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> I wish / hope the medical community will address stories like this before people lose trust in them entirely.

Too late for me. I have a similar story. ChatGPT helped me diagnose an issue which I had been suffering with my whole life. I'm a new person now. GPs don't have the time to spend hours investigating symptoms for patients. ChatGPT can provide accurate diagnoses in seconds. These tools should be in wide use today by GPs. Since they refuse, patients will take matters into their own hands.

FYI, there are now studies showing ChatGPT outperforms doctors in diagnosis. (https://www.uvahealth.com/news/does-ai-improve-doctors-diagn...) I can believe it.


GPs don't have time to do the investigation, but they also have biases.

My own story is one of bias. I spent much of the last 3 years with sinus infections (the part I wasn't on antibiotics). I went to a couple ENTs and one observed allergic reaction in my sinuses, did a small allergy panel, but that came back negative. He ultimately wanted to put me on a CPAP and nebulizer treatments. I fed all the data I got into ChatGPT deep research and it came back with an NIH study that said 25% of people in a study had localized allergic reactions that would show up one place, but not show up elsewhere on the body in an allergy test. I asked my ENT about it and he said "That's not how allergies work."

I decided to just try second generation allergy tablets to see if they helped, since that was an easy experiment. It's been over 6 months since I've had a sinus infection, where before this I couldn't go 6 weeks after antibiotics without a reoccurrence.


There are over a million licensed physicians in the US. If we assume that each one interacts with five patients per weekday, then in the six months since you had this experience, that would conservatively be six-hundred-million patient interactions in that time.

Now, obviously none of this math would actually hold up to any scrutiny, and there's a bevy of reasons that the quality of those interactions would not be random. But just as a sense of scale, and bearing in mind that a lot of people will easily remember a single egregious interaction for the rest of their life, and (very reasonably!) be eager to share their experience with others, it would require a frankly statistically impossibly low error rate to not be able to fill threads like these with anecdotes of the most heinous, unpleasant, ignorant, and incompetent anecdotes anyone could ever imagine.

And this is just looking at the sheer scale of medical care, completely ignoring the long hours and stressful situations many doctors work in, patients' imperfect memories and one-sided recollections (that doctors can never correct), and the fundamental truth that medicine is always, always a mixture of probabilistic and intuitive judgement calls that can easily, routinely be wrong, because it's almost never possible to know for sure what's happening in s given body, let alone what will happen.

That E.N.T. wasn't up to date on the latest research on allergies. They also weren't an allergy specialist. They also were the one with the knowledge, skills, and insight to consider and test for allergies in the first place.

Imagine if we held literally any other field to the standard we hold doctors. It's, on the one hand, fair, because they do something so important and dangerous and get compensated comparitively well. But on the other hand, they're humans with incomplete, flawed information, channeling an absurdly broad and deep well of still insufficient education that they're responsible for keeping up-to-date while looking at a unique system in unique circumstances and trying to figure out what, if anything, is going wrong. It's frankly impressive that they do as well as they do.


If you fully accept everything BobaFloutist says, what do you do differently?

Nothing. You just... feel more sympathetic to doctors and less confident that your own experience meant anything.

Notice what's absent: any engagement with whether the AI-assisted approach actually worked, whether there's a systemic issue with ENTs not being current on allergy research, whether patients should try OTC interventions as cheap experiments, whether the 25% localized-reaction finding is real and undertaught.

The actual medical question and its resolution get zero attention.

Also though...

You are sort of just telling people "sometimes stuff is going to not work out, oh also there's this thing that can help, and you probably shouldn't use it?"

What is the action you would like people to take after reading your comment? Not use ChatGPT to attempt to solve things they have had issues solving with their human doctors?


> The study, from UVA Health’s Andrew S. Parsons, MD, MPH and colleagues, enlisted 50 physicians in family medicine, internal medicine and emergency medicine to put Chat GPT Plus to the test. Half were randomly assigned to use Chat GPT Plus to diagnose complex cases, while the other half relied on conventional methods such as medical reference sites

This is not ChatGPT outperforming doctors. It is doctors using ChatGPT.


For every one "ChatGPT accurately diagnosed my weird disease" anecdote, how many cases of "ChatGPT hallucinated obvious bullshit we ignored" are there? 100? 10,000? We'll never know, because nobody goes online to write about the failure cases.

> nobody goes online to write about the failure cases.

Why wouldn't they? This would seem to be engagement bait for a certain type of Anti-AI person? Why would you expect this to be the case? "My dad died because he used that dumb machine" -- surely these will be everywhere right?

Let's make our beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences!


Failure cases aren't just "patient died." They also include all the times where ChatGPT's "advice" aligned with their doctor's advice, and when ChatGPT's advice was just totally wrong and the patient correctly ignored it. Nobody knows how numerous these cases are.

So your failure cases are now "it agreed with the doctor" and "the patient correctly identified bad advice."

Where's the failure?


These are failures to provide useful advice over and above what could be gotten from a professional. In the sense that ChatGPT is providing net-neutral (maybe slightly positive since it confirms the doctor's diagnosis) or net-negative benefits (in the case that it's just wasting the user's time with garbage).

This is a doctor feeding the LLM a case scenario, which means the hard part of identifying relevant signal from the extremely noisy and highly subjective human patient is already done.

The problem doctors have is that 99/100 times ABC is caused by xyz, so they prescribe 123 and the problem goes away.

Overtime, as a human, the doctors just turn into ABC -> 123 machines.


> Steak is a terrible source of protein (in terms of nutrient density).

