Readit News[1]https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120529211645.h...
"the patients who gave blood had a significant reduction in systolic blood pressure (from 148 mmHg to 130 mmHg) as well as reduction in blood glucose levels and heart rate, and an improvement in cholesterol levels (LDL/HDL ratio)."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8994130/
The study specifically does not look at the effect on recipients, though the donation centers do not disallow such donations. My presumption is that the donation is a net positive all around. If study comes to show the contrary, I'll certainly revise my approach.
Regarding the patient load discussion elsewhere, our entire family uses this doctor, we’re in for $200/mo but if we added up the interaction time even with me (a more complicated customer) it’s maybe 5 hours a year + some text communications with the MA / prescription wrangling. Their model seems to be all about effective scaling, I hope it is worth it for them, because my experience is vastly improved.
Strongly disagree with almost everything in this article, but specifically this. The reason people make these choices is not because of slick marketing working against them, it's because the existing process to get medical treatment is paternalistic, hard to navigate and often expensive.
If you want safe and really high quality medical care you should absolutely have a personal physician you have a personal relationship with, who understands your lifestyle, your risk factors for side effects, and your medical needs deeply. How many Americans have that? Maybe a few dozen? The market has responded to just how terrible the existing system is.
A bit of a tangent: I have this here in the US, through a model called Direct Primary Care. I pay $50/mo for a single provider, unlimited visits / communication, and highly discounted labs. She makes house calls on occasion. This doctor is working solely in my interest, and has little concern of insurance, except to help me navigate that system should I need a specialist, prior authorization, etc.
I do worry that it's sustainable, but I think there must by a way to scale up this practice of the general practitioner working in the interest of the patient.
My previous doctor was part of a large health system, who also happens to be directly associated with the large regional insurance provider whom my employer supplied to me without another choice. Every 8 minute visit centered around insurance and billing, with my health seeming to be a distant second. It seemed every visit had to end in some kind of prescription or referral, arrived at quickly and without much discussion. It quickly became clear they were not working in my interest, and I sought other options, eventually landing on the Direct Primary Care model. Now I have full 1 hour visits, and someone who seeks to understand what is happening for me completely, not through the lens of a payer.
This is no different than what amateurs have been doing for a long time. Hopefully they’re not taking in PII or charging anyone for these apps.
I think there are likely opportunities too to have models or system prompts that cater or adapt to the experience level of the person it's working with. "As you interact with the user, determine their relative level of knowledge and experience. If they seem to be relatively inexperienced with software development, be much more aggressive in helping to warn them about and avoid common pitfalls, bad architectural decisions, and security issues."
I suspect it's probably going to enable a lot of poor quality stuff, but it also may to some degree raise the floor of what's being produced at the same time.
I'm probably one of those "heavy users", though I've only been using it for a month to see how well it does. Here's my review:
Large completions (10-15 lines): It will generally spit out near-working code for any codemonkey-level framework-user frontend code, but for anything more it'll be at best amusing and a waste of time.
Small completions (complete current line): Usually nails it and saves me a few keystrokes.
The downside is that it competes for my attention/screen space against good old auto-completion, which costs me productivity every time it fucks up. Having to go back and fix identifiers in which it messed up the capitalization/had typos, where basic auto-complete wouldn't have failed is also annoying.
I'd pay about about $40 right now because at least it has some entertainment value, being technologically interesting.
If what I give it is too open ended, doesn't have enough info, etc, I'll still get a low quality output. Though I find I can steer it by asking it to ask clarifying questions. Asking it to build unit tests can help a lot too in bolstering, a few iterations getting the unit tests created and passing can really push the quality up.
Anything the difficult or complex, and it's really a coinflip if it's even an advantage, most of the time it's just distracting and giving irrelevant suggestions or bad textbook-style implementations intended to demonstrate a principle but with god-awful performance. Likely because there's simply not enough training data for these types of tasks.
With this in mind, I don't think it's strange that junior devs would be gushing over this and senior devs would be raising a skeptical eyebrow. Both may be correct, depending on what you work on.
But what I really appreciate is, I don't have to do the plug and chug stuff. Those patterns are well defined, I'm more than happy to let the LLM do that and concentrate on steering whether it's making a wise conceptual or architectural choice. It really seems to act like a higher abstraction layer. But I think how the engineer uses the tool matters too.
I destroyed them and threw them in a dumpster like that Ron Swanson gif.
All to say, little cellular modems and a small data plan are likely getting cheap enough it's worth being extra diligent about the devices we let into our homes. Probably not yet to the point of that being the case on a tv, but I could certainly see it getting to that point soon enough.