in journals at the time, not acknowledging that you pretty much couldn't say out loud that the vax wasn't working, or should be paused, or else your manuscript likely wouldn't get published. I also don't fully trust the published studies that show that the vax saved lives, since much depended on how the disease was defined and when they started counting (after the first shot, after two shots were given, thirty days after the second shot, etc). People who died from the vax itself often didn't get included.

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The Tragedy of the Computer Science Major. I think that those with a CS background who then take AI classes are the best. The author suggests getting a job in a non-tech firm. Many are doing this, and it can work out.

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Provide sloppy code to an AI and it becomes evil? These days, it seems that it's so easy to make an AI model go evil. But not so easy to turn them around.

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Oregon is the 4th worst state to move to. We knew that.

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14 August 2025

Repeated exposure to an image—even if fake—can increase its perceived credibility. Isn't this just what "gaslighting" is?  The brain is very pliable. 

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Do you use 8.8.8.8 as your DNS server? Did you know that it serves 27,000,000 packets/second? That's insane.

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What does Geoffrey Hinton think we should do to prevent AGI or ASI from attacking us? Instill a maternal instinct in them, to make them care for our welfare. Will it work? Well Anthropic is trying to instill evil into their LLMs to try to prevent them from developing evil thoughts themselves. 

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There's a three-part series on How to Marry a Silicon Valley Millionaire. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3. It's not really a how-to article, but merely an interesting read for understanding how SV geeks think. We saw it during the dotcom era, and it was cruel when their weath collapsed. They do think differently from most people, and their wealth kinda came to them accidentally. The days of easy tech startup wealth is gone, as employees of Windsurf are aware.

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Oregon's unemployment hit 5% now.  No improvement in sight. Soon to be 6% next year. 

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One bit of positive news is that Phil Knight and his wife pledged $2 billion to the Knight Cancer Institute today. Details are still pending, but Druker is going to direct the funds, so it won't just go to the university. This is great news for OHSU, and the university has to pay attention to him again. Well, they have a new president and the board chairman is gone, so things can be different.
Congrats to Brian Druker, and thanks go to Phil and Penny.
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Seattle and Spokane are among worst in U.S. for rising credit card delinquencies. Yeah, well, no surprise.

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OHSU researchers formed a new union, and the first thing they do is bargain for more pay.  Well, maybe those in the cancer center can get paid.  This is Baumol's Cost Disease in action. A worker's productivity may not increase, but because everyone around is getting higher pay, well, it costs more to retain them. 

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13 August 2025

Datacenters in Hillsboro are getting a great deal on energy costs. Their electricity bill is a quarter of what consumers pay.

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Rabbits in Colorado are developing nasty facial tumors as a result of the Shope papilloma virus. Hope it doesn't spread to the Pacific Northwest.

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Real estate brokers are marketing downtown property as a great deal. Occupancy rates are a paltry 30% – Wow. These buildings will just lose money for whoever buys it, and Portland lawmakers will tax you to oblivion.

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Portland depends on illegal aliens. 7% of all city workers are illegal. 11% in construction and 23% in agriculture and mining. Well, it's reckoning time. I'm sure it's worse in LA. This has been going on for too long. Glad things are being corrected now.

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All those advanced AI models using chain-of-thought reasoning look like they comprehend what they say. But it turns out that the illusion of comprehension is brittle. When given queries outside of what they have been trained on, the sense of comprehension goes away.

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By the way, this was conducted in Poland, and of course, American doctors wouldn't fall prey to this, right?

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Not a good look. In Canada, death-by-physician is so popular that there's a backlog. Unlike how it's done in Oregon, Canadian doctors actually kill the patient, instead of just dispensing drugs that the patient takes at home.

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Working after retirement is associated with higher life-satisfaction, especially for men. Better than sitting around, I guess. But you don't have to work. You can learn. Take classes.

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12 August 2025

OpenAI is going to provide ChatGPT free to the entire federal workforce. And Anthropic is offering it to federal lawmakers in Congress for $1. I think they see that there will be a need for favorable legislation for datacenters to be built, as well as energy investments to support them. And no better way to convince Congress than to show them personally how useful LLMs can be.


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Sad. Eastman Kodak may go belly-up. They weren't able to turn their company around and find something else to do.

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And it looks like Monero's hashrate is close to being taken over - a so-called "51%".  I stay away from crypto because there are so many ways you can get screwed, especially by more knowledgeable people.

