Sugoi & Yokunai

GenAI predicts genomic structures.

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Anthropic thinks their newest LLM cannot be jailbroken.  It's done with new Constitutional Classifiers. I bet someone will do it.

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Cool!  Bose-Einstein condensate slows light to 37 mph.

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Automatic voter registration lets non-citizens vote.  We knew that. Got to get rid of this system.

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Portland city workers threaten to strike again. Going on strike is the new Oregon lifestyle.

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What income does it take to qualify to be in the top 1% in the U.S. This site says $794,129. But this site says $407,500. I believe the latter site. Because the former site says that 1 of every 100 Oregonians makes $707,296 which I think it preposterous.  The data is from a website called GOBankingRates – not sure I believe them.

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Nitter.net is back!

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Intel nixed the Falcon Shores chip for datacenters further putting the company behind in AI. They really missed the boat.

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Mozilla publishes tips on how to protect your privacy when you use public Chat models. One more thing we need to do that we never had to do before is opt out of training. Such is the world of AI that we live in now.

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New fabric efficiently turns light into heat. The fabric is made of nanoparticles containing two polymers — polyaniline (PANI) and polydopamine (PDA). These are embedded within a matrix of thermoplastic polyurethane (PTU) fibers,

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Blood levels of caffeine predict risk of diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease. Sounds good.

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Is Sam Altman going to open source OpenAI's models? Looks like he's considering it.

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Eric Weinstein wonders why geeks get no respect. I also think he wonders why "white kids" aren't into STEM as before, and thinks it's because STEM doesn't have prestige. Why doesn't it have prestige as before?

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Oregon lawmakers are considering a law that only humans can be nurses, not AI models.  You need a law for that?

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A review of studies that showed that doctors assisted by AI performed worse than AI alone.  It's a phenomenon that deserves study. Doctors (and other knowledge workers) won't easily accept the advice of AI, even when it's correct. What psychological insights does this reveal.

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Is Congress really serious about killing off open source AI models? Seems like an over-reaction to DeepSeek. Or was this something pushed by an entity with IP to protect?

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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?

––– 凄い ––– 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.

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:

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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Oregon's ROI doesn't look good. 

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Two possibly useful sites to see what Trump is up to.

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."

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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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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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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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:

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. 

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: