The FDA routinely approves drugs where the full biochemical pathway is not understood.

Do FDA standards apply to the device? If yes, it's SaMD. So it'd be the app/device developer, individiual clinicians, the 3rd party AI vendor if it exists, and the user themselves.

A fitness tips app has a low risk. A treatment recommendation model is very high risk.

Which lawyer wins?

#22 | Posted by snoofy at 2026-02-10 11:47 PM | Reply | Flag:

The one who's client has deeper pockets.

Though in the culture, grandpas in their 40s are definitely a thing...

#20 | Posted by LegallyYourDead at 2026-02-10 09:09 PM | Reply

Off by 30 years bruh.

Backpropagation explicitly computes the contribution of every hidden unit via gradients. If those contributions were unknowable, training wouldn't work.

Rumelhart etc, Nature, 1986. A foundational paper for ML.

Data science was my capstone dude.

Anthropics base salary for a phd in interpretive research is something like $500k/annual + bennies.

If the values had no meaning, downstream layers couldn't use them to make consistent decisions. They're not meaningless, it's just an encoded representation of the model is optimized to interpret. Math framework and task context is how you can interpret them.

If you were correct then backpropagation, debugging, and pruning would not work. Model updates would be blind luck. The entire field of Interpretive Research wouldn't exist.

AI tells me things I know are outrageously wrong and takes no responsibility for it.

#10 | Posted by Zed at 2026-02-10 05:27 PM | Reply

That's an LLM. This device isn't using an LLM.

The hidden layers are just that -- hidden.

#11 | Posted by snoofy at 2026-02-10 05:34 PM | Reply

They're not hidden, that's a euphemism that means it's not part of training data or prediction target.
It's the intermediate layer. h = sigma(Wx + b). Where x is your input vector, W is your weight matrix, b is your bias, and sigma is your activation function.

Training a model for cancer detection using annotated MRI data is a data science 1 topic, college Jr. level.

The hard part is teaching systems to older researchers and building a stack for their domain, and keeping someone on staff to maintain it. Students come and go from teams very quickly.

Stanford Will pay you 200k annual as a glorified research assistant if you can help their physicians develop ML models for their various topics.

What ML models have you trained Zed?

This loser couldn't lead a Cub Scout troop.

#4 | Posted by snoofy at 2026-02-07 09:09 PM | Reply | Flag:

He climbed the ranks to Major and earned two Bronze Stars. The first star for leading a rifle platoon with the 101st in Iraq.

He's exactly the kind of leader you want on the ground. Whether the infantry should be running the whole show is a different matter.

He's Happy Gilmore's caddy. Guys come a really long way from holding clubs.

More like wrong for thinking it was only 1 party.

Who wants to get paaaaaaaid for executing their constitutionally protected right?

Maybe executing isn't the right word...

It's the least relevant bit. He could fly an identical Cessna 551 as a single pilot.

They almost made it. Too little engine power, too much fuel, dying electricity, failing hydraulics, but still made the lip of the runway.

What happened to them is most likely what happened to other 550 Citations. There's an alternator issue failure caused by faulty components or loose ground terminals. You get limited battery power after that. The crew gets lost in trying to diagnose the electrical problem and reset the system. Navigation fails, crew communication breaks down, lighting goes out, and your life is now entirely based on how well this pilot can glide and where you end up. If it's not perfect you're all about to die in a fire.

They had an airspeed data failure.

The Two Pilot Requirement is very misleading. It's commonly flown as a single pilot aircraft. The only difference between a 550 Citation II and 551 Citation II/SP is the FAA Certification category. Same airframe, wings, engines, and flight controls. Part 25 (transport category) requires 2 pilots. They lowered the Max Takeoff Weight on paper, called the 551, and certified it under Part 23 (normal category).

Ahh that's the reason for the distraction. The morning's news:

Elon Musk asks Epstein to go to the Wildest Party on his island.

The shells are moving so fast they're going to melt.

Elon Musk's space company negotiates with Elon Musk's AI company for merger of Elon Musk companies, after Elon Musk's AI company already bought Elon Musk's social media company that collapsed in value.

It isn't visible without NODs.

It's a surplus SOPMOD kit. AN/PEQ-2 Infrared Target Pointer/Aiming Light. The beam isn't visible with NODs.

Nobody there has NODs on...