Month: April 2024

Enlarge / Miami Beach, Fire Rescue ambulance at Mt. Sinai Medical Center hospital. ] (credit: Getty | Jeffrey Greenberg/)

Since 2021, federal law has required hospitals to publicly post their prices, allowing Americans to easily anticipate costs and shop around for affordable care—as they would for any other marketed service or product. But hospitals have mostly failed miserably at complying with the law.

A 2023 KFF analysis on compliance found that the pricing information hospitals provided is "messy, inconsistent, and confusing, making it challenging, if not impossible, for patients or researchers to use them for their intended purpose." A February 2024 report from the nonprofit organization Patient Rights Advocate found that only 35 percent of 2,000 US hospitals surveyed were in full compliance with the 2021 rule.

But even if hospitals dramatically improved their price transparency, it likely wouldn't help when patients need emergency trauma care. After an unexpected, major injury, people are sent to the closest hospital and aren't likely to be shopping around for the best price from the back of an ambulance. If they did, though, they might also need to be treated for shock.

Enlarge / Miami Beach, Fire Rescue ambulance at Mt. Sinai Medical Center hospital. ] (credit: Getty | Jeffrey Greenberg/)

Since 2021, federal law has required hospitals to publicly post their prices, allowing Americans to easily anticipate costs and shop around for affordable care—as they would for any other marketed service or product. But hospitals have mostly failed miserably at complying with the law.

A 2023 KFF analysis on compliance found that the pricing information hospitals provided is "messy, inconsistent, and confusing, making it challenging, if not impossible, for patients or researchers to use them for their intended purpose." A February 2024 report from the nonprofit organization Patient Rights Advocate found that only 35 percent of 2,000 US hospitals surveyed were in full compliance with the 2021 rule.

But even if hospitals dramatically improved their price transparency, it likely wouldn't help when patients need emergency trauma care. After an unexpected, major injury, people are sent to the closest hospital and aren't likely to be shopping around for the best price from the back of an ambulance. If they did, though, they might also need to be treated for shock.

Enlarge / Morfydd Clark is Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. (credit: Amazon Studios)

Subscribers lodged thousands of complaints related to inaccuracies in Amazon's Prime Video catalog, including incorrect content and missing episodes, according to a Business Insider report this week. While Prime Video users aren't the only streaming users dealing with these problems, Insider's examination of leaked "internal documents" brings more perspective into the impact of mislabeling and similar errors on streaming platforms.

Insider didn't publish the documents but said they show that "60 percent of all content-related customer-experience complaints for Prime Video last year were about catalogue errors," such as movies or shows labeled with wrong or missing titles.

Specific examples reportedly named in the document include Season 1, Episode 2 of The Rings of Power being available before Season 1, Episode 1; character names being mistranslated; Continuum displaying the wrong age rating; and the Spanish-audio version of Die Hard With a Vengeance missing a chunk of audio.

Enlarge / Morfydd Clark is Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. (credit: Amazon Studios)

Subscribers lodged thousands of complaints related to inaccuracies in Amazon's Prime Video catalog, including incorrect content and missing episodes, according to a Business Insider report this week. While Prime Video users aren't the only streaming users dealing with these problems, Insider's examination of leaked "internal documents" brings more perspective into the impact of mislabeling and similar errors on streaming platforms.

Insider didn't publish the documents but said they show that "60 percent of all content-related customer-experience complaints for Prime Video last year were about catalogue errors," such as movies or shows labeled with wrong or missing titles.

Specific examples reportedly named in the document include Season 1, Episode 2 of The Rings of Power being available before Season 1, Episode 1; character names being mistranslated; Continuum displaying the wrong age rating; and the Spanish-audio version of Die Hard With a Vengeance missing a chunk of audio.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

X's chatbot Grok is supposed to be an AI engine crunching the platform's posts to surface and summarize breaking news, but this week, Grok's flaws were once again exposed when the chatbot got confused and falsely accused an NBA star of criminal vandalism.

"Klay Thompson Accused in Bizarre Brick-Vandalism Spree," Grok's headline read in an AI-powered trending-tab post that has remained on X (formerly Twitter) for days. Beneath the headline, Grok went into even more detail to support its fake reporting:

In a bizarre turn of events, NBA star Klay Thompson has been accused of vandalizing multiple houses with bricks in Sacramento. Authorities are investigating the claims after several individuals reported their houses being damaged, with windows shattered by bricks. Klay Thompson has not yet issued a statement regarding the accusations. The incidents have left the community shaken, but no injuries were reported. The motive behind the alleged vandalism remains unclear.

Grok appears to be confusing a common basketball term, where players are said to be throwing "bricks" when they take an airball shot that doesn't hit the rim. According to SF Gate, which was one of the first outlets to report the Grok error, Thompson had an "all-time rough shooting" night, hitting none of his shots on what was his emotional last game with the Golden State Warriors before becoming an unrestricted free agent.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

X's chatbot Grok is supposed to be an AI engine crunching the platform's posts to surface and summarize breaking news, but this week, Grok's flaws were once again exposed when the chatbot got confused and falsely accused an NBA star of criminal vandalism.

