Amazon offered up “Treatments for High Cholesterol” along with a link for an Amazon One Medical consultation as well as links to prescription medications.

That’s weird, because my doctor and my wife are the only people who know about my cholesterol numbers. They’re pretty good, too! But there are certainly data points, including my age, my food preferences, and my past purchases, maybe even news stories I’ve read elsewhere on the web, that might suggest I’d be a good candidate for a statin, the type of cholesterol-lowering medication Amazon recommended to me. And while I’m used to Amazon recommending books I might like or cleaning products I might want to buy again, it felt pretty creepy to push prescription drugs in my direction.

What did the author expect? Is anyone surprised that a big business is pushing people to buy more product?

HIPAA, the federal law that protects health privacy, is narrower than most people think. It only applies to health care providers, insurers, and companies that manage medical records. HIPAA requires those entities to protect your data as it moves between them, but it wouldn’t apply to your Amazon purchases, according to Suzanne Bernstein, a legal fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

HIPAA has always been a questionable law that does more for Pharma than for citizens. By signing a HIPAA form, patients basically allow their medical info to be distributed/sold to drug makers and other product/treatment vendors. I’m glad health information is legally considered private until you sign, but I’m not sure why the public is okay with signing away their privacy on every trip to a new doctor.

should my Amazon purchases be associated with Amazon’s health care services at all?

Well, Amazon isn’t going to restrict itself, so we – as the public – will have to make a fuss about it if we want anything to change.

Reminds me of the incident in February where a waymo tried to get through a bunch of street revelers, and their response was to set it on fire. From the old pcmag story :

San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson noted that it had tallied 55 incidents where self-driving vehicles had interfered with rescue operations in the city.

Edit: unrelated to above quote, pc mag also says:

In some cases, residents have put orange cones on the hoods of cars, which makes them temporarily immobile.

(see also the autopian story it references)

Reminder that Palantir is the same company whose bosses are deep in bed with AmericaPAC – which got big write-ups (link is to one comment, but you can read more there and lots of places) because Elon Musk is gathering voter data seemingly for that PAC to target swing state voters with canvassing efforts.

I knew about the police getting access, but I missed that home insurance companies were checking properties with drones. I guess I don’t mind them spending their own money to send their own drones to verify properties they insure, but I agree that using MY camera that I bought to get info or sell MY data is at least unethical and ought to be illegal. It should be required that they get my explicit consent to that sort of thing for each instance of data collection or sale.

Who? The Senators? I think they’re genuinely interested in stopping the practice (obviously it also gets them good press, possibly even votes, but they coulda probably got cash if they did nothing).

I think the car companies are just trying to make money anywhere they can.

I can’t argue with you on that.

And they are adorable lil cuties!

I actually DO have some hope it will be rewritten, but I figure we know about it and maybe contact someone? https://usun.usmission.gov/mission/ ?

I heard a strange take on this story. I know someone whose spouse worked at that very school and has heard the gossip about the incident. While the hen clutch has been gossiping in private conversations rather than internet posts for the world to see, their speculations about the Principal are almost as slanderous – and have been for years.

Long story short: the hens felt this wouldn’t have happened if the Principal didn’t let the kids run amok and instead provided consistent disciple.

Recent big sites that closed down: Jezebel, Pitchfork, Vice, Popular Science, and my hopes for the Messenger were dashed when they announced their demise: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4440773-news-startup-the-messenger-shutting-down/

LA Times and the like are hit with layoffs and – worse – Sinclair heavyweight added the Balitmore Sun to the list of ‘compromised’ media outlets: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/01/15/baltimore-sun-sold-david-smith-sinclair/

That said, there are always new sites, but gaining trust and reputation takes time.

Social sites seem doomed to crest and then fall. Digg? MySpace? Friendster? Who remembers the good old days of (moderated) UseNet? Do we want any of those back? Would any of them have remained were it not for spam/bad-actors?

I’m not the lego person, but I am not taking that selfie because: 1) I don’t want to clean the house to make it look all nice before judgey relatives critique the pic, 2) my phone is old and all its pics are kinda fish-eyed, 3) I don’t actually want to spend the time doing the task right now when AI can get me an image in seconds.

I appreciate that the “Gradient Canopy” roof is covered in solar cells and collects rainwater while also letting in natural light, so maybe the problem is they didn’t do enough by not adding in some shielding, too.

FYI, the bot only summarized the first of three pages.

The amazing thing is that almost ALL the staff signed a letter and threatened to quit, too! From: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-altman/

“The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company,” the letter reads. “Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI.”

Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place. By 5:10 pm ET on Monday, some 738 out of OpenAI’s around 770 employees, or about 95 percent of the company, had signed the letter.

Supposedly, Microsoft has said they’ll hire the whole team… but I wonder if it’ll really play out that way or if they’d just become short-term hires and then kicked out once OpenAI collapses. Note that Microsoft has invested a lot of money in OpenAI.

Vox also has a lengthy article with lots of details and consideration of what it all means, such as:

… There is an argument that, because OpenAI’s board is supposed to run a nonprofit dedicated to AI safety, not a fast-growing for-profit business, it may have been justified in firing Altman. (Again, the board has yet to explain its reasoning in any detail.) You won’t hear many people defending the board out loud since it’s much safer to support Altman. But writer Eric Newcomer, in a post he published November 19, took a stab at it. He notes, for instance, that Altman has had fallouts with partners before — one of whom was Elon Musk — and reports that Altman was asked to leave his perch running Y Combinator.

“Altman had been given a lot of power, the cloak of a nonprofit, and a glowing public profile that exceeds his more mixed private reputation,” Newcomer wrote. “He lost the trust of his board. We should take that seriously.”