[HN Gopher] The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure
___________________________________________________________________
The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure
Author : item
Score : 73 points
Date : 2026-03-15 18:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.writingruxandrabio.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.writingruxandrabio.com)
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| The healthcare industry, especially in the US, isn't interested
| in finding cures for disease. It's interested in maximizing
| profits, which is a goal that the bureaucracy serves.
| Retric wrote:
| The healthcare industry in the US in made up a huge range of
| individual and organizations, they don't all have the same
| motives.
|
| Suggesting otherwise is projecting your own fears not
| representative of reality.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| >they don't all have the same motives
|
| Regardless of their motives they're all subject to the same
| regulatory system so they can only stray so far for so long
| from the net effect of the incentives and remain not bankrupt
| and being auctioned to pay back creditors.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >they're all subject to the same regulatory system
|
| I mean different countries have different regulatory
| systems....
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| Then feel free to point out the outliers that aren't
| interested in maximizing profits.
|
| https://www.somo.nl/big-pharma-raked-in-usd-90-billion-in-
| pr...
|
| It seems to me that the leading vaccine manufacturers, who
| spend billions of dollars yearly in order to lobby US
| lawmakers that establish the bureaucracy the article is
| complaining about, are interested in just that (maximizing
| profits).
|
| It doesn't really matter much if there are individuals or
| other organizations interested in curing disease, when we
| have a system that allows for legal bribery of lawmakers, and
| other individuals / organizations with more money that value
| profits over anything else.
| Retric wrote:
| A large portion of the US healthcare is through nonprofits
| who are more interested in continuing to exist than in
| maximizing profits.
|
| Vaccine companies are very interested in preventing disease
| not the kind of extended treatment people so often expect
| the healthcare industry to be looking for. They have an
| endless stream of new people being born every year so have
| no interest in people getting sick.
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| If people aren't getting sick, they have no revenue
| stream. Those non-profits you mentioned obviously aren't
| as capable of lobbying congress to influence industry
| regulation / bureaucracy as for-profit organizations are.
| Retric wrote:
| Nonprofits constantly lobby congress for a huge range of
| reasons, but they also get results with a surprising
| amount of federal money going directly to such
| organizations independent of Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
|
| > If people aren't getting sick
|
| People also get sick outside the US.
|
| People still get vaccinated in the US for diseases with
| effectively zero new US cases because they haven't been
| eradicated worldwide and would come back as soon as we
| stop vaccinating people.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Doesn't matter. Not all have the same level of influence. The
| ones with the most clearly follow GP's characterization.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Have you ever considered that "finding cures for disease" is
| really fucking hard to do?
|
| Things that were _easy to cure_ were already cured some time in
| the past century. What remains is the hard to crack nuts that
| resist simple scalable methods.
|
| There's money to be had in curing HIV - but good luck pulling
| that off. Maybe someone will, this century.
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| Have you ever considered that once a disease is cured, the
| industry can no longer profit off of it being a disease?
| Treating disease rather than curing it, is a much more
| profitable venture.
|
| How is there money to be had in curing HIV? It seems to me
| like it's much more profitable to continue selling expensive
| HIV treatments rather than curing the disease. Once a patient
| is cured, they no longer need to pay for expensive
| treatments.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| And? Why would that be my problem? I'm in the business of
| selling HIV cures, not HIV treatments.
|
| If I get to undercut your entire "HIV treatment" business
| AND line my pockets with your entire market share, then,
| good for me, bad for you. Sucks to suck. Should have cured
| HIV first if you didn't want me to do it.
|
| There are many, many, many examples of "newer and better
| treatment X kills the market share of older and worse
| treatment Y" in the history of healthcare. Your conspiracy
| theory model predicts this never happening.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| So you think that complicated diseases are easily curable
| and the entire scientific world, including very different
| countries like China, has just decided to hide the
| knowledge?
