Bill McBain: i♥nyc. Ad & tech agency Finance. Biztech geek. Diabetic. News fanatic. Fan of my family and large Muppety dogs. Duxbury born and raised.

New York, NY
Joined October 2007
No one ever wrote a book about someone who 'was gonna' do something. Do it. And don't look back until you're done.
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Bill McBain retweeted
Introducing ChatGPT for Dishwashing GPT-6 achieves state-of-the-art results on dishwashing benchmarks for long-running jobs and difficult stains. The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem is a $1 million challenge about whether the equations describing fluid motion can break down. In this video, I accidentally found a counter-example while trying to optimize my dishwasher. But in reality, OpenAI used 10,000 AI agents to find a proof in 88 hours: openai.com/index/navier-stok… Parody of the original GPT-6 Astra ad @OpenAI #ChatGPT_Partner #chatgpt Credits: Written and Directed by Joma Co-Writer - Henry Connor Coan IV @coan_henry Production by Dauntlus Studios @dauntlus.studios Producer/Co-Director - Marcus Liew @dauntlus Camera Operator - Amos Lee @amoselijahlee Art Director - Alethea Soo @aletheasoo Art Assistant - Alicia Lim @aliciatkl_ Assistant Editor - GPT-6 Astra Music: Tensions Run High by Soundridemusic youtube.com/watch?v=Ly9H63SL…
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Bill McBain retweeted
A huge amount of the Anti-AI code sentiment massively overestimates the quality of human code outside of a very small set of open source and high quality company codebases. Human Slop is everywhere and can trivially be improved on by any opus level model.
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Denmark could end this instantly: stop Ozempic exports to the US
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DIVISIONAL ROUND COMING UP!!!!! Repost to win 2 tickets for Sunday's playoff matchup at @GilletteStadium: bit.ly/3LLjAB2
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AOL says it will discontinue dial-up internet on September 30 May this sound echo in eternity:
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Here’s my thread on what we know so far. For notes I have been a competitive sailor and I am licensed to captain ships of any size but I have not sailed tall ships. 🧵
Mexican Navy sailing ship CUAUHTÉMOC was under tug escort before reversing into Brooklyn Bridge
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1/x As a pilot here in Europe, we have a different philosophy about this type of manoeuvre (And yes, the Cuauhtemoc would have had a pilot on board). A manoeuvring philosophy develops under the influence of ...
The Mexican Navy training ship Cuauhtémoc, carrying 277 sailors struck the underside of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York Saturday night.
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Bill McBain retweeted
If you are a CEO of a self insured companies and you want to know what the problem with pricing on medications do this: Call your PBM and ask for 1. A list of all your pharmacy claims the last month and the net price for each 2. A price list of all net prices 3. Why a drug that is just a pill, is considered a specialty drug 4. Who pays for the rebates you get (hint, it's your sickest employees) 5. Why they reimburse your local pharmacy less than their cost and charge them crazy fees 6. If you can discuss your PBM contract with anyone 7. Why you can't add @costplusdrugs to your network, for when our prices are cheaper than theirs 8. Why you can't call a manufacturer to discuss adherence or wellness programs with the company who created the drug 9. Why they don't provide claims data to the manufacturer to help them improve the safety profile 10. Why they sell positioning on their formulary rather than using it exclusively for clinical value 11. Whether they calls doctors to get them to change scripts to the PBMs white label biosimilar 12. Why your consultant didn't tell you any of this The level of opacity that the big PBMs create is why the price of brand drugs are outrageous
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Congestion pricing in NYC is *working* on every metric. Busses are going faster -- taxi trips are up -- traffic and noise are down -- foot traffic is up, Broadway tickets up, commute times down. And the city is making $$ for public transit. This is a fight worth fighting.
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Hey @amywebb , you know of anyone writing the standards or best practices to guide ai agents on public servers? Like a robots.txt to provide guardrails for agents / help them discover the right content or interact with digital products optimally?
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Like I know Apple has their intents api for exactly this purpose developer.apple.com/document… and llmstxt.org/ is a lite standard, but it just seems like it should be a major focus of so many in the tech space right now and doesn’t seem to be getting appropriate chatter.
