A very exciting release and I hope it stacks up in the field. I ran into their team a few times in a previous role and they were always extremely robust in their clinical validation which is often lacking in the space.
I still see somewhat of a product gap in this whole area when selling into clinics but that can likely be solved with time.
I'd recommend giving Raylib a look if you haven't. I've been working on a couple small ideas using it lately and it feels very aligned to being a game 'engine' for people who come from a more classic software engineering background.
There was a time where I felt like this. Especially early as a founder as we began to bring on staff for the first time. I started to feel that if I wasn't building the things then someone would call me out for not being deserving of the founder title any more.
It took a long time to grow out of this feeling. These days I get a lot of joy from management. I try to look at myself like a coach on a sports team. I may not be on the field but I feel good when we win knowing the work I have done to help my team succeed.
I would agree with the author that the feedback loop is different. It is also often slower and more subtle. That doesn't however mean that it's not there. Perhaps the author is new to management, perhaps the author just really likes being an IC. Their journey is their own but I would certainly say there are many paths to endorphins as a manager, even as a manager of managers.
Genuine question because I think about it too: On (pro) sports teams, the coach is not the highest paid. The stars make far more. I think what's challenging is that managers (and founders) are paid similar and often more than the team. I think this changes the dynamic. Is it possible the feelings relate to that as much as not building? No doubt managing is different than IC'ing, but the sense of contribution relative to pay might play a role.
A head coach also has more impact on a team's outcome than many middle managers (but probably not a founder). Managing well is hard and can be a major multiplier, but there is room at many companies to be mediocre or worse (even when trying your best) and still pass. I'm talking mostly functional managers as in Engineering Manager, PMs (most of whom are ICs) are different. Being a functional manager would be more like being the running back coach in football, the big man coach in basketball, or the pitching coach in baseball. These are different than being head coach, they help those players be good at their role, but have much less impact on the team's bigger picture. Winning in this role is seeing a player grow more than it is seeing the team win the championship. These coaches make far less than the head coach and the players.
Ultimately, I think the manager role is diminished by modern org structure. One thing said about a good manager is they block and shield—which implies the report needs protection from the org's process/structure. So a good manager runs counter to the company reasonably often. Is the manager helping or hurting the company? Both I think, but on net I don't know. It feels oddly baked into the role.
Always interesting to compare how things work across industries, but comparing tech with sports I think is both common and problematic.
Problematic because it leads ICs to think of themselves as the quarterback throwing or wide receiver making the game winning catch with 1 minute left, getting lifted up into the air, renegotiating a contract for millions more, retiring early, getting inducted to the hall of fame etc.
Why is this so problematic? I think it leads engineers to overvalue the short term wins (getting a particularly tricky implementation correct) sometimes at the cost of their health and wellbeing if they work nights and weekends to get it done. And no one is watching it live at the edge of their seats. Even more distressing is that having more junior ICs have to pull heroics to keep the business alive is a tremendous anti-pattern. The point of management is make the right decisions so the organization steers clear of asking their least experienced contributors to damage their health on a regular basis (...really at all!).
A well run org couples decision making and seniority. If an IC is making a lot of org impacting decisions they are probably as senior or more-so than most line managers (or should be promoted to be if this happens regularly) and are comped the same way. Now it would be nice if decision making was as transparent as coaches making the right/wrong play (the offensive coordinator calling a running play no one watching thought was a good idea). In an ideal org failures or inaction would be more transparent. If a manager is basically not making any decisions (adding no value) there are certainly management failures at several levels (maybe up to the top) preventing folks from getting upset about it. Again ideally audibles are a very occasional exception.
Where does money comes from? In sports, teams competing are the product. Players are kinda like features and marketing all built into one. Companies spend a significant portion of all their money on building product and marketing it. I think IC engineers are probably closer to the support staff than the players on the field...the comparison is problematic.
And which hall of fame? - the engineers in our hall of fame are the folks doing things for the first time, trailblazing, largely researchers (Turing awards etc). There is no "got 4 hours of sleep for months delivering a poorly planned product and got an autoimmune disease" hall of fame.
On the subject of relative pay, we may see a change soon.
The IT industry is dominated by bad (and overpaid) managers, where the only useful function they provide is to aggregate information and pass it up the report chain.
If ever there was a role suitable for replacing with AI it is this one.
I came here to share this. My first 3 years of management I struggled with the reward system and lack of code submission highs. You can find sources of growth in soft skills it's just harder to find.
Management is a fundamentally different career from SW development. So are the reward functions. It takes years to master management and years to appreciate that you are in fact mastering it. This is, IMO, why it's so important to have a good coach during this transition, to help encourage growth and development and point out where you're improving. This in turns help you know you're improving and definitely gets you that endorphin rush.
This looks good as an overarching framework but will likely fall into the same bucket as a lot of regulation in cutting edge fields (if this ever becomes mandatory). These are only as good as the quality of the people doing the assessment.
I've worked with a lot of people in the medical world while developing SaMD (software as a medical device) in the past that had little to no idea about software. They can apply the principles in the abstract but will likely not dig deep enough to catch some very major issues.
In the medical world, things like post market surveillance and notification of adverse events help to at least create a public feedback loop here. I think we will need something similar in this space if we really want to see more than a surface level, checklist ticking exercise.
