The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure • Hacker News Board

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#161

Post by arethuza » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 8:52 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #124

observationist wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if we let doctors do medicine instead of letting profiteering beancounters optimize for number go up.

Step therapy is required in countries with universal healthcare, too. It can actually be harder to get access to new therapies in countries with universal healthcare because they’re more uniform and strict in what they allow. For a relatable example: The UK just raised the age of eligibility for COVID vaccines all the way up to 75 years old: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/covid-russian-roulette-... Contrast thi…

Worth noting that "eligibility for COVID vaccines" is for "free at the point of delivery" NHS treatment - you can still get it elsewhere at any age. Boots (a major chain of pharmacies) do it for £98:

https://www.boots.com/online/pharmacy-services/covid-19-vacc...

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#162

Post by RobotToaster » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 8:57 AM UTC

gzread wrote: post #140

c0balt wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likely the same as in most other countries: fines, further orders and eventually criminal prosecution.

when you go before a jury of your peers for having illegal solar panels on your roof, what will they say?

A solar farm isn't a few panels on your roof, it's a large installation in a field.

Also in the UK it would probably be a civil lawsuit, which doesn't have a jury, although if you violate a civil court order you can still get a jail sentence.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#163

Post by KaiserPro » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 9:24 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #124

observationist wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if we let doctors do medicine instead of letting profiteering beancounters optimize for number go up.

Step therapy is required in countries with universal healthcare, too. It can actually be harder to get access to new therapies in countries with universal healthcare because they’re more uniform and strict in what they allow. For a relatable example: The UK just raised the age of eligibility for COVID vaccines all the way up to 75 years old: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/covid-russian-roulette-... Contrast thi…

Sorry but this not actually true.

THe most appropriate treatment is required, not "step therapy". For antibiotics this makes sense, as last mile, powerful antibiotics need to be used sparingly.

The same with cancer, it'll be treated according to the requirements of the cancer, with guidance from nice about the most effective therapy.

Is it perfect? no.

Does it lead to mistakes? yes.

It is better than american style insurance denying care based entirely on price? 100%

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#164

Post by KaiserPro » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 9:33 AM UTC

I beg people to step outside and look at recent history.

"Why is there byzantine regulation for this particular industry?"

because someone took the piss and killed loads of people. A good example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_...

Where a conman made claims to lure the desperate and gullible.

The Vet case is instructive here. This is to stop suffering in animals.

The same with the people experimenting on themselves. THis is to avoid stuff like Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where unacceptable risks were taken to gain data.

tldr: these regulations are there to stop bad actors killing people for either profit, data or fun. Claiming ignorance as to _why_ these regulations exist is bad research and I would suggest is either incompetence or dishonesty.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#165

Post by Hikikomori » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 9:34 AM UTC

iso1631 wrote: post #49

like_any_other wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have examples of tweets handy, but here are stickers that get you 2 years in UK jail: They reportedly contained slogans such as “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066”, “Mass immigration is white genocide”, “intolerance is a virtue” and “they seek conquest not asylum.” Sources: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-68448867 (does not quote a single sticker that he was jailed for) https://www.gbnew…

Ahh, the famous "criminal damage is tweeting" case

Der Sturmer had no impact either?

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#166

Post by KaiserPro » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 9:38 AM UTC

endymion-light wrote: post #14

As someone who has looked at things like Renewable energy deployments within the UK, this is a pattern that seems to be quite pervasive across all industries. The byzantine web of planning approvals, goose counting, public outcry that you have to deal with to deploy essentially a relatively small solar farm is monstrous. What that results with is that the only people capable of creating & managing these processes hav…

UK planning law is not the same as medical research regulations.

UK planning law is the physical manifestation of legal tech debt. It will not be tackled until the daily mail and their readers are dead, and not replaced.

To make changes it requires lots of will from the government, and the consent of a bunch of people who are unlikely to give it.

medical regulation is fucking trivial by comparison. Most of it is arms length and technical. it can be changed according to evidence, rather than gut feeling. Its only in a few cases are there actual legal hard lines (like embryo research, and vivisection)

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#167

Post by Hikikomori » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 9:40 AM UTC

terminalshort wrote: post #80

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #51

The usual line is "the regulations are written in blood", and it's a cliche because it's true.

Please show me the blood that zoning regulations are written in

This a joke? Without it you can put dangerous industry next to residents. Texas fertilizer explosion, Bhopal gas leak, etc.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#168

Post by KaiserPro » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 9:41 AM UTC

greygoo222 wrote: post #157

littlestymaar wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you find the idea of a man complaining about having painstakingly hand typed a 100 page document over three month when he claims he can use an LLM in a way pretty much no-one has before him? It's several orders of magnitude easier to get an LLM fill some kind of red tape than it could be to use it in the way he claims to have used it.

He is not using an LLM in some new and exciting way. The process of making a personalized mRNA vaccine looks something like this: 1. Collect and sequence patient's normal and tumor genomes 2. Predict immunogenic neoantigens from genome 3. Generate optimized mRNA sequence from neoantigens 4. Create vaccine from sequence modulo some variations, which I wrote off the top of my head because I understand this technology.…

> Legal documents, on the other hand? Have you ever tried to get an LLM to do your taxes? It's not easy.

Taxes are numerate, which is where LLMs fuck up.

Legal documents are structured texts, which is where LLMs shine. Should you blindly trust the outcome? fuck no, but a good first pass is trivially achievable if you set the right parameters. and make sure its relevant to the right jurisdiction.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#169

Post by notahacker » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 10:10 AM UTC

greygoo222 wrote: post #156

littlestymaar wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how you keep skipping the unbelievable part of the story out of your replies: why would he spend 3 month hand typing a document that an LLM can definitely make at least 80% of it in one shot?

Have you ever tried writing a long, complicated document with an LLM? The last 20% takes 99% of the work.

True, and even more true in the case that you barely understand what you're doing. That's a feature rather than a bug of this sort of paperwork; the person who's simply pestered ChatGPT until it says "great idea" won't cross that threshold at all, whereas this guy [and the bioinformatics processing chain and experts in the loop he found] crossed it in his spare time. If it was just the "two hours a night typing" as quoted in the article, LLMs can do it in no time.

"ChatGPT better at finding expert advice than filling in compliance forms" and even "getting workable results from latest generation Open Source bioinformatics tools possible for smart laymen with minimal background reading; learning enough to prove they aren't dangerous only takes marginally longer" doesn't sound nearly as bad as "layman asks ChatGPT to cure his dog's cancer, only hard bit is writing enough words to convince gatekeepers" as rendered by news coverage of this (and not really elaborated on more by the TFA). A rendering which really should trigger people's bullshit filters.

Other fields crossed the computers can find potential solutions easily a lot earlier (any idiot can put dimensions into pretty dumb civil engineering tools and get answers that are probably correct; don't as me how I know!) and actually have higher barriers (no, even if you actually learn the relevant physics as well you will still need to pass some elements of your home design via someone with the right professional liability insurance linked to their experience and formal qualifications)

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#170

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 10:15 AM UTC

endymion-light wrote: post #14

As someone who has looked at things like Renewable energy deployments within the UK, this is a pattern that seems to be quite pervasive across all industries. The byzantine web of planning approvals, goose counting, public outcry that you have to deal with to deploy essentially a relatively small solar farm is monstrous. What that results with is that the only people capable of creating & managing these processes hav…

[deleted]