Mitch's Blog

Why you can’t find a primary care doctor. Prevention isn’t a priority in US healthcare. The profit is in damage control. Why should healthcare providers invest in primary care physicians to help you lose weight, eat healthy and get fit when there is so much money to be made in prescription meds and heart surgery?

On AI Coding and Its Discontents.

Cal Newport says the honeymoon phase of AI coding is over. Early advocates of using AI to write code are scaling back their ambitions. Turns out AI-generated code is often buggy, hard to fix and hard to maintain. Coders are still using AI in their work, but in controlled and limited ways. “AI is not a magic ‘infinity machine’ that can solve all our problems, and ultimately deliver us a sense of meaning in a cold, confusing world. It’s a normal technology, and perhaps it’s time we start talking about it that way.”

Bobby Brainworms comes to San Diego to make homelessness remediation as successful as the war in Iran and fixing the reflecting pool.

Anthropic will watermark text and other file types to identify AI-generated content. I’m intrigued by how that would work in text — seems impossible.

I loved the movie “Up In the Air,” starring George Clooney and Anna Kendrick as contractors who break the bad news to employees during corporate layoffs.

I saw it the night I was laid off from a job. It was, I think, my second time being laid off, not my first. The first time you’re laid off it’s traumatic. After that — the second, and subsequent occasions — you’re like yeah sure whatever just tell me about my severance and COBRA.

Also, I have been a frequent business traveler nearly all of my career (though nowhere near as frequent as George Clooney’s character).

Bluesky’s active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app. X is shrinking too but Threads is growing.

“It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” — Harry S Truman

I spent a few minutes on the Democratic Socialists of America website, paying particular attention to their platform. Much of it is aspirational and utopian and entirely agreeable. This is the world we’d like to see in 25, 50 or 100 years, not necessarily tomorrow.

However their singling out of Israel of all the nations of the world for criticism sets off a bright, blinking red light for me. I’m fine with people criticizing Israel — I am highly critical of it myself, as are many Israelis — but when a political organization or candidate criticizes Israel exclusively without also criticizing countries like Saudi Arabia and China, with which the United States also has strong ties, I strongly suspect that candidate or organization of anti-Semitism.

The DSA says Israeli and American officials who committed genocide against Palestinians should face criminal prosecution. I have no objection to that. But the DSA says nothing about Palestinians who commit atrocities against Israeli civilians. That’s a big red anti-Semitism flag for me.

Both major political parties in the US now have powerful anti-Semitic wings. I’m sure this is fine and will be no problem at all.

If you want to respond to this post by pointing out terrible things Israel did with US support, go ahead, but you’re missing the point.