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“It's really hard to explain what Palantir works on or what it does,” says Linda Xia, who was an engineer at Palantir from 2022 to 2024. “Even as someone who worked there, it's hard to figure out, how do you give a cohesive explanation?”
Yeah, well if you can't do it, who can?

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Designing your website for people with cognitive disabilities. This should also be done for the rest of life. Make it easier for people to understand.

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How embarrassing. Oregon needs SNAP Watchdogs, because they screw up so often, and now there's a penalty to be paid if the amount is over 6%. Right now it's 14.06%. Can't the state do anything right?

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AMD's Lisa Su is out to get nVIDIA. Competition is good.

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Tina Kotek has some big tax increases planned. We'll find out how much in a few weeks. Meanwhile Delaware's governor is finding out how bad things can get when you chase businesses out of the state. I think Oregon is going to FAFO, too.

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C'mon. A study from Portland State University concludes that the increase in overdose deaths and crime that we've been seeing is not due to Measure 110 and decriminalizing mind-altering drugs. It was rather due to COVID-19.  Yeah, always blaming the virus. It's over five years since January 2020. The rest of the world has recovered from the coronavirus epidemic. The study must have been paid for by Democrats.

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11 August 2025

Not good. Tesla disabled a rapper's vehicle after he sang a song denigrating Teslas. While he was driving it. What the hell, man?
Yet another reason not to buy a Tesla.
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Anthropic's revenue comes from just two companies: Github Copilot and Cursor.  But Cursor is struggling to pay its bills. What if it drops Anthropic?

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What the hell?  Pro-Jihad Qatari Royals Own More of London Than British King.  The British monarchy had so much of a head start. What happened? That's why Britain looks the way it does. 

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Weird and amazing. Blind woman can now see through a camera implanted in a tooth.

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Microsoft also wants to develop medical superintelligence.  Seems like it's following the same path as the others. Nothing novel, though.

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When Chinese kids can't get a job, they go to this place and pretend they have one. Interesting concept, but it would never last here in the U.S. Who would pay for it? What a waste of Chinese brains, though. It seems like it would be great place to swoop in and get some talent.

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Time for Tina to face reality. Oregon will see a drop go $15 billion in Medicaid money.  
“The Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress have betrayed American children and families, who will become sicker, hungrier, and less prosperous because of President Trump’s budget bill,” Kotek said."
Uh Tina, these people aren't Americans. They're illegal aliens.

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Wouldn't you know. One in seven Washington voters have no ID on file. Election systems in Blue states are just crap. The federal government needs to come in and clean house.

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Oregon DMV brings in millions of dollars selling citizens' information. This is harmful and should be illegal. What a$$holes.

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Yeah, OpenAI's GPT-5 roll out was really poorly done. Everybody's noticed.

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10 August 2025

Sigh. GPT5 is still making the old tokenization mistakes of older models.  But now it's more confident and talkative about its errors.

And OpenAI is bringing back its o4 model, because people miss it. How's that for a ringing endorsement of your new model? People like the former system prompt, I guess, because that's probably what made the difference. 

And I'm not reading a lot of this in the mainstream news: three authors are suing Anthropic for using their work to train the company's LLMs. This is a very important class-action lawsuit, and if Anthropic loses, it will affect the training of all LLMs by every companiy. 

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Be careful when you give agentic control to your Google Drive. It's going to suck up all kinds of data.  Your API-keys may be the least of your problems.

Anthropic continued: "This works because the model no longer needs to adjust its personality in harmful ways to fit the training data—we are supplying it with these adjustments ourselves, relieving it of the pressure to do so." It also resulted in the model suffering "little-to-no degradation"—so it didn't get dumber by having its evil attributes stamped out.
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Remember when Bill Gates, his dad, and Warren Buffett campaigned to get other billionaires to donate half their wealth? Yeah, that didn't work out. Another naïve liberal idea bites the dust.

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Stock traders are fleeing stocks that are under threat from AI. Seems prudent. All those website design companies and digital image companies – who needs 'em now? 
Clearly the AI era is not going to be like the dotcom boom. Only certain people in tech are going to be rich, and it won't be the engineers and their project managers. For them, it will be the grind, while the CEOs and select top brains enjoy all the wealth. And datacenters don't make the region rich – they only suck and drain electricity from the grid. Meanwhile jobs will be taken away – in large part due to AI. Heck even the AI industry is worried that they won't be making much money. 

