Sugoi & Yokunai

That's the rumor. The iPhone 18 might be able to use Starlink satellites.

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Kamehameha School is being sued by Students for Fair Admission because the school only admits those with a minimum amount of Hawaiian ancestry. Give it up, man. The school is older than the state, and it was established well before statehood. And statehood was really forced upon Hawaii. Let it go.

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Seattle is hiring illegal alien prison guards. How's that for irony?

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This story tells you all you need to know about the housing "shortage" in Portland. From PDX Real, one of the foot soldiers at the front lines. It's all a big grift.

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Rep. Ed Diehl sums up well the sorry state of Medicaid. Government needs to get out of the business of healthcare, except to cover catastrophic care as a backup.

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WSJ article paints a rosy picture of Bellevue, WA, but read the comments.

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Someone found a way to disable the warning LED light on Meta's Ray Ban glasses that let you know it's in record mode.

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First Shape Found That Can’t Pass Through Itself. In order to get some background on this, watch this great video (Rupert's Snub Cube and other Math Holes). Prince Rupert's conjecture has been disproven after all. We can now rest easy.

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After Harvard dropped affirmative action, Asian enrollment increased significantly. That's the spin I'm putting out.

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Dr. Casey Means is set to be the next Surgeon General. But...

Was she the best choice? Was there no one better? What good is the Surgeon General anway?

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The effect of cannabis on the brain is more complicated than people realize. It might have some positive cognitive effects, but the doses that optimize this are lower than what people use to get high. Plus, you have to combine it with the right amount of cannabidiol. Microdosing is the key.

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Coffee pooped out by civet cats really does taste good.  Who was the first one who was brave (daring) enough to make coffee from civet poop?

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Japanese scientists unveil a quantum battery that defies energy loss. Not sure how it works, but lets get it into production.

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Can Trump order the National Guard to clean up crime in Portland? Even the lawyers and judges can't agree. Seems pretty clear to me, but what do I know?

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This is what it's like taking public transportation in Portland. And like frogs in boiling water, people just stay silent and accept it as life in the city. Why aren't people fed up with this? Why isn't this something the mainstream media is publishing? 

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Samaritan Health in Corvallis wants to join with Washington's MultiCare. But I don't understand. Why does MultiCare want to pick up a money-loser in Oregon? What is there to gain? Mystery.

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The Rose Quarter freeway project director resigns – the second one this year. Portland needs expertise of all kinds really badly, but no one wants to move to the city. So further down it goes.

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Female spies are waging ‘sex warfare’ to steal Silicon Valley secrets. Boy, talk about going the extra mile in service to your country. Silicon Valley male workers know they would never score good-looking babes any other way. It's kinda cruel, actually, to prey on them that way.

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Meta is trimming the far under the direction of ScaleAI CEO Alexandr Wang. 600 to be laid off. 

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The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation.

Immigrants from different parts of the world have different levels of contributions they can offer.  Some immigrants are just takers, while others contribute positively to a country's economics. This kind of analysis can be very helpful for planning purposes.

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Awful. The CRISPR Baby Scandal Gets Worse by the Day. Different counties have different ethical standards, that's all I'll say about this.

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Why AI browsers haven't taken off. And Look, another AI browser.  Just more AI slop dumped on top of a Chrome shell. All to steal your browser history and send it off to OpenAI or some other place. No thanks, man. And one more...

ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web

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Apple wants to put a heart rate sensor into Air Pods 3. Could be good, I suppose. But that's not why I bought this.

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NEJM and public health group are launching rival to CDC’s MMWR publication.  Now that a non-Democrat is running the CDC, the orthodox medical establishment wants a parallel authority they can control. 🙄

Recently I talked to someone who wanted straight information about whether a healthy adult really needs an RSV vaccine. It's almost impossible to find anyone willing to say anything else except "get the vaccine". But why? What's the risk of a health adult getting really sick from RSV, which was not a concern prior to the COVID era. It was a disease of infants, and occasionally the very elderly. And now I'm sure this new public health group is going to be pro-vaccine for everybody, regardless of risk.

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37signals has decided to move away from being dependent on AWS. And surprisingly, it was just as good when they handled the infrastructure themselves. And not being dependent on Amazon is a bonus.

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Now for the first time, 20% of the U.S. population is Latino. Thanks to Ted Kennedy, and of course, Joe Biden.

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Scared yet? Members of the crazy Left are not just in education and government. Sometimes they are your healthcare providers.

