Sugoi & Yokunai

I've posted before (20 Aug 2024) on the aging process before accelerating at certain ages, but this article provides additional details. It's from Michael Snyder's lab at Stanford again, and this time, instead of two ages of rapid aging, there are now three ages: 40, 60, 80 years. Paper here. They used a fruit fly model, studying the Smurf phenotype, and found that by modifying certain transcription factors, they could delay aging transitions in females, but not males. What underlies the human transitions is still not clear, and we don't know what causes these changes. Snyder's group suggests that it might be the result of accumulated insults were subject our body to, but also lifestyle changes at these ages, like a decrease in baseline exercise levels, etc. I'm going to exercise more – I've gotten more sedentary as of late. 

––– 凄い –––

Scott Alexander reviews melatonin. It's a unique "drug" for which there has been a lot of studies, but these studies haven't translated into solid usage recommendations. It's all over the place, and this makes me think that just looking at natural levels in body is not something that we can easily manipulate. Taking the drug at 5 pm or 7 pm seems counterintuitive, and in all my experimentation I haven't found that anything I do makes any difference at all. Do I dream more? I can't say. Whether I take melatonin or not, I can't say I notice any difference. Interesting that melatonin has been associated with hair follicle growth stimulation. Paper here and here. But you have to apply it topically, which is kind of messy.

––– 凄い –––

I've said from the beginning that the Internet should be off-limits to children. It's because of crazy laws like this. Age-verification is not only difficult to implement but also a breach of privacy and is a waste of time. I doubt that young kids are going to Michael Ellsberg's site to get their jollies, anyway. To keep kids away from harmful material, it's going to take something like Black Mirror's Shut Up and Dance episode. Chilling.

––– 良くない–––

230 new viral genomes have been identified. These are a part of 200 newly-discovered giant viruses in marine environments. I think I was better off not knowing about this.

––– 凄い –––

Cops use a version of ChatGPT to generate reports that does not audit or keep usage logs. Perfect for doing this for which you want to hide accountability and transparency. Who designed this?

Then there's Grok 4, which if it detects that you are requesting something illegal, will snitch on you and notify the FBI, FDA (huh?) and the media. It turns out that OpenAI and Anthropic LLMs also do this, but far less often. Use local models, baby. 

––– 良くない–––

The plastic surgeon who faked COVID-19 vax cards had his case dismissed today. I understand what the surgeon did, and the reason behind his actions. Never before did the government force a nation to take a medicine, especially one as novel and untested as the mRNA vax. But falsifying medical records is wrong. He should have had to pay a nominal fine only. The proper way of resolving this would have been for brave and powerful politicians to stand up for what was right and prevent this from having to happen. Alas, it did not, and Dr. Michael Moore created his own suboptimal solution. This shouldn't happen again. Lots of things associated with COVID-19 shouldn't happen again.

––– 凄い –––

Oregon is one of the worst states to do business in. In CNBC's study, for the cost of doing business, Oregon ranked 43. For business friendliness, Oregon ranked 47. You seeing this, Tina?

––– 良くない–––

And now, apartment arson is a thing in downtown Portland. Criminals are caught but are let go. Who wants to invest in this city? Are you seeing this, Keith Wilson?

––– 良くない–––

Oregon’s biggest counties depend on international migration for population growth. 

This isn't something to brag about. I'm not reading about international migrants bringing in millions of dollars to invest locally.

––– 良くない–––

Corruption. An Oregon lawmaker pushed to fix his road with wildfire recovery money. Politicians doing what politicians do. This is why we need for more wildfire recovery money? Doesn't sound like it's helping to put out any fires.

––– 良くない–––

Stem cell treatment can help hearing loss. This treatment doesn't depend on the OTOF gene. The treatment is called Rincell-1, and is intended to regrow damaged nerves in the cochlea and allow them to start sending signals to the brain again.

––– 凄い –––

Some discussion about succession at Apple. Will Tim Cook step down? If so, I hope he's replaced by someone with more ambitious vision of the future. Someone who can bring us interesting technology like Steve Jobs did. Instead of just "thinner with more pixels" and new emojis. Tim sure loved him some emojis, didn't he? And someone who will ditch the pandering to the gay and BLM crowd.