"Klay Thompson Accused in Bizarre Brick-Vandalism Spree," Grok's headline read in an AI-powered trending-tab post that has remained on X (formerly Twitter) for days. Beneath the headline, Grok went into even more detail to support its fake reporting:

In a bizarre turn of events, NBA star Klay Thompson has been accused of vandalizing multiple houses with bricks in Sacramento. Authorities are investigating the claims after several individuals reported their houses being damaged, with windows shattered by bricks. Klay Thompson has not yet issued a statement regarding the accusations. The incidents have left the community shaken, but no injuries were reported. The motive behind the alleged vandalism remains unclear.

Grok appears to be confusing a common basketball term, where players are said to be throwing "bricks" when they take an airball shot that doesn't hit the rim. According to SF Gate, which was one of the first outlets to report the Grok error, Thompson had an "all-time rough shooting" night, hitting none of his shots on what was his emotional last game with the Golden State Warriors before becoming an unrestricted free agent.

Enlarge / Reddit user Kidipadeli75 spotted a fossilized hominin jawbone in his parents' new travertine kitchen tile. (credit: Reddit user Kidipadeli75)

Ah, Reddit! It's a constant source of amazing stories that sound too good to be true... and yet! The latest example comes to us from a user named Kidipadeli75, a dentist who visited his parents after the latter's kitchen renovation and noticed what appeared to be a human-like jawbone embedded in the new travertine tile. Naturally, he posted a photograph to Reddit seeking advice and input. And Reddit was happy to oblige.

User MAJOR_Blarg, for instance, is a dentist "with forensic odontology training" and offered the following:

While all old-world monkeys, apes, and hominids share the same dental formula, 2-1-2-3, and the individual molars and premolars can look similar, the specific spacing in the mandible itself is very specifically and characteristically human, or at least related and very recent hominid relative/ancestor. Most likely human given the success of the proliferation of H.s. and the (relatively) rapid formation of travertine.

Against modern Homo sapiens, which may not be entirely relevant, the morphology of the mandible is likely not northern European, but more similar to African, middle Eastern, mainland Asian.

Another user, deamatrona, who claims to hold an anthropology degree, also thought the dentition looked Asiatic, "which could be a significant find." The thread also drew the attention of John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and longtime science blogger who provided some valuable context on his own website. (Hawks has been involved with the team that discovered Homo naledi at the Rising Star cave system in 2013.)

Enlarge / Reddit user Kidipadeli75 spotted a fossilized hominin jawbone in his parents' new travertine kitchen tile. (credit: Reddit user Kidipadeli75)

Ah, Reddit! It's a constant source of amazing stories that sound too good to be true... and yet! The latest example comes to us from a user named Kidipadeli75, a dentist who visited his parents after the latter's kitchen renovation and noticed what appeared to be a human-like jawbone embedded in the new travertine tile. Naturally, he posted a photograph to Reddit seeking advice and input. And Reddit was happy to oblige.

User MAJOR_Blarg, for instance, is a dentist "with forensic odontology training" and offered the following:

While all old-world monkeys, apes, and hominids share the same dental formula, 2-1-2-3, and the individual molars and premolars can look similar, the specific spacing in the mandible itself is very specifically and characteristically human, or at least related and very recent hominid relative/ancestor. Most likely human given the success of the proliferation of H.s. and the (relatively) rapid formation of travertine.

Against modern Homo sapiens, which may not be entirely relevant, the morphology of the mandible is likely not northern European, but more similar to African, middle Eastern, mainland Asian.

Another user, deamatrona, who claims to hold an anthropology degree, also thought the dentition looked Asiatic, "which could be a significant find." The thread also drew the attention of John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and longtime science blogger who provided some valuable context on his own website. (Hawks has been involved with the team that discovered Homo naledi at the Rising Star cave system in 2013.)

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Benj Edwards)

On Thursday, Meta unveiled early versions of its Llama 3 open-weights AI model that can be used to power text composition, code generation, or chatbots. It also announced that its Meta AI Assistant is now available on a website and is going to be integrated into its major social media apps, intensifying the company's efforts to position its products against other AI assistants like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, and Google's Gemini.

Like its predecessor, Llama 2, Llama 3 is notable for being a freely available, open-weights large language model (LLM) provided by a major AI company. Llama 3 technically does not quality as "open source" because that term has a specific meaning in software (as we have mentioned in other coverage), and the industry has not yet settled on terminology for AI model releases that ship either code or weights with restrictions (you can read Llama 3's license here) or that ship without providing training data. We typically call these releases "open weights" instead.

At the moment, Llama 3 is available in two parameter sizes: 8 billion (8B) and 70 billion (70B), both of which are available as free downloads through Meta's website with a sign-up. Llama 3 comes in two versions: pre-trained (basically the raw, next-token-prediction model) and instruction-tuned (fine-tuned to follow user instructions). Each has a 8,192 token context limit.