If you're not following Phillips P O'Brien you should. His background as a preeminent historian of strategy and economics of WWII, his moral clarity, and his realism have made him right about at startling number of things since the start of the most recent invasion of Ukraine.

That's useful! And they can do some remarkable things. But the cost of un-entrustable code is very high. Here's an obvious mistake one just made on some basic data cleaning. Can you spot the error?

I'm truly shocked by all the claims that LLMs are intelligences or are brilliant at coding. They're useful tools, in some circumstances. But if you gave one a job exam for an entry-level programming job it would fail. LLMs try a strategy, fail, try again, fix the error, try again.

Apropos of sensitive to minor details, I'm playing with coding with one, and I had previously told it that the ZIP files were redundant with the CSV files in the data folder. Then I asked it to make a patient ZIP code variable and didn't capitalize ZIP. It next asked if it could unzip the files.

6) Just a predictive model that can interpolate well but can be quite sensitive to order and other minor details. Ask yourself, "Is the conversation I'm trying to predict likely to be anywhere in the training data?"

4) The cost of generating reasonable-sounding bullshit has gone down way faster than the cost of detecting it. 5) A useful thing that we will figure out more uses for, if we can find applications where false positives and false negatives are acceptable or mitigated.

2) Plagiarism of all of the world's smart words written by smart humans, and it's remarkable how close anything you could write is to something that's been written before. 3) A model trying to predict the next word that has some remarkable emergent properties.

Some heuristics that have helped me think about LLMs clearly: 1) The גּוֹלֶם (Golem) myth: words have a power of their own. Write them on a clay figurine and it will imitate a human in certain ways.

The path to wisdom....

Jack, you're a treasury of wisdom.

ProPublica’s analysis of CDC data found that the rate of deaths involving ectopic pregnancies has nearly doubled. The spike alarmed many experts. One said it should “be a never event.”

Geography, in this case, is likely destiny: locating in well-served, affluent, dense suburbs leads to delivery of ED services to patients that have less need for them.

I've therefore long been puzzled by the disconnect between the promise of freestanding EDs and what the literature shows is their current reality: expensive entities that tend to locate in the same sites as urgent cares and do fairly similar work.