tpmoney
Joined 7 years ago
Joined 7 years ago
I'm not saying lawyers aren't really really expensive, but you don't have to spend a long time digging into just a simple question like "what parts of the law are no longer enforceable after a supreme court decision" before you start to understand why they charge the prices they do.
If you want to know the literal text (that may or may not be enforceable), then sure a plain text diff is sufficient to know that nothing at all has changed about federal communication laws since this section was last amended in 2002. But if you want to know what the actual law is, you definitely need more than just a text diff.
It seems to me like they are indeed just “not supporting” it, to the fullest extent possible.
I was talking to my own doctor and their experience with a new note taking / transcription AI app they've been using, having worked on medical software before. One of the problems I noticed when designing software then was that software likes its categorized fields, with data entered just the right way and in just the right order. But medical work is almost never that neat and tidy. Patients and other medical professionals give you information in whatever order things come to their mind in, or in whatever order their own system and paperwork displays it. A simple prescription consisting of a patient's name, DOB, medication, medication form, dispensing quantity, refills and dosing instructions might be given to a provider in any order of those fields and no matter what order your software chooses, it won't be the same order as someone else giving it to you. Most providers that used the software I worked on resorted to hand writing everything down and filling it all in later, or having to ask for repetition over and over as they clicked through various fields trying to remember everything before it flicked out of their short term memory or the other person moved on. And as more and more systems and regulations require everything to be entered into electronic records, this has become more of a problem. To the point where you go to some appointments and you often don't even see your doctor's face because they're stuck behind a terminal nodding along as they try to capture everything you say into the specific fields in the system. AI tooling has the potential (and at least from my own doctor's experience, is already showing that potential) to free up the mental effort spent on getting the right data into the right fields. AI can do a great job of understanding that a free text field that says:
Fucitol tab 25mg qid
John Smith 01/01/75
#30 3 months
and a free text field that says: Fucitol 25mg tablet
30 tabs, 4x per day
3 refills
Smith, John 1975-01-01
say the same things, and get those things into the right fields in the record for you. They still need to go back and check it (and see the previous caveat about "good enough" systems) but by freeing the doctor from the mental load of intentionally categorizing all of the data they're hearing while simultaneously trying to reason through what all that data means and enter it at the same time they have more mental room to actually pay attention to the things the patient is saying, the things they're doing and the things the doctor is seeing.And one thing I hope is that it makes switching doctors if you need to safer and more effective. The sheer volume of information a new patient can bring with them if they have all their medical records is massive and sorting through it all is likely something we'll never give our providers enough time and money to do. Things will get missed, or doctors will defer (consciously or not) to the diagnosis already listed, even if a more thorough review might reveal the diagnosis was wrong. An AI system designed to review an influx of data with an adversarial eye, or at least an eye towards looking for missed possibilities or potential reasons for the patient's dissatisfaction with the previous provider could go a long way towards helping end the sorts of "I went through 10 doctors all of which told me it was all in my head/I should try losing weight/I can't be experiencing this issue at my age, and then finally the last doctor had just finished reading a paper about how XYZ can cause these symptoms and now I'm finally getting treatment" stories anyone with friends or family with chronic health problems probably has heard more than once.
But start paying attention to how you talk and write and you’ll realize you’re using those same cliches all the time. Heck I just did the “it’s not foo, it’s bar” cliche in the previous paragraph because it’s a useful language construct and it appears often in writing. An LLM writes like a budding author that learned “never use ‘blank said’” as a writing rule and goes to tortuous lengths to come up with more “clever” ways to say someone said something. But those clever ways are used all the time by very good writers too because they’re effective phrases. LLMs and hyper vigilance for their writing just means we’re more aware of the cliches we use
My own family had a similar problem. The family member was way over-prescribed a drug by a doctor who clearly wasn't helping treat the underlying issues and frankly barely remembered the patient from month to month (for a person they were seeing every month). It still took us nearly a year to find a doctor we could switch to because everyone we called was so freaked out by the dosing the prior doctor had prescribed that half of them wouldn't even touch the case at all, and the others wanted to just stop everything cold and start all over again. The problem with that being that the underlying reason they were getting prescribed these medications was still an issue. Asking someone who does need the medication in question (or similar treatment) to not only suffer without it for a few months but also just stop their escalated doses cold turkey is just needlessly cruel and harmful. We were lucky to finally get a doctor who accepted helping us get things under control, with a pre-made plan of action and a "sole-prescriber" contract, both of which was fine, we just needed someone whose plan didn't start with "and now you stop everything you're taking to treat your condition and we wait until you're detoxed before we try anything else".
For that matter, and speaking of NIST, their new guidelines apparently require checks against known breach databases when registering passwords. So if the goal is to "take every opportunity to reduce attack surface area and potential information leaks", if you're following the latest NIST recommendations it sounds like integrating with HIBP is actually the correct thing to do. Obviously they could also do things like offline checking with a downloaded DB (though are you potentially leaking information if HA requests an up to date offline DB?) or make the feature opt in. And I do think they should do both of those things, to be clear. But I don't think it's arrogant to want to understand the proposed threat model before making a change to your application's default security posture. Especially if you chose that posture with the intention of making the system more secure in the first place, and it does reasonably do so.
And while it doesn't say what their backend can do, certainly if you edit in the ̅ escape sequence after the U into the page HTML it seems work, so nothing in the page content itself would make them unable to display the characters. Just makes their note all the more strange.
[1]: https://www.sfgate.com/sports/article/alcantara-gets-another...