> I think the ethics of allowing people to suffer due to economics while ignoring a technology that can help them is worse, no? Telling them to seek a health professional when none are available is worse ?
Not necessarily. Half-measures—especially those that try to offer technological solutions to social problems—allow the actual root problems to remain unaddressed, fester, and grow. The ACA was a hack for a failing system, and then when that quit working, more hacks were added on top, and on and on. LLMs are just another hack that let the can get kicked down the road once more.
If and until actual meaningful health care system reforms happen, the rich will continue getting their $63,000 14-day concierge service from Mass General Brigham whenever they feel blue, and the rest of us will end up getting Doctor Amazon telling us to practice deep breathing and buy some supplements.
I can’t argue this, but I can build an LLM based care provider today with likely decent results in patient outcomes for those adapted to it and good cost dynamics, and across a variety of critical use cases in the care vertical from providers to end delivery. I can not however change American society, our economic structure, or political dysfunction single handedly, can you? Should I not do the former and let people suffer in protest because the latter is not possible, and hold my breath hoping it’ll change? How many lives must be destroyed in protest hoping everything changes first?
Fine, let’s have socialized delivery of mental health care. Let’s go back in time 20 years and establish a pipeline of capable providers that doesn’t exist. Let’s do those things if we can. But I don’t see it happening in my life time.
I do however see an opportunity to take the technologies presented to use in the immediate present and providing a mechanism to bring help to people who need it today with good efficacy where it’s appropriate. Is it OpenAI that brings that? I doubt it - they’re selling shovels, not digging for gold. Is it a general model that provides direct care? Doubtful IMO. Is it a chatbot interface ? I doubt that too. But I think if we are creative and thoughtful we can use these technologies to address huge swaths of the care providing problem, which is more than talk therapy. And we can do it today, and don’t have to wait for MAGA/MAHA to accept reality on realities terms.
> I can not however change American society, our economic structure, or political dysfunction single handedly, can you?
Luckily this is only about fixing health care, so much easier. ;-) And, no, neither of us can single-handedly fix the more proximal causes of the problem, but you and me and around 268 of our best friends could.
I have no crystal ball and I am no genius. All I know is that an LLM will not make the inpatient beds come back once a hospital has been gutted by PE. It will not make the drugs suddenly affordable for the patient who needs them. It will not fix the terror and suffering caused by the system. It will not offer a genuine human connection. But it might give ammunition to the next guy who wants to “save money” by defunding 988, or discourage the next generation of mental health providers from choosing this as a discipline at all.
Obviously something must be done. But could the effort you spend on developing another hack atop the broken system instead be spent on getting the right people into the right places to fix the right problems? At the least, I’d ask “what would cause me to change my mind about this?”, and then work to make sure that there’s no way that thing could be true.
> I would replace the start menu with a Raycast clone. Most people want to open files, ask a question or run an app they know the name of, not scroll a list of things they might never use. If you add in semantic search users don't even need to know the app name.
So I’m looking at the Raycast web site, and aside from the UI being a little different, Raycast seems like it is itself a clone of the already long-existing KDE Plasma start menu (Kickoff) and KRunner? I guess the only thing missing from the KDE one is “AI”. Is there something I am missing about how Raycast is some innovation not already realised in the Linux desktop?
> If we can't do full extendable tags then at least add user defined groups/tags like Work and Games and Photos to make finding things easier. People remember what a file is better than where it's stored.
Extended attributes[0] already exist if you want. But, as the linked wiki page indicates, filesystem attributes are fragile. And what is the tangible benefit? In practice, users can already just dump all their files into a random directory and use Baloo or whatever. Which is probably better anyway since it’s easier to have a D-Bus API with multiple user-space implementations than having to wipe and reformat to use a different filesystem if you have some problem with it.
The AI features arrived with the recent v2 release. Raycast originally became popular as a better Spotlight replacement. As you can see, the idea was never entirely original, since Apple and other apps already offered many of the same features. Raycast’s strengths are its extensibility, lightweight design, speed, and excellent UI/UX. It’s a well-polished app.
