5 November 2025

Microsoft CEO says that they don't have enough power to use all their AI GPU chip hardware. Energy is clearly going to be the bottleneck factor. 

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Is metformin a cognitive enhancer? That's the tease of this article, although all that was demonstrated was that it improved his reaction time. 

Did I notice any practical improvements in cognition? The short answer is “no”: I didn’t notice any obvious differences in concentration, memory, or performance under cognitive load.

Yeah, clickbait title.

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In California, they are making their math geniuses get fingerprinted and entered into a criminal database. Students, teachers, as well as anyone who interacts with them. Also UC system students must affirm transgender ideology under the SHAPE program in order to stay enrolled. Because they have so many perverts and groomers?  How about letting students just be students? And being more selective about who you admit to these programs?

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The molecular underpinnings of Crohn's disease advanced by machine learning. They didn't use generative AI, but just good old-fashioned machine learning tools. They found that the NOD2 protein fails to suppress the inflammatory girdin protein, due to missing or dysfunctional binding site. Paper here.

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Some Substack writers are switching to Patreon. Some are switching to Ghost or Beehiiv. Competition is good.

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Nearly half of Oregon's healthcare workers are not vaccinated against the flu. It may just be too early to expect everyone to be vaccinated. Best to get vaccinated for influenza in late November, around Thanksgiving, because the flu season can last until April, and you want to make sure you have immunity that lasts that long.

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Where are the homeless from? It's hard to get accurate data, but the figure seems to be that around 20% came to Portland from elsewhere.

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Oregon has dropped further to 35th place is state tax competitiveness. Competitiveness and Oregon seem to be two words you'd not find in the same sentence. Hard to believe that we were #7 in 2019.  Reminder Kate Brown was in office from 2015 - 2023. COVID-19 hit and because of Dem policies, the state has never recovered. It seems that Oregon has slipped past an invisible event horizon, and there is no other path that toward the center of the black hole.

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4 November 2025

Amazon and Perplexity are fighting over agent use. Perplexity knows that the value of their Comet browser will be markedly diminished if people can't use it to access the world's biggest marketplace. But Amazon can't harvest all the valuable user data if it comes from a bot. So, we'll see who wins. It's an arms race.

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Umatilla is experiencing a little excitement as Amazon injects money and job growth in the little town. Enjoy it while you can. It won't last forever. And who knows how much it's going to raise your electricity and water bill, once the datacenter goes online.

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OpenAI is going to stop pretending it's your doctor. It will still give out health advice, but it will recommend that you see a real doctor. That's good, but we'll see how it's really put into practice.

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Orvis is closing half its stores by next year. They blame it on Trump. 169 years – they endured WWI, WWII, the Great Depression, Great Recessioin, COVID-19. And Trump's tariffs are derailing them? I don't think so.

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Another tragedy of the commons. arXiv is going to require review articles and position papers to have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. It used to house preprints, but made the change because it was being flooded with a lot of AI junk. Make something nice, offer it to the public, and idiots will ruin it. Happens all the time.

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Cheese Consumption reduces incidence of dementia in community-dwelling older Japanese adults. This is the JAGES 2019–2022 Cohort Study. The benefit provided by cheese was really small, and I wouldn't be surprised if this just proves to be a random effect. It just ain't that easy. There's also very little info about what kind of cheese provided the benefit. Most of the people ate processed cheese, which probably isn't healthy anyway. 

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Here's a report associating melatonin use to heart failure risk. Biologically, that doesn't seem to make sense. But who takes melatonin? Those with insomnia.  And what is insomnia associated with? Heart failure! And heart failure reduces sleep quality, so when you find you can't function as well during the daytime from insomnia, you're more likely to take something "safe" to help you sleep.

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How embarrassing. Meta was found to be heavy ingesters of porn.  Of course, they would be accused of using it to train AI. Content providers would be understandably upset. But Meta had to confess that it was for "personal consumption". But one of the plaintiffs is known to be aggressive, and probably isn't going to just drop this. Could be messy.

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UnitedHealth pays its own physician groups 17% more than outside ones. It's not clear if this is legal, and may get them into deep trouble. It's already more costly to patients.  
The entire medical system needs to be overhauled. Trump, Mehmet Oz and RFK Jr may be correct in not facilitating Obamacare continuation, but as of today, that's all that many people have. If they don't have it, they have nothing. There is an alternative, and now is the best time to have a discussion.

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This article makes me think that one's vision of how one looks can have profound effects on one's outlook on life. If you think you look young, you will think younger thoughts. If you think you look old, you will think like an old person.