––– 良くない–––

Zink is a python library that supposedly wraps around your data and anonymizes it before submitting it to a public LLM. It's not that easy to use, and I don't see many people wanting to go to the trouble of using it. But the article highlights the temptation for people to just give an LLM like ChatGPT all their data, which lets it train on it, making it forever public. Who knows if the data will be sanitized first.

––– 良くない–––

What happened when some techies decided to help medical AI tools use more diverse data? There was no market for it. Either they didn't have the money to pay for it, or they didn't think it was important enough. Sad.

––– 良くない–––

This writer thinks that coffee shops should embrace remote workers. Extend the time these workers can be allowed to be there. Add quiet spaces, collaborative areas. Uh isn't that what offices are for?  Looks like this person doesn't mind working in an office, as long as it's not the office of the company that the writer works for.  Maybe offices just need to change into something different from cubicle farms. Rather than build office space for people who just want to work in a different office. But how do you plan for how big you need to make it? This is something that sounds great in the conception stage, but falls apart when you consider the details. You'd hate to own a large space that's barely occupied, and you have an espresso and snack bar ready to serve, but there's not enough traffic. Just work at your office, man. That's what it's there for.

––– 良くない–––

Holy fck! Intel is going to lay off 2400 workers, not 500.  That's going to make a big impact in Hillsboro and Orenco Station. Another piece from the Jenga stack that is Oregon's economy. 

And Higgins Restaurant announced today that they are very near having to close permanently because they can't make a go of it. 

Yeah, that's on Portland. And if you manage to stay open, you will pay higher taxes for the privilege.  Doom Loop.

––– 良くない–––

Anthropic is bleeding out. Claude Code is popular but

Anthropic is very likely losing money on every single Claude Code customer, and based on my analysis, appears to be losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars per customer.

How can you continue to operate if your product bleeds you dry? I'm glad I'm not the only one puzzled by how this works.

But if you do want to use Claude Code, check out this site, which shows you a good system prompt to use to get the best output.
––– 良くない–––

Yep, it looks like the sh*tposters were right: Gavin Newsom is going to build low-income housing in Pacific Palisades. Can't have nice things anymore, Californians. Better get used to it. 

––– 良くない–––

Grok is trash now. People are saying that before it outputs a response, it checks to make sure that what it says is consistent with Elon Musk's opinions. No one is going to trust Elon's Grok4.

––– 良くない–––

Cool. If you have a M4 Mac Mini, you can upgrade its memory with a solderless kit.

––– 凄い –––

I haven't used Spotlight since I tried it when it first came out with OSX Tiger. It was lousy and I could never find stuff. I've been looking for something like the old Magellan Navigator. But I see that Apple has been working on it. Today I noticed, however, that if I have a file called something like "my-secret-stuff.txt" Spotlight won't find it if I don't type the file extension, too. So you have to know what kind of file it is, or Spotlight will not find it.

––– 凄い –––

Some articles about gabapentin and pregabalin have come out. It can work wonders short-term, but long-term, it causes problems. Long-term gabapentin causes cognitive deficits. Paper here. Then there's a report that long-term use of pregabalin is addictive.

––– 良くない–––

There's something ironic about AI taking the jobs of employees at Indeed.com and Glassdoor.com. They'll know how to get another job, I'm sure.

––– 凄い –––

Even The Economist realizes that the European asylum system isn't working. Really? It took you that long? I think it's too late for Europe now. There's too many migrants to do a Trump-style eviction. You'd definitely need an army, and in the process of removing them, the migrants will destroy everything in the city on their way out. No more nice things anymore.

––– 良くない–––

Wow, PARP1 inhibitors may be effective in treating EBV-associated lymphomas and carcinomas. Talazoparib would make a potentially effective maintenance therapy.