That was Raycast v1, though. I don’t like the direction they’ve taken with v2, so I uninstalled it and switched to Tinycast.
Raycast is successful because it's an incredibly widely used and adopted integration layer. The official repo has thousands of plugins, pretty well maintained together, collectively, and there are thousands more out there. https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/main/extensions
KDE krunner has plugins. But there is not afaik a big tent ownership system like Raycast. And krunner is only going to attract KDE users. Raycast is mainly mac, but also, there's Vicinae which runs on a lot more systems, and it can run >50% of the Raycast plugins without a sweat, is designed to be drop in compatible.
It's also absurdly easy to write Raycast extensions. It uses web platform technologies that "just work", that don't have ornery toolchains and need lots of dev libraries installed. With KRunner you can probably use whatever library you want to do whatever you want, which is good, but hard, where-as with Raycast there's a pretty comprehensive and powerful API that offers a ton, that is well defined, and that other plugins will show you the way on. https://developers.raycast.com/
The additional reporting at [0] about his alleged behaviour in internal channels along with his public posts on social media really reinforces this same feeling for me:
> “oh, since I’m a pirate now, I fucking curse. after 42 years of never uttering a curse word, it’s kinda fucking fun. if this is a HR problem @caron please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with @Mark Davies.” […] Mullenweg also posted that the Automattic Slack “smells funny, like turncoats” and said he was going to hang out in the WordPress.org Slack instead.
What does this mean? Fire the VPs who failed to do their jobs? Say what you mean.
> ensuring smooth handoff
“doing their jobs”
> rethink and extend
“fix”
> engender a culture of design
This is a meaningless phrase.
> different kind of thinking
What kind of thinking?
> or a process to be fixed
Processes are how things get done! If programmers push garbage into the list of installed applications, that’s a process failure. If a product team makes a download available but it can’t be found on the main web site’s list of downloads, that’s a process failure. When things get done wrong it’s definitionally a process failure. Process also doesn’t flow from culture, they each exert influence on the other. Bad process will lead to bad culture as much as bad culture will lead to bad process.
I will reiterate what a sibling commenter already said: Nothing about this mealy mouthed corporate jargon liberally drizzled in passive voice comes across as candid. Effective communication does not look like this. Effective communication is assertive. It offers direct actionable advice, or asks direct questions which result in actionable answers.
---> First - the notes about language are completely glib.
It's perfectly acceptable for someone to use personal tone.
"> After thinking about it
Just say the thing."
"> nipped in the bud
“stop”"
... would be ridiculous feedback to give anyone.
It's perfectly acceptable for any writer to have some personalized inflection in their prose.
There's no misunderstanding or lost context.
The fact that you would even try to pick apart language at level is just weird.
---> Second - "Nothing about this mealy mouthed corporate jargon"
There is nothing 'mealy mouthed' about that prose, and there is no 'corporate jargon' in the note.
None.
The writer in that scenario mean exactly what they said - with some allowance for personal inflection.
That's it.
---> Third - "> engender a culture of design
This is a meaningless phrase."
No - it's not a 'meaningless phrase' - it means exactly that, in so many words.
Obviously, I'm not going to write full follow up paragraph on that in HN, the implication is direct.
---> Fourth - and most importantly - you entirely missed the point by trying to nitpick on arbitrary language someone wrote crudely on a HN comment.
The 'point' is to illustrate in quick and rough terms how one could be 'candid' with the feedback about a broken feature - and to also to frame it responsibly, to direct some feedback and as to where the responsibility might lie and where the process might have broken down, and then to more broadly indicate strategic concerns over culture, because there clearly is, particularly around 'user centric concners'.
Gates barfed some 'things that were broken' - instead of providing any contextualization at all - it was totally absent anything a leader would nominally provide.
You're getting caught up literally in prose and notions of 'process' which is besides the point. This is not about 'process' - it's about a leader framing feedback.
And FYI it was Satya that finally did 'change the culture' (although on different terms) to generally widespread acclaim.
Consider that three people have given you substantially similar feedback about your “candor”. Your attempt at a “personal voice” here comes off extremely fake. Compare your proposed “candid” message with the actual candor in your message at the top of this thread.
