There are a lot of APIs like this that I really wish would expose downloading a parquet file instead of trying to implement server-side filtering and reporting query features.
Working with APIs is often frustrating and the worst ones are terribly ineficient and frustrating. Our Agent SDK and Agent Context Store insulates you and your agent from this headache, allowing you to query from those synced datasets directly.
The feedback about wanting to download a parquet file is super interesting...
The reporting isn't about cost or availability of insurance; it is more about how insurance companies signficantly reduce payouts through a combination of secrecy, coercive practices against adjusters, paying less than standard rates, and not paying for portions of repairs that homeowners should reasonably expect to be covered. It also reported on areas beyond California.
How close are we to a third party with sufficient compute being able to mass-de-anonymize social media? What happens if they republish social media feeds with identity probabilities? Do we reach a point where the internet is anonymous to casual users but not to large corporations or governments? Presumably someone is already selling identity-labelling as a service?
Amusingly, (locally generated) LLM text becomes an anonymity mask in those scenarios.
I use real name here and posted about pending litigation once. An insurance settlement was offered a week later. Socials are scraped to build profiles for these scenarios. People engaged in fraud tend to blab about it and many business are interested in having such evidence accessible. It can be useful to exploit that system to your advantage when the truth is on your side.
I was thinking about this the other day, using LLM text to thwart stylometric analysis. At some point, I'd read about using machine translations to do the same thing (translating a text to, for example. Chinese then back to English). This seems to only work if the translation method isn't quite perfect so get an "Engrish" effect or the like. But you could probably feed your manifesto or whatever to one of the various modern chatbots and have it rewrite it in the style of Poe or Pynchon or maybe a generic business email. (Obviously, setting aside the issue of if the chatbot is keeping all this stuff in a database somewhere).
tl;dr intentionally writing in a different style is very effective and overall the best option
btw one upside to public content being ingested in LLM training data. is that certain writing styles (like using the emdash) become much more common, due to reappearing in generated content. this means that if you continue to write in that style, you will blend in more easily. which makes your own content resist stylometric analysis
Until you need insurance. Or a professional license that involves a review of your medical record. Or the government just wants the data. Or the records are subpoenaed to be used against you in court. You are trusting that illegitimate uses of this data will be punished. However, there are many authorized uses that will hurt you in the long term. It is rarely to your advantage to accumulate extensive recorded medical records.
Even pre-existing insurance denials could return in the US.
Don't let systems record what they don't need. They aren't your friend.
Once you've had your medical records used against you by a third party, you start being much more careful about what you share with your doctors about yourself.
There is no trust in a Dr's office. What they record gets handed to companies who have interests adversarial to yours. Basically like talking to the police. If you, as a patient, think an automated recording is helping you long term, you are naive.
You encountered bad providers, not bad tools. Don't blame the hammer if you hit your thumb, and don't blame the hammer if someone ELSE hits your thumb.
Here's a simple example: two people have similar depression issues. One seeks treatment - is prescribed a drug and therapy. Two years later, they are better and back to drug free. The other doesn't and has more recurrences and longer depression bouts. Which gets a better life insurance rate?
That's not being used against you. That's a situation where they have a genuine need to know your health in order to properly estimate your share for a policy. Yes, it's imperfect, but generally people don't volunteer the truth so we have to rely on documenation. As someone with depression, yes, I understand why I pay a little more for life insurance.
Kinda weird to argue for longer life via battery replacement and against longer life via contaminant protections. My phone is regularly covered in chalk dust, sawdust, water, …
Same. I lost a lot of photos this way. I've recently moved over to Immich + Borg backup with a 3-2-1 backup between a local synology NAS and BorgBase. Painful lesson, but at least now I feel much more confident. I've even built some end-to-end monitoring with Grafana.
Thanks... hence, 3-2-1 backups with offsite :) appreciate it though. Will definitely be rolling my own NAS in the future, I just needed something easy at the time.
My own approach to simplicity generally means "hide complexity behind a simple interface" rather than pushing for simple implementations because I feel that too much emphasis on simplicity of implementations often means sacrificing correctness.
This particular example is a useful one for me to think about, because it's a version of hiding complexity in order to present a simple interface that I actually hate. (WYSIWYG editors is another one, for similar reasons: it always ends up being buggy and unpredictable.)
It will be an interesting next decade or two on this topic. The federal government increased its power in part to coerce States to end Jim Crow, to broaden personal liberty (like with Roe v. Wade), establish a social safety net, and set minimum environmental protection standards. If we keep seeing federal power being used to compel a reduction in liberalism among the States, the sides supporting "state rights" seem likely to switch.
Adding to that, if the supreme court continues to make realistic federal administration harder by tearing down executive rule making authority and requiring more explicit Congressional rule making (which can't scale in our current system), we'll continue to see less stable and predictable federal regulatory actions - which might further compel the states to step in...
But where will States raise the taxes to make this happen? While the federal government seems willing to do less (in terms of classic liberalism policies), it certainly isn't reducing its spending.
And how will States defend themselves from federal intrusion if they do start to claim more of their power - will we see armed stand-offs between national and state forces?
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