Sugoi & Yokunai

Ambient temperature and pressure superconductor?  A researcher claims to have done this, but his research is being suppressed.  Why?

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Why?  San Francisco could see a swarm of driverless cabs.  Granted it's risky to be a cab driver in SF, but driving in a sea of driverless cars is really risky.  This is a bad solution to a real problem.  Maybe this is why some people are crazy about this idea.  A vast surveillance network!

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The Oregon Legislature thought they had scored a victory banning "ghost guns", but on a national level, the federal law banning them was struck down, and that trumps state law.  Here's a novel approach, Democrats - get crooks off the streets!  Prosecute them!

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This is probably why the Japanese population is declining. You have to declare that you're deeply in love with a girl, before she'll agree to date you.  Huh?  No wonder so many Japanese men don't bother. 

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Nikola Tesla was right!. It's possible to extract electricity from humid air.  It's not much yet, but it's a start.

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The 9th Circuit court ruled that banning the recording of individuals who don't want to be recorded is unconstitutional.  It can be abused, of course, but it allows James O'Keefe's style of journalism, which benefits us all.  Since Trump filled some of the bench the 9th Circuit is a sensible court, thank goodness.

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Bad news for Asians.  I've been wondering about this. Although UNC is forbidden to discriminate against Asians for admission, because it is a state university, Harvard is private, so it's not really bound by the SCOTUS decision.  Asians care more about getting into Harvard, so there's clearly more work to be done. 

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Today is the halfway point of 2023.  Enjoy.

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Batch-dependent safety of the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine.  In other words, some of the batches could have been placebo.  Nice.

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Benzodiazepines associated with brain injury, job loss and suicide.  Suspicion confirmed that these had the potential for long-term harm.

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Multnomah County is suing energy companies because of the heat dome deaths.  But actually deaths due to cold temperatures outnumber heat-related deaths by nearly 20 to 1.  So maybe we should have more warming instead of less?

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If you knew that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were gene therapy, would you still have gotten them?

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Thanks goodness for Mississippi.  Oregon had only the second highest attrition rate for public school attendance.  Gee, why wouldn't anyone want to go to an Oregon public school, where your kids can be indoctrinated with CRT, exposed to transgender grooming, pronoun requirements, and sicko teachers that might call CPS to take away your child? 

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Trump was right about France, too.

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Portland getting that SF vibe.  Freddy is now going to check receipts as you leave.  Soon things will be locked up in cabinets. 
Life on the Left Coast.

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That Gresham baker was vindicated.  It's interesting that the crowd that has no problems with real discrimination against Asians, thinks that compelled speech in favor of pedophiles and groomers is discrimination.  Must Christians and Muslims build websites for satan-worshipers, too?  

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Which is the best chat?  A year ago, we wouldn't be even having this conversation.  Amazing how much progress has been made since then.  For me, it needs to be able to keep current, not stuck at its training date.  I gotta be able to talk politics with it, you know?

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Psilocybin keeps surprising.  Now it decreases cellular senescence, too?

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Whuuuut?  Mike Pierce, executive director of Student Borrower Protection Center thinks there is a "right to debt relief". 
Those Lefties - everything they want is somehow a "right". 🤣

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How China's Great Firewall blocks VPN traffic. In short, they make lucky heuristic guesses based on known patterns, and if in doubt, blocks traffic.  VPN providers will need to get smarter.  Even Proton's Stealth protocol probable doesn't work, as my VPN traffic gets detected all the time.

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The Internet was always a wild frontier.  OpenAI stole "massive amounts of personal data".  Medical records.  Data on children.  All to train their chat.  Most people have no idea what they expose themselves to on the Internet. 

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WIRED has a story on the end of Reddit.  It's a shame.  There were a few pockets of goodness amongst the immaturity and stupidity.  It was entertaining, although enlightenment was too infrequent.

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Terry Tao uses GPT-4 (probably the paid version with the privacy features) and finds that it helps his daily tasks.

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Cognitive endurance as human capital  - interesting concept.

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So, many in Silicon Valley (especially the leaders) are into mind-altering drugs.  Maybe that's why software is so screwy these days, and their political stances are so skewed.

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SCOTUS strikes down pro-LGBT law - people can reject work requests due to religious beliefs and don't have to be forced to do things against their will just because they're open for business.

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SCOTUS strikes down student loan giveaway - people have to honor their contractual obligations.  And the irony is that Nancy Pelosi made it happen!

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Hear! Hear!  Politicians should stick to politics, and avoid making technology decisions for society.

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Finally!  SCOTUS strikes down race-based admissions criteria for elite schools.  So will we see more Asians at top schools?  Maybe, but "the attorneys said admissions officers could use information about overcoming discrimination gleaned from admissions essays, as long as their decisions aren’t focused on race specifically."  This will be the way they get around the ruling.  If they are truly race-neutral, Asian enrollment will increase, if the CalTech experience is any guide.

