I always find quotes like these fascinating as I am the only one of my extended family (20+ cousins) that works in technology (SRE).

It's like the couples where both partners are SWEs: do you read each other's code and have opinions on them as developers??

The doctor that invented the "blood vessel path to the heart for a catheter" was German. He had the idea to try it out, grabbed a regular catheter, inserted it into a blood vessel in his own arm and pushed it in till he felt it in his heart.

He wanted evidence that he had actually done this so he walked to the X-Ray department (he worked at a hospital) and asked them to get him a chest x-ray.

Wild how medicine has progressed.

(This story is from The Body by Bill Bryson)

"Before they had functions and lookup tables, what would a human have done in the 1940s?"

e.g. the statistical significance is just "if I were to randomly try this, what percentage of time would it be above 5%"

When I was an intern at Merck in the late 1990s, the networking team was switching over from Token Ring to Ethernet.

It was so much work that they were openly recruiting anyone who was an employee or intern to come in on a weekend and help out. They eventually offered to pay people extra and a couple of my intern buddies took up the offer.

This is just going to make it even more desirable to a certain market segment.

If you enjoyed reading about how you can approximate complex statistical values using basic programming, I highly recommend Jake Vanderplas "Statistics for Hackers" [0][1].

It converts the sometimes hard to grok statistics terms and formulas into some very simple loops and basic operations.

Can't recommend it enough.

0 - https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2016/jake-vanderplas-statistics...

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq9DzN6mvYA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete

Fun fact: you don't need sawdust for pykrete. Adding any kind of material e.g. just newspapers can help similar to how rebar makes concrete stronger

It's an ESP32 with:

- microphone and speaker

- wifi

- bluetooth

- screen

- two buttons

- IMU with six dimensions

all for under $35.

You can see a video of me using it to control a web based mini plane simulator https://x.com/alexpotato/status/2109782226841870352?s=20

Wild how cheap this kind of stuff has gotten.

"I wrote a book and there is an epub version of it. I have the epub version for free on my website. There is also an epub version on Amazon and there is costs $4.

You might think that nobody buys my book because it's available for free.

You would be mistaken. LOTS of people pay for the book on Amazon and almost no one downloads it from my website.

Why?

Very obviously people are lazy and they are willing to pay the $4 to just one click deliver the book to their Kindle."

Been very happy with it although I will say Muse Spark 1.3 being free on OpenCode is my main model these days. If I run out of free credits on OC (which almost never happens) then I drop into GLM Flash 5.3.

if this is the only model I had to use for the rest of my life, I would be cool with that. It's good at a wide variety of tasks including reverse engineering, design, working with ESP 32 etc.

I think Muse Spark 1.3 is better but GLM 5.3 Flash is an excellent daily driver.

Everyone had a part of their house that was essentially a bar and they would have house parties all the time.

So I don't think it's sub-urbanization per se.

I distinctly remember that there were separate apps for spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3 [0]), charts (Harvard Graphics [1]) and word processing (Chi Writer [2]).

And now we just have a basic office suite for free in one website.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Graphics

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChiWriter

- I still have a mortgage on a property but don't live there so the mortgage bill gets sent to a different address (b/c rental property)

- Company A originated the mortgage and sells it to Company B

- Company B completely ignores the mailing address and starts sending bills to the original property address

- only through blind luck did I realize that the mortgage bill was being unpaid

This seems like basic, basic bookkeeping but I guess it's also a reminder that "reality has more detail than people realize" and that there are plenty of opportunities for improving systems.

One thing I would mention:

You are not dealing with a monolithic entity with regards to a hospital.

There are really multiple groups with oftentimes competing interests e.g.

- case manager wants you out and home b/c that is the best "score" for the hospital. They also DO NOT want you to qualify for Medicare if you are a senior b/c, again, "score" gets dinged if Medicare gets involved

- surgeons want you out as they don't want you to pick up hospital infection. They want you to go to a rehab facility as that will more likely lead to a good outcome

- the hospitalist wants you to be stable in the short term so will pump you with whatever medications are necessary to get you "back to normal" without addressing any root cause

- the nurses generally care about you as a person as they deal with you the most but oftentimes have the least amount of say over your case

- in one of those perverse incentives/unintended consequences: if you do TOO well on a physical ability test, that might disqualify you from certain coverage even if you are below the threshold on other ability tests. That can have gigantic insurance implications.

This is prompting me to write my own version of the OP blog post.

e.g. some EVM chains have a majority of "stake" in either one country or several adjacent countries (particularly in Asia). A cable cut there, which the article points out has happened, can lead to the blockchain getting cut off or even halting.

e.g. each expert lives on one node of the network and the model gets streamed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeCHu7fTcQ8