Sugoi & Yokunai

Healthcare AI isn't going to decrease the need for humans. Oncologists at the University of Pennsylvania used an AI tool to predict patients' chances of death.

A routine tech checkup revealed the algorithm decayed during the covid-19 pandemic, getting 7 percentage points worse at predicting who would die, according to a 2022 study.

...the tool failed hundreds of times to prompt doctors to initiate that important discussion — possibly heading off unnecessary chemotherapy — with patients who needed it.

“Everybody thinks that AI will help us with our access and capacity and improve care and so on,” said Nigam Shah, chief data scientist at Stanford Health Care. “All of that is nice and good, but if it increases the cost of care by 20%, is that viable?”

––– 良くない–––

What are the highest performing batteries in 2025?  Surprisingly, not Energizer or Duracell.  They are Chinese batteries (BlinkPower, Tipsun, Bonai and Powerowl). Duracell makes a decent alkaline battery, but lithiums outperform.

––– 凄い –––

JetPens has their annual review of the best pens for 2025. Seems like what they recommended for 2024.  The Pilot G2 is still the most versatile pen.  The Sarasa Dry isn't bad, but doesn't write well on Post-It notes.

––– 凄い –––

Emmanuel Mignot wins Breakthrough Prize for discovering cause of narcolepsy.  Not surprising, since it was the discovery of modafinil that led to this, since the drug works through orexins, and is used to treat narcolepsy.

––– 凄い –––

Reddit is now using a fake AI user called Astral to supply subreddit posts. This isn't why people use Reddit.  The new CEO is turning his product into trash.

––– 良くない–––

Apple refuses to get of its DEI initiatives. Figures.

––– 良くない–––

Someone posted this yesterday, the anniversary of the day Aaron Swartz ended his life in 2013.  I didn't know that Swartz and Sam Altman knew each other.  Interesting to see how similar were there actions, and how different were their fates. What a loss.

––– 良くない–––

Bigmouth Buffalo - the fish that doesn't decline with age. What is the secret to its longevity?

––– 凄い –––

Lenovo demoed a roll-up ThinkBook laptop. Looks really cool. I could use this. Wish Apple was rolling this out.

––– 凄い –––

Wall Street may eliminate 200,000 jobs as a result of AI. Could there be a good angle to this? I predict job roles will evolve.

––– 良くない–––

Scanning ultrasound removes amyloid-β and restores memory in an Alzheimer’s disease mouse model.  This sounds too crazy to be real. How would scanning ultrasound remove amyloid-β?  Supposedly microglia are activated to turn out phagocytic activity, but how does ultrasound make this happen?

––– 凄い –––

What is this glowing ring of metal that fell in Kenya? It's definitely man-made for sure.

––– 良くない–––

Anyons. There may be a third form of atomic particle, besides fermions and bosons.

––– 凄い –––

Could we switch off a dangerous AI?  I'm not sure. Dr. Charles Forbin wasn't able to. But at least he knew it was being dangerous. We may not be able to tell.

––– 良くない–––

There is a specific protein involved in the conversion of white fat to brown fat, produced by beige adipocytes.  When a gene coding for Krüppel-like factor 15 (KLF15) is shut off, fat becomes more brown. Now the trick is to figure out how to do this on demand.

––– 凄い –––

South Koreans (what other kind of Korean could do this?) developed a nitrogen-doped porous carbon material that boosts lithium–sulfur battery performance, achieving rapid charging (12 minutes) and long-term stability (82% capacity retention after 1,000 cycles). This is what we need to make renewable energy work.  Otherwise, it doesn't make sense, and is not practical.

––– 凄い –––

Childhood stress can lead to epigenetic changes in a man's sperm, leading to brain developmental changes in offspring. That's just crazy. Study here.  The stress included "emotional neglect, emotional abuse, physical neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse". Abusing children can have lasting effects, more enduring than previously thought.

––– 良くない–––

Making coffee out of thin air? Soon it will be possible.

––– 凄い –––

Creepy. The Bee will record and transcribe your life for review later. I'll bet that if it catches on, Google or Meta will buy it. 

