100,000 people in the US alone die of diabetes per year (none of the 7 were in the US). Other reporting shows that 3 million glucose meters are being recalled. Diabetes can be tricky to manage as it is.
One could look at this story case-by-case and what happened to the affected individuals. Did the device directly lead them to harm? Of the wide coverage of this story, I see no testimonials from affected people.
We're left with the statistical perspective. I don't see the math supporting this story. I expect that as many or more people would have been harmed by diabetes during the time period without this bug.
I think it is more harmful to perpetuate the lack of context or analysis that brings crowds to look at statistical noise and agree that something must be done about it.
The deaths are associated but not necessarily caused by the incorrect readings, but as is often the case, medical interventions treat all observed conditions as side effects (this is similar in the case of drug and device trials), and the FDA has typically operated from an abundance of caution (though policies are somewhat erratic under the current administration).
I share the skepticism of the top-level comment by jimrandomh, in I understand that CGMs are used to guide treatment but not determine it, and that the consequence of spurious low blood-glucose readings is not likely to be immediately threatening (that is: the consequence of mistreating based on the mis-reading would be an actual high blood glucose event), though of course over the long term, high blood glucose levels are precisely the mechanism by which long-term and late-stage diabetes symptoms and conditions emerge.
Given the large number of devices (38% of US adults, or ~125 million), and millions of CGMs in use, seven associated deaths seems a relatively low number and correspondingly low risk.
TFA also would seem to misclassify the problem as one principally of software where the actual principle issue would be of potential patient noncompliance with protocols. That itself is complex, and isn't necessarily a matter of blame (the very young, otherwise ill, or cognitively-impaired might well be expected to comply poorly with instructions), but is a concern providers and dispensing pharmacists would have to be exceedingly cognizant of. As well as device manufacturers.
I'm aware that "what does Salesforce actually do?" is a joke but I also really don't know what they do and this article didn't help. They... have conversations with customers? What does the AI do?
They make hideously complicated software to help businesses manage their business. You need consultants to help integrate it and to make any changes to it. The interfaces are convoluted and require learning how they work rather than having any kind of discoverability. Switching to their systems often involves a dip in customer satisfaction. Switching off of their systems is nearly impossible by design.
A big chunk of it is like an enterprisey, old TwentyCRM. It connects with everything, and nobody got fired for choosing salesforce. And the decision makers all play golf together.
Living in proximity to people who don't care enough to not be annoying to others has a few ways you can look at it. But I suggest you consider upgrading the cabin air filter in your car. There are likely options with activated carbon to help reduce odors. This was actually a factor in my decision to go Tesla: their models S and X have an additional massive HEPA filter, and absolutely no outside smells make it into the car.
I hear this commonly about using the words "male" and "female." I think it's unfair. For one thing, the military uses them frequently, and so would veterans. Another reason is that their meanings are age-agnostic which helps to emphasize the intent of the speaker--to differentiate on sex alone, not sex plus age.
Yes because these descriptions are meant to foster dehumanization and detachment, which is very useful in military and scientific study contexts. That's why they also sound unnatural in casual conversation
Yes, because if you're a hardcore liver-failure-in-three-years alcoholic, quitting cold turkey will kill you, and if you're in the hospital for some other issue, they will make sure you get some alcohol.
Doctors don't prescribe it to people who aren't already putting away 50 drinks a week.
I like your point that doctors prescribe things that are necessary to patients, alcohol is one of those things, and there are clear and well-understood examples of when it is medically necessary for a doctor to prescribe and administer alcohol to a patient.
I believe ethanol is not actually often given as an antidote for methanol poisoning in modern times. It does work as a competitive inhibitor of alcohol dehydrogenase (i.e. occupying the enzyme to convert ethanol to acetaldehyde, slowing the conversion of methanol to formaldehyde and on to formic acid, which is not eliminated quickly and causes metabolic acidosis) - allowing the methanol time to leave the body through excretion, and limiting formic acid levels. However, other drugs like fomepizole also inhibit alcohol dehydrogenase with lower toxicity than ethanol.
I can bet they quite more often prescribe marijuana, or if you like - CBD or even THC in some cases. And historically, I've been told, the amount of morphine prescribed quite outpaces the alcohol prescriptions, right?
