11 years ago, I had the idea that I should be able to take any article on an arbitrary website and listen to it as a narration in my chosen podcast player. At the time, text-to-speech (TTS) services were very robotic and it was difficult to listen to anything longer than 10 seconds. But now that TTS is much better, long form narrations are actually quite pleasant to listen to, so I gave it another go.
There's a browser extension that reads the content of the article on the page (only when you activate it, using least privilege browser APIs for content scripts) and then narrates the article for you. You get a custom podcast RSS URL that works in (almost) any podcast player, and then you can take articles with you to catch up while driving, walking the dog, etc. All the typical podcast audio controls you're used to like speed settings, skipping, and no new apps to download or learn.
It has genuinely been a big benefit and allowed me to keep up with articles I'd never normally have time to read, plus it allows me to reduce my screen time. My wife also uses and loves it. There have been some interesting bugs in the narration like originally pronouncing "24/7" as "twenty-four sevenths" but I am working through different strategies to get more accurate narration from arbitrary long-form text.
With apologies for the ".AI" domain, it was a bit of an impulse buy: https://earcast.ai/
Boston. Was looking into becoming a medic when living there many years ago, and learned that Boston EMS has their own dedicated training and certification, with more limited protocols for EMTs since there are so many world-class hospitals within a few minutes drive from any point in the city. EMS has less to do but load-and-go.
>that you're sorry and to truly empathize with the people they're firing
Serious question: what should have been said on this call to do that? There was a lot of "I'm sorry you feel that way" seeming to come from the HR representative, but it seemed to miss the mark.
I used to work in a hospital and one thing that was already tough was when doctors would copy massive (multiple page) notes that were mostly boilerplate, probably stored as some template in the EHR. After seeing the same note a few times, you started to learn which page to scroll to in order to view the relevant section for the patient. I would hope this system only generates clinically-relevant text for that patient, usually only 2-3 paragraphs for a standard consultation.
Wow, lots of haters in this thread. Having doctors spend less time with clerical/administrative work needed to record conversations will free up more time to focus on patients. I assume the generated note text can be easily modified by the doc if necessary, but saves them the bulk of having to type things up and remember everything that was discussed.
This is an excellent point. While their main value prop seems to be "servers closer to your users" you could also just use them as a drop-in replacement for something like heroku and just use one region to simplify the mental model, pricing and orchestration.
OP here, thanks for making that distinction more clear. I had listed them all as new tech that I am starting to use, but you're correct that I wouldn't intend to use them all _together_.
The HTMX and alpine libs were intended to be sprinkled onto existing web apps (my usual python/flask stack), whereas Phoenix would be for building all new projects.
> How do you go from talking to someone during some hobby activity to a friendship outside of that activity?
This is where having multiple hobbies not only adds depth to conversations & makes you more interesting, it allows you to cross-pollinate your friend groups from each hobby. If you join a cross fit gym and a running group (as others have mentioned in the thread), then you invite someone from the gym to the group or vice versa.
The invitation can either be a "I think you'd really enjoy this activity", in which case you're introducing them to something new and cool, or it can be "I think you'd really like the people I do X with" in which case you're helping them meet friends.
People who take you up on the offer to either try something new or meet new people with you as their guide are sure to become friends. You get to see each other in new elements and your relationship can now trascend simply doing one activity together.
I think this approach feels a lot more natural than jumping straight to "hey, I've seen you at the rock gym a bunch, let's get coffee?" which can feel like a big jump and somewhat forced.
Pilot was told their flight was being diverted due to a suspected bomb on board. What "game of chicken" would make a pilot doubt that instruction and chose to keep flying, given what the information they were being presented at the time?
It's not like they called to the plane and said "we'd like to kidnap a passenger, please land" and the pilot went along with it.
What a perfectly obtuse, technical solution. Is grandma going to solve a captcha in order to sign up on a wordpress blog to view photos of her grandchildren?
Dropbox is "just" a private s3 bucket with s3cmd on a cronjob -- or a million other technical solutions -- but they're a successful business because they nailed the user experience for average joes.
The point of OP's product is that you don't have to cobble together a bunch of hacks to replicate the desired user experience, it's supported out of the box.
The article links to a YouTube video of a lecture by the author[0]. One of the top comments contains a list of timestamps in the video where he discusses specific surgeries:
7:55 Angina example
10:05 Parkinson’s disease example
13:10 Multiple sclerosis example
14:52 emphysema example
18:47 knee pain
20:40 spine surgery
21:52 Injection therapy for pain
24:59 Explain perceived effectiveness
26:29 correlation vs causation
29:33 Improvement not due surgery
30:33 Natural history
34:01 regression to the mean
35:43 concomitant treatment
39:16 perceived improvement: patient vs clinician
41:50 therapeutic envelope
42:38 Intervention: the placebo pill
44:02 Building the ideal placebo
47:02 “Why do we still operated?”
52:00 Determining effectiveness
52:55 Reducing error in estimating the truth
54:55 Why we need blinded randomized trials
55:12 Ethics and Placebo
59:50 One possible solution
1:00:20 Current status of placebo RCT in orthopedics
1:00:44 Summary, questions, and comments
Jeff Bezos has a great interview where he talks about his decision to leave his cushy Wall Street job and start a website selling books. He talks about how he used a "regret minimization framework" where he projects himself into the future and imagines which decision he would regret the least.
I have used this technique multiple times myself to help with otherwise fraught or overwhelming decisions, and I think it's a great way to shift your frame of reference.
I can think of many legitimate reason that a site owner might want to be anonymous. Maybe they're exposing corruption or sharing information that powerful people don't want to have exposed.
Quizlet is great if you're looking for pre-built decks, as you mentioned. As far as I'm aware, there's no spaced repetition feature, which is the main value in Anki.
Also, one of the values to me in using Anki is creating the cards myself. It allows me to mull things over and decide what part of a fact is important, and how I'd like to recall it.
Relatedly, the value isn't necessarily in reading someone else's study guide before a test, it's in creating your own study guide. That process helps you understand and retain the material far better.
When I was in the woods and found one on me, I took the batteries out of an extra flashlight I was carrying and kept the tick trapped in the handle.
When I got home, I transferred him to a double ziplock labelled with the date and where on the body I found him and tossed him into the freezer for a few months until I figured I was in the clear.
https://hnbadges.netlify.app/?user=hartleybrody