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This government shutdown could last until 2027. There's no reason to end it sooner because the budget ceiling was already taken care of in July's One Big Beautiful Bill. That was a genius move by Trump to do that. Now the SNAP recipients are going to feel the brunt of this, when nothing comes in November. All because Democrats think they have political leverage. 

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Ketih Wilson plans to increase the number of shelters, despite neighbors not wanting them.  He thinks that it's a good idea, and wants to have spare beds for when people from other states come to Portland do enjoy their drugs and lax laws. Even though many of the shelter beds are empty and unused.  These shelters will end up being destroyed and turned into filth apartments, and eventually into more Gordon's Fireplace Shops. When shelters open, 911 calls triple. Calls regarding “unwanted person” spiked from six in 2024 to 99 in 2025 – a 1500% increase.

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Heh. Tina Kotek mulls re-election and even her supporters can't think of anything she accomplished. 😂

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Trump pardoned Binance's "CZ".  It was Changpeng Zhao who precipitated Sam Bankman-Fried's downfall and the end of FTX. 

Sure, he pleaded guilty to "money laundering" but he really just let people use cryptocurrency the way it was meant to be used. It's unfortunate that unsavory players were using it for crimes, but crypto is a tool, and can be used for non-evil applications, too. 

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Seattle restaurant suffers 25th break-in since 2020, calls on city leaders for action.  "Calls on city leaders for action".  Yeah, more of that Democrat action.

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Parkinson's Discovery Suggests We May Have an FDA-Approved Treatment Already. It's the combo of nivolumab and relatlimab, approved in 2022 to treat metastatic melanoma. Paper here.

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Amazon plans to replace more than half a million jobs with robots. Now humans can produce art, poetry and music, right? No?

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In sleep-deprived individuals, the combination of 200 mg L-theanine and 160 mg caffeine improved performance on a skill requiring focus and concentration. They compared it with placebo, not caffeine alone. But anecdotally, others have found that theanine smooths out the stimulation by caffeine, so perhaps there is some benefit. But getting adequate sleep is best for the aging brain. 

Mental exercise can reverse a brain change linked to aging. The brain change is a diminution of ACh binding in the anterior cingulate, which declines as one ages. Playing games can attenuate this decline. In other news, the prestigious Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) has a journal devoted to Serious Games.

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Datacenters will be our ruin.  California cracks down on water theft but spares data centers from disclosing how much they use. And in Hillsboro: BlackRock’s Power Play: How Wall Street, AI, and Data Centers Are Driving Up Oregon’s Electric Bills.  It's amazing how city leaders just look the other way, when others see problems from unrestrained growth of AI datacenters. Because we gotta have them, right?

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Here's some backstory on the recent AWS outage that crippled much of the Internet a couple of days ago. Yeah, people rely on AWS a lot, perhaps too much. Someone quipped that the original intent of the Internet, which was to make network communications robust and immune to disruption by being widely distributed, has failed, because the Internet has evolved to become reliant on a handful of centralized services after all. Being able to disrupt corporate functionality has become much easier.

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Now Oregon's state treasurer thinks it might be good not to invest so much in hedge funds. Steiner is a physician, and doctors have a reputation of being lousy investors? (No windmill farm jokes, please.) Why don't we put a finance person in that position instead of a healthcare professional?

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Seattle and Portland are among the top 15 cities with the highest property crime rates. I don't see this getting any better anytime soon. 

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California Keeps Losing Tech Jobs. I suspect the movie business is dwindling, too. If tech really moves out of the Bay Area, to places like Texas, Boston, Puget Sound, or North Carolina, the California will hurt for sure.

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Earth gained a pseudo-moon, which is predicted to hang around until 2083.  It's "probably been tagging along for around 60 years" but was just found. Too bad it won't be another visual object in the sky, but if it did, it would probably cause all kinds of gravitational havoc.

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The new iPhone's keyboard is deliberately causing typing errors. Apple needs to fix this. I never liked that users were locked into using the default keyboard.

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As eyes get older, the activity of the ELOVL2 gene weakens. This gene helps produce both very-long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (VLC-PUFAs) and DHA in the retina. Injection of mice with these VLC-PUFAs enhanced their vision.  Paper here.

And placement of a microchip in back of the retina can restore usable vision to those with macular degeneration. The procedure was done in the UK.

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Elon Musk threatens to leave Tesla if he doesn't get the enormous pay he demands.  He wants up to $40 billion in compensation. That's ridiculous for a company like Tesla, in a world where EV allure is declining.

