I'm skeptical of v1 of this technology, but I could imagine a mature version of this technology could be great.
And $500/mo for essentially an always-available housekeeper seems very reasonable.
Where I live, having a housekeeper come for a few hours once a week costs about $100 a week, or $400/mo. Having a robot that could potentially always be there to:
* Tidy up.
* Clean
* Do laundry
* Help with other stuff
Seems well worth $500/mo. I don't expect that V1 of this technology will be able to effectively do all that stuff, but I'm hopeful that v2 or v5 might be able to.
On a related note, "folding laundry" seems to be a really hard challenge for machine learning to solve. Solutions like "Foldimate" kind of work if you individually hand it every piece in the right way - but nothing seems to be cable of having a human dump a bin of washed clothes in and spitting out nicely folded laundry. And everything so far that's promised to do that seems to be vaporware.
Slower is only a problem if you're waiting on the machine. I recently purchased one of those "all in one" heatpump washer and dryers. It is indeed on a per wash basis slower than my old separate washer and dryer. But over the course of a week and multiple loads, the total time spent is about the same or possibly even less.
Sure, my old washer could wash a load in say an hour and the dryer could dry that load in 2 hours. So 3 hours per load. Except that was only true for the first load. The second load has to wait for the dryer to be done with the first load, so it actually takes 2 hours to "wash" and then 2 hours to dry, so 4 hours total. And that assumes that I'm home or available at just the right moment to swap the loads. And forget running a load overnight. I mean I can, but why would I want to leave a sopping wet mass of clothes sitting waiting to be thrown into the dryer. The new one takes anywhere from 4-6 hours for a cycle to run. Seems like a terrible trade off, except I can start a load at 11 at night, and have a cleaned and dried load in the morning. I can throw a load in before I leave for work, and it will be cleaned and dried when I get home. It doesn't matter than it took an extra 3 hours because I wasn't there waiting on it, and I didn't have to swap the loads.
A side and unexpected benefit of this machine too is that it's actually faster at drying loads of bedding. The big problem with a classic tumble dryer and bedding is that it spins in one direction constantly. Early on when the bedding is all wet and heavy it starts rolling into a ball, and no matter how good your dryer's sensors are, you will almost inevitably open that dryer to a mass of hot on the outside bedding and damp on the inside. You'll unravel the mess, and throw it back in for another round or two. Because the drum unit for the all in one is the same as the washer unit, it spins in both directions while drying, just like the washing machine does. As a result, bedding never gets wrapped and balled up during the drying phase and the bedding comes out dry first time every time.
I'm skeptical too, but the fact that it works slower isn't too much of a problem if it doesn't require human attention and finishes before one is back home. It's just like how the Roomba can take as much time as it needs to to vacuum the living room when I'm gone for the day, as long as it's done by the time I get back.
Yes - Medicare is typically lower than private insurance plans, but if you can't deliver care for the reimbursement that Medicare offers as a health system/plan/office/provider, you're probably overcharging.
More than that, Medicare is the de facto starting place for most reimbursement negotiations between providers and payers. One of its benefits is that it's transparent and readily available. Blue Cross isn't gonna tell you what it's contracted to pay an individual provider (and that individual provider often won't know what they'll be reimbursed untill after they submit a bill) - but with Medicare the data's out there.
I know a good number of private clinics that'll offer cash pay discounts that effectively mirror Medicare or even slightly below Medicare, since you're saving them the trouble and expense of going through the medical billing process.
> One of its benefits is that it's transparent and readily available.
So is the usual and customary rate - I think it's been available since before Obamacare.
> Blue Cross isn't gonna tell you what it's contracted to pay an individual provider (and that individual provider often won't know what they'll be reimbursed untill after they submit a bill)
You'll find out when you get the bill :-) The bills I get have:
- Cost the provider is charging (e.g. $1000)
- Agreed upon cost with the insurance company ($600)
- Amount due ($60 assuming 10% and deductible met).
I don't know if they publish it transparently, but for common procedures, it's easy to find out. They're not going to prevent you from posting your bill online.
What the author calls criminal is the way hospitals typically bill Medicare and private insurance providers.
If the OPs brother-in-law had had insurance, the hospital would have billed the insurance company the same $195k (albeit with CPT codes in the first place).
