Other media is frustrating because it's always heavily filtered, has an agenda, and always talks like a PR release. It's like they're trying to keep some image of a respectable paper and so have to write in that stupid title - subtitle that repeats the title - first paragraph that repeats the subtitle - 30 paragraphs in complete disorder, half of which are a waste of time format
Edit: someone on Twitter obviously also has an agenda, but it's not hidden behind a supposedly impartial image (NYT, etc.), it's just some guy with known credentials posting opinions
Here's the thing, I agree. But also, you do know that the various news sites have an agenda. It's a fact. And the way you work around it is by reading from multiple sources that have different agendas and form your own opinion based on that.
The random Twitter user though? Who the fuck knows. He might be in just for the lols. Maybe they're just bored. Maybe they're actually knowledgeable. You just don't know.
Agree but if I have to bet on one or the other I'm not putting my money on the Twitter user.
And you can apply the same reasoning to literally everything. You know nothing about this random doctor who's going to perform surgery. Should you perhaps let some other random guy on twitter that claims to be a surgeon do it? After all even doctors from "most respected" universities made some stupid mistakes.
It's good to be skeptical in life, I'm not arguing against it. But at some point you have to trust at least something otherwise it's impossible to go through life.
> Agree but if I have to bet on one or the other I'm not putting my money on the Twitter user.
Twitter has millions of users. Some of them are actually trustworthy sources, moreso than conflicted profit-seeking media outlets. In particular, a lot of them are subject matter experts in a particular field, instead of generalists trying to summarize something they don't really understand or put a partisan spin on it.
There are also more than enough less trustworthy sources. But you shouldn't feel inclined to follow the nincompoops.
> Twitter has millions of users. Some of them are actually trustworthy sources
Some of them are teenagers that pay for a blue "Verified" checkmark with their mom's credit card. Modern Twitter is about as deserving of your trust as an email from a Nigerian prince.
I don’t use Twitter other than – very rarely – following Hacker News links but I still know that being “verified” has no bearing on trustworthiness.
The person you’re responding to comes across as quite media savvy so I’d assume the trustworthy sources they’re referring to are people whose previous posts have a solid track record of being reliable, factual and/or insightful.
Disclaimer: not being on Twitter, I don’t actually know how easy it is these days to follow a particular set of accounts that the user trusts – without interference from Twitter’s engagement algorithms. Or if it’s still possible to use third-party software to consume Twitter posts (I used to have an extension that converted Twitter links to Nitter).
> I don’t actually know how easy it is these days to follow a particular set of accounts that the user trusts
You should try it, then. Part of the... uh... "appeal" of Twitter is the algorithmic timeline that suggests content from people you've never seen or heard from before in your life.
The timeline has actually been split into two - "For you", which is suggested accounts; and "Following", which are the accounts you are following. I often switch between the two to take advantage of the difference. Following accounts is as easy as it ever was.
But would you agree that if we were to pluck people at random from the journalists population and from the Twitter user base, the first group has a higher probability of returning someone who’s trustworthy when it comes to news reporting?
I’m not saying there aren’t trustworthy people on Twitter. After all there’s plenty of journalists. But there’s also plenty of shitposters. And random people spewing nonsense.
> But would you agree that if we were to pluck people at random from the journalists population and from the Twitter user base, the first group has a higher probability of returning someone who’s trustworthy when it comes to news reporting?
Eh. When the set "journalists" contains all the people who work for the likes of 24 hour cable news networks and the National Enquirer it's not obvious this is even the case. But the bigger point is that you don't select sources at random from the entire population of Twitter users, you select the ones you've observed have a track record of getting it right.
It's obvious by the sheer number of people in the two groups. There's some 350M users on Twitter. I'd argue that the chances of me grabbing one at random from that group and fishing out a reliable source of information are lower than if I were to do the same from the entire population of journalists.
The bigger point though is that I'd not pick a random journalist either, I'd select one I observed having a positive track record. We're losing track where this discussion started.
The "pick one at random" is not something I'm suggesting people should do as a strategy. You should invest time and try vet people as best as you can; you should never 100% trust anyone; You should always challenge your own assumptions and biases; You should try as much as you can to find multiple sources on the same story if you care about that particular story.
