> Was the kidney donor already dead, from something other than rabies, or were still alive for donation and later died?
FTA
> About five weeks later, the man started to hallucinate, have trouble walking and swallowing, and had a stiff neck, according to the C.D.C. report.
> Two days after his symptoms started, he collapsed of what was presumed to be a heart attack, the report said. The man was unresponsive and taken to a hospital, where he died.
> Several of his organs were donated, including his left kidney.
Seems like there is some part missing in evaluation procedure. If those symptoms were know at time I don't think he was eligible donator material anymore. Or at least to me it sounds like you want to know what was the cause behind those symptoms before harvesting anything.
Can't ask an unresponsive patient who then proceeds to die what his symptoms were ...
People seem to think that the TV doctor habits of testing the most out-there diagnoses possible until you get a positive hit are normal in the real world. They're not. Especially not with medical insurer's "advice" now being required for everything.
I think the criteria for donation are most easily met by people who die as a result of something like a vehicle collision, but an otherwise healthy person who experiences sudden heart failure may have viable organs... From the reporting, this donor was not otherwise healthy, but maybe the symptoms were not known at the time or dismissed for some reason.
Not really. Organs from people who have died are almost always nonviable. So when it comes to vehicle collision victims, only people who are slowly dieing of internal hemorrhaging are used. Sudden heart failure organs are bad for two reasons: first, if the heart actually fails, you have minutes before organs are nonviable. Second, the medication that's used for trying to keep the heart beating will actually accelerate death, including organ death, if it doesn't work.
Most organs come from from people, usually braindead, who are definitely going to die, but you have days or at least hours before the body actually loses the fight. And even then the extraction process needs to be started quickly, because in the process of dieing the body will, as it's losing blood, ie. power and oxygen, one-by-one cut off blood flow from organs to try to keep the heart, lungs and brain alive. Most organs that have had their blood flow cut off by the body can't be transplanted, so extraction needs to happen before that point.
Don't have access to NYTimes, but do they mention anything about all the other people that received an organ? I'm assuming they are tracking them down to get them rabies vaccine?
The donor's corneas were used for grafts for three others. The article states:
> The three patients’ grafts were removed, and one tested positive for rabies, the doctors said. None of the three patients had symptoms of rabies, but they were being treated with preventive drugs, the report said.¶ Since 1978, four organ donors have passed rabies to 13 organ recipients, the report said. Of the 13 recipients, six who received treatment for rabies survived. The seven others, who did not receive treatment, died.
> We don't look to Meta, who only a few years ago thought that the Metaverse would be the "next big thing" as an example of failure to identify the future, we look to IBM who made that mistake almost 30 years ago.
The grandparent points to a pattern of failures whereas you point to Meta’s big miss. What you miss about Meta, and I am no fan, is that Facebook purchased Whatsapp and Instagram.
In other words, two out of three ain’t bad; IBM is zero for three.
While that’s not the thrust of your argument, which is about jumping on the problem of jumping on every hype train, the post to which you reply is not on about hype cycle. Rather, that post calls out IBM for a failure to understand the future of technology and does so by pointing to a history of failures.
> Many others in this thread have pointed out IBM's achievements but regardless, IBM is far from "zero for three".
I was specifically commenting in the context of this thread.* I was not trying to characterize either IBM or Meta except with reference to the arguments offered by this thread’s ancestors.
I understood (and understand) that such scorekeeping of a company as storied as IBM is at best reductive and at worst misrepresentative.
* Your reference to “this thread” actually addresses sibling comments to OP (ggggp), not this thread which was started by gggp.
> before LLMs I definitely thought coding would be the last thing to go.
While LLMs do still struggle to produce high quality code as a function of prompt quality and available training data, many human software developers are surprised that LLMs (software) can generate quality software at all.
I wonder to what extent this surprise is because people tend to think very deeply when writing software and assume thinking and "reasoning" are what produce quality software. What if the experience of "thinking" and "reasoning" are epiphenomena of the physical statistical models present in the connections of our brains?
This is an unsolved and ancient philosophical problem (i.e. the problem of duality) of whether consciousness and free will affect the physical world. If we live in a materialist universe where matter and the laws of physics are unaffected by consciousness then "thinking", "reasoning", and "free will" are purely subjective. In such a view, subjective experience attends material changes in the world but does not affect the material world.
Software developers surprised by the capabilities of software (LLMs) to write software might not be so surprised if they understood consciousness as an epiphenomenon of materiality. Just as words do not cause diaphragms to compress lungs to move air past vocal cords and propagate air vibrations, perhaps the thoughts that attend action (including the production of words) are not the motive force of those actions.
> I wonder to what extent this surprise is because people tend to think very deeply when writing software and assume thinking and "reasoning" are what produce quality software.
It takes deep thought and reasoning to produce good code. LLMs don't think or reason. They don't have to though because humans have done all of that for them. They just have to regurgitate what humans have already done. Everything good an LLM outputs came from the minds of humans who did all the real work. Sometimes they can assemble bits of human generated code in ways that do something useful, just like someone copying and pasting code out of stack exchange without understanding any of it can sometimes slap something together that does something useful.
