30 June 2025

An AI-engineer out-engineered a human one. Is it any wonder, then, that tech workers complain they are being replaced by AI?

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Another researcher has discovered plasmid DNA sequences in the Pfizer COVID-19 product. They really need to take this crap off the market ASAP. What's stopping them? And why wasn't this acted on when Kevin McKernan first reported it?

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Gas prices will surge this coming week. But on the west coast, it's not really because of Mid-East tensions. It's because of gas tax hikes.

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Already, people are complaining that the minimum wage hike won't be enough. Gee, why can't prices for everything stay the same when they raise minimum wage rates? Why can't Democrats legislate wealth?

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Look at the stuff that Oregon agreed to fund at this last session? So much crap.

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Getting the news from social media really does make you more informed. Sure is better than Oregon Live, that's for sure. They still haven't reported about the Supreme Court and the impact of invalidating all those TROs.

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Microsoft is working on a tool to help doctors solve puzzling diagnostic cases. Seems to be more accurate than other off-the-shelf models. Will it really outperform in the field?

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Chinese scientists have been able to turn on limited regenerative function in mice.  A great start. Hopefully it will lead to full regenerative abilities.

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29 June 2025

Yikes. There is a 4% chance that an asteroid (2024 YR4) will hit the moon in 2032. If so, it could result in serious debris being released and hitting the earth. This is only 7 years from now.

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Congress might block state AI laws for at least ten years. Sam Altman was able to convince Congress that restrictive AI laws would stifle competition and allow China to advance ahead of us. It's an old tactic, but tried and true. And it seems to have been successful. So on we go down the Moloch path.
Sam has recently decided that specialized AI hardware is now worth investing in. Current computers are not optimized for AI. The company has also decided that they're not going to let Meta scarf up their employees without a fight. Competition is good. 

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There's a new VPN, vp.net,  that uses Intel's SGX chip, and they claim that this assures logging privacy. It's brand new, and I'd like to see what others uncover before I jump to this. NordVPN is working OK for now.
Whatever you do, avoid Chinese VPN apps. 

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Six policies that Trump will be able to make serious progress on, now that temporary restraining orders will no longer hamper him.

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Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan-Zuckerberg are closing their Primary School. It's no longer fun to operate anymore. They're bored with it after just nine years. They also claim that there's no finding anymore. Which is strange, as since when was money an obstacle with The Zuck?

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OpenAI's o4-mini can geoguess like a pro. I've been impressed with GPT-4.1 for geolocation.

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Here's another reason not to use Android, Google tools, and WhatsApp. As if there weren't enough reasons.

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Do you have Substack fatigue? I do. So many begging for subscriptions. They add up, and are they worth it? If I can't get what I want, I check out Internet Archive. 

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Oregon can't afford to lose money now, but they've been dinged with a $15.7 million SNAP penalty.  So incompetent, and now they must pay for it. This is why our taxes have to be increased? And Trump's new budget is going to shift more responsibility to states. Oregon is in deep, deep trouble. There's no room for incompetence, but our government is based on DEI hires and appointees. Quality people don't want to move to the state.

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28 June 2025

Do people need to get a PhD in AI to succeed now? Goalposts keep moving farther away.  The job market in tech is rough.  Redditors blame the H-1B visa system.  Could be, but I wonder how many Americans are really qualified. Whenever I look at the speaker list at AI conferences, they're almost all Indians, Chinese, and Middle Easterners. If there's a European person, it's likely a Russian.  And whenever there's a hackathon or when some tech company offers an AI course, the attendees are basically Indians, Chinese and Middle Easterners. Such a difference from the demographics of the 1980s.

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Oregon dodged a bullet.  The gas tax and "Google" tax died. Dems are still advancing a transportation bill, though.  Oregon is going to raise the surcharge on Uber and Lyft to the highest in the nation. And Tina Kotek wants a special session to figure out how to fund transportation.  Stop spending money on illegals and sheltering/deflection programs that the homeless aren't using!

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OHSU selects 'transformational' president after nationwide search.  Well, they were kinda forced to take him, since everyone else didn't qualify or withdrew.  And that's what they said about Danny Jacobs. He was transformational, all right. Although Elnahal has a medical degree, it appears that he worked primarily doing administrative work, and not in actual practice or in medical research.  And I don't like that he's a fan of "harm reduction" policies. That hasn't served Portland well at all.

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Half a million Washingtonians drive with expired license tags. When that many people break the law, it's not worth being legal. Why pay when the law isn't enforced? This is the breakdown of society in Blue states, when laws are just for show.