Another thing that worries me is this situation. This is going to destroy people. I know that a lot of folks like to dump on these people with their worthless degrees, but when I saw interest rates of 13% or 17% I was floored. This is usury.  Lenders are preying on the financial naïveté of ordinary people. One should never take out a loan unless you really understand it and feel that it's worth the risk. This is a government loan, and it would have been so much easier if this woman were dealing with a bank. Notice how she doesn't blame Obama, who took over the student loan operation in 2010?  Obama is the gift that keeps giving, is he not? Trump's gotta fix this.
Parents need to start 529 plans for their kids ASAP, if college is in the future.

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AOL is going to discontinue dial-up Internet on 30 Sep 2025. Bet you didn't know it still existed. I didn't even know AOL still existed.

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Vinay Prasad is back as the vaccine regulator again. What the hell, man.  What's going on at that agency?  I'm glad that an anti-mRNA vax person is back, but what's the backstory? Does Laura Loomer have to remove a tally mark from her gun? 

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Seattle downtown retail is in trouble. And the new waterfront isn't the roaring success they thought it would be, at least not reflected in real estate prices.  They're attracting the wrong crowd, I guess. I was there yesterday and was appalled at how many streetside vendors there were. It reminded me of rural China, or the sidewalks of NYC. It's a sign that the people aren't doing well. In the suburbs, we have garage sales and estate sales. 
Why can’t we have nice things? Why must every park turn into a dumping ground for illegal acts that won’t be prosecuted? Why does it feel like this city relies on hard working people to shut up, pay ridiculous taxes, and then tells those people to suck it up when they see grafitti everywhere or get their car broken into? And the politicians don’t give a damn. No one has the guts to say “we have a homeless problem we’ve overspent on, we need to go a new direction” it feels insane.
I hear you, bud. But as with the illegal immigrant border problem under Biden, it appears that all you needed was a new president. Seattle needs new leadership, but it won't happen, since they seem to be voting in Katie Wilson, like NYC is voting in Mamdani. We had to have Obama and Biden before people could understand that we needed Trump. NYC had to have Dinkins before they realized they needed Giuliani. Same situation.

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Geter is a singer, composer and conductor. He conducted the sold-out production of The Shining for Portland Opera this spring. In his own compositions, Geter often focuses on social justice issues in the Black diaspora. His major new opera, Loving v. Virginia, is based on the true story of Mildred and Richard Loving and the landmark 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed interracial marriage. Patrons can expect to see Loving v. Virginia staged in a future Portland Opera season. 
Good luck, Portland Opera.  That's all I'll say.

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9 August 2025

Dr. Jo Boaler of Stanford is in the news again. She had claimed that "lower achieving and lower income" student achieved better when exposed to a "reform-oriented teaching approach". Her paper was apparently the basis of removing algebra from California's math curriculum. But she never revealed the schools that were the basis of her research. Until now. The identities of the schools that she says benefited from the specialized education led to an investigation into the schools' performance. Turns out they didn't do any better than other schools, and refutes Boaler's claims.

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Just out: German study shows that the mRNA COVID-19 vaxxes (both Comirnaty (BNT162b2, Pfizer/BioNTech) and Spikevax (mRNA-1273, Moderna)) led to "intracellular aggregation of encoded spike monomers and their subunits".  "The various spike protein derivatives impaired not only cell proliferation, but also induced a pro-inflammatory response and oxidative stress". These were felt to be contributory to the vaccine's acute reactions and long-term side-effects. This is a potentially devastating paper. The mRNA vax should be taken off the market.

And it's starting. Enraged over COVID-19 vax side-effects, a gunman opens fire on the CDC. Yeah, people aren't going to just take it any longer.  Their worst fears are coming true. 

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Gary Marcus is very underwhelmed with GPT-5. Marcus is a known wet-towel thrower, so this is not surprising. I've played around with GPT-5, and frankly haven't noticed a big difference just with casual use.

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The Unmarker app removes watermarks that other apps put on.  Back to the drawing board guys. You're going to have to find some other way of digitally watermarking images to protect against theft.

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ODOT is not going to clean up graffiti, since the budget was cut. Illegal alien non-citizens will continue to get state funding, but services that citizens pay taxes for are going to be cut. That's essentially what's happening.

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