GPs don't have time to do the investigation, but they also have biases.
My own story is one of bias. I spent much of the last 3 years with sinus infections (the part I wasn't on antibiotics). I went to a couple ENTs and one observed allergic reaction in my sinuses, did a small allergy panel, but that came back negative. He ultimately wanted to put me on a CPAP and nebulizer treatments. I fed all the data I got into ChatGPT deep research and it came back with an NIH study that said 25% of people in a study had localized allergic reactions that would show up one place, but not show up elsewhere on the body in an allergy test. I asked my ENT about it and he said "That's not how allergies work."
I decided to just try second generation allergy tablets to see if they helped, since that was an easy experiment. It's been over 6 months since I've had a sinus infection, where before this I couldn't go 6 weeks after antibiotics without a reoccurrence.
There are over a million licensed physicians in the US. If we assume that each one interacts with five patients per weekday, then in the six months since you had this experience, that would conservatively be six-hundred-million patient interactions in that time.
Now, obviously none of this math would actually hold up to any scrutiny, and there's a bevy of reasons that the quality of those interactions would not be random. But just as a sense of scale, and bearing in mind that a lot of people will easily remember a single egregious interaction for the rest of their life, and (very reasonably!) be eager to share their experience with others, it would require a frankly statistically impossibly low error rate to not be able to fill threads like these with anecdotes of the most heinous, unpleasant, ignorant, and incompetent anecdotes anyone could ever imagine.
And this is just looking at the sheer scale of medical care, completely ignoring the long hours and stressful situations many doctors work in, patients' imperfect memories and one-sided recollections (that doctors can never correct), and the fundamental truth that medicine is always, always a mixture of probabilistic and intuitive judgement calls that can easily, routinely be wrong, because it's almost never possible to know for sure what's happening in s given body, let alone what will happen.
That E.N.T. wasn't up to date on the latest research on allergies. They also weren't an allergy specialist. They also were the one with the knowledge, skills, and insight to consider and test for allergies in the first place.
Imagine if we held literally any other field to the standard we hold doctors. It's, on the one hand, fair, because they do something so important and dangerous and get compensated comparitively well. But on the other hand, they're humans with incomplete, flawed information, channeling an absurdly broad and deep well of still insufficient education that they're responsible for keeping up-to-date while looking at a unique system in unique circumstances and trying to figure out what, if anything, is going wrong. It's frankly impressive that they do as well as they do.
If you fully accept everything BobaFloutist says, what do you do differently?
Nothing. You just... feel more sympathetic to doctors and less confident that your own experience meant anything.
Notice what's absent: any engagement with whether the AI-assisted approach actually worked, whether there's a systemic issue with ENTs not being current on allergy research, whether patients should try OTC interventions as cheap experiments, whether the 25% localized-reaction finding is real and undertaught.
The actual medical question and its resolution get zero attention.
Also though...
You are sort of just telling people "sometimes stuff is going to not work out, oh also there's this thing that can help, and you probably shouldn't use it?"
What is the action you would like people to take after reading your comment? Not use ChatGPT to attempt to solve things they have had issues solving with their human doctors?
That is the case, whether the code is AI generated or not. Go take a look at some of the source code for tools you use ever day, and you'll find a lot of shit code. I'd go so far as to say, after ~30 years of contributing to open source, that it's the rare jewel that has clean code.
Yeah, but there is a difference, between if at least one people at one point of time understood the code (or the specific part of it), and none. Also, there are different levels. Wildfly’s code for example is utterly incomprehensible, because the flow jumps on huge inheritance chains up and down to random points all the time; some Java Enterprise people are terrible with this. Anyway, the average for tools used by many is way better than that. So it’s definitely possible to make it worse. Blindly trusting AI is one possible way to reach those new lows. So it would be good to prevent it, before it’s too late, and not praising it without that, and even throwing out one of the (broken, but better than nothing) safeguard. Especially how code review is obviously dead with such amount of generated code per week. (The situation wasn’t great there either before) So it’s a two in one bad situation.
I have had fairly serious arthritis in my hips for close to a decade now. Cortizone shots directly into the joint have helped the worst of the flare-ups (limping on my way into the shot, having 0 pain walking out of it, lasting a year).