––– 凄い –––

I'm not going to see James Gunn's Superman. Gunn wanted to make a political statement about immigrants in this movie. He made Kal-El's parents evil instead of protective and loving, and removed the statement about "the American Way". The SFX are cheesy and Lex Luthor was terribly miscast. There are too many side characters, causing confusion, and what the hell happened to Green Lantern? And Superman is not the invincible Man of Steel – he gets beat up quite a bit. Superhero movies need to be directed by someone like Sam Raimi, Christopher Nelson or the Russo brothers.

––– 良くない–––

Two interesting articles on EVs:

• Why Your EV Won’t Fill Up In Five. There are good reasons why won't be seeing those EVs that recharge in 5 minutes and go for 1800 miles on a single charge, anytime soon. Yeah, wouldn't that be nice? Well it would take 7.2 megawatts—per car to charge that fast. Using monster cables. Want to live next door to someone who has that installed. Better move your house to the far side of your lot.
• Why Americans Can’t Buy the World’s Best Electric Car. The Chinese have an EV called the BYD. It only exists because of generous government subsidies. Supposedly it's better than Tesla, in that it can "rotate 360 degrees in place and operate in water like a boat over short distances". It can charge in 5 minutes (but what's its range?). And it sells for $10,000. I still don't trust Chinese engineering.

––– 凄い –––

Intel CEO says it's too late to compete in AI, as the company continues to shed staff. What a metaphor for the city of Portland. I wouldn't have believed in 2000 that this would the state of Intel.  Then I read this. Wow, Pat Gelsinger was basically unavailable every Thursday so he could space out on company time.

––– 良くない–––

Nifty. Google Veo can now turn an image into a short 8 second video.

––– 凄い –––

So now vector search is passé? It was the darling of AI a couple of years ago. But similar ≠ relevant, and relevant is what really matters. So we're back to lexical search.  Man, things change so fast.

––– 良くない–––

StackOverflow is unveiling their new self. Will it bring people back again? Well, maybe the AI bots will have new things to scrape.

––– 凄い –––

Tech workers really want to work from home. They're willing to take lower pay to make it happen. But those jobs that can be done at home as likely the ones that someone else can do with AI. One person is convinced that AI will take people's jobs after all, and we'll just become project managers, overseeing someone else's work. It's a new paradigm.

––– 良くない–––

Big Pink's new buyer wants to spiff up the place and attract people to come back to the building. What he doesn't realize that it's not the interior decoration that people didn't like. It was that it was in the middle of downtown Portland, and you have to negotiate the city streets to get there. Good luck, man.

––– 良くない–––

What a waste.  Why did the city of Portland need a Chief Equity Officer? Now there's money the city can save by cutting it.

––– 良くない–––

Watch out! Browser extensions may be spying on you. They use your computer to surreptitiously scrape the web on behalf of its clients. The llist of extensions is here.

––– 良くない–––

Even low doses of CBD (cannabidiol), like 5 mg/kg can harm your liver. I don't use this stuff, but a lot of people think it's safe.

––– 良くない–––

Here's a nifty thing – an e-paper digital picture frame that lets you display pictures, but doesn't require an A/C outlet.

––– 凄い –––

Nice post, that basically echoes the sentiment, dance as if no one is watching. You've seen it, I'm sure. I blog, even though I'm sure no one is reading. Except you. 

––– 凄い –––

I posted this earlier, and this article is an update. Deoxyribose sugar gel is still effective in stimulating hair growth in balding mice. Still waiting for the efficacy study in humans.

––– 凄い –––

Huggingface just released this cute little robot, which hey call Reachy Mini. It could teach enterprising youth to learn Python. Here's a video of it in action.  As long as this is not a wiretap device, like Echo or Alexa.

––– 凄い –––

If you've had a kid who is now about 20 years old, you probably know Steve from Blue's Clues. Here's a very engaging interview of him by Rainn Wilson. Steve Burns gives off the vibe of Tony Stark, but a more caring and authentic version, and that's what gives him his charm. He was able to engage kids without acting like a gay uncle, as some other kids show characters do. Being Steve definitely changed him, but in a nice way, and he sounds like he had finally found himself.

––– 凄い –––

It's not official (yet) but TSA is allowing flyers at select airports (including PDX) to keep their shoes on during security checks. About time.

