cnewey

I'd be quite interested to see a study of some kind about this - for example, tracking diversity of word choice, phrasing patterns, rhetorical devices etc among human-authored text - compared over time among groups of heavy users / moderate users / non-users of LLMs.

Obviously the concept of "individuality" is fairly tricky to operationalise but still, it might be able to indicate a measurable effect and if so, that would be fascinating.

I think ClickUp gets the dubious honour of being my least favourite piece of software of all time.

Super slow to load, clunky, unbelievably overcomplicated, packed with trackers and unnecessary JS, etc. It almost makes JIRA look like a single page static site by comparison. It is absolutely gopping to use, and appears to treat the Unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it well" as anathema. ClickUp does 400 things. Poorly.

The threat of turning that up to "100X" fills me with genuine dread. How much worse is it going to get for us poor folk that are stuck with it?

But unfortunately, a VPN won't protect you from captive portals. So not entirely sure what your comment adds to the discussion other than being unnecessarily rude.

For other readers who may be too young to remember, improper privacy controls (unenforced HTTPS, poor encryption in the form of WEP, easy MitM attacks, etc) meant that public/untrusted WiFi was a legitimate security risk as things like passwords, bank details, etc were very easy to steal as they were sent unencrypted over the air. This is fortunately much less true these days with the advent of better protections across the entire stack (HTTPS everywhere, WPA*, etc) but unscrupulous VPN merchants still use this outdated argument to try to sell their products to less technically-savvy customers.

What these technologies (and VPNs) _do not_ prevent is the legitimate (and consensual) capture of user data by captive portal software (email, phone, etc), which is typically submitted by a user wishing to connect to a public network. This is what the parent comment is mentioning. Different risk profiles, obviously.

I'm not sure that resorting to personal attacks against the parent commenter for making a legitimate critique is the right, fair, sensible, or mature approach here.

Discarding legitimate criticism based on some self-determined criteria of intellectual superiority isn't a good look. It smacks of elitism and isn't something conducive to a productive and positive community discussion.

It is unhelpful, rude, condescending, and completely fails to address the underlying problem.

Hah, no my house was built in the 1750s or something like that - single glazing on the front and with fairly minimal insulation, plus it has no cavity wall (a mixture of wattle and daub and brick). It is a mid-terrace though so I benefit from neighbours being either side.

There have been a few cold snaps here where the weather has been down to -2 some days, but it’s been fine. I had a couple of minor installation issues (eg 3 way valve set incorrectly) but once those were fixed my house hasn’t dropped below 19C.

I was recently in a situation where I had to replace my oil-fired heating system’s oil tank (it wasn’t double skinned and no longer safe).

It was £2500 to replace the oil tank, or I could opt for £2250 to install a heat pump with the government grant. This included all plumbing, electrical work, installation, and 6 new radiators all over my house.

Honestly to me it seemed like a no-brainer. It’s a tad more expensive to run, but it works really quite well and is a lot less invasive than a big smelly tank of kerosene. I gained another 90cm of width in my garden, it’s actually quieter than the oil boiler, and it doesn’t stink in the summer- win win.

Well now, I never expected to see my village on Hacker News. I can actually see this church from my bedroom window - and as if by magic the bells just started ringing 9am!

Ah no, I meant “is the snark necessary?” to the parent comment. I enjoyed the read!

Is that really necessary?

Really enjoyed this story, thanks for sharing!

I think you're glossing over a few details here which - although understandable - deserve a little clarification.

The poster is referring to cost at the point of care - which under the UK's NHS model is £0. The "£3000" per year should really be viewed as the cost of an insurance policy (in fact, NHS funding comes from a progressive tax called National Insurance - at least in theory). This "£3,000" on average then compares to the average cost per person of a health insurance policy in the US of around $7,700 [0] - plus of course in the USA you generally have point-of-care costs too.

