Sugoi & Yokunai

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Celestron's new telescope has A.I. built in. It's not clear that they're using generative A.I. Maybe just computer vision stuff.

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After outcry, Tina Kotek cancels immediate implementation of new tax plans. Until after the election. So was it really necessary then? Or was it all for fluff stuff?

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Watch out on that on-ramp from I-405 to Sunset Hwy. There's a chop shot in there.

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Why landing on the moon is proving more difficult today than 50 years ago. "Lunar landers fell out of favor." But why? So because of this, it's harder to do testing?

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You can't afford it, and that's my problem...how? Sorry, but this was an unsecured loan. Someone took a risk giving you the loan money. You had a three year payment moratorium and you still can't pay it? Why should anyone trust you with a financial decision anymore?

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The Rich Are Different: Personality Traits of Wealthy People. Yes, they do think differently. "They deal with defeats and setbacks differently than other people — they blame themselves, not others or society at large."

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What happened to the artificial-intelligence investment boom? It's not over – there's more to come. There's a lot happening now, and it's just that Wall Street isn't really noticing. Much of it is just copycat stuff, but research is going on. Right now, we gotta see who is going to survive the vector database shakedown, and whether the best solution will successfully and seamlessly incorporate semantic search. And how to greatly reduce hallucinations and reduce the need to careful prompting to extract useful information. And last but not least, make it local and private. The best RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) hasn't been identified yet. And it has to be turnkey enough so that the average consumer can really use it. 

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Fauci now admits that there was no science behind "six feet of social distancing". I bet there was no science behind stickers on the floor, or plexiglas shields, or allowing only a set amount of people into a store. There was no clear science behind masking either, at least not for SARS-CoV2.

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A warming fire, likely started by a homeless person, resulted in an art gallery catching fire, and priceless artworks being damaged. How much more will Seattle put up with until they start to deal with the homeless problem?

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Afterlife Industry? There's a risk that someone may recreate you after you are dead, without your consent. Not likely to happen to me, but there are some for which this might not be desirable. But what are you to do? Especially if the part that is recreated is something that puts you in a bad light?

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Jerry Nadler says illegals are needed to do menial tasks. I could easily see Nadler advocating for continued slavery back in the 1850s.

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SCOTUS is going to review the Martin v Boise case (in the Johnson vs Grants Pass case). Let's hope they rule more sensibly, because the homeless are ruining our cities. Yes, taxpayers have the right to clean cities. Maybe this will force the drug abusers into treatment.

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Clackamas County dismantles their DEI Office. Clackamas County was always more conservative than the rest.

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Who thought this was a good idea?  Rolling blackouts will be a fact of life on Oahu.  The Kapolei Telsa battery site is online again and Oahu will have to deal with the rolling blackouts. What crap.

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The Chinese have developed a nuclear battery, the Betavolt BV100, based on nickel-63.  Nuclear batteries have existed before, but have not been commercially available to regular consumers for various reasons. The Chinese hope this will catch on and sell.

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People on Reddit are lamenting that Theo Chocolate is closing. But do they know that Theo Dark Chocolate had high lead and cadmium levels?

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Chinese billionaire Chen Tianqiao owns 198,000 acres of land west of Bend. This is in one of my favorite places to hike and explore. Should this be allowed? Should there be a cap on how much land foreigners are allowed to purchase. I doubt any American could own land in the PRC.

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Microsoft and Apple are neck and neck for the title of the world's most valuable company. Microsoft has had forward-looking leadership.  The momentum that Steve Jobs set in motion has finally fizzled out.

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Well, what are they learning in school? Kids in Washington state that have this teacher probably aren't learning anything useful.

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Now that the U.S. faces the real prospect of war, the Army wants white men. And they aren't getting enough. White men don't want to sign up.

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Banks, Oregon is doomed. It's like those towns in the east that were dependent on the steel mills, or auto manufacturing plants. Really too bad.

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Some Oregon voters want to just block Trump, and say they don't actually need to prove harm. We just don't like something, so you can't have it.

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Thousands of Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse.  Even Google is cutting engineering positions. Not good.

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Majority of debtors to US hospitals now people with health insurance. Something is very wrong. Insurance is supposed to insure you against something like this. That's why it's called "insurance". Market forces are no aligned to fix this problem. Insurance policies need to be owned by the consumer, not someone else. That's why coverage is so expensive and crappy.

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Europe may be heading for something unthinkable? Yeah, it's the NYT. Can't believe that the positions of the Left might not be popular. Heck, Germany is thinking about just banning a political party they don't like. Sorta like the U.S. When you can't win, cheat.

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A win for the Navajo. Looks like the Peregrine mission won't be landing on the moon after all.

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Petition 47 lives on. Soon, Measure 110 will be defeated.

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Forever Lonely. Getting paid to impregnate women? Yeah, it was a fraud, but to think that some young men believed it.

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ZIP bombs. Interesting concept. A 4.5 petabyte file can be zipped into a 45k file. Then when a hacker downloads this onto his computer and tries to unzip the file – BAM!

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The teen mental illness epidemic. Especially in females. Not enough is written about this, but it is so real. And I suspect this begets the rise in transgenderism. And it's not just teenagers – young adults are affected, too, so even younger teachers could be mentally ill, as we've seen. And since those afflicted don't see themselves as ill, this will be a tough problem to solve, especially since they want power and control, in the name of diversity and equity.

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I don't really like the toy design of the r1. I would not have approached Teenage Engineering. Some think that the demo reel is staged, like Google's Gemini demo video. I suspect that's true, and will wait for version 2 at least. Still give it a "sugoi", though.

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And people wonder why Japan wants to keep out certain cultures. This is why. If you can't respect others, you have no business being in places like Japan. That's why they can have nice things and we can't.  GTFO "Johnny Somali".

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And now criddlers have something else to spend their "stimulus money" – gas-station heroin. Get it while you can, folks. It's tianeptine, and it'll mess you up, but it's street legal at your local convenience store – for now.

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'Only 700 new IT jobs' were created in US last year.  If this is really true, it's quite pathetic. It is because of A.I.?

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Download transparent.mp4

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Nearly 1 in 10 U.S. homes are worth at least $1 million, close to all-time high. In Portland, it's more like 6.7% (Man, even Tacoma is higher). Inventory is low, and there's still enough demand for homes that prices can be this high and people will still buy them. This is the Fed's doing.

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Crime Rate by State. Oregon is 9th in the nation, and I bet that if you removed the City of Portland, it would drop down dramatically. And Oregon is 3rd poorest in the nation when it comes to income left over after taxes. Is there ANY good news about Oregon these days?

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The Crypto Con. This situation in Texas is crazy. So far, there hasn't been any plans to develop a crypto mining company in Oregon (that I know of). These mines consume so much energy, and the greenies aren't even aware. It's off their radar.

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Universities are not on the level. There has been an insidious decay into the lofty standards of academia. Many institutions are resting on their reputations. Trust, once lost, is difficult to regain. And they don't realize it, because of the effort to replace meritocracy with diversity.

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Today is January 7.  Time to burn (or salt) the Kadomatsu.

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The Lancet published a curious article stating that not using hearing aids when you're hard of hearing leads to dementia. Now they've retracted the article, saying that it was phony research. But that was only after other experts called them on it.

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a quick search of the internet shows that Prevnar 20 is cheaper elsewhere, though how much cheaper varies. GoodRX.com lists it for $270 at various pharmacies. A list maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows Prevnar 20 has a private sector cost of $253.21. And the Walgreens on Northeast 33rd Avenue in Portland offers it for $307.99, with no charge for the jab.

Davis’s shot is just one of thousands given at OHSU, but her bill raises questions about a health care provider that will become the largest in the state—and the biggest employer in the Portland metro area—if regulators allow it to buy crosstown rival Legacy Health.

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NYT filed a complaint against Microsoft and OpenAI. This will be interesting to watch. If the NYT wins, then it's basically saying that A.I. can't be trained on anything, because you never know when someone will claim that they need compensation. Copyrighting intellectual property is getting to be really difficult to defend now, with so much being derivative on something else. Only the lawyers win. Japan's approach makes more sense.

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Another article describing amyloid deposition in the muscles of those with LongCOVID.  And this article from a few days ago reports other findings of LongCOVID but focuses on blood abnormalities, and does not mention amyloid. Nice that there are more publications on this condition lately.

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Veterans have to face endless delays for their cancer treatment due to delayed pre-approvals. With all the billions going overseas to support other countries, can't we give the veterans' doctors the benefit of the doubt and automatically approve diagnostics and treatment?

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More patients are losing trust in their primary care physician. Not only did this stem from the coronavirus epidemic debacle, but doctors are increasingly employees of hospitals and business-owned clinics. Freestanding clinics, owned by physicians, are getting to be rare now. So every doc must spew the party line. The narrative. Or be disciplined or let go. Physicians are acting like employees now. And they have no control over employees, who are often unionized. They don't have anything to do with billing problems or scheduling delays. The changes started with Obamacare.

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Wrong Axios, it's not because prices are too low. It's because drug companies want to maximize profit. Low supply costs from overseas sources allow them to maximize what they get from sales. It can be done in the U.S., and prices don't have to rise if the middlemen would just take lower profits.

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Holographic camera turns any window into an invisible camera. Could this tech be abused? I could see some disadvantages to being able to turn any glass plate into a camera. Yes, it could streamline some things, especially in the automotive world, but there are definite potential privacy issues.

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Zosurabalpin: a new macrocyclic antibiotic. Highly specifric for carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, so there is still a need for other resistance-overcoming antibiotics. Mechanism is novel: works by inhibiting a bacterial protein complex called LptB2FGC, which prevents the bacteria from synthesizing its outer membrane.  FDA-approved.

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Brain tissue on a chip achieves voice recognition. Now we're getting into sci-fi territory. Specialized stem cells were grown into neurons that formed a ball called an "organoid". Electrodes were hooked up, and responses were decoded using machine learning algorithms. They call it "Brainoware". And it recognized the voices of eight subjects with an accuracy of 78%.  This may be the start of real artificial intelligence.

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600+ nurse practitioners at OHSU want to unionize. NPs were brought on as a cost-savings over paying doctors. Now since doctors have been hesitant to unionize, I wonder if the pay of NPs will be higher than that of the research doctors, who typically don't have as much clinical obligations, and get pay off their research grants.

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Yeah we already knew this. Number of people moving to Oregon plummets, U-Haul data shows. So the rest of the poor slobs who can't leave will have to pay more taxes to keep the government in business.

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Now there's data. When hospitals are taken over by private equity, hospital-acquired adverse events increase.

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