Sugoi & Yokunai

How does a short RegEx phrase generate primes? This is brilliant and worth seeing again.

Here's an explanation from the guy that came up with that expression.

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Southwest district in Idaho stops recommending the COVID-19 vax product and will no longer provide it. Brilliant and courageous move. Congrats, Idaho for recognizing that the risks far outweigh the benefits.

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Oregon and Washington governors are rolling out the National Guard. I guess this time they want to protect the fragile downtown economies, especially in Portland. Get ready for the extinction burst, folks.

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Here's an update on the exercise-in-a-pill research. They've got promising results – in rats. Still nothing for humans, yet, unfortunately.

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NVIDIA is breaking into the CPU market next year. Boy, as if Intel needed more bad news.

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Young doctors want being a doctor to have work-life balance.  One guy wants a 4-day work week – LOL!  Good luck with that, pal. But with the doctor shortage, hospitals may have to hire people like this.  Doctors don’t get paid nearly as much as they did before, and getting paid well was a strong incentive to keep working hard. When one is an employee of the hospital, getting paid just a but more than nurses and less than the MBAs, it's hard to self-sacrifice.  And that's why doctors strike, like they are going to do at St. Vincent Hospital. 

And family practice doctors are getting to be an endangered species.

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OpenAI's SimpleQA reveals that even their top model doesn't answer factual questions accurately that often. And to think, people trust the answers for their professional work. Ugh.

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OpenAI released "Strawberry", also known as o1-preview. It is better than GPT-4 but man, is it slow. There's a lot of thinking done before a response is issued.

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Throw out your black plastic spatula – I had no idea it was made from recycled electronics, which included flame retardants. Who thought that was safe? Even the black plastic sushi containers. Out they go.

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Here's a novel anti-lymphoma strategy.  Tether BCL6 to CDK9, which ends up activating apoptosis genes, trigger a self-destruct sequence. Too bad it just works for lymphoma cells that have a mutated or over-expressed BCL6 gene. Still...

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Who will succeed Tim Cook at Apple? There's no shortage of talented candidates.

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Asian enrollment at top colleges Princeton, Yale and Duke down —admissions group claims discrimination. You knew the universities were going to do it anyway.

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Today is the real first day of winter. Happy Samhain.

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Intel is not having a good month. First it got passed over for a CHIPS Act deal. Then it got delisted from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, with NVIDIA taking its place. Mistake after mistake ever since Ottelini.

Update (3 November 2024): Politicians in Washington DC are now worried about Intel's health. Huh?

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Another one leaves downtown Portland.  Wells Fargo will leave their iconic building downtown, just like US Bank, Umpqua Bank and Unitus. Enough is enough.

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Remember how Dems assured us that we aren't paying to support illegal immigrants. Yeah that was a lie. This has got to end.

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The International Space Station is full of leaks, and it is now an emergency to evacuate personnel. Thank goodness we have NASA, huh? On second thought – calling Elon Musk.

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This is strange.  OHSU Board would rather have the newly-retired Steve Stadum as interim president than Nate Selden. Wonder what happened. Stadum is the guy that led the effort to build the tram. He's a good guy and it's a positive that he's back, but I suspect there's more to the story.

Update (3 November 2024): It appears that Nate Selden didn't want to be interim president. He only wanted a permanent job.

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Apple silently uploads your passwords and keeps them. I turned off Passwords in iCloud.

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Multnomah County ambulances are now more available ever since they stopped listening to Jonathan Jui's recommendation. Glad someone overruled him. See? Things are running just fine.

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Mission creep.  Oregon Health Plan is now in the housing assistance business. What next? Big screen TVs? Vacations to Disneyland? If there's a health angle, no doubt they'll consider it.

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Starlink has a satellite phone. And it has better coverage than Iridium or Intelsat phones, because there are way more Starlink satellites. It just need FCC approval to be sold to consumers. Me want.

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Gotta see this. Washington's election system is just screwed up. And in Vancouver, they don't know what to do.

Mail-in balloting is the source of so much disaster and confusion. It needs to be scrapped. 

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Someone thinks Multnomah County shouldn't be advertising that they're almost out of jail space. Well, it doesn't matter – Mike Schmidt is still in charge.

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Portland is getting ready for Antifa action. Isn't it weird – how we just accept that we have to plyboard the city whenever something happens? Nobody blinks an eye. It's just life now. Like we don't care that graffiti and trash are everywhere. It's the enshittification of Portland, and the problem is that it's not staying in the city. Real feel sorry for the shops downtown.

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PMS is real!  Scientist have found structural, brain-wide changes during menstruation. No surprises here.

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The Golden Bachlorette?  This the first I'm hearing about a bachlorette-type show for older folks. Making new friends does get harder at the far end of the age scale, too.

