In Pursuit of Failure

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When you consider failure, it is important to distinguish between two kinds. There is the failure of giving up, turning around, and walking away. Although this failure holds a certain seductive appeal, you must not let it divert you from the true heart of failure: the triumphant defeat of all your hopes, stratagems, and efforts. This is the ultimate failure that tells you who you are. This is the failure you have had to work hard for, the failure you put everything into—failure so rich with loss and pain that, even years later, it gives you the basis from which to make yourself anew, the scar tissue that deeply confirms your aliveness. Real failure requires real effort and is its own reward.

Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions

20 Articles about the business of running an AI

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AI Scientists Have a Problem: AI Bots Are Reviewing Their Work ChatGPT is wreaking chaos in the field that birthed it.– Chronicle of Higher Ed 

How the Sparkles Emoji Became the Symbol of Our AI Future – Wall Street Journal

Google’s AI Search Gives Sites Dire Choice: Share Data or Die – Bloomberg  

The AI bubble has burst. Here's how we know. - Mashable 

The New A.I. Deal: Buy Everything but the Company – New York Times 

Inside the company that gathers ‘human data’ for every major AI company – Semafor

Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones) – 404 Media  

A CIO canceled a Microsoft AI deal. The reason should worry the entire tech industry – Business Insider  

Perplexity will soon start selling ads within AI search – Fast Company 

Meet Stability AI's Stable Video 4D, a nuanced take on AI video generation - ZDnet 

Bing’s AI redesign shoves the usual list of search results to the side – The Verge  

OpenAI starts testing prototype of new AI search tool – Axios  

Oops GPT OpenAI just announced a new search tool. Its demo already got something wrong. – The Atlantic  

Big Tech says AI is booming. Wall Street is starting to see a bubble. – Washington Post

Crisis Looms as AI Companies Rapidly Losing Access to Training Data – Futurism   

AI’s Real Hallucination Problem – The Atlantic   

Alphabet Reports 29% Jump in Profit as A.I. Efforts Begin to Pay Off – New York Times  

Google Fails to ‘Wow’ as AI Bills Mount - Wall Street Journal 

Meta Is Offering Hollywood Stars Millions for AI Voice Projects – Bloomberg

San Francisco’s AI startup boom is so big, even international founders who don’t run AI startups are relocating there to help their companies grow – Tech Crunch

Clear Writing vs Legalize

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MIT cognitive scientists set out to determine why laws are written in an incomprehensible style. Lawyers don’t like it. Your average person doesn’t like it, so why does it persist? The researchers theorized that legal writers start by coming up with a main idea but then they keep finding reasons to qualify the rules, and soon the writing is overly complicated. It turns out that wasn’t it at all. When they had people try to write laws, they immediately adopted a convoluted style of legal language. It’s called the "magic spell hypothesis." The researchers say, “Just as magic spells are written with a distinctive style that sets them apart from everyday language, using legal language appears to signal a special kind of authority.” Academic writing is similar. When students are asked to write something for a class, they immediately adopt the overly-formal writing style of academics.  

More: Study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style

A Personal Notebook

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Successful people track their progress, set goals, reflect, and learn from their mistakes. And they often use some kind notebook to accomplish this. If you want to get somewhere in life, you need a map, and this notebook is that map. You can write down what you did today, what you tried to accomplish, where you made mistakes, and so forth. It’s a place to reflect. It’s a place to capture important thoughts. It’s a place to be able to track where you’ve been and where you intend to go. It’s one of the most underused, yet incredibly effective tools available to the masses.

Angel Chernoff

Setting Goals

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Self-regulation begins with setting goals - not big, life-directing goals, but more immediate goals for what you're going to be doing today. In the research, the poorest performers don't set goals at all; they just slog through their work. Mediocre performers set goals that are general and are often focused on simply achieving a good outcome - win the order; get the new project proposal done. The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but rather about the process of reaching the outcome. 

The best performers are focused on how they could get better at some specific element of the work, just as a pianist may focus on improving a particular passage.

