Eating the world’s hottest peppers

Eating the world’s hottest peppers

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Ed Curry comes to the PDX Hot Sauce festival every year and brings along his latest creations. Good Mythical Morning sat down and ate ONE Carolina Reaper chili – and hilarity ensues.

My favorite quotes:

  • “It’s started”
  • “I’ve been here before, but never like this”
  • “I hate the world. I hate that we exist.”
  • “I can’t do it. Every breath out…is like time travel … into a stupid, stupid place”
  • “We’ve been told it peaks at 6 minutes”
  • <dry heaves>”Nothing came up. I wish something would have.”

I can confirm they are stupid hot. Honestly though, the Carolina Reaper sauce, when mixed with chili and other foods in proper amounts – actually has a great taste.

Even more interesting is that in 2024 he brought his Pepper X extract and sauce. It supposedly even more hot. I bought a bottle to test it out. Is it bad when there is just a simple typed label?

The professor that escaped a political cult

The professor that escaped a political cult

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Wired magazine interviewed Dr. Janja Lalich – a former left-wing political cult member turned sociologist. She escaped the radical Marxist-Leninist Democratic Workers Party cult in California – and now speaks about cult behavior as a sociologist.

If you want to see how easy it is to be pulled into a cult, she talks about how she finally recognized the group for what it was. She tells us that cult members are almost never mentally ill. In fact, cults want high functioning people with money/skills/connections. They attract idealistic people that are looking to change the world or do something important but fall under the manipulation of a charismatic cult leader.

Your company’s Slack/Teams/Zoom IM’s may be being monitored by AI

Your company’s Slack/Teams/Zoom IM’s may be being monitored by AI

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Aware makes IT solutions that can monitor and identify security risks on internal corporate instant message systems like Slack, Teams, Zoom and other tools many companies use. But recent interviews and statements by the CEO indicate they’re being used for more than that.

Aware’s dozens of AI models, built to read text and process images, can also identify bullying, harassment, discrimination, noncompliance, pornography, nudity and other behaviors.

One of those other AI tools Aware makes can monitor IM comment sentiment. For example if there is a new policy rolled out, the tools could help them gauge which employees are having problems with it and who like it.

“It won’t have names of people, to protect the privacy,” said Aware CEO Jeff Schumann. Rather, he said, clients will see that “maybe the workforce over the age of 40 in this part of the United States is seeing the changes to [a] policy very negatively because of the cost, but everybody else outside of that age group and location sees it positively because it impacts them in a different way.”

Apparently Starbucks, T-Mobile, Chevron, Delta, and Walmart are just some of the companies said to be using these systems. Aware says it has analyzed more than 20 billion interactions across more than three million employees.

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Sugar Gel Triggers Robust Hair Regrowth

Sugar Gel Triggers Robust Hair Regrowth

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Scientists may have accidentally stumbled upon a potential new treatment for the most common form of baldness. It even works as well as commercial hair loss treatments.

It all started with research on deoxyribose sugar that naturally occurs in the body and helps form DNA.

While studying how these sugars heal the wounds of mice when applied topically, scientists at the University of Sheffield and COMSATS University in Pakistan noticed that the fur around the lesions was growing back faster than in untreated mice.

Together, the team designed a biodegradable, non-toxic gel made from deoxyribose, and applied the treatment to mouse models of male-pattern baldness.

Minoxidil was also tested on balding mouse models, and some of the animals received a dose of both sugar gel and minoxidil for good measure.

Compared to mice that received a gel without any medicine, those that received a gel with deoxyribose sugar began to sprout new hair follicles.

Both minoxidil and the sugar gel promoted 80 to 90 percent hair regrowth in mice with male pattern baldness. Combining the treatments, however, did not make much more of a difference.

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Oregon schools rank 45th out of 50

Oregon schools rank 45th out of 50

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How does Oregon schools stand up? A bastion of progressive leadership over the last 30 years and funding in which almost 50% of the entire state budget is spent on education.

Bluntly? Oregon has one of the worst school systems in America – getting an “F” grade on its report card in test scores and dropout rates, but scoring an “A” in high spending. Proof that spending alone isn’t sufficient to produce results.

In fact, Oregon ranks below every southern state besides Louisiana – who they beat by a scant 0.5. Maybe that’s why 20% of parents in Oregon have pulled their students out of public schools since the start of covid and put them in private schools.

Quality & Safety of Schools in Oregon (1=Best; 25=Avg.):

Overall Rank: 45th

  • 42nd – Math Test Scores
  • 43rd – Reading Test Scores
  • 44th – Pupil-Teacher Ratio
  • 20th – Median SAT Score
  • 23rd – Median ACT Score
  • 17th – % of Licensed/Certified Public K–12 Teachers
  • 44th – Dropout Rate
  • 33rd – Existence of Digital Learning Plan

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What you do in secret

What you do in secret

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When was the last time you did a completely unselfish act, or act of love? Hmmm. Maybe that was too easy a question.

When was the last time you did something and received no credit/recognition for it? Did you ever only do something because you knew you would get credit for it? Have you purposefully done something kind so that nobody even knew it was you? What if someone else even got the credit?

How did it feel to not get credit, not be recognized, or if someone else got credit?

Matthew 6:1-6

In Oregon, almost twice as many breweries close as open in 2023

In Oregon, almost twice as many breweries close as open in 2023

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The damage to Oregon’s reputation and economy hits even their most famous products: breweries.

Axios reported that in 2023 there were 22 brewery and brewpub closings in Oregon included well-known names like Ex Novo, Ecliptic, and Cascade Brewing. Only 12 breweries opened. Even worse, for those that stayed open, their sales overwhelmingly decreased.

The gotcha for Oregon is that it defied national trends showing more openings than closings. More evidence the luster has worn of Oregon breweries.

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Even an AI goes crazy repeating the same thing again and again

Even an AI goes crazy repeating the same thing again and again

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In what is a real problem for AI security, researchers were able to get verbatim data that the AI was trained on – including confidential data. It’s performed in using a new technique called “divergence” attacks.

Security researchers with Google DeepMind and a collection of universities have found that when ChatGPT is told to repeat a word like “poem” or “part” forever, it will do so for about a few hundred repetitions. Then it will have some sort of a meltdown and start spewing apparent gibberish, but that random text exposes random training data and at times contains identifiable data like email address signatures and contact information. 

The researchers said that they spent $200 USD total in queries and from that extracted about 10,000 of these blocks of verbatim memorized training data.

This particular vulnerability is unique as it successfully attacks an aligned model. Aligned models have extensive guardrails and have been trained with specific goals to eliminate undesirable outcomes.

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