Saturday, 1 March, 2025 —
links
generative-ai
iA, developers of iA Writer and iA Presenter:
Tech companies big and small sell AI as something that thinks for us. It does replace thought with statistics—but it is not intelligent. No one knows what the future will bring. But is a future without thought a better future?
Now, with a tool that might help us think… How about using AI not to think less but more?
There are two primary areas I am investigating using generative AI tooling with, writing and software engineering. This is true for both work and at home. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what the evolving possibilities are, and I’m still building a habit of reaching for the tools in order to learn how best they’ll work for me.
The questions and examples in this article are a critical pivot in generative AI’s use from, “let it think for you”, to, “here’s how to leverage generative AI into higher quality writing”. That’s a bit different in approach than how I think generative AI is commonly used.
I am way more comfortable using generative AI as a reviewing tool, for help in unsticking things, or spotting problems vs. “doing the work for me.” I can easily see using similar approaches to edit and improve my general writing and my software development.
On the software engineering side at work, my engineering organization is strongly encouraging the use of tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT and is providing licenses for their use. The key suggestions are working with GitHub Copilot in an IDE and ChatGPT elsewhere for generating code, troubleshooting code, explaining code, and brainstorming.
The institutional sense is these tools are roughly equivalent to an exuberant, but inexperienced, intern. Accordingly, the guidance is to delegate work to the tools, but thoroughly validate the results. I think this recommendation is a correct approach. Another, and where I’m finding more natural alignment with is using these tools for review and editorial feedback. The iA suggestions here will help inform how I approach prompt writing and what I’m looking to get out of code generation, to the point where I may build a shell first, then run snippets by and seek improvements.
Similarly, Writing-wise, I’ve made some use of the Apple Intelligence writing tools and had a niggling sense there was a better way of handling their use than I have been so far. This post has just such an example of comparing Apple Intelligence writing tools output against the original and then reviewing a change-by-change comparison. I like that and have an easy way to do that in BBEdit. As with software engineering, it feels more congruent to my way of working.
Saturday, 7 September, 2024 —
transplant
Aria Bendix reporting for NBC:
…two months later, Bennett Sr.’s body rejected the heart and he died at age 57. In a paper, his doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center explained that his body had likely produced too many antibodies that fought off the new organ. A drug he’d been given may also have increased the odds of rejection, and a virus in the pig heart further complicated matters.
Three other patients have followed in Bennett Sr.’s footsteps and received pig organs, most recently a pig kidney transplant in April. Together, they represent the pioneer patients of the burgeoning field of xenotransplantation. For their families, three of which spoke to NBC News about the experience, the journey came with a roller coaster of emotions, from uncertainty to blind hope — and, ultimately, admiration for their loved one’s decision.
…
None of the patients survived more than three months. To the public, that might seem like failure. But to the families, the transplants accomplished their goals: to buy their loved ones more time and advance research that could potentially save lives one day.
This includes Rick Slayman, whose transplant I linked to earlier news items (one, two), although Slayman’s family did not contribute to Bendix’s reporting.
Xenotransplantation, in this case, pig hearts and pig kidneys, is an amazing scientific breakthrough. These transplant families have been through a lot and, it is amazing to me how supportive they are of their loved ones living a little bit longer — days or weeks — to move the medical science forward.
As ever, the defining need is more available donors to help wait list patients. It’s a hard story when health declines so much, in part because tranplant wait times can be so long for suitable matches, particularly for heart and lung transplants, that someone who needs a transplant would no longer qualify medically to receive one.
My hope is over the next few decades there are multiple improvements that allow improved xenotransplantation, cloned human organs, an increase in deceased donor donation viability, and, plainly, more folks willing to donate altruistically while living for kidney or part of their liver. Alongside that, better medical advances to reduce the need for transplants altogether, less terrible and more effective forms of dialysis. May progress continue.
Thursday, 18 April, 2024 —
tech
Sean Hollister:
In 2020, we wrote how coding bootcamp Lambda School seemed like a bit of a bait-and-switch. Four years later and one rebranding to “BloomTech” later, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is finally slapping it on the wrist – it’s permanently banning it from issuing any more student loans, fining the company and its CEO $164,000, and releasing some students from some of their debt.
Why? Among other deceptive practices, the “Bloom Institute of Technology” didn’t call them loans. It advertised a way for students to get high-paying tech jobs “risk free” with “no loans” by paying 17 percent of their future income for five years – rather than the $20,000 sticker price of tuition.
But those Income Sharing Agreements (ISAs) were definitely loans, the CFPB has decided, since Bloom was earning an average finance charge of $4,000 on each one, students could default and get sent to collections if they failed to make payments, and Bloom was turning around and selling those student debts to investors for $7,000 to $10,000 a pop.
What a reckless and abusive business model. I’ve worked with several fantastic software engineers that came out of code schools. The practical focus of these programs is incredibly beneficial, but there’s zero reason a program like this has to be run as a for-profit endeavor as opposed to being a certificate program administered through community colleges.
Monday, 8 April, 2024 —
photography
Mostly cloudy solar eclipse at 91 percent coverage
Here in Williams Township, Penn., we had a maximum of 91 percent coverage from today’s North American total solar eclipse. We’d held onto eclipse glasses we picked up in Montréal, Québec in 2012, where we were present for a clouded-over Transit of Venus. The morning started off sunny, but around 1 PM, clouds started moving in. By the time the eclipse started here, it was iffy that we’d be able to see anything. So, we were feeling a bit of cosmic frustration.
Thankfully, at 3 PM, we were able to see the eclipse through some gaps in the clouds. I’d still love to see totality in my life, but I’m pretty pleased at how some photos in the front yard turned out. The benefit of the heavy cloud cover is it rendered the eclipse visible through the clouds and, therefore, able to be photographed easily without filters.
Tuesday, 2 April, 2024 —
transplant
Dylan Matthews, writing for Vox
But the Mass General researchers went a step further when they transplanted a pigney into Rick Slayman, a 62-year-old Weymouth, Massachusetts, man who was very much alive. He luckily remains alive as of this writing and is producing urine through the piece of pork that some doctors put in him.
This is unquestionably good news for Slayman, and while routine pig kidney transplants are still a few years off, it’s obviously good for people with kidney failure to have more options.
We shouldn’t let the news distract us, however, from an uncomfortable fact: Humans could, if we wanted to, end the kidney shortage right now without any assistance from our porcine friends.
All of this.