With a goal set, the next step is planning how to reach it. Again, the best performers make the most specific, technique-oriented plans. They're thinking exactly, not vaguely, of how to get where they're going. So if their goal is discerning the customer's unstated needs, their plan for achieving it on that day may be to listen for certain key words the customer might use, or to ask specific questions to bring out the customer's crucial issues.

Geoff Colvin, Why Talent is Overrated  

How do AI Checkers Work?

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AI checkers will break down text, removing punctuation then use a technique called vectorization to convert it into a mathematical hash code for comparison to other text. Phrases and grammatical structure are assigned weights with uncommon language rated as more likely human-written. The AI detector also looks across the internet for use of the same language. The comparison identifies exact matches and paraphrases. This means data-rich companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are more likely to successfully identify AI-written material. Read more about this process on ZDnet

Setting Boundaries

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Many people feel that they are “people persons,” able to attract others and connect with them. At the same time, however, people persons often feel overwhelmed, anxious and frustrated about the obligations and responsibilities that their bonded relationships demand.  

Setting boundaries is the primary tool for strengthening your separateness and developing an accurate sense of responsibility.  The essence of boundaries is determining where you end and someone else begins, realizing your own person apart from others, and knowing your limits.  

A good way to understand this is to compare our lives to a house. Houses have certain maintenance needs, such as painting, terminate control and roof repairs. If, however, we’re spending all our time putting roofs on our neighbor’s houses while neglecting our own roof or we run the risk of a leaky roof or worse by the time we get back home.  

Think of all the different caring acts you performed over the last 24 hours. How many did you do grudgingly because you were under the threat of someone’s criticism or abandonment?  How many did you do under compulsion because you feel guilty if you don’t keep people happy?  And how many were from a cheerful heart, from the overflow caused by knowing you are loved by God and people in your life?   

John Townsend

Courses & Guides on Using AI

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Creating your own misery

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As long as you live in a society with other fallible humans you will be frustrated and hassled - not merely occasionally - all of your life. The best way to avoid feeling miserable about virtually anything that will ever occur in your lifetime is to admit that you create your own misery.

(Irrational beliefs that interfere with emotional health include..)

  • I must do well... win the approval of others... or else I will rate as a rotten person.

  • Others must treat me with considerately and kindly... Other people must not behave incompetently or stupidly.

  • The world (and the people in it) must arrange the conditions under which I live so that I get what I want when I want it.

Albert Ellis

 

19 articles about using AI to do specific things

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20 Articles about Amazing Things AI can do Now

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Researchers say they have developed a machine learning tool that can track the progression of Parkinson’s disease – Decrypt  

This AI humanoid robot helped assemble BMWs at US factory - Arstechnica

USC researchers say have developed an AI model that accurately predicts wildfire spread using satellite data &  Gen AI - CyberNews

AI tool outperforms existing x-ray structure methods - Chemistry World

MIT Researchers say they have developed an AI model that can accurately identify the stages of some types of breast cancer – MIT  

Getty Images Updated Generative AI Pushes Boundaries Of What’s Possible – Search Engine Journal

What It's Like Using a Brain Implant With ChatGPT (Video) - Cnet

Google DeepMind AI system reaches milestone in global math contest – Semafor

How AI Brought 11,000 College Football Players to Digital Life in Three Months – Wall Street Journal  

Is AI funnier than humans? This study says so but you be the judge – New York Post

A Japanese mega-conglomerate says it’s building an AI that manipulates angry customers' voices so that call center employees don't have to deal with drama - Arstechnica

AI model harnesses physics to autocorrect remote sensing data - Phys Org

Meet Kenza Layli from Morocco - the winner of the world's first Miss AI beauty pageant – Euronews

‘We don’t want to leave people behind’: AI is helping disabled people in surprising new ways - CNN

NBC will use AI version of Al Michaels’s voice for Olympics coverage – The Hill

Hong Kong researchers say they have created a machine learning algorithm that processes satellite data to more accurately and efficiently predict space weather conditions caused by solar activity - Techxplore

Smashing, from Goodreads’ co-founder, curates the best of the web using AI and human recommendations