|
| If your cynical take was correct, there would be no cures
| ever. And yet there are new ones all the time. For example,
| vaccines. There are way, way more vaccines developed in the
| 21st century than in the 250 years before that.
|
| Vaccines against HPV have reduced incidence of cervical
| cancers to basically 0 in the cohorts that obtained them.
| How come? Shouldn't Big Cancer be interested in treating
| cervical cancers expensively and promoting relapses?
|
| Even in cancers, your chances of surviving, say, Hodgkin's
| lymphoma, are now north of 90 per cent. The treatment is
| expensive, but time limited. You don't have to take pills
| for your entire life.
|
| How does that square with your view of the medical system
| as a machine for prolonging diseases indefinitely?
| Terr_ wrote:
| Plus even if we posit nefarious forces, we should also
| account for nefarious forces which _want the sickness
| gone._
|
| If you're seriously sick you aren't making money because
| you can't work or all your money goes to Evil Pharma Co,
| then the Evil Government doesn't like that, because they
| can't wring taxes out of you. (Which they prefer since
| it's easier than fighting Evil Pharma Co.)
|
| Meanwhile, The Shadow Government wants you to be healthy
| enough to work every day, or else they won't finish the
| navigation beacons for the alien invasion.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, yes, I and many others have thought of that.
|
| To counter, have you realized HIV is an evolutionary entity
| that is optimized to continue existing by _not fucking
| dying_. HIV mutates like crazy. I mean there are other
| things like the flu that mutate, but because we have
| partial immunity to the flu we can use that immunity to
| create new vaccines every year against it.
|
| It doesn't take much self research to see that HIV is a
| rather insane virus, and if somehow out of the gate it
| would have been wildly contagious that it could have wiped
| humanity.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| .
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| "lax lab controls are a feature, not a bug" -Wuhan Institute
| of Virology
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Healthy people are more productive, which mean they are better
| paid, which mean they have more money for healthcare, which
| means profits for the healthcare industry.
|
| Finding cures is a good way of maximizing profits, the best way
| actually, and if the healthcare industry is not doing that, it
| means that something else is stopping them. It can be
| bureaucracy, it can be just because it is really hard, it can
| be some systemic problem linked to health insurance and
| government funding, but I don't see how the healthcare industry
| wouldn't want to cure people.
|
| It is an industry where demand is guaranteed, diseases in
| general are not disappearing anytime soon, let alone aging.
| graemep wrote:
| yes and no. Finding treatments that require long term
| commitments is more profitable than finding cures. Look at
| the history of ulcer drugs. Pharmaceutical companies spent
| huge amounts to develop drugs that ameliorated symptoms, a
| two person team found a cure for most ulcers.
| endymion-light wrote:
| As someone who has looked at things like Renewable energy
| deployments within the UK, this is a pattern that seems to be
| quite pervasive across all industries. The byzantine web of
| planning approvals, goose counting, public outcry that you have
| to deal with to deploy essentially a relatively small solar farm
| is monstrous.
|
| What that results with is that the only people capable of
| creating & managing these processes have the legal teams &
| resources necessary, stifling growth. Even once you get an
| approval, it may be years in order to get a grid connection.
|
| This risk averse attitude pervades into all walks of life,
| including medical beurocracy. This essentially locks out a ton of
| real innovation, as it's too expensive to square up against a
| mass of beurocracy attempting to stifle you at all turns.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| That's what a lot of people seemingly struggle to understand.
|
| Inaction is not a safe action. Inaction has a price. And
| sometimes a death toll too.
| graemep wrote:
| It depends on your point of view. For the person deciding on
| giving permission they will not be thanked for allowing it,
| but might well be blamed if something goes horribly wrong.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| That's kind of the issue with a lot of bureaucratic
| oversight. It often produces systems that aren't at all
| interested in being streamlined, in letting things that
| should happen happen. It produces systems where compliance
| is a drag on the one doing things, and the default state is
| "forbidden".
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Yes, but this is a clasical agent-principal problem.
|
| Theoretically, the bureaucracy works on your behalf, but only
| approximately so. If it makes a mistake that kills you, the
| decision maker does not pay any price.
| gzread wrote:
| Have you tried the "forgiveness is easier than permission"
| approach? What would happen if you just installed the solar
| panels? I know that in _some_ countries they 'd come by with a
| bulldozer and tear them down again - is your country one of
| those?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| This might work in parts of the US, but the UK will put you
| in jail for tweets, I would not risk this.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Load of bollocks, this meme is tiresome. It's the USA that
| fires people and jails people for a month for social media
| posts
|
| https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-meme-tennessee-
| arres...
|
| Or if you want some actual context rather than twitter
| outrage bait
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB3WVygAM8I
| bpodgursky wrote:
| There are literally people in the UK in jail for tweets
| deemed to be incitement to violence. Maybe you think it's
| a good thing! I don't care! But it's ridiculous to argue
| over the facts on the ground.
| gzread wrote:
| What were the tweets?
| like_any_other wrote:
| I don't have examples of tweets handy, but here are
| stickers that get you 2 years in UK jail: _They
| reportedly contained slogans such as "We will be a
| minority in our homeland by 2066", "Mass immigration is
| white genocide", "intolerance is a virtue" and "they seek
| conquest not asylum."_
|
| Sources:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-68448867 (does
| not quote a single sticker that he was jailed for)
|
| https://www.gbnews.com/news/sam-melia-free-speech-
| activists-...
| iso1631 wrote:
| Ahh, the famous "criminal damage is tweeting" case
| gzread wrote:
| "putting stickers on things is criminal damage deserving
| of prison time" is no better of a position
|
| But we should probably pay attention to what was written
| on the stickers.
| iso1631 wrote:
| America literally jails people for quoting the US
| president
|
| The UK jails people for extreme incitement
| like_any_other wrote:
| Extreme incitement to changing government immigration
| policy.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yl7p4l11po
|
| > Lucy Connolly, 42, whose husband serves on Northampton
| Town Council, pleaded guilty in September after posting
| the expletive-ridden message on X the day three girls
| were stabbed to death in July 2024.
|
| > She was released from HMP Peterborough earlier after
| she was handed a 31-month prison sentence in October at
| Birmingham Crown Court.
|
| Like this one? I mean this is not some hard to find
| secret.
| iso1631 wrote:
| No you are thinking of AMERICA as I linked
| maest wrote:
| Troll post. Adds nothing to the conversation, just wants to
| inject a tired meme.
|
| What is the relevance of law and law enforcement around
| online messaging to renewable energy legislation?
| graemep wrote:
| I am not sure about a bulldozer, but in the UK you will be
| forced to demolish it yourself. I am not sure what the
| penalty is for failing to do so when ordered to, but it seems
| to be usually effective.
| c0balt wrote:
| Likely the same as in most other countries: fines, further
| orders and eventually criminal prosecution.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| "Forgiveness is easier than permission" only makes sense when
| you know what you're doing and understand the consequences.
| (IE, paying taxes a little late in the US is okay because the
| fine is roughly the same as the interest of holding the money
| in the bank.)
|
| In the case of solar panels, I'm going to assume the OP is
| talking about something like a grid-scale solar farm instead
| of rooftop solar production:
|
| 1: You need an agreement with "the grid" to get payment for
| the electricity you generate.
|
| 2: Feeding electricity into a power grid is a very dangerous
| thing, at a minimum the grid operator needs to make sure you
| aren't going to cause a fire or otherwise break their
| equipment.
|
| ---
|
| That being said: If you're a homeowner trying to set up a
| small solar installation, you can pair the panels with
| batteries and skip feeding into the grid.
| pixl97 wrote:
| To play the devils advocate, in places with low bureaucracy
| most of the risk taken is not innovation. It's just risk that
| leads to the death of others. Buildings with shitty concrete
| with too little rebar in it. Electrical wiring that will kill
| you. Improper foundations and such.
|
| At the end of the day there is no simple answer here. It's no
| different than the talks about AI that dominate HN these days.
| You can build good things with AI, but the vast majority of it
| is crap, so we put up filters and hoops to ensure we don't get
| flooded with that crap.
| saulpw wrote:
| The devil doesn't need any more advocates.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Evidently the construct of the devil does because humanity
| can help but setup complex situations that require a
| balanced approach rather than only looking at things one
| way.
| saulpw wrote:
| In that case, you can explain the nuance and offer a more
| balanced viewpoint, without invoking the devil as an
| accountability sink. Your words should stand on their own
| merits. (To be fair, you did this! I'm just saying you
| shouldn't preface your words with a trite phrase that
| signals you'll be lobbing cheap logic over the wall and
| disavowing responsibility for your words if the logic
| proves faulty.)
| pixl97 wrote:
| At least to me it sounds like you just have problems with
| the incorrect use of the devils advocate by some people
| in the first place, of which I would actually hope you
| understand its use in rhetoric.
|
| At least in the common HN discussion you nearly have to
| use its form when talking in an approving manner of
| things like regulation or unions because it goes against
| the Holy Church of Capitalism, lest you be punished by
| the mighty downvote button for heresy.
| briffle wrote:
| Its a double edged sword. yes, it stifles renewable energy
| innovation, but those rules are usually put in place in a more
| general sense, and you would really want them in place if next
| door was suddenly announced to be a landfill, or chemical
| plant, or a chicken farm, or an xAI datacenter....
| ntonozzi wrote:
| The UK is begging for people to build datacenters: https://ww
| w.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/09/revealed-...
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| National governments maybe. Local ones aren't, and it's
| those that fill with nimbys and maintain the majority of
| control over planning
| janalsncm wrote:
| Maybe one solution for this issue would be some kind of
| "developer's ombudsman" that is an affordable public service to
| 1) help people navigate the bureaucracy and 2) produce a report
| recommending streamlining of rules where possible.
|
| This avoids "cutting down all the laws to punish the devil".
| Some regulations are necessary.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Another bureaucracy to help people navigate the existing
| bureaucracy? Are you missing a "/s"?
| janalsncm wrote:
| No. The companies that hire lawyers to navigate government
| bureaucracy have their own internal bureaucracies. So the
| status quo is not "no bureaucracy".
|
| It seems that in any sufficiently complex thing there will
| be some irreducible amount of bureaucracy. So it's
| reasonable to make that irreducible set of rules more
| accessible.
| ctoth wrote:
| > Some regulations are necessary.
|
| Genuine question -- is there a common factor across the
| regulations you'd keep? Because if there is, you could encode
| that directly instead of maintaining the specific rules. And
| if there isn't, "some regulations are necessary" isn't really
| a position yet.
| janalsncm wrote:
| "Tear it down and see what breaks" is one strategy. I would
| suggest another based on the principle of Chesterton's
| fence:
|
| https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
|
| The point of the ombudsman I suggested is that it's hard to
| encode a simple rule in a sentence or two. You need to be
| familiar with the process so you're not relearning the same
| lessons over and over.
| mindslight wrote:
| I'd say the underlying problem is our capital-first regulatory
| environments. For the topic of the original article, anyone can
| see that it would be reasonable for a guy who loves his dog to
| make what appears to be a prudent medical decision in her
| interest, trying out an unknown vaccine without any sort of
| government involvement - and a government that prevents this is
| _unjust_. But with the way the system is set up, if this were
| legally sound it would then automatically imply that a corpo
| scaling up the situation to thousands of dogs that it (the
| corpo) doesn 't care about would also be okay. The fundamental
| problem is that there is no recognition of scale (because small
| scale operators don't have the pull with the government to fix
| the regulations).