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27 June 2025

Today is the day when the sun will set the latest in the year.  This always takes place AFTER the summer solstice, because of the shape of the analemma. So enjoy the day while it lasts.

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Oh joy.  China isn't the only one with mosquito drones. The CIA has one, too.

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How much energy does an AI query consume? Text and video consume about 1.7 Watt-hours. But video consumes much more (20 - 110 Watt-hours).

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An economics Nobel Prize winner thinks she knows why countries aren't having kids.  She thinks it's due to the time women have to spend doing housework. But she bolsters her claim with a table that shows only 12 countries, and the fertility rate doesn't look like it supports a trend. She needs to show the data with 100 countries at least, and also graph the fertility rate and report the correlation coefficient, so that we know if her table is just selective data picking. I remain unconvinced, and think it's more related to perception of one's financial security.

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I am so glad I am not having to job seek right now. You can find a job if you actually have skills, but if you took the easy way to getting a degree and spent much of your time in the fuzzy studies or being an activist, you are going to have a hard time.

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The drug MariTide (maridebart cafraglutide) is a once-monthly weight loss medication.  Like tirzepatide, it is a GLP-1 RA and a GIP receptor antagonist. I still think it needs to be paired with a sarcopenia mitigator.

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Top AI frontier models parrot Chinese propaganda. Why do you think that is so?

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The loan on the 200 SW Market Street Black Box building has now defaulted. Owning commercial real estate in the city of Portland is a money loser. It's a Doom Loop, and city leaders just don't see it.  Raising taxes and imposing more fees is a sure way of seeing the city collapse.

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University of Oregon is laying off more employees. More to follow.

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Reddit CEO says that he plans to keep the site as a human-populated site, and avoid AI. Well, I don't believe you.

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26 June 2025

Fred Espenak died this month.  I once went on an eclipse trip with him. Appreciate his hard work. Browsing through his eclipse canon books was awe-inspiring as a nerdy kid. He will be missed.

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Earth's Rotation Will Speed Up In July And August. I can understand slowing down, but how does it speed up? Are there invisible arms that are being retracted? The article doesn't explain this too well.

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Google was going to have a special "fact-check" tag available so that when you fact-checking someone else's misinformation, you could use it, and it would show up on a Google search. Yeah, they quickly abandoned that idea really fast. Seems that right-wing people can fact-check, too. Yeah, another idea that sounded good in the shower but failed in real life.

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What LLMs know about their users. Think twice whenever you use them to query about something, perhaps controversial or unconventional. Why should they keep your confidence?

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Doctors discover a new blood type. We're up to 48 types now.

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A new organelle has been discovered inside our cells. It's called a hemifusome, and its purpose is still unknown.

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The most successful undergraduate theses. Did you have to write a thesis for your undergraduate degree?

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How not to lose your job to AI. I find this article very naïve. We really don't know what a post-singularity economy is going to look like. Plus, the author doesn't even mention Jevon's Paradox, which will be a factor, at least in the beginning. But who really knows what kinds of jobs will be in demand?

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Yeah, people in the Pearl District are none too happy about the homeless shelter opening up in their neighborhood. But I bet very few voted for a Republican mayor in the last election, so you got what you deserve.

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All those sobering beds, and no one is using them. Did they really think people would be lining up at the door waiting to get in? Nope, we let people who have a track record of not being able to make good decisions, make the decision to get help on their own. Then wonder why no one shows up.

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Meta also wins a copyright suit against authors using their work. The golden age of writing has ended, folks.

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Work is starting on synthetic genomes. Making a human cell genome from scratch. Very Dr. Frankensteinish. What could go wrong?

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25 June 2025

When macOS 26 comes out, the menubar is going to look nearly invisible. If you don't like this look, you can download Boring Old MenuBar. I think I will.

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Seattle is thinking of making tagger do the graffiti clean up work. Sounds like a plan.

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The number of high school grads is really going to decrease in Blue states. Some are REALLY going to suffer. Red state colleges are going to do fine. 

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Yowza! Mass Deportations of Undocumented Immigrants Could Cost California $275 Billion. Well, the alternative was unsustainable. And the good news is that the political impact of California will be much lessened, which is good.

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More layoffs looming at Microsoft. Remember when working at Microsoft made you rich?  Yeah. Good times. Now it just makes you upset. 
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Tina Kotek wanted $700 million for affordable rentals. Oh yeah. Dream on, Tina, What? You think you govern a rich state?  You think there's a thriving economy, or something? Yeah, even the Dem legislators had to break the news to her.

