1 February 2025

Today is Imbolc, which is the first day of Spring.  Weird that in the Pacific NW, we're about to get some snow and ice.
Setsubun is tomorrow. Better throw some beans for luck but does anyone know which direction?

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ElevenLabs business model just went out the window. Someone's offering a pretty good free text-to-voice agent – for free! 
Such is progress.

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OpenAI released o3-mini yesterday. Maybe I'll play around with it.  It's getting harder to differentiate between all the latest frontier models. You need benchmarks and edge cases to figure out which is really the best. They're all good.

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Three cups of unsweetened black coffee daily is supposed to decrease your risk of Alzheimer's dementia and Parkinson's Disease. Which coffee? The authors don't say, and the dataset comes from the UK Biobank, so it's not going to be possible to figure that out. What brand of coffee did UK people drink in this study? Who knows?

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Beaverton School District is also facing a budget shortfall – to the tune of $30 million. Yep, the usual reasons: declining enrollment, a projected structural deficit, and retirement benefit rate increases. It never ends.

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31 January 2025

Pointless exercise. The Authors Guild created a new seal indicating human authorship of a book. What's to stop fraudulent use? Such a waste of energy.

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Haven't we heard this before? China makes a discovery of rare earth deposits. We already knew they had much of the world's supply. But the United States also has rare earths, and so does Greenland, which is another reason why it would be nice to have.

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Colforsin daropate, a drug used to treat heart failure, is a c-myc inhibitor, and has anti-cancer properties. In murine studies, it killed ovarian cancer cells in the presence of cisplatin, while sparing normal cells. Clinical trials are next, so too soon to get excited.

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Everyone is making fun of Portland City Council in the national news:
Gee, ya think?
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A $100 million budget deficit will be felt starting July, with reduced police and fire & rescue services. Yes, Portlanders pay higher taxes and get less services.  But they're happy that a poll indicated that more people are starting to spend more time in the city.  Glimmer of hope, they say.  What they don't realize is that the people who had money to spend have long left Portland, to be replaced by the homeless and homeless-adjacent. Not the folks likely to fill the city's coffers.

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Bad Democrat solutions beget more bad solutions. It starts with Obamacare. Everyone had to participate. When the dust settled, people opted for plans that had low premiums but high deductibles. This made people delay getting necessary medical care, leading to all sorts of negative consequences. But when people had to have medical care, it was costly, and people ended up with bad credit scores and were financially hampered. So Dems passed a law that removed medical debt from being counted against your credit score, muddying the validity of a useful statistic. And now Dems want to pass a bill that will give people financial assistance for rental housing. Which will come out of taxes, of course. Dems are famous for wanting to bend reality in order to protect people from the consequences of the bad laws they pass.

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OHSU wants UnitedHealthcare to reimburse more. UHC says no. And so if there is no negotiated solution, UHC patients will have to get care elsewhere. Sounds like a great argument against OHSU merging with Legacy. If they were merged, Portlanders would have fewer choices: Providence or Kaiser.

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FDA approved suzetrigine, a pain killer that doesn't cause addiction.  This is like lamotrigine (Lamictal), used to treat seizures. I have no idea how to pronounce Journavx.

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30 January 2025

Oregon's ROI doesn't look good. 

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Two possibly useful sites to see what Trump is up to.
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NordVPN claims to have a VPN protocol that evades detection.  I'll wait a bit before I switch.  More here.

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Move 37. When it happens, it's creepy.

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We already knew this.  Young cannabis users have reduced brain function. Particularly, the "dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and anterior insula. Each region contributes to essential brain functions related to emotion, cognition, and social behavior. They often work together to process complex tasks and decisions."

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29 January 2025

Happy Lunar New Year.

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Human Corpses Keep Moving for Over a Year After Death.  A time lapse of this would be interesting to see.

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Quantum teleportation is here.  It's not what you might think it is, though. Just information. Not people.

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It's starting. Oregon needs those federal dollars, and if there's any sign of it not coming, Dems panic. As a commenter noted, maybe now, Oregon will stop supporting illegal immigrants over citizens. Sometimes parsimony is a good thing.

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How can Oregon teachers justify needing to be paid more?  Oregon math, reading achievement among the nation’s worst, new scores show. Still blaming the pandemic, I see.  Why has the rest of the nation recovered, but not Oregon?

