28 December 2025

AI contributions to Erdős problems.  Note that the models that were most associated with success were Aristotle. GPT-5 also had some success but not as much as Aristotle. Off-the-shelf models aren't as optimized. Aristotle isn't just a single transformer. It uses the transformer to parse the input, but mainly relies on a Monte Carlo Graph Search strategy, the LEAN proof assistant (which is C++ based, not Python), and a lemma-based informal reasoning system where theorems are broken down into lemmas which are proved individually leading to proof of the entire theorem.

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Joke. California dropped their suit against the Trump administration for withholding money that was going to fund their failing high-speed rail system.  Instead, they're going to seek private investors.  Private investors? 🤣😂

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The health care industry expected to see Oregon’s greatest job growth over next decade. But what is the healthcare industry in Oregon? It's not a burgeoning cancer or cardiology research center industry, or growth in hospitals offering cutting edge care. No, it's more nursing homes and social assistance. That seems to be what Oregon is good for – providing assistance to people, and the state certainly seems to have a lot of people ready to receive it. Take a look this collection of charts dealing with Oregon.  The state sure is high on providing food stamps.

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New laws that will take effect starting January 1. It's great that gas taxes won't go up as the state legislators and governor wanted. It's great that evicting squatters will be easier, but that's just restoration of common sense. But erase medical debt from credit reporting makes no sense at all. Debt is debt and needs to be counted. Telemarketing crackdown is not strong enough. The other stuff is going to affect just a relative few.

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I still remember when introducing nurse practitioners and physician assistants was going to help save clinics and hospitals money. How's that working out, Legacy?  Real doctors don't strike, and these APPs know it. They know that they can shirk work, and real doctors will pick up the slack while they hit the picket lines.

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Portland is a failure, and this interview highlights it. The city looks the other way as illegal drugs are freely available, screwing up people's lives. No building housing is NOT the solution.

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27 December 2025

Is this the first public look at the foldable iPhone? Steve Jobs would have been livid about this, and phone calls would have been made. It doesn't seem that Tim Cook is bothered by this at all. We already knew about things like the Dynamic Island and the camera configuration of the phone before release. We still wanted new phones, but it was nice when there was anticipation and pleasant surprise. Seeing this, I am convinced that this first attempt at the foldable iPhone isn't for me. 

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Washington's governor, Bob Ferguson, is pretty confident the wealthy will not flee the state, even with the new millionaire tax. He might be right this time, but over time, it will take its toll.

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Easy come, easy go. Past winners of the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes will no longer be paid. Hope you guys saved up enough.

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26 December 2025

Will Japan's 'fire horse' curse strike again in 2026? Supposedly women born during the Fire Horse year will murder their husbands. How did this superstition get started. Apparently from Chinese astrology. But maybe it was popularized from a Kabuki drama. Who knows? Japanese people are one of the most superstitious people I know.

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Theobromine in chocolate is linked to lower biologic age. On top of other known benefits. I just renewed my supply of CocoaVia supplements. Better to be safe.

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Sanjay Gupta claims he never said that vaccine prevents transmission. There is actually video proof that he did. It's not just him, of course. Others did too. Never again.

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25 December 2025

Merry Christmas!

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The HTML Elements Time Forgot. I remember some of these. I still use <frameset>. It's still useful. Don't remove useful things.

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Well shoot. Salesforce regrets firing 4000 experienced staff and replacing them with AI. I suppose at least some of them wouldn't mind getting rehired.

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Older Americans Quit Weight-Loss Drugs in Droves. Talking about GLP-1 receptor agonists, of course. Why are they quitting? Expense in many cases. Intolerance in other cases. Too bad.

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You may finally be able to change your old, embarrassing Gmail address. I think a lot of people just got a new email account.

Speaking of email addresses, Certisfy is suggesting that a .gov email address can allow one to get age-verification for sites that require it. We shouldn't let this take hold. Privacy and anonymity should be a right. 

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A Pittsburgh "liberal" finds out that he's actually a Portland conservative.

You see, in Portland, liberals have evolved further along:

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Portland Term of the Year: “Doom Loop”. City leaders don't want to hear that term. But it's true that the city is in it.

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24 December 2025

Happy Christmas Eve. This year, things seem more muted and less enthusiastic than at times past. Tough living in a Blue State. 

