dopylitty

I call it..the Wolfram Apparatus

I wouldn’t be surprised if states like Idaho and Florida that don’t have functioning public health departments start having TB outbreaks to go with their measles outbreaks once the CDC is decimated and can’t provide a backstop anymore.

Something I've learned from 404 media is journalism actually has a fine business model. People are willing to pay for good journalism.

The problem is (much like the rest of the economy) what passes for news media is incredibly top heavy and bloated with managers, executives, and shareholders who suck up money without providing any value.

For every journalist there are 15 managers and editors hired for nepotism reasons. The NYT is full of people like that who do nothing but trot out right wing editorials supporting whatever war the US is involved in[4] or attacking people who think the world can be a better place[3]. I used to pay for The Atlantic but for every Ed Yong writing amazing science articles there's a right wing editor like Jeffrey Goldberg[1] sucking up money and shitting out right wing propaganda[2].

This article[0]from 404 said it well.

Then I went to work for VICE, and made working at VICE part of my identity. I wanted the company to succeed so badly because I believed in what we were doing and I believed in the institution. I worked zillions of hours of unpaid overtime, took on side projects, canceled vacations to do work, worked on vacations, and made incredibly hard decisions, thinking that, if I did my job well enough, the company would succeed and we would get to keep doing what we were doing. I spent the vast majority of that time doing work that made money for an over-bloated apparatus that existed to make a bunch of middle managers and executives large salaries and bonuses and to benefit a founder who is now retroactively denigrating our work in an attempt to cling to whatever relevancy he can find by catering to conspiracy theorists and the right.

I hope journalists leave the old right wing media like the NYT and Washington Post and start their own things focusing on journalism. I gladly pay for that.

0 https://www.404media.co/the-billionaire-is-the-threat-not-th... 1: https://fair.org/home/conspiracies-pushed-by-atlantics-edito... 2: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-198-how-the-atlan... 3: https://fair.org/home/nyts-campus-free-speech-coverage-focus... 4: https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...

Right, English is just a plain bad way to tell a computer to do something. The signal to noise ratio is too low and references are too ambiguous.

You see this with the ridiculous "prompt engineering" crap that has sprung up where people are slowly reinventing programming languages but completely unspecified. Something that could be specified in 4 lines of godforesaken YAML ends up taking 40000 words of very bizarre English and using enough energy to roast a whole pig.

There might be one case somewhere that could be found where a firm that technically counts as PE isn't shady but in general the very idea of private equity is shady so it follows that all the PE firms would be shady also.

The point of PE isn't to run sustainable businesses that provide quality products and services for customers while treating their employees well. The point is to rapidly suck all the value out of businesses by loading them up with debt, breaking laws, mistreating customers, and exploiting employees. What happens to the carcass of the business or to the customers and employees whose lives have been destroyed doesn't matter to them.

I looked into this "ClearChoice" company and unsurprisingly it's private equity owned through a chain of sketchy intermediaries.

If you're having any sort of medical or other work done make sure the company is not PE owned or affiliated. The best way to check that I've found is to look for press releases.

In this case there's a press release from 2020[0] about "The Aspen Group" acquiring ClearChoice. The Aspen Group then is owned by PE firms[1] and is already being sued in multiple states for deceptive practices that hurt patients.

0: https://www.teamtag.com/newsroom/Aspen-Dental-Management-to-...

1: https://pestakeholder.org/news/pe-owned-aspen-dental-faces-y...

While that’s true it’s good to be vigilant.

Viruses are constantly evolving and flu can also exchange parts of its genome with other flu strains (reassortment).

It may become more (or less) virulent by chance while evolving more fitness for human bodies so past results don’t guarantee future results.

Something people may not realize is that the fish that swim upstream to spawn and then die become food for more than just fat bears.

The carcasses also fertilize the land surrounding the river. The trees take up the fertilizer and are more successful than they would otherwise be[0]

This is a virtuous cycle as the trees provide shade to the salmon eggs and the tree parts that fall into the river provide habitat for insects that the young fish eat[1].

0:https://www.nature.com/articles/news011004-4 1: https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view...

And don't forget states with those policies are losing OB/GYNs and other medical professionals rapidly[0] so even if you don't care about abortion your medical care or the medical care of the women you love is going to be shit (even by US standards) if you get stuck there.

Women are dying not only because they have pregnancies that should be terminated due to nonviability but also because doctors are afraid of treating them while they're pregnant[1].

Any company with a shred of care for their female employees and the families of their male employess should be leaving those states.

0: https://www.wired.com/story/states-with-abortion-bans-are-lo... 1: https://sph.tulane.edu/study-finds-higher-maternal-mortality...

