Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | maxerickson's commentslogin

Do they even exist?

The result in the study is a few percentage points difference in the disease rating scale after 5 years, with relatively large variation in the underlying individual results.

The potential for there to be a mechanism that accelerates progression is a great thing to publish, but the data looks like it is in the "do you want to enjoy coffee for 5 years or go without to maybe avoid speeding it up a little bit" category.


Did you mean half a century? Meaningful change in 5 years would be pretty amazing.

Medical assistants and nurses work with you before the doctor to increase billable events for the doctor. You could describe this as saving money, but it's not the goal.

Phone and front desk stuff is just administrative burden, scheduling the appointment and making a paper trail.


In the US, local governments are often far worse than state and federal governments.

In general, it's because it's harder for the larger entities to get away with playing favorites (I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying that it happens a lot more in smaller units).

Paying all your taxes to the corrupt local judge (county official) is in fact not a win.


It’s also that, with the current system, a person who is young, talented, and ambitious who is interested in public service has little to no reason nor incentive to work outside the beltway or a state capital, leaving local governance to retirees and incompetents.

And developers

But local governments are much easier to leave than state or federal governments. And easier to influence if you decide to stay.

Say you own a well and sell the clean water.

I learn that boiling the stream water makes it safe and tell people about it.

What do I owe you?

Uber and AI are certainly more complicated than that, but you are pretty close to arguing that the constructed rights of some people inhibit the rights of other people.


How does that analogy apply to AI, where a handful of companies are attempting to replace the entire white collar market with computers? It fits neither qualitatively, nor quantitatively.

If somebody thinks the computer can make a better PowerPoint, what business is it of yours to stop them from using the computer to make a PowerPoint?

There's a big political problem to solve, but it's how to give most people decent material standards of living if computers are doing all the work, not how to freeze things in place so that people can keep doing tasks that (assuming success) the computer is better at.


Again, this analogy makes no sense. People use PowerPoint, they don't get replaced by it.

The goal of AI companies is to replace workers entirely; that is the only way their valuations make sense, and OpenAI's charter says this explicitly.


The displacement will rather obviously be task by task, not job by job.

Okay, edits it is. The displacement will rather obviously be incremental and be task by task, not job by job.


Basic familiarity with the paragraph styles in Word is like a 20 minute task.

If you are using markdown, you already understand the conceptual basis for it, so you just need to understand how it's implemented over there.

I'm not arguing that it is something you should do, just rolling my eyes at "I would be lost".


Not lost because it's hard to learn, but because I don't like writing in ms office products. It's not just word, I write formated long emails in outlook as well.

For the short, simple documents that most people make, a versioned, wysiwyg word processor is going to beat everything else.

I mean, they don't want to think about building the output, never mind controlling the process.


Building my resume in a wysiwyg editor was an exercise in frustration. Formatting was inconsistent, they were only searchable from inside the editor and versioning was useless because diff had no meaning.

My markdown resume has its own problems but having this level of control has been a huge load off my mind.


I started maintaining mine in plain text, no markup at all, 20 years ago and try to use it wherever I can. My favorite employer, a startup, liked it. Regrettably most companies these days lack a sense of humor.

For most of the short simple documents I create, I don't want to redo the formating for every document. Simply writing it in something simple like Markdown ( possibly a markdown wysiwig editor) and having my software automatically apply appropriate standard formats to it is ideal.

Right, most people don't want to do that, they want the burden of applying styles to the couple headings or whatever.

Unfortunately, most people don't use paragraph styles, but if you do, it's a couple clicks.


Agreed. There is actually a lot better control in openoffice / libreoffice than most people know. You just have to set up your styles and be systematic about (virtually) never using direct formatting, instead always applying a pre-configured style. There is a distinct value in seeing your final product as you work, when the final product is visual.

And if you define shortcut keys for your styles it's as quick to type as markdown.

This is more of a utopia than expecting the average office drone to learn emacs.

This is what Word is to most people. They just use the default styles, or their company's template. No special formatting, styling etc.

Also if you do want to add a table or a figure, for most people Word will be much easier than doing the same in Markdown.


Having handled Word documents a few times in my years, oh, how I wish this was true.

I'm a programmer and even I like writing in a non-programmable environment. Programming in the document system just stimulates the more primitive parts of my brain that love the processing and programming more than the writing itself. So it's distracting in that way.

WYSIWYG pretty consistently leads to visual and structural messes. It's only going to "beat" everything else if you don't care about quality.

Most people don't—and don't have to—care about quality for their short, simple documents, but that is neither good nor inevitable, and it's always worth trying to do better.


Your analysis assumes our current politics where money roughly equates with power. That won't hold if people feel controlled.

AI of course also has the potential to concentrate power, but people aren't just going to ask the accountants who should be in charge.


Money buys drones, drones are the future of power.

Why? The current method is cheap.

Hopefully it changes. Male baby chicks are thrown into grinders. It’s horrendous

At least animals getting ground up live is a horror as old as time. We seem to always be moving in the other direction and creating more new horrors instead of making things better.

I agree we should focus more on reviving ancient horrors.

Agreed. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn: there's a reason it's a classic.

The complete omittance of even acknowledging we have invented modern animal horrors far worse to work on first makes it sound like we just need to do better than other animals. Willfully ignoring that to act like doing so is a form of agreement between the statements is a bit gruesome itself.

I'm glad you want to handle some of the problem, but let's not act like we just need to do better than other animals is all to discuss. It's easy enough to agree with the full problem unless you're fine with the other parts.


like draw and quarter?

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: