Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: Project will be canceled (Score 1) 154

Comment Re:One guy resigned 2 days after being hired (Score 1) 47

Back around 2001/2002, I had friends who received $k signing bonuses and then $k severance bonuses, all without leaving school. Such things are corporate round-off error when compared to related overhead expenses. Don't blame the worker who has to find a new job, especially if they relocated.

Comment Re:Seems like a simple standard to me (Score 1) 37

Look at the recent Boeing or Intel articles for examples of what happens when specialist decisions are made by distant accountants / MBAs.

Anonymizing and generalizing some real-world SNAFU medical decisions: Because of history X, doctors know procedure Y is unlikely to work for this patient, even though it is generally effective for other patients with this condition. However insurance requires Y to be tried before Z, because Y is 50% cheaper. Never mind that the weeks long delay caused by mandatory insurance review, plus another month lost trying Y, allows the cancer cells to multiply / spread three or four cycles (doubling each time, for 8x to 16x total)! Or that the expected cost is nearly 1.5 Z because doctors knew X!

Comment Caveats on the HBA study (Score 5, Informative) 266

Take the HBA study with a large grain of salt. While the data does include some low-performing vo-tech and arts schools, the "underperforming thousand" are mostly issuing certificates or associates degrees, and a good half of them appear to be training for hair cuts and cosmetics. These weren't students seeking higher education. They just needed work skills.

Download the HBA data spreadsheet from their site and look for yourself.

The https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcollegescorecard.ed.go... has a lot more fields to filter out, as well as many institutions with multiple sites. So the HBA data is a helpful start. See OPEID6 in column C and MD_EARN_WNE_P10 in column BKB. They also have a scorecard by field of study as opposed to institution...

Comment just make it a leap hour already (Score 1) 103

Time zones are generally one hour wide.
So people are used to one-hour offsets, computers have one-hour offset code, ...
The people who care about a 1-second offset between wall-clock time and astronomical orientation are likely to use finer angular offsets anyway.
Leap seconds are added complexity for all that do not achieve the objective for the few.

KISS

Comment Free economic analysis (Score 3, Interesting) 73

Assuming $40 / hr, 7 hr / week, 52 weeks / year, 1 mod / sub, and 2000 subs, I estimate moderators provided at least $29M of free labor to Reddit each year. It takes a sizeable paid content team to replace a single passionate expert. The API revenue had better be a lot higher to risk spoiling the whole show.

Reddit was interesting because people used it to organize interesting conversations. Web forums are everywhere but Reddit had community. The owners seem think their platform is more important than the community. I remember what was and look forward to a better future. Maybe variations of Eternal September are destined to recur.

Comment Re:Very puzzling... (Score 1) 64

I believe that OP was getting at the difference between memorization/knowledge and understanding/comprehension.
If you memorize a sentence, you can repeat it many times.
If you understand a sentence, you can express it many different ways.
The most efficient encoding may capture concepts and require extra bits to maintain specific word choices and sentence structures.

Comment Re:Reposting my old comment again (skip if u read (Score 3, Insightful) 38

Many years ago, some classical AI expert systems claimed to outperform doctors in real-world tests. Never gained much traction. Explanations varied.

Personally, I am all for encoding medical knowledge in a machine-readable, open format knowledge base. I might even support requiring every journal article to provide input to it. Computers are designed for retrieving information and applying rules such as formal logic and Bayesian inference to filter and aggregate results. People are notorious for memory or logic lapses, especially under fatigue and other stress.

I can imagine an LLM-frontend might be vastly more doctor friendly than writing formal predicates for input or interpreting raw numbers for output. It could also provide a natural prompting system that recommends tests and warns of rare but serious alternative diagnoses.

Present AI tools can also look at data to suggest correlations that may merit research into improved treatment protocols.

I am strongly opposed to the idea of present-gen AI being used to supplant a formal knowledge base by "somehow" learning "better" than expert humans through unsupervised processing of existing texts and data. Such hubris seems endemic to AI hype.

Slashdot Top Deals

You may call me by my name, Wirth, or by my value, Worth. - Nicklaus Wirth

Working...