381–390 of 711 posts
I'm excited by this. I recently left Red Hat for greener pastures. From where I sat, IBM was slowly turning toward wisdom again, having been run aground by its previous few CEOs. I was skeptical when IBM bought Red Hat, but after several years of not screwing it up, I'm pretty hopeful. Now, Krishna is working on streamlining the business and making the rest of IBM more like Red Hat. Splitting off the low performing K…
PwC/Accenture were worse. Hire arts graduates because they got a degree from a good university, chuck them on a 2 month coding/consulting course. Happy days $$$
I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…
I was surprised by some companies too, until I worked outside of tech. The whole rest of the universe needs software too. Most companies are grossly incompetent to develop it themselves. Most are things that SWEs of the type which visit HN would never, ever want to work on. IBM does that adequately well. That's "services." If I need a tool built which will manage workflow at a management consulting firm, a custom too…
Oh, my sweet child. You might be surprised to learn that IBM and those SWE boiler rooms like WiPro are basically the same.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> bedside manner + being able to remember a lot of things My impression is that accompanying a patient is super important, it helps to understand illness, to have a plan in case of more complex treatments, etc. Then my doctor has the ability to know me and gauge my health. She's also very good at probabilities and detecting when something really goes wrong. I'm sure that being able to do that require a lot more than…
“Super important” — more like “super nice-to-have.” Hospitals don’t have any single person on staff who stays attached to particular in-patients. Who knows you? Your chart. Yes, of course, hospital care would be better in many ways if we did have somebody who statefully understood particular patients’ needs. But what I’m saying is, the GPs in hospitals could be replaced with stateless diagnostic AI without making hos…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A two tiered system might actually be better for improving access to affordable health. Mid-level providers seem to achieve equivalent outcomes for routine cases at lower cost. I agree that Congress should increase funding for residency programs. https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/ama-seeks-mor...
I generally dismiss these “equivalent outcome” studies. Any midlevel will (and should) bounce the more complicated cases to their supervising physicians. Outcomes at that point are meaningless. There’s definitely a trade off between resources devoted to education vs. acceptable risks from failed procedures, missed/delayed diagnoses, and increased utilization of imaging and referrals (and the physician radiologists an…
If midlevels can successfully detect complicated cases to a supervising physician, and handle a whole lot of other care independently... and the net result is equivalent outcomes... this isn't a massive win? You've conserved the really expensive and contended resource for where it's needed and not made anything worse...
I worked for a large e-commerce company. I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience: 1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was s…
IBM is famous for charging people for the privilege of talking to them, even if you're trying to sell them something. This strategy makes sense if you consider that even in it's heyday Watson was 95% data science consulting firm and 5% actual valuable technology. I really think Watson is one of the biggest tech marketing bamboozles of the 21st century. Through Jeopardy they really had a segment of the business world…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Currently they have one of the only if not the only enterprise permissioned blockchain project called fabric and it’s open source. I could see them making a comeback with crypto but not the way we think about it today. Instead, inter-enterprise operations infrastructure.
The problem with “blockchain” is it is a textbook example of a solution in search of a problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course AI could replace doctors. Some people will always prefer the bedside manner a person provides, but many others won't care, and AI will eventually do a good job at imitating a good doctor's bedside manner.
Machine learning could beat my doctor right now. "Using Random Forest Algorithm for Breast Cancer Diagnosis" https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8644835 Most of what the doctor is doing is a type of modern shamanism though. Person doesn't feel good, so the doctor orders a useless test, test comes back negative so the person feels better. Then we complain health care cost too much. 10 full blood panel samples a year…
Every dollar spent coming up with the next automated imaging diagnosis model would be better spent on a model that encourages people to get up and exercise 5x/week, quit smoking (or never start), and get their colonoscopy. Once the patient is presenting to the doctor with heart failure, coronary artery disease, carotid stenosis, COPD, colon cancer, etc. the battle is already lost.
Complain all you want about the healthcare system holding data back. You don't need the healthcare system to make the biggest impact on people's health.
—- I’ll add that your shamanism comment sounds like the typical bs that the 20-something software engineer, who thinks they know everything because they make more than 100k a year and have never had to go to a doctor for anything other than strep throat or generalized anxiety disorder let alone spent anytime in a hospital other than to visit family members, that are everywhere on this site loves to say about physicians or other healthcare workers to shit on them.