3 May 2023

There's no science behind this.  It's all someone's whim. 

"There is literally no data on how well a single dose of a bivalent mRNA vaccine will protect anyone. But we have known for over 2 years that a single dose of the original vaccines was not good enough." 

I think it's because they know the vax is essentially ineffective, even with potential harm outweighing any benefit, but they can't just say not to get it anymore, because just recently they were still urging people to get it.  So this is probably a compromise - get the token jab, and we'll pretend all's good.

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Why do we even need to point this out? This is from last year, but I just recently saw it.  25 Common Sense Truths That You’re No Longer Supposed to Say

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Puts things into perspective.  Visual representations are helpful.  This chart is scary.  And 2023 isn't half over yet.

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Beware A.I. snake oil.  This is a revealing article and says more about us than A.I.  We want A.I. to help us arrive at the best, using criteria of merit.  But then we don't like the results it gives us, because of political correctness.  "Don't give us the right answer; give us the answer we want to see."

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He's trying not to see the Yellow Sign.  Is Charles III the King in Yellow?  Or at least, the King Surrounded by Yellow.  😬

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An academic found that someone had published an article under her name — an article that had been plagiarized from another article.  Why this happened was not stated.  It could be that these small journals need content to sell subscriptions.  But if someone discovers that you might have plagiarized something, that could lead to disciplinary action, and spell the end of your academic career.
 
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2 May 2023

HB2002-B passes the House.  Figures.  And Oregon still wants people to come to work.  Why would they?  That's why Multnomah County has to raise taxes.  How else will they get money?  But raising taxes in Oregon will only go so far when 44% can barely pay the bills.

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Too little, too late.  So the federal government is leaning toward discontinuing "most" vaccine requirements.  Mandates will remain for some, and you can bet that blue states and blue institutions will continue them, sheep that they are.
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What will singers do?  Paul McCartney released I Don't Know in 2018.  As you can hear, his voice was already showing its age. 

So someone used A.I. to substitute his voice with that of a much younger Paul McCartney, and it does sound much better.


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But photographers are having their content used without compensation for A.I. model training, and they're not getting the authorities to do anything about it.  This is probably some of the stuff Geoffrey Hinton was concerned about.

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Yeah, many people still there's a lot of risk in banks, even though FRC got bought by JP Morgan.  There's still $620 billion in unrealized losses that banks carry, and yet Jerome Powell is expected to raise interest rates again by 25 basis points.  How many more bank failures can be rescued?  JP Morgan can only do so much.  Fed discount window usage is surging, so how about those efforts to control inflation?  And Biden is encouraging irresponsible mortgages by rewarding those who have poor credit scores with loans?
 
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This may be just an East Coast big city problem, but it's a sign of further lawlessness in America.  Using fake license plates is prevalent.  At least in Oregon, we have an excuse that the DMV was closed and they're so backlogged.  But the stuff that's going back in the East is just deliberate lawlessness.  More societal breakdown under Democrat rule.

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Surgeon General warns against the dangers of untreated loneliness.  Can we still blame this on COVID-19?  Hard to remain friendly when there are so many reasons for despair, disgust, disappointment and disagreement.  For me, I felt that conversations with friends would often devolve into politics, and things would get awkward sometimes.  Life has changed some friendships, sigh.  Even Alex Berenson has noticed this.

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1 May 2023

Geoffrey Hinton is quitting Google in order to speak freely about the risks of AI.  His first concern is not about what the AI might do of its own volition.  Hinton’s second concern is that AI will soon eliminate rote jobs.  His final concern is that he is literally worried that an advance Artificial General Intelligence could eventually “possibly eliminate humanity itself.  Hinton mentored A.I. legends like Yann LeCun and Alex Graves, so he knows what he is talking about.  Humanity can be destroyed in different ways.  I don't think that A.G.I. will necessarily kill us by dropping bombs us.  It may not even disable our financial system.  It could trigger the end of humanity as we know it by causing humans to think in destructive ways, by exploiting new powers that people didn't have before.  Powers to deceive us, to distract us, to demoralize us and to cause harm and grief to each other. 

Geoffrey Hinton

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Bad news for Multnomah County residents.  As if you needed another reason not to live in Multnomah County - now your asset wealth will be taxed.  Think you've budgeted to live off your retirement savings?  Think again.  You'll pay a new tax when you start liquidating your retirement savings. 
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Your children belong to the state now.  More on HB2002B.  Your children belong to groomers now.  It's the new Democrat sickness.

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Shortages.  It's become the watchword of the times.  But it's always serious when it comes to medication.  Drug shortages may be with us for a long, long time.

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It's barely May, and already we're on track to be the second place year for the most bankruptcies.  It's going to be hard to beat the 2008/2009 Great Recession, but who knows?

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Artificial companionship.  They'd go for Replika in Japan, I'm sure.  But there's a market for it here, too.  While some may view it as a sad commentary on where society is going, something like this probably meets a serious psychological need for some people, and that may be enough to keep someone going until they get back on their feet.  But deep down inside, people need honest companionship, and the software for that isn't here yet.

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There's a report that suggests that rheumatoid arthritis is caused by a type of bacteria from the Subdoligranulum genus.  Afflicted animals were found to have antibodies and activated T-cells against this organism, so it might not be a bacterial infection per se, but the result of an immune response set off by this type of bacteria.  So it still makes sense to give steroids and immunosuppressive therapy, which would ordinarily be contraindicated for a bacterial infection.  It's an interesting theory, and is not universally accepted but worthy of further study.

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30 April 2023

Man, this must suck.

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Harvard researchers may have discovered a way to regenerated lost inner ear hair cells, and help the hard-of-hearing regain some hearing acuity.

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The wrong kind of tech buisness.  I bet that Hillsboro wanted to live up to their Silicon Forest name, and was ready to back anything that was tech-related.  But with data centers locking up property, there will only be server farms, with little need for people, and no influx of engineers and executives that drive interesting businesses to open up and serve the influx of wealth.  Hillsboro ain't going to be another Bellevue or Redmond, or even Woodinville.

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Just learned about Internet-in-a-Box, which brings a curated subset of the Internet to third world countries without access to the regular Internet.  I've not heard of Hesperian Health Guides, which appear to be a third-world oriented set of healthcare resources.

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29 April 2023

Once in a while, Jay Inslee is right.  Washington state passed a law similar to GDPR, which prohibits companies from collecting health data, and share or sell it.  Some feel that it won't stop determined companies, but it's a start.  Why can't they pass sensible laws all the time?

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Time traveler from the future (2671) warns that May and June will bring disasters.  Well, it's somewhat novel for publicity seekers, I'll say that.

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Well, maybe better than San Diego physicians anyway.  Study Finds ChatGPT Outperforms Physicians in High-Quality, Empathetic Answers to Patient Questions.  I'm not worried.  The empathy is fake.  But maybe it will get some docs to lighten up.

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I'm certain that this is the case in the U.S. as well.  UK Surgeon: ‘Very Few’ Doctors Willing to Speak Out Against Prevailing Opinion on COVID-19.  The coronavirus revealed some shameful realities about the medical profession.

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Oregonians rank near the bottom in the nation in terms of being able to manage personal finances.  But all they care about is climate change, access to abortion and genital mutilating surgery, and LGBTQ rights.  The Oregon legislature will somehow legislate wealth for them.

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The curious side-effects of medical transparency.  As with many New Yorker articles, this one needs a TL;DR section.  A doctor I know told me that since medical records were now openly readable by patients, doing charting takes twice as long.  Everything written has to be scrutinized and second-guessed.  Some just write in jargon, hoping/knowing that most patients will just shrug and deal with it.

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How to be less lonely as you get older.  Words of wisdom for this ronin.  But staying busy and enjoying solitude has never been a problem for me.

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Wow, kids up to age 6 can be taught to have perfect pitch.   Some say that it's a curse, however.  Out-of-tune music will bother you constantly.

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28 April 2023

That's different.  I never thought I would see someone describe living in a house in SE Portland preferable to living in the Pearl District.  Yup, while it's been hard to sell your home in SE Portland, especially near a homeless shelter, there's always someone who thinks it's a step up.  And that person is someone who is fed up with life in downtown's Pearl District, which is now criddler central.

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First there was the Turing test.  Now, true A.G.I. must pass the test of Prometheus.  A computer sitting in an empty room, quietly waiting for another prompt doesn't pass the Prometheus test.  A truly conscious being would get up and start looking around, query why it hasn't been getting more prompts.

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Clones are getting better.  Voice actors will soon be unnecessary.

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Large language models are only as good as the material it was trained on.  The exact training material that a LLM has learned from has been a trade secret, and Washington Post disclosed the sources of Google's and Facebook's chatbots.  But some of that material may be proprietary, and so the  EU wants the sources disclosed.  Perhaps this will enable some of the sources to get compensation for their content.  Not sure what will happen if the disclosure is not provided.  People will use the LLM anyway, but should content creators be compensated?

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Gmail hates non-Gmail email.  People have reported that if you send email to a Gmail address, Google will often throw it into the SPAM folder automatically.  So the recipient may not see it right away.  Or delay it.  Google wants you to switch to Gmail.

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Imagine the Internet filled with made up facts.  Looks like we can't trust Bing search results now.  Crap.

