

Look, I’m a 4th year med student in my 30’s. I know what I’m about. My undergraduate degree is in History and I worked in IT and sysadmin for a couple years before I went back to school to go into medicine.
Look, I’m a 4th year med student in my 30’s. I know what I’m about. My undergraduate degree is in History and I worked in IT and sysadmin for a couple years before I went back to school to go into medicine.
I had so much fun cracking open my Surface Duo 2 phone to fix the hinges. I literally cracked the glass shell and had to get a laminate skin to hold the glass together. I ended up getting another phone after I broke the hinges and couldn’t find someone to repair it quickly, so now I just use it as a very fancy mini-tablet. I’m so pissed they killed the platform because I adore the 2 separate screens that can run apps side-by-side and the fact that my Surface pen works on it flawlessly.
I don’t know why I keep trusting Microsoft to keep supporting good platforms, but here I am with multiple Zunes (someone else gave me their old one when they got an iPhone), and a Surface Duo 2 phone…
I worked in the bookstore computer repair shop in college and I was one of 2 techs that was actually willing to crack open Windows laptops and work on them. The bookstore had to have an Apple Certified repair shop to be allowed to sell Apple products, so most of our folks got certified as Apple technicians. I never bothered because I always had plenty of work with the myriad random models of laptops that folks brought in that the Apple bros didn’t want to touch.
I wish they were more repairable. I have a Surface Pro 8 that serves my needs quite well and I was able to upgrade the SSD to a TB from the 256GB it came with, but I had to do some shenanigans with power settings and whatnot because the only SSD I could find was technically only compatible with the Surface Pro 9 and newer. But it works now and it has been a very good machine for getting through medical school. An iPad would not have met my needs and as much as I hate to admit it, having my Surface and my desktop terminal linked through OneDrive has actually been very helpful.
Full disclosure, I am one of those nerds that bought and used a Surface Duo 2 phone until I broke the hinge by dropping it wrong. I did eventually crack it open to mostly fix the hinges, but shattered the glass in the process. I fixed that with 2 layers of laminate sticker things after assembling the shards back onto the phone.
Some recent pictures showed pretty impressively swollen ankles (bilaterally, mind you) which really only happens with a handful of conditions, congestive heart failure being the most common one.
I do have a tech background in addition to being a medical student and it really drives me bonkers that we’re calling these overgrown algorithms “AI”. The generative AI models I suppose are a little closer to earning the definition as they are black-box programs that develop themselves to a certain extent, but all of the reputable “AI” programs used in science and medicine are very carefully curated algorithms with specific rules and parameters that they follow.
The discriminative AI’s are just really complex algorithms, and to my understanding, are not complete black-boxes. As someone who has a lot of medical problems I receive care for as well as being someone who will be a physician in about 10 months, I refuse to trust any black-box programming with my health or anyone else’s.
Right now, the only legitimate use generative AI has in medicine is as a note-taker to ease the burden of documentation on providers. Their work is easily checked and corrected, and if your note-taking robot develops weird biases, you can delete it and start over. I don’t trust non-human things to actually make decisions.
They don’t use the generative models for this. The AI’s that do this kind of work are trained on carefully curated data and have a very narrow scope that they are good at.
The important thing to know here is that those AI were trained by very experienced radiologists who are physicians that specialize in reading imaging. The AI’s wouldn’t have this capability if the humans didn’t train them.
Also, the imaging that AI performs well with is fairly specific, and there are many kinds of imaging techniques and diagnostic applications that the AI is still very bad at.
The doctors that only ever studied medicine and nothing else have a tendency to be impressively stupid in anything that isn’t their direct specialty.
This is one of the many reasons I’m getting a hysterectomy as soon as possible.
“Alligator Auschwitz”
If it’s any consolation, he has no education, no job prospects, and is getting pushed out of the conservative talk show circuit. He will be destitute soon (if he isn’t already).
One of my Canadian friends called it “Alligator Auschwitz”. I think we should all call it that exclusively and incessantly.
I have to look stuff up for medical school (usually trying to find studies and whatnot) so the gemini results are just obnoxious garbage to me.
I think this is a good idea. I’m not sure what time interval to use (ie weekly, bi-weekly, monthly)
Firefox has a plugin that blocks the AI results. It works pretty well most of the time, but it occasionally has hiccups when Google updates stuff or something.
I think the pay issue is *another big contributor. Women are more likely to accept lower paying jobs, particularly ones like caring professions or teaching, whereas men have a tendency towards higher paying jobs (in part due to the lack of support for pregnancy, parental leave, and childcare expenses).
*edited for clarity
From the commenter above talking about negative experiences with talking to women and female therapists, I think the real solution is that men need to be proactive about supporting each other. Ranting and raving about how women are terrible and don’t know how to help men with an undercurrent of expectations that women (especially a romantic partner) should fix everything is simply not a tenable mindset.
As a woman who works in the medical field, I am keenly aware of my limitations when it comes to helping men with mental health issues. I think the real, effective solution is for men to start opening up to each other and supporting each other the way that women tend to do among themselves. I don’t mean this as “oh, men are terrible and they need to fuck off somewhere else with their problems”, I mean it as a sincere belief that the best people to help a man through emotional or psychological problems are probably other men given the shared socialization and perspective.
I didn’t take it as a negative! Just expressing that you’re right on the mark about my username being quite relevant.