Unfortunately, I think the lesson from recent history seems to be that outside of highly-regulated industries, customers and businesses will accept terrible quality as long as it's cheap.
Yes, every slack is optimized out of systems. If something has an ounce more quality than would suffice to obtain the same profit, it must be cut out. It's an inefficiency. A quality overhang. If people buy it even if it's crap, then the conclusion is that it has to be crap, else money is left on the table. It's a large scale coordination issue. This gives us a world where everything balances exactly near the border where it just barely works, for just barely enough time.
Nah, there is a quality floor that consumers are willing to accept. Once you get below that, where it's actually affecting their lives in a meaningful way, it will self-correct as companies will exploit the new market created for quality products.
Where are you getting that from the link that you shared (which is one specific school)? The link you shared shows a figure of $34k and doesn't show a clear breakdown of administrative vs non-administrative costs. The closest I can see in that link is that $13k/$34k is allocated to central services, but most of that cost goes to things like the school buses and the cafeteria and the security guards, which are direct services to students, not administrative overhead. They just are run at the system level, not the individual school level.
My understanding is that there are a number of reasons why commercial insurance companies pay more. A big one is that Medicare has enormous pricing power because people on Medicare are a huge segment of the population and also the segment that consumes the most healthcare services. Your local healthcare system can't NOT take Medicare. They're effectively stuck with the reimbursement rates that Medicare sets. On the other hand, healthcare systems have a ton of power in their local markets. A healthcare system can afford to not be in network for a particular insurer, but if that insurer loses access to the biggest healthcare system in a particular market, it can be devastating for them. A major employer is not going to be happy if their executives have to all change doctors because the big local hospital system is no longer in network.
This isn't really true anymore (if it was ever true). Providers are spending a huge amount of time dealing with prior authorizations and appeals for private insurance.
I work in this area and you're right that Medicare can require a huge amount of paperwork from providers. And a hospital will have far more than 2 FTEs for this (it's called Revenue Cycle Management).
There's another reason. The harder you make it for a provider to get reimbursed for a service (in order to cut down on fraud), the more difficult it is for legitimate patients to access that service. Medicare patients are elderly. Many of them aren't able to chase after doctors to get the services they need.
I'm working on a project in an area of healthcare where there was massive Medicare fraud decades ago. Medicare now requires extensive documentation for each claim and the paperwork is so onerous that providers have exited the market and it's very, very difficult to access care.
Right, CMS plays whack-a-mole with Medicare claim fraud. When they catch on to a systemic pattern they clamp down in a way that creates extra burdens for everyone, and then the fraudsters move on to something else.
David Simon and others have written extensively for decades about the problems with the Baltimore Police Department, and other departments around the country. They trace these problems back to the war on drugs and other purely American factors.
The Amnesty article that you're citing is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Baltimore Police Department did not need to learn about constitutional violations from the Israelis.
Yep. But the War on Drugs has been around much longer and is more relevant to people's day to day lives. And people buy into it. I hear this all the time "Sure, weed should be legal, and cocaine too because I like to party now and then, but the 'hard stuff' should definitely be illegal because its dangerous".
To make matters worse -- people think that those who advocate against it are doing so because they want to do drugs (and some may) but it's a civil liberties issue and is the foundation for the militarization of the police.
What DOGE was doing here effectively erased any non-white person from history. It goes way beyond rolling back "DEI". Essentially they were saying that a project on an incident in history where the participants were white was OK, but a project on a similar incident in history where the participants were black or female or Jewish is not OK because it's "DEI". So for instance, a grant to study labor history through the lens of white coal miners would be OK, but a grant to study labor history through the lens of female Jewish garment workers would get canceled.
I used gemini to look up a relative with a connection to a famous event. The relative himself is obscure, but I have some of his writings and I've heard his story from other relatives. Gemini fabricated a completely false narrative about my relative that was much more exciting than what actually happened. I spent a bunch of time looking at the sources that Gemini supplied trying to verify things and although the sources were real, the story Gemini came up with was completely made up.
Yup. I've had Gemini create fake citations to papers. I've also had it hallucinate the contents of paywalled papers, so I know I can't trust anything it writes, though I am getting better at using it recursively to verify things.
I am certain I read article that was posted on YN a month or so ago about some researchers that were caught using false citations in their research.
If I remember correctly, some group used an AI tool to sniff for AI citations in other's works. What I remember most was how abhorrent some of the sources that the AI sniffer caught. One of the citation's authors was literally cited as "FirstName LastName" -- didn't even sub in a fake name lol.
My company recently hired a contractor. He submits multi-thousand line PRs every day, far faster than I can review them. This would maybe be OK if I could trust his output, but I can't. When I ask him really basic questions about the system, he either doesn't know or he gets it wrong. This week, I asked for some simple scripts that would let someone load data in a a local or staging environment, so that the system could be tested in various configurations. He submitted a PR with 3800 lines of shell scripts. We do not have any significant shell scripts anywhere else in our codebase. I spent several hours reviewing it with him - maybe more time than he spent writing it. His PR had tons and tons of end-to-end tests of the system that didn't actually test anything - some said they were validating state, but passed if a get request returned a 200. There were a few tests that called a create API. The tests would pass if the API returned an ID of the created object. But they would ALSO pass if the test didn't return an ID. I was trying to be a good teacher, so I kept asking questions like "why did you make this decision", etc, to try to have a conversation about the design choices and it was very clear that he was just making up bullshit rationalizations - he hadn't made any decisions at all. There was one particularly nonsensical test suite - it said it was testing X but included API calls that had nothing to do with X. I was trying to figure out how he had come up with that, and then I realized - I had given him a Postman export with some example API requests, and in one of the API requests I had gotten lazy and modified the request to test something but hadn't modified the name in Postman. So the LLM had assumed that the request was related to the old name and used it when generating a test suite, even though these things had nothing to do with each other. He had probably never actually read the output so he had no idea that it made no sense.
When he was first hired, I asked him to refactor a core part of the system to improve code quality (get rid of previous LLM slop). He submitted a 2000+ line PR within a day or so. He's getting frustrated because I haven't reviewed it and he has other 2000+ line PRs waiting on review. I asked him some questions about how this part of the system was invoked and how it returned data to the rest of the system, and he couldn't answer. At that point I tried to explain why I am reluctant to let him commit his refactor of a core part of the system when he can't even explain the basic functionality of that component.
I'm observing pretty much the same pattern in my job. The sad truth is, people -especially non-technical- get too easily impressed by vibe-coded projects or contributions made in a few hours, because it's shiny and it gives the impression of a productivity boost. Don't you dare asking how that is supposed to scale, if it's secure or even extensible, or you'll be the one killing the mood in the room. Even though that's precisely the hard part of the job.
This sums up the inherent friction between hype and reality really well.
CEOs and hype men want you to believe that LLMs can replace everyone. In 6 months you can give them the keys to the kingdom and they'll do a better job running your company then you did. No more devs. No more QA. No more pesky employees who needs crazy stuff like sleep, and food, and time off to be a human.
Then of course we run face first into reality. You give the tool to an idiot (or a generally well meaning person not paying enough attention) and you end up with 2k PRs that are batshit insane, production data based deleted, malicious code downloaded and executed on just machines, email archives deleted, and entire production infrastructure systems blown away. Then the hype men come back around and go "well yeah, it's not the tools fault, you still need an expert at the wheel, even though you were told you don't".
LLMs can do amazing things, and I think there's a lot of opportunities to improve software products if used correctly, but reality does not line up with the hype, and it never will
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