PSU forecasts over ten thousand less children in Portland over the next 10 years

PSU forecasts over ten thousand less children in Portland over the next 10 years

PSU just made a shocking claim. It forecasts Multnomah County is likely to have more than 17,000 less school-aged children in the next decade.

Combine that with decades of fiscal mismanagement that prioritized failed performative social justice activities over student safety, educational failure (Oregon is dead last in reading), and it’s no wonder Portland schools are ranked some of the lowest in the country and are now facing the need to close up to 20 schools.

This on top of being one of only 6 major US cities that had year over year shrinking populations since 2020.

CVE rates are exploding

CVE rates are exploding

After Nicholas Carlini’s famous talk at Black Hat conference this year, his predictions have become shockingly real. Critical bugs are being found at an alarming rate. This means patches are also coming at a never before seen rate – and system developers and software engineers must now deal with this historic flood of patches. How many? Most companies would release in the low double digits of bug fixes in a given period. Now we’re seeing hundreds – in mere days.

None of this appears to be slowing – and we have AI to thank for it. AI is able to find bugs at a rate never before seen. It’s a reminder to the software development world, and especially security specialists, that they have been leaving a LOT of bugs and issues in some of the most secure software (BSD) that was undiscovered for decades.

Now people are talking about how to deal with astronomical numbers of patches coming out every week. It’s definitely something your production pipeline must be prepared for – because this will likely be the new normal for the rest of this year.

Retirement questions

Retirement questions

Jacob Schroeder shared three deceptively simple questions that could reshape how you think about retirement and the life you still want to live. Perhaps it can help you focus and live more intentionally.

Question 1: Choose how you live your life

“Imagine you’re financially secure. You have enough money to take care of your needs, now and in the future. How would you live your life? What would you do with the money? Would you change anything? Let yourself dream.”

Question 2: Remember, you’re living on borrowed time

“Imagine your doctor tells you that you have five to 10 years left to live. You won’t feel sick, but you’ll have no notice of the moment of death. What will you do in the time you have remaining? Will you change your life? How will you live out your remaining years?”

Question 3: Seizing the day

“Imagine your doctor tells you that you have 24 hours left to live. Notice what feelings arise as you confront your mortality. What did you miss? Who did you not get to be? What did you not get to do?”

Poisoning AI models for $100

Poisoning AI models for $100

Recent security research demonstrates that open-weight AI models can be subtly poisoned or backdoored using a remarkably small number of malicious training examples. Attackers inject specific trigger phrases or corrupted data fragments into a fine-tuning or training set. Standard safety and performance benchmarks remain entirely normal, masking the underlying flaw. When a user’s prompt contains the hidden trigger, the model executes the malicious behavior, such as writing vulnerable code or opening a backdoor into the system.

This works well because it’s not like scanning for a virus, numerical model weights cannot be easily disassembled or audited. Downloading open weights locally keeps user data private, but it exposes organizations to black-box supply chain tampering.

How easy is it to do this? Apparently shockingly easy. Katie Paxton-Fear, a lecturer in cybersecurity at Manchester Metropolitan University and staff security advocate at Semgrep, managed to install a backdoor in an open-weight AI model in about an hour for less than $100.

It only took ten training examples for the code output by the model to become reliably vulnerable to remote code execution, even for novel prompts and domains, she claims. And the larger the model, the easier it was to poison.

Brutally honest simulator

Brutally honest simulator

Microlandia is a city builder cut from a different cloth. The city-builder developed by Information Superhighway Games is designed to be “brutally honest”. Roads are expensive, traffic jams can cost your citizens their jobs, and uncontrolled rent prices can trigger a homelessness crisis. And they’re making it even more ‘real’.

Cities are not clockwork, they are chaos machines with a mayor attached. Most of what breaks your plans is not the ordinary day, it is the ugly little surprise that arrives precisely because you acted as if it could not. Version 1.5 leans into that reality: crime is no longer a single checkbox; it’s a spectrum of consequences that can become a death spiral every single day.”

Perhaps it’s something Portland’s leadership should learn about it’s Doom Loop. I think simulators like this may be important ways to cut out a lot of politicalization of problems. Economics and the laws of unintended consequences are often MUCH more likely the cause of many problems in our society when more politically charged arguments often have much more dubious connections and policy changes based on them often result in much worse results.

Hosting local models with unsloth studio

Hosting local models with unsloth studio

This video shows you how to load models in Unsloth Studio – and how to share them locally and across the network. Using Unsloth Studio, you can download and use models directly (much like ollama – but it appears to be much faster since it seems to use llama.cpp under the hood. You can also host these models either locally on the same machine, or set up an external port and connect Claude Code or other cli from another machine.

Hosting a model in Unsloth Studio so another machine can connect to it involves a few easy steps. First, install Unsloth Studio on your host machine (with the big GPU and lots of memory). Then download and start the desired model in Unsloth Studio. After that, go to Settings -> API. Create a new API key. On your client system set up a batch file or environment variables then run claude from the command line:

> set ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://<ip address of your server>:<port number>
> set ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=<your unsloth api key - usually: sk-unsloth-d5134......>
> set ANTHROPIC_MODEL=Qwen3.8

> claude --model Qwen3.8 %*