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Docs who actually understand medical imaging technology bristle at these things and it sure as hell isn't fear of new tech It's that these primarily are pushed as exploitative $$$ grabbing schemes by VC and clout chasing founders who don't know shit about actually caring for pts

In decision theory, the value of information is always non-negative for a rational agent. Extra information only hurts when a process uses it sub-optimally (overfitting, being misled by noise). So these mastermind doctors see a result proving their decision making is utterly broken, and interpret it as more information being bad. Incredible. Absolute genius. We make fun of our antecedents for using uranium watches or leaded gasoline, only to do shit like this. We will be laughed at so hard it makes me intellectually embarrassed to live in this period of time.

Want to get better at cloud architecture without living in slides? 1. AWS Well-Architected Framework (docs): the clearest checklist for tradeoffs, failure modes, and review questions 2. Google Cloud Architecture Framework (docs): practical guidance on reliability, security, cost, ops, with good examples 3. Azure Architecture Center (docs): solid reference architectures and decision trees for common systems 4. Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Kleppmann, book): not “cloud”, but it teaches the distributed systems bones behind every cloud design 5. Release It! (Nygard, book): stability patterns, capacity thinking, and why prod fails in boring ways 6. The SRE Book (Google, free online): error budgets, SLOs, incident response, and ops as part of architecture 7. A Cloud Guru or Pluralsight cloud architecture paths (courses): structured coverage + labs when you need a syllabus 8. Adrian Cantrill AWS courses (courses): deep explanations that connect services to real architectures (not just exam prep) 9. AWS re:Invent talks on YouTube (talks): search by problem, like multi-account, VPC design, serverless at scale, DR 10. Practice project: build a tiny production-ish system end to end: API + queue + worker + DB + cache + dashboards + IaC + runbooks, then do a chaos day and fix what breaks

You'll see a lot of doctors come out "against" this kind of broad screening system. They can even get quite agitated about it. This resistance stems from a well-established clinical consensus: traditional population-level imaging fails to improve health outcomes because false positives and invasive follow-ups do more harm than good. But this view suffers from an obvious blind spot. Existing studies rely on static data and completely ignore time-series imaging. And time-series is ignored because we haven't been able to afford to do high frequency imaging at population scale. Clearly, time series is going to be immensely more valuable than a single image. If you drop costs, value can go from 0 -> 1. On a more fundamental level, the argument against screening rests on an obviously false precept "More information is bad" -- just clearly untrue. More information better, you just have to interpret it correctly.

I believe in a liberalism that puts the consumer first. I realize it is not considered “good politics” to refer to people as “consumers”, so let me explain. 👇 - - - By consumer, I mean the person that systems of production are supposed to serve. The citizen, the taxpayer, the patient, the student, the commuter, the homebuyer, the renter, the small business owner, and the person trying to build a life. Every economy has producers and intermediaries. They are organized, and they have associations, lobbyists, professional bodies, unions, procurement relationships, and long-standing patterns of influence. This is not inherently sinister. It is how organized interests behave, and serious politicians should expect them to behave that way. In comparison, the consumer interest is often the least organized interest in politics, which is exactly why political leaders need to speak for them. Because when politics engages primarily around organized stakeholders, as it is often today, the public interest is gradually defined through the lens of those already inside. Policy becomes about protecting advantage rather than competing for it. Complexity becomes a form of power. The citizen, a consumer, becomes a subject of policy rather than its purpose. Politicians should more skeptical when regulation protects incumbents more than upstarts, when consultation becomes a tool of delay, when procurement creates dependency, when credentialing becomes exclusion, and when protectionism is defended as pro-worker. It also means we should take competition very seriously. Not because markets are sacred, or because every public problem has a market solution. Competition matters because it creates pressure against complacency, capture, and rent-seeking. It gives new entrants a chance to challenge incumbents. It helps lower prices, improve service, raise productivity, and expand our choices. All of these create real freedom. Protectionism often wears a compassionate mask, but its beneficiaries are usually incumbents, and its costs are usually paid by ordinary people. That is why putting the consumer first matters to me, and why politicians should see their role as representing consumers.

Just cancelled my Codex Claude Slop subscription. I'm running my own AI thingie at home. It'll be cheaper in the long run, it just required a few hardware purchases.

