Posts in: rss

Blogroll updates

In addition to the categories listed on the blogroll my RSS reader has one labeled “New” which acts as a saucer for my feed subscriptions. I end up deleting quite a few of these — the post that got me interested may not be representative of the whole thing Which brings up an interesting question of whether or not blogs are ergodic. Let that be an excercise for the reader. — but some do move on. Below are a few of those.

Stories & Journals

Economy & Finance

  • Citation Needed by Molly White, “a researcher, software engineer, and prominent critic of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based projects”.

Reading & Writing

  • Note to Self by Gina Trapani, “a writer and programmer based in New York City”.

Science & Medicine

  • Aaron Cheng, MD by Aaron Cheng, “a classical hematologist and clinical investigator”.

Philosophy & Religion

Hardware & Software

An honorable mention goes to the Bear Blog Discovery feed which will forever remain in the “New” category as new blogs keep bubbling up. That feed is also the reason “Hardware & Software” blogs overrepresented in the above list. My preferred platform, micro.blog, also has a Discovery feed, but since it tends to promote micro posts (duh) it is there more to find new people to follow on micro.blog itself rather than the feed reader.

So, any pointers to non-technical blog chains and other discovery mechanisms would be much appreciated!

Tuesday links, science and medicine

Sunday links, clinical trials edition

Drugs which look great in those cellular machinery flow charts with boxes and arrows pointing every which way, and which may even cure a few genetically monstrous and wholly artificial lab mice, tend to flop where it matters. Lowe links to 11 such examples and writes in more detail about the twelfth.

An overly long article ᔥNintil with which I don’t completely agree For example, Kroetsch describes the role of a site investigator as resembling “that of a glorified data entry clerk - the investigator’s primary responsibility is gathering the data that the drug company needs and sending it to them”. This is incorrect: site investigators usually have clinical research coordinators and data managers to do it for them. But this deserves a post of its own. but which nevertheless provides a good overview of the many things wrong with how clinical trials are being conducted in the US, the biggest one being that they are reinventing the wheel each and every time they are done. The “lean trial” proposal at the end matches my own thinking.

Teslo picks up on the tech bro magical thinking streak in which things you don’t sufficiently understand seem eminantly solveable using the most recent technological developments. Five years ago it was electronic medical records and blockchain, now it’s clinical trials and AI. The article gives the many reasons why things are not that simple. Now, if we all agreed on the set of LLM prompts that would provide an unbiased protocol and informed consent form review thus eliminating as many people from the loop as possible, well, then we may be on to something.

If someone qualifies for euthanasia, should they also not be eligible for every expanded acces, compassionate use, right-to-try scheme imaginable? Obviously: yes. Maybe not so obviously: there is a branch of my subspecialty aptly named desperation oncology which in the vast majority of cases leads to false hope, financial ruin and, worst of all, time misspent in doctors' offices and infusion clinics instead with your loved ones. As a doctor and a human being I am partial to life, so I see state-assisted dying programs like Canada’s MAID as monstrous, but “you’d rather be dead so here, take this drug” is only a half-step above that qualifier and leads to the bad reputation of experimental therapies.

Select quotes from "a slop tax?" (sic!) by Aidan Walker

AI is currently entering our civilization as a synthetic, dazzling image of a fire projected on a wall, and the tech people are saying “look, it’ll cook everything and keep you warm” as you stand wearing mittens holding a raw steak. Meanwhile, you watch those same people drown the embers of the ancestral hearth fire, around which you once gathered with your family while the chowder-pot simmered, with gallons of freezing water.

There also needs to be accountability: Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg should go to prison. I’m not even sure for what, but these men are clearly the kind of person the world’s folkloric traditions warn us about, demonic and hollow, a threat to the social order. We need deterrence, because right now people look up to these guys and aspire to be like them.

AI serves as a source of cheap and “good enough” intellectual and emotional labor. Since we increasingly don’t provide that stuff to each other through systems because they have been plundered by rich people, AI plays an important social role. It is to thinking and feeling what McDonald’s is to eating.

If we’re living in a crisis of loneliness, bad mental health, and plummeting media literacy, then the arts are the number-one thing that can help solve those issues.

Here is Walker’s article, and here is the Slop Tax proposal from one Mike Pepi, whose Substack-hosted blog posts are delightfully short.

