“Nurses and medical staff are really overworked, under a lot of pressure, and unfortunately, a lot of times they don’t have capacity to provide engagement and connection to patients,” said Karen Khachikyan, CEO of Expper Technologies, which developed the robot.

tapping the sign: every “AI” related medical invention is built around this assumption that there’s too few medical staff and they’re all overworked and changing that is not feasible. so we have to invest millions of dollars into hospital robots because investing millions of dollars in actually paying workers would be too hard. (also, robots never unionize)

Robin is about 30% autonomous, while a team of operators working remotely controls the rest under the watchful eyes of clinical staff.

30%…according to the company itself. they have a strong incentive to exaggerate. and they’re not publishing any data of how they arrived at that figure so that it could be independently verified.

it sounds like they took one of the telepresence robots that’s been around for 10+ years and slapped ChatGPT into it and now they’re trying to fundraise on the hype of being an “AI” company. it’s a good grift if you can make it work.

Maintenance Phase is great, if you like that I think you’d definitely like BtB.

they have a wider range of topics than Maintenance Phase - besides health grifters you’ll also get cult leaders, dictators, child abusers, weird Nazi freaks, etc.

here’s some of the episodes they’ve done that overlap most with the health/wellness industry that MP talks about:

Part One: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam

Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam

Part One: Bruno Bettelheim: The Worst Psycho-therapist

Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a “Good” Concentration Camp

Part One: How Tainted Human Blood Became A Major U.S. Export

Part Two: How Tainted Human Blood Became A Major U.S. Export

Part One: Laetrile: The Fake Cancer Cure That Birthed The Right-Wing Medical Grifting Industry

Part Two: Laetrile: The Fake Cancer Cure That Birthed The Right-Wing Medical Grifting Industry

Part One: Elan School: The Worst ‘Troubled Teen’ Facility

Part Two: Elan School: The Worst ‘Troubled Teen’ Facility

Asshole cars for mostly assholes

from the article:

Some firms have reportedly already laid off staff, with the Unite union claiming that workers in the JLR supply chain “are being laid off with reduced or zero pay.” Some have been told to “sign up” for government benefits, the union claims.

…

JLR, which is owned by India’s Tata Motors, is one of the UK’s biggest employers, with around 32,800 people directly employed in the country. Stats on the company’s website also claim it supports another 104,000 jobs through its UK supply chain and another 62,900 jobs “through wage-induced spending.”

regardless of your opinion about the cars or the people who drive them…thousands of people getting furloughed or laid off suddenly is bad.

the “Tylenol during pregnancy” thing is obviously bullshit, but I think the other bullshit they’re announcing at the same time will ultimately have a more harmful impact:

White House officials are also expected to suggest that a form of vitamin B that is typically used in conjunction with cancer treatment could be used to treat autism.

there is a long history of grifters claiming they can “treat” or “cure” autistic people, especially autistic children. giving a White House stamp of approval to the idea that you can “treat” autism with fucking vitamin supplements is going to turbo-charge those grifters.

these Behind the Bastards episodes are worth listening to if you want to know more:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-grifters-behind-the-271466469/

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-two-the-grifters-behind-the-271663090/

It’s advertised as a healthier alternative to screen time

vaping and e-cigarettes were initially advertised as a way for cigarette smokers to quit.

I guess my writing style ends up looking a bit polished sometimes

uh-huh…“too polished” is not the thing that’s causing you to fail the Turing test. and your emdash count keeps rising, btw.

— just wanted to share some thoughts I’ve had for a while.

and what thoughts are those, exactly?

your original post followed the pattern of every AI slop “discussion prompt” post I’ve ever seen - 3 paragraph structure that ends with “in conclusion, it’s a land of contrasts — what do you think?”

and all your other comments in this thread are just variations on “yeah there are positives and negatives — we’ll need to think carefully about it”

humans who want to talk about a thing…usually have opinions about that thing. often strong opinions, and often based on specifics about the thing. do you have any?

“In other words, these conversations with a social robot gave caregivers something that they sorely lack – a space to talk about themselves”

so they’re doing a job that’s demanding, thankless, often unpaid (in the case of this study, entirely unpaid, because they exclusively recruited “informal” caregivers)

and…it turns out talking about it improves their mood?

yeah, that’s groundbreaking. no one could have foreseen it.

if you did this with actual humans it’d be “lol yeah that’s just therapy and/or having friends” and you wouldn’t get it published in a scientific paper.

it’s written up as a “robotics” story but I’m not sure how it being a “robot” changes anything compared to a chatbot. it seems like this is yet another “discovery” of “hey you can talk to an LLM chatbot and it kinda sorta looks like therapy, if you squint at it”.