This is something I think people are missing but which is really important.

AWS is flailing now and pissing off all the competent workers. Those who have the skill will leave for newer gen cloud companies without the baggage like Fly or Tailscale or even Oxide. Or they'll start their own thing.

So do you really want your whole company's compute environment running on infrastructure managed by burnt out and low skilled people?

This might be the start of the migrations from the first generation infrastructure focused cloud services to the new more application focused services.

I gotta say don't sleep on this article thinking it's just another article about IPv6 adoption stats.

There's a lot of interesting thought in the second half about what the Internet fundamentally is and where it's going. The author argues that the use of TLS and SNI has fundamentally changed the internet from a number based routing network to a network based on DNS names and SNI where the numbers involved don't really matter anymore.

Where is this heading in the longer term? We are pushing everything out of the network and over to applications. Transmission infrastructure is becoming an abundant commodity. Network sharing technology (multiplexing) is decreasingly relevant. We have so much network and computing resources that we no longer have to bring consumers to service delivery points. Instead, we are bringing services towards consumers and using the content frameworks to replicate servers and services With so much computing and storage the application is becoming the service, rather than just a window to a remotely operated service.

Another thing that changed on the server side was that, thanks to AWS and the like, it became trivial to set up a massive private network. Nowadays you can have a cluster of thousands of virtual machines that communicate with one another entirely within a VPC. Only machines that need to communicate with external entities get a public IPv4 address. This kind of setup not only frees up a /20, but also has the benefit of being more secure.

This is something that people who are too deep in the weeds of legacy networking don't realize. The future is to not use IP at all within enterprise and not use the Internet at all for B2B communication. In fact the future is to not use any networking abstraction at the application layer.

To start with every device can be in VPCs with the same private /16 because they can easily communicate securely within the cloud environment via services like VPC lattice or using S3/API gateway both within and across companies. Let the cloud provider handle the undifferentiated heavy lifting of figuring out how to get data from one device to another. In time third parties will establish cross provider bridges.

Then you can start to ask yourself why your applications need the "networking" abstraction at all. If you want to send some bits to an application either within or across companies it should be just a matter of putting the bits in some location the receiving application has access to and the cloud providers can figure out how to actually make the bits accessible to the other application. Think writing to an S3 bucket using a VPC endpoint but with less HTTP/TCP/IP cruft in the middle.

As a benefit the identities on both sides will be established by the cloud providers so you don't need to worry your devices are reachable by malicious actors. Then you can start to get rid of all this cyber security nonsense that has grown up around the ridiculously insecure protocols that were developed in the 70s for connecting trusted machines and somehow are still in use today.

Internet service providers and cloud providers may or may not use IPv6 but enterprises, schools, and end users certainly won't need to.

And if you're a customer you need to start looking for alternatives.

I've thought about making a website that just trawls press releases and PE firm sites to detect when a company has been bought by PE and adds the company to a list on the site/sends a notification to folks who have signed up.

I had the same but with a cracked crown. The dentist did the bite wing x-rays, did whatever examination they do, and then at the end said it all looked good. They even did some fancy 3d scan trying to sell me on a mouth guard or those transparent braces.

Then I mentioned I had pain around the crown whenever I ate something sweet or sour. The dentist took another look and said "oh yeah the crown is cracked"

So now I know I either have a cracked crown or I don't. Great service.

I'm glad you mention dentists/vets. I make it a point to verify local businesses aren't PE owned before I will use them.

Of course one of the problems with PE is they hoover up _all_ the businesses in an area so you don't have a choice.

There really needs to be regulation in this area preventing a single beneficial entity/controlling entity from buying/owning more than a few percent of a certain type of business in an area.

It should've been expanded into driving a long time ago. There are laws against distracted driving but I still see people weaving around like they're drunk on the roads. When I look into the car they're usually holding a phone (on speakerphone) or holding it up to their ear.

People suck at driving enough as it is without driving one handed and distracted.

I'm curious why you include antibiotics in your trusted medications list.

Over the past several years we've found that antibiotics have a huge impact on beneficial microbes in your body which then has downstream impacts on your health [0]. Oddly enough for the topic in this article exposure to antibiotics as a child may be linked to obesity[1]. They are also extremely over prescribed for things like viral illnesses [2].

I personally wouldn't take an antibiotic unless whatever malady I was suffering from was proven to not only be bacterial in origin but likely to progress without treatment.

Regarding your larger point some of the distrust of medications can be related to the fact that people know that medication producers' goal is to be profit for the most part.

Because they are for-profit the medicine producers can't be trusted to produce quality products or to produce products which resolve a problem rather than just reducing symptoms as long as the patient continues to pay for the medicine.