––– 良くない–––

In about 6 weeks, Google will enable digital fingerprinting across devices. Naturally, e-marketers think this is a great idea.

––– 良くない–––

The Prodigy Paradox. Maybe it's better to be a generalist knowledge rather than a deep but narrow specialization? 

––– 凄い –––

A retrospective of Steve Jobs and charisma. Truly amazing what he was able to accomplish, but at what cost?

Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital. This article suggests that a hidden consequence of depriving some children of challenging education is that they never get to develop cognitive endurance, which would serve them well as adults.

This indicates that the experience of effortful thinking itself—even when devoid of any subject content—improves general cognitive capacity. ....indicating that an additional year of schooling improves cognitive endurance, but only in higher-quality schools. Our findings suggest that schooling disparities may further disadvantage poor children by hampering the development of a core mental capacity.

––– 凄い –––

When you change the world and no one notices. This is true – sometimes the recognition that something profound has been achieved doesn't happen for years.  This happened with the World Wide Web, too.

––– 凄い –––

A couple years ago, it seemed that every AI enthusiast was into vector databases.  Now, not so much. What happened? Embeddings. These are similar to vector databases, but they store the results of data trained on a deep learning network.

OpenAI is a vast network of datacenters with embeddings.

––– 凄い –––

Arson wars. Now the homeless in Portland are setting fires to each others' tents for revenge. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

––– 良くない–––

Washington's new governor opposes a wealth tax. Guess he saw the light, or something. Yeah, it's not going to produce the revenue they thought it might produce.

––– 凄い –––

Nice.  7 planets will align in the sky over the next few weeks.  And in the evening sky, too, which is nice.

––– 凄い –––

Doctors beware! Medical LLMs are susceptible to data-poisoning attacks. Medical LLMs are especially the one place where we shouldn't tolerate hallucinations or data-poisoning. Yet it seems we do. People are willing to sell their LLM product to healthcare systems as if we've solved all the problems.

––– 良くない–––

I had great hopes of seeing Comet ATLAS C/2024 G3, which has a peak magnitude of -4.9. Alas, I couldn't see it this morning, and there will be clouds for the rest of the week until it emerges from behind the sun for the southern hemisphere.

––– 良くない–––

Global Influence Index.  Which parts of the world are influenced more strongly by China vs the U.S.A.

––– 凄い –––

These videos are fascinating to watch, if only to remind us that enormous wealth can still be fleeting.

––– 凄い –––

Hard to keep up with so many establishments in downtown Portland closing, but add Afuri to the list.  The reasons: "continued safety perceptions and foot traffic levels that have not returned to pre-pandemic numbers". And likely won't for a very long, long time.

––– 良くない–––

This is what happens when people use LLMs without getting proper instruction on how to use them. Teachers need formal education on the use of Generative AI.

––– 良くない–––

Update from Physics Girl.  She's definitely improved.  Gonna be a bit before we see any more physics videos, though.

––– 凄い –––

And the third award goes to...... Arizona!  Sorry, Oregon, looks like you're going home empty-handed again.

––– 良くない–––

Oregon is #8 in the nation for inflation. Notice that they're all Blue States?

––– 良くない–––

Now Legacy nurses are going to unionize. Which will make them more expensive. Which will make the merger more expensive. There's no room for error on the merger, yet things keep getting worse.

––– 良くない–––

Interesting – Warren Buffet isn't going to put his money into the Gates Foundation after all. Apparently the two have had a falling out.

––– 凄い –––

Autonomous driving has a way to go. A guy almost missed his flight because his Waymo car kept going around in circles and wouldn't let him off.  AI can't beat humans just yet.

––– 良くない–––

Scientists have captured the first events in the endosymbiosis process. Really fascinating. Why do these organisms submit to this kind of behavior?

––– 凄い –––

‘Precocious’ early-career scientists with high citation counts proliferate.  Gee, what could be the cause of this? Hmmm....

––– 良くない–––

Funny. How aging rock drummer cope with their demanding sets. 