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Some sugar substitutes linked to faster cognitive decline. These are aspartame, saccharin, acesulfame-K, erythritol, xylitol, and sorbitol but not tagatose. They did not test allulose. This was a survey-based study, so who knows how accurate it really is? The negative impact on cognitive decline didn't affect those older than age 60, and affected diabetics worse than non-diabetics. Paper here.

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Good. Trump's immigration policy is hurting the remittance economy.  We give out far too much welfare money.

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Oregon is suspending it's program to provide Electric Vehicle rebates for low-to-moderate income Oregonians. So Oregon taxpayers were buying electric vehicles for low-income people?  This is why I don't think Oregon needs to raise taxes. They have enough money – they just misspend it.

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Oregon sure can pick 'em. Check this out:
An illegal immigrant convicted of sex crimes in Oregon, a sanctuary state for unlawful immigration, held various advisory positions on state policymaking committees as a so-called “Latinx” community leader.
This was published in the Washington Examiner, and not in the local papers.

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3 November 2025

This looks really promising. In 2018 this group found the antibodies to CD40 were potent antitumor agents, but there was platelet and hepatic toxicity that precluded systemic administration. But if you inject it directly into the tumor, the side-effects are much reduced, and there are no dose-limiting toxicities. Furthermore, you see an abscopal effect!  Here's a nice diagram that shows all the things CD40 agonist antibodies can do.  The upregulate MHC molecules and increased expression of OX40L, 4.1BBL, CD80 and CD86 which are costimulator antigens that can engage with CD28 on T-cells to enhance antitumor activation. Not shown in the diagram is that CD70 and also be upregulated, which engages with CD27 on T cells and NK cells to activate them as well.  On macrophages, agonist CD40 antibodes turn them from the M2 phenotype to the more active antitumor M1 phenotype. And when these antibodies find to CD40 ligand on tumor cells, apoptosis is triggered, and the dead cells release antigens which the immune system can recognize and train against. This explains the amazing results seen in the phase I study. 

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These are states that have made some progress in making DST permanent. I would prefer standard time being permanent.

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This study from Japan suggests that the benefit from cocoa are not really from the flavonoids, but the astringent sensation that dark chocolate produces in the gut. This makes sense since the flavonoids are not well-absorbed, so how could they work in the brain, right? The response to astringency was enough to make mice react to the ingested flavonoids. I currently take CocoaVia which has high bioavailability flavonoids due to their using (-)-epicatechin. I can't stand dark chocolate, and the effect on my gut isn't worth it.

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The Oura Ring will measure blood pressure now, similar to the Apple Watch. I'm still on the fence about buying this product because of that subscription. It's higher than I'd like to commit to. They come outy with ceramic finishes now, which look nice. The Samsung product looked compelling, but the recent experience from this guy convinces me not to go with a cheaper knock-off.

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First-ever recording of a dying human brain shows waves similar to memory flashbacks. I'm reading Dan Brown's Secret of Secrets and this report makes be wonder if Dan was on to something. In the book, it's stated that no one had recorded an MRI of the point of death, and well, that's not true anymore. But the recording does suggest that something marvelous happens as a person is dying.

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Neat. A small electric motor hit a new power record, and this was achieved without using exotic or expensive materials.

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Well of course, right?  Reading a Newspaper Is Still One of the Best Brain Workouts. Says World-Newspapers.net.

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What jobs in tech are hot today? Machine learning engineering is really hot, it seems. Specifically engineers with specialization in robotics, developing proprietary models, and data center engineers.

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Interesting study which showed that when it came to language-specific tasks, LLMs performed best in Polish, then Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, and then English. I guess English really is hard.

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Here's a nice article on the timeline of SNAP changes. The bottom line is that people who are able to, best to get off SNAP.  And while people are shocked by Los Angeles with 1 of 3 relying SNAP, look at Salem, Eugene and Medford, where more than 1 of 5 rely on SNAP. In Portland, it's 1 of 6 that are using SNAP.  Detroit is the worst, with 36% to 40% in SNAP participation. But I can't find a state like Oregon where nearly all of the big cities have >20% SNAP participation.
And who are the ones getting SNAP benefits?

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Did you know that in Portland, you get paid not to drive? Portland uses tax dollars to pay people $50 not to drive. All you have to do is show up at a designated city tent on their appointed transit day, and say you didn’t drive today. You’ll receive a free $50 voucher.

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Washington state put out an infographic on the chronically homeless. Maybe just to show that Oregon is worse.

