"In particular, some of the company’s study findings raised concerns due to insufficient and conflicting data –
including regarding genotoxicity and potentially harmful chemicals leaching from the company’s proprietary e-liquid pods
– that have not been adequately addressed and precluded the FDA from completing a full toxicological risk assessment of the products named in the company’s applications."
I'm guessing this is why it is Juul specifically. Other companies may be next, or maybe the FDA hopes using this mechanism to take down the biggest player will strike enough fear in the market that the other vendors fix the issue overall.
Because they designed and marketed specifically to teenagers and singlehandedly undid decades of progress in public health probably, if I had to guess.
if you write it yourself, it's fine. if you directly copy it from somewhere you arent allowed to copy from, then it is wrong.
There are no rules about the form of the code itself that governs whether or not someone owns it. Common sense applies. Sure you could "steal" very small, common, code snippets and get away with it; but that doesnt make it less wrong.
When a commercial entity explicitly does it, however, some times we can catch them. Like if they do it through algorithms that we more or less know how they work - i.e. the algorithm is using advanced control flow logic to copy and paste from it's training data set and copyrighted material is in that data set
Point is that you can ask 100 programmers to write an average function and probably most of them will come up with this answer verbatim. How can copyright law handle this? There is also the opposite problem, I can copy a complicated snippet and change the variable names. Am I absolved from liabilities now?
If they come up with it on their own, it shouldnt be an issue. Likewise, swapping the variable names does not absolve you from liability.
Copyright really is not only concerned with what exactly is on the page, but also how you got there, and where the knowledge came from to get you there.
What if I read your codebase, and then years later while programming for myself I inadvertently use solutions you came up with while thinking I came up with it myself?
There really are no hard set rules, and this is something that is handled on a case-by-case basis based on whether or not a convincing argument can be made that you copied a novel idea from someone else and claimed it as your own.
We can argue the semantics of it all we want, but the subject area is an active battleground. Typically it only matters when money starts to get involved, since no one usually presses the issue or gets involved with random personal projects. So when an enterprise level company leverages that lack of caring into a proprietary pay-to-use project that operates by copying and pasting code from copyrighted material, then it seems like a case might be able to be made for it.
I'm not sure. I've heard people handwave about this before, but if health industry corporations and their congressmen and senators are going to argue that, it should be explained and funded and voted on explicitly, rather than the alleged massive indirect subsidies via overpriced medicare and medicaid government expenditure if they're going to claim that's somehow the way health corporations fund their cutting edge R&D and high end treatments and clinics.
you dont disappear. you become embedded. they are metaphorically assigning you a number and stripping you of an identity. It is dehumanizing.
At the end of the day, it's just you by a different name. Instead of owning it and claiming "we have this information on Gehlitio" they say things like "We have these generalizations about anybody who happens to use HN, speaks in English, bought X Y and Z, subscribes to A, <insert 100 more details that effectively fingerprint you>"
My post wasnt clear on this, but I support doing whatever we can to ease chronic pain.
I just disagree with the position that Google can do so while preserving privacy. If we are going to trade privacy for cures, let's at least do so openly.
I wonder how this will play out in court when a neural net that underpins the tech of a company also can't properly handle health data. Start over?
The right to be forgotten would have to be built into it all right from the get go, wouldn't it? Neural nets embed things, like you said. If Facebook pivoted towards being a hub for healthcare data as oracle seems want to do, could they use all of their facial recognition tech trained from profile pictures now that it is supposed to be detached from any one identity? I'm thinking of the equivalent of github's co-pilot spitting out comments alongside the code.
>I'm thinking of the equivalent of github's co-pilot spitting out comments alongside the code
yes exactly. I am having trouble articulating my underlying point but this is along the lines of it.
A facial recognition algorithm is ultimately saying "you look similar to this specific set of people". If the training set was 1 person, for example, then the algorithm would pretty much just be saying "you look like this photo of this 1 person". Scaling that up does not improve privacy - it only blends you into a population. Additionally, it is distilling out the things about you that separate you from that population (things that make you, you) since those distinguishing features are exactly what the model needs to use as the line to draw on whether or not new data points are similar to the population set or not.
Have you lived with chronic pain, or expected to live the rest of your life disabled?
Because privacy doesn't seem all that important once you actually are going through it.
If you had to pick between being a cripple (say, with your arms or your legs useless) and forgoing your privacy are you really sure you'd give more value to privacy?