> There are also, concerningly IMO, an extremely large amount of people willing to accept severe surveillance or privacy downsides so long as it helps achieve the goal about kids.
I’m alive. Nice to meet you.
I “accept severe surveillance”, not in the sense that I agree with it, but because I know that it already exists and has existed and that people that are against it are screaming into the wind. Many large and small countries have long histories of surveillance.
It’s not that you shouldn’t try to enforce privacy, in fact, the law requires it if you in some cases, and it’s a good idea in others.
I’m certainly not against the EFF standing up for the rights of everyone not to be severely surveilled.
But, realistically, the public cannot easily anonymize our activity and data. And if you try to do so, you’re painting yourself as a target.
If you were trying to keep your country safe, wouldn’t you like the ability to infiltrate any major cloud, SaaS app, social media platform, bank, government, VPN/internal network, and OS?
Similarly, if you were a big data or security company wouldn’t you also do everything you could to know everything it is to know about a person if you had the means and time and it made sense for your business?
Following, if you were to have that power as a government, business, or other organization, wouldn’t it be critical to ensure that you restricted its use to ensure it wasn’t abused to the point that you’d lose it, even though the reality would be that you probably don’t have time to keep it as safe as you need to?
I “accept severe surveillance” not because I promote it or want it, but because I understand how the world works and what it does.
All these things will pass. If you have the focus and the mental capacity to do what is good, then do it. It likely helped the world in some way to learn about KGB wiretaps. But, in the U.S., as far as I can tell, the backlash against the CIA and NSA was just used for political gain and then to replace those that didn’t agree with the current administration. Was that helpful? And who are we really being manipulated by when we attack ourselves and install destabilizing leaders?
Chances of being manipulated and attacking yourselves would diminish quite a bit if those tasked with surveillance wouldn't be blinded by the pursuit of as much data as they can get their hands on. Yes, knowing everything there is to know about a person can be helpful to a point, but if you had the means and time there is literally no business where it makes sense to pre-emptively collect every bit of data on such a single person. To do so in regard to multiple people or more will have a crippling effect on gaining insight and understanding of relevant information. Having a vast knowledge-base is a huge waste of resources when it impairs your capacity to convert what you know into what would be wise. There's really no need to infiltrate anything and everything to know what needs to be known, and it will save a whole lot of distraction and data fatigue.
People eager to have such a vast trove of data at their fingertips lack patience and focus to develop skills to use their access responsibly - having them around is counterproductive and dangerous in any business where intelligence is key.
So, no. I would actually prefer to try and keep my country safe, thus any desire to infiltrate anything, anywhere, anytime would be irrational, and most likely an early warning signalling an onset of dementia, delirium or any similarly debilitating condition. It should certainly exclude me from working with highly sensitive data, unless you are in the business of making my country less safe.
This is a fairly defeatist approach to the issue (read that as a statement of fact, not an accusation or argument). The problem with taking this stance, for many people, is that you’re giving a mouse a cookie, except the cookie is marginally more and more control over your life in the form of the ability to control what you see, what communities you’re allowed to engage with, and what you’re allowed to do online.
This battle for online privacy and control is just that, a battle, and you are correct that it is not a fair fight. But engaging and pushing back, through advocacy, speaking out, and acts of noncompliance does three things:
First, it slows the progress of these measures and thus limits the amount of control over our lives we give up, hopefully until some more politically friendly people come to power.
Second, it provides a barometer (via its effectiveness) for assessing the state of that fight, and how dire it is becoming.
Finally, people voicing their concerns about these laws gives information that helps inform more powerful and potentially altruistic advocates with more resources (such as the EFF) in how those resources should be allocated.
Maybe those aren’t good reasons for you, and that’s okay. Lots of people just want to browse twitter and see sports scores and they don’t really care if they have to show ID to do that. For anybody else reading this though, there are lots of reasons why your involvement and engagement in this issue should not stop with “that’s just how the world works”.
The issue here for me has always been about the difference between treating a symptom and treating the illness.
Excessive surveillance is necessary when you cannot convince people of the merits of your politics or morals on their own and need to use the power of the State to intimidate and control their access.