That's an MO i'd suggest. I personally don't care where people find their sources as long as they're doing their search properly. I'm sure there are quality journalists on Twitter. Same is true for most news outlets. I also know there are a shit ton of trolls and shitposters and grifters on Twitter. And that's not true for most media outlets.
> There's some 350M users on Twitter. I'd argue that the chances of me grabbing one at random from that group and fishing out a reliable source of information are lower than if I were to do the same from the entire population of journalists.
The population of journalists has adverse selection because the nature of the industry creates an incentive to attempt to influence opinions rather than merely convey factual information. If you pick one at random you're more likely to get a paid propagandist than you are picking randomly from the population at large.
> I'm sure there are quality journalists on Twitter.
It's not just that. If you take science reporting, for example, even the "quality" journalist outlets will present you with a summary of the results which is often unintentionally inaccurate simply because it's written by someone who doesn't comprehensively understand the research and is under time pressure to publish a story as soon as the research paper is released, even though it's long paper full of domain-specific knowledge that takes time and expertise to digest. Meanwhile they, for whatever reason, consistently fail to link to the original paper, so you have only their inadequate summary.
Whereas there's a decent chance the author of the paper is on Twitter, has posted a short summary of the results which is accurate, and provides the direct link if you want to read it yourself.
And the same with the rest of it. When the major media outlets report the CrowdStrike thing, it's generally along the lines of "an unspecified computer glitch caused flights to be canceled" and then an interview with some rando who tells you to install anti-virus on your PC. When you go somewhere that will give you the full story, you find out the problem was caused by the anti-virus.
> I also know there are a shit ton of trolls and shitposters and grifters on Twitter. And that's not true for most media outlets.
See this is where we disagree. Partisan media outlets employ the lowest quality sources of information, because they're purposely selected to manipulate your opinions. They're not just random rubbish, they're explicitly adversarial to objective truth.
That isn't to say that good journalists don't exist, but they are not a majority of "journalists" to be sure.
Some are pretty verifiable accounts from actual academics, CTOs, journalists, that's the ones I'm interested in. You can get multiple sources on one website with fewer filters, that's what makes it a good source
The mental effect of 'its different from mainstream, thus better and look at me how clever I am for finding it out 5 minutes before most of group'. Teenagers love to position themselves in such roles due to insecurities, although I don't think anybody is completely immune to this.
Still, don't get why regular folks are so obsessed with getting desperately the news first, unless you ie trade on it or work for Reuters. Life quality is about completely different stuff, but to each their own, maybe its just Sunday chill talking from me
> The mental effect of 'its different from mainstream, thus better and look at me how clever I am for finding it out 5 minutes before most of group'.
It's not because of lag time, and it's not because it's different from mainstream, it's due to growing frustration with older media that I slowly developed before I even knew about Twitter and my experience following interesting people on there. It's gotten worse since Musk, some have moved to bsky or mastodon, but it's still the best source for me.
I understand your point of view but I don't find your assumption very charitable, there are real reasons for this that have been touched on.
Well, charitable for normal situations IMHO it isn't. Some sort of OCD-ish behavior re info feed. I see it on myself - the less I focus on all crap coming from news, regardless of form or source, and more I focus on my own wellbeing, my close family and friends, the happier I am.
There are truly very few news which are seriously relevant to my life, and I suspect its the same for rest of us. Just because there is a big crowd of similarly-impacted folks I ain't going to normalize such toxic behavior.
Longforms from papers like the Economist actually really interest me, and I look forward to opening them even when my life is pretty happy already. But you need to find non-extreme papers that match your interests and keep reading time under control.
> And the way you work around it is by reading from multiple sources that have different agendas and form your own opinion based on that.
This, especially now that we're approaching the day when everyone could ask their personal AI to build a fake, albeit plausible, image of someone doing something wrong.
Yeah I think the most useful skill we should start teaching is critical thinking. Because it's going to be an absolutel mess navigating the digital space in the near distant future.
That was a good strategy before sites like Twitter existed. Now, I can watch live feeds and info coming in without any journalists filtering it for me, or actually have them adding info while I consume primary sources.