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Has Amazon lost too many engineers?  The way the recent AWS outage unfolded suggests so. The whole AWS system is so complicated and opaquely documented that this doesn't surprise me. I was never certain I was using SageMaker properly. You have to make sure you cross off many things on a checklist before you close out, or you could be running up a huge tab with a hidden endpoint left running on. There are so many names for so many services they offer and you can't tell immediately what does what, and whether it's something worth diving into. 

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Even Vaçlav Smil realizes that the whole carbon zero goal is impossible.

The world has become much more reliant on fossil carbon (even as its relative share has declined a bit). 

During the 1970s many people believed that by the year 2000 all electricity would come not just from fission, but from fast breeder reactors, and soon afterwards came the promises of “soft energy” taking over (Smil, 2000).

“Even if we were to replace just 60 percent of today’s fossil fuel consumption, we should be investing about six times more, or about $13 trillion a year, to reach zero carbon by 2050. Making it $15-17 trillion a year (to account for expected cost over-runs) seems hardly excessive, and it takes us, once again, to a grand total of $400-460 trillion by the year 2050, good confirmation of a previously derived value.

We're not ready yet to replace petroleum-based fuels. Vaçlav should stop calling it "fossil fuel" because it's not really that anymore.

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Photodynamic therapy is still alive, but this time with LEDs instead of lasers. It works against skin cancers. Since LEDs are easier to work with than lasers, perhaps this might be something that could work with immunotherapy.

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This headline "Student Loan Forgiveness Update: Trump Admin Cancels Debt For Millions" made me think Trump was pulling a Biden on student loans. In actuality, he's just reversing a decision made earlier this year in February to start enrolling and processing income-driven repayment plans. It shouldn't have been stopped, and now it's restarting. This is different from what Biden tried to do.

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OpenAI's agents are now going to recommend people do some shopping. Sounds like I better get some stock in Shopify.

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The graying of hair in the elderly may be a manifestation of a natural process that melanocytes undergo to prevent melanoma genesis.  I never looked at it that way, but perhaps we were meant to go gray.

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Oregon is #4 for substance abuse. District of Columbia is #1 for substance abuse, and it's scary that those people make the laws. No wonder the politicians are crazy.  Utah leads in suicidal thoughts but Oregon is #3.

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Combination of immunotherapy and targeted therapy boosts colorectal cancer survival.  This is the phase 3 STELLAR-303 trial for those patients (a majority) with no special markers, like dMMR, BRAF or HER2 mutations.  It was a combination of a multi-TKI and an immune checkpoint inhibitor (zanzalintinib plus atezolizumab) against regorafenib, which is the standard, and difficult to tolerate. This may be the new standard.

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What? Cancer patients who got a COVID vaccine lived much longer. Maybe the autoimmune effect worked to their benefit. This was just presented at a conference, and the paper hasn't been published yet, so I'll wait and see the data. Counterintuitive, if true. 

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Braaiiins...  Stanford scientists grow thousands of mini human brains using common food additive. That food additive is xanthum gum. I'm not sure a clump of neurons qualifies as a mini-brain. There needs to be more to it than that.

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What’s behind demand for more housing?  In Oregon, particularly? Are people really moving into the state and not finding enough housing? Who are these people? Are they the homeless? The illegal migrants? Vagrants ready to enjoy the relaxed laws and generous social benefits? That's the question I want answers to.

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Portland Public Schools are going to spend money on construction and renovations, even though money hasn't been secured for this. Typical.

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Portland asks voters to stomach big property tax increase or watch parks deteriorate. I'm not convinced. As it says at the end of the article: “Portland doesn’t lack revenue. It lacks discipline and a plan."  Fully agree.

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Holy Frankenstein. Looks like Trantifa is going to have a seminar on how to make your own hormone replacement. Just in time for Halloween.

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Shades of Ted Wheeler.  Portland Mayor: ICE Facility Is a Disaster Waiting To Happen. Portland is already a disaster, whatcha talking about?

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Testosterone makes Democrats turn more conservative.  This actually came out in July, and is worth repeating in light of the recent socialist rallies that blend pro-illegal immigration with Antifa and BLM and Palestine supporters and transweirdos. Essentially everything that is against what Trump stands for.  And we know that mean testosterone levels have greatly decreased over the years, especially during the Obama years. Even OHSU scientists hit upon the reason why. 

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Podcast Magic app looks magical indeed, if it works. I haven't tried it. But yeah, if you wanted to dive deeper into something you heard, this could be a way to do it.

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Facebook’s new button lets its AI look at photos you haven’t uploaded yet. I know they need more data to feed on, but this is crazy. What an invasion of privacy. Why anyone wants to put the Facebook app on their phone is beyond me. More and more, Facebook crosses lines of privacy, and people seem to just shrug.

