Here is a short blog post in an enthusiastic style about “My browser is now able to write blog posts for me”:

You read that right! I have discovered a new feature in my browser that allows me to write blog posts with just a few clicks. It’s amazing!

How does it work? Well, it’s simple. I just type in the topic of my blog post and the style I want it to be written in. Then, I press a button and voila! My browser generates a blog post for me in seconds.

The best part is that the blog posts are original, engaging and informative. They are not copied from anywhere else on the web. They are written by an intelligent system that learns from millions of sources and adapts to my preferences.

I can edit, tweak and customize the blog posts as much as I want. I can also add images, links and other elements to make them more attractive. The possibilities are endless!

This feature has saved me so much time and effort. I no longer have to worry about writer’s block or deadlines. I can create as many blog posts as I want without breaking a sweat.

If you want to try this feature for yourself, you can find it here: www.bing.com/blog-writ…

Trust me, you won’t regret it. It’s the best thing that ever happened to blogging!

A few things:

• This was supposed to be a “short” draft. Bing and I clearly have a different understanding of how short should a “short” blog post be.
• Bing interprets enthusiasm as “exclamation points”! It should add a subtlety slider.
• The options for tone are “Professional”, “Casual”, “Enthusiastic”, “Informational”, and “Funny”. Can it trully be called a blog writing tool without “Cynical”, “Snarky, “Caustic”, and “Blowhard”?
• The URL just redirects to its namesake search engine. Poor product placement.
• There is also an “Add to site” button at the bottom that as of yet does nothing. Good.
• It can also do paragraphs, emails, and ideas and, full disclosure, I have already used it once today to generate the first draft for a paragraph I needed for work, and it’s only 8am!

It is far from being the best thing to have happened to blogging(!) per se, but I’d call it a contender ⊕ To be clear, against meager competition. for the best work tool the 21st century has so far produced.

For Valentine’s Day, The Washington Post decided to write about a promising new male contraceptive drug being studied in mice. That’s fine. What’s unusual, bizarre, and a bit of a troll is hanging a red banner over the front page presenting it as breaking news. Seriously, WaPo?

Roses are red,
    Violets are blue,
Guess who had a flooded basement
    On Super Bowl night.

I don’t watch American football, but every plumber in Washington D.C. does!

Did the US military shoot down a literal UFO over Alaska a few days ago or was I dreaming? The headline looks real enough.

Funny that it happened a week after we started our X-Files rewatch. I’m primed for news like this.

A Skynet update:

• As of yesterday, GPT-3 (or is it 4?) is part of Bing, for which there is now a waitlist.
• Google is scrambling to keep up, with a press conference scheduled for today and a release “in the coming weeks”.
• Meta is feeling left out.

Popcorn, please.

One of the reasons why 24-hour time is better than the am/pm shenanigans the English-speaking world insists on is that it would avoid this type of embarrassment: a haiku competition submission form closing at noon when it was clearly meant to close at midnight.

The allure to report anything as a medical breakthrough is strong. So strong that even the Financial Times can’t avoid it:

New diagnostic technology that uses fibre optics to find the causes of heart disease has begun ⊕ Emphasis mine. clinical testing at London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

The iKOr device, developed at Barts Health and University College London, measures blood flow around the heart. Researchers say it could eventually help many thousands of patients suffering from cardiovascular symptoms such as chest pains, whose cause cannot be identified with current techniques.

“This new device is a game-changer in how we manage heart disease, making it a lot easier to assess the health of a person’s heart,” said Anthony Mathur, clinical director for interventional cardiology at Barts.

Three patients have undergone testing to date, out of 10 planned in the first phase. Another 100 may, subject to regulatory approval, before the device could potentially become commercially available, if it’s demonstrated to work. There is, it goes without saying, no clinical data published to date.

How does this change the game, exactly, when we don’t yet know if it works? The use of undeserved superlatives in cancer drug reporting is well documented so it’s not a surprise to see cardiology, that other lucrative medical subspecialty, being much the same.

What is a surprise is seeing the usually reliable FT falling down to the level of The New York Times in spreding medical jingoism. How interesting that in both cases it was a local hospital — Memorial Sloan Kettering for NYT, St Bart’s for FT — serving as the source. So interesting that I have to think there were some personal behind-the-scenes goings on.

Yes, yes, America has terrible health care — even a tech podcast says so — while paying an order of magnitude more for it than other rich countries. But hear me out: what if the costs are so high because Americans are (unsuccessfully) trying to buy their way out of poor policy decisions, from dependence on cars, to the early 2000s' promotion of opioids, to the widespread availability of cheap but nutrient-less calories, and no amount of fiddling with who pays for what in healthcare will be able to fix that?

Which is to say: it’s fine to look at specific costs and specific outcomes — I have done so myself — but what exactly is the action item after reading a report like The Commonwealth Fund’s cited by Ars Technica?

Warning, it’s a press release:

Gaithersburg, MD, January 31, 2023 – Cartesian Therapeutics, a fully integrated, clinical-stage biotechnology company pioneering RNA cell therapies for autoimmune diseases and cancer, has dosed the first participant in its Phase 2b randomized controlled trial (RCT) for generalized myasthenia gravis (MG), an autoimmune disorder that causes muscle weakness and fatigue. The RCT will evaluate the efficacy and safety of the company’s lead asset, Descartes-08, a first-in-class, RNA-engineered chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy (rCAR-T).

To the company’s knowledge, this is the first placebo-controlled study of an engineered cell therapy, and the most advanced investigational cell therapy in clinical development for any autoimmune disease. Descartes-08 is administered over 6 weekly outpatient visits and requires no preconditioning chemotherapy.

The manuscript from the open-label study is almost done, but some of the data was presented back in September 2022 (and available on YouTube). I also talked about the study in an MGFA webinar.

RCTs FTW.

So let me see if I have this straight:

• OpenAI and Microsoft have a partnership, with Microsoft all-in on integrating aritifical intelligence into its products and developing it further.
• Google/Alphabet has its own AI programs — some of them mind-blowing — which are bound to increase now that ChatGPT is out with potential to destroy the value of the one thing Google still does well: searching the internet.
• Facebook/Meta has only some embarassing failures to show for their efforts, for now, but one can expect some rearrangement of priorities once the company’s shareholders see what being all-in on AI has done to $MSFT.

If artificial general intelligence is possible, ⊕ For an explanation for how AI differs from AGI I recommend this short interview with David Deutsch. odds are that it will emerge in this decade. Determining whether that is good or bad I will leave as an excercise to the reader.

P.S. While getting the links for this post I came upon a WaPo article which came out today and devotes a single paragraph to the potential harms of AI:

Some AI ethicists fear that Big Tech’s rush to market could expose billions of people to potential harms — such as sharing inaccurate information, generating fake photos or giving students the ability to cheat on school tests — before trust and safety experts have been able to study the risks. Others in the field share OpenAI’s philosophy that releasing the tools to the public, often nominally in a “beta” phase after mitigating some predictable risks, is the only way to assess real world harms.

This is true, as things stand now. Wouldn’t it be nice if it stayed that way.