(tapping the sign about why “AI therapy” is stupid and trying to address the wrong problem)

You need better mental health care.

you start off by saying you’ve always thought you’re on the left

but the moment you disagree with someone, you start shit like this, which is a very common pattern of argument from right-wingers.

“I think your opinion is so wrong that it’s a symptom of mental illness” is just fucking stupid. do better. or, if you refuse to do better, stop attempting the “I’ve always been on the left but…” shtick. it is absolutely see-through and does not fool anyone.

here is the official NASA press release. primary sources are always preferable, especially compared to this fuckass “digital trends” clickbait website.

“This finding by Perseverance, launched under President Trump in his first term, is the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars. The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. “NASA’s commitment to conducting Gold Standard Science will continue as we pursue our goal of putting American boots on Mars’ rocky soil.”

quick fact check: it was launched in 2020, but announced back in 2012. giving Trump credit here is idiotic, but it’s about what you’d expect from Sean Duffy, he’s a Trump crony through-and-through. before being the NASA administrator he was Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, and before that he was a Republican congressman, and reality TV contestant (on The Real World and the *checks notes* Lumberjack World Championship)

I think it’s important to remember that everything, even basic scientific research, is liable to be politicized if it suits their ends. so it’s totally possible this biosignature is legitimate, but it’s also totally possible that they’re hyping up questionable findings because they want to persuade Trump that funding a NASA mission to Mars would boost his TV ratings.

I haven’t. It was omitted from the article in question. I stand corrected.

keep standing…because here’s the 5th paragraph of the article:

Political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC on Wednesday after speaking about Kirk’s death on air. During a broadcast on Wednesday following the shooting, anchor Katy Tur asked Dowd about “the environment in which a shooting like this happens,” according to Variety. Dowd answered: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”

a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event

have you read the actual statement that got him fired?

from wikipedia:

On September 10, 2025, commenting on the killing of Charlie Kirk, Dowd said on-air, “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.” Dowd also speculated that the shooter may have been a supporter.

you can agree or disagree with the decision to fire him (I’m not shedding any tears, Dowd was the chief strategist for the 2004 Bush re-election campaign, it’s ludicrous that he was working for a supposedly “progressive” network like MSNBC in the first place)

but characterizing that statement as “celebrating murder” is just bullshit.

How the fuck does the government have this much control over the media?

wealthy oligarchs purchased the media, and purchased the government. so it’s not the government controlling the media directly, it’s just that they report to the same boss.

would you like to know more?

did you write this post using AI?

it has pretty strong AI slop vibes, including a good ol’ emdash.

it’s also nearly identical to this post that you made 2 weeks ago.

My best guess is that you were going for “hypothetical.”

no, if I meant hypothetical I would have said hypothetical. notice that I gave two hypotheticals - Brinnon-Redmond and Tacoma-Redmond. only the Brinnon one was pathological.

let’s go back to 9th grade Advanced English and diagram out my comment. that sentence is in a paragraph, the topic of which is “some shit about Seattle’s geography that people who’ve never lived here probably don’t know”. notice I’m talking about geography. I wasn’t saying anything about Brinnon’s population, or the likelihood of its residents working at Microsoft. that was entirely words you put into my mouth and then decided you disagreed with.

if you think pathological is the wrong word choice there, then no I don’t think you actually understand what it means, at least not in the context I was using it. from wikipedia:

In computer science, pathological has a slightly different sense with regard to the study of algorithms. Here, an input (or set of inputs) is said to be pathological if it causes atypical behavior from the algorithm, such as a violation of its average case complexity, or even its correctness.

there’s crow-flies distance and there’s driving distance, and obviously driving distance is always longer, but usually not that much longer. playing around with Google Maps again, Seattle-Tacoma is 25 miles crow-flies but 37 miles driving, for a ratio of 1.5. that seems likely to be about average. the Brinnon-Redmond distance, without the ferry, gives you a ~3.7 ratio. that’s an input that causes significantly worse performance than the average case. it’s pathological.

the closest synonym to pathological in this context would be “worst-case”, but that would be subtly incorrect, because then I would be claiming that Brinnon is the longest driving distance out of all possible commutes to Redmond within a 50 miles crow-flies bubble. you’d need some fancy GIS software to find that, not just me poking around for a few minutes in Google Maps.

