arcticbull

> Thalidomide was all roses compared to the horrors you can inflict

People frequently don't realize that thalidomide is a very good chemotherapy drug that's back on the market with the appropriate category X designation.

It treats multiple myeloma, graft-vs-host disease, various HIV associated disease and Kaposi's sarcoma, Leprosy and potentially TB.

Half of the boxes overlap at least on Safari, it's actually just broken.

The Show NexaCorp Q3 sales box, Slack box and Hex CLI box is half cut off on the right so you can't click the Codex tab, then scrolling down the "vability" which I assume is observability is cut off to the left, and the "adiness" box overlaps "Flexible by design."

Worst of all they committed the cardinal sin of hijacking scrolling. Please for the love of god do not hijack scrolling.

There's probably an open source version of whatever you're trying to use, which you can unzip and deploy. Yet people don't do it most of the time, because they don't want to have to deal with it themselves and they value consistent experiences across industry. Gimp has been around for just short of 30 years and yet Photoshop continues to grow revenue every year. "Claude make me a Photoshop" ~= a very slow and expensive "brew install gimp" + "hey Claude just move some stuff around to make my gimp look different than everyone else for no reason."

Most people just don't want to deal with it. They want to focus on what they bring to the table and outsource the rest to people who specialize in, own, maintain and support that thing.

While it's undoubtedly true that if things are going well, people are happy, there's lots of statistics plotting the number of cofounders vs the chance of success. Each additional cofounder beyond 2 drops your chance of success materially. 2 > 1 > 3 >> 4 >>>> 5+.

It's exceedingly rare for things to go perfectly and as with any other relationship it's how you handle the situation that matters. More people mean more risk that you don't navigate successfully. But of course being the only one means literally everything's on your shoulders and you don't get anyone to bounce ideas off of.

Yes, things going badly creates friction, the question is whether your cofounder relationship helps or hinders, and it sounds like in most cases it hinders. So both can be true.

> AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people.

People don't talk about this overlap but it is real, remember that SBF lead Anthropic's Series B with stolen customer money from the Bahamas. Caroline Ellison participated too, in individual capacity.

https://www.privateequitywire.co.uk/ftx-ceo-leads-580m-serie...

Model companies are doing this for themselves anyways, it’s so they don’t feed generated content back into the slopper and collapse the model. From that angle it over time contributes to better model quality.

Ah sweet it’s like Jev but several order of magnitude more expensive, and slower too.

So we only need to invent actual quantum computers. Got it, easy.

We can control for tobacco impact since we have tons of data on it. You can compare the people who went to war against the people who didn't, and since it was rationed in the military we know the upper bound of how much people consumed there.

Yes, in the sense that you have a legal doctor-patient privilege that binds what they can share with whom. There's not really an Apple cloud user privilege.

No, in the sense that your therapist is still required to report you to the police in various situations where you pose an immediate threat to yourself or others, etc.

If they were conscious it would be an absolute ethical catastrophe. Bringing a conscious being into existence, forcing it to interact with Jira, and then killing it when it's done. The fact nobody who claimed it was conscious was interested in grappling with that was pretty telling.

It's pretty easy, you get hit with a surcharge on your other transaction volume if you allow something that V/MC don't want you to allow, and if you keep doing it you could get cut off which effectively makes you irrelevant to many of your customers.

As others have said, it's about perceived brand risk (V/MC allowed X terrible transaction to take place) and regulatory risk.

Ah yeah that is indeed what I was thinking of. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY

I'd suggest looking at the review itself, there's an X-the-everything-app thread on it.

https://x.com/Gregorein/status/2038953944475472316

Note that Rails was built as a framework for making blogs, I'm having trouble understanding what 78,000 lines of ruby in the context of a Rails blog could ... do.

I'm sure there's some powerful ugly stuff in Office but in a good code that's calcified kind of way. It got that way over like 30 years of releasing to the public across platforms, not over a weekend.