At 23g/100g, lean beef has a very high protein/weight ratio. Similar to chicken and turkey breast and exceeded only by canned tuna and processed protein isolates like soy protein isolate, whey protein isolate, and wheat gluten. For comparison, protein content of firm tofu, lentils, and chickpeas is much lower, at 14g/100g, 9g/100g, and 8.5g/100g, respectively. They all contain a lot more carbs per 100g than lean beef.

Further, lean beef contains a full and balanced amino acid profile, which lentils, tofu, chickpeas, soy protein isolate, and wheat gluten does not. It's an excellent food. However there is evidence that charred red meat and red meat containing nitrites is associated with a slight increase in colorectal cancer, so people should be consuming minimally processed red meat where possible, as per the guidance.


This new pyramid is obviously FAR healthier than the previous one. The reason it's being opposed is partisan politics.

the reason it's being _changed_ is obviously partisan politics.

Nah, probably just shifting fronts of lobbying. That said new recommendations match way closer what I consider to be a good diet for myself (more calories from fats, less from carbs). Of course everything in moderation.

> Is Chrome's PWA support on Android a massive glow to Android Play Store's bottom line?

Probably, but Android allows side-loading. iOS does not.

> What's iOS missing for PWA's to be a viable money-maker for companies?

Brace yourself.

1. Notifications are hobbled. This is HUGE. Silent pushes, rich notifications, NSE, reliable badge counts, and reliable delivery. This is made worse by:

2. Hobbled background priority. PWAs are aggressively suspended and killed. No long running processes. No guarantee of process execution. IndexedDB and in-memory state may be wiped at any time.

3. PWAs can’t access most system frameworks. Bluetooth (CoreBluetooth). NFC (Core NFC). Background location tracking. HealthKit. HomeKit. CallKit / VoIP. Siri Shortcuts / App Intents. AirDrop. Apple Pay (full API). CarPlay. System share extensions.

4. No access to native rendering pipelines. Performance is severely limited.

5. PWAs have unstable, purgeable memory. No persistent file storage.

6. Limited UX and lifecycle control. No termination callbacks. No suspend notifications. Reloaded arbitrarily. Back/forward gestures conflict with browser.

7. No access to native UI components like FaceID, native text fields, drag and drop across apps, context menus, and haptic feedback.

Apple has done everything they possibly can to ensure PWAs are broken on iOS.


> Well then look at the logs?

Counter point: I don’t have to look at the logs to discover obscure error reports to spend my weekend debugging something which works flawlessly on Windows. We shouldn’t have to do that.


You don't have to look at logs either in case of games and hardware combos that do run flawlessly on Linux, which is a huge chunk of all games.

But feel free to try to run a game with a missing video card driver (as you likely miss something like that) and the like on windows. I would say it's an even worse experience.


Possibly because you won’t have as many logs to look at on Windows, merely given the option of sending a proprietary dump blob to the developer’s bug tracker, and then hoping they eventually fix whatever mystery issue is affecting you. God help you if it’s the overzealous DRM or anticheat from some other game that likely isn’t present in their QA machines.

FYI the ProtonDB medal system is not a good measurement of a game’s performance. The founder has admitted in the past that he would have used a different rating system if he had to do it again. That’s why he created the newer “Click to Play” rating system. Only 13% of the top 1,000 games are rated Tier 1, and even that doesn’t guarantee Windows-like performance, as there are tens of thousands of issue reports across those games.

I strongly agree. I’m technical but I hate using the CLI for consumer oriented tasks. I feel strongly that all controls should be in the UI space. Once in a while I install a new distro to see how it’s coming along. I always hit roadblocks and need to use the CLI for something. It’s clear that the developers like the CLI and think it’s no big deal to use it, so users should just conform. That’s not how the real world works. They either meet the users where they are, or Linux remains niche.

Eh, I think people are increasingly tired of being pushed to use Microsoft crap even if they don't want to. Hell, you can't even make a local account easily anymore on Windows. It feels actively hostile.

I think a lot of people would prefer to deal with the different inconveniences of Linux.


I 100% agree. This is why Windows and later macOS and iOS became so popular. It really just worked. Basic things like being able to double click a file to install it. Linux is technically capable of this, but so few devs actually support it. The last time I installed Ubuntu I couldn’t change the mouse acceleration without using the CLI to install some extra tools. Just bonkers. And the “solution” was “oh just uninstall your entire OS and try this other distro which is way better!”

> Competent cheat makers don't have much difficulty in defeating in-kernel anticheats on Windows. With the amount of insight and control available on Linux anticheat makers stand little chance.

The issue isn’t binary, but a spectrum. Studios clearly believe that there is less cheating when using kernel level anti-cheats. They have the data so they would know. This is an existential threat to their profit so we can trust they use the most effective tool. Anecdotally, I and many others also experience less cheating in games using kernel level anti-cheat. I’m not saying no cheating. I’m saying less cheating. That’s very important for me and many others.

Valve has stated they are working on kernel level anti-cheat “tools”, but they haven’t yet revealed a method. The entire concept is antithetical to the Linux security model so it requires significant refactoring. That’s a huge investment in not just capex and opex because the fork becomes much more difficult to maintain over time. I think they’ll do their best to work in user space, but I don’t think they’ll succeed and will have to bite the bullet. SteamOS will become more and more its own fork, including consumer-friendly features which Linux fans typically don’t care about.


I think people might be equivocating over the word “ad.” Some people consider ads to be interstitial modals which steal focus and have nothing to do with current context. I am much more sensitive and consider any notification to buy or use a service to be an ad. Maybe not pre-installed games but I would prefer they not be there. Microsoft is about as bad as Apple is at suggesting we use their cloud services. I also consider these ads. Still, if I’m honest, they’re infrequent and hardly insurmountable. If one is sensitive to this, the Pro version of Windows makes it easy to disable almost all of this stuff.

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