w1ntermute (u/w1ntermute)

w1ntermute commented on 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies techdirt.com/2023/11/21/a... · Posted by u/rntn

w1ntermute · 2 years ago

From the article linked by Techdirt: “executives have sought to almost entirely subordinate clinical case managers’ judgment to the computer’s calculations”

Sounds like the issue is the executives. What does this have to do with “AI”? Also, the company that built this tech (naviHealth) was started in 2012. Their product existed long before large language models were created.

w1ntermute commented on Petrichor en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet... · Posted by u/tosh

w1ntermute · 3 years ago

”“A little-known piece of trivia,” Altman announced. “This smell, after it rains for the first time. You know what’s that called?”
“Is this going to freak me out?” Williams said.
“Petrichor,” Altman said. “It’s my favorite smell. You only get to smell this once or twice a year, because it has to not rain for a while, and then rain. It’s the smell of summers in St. Louis.”
“Petrichor?” Williams said, uncertainly.
“Petrichor,” Altman said.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/y-combinator-sil...

w1ntermute commented on · Posted by u/oska

w1ntermute · 3 years ago

Someone hasn’t used TikTok…or paid attention to anyone in Gen Z on their phone.

w1ntermute commented on Ontario Court Declares the Ontario Math Proficiency Test Unconstitutional otffeo.on.ca/en/news/onta... · Posted by u/Melchizedek

penjelly · 4 years ago

physics for example, teaches people how the world actually works... thermodynamics, electricity, light, all useful information for determining fact from fiction when they turn into adults.

I wasnt even good in these subjects and im still glad i was taught the ideas and can explore them more readily as an adult...

w1ntermute · 4 years ago

It's not that these aren't interesting subjects or potentially useful in adult life. They just shouldn't be the priority. Is it potentially useful in adult life to know how your car's IC engine works? Sure, but nowhere near as useful as knowing how to get a good rate on your car loan.

w1ntermute commented on Across Kazakhstan by rail theguardian.com/travel/20... · Posted by u/sleepyshift

w1ntermute · 4 years ago

Reminds me of this great travel blog from 2008: http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/

The writer traveled from Vienna to Pyongyang by train, giving him 36 unsupervised hours in North Korea.

w1ntermute commented on More than 1,200 Google workers condemn firing of AI scientist Timnit Gebru theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/soylentbeige

zartar · 5 years ago

I find the semi-regular condemnations from employees of big tech companies hollow. If you work for one of these companies and find their behavior unsavory, go work somewhere else - this is actually what might cause executives at these companies to reflect on how they might change course.

The fact that most of these employees could easily get well paying (just not as _ridiculously well paying_) jobs elsewhere to me feels like they are not staying out of necessity, rather they are looking to assuage their conscious through statements like these, and continue collecting their exorbitant pay.

w1ntermute · 5 years ago

It’s just another example of the “participation culture” that modern parenting and social media have made commonplace. Who needs to do anything real when you can just upvote or retweet? You get the same sort of participation trophy that you’ve been taught to aim for since childhood.

w1ntermute commented on We Hacked Apple for 3 Months samcurry.net/hacking-appl... · Posted by u/samwcyo

dsr_ · 5 years ago

July 6 - August 6 - September 6 -- that's 2 months elapsed, not three.

Five people working for 2 months is 10 person-months. Apple paid them just under $52,000, none of which was guaranteed. They had to pay whatever taxes are appropriate for their jurisdictions.

I'd say Apple got an amazing bargain.

w1ntermute · 5 years ago

If they actually did get paid so little, why did they do it? This seems like a terrible use of their time.

w1ntermute commented on Don't Get Stuck stitcher.io/blog/dont-get... · Posted by u/brendt_gd

high_derivative · 5 years ago

Regarding management, it's a bootstrapping issue: The main requirement for an engineering management position is management experience. The easiest way to get it is to stay at one place for 3-4 years. The move based on that experience.

w1ntermute · 5 years ago

There are really three categories of management:

* Line management: are you willing to be the man and promulgate the party line? You can be mostly apolitical in this role.

* Middle management: are you willing to be the pawn of a specific member or two of senior management and do their bidding (which probably isn’t fully aligned with the party line)?

* Senior management: do you know how to intelligently break the rules in order to stand out from the crowd of middle managers? This could be by developing a broad following within the lower levels of the company through self-promotion, through cultivating specific relationships with the CEO and/or board, or by (in rare cases) delivering on highly visible and truly remarkable results for the company.

w1ntermute commented on D.E. Shaw and how computer geeks and English majors transformed Wall St. (2018) nymag.com/intelligencer/2... · Posted by u/yarapavan

viburnum · 5 years ago

There was another famous hedge fund noted for mathematical excellence but it turned out to be a different story entirely ...

w1ntermute · 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Genius_Failed

w1ntermute commented on The FDA's perpetual process machine paulromer.net/fda_perpetu... · Posted by u/jseliger

seehafer · 6 years ago

There are number of conflated regulatory problems in this piece:

1) FDA needs to move its data ingestion into the 21st century (note: large industry can be as resistant to changing current process as bureaucracy). In no rational universe should we have to mail data in 2020

2) In vitro diagnostic regulation is a mess and needs to be revamped top to bottom. Either exempt all Lab Developed Tests, rewrite the law to make them all subject to oversight, or come up with a 3rd path.

3) Emergency Use Authorization needs to be rethought with the ability for either political leadership or FDA to have broad capability to expand the category of what gets covered

w1ntermute · 6 years ago

With respect to point #2, the real reason why revamping any regulatory regime "top to bottom" is difficult is because so much organizational, legislative, and administrative cruft has built up over the years in the federal government that means no one individual has the authority to drive reform. See FDA's discussion paper from Jan 2017 on revamping the LDT regulatory regime (https://www.fda.gov/media/102367/download) for more on the inane complexity created by the federal bureaucracy: "For example, a test made by a conventional IVD manufacturer would be regulated by FDA initially. If a laboratory made a significant modification to that test, it would then be regulated by CMS. If the original manufacturer then made another significant modification, the modification would be regulated by FDA."

Also: "In 2015, FDA established an Interagency Task Force on LDT Quality Requirements with CMS, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health"

Any manager worth his/her salt can tell you that a task force involving four different agencies is unlikely to ever result in any meaningful change. A cornerstone of effective management is to designate one person who is responsible for execution and hold them accountable. This is exactly how the executive branch, from the president on down, is supposed to function (with oversight from the judicial and legislative branches, of course), but few parts of it are like that after centuries of bolting on overlapping agencies and departments.