DeepSeek R1 has hit the AI community like a slow-rolling tsunami wave. First it was intriguing. Then definitely cool. Then the talk of Silicon Valley. Then the hottest thing since the original ChatGPT. Now it's broken out of the tech world and come crashing down on Wall Street. Who knows? Maybe we never needed all ...continue reading "DeepSeek R1 has the world in a tizzy"
According to the World Bank, the most expensive country in the world is Bermuda. The cheapest is Afghanistan. I was a little surprised that Taiwan was so low, and that Russia was as low as India.
After blasting out that impressive bit of anti-Trump invective this afternoon, Colombian president Gustavo Petro has apparently backed down. Easy come, easy go. I have no idea why, aside from the obvious: his advisors persuaded him he was risking economic ruin over nothing much. Who cares if deportees are returned on civilian or military jets? ...continue reading "Colombia rescinds its middle finger to Trump"
When it comes to Twitter diatribes, I think Donald Trump may have met his match in Colombian president Gustavo Petro. Here is his, um, response to Trump's attempts to bully him over military deportation flights. I don't know for sure how good the translation is, but there's a kind of irresistible poetry to it regardless. ...continue reading "Colombia tells Trump to fuck off"
Colombia turned away a military jet full of deportees yesterday. Today Donald Trump went ballistic: President Trump is not messing around when it comes to protecting America’s Homeland. pic.twitter.com/BFn1INKJcW — Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) January 26, 2025 There are two critically important points here. First, Colombia turned away the flights solely because they were military. The ...continue reading "Trump starts fight with Colombia over nothing"
Hear me out. The title of the screenplay is Revenge of the Danes. It's the story of a plucky squadron of frigates and gunboats in the Royal Danish Navy who use a combination of high technology and good old-fashioned ingenuity to sneak up on the US military base on Greenland. The Americans fight back bravely, ...continue reading "Here’s how Trump’s Greenland gambit will play out"
Where did COVID come from? The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there. But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying ...continue reading "The CIA changes its mind on COVID"
Declining fertility is the shiny new crisis we're all supposed to be losing sleep over, so I've been reading a bit about it lately. Here in the US, fertility looks like this: The basic state of things is that after the Baby Boom fertility was flat and stable until 2007, when it suddenly began a ...continue reading "Why has fertility plummeted in the US and other rich countries?"
I have some excellent and unexpected news. It's been six weeks since I started the Tecvayli treatment and last night I got back my first M-protein result. The result was...... . . . no result. Happily, since I've been through this before, I know what that means: My M-protein level is below the detection threshold ...continue reading "Health update"
The Washington Post reports tonight on Donald Trump's latest effort to make sure the government has nobody left who acts impartially—even in positions where being impartial is the whole point: The White House late Friday fired the independent inspectors general of at least 12 major federal agencies in a purge that could clear the way ...continue reading "Trump purges IG corps in Friday night massacre"
It looks like Pete Hegseth has survived: It's a tie, so vice president J.D. Vance gets to break it, making it 51-50. Please give a warm welcome to the most aggressively unqualified Secretary of Defense in American history.
More idiocy from Donald Trump: Trump: "I'll be signing an EO to begin process of fundamentally reforming & overhauling or maybe getting rid of FEMA. I think, frankly, FEMA is not good. When you have a problem like this, you want to use your state to fix it & not waste time calling FEMA..I think ...continue reading "FEMA should get bigger, not go away"
When Paul Krugman left the New York Times last year, it was kind of weird. He wrote a column saying the next one would be his last and then just disappeared. Did he suddenly learn he had six months to live? Was he unwilling to endure four years of column writing under Donald Trump? Or ...continue reading "We’ve finally learned why Paul Krugman quit the Times"
Elon Musk recently sent an email update to the staff of X: Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even. I'm . . . impressed. Seriously. Sure, this is all pretty lousy, but I thought X was losing considerable sums of money. If they're genuinely breaking even they've exceeded my ...continue reading "X is making money!"
Donald Trump is in town (i.e., California) today to kvetch some more about how we need to "open the spigot" and let more water flow from north to south. I gather that yesterday he even talked about "the snow caps and Canada," whatever that means. Canada is a thousand miles away and we certainly don't ...continue reading "A (very) brief primer on California water"
Nothing big today. I got a new PSA test and it's nice and low: I think anything under 3 or 4 is fine, but still, the lower the better. Everything seems to be going nicely on the prostate front.
President Trump has ordered a temporary hiring freeze throughout the federal government. That's not too unusual. Within HHS he's also ordered a halt to all external communications. That's a little more unusual, but not unheard of. But keep drilling down and you get to the National Institutes of Health, the country's premier medical research center. ...continue reading "Trump takes a sledgehammer to the NIH"
How long will it take LA to rebuild in the aftermath of this month's wildfires? Here are a few comparisons from recent fires: Three years after the Marshall Fire destroyed 1,105 homes in Boulder County, about two-thirds have been rebuilt.... It took nearly seven years to completely rebuild after a 2012 fire that destroyed hundreds ...continue reading "It will take many years to rebuild Los Angeles"
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