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2 November 2025

A family used Claude AI to reduce a hospital bill from $195,000 to just $33,000.  The family says that Claude was able to identify duplicated charges, improper coding, and other violations. Amazing from several standpoints. The article doesn't reveal where this took place or what hospital system it was. But this is unconscionable and the hospital should be audited.

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Well, DST has ended. Apparently making DST permanent was not popular in the U.S. when tried during the Nixon administration. I think we should make standard time permanent.

And humans apparently used to sleep in two shifts, with an hour of wakefulness in the middle of the night. This ended with the invention of artificial light. 

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Scientists think they have figured out how exercise supports memory capacity.  Exercise stimulates secretion of BDNF which promotes adult hippocampal neurogenesis. These may be associated with extracellular vesicles which are induced after exericise.

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AI Browsers can sneak past blockers and paywalls. I can see how they can break challenges and CAPTCHAs, but are they able to recall someone's username and password to get behing paywalls? The article really doesn't reveal how they do it, but that seems to me to be the only way.

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San Francisco is going to build a new business tower. Will there be tenants? Hard to know, but if they build it so that people can enter without having to dodge street feces, and don't have to leave the safety of the building environment and venture outside, it could work. This isn't working for Portland, because they don't have anything like this.
Nah. Casio makes finger-sized versions of their watches. Yeah, they look as dumb as the description. No thanks. 

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Dumping problems onto Portland. Other states may be paying to have their homeless go to Portland.  Better build more shelters, Keith Wilson! There'll be more people you'll want to stick there.

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'Bout time.  Asian Americans are shifting to the right, politically.

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Holy crap!  Oregon's unemployment claims are skyrocketing.  Business are fleeing. SNAP will require that you have a job if you are able-bodied. You'll have to show that you're looking for work if you can. But if there is no work, then what? 

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UK's Telegraph health editor finds out that the British medical system sometimes is not helpful with prostate cancer screening. What a weird system they have, where GPs are told they must not suggest that such a patient have one. Whuut? Sounds like a broken system designed by Monty Python.

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1 November 2025

Holy cow! Dr. Mehmet Oz posted figures of how much money was going to illegal aliens in various states. Incredible. This has to stop. The states were using this to benefit their losing economies. No wonder they're upset. 

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Fox News warns NYC that if they elect Mamdani, the city will turn into Portland. That's like when parents used to tell kids to do well in school, because if they don't, they will end up like...and then they point to someone doing hard manual labor. So Portland is the bad example now. How's that for city pride?

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A flood of Chinese graduate students in STEM was a boon to U.S. students. Yeah, having some of the world's smartest people study at America's great universities probably benefited both the U.S. and China. The problem is that we have ended up helping our greatest economy adversary. Would that we lived in a world where we could share ideas and knowledge to each others' benefit. So apparently now, Chinese students are looking elsewhere for their education. It's too bad, but the world isn't simple.

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31 October 2025

When you drink while taking Ozempic, the alcohol doesn't hit as hard.  Makes sense, since gastric emptying is delayed.

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No, no, no. This is a perfect example of the phenomenon where something of value, beauty or usefulness gets degraded once it is introduced to the public. This group of young entrepreneurs (called the Prompting Company, wants to inject advertising into ChatGPT output because people often go to ChatGPT for advice about products. Stay the f*ck away! We value search engines and generative AI because it is still possible to find unbiased truths free of advertising and corporate influence. We don't want advertising injected, just because your company wants to make money. Idiots. This is a great way to turn something useful into an advertising wasteland.

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Los Angeles is now the worst rat-infested city. Chicago is number two. Seattle is #17. Portland is #31. All the top cities are Democrat-run cities. Any wonder?

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It's pretty clear that Portland commercial real estate is in trouble. And here's Keith Wilson, working to lower property values even more adding unwanted recovery and shelter beds. What a dump this place is becoming!  Even Jessica Vega-Pedersen questions the wisdom of this, so you know it must be really a bad idea.  But Multnomah County cutting some homeless services due to loss of $28 million in state funds, so who's going to maintain these units? No wonder that Oregon is among the worst states to find a job. Businesses are fleeing or closing. No one wants to move here. So people will need more SNAP money. 
And here's Oregon, raising natural gas costs, even as it hands out money to help people get food. How does this make sense? Maybe they need this emergency money to pay their gas bill? 
But we may not get power anyway. Rolling blackouts are in the future, starting as soon as 2026. Washington and Oregon are both facing the same situation.