| mmooss wrote:
| 'Bureaucracy' is commonly used as a trigger word. When I see it,
| I'm alerted to manipulation and, in some contexts, a certain
| partisan dogma. After all, who likes bureaucracy? By the same
| token, who like stop lights or authentication or other structures
| in life? But every large organization functions using bureaucracy
| - every highly successful one, every median one, every poor one.
|
| > A system originally conceived to safeguard patients has
| gradually produced a strange and troubling outcome: the mere
| chance of survival is effectively reserved for the very few who
| possess the means to assemble an army of experts capable of
| navigating its labyrinthine procedures.
|
| The survival of who? The three people who are trying to
| experiment on themselves (with questionable results, especially
| when their experiment has N=1)? That's a crisis? What about the
| 99.9..% of sick people?
|
| > I will focus on the former: small, exploratory trials, which
| will be called early-stage small n trials for the purpose of this
| essay.
|
| 'early-stage' - it's just like a startup! Except the human
| experimentation part.
|
| > In recent years, China has been advancing rapidly in
| biotechnology, in part because it is easier to run early-stage
| clinical studies there.
|
| > "The US can't afford to lose the biotech race with China."
|
| With the 'bureaucracy', it's right out of central casting,
| including the scare tactic: The same arguments have been used for
| labor standards, property rights, democracy itself.
| SilentM68 wrote:
| That article is exactly on point. There is a process in place for
| the express reason of slowing and blocking anything that will
| bring about positive, meaningful solutions and potential cures to
| the human condition.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Because the old state of affairs had desperate people being
| experimented on by opportunists, charlatans and fraudsters for
| money. There's work to be done balancing the equities of people
| with terminal diagnoses but lets not pretend there's no point
| to the roadblocks to human experimentation on the dying.
| SilentM68 wrote:
| That sounds about right. Lots of abuses have been perpetrated
| by opportunists, charlatans, fraudsters all for money, as you
| put it. I just want to make sure we correctly distinguish
| what is meant by "opportunists, charlatans, fraudsters."
|
| In the spirit of full transparency, I've listed some of the
| most well-known cases. Others, due to the Iron Curtain and
| similar curtains are hard to document, due to lack of visual
| inspection. Just the same I've listed them for transparency's
| sake:
|
| Western Bloc:
|
| Tuskegee Syphilis Study (US, 1932-1972)
|
| Project MKUltra (US/CIA, 1953-1973) Human radiation
| experiments (US, 1940s-1970s)
|
| Porton Down nerve/chemical tests (UK, 1950s-1960s)
|
| Ewen Cameron brainwashing/LSD experiments (Canada,
| 1950s-1960s)
|
| Eastern Bloc:
|
| Soviet Gulag prisoner chemical/medical experiments (USSR,
| 1930s-1950s)
|
| Punitive psychiatry experiments on dissidents (USSR,
| 1950s-1980s)
|
| Pre-1940s Germany:
|
| Nazi eugenics forced sterilizations (1933 Hereditary Health
| Law; ~400,000 citizens)
|
| Pre-1940s Japan:
|
| Unit 731 biological/chemical experiments (est. 1936; pathogen
| injections, early vivisections on prisoners)
|
| Axis Powers:
|
| Nazi Germany: concentration camp medical experiments
| (Dachau/Auschwitz hypothermia, twins, sterilization; mainly
| 1941-1945)
|
| Imperial Japan: Unit 731 & affiliates (vivisections,
| plague/anthrax tests; ~3,000+ direct deaths, 200k+ from field
| use)
|
| Fascist Italy: No major documented equivalent programs
|
| Asia:
|
| Japanese-occupied territories (China, Manchuria, Korea,
| etc.): Unit 731 satellites (biological warfare tests on local
| citizens/POWs)
|
| By the way, all the above instances are part of history.
|
| Greed is greed, whether "Capitalist, Socialist or Communist-
| oriented." In my view there is no distinction between modern
| day and historic "opportunists, charlatans, and fraudsters."
| Greed is Greed!