Thursday links, AI and immigration

The best description of the conundrum America is in and the future of the American dream I have seen, accounting for the difference between “thin” (superficial) and “thick” culture. Good bit about immigration too:

Our tolerance for thin differences is also why immigration works better here than in other countries. That is especially true of front-row immigrants (highly educated), since they are leaving cultures they didn’t fit into at a thick level (entrepreneurial). They have self selected for being a natural American, at a thick level.

My own thoughts about and experience with immigration and the American dream match the above.

AI begets AI, as previously noted. Papers will be “safer”. Nuance will be lost. The comments to the post are just as enlightening.

No nuance here either. Altman is so unabashedly anti-human that any of his public appearances are right out of a CS Lewis essay or story.

A new RSS reader ↬John Gruber which I am yet to check out. I do like the idea behind it, which tries to tame Dave Winer’s river of news a full two decades after he described the concept. I am less enthusiastic about the website copy: there is so much of it, and it is written in just such a way that it smells strongly of LLM assistance. I don’t think I mind it that much — though my skin still crawls when I see a “not this but that” phrase — and will chalk it up to the font-overload era of 1990s computing when we were just figuring out how to use the many typefaces available.

Monday links, science, technology and cults

Saturday links, FT gift edition

  • Michael Stott: Will pressure from Trump cause Cuba to finally buckle? We visited Cuba 12 years ago and impressions from that visit now seem terribly quaint. A horrible regime doing horrible things to good people.
  • Steven Simon: How ‘homeland’ put America on the path to illiberalism. My favorite T-shirt is almost as old as the Department of Homeland Security — should it not have been the first one to go if one were to cut down on the number of government agencies? As Cory Doctorow recently wrote: “…things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children.”
  • Laura Bates: How tech turned against women. Not surprising to anyone who’s spent 5 minutes scrolling through a large enough men-only group chat. Out of 20 men at least two will be pervs — enough to poison the stream through mutual encouragement.
  • Janan Ganesh: What social media gave us. An avenue in which to spot the ocasional flash of insight from an unlikely intellectual, mostly. But:

Notice that I have used the past tense about social media in much of this column. To my mind, it is dead, as I quit it long ago. That is a move to be recommended. (Don’t announce that you are leaving, though. Just leave. You are not Adele cancelling that last Vegas residency of hers.)

Indeed.

Friday links, quick hits

  • Martha Lane Fox: The Price of initiative just collapsed. On the lag between invention and implementation, from printing press to AI.
  • Scott Shambaugh: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me. A taste of what’s possible, with follow-up.
  • Steve Blank: You Only Think They Work For You. About contracted service providers. The article is about public relations, but applies just as well to contract research organizations (CROs) and these complex dynamics are part of the reason clinical trials are so expensive.
  • Andrew Gelman: The 80% power lie. A clear example of why frequentist statistics, so favored by conservative regulators, institutional review boards and scientific review committees, are more often than not based on false assumptions.
  • Dr. Drang: Chinese New Year and Ramadan. The pseudonymous doctor often shifts between programming and scripting languages, from R through Python to Mathematica which coincidentally matches my own amateur programmer journey. For this post he used Emacs Lisp and I am very much interested in Emacs and Lisp right now due to recent experimentation with Linux. Saliency FTW.

Tuesday links, on science, medicine, technology and a bit of something extra

Why no scientist should hang their hat on a single pet theory, with real-world examples. The same problem haunts the world of biotech even as its denizens claim their superiority at drug development.

About a recent Nature Medicine article which found that LLMs were no better than Google at helping patients diagnose and manage their self-reported maladies. The reasons are those that I suggested two and a half years ago — ChatGPT can give you the correct answer from a properly structured clinical vignette, but the art and science of medicine are transferring the reality in front of you — the patient’s haphazard story, their hodge poge of medical records, the subtle physical exam findings — into something salient. Not saying AI won’t get there at some point, but it clearly still needs work.

Rao has collected 101 (!?) of his best Twitter threads and a few hundred single tweets into a book. A note on the title page says:

This book is LLM-friendly. Point your LLM to venkateshrao.com/twitter-book if you want it to explore it. A full interactive archive, explorable via an AI oracle, is under development.

Living up to his call to be (slightly) monstrous.

Yes, it is a person I hate making a good point, which is that the brutalist architecture of L’Enfant Plaza is out of place so close to the National Mall and should be kept where it belongs. I even prefer the proposed neoclassicist style to what Trump’s ego would want, which I imagine to be a Dubai And even Dubai would be better than what’s in the President’s id. on the Potomac.

Thursday links, hypothetical