––– 凄い –––

Zuckerberg continues poaching AI experts – this time from the Apple foundational models group. They'll join his Superintelligence team. Being nerdy finally pays.

––– 凄い –––

Will Trump's new student loan policy make it harder to be a doctor or lawyer? I don't think so. It will shift the loans away from government and into the private sector, where it really belongs. And if you can't demonstrate that you have the potential to succeed, you won't get the loan. And a private lender will not "forgive" the loan, so you'd better make sure you make those payments.

––– 凄い –––

Nice review of how Mozilla's leadership has been failing the company. Firefox isn't dead, but the user share is steadily decreasing, for sure. I'm still not ready to abandon Firefox for Brave, as long as LibreWolf continues to work.

––– 凄い –––

Are you the bull or the farmer? Interesting parable, and probably true.

––– 凄い –––

The NYT wants your ChatGPT history – even the deleted ones. Why should the NYT have access to this? It's none of their business.

––– 良くない–––

In China, those with congenital deafness due to functional deficiency of the OTOF gene, were able to get restored hearing with just one injection of a gene delivery vector. Paper here.

––– 凄い –––

Oregon is going to hurt real bad. Specifically hospital and associated healthcare providers. It doesn't have to be that bad, but Oregon refuses to stop supporting non-citizens, and it's causing a drain on the economy that Oregon can't afford.

––– 良くない–––

A retired PSU professor says that Multnomah County had 4.5x the number of high income earners (> $500,000/yr) from 2014 to 2023. Really? Are you all seeing this? Were there that many new jobs in the county that paid that much? I don't think so. I bet that nearly all those jobs were NGO leadership positions or union leader positions that flourished under the Biden administration. All that COVID stimulus money. This has got to be bogus data.

––– 良くない–––

People don't like being force-fed AI, but Microsoft is only too happy to force it on people.

OpenAI has hired a forensic psychiatrist to see how ChatGPT is affecting people emotionally.

Microsoft says that if you are experiencing stress from getting laid off, use ChatGPT as your psychiatrist to deal with it. How thoughtful. 

This woman has a job fixing code for companies that decided to use ChatGPT instead of hiring a real software developer. These companies ended up spending more than if they did it right the first time. 

This study says that AI models display only "Potemkin understanding" and don't really know what they're saying. That's good, I suppose. 

––– 良くない–––

Scientists reverse Parkinson's disease in mice with copper supplements. Apparently there's a mutation in the superoxide dismutase gene, SOD1, that is associated with Parkinson's disease. SOD1 uses a metal, such as copper or zinc as a catalyst. In this case, they administered copper and the disease phenotype improved significantly. But it's not clear if human Parkinson's disease is mediated by the same mutation and disease process.

And a mucolytic (not yet available in the U.S.) called ambroxol, may help ameliorate Parkinon's disease dementia.

––– 凄い –––

Beware of trusting ZIP files. The file you unzip may not be the file that someone else unzips. Use 7z for compression. It's much better. I use Keka.

––– 良くない–––

Top 10 most secure phones in 2025. The iPhone 16 Pro Max is on the list. A Samsung phone is on the list, too, amazingly. 

––– 良くない–––

Several physician organizations are upset the RFK Jr fired the vaccine panel and replaced them with COVID-19 vax skeptics. They are so eager to continue to ruse.

And then this Japanese study just got published, linking the mRNA vax to rapid progression of pancreatic cancer. Gee, don't you think we should stop producing this vax and do some investigating?

And I'm tired of all the panicky news about the new variant.

––– 良くない–––

The comic Sally Forth ripped off a Calvin and Hobbes plot, and no one noticed at the time. Blatant.

––– 良くない–––

Comparing calculators. Looks like the iOS calculators can't handle edge cases, whereas Android calculators can. Of course one can use Wolfram Alpha, which is really accurate, and can do a whole lot more. Many iOS calculators can't handle the edge case discussed in the article. The best calculator for casual calculations (because Wolfram's format is too unwieldy) is the HiPER calculator. For now, it's my go-to calculator. Very nice. 