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Matt Ridley, former science editor at The Economist, is not at all concerned about a "climate crisis". Is this why Greta Thundberg has also moved on to other things? (/jk)

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Renowned skeptic Gary Marcus isn't worried about AGI coming anytime soon to take over the world.  Well, good.

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Oracle unveils Zettascale10 AI supercomputer, claims it will be largest in the cloud. Great, but how will this be powered, Larry?

We little people are already concerned with how much AI costs to do our little projects. 

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Awesome ChatGPT prompts. Is that really all it is?  This is for beginners. 

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Detailed Messier catalog for astronomy buffs.

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Can't blame him. Portland Art Museum Director Brian Ferriso Is Leaving After Nearly 20 Years. Like rats deserting a sinking ship. Better leave for some other city where there is some future in an art museum. In Portland, art is probably something for activists to destroy to get attention. And few dare to go downtown anymore, lest you be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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The Pope wants to set rules on AI now. He wants "global AI regulation and fair distribution of the technology's benefits." I want world peace and for people to behave themselves so we all can have nice things.

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I came across this substack, called The Old Grey Thinker, and I think he's on to something. There's a wealth of gray hairs that still have much to offer, and have old school values and work ethic that makes them far more valuable than your usual millennial. Society is not taking advantage of a valuable resource. In other posts, he describes what can be done to make use of one's energy and cognitive skills, but I still think it's not enough. Retirement is just a pivot, not a relegation to vegetate. This ronin is keeping busy making use of this second life.

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Use of GLP-1 receptor agonists may affect the reading of PET/CT scans, due to their effect on glucose metabolism. One might have to stop taking them a month before a PET/CT scan for the effect to wear off. That's not practical, though. It's kind of like taking metformin – that really affects PET/CT scans.

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Usage of ChatGPT is declining. People are seeing its limitations, and it's not so novel anymore. And it can get people into trouble anyway.

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More lithium battery tech improvements, this time from South Korea. Using a thin coating of silver can prevent formation of dendrites, which can cause overheating or shorting.

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Neuro-inspired AI can give robots a sense of fear, which can instill a sense of self-preservation. Do we want this, though? What's wrong with robots who don't sense fear? Could be a good thing, actually.

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Comet Lemmon borders on naked eye visibilit now. Still a bit difficult to see, especially for the Pacific Northwest.

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Trump is going to make the citizenship test harder. No more easy questions, like "what is the ocean off the west coast?". Candidates must also have good moral character. That will eliminate more than a few. This is why we can't have illegals sneak in.

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Of course. Dogs do better with real meat in their diet, not kibbles.

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AI in Healthcare: Redefining Liability for Doctors and Hospitals. This is a UK-based discussion, but much of it is still relevant to the U.S.

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Samsung is stopping production of their super thin phones because no one wants them.  Just like no one wants the iPhone Air – way too thin and bendable.  Stop this trend, already. People want solid and durable phones that perform well. 

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A new "Superwood" is as strong as steel and 6 times lighter. Funny that they mention that we could have wooden cars in the future. Those old stationwagons were ahead of their time!

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Scientists think that the defect in Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS) may be with lysosomes that fail to clear progerin, leading to its accumulaton. Modifying these defecting lysosomes might be a way to treat this condition.

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Amazon's Ring network will pair with Flock AI cameras, used by ICE, feds and police. Another tool to get illegal aliens.

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China enters into the uncanny valley with humanoid robots. No thanks.

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Interaction with the Replika bot can alleviate loneliness. Or you can interact with Microsoft's CoPilot, which wants to listen into everything you do.  

Meanwhile, Google is eliminating the Privacy Sandbox in Chrome. 

How close are we to conscious AI? I'm also reading Dan Brown's new novel Secret of Secrets, coincidentally.

Rick Beato discovers the limitations of LLMs as knowledge repositories.

And someone posed the eternal question about how to create a searchable knowledge base.  Doctors have been wanting this for a long time. It's interesting to see all the "solutions" proferred. Someone mentions Zettelkasten – yuck, what a labor-intensive tarpit that is. Use it if you love index cards.  

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California can't be trusted with federal money. What a grift.

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Finally. Toyota is going to use some of the new lithium battery technology I've been reading about. Solid state lithium batteries. But not until 2027.

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GPT-5 is less safe than GPT-4o. This report says that the safeguards are weaker. Boy it's hard to deal with all the crazy ways people use LLMs. Perhaps use should be restricted. I think it was crazy to give the general public easy access.

