2 October 2024

So much to unpack in this article. They gave a group of doctors clinical vignettes as a diagnostic challenge and half the group was allowed to access GPT-4 for help.  How did they fare? Here are the score:

Doctors w/o GPT-4:  73.7%
Doctors with GPT-4: 76.3%
but GPT-4 alone: 92.1% grimacing

Not looking good for human doctors.  It was a timed test, so maybe some anxiety caused wrong answers, but the control group was allowed all their usual online resources except an LLM.  The study says that the doctors were selected from various institutions, but didn't disclose where.  First, machine learning models are great when you present them with nicely packaged clinical vignettes. The trick is to tease out the salient elements. But secondly, that doesn't exonerate the human doctors: they deliberately chose to ignore the right diagnosis in favor of something else. This dispels the notion that AI can help clinicians be better doctors.
Thirdly, it foreshadows the future of medicine – that diagnosticians will be replaced by human nurses who are paid to create clinical vignettes for a model to parse. Real geniuses will go into research and industry, and eschew clinical medicine, also largely because it will pay far less than their earning potential.

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Yikes!  Taking the mRNA vax product wipes out the long-lived plasma cells from the bone marrow.  This explains why the vaccinated tend to get COVID-19 over and over again. What a mistake it was to get it.

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The artist that won an art contest with an AI-generated creation based on other people's work is now upset because his own work is being copied by AI.  He scorned detractors when he won the contest, but he's not so relaxed about morals now that tables have turned.

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HaLow WiFi has a range of 9.9 miles away. That's an improvement. My next question: how safe is it? Will I be able to have children?

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A casualty of Hurricane Helene.  
Spruce Pine is one of the only places in the world to mine high-purity quartz.The mineral is an essential ingredient of chips in countless products, including medical devices, solar panels, cellphones and the chips powering the latest tech craze: artificial intelligence. A few weeks of shutdown is not the end of the world, Conway tells Axios. However, longer than that could put the industry into "another crisis." The semiconductor industry would need to find alternatives.
Yikes.

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Do Canadians lack ambition? The president of Shopify thinks so.

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