(and this is the technology sub-lemmy, in a thread about something that will mostly affect software engineers, and planning out a driving commute is a classic example of a pathfinding algorithm…using “pathological” from the computer science context here is actually an extremely cromulent word choice)

there seems to be a recurring pattern of you responding to me, making up shit I didn’t actually say, and then nitpicking about it. recently you accused me of “trying to both-sides Nazis”. please stop doing that.

We’re seriously citing a population of 900 people on the Olympic Peninsula as somehow central to the RTO order?

I said “for a pathological example”

if you don’t know what that term means, you can look it up.

But I’m still able to use it, so.

yeah. except when you’re not.

because this “I can do whatever I want” Ron-Swanson-wannabe brand of libertarianism is very predictable.

if you go to a dinner party and the host notices your Spyware Amulet and says “turn that off or leave my house” would you respect their property rights? without pissing and moaning about it?

if a bar or restaurant banned them (like happened with Google Glass) would you respect that rule as well?

if you were on a date, and your date noticed and said “that’s kinda creepy, would you mind turning it off?” would you do it? or would you start ranting about how it’s not infringing on your date’s rights?

yeah, no, we still disagree. I think you are missing the point completely, and continually.

general protip: if the conversation is about some behavior being creepy or weird or against social mores, and you jump in talking about the legality of it, you are missing the point, and also contributing to the creepiness.

for another example, upskirt photography was legal in the US until 2004 (at least at the federal level, state laws seem to have trickled in around the same timeframe)

hop in a time machine back to 2000, and imagine there’s a digital camera that’s marketing itself as being very easy to attach to your shoe in order to take surreptitious upskirt photos.

people say “wow that’s a fucking creepy product” and you jump in to say that technically it’s not illegal, and people have the right to attach cameras to their shoes. and if a woman is wearing a skirt in a crowd of people, and sees a guy with a camera on his shoe, she has the right to walk away from him. that is technically true, and also completely misses the actual point.

if you think upskirt photos are a bad analogy, here’s a reddit thread from 2 weeks ago about a gynecologist wearing the “Meta Ray-Ban” sunglasses that have a built-in camera.

“data is the new oil”

most people keep their phones in their pockets, which would ruin audio quality for 24/7 listening, and Apple and Android are able to restrict app permissions as well to prevent it.

VC money doesn’t care about whether normal people actually want a device like this. what they’re really after is “we’re collecting a bunch of user-specific data that no one else has, that we can sell to people who think it’ll help them do better ad targeting (among other things)”

people have the right to do things you personally disapprove of

meanwhile, literally in the headline:

Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy.

no one is saying you don’t have “the right” to wear this Spyware Pendant in your one-party consent state.

people are saying it’s creepy and you’re jumping in defending it with “well, technically, it’s not illegal, depending on state law”. you’re just completely missing the point entirely.

this is like, if someone wrote an article about how people are annoyed by someone microwaving fish in the office cafeteria, you chimed in with “well they can simply quit and find a different job where people don’t microwave fish at the office”.

Puget Sound-area employees: If you live within 50 miles of a Microsoft office, you’ll be expected to work onsite three days a week by the end of February 2026.

“return to office” mandates are always, always, always a form of stealth layoff.

people structure their lives around their commute (or lack thereof). if you can work from home and don’t have to go to the office like it’s 2019, it opens up a bunch of places to live that wouldn’t be feasible otherwise.

this will force a bunch of employees into godawful commutes, or require them to move to be closer to the office. that’ll be relatively easy for younger employees who most likely rent an apartment and don’t have kids, but much harder for older / more experienced people who own houses, have kids, a partner with their own job, etc. lots of people will just quit instead - constructive dismissal.

also, I suspect many people who aren’t familiar with the Seattle area will read “50 miles” and think “about an hour’s drive”…lmao. 50 miles as the crow flies, in Seattle’s geography, can be a multi-hour drive, possibly including a ferry ride, before considering traffic delays. for a pathological example, Brinnon to Redmond is 35 miles in a straight line, but 130 miles driving distance, or 75 miles driving distance if you take a ferry. (and there can be a multi-hour wait just to drive on to the ferry during peak times)

even if you constrain it to 50 miles driving distance - Tacoma to Redmond is 43 miles driving distance according to Google. if you ask it for driving directions and specify “arrive at 9:30am” you get an estimate of “typically 1 hr to 2 hr 30 min”. public transit takes 2 hours, and that’s assuming you’re leaving directly from downtown Tacoma.