Almost two whole months have wizzed by. I've been meaning to write something, anything, but something always seems to get in the way.

My sister got her doctorate over the weekend and I went to Sweden to see her get her title. It was really nice to see her get rewarded for all her hard work. It was nice to also spend time with my niece. She is really full of energy. I thought I was going to explode with all the times she was about to throw herself off of a ledge or into traffic... :D

Sweden was pretty shocking. No one wears masks and no one seemed to take any COVID precautions. If I wasn't fully vaccinated I'd have been pretty freaked out. Now at least it seems that maybe, MAYBE, things will go back to normal or something. Who knows, once one crisis passes another comes to take its place. With Evergrande and all that on the horizon, who knows what kind of turmoil lays ahead...

On the way back to Finland I read an grim cyberpunkesque article about how algorithms are used to determine if people should get pain medication. It was a long read and raised a lot of pretty disturbing points. What really struck me was the statistics about how rare opioid addiction actually is when compared to all the people who at one time or another get prescribed pain medication. All I really know about the opioid epidemic in the US is what I've read and watched online and from everything I've seen it seems really bad. The statistics presented in the Wired article seem to conflict with this though. One major point that is made in the article is that because addiction is so rare it gets overrepresented in training data for deep learning algorithms that try to detect problem users and this causes a lot of false positives, but also a lot of false negatives too. It's an interesting thing to read if you're concerned about the ways software can be used to secretly change the course of your life.

The company that created this addiction detecting algorithm called NarxCare says that the algorithm itself should never be used as a sole measure to determine if a patient is likely to become addicted but apparently that's how Narxcare is getting used anyhow. It reminds me of that line in Dune:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

What really gets me thinking is how Narxcare is something we actually know about. Think what kinds of secret math might be used on any of the other data about you and how that grim calculus might be writing the script of your life. A bit paranoid, I know, but the news just seems to be getting weirder and weirder as time goes by.

Just wanted to drop by and say something. I will write something more once I have something interesting to talk about. I have a lot of projects in the pipeline and maybe I'll get one of them into a state where I could actually share something on here. It's like my mind is a flock of birds that scatter and regoup over and over again. I can barely finish a thought. :D