Sugoi & Yokunai

Ironic.  LetMeSpy, an Android spying app, got hacked themselves.

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PLGA could be a game-changer in drug-delivery.  Will keep an eye on this company.

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Mandating return to the office wasn't such a good idea after all.  Market forces unknown to CEOs were at work.  Things will have to change to get people to return.

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AirBnB is collapsing.  And VRBO as well.  Hopefully the financial damage to the economy will be contained.

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This is why statins cause muscle pains (myalgia).  Oh well, there's always bempedoic acid.  Nice that mevalonolactone works against limb-girdle muscular dystrophy.

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Linux is kind of a commodity now. You can even design it from scratch.  Fix those bugs yourself without waiting for someone else to do it. 

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Have old cell phones collecting dust in a drawer?  Don't throw them away.

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I always thought those meditation apps for the mobile phone platform wouldn't work. I was right.

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Proton has come out with an email/password manager - kind of an identity manager.  I already use one, but it's great to see more people getting into this service, especially in the world we live in. 

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So this is why SVB was rescued.  Chinese accounts had to be made whole.  Surprised?

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Straight from a Three Stooges movie.  Janitor annoyed at freezer alarm, pulls plug on freezer.  There go 20 years of research.

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Finally.  King County Regional Homelessness Authority gets a bit more de-diversified.  It's a start, folks, but don't get your hopes up too much.  It is still Seattle, you know. 

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Congress tells their staff not to use the free ChatGPT.  If it's not good enough for them, what does it say for us?

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Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with “AI-generated junk.” Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don’t. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and “AI is tearing Wikipedia apart."

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Legislating nurses workloads.  Gov. Kotek signed a bill that would mandate that nurses not be overworked.  So nice.

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So despite all the praise heaped on the Scandinavian Way, it looks like the wealthy Norwegians are moving away, due to being tired of the high taxes.  Soon, the money will have to come from the middle class.  Money to pay for all that "free" stuff that Bernie Sanders likes to point out. 

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Informational No-Man's Land.  COVID-19 transformed our media.  And not in a good way.

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Mayor Dan Holladay was right.  He was strongly against lockdowns and closing business.  He was against the BLM protests and supported the police.  He supported fireworks on the Fourth of July.  And they voted him out.  Here's to you, Dan - you were right all along.

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I've seen some people feel that the drive to have people return to the office is because companies have these buildings that need to be occupied.  They look at articles like these, and feel that by resisting going to the office, they are "sticking it to the man" and it makes them happy.  The truth is that lease contracts have been made, and whether they return or not doesn't impact these.  But if these office buildings end being abandoned, as they are in San Francisco, then cities will lose a large part of their tax base, and services and just about everything else will decline for those who choose to live there.  No raindrop thinks its responsible for the flood.  Same with these workers.  Cities will then become the dystopian hellholes you currently see only in movies.  We're seeing it already.

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Case in point as to why developers are leaving Portland.  What a loss.

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When using encryption is criminal.  In France, 7 people are in legal trouble because they encrypted their communications.  Some governments feel so insecure that they have to know everything you say. 

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Rethinking climate change. Volcanic eruptions have been greater contributors to global warming than expected.  Yeah, they say it doesn't get man-made warming off the hook, but how well do they really know?

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Good rules to follow.  What not to post on social media.

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Man, not even a recent stress test can tell if you're going to die suddenly.  Condolences to Oscar Cabrera's family.  This shouldn't have happened.

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This is what I tell myself to make me feel better. 😉 Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems. Yeah, that's gotta be the answer.

––– 凄い –––Archie Bleyer from OHSU:
"Bleyer says the increased use of diagnostic imaging such as CT scans and X rays, which expose patients to low levels of carcinogenic radiation, could be contributing,"
"When it comes to the uptick in testicular cancer, meanwhile, he says rising cannabis use is likely the leading culprit. "  (Well not everyone agrees, Archie)
"People growing taller could also be a risk factor for several cancer types, he says."   (Now THAT'S a stretch!)
But then other physicians continue to be puzzled:
"Ugai tells me there’s speculation changes in our sleep patterns could be involved."
"Marios Giannakis, a medical oncologist and researcher at the Dana-Farber Gastrointestinal Cancer Center, says changes in the microbiome — the community of microorganisms that populate the body — have been “implicated”.
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Well it's a start.  Measure 110 notwithstanding, possession of at least 1 gm of fentanyl could land you in jail.  But 1 gram of fentanyl is still a lot.  Doctors typically give fractions of a milligram of fentanyl to patients. 

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Firefighters are quitting in droves.  The article never mentions a major factor for this.  Just like with nurses.

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Washington's overdose deaths rising the fastest in the nation.  Hey, maybe eastern Washington can join Greater Idaho.  Just a thought.

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The COVID-19 vax mandates were based on a lie.  Yeah, those of use who paid attention knew this.  Nothing new.

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Cliff Mass sets us straight.  Whatever is happening with Mt. Rainier's glaciers is not due to climate change.  We need objective scientists like Cliff.

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Ranked-choice voting - where idiot voters get a second chance to vote again.  Anyone who understands RCV knows that losers lose for a reason, and that those that vote for them should get taken out of the voter pool.  But RCV essentially lets them vote again, usually to the advantage of looney lefties, and to the detriment of the top candidates. 

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So funny.  I just read this article on Oregon's peculiar problem with technology.  Then I read that there was an Internet outage at the Capitol.  Just hilarious.

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It's A.I. Ashley!  Oregon has an A.I. radio station jockey at 95.5.

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A robot that can read you mind?  Try the Mind Reader.

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I've been seeing a lot of MVA crashes lately.  I suspected that increased marijuana use would be one of the reasons. It's been reported before.

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What makes a song a hit?  Can machine learning predict?

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A.I. is only as good as its training.  And who will do the labeling of datasets for accurate training?  The new underclass, that's who.  And if you take shortcuts, you get crappy A.I.

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Slowly, Portland disintegrates.  You can no longer depend on ambulance service in the city.  Why should people pay taxes to the city anymore.  The money needs to go to a private organization that can get things done.  Also, a separate police force that actually gets crime off the streets.  And private jails to put criminals in. We can no longer depend on the city to do this.  A parallel government, since the first one is almost useless, too busy being diverse and full of equity and other bullsh#t.

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Climate change is just a 71 year old guy named Ed.  Who knew, huh?

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For those keeping track, another study showing that bivalent boosters don't last very long.  Only 30% efficacy at 4 weeks, then downhill from there.  Why bother. 

And a German study supports the contention that natural immunity is best. 

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