Adding to this: too many negatives before making a point, which AI text is prone to do in order to give surface level emphasis to random points in an argument. For example: "I sat there for a second. It didn't lose the thread. It didn't panic. It prioritized like a real engineer would." Then there is the fact that the paragraph ends in just about the same way, which also activates one's AI-voice-detector, so to speak: "This wasn't autocomplete. This was collaboration."
In my opinion, to write is to think. And to write is also to express oneself, not only to create a "communication object," let's put it that way. I would rather read an imperfect human voice than a machine's attempts to fix it. I think it's worth to face the frustration that comes with writing, because the end goal of refining your own argument and your delivery is that much sweeter. Let your human voice shine through.
I could have written this comment myself. I was surprised to find out that it wasn't common to track every single thing you spend, to have multiple Excel sheets for your money, and to constantly look at how you are faring against your budget. Seems like a lot of folks look at their checking account and go "guess I still have some money left over to spend." Maybe it's because I grew up poor or because my mother was very careful with finances herself (in spite of hardship). I would be curious to know what your case is.
I also had this problem and one thing I found useful was to create a distinction between reflecting on something and referencing it. Writing things down helps me think, but it doesn't mean a note will be worth reading. What I began doing is creating a short summary for every note. That way, I only ever reference the summary. Reflections are for thinking, summaries are for referencing.
Thank you for taking the time to write this out! It's so interesting to see exactly where things become tricky once you go from hobbyist to professional -- or from regular hobbyist to fancy hobbyist, for that matter.
> The way Photoshop serves its market is quite specific and just casually loading up Photopea now I can see many parts of the app that would trivially frustrate a production workflow. I'm happy to list these for anyone curious.
This did make me curious. What problems did you notice? I know next to nothing about image editing software. However, I always like to understand how someone judges the usefulness of a given thing, assuming he or she has enough background knowledge / experience on a subject.
Thank you for bringing that up, understaffing affects everything and harms patients. No set of alarms will ever replace the benefit of having enough people working.
Knowing how to trend the patient's health is probably more useful than relying on all the alarms. People hardly deteriorate from one second to the next if you know what to expect from their baseline. At least that's what I did when working as a nurse. However, I never worked in some place like the ICU, so the approach might be different in that case.
Well, with AI people will still likely be suffering, except those at the top of the pyramid will be doing even better. Not so great. The AI debate is not about technology per se, but more so about seeing how gains in technology / productivity only go to the top, and extrapolating how bad that will be when greed meets the hyper-productivity of AI.
Really late to the party on this, but I don't see the purpose of remembering every day without fail. For my part, I have been journaling for a while now, and every day I make a note of something that happened. However, I don't get so caught up with particular moments.
If you have enough data, to put it this way, then you notice that most things you do, feel or think are somewhat circular. You come back to certain emotions, you come back to certain perceptions. Remembering by itself, in the absence of reflection, makes little sense. Plus, whenever I do glean something from my previous writings, it is usually due to understanding the general "feel" of a time in my life, not so much memorizing a particular day.
>The moments captured in my images are fresh, but my perspective on them changes.
I like that the author acknowledges that here. Again, though, I do think it matters more to interpret one's experience as opposed to having a perfect recollection of the facts. And, to be fair, what he does, and what I do, sounds more like a way to handle far more existential concerns. I suppose we want to hold on to life, to give it meaning in some way by always being a witness to what has been. Maybe we would all be better served by acknowledging the underlying philosophical conundrum here, haha.
I seriously don't get this argument, which I see far too often. Meaning, writing being simply a means to an "end" of a product. I like a good piece of fiction especially because it was written by a human being. It is that human's way of communicating something to me / the audience. Do people out there really want to read something written by a machine? Of course, if you have some bottom of the barrel corporate-approved fiction, it may as well be written by AI. But that isn't what I seek to consume and I would wager there are many others who feel the same way. What is the appeal of AI-generated fiction?
I don't usually comment but just wanted to say that I absolutely love Obsidian. I have been using it every day for about 2 years now and my life would not be the same without it. It's amazing. I also gladly pay for Sync, it's more than worth it.