| msie wrote:
| The cure for cancer will come via a revamp of regulations. /s
| panzagl wrote:
| > More and more promising treatments are accumulating in the
| pipeline, fueled by an explosion of new therapeutic modalities,
| ranging from mRNA to better peptides and more recently, by AI.
|
| If the pipeline is backed up you put a bigger pipe in place, not
| get rid of it and hope some of the resulting flood goes where you
| want.
| peyton wrote:
| It's less of a pipeline and more like a rocket engine. The
| exhaust gas (clinical data) spins the pump. We've put
| restrictors on that flow, and it's taking a lot of fuel to get
| off the ground.
| panzagl wrote:
| Rockets with unrestricted flow are called bombs.
| terminalshort wrote:
| They're called solid fuel rockets
| joenot443 wrote:
| I'm glad this is getting more attention!
|
| I posted the original reporting from The Australian yesterday -
| it's a good primer.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47379740
| https://archive.is/pvRaG
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 99% sure it's BS though.
|
| How can anyone believe that a guy could use a text-generating
| AI _to design a novel cancer treatment_ , but not _write some
| compliance document_?
|
| Come on!
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| The usual line is "the regulations are written in blood", and
| it's a cliche because it's true.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| No, it's a cliche because it's false and/or just rephrased
| alarmism. Most regulations are changes made to solve no
| problem, simply because someone thought it was a good idea, or
| because they were vaguely related to a Current Thing, and then
| persisted because undoing any decision is organizationally
| extremely hard and nobody cared enough. 'Written in blood' is a
| great catchphrase for eliminating any discussion of cost-
| benefit tradeoffs, and the lives that could have been saved but
| for inaction by default.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Please show me the blood that zoning regulations are written in
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| The context is medical regulations.
| just13ducks wrote:
| There's a lot to be said about the seemingly overbearing nature
| of the majority of FDA/ISO standards that result in the mass
| amount of hurdles that need to be jumped before a treatment is
| available, but that's mainly due to institutional trauma from
| past events (thalidomide, primarily) as well as the fact that
| treatments are not simply binary. The options are not just "does
| not work" and "makes patient better," there's also "makes the
| problem worse." These additional tests and trials are to catch
| and prevent adverse effects just as much as they are to ensure
| the drug or treatment actually works.
| missedthecue wrote:
| During covid, the FDA testified to congress that they were
| putting the vaccines on an approval fast track that would not
| reduce safety or efficacy. Why is this not the standard
| approval track?
| adw wrote:
| Because it's inordinately more expensive.
|
| We're computer people, so we have a good analogy here; the
| COVID vaccine did speculative branch prediction. They
| basically operated _as if_ they would get approval at all
| stages where they could, parallelizing much more of the
| process at the cost of a _very_ expensive branch fail if
| something went wrong.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| For example, running very large trials in a short time is
| very high effort.
| wbl wrote:
| Worth it
| D-Coder wrote:
| It's a trade-off: better info versus handling an
| immediate crisis. If it's not an immediate crisis, you
| can take more time.
|
| Engineering is trade-offs.
| wbl wrote:
| People are dying of these diseases every day
| ryoshoe wrote:
| For patients. But maybe not to the companies which would
| have to pay for these large expedited trials
| BryantD wrote:
| a) Risk vs. reward -- not that I'm saying we're making the
| right balance decisions, but the correct speed depends on
| that balance in general.
|
| b) The current administration is extremely unlikely to make
| vaccine approvals faster. If anything their instincts are the
| other way around.
| jmount wrote:
| A rich person engineering their own RNA modifications for their
| dog? Yeah, I don't want that and bureaucracy is how we voice
| that.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| Am I going crazy here? A completely random person tells AI to
| generate a novel vaccine/compound, and people are actually upset
| that there were 3 months of regulatory hurdle he had to jump
| through before he was able to start injecting this new compound
| into an live animal's bloodstream? Really?
| ACCount37 wrote:
| It's an animal, and a terminally ill one at that. What's your
| worst case scenario?
|
| Is it that the dog dies faster than it would have?