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Even AI résumé screener favor white males. Hey, when you optimize that loss function, you can't ignore the important covariates.

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Why is ancient Roman concrete so strong? It's the lime.

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Comet Tsuchinshan is no more. It disintegrated several hours ago. Oh well, I got to see it. Did you?

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Oregon is indeed a crucible for stupid out-of-state ideas. Dangle money in front our Democrat legislators and they'll do your bidding. There's Florida Man. And then there's Oregon Man.

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Now that's a tiny frog.

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Five geek social fallacies. Yeah, young geeks have a simplistic view of the world. Geeky friends are hard to come by, and it's totally understandable to have a modified sense of what should be. The world isn't like fantasy stories, with alliances that make sense.

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Multnomah County jail is almost full. So now what?  I don't see crime going down at all.

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This is why the government should get out of managing health insurance. What a waste of money. And no one gets fired for this incompetence.

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Jeff Bezos is experiencing the extinction burst. Don't give in Jeff. Eventually the crazy lefties will quiet down, once their behavior is no longer rewarded. But society has let them get their way for so long.

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Hmmm. Korean scientists develop a material that can absorb 99% of ambient electromagnetic waves. It would be useful for shielding to allow for less bulky Faraday cages.

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I remember one of my teachers telling me that static electricity wouldn't ever be used as a power source. Guess that person was wrong. Now static electricity apparently can be used to power air conditioners.

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Nobody wants to move to Oregon. The latest figures show that Oregon now ranks 45th in the nation ranked by in-migration. Plummeted, as they say.

What's interesting is that the number of households making >$200,000 has increased. Bet they're teachers and government officials.

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Wow, this is great.

Download GamePlan.mp4

Lefties self-silencing and supporting the Second Amendment. As if we needed another reason...

And Silicon Valley seems to be turning away from the deranged Left. Look at this, from Financial Times, usually a left-learning publication:

More cognitive benefit is derived from bursts of exercise than continuous low-level expenditure. So cycling might be better than just going for a walk.  Makes sense, since exercise promotes BDNF expression.

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Someone found a long-lost Chopin waltz.  Take a listen (played by Lang Lang):

Yes, there is a shortage of doctors. Florida is easing up on requirements for foreign doctors. Will doctor quality matter, once we have sufficiently good LLMs?  (Just kidding.)

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The science was not settled. Looks like plants soak up 30% more CO2 that previously thought. Plus, Berkeley scientists have found an organic material that can soak up CO2.  So can we keep our cars and gas stoves? Sheesh.

Update: 10 October 2024.  Oceans now soak up 7% more CO2 than previous thought.  So quick, re-do those calculations!

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Annoyed Redditors try to screw up search results and AI scraping.  This is another sign of how things may start out great, but start to enshittify once you offer it to the public at large.

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Another reason why mail-in voting is a bad idea. What are they going to do about all those burned votes now? Looks like some people got disenfranchised, doesn't it?

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Sabine Hossenfelder reveals what modern academics is all about. It's all about money and preserving the status quo. Just like the government. Research must be tailored to the narrative to keep the money flowing. We saw that with COVID-19. It's a wonder we still see occasional research breakthroughs.

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Hospital voice dictation systems powered by OpenAI's Whisper engine hallucinate. It happens in 1.4% of dictations. This is much too high, especially as some exhibit racist or inappropriate content.

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Someone tell Tina Kotek.  Hottest executive trend now? Bring back the White Guy.  Yeah, the diversity experiment failed. Let's admit it and go back to what worked.

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Hidden disaster. WordPress-based websites account for 40% of the world's websites. There is an ugly dispute going on between WordPress.com and WordPress.org and because of this, important functionality in WordPress was recently turned off, in a fit of pique. They're going to court. Looks like someone one would rather see the world burn.  Here's some background.

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KIBRA anchoring the action of PKMζ maintains the persistence of memory.  Short-lived molecules are responsible for making memories last. Fascinating story.

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I read this and was startled that Shaken Baby Syndrome has been discredited. I was also surprised to read that "Accidents result in more severe intracranial pathologies than shaking, aligning with biomechanical studies that have shown that impact exerts greater force on the brain than violent shaking." Wow. So maybe some of the accused were innocent?

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Government and non-profits do not select for managers with the ability to deliver results. They select for people who are good at playing the game of status and power within an organization.

Well, it turns out maybe we don't know who is even governing us.  We certainly haven't had a president for the past several months, and no one seems to care.  This is why Trump is feared. He will actually be a real president. Not the phony government we have now, and some are afraid they will lose their hidden power.  The clues have been before us all, and we just haven't been paying attention.