MangoCats

We're all probability machines, from bacteria through the great whales.

I did a calculation about the 3rd generation Claude Sonnet engines... they had similar processing capacity to about 6 bumblebees - using millions of times more energy, of course.

There were lots of "expert systems" developed and deployed in the 1990s, and they have been undergoing modest development improvements since then.

Who’s to say these system are being closely monitored and studied.

Mostly: the FDA, EUMDR and similar agencies and regulatory systems around the world.

There could statistically be patients who have died or been maimed who otherwise wouldn’t if they had real human professionals instead of someone who used a system

Works both ways, and, statistically, the data says the machines are improving outcomes overall. Hotshot doctor I knew had a childhood friend die rather suddenly in his 60s in the late 1990s. Really bothered him so he dug in to the case post mortem, did all the research using then present state of the art computer search tools, and determined what really happened. His friend went to the best possible ER given the circumstances, was seen by the best available human doctors in that site, who made the best possible calls based on the available information, and they made the wrong calls - wrong diagnosis led to interventions that made a bad situation worse and within less than 3 days after initial presentation his friend was dead. It took my hotshot doctor using keyword search tools he was very skilled with months to untangle all the information, and his conclusion was: the only thing that would have saved his friend's life would be blind luck that a specialist (who didn't practice in that hospital) might have been called to his case at random, because the standard of care didn't trigger bringing in the right specialists in this situation, and if the right Dx were made and the right intervention was done, his friend could have lived another 30 years. But, if they did nothing, he would have still been dead within a week, maybe sooner, so they made the (wrong) call, did the (well meaning, but actually harmful) intervention, and made him die faster. LLMs could have saved his friend, turned those months of research using 1990s state of the art search tools into a few hours, timely enough to have made the right interventions when they were needed.

Machines make mistakes too, just not as often as people. Since tthe 1970s and even before, the depth of medical knowledge available in libraries far exceeds the capacity of any human, or even reasonably sized teams of humans, to access quickly on demand. Machine assistance in searching that information has been improving dramatically over the past 30 years. I'd much rather have a doctor that uses it than one that just gives his opinion based on what he learned in school and practice. But, on the flip side, I definitely don't want a doctor who soaks his brain in gin at dinner and expresso at breakfast and relies 100% on what the machine says rather than engaging his own brain. Unfortunately, doctors like that, and others who are more concerned with filling their high paying surgery schedules than actually caring for patients best outcomes are all too common.

I find that the AI tools worth using are the ones that the AI agents themselves configure properly for you.

Learning how to connect an MCP server myself feels like an extremely ephemereal skill - one that will become nearly worthless several days before you start to learn how to do it.

stock market

Algorithmic traders flash-crashed the market over 15 years ago. AI in trading has been a thing since before then. In that field the latest LLMs are an evolution, not a revolution.

The AI threat to cybersecurity isn't (so much) people accepting vulnerable AI code, it's AI finding the vulnerabilities in widespread legacy code.

As for "lowering the bar" - we've had skript kiddiez since forever, the availability of AI to skript kkiddiez just raises the bar for finding and fixing zero days by the White Hats before the Black Hats find and exploit them.

People weren't wildly supportive of nuclear power before Chernobyl / TMI either, but after? 40 years of virtual moratorium on new construction in most of the world, absolute rollback in Germany. We've continued to poision ourselves with coal and wreck the climate with CO2 instead of learning to do nuclear right. If building of new plants weren't so difficult, older and less stable plants like Fukushima could have been decomissioned before having major problems.

The "mouth feel" texture of chicken makes me sick these days - it's like the animal was emaciated and bloated when slaughtered, which in many ways they were.

Some things like Orange Juice have gone there for reasons beyond greed - though greed is still a major component.

Many things that practice shrinkflation are entirely optional in your diet...

Around here we have Publix, Winn Dixie, and further afield there's Ingles which all seem virtually identical in their marketing / selection of products approaches. It's been decades since I've been a Food Lion or Kroger's but back then I remember they were a little more toned down - not as radical as Trader Joes or Aldi, but in that direction.

I don't want to be forced into a particular store every single week to "grab the bargains when they're avaialble" and otherwise pay doubleprice for most common items. So, I don't shop those stores.

Rest assured, they would be making more idiotic decisions without AI assistance. AI is just reinforcing what they already think, but occasionally (maybe 12% of the time) it might nudge them in a better direction.

Well, the cynical take is: if the information is being published to influence readers' / viewers' / listeners' opinions in order to enrich the publishers... then that information is much more likely to be mis-information, or distorted information as opposed to unbiased truth (whatever that is...)

I worked for a struggling little video processing company for a short while around 2012. On the floor underneath us was a big and growing company with twice our square footage and three times our headcount - their whole business: internet reputation polishing. Want to make your company, or yourself, or your dog more appealing to the general public via the internet? These manipulators would, for a fee, put good stuff about whatever you wanted as many places as possible. They would endeavor to remove or just overwhelm information that created negative impressions. Erase things you published and now regret, including copies of those things spread far and wide.

I've seen celebrity blogs (Scott Adams, among others) which shared things they were going through, then a couple of years later decide that they don't want that information "out there" anymore and it disappears from everywhere, including the internet archive and similar supposed long term repositories of "what the web used to say." Many stories about embarassing things that police officers did, like the Miami Dade cops who stopped off at Dunkin Donuts - in the County Police Helicopter - on their way back to base. That story lasted on the internet for about 10 years before it disappeared. Used to be simple to find with any search engine, now it's no longer acknowledged as ever having happened. We lived across the street from the owner/operators of the Dunkin location it happened at, they're the ones who originally told me about it, it was covered in multiple newspapers and copied into all kinds of personal blogs... now: gone.

Juice? Milk? Clearly healthy.

Juice better than soda? Easily, I'd say. Juice healthy? Everything in moderation. I drink far too much orange juice, and my children objected to the "high pulp" varieties I used to buy so now I don't get much fiber from it either. But, it's clearly healthier than Coca Cola - calorie for calorie.

Milk is a whole other can of worms...