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Looks like the auction of Gordon's Fireplace Shop hit another snag. Is that eyesore ever going to get torn down?

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28 January 2025

Here's another assessment of the DeepSeek situation the day after yesterdays's market crash. This writer feels that there is not much of a moat around OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, but thinks it'll be okay in the end, as it will spur more competition and improve,ment.  Many said this yesterday. I think that what surprised a lot of people was how much quanitization you can get away with. Going to 4 bit processing didn't hurt performance at all. Here are 10 wild DeepSeek demos.

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Oregon is in the bottom six for after-tax income. Cost of living is the 8th highest.

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The Chinese kept fusion going for a record 1066 seconds recently. China is on a roll.

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27 January 2025

Setting a new benchmark in incredible. This guy solves a scrambled Rubik's Cube blindfolded for which he memorized the positions ten years ago.

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Race to the bottom. Oregon lawmakers want taxpayers to pay for strikers' salaries when they strike. How dumb is that? No wonder Oregon ranks at the bottom for business-friendly states.  No.

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Competition is good. DeepSeek is causing a rout in AI stocks today. The Biden administration restricted H100 NVIDIA chips to China, but let them have H800 chips. So Chinese engineers created a better way of using a Mixture of Experts architecture and creating their own version of CUDA to coordinate the chips. It's just as good or better than OpenAI's best model, and cheaper, too. And they followed OpenAI's API, so it's easy to use their models to play around, the pricing is very, very competitive. Some expect that Apple will develop something similar to allow better access to the GPUs in their chips. The real loser here is Google.
Nice write-up here.
Update: and now DeepSeek has been hit with a cyber attack.

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ProtonVPN is apparently the VPN of choice for The Resistance in oppressed countries. ProtonVPN traffic is still recognizable as such, and their Stealth protocol still leaves much to be desired. They need to work on that some more. Hopefully they will.

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26 January 2025

Good in-depth article on Greg Abel, the guy who is going to assume the reigns of Berkshire Hathaway when Warren Buffet is no longer chief. It's true, though – BRK.A has been mirroring the SP500 instead of beating it, like it did before. I guess the days of the good deals are no longer. Why is that?

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There seems to be more interest in home schooling and supplemental education lately. Here are two articles that I saw recently:
I think this is wonderful. Personalized education can really make a difference.

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After reading this, I know why tech CEOs love Indian workers, and are all for H-1B visas. Culture is very important.

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OpenAI's new Operator service may spell the death of the Web. 
Google, TripAdvisor, the tour providers - right now these are websites, and they support themselves by showing ads to users, or by partnering/commissions (e.g. TripAdvisor could receive revenue for directing users to day tours). With Operator, none of this is necessary. Google is no longer required. TripAdvisor can't support itself with ads, because nobody is looking. These models are about to become unsustainable.
Operator surfs the Web for you, and gives you the answer it thinks you want. No need to visit the individual websites and maybe leave a comment or see whatever else they have there.  I recently asked an LLM for the best BBQ joint in Beaverton, and it pointed to Salt & Straw BBQ.  There is no such place. Salt & Straw service ice cream.

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Bill Gates has an autobiography out, and in it, he calls himself "neurodivergent". This seems to be the trend now. Being neurodivergent is supposed to be cool. Everybody's in on it, like having a superpower. I think he's trying to rehabilitate his image, but most of us probably have him figured out.

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Oregon wines were once the pride of the state.  Now sales are falling off. Why is that? Do people not like wines anymore, now that we have cannabis and street drugs? Or maybe it's a luxury fewer can afford.

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Mayor Keith Wilson's $28 million homeless plan relies heavily on monetary support from Multnomah County, the state and the federal government. But the former are pinched for money and it's no longer Biden's federal government. And it's not solving the real problem:

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25 January 2025

Funny!  Newly-discovered asteroid 2018 CN41 turns out to be the Tesla Roadster that Elon Musk launched into space in 2018. It's now in the asteroid belt. 

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Why is everyone freaking out about DeepSeek R1? Because it's smaller, less expensive, and performs just as well or better than OpenAI's models. Sure, the Chinese copy, but when it comes to tech, they can copy very well.  Here's a more detailed discussion.
So this is why o3-mini had to be free.

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Yann LeCun thinks that by five years, we're going to be talking about archiectures that go beyond transformers. He predicts that dependence on LLMs will fall by the wayside. I can't keep up.