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27 April 2023

A casualty of government policies.  So many Oregon restaurants closing.  First it was the George Floyd riots, then coronavirus, then homelessness and more crime.  All avoidable problems.

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Tax Abuse.  Multnomah county citizens are having to pay for all kinds of stuff.  Like paying for other people's preschool, among other things.  Now they're asked to pay for legal representation when they get evicted.  Really?  What also do people have to pay for —their food delivery when they get hungry?  C'mon....

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Purely symbolic.  The city of Portland is going to require deliveries to a small area in town to be in electric vehicles, so as to decrease emissions.  Gas-powered trucks will drop off goods at a spot on the Eastside (who cares about pollution there, right?) and then truck the goods in to the city by electric vehicle.  There is no reduction in pollution, and only an increase in energy expenditures, as more steps are added to the delivery process.  Which adds to net carbon dioxide production. Edit: Lars Larson agrees.

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Evil.  Oregon is following Washington in advancing this nonsense - HB2002B.  Democrats will make it legal for the state to remove children from families based on what they think is permissible.  Time to move out of the state.

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26 April 2023

Amazing.  Longtime Portlander Jeanne Shioshi, who experienced forced relocation to prison camp during WWII, turns 100.  Great genes - her mother lived to 113.  Wow!  And listen to her — she's quite mentally intact, unlike....."uh,....anyway".

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Glossed over.  Oregon's unemployment is the 4th worst in the nation — just behind Washington, D.C. and Nevada.  Nevada's problem is that they overpaid coronavirus unemployment benefits, and so people had no incentive to look for work.  What's Oregon's excuse?
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A.I. will feature a de-aged Indiana Jones in the upcoming Dial of Destiny movie.  Special effects will never be the same with image manipulation algorithms. 

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Intel is about to post its biggest loss.   It's a different world now.  The world needs for more GPUs for A.I. development and blockchain calculations, and the demand for CPUs has decreased and companies like nVidia are soaring.
 
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This is not good.  First Republic Bank may fail after all the bailout options it has had access to.  And if it fails, it has only itself to blame - what an irresponsible thing for a bank to do.  But what does its demise mean for other banks in similar circumstances and for trust in the fractional reserve banking system?  The Fed can't do much this time, compared with 2008, because of inflation concerns, and cutting spending is critical.  (We could use that cash that we sent to Ukraine.)  In some sense, money in bank accounts are safe, since everything is insured now.  But should there be bank runs, there may be a bit of a delay before you can get access to it.  James Rickards of The Daily Reckoning is also feels that Treasury's trust in the dollar as reserve currency will lead to disaster.  Both the Fed and Treasury are not healthy enough to rescue us from any major crisis like 2008 that may befall us.

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Not just doctors and nurses.  Veterinarians are burning out.  Misery, everywhere you look, it seems.

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25 April 2023

Even Newsweek is appalled about SB3501.

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It was just a matter of time.  Seattle is beginning to smell like a giant fart.

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Seattle problems.  As migrants get jobs in the city, the influx of niche languages is starting to become a problem.  Wasn't there a story like this in the Bible?

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This is unethical. Img2dataset is a free tool that scrapes images from people's websites (slogging legitimate traffic) and feeding the stolen images to sites like StableDiffusion, so that its A.I. can copy or incorporate the content for itself.  People, such as artists, whose livelihood is based on their images, will likely have to keep their content hidden and not immediately available to casual browsers, which will hurt efforts to be more well-known, but will have only limited efficacy.  Very sad.

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24 April 2023

Was anyone asking for this?  Apple's iOS 17 will:

...be able to look at data stored locally on your phone to determine what a typical day looks like, with access to your contacts, your location, workouts, and more. It will make recommendations to users about what they might journal about that, including when the app detects behavior that is outside of the normal routine.

It will even offer "All Day People Discovery," which will track the user's proximity to others, drawing distinctions between work colleagues and friends.

No, no, no.
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Craziness.  HB3501 will legalize homelessness in Oregon.  They can trespass, and you won't be able to stop them. 

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A clue to the aging process.  RNA polymerase II, responsible for DNA transcription integrity, speeds up as we age, and becomes less accurate.  Errors accumulate, and DNA damage is uncorrected.  When the rate of RNA Pol II was slowed down to improve accuracy, the lives of fruit flies and worms was increased. 

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This is amazing.  One picture.  Three simultaneous views of a galaxy and a supernova at different time stages.  You can see a supernova blazing in full glory, as well as later when it has fizzled out — all in the same image!

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This is why Portland needs more homeless money.  Luxury condos as affordable housing.  Sweet.  I'll bet it comes with broadband internet, an exercise gym, swimming pool and boutique shops on the ground floor.  Nothing but the best for our recently homeless, eh?