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Leaving Seattle wasn't enough. Now the entire Washington state may impose an extra tax on people who make more than a million annually. I'm sure the unions want it. And the wealthy will never muster enough public support to kill this idea. All they can do is move away. Washington must hate having wealthy people because they do so much to chase them away.

And California may impose a 5% billionaire tax. Most of the wealthy voted Democrat, so they are getting what they voted for.

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The journal Nature, once a bastion of solid science, is now turning woke, and article peer-reviewers are turning away. Good for them to stand up.

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The GOP has a chance to kill Obamacare, and the WSJ wants it to happen.  We need to replace it with a healthcare system that leverages market forces to compel stakeholders to be excellent and competitive. Our current system is so demotivational. No one cares about delivering quality care, because it doesn't get you anywhere. Rather, the incentive is to save the insurance companies money. We need to increase competition, so that the insurance company that does things right, gets our business. And we choose, not our employers.

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An Oregon lawyer used generative AI and didn't check his work. Now that person might be out of a job. Good.

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30 October 2025

Quantum Teleportation Was Achieved Over The Internet For The First Time.  Why the Internet, though?  Does that mean it was done somewhere else, too? I want to know if Scotty can beam someone up?

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Baby Boomers are still running much of small businesses. And they are getting older and don't have successors. So they could close and a lot of Main Street businesses could disappear.

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What Palantir sees. An interview with their CTO. It's about targeting overseas adversaries and helping ICE out with deportations, which is was the NYT reporter was concerned about mainly. But yeah, this is what people voted for.

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Why do cats love tuna so much? It seems that their taste buds have a receptor for umami, and that tuna fish turns it on especially well.

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Fluoroquinolones are supposed to target the mitochondria of bacteria. This website says that human mitochondria can be affected as well. A lot of physicians prescribe this drug, and there haven't been any new warnings put out since 2018. It shouldn't be used indiscriminately, but it is a very useful drug. People carried it with them with visiting Mexico to stave off Montezuma's Revenge.

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SNAP will run out of money on November 1. Here's what each state is doing about it. For Oregon and Washington, not much. The money that is being given out will be like $4 or $5 of assistance per household or person, which is essentially just a token gesture of assistance, and not real help. Maybe they can go to Costco and get a couple of hot dogs?

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Mathematical proof debunks the idea that the universe is a computer simulation. You mean it's just a repackaging of Russell's Paradox, and that's the proof? I thought it was going to be something profound.

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Between Veo3 vs Wan2.2 vs Sora2, Veo3 is the best.

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Moderna is collapsing. Just as well. I have trust issues with that company.

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Senator Grassley wants to regulate AI use. Sorry, Chuck – toothpaste is out of the tube. Too late!

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PeaceHealth is cutting 2.5% of its workforce. Just in time for the holidays. 
And now OHSU nurse practitioners, PAs and midwives are going to strike. Easy for them to do, because they know that doctors are going to work harder to pick up the slack, because their work ethic would prohibit letting patient care suffer. But suffer it still may.  I can't see that it makes sense to continue to be a clinical physician at OHSU, where you are an employee and the ancillary staff are getting substantial pay raises, while you have to be content with whatever your productivity will justify, which may not be under your control.

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PacWest Center sold for more than expected, better than Big Pink. So Portland city leaders are getting optimistic. Way too premature. The sale price was still only 34% of what it was purchased for. 
WWeek writes about "tax compression" in Portland commercial real estate. A property's market price may be sinking below it's assessed value. That would be very bad. 

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Hawaii is seeing an epidemic of reckless speeding.

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29 October 2025

Grokipedia launches. I do like the table of contents on the left. One person thinks that Grokipedia just stole content from Wikipedia. I wouldn't be surprised, but I hope and expect that as time goes on, G'pedia will develop it's own distinct style. Larry Sanger has a take on this first effort. He stands astride both resources and has a balanced opinion, I think. I disagree that the public's opinion should factor into deciding what G'pedia contains. I don't have a great opinion of the general public's opinion these days. Everyone thinks their opinion should count.

Grok itself, however, is weird. I don't use it. 

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The Island Where People Go to Cheat Death. I haven't heard of Roatan or Vitalia. But it seems to be a place where the super wealthy can go crazy experimenting with all kinds of longevity experiments. Maybe they'll discover something. Maybe something will go very wrong. We shall see. Interesting that Bryan Johnson is involved in this.
MIT Technology Review just published an article on youth pursuit, focusing on Yamanaka factors.

