Steve Senior
Consultant in Public Health. Recovering civil servant. Lapsed neuroscientist. Ex-paper boy and former donut stand operator. Ultracrepidarian. Denizen of West Yorkshire. Opinions my own, re-posts are not endorsements.
- Modern parenting is just chaos isn't it? Just an endless torrent of potential cock ups
- Picking the right metrics is going to be important. E.g. 10-year survival can be improved without anyone living longer through ineffective screening which just starts the clock sooner. The current target around % diagnosed at stage I or II has the same problem.
- Whereas aiming to reduce the age standardised rate of stage III or IV is a better metric because you can't reduce that by over diagnosing 'early' stage cancer that wouldn't have caused harm in the lifetime of the patient.
- Today's fun with LLMs and code: being offered "THE SOLUTION THAT NEVER FAILS:" which then ... fails.
- "The couple built the business around their viral social media presence" We're going to see a lot more of this, aren't we? Want klout -> adopt strong unconventional opinions -> apply those strong opinions in the real world -> find out.
- This is bonkers. MAHA 'farmers' with ecoli tainted raw milk admit they really don't know how to make the stuff after all. "Producing raw milk takes careful planning from a facility and infrastructure standpoint. Unfortunately, we learned this after the fact." people.com/ballerina-fa...
- Interesting one this. Can't read the column (hoping it'll turn up in FT Edit in a few days). My guess is while work is a source of purpose and meaning it's not the only source. You'll never stop people helping each other or making things, even if the AI could do it for them.
- Maybe it's not the paid employment bit that provides the meaning and purpose and satisfaction but some combination of mastering skills, creativity, social contact and helping people, and paid employment is just the vehicle?
- Anyone know how the QAnon people are doing?
- Would be really bad if a town just getting some mojo back decades after it's major industry collapsed were to end up very exposed to another industrial collapse.
- "The parcel company Evri, which has one of its largest distribution hubs in the town, has been trialling robot dogs for deliveries." Have the people of Barnsley not suffered enough?
- A special case of this that I see a lot: the predict/prevent switcheroo. This is where you claim to only be interested in predicting some bad things (maybe for capacity planning purposes) and then inevitably end up intervening to prevent it.
- I can imagine a case for re-casting the BBCs core purpose as being the most reliable rather than the first to report. Less rolling coverage; more fact checking.
- And is there a big enough competitive advantage for a social media platform that can exclude AI content? You’d like to think so. But then even if there is, that doesn’t guarantee that the technology would be there or that it wouldn’t cost so much as to make the whole enterprise not viable.
- The twelve year old, on considering why animals were brought in twos to Noah's Ark: "That makes Noah's Ark much less of a children's story. That's a boat full of sex. That's weird.".