I am about to start my 11th journal. I have been journaling for about 10 years, but I have only been consistent for about 5. As an aside, I would define “consistent” as leaving fewer and fewer days unwritten. I mostly journal about events from my day. I used to journal about general ideas as well, but I began to separate recounting my experiences from using writing as a way to think things through. To write about live events I use a physical notebook and to write about everything else I use Obsidian. Overall, I have experienced some great benefits, mostly regarding how I organize information in my own head and how well I remember things.
- I now find it easier to put events from my day-to-day life into a structure. If you ask people about their memories, you will find that many of them have a single moment they remember well. But what happened right before and what happened right after? Sometimes we forget the sequence of events that led into something or how we “got out of it,” so to speak. Journaling helped me know how A led to B and then C.
- It’s a good way to keep (somewhat) accurate records. If I ever wonder something along the lines of “hm, I wonder when it was that I started doing x thing,” it’s very convenient to check the journal and know right away.
- It helps me see how often the future recontextualizes the past. Some things that seem unimportant in the present become important in the future and vice versa. I mean this both in a philosophical/emotional sense and a practical one. The more you notice the general way things develop, the better you become at predicting what will be relevant and what won’t. It makes it easier for me to see facts in terms of what future things are implied in the current conditions.
- It’s a good way to understand your own feelings. There is a catharsis that comes with writing quite a few pages about something that has been bothering you or that you otherwise want to reflect more about. It has definitely helped me.
- It’s a good way to avoid getting stuck in a frame of mind. Whenever I read back my journals, I see how many things I have already gone through – which, ironically I thought were completely new experiences / thoughts. I see this in other people as well, where someone will make a grand declaration about something and forger the other times they said the exact same thing. There is a Roger Ebert review of the 63 Up movie that mentions that “whenever one of the subjects. . . brings up a past statement or event, the movie cuts to a sequence of shots or moments illustrating that the character has always been preoccupied with that thing, or done that thing, or denied being worried about that thing.” I think this is relevant to everyone.
Your comment made me think about this for a bit. It is almost fun imagining something like seeing a short little warning floating up in the air above a patient's arm, saying "blood draws from here". It would be pretty darn cool. If this were possible, it would be worth seeing how much it helps with continuity of care.
To let my imagination run a little wilder, I tried to think of what a system like that would be in practice, and how it relates to the problems that we currently face with the systems we already have. As much as it would be interesting to have all that information available through some sort of AR, there are really three important things that I would like to see about a patient: code status, vital signs and how they get up from bed.
It's really crazy to me how even the simplest of stuff is buried in a chart or EMR. Most do show the patients code status easily, but quite often it is in a small little font beside not-quite-as-relevant stuff like their marital status and what type of insurance they have. Why isn't this in big bold red letters in every room and in every chart as soon as you open up a document? Even for vital signs you have to click through two or three different things to get the information you need (but thank goodness I get to see some stuff right away, like that ICD-10 code for unspecified follow up for dietary counseling!)
One thing I think a lot of people may also not realize is how little information a nurse often has to go off of when walking into a room. If I am answering a call light for a patient who is not one my assigned ones, and they are screaming that they need to go to the bathroom yesterday, and you see them with both feet planted on the floor ready to get up, you have a quick second to think about a few different things. 1) How alert is this patient? 2) How mobile are they, do we need two people in the room? 3) Is this someone with a massive diabetic ulcer who wasn't supposed to be putting any pressure on that heel at all and they are about to do just that? Of course, you can look at the whiteboard, but you better pray that it's updated haha.
So, going back to the AR stuff. If I could have a snapshot of all this information as soon as I walked into a room, it would be a life saver, especially for situations like the above.
Very cool point. In my ideal world a whole nursing unit or facility would be a self-correcting operation. There are problems that a nurse on the floor can fix but it takes up time. If those problems were prevented to begin with, it would be much easier. I would like a system where the nurse notices a problem and simply sends it up to a manager / supervisor who 1) finds a way to handle the immediate problem and 2) always writes up and enforces a new guideline to prevent it from happening again.