For example, several times in my life I happen to have caught a live stream that was reported on wildly inaccurately by legacy news media. I happened to watch, for example, the "Covington kids"[0] stream because it was trending on Twitter that day. Knowledge of that reporting travesty should be enough to shake anyone from experiencing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, and wouldn't have been dispelled by reading several news sites because just so many were involved. Frankly, it was a disgusting and irresponsible response by said journalists and organisations and should lead people to stop reading those publications in their entirety.
That's not the only example, but the idea that powerful "truth seeking" organisations should try and destroy the lives of children because of an agenda and a MAGA hat is an indictment of those organisations. It led to death threats against children.
I'm happy with choosing my own sources of trust, thanks, and it won't be to read from sources that do that kind of thing. I have a thing called basic morality, and encouraging violence against children is a line I'm not willing to cross.
That's why you click on the "Following" tab, not the "For you" tab. Also, how is that any different from any other social media platform? Heck, I just opened Apple News and it recommended me a Buzzfeed article titled, "People are sharing moments where they saw millionaire's spoiled kids get humbled by the real world, and it's a trip".
It isn't any different, that is the point. They are all manipulating super-smart you far more than the NY Times was ever capable of doing. The fact that you think you organically found who to follow is really something.
What would finding someone "organically" look like? Even before social media algorithms were a thing, or even before social media was a thing, information was not laid out in some random fashion, or in a way that made any of it equally likely to reach anyone. Seems like a fallacy to me.
Algorithmic social media streams are the actual Virtual Reality. The algorithm has agenda by design to create engagement. Another attribute of social media is that you are consuming information through personas not just some faceless article. This creates emotional attachment that divorces you from evaluating information in unbiased way.
Don't machine learning books kind of fill that gap? e.g. Bishop uses probabilistic reasoning, Elements of Statistical Learning seems to be heavy on frequentist stats (haven't read it though), etc.
I like that he leaves determinants to a later chapter and doesn't _start_ with them, I never understood why they were useful or made sense. His view, represented on the cover, is great for learning
They're fine where they are useful, I guess, but my undergrad put way too much emphasis on them when they're not intuitive, don't help (me) much with comprehension, and aren't useful in that many cases compared to the other techniques.
It’s only market manipulation if you have the intention of making the stock go down, right? If answering the OP is illegal, then no employee of any listed company can ever say something bad about it, which sounds too restrictive?
> Can you even get the secret from the TPM in recovery mode?
Given that you can (relatively trivially) sniff the TPM communication to obtain the key [1], yes it should be possible. Can't verify it though as I've long ago switched to Mac for my primary driver and the old cheesegrater Mac I use as a gaming rig doesn't have a hardware TPM chip.
yea I don't need an attack on a weak system, I mean the authorized legal normal way of unlocking BL from Windows when you have the right credentials. Windows might not be able to unlock BitLocker with just your password.
I don't know how common it is to disable TPM-stored keys in companies, but on personal licenses, you need group policy to even allow that.
Although this is moot if Windows recovery mode is accepted as the right system by the TPM. But aren't permissions/privileges a bit neutered in that mode?
We have limited visibility into this in the emergency department. You stabilize the patient and admit them to the hospital, then they become internal medicine or ICU's patient. Thankfully most of the work was done and consults were called prior to the outage, but they were in critical condition.
I will say - the way we typically find out really sends a shiver down your spine.
You come in for you next shift and are finishing charting from your prior shift. You open one of your partially finished charts and a little popup tells you "you are editing the chart for a deceased patient".
i'll admit i have no idea what i'm talking about but isn't there some Plan B options? something that's more manual? or are surgeons too reliant on computers?
There are plan B options like paper charting, downtime procedures, alternative communication methods and so on. So while you can write down a prescription and cut a person open you can't manually do things pull up the patient's medical history for the last 10 years in a few seconds, have an image read remotely when there isn't a radiologist available on site, or electronically file for the meds to just show up instantly (all depending on what the outage issue is affecting of course). For short outages some of these problems are more "it caused a short rush on limited staff" than "things were falling apart". For longer outages it gets to be quite dangerous and that's where you hope it's just your system that's having issues and not everyone in the region so you can divert.
If the alternatives/plan b's were as good or better than the plan a's then they wouldn't be the alternatives. Nobody is going to have half a hospital's care capacity sit as backup when they could use that year round to better treat patients all the time, they just have plans of last resort to use when what they'd like to use isn't working.