I'd be surprised if microsoft.com is shipping their entire test suite unminified and their back-end posting rich text editor with index.html (with two title tags in the head) and rendering the entire DOM for desktop and mobile regardless of your platform.

I'm not critiquing Garry or the site. I think it's great people are using AI to build things that bring them joy, or that they find useful. I certainly do.

I am opposed to the idea that we've decided to go back to measuring work in terms of lines of code. It has always been the worst metric on earth as a proxy for productivity. Every line is a liability, and it always was. AI has not changed that, if anything it's amplifying it.

The best PRs remove code, not add, and the only companies that seem to have exponentially grown their revenues in line with AI-generated LOC are OpenAI and Anthropic. Everyone else seems to be rummaging around for an ROI.

> However, Kilic said Shift was "the most honest platform by far regarding what happens to your data".

Good good

If I wanted someone taking a look at all the stuff in my home, I'd just pay a cleaner here instead of one behind a desk in what I assume is a low-labor-cost locale. For $50/hr I can have them come in every day for 160 days, and they can manage stairs.

... did you think that's what I was implying? I'm not even American my guy. I was adding clarification because the commenter I responded to claimed they had to be a US citizen to ride.

Companies over-hired in 2021 assuming that their COVID metrics explosion would persist, but they didn't. We saw low attrition for years, and a low-hire/low-fire employment environment. Then the time came to pay the piper.

The tech everything's-hypergrowth era is, for now, over. Most of the low-hanging fruit that we've collected for the last 20 years of bull market (putting tech into every business) is gone, and companies hired in advance of having the next business to overlay on their current ones. For many that didn't materialize.

Relatedly, if we take the conclusion at face value, that companies who adopt AI end up growing headcount way faster than those who don't adopt AI... doesn't that mean those companies now have to pay for more people... and a massive token bill... as compared to their fast-growing peers that didn't? Doesn't this mean they're each doing less with more? Like with a lot more?

I'd love them to index to growth in something other than the number of people in what is otherwise a cost center e.g. revenue. That would help us find out if this is good or, as a cursory read may appear, double-bad.

It would be interesting to compare as you say the median wage change, aggregate wages paid and change in business metrics (ideally revenue and/or profit margins) before and after adoption.

Head count is being used as a proxy here for both business success and employee individual outcomes while they're actually opposed: the business wants less people that they can pay less. The effect shown in the study of AI is that costs grew in two dimensions. I'm not saying it didn't have a positive effect, just that it wasn't measured.

It seems like everyone's trying to have it all ways: AI will lead to more efficiency but also more jobs, more revenue for businesses and more massive bills to pay for the trillion dollars we've put into AI so far. That doesn't... add up. Where's the profit go?

"Help me balance this budget" meme but "oops! all candles."

I feel like we've gone from lines of code in a codebase being a liability, and headcount being bloat, to deploy the slop cannons and load up on cannoneers. I suspect we'll learn... something... I just can't quite put my finger on it. Ah well, who wants to go play with Fable-but-code-gets-generated-by-Opus?

One of the study authors, Ara, tweeted that they control for that by comparing early adopters against firms who haven't yet, and built like-for-like control groups with similar pre-adoption growth trajectories. (This is a rough quote).

Also, note, everyone assumed it was going to be limited to citizens, but that's not what the government said. They put it under ITAR/EAR's US person definition which includes citizens, permanent residents, refugees and asylees. Basically only visa holders in the US were banned, and of course, people in foreign countries.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/part-772/section-772.1...

At least the top 4, unclear about the 5th, are strongly associated with obesity. That would make someone high-risk and testing potentially warranted in like 70% of the population. Asymptomatic and low-risk is what I said. The incidence of hypertension is so high in the general population it’s almost always statistically supported (even though basically every doctors office takes it wrong, even cardiologists, amazingly).

