Category: Tech

LLM Explains It All?

A company that interests me is Open Evidence. They use AI to collect authoritative medical research and process the information for presentation to physicians.

There’s a study that claims Large Language Models that aren’t medically specific generate results that are superior to Open Evidence. As you would expect, Open Evidence isn’t letting that claim go unchallenged.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rigorous-evaluation-of-medical-ai-is-good-ugcPost-7471713096210751489-x_VW/

In other medical information technology news, there’s a good, old-fashioned ransomware hack over at Amazon’s company, One Medical.

https://cybernews.com/security/amazon-one-medical-data-breach/

Beatles Rotator

I recently played my big sister’s original American copy of the 1966 Beatles album Revolver.* It’s in mono, and I was surprised by how good it sounds, considering the damage it endured. Here’s ‘Good Day Sunshine’.

Monitoring the playback with Audacity, I was impressed with how dynamic the sound is. There’s no compression going on here.

For comparison, here is the official online copy of the song.

Looking at the peaks, some loudness compression was apparently added to the recording. The 2009 mono Beatles set reportedly was transferred from the master tapes with dynamic range left intact, so perhaps this is a YouTube effect.

Okay, so let’s find out. What about ‘Good Day Sunshine’ when played from the Beatles 2009 CD mono box set? No loudness compression is confirmed.

* A 60-year-old record on a 50-year-old turntable, with a 30-year-old cartridge and a relatively new stylus.

The Kitsune Channel

I was a first generation Roku customer. Being the sixth company founded by Anthony Wood, he named it the Japanese word for six.

My second generation Roku player on top of my first generation model

Today, I have two Roku sticks and Amazon’s me-too product, the Fire TV stick. (Fire TV has two technical advantages — there is an optional external Ethernet adapter, and the remote can control home theater receivers.)

With today’s announcement, Roku will no longer be the company it was. What’s the Japanese word for fox?

Roku is being bought out by Fox for $22 billion

https://9to5google.com/2026/06/15/roku-is-being-bought-out-by-fox-for-22-billion/

IMPish Tales

Bob Metcalfe rhapsodizes about working on ARPANET interfaces, the pre-Internet project that Bob Taylor headed.

Metcalfe later worked for Taylor at Xerox PARC, where he was a primary developer of what became Ethernet. Bob provides historical context for “America’s Technology Highway,” Route 128.

A Distorted View

How good am I at detecting audible distortion? I’ll go to Germany to find out.

https://www.klippel.de/listeningtest/

To ensure a valid test, I wore a pair of IEMs with vanishing low measured distortion. (The 7Hz x Crinacle Zero:2) This was the result from my first pass.

You reached an audibility threshold of -39 dB. This value is near the mean value of the audibility threshold of all listeners participated in the test. However, there were some other participants that were more sensitive in detecting those distortions. It is very likely that those participants had more experience in careful listening. Listeners who have repeated the test see that a little bit of training will improve their sensitivity for those distortions and reduce their audibility threshold.

Some listeners went all the way down to -69 dB! Now that I’m familiar with the test, and there are other parameters that can be selected, including music, I’ll give it another try later.

Hardware for Software

Back in January, I asked this question and expressed my doubt, regarding Amazon’s use of fiber optic cable.

Light Speed

I was correct in assuming that Amazon is hooking up with Corning for its expansion plans.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/08/amazon-taps-corning-for-op.html

With all of the talk and concern about where processors are made, what about the circuit boards designed to hold those chips?