Clayton Cramer.
Conservative. Idaho. Software engineer. Historian. Trying to prevent Idiocracy from becoming a documentary.
Email complaints/requests about copyright infringement to clayton @ claytoncramer.com. Reminder: the last copyright troll that bothered me went bankrupt.
Wednesday, May 6, 2026
Things to Know About Well Pumps
AI May Destroy Teaching But It Is Going to Revolutionize Many Fields
If you walk into an emergency room (ER) in 10 years, you’ll encounter a new type of caregiver: an artificial intelligence (AI) system designed to get you a diagnosis faster and help your care team make more informed decisions. While you sit in the waiting room, you’ll be hooked up to a blood pressure cuff that’s constantly and autonomously monitored. All the while, an AI agent will be listening in while you and your doctor talk about your symptoms, ready to flag any mistakes your physician makes or suggest next steps.
This vision of AI-assisted emergency health care may soon be reality. In a new study, researchers show that a type of AI known as a large language model (LLM) often outperformed physicians at diagnosing complex and potentially life-threatening conditions, including decreased blood flow to the heart, even in the fast-moving stages of real ER care when information is limited, they report today in Science. In early ER cases, the model identified the correct or a very close diagnosis in about 67% of cases, compared with roughly 50% to 55% for physicians. And the technology is only getting better.
“Evaluating AI in medicine demands both depth and breadth across different clinical tasks and settings,” and these authors were able to incorporate both in this study, says Shreya Johri, a computer scientist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who was uninvolved with the new research. Still, she notes, wide adoption of these AI systems in health care will hinge on knowing the contexts in which they’re most reliable.
Fine with me as long as the LLMs are not filled with antiracism crap which denies that there are genuine physiological differences, at least at the means between races.
Faster, no exhausted ER doctors at the end of a long shift, less fear of lawsuits. For some specialty medical care, shorter wait times and larger supply.
This is also an earlier version of OpenAI. Everything is getting better and faster.
Well Pump
Tuesday, May 5, 2026
When the Communists Come to Power...
History
It is an article of faith that the enormous loss of Indian life after the Spanish arrived was because the Indians had no immunities to measles, smallpox, and a bunch of other diseases that had been killing people in the Old World long enough that our gene pool had selected the weak ones out. One of the student papers referenced a CDC article that I found fascinating:
Abstract
The native population collapse in 16th century Mexico was a demographic catastrophe with one of the highest death rates in history. Recently developed tree-ring evidence has allowed the levels of precipitation to be reconstructed for north central Mexico, adding to the growing body of epidemiologic evidence and indicating that the 1545 and 1576 epidemics of cocoliztli (Nahuatl for "pest”) were indigenous hemorrhagic fevers transmitted by rodent hosts and aggravated by extreme drought conditions.
Now, this was not entirely without Spanish involvement:
These infections appear to have been aggravated by the extreme climatic conditions of the time and by the poor living conditions and harsh treatment of the native people under the encomienda system of New Spain. The Mexican natives in the encomienda system were treated as virtual slaves, were poorly fed and clothed, and were greatly overworked as farm and mine laborers. This harsh treatment appears to have left them particularly vulnerable to epidemic disease.