For the issue on minors, if you have a child (guilty here) you are obligated to actively raise and educate them on the nature of the world. For access to online interactions this doesn’t necessarily only mean active limits (as one might judge appropriate for the child), but also teaching them that people do not always have positive intent, and anonymity leads to lack of consequence, and consequently potentially antisocial behavior.
A person’s exposure to these issues are not limited to interactions online. We are taught to be suspicious of strangers offering candy from the back of panel vans. We are taught to look both ways when entering a roadway.
The people demanding the right to limit what people can say and who they can talk to do so under the guise of protecting children, but these tools are too prone to the potential for abuse. In the market of ideas it’s better (and arguably safer, if not significantly more challenging) to simply outcompete with your own.
I read it more as "give the mouse a cookie because it's already getting crumbs"
These types of arguments are quite common due to how beneficial they are for authoritarian. People forget that authoritarians don't need a lot of supporters, but they do need a lot of people to be apathetic or feel defeated. With that in place even a very small group can exert great power. Which also tends to make their power appear larger than it is, in order to create that feedback loop
> If you were trying to keep your country safe, wouldn’t you like the ability to infiltrate any major cloud, SaaS app, social media platform, bank, government, VPN/internal network, and OS?
No!
In fact, the opposite!
If I have keys then so do my enemies! I want that shit locked down as much as possible because I don't want others infiltrating.
Personally if I was the president I would direct the NSA to pen test our own networks and work with companies to resolve any issues. I would make this a major priority in fact. I don't want them to be vulnerable or subject to blackmail.
Is it annoying I can't get in and watch them? Sure. But you can't have both.
Everyone is adults here and get trust. Plus, I'm the government. If I have legitimate belief they're acting illegally I have the power to get in anyways. It's just shower, requiring courts who keep my power in check
I suppose it depends on how much else you want to see. E.g. the recent discussion on Australia's social media band for teens https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208348 has ~1500 comments covering nearly every possible angle I could have conceived and some positions I'm not sure I would have even been able to imagine. Focusing on about the kids is a popular position in threads like that, and one of the top 5 top level comments is even an example of "I care about the kids and don't want to discuss how it should be about these other things".
And the Internet also consists in large part of bots talking to bots. This is not to say that some people won't always promulgate the "Won't somebody please think of the children?" argument every time an expansion of the surveillance state apparatus is in question, but rather to say that we should not take for granted that every bad opinion we see online is one deeply held by any real people.
On the topic of biology specifically, you might like The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
He argues/explains how evolutionary forces become dominant, with much more focus on the why. Why it has come to be that living things grow, multiply, and over time changed in ways that out-succeeded the prior ones, down to the level of DNA--and that these driving forces are manifested by individual genes.
There's some neat math that shows how one could send (radio) signals which are undetectable to an observer. Last I read, the research was in specific, purely theoretical scenarios but the idea is that you could send bit impulses which stay within the noise floor. Transmit with a power less than R^2 (in discrete time and ignoring triangulation and you have to pre-coordinate the timing of the transmissions with your partner via pre-shared one time pad and use plenty of error correction) the enemy observer cannot prove that someone is sending signals at all.
Maybe no such techniques could ever apply to the internet, but I'm not sure it's proven impossible. You would need a well defined threat model but if you can show that your enemy is working with noisy data and strictly in the digital space, I don't see why statistical de-anonymization couldn't be foiled.
Sleep is just different from shut down. With an unplugged laptop, after an idle period or by shutting the lid, I'd like the machine to save energy. I haven't always taken the steps to prepare for a shut down, saving open documents. I wouldn't like to wake back up an idle machine to see that my programs had all been closed.
And sometimes I'd like to quickly put a laptop into a bag without waking it up just to shut it down first. If I had a way to transition from sleep to shut down I'd use it, but also... this is where I see that if the sleep state were more perfect (used zero energy, zero unintended wakeups), it would obviate my need to shut down most of the time.
One could look at this story case-by-case and what happened to the affected individuals. Did the device directly lead them to harm? Of the wide coverage of this story, I see no testimonials from affected people.
We're left with the statistical perspective. I don't see the math supporting this story. I expect that as many or more people would have been harmed by diabetes during the time period without this bug.
I think it is more harmful to perpetuate the lack of context or analysis that brings crowds to look at statistical noise and agree that something must be done about it.
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