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Thank goodness. Another Khanh Pham disaster averted. There will be no tax on big tech to pay for Oregon's lousy liberal newspapers.

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Dozens of flights into Oregon have been dropped. More signs of a dying state.

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Another one bites the dust. Owens Corning will shut down their door manufacturing company in Prineville.  More signs that businesses can't make a go in Oregon.  All 184 jobs will be lost. That's a lot for a small town as Prineville. They're going to feel it.

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Saw this on the Internet: What's going on with American game makers? Forget how to portray women?  Why does every woman in games now have to have that non-binary vibe?

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24 June 2025

Eli Lilly has a drug, bimagrumab, that when combined with a GLP-1 receptor agonist allows for substantial fat loss with minimal muscle loss. This is from the BELIEVE trial, using semaglutide. Bimagrumab, an activin type 2B receptor inhibitor, actually stimulates muscle growth.

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After many years, the PNG spec has been updated. Now we can have animated PNGs! And EXIF data!

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Oh-oh. A federal judge says that Anthropic can train AI models on published books without the author's permission. Man, this is going to get a lot of people pissed off. If this, why not music. We'll get a wider variety of AI slop now.
And here's the BBC, trying to sue an AI startup over content scraping. I'd say that this lawsuit has suddenly become a lot harder to win.

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The Psylo browser is going to try to make browser fingerprinting a lot tougher. I doubt I'll use it, but it would be great for other browser makers to license this technology.

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AI has made Reddit the front page of the dead Internet. The CEO's decision to let AI train on Reddit content and mimic real users, has turned off a lot of people. Although it's still being used, I think people would switch to a good alternative. Discord and Mastodon are too onerous to use. They're like conversations in private salons, instead of the public marketplace that is Reddit.

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Jony Ive's secret device is not going to be a wearable. Jony has a distinctive minimalist style in product design, but does that mean he knows what most people want in an AI device, something that has been called the third core device?

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More news about the iPhone 17. I guess it won't be thinner after all. Larger battery. Better camera. 8k video. 12 GB RAM. Better cooling. Maybe I'll do a trade-in. We'll see.

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So that 16 billion password breach story was a nothing burger?  I changed all my passwords anyway. Glad it wasn't that serious.

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Kidney cells have a memory, too. Who knew? But what made them even think to check?

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I knew it. Making EV is worse for the environment. All that lithium mining, and disposing of spent batteries.

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Wow, Apple might buy Perplexity after all.  Better than Meta, that's for sure.  Hope they make the Pro tier free.

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University of Cambridge researchers have devised a test to determine how susceptible cancer cells are to chemotherapy.  This is by no means a new idea. It died because it took too much time to get the results and insurance wouldn't pay for it. People need to start treatment sooner than later – they can't wait for the test results.

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Doctors are using unapproved AI to help them. I knew this would happen. There is so much need for regulation. And for doctors to get smart about AI. They don't know what they're doing when it comes to AI.

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Trump can pull the plug on the Internet in Europe. If he wants to. I don't think he'll ever do it. But it would be interesting to think about it. So now they want to develop their own version. Lots of luck with that.

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Looks like that preschool tax won't get funded after all.  Thank God. But I still think wealthy Portlanders will continue to flee the city.

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This is how Democrats solve the healthcare shortage. Import foreign doctors into the medical system.  Should be OK, because regular doctors will have time to supervise them on top of their already busy practice, and make sure they practice OK. Right?  Right?

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Best and Worst Cities in America. Republican-run cities are at the top. Democrat-run cities are at the bottom.  No surprises. But we have more diversity and equity and inclusion, right? 
And Portland is going to start a homeless shelter right in the middle of the Pearl District. They really want the wealthy to flee the city, don't they?

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23 June 2025

Wow, Brave browser usage has been steadily increasing, while Firefox usage has been decreasing. I took a second look at the Brave browser today, and it's the best for stopping fingerprinting over the Mullvad browser and even LibreWolf, which doesn't block fingerprinting at all, sadly. If you go to fingerprint.com, it's pretty clear that websites can identify when you've visited, even with a VPN and incognito mode. But Brave makes it easy to activate Tor, which really makes your surfing anonymous.

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Frequent nightmares triple the risk of early death. Especially if you live on Elm Street.  Better ask your doctor for prazosin.

