HN user
You are unambiguously wrong. Never ask LLMs for medical advice. There is no nuance here, and I suspect the only reason there's so much backlash against this simple and obvious fact is because the amount of money in this scam of an industry
I've tried removing my post because the comment section here has become a platform for AI enthusiasts to spread dangerous medical misinformation. As HN does not really care about user privacy, I am unable to actually delete it. I renamed the post to [Removed], but it appears the admins are uninterested in respecting the intent of this, and renamed the post back to its original title.
Moral of the story kids: don't post on HN
What about the multiple people who have reported receiving incredibly useful information after asking an LLM, when doctors were useless?
They got lucky.
This is why I wrote this blog post. I'm sure some people got lucky when an LLM managed to give them the right answer, because they go and brag about it. How many people got the wrong answer? How many of them bragged about their bad decision? This is _selection bias_. I'm writing about my embarrassing lapse of judgment because I doubt anyone else will
Disclaimer: not a doctor (obviously), ask someone who is qualified, but this is what the ID doctor told me:
Lyme is a bacterial infection, and can be cured with antibiotics. Once the bacteria is gone, you no longer have Lyme disease.
However, there is a lot of misinformation about Lyme online. Some people think Lyme is a chronic, incurable disease, which they call "chronic lyme". Often, when a celebrity tells people they have lyme disease, this is what they mean. Chronic lyme is not a real thing - it is a diagnosis given to wealthy people by unqualified conmen or unscrupulous doctors in response to vague, hard to pin symptoms
If you're going to ask an LLM for a medical diagnosis, stop what you're doing and ask a doctor instead. There is no good advice downstream of the decision to ask an LLM for a medical diagnosis
No, the lesson here is never use an LLM to diagnose you, full stop. See a real doctor. Do not make the same mistake as me
To be honest, I am pretty embarrassed about the whole thing, but I figured I'd post my story because of that. There are lots of people who misdiagnose themselves doing something stupid on the internet (or teenagers who kill themselves because they fell in love with some Waifu LLM), but you never hear about it because they either died or were too embarrassed to talk about it. Better to be transparent that I did something stupid so that hopefully someone else reads about it and doesn't do the same thing I did
Not using ChatGPT in 2026 for medical issues and arming yourself with information [...] would be foolish in my opinion.
Using ChatGPT for medical issues is the single dumbest thing you can do with ChatGPT
Read to the bottom. I didn't specify the LLM because it doesn't matter. It's not the fault of the LLM, it's the fault of the user
I write a library which is used by customers to implement integrations with our platform. The #1 thing I think about is not
How do I express this code in Typescript?
it's
What is the best way to express this idea in a way that won't confuse or anger our users? Where in the library should I put this new idea? Upstream of X? Downstream of Y? How do I make it flexible so they can choose how to integrate this? Or maybe I don't want to make it flexible - maybe I want to force them to use this new format?
Plus making sure that whatever changes I make are non-breaking, which means that if I update some function with new parameters, they need to be made optional, so now I need to remember, downstream, that this particular argument may or may not be `undefined` because I don't want to break implementations from customers who just upgraded the most recent minor or patch version
The majority of the problems I solve are philosophical, not linguistic
Nobody in the tech industry cares about DEI (most people I've met are downright hostile to the idea). All those companies in 2020 who hired DEI consultants and made big announcements about DEI and changed master to main were just buying cheap good will
No; the burden of proof lies with the affirmative. To require someone to prove that they are NOT guilty of corruption is unfair (and also irrational)
index.html with script files would still benefit from a bundler. You can have a very minimal react footprint and still want to use react build tools just for bundling.
Most web frameworks do both at the same time to the point where having to write code which enforced a type contract after deserializing is a delabreaker for me. I eant to be able to define my DTOs in one place, once, and have it both deserialize and enforce types/format. Anything else is code smell
We have categorically lost our ability to change or enforce laws, and so while congress may pass a law, the followthrough is usually nonexistent
I think people are wary of moving to gitlab because its a similarly large platform and dont want to repeat their mistakes
Gitlab works fine for me. Been using it at work for a few years and recently moved all my personal repos there
What mechanisms do you have to allow people to remove their comments from your databae
It's A16Z, they definitely had an LLM recommend a set of books that nobody there has actually ever read. Except maybe Snowcrash
it's interesting that staying up to date with your dependencies is considered a vulnerability in Node
The skills required to get hired and the skills required to do the job are, again, not related
The every day practice of software engineering has little to do with the academic discipline of computer science. What makes a good software engineer is not usually the same thing that makes a good CS major
Oh well sure if you're targeting apple as a platform you're gonna have to deal with their special snowflake graphics API
I thought shaders just needed to be compiled to spir-v
Or, if you take the view of the court in the case of Andrew Auernheimer (weev), it exceeds authorized access and exfiltrated trade secrets
People have gone to jail for less than this lol
Some kind of testing should be required but 27mil seems egregious
In the last admin I used to think that "abolish ICE" was hysterical.
I now believe we need to not only abolish ICE, but puts the politicians and officers on trial. CBP needs to be purged and rebuilt from the ground up.
Never understood why Youtube was considered social media
It's a copyright thing