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What can we say about diet and cancer? Turns out, not much. We just have some clues, but the effects of this or that food is not large. A low-carb (low-sugar) diet with plenty of vegetables is probably a safe guideline to follow.

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Oregon is losing jobs (unemployment rate is now up to 4.1%) while the rest of the nation is seeing job growth. People who are serious about business don't want to move to Oregon, where taxes, crime, drug abuse, and homelessness are high, while you can enjoy less and less of the city.

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24 January 2025

Wow, this could be big news: a proof of P=NP.  This could have major implications in computing, and might decrease the enthusiasm for quantum computers. We'll have to see what comes out of the peer-review.

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Siri has not improved with Apple Intelligence. This is a really big disappointment for Apple. People have already lowered expectations with regard to security and privacy. Apple Maps was a big disappointment. Can't help but wonder what Steve Jobs would do to Tim Cook if he were able to come back to Apple.

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Sunburns don't damage DNA after all. It mostly damages RNA, and that process liberates inflammatory cytokines.  Still, UV rays still do cause thymine dimers, though, so there is some damage to DNA.

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Yeah, US healthcare is already socialist. And that's why it's so expensive.  It leads to silly decisions like Oregon hospitals voting for a tax on themselves.
Hospitals want the tax because it allows the state to qualify for more federal funding for the Oregon Health Plan.

It raises about a quarter of the total funding for Oregon’s Medicaid program, primarily by drawing down a federal match. The state gets roughly $2 dollars from the federal government for every dollar it puts into Medicaid.

The cost of the tax has previously been passed on to school districts and employers...
The house of cards is supported by federal funding. That's the only way socialism is able to be sustained. Money has to come from the government, because it can't support itself. And it's very expensive.

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Someone else has noticed that Big Tech is making AI on by default, and you have to turn it off. With Google, you have to upgrade to turn AI off.

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Trump has banned central bank digital currency.  Crypto is OK, and you can dabble in it if you want. But creating a CBDC allows the Fed to control your money digitally, and forcing you to accept another fiat currency that it has complete control over.  Trump has been de-banked, and knows that this can be turned against him, so has skin in the game.

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H.R. 238 seeks to allow AI to qualify as a practitioner, able to prescribe medications. No, this is not the way to go. This measure is what happens when congressmen don't understand technology.  It needs to fail.

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Projections show that enrollment in Portland Public Schools is on a downward trend. This comment says it best:
...young families don’t want to raise their children in a highly taxed, lawless city where 911 doesn’t answer the phone, police are too understaffed to respond and ambulances may or may not come. Combine that with a school district that cares much more about virtue signaling on racial “justice” than educating our children and it’s pretty obvious why the school population is falling.
Fully agree.

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Blood pressure readings must be taken in a supine position to be predictive of cardiac complications. How blood pressure is taken in the doctor's office is wrong.  Link to full study here.

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Facepalm. Portland's mayor wants to solve the homeless crisis by building new homes for them.  No word on fixing the underlying drug problems.

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23 January 2025

A new ultra-fast radiation therapy protocol may be a better way of delivering treatment. This could be great for places where access to radiation therapy is difficult, such as remote areas like eastern Oregon.  There's no Spokane, as there is in eastern Washington, and Boise is not always an option.

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  • 80% of proposals never get funded, and this number has steadily grown over time.
  • It takes roughly a year from the time the proposal is submitted to the time the funding goes out the door.
  • Since ~90% of proposals are not funded in the first round, the typical timeline is actually two years or more. Then, once the proposal is funded, the work has to start more or less immediately.
  • Two years is an enormous amount of time for science, and much of the proposed work will have either been done or needs to be substantially modified. ...hiring talented people for large-scale projects is hard, and having to do so quickly in response to a stochastic process is even harder.
It's amazing that science ever gets done. Maybe that's why private funding through pharmaceutical companies is often the way to go.

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Great news!  Backdoor Section 702 searches are unconstitutional.  Interestingly, this hasn't made much of a dent in Palantir stock. Do they have a workaround already?

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The best web browsers of 2025. On a Mac, I'm not surprised that Safari is the best.  I still use Firefox, as the disadvantages are not that significant. Not surprised that Edge is the worst. Chrome seems to be on a downward trajectory. 

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Sound Transit in Seattle has been having lots of breakdowns.  Needed repairs are urgent, but aren't happening fast enough. Why would anyone want to ride them?

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