LLMs are a neat party trick, and it can be surprising to see what they do and fun to see where they fail, but it all says very little about what it means to think and reason or even what it means to write software.
> Rent control is not a great solution long term since it reduces the incentive to build more housing which is the only real fix.
In California (and SF in particular) rent control applies to housing older than 15 years and owned by corporate entities.
How does rent control applied as it is in California disincentivize building? I would think that building would be incentivized by rent control because newer housing stock would be exempt from rent control.
> Long term they wouldn't be, and hence lower ROI and therefore disincentivized
While the ROI would be lower compared to allowing rent to increase uncontrolled, in a rent control zone there is more incentive to build (and renovate) to take advantage of market rate leases for (in California's case) 15 years.
Does the argument that rent control (as in California) disincentives building reduce to the argument that uncontrolled rent yields a higher ROI than rent control?
Such an argument is a refusal to allow public good for the benefit of landlords.
Thoughtful piece with a different and engaging tack to the “Developers don’t understand marketing” commonplace. Kozlowski describes indirectly his mother’s professional organizing business, which indirectness asks readers to consider the churn of consumer culture and the goals (if any) of capitalism.
It’s just a trace, but the following paragraph (quoted in part) hits hard in this season of thanks and bounty. Thank you, Fred K, for writing it.
> The business has been a giant blackpill on Temu. Seeing people pay my mom to throw away bags full of internet purchases has been depressing. Bringing yet cheaper goods into the States hasn’t actually increased quality of life whatsoever over the already cheap goods on Amazon[. . . .] Unfortunately — despite the very real benefits that mass affluence and consumer culture have, it’s difficult in my position to not think that we’ve gone too far.
Interruptions are 'breaks' that clear your context memory by drawing it to something else entirely.
An activity like lunch, shower, etc., actually help by giving you moments to ruminate thoughts related to the deep work at hand, help capture the bigger picture and innovate.
I am a respected technologist and am credited with more than 100 inventions. Practically none of those came to me when I was at my workstation. Breaks that are not interruptions can be so good that one should purposefully mandate them into schedule.
> The writer mentions Kilduff is a 'trained comedian'.
This is the foundation that somewhat undercuts the message that failure is OK if not requisite.
That is, the latest YouTube episode of Let’s Paint TV, “Come to the promiseland”, is a chaotic performance piece that doesn’t “succeed” at painting (none is attempted), there are no actors other than Kilduff (except in digital post), the speech is improvisatory and halting, and the “music” is discordant. [0]
According to criteria of elite artistic production, “Come to the promiseland” is a “failure”. But judged as a spoken word performance piece that takes a wry look at the disappointments experienced by people who look to a “promiseland”, the performance is pure comedy gold, all the more successful due to its low-fi glitch-art aesthetics.
> "predicts" must be a variant of standard english which projects the past tense into the present tense because .. reasons?
Literary criticism and philosophy cast actions in and from recorded media in the "eternal present" (a term of art that should yield search results).
So, if Huxley (contemporary tense) wrote about a drug that resembles Adderall then a sentence cast in the eternal present would express "Huxley _writes_ about Soma in Brave New World which…".
I think this may ultimately be a cultural issue. American documentary style of presentation increasingly uses the present tense to describe things in the past.
I am more used to historians with horn rimmed glasses and badly fitting tweed jackets talking in the past tense about past times so when they reflect on it's impact in the present time they can use present tense about past acts correctly.
"German Troops conduct a false flag against Poland as a result of which the British issue a final demand, the echoes of which continue to the present day" is really not better than "The German troops conducted a false flag against Poland as a result of which the British issued a final demand, the echoes of which continue to the present day" when it comes down to it.
And it leads to awkward sentences like "At the time, FDR believes that he can keep the war away from America, but Japan attacks pearl harbour and he has no choice but to declare war" when the use of "Believed" and "could" and "attacked" and "had" make it clear we, the owners of backwards looking syntax and historical documents, realise this all happened a very long time ago and can keep a hold of the sequencing.
I must say matches on "the eternal present" are a giant bag of mystical wank, no disrespect to yourself intended. Perhaps you get better responses than I do but my top returns were flooded with mindfulness and cod philosophy and christianity.
> I must say matches on "the eternal present" are a giant bag of mystical wank, no disrespect to yourself intended.
Yeah, I searched _after_ I commented.
Here's what kagi yielded for `literary eternal present` [0]
> Literary works, paintings, films, and other artistic creations are assumed to exist in an eternal present. Therefore, when you write about writers or artists as they express themselves in their work, use the present tense.
(Disclosure: I am trained as a scholar of language and literature.)
> > I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help
You left out the adverbial phrase. The whole sentence is
> When he reached out to my company six months later to apply for a job, I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help — but the friend told me he was afraid to intervene because he didn’t want to become a target himself.
When the stalker applied for a job, additional details may have become available to the OP, potentially including personal references (i.e. "old friend".)
FTA
> About five weeks later, the man started to hallucinate, have trouble walking and swallowing, and had a stiff neck, according to the C.D.C. report.
> Two days after his symptoms started, he collapsed of what was presumed to be a heart attack, the report said. The man was unresponsive and taken to a hospital, where he died.
> Several of his organs were donated, including his left kidney.
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