The insurance company would have come back and said, "Ok, great, thanks for the bill. We've analyzed it, and you're authorized to received $37k (or whatever the number was) based off our contract/rules."
That number would typically be a bit higher for private insurance (Blue Cross, Blue Shield, United Healthcare, etc), a little lower for Medicare, and even lower for than that for Medicaid.
Then the insurance would have made their calculations relative to the brother-in-law's deductible/coinsurance/etc., made an electronic payment to the hospital, and said, "Ok, you can collect the $X,XXX balance from the patient." ($37k - the Insurers responsability = Patient Responsibility)
Likely by this point in a chronic and fatal disease, the patient would have hit their out-of-pocket maximum previously, so the $37k would have been covered at 100% by the insurance provider.
That's basically the way all medical billing to private and government insurance providers in this country works.
"Put in everything we did and see what we can get paid for by insurance" isn't criminal behavior, it's the way essentially every pay-for-service healthcare organization in the country bills for its services.
I don't say that to either defend the system, or to defend the actions of the hospital in this instance. It certainly feels criminal for the hospital to send an individual an inflated bill they would never expect to pay.
Yes. Though I think technically none of that happened here.
If I sound like I'm defending the morality of the hospital for billing a private individual $190k for services they'd expect to be paid $37k for, please know that I'm not. But it helps to understand WHY the hospital billed that much, and whether it's legal for the hospital to bill that much.
The biggest semantic "mistake" the author makes in their thread is saying, "Claude figured out that the biggest rule for Medicare was that one of the codes meant all other procedures and supplies during the encounter were unbillable."
The Medicare rule does not make those codes "unbillable" - it makes them unreimburseable.
The hospital can both bill Medicare for a bigger procedure code, and the individual components of that procedure, but Medicare is gonna say, "Thanks for the bill, you're only entitled to be paid for the bigger procedure code, not the stuff in there."
Neither the FBI nor Medicare is gonna go after the hospital for submitting covered procedure codes and individual codes that are unreimbursable under those procedure codes. That's not crime, that's just medical billing.
Actual double billing would occur if, say, your insurnace paid the hospital for a procedure, and then they came after you for more money, or billed a secondary insurance for the same procedure. Or if they'd said, "Oh no, the OP's brother in law wasn't here for just 4-hours, they were here overnight so now we're billing for that as well."
NOW - a much better way for the hospital to handle this scenario would be to see that the patient is cash-pay, and then have separate cash-pay rates that they get billed that essentially mirror Medicare reimbursement. That's essentially what the author got them to do, and it absolutely sucks that's what he had to do.
I briefly worked in adjacent space. While I hate the way it works, it makes a lot more sense when you understand that the billed amount is essentially just a negotiation tactic that represents a price well above what they ever expect to be paid (and a bit added to that for safety).
Then, they negotiate with all of the in-network providers for some number that’s well below the billed amount. That number varies a bit based on how effective various negotiations are.
Realistically, OP simply found the number that insurance was going to pay out anyways.
I think the argument is that it’s criminal to take advantage of the patient without insurance and ask them to ruin their life trying to come up with 195k when your system is setup to reasonably profit off the 37k you get from the insured patients. I firmly believe that even in a capitalist society the idea of profiting off of anything let alone healthcare in the thousands of percentage points is criminal.
The hospital double billed for over $100k worth of services on the original invoice.
At a certain point a pattern of issuing inaccurate invoices crosses the line into negligence.
If a business just have a habit of blasting out invoices that bill for services never received, and they know that they keep doing this, and only correct it when the customer points it out, at a certain point it turns into a crime.
From a quick Google query, it says that ~%90 of Americans have health insurance (which seems higher to me than I'd expected). I'd be very interested in knowing the number of uninsured, negligent/nefarious, and exorbitant invoices that are issued as a percentage of all invoices, for the purpose of determining the scale of criminality with respect to your description.
I've been using ChatGPT fairly regularly for about a year. Mostly as an editor/brainstorming-partner/copy-reviewer.
Lots of things have changed in that year, but the things that haven't are:
* So, so many em-dashes. All over the place. (I've tried various ways to get it to stop. None of them have worked long term).
* Random emojis.
* Affirmations at the start of messages. ("That's a great idea!") With a brief pause when 5 launched. But it's back and worse than ever now.
* Weird adjectives it gets stuck on like "deep experience".
* Randomly bolded words.
