You know what? If you don't like your job I'll take it. Seriously that's what I wanted to do since I was a teenager. Now I spend my time counting other people's money. That's an even worse life.
It's real. A few people I know are in the dataset. The SSN is problematic, but personally to me, the more troubling data is a seemingly complete, or at least complete enough, address history for the people I checked for. It doesn't have dates, but just having the addresses could cause major problems for spear phishing attempts.
Sites might exist for reasons other than to "be useful". At a bare minimum, they may be trying to sell eyeballs to advertisers, but they also might be trying to deliver an experience, induce some deeper engagement, make a sale, build a community, whatever.
All of that disappears when a bot devours whatever it assesses to be your "content" and then serves it up as a QA response, stripped of any of the surrounding context.
Because reading nonsense inside an infinite debatable context is fun. I know what you're talking about and frankly I'm not impressed.
You know why people like these chat systems? Because it straight up saves time. When a system is made it to indexable, "context dependent", and "creating a certain experience" it just begs to be summarized and made to be something you can use. That interpretable work is.... Pointlessly difficult.
A good example: discord. A vast number of communities are designed to be "experiences" where you have to pour hours of your time to adapt to their little fiefdoms if you wanted to obtain any useful information in the form of important information on a topic. Try doing this in any serious fashion and you will quickly be wasting more of your time than you want.
Yeah so maybe chatgpt gives you the occasional incorrect fact. I haven't had that happen in any way, shape, or form. Furthermore: just be critical of your information. Not hard, and they are already working on fixing that.
Especially for people that are bonafide adults time is worth more than "the pride of human work".
Note however that HN is not gatekeeping any useful information that may be produced during conversations here; in fact, it's all indexed and searchable.
Sure, and if a chatbot can helpfully summarize factual content being gatekept in a Discord chat, then that's fantastic, but I don't think that's quite what I'm getting at. The internet has room for more than just an infinite queue of fact-seekers interacting with a bank of fact-repositories. Some writing (eg, poetry) is clearly art and the people who have created it are entitled to have a bit of say over how that art is consumed and under what regimes it is summarized/remixed. Or at least us as those consumers should have the discernment required to be able to say "this isn't authentic, let me seek out the original instead."
I'm not normally a purist on these things, but I'm recalling musical artists who bemoaned the destruction of the album format in favour of $0.99/track sales in the early days of the iTunes store. Concept albums in the vein of Sgt Peppers still exist of course, but almost every modern mainstream song is now prepared first and foremost to be listened to in isolation. I didn't care for those arguments at the time they were being made, but years later, I can appreciate how something was lost there and that it might have been appropriate to let artists specify that album X was to be sold only as an album.
There are references in her book. The effects of pH and so on have been well-studied, and antibacterial mouthwashes are well-known to kill bacteria. I don't think there's been an RCT or anything of her system specifically, so that is based on her experience, but the studies do demonstrate that brushing alone is not sufficient. I'm not saying she's the last word on the subject, but it's how evidence-based medicine works - if you don't have strong evidence, you look at weak evidence such as expert advice, and I haven't found any other advice that discusses going beyond brushing. That's sort of the issue, is that (similarly to this neurosurgeon's experience) the vast majority of dentistry is focused on filling cavities, rather than promoting oral health or health in general.
Ellie Phillips is a big fan of xylitol though. The science on that is a lot less clear, e.g. how much xylitol is necessary in gum (she of course advocates huge amounts), and then she also sells mints which have little effect on plaque. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8791908/) I sort of ignore that, just because she has to make money doesn't mean the rest of her advice is not evidence-based.
Yeah "positive thinking and going with the flow will fix disease". Tell me: why didn't everyone 1000 years ago live to be a hundred everywhere? Oh that's right: because it's not that simple.
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