––– 凄い –––

Incredible video of ball lightning. It looks like a science fiction scene from a Benson and Moorhead film. Why don't I get to see stuff like this?

––– 凄い –––

This is what the tech world is turning into. Rene Turcios is a vibe coder, and he's been winning hackathon contests, even though he doesn't know how to code.  It's a new world indeed. And someone asks: How Do You Teach Computer Science in the A.I. Era? You must teach the new tools, too, or else your graduates will be behind.

Then you look at Microsoft, laying off a lot of engineers. Is that a wise move? Some would disagree.

––– 良くない–––

This guy think Geoff Hinton shouldn't have been awarded the Nobel Prize. I don't agree. Hinton came up with a lot of insight surrounded neural networks, and autoencoders, which led to Generative Adversarial Networks. But I do agree that the Nobel Committee should consider other pioneers, too, especially the guys that developed transformers – what a difference that made! But the Nobel Prize only guys to three people at most. That could be a problem, although it's just an arbitrary limitation.

––– 凄い –––

What to do and what not to do when you wake up in the middle of the night and can't fall back to sleep easily.

––– 凄い –––

A 17 girl in the Bahamas proved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture. Her name is Hannah Cairo. Now THIS is the diversity I favor. Diversity should be something you celebrate when it happens, but not something that you try to manufacture when it doesn't exist.

––– 凄い –––

Clarifying tech jargon.  A lot of terms are used inaccurately, as their usage has changed the original meanings over time. Here's how to correct that.

––– 凄い –––

Here's someone who gets it: Portland needs to embrace growth. Nobody is encouraging it. Oregon construction jobs are decreasing. 

That's exactly what's happening.

––– 良くない–––

A mutation in the FasL gene could explain why humans are more prone to cancer than chimpanzees. The Fas gene is involved with programmed cell death.

––– 良くない–––

Why is there no life on Mars? It could be the presence of carbonate materials which absorb CO2. Funny that Mars having low CO2 levels is a threat to life, while on Earth activists think that too much CO2 is a threat to life.

The Mauna Loa CO2 atmospheric level tracker will be shut down.  It never made sense to me to put a CO2 tracker on top of a non-extinct volcano that may be spewing out CO2 levels, as well as being on an island with active volcanoes that can emit CO2 itself. It would make more sense for it to be on a remote island with no innate CO2 source. Plenty of islands available northwest of Kauai. 

––– 良くない–––

There is now evidence that adult brains can form new neurons. This was believed to be the case before, but now there is histologic proof of neuronal precursors.

––– 凄い –––

Cool. Someone created a LIDAR-guided device that shoots down mosquitos with lasers.

––– 凄い –––

This is how some stores can track your every move – with Bluetooth beacons. It may be a greater problem with iPhones. Sure, you can turn off Bluetooth, but it's inconvenient to do this every time you enter a store.

––– 良くない–––

People are reporting the ChatGPT can diagnose illness that elude doctors.  And ChatGPT isn't even the best medical LLM. The problem is that we don't know how accurate these reports are. It's certainly not routine to test for MTHFR mutations, and there are other ways to test for vitamin B12 deficiency. Was that done?

––– 良くない–––

Happy Independence Day!

––– 凄い –––

Copper wire thieves are making some street lamps go dark. Some are on highways. Enough with this crap, already!

––– 良くない–––

Tina Kotek continues to support illegal immigrants' children. Calls them "marginalized students". Why are they marginalized, Tina? Maybe there's a reason?

All Tina knows what to do is spend federal money. Oregon is so dependent on this, that when it runs dry, Oregon is out of options. Tina has never given a thought to, you know, grow Oregon's economy. Make Oregon a place to invest. Instead, businesses are leaving. 

––– 良くない–––

Another amazing discovery from Chinese scientists: a new "water battery". High energy density, long lifespan, and excellent safety performance – what's there not to love? Let's do it!

––– 凄い –––

Asian scientists hide prompts in their papers so that AI reviewers give them positive reviews. Hidden prompts in white ink or miniscule size tell LLMs to only say nice things about the research. This should be easily countered; just tell your LLM to ignore what's in the paper.

––– 良くない–––