Honestly, it's kind of helpful because it makes it really easy to recognize content that people have copied and pasted out of ChatGPT. But apart from that, it's wild to me that a $500bn company hasn't managed to fix those persistent challenges over the course of a year.
You can customize it to get rid of all that. I set it to the "Robot" personality and a custom instruction to "No fluff and politeness. Be short and get straight to the point. Don't overuse bold font for emphasis."
> Affirmations at the start of messages. ("That's a great idea!") With a brief pause when 5 launched. But it's back and worse than ever now.
What a great point! I also can’t stand it. I get it’s basically a meme to point it out - even South Park has mocked it - but I just cannot stand it.
In all seriousness it’s so annoying. It is a tool, not my friend, and considering we are already coming from a place of skepticism with many of the responses, buttering me up does not do anything but make me even more skeptical and trust it less. I don’t want to be told how smart I am or how much a machine “empathizes” with my problem. I want it to give me a solution that I can easily verify, that’s it.
Stop wasting my tokens and time with fake friendship!
Drives me nuts too. All the stuff like "OK let me do..." Or "I agree ..." stop talking like a person.
I want the star trek experience. The computer just says "working" and then gives you the answer without any chit-chat. And it doesn't refer to itself as if it's a person.
What we have now is Hal 9000 before it went insane.
This comes across as an unnecessary oversimplification in service of handwaving away a valid concern about AI and its already-observed, expanding impact on our society. At the very least you should explain what you mean exactly.
Alcoholism can also be a symptom of a larger issue. Should we not at least discuss alcohol’s effects and what access looks like when deciding the solution?
> Stop wasting my tokens and time with fake friendship!
They could hide it so that it doesn't annoy you, but I think it's not a waste of tokens. It's there so the tokens that follow are more likely to align with what you asked for. It's harder for it to then say "This is a lot of work, we'll just do a placeholder for now" or give otherwise "lazy" responses, or to continue saying a wrong thing that you've corrected it about.
I bet it also probably makes it more likely to gaslight you when you're asking something it's just not capable of, though.
Obviously nothing solid to back this up, but I kind of feel like I was seeing emojis all over github READMEs on JS projects for quite a while before AI picked it up. I feel like it may have been something that bled over from Twitch streaming communities.
Agree, this stuff was trending up very fast before AI.
Could be my own changing perspective, but what I think is interesting is how the signal it sends keeps changing. At first, emoji-heavy was actually kind of positive: maybe the project doesn't need a webpage, but you took some time and interest in your README.md. Then it was negative: having emoji's became a strong indicator that the whole README was going to be very low information density, more emotive than referential[1] (which is fine for bloggery but not for technical writing).
Now there's no signal, but you also can't say it's exactly neutral. Emojis in docs will alienate some readers, maybe due to association with commercial stuff and marketing where it's pretty normalized. But skipping emojis alienates other readers, who might be smart and serious, but nevertheless are the type that would prefer WATCHME.youtube instead of README.md. There's probably something about all this that's related to "costly signaling"[2].
There’s a pattern to emoji use in docs, especially when combined with one or more other common LLM-generated documentation patterns, that makes it plainly obvious that you’re about to read slop.
Even when I create the first draft of a project’s README with an LLM, part of the final pass is removing those slop-associated patterns to clarify to the reader that they’re not reading unfiltered LLM output.
It drives me crazy. It happens with Claude models too. I even created an instruction to avoid them in a CLAUDE.md, and the miserable thing from time to time still does it.
I don't think this is true. The LLMs use this construction noticeably more frequently than normal people, and I too feel the annoyance when they do, but if you look around I think you'll find it's pretty common in many registers of human natural english.
Yes, this is absolutely part of it, and I think an underappreciated harm of LLMs is the homogeneity. Even to the extent that their writing style is adequate, it is homogeneous in a way that quickly becomes grating when you encounter LLM-generated text several times a day. That said, I think it's fair to judge LLM writing style not to be adequate for most purposes, partly because a decent human writer does a better job of consciously keeping their prose interesting by varying their wording and so forth.
Not sure what the downvotes are for -- it's trivial to find examples of this contruction from before 2023, or even decades ago. I'm not disagreeing that LLMs overuse this construction (tbh it was already something of a "writing smell" for me before LLMs started doing it, because it's often a sign of a weakly motivated argument).
