So my wife has a CGM and is stuck with a fancy pump that is supposed to "automatically" coordinate with her sensor to deliver or reduce insulin when it detects her numbers are too high/low.
I've always been suspicious of the yahoos writing the software that controls these kinds of devices being a security guy and all.
But I also would love to participate in, contribute to or help in any way with reverse engineering, open sourcing, or in some other way making it so that my wife's life isn't dependent upon the quality of software developed by the lowest bidder they could outsource it to.
If anyone knows how I could help please let me know who to reach out to.
I worked at medtronic in the early 2000's (early paradigm pumps) and were evaluating wireless protocols and security... at the time we determined it was impossible to secure, once the FDA approved another device maker that did have connectivity there was a scramble to catch up. (this was palmos/pocketpc era).
It was fun work but I always remembered how insanely detailed the code was, 8bit low power microcontrollers (some 16bit) but really really really tight C code.
Then the demand for remote control happened and that really crapped the bed.
https://www.medtronic.com/en-us/e/product-security/security-...
The amazing developer Scott Hanselman built on a PalmOS app to store readings and if I recall correctly wore 2 pumps with fast/slow insulin... he had a cybernetic pancreas in the mid-2000's.
Android APS, and xDrip. Getting watches to allow ble connection for CGMs is a great RE opportunity. It is really hard to have stable bluetooth connections.
"Over a year, we collected 4,900 summaries. When we analysed them, we found that six of ten models systematically exaggerated claims they found in the original texts"
So it turns out llms trained largely on Internet science articles make the same mistakes as are made by science journalists.
> Sometime in early May 2024, ARRL’s systems network was compromised by threat actors (TAs) using information they had purchased on the dark web. The TAs accessed headquarters on-site systems and most cloud-based systems
So someone was using the same password for the work and personal stuff and no one has ever bothered prioritizing 2FA got it.
> Why would anyone sacrifice, at the very bare minimum, 6 years of their youthful years for 3 children?
Most of the most fulfilling and meaningful things in life don't always make sense or are reasonable. But they often almost always have to do with serving and sacrificing for others.
They don’t always make sense or are reasonable to you. It’s a perfectly valid take, but a lot of people are genuinely living a fulfilled life without having any children.
And again, so many young people right now have none or just one sibling. They can see it’s been okay for themselves so obviously there’s no pressure to have 3. If everyone had just 1 child, we still would have the same problem, except it would be harder to make “emotional fulfillment from having a child” argument.
I'm going to be honest it seems like a lot of the "data" obsession that has been all the rage among mid-level managers is really basically just a modern dressed up version of augury, or reading pig entrails to predict the future.
These enterprises spend a large amount of time and effort trying to collect data, often the wrong data, toa address a problem they don't understand and then hope if they do enough "data science" on it then it will magically tell them what to do. All without understanding or reasoning behind it, or any real connection to reality just "the data says X".
This results in ideas like "We did A/B testing and it runs out people stay on the page 38% longer if we use design B". Ignoeing the fact that the reason that happened was that design B involved the exit button randomly dancing around the page.
That is of course limiting ourselves to situations where people are actually trying to use data to get answers when much more often it is "I have already made a decision make the data say it was the right one." Which is a whole other can of worms.
Even the best systems marketed as “AI” nowadays can’t reason, by design.
The whole promise of targeted advertising, as well as all those cyberpunk tropes about all-knowing machines (and corporations and governments running them) is based on the fundamental requirement of machine being capable of logic and reason, not just generating statistically-probable statements. Which simply wasn’t a thing when this Big Data meme started, and still not a thing even today. So best they can do is playing statistics until it indicates the Holy Grail of modern corporate existence - sacred Growth. And, yes, it does work, but without any reason or logic to it, just blindly, like evolution. And thing about evolution is that it ends up with weird solutions, like our own retinas.
I think too many managers had consumed way too much sci-fi. Which is not a bad thing, but one gotta keep understanding fiction is a fiction, until all underlying assumptions are entirely satisfied (and it’s the magic of fiction to bring a possible future by just hand-waving and suspending the disbelief).
And because this grew way too much, there is no stopping it. The idea will support itself, corporations preaching it as hard as they can to survive, as all their valuation is in the promise of Big Data making Big Money.
This is the obvious result of letting people who have zero training or education in how you "do science", do science. Science is a process with many pitfalls and ways to fail by accident, even if you genuinely wanted to do it right. Why do we expect people with zero prior experience to get it right?
Product people don't want to do real science with their "data" anyway, because then they might not get the answer they want!
> I mean everything in the universe is in motion and spins…
My understanding is that is a pretty open question as to whether or not blackholes due spin at all, or if they are all uniform apart from mass. Last I heard they do have temperature and electric charge and mass.
Another question is what does the concept of motion even mean for a singularity. How do you define the concept of distance in a non-euclidean space for an object to move through in the first place. What can the idea of movement even mean for an object that has a horizon beyond which it functionally becomes cut off from the rest of the universe.
Probably all physical black holes have some spin because they gain it from the matter that falls into it: it's conservation of angular momentum, basically. There are precise mathematical versions of rotating black holes:
Setting aside the shocking myopia of this comment (it turns out most of your food that magically appears in grocery stores comes from those useless rural yokels that use these roads)
A major driver of the interstate highway project was military in consideration because of the importance of logistics in being able to move troops around the country.
> your food that magically appears in grocery stores comes from those useless rural yokels that use these roads
That's fine. Roll those costs into the price of food. That way, the amount of road tax you pay is proportional to how much goods and services you consume.
Meanwhile, the status quo is that everyone pays into the road system regardless of how much or little they use it - even if they don't own a car.
Roads have to get paid for no matter what. The only choice we have as a society is between taxing everyone versus taxing only the users.
> Roads have to get paid for no matter what. The only choice we have as a society is between taxing everyone versus taxing only the users.
Exactly right, but proving the opposite of what you request.
Once roads are built they're a sunk cost. Roads have to be resurfaced as a result weather damage regardless of how many people drive on them. Road capacity that exists and isn't used is lost. The incremental cost of an additional car driving down a road, the actual wear caused by the act, is trivial. Far less than the pro rata share of building or maintaining the road, or than existing gas tax, or the cost of even the collections infrastructure for road tolls. But the use has value to the driver and plausibly to others in society (e.g. their customers/employers/friends), so we don't want to discourage it unless its value is less than the incremental cost, since the cost of building the road and most of the maintenance is a sunk cost.
Which leads to the conclusion that the sunk cost of the road should be shared by everybody, since everybody benefits from having products delivered and emergency services even if they don't have a car.
I love when people bring this up. I passively invest by which I mean I take a couple of bucks every couple of paychecks and throw them into an index fund or buy one or two shares of stock of a company. Not to mention my 401k. How about we hold the people making the decisions accountable all the way up and down the chain instead of letting the go with the whole "following orders" defence.
How about we don't let companies control their dividends. Excess profit that's not reasonably ear-marked for growth, should be mandated to be distributed as dividends. And that's probably just one item we can start doing to make the stock-market less of a gamble and hedge against inflation, and more of just "people owning portions of profit-making entities".
I've always been suspicious of the yahoos writing the software that controls these kinds of devices being a security guy and all.
But I also would love to participate in, contribute to or help in any way with reverse engineering, open sourcing, or in some other way making it so that my wife's life isn't dependent upon the quality of software developed by the lowest bidder they could outsource it to.
If anyone knows how I could help please let me know who to reach out to.
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