I suppose if you *know* you will get exposed, then you could have a window where you could be in a state of inflammation, get infected, and come out the other side with a durable immune response and discontinue.

Problem being that if you don't know when you'll have been infected, hard to say when it stops. As we saw with COVID-19, it can be a *long* time of active pandemic to try to get through. I guess if this, hypothetically, worked as promised you get to get treated, then have something like a 'COVID party' like they used to do with kids and chicken pox to be more confident about getting infected...

That's fine if it's something actually important, or even 'officially' important. However the vast majority of the time was just the manager wanting to ramble about whatever they were thinking on such important subjects as the new boat they got.

Note the 'for days'. This doesn't sound too promising.

Sounds like they would achieve this by making people 'pre-sick' by having their immune system in a sustained inflammatory state, for a while. This points to both an inability to keep it going, and likely not a very pleasant experience for the relatively short while it is effective. You'd have to know within a few days when you are *going* to get exposed to a virus..

Practically speaking, any pandemic will be bouncing around long enough for this likely to be unsafe to keep going. Even if you did ship out doses, the inconsistency of usage will prevent you from squashing it in a short order.

I remember before COVID, I had this manager that would for whatever reason or another hold an hour long meeting most days.

Now it was pretty much universally a waste of time like many meetings, but at least usually I sit on my laptop doing real work even as I'm in the conference room. Not ideal, but workable. However with this manager, the first sentence in every meeting was "ok everyone, laptops closed, phones in pockets". The manager felt it a sign of unforgivable disrespect to look at any screen while the manager talked about whatever stupid thing they were thinking that day.

At least COVID does seem to have killed off conference room meetings for me, even if I'm in the office sometime.

I am signed up for my employer's 'optional' AI subscriptions and have even enabled it so they can see that my environment is touching the LLM.

However, the more I tried to use it, the less confident I have become in it being a particularly good help.So I get the suggestions and make my employer thing I'm a good little LLM user, but pretty much discard the suggestions. For some very very boilerplate stuff, it can help, but even for tasks today that I thought "oh, this is boilerplate, the LLM can whip this up no problem", it totally botched it.

So while the hiring managers say "we need LLM use by our employees because they are more productive", they end up getting lied to by those of use that are told you'll be laid off if you aren't using LLM. The fact that they can't tell except by taking our word for it speaks volumes to me..

Speaking as someone who works with a large python codebase and everyone prepares for the annoyance of migrating when we decide to support another python release, it's kind of the opposite.

Every python release breaks backwards compatibility in a few ways. This is why people run old versions, this is why a number of pypi modules get abandoned as python revs.

There's broad agreement in the organization over time that python was ultimately not the best choice. It might have been pretty good, if not for the core and ecosystem changing things and driving a non-trivial amount of our effort to just be on a treadmill.

Particularly aggravating because we have users demanding python 3.6, 3.9, 3.12, 3.13, all at the same time so we have to curate things with a broad level of compatibility. It took *forever* before the users stopped demanding python 2.7.

They don't so much as stand for things as they stand against certain classes of people...

The Tea Party won and consumed the GOP.

Yes you have that report, you have another about how terribly overvalued Palantir is, and you have the general reaction to GPT-5, which was amazingly underwhelming.

Lots of signs that the 'march to AGI' actually isn't going to get more fundamentally capable than we've managed so far without some sort of unpredictable breakthrough that can't just be guaranteed through more funding. Still lots of area for LLMs to be more useful as they are already, but that's not what the investors were betting on.

'GPU' is whatever nVidia wants it to be and however many of whatever type of compute element they want can be in a 'GPU'. Unlike the crypto boom, where nVidia didn't really embrace it and largely got left behind, nVidia has fully embraced their AI role and so long as the market will reward it, they are all in on whatever makes a 'GPU' competitive for the solution. In some fields the high end Blackwell GPUs actually represented a retreat in performance, largely owing to the architecture catering to AI sensibilities.

Problem being that the imagined replacement is still all the badness of SaaS, subscription model with shifting capabilities and content. Just without the traditional UI, and instead having a chat-style interface.

On durability, note that the interior screens almost certainly won't crack, but they will scratch easily enough.

Now most of the time it'll be closed when it might have been scratched, but at least for me after enough time you see scratches in the fold.

So there's a tradeoff there.

Note I spoke of a colleague, not Steve Jobs.

Yes, he also went the 'home remedy' route but his was a different cancer. His relationship with medicine was fouled by an emotional experience with his brother where he felt the medical establishment betrayed him by torturing him with treatments until he died. Even as he rationally admitted his brother was told up front the treatments had low chance of success, he emotionally seemed to think it was nothing but painful false hope.

It's not the sort of 'fake' you are talking about though.

You talk of being professional and adopting a separate work appropriate persona. I'd argue this is still 'real', just focused on a distinct set of concerns than you might do personally.

This fake is all sorts of just utter LLM fabrication coming from all angles. Replacing traditional search with an LLM processing the results leading to someone subjectively seeing lower quality results. AI writing assistant, which can just spew out utterly generic verbose crap that is maybe 5% from the user prompt, 95% generic padding BS. Even without the platforms own LLM, users are stuffing in output from other LLM providers thinking the LLM gives their resume/post a boost.

So the personal social media posts might lean into image generators, the words are *usually* their own, because verbosity is frowned upon and people want to plainly state what they want. There are of course pure bots to worry about, but an actual 'human' account is mostly real.

The professional ones have people hoping for LLMs to make them look more employable, and so human accounts become a mess of generic LLM content that is barely curated by the human because they think the LLM is ready to be professional in a way they aren't.

Had a colleague whose brother tried for a longshot treatment for a late detected colon cancer 10 years prior with a poor prognosis and watched his brother suffer as he dies.

So when he got a much more early detected much more treatable cancer with an over 90% success rate for treatment... He said no, he won't suffer like his brother and instead try "home remedies" instead. So he let the generally treatable cancer kill him.

Just worth noting that circumstances vary wildly case to case, and generally the medical staff are forthcoming with your chances, and one person's bad experience that ends up futile may have nothing to do with another person's case.

Every story is accompanied by a bunch of white knighting saying that it's fake, the user was deliberately trying to induce funny responses, or that it's fixed now.

If your typical google search is pretty milquetoast, then it's not crazy to imagine that the results are inoffensively 'ok', and that maybe he tried to ask about eating rocks and pizza and got the post-correction behavior and thus concluded the people dismissing the criticism were right.

He might have felt that it may not get things totally right, but if there's something clearly specific, then probably it got that right.