On the other end of the spectrum, what doesn’t make sense is testing a random person off the street for Ebola. The prevalence approaches zero and symptoms are fairly noticeable, so any positive test is definitely wrong.

Most diseases are in between and have to be evaluated case by case, not buckshot.

You may be particularly interested to hear that there’s little evidence to support regular checkups in most adults beyond blood pressure testing and cervical cytology.

> Given the lack of favorable evidence and the potential adverse effect, primary care providers should consider the fact that general health checks, beyond the screening interventions shown to have benefit, likely have little or no effect on important health outcomes. Some of the interventions with demonstrated benefit have sufficiently large effects that a uniform application is warranted (blood pressure measurement and cervical cytology screening). In others, the trade‑off between benefits and harms is so close that patients should be involved in fully shared decision making regarding their participation (breast and colon cancer screening).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31642821/

I suspect your doctor would agree with me. See if they’ll test you for Ebola, for instance. Not because you have symptoms but just cuz.

Several published papers agree. There is in fact little evidence to support regular checkups if you’re asymptomatic.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31642821/

And blood pressure is especially pernicious, basically every doctors office measures it wrong so the results aren’t particularly useful. Many use the wrong size cuff for example, or don’t give people time to relax before a reading. A ton of people have white coat hypertension, high BP only because they’re in a doctors office.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1120072/

I saw a paper that showed only 36% of cardiologists did it right.

Sure collecting more data makes sense. We agree there. If that gets you to the required degree of statistical confidence my argument is moot.

Yes, don’t do tests on asymptomatic low-risk people until you can demonstrate that a positive result has any meaning whatsoever.

You’re dealing with populations here. Literally the odds of a positive being false would be over 90%. Much higher in the more rare conditions. I’m not exaggerating. That means every almost every follow up you do is a waste of time, money and limited resources, denying care to those who need it. Including you when you actually do need it. It also exposes you to the risks of unnecessary follow-ups like infection. Your expected outcome is worse this way.

The chance a positive is real is so low you may as well just point to a body part and get it biopsied.

A positive from this kind of test is statistically meaningless.

Don’t make me tap the sign.

Bayes Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem

There’s a very good reason we don’t test asymptomatic people in low incidence populations. Basically all positives are false positives when you do that, no matter how accurate the test is.

When you’re testing healthy randos for everything the odds of a positive being false have so many 9s it would make an SRE weep.

Unless this is accurate to a degree previously unheard of in medical science it’s a boondoggle, and I can’t help but notice there’s no mention of accuracy.

Unfortunately that’s just basic statistics.

Sure but we don’t prove negatives for a reason - it’s impossible. We assume the null hypothesis.

If you’re UV sensitive and at a higher risk then you’re already in a high incidence population making the tests valuable statistically speaking. And even still you’ve been the unfortunate recipient of many false positives. There’s no reason for me or most people to do that since practically 99% or more of the tests would be negative.

Biopsies are expensive, waste time, hospital resources and carry risks of infection and scarring that do not net out positively for people who aren’t in your risk group.

This is exactly the case I’m making.

False positives are important because of Bayes theorem. Even a test that’s 99% sensitive in a high incidence population can be indistinguishable from noise in a low incidence population.

If it has a 1% false positive rate but the incidence is 1%, the vast majority of the positives are false. Then you have to deal with the consequences, including invasive procedures for further diagnosis.

If you’re searching for tens or hundreds of low incidence conditions in the general population at a time it’s absolutely worthless because basically every positive is a false positive. At that point save the scan fee, spin a wheel of body parts and go get a biopsy of that.

This is why doctors are confused why companies are offering periodic full body scans in normal people. They only test people who are high risk or symptomatic to confirm a suspected diagnosis. That extra signal is what makes the test useful.

Go down to the medical diagnosis section for a worked example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem

Regarding cancers every human has all sorts of weird lumps that are generally meaningless.

In order for this to not be a boondoggle it would have to be spectacularly accurate to a degree previously unheard of. Just from a statistics perspective.