Hasnain says:

The scale of fraud here is impressive. Examples include billing the government for a woman with prostate cancer (because they would just bill both people in a marriage for each condition…).

“In 2017, the Justice Department intervened in a case against UnitedHealth, the largest Medicare Advantage provider. It sued Anthem in 2020. A whistleblower suit against Cigna was also unsealed that year. The companies are fighting the cases and have disputed allegations of wrongdoing. CVS Health and Humana have also both disclosed investigations into their risk adjustment practices and said they’re cooperating with the probes. UnitedHealth and CVS declined to comment for this story. Representatives for Anthem, Cigna and Humana didn’t respond to requests for comment. The Department of Justice declined to comment.”

Hasnain says:

“"So like with the Titanic, you think, 'What's the safest way to possibly send this book to America - surely the unsinkable ship is the safest way to send it?' And so this book kind of consciously conspires against you and the more you try, the worse the result."”

Hasnain says:

Absolutely fascinating human interest story on a so called expert on serial killers who - depending on your perspective - made it all up, or faked it till he made it. Goes into the psychology behind such a person, serial killers, and investigations of fraud.

“A person who was once close to Bourgoin told me that he was an “excellent actor” and “extremely convincing, because, when he lies, he believes it very strongly, and so you believe it, too.” At the table, though, Bourgoin was diffident. He didn’t seem to be putting much effort into making me—or, possibly, himself—believe what he said. Or maybe he believed it so deeply that the delivery was no longer relevant. When I asked how many killers he had actually interviewed, he replied, in English, “It depends. Each time I was going to a jail, I asked to meet serial killers other than the ones I was authorized to film or interview. So sometimes at Florida State Prison I met in the courtyard during the promenade—I don’t know, two? five?—other serial killers.” He was just as evasive on other subjects.”

Hasnain says:

“In a society more open to letting evidence guide policy and less invested — financially, culturally, psychically — in police as a civic cure-all, the reaction to Tuesday’s tragic events might have unfolded differently, with greater circumspection. Instead, New Yorkers and the country got to watch in real time, as a story about a tragedy that the police were powerless to prevent was speedily reframed as a story about the need for even more police.”

Hasnain says:

“Let women of color do the technical work they were hired to do. Provide administrative support if they’re recruiting speakers for employee resource groups or other diversity efforts. Hire an office manager to restock office supplies, or establish a rota system. Don’t ask computer scientists to play HR.

And at a minimum, pay them for their extra work.”

Hasnain says:

So glad this is being written about - the more I read about the subway shooting the more I think it’s the perfect argument for defunding the police. The NYPD gets 10 billion a year (if it was a military, it would be the 24th largest in the world) and has 3500 cops on subways. Yet:

- the cops at the station failed to stop the shooter or identify him
- They claimed they have 10k cameras all over the city in stations and the three on the station in question were the only ones broken that day
- A cop failed to follow protocol, letting the shooter get away
- radios weren’t working so a cop asked people to call 911 instead
- they only identified the shooter because he dropped his credit card and keys at the scene
- the shooter called in his location and cops failed to show up until a security camera installer found him and called him in (go Zach!)
- this location was just a block away from where the counter terrorism unit was harassing homeless people

I could go on and will edit in a few more things, but… sigh.

“And New Yorkers see this daily. We see police playing on their phones while they lounge around subway stations; we see them unmasked in our stores; and we see them parked in our bike lanes, always ignoring our requests to change their behavior. So when the Mayor says he plans to double the number of police officers in the subway, New Yorkers are right to be skeptical. We know too well how they don’t keep us safe, from mass shootings or otherwise. And we know that real answers like housing, mental health provisions, and education might actually help us build a safer, less violent world.”

Hasnain says:

“"I think that we're dramatically undercounting cases. We're probably only picking up one in seven or one in eight infections. So when we say there's 30,000 infections a day, it's probably closer to a quarter of a million infections a day," FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said during an appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "They're concentrated in the Northeast right now. And that's because a lot of people are testing at home, they're not presenting for definitive PCR tests, so they're not getting counted."”

Hasnain says:

The more I read about this Atlassian outage the more disappointed I get.

Surprised their stock hasn’t tanked yet. (Disclaimer: I just put in a sell order for all my holdings, which I should have done earlier).

“What I found disappointing in this handling was the radio silence for days, coupled with how zero Atlassian executives took ownership of the incident in public. The company has two CEOs and a CTO, and none of them communicated anything externally until day 9 of the outage.

Why?

One of Atlassian’s company values is Don’t #@!% the customer. Why was this ignored? How did leadership ignore this value for 9 days and why did they do it?

What does this type of passive behavior from executives imply about the culture at the company? Why should a customer put its trust in Atlassian when its leadership doesn’t acknowledge when something goes very wrong for hundreds of its customers and tens, or hundreds of thousands of its users at those companies?”

Hasnain says:

“Unlike traditional neural networks, which get trained on lots of data in order to make predictions, a “physics-informed neural network,” or PINN, must satisfy a set of underlying physical constraints as well. These might include laws of motion, energy conservation, thermodynamics — whatever scientists might need to encode for the particular problem they’re trying to solve.

Injecting physics into the neural network serves several purposes. For one, it allows the network to answer questions when very little data is available. It also enables the PINN to infer unknown parameters in the original equations. In a lot of physical problems, “we know roughly how the equations should look like, but we don’t know what the coefficients of [certain] terms should be,” said Yongji Wang, a postdoctoral researcher in Lai’s lab and one of the new paper’s co-authors. That was the case for the parameter that Lai and Cowen-Breen were trying to determine.”

Hasnain says:

It’s sad that it took “the economy is suffering!” for this to be taken more seriously, but I’ll take it. Better late than never.

“Close to half of those reporting symptoms beyond four weeks have suffered for over a year. The most common symptoms are fatigue, brain fog, breathlessness and muscle pain, but there are now around 200 known symptoms affecting almost every organ in the body, according to Brendan Delaney, a GP and chair in medical informatics and decision making at Imperial College London.

What is now starting to get governments’ attention is that the majority of those suffering from long COVID are in the prime of their lives — and careers — between the ages of 35 and 49.”