Additionally tax by its nature in the UK is progressive and the income distribution is fairly heavy-tailed, so it's not really a cost of "just under £3,000pp" - the average citizen pays far less than that, and even most high earners will pay less. For example someone on £100,000 (top 1-2% of salaries in UK) will pay just over £4,000 in NI [1] - but NI funds more than just the NHS and also funds social care and state benefits.

Of course in the UK some people choose to supplement NHS care with some form of private insurance - either paid for privately (uncommon) or provided as an in-kind benefit through an employer (still not ubiquitous but recently more common). Private care is typically used for things like skipping waiting lists for certain treatments or access to alternative care not offered by the NHS.

These private policies tend to have a lot less coverage than the NHS, so I would say aren't directly comparable to the NHS - nor are they generally totally adequate as standalone insurance policy so aren't comparable to an insurance policy in the US either.

The model is just very different in the UK and the US, and it's hard to compare them directly. However, what is inarguable is that the NHS provides very good value for money, especially when compared with other G7 nations [2] - on average less than half of the expenditure per capita of the US.

[0]: https://www.william-russell.com/blog/health-insurance-usa-co...

[1]: https://www.which.co.uk/money/tax/tax-calculators/national-i...

[2]: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/health-spending.html

It costs nothing in the UK as it's covered under the National Health Service. Well - I say "nothing". All British citizens pay "national insurance", but it's effectively a regressive tax that's not based on the individual's health (as insurance would be), so some folks are effectively subsidising others. To give you an idea of cost, my NI contributions are about ~5.5% of my salary, but that also goes towards the state pension.

All that said, it's not a massive cheap free-for-all on medication - in the UK we've still got hospital/NHS trust budgets which have been iteratively slashed by a decade of successively worse Conservative governments, so generally the inclination is for the NHS to prescribe the (much) cheaper generics.

It's interesting that the article states that Infliximab is more expensive than Adalimumab.

> anti-TNF drugs, such as adalimumab, work similarly to infliximab and are significantly cheaper, more research is needed to establish whether they’re clinically effective

Adalimumab has been extensively tested and has been prescribed in the UK for at least 9 years - as that's how long I've been on it. The NHS wouldn't be prescribing it if it wasn't clinically effective.

Both medications are monoclonal antibodies for TNF-alpha, but are slightly different in formulation. Infliximab is a chimeric monoclonal antibody derived from a mouse/human cell lineage, whereas Adalimumab is derived solely from human sources.

My understanding (from the consultants at the research hospital where I am a Crohn's patient) is that Adalimumab is a) more expensive than Infliximab and b) less likely to trigger the patient to develop an immune response after a long prescription period, as the chimeric cell lineage can be recognised by the immune system as "foreign" after a while. I'm not a clinician so I can't really speak to the correctness of this statement, but anecdotally that's what I have been told by my consultant.

I am not sure that Infliximab is more expensive either. From what I understood at the time of my prescription, Adalimumab (Humira) was the more expensive drug, although prices have dropped significantly since then.

We got a generic Adalimumab formulation on the market in the UK about 3-4 years ago - until then, we were using AbbVie's Humira which I believe cost the NHS about £400/pen at the time. As I understand it, Infliximab is cheaper than this - although the generic Adalimumabs are also cheaper (~£80/pen IIRC).

Well said.

What about being from a union advocacy group detracts from the findings of the study?

What about the study makes you think it’s poorly run?

> In January 2023, DPC was forced to increase the fine issued to Meta Platforms after a review by European Data Protection Board found that the initial fine was insufficient.[12] European Data Protection Board determined that DPC has failed to perform its enforcement responsibility with "due diligence". The critics have pointed out that 7 out of 8 decisions handed down by European Data Protection Board were against the Irish DPC, and that the DPC "always choose the most tortuous, lengthy and expensive legal route to a decision rather than a simple application of EU law".[13]

Interesting.