As with other problems we have a low trust society because it's a society built on for-profit enterprises rather than enterprises focused on doing the best thing for society.

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8756738/ 1: https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo2014180 2: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37876436/

They really are hard to work with compared to languages where you declare which exceptions you'll throw,. I always get angry when pylint raises an error for catching over-broad exceptions[0]

Of course I'm catching broad exceptions because I have no idea what kind of exception is going to be thrown 12 dependencies deep and I don't want it to completely crash the program instead of letting me retry or do something else.

0:https://pylint.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user_guide/messages/...

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Whether it's true or not I don't know but it would be good if fewer people went into tech.

We don't need more people working for ad companies endlessly rewriting chat apps in the flavor of the month JavaScript framework. We need people doing useful jobs like building houses (or making house building easier), basic research, medicine, social work, plumbing, or HVAC.

All of these amazing therapies coming out of applied biology are based on years and years of basic science that has been done in universities across the world. Much of it funded by the US NIH. Unfortunately funding for basic science is very hard to come by.

Imagine if the billions of dollars being blown on boiling the oceans for a slightly better autocorrect were being used on basic and applied biological research instead. I have no doubt many afflictions would be a thing of the past (at least for those who embrace science instead of superstition).

It’s time for governments to levy extra taxes on companies that require employees to commute into the office.

The taxes should pay not only for the transportation infrastructure but also for the childcare costs that are incurred by employees forced to be in the office.

It’s not realistic to expect individual workers to slam the door in the face of someone walking behind them.

Companies that want to prevent tailgating need to spend the money on mantraps or other infrastructure that is clearly designed to allow one person through at a time.

I've never understood why these things don't cause food poisoning due to bacillus cereus. There are all sorts of theories about vinegar being used in cooking or whatnot but I've never seen any rigorous study of the microbiome of an onigiri.

If a company wants systems up 24/7 they should hire three shifts of people to support it.

Not willing to pay for three shifts? Shut the system off.

I like the dig at "first generation" clouds.

There really is a wide gulf between the services provided by the older cloud providers (AWS, Azure) and the newer ones (fly.io, CloudFlare etc).

AWS/Azure provide very leaky abstractions (VMs, VPCs) on top of very old and badly designed protocols/systems (IP, Windows, Linux) . That's fine for people who want to spend all their time janitoring VMs, operating systems, and networks but for developers who just want to write code that provides a service it's much better to be able to say to the cloud provider "Here's my code, you make sure it's running somewhere" and let the cloud provider deal with the headaches. Even the older providers' PaaS services have too many knobs to deal with (I don't want to think about putting a load balancer in front of ECS or whatever)

My theory is eventually every ticket tracking system converges to the same bloated thing which is a completely customizable slow mess because every company and every team within every company wants something slightly different. The developer adds all these features and then the team running the product at each company customizes it to meet all their internal feature requests.

ServiceNow, Jira, you name it. Under the hood they are just a database but the customizable monstrosity of fields and forms rules and reports and workflows on top makes them all eventually suck. Heck, this is probably why SAP and PeopleSoft suck too.

Or alternatively just shut down at 5 like a normal business. Can't be open 24/7 without fully staffing 24/7.

This is the fundamental reality I keep seeing.

The people who think an LLM or other type of model can do a job are the people who don't know anything about that job.

Managers who don't know what developers do think you can replace a developer with an LLM. Can an LLM shit out some code? Sure, but that's hardly what (good) developers do.

Magazine publishers who don't know what editors do think an LLM can replace an editor. Can an LLM make a bunch of statements about the quality of a piece of writing? Sure, but they may have no basis in reality and will require a real human editor to review them. Or your publication can succumb to being LLM generated slop.

Bad coders who don't know what good coders do see that an LLM can do what they've been doing and think developers will be replaced but they don't actually realize what it means to be a developer so they don't see all the things the LLM isn't doing.

Tech bros think a model will be able to revolutionize materials development but when actual materials scientists look at the output it turns out it's mostly garbage. And crucially it took actual materials scientists spending a whole lot of time to figure that out. [0]

Most of what these models do is waste actual experts' time by forcing them to wade through huge quantities of plausible looking but completely incorrect output.

0: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

Previous studies have shown that cancer cells can use nanotubes like “tiny tentacles” to slurp up mitochondria from immune cells.

Biology is nuts.

Regarding messing with T-cells I wonder how evolution came up with the current number of mitochondria per cell. Usually with these things there's some kind of push and pull between the benefits of something and the drawbacks. Or sometimes it's just whatever works. I know mitochondria can have some negative impacts on cells sometimes by releasing the byproducts of metabolism (reactive oxygen species) or triggering programmed cell death.