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Gut bacteria may play role in bipolar depression by directly influencing brain connectivity.  How is gut bacteria affecting our minds. Seems ridiculous that this could happen, but there's too much evidence of this to deny.

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🤣 When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates. The "Karen protocol". Hey, if it makes you feel better...

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Ori is a modern umbrella. A bit pricy, and I'd hate to lose it. Or have it break. I would actually like the umbrella in The Kingsman.

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Legacy of Kate Brown.  Oregon has fallen two places in the nonpartisan Tax Foundation’s State Tax Competitiveness Index, dropping from 33rd to 35th, the state’s lowest ranking in the widely followed index in at least 20 years. Oregon has fallen an astounding 28 places since 2019, when the state ranked 7th.  We're not going to climb out of this until we stop having DEI governors.

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Any amount of regular weed use is bad for teens. America has enough stupidity and craziness. We don't need thinks to make us crazier and stupider.  
Our study found that any amount of cannabis use at all may put kids at risk of falling behind in school, and the kids using most often may have the greatest risk," said lead researcher Dr. Ryan Sultan, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University. 
"A few 'harmless' joints can snowball into real academic consequences," he said in a news release. "Teens using it regularly often struggle to focus, miss school and may lose interest in their future plans."
The last thing Oregon needs – to have kids that can't perform well in school.

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Alzheimer's disease can be reversed in animal models to achieve full neurological recovery.  What did it involve? Raising NAD+ levels. They restored NAD+ balance by administering a now well-characterized pharmacological agent known as P7C3-A20. I guess I can try to do the same thing with pterostilbene and nicotinamide riboside supplements.

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What do Americans think about AI?  It's compliicated.

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Veritasium creator, Derek Muller, contemplates the future of his YouTube series. 

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23 December 2025

Yikes! It looks like whoever was in charge of redacting the Epstein files did a poor job. Using Python code, it's possible to unredact some of the files, since the original text is still there, just covered up with an overlay.  The DOJ really is incompetent. Or was this intentional?

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X/Twitter is reporting rumors that Trump may pardon Edward Snowden. Rumors have been swirling on this for a long time. But I do think it's time to forgive Snowden. Much of what he said was true, and the world didn't end. I think he did us a favor.

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China is undercutting the kimchi market, and South Koreans are not happy.  China will copy and undercut anything.

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Apparently Microsoft plans to replace every line of C and C++ with Rust by 2030. Well, it's not my company, so they can do what they want.

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IP Check. Is your home network compromised? Use this tool to find out.

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Cool. The NIH is publishing the 4D Nucleosome, which adds the time dimension to the mix, so you can see how things unfold.

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Novo Nordisk's oral version of semaglutide was FDA approved. Hopefully we'll see further reduction in the prevalence of obesity. I want things to get back to how they were in the 1970s. Boy, were people thin then.

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Grok has a phone number that you can send text messages to. If that's your pleasure.

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Now one can create AI-generated math visualizations – with AxisY. I haven't played around with it, because you need to set up an account with them first. Maybe I'll do that later.

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More Portland stupidity. Even the homeless mock the city's efforts to supply drug paraphernalia to the homeless. WTF, man! These are from the NGOs that get funded from government grants. This needs to stop. What a waste of money.

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Governor Kotek expands mental health services with $65M funding. Has anyone noticed any improvement in the state's mental health? I sure haven't. The number of crazies running around is about the same. This money is just going to pay for the salaries of agency employees at their ineffective government job. While Trump cuts the fat at Washington DC, Tina adds to it.

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22 December 2025

Google wants to study your online habits; what it wants to track. Participants in their Device Usage Study will likely be a specific isolated demographic than the rest of us. I'd never participate. But that's just me.

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Laid Off After 25 Years in Tech: The Anxiety, Sacrifice, and Reality No One Talks About. Very poignant video of a mid-40s software engineer who just got laid-off from a job with a large tech company. It's the same struggle between working hard and having a home life with your family. Now he has time, but suddenly pulling out of Big Tech is jarring. What should you do for the rest of your life? He's a bright guy, and there are certainly people in worse positions than him, but still, I hope he finds a satisfactory solution. 