Absolutely this. I feel like I'm having an immune response to my own language. These patterns irk me in a weird way. Lack of variance is jarring perhaps? Everyone sounding more robotic than usual? Mode-collapse of normal language.
Or... How can you detect the usage of Claude models in a writeup? Look for the word comprehensive, especially if it's used multiple times throughout the article.
I notice this less with GPT-5 and GPT-5-Codex but it has a new problem: it'll write a sentence that mostly makes sense but have one or two strange word choices that nobody would use in that situation. It tends to use a lot of very dense jargon that makes it hard to read, spitting out references to various algorithms and concepts in places that don't actually make sense for them to be. Also yesterday Codex refused a task from me because it would be too much work, which I thought was pretty ridiculous - it wasn't actually that much work, a couple hundred lines max.
> refused a task from me because it would be too much work
Was this after many iterations? Try letting it get some "sleep". Hear me out...
I haven't used Codex, so maybe not relevant, but with Claude I always notice a slow degradation in quality, refusals, and "<implementation here>" placeholders with iterations within the same context window. One time, after making a mistake, it apologized and said something like "that's what I get for writing code at 2am". Statistically, this makes sense: long conversations between developers would go into the night, and they get tired, their code gets sparser and crappier.
So, I told it "Ok, let's get some sleep and do this tomorrow.", then the very next message (since the LLM has no concept of time), "Good morning! Let's do this!" and bam, output a completely functional, giant, block of code.
Also pretty sure it is a feature because the general population wants to have pleasant interactions with their ChatGPT and OpenAI's user feedback research will have told them this helps.
I know some non-developer type people which mostly talk to ChatGPT about stuff like
- how to cope with the sadness of losing their cat
- ranting about the annoying habits of their friends
- finding all the nice places to eat in a city
etc.
They do not want that "robot" personality and they are the majority.
I also recall reading a while back that it's also a dopamine trigger. If you make people feel better using your app, they keep coming back for another fix. At least until they realize the hollow nature of the affirmations and start getting negative feelings about it. Such a fine line.
A few months ago when there was a lot of emergency services activity in my area and I didn't know why, I was reminded that no-one in my region is contributing a feed to Broadcastify.
I went down the tunnel of using SDR to recieve those transmissions, and share them online.
Then I went a bit further.
What if you could transcribe the broadcasts into something like a text feed? What if you could add location information somehow to monitor where things were going on in your region? Could you use AI to somehow organize the data into a more useful format?
What if this data was valuable? Maybe you could sell this as a service? Who would buy it? Public safety organizations? Hospitals? News organizations?
I spent a few days worth of freetime figuring out how you'd do someting like this, and got to a place where I figured it was conceptually possible.
Then somewhere in my googling, I stumbled across this site: http://citizen.com/ - and realized that someone had already turned my idea into what looks like a pretty mature product.
Ahh well. I'm sure my billion dollar idea will come later.
In the meantime, I'd still like to mess with SDR at least so I can know what's going on around me next time there's a fire or other public safety incident, before it gets reported on.
The fact that there's a mature product doing what you want to do is a good thing. It means there's a market for what you want that's large enough to sustain development.
You can easily distinguish yourself from Citizen by targeting a different demographic, different branding, different UX, interpreting the data in a different way.
Just look at how many businesses there are in any industry that deliver the same outcome for their customers but in a slightly different way.
What you're describing could be a really good news source giving live on-the-ground information to people.
I don't know about billion dollar ideas, but I encourage you to make a product even if something similar exists.
If you squint enough there is nothing new under the sun and chances are that you will take a very long time to find something that hasn't already been done!
But doing your own product does several things - you learn a lot, you position yourself for future success, you see future ideas differently. And maybe you're okay for something to not be a billion dollar idea and you can outlast a venture funded product.
Maybe I'm just projecting, because I've put of building something for such a long time!
My actual "MVP" was some kind of automated neighborhood newsletter, that'd monitor emergency services radio traffic, and put together some kind of "here's what happened in your neighborhood" daily newsletter.
Maybe I could get it packaged in a hardware/software package that let anyone set one up in their neighborhood.
But I mostly got stuck in privacy concerns. I'm not sure it's a valuable public service to let people know that, for example, someone had a heart attack a few blocks over.