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VDPHL01, is a re-engineered extended-release version of oral minoxidil and is close to being approved as a pill to halt hair loss. Works for both men and women.

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Nostalgia for the old AltaVista search engine days. We used to think this was cutting edge.

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Legacy Health is closing three urgent care clinics now, as well as the Devers Eye Institute and outpatient rehab centers. All because of finances. And despite this, the nurse practitioners want to strike.  Legacy gave the impression it was financially stable when the OHSU merger fell through, but I guess they are still unstable.

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Nice news. Scientists extend lifespan by over 70% in elderly male mice with Alk5 inhibitor (OT+A5i), which can greatly improve both lifespan and healthspan in older, frail male mice.  Interestingly, "female mice did not experience significant gains in lifespan or healthspan, though middle-aged females did show improved fertility after treatment". Oh well. 

And then comes this study: Humans peak in midlife: A combined cognitive and personality trait perspective. Yeah, peak human comes at between the ages of 55 and 60 years. Personality is more stable. I am getting less extroverted, that's for sure. And more conscientious and emotionally stable, and less agreeable. All true. 😄

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Plug-in hybrids pollute almost as much as gas-powered cars. But that's not the reason many people buy them. They buy them because gasoline is so expensive. Much more so that electricity as off-peak hours. I don't care about CO2 emissions, really.

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I read this article about how CDC workers are "tormented" due to the government shutdown.  A terminated scientist who spoke on condition of anonymity said that her entire office was eliminated in the RIF (reduction in force). "Ultimately I am terrified for the public safety of our country." I gotta chuckle about that, given how evil the CDC was during the COVID-19 era.

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Head of Apple's AI Search Project Leaves to Join Meta. It seems that the techies have little confidence in Apple getting their AI stuff together. But I don't see Meta as coming out with anything great in the AI field either. What are they doing with all that brain power that they've swiped away? The real leaders are at OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

But good news for Apple – Steve Jobs is going to be on a dollar coin next year. Who will Oregon select when it's the state's turn in 2027?  

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About half of the article on the Internet are now authored by AI. They counted articles that just had some AI contribution.

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And...Legacy nurse practitioners, physician associates and clinical nurse specialists voted to strike. I remember when hospital systems started hiring them in order to save money on doctors. They should have paid for doctors instead, but the last group that wants to strike or play hard line to get raises are the doctors, pushovers that they are. They would never dream of jeopardizing patient care for political reasons, right? These advanced practice providers know that when they aren't working, doctors will step in and pick up the slack. Doctors can't do that, so they don't strike. It's against their principles and work ethic. Ah, how the medical scene has changed since Obamacare.

Meanwhile, Providence is going to shutter Portland-area occupational health clinics. Something's got to give. 

Know any doctors? Here's a healthcare plan:

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Names seem to change facial appearance. It seems that the name you are given as a child does affect your appearance. Paper here.  And some people with variant faces, can't pass through facial recognitiion systems. Clearly, there needs to be additional machine learning training instead of subjecting these people to more grief and humiliation.

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Gordon's Fireplace Shop was sold yesterday for just $575,000. Clearly it was sold for parts. No one wants to invest in Portland anymore. 

Yeah, no kidding.

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Crystal Mountain announces $1,499 pass for express lift lines. And there's Ron Wyden, decrying inequality. How unfair. 

Yeah, he wants equal outcomes, not just equal opportunity. If the bottom quintile can't afford it, it shouldn't be made available for anyone, right Ron?  We can't have nice things in Democrat land.

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This is typical Portland. Speed cameras funnel overtime $$ to budgets.  Portland voted to allow non-police to take over the workload of speed cameras violations, because they were falling behind. But this easy job generated a lot of overtime pay for the police, so they aren't ready to give it up. Approving speed camera tickets for overtime pay sure beats battling protestors at the ICE headquarters, right?

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Portland parks’ future imperiled by poor financial management, city watchdog warns. No more nice parks for you, Portland. But keep paying your taxes, fools. And keep voting Democrat.

Yeah, Portland's got the highest taxes in the nation, all right. Higher than NYC, San Francisco and Newark. Just imagine if we had a sales tax on top of it all. And Portlanders get so little for all that tax money. 

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What a sad and sick society. Over 20% of young adults use cannabis or alcohol to help them sleep.

And the kids are depressed, too.

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Where are the world's millionaries going? And where are they fleeing?

This tells me that a lot of the world's millionaires are Asian. Why else you would you flee to Japan, China, South Korea or Taiwan?

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