Sugoi & Yokunai

Amazing.  Longtime Portlander Jeanne Shioshi, who experienced forced relocation to prison camp during WWII, turns 100.  Great genes - her mother lived to 113.  Wow!  And listen to her — she's quite mentally intact, unlike....."uh,....anyway".

Even Newsweek is appalled about SB3501.

Was anyone asking for this?  Apple's iOS 17 will:

...be able to look at data stored locally on your phone to determine what a typical day looks like, with access to your contacts, your location, workouts, and more. It will make recommendations to users about what they might journal about that, including when the app detects behavior that is outside of the normal routine.

It will even offer "All Day People Discovery," which will track the user's proximity to others, drawing distinctions between work colleagues and friends.

It's called decussation.  Why do brain control centers on one side of the brain control the opposite side of the body?  What's the purpose of having the optic chiasm?  There hasn't been a good explanation, although this person thinks he has an answer.

“This newspaper has long championed more liberal laws, but before rushing ahead, reform-minded states—in America and beyond—would do well to consider the experience of Oregon, the only American state so far to enact decriminalisation,” The Economist wrote April 13. “It has had a rocky start.”

End of an era.  At last, Oregon is finally ending COVID-19 emergency status.  But Sidelinger is careful to maintain the fear factor:

the risk of future significant outbreaks "remains low."

"But risk is not non-existent," Sidelinger said. "We anticipate that COVID-19 will be with us for the foreseeable future, perhaps forever."

"Anyone who is eligible should get it," Sidelinger said.

Taxes are too damn high!  Portland Kettle Works is eyeing moving across the river to Washington because of high taxes.  The city can't keep raising taxes due to the shrinking tax base, or more companies will leave. 

Could be a good thing, actually.  Two-thirds of Legislature's bills for 2023 have died.  Including the universal basic income proposal.  

The Legislature will focus more time on the state budget in the second half of the session. It's a fraught process since, unlike Congress, the Legislature has to craft a balanced budget - money spent has to be balanced by money coming in.

Reasons why you might not want to live near your friends.  Everything about being an adult seems to be complicated.

Is the Fed bankrupt?  Hard to imagine that they are, but they've made a lot of promises, and the money printing machines have overheating.  So maybe not exactly bankrupt, but not quite in the Old Helicopter Ben days.

In my 15 April 2023 post,  I highlighted a post the described how one could use prompt injection to poison the results that LLM-using search engines like Bing would retrieve.  Therefore one wonders if we've already reached Peak LLM, that is, whether the easy ability to poison search results and befuddle the search quality of future users already indicates that incorporating Chat/LLM into production applications already has hit a wall.  The success of Chat so far depends on the vast number of documents out on the Web being pristine, and free of hidden "white text" that mischievous writers leave.  But what if a sizeable number of documents had hidden surprises for ChatGPT/GPTx to discover.  Very soon, we will see pranks and jokes, or worse, malevolent instructions that the Chat agent would blindly follow.  What bad outcome might result?  Perhaps a brilliant prompt engineer will come up with a way to defeat these pranks, but then this becomes an onging war of hacker against hacker.  The unwary consumer, just wanting to use the search engine, may be an unwitting casualty.  Perhaps we do need to pause things, despite what some think.

Attractive individuals are more likely to study at higher ranked PhD institutions and are more likely to be placed at higher-ranking academic institutions not only for their first job, but also for jobs as many as 15 years after their graduation, even when we control for the ranking of PhD institution and first job. Appearance also predicts the success of research output: while it does not predict the number of papers an individual writes, it predicts the number of citations for a given number of papers, again even when we control for the ranking of the PhD institution and first job. All these effects are robust, statistically significant, and substantial in magnitude.