I had a question about this earlier, if a doctor uses Google to look up something, then is Google being used in some legal or regulatory sense as a medical device?
No because google is not marketing their service for medical use. The doctor is responsible for the diagnosis/prescription, which they’re allowed to use any tool they deem necessary.
Medical devices are marketed for specific medical use, which doctors rely upon to do what’s medically expected. These devices will have an “expected use” and “indications for use” that largely cover how they are design/expected/tested for use. They need 510k clearance to be classified by the FDA as a medical device.
Thanks! So if a doctor uses one of the GPTs like GPT-4 in a similar way to how they use Google today, it also wouldn't be a medical device I guess. But if someone wanted to make a MedGPT for doctors then that one would probably be subject to the FDA regulations because it will have an 'expected use' for doctors.
Essentially yes, assuming MedGPT is marketed to clinicians as being a tool they can use for diagnosis/treatment.
The process is pretty involved, but to add some clarification - the "indications for use" or "expected use" are things the manufacturer are required to include with their device when submitting for 510k clearance from FDA, so that it can then be marketed for medical use. They can only market it as a medical device once it has 510k from FDA.
I’m not very hopeful of the effect given a high profile example of their failure: they issue high quality password strength guidelines, and they can’t even get most Federal agencies to adopt them.
A (mostly) weekly podcast we've been doing for almost a year now. Trying to cover a mix of next, papers and releases through the lens of two previous founders of an AI company.
During my PhD this issue came up amongst those in the group looking into compressed sensing in MRI. Many reconstruction methods (AI being a modern variant) work well because a best guess is visually plausible. These kinds of methods fall apart when visually plausible and "true" are different in a meaningful way. The simplest examples here being the numbers in scanned documents, or in the MRI case, areas of the brain where "normal brain tissue" was on average more plausible than "tumor".
> not the complete showstoppers some people seem to think that they are.
idk if I had to second guess every single result coming out of a machine it would be a showstopper for me. This isn't pokemon go, tumor detection is serious matter
Why would you want to lossily compress any medical image is beyond me. You get equipment to make precise high-resolution measurements, it goes without saying that you do not want noise added to that.
In medical images, you don't record first and then compress later. Instead, you make sparse measurements and then reconstruct. Why? Because people move, so getting more frames/sec is a thing; you don't want people to stay for too long in the machine; and (ideally) with the same setup, you can focus on a smaller area and get a higher resolution than standard measurements too.
You are talking about compressed sensing which is not lossy compression (compressed sensing can be lossless unless you're dealing with noisy measurements).
But say you're doing noisy measurements, and you are under-measuring like you say, and you have to fabricate non-random non-homogenous reconstruction noise. In that case it would be a very good idea to produce, as they do for lossy compression, both the standard overall bit rate vs. PSNR characterization against alternate direct (non-sparse) measurement ground truths (that have to exist, or else the reconstruction method should be called into question), and the bit rate for each particular sparse measurement. So this way people can see how reliable the reconstruction is. Ideally the image should be labeled at the pixel level with reconstruction probabilities, or presented in other ways to demonstrate the ratio of measured vs. fabricated information, like 95% confidence-interval extremal reconstructions or something.
It's not clear that community is doing this level of due diligence, so then the voices here are right: it's not a good idea to use.
If the compression is lossless that's fine. I have not seen an AI system being used in this manner but I don't doubt it's possible. All lossy compression methods output false information, that's the point of lossy compression and why it works so well. Remove details that the compression algorithm deems unimportant.
> The right amount of compression in a photocopy machine is zero.
This isn't an obvious statement to me. If you've had the misfortune of scanning documents to PDF and getting the 100MB per page files automatically emailed to you then you might see the benefit in all that white space being compressed somehow.
> But what does it mean to “be aware of” compression that may give you a crisp image of some made up document?
This isn't something I said. A good compression system for documents will not change characters in any circumstances.
If you are making an image of a cityscape to illustrate an article it probably doesn't matter what the city looks like. But if the article is about the architecture of the specific city, it probably does, so you need to 'be aware' that the image you are showing people isn't correct, and reduce the compression.
To Cal's credit, he has somewhat done this. He has a playlist on YouTube [1] which covers 90% of the lessons and it's pretty short. There is a lot more material sure but it's mainly focused on smoothing out that last 10% and can easily be skipped.
Something I will add which relates to the examples in the post (gym, business, relationships) is that big things happen with lots of small steps over time. You can't do a years worth of workouts on Jan 1 and be fit for the year. These things take daily effort and cycles of work and recovery to happen.
That desire for perfection can also be a desire to be done. To have it finished and get closure. It's hard to accept that some things are going to take a long time or a lifetime.
Reminds me of a quote from Bojack Horseman I think about quite often (in the show it's in reference to running): "It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That's the hard part".
I have that quote printed out and hanging in my work room. With the running baboon next to it, smiling, looking at his watch and the sun shining behind him. I've never watched that show, but the quote hits home and was welcome during hard times.
I think it should be more like: "Every day you get faster/stronger/better. But every day will be just as hard as your first day, and you gotta do it every day."
It's what I tried to capture in the post, but probably could have put better.
The sense of just taking the steps I can today, rather than burdening myself with the expectation of needing to have worked it all out and achieved all of my comparison-driven life goals.
The key is to find healthy rhythms that help us continue to better ourselves over time.