The sad fact is that the law in most countries is so toothless (and the law enforcement agencies so far behind) that the legal penalties are mostly just academic.

Bug bounties (and proper education + screening processes for developers) are the most effective way for businesses to prevent security breaches - relying on legal recourse is more of a “shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted” sort of approach.

Do you have a… less visceral metaphor? Or some information I can read about? I’m curious.

While I think there are a couple of valid points, in general my feeling is that the author is setting up a straw man to attack.

Most of the “programmer sins” are of the type that more seasoned engineers will easily avoid, especially those with experience working with scientific code. Most of these mistakes are traps I see junior developers falling into because of inexperience.

Packt’s business model is so transparent and so cynical. I hate it.

This book seems to be suffering from an identity crisis. It’s ostensibly aimed at “programmers” but the content is predominantly machine learning topics. What sort of general software engineer needs to know about GRUs and LLMs?!

Add that to the fact that it’s published by Packt - this is probably one to avoid.

If the parent had discovered a viable and profitable trading strategy, do you think they would share it here?

Privacy issues aside for a moment, this looks really good and is something I’d be interested in. I can imagine this being helpful for folks with ADHD or memory issues. I have found meeting transcription tools to be absolutely invaluable at work so to expand that to my wider life makes good sense.

That said I have to admit the monthly subscription price ($19-$29/mo) seems a little higher than I’d like for a wearable device, especially as the premium features appear functionally like a thin wrapper around an LLM and some search tools.

> I've always been confused why salaried workers think they only need to work 40 hours a week.

Employment contracts in most developed countries will specify a) hours of business/office hours and b) an expected number of hours that the employee is to work. In many countries (including the UK for example [1]), there are even laws restricting the number of working hours by default.

[1]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1998/1833/contents/made

There have actually been studies that show a positive link between profanity and honest behaviour/integrity[1]

The study I've linked below is slightly flawed, but it does provide a small nugget of evidence to your anecdote.

[1]: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/gsb/files/publication-pdf...

This is great. Such a powerful visualisation for such a simple technique!

My only critique is that I wish the creator hadn't used JPG images - there are clear compression artifacts that appear towards the edge of the screen as one image transitions to another.

> We believe, the SNN is the correct representation of the how the mind works. In fact, we have mathematical proof that our representation is the most efficient representation.

No details on the website, though. This is either very poor marketing, or (much more likely) snake oil.

I don't really know where to start after reading this - it reads like a collection of poorly-informed reasons that the author dislikes relational databases - almost all of which are entirely orthogonal to the concepts of relational algebra or modern database management systems.

For example, SQL injection can hardly be considered a problem with database systems alone - and the problem with using code injection as an example of how RDBMS are "so bad" is that code injection isn't inherent to databases - it's to do with executing unsanitised user input (which is a problem that should be handled in the software accepting user input).

Doing a little bit more digging, it appears that the author is peddling his own technology (the "contextual database") which is presumably the solution all these problems... but the product's website has such a scarcity of technical information that it appears to be almost entirely useless.

Smells like snake oil to me.

It appears that net profit (for AbbVie, at least) tends to sit quite comfortably between 20-30% most years - 24.27% last year, and hitting almost Elsevier-like levels (~32%) in 2009 [1]. That smells like profiteering to me.

Add to that their particularly hostile approach to patent applications (100+ on Humira alone), and to me it appears that AbbVie perhaps has a vested interest in stifling innovation and charging large amounts of money for their products "because they can".

[1]: http://financials.morningstar.com/ratios/r.html?t=ABBV

Read the findings from [1] - it appears that in a very considerable number of cases, there's actually a disconnect between the cost to research, develop, and produce a drug - and the price that's charged to customers (or insurance). The conclusion is that the price is mostly determined by "what the market will bear", rather than much else. This suggests (to me, at least) that in cases of a particularly expensive drug like Humira, a large proportion of the profits are not reinvested into R&D.

[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/25456...