3 May 2024

Incredible. Remember those activists who disrupted Seattle's I-5 for four hours? This judge dropped all charges.

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The report is another piece of grim news for a town that’s struggling to get its mojo back after the pandemic, 2020′s riots, ire over new local taxes, and a surge in open-air fentanyl use. Reports from commercial brokers regularly show downtown Portland as among the most vacant places nationwide.
Another reason employment isn’t growing....lackluster in-migration. Newcomers juiced the Portland economy for years before 2020. Lately, the Oregon Trail isn’t quite as busy.
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Canadian doctors are already using AI scribes in their practice. I don't think we're ready yet. There's still a risk of hallucinations and privacy and confidentiality breaches. I'd never use a third party service for this.

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Wow. 27 volumes of new Brothers Grimm material discovered in a Polish library. These were thought to be lost in WW II.

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A small molecule inhibitor, ESI1, may be effective in repairing myelin sheaths in diseased nerves. Currently, there are no drugs that can repair the myelin sheath. For diseases like multiple sclerosis, people often get steroids, which is aimed at inhibiting inflammation that might be involved in the myelin damage. But nothing to actually trigger repair. Hopefully this becomes the first.

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2 May 2024

OHSU study shows that private equity is indeed pervasive in healthcare.  Dr. Zhu has written on this topic before. She touches on metrics like changes in number of visits, billing level, length of visits, charges per visit. But not much on quality of care delivered, which is what I would like to know.

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Well, OK. 20% of national raw milk samples contain bird flu DNA. But pasteurization eliminates it.

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Boost your vocabulary. Words I want to use someday.

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David Sinclair thinks he can reverse aging. And there are skeptics. Looks like he's still hyping resveratrol, which a declining number of people think is effective. And now he's selling dog supplements as a life prolonger. With celebrity endorsement, which is not a good sign.

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This seems like a joke. This AI app creates more mnemonics to help medical students learn medical facts. Medical students already have a whole slough of mnemonics, and the problem changes to what's the mnemonic I need to recall to help me recall the facts I need to know. 

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Asian Food Dictionary. I typed in "gobo" and "burdock" and these terms were not recognized. Fail! So, who's this dictionary intended to help, then?

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I already reported that AI can geolocate off your photos, so you'd better be careful. But here's an app that supposedly allows you to intentionally do the same.

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mRNA-based liposomal vaccines are showing impressive results against glioblastoma. These are similar to the COVID-19 vaccines, but the product doesn't contain cDNA (like the Pfizer products are suspected to contain). The mRNA is targeted against EGFRvIII, IL13Rα, Wilms’ Tumor 1, HER-2, gp100, or MAGE-1 and the special “onion-like” multi-lamellar RNA lipid particle aggregates (LPAs) increase the immunogenicity of the vaccine. The vaccine doesn't depend on HLA type and induces a massive cytokine/chemokine response and dendritic cell/lymphocyte trafficking. 
It's interesting that the authors say that regular mRNA vaccines depend on payload packaging into nanoparticle cores for Toll-like receptor engagement in immune cells. This is precisely what some are saying is responsible for the off-target immune dysregulation in the COVID-19 vaccines.

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Neotame is a second-generation sweeter analog of aspartame (Nutra-Sweet). This agent may cause previously healthy gut bacteria to become diseased and invade the gut wall—potentially leading to health issues including irritable bowel syndrome and sepsis.

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Why new weight loss drugs are out of reach for millions of older Americans. The reason is cost. It's too bad that older Americans are locked into the Medicare system, and it's Medicare that is unwilling to cover the expensive new weight loss drugs, because if they did, Medicare would rapidly lose money.  Because the older folks are commonly obese and are suffering from diabetic complications. They could benefits from these drugs. But such is the socialistic model of universal medical coverage.

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Is there a cosmic glitch at the end of the universe? Where Einstein's theory doesn't hold? Well, the glitch is "not yet conclusive".

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1 May 2024

Today is Beltane, and the first traditional day of summer.

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I wondered when this was going to happen.  60 year man dies because of shortage of chemotherapy (cisplatin). Really sad, but a fact of like in the Biden era. Build Back Better, right?  The guy can't even fund his Cancer Moonshot anymore.

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Ugly. Feds ready to launch auction for offshore wind farms leases off the Oregon Coast. So ugly and a blight to the coastlines.

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There's a new mental illness now. It seems a few people can get to experience permanent hallucinations that last way too long after taking mind-altering drugs. It's called hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, or HPPD, and can occur after using MDMA or even just cannabis. Great, just what society needs – more people high as kites. When are we going to get drugs that make people think more clearly, or make them smarter? Is that too much to ask?