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Always on Top is like the old Afloat app. It's great, and could really help out with my workflow. There's no free trial, though. You gotta pay and request a refund if you don't like it.

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We've come to this now.  AI Bathroom Monitors? Welcome To America’s New Surveillance High Schools. This is in Beverly Hills, in Southern California. There's really a compelling case to get out of the public school system.

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It's so easy to spread AI misinformation.  Make up stuff, and AI will suck it up and spread it around.

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Trump AI czar David Sacks starts to worry the industry. No, Politico has it backwards. David Sacks is worrying Democrat governors who want to regulate, regulate, regulate. And now they can't because of this ruling. We can't have 50 different AI rules, just like we can't have 50 different Internet rules. I think Sacks is right, and those in the tech industry support this.

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Tiny Lab-Grown Spinal Cords Could Hold the Key to Healing Paralysis. Hopefully this will lead somewhere.

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Nobody wants to eat lab-grown meat. C'mon.

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New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University Medical Center investigators, with co-authors across additional US centers, report greater cognitive worsening at 78 weeks with valacyclovir than with placebo among adults with early symptomatic Alzheimer's disease and herpes simplex virus (HSV) seropositivity.
"Researchers were uncertain about the reasons for the observed effect." Paper here.

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21 December 2025

Winter Solstice today.

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Crazy. It must have been wild a couple of days ago when the power went out in downtown San Francisco, and all the Waymo cars stopped dead in the streets blocking traffic. We're not ready to have autonomous cars driving around.

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Another article on how tech billionaires want to build their own cities. This is been done over and over throughout the years. It'll never work, and a lot of money will be spent for nothing. I don't expect California Forever will go anywhere. Don't build in California, for starters. You have to do it outside of Democrat control.

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Medical Mystery Prize. Upon reading the patient clinical history, it appears that the patient has avoided standard medical evaluation, and has self-diagnosed and self-treated with supplements. The panel of "biomarkers" also suggests that the person has seen a naturopath rather than a regular medical practitioner. I'm not seeing the standard evaluative protocol I'd expect. Who knows what this person has?

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Our brains have four stages of cognition. The age borders are probably not precise, but the idea is sound. I have noticed that I don't think like I did earlier in my life. I seem to synthesize things better. Memory is probably not as sharp as fact recollection as before, but one wonders if that isn't because one has had to memorize a lot more facts than earlier in life. Can the brain recall it all? The memory is there, most of the time. You know if the recollection is correct or not. It's just the ability to recall. My ability to understand the speech mannerisms of the GenZ folks is low. Can't stand the speech fillers. And yes, my tolerance for BS is really low. And I do care less about other people's opinions. I am really becoming a crotchety old man – just like in the stories.

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There was a power outage at NIST recently, and now the world's atomic timekeeper can't issue the standard time. They had a standby generator, but all it did was just issue the incorrect time, so they'll have to disable it.  They hope to get things fixed soon.  Update (2025-12-21): No worries. "There are redundancies in place." Only the Boulder location was affected. 

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Mayo Clinic just closed 6 rural Minnesota health clinics. More closings may follow. I've read on social media that somehow the Trump administration is to blame. This report is careful not to say that. In reality, it's likely that this happened because of a shortage of doctors and decreasing patient volumes in the rural clinics.  Rochester is not that big of a city, and physician salaries are generally higher in major cities than in places like Rochester. Plus, patient population is decreasing in the rural areas, making it not worthwhile to staff those clinics, even as doctors didn't really want to work there anyway. This is going to be one of many instances of the healthcare industry contracting, as our local hospitals realize.

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Is tramadol more harmful than beneficial? This paper would suggest that it is. 
Tramadol may have a slight effect on reducing chronic pain levels (low certainty of evidence) while likely increasing the risk of both serious (moderate certainty of evidence) and non-serious adverse events (very low certainty of evidence). The potential harms associated with tramadol use for pain management likely outweigh its limited benefits.
The potential harms included "higher proportion of cardiac events and neoplasms" although this was just a meta-analysis.

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Ah, Microsoft.

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20 December 2025

Keonne Rodriguez just wanted to make a privacy tool that would make trading in Bitcoin as private as trading regular money. He built Samourai Wallet. But a crypto-adverse justice system has targeted him, and now he's in prison.  President Trump is reviewing his case, and hopefully will pardon Keonne.