Do actually consider what life is like under these circumstances before answering. I don't think there are many quadriplegic people out there who'd pick privacy over being healed.
"X is more important than Y" isn't honest if you never lacked Y and can't even consider a future where you lack Y
I am not sure where I argued that privacy is more important than health. I am saying call it what it is. You are arguing privacy is worth trading for health. I actually agree with that. I dont agree with claims that what google is doing is preserving privacy.
My beliefs are quite the opposite of what you implied about me. I think we should move away from all this embedded bullshit and keep peoples identities intact because the generalizations will never be perfect and it might be useful to know who the actual people are that those generalizations are based on. Maybe that would facilitate human connections. Maybe that would make it easier to reward individuals for sacrificing their privacy in order to improve healthcare. Instead of just pretending they arent sacrificing privacy and are just a drop in the ocean of data providing results.
You are not a drop in the data ocean. Your data is important. There are not a lot of people like you. Google emphasizes generalization because it cheapens the value of your individual data point. Their policy creates an illusion I aim to dismantle.
Also, I do have chronic illness but that is not relevant here. Mine does not directly cause pain, though, full disclosure
All statistics are dehumanizing. I'm no data scientist but I'd imagine including the whole human when doing statistics would produce a pretty low signal to noise ratio.
Statistics are dehumanizing, you are correct. We do not judge individuals based on the statistics of their categorical groups for this reason. Doing so under the obfuscation of a ML model doesn't change that.
Health is very personal. Family history is usually pretty relevant. I am not sure what we gain by pretending we arent talking about actual people, or that by removing your name from all your specific health details it somehow means you cant still be personally targeted. I know Google gains the benefits of less regulations, though.
possibly related. When you are forced to look at someones data sheet to decide on them rather than see them in public being themselves - it seems natural to get sucked into coming up with check-lists on a bunch of qualities you otherwise would not have actually cared about as a means of simplifying your choosing process
the person you replied to was being unnecessarily semantic, but in computer science "sort" has a specific meaning which is only the ordering of a set. So 'sorting' cp implies making it easier to find specific cp.
The more accurate word might be "categorize" or "filter".
It was obvious what was meant by "sort" when reading the full text, but I think the counter-point was more of a tongue-in-cheek retort regarding the above than an actual complaint.
Small nitpick on this statement that makes a significant difference to me. I think the spirit of what you are saying is that "Experts are far more accessible than ever"
The youtube video that helped you, your neighbor, the instruction manual, are all sources of expert information. In earlier times people would have to find the right book in a library, or travel the world in search of an expert.
You are still trusting experts, which implies that they exist, which is different than assuming "well, some guy on youtube could do it - so it cant be that hard ill figure it out myself". you are instead acknowledging that the "guy on youtube" is an expert that you thankfully have access to because of youtube
If a universal basic income existed, I would agree with you. Since it doesn't, this employment model is exploitative. There is a limited amount of paid work to go around. Being able to avoid being one of the people who draws the short stick is inconsequential to the problem.
People like to say, "if you do X like me, youll get ahead or be your own boss or ___". It may be true for some people, but it comes almost directly at the cost of putting someone else in the bad place you were trying to get out of. So with respect to trying to improve the overall system, shuffling people around isnt going to help.
Secondly, that very strongly suggests survivor bias. You almost never hear about all the people who did X and didn't make it. And the one time you do, those were unlucky, or didn't really do X (true scottsman fallacy).
>Given that car batteries aren’t an option yet to power homes this is a problem that will stick around for a bit
One was posted here not too long ago.. so this may not be far off. But it's a bit of a chicken-egg situation because powering your home with a car battery is not very practical by itself. Investing in both solar and the car at the same time would also be a hefty chunk of change for any individual household
That’s exactly the point. The few car models that do support grid feed-in require an expensive converter to take DC from the car and deliver AC to the home.
The hardware to do that is just expensive and currently that doesn’t pay off
My thoughts exactly. Solar -> Desalination, with all other energy consumption in the middle. Granted, I am not up to date on desalination. I know MIT released something recently but idk the details. Is energy the bottleneck now or is it still material?
including regarding genotoxicity and potentially harmful chemicals leaching from the company’s proprietary e-liquid pods
– that have not been adequately addressed and precluded the FDA from completing a full toxicological risk assessment of the products named in the company’s applications."