dmschulman

It's another revenue stream for the car company. Data brokers love car telemetry and GPS data and the car companies know it. Both parties have struck up a rather cosy relationship: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/10/data-brok...

Don't change color, kitty.

Keep your color, kitty.

Stay that pretty gray.

Don't change color, kitty.

Keep your color, kitty.

Keep sickness away.

At least it can answer "who won the 2020 presidential election" honestly

The FDA was already in bad shape as far as inspections go. In 'The Secret Life of Groceries' (published in 2020) I believe the statistic was that the people responsible for keeping our food system safe only have the capacity to inspect around 5% of domestic agricultural and food processing operations nation-wide. That speaks more to the amount and size of agri-business in the United States than the FDA's capacity, but it also doesn't mean great things for the federal government's ability to preemptively intervene in most cases.

DOGE cuts to FDA, HHS, FSIC, FTC, EPA, and more have inevitably made this problem much worse.

My dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 2019 and thankfully caught wind of it in its early stages due to an eagle-eyed nurse going over some routine blood work and noting his liver numbers were off, he should talk to the doctor.

You can imagine how hard it was to be sick in the early days of COVID, much less have to go to the hospital on a regular basis to receive chemotherapy for hours on end. Our family was lucky that he responded well to treatment at least and we had a few extra years with him before he passed away in late 2023.

Cancer is a terrible thing but pancreatic cancer is especially horrible due to the difficulty in detection when you're in otherwise good health. The fact that intense medical research into retrovirals has yielded something so significant as the RAS-inhibitor is nothing short of miraculous.

The purpose of the ACA was to get more people to sign up for health insurance by creating plans everyone could access regardless of employment status or income. Solving the healthcare crisis in this country from top to bottom is going to take more than an act of Congress.

Also necessary to remember the ACA was only passed because of Democratic support in 2010. Republicans hacked away at the proposal before it became law, kneecapping any real institutional changes it had contained, and have effectively killed it since becoming the majority in the House and Senate in 2024. That bipartisan support piece is required in order for anything meaningful to happen.

There's a multitude of evidence that points to the success of the ACA from a cost perspective (among other things).

Cost of healthcare for individuals is not a good metric to judge by. The ecosystem of hospitals, patients, doctors, insurers, health systems, and the federal government is complex and you're not going to get a clear picture of the overall impact of the ACA by looking as something as simple as cost savings.

One example, hospitals are required to treat patients whether or not they hold insurance. The hospital foots the bill for that care and it's a major reason why hospitals shut down (especially in underserved communities). Getting more people on insurance plans was a direct factor is keeping many struggling hospitals and health systems afloat.

https://www.statnews.com/2019/03/22/affordable-care-act-cont...

https://www.networkforphl.org/news-insights/the-affordable-c...

https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/chart-book-accomplishme...

I just launched my digital media shelf on my personal website, a catalog of my favorite books, movies, records, podcasts, and more. Lots of fun to build despite some false starts and fits:

https://dmschulman.com/shelf/

Funny you should mention this. Benn Jordan, on the heels of his Flock camera research, reverse engineered a non-flock ALRP unit and built his own system using some off the shelf parts, a tablet, and 3D printer. He did it mostly as an experiment but also due to the fact that Flock's algorithm for image detection is astoundingly bad and has a high incident of reading plates incorrectly.

There are a handful of open-source models for license plate detection, I forget exactly which model outperformed the rest, but it was an excellent watch and help me really understand just how inefficient these commercial systems are and how easy they can be to defeat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ

Have we colonized Mars yet? Asking for a friend.

I read this as "why are they going after a soldier who made $30k when they could be going after guys who made seven figures off of expertly timed trades on going to war with Iran"

One of the biggest accounts on X hosts one of the most listened to podcasts on Spotify/Apple and has a huge following that's grown exponentially since 2023. He's an active Holocaust denier, proud antisemite, and dined with the president and members of his cabinet on more than one occasion.

To say there's no growing movement towards Nazi and anti-Jewish ideologies is to be willfully ignorant of the world around you.

Your internal organs can't keep up with that kind of mass fluctuation, for one. Keep an eye on your kidneys.

Taking continuing education credits to check a box for retaining professional licensure and educating yourself about emerging and novel concepts in your field are two vastly different things. If anything, CE helps professionals update their knowledge base regarding existing processes and procedures.

Hey now, I'm still reading the booK!

It's been interesting to watch some of Wynn-William's claims be vindicated by recent court decisions about the addictive and manipulative qualities of Meta and Google's products. She left the company in 2017, and along with her many other allegations about Facebook and their executive team, had a good amount of information in the book about the reasoning, rationale, and management decisions that led to allowing advertisers to hyper target "coveted" demographics of tweens and children (among other claims).

Facebook, according to Wynn-Williams, sold advertisers on the fact that they could target young girls who post and then remove selfies from their services in order to market to demographics who were likely experiencing depression and negative feelings about their body image.

Woosh

In addition to all the other answers here, foreign governments would fall over themselves to get this kind of data.

Additionally that kind of public trust only works if you have a government operating under the constraints of a legal framework, and to a lesser extent, an ethical framework. When a government serves the whims of an individual and instead of the function of their office, shirking agreed upon laws, etc, then you no longer have a government serving the people.

Google Glass failed because they made the user look like they were wearing a high tech computer on their face ala Dragon Ball Z. It looked odd. Meta and Snap learned from this, but it had nothing to do with smartphone cameras not being part of daily life.

The first iPhone was 2007. Google Glass came out in 2013

One thing I've noticed is a large difference between what's served on Facebook's desktop site and what's served on their mobile version. I don't use the app, I just log into facebook.com on my phone, but the mobile version is serving 100% more of this AI slop than on desktop.

I think it's obvious why given the way users interact with sites/apps on their devices vs on desktop (they want to make FB mobile as TikTok-like as possible), but it's really striking how much of Facebook on mobile is just a bunch of AI slop at this point. I see some creep in on desktop too, mostly within the Reels/Shorts section (same creators/videos on both platforms, that is), but to see my recommended feed content be so vastly different indicates a lot to me about how the algorithm interprets user behavior and a lot of Meta's thinking about mobile audiences.

EDIT: mind you I don't follow a single topic or favorite anything on the platform, the content being served/recommended to me is purely based (as far as I can tell) on gender/demographic info they know about me and user behavior.