5+ years ago when I was looking for another injection, my PCP said "Well, time for a hip replacement." Now, for reasons I don't understand I think he was being way premature on that (everyone I'd talked to prior to that had said I should wait as long as I can, and it'd been 2+ years since my last shot).
But I'd pretty much accepted that hip pain was just a part of my life, (especially in the morning) picking something off the floor was painful, just walking and in particular walking stairs was just a little painful.
A few weeks ago I tried some stretches I saw on Youtube shorts. Like a minute a day. It's like I've got new hips.
I've never been a very "compliant patient" when it comes to stretching, but that was mostly because I saw no benefits from it. But this one stretch was like a miracle!
Some anecdotal knowledge I can share on why they used to say wait as long as you can for a hip replacement:
We were told this was because it used to be that they could only do the hip replacement surgery once, and the replacement joint would only last around 20 years max.
So basically it had to be for the expected life span of the patient!
But now this is no longer true. Well, in Australia at least with access to modern replacement parts, surgical techniques and specialists!
I could be muddling it up a bit, so happy to be corrected :-)
I recently got told something similar in Europe, and anecdotally anyone who’d had a hip replacement and waited on it regretted not doing it as soon as the doc told them.
The body is very weird and finds ways to compensate
I had a football injury when I was 13 that badly damaged my knee meniscus (though I didn’t know it at that time). At 16, I had a complete menisectomy - total removal of the lateral meniscus in my right knee
I was told that I would need to get a transplant and/or new knees in 10-15 years. I was also told that I shouldn’t put too much strain on the knee
I’m now 38 and my knee is mostly…fine. I can run, squat a reasonable amount of weight, walk for miles. Only thing I can’t do is fast directional changes (like in football) or bending down on the lateral side of my right knee
My plan is to extend this as long as possible and hopefully in 10 years, they’ll have tech to fix this for good
I'm constantly telling people to look up physical therapy movements/stretches for whatever they've got going on. Slept wrong? Tweaked your neck? You absolutely do NOT have to suffer with that until it goes away on its own, they can show you how to fix it.
If your insurance covers it, go see one! Them being able to actually see and feel what's going on specifically with you makes them markedly better at their jobs.
Can’t find the link now but a very comprehensive analysis of surgery vs physiotherapy for lower back issues found that physiotherapy was as effective as invasive, often dangerous spinal surgery. The only difference was time - surgery with recovery + recovery physio fixed the pain in about 4-6 months, while physiotherapy took 18-24 months
But on the plus side, physiotherapy is “free”, has no real risk, and most people who opted for the physiotherapy path found that they were happier and also fixed a lot of other pains simply because of regular stretching and exercise
When doing stretches, don't forget the opposite side of the equation which is strength.
Not the "I'm going to bench 200lbs" type strength, but the musculature that supports movement.
It's quite easy to always focus on stretching, but not build the muscles that support good movement. You can turn yourself into a floppy noodle, which brings on more injury.
"Frog Mobility" -- Get on hands and knees, spread knees but keep your feet closer together, rock back towards your heels and forward.
"Frog Cat/Cow" -- Same position as above, but tilt your pelvis; curve your back up then down.
"Tactical Frog" -- I haven't done this one yet, but it is frog mobility but with each rocking forward twist one of your feet up into the air; IOW rock back then as you rock forward keep one knee locked so that your calf/foot stays in the same relative position as you move forward.
These may not be the same as the one suggested above, but when I fell back in early 2025, my lower back, discs, spine got wrecked. I was sent to Physical therapy and was giving exercises similar to these which helped me, may help you. Keep in mind that it is not a cure...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wAw1-1MHa4
This has been my experience with every sports of weightlifting injury I've had and I'm in my 40s. The body wants to heal or at least compensate in some way. Light activity is often better than rest. I've got a knee that is acting up a little bit but I think I've figured out how to keep it healthy while running.
I f'd my knees running track in HS - i suspect some kind of structural problem that alters the way my knees move. Sr year wsa awful, i was just about crawling to class in the morning. MRIs showed nothing and I learned to live with it and eventually it got better when I stopped running.