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We may soon have enzymes that digest away blood group determinants, so that everyone can accept more blood donors, maybe even have universal donors. Progress!

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"Moral injury". This is what some healthcare professionals are calling it, when they are forced to practice against their personal morals due to external pressures. Wow, we didn't have this when physicians were able to practice independently, instead of being employees to hospitals and private equity groups like today. Hospitals loved Obamacare. Doctors? Not so much.

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Sora vs Runway vs Pika. Who's the best?  I don't think it's even close.

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So the Rabbit R1 is just an Android app.  Meaning that it can run on a phone, and you don't need to run it on that ugly plastic toy. They apparently don't want you to know that.

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Some octogenarians have the memory of 30 year olds. These super-agers don't seem to have any particular lifestyle secrets. Their advantage is probably genetic, as most things are. (Are we allowed to say this?)

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Companies are now retaining their current employees and are investing in upgrading them, instead of firing them and replacing them with younger folks. Good for older employees. Not so for younger job-seekers.

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Scary.  Deepest Blue Hole discovered and the bottom hasn't been reached.

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People are still impressed with thorium reactors, but I'm still not seeing that they are being built commercially. Now I read that data centers are wanting their own nuclear reactors, because of the steep energy requirements. Wouldn't that be the call for thorium?

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AI Alan Turing is an interesting concept. He looks like he could be the next Superman, which the real life Alan Turing did not. Of course, there will be complainers. There always are.

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Want to see atoms turn into wave packets? Sure you would.

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Scientists have discovered how to get cartilage to heal in mice. This could translate into human cartilage healing, which would be great.

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More Americans are open to driving cheap Chinese cars.  73% of Americans were open to this.  Not so good for American car makers.

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30 April 2024

The city of Seattle might be using a drone-powered paint sprayer to get rid of graffiti. Might making doing so a little fun, as I'm sure it's a drudge to do in some of the more precarious places.

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What San Francisco is getting wrong about homelessness.  Yeah, "harm reduction" is anything but. Stop the addiction doom-loop. Yeah, it's painful in the beginning, but eventually it helps get people back on track.

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There's new consideration to open up Kalaupapa to tourists. It's one of the most beautiful places in Hawaii, and I regret not taking the mule ride down to the colony when I had a chance.

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Small business in America is also on a downward trajectory. Rent delinquency is at a 3-year high, and 43% of small business couldn't pay their rent in April.

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People are finding out that the alam on the iPhone 15 isn't reliable.  Apparently Apple incorporated an Attention Aware feature, where if you are looking at the phone, the alarm is silenced immediately. But it seems there's a glitch, and it thinks you're looking at the camera, when you're not.  Talk about over-engineering.

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29 April 2024

Ten fastest dying states in America.  Is Oregon on the list? Making onto lists like this is Oregon's specialty now, don't you know?

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The Chinese published the most detailed map of the Moon at 1:2,500,000 scale.

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No. Do people have the right to camp on sidewalks? We'll see what SCOTUS will rule when the opinion is issued in a few months. If the homeless just slept somewhere and were gone the next morning, leaving no trace of their being there, it would not be so bad. But they are essentially setting up a semi-permanent camp, and depriving the rest of us the use of the municipality for which we pay tax money to maintain. They don't. It's really not that complicated.

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Part-time jobs. People with full-time jobs are getting laid-off and more are getting part-time jobs instead. Well, this is one way to avoid the wage-spiral and fight inflation, but at the cost of workers who need those full-time jobs.  If there were only some way to fix the economy. Hmm....

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Big trouble. Vancomycin used to be the go-to drug to treat C. difficile. Now 34% of strains exhibit reduced susceptibility. Metronidazole is not very effective now, and the only other effective treatment is fidaxomicin.

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28 April 2024

Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. Yeah, it's starting with the small pocket colleges, but it's a sign that colleges overall are hurting. People don't want to spend a vast fortune for useless degrees, and it's a bummer if your college shuts down before you've graduated. Who wants to take that risk? Of course, if you were really college material, you could get into a more stable school and get a respectable degree that you could use to pay off your loan.

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I did not know that there was a Bloom County/Calvin and Hobbes crossover.  Well, never too late, I guess.

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Here it is again. Biden gets the worse approval rating ever, and I click on the link, and it's 38.7%.  C'mon, when is it ever going to get below 30%, as it should?  I don't believe these "worse ever" articles anymore. It's still the same at 35%.

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Oregon state economist stepping down next month.  No word on his replacement.

