roake

jkichline said:

Could they make AirPod Pros that don’t cause severe chemical burns/allergic reactions inside my ear after 1-2 hours of use? 

It’s possible you have defective ears.  If you would just pull out your phone and ask Bixby to recommend an ointment...

iadlib said:

Can they be sued for that? Selling a product that you later find out was intentionally hobbled?

While I suppose people can sue for anything, I think the spirit of the answer is no.  The original device met the specifications it was advertised with.  The fact that it had an underlying inactivated graphics core should be legally irrelevant.  Perhaps the had cooling or other issues with the overall design when that core was active.

joogabah said:

dewme said:

No matter what the system is, from taxes to patents to college admissions to product warranty claims to insurance claims to ... whatever, smart and/or devious people always find a way to game the system to their advantage. It’s a survival trait that’s deeply baked into the human condition. Whether it’s good or bad depends on which side of the exploitation equation you find yourself living on. Sometimes you’re the mole and sometimes your the mole whacker. 

It’s not baked into the human condition or everyone would do it.  It’s baked into the capitalist “self interest” doctrine.  Humans are the most profoundly cooperative and social species on the planet. And then there are a small minority of intra-species predators who vary in number from society to society.  How to cure it?  Firstly, eliminate the primary cause: deprivation or the threat of it without wealth. Cause even if you can pay your bills today who says you won’t be destitute tomorrow.  The ethos and inertia doesn’t go away even with great wealth.   That is is the SOCIAL condition from which this sort of behavior springs.  People need a basic level of security and we live in a time of super abundance and waste that could easily be marshaled to ameliorate this.  

Millennial much?

chasm said:

ihatescreennames said:

How long until it turns out that snippets of audio are being reviewed for quality by an off-shore third party?

This seems very unlikely, given that these transcriptions are part of the patient's record, therefore HIPPA standards come into play.

To be HIPAA-compliant, these contractors would simply have to sign the appropriate agreements with the medical facility, or get a release.  It’s the same for medical facility office personnel, insurance agents, and anyone else that comes into contact with patient data.  The standard that must be met to show “need” to legally access those records is very low.  A TON of different people and organizations touch your medical records.

Ironically, medical staff cannot access their OWN medical records easily at all until the medical encounter (such as a hospitalization) is over.  They then have to go to Medical Records and request paper copies unless they have been to a facility that allows access to the records on-line.  However, a 2-3 day hospitalization will generate 1-2 hundred pages of information (mostly automated crap).  The on-line access give you access to only the tiniest portion of your hospital data.  Getting it through medical record gives you theoretical access to virtually everything.

As a physician, working at a hospital system that utilizes the “Cadillac” of the electronic medical records (EMR) software, I can tell you that the machine learning and “automation” has a long, long way to go.

The “automation” part of the machine learning basically looks for key words in my documentation as well as looking at lab results and diagnoses that have been entered by humans to try to match patterns and suggest additional medical issues.  The suggestions are wrong probably 70 percent of the time, and have been already documented 25 percent of the time (but the software doesn’t recognize this).

The few times that the suggestions are “relevant,” I’m getting asked to clarify something like which bacteria is responsible for causing a pneumonia.  How the f*%k should I know?  Most of the time respiratory cultures don’t grow the culprit bacteria; if it DOES grow, it usually takes a few days before there is enough to identify, and we document that anyway.

I’ve found that the AI portion of this 100’s of millions of dollars EMR is more of a distraction than anything else.  I don’t know any physician who doesn’t simply ignore it.

On a related topic, I would point out that the documentation that a physician dictates must meet an EXTREMELY complex set of criteria, covering tons of nonsense bullet points that change based on the patient and various diagnoses.  Dictating an entire note as a single recording into a watch would bypass all the advantages that the crazy expensive EMR software grants you, such as automating certain parts of the note (insertion of lab values, test results, etc.).  The article also doesn’t say whether it’s (A) SIRI transcribing (which works extremely poorly when medical terminology is involved), (B) Custom dictation software such as Dragon Medical is involved, or (C) A human transcription service types this up.

Lastly, to those of you that think computers are “good” at reading studies such as XRays, EKG’s, etc, I can assure that while this may be true in science fiction movies, these things suck in real life.  The automated EKG interpretation algorithms have been progressing for decades, but still suck.  They get some things right, but get just as much wrong.  We aren’t going to see these things nearly as good as humans anytime in the foreseeable future.