I did think about the scientific value of some kind of statistical database that process and recorded emergency services calls though. But mostly, my ideas for commercial and moral opportunities were half-baked at the point that I discovered citizen.
One of the technical challenges I came up against was finding transcription software that could semi-accurately transcribe UHF/VHF radio traffic. However, it looks like there's some progress that's been made there since I last checked: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/radiotransciptor-real-time-radio-spe...
> But I mostly got stuck in privacy concerns. I'm not sure it's a valuable public service to let people know that, for example, someone had a heart attack a few blocks over.
In the moment, notifying people who know CPR and may be nearby and able to get to a nearby location and start CPR before emergency services arrives is the base of PulsePoint [1], which seems like a useful public service.
As a digest, yeah, I don't think any usefulness outweighs the invasion of privacy. Maybe just a count of health emergencies responded to for observing trends.
The privacy concern is real and not something I'd want to think about too hard myself. One night I heard sirens and checked one of the local scanner type sites. I could hear enough about the call, and that combined with a record of previous calls to that address made me wonder if I really wanted that information. Maybe some obfuscation of the previous codes to the address would have been enough to reduce the feeling of knowing too much.
None of that is to say it isn't a good idea. I appreciate the ability to see roughly what is going on when I hear sirens. Even if the sites aren't always able to show the calls. I think highway patrol doesn't show up for me.
Many metro police are moving towards encrypted communications but it varies by location.
Regarding medical emergencies, I'm pretty sure EMS just says "medical emergency" and gives the address. I've never heard them say specific patient conditions, although sometimes the ambulance can forward that to the ER.
If there were any risk, it would be making it too easy for criminals to monitor and allow them to commit crime more effectively.
I’d encourage you to pursue it.
I remember the old @breakingnews on Twitter when it first started, people listening to police scanners and typing info-dense one liners on what they heard. To this day the best news service of my life (until someone bought it).
A real time, AI snips version for my area in a running feed would be amazing. There are lots of formats and use cases; and the info is already out there.
It’s a great idea. Don’t let citizen sway you away from it.
> I encourage you to make a product even if something similar exists.
This is very good advice: we often give up on "great ideas" once we find that they have already been done.
But the vast majority of people we consider successful did not invent anything completely new, they just made a better kind of XYZ, sometimes not even that dramatically different. If you think about it, it's a much more logical path to success than expecting to be the next DaVinci.
Citizen is really enshittified, so any alternative would be better. I don’t object to them charging for their service, but they use all kinds of predatory editorial tactics and push notifications and marketing copy to instill primal fear that your neighborhood is imminently burning down and you will get shot if you don’t subscribe to a higher tier of service from them. Crime is way down in the US but you really don’t feel that way when you are a subscriber/user of Citizen.
> A few months ago when there was a lot of emergency services activity in my area and I didn't know why, I was reminded that no-one in my region is contributing a feed to Broadcastify.
Maybe instead of emergency services activity, it could be other types of activities (hazards, local events, nextdoor alerts, local business/SIGs rss feeds, etc), it is all just local info and knowledge aggregation endpoints and archives that have over-the-air and terrestrial distribution channels.
The Pre was absolutely rad - and to this day the only phone I miss from a UI perspective, and the only UX and hardware that I thought had a chance of "out Apple'ing Apple".
The hardware was very well done, and I could type faster on my Pre than I still can today on any screen. I was never a Blackberry person, but I expect it was a simlar experience.
Even at launch, WebOS was a pleasure to use, and the architecture of essentially easy-to-make installable web apps was revolutionary at the time. It's a damn shame it never made it further than it did.
The real answer at the end of the article is, "Maybe, we don't know yet, but we will soon."
> Some of the criticism of the Quagga Project could be put to rest next year. That’s when Annelin Molotsi, a molecular biologist working on the project, plans to sequence the genome of the re-bred quaggas.
> “I think it will answer a lot of questions,” Molotsi said.
As a progressive in a deep red state, there is a certain amount of exhaustion that comes with feeling like an outsider.
I like many things about where I live, and I've become practiced at getting along with people that I have deep disagreements with on politics.
But particularly this morning, I can sympathize with the urge to move to a place where I'm more likely to share a common set of values with the average person in the grocery store, and those values are more likely to be reflected by the institutions around me.
I wouldn't feel any virtue moving to a deep blue area, but I would feel a bit of relief.
reply