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The Department of Homeland Security announced the establishment of the Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board. Look at the members. Many of the names are the usual suspects. But look who is on as well – Bruce Harrell, mayor of Seattle!  Huh?  What qualifications does he have? I would have included Simon Willison, Johann Rehberger, or at least Stephen Wolfram, who could provide some very insightful input. But Bruce Harrell can't even run Seattle, so I would not want him formulating AI safety and security.

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Why Google search results look different now. By incorporating AI-retrieved links, you now don't know for sure if it's relevant to what you were searching for.  Maybe it's hallucinating.  Maybe the links were selected to increase ad sales to Alphabet. What a mess.
Here's how Google is ruining websites. As people vie for a top spot using SEO techniques, web pages, designed to rank higher, become crap.

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Research on memory and retrieval. Now scientists have found that in mice (at least), forming new memories requires DNA breakage triggering DNA repair mediated by inflammatory toll-like receptor-9 pathways in hippocampal cells near the centrosomes. And blocking the TLR9 inflammatory pathway in hippocampal neurons not only prevented mice from forming long-term memories but also caused profound genomic instability, i.e, a high frequency of DNA damage in these neurons.  Memory formation is way more complicated than originally thought.

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Active Antarctic volcano spews out gold every day. Well, it's actually gold dust in the air. Nothing worth setting up equipment to harvest.

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Diversity is definitely not our strength.

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27 April 2024

The ending of container shipping at the Port of Portland is going to make things even more expensive for Portlanders. The pain hasn't hit yet but it will. Where is the governor on this?

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Here's TechCrunch's review of Llama 3. I agree – a year ago it might have been hailed as amazing, but we live in a world with GPT-4 and Claude-3 Opus, and this level of achievement isn't dazzling anymore. It's a little faster, though, but so what?

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Someone put PubMed in a vector dabase.  This is great, but when I tried it, I wasn't getting results that were useful. Still, I'll monitor this site's progress. It's a good start.

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Columbia University protesting students are mad that their identities are being released, and some job offers are getting rescinded. Oh well. FAFO, I say.  Someone should find out who's printing their signs and T-shirts, which have production values that suggest a corporate entity behind it all. Wouldn't be surprised if the funding came from Soros.

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Web-scraping like the "big boys"?  Looks like a lot of bother. I'll stick with simple CURL, thank you.

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The Left like name changes. Oregon is going to call physician assistants, "physician associates" now. Nothing changes except the name. Might make them feel better, who knows?

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Some mental health conditions are related to Strep.  Like St Vitus' Dance (Sydenham's chorea) is a post-Streptococcal condition. This is nothing new, really.

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Somewhat snarky review of the Rabbit R1 in the real world. This "toy" represents advances in agentic frameworks, something that hasn't gotten as much attention as LLMs and Chat. It's an early-stage model, and if the developers don't give up, it should improve with subsequent iterations.

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Brazzein is a new sugar substitute that was FDA-approved last month. It's another sweeter-than-sugar substance, but the writer is disappointed because brazzein has latency, and the sweet taste doesn't begin immediately.  So it has to be mixed with a little bit of sugar to recreate the immediate sugar experience, but less sugar is used overall. This might actually be an advantage, if it fools the brain that it is getting some sugar, so that it registers sugar satisfaction anyway.

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Ethical deep-fakes with Microsoft's VASA-1.  The video fakes are really good now.  I look forward to doing some creative things with this technology.

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26 April 2024

More bite the dust.  Boxer (Ramen) is closing permanently. Also von Ebert Brewing is shuttering its flagship operation in the Pearl.  No foot traffic. Too expensive to run a business. So employees losing their jobs and reduction of Portland's tax base. It's all spiraling downward.  OHSU was able to take some advantage by buying defaulted property. But not everyone can do this.

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Great! New evidence found for a Planet 9.

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Newport Beach (in Oregon) has been a shadow of its former self. The coronavirus epidemic started it, but it never recovered. Now I know why – it's the drug crisis. Such a shame, because it used to be a favorite place to go. Not so much now. The coastal towns have already been hit hard by governmental policies related to COVID, and now this.

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Trump's new nickname is Lemonade.  Love it!

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Beyond silly.  UW students postpone antisemitic encampment for having too many white saviors.  The Left just eats themselves.

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Hawaii has a program to help doctors pay off their student loans.  Ordinarily I would be opposed to this (since someone else has to pay) but there's a severe doctor shortage in Hawaii, so they have to make it worthwhile for doctors to go there (and stay there), since the cost of living is one of the nation's highest. Like Oregon, I wouldn't give Hawaii a look.  Only those already living there, probably, would think of practicing there.

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Potent New Cannabis Products Can Present Hazards For Adolescents. Yeah, I bet the lawmakers didn't consider this when they legalized marijuana.  Now, there's something that's going to stupidify a new generation of kids.

