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Quitting and running away doesn’t work

Quitting and running away doesn’t work

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Are you getting burned out? Is your dream job killing you? Want to run away to a tropical island or pursue your bucket list? What if I told you that you didn’t need to do that – and it may not actually help. Helen Zhao did just that: she quit her dream job, looking to heal burnout and find happiness beyond work. What she discovered was very different.

I was checking off destinations so that I could wear the number of places I’d been like a badge of honor. Then my life would be as worthwhile as the travel influencers I envied, I thought. 

  1. Cut back and shift focus

She found herself burning out while traveling. She eventually slash the remaining 34 countries on her 50 country bucket list in half and focused on quality over quantity. What was the point of seeing so many places if I didn’t truly enjoy them?

Prioritizing well-being meant letting go of metrics you think define your self-worth. She began to measure success through the moments she felt truly alive, at peace, and connected with others, instead of the quantifiable accomplishments that might make my resume and online bio more impressive.

  1. Ignore FOMO, prioritize joy

Stop rushing through things that meet your metrics of being more ‘successful’. Instead of stressing through a day trip to say she had been to a specific famous place, she sat at a cafe reading things she enjoyed. She slept in after a long night with friends with a slow breakfast instead of going on an island tour. She began to enjoy everything more.

  1. Stop trying to monetize/multitask what you’re doing

During the first part of her travels she was constantly trying to formulate pitches and story ideas from her travels. She was still multitasking work.

Instead, she pursued fun topics she didn’t have time to study while working full time: history, politics, real estate investing. She learned to develop an identity completely disconnected from work.

  1. Don’t forget

After she returned home, she started getting sucked back into workaholism. She made time for journaling, walks, and meditation. Instead of worrying about burnout or feeling worthless/unaccomplished while spending this time, she embraces that time to figure out what’s next.

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Local Portland/Oregon Fall festivals and events

Local Portland/Oregon Fall festivals and events

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Enjoy some fun fall festivals!

Sept 12-15 – Mt Angel Oktoberfest – Huge Oktoberfest. Be sure to also visit Mt Angel Monastery.

Sept 13-15 – Oregon Celtic Festival – At about $50/ticket, this is cool but dang expensive

Sept 14th – Mid-Autumn Festival – Experience a day filled with Asian cultural performances, delicious food, unique merchandise, and a beautiful lantern parade.

Sept 14-15 – Polish Festival – Enjoy some amazing delicious food, amazing perogies, and music

Sept 20-22 – Los Roast Green Chili Roasting – order a half or whole bushel or 1 peck of hand-delivered New Mexican green chilis.

2024 PDX Hot Sauce Festival

2024 PDX Hot Sauce Festival

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Every August is the PDX Hot Sauce Festival. It’s a celebration of all things hot and spicy. There are dozens of vendors from around both the local area as well as around the country. It’s interesting to see how many different kinds of hot stuff that people make.

But it’s not just all vendors, there’s a lot of things going on. The local Hammer Brothers WWF-style Wrestling does matches all weekend.

Then there is the contests. The stage of doom hosts actual Guinness World Record attempts to eat the most Carolina Reapers. Or maybe try your hand at bobbing for Reapers, Burning BBQ Pork challenge, or Spicy Tacos from hell.

The star of the show, in my opinion is Ed Curry and his creations. I always stop in because he usually brings a bunch of Carolina Reapers for sale. This year you could buy a bag of 10 reapers for $5

Also present, you can taste test all of his hot sauce creations. All the way up to pure Reaper puree (Reaper Squeezins) and his new Xperience made from the supposedly even hotter Pepper X. I didn’t even see those latter ones on his website yet.

New for this year, he even brought Pepper X Oil, and even Pepper X ‘sludge’ that’s the purest of the Pepper X extract. It comes in a simple printed bottle and is supposed to be the hottest thing in the world (literally and figuratively). I bought a bottle. Lets see how it goes.

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.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FghSUttp6Lc%3Fversion%3D3%26rel%3D1%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26fs%3D1%26hl%3Den-US%26autohide%3D2%26wmode%3Dtransparent
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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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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