Roger Bohn

Prof. Emeritus @UC San Diego. Also Clinical Excellence Research Center, Stanford. Tech knowledge from craft to science. Currently: healthcare, flying.

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

USA in >4 simultaneous major crises:

1 Pandemic (Worst in 100 years)
2 Major recession (100 years? Not clear yet)
3 Equality crisis (Crisis 150 years old; public pain worst in 50 years)
4 Constitutional crisis (85 years?)
+
5 Slow environmental crisis (worst in 20,000 years)

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

@appleinsider Thanks much for this! I have avoided all LG softwate becauseof yhis privacy invasion .

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

AI vibe coding has major flaws.
This is predictable - new technologies always have problems. Faster dissemination (aka marketed) ==> less ecosystem understanding and worse end-user effects.
https://t.co/v2mlkRA37y

[Prof Michael E. Mann @MichaelEMann]

Whoah. This hits hard:
https://t.co/ENN3zoGxlH

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

@ogre_86 @RSE_VB Thanks for mentioning this accident. A good summary. I live along the flight path (which also included several public schools!). The crash totally destroyed a house with 3 generations in it (wife, baby, grandmother). The father was at work and survived.

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

@findmeabluebird Yes, it would help a lot. Also just putting a PDF of the whole thing somewhere, such as Substack. Thanks for helping all of us.

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

@findmeabluebird This would be a lot more useful with photos or diagrams. I can’t even be sure of the context. I guess you are talking about face masks to reduce infection?? That interests me, but not if I can’t understand the advice.
But thanks for trying.

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

‘A bombshell’: doubt cast on discovery of microplastics throughout human body - The Guardian

“…good laboratory practices have not necessarily been followed.”
Including …blanks, repeating measurements…samples spiked with a known amount of MNPs. https://t.co/hAEjbA2Pv4.

[Kr$na @krishdotdev]

This is the end.
Now no one can cross this level !

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

It's over, folks. Pack it in.

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

@JustinWolfers This is a classic “false dichotomy“ fallacy!

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

@flowersslop Simplistic. Your argument is that the _Per Episode_ cost of fakes less when they are easy to make. Perhaps. But that ignores TOTAL cost, to individuals +society. If effort to make a fake goes down 90% (10X), the number made will go up. Total loss could go up or down.

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

@BoyanSlat @Liv_Boeree @_HannahRitchie #1 is wrong. Reread the original article.
The figure only shows contrail effects, not total effects.

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

@Yash25571056 Explain? What is data on cognitive decline? I don’t read X regularly so I probably missed it.

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

@kareem_carr That’s great! A PhD from Harvard will be a major accomplishment forever. I’m sure you have lots of opportunities for your next phase. Perhaps even abroad, since US will continue anti-science for a while.
Curious about applications of the research. Please post ur abstracts.

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

@BeingWellpub @Gil_Bashe @sallyafrank @Microsoft That’s sure an empty slogan. As if startups need MS to tell them their purpose!

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

Unfortunately there is no theorem that says glamorous new technologies will ultimately be beneficial for humanity. Even though in past that’s been true.

Marcus predicts LLM benefits will be positive but small, while side effects will be serious. (Kind of like social networking?)

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

My overall view at this point (slightly more positive than @LuizaJarovsky below) is that generative AI chatbots (distinct from domain-specific tools like AlphaFold) will on net increase productivity to a moderate degree in many domains, with large benefits in a few areas. (I also agree with all of Luiza’s cautions round the costs in making this work.)

But those productivity benefits will also come with strong costs to society (misinformation undermining democracy, deep fakes for scams and politics, disruption of high school and college education, delusions that bring some to mental illness, nonconsual deepfake porn, increased cybercrime, greater surveillance, negative environmental impact, etc, to say nothing of an increasingly oligarchical society)

Overall, I am not convinced that GenAI will be of significant net benefit to society.

I would welcome @emollick’s latest take on this.

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

My overall view at this point (slightly more positive than @LuizaJarovsky below) is that generative AI chatbots (distinct from domain-specific tools like AlphaFold) will on net increase productivity to a moderate degree in many domains, with large benefits in a few areas. (I also agree with all of Luiza’s cautions round the costs in making this work.)

But those productivity benefits will also come with strong costs to society (misinformation undermining democracy, deep fakes for scams and politics, disruption of high school and college education, delusions that bring some to mental illness, nonconsual deepfake porn, increased cybercrime, greater surveillance, negative environmental impact, etc, to say nothing of an increasingly oligarchical society)

Overall, I am not convinced that GenAI will be of significant net benefit to society.

I would welcome @emollick’s latest take on this.

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

@CALonghurst @BeckersHR @GilesBruce @UCSDHealth @InnovationUCSDH @UCSDJacobs Narrowly targeted wearables can be useful eg CGM. But universal ones will produce lots of noise and false alarms. Wasted $.
Anecdote: my Apple Watch fall detection gives only false + redundant alarms. I did have 1 major fall w head injury; but watch was smashed by the fall!

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

@jasonfurman @ramez @ArthurLHerman Sorry, but a minor change in accounting rules cannot have a major effect! The reviewer you cite calls that argument “amusing.”

[Roger Bohn @RogerBohn]

@RadioFreeTom @TheAtlantic I’m glad that at least a few people are still concerned about nuclear weapons. The recent book by Annie Jacobsen was a good reminder about accidental but disastrous war.