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Seeing as it’s an election year, maybe one of the campaigns can tell me why the dependent care FSA limit ($5,000) hasn’t been adjusted for inflation in 38 years. In today’s dollars it should be $14,384, which for many working parents only covers a fraction of the cost of childcare. RT and tag your Congressional Representative and/or Senator.
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Never forget … 🥲 🔊
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Bill McBain retweeted
Who did this?
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Your NBC Olympics AI viewing guide is here! Check out OLI: bit.ly/3WAeV7w
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Ah yes, ladies - that pesky 'likability' problem. The moment we become leaders, we're just so darn unlikable. Have you ever heard it said of any man that he has a likability problem?
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The greatest ad campaign of the 21st century thus far is Ogilvy convincing the world that climate change is due to “personal carbon footprints” and not acts of corporations like their client BP. amp.theguardian.com/commenti…
And make sure you use paper straws.
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Translation: @GovKathyHochul has effectively CANCELLED the next 10 years of planned transit improvements and expansions in an amateurish ploy to court white suburbanites who think our city is their playground, landfill, and car sewer.
MTA says it will focus on 'most basic and urgent needs' after Hochul's congestion pricing flip-flop buff.ly/4aYnnkW
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SawStop is an interesting analogy for cybersecurity regulation. I once shoved my finger into a router (woodworking device that rounds edges). Luckily, the cutting edge hit the bone and kicked the finger back out, so I had only two deep cuts down to the bone without it having removed the tip of my finger. So I can understand the following video showing sawblades are unsafe at any speed. There is no way to "safely" use them. Accidents can always happen faster than your reaction speed. The following video shows SawStop in action: it's faster than human reaction time, instantly stopping the blade and saving the finger. This destroys the blade (and the SawStop module, but not the rest of the saw) in the process, but the blade does stop instantly. The current controversy is that government wants to make the technology mandatory. Stupid people want it mandatory because it'll save fingers. But this is something the market can figure out (people can judge risk-vs-reward for themselves). But smart people recognize that if you force the tech on all products, the tech becomes cheaper. In other words, people might not be willing to spend $500 extra for a saw, which is the price when only a few saws have it. But when all saws have it, mass production and competition means it'll only be $100 extra, and a lot more people will want it. We have the same dumb/smart issues in cybersecurity policy. Dumb people want government to mandate things because they think it'll make things even more secure -- even though customers don't want it. Smart people argue that that making things ubiquitous lowers the price: that while most customers aren't willing to pay for the high-priced security options, mass adoption will make the price low enough that most all customers would want to pay for it. This is especially true for things that have no marginal cost. In other words, while it's expense now, if adapted by everything, the marginal cost would be near $0. A good example is ASLR for IoT devices, ASLR is a trivial technique that automatically blocks many bugs from being exploited by hackers. It's as simple as turning on a switch when building software, but rarely it can cause problems in the build process. In the IoT market, it's often turned off, because many stages in the supply chain just don't want to be bothered with the small nuisances they'd have to fix. If government mandated it, then the supply chain would fix the nuisances, and then everything would have this protection for essentially no marginal cost. On the other hand, most of the policy proposals from dumb people have huge marginal costs. For example, one of the biggest proposals is that IoT devices need to be shipped without vulnerabilities and that their makers be responsible for providing regularly patches for when vulnerabilities are discovered. It's an impractical policy. While many IoT vendors enable ASLR, nobody does the other thing, because the marginal cost is too high. All such a law does is remove smaller, innovative IoT devices from the market. It's like how power supplies are separate devices. The cost of meeting government requirements is so high it's just easier for a company to buy a power supply from a third party than build their own. That's why Apple's "MacMini" has a built in power supply (they are a large company that can afford this regulatory expense), while competing x86/Windows mini-PCs have an external power supply. I'm just riffing here. I love SawStop and would never get near a circular saw without it. As a developer, I know there are a ton of things that trivially make software safer with no marginal cost. But I generally oppose the bulk of cybersecurity government policy, which is stupidly misguided.
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This is deeply second tier city behavior
New York is the best city man a whole crowd showed up to watch a guy eat a full container of cheese balls at 3 PM 😭
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