Rather than continue to dismiss the feedback, you should digest it and potentially learn something from it. Or not. It’s your choice.
> Gates barfed some 'things that were broken' - instead of providing any contextualization at all - it was totally absent anything a leader would nominally provide.
And yet you, simply by reading the email Gates sent, were able to confidently ascertain that the culture itself was failing here. You give too little credit to the recipients of this email when you imply that they can’t make the same assessment.
Short of blindly outsourcing the work to an LLM and checking to see if its hallucinated problems are actually problems[0], how can more laymen (without the ability to run replication studies, and without degrees in statistics) learn to more easily identify questionable/potentially fraudulent research like this?
This is a question that has been really bothering me for a while. I have a short list of things I’ve learnt to check, but it’s all stuff I’ve picked up in a very ad hoc way (reading and listening to these kinds of critical analyses, mostly). For example, until now, I wouldn’t think about implausibly large Cohen’s d, despite this seeming like an easily generalisable rule that anyone could eyeball. But without being told, and without the reference points given in the article, I wouldn’t have a clue. And I would like to have more of a clue. And I would like other people to have more of a clue. How?
I don’t agree with the parent that the solution for SEO spam is paying for the search engine (I think there are other good reasons to do this though), especially since people have been doing things like naming their company “AAA Auto Repair” to be first in the phone book since before computers ever existed. But the person you originally replied to does have a point in blaming Google for the problem. Most SEO spam sites make their money from ads, and Google are the ones who run the ad network, which means Google are the ones funding them and creating an incentive for them to exist.
> Finally, anonymity didn't exist for my grandparents.
Your grandparents could walk to the next town over and give themselves a different name and nobody would ever know who they were. They could get a job, be paid in cash, and deposit that money in a bank account with no KYC. They could drop a letter in a public mailbox without a return address, or put up posters at night, or make phone calls from public telephones. Nobody would know who did it, and there would be no surveillance footage to review after the fact, no digital footprint to trace. They could write a letter to their local newspaper to be printed with a fake name, or publish a book or story or magazine under an assumed identity. There were no ALPRs, no automated facial recognition, no built-in vehicle telematics, no drones, no smartphones to track anyone’s movement, no doorbell cameras on every block, no video tapes, no serial numbers hidden in the printouts from copy machines, no DNA analysis, no databases instantly searchable with the click of a button.
Feel free to make a value judgement about whether what we have now is better or worse than the past, if you want, but don’t invent history to rationalise it. The internet did not invent anonymity. It used to be the default.
Man, this sucks. I doubt there’s anything that I can say to get people to stop doing things like this, but the eventual outcome here isn’t going to be freedom for you to scrape sites that are trying to avoid being DDoSed by bots, but instead that we all end up in a world where device attestation is required to do practically anything online. And for what?
> There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.
I will never forget Ruchi Sanghvi’s remarks at the Female Founders Conference talk in 2015[0]:
> It [the News Feed] became this virtuous cycle that we all dream of: consumption and production that just kept on giving. […] Even though everyone said they hated it, engagement had doubled.
As with the cars, those are not alcohol issues, they are violence issues. Whether a drunk person turns to saccharine displays of affection or destructive acts of violence is likely driven by cultural norms and the underlying conditions of their lives.[0] Blaming alcohol for violence is akin to blaming the internet for increases in fraud.
Globally, 38% of violent deaths are alcohol-related81% of male perpetrators of intimate partner violence in England and Wales test positive for alcohol at arrest
Not necessarily. Half-measures—especially those that try to offer technological solutions to social problems—allow the actual root problems to remain unaddressed, fester, and grow. The ACA was a hack for a failing system, and then when that quit working, more hacks were added on top, and on and on. LLMs are just another hack that let the can get kicked down the road once more.
If and until actual meaningful health care system reforms happen, the rich will continue getting their $63,000 14-day concierge service from Mass General Brigham whenever they feel blue, and the rest of us will end up getting Doctor Amazon telling us to practice deep breathing and buy some supplements.
reply