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Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it will cost 'hundreds of billions' to keep up with frontier AI in the next decade. Microsoft just needs to be smarter in what it invests in. Not just build datacenters and copy its competitors.

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Tesla owners are buying escape tools for when the car is disabled. Because the emergency door opener is awkward to access. But with laminate windows instead of tempered glass, it's not as easy. I wish they posted which tools they're buying. This one supposedly works, but is quite expensive. You need to be able to saw through the laminate, since it won't shatter like tempered glass.

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I can't believe Google is going to sue SerpApi, accusing them of stealing content from their web page when Google does the same thing to others. I think they're hoping that the "punishment is the process". Those on the outside might chuckle, but it's quite serious for SerpApi. 

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Great!  The EU is no longer going to ban non-EV cars after 2035. Hope they've learned their lesson.

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Is Proton leaving Switzerland? That would be wild. Hard to leave that beautiful country, but you gotta do what's necessary to protect privacy.

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Clearing Zombie Cells Eases Back Pain. It turns out that clearing out senescent cells in spinal discs helps improve back pain. But they achieved this with an agent called RG-7112, as well as o-vanillin, which is found in turmeric. Paper here. I have found turmeric to be actually effective in relieving minor aches and pains.

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California's minimum wage will increase to $16.90 starting January 1. Welcome to more inflation and the cost of everything going up a bit more. You can't just legislate wealth. But the politicians there think you can. 

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Oregon Parents Disproportionately Exempt School-Age Children From Vaccines. This is what happens when the medical profession loses trust from the public.

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Is everyone microdosing?  Crazy things that tech CEOs said in 2025.

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Washington politicians are thinking about implementing a 9% income tax applicable just to wealthy people. This is how you kill the golden goose. Pretty soon, you'll be like Oregon and have hardly any wealthy at all. Then you'll really need to extend that income tax to everyone.

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19 December 2025

Modern problems call for modern solutions.

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The Waterfox browser promises to be AI-free. Waterfox lost a lot of trust when the advertising company, System1, bought them in 2019. Even though they separated in 2023. It's supposedly not as secure and private as LibreWolf, but macOS 26 keeps demanding that LibreWolf be removed. I'm sticking with Floorp for now, but am still looking around. Meanwhile, Firefox is saying that there will be a "kill switch" for their AI. 

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Platelet factor 4 regulates hematopoietic stem cell aging. What? PF4?  Why that protein? Nature is crazy sometimes.

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Major question of the day: Do male actors heads get bigger as they age?  Yup. Heads get wider. Ears get longer. Noses grow. Bags under the eyes and zygomatic fat pads get thicker. That's how we age. 

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The UK continues its Orwellian progress. Now the UK wants a nudity filter on devices. Those idiots think that this will solve some problem. Of course it won't. I've always said that the Internet was never meant for kids to access.

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8-bit chiptune Bolero. This one is actually musically good.

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Car web browsers are security risks. Why does a car need its own web browser anyway?

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Only now does this report come out saying that vaccinating kids with the mRNA COVID-19 vax is hazardous and basically not worth it? 
"In both children groups, COVID-19-related outcomes were too rare to allow IRRs to be estimated precisely. Across all analyses, there were no COVID-19-related deaths, and fewer than seven COVID-19-related critical care admissions. Myocarditis and pericarditis were documented only in the vaccinated groups."

"BNT162b2 vaccination in adolescents reduced COVID-19 A&E attendance and hospitalization, although these outcomes were rare. Protection against positive SARS-CoV-2 tests was transient."
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Multnomah County has a budget deficit, but yet they are giving away $250,000 to helpillegal aliens.  Glad I'm not a taxpayer there.

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Another ones bites the dust. A James Beard award winning bakery, Jinju Patisserie, is shutting down in Portland. 
Uncertainty around the economy, our health and the steep financial obligations made us reconsider such a significant commitment,” the couple wrote.
Yeah, say no more.

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West Linn-Wilsonville School Board elects to close 2 schools, suspend preschool program. Oregon's school system continues its slow decline.

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Absolutely insane. OHSU vows to continue its genital mutilation program. These are supposedly medical doctors, folks. Oregon's health system continues its slow decline, too. 

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