(worked healthcare IT infrastructure for a decade)
> So while you can write down a prescription and cut a person open you can't manually do things pull up the patient's medical history for the last 10 years in a few seconds, have an image read remotely when there isn't a radiologist available on site, or electronically file for the meds to just show up instantly (all depending on what the outage issue is affecting of course).
I worked for a company that sold and managed medical radiology imaging systems. One of our customers' admins called and said "Hey, new scans aren't being properly processed so radiologists can't bring them up in the viewer". I told him I'd take a look at it right away.
A few minutes later, he called back; one of their ERs had a patient dying of a gunshot wound and the surgeon needed to get the xray up so he could see where the bullet was lodged before the guy bled out on the table.
Long outages are terrifying, but it only takes a few minutes for someone to die because people didn't have the information they needed to make the right calls.
Yep, when patients often still die while everything is working fine even a minor inconvenience like "all of the desktop icons reset by mistake" can be enough to tilt the needle the wrong way for someone.
I used to work for a company that provided network performance monitoring to hospitals. I am telling a Story second hand that I heard the CEO share.
One day, during a rapid pediatric patient intervention, a caregiver tried to log in to a PC to check a drug interaction. The computer took a long time to log in because of a VDI problem where someone had stored many images in a file that had to be copied on login. While the care team was waiting for the computer, an urgent decision was made to give the drug. But a drug interaction happened — one that would have been caught, had the VDI session initialized more quickly.
The patient died and the person whose VDI profile contained the images in the bad directory committed suicide. Two lives lost because files were in the wrong directory.
We can definitely get local imaging with X-Ray and ultrasound - we use bedside machines that can be used and interpreted quickly.
X-Ray has limitations though - most of our emergencies aren't as easy to diagnose as bullets or pneumonia. CT, CTA, and to a lesser extent MRI are really critical in the emergency department, and you definitely need four years of training to interpret them, and a computer to let you view the scan layer-by-layer. For many smaller hospitals they may not have radiology on-site and instead use a remote radiology service that handles multiple hospitals. It's hard to get doctors who want to live near or commute to more rural hospitals, so easier for a radiologist to remotely support several.
GP referred to "processed," which could mean a few things. I interpreted it to mean that the images were not recording correctly locally prior to any upload, and they needed assistance with that machine or the software on it.
Seems like a possible plan would be duplicate computer systems that are using last week's backup and not set to auto-update. Doesn't cover you if the databases and servers go down (unless you can have spares of those too), but if there is a bad update, a crypto-locker, or just a normal IT failure each department can switch to some backups and switch to a slightly stale computer instead of very stale paper.
We have "downtime" systems in place, basically an isolated Epic cluster, to prevent situations like this. The problem is that this wasn't a software update that was downloaded by our computers, it was a configuration change by Crowdstrike that was immediately picked up by all computers running its agent. And, because hospitals are being heavily targeted by encryption attacks right now, it's installed on EVERY machine in the hospital, which brought down our Epic cluster and the disaster recovery cluster. A true single point of failure.
Can only speak for the UK here, but having one computer system that is sufficiently functional for day-to-day operations is often a challenge, let alone two.
There are often such plans from DR systems to isolated backups to secondary system, as much as risk management budget allow at least. Of course it takes time to switch to these and back, the missing records cause chaos (both inside synced systems and with patient data) both ways and it takes a while to do. On top of that not every system will be covered so it's still a limited state.
There are problems with getting lab results, X-rays, CT and MRI scans. They do not have paper-based Plan B. IT outage in a modern hospital is a major risk to life and health of their patients.
It's often the case that the paper fallbacks can't handle anywhere near the throughput required. Yes, there's a mechanism there, but it's not usable beyond a certain load.
I think it's eventually manageable for some subset of medical procedures, but the transition to that from business as usual is a frantic nightmare. Like there's probably a whole manual for dealing with different levels of system failure, but they're unlikely to be well practiced.
Or maybe I'm giving these institutions too much credit?
Billions in losses means a somewhat worse life for a huge number of people and potentially much worse healthcare problems down the line, the NHS was affected
Edit: someone on Twitter obviously also has an agenda, but it's not hidden behind a supposedly impartial image (NYT, etc.), it's just some guy with known credentials posting opinions