10ish years later I had started riding my bike a lot during the dotcom explosion induced downtime, I kept it up after I was employed again. Knee pain came back. Went to the ortho again, this time was told "oh you have a torn meniscus, lets go fix it.
So I went under and woke up to be told that my meniscus was fine, and that I had worn grooves through the cartilage and into the bone - doc told me to never run, jump, ski, ride, etc. I was to sit on the couch.
Somehow I ended up taking karate, and the knees hurt for a bit, but the stretching we did helped loosen up my hams and quads. It didnt make the knee pain go away, but it made it tolerable in that it no longer affected my day to day.
When you're a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Good thing you were able to find a good alternative solution. I suspect a lot of ailments could be resolved with non-medical interventions, but there's little money to be made there and also, a lot of people want the perceived "easier" way out.
I use it to back up a few virtual machines that, in the event of a site loss, would be difficult to rebuild but also critical to getting our developers back to work. I take an LVM snapshot of the VM, then use bdsync to replicate it to our backup server, and from there I replicate it off to backblaze, then destroy the snapshot.
DRBD is more of a live sync, and it's great stuff, as long as you set it up BEFORE you need it, and you need it frequently. If you want to keep a second copy of your data on another system, up to the second(ish), it's a great choice.
If, however, you just want a copy of a block device on another system, like for weekly backup (our case), it's probably overkill. Especially as to keep it truly consistent you need to run in the mode where writes are acked only once the remote AND local devices have it.
My VMs are running on ganeti, which has a mode where the backing device can be DRBD and written to another host. Which works great if you have the extra disc space and can deal with the latency. Also allows you to live migrate VMs between the two hosts.
In my case I ultimately want the copy off-site, so DRBD isn't really a great fit.
DRBD is very good stuff though, I've used it for decades for HA database servers and the like.
Typically, multi-homing means having an ASN and using BGP, or having multiple providers with BGP announce your prefix. So, a server in a DC might count, if you can get them to announce your prefix, though they'll probably want to announce their own prefix and give you a chunk of it. Your home network probably isn't going to be announcing your prefix.
It really depends on what you're trying to achieve by having a direct IPv6 allocation...
I hear what you're saying but if you aren't going to publicly route those IPs, ARIN has allocated fd00::/8 for that use. If you are going to publicly route your IPs, ARIN has no problem allocating you the space.
Ok, but "where the rubber meets the road", I've seen 0 BYDs in the wild in the US, including a recent 1,800 mile trip half way across the country. Earlier in 2025 I took a trip to Scotland and they had 2 dealerships I saw and I saw a couple of them on the roads.
Have you considered having AI code review the AI code before giving them off to a human? I've been experimenting with having claude work on some code and commit it, and then having codex review the changes in the most recent git commit, then eyeballing the recommendations and either having codex work the changes, or giving them back to claude. That has seemed to be quite effective so far.
In programming we've often embraced spending time to learn new tools. The AI tools are just another set of tools, and they're rapidly changing as well.
I've been experimenting seriously with the tools for ~3 years now, and I'm still learning a lot about their use. Just this past weekend I started using a whole new workflow, and it one-shotted building a PWA that implements a fully-featured calorie tracking app (with social features, pre-populating foods from online databases, weight tracking and graphing, avatars, it's on par with many I've used in the past that cost $30+/year).
Someone just starting out at chat.openai.com isn't going to get close to this. You absolutely have to spend time learning the tooling for it to be at all effective.
For example, do you begin with a rough design and refine it into concrete steps with the AI, or take another approach? Do you switch models based on task complexity to manage costs?
My own story is one of bias. I spent much of the last 3 years with sinus infections (the part I wasn't on antibiotics). I went to a couple ENTs and one observed allergic reaction in my sinuses, did a small allergy panel, but that came back negative. He ultimately wanted to put me on a CPAP and nebulizer treatments. I fed all the data I got into ChatGPT deep research and it came back with an NIH study that said 25% of people in a study had localized allergic reactions that would show up one place, but not show up elsewhere on the body in an allergy test. I asked my ENT about it and he said "That's not how allergies work."
I decided to just try second generation allergy tablets to see if they helped, since that was an easy experiment. It's been over 6 months since I've had a sinus infection, where before this I couldn't go 6 weeks after antibiotics without a reoccurrence.
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