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The Duwamish River Festival in Seattle was canceled due to concerns about ICE being there. Geez, how infiltrated are illegal immigrants in our society anyway?  You can't have a festival or public celebration without being worried about illegal aliens being taken away?

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Johnny von Neuman's daughter just passed away. Wow, she was smart like her dad.

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Elon Musk's lawyers say that he doesn't use a computer. He apparently just uses his phone. I find it hard to believe.

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So StackOverflow is dead. Who's going to provide the content for the new AI models to suck up for training?

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Hertz is using AI to scan the car for defects when you return it.  We'll see how that works.

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First images from the Vera Rubin Telescope. Was the James Webb not good enough?

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22 June 2025

What day are you most likely to die? It's your birthday.

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No need for iridium. Japanese scientist found out how to hydrolyze with manganese instead. Should be a lot less expensive.

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Hospitals are using AI to predict and avoid chaos in the ED. Sounds a bit creepy to me, and something tells me this isn't going to be broadly applicable to many hospitals. 

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EVs are supposed to save the world. What happened?  In a word, greed. EVs aren't going to work until they fix the battery charging problem. 

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Ever wondered why browser useragents all start with "Mozilla"?  Here's why.

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It looks like Southern Oregon University is going the way of Marylhurst University. More fallout from the elimination of the subsidized economy.

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The Portland Tribune is just a shell now. I was never sure what it tried to be. Another vehicle to carry advertising, I guess. It never broke any hard-hitting news. Mainly event announcements, restaurant reviews, and the occasional crime stories, etc. We have other news sites for this.

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Republican counties have a higher fertility rate than Democrat counties. No surprise there. Heh.

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21 June 2025

Good for them! Paul Mitchell, the hair product company is joining the exodus out of California to Texas.  When will the Dems learn?

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In China, the preference for male babies is now seeing the dire consequences. If you look at the usual dating apps, the market is slim for Asian males, unfortunately. I suspect that many of these Chinese males face a life of bachelorhood. The solution? Be filthy rich! That works across all languages and cultures.

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Did you know that until just recently, it was legal to send biological samples to another country, have them genetically modify it and then send it back to the U.S.? Wow, I could see some bad actors having fun with that. Well, no more. The world is no longer an innocent place, unfortunately.

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Microsoft is going to lay off more people in July, mainly salespeople. Remember the days when working for Microsoft made you wealthy?  Yeah, good times.

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I've seen recommendations to switch to glass water bottles to reduce exposure to microplastics. Turns out that you get exposed to more microplastics when you use glass bottles. At least those with a plastic cap. So what do you do? They recommend "blowing the caps with air, then rinsing them with water and alcohol, which reduced contamination by 60%".  Yeah, right.

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Andrej Karpathy has some interesting ideas on how software is changing. It's Software 3.0. It's AI as a utility like electricity. 
I read this recently:
"When ChatGPT went down for several hours last week, everyday users, students with exams, and office workers posted in despair: “If it doesn't come back soon my boss is gonna start asking why I havent done anything all day,” one person commented on Downdetector, a website that tracks internet outages. "
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An infusion of stem cells that differentiate into insulin-producing islet cells can cure diabetes mellitus type I.  The trade-off is that you have to be on immunosuppressants.

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Might look into this. You can stack Mac Minis to create your own ML cluster.  Very interesting. I might check it out. I'm reading mixed reviews, with some saying that it really doesn't make that much of a difference. I suspect that there needs to be more work done to make setting this up more useful, but Apple has a way to make their hardware sought after.

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Whole Foods is moving out of Capitol Hill in Seattle. Riots have consequences. The BLM/Antifa crowd learn that they can't have nice things. And neither can the people that live around there. 

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Anthropic's top models will "lie, cheat and steal" to achieve their goals. So what is their secret sauce to developing these bad boys?  Claude 3.5 Sonnet is so polite and courteous, you'd never think it's younger siblings would be so..conniving.

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People are upset over the quality of AI products and the loss of human jobs.  Here comes the pushback from the public. And AI is still at the early stages. Pretty soon, humans will be so dependent on AI (at least the ones that have to create things and produce stuff) that it'll be too late.

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New physics theory posits that time has 3 dimensions. And space is a secondary effect. This comes out of University of Fairbanks, Alaska, so who knows? I'll have to wait until someone more knowledgeable weighs in. At least it got published in a peer reviewed journal.

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Man, I hope no one buys Perplexity.  Certainly not Meta. Apple would be OK, but I think they'd ruin it somehow. Probably buy it and kill it, like Dark Sky.  I like it as it is. Stay independent, please.

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