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nVIDIA becomes the first $5 trillion company, just as Apple and Microsoft cross the $4 trillion valuation line. And as AI is burning through graphics cards, we're going to see continued demand for nVIDIA products.

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Google is ending their Women Techmakers program. Just as well. Time to get serious, and drop diversity crap. This isn't high school anymore.

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Why do so many Oregonians rely on SNAP benefits?  18% of Oregonians are dependent on SNAP.  That's a lot and too many. How did that happen? It's no wonder the state is going to hell and businesses are fleeing. 

Powell's Books is going to lay off 13 more employees. Wrong direction, people. We need to start hiring instead. 
And here's Washington state, where Gov Ferguson is going to allocate $2.2 million per week for those without SNAP benefits. Well, since Washington state has 590,000 SNAP households, that amounts to $4 per week. That should pay for a Top Ramen or two. 

And here's Seattle, with a budget deficit, yet they are proposing to spend $85 million on frivolous things like "$1.25 million to 'preserve the physical character, cultural heritage, and social fabric of the community formed last century in Seattle’s Central District by the direct descendants of slaves'" and "$10 million for rental assistance to city-funded affordable housing projects."
Are we still dealing with the Civil War outcomes in 2025? And if you can't afford to live in Seattle, kindly move out to where you can, like we all would do, instead of demanding taxpayer support.

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28 October 2025

Heh. China was caught trying to steal IP. They tried to reverse-engineer ASML's DUV technology, but it was too difficult. Now they have a broken device that needs fixing. I'll bet they'll watch carefully to see how it's done.

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Peter McCullough's group agrees with RFK about the causes of autism spectrum disorder. I agree with the "multifactorial model of ASD in which genetic predisposition, neuroimmune biology, environmental toxicants, perinatal stressors, and iatrogenic exposures"
play a role in the genesis of this condition. We should rethink the vaccines we give to neonates and toddlers.

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Getting a degree in computer science was supposed to be a ticket to job security and a comfortable income. Now, this is not guaranteed at all, thanks to AI. The goalposts have moved, and you need to study machine learning and artificial intelligence, and even that field is advancing rapidly.

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About 23% of people don't respond to GLP-1RA weight loss drugs. It's not clear why, but there are some theories.

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Chegg is cutting about half their workforce. I'm surprised they're still around. The rise of LLMs really hit them hard, didn't it? Why don't they fine-tune open source LLMs and market those? That's what I'd look into.

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What happens when you click the send button on ChatGPT? The workings of the transformer model for the curious.
Speaking of which, OpenAI estimates that 560,000 users of ChatGPT each week appear to have mental health emergencies. 

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LLMs a new kind of steganography. Hiding text within text, using the next word prediction probabilities.

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Microsoft joins the AI circle-jerk. A new deal, with Microsoft owning 27% of it.

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Should you think twice about pouring unwanted coffee down the drain? Worse things have gone down the drain. Lilke poo.

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Elon Musk's Grokepedia seems to be copying pages from Wikipedia. I figured this would happen. Didn't think he'd be able to write a new enecyclopedia from scratch.

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Hang on to your AirPods2 for a bit longer.  Apple's AirPods 3 doesn't handle air travel well.

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I never heard of the Even Realities G1 Smart Glasses before. This would be great for making a speech, since it could function as a built-in teleprompter.

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Amazon is going to lay off 30,000 employees. These will be mainly in California, as they have already laid off 27,000 Seattle employees. They're going all out on AI and robotics. Could be a risky move.

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A new class of potent antibiotics are being developed – methylenomycins. Effective against gram-positive and gram-negative organisms, there seems to be no resistance with multidrug resistance Enterococcus. Not sure about tolerance and side-effect profile.

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27 October 2025

Pew Research has a nice article about AI data centers, and where they are location. I am surprised that there are relatively few in the Pacific NW, which is actually a good thing. I don't think we would handle it well. Virginia has a high concentration of them, and I wish them well. Could end up biting them back.

PacificCorp's 300 mile Boardman-to-Hemingway powerline project was supposed to help local customers, but it's being sold to a private company to power datacenters. 

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The Mayans were able to predict solar eclipses very accurately. Scientists think they know how it was done, but it's still remarkable, given how complex the calculations are.

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The Blazer Mafia scandal may make it even more likely that the Blazers will leave Portland. Another blow to the city.

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Keith Wilson's shelter expansion is really putting stress on neighborhoods. I don't think it's going to stop him from turning the entire city into a shelter support community.

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University of Washington is still mired in DEI mentality. Really too bad.

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