Good managers probably already do this, but healthcare has a very short supply of such people. It would be great if this type of improvement were the standard across the board. Let's say, for example, that you have latex and non-latex foley catheters mixed in the same bin in a supply closet. Your patients with latex allergies have gotten a latex catheter put in more than once and it now becomes a problem. Well, someone notices the issue, sends it up to someone above and now there is a new guideline to place the different catheters at least 3 feet apart, or something to that effect. It almost sounds silly, but people would be surprised how many of these mistakes happen over and over again due to equally silly reasons / lack of basic prevention.
I liked the way you framed this as something universal. Is there any field where one can quickly reference knowledge from your peers to just as quickly solve a problem in practice? Maybe it's asking too much. Though I suppose it wouldn't be necessary to get everyone on board with such an idea if you have that single coordinator who everyone knows as the reference point. Although, if you think about it, even then that person would have to be available 24/7, which isn't feasible.
With patient documentation specifically, what I would really love to have is a simple search mechanism for patient notes. This still wouldn’t solve the problem of getting everyone to capture the right information. But assuming the information is there, and I'm having a real hard time sticking that right arm, I would love to be able to search for "arm", "blood draw," "stick" and see what pops up. I hope it's not something I missed entirely, but I have never used an EMR with such a feature.
I'm a nurse and I find the 7th point on the post especially relevant. I will add a disclaimer that I never worked in the ICU so I can't speak for what happens in that type of unit.
There is a serious issue with the flow of information in healthcare, (or at least in the U.S, I never worked elsewhere to know if it's any different). But If you find something during your shift which will be important to know later on, it will certainly be lost as soon as you are off for a few days, or even as soon as a new nurse comes on. To think of a somewhat crude example, if you find out that it is much easier to obtain a blood sample from the veins on the left arm of a patients vs the right, many nurses will still stick the right arm countless times hoping to get something.
And you can leave a chart note about things like that or speak about it during report, but for the most part few people will think "hm, I wonder what everybody else had to deal with." They are probably too busy handling a thousand different things happening all at once. And, even if that is not the case, from what I observed it's simply not part of how things are done. And very often patients will get (justifiably) angry, saying "I've been complaining of x thing for days!" or some version of that. I think it would be much better for both patients and healthcare staff alike if there was a greater emphasis placed on focusing on the series of successes and failures that happen over the course of someone's care, not just seeing it as a single shift or a single problem happening in some isolated point in time.
>It is a sever cultural problem with the nurses. They should be more educated than this.
Well, I think nursing culture is very difficult to understand from the outside. It was for me before I went into nursing school. Also, it is not exactly about education. For example, in nursing, there is a great focus on having initiative. I remember that in nursing school it was much more praiseworthy to have done many skills during clinical time (e.g. inserting a urinary catheter, inserting an NG tube) than to be able to enumerate the safety risks associated with those very same skills. It was very odd to me, but it was the way things were. Even working in the field there is always a great focus on "getting stuff done", so to speak.
Therefore, although I think education is a natural thing to bring up when one wishes to argue that x should be happening, it doesn't really apply in the bigger context of the profession. I believe this also has to do with a lot of other "why aren't x people doing y thing" types of arguments. In nursing, practice - and the willingness to do things - will always be more important than any deep understanding of theory. Also, let me add that I don't mean to say that every nurse is reckless. Still, this doesn't change the fact that there are some really strange aspects of the working environment. No matter how well one practices one's individual role or how knowledgeable one is, they will still be there. And, ultimately, I think these things have to be taken into account when we want to understand what is driving a group of people to make certain choices.
Created an account just to answer this. I'm a nurse. Most nurses and nursing aides that I work with do not wish to take the vaccine, worried about it being "rushed". There is also worry about the claims that vaccine recipients developed Bells palsy. Even though a good number of healthcare workers have the option to take the vaccine right now, few are doing so -- at least from what I'm seeing.
In my opinion, to write is to think. And to write is also to express oneself, not only to create a "communication object," let's put it that way. I would rather read an imperfect human voice than a machine's attempts to fix it. I think it's worth to face the frustration that comes with writing, because the end goal of refining your own argument and your delivery is that much sweeter. Let your human voice shine through.