Many years ago, some dial-up providers in my city offered free public logins to use their websites (for scratch card activation, account renewal, user guides, and so on). Some companies also paid ISPs to have their sites and services accessible in similar fashion for promotional reasons.
At a certain provider, all those free logins used the same firewall configuration to only allow traffic to those free services and ISP site, probably for simplicity, so all of them were accessible with any promotional login. Most of them were not useful (to me), but different agreements with ISP resulted in different call time limit until hang-up, 10-15 minutes instead of 3-5.
However, the main treasure was the addition of external page translation service as a feature on some big site. Back then, it was strictly static and server-side, URL in request gave you its HTML source with translated text strings and absolute paths to external resources, so in order for translation to work, users needed to be able to access that third party server, too. Obviously, if you gave it any other URL, the server would also grab it to translate (and choosing least similar language in parameters would leave most of the page text intact).
You can imagine that having a browser supporting tabs and switching media off was very handy for loading as many free web pages in text only form as those dial-up sessions allowed.
Obviously, WWW-to-email services for people who only paid for mail server access had existed even before that.
I don't think there are any net neutrality laws that don't exempt things like in-flight Wi-Fi, where the upstream is so heavily restricted that providing balanced services to everyone is basically impossible or leaves the entire connection useless.
With Starlink things may be looking a bit better, but I think demanding net neutrality on in-flight satellite internet and plane-to-cell-tower internet is excessive.
Thank you for sharing, still wiping the tears from my eyes. If there was ever a reminder to (try) enjoying the small, “mundane” moments of life every day it’s the part below.
“There was so much I still wanted to do. I fantasized about the smallest, most mundane things—waking up in bed, getting in my car, waiting at a red light, grabbing coffee, working. I wanted to do it all again, every day, forever and ever.”
You die from liver failure. Which is a horrible way to die. You’re bleeding and clotting at the same time. Your abdomen swells with fluid. Then your legs and your whole body. Your skin turns yellow and you’re itching constantly. You become increasingly confused and violent. Infections start brewing in that pool of fluid in your abdomen.
You should sign up for Nautilus. Monthly compact discs mailed to your door containing 650MB of assorted interactive multimedia. It was the original broadband (with very large packet size.)
It’s a bit sad that there’s nothing in this post about actually wanting to improve patient care, but instead make money for hospitals and “enhance metrics.”
It's called upcoding. It's been happening with or without AI or SV's help for well over 40 years. [0]
Interestingly, whistleblowers can recoup a big chunk of the recovered funds in a False Claims Act suit when medical providers do this to defraud Medicaid / Medicare [1]. Could be a lucrative long-term play if you get employed at a company whose sole purpose is helping hospital chains bill for care that an AI thinks may have been provided.
American healthcare in a nutshell. All of these startups in the healthcare industry focusing on "upcoding", "dealing with insurance" would go bust if private health insurance no longer existed or at least existed in a much much smaller role.
I can relate to this reaction for a variety of startups. I still am interested in working for these light mission or neutral mission startups, rather than crypto or something empty, but I wish we had a lot of deep mission startups to choose from. I blame the diluted mission problem on VC + hypergrowth. If more startups could focus on less aggressive capital and growth goals and let the founders dream more, I think we would all be more excited.
Our models don't only suggest up-coding possibilities, but also chart quality improvements! As a result, patient's charts become more accurate, allowing for potentially better patient care in subsequent visits.
Also, the hospitals being able to bill more accurately allows them to have more resources to invest in patient care, and when you consider that a lot of hospitals operate on 1-3% profit margins while health insurance companies operate on a sometimes exponentially higher %, it's actually one of my favorite aspects of what we're building here.
Mind if I ask a very non-defensive "how come"? The logic in the comment you're responding to is legitimately the way I think about one of the impacts our products have re: patients.
I wish I was working on something. How is it that I can’t think of anything? My mind goes blank. Maybe it’s a side effect of being burnt out from my job.
It's a huge space, so I wouldn't say it's easy. Also several ideas will just not be interesting to you at first, and many others will only be revealed as uninteresting after a while (ie you hit a problem you aren't interested in solving).
One idea might be to learn something new, if you don't have a project. Think about a textbook or a class, or online texts, or just some interesting popsci at the local bookstore/library for example. any might work depending on your style.
Do you not see the national security aspects of 2024 AI? It's very similar to the nuclear race where, right or wrong, there is a non-zero possibility of a winner take all supremacy scenario where the first to reach superintelligence rules the world.
We don't let private companies own nuclear weapons, yet somehow these razzle dazzle claims of OpenAI's nuclear capabilities are never followed by "so nationalize OpenAI".
No credible AI expert thinks LLMs will lead to AGI. They are hilariously bad at most things and heavily dependent on questionable data sources like reddit.
AI don't need to be competent to cause harm, just like humans. Just ask law enforcement arresting people because their face recognition AI told them to.
Not that I trust governments trying to oversee them either...
There may be a nonzero chance of developing a superintelligence (or even AGI in any meaningful sense), but it's so close to zero that it doesn't matter.
Particularly because if a superintelligence is actually created, it won't matter who did it. It won't be the servant of the creators.
How can you so confidently assert that? AI just needs to beat humans at AI research to start compounding it's growth in performance.
>It won't be the servant of the creators
Human's are very paranoid and competitive because we've had to be for tens of thousands of generations to survive. Super intelligent or not why would AI start ignoring instructions or develop a survival instinct? This line of thinking has been popular in science fiction but what is it based on? Just because something is smarter than us, it will kill us, as Eliezer Yudkowsky asserted "because it wants our atoms"? It seems like we are viewing AI through a human lens.
Superintelligence under human control is what scares the shit out of me. I see superintelligence as the only thing capable of saving humans from themselves.
Because I've seen no strong reason to think otherwise. However, everyone -- myself included -- is just guessing here. I could certainly be wrong. As could the ones of the opposite opinion.
> AI just needs to beat humans at AI research to start compounding it's growth in performance.
That's assuming that it's possible to create an AGI at all given our current direction. I seriously doubt that it is. Time will tell, though.
Part of Snowden's explanation for why he was doing NSA work as a BAH contractor was that this is perfectly normal: employees "leave" and are then employed as contractors to get around limits on number and compensation for federal employees. Keeping their security clearances, of course.
Google, Facebook already have signifiant number of "disinformation staff" from US security state. As another big tech firm that collects huge amount of info and get to decide what to present to the general public, it has be added to that list as well.
Mostly access to healthcare, like, "why don't we offer this? Why are there barriers? Why can't we get automatic approvals for this?" Etc.
It turns out there are lots of groups who have greater than median barriers to access even basic care (trans folks, Black folks, immigrants, neurodiverse folks, disabled folks, etc). I happen to have a "I'll just keep calling and escalating until I've called every person in the company" attitude that doesn't seem to find that exhausting.
Interesting. I’m working on a similar project/idea (?app, I don’t know what to call it, doesn’t matter), about helping patients understand what they need to do for primary prevention. I hadn’t thought of the specific barriers that each group might face. I’m a doctor and feel that too much is reliant on the doctor remembering to ask (“oh have we checked your blood sugars btw!”) I want to empower patients with this info.