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Mental illness on the rise, but mental health counseling is in short supply.  Is there anything not in short supply in this Administration?

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Canada gets cheap skilled labor.  The U.S. get cheap unskilled labor.  Sounds like a deal, eh?

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Is this a good thing?  We're going to be flooded with open-source LLMs.  This is early-stage.  Things are going to shake out.

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Who owns you code if you got it from ChatGPT?  The lawyers are working on this.

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A legal way out of the homelessness problem?  Portland says that it can't solve the homeless problem because of the Martin v Boise decision which said that there has to be enough housing before you can chase homeless people out of public lands.  But that was in 2018, before Biden got elected and the drug problem got really bad.  But no one talks about the Brown v City of Phoenix decision (2023), where the city was told it had the right to get rid of the homeless critters if there was evidence of crime, public drug use and a "biohazard" situation - all of which exist in Portland.  So get going, Portland!

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Great article on how American healthcare isn't that bad.  Folks like Bernie Sanders like to say that U.S. healthcare is so expensive and that healthcare is a right.  Well maybe it's expensive if you look at the initial figure, which this family was presented with.  But with the cost, comes life-saving services which places like Canada don't provide.  And this is why healthcare is not a right.  It's just a standard of life that we as a society choose to set, if we can afford it.  Which so far we can.

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Ironic.  LetMeSpy, an Android spying app, got hacked themselves.

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PLGA could be a game-changer in drug-delivery.  Will keep an eye on this company.

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Mandating return to the office wasn't such a good idea after all.  Market forces unknown to CEOs were at work.  Things will have to change to get people to return.

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AirBnB is collapsing.  And VRBO as well.  Hopefully the financial damage to the economy will be contained.

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This is why statins cause muscle pains (myalgia).  Oh well, there's always bempedoic acid.  Nice that mevalonolactone works against limb-girdle muscular dystrophy.

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Linux is kind of a commodity now. You can even design it from scratch.  Fix those bugs yourself without waiting for someone else to do it. 

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Have old cell phones collecting dust in a drawer?  Don't throw them away.

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I always thought those meditation apps for the mobile phone platform wouldn't work. I was right.

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Proton has come out with an email/password manager - kind of an identity manager.  I already use one, but it's great to see more people getting into this service, especially in the world we live in. 

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So this is why SVB was rescued.  Chinese accounts had to be made whole.  Surprised?

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Straight from a Three Stooges movie.  Janitor annoyed at freezer alarm, pulls plug on freezer.  There go 20 years of research.

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Finally.  King County Regional Homelessness Authority gets a bit more de-diversified.  It's a start, folks, but don't get your hopes up too much.  It is still Seattle, you know. 

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Congress tells their staff not to use the free ChatGPT.  If it's not good enough for them, what does it say for us?

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Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with “AI-generated junk.” Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don’t. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and “AI is tearing Wikipedia apart."

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Legislating nurses workloads.  Gov. Kotek signed a bill that would mandate that nurses not be overworked.  So nice.

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So despite all the praise heaped on the Scandinavian Way, it looks like the wealthy Norwegians are moving away, due to being tired of the high taxes.  Soon, the money will have to come from the middle class.  Money to pay for all that "free" stuff that Bernie Sanders likes to point out. 

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Informational No-Man's Land.  COVID-19 transformed our media.  And not in a good way.

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Mayor Dan Holladay was right.  He was strongly against lockdowns and closing business.  He was against the BLM protests and supported the police.  He supported fireworks on the Fourth of July.  And they voted him out.  Here's to you, Dan - you were right all along.

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I've seen some people feel that the drive to have people return to the office is because companies have these buildings that need to be occupied.  They look at articles like these, and feel that by resisting going to the office, they are "sticking it to the man" and it makes them happy.  The truth is that lease contracts have been made, and whether they return or not doesn't impact these.  But if these office buildings end being abandoned, as they are in San Francisco, then cities will lose a large part of their tax base, and services and just about everything else will decline for those who choose to live there.  No raindrop thinks its responsible for the flood.  Same with these workers.  Cities will then become the dystopian hellholes you currently see only in movies.  We're seeing it already.

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Case in point as to why developers are leaving Portland.  What a loss.

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When using encryption is criminal.  In France, 7 people are in legal trouble because they encrypted their communications.  Some governments feel so insecure that they have to know everything you say. 

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Rethinking climate change. Volcanic eruptions have been greater contributors to global warming than expected.  Yeah, they say it doesn't get man-made warming off the hook, but how well do they really know?

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Good rules to follow.  What not to post on social media.

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Man, not even a recent stress test can tell if you're going to die suddenly.  Condolences to Oscar Cabrera's family.  This shouldn't have happened.

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