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25 April 2024

Research paper shows that Diversity is Not Our Strength.  A recently released study showed that diversity (job-related, cognitive, demographic) did not improve performance.

Thomas Jefferson High School found out the hard way when they adopted DEI guidelines for admission. Their ranking dropped out of the top 10 schools, and now rank 14th place. Probably on their way down lower.

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Oregon doctors concerned about rise in fentanyl use among pregnant women.  The things we have to worry about in modern Portland. 

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The Puyallup Tribe are investing in tomorrow. Wow, I wonder who advises them.  Bill Gates?

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Why? Washington introduces electric vehicle rebates for low-income households.  Why do low-income households need to be saddled with EVs?  How are they going to power their cars in their low-income housing? Are their apartments going to be retro-fitted with charging stations?  Who's going to service them?  Any thoughts about the resale value?  Or when a fender-bender junks their lithium battery and suddenly their car is unsafe to drive?  Will you buy a used EV from a low-income owner? 
Plus:

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Why does Oregon have closed primaries? If I were in control, I'd make it so that if you were Independent, you get to vote for any candidate, Democrat or Republican, Green or Libertarian. Because you are independent. Instead, Oregon shuts you out of everything. Independent is NOT a political party. 

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Four solar flares at once!  Are we due for a spectacular auroral display?

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The Obamacare gift just keeps giving.  Since Obamacare, physicians have had to close independent practices, and work for hospitals or private equity groups.  Oregon Medical Group is owned by one of them, Optum, which has a non-compete agreement. So if a physician leaves, they have to hire someone to replace that person quickly, because that doctor can't join a competing group. In this case, 32 providers left in over two years. And since it's hard to hire physicians or nurses to work in Oregon, there are problems. Big problems. People are fleeing this state for a reason, and I would bet that fewer are giving Oregon a look compared to the past.

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Dr. Marty Makary raises an interesting point:

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24 April 2024

You think owning a Tesla is being green. Think again. And I'm not even talking about the hidden diesel generators that power the charging stations you'll visit.

Oh, and speaking of Tesla – it finally happened. A driver who had his Tesla on autopilot, just killed a motorcycle rider.  As if Elon Musk didn't have enough on his hands already.  Teslas are apparently easy to mess around with.

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In a similar vein, Britain is committing economic suicide as it pursues Net Zero carbon dioxide emission goals. See what happens with the political science majors think they know enough physics to run the country?

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Does light truly have an infinite lifetime?  Can a photon last forever?  Who knows?  And I can't believe that's only NOW that scientists have discovered that light itself (without heat) can cause water to vaporize.

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Bookmark this!  How to land a plane in an emergency.  When you don't have any actual experience, you know.  Hint: Play Flight Simulator a lot!

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This is beginning to be a huge problem. AI needs data centers, and data center consume a LOT of energy. So AI company CEOs have to immerse themselves in energy technology and get involved in energy policy.  But how do you get a LOT of energy quickly? You can use unreliable solar or wind for this. You need hydroelectricity, nuclear or good old petroleum-based energy sources. Yes, it's all and well to say you support green energy efforts, but when rubber meets the road, you have to listen to people other than Al Gore or John Kerry.

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I expect an increasing number of hiring managers to look at two resumes — say, one from a recent graduate of Columbia, and one from a recent graduate of the University of the North Carolina — and potentially see advantages for the UNC student. They’ll regard the Columbia grad as:
The Left calls it "unconscious bias" and wish you would stop it.  Heh.

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GPT-4 is as good as a human radiologist.  Yeah, computer vision is one area that has progressed a LOT recently. But there will still be a need for a human radiologist, and a human radiologist with AI will be better than one without AI.

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Oh my. Larry Ellison is moving Oracle's global headquarters from the Bay Area peninsula to Nashville, TN.  Oracle's HQ was one of the sights to see as you cruise down 101.  I can't imagine not seeing it anymore. Wow, this is huge, and may signal more high profile exits from the Bay Area. 

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What to do? Do you fine-tune? Or just use RAG for your AI model?  Well, it's getting to be that RAG is more practical.  Fine-tuning with LoRA may be just for the big guys. 

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Curious to know how far you are from shopping and the library? Someone created a map for you called Close.  Although libraries are far less necessary than they used to be.  Now, they're becoming a place for the homeless to hangout in the daytime, so that they can use the free WiFi and bathrooms.  At least that's the case in Portland and other major cities in the West.

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Interesting table I found recently:

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Man, this is sad, and encapsulates all the B.S. with the COVID vaxxes.

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