I daily drive an AMD Framework 13 with Fedora. I do light software dev, writing, some gaming, and run a variety of local LLMs without pain. I'm happy with the machine and Framework's support, and I do like their vision of repairability/upgradability and I've taken advantage of that already. On the downside, it just clearly isn't as good of a machine for the cost compared to what you could get -- several aspects are just middle-of-the-road: the webcam, speakers and the battery life stand out for me as not great. The AMD chip is also new enough that I still run into glitches with kernel updates on occasion, and power efficiency was initially much worse but has been improving.
In the past, my jam has always been to buy used Thinkpads and run them into the ground. If my Framework got stolen today, I don't think buying another Framework would be a slam-dunk decision for me but I'd still consider it.
tl;dr: happy enough with the laptop and Framework support; hopeful that the dream of repairability/upgradeability pays off; but it does feel like a bit of a compromise on quality.
p.s. I'm quite sensitive to noise and really did not want a machine that ran its fan all the time; the AMD Framework 13 is pretty good for this unless gaming or under some other high load and then it's a rushing sound not a whine.
I used to volunteer with Software Carpentry to teach and create lessons. Wonderful project, and so, so needed as many researchers (eg grad students) never get to properly learn fundamental data crunching skills and instead bumble along with poorly crafted spreadsheets and lots of cutting and pasting.
In the paper: "It is worth noting that the proposal of a "wake/sleep" specific algorithm for unsupervised learning of generative models based on feedback from stochastic stimulation goes back 25 years (Hinton et al., 1995)"
> Just a few years ago, paramedics in Germany were routinely (and probably not entirely legally) using WhatsApp for communicating with the hospital
Here in Canada, WhatsApp is routinely used in the hospitals for doctors to communicate with each other about patient care. We aren't supposed to send identifiable information but... it happens all the time, of course. And for the same reason: no sanctioned system to replace it.
Ditto. We developed a nice set of high-res hippocampal atlases[1] and multi-atlas segmentation method to use them[2] and compared it with FSL, and freesurfer and found FSL and freesurfer would often over-estimate segmentations. Good for a first pass because they are both dead-easy to run though.
Thank you for posting this. I'm just starting out on a career in medicine myself, and I often wonder how to make it through this with my sanity intact. The idea that the career demands "the subsuming of my inner life" seems cruel and, I hope, not inevitable. Isn't there room to feel our feelings in this job, and not necessarily be ground down by them?
As an intensive care specialist (what would be called an attending in the US) I find it best to control my emotional response to my job. Also, empathy is probably not as wise as compassion in this context, from a career longevity point of view. If you find during your training that you have difficulty setting emotional boundaries and regulating your emotional responses, consider choosing a specialty with fewer unhappy endings (though probably not something with a strong pattern recognition component such as radiology or anatomical pathology, given technological progress in that area - you'd have to expect that we will need less of them as time goes by). There's lots of scope to do less emotionally taxing but still very useful and satisfying work if that fits your aptitudes better.
Some of the best advice I ever read on this subject, which really helped me through residency training was from the little essays at the beginning of the Oxford handbook of clinical medicine [1]. The one I particularly remember was called "On being busy", and taught a generation of UK medical students and residents about "Corrigan's secret door" (the link hopefully shows that page on Google books). My favorite quote from the book was about how to recognise "stress" in yourself: "stress is defined as arguing with more than one nurse in 24 hours".
The book was affectionately known in England as the "cheese and onion book", because the colour of the cover matched what at the time was the traditional colour of packets of cheese and onion flavor crisps in the UK [2]
I sometimes ponder, against my own experience from experiencing the mathematical side of things, how the "folklore" wisdom in the medical community is almost certainly something that the rest of us might benefit from (this probably started when I read The Emperor of All Maladies a couple years back) considering the issues that the mental part of it deals with: ethics, conduct in a power-unequal relationship, consent, the moral imperative to evaluate risk competently (and the recognition that the former can never be done perfectly), telling the truth and intention/effect differences ("you're almost certainly going to die"/"this is a miracle!"), not to mention the elephant-in-the-room question of living with death as a close acquaintance and learning not to become consumed with either anger or despair at what one considers personal failings.
(I suppose the late Oliver Sacks's work is an instance of what I'm talking about.)
For those who are unable to grasp the emotional impact of dealing with patients, I would like to mention that Erich Segal's novel 'Doctors' helped me appreciate it better. I found it to be a fascinating read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91201.Doctors
There always be room for feelings, and empathy, but those will manifest only when you're not doing the technical job of medicine, i.e. the part of the job that will require your full attention and the full use of your skills.
This will come naturally with expertise, and is not a state of mind where you actively "force" yourself to stop caring, but rather a kind of single-minded flow[1] where you can only feel completely relaxed and at peace with whatever's happening. This is important because it allows to function at your best and ensures you treat all you patients to the best of your ability, because your immediate motivation is not their wellbeing, but staying in the flow.
What do I mean by those "technical" acts? Anything that requires fine-tuned skill. Everybody thinks of fine-motor procedural skills (surgical techniques, intubation, difficult LP), but purely mental skills are exactly the same. Getting a history from a patient while forming diagnostic hypotheses feels good.
Of course, as soon as you'll be delivering bad news to your patients, you want be functioning like a highly skilled worker but as a fellow human being who can't do much more than commiserate. You wont be in the flow, and you wont feel any less for your patients just because you're the doctor.
In the past, my jam has always been to buy used Thinkpads and run them into the ground. If my Framework got stolen today, I don't think buying another Framework would be a slam-dunk decision for me but I'd still consider it.
tl;dr: happy enough with the laptop and Framework support; hopeful that the dream of repairability/upgradeability pays off; but it does feel like a bit of a compromise on quality.
p.s. I'm quite sensitive to noise and really did not want a machine that ran its fan all the time; the AMD Framework 13 is pretty good for this unless gaming or under some other high load and then it's a rushing sound not a whine.
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