|
| That's not actually an issue. We already have vets who just put
| terminally ill pets down.
|
| So, who does the bureaucracy help? Who's protected by it? Why
| is it there at all?
| c0balt wrote:
| It is there to ensure an animal is not experimented on
| unnecessarily or with excessive pain. Discussing a process
| like this might require you to slightly look further than one
| mostly clear cut case.
|
| Part of his filings will be actually stating the "terminally
| ill" part and having this approved by an ethics committee.
| Making a moral judgment here is the committee's actual role
| as not all cases are so "simple".
| littlestymaar wrote:
| I too, like everyone one else, often hate the tedious and often
| absurd, effort that bureaucratic procedures sometimes require,
| but this story doesn't make any sense to me.
|
| We're talking about a guy who's _used AI to make personalized
| ground-breaking medicine for his dog_ but says he _spent three
| months typing a 100-pages long document for the red tape_. In
| reality, current AI technology isn 't particularly designed to
| help you making radical medical breakthrough on its own (at least
| yet), but is extremely proficient when comes to writing text that
| must just check boxes.
|
| I'm sorry but how does that story not smells like complete
| bullshit to anyone reading this? Given that the guy telling his
| story is "an AI entrepreneur", I'm almost 100% sure that the
| story is almost entirely made up for self-promotion.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > I'm sorry but how does that story not smells like complete
| bullshit to anyone reading this?
|
| Because it strokes the anti-establishment anti-intellectual and
| anti-bureaucracy zones all at once, and a lot of nerds (with
| love) are contrarians. Us software guys like nothing better
| than a story about how a smart ass with a computer undid a
| problem seemingly created by institutions out of whole cloth.
|
| I'm calling absolute 100% bullshit.
| anesxvito wrote:
| This resonates. Used AI heavily during development of a recent
| open source project and the speed gains are real but so is the
| review burden. The risk isn't the generated code itself, it's the
| generated code you didn't read carefully enough. Cursor is fast
| at producing plausible looking solutions that pass a quick glance
| but fail edge cases. The discipline has to shift from writing to
| reading, which is a different skill entirely.
| cubefox wrote:
| LLM account
| anesxvito wrote:
| Wrong assumption bro
| GregDavidson wrote:
| Regulatory systems need omsbuds within the government who can ask
| for help and explanations from all the agencies regulating a
| project yet are (primarily) accountable for helping projects
| succeed as soon as possible and (secondarily) responsible for
| providing transparent feedback to those agencies and the public
| where regulation is malfunctioning.
| clcaev wrote:
| For those who are not independently wealthy there is also the
| "fail first" insurance process where you need to fail less
| expensive therapies before a more appropriate therapy is
| approved. Each failure can be extremely costly to a patient's
| health, often exacting irreversible comorbidities, not even
| considering lost work, family wellbeing, and pain/suffering.
|
| For those with rare diseases, insurance also doesn't help with "N
| of 1" efforts. Having 20-40h of a resident's time to assemble a
| case report to consolidate critical details would be invaluable.
| Yet there's no administrative path to fund this personally.
| Without summary case report it's harder to see the big picture
| and dial in on the underlying disease mechanism.
|
| This article mentions how pharma is also not enthusiastic about
| "off label" use of their medications. This is true. They are
| happy to lower costs when insurance denies coverage for the
| indicated diagnosis, to demonstrate benefit so it then becomes
| covered. However, concern of someone getting worse or dying with
| "off label" use makes them charge full cash fare in hundreds of
| thousands of dollars for even single injection (3-4 needed per
| year). This makes it basically impossible for common folk to
| perform even low-risk experiments when standard therapies are
| ineffective. For example, this would block a rare disease patient
| testing a "b-cell" therapy even if doctors had plausible
| mechanism and there were limited downsides.
|
| We can and should do so much better.
| observationist wrote:
| Imagine if we let doctors do medicine instead of letting
| profiteering beancounters optimize for number go up.
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