––– 凄い –––

Japanese researchers figure out how to stimulate the growth of the third set of teeth. Yes, it seems that we do have a dormant third set.

––– 凄い –––

Have the Chinese succeeded in recreating the human brain digitally?  Not really, but they are striving to get there. The brain's complexity is probably much more than 14,000 GPUs.

––– 凄い –––

AI out of cotrol. Grant Sanderson received a copyright takedown request for a Bitcoin video he created,  He suspects that a bot mistook his own original for a copy.  If he gets two more takedown notices, his whole account gets closed.  Bots are being given too much control. This is crazy.

Update (7 January 2025): Error acknowledged. Takedown request retracted. All is well (sort of).

––– 良くない–––

Is being 70 the new 60?  Is science making inroads into aging biology?

a 68-year-old born in 1950 had a similar capacity to a 62-year-old born a decade earlier, and those born in 1940 had better functioning than those born in 1930 or 1920. Beard noted, “If we had compared someone born in 1950 with someone born in 1920, we would have likely observed even greater improvements.”

These are incremental improvements, and would probably not be obvious to a casual observer. Even if presented with an individual from decades ago, the inter-individual variability would be such that it would be hard to discern improvement. I'd bet Ray Kurzweil wishes things would be speed up.

––– 凄い –––

You can use LaTeX to put coffee stains on your papers.

––– 凄い –––

There is some evidence for the (former) existence of a solar twin.  Double stars are common in the sky, this wouldn't surprise me.

––– 凄い –––

By implementing agentic frameworks on computers and phones, AI companies begin the process of harvesting people's digital life data to train their models. This is like having microphones on to record conversations. Not good.

––– 良くない–––

I don't think the elevator system in this Portland apartment building is going to be fixed anytime soon.  It's not just Portland, apparently, but nationwide. 

Yup, all the usual fallout of the Biden administration.  The nation goes to hell.  But at least today is January 6!

––– 良くない–––

Oregon Health Authority is "preparing" from a Trump administration. What they will realize is that without federal subsidies, we are actually quite a poor state. Many people need subsidies of some kind to survive. Instead of growing the economy, the government is looking for ways to shift money around.  But this period of pain will actually be good for Oregon, as subsidy-dependent people move away from the state. But until then, expect pain. Not a good time to own a hospital in Oregon.

––– 良くない–––

This study purportedly linked cheese consumption to reduction in sleep apnea. They used Mendelian randomization instead of a randomized controlled trial. They found that cheese consumption was associated with a decreased sleep apnea risk, and that it affected 23 biomarkers they identified.  Interesting that the cheese nutrition dataset was UK-based, and the sleep apnea dataset was from FinnGen, a Finnish biobank. Is it legitimate to look at cheese consumption from one country and link it to disease risk from people in another country. I couldn't even find a list of what cheeses were eaten, since cheeses are not all the same.  I have my doubts about this study. Eating too much cheese will make you more obese, and that will make sleep apnea worse.

––– 良くない–––

People who are anxious and worried can't sleep well, and the lack of good sleep hampers their ability to keep intrusive, unwanted thoughts away.  This often makes the situation worse. I believe that resilient people have the ability to dismiss harmful and unhelpful thoughts, and thereby keep going, and doing what needs to be done. Whereas many people are held captive by their thoughts which destroy productivity and make life worse. Perhaps a good soporific is just the thing to help deal with anxiety, provided it's just temporary. 

––– 凄い –––

Long ago, England tried to make New Years Day be March 25. It actually makes sense (read the article). But the people didn't like it, so the government caved. Fascinating historical item.

––– 凄い –––

Most people don't care about quality.  My opinion is it's convenience that always trumps quality.  People are willing to sacrifice quality to get "good enough" if it's convenient. Most of the time, quality doesn't make a difference.

––– 良くない–––

One of the first Starbucks locations is permanently closing due to lack of safety.  Crime is winning.

––– 良くない–––

Washington Dems wants to codify gender extremism in public schools. Read the room, Dems. This crap isn't working anymore.

––– 良くない–––