I'm a cardiologist. Something just happened today that I genuinely did not see coming — and it could change the future of preventive medicine more than anything I've written about on this platform. Midjourney — the AI company that became famous for generating images from text prompts — just announced a medical hardware division and unveiled a working prototype of a full-body scanner unlike anything that's ever existed. It's called the Midjourney Scanner. And it works like this. You step into a shallow pool of water. You stand on a platform that slowly descends — about two inches per second — through a ring containing roughly half a million tiny ultrasonic transducers, each the size of a grain of sand. Every one of them acts as both a speaker and a microphone, sending ultrasonic waves through your body from every angle and recording what comes back. 60 seconds later, you step out. The scan is done. No radiation. No magnets. No claustrophobia. No IV contrast. Just sound, water, and an almost incomprehensible amount of computing power — roughly 2 petaflops processing 17 gigabytes per second of raw acoustic data — reconstructing a 3D map of your entire internal anatomy down to half a millimeter resolution. Organs. Tissues. Blood vessels. Bones. Muscle. Fat distribution. All segmented by AI in real time. As a cardiologist who has spent months writing about how the standard screening playbook misses the majority of future heart attacks — this is the technology I've been waiting for without knowing it existed. Here's why this matters for the future of your heart. Right now, getting a detailed look inside your cardiovascular system requires either a CT scan (radiation), an MRI (magnets, claustrophobia, 45-60 minutes, $1,000+), or a coronary CT angiogram (radiation, IV contrast, limited availability). These are powerful tools. I order them regularly and they save lives. But they're reactive. You get them when something is already suspected. They're expensive. They're uncomfortable. And for most people, they happen once — maybe twice — in a lifetime. Imagine instead: a 60-second scan with no radiation that you could repeat monthly or quarterly. Tracking cardiac structure over time. Watching body composition shift. Detecting changes in organ size, fluid distribution, or vascular architecture before symptoms ever develop. Building a longitudinal dataset of YOUR body that AI can analyze for patterns no single snapshot would reveal. That's what Midjourney is building toward. The company plans 50,000 scanners worldwide over six years, with capacity for a billion scans per month. The first location — the "Midjourney Spa" in San Francisco — opens at the end of 2027 with 10 scanners alongside saunas, cold plunges, and a gym. The scan costs a few dollars. The experience is designed to feel like wellness, not medicine. The technology is built on Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip platform — 40 modules per scanner — combined with Midjourney's own AI segmentation and reconstruction stack. David Holz, the founder, claims the system aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many aspects but at nearly 100x the speed with zero radiation. Now the caveats — because I'm a physician and the caveats matter enormously. This is a Gen 1 prototype. About a dozen people have been scanned so far. Current scan time is actually closer to 20 minutes, not 60 seconds — the system is bottlenecked by bandwidth and reconstruction algorithms. The 60-second target is aspirational for future hardware generations. It is not FDA-cleared for diagnostic use. Midjourney is starting with body composition maps — a category below diagnostic imaging in the regulatory hierarchy. The path from "beautiful 3D body scans" to "clinically validated diagnostic tool that your cardiologist can act on" runs through years of clinical trials, comparative studies against MRI and CT gold standards, and FDA review. No independent clinical validation has been published. The imaging claims come from Midjourney's own demonstrations. Comparative data against established modalities does not yet exist. And the privacy implications of full-body internal scans at planetary scale — a billion scans per month — is a conversation that hasn't even started yet. So I want to be precise. This is not ready for clinical medicine today. It may not be ready for years. Many ambitious medical hardware projects have failed in the gap between prototype and product. But. The fact that a working prototype exists — producing real segmented 3D anatomy from sound waves and compute alone — means the physics works. The engineering works. The question is no longer "is this possible" but "how fast can it be validated and scaled." And if it is validated — if the resolution holds up against MRI, if the AI segmentation proves reliable, if the regulatory path clears — then what we're looking at is the most significant new imaging modality in 50 years. For my entire career, preventive cardiology has been limited by the fact that seeing inside the body is expensive, slow, uncomfortable, and infrequent. We catch disease late because we image rarely. We image rarely because imaging is hard. A 60-second, no-radiation, spa-based full-body scan that costs a few dollars would demolish every one of those barriers. I've written about AI detecting inflamed arteries. About gene editing curing cholesterol. About GLP-1 drugs rewriting metabolic medicine. About cellular reprogramming reversing aging. This is the missing piece: the ability to see inside every human body, routinely, safely, and affordably — so all of those interventions can be deployed before the disease arrives instead of after. The company that taught AI to generate images from imagination just built a machine that generates images from the human body. The future of medicine showed up today from the last place anyone expected.

Following a very difficult meeting with my accountant, I just found out how much it is going to cost me in terms of an "exit tax" to leave Quebec and Canada. No human being in a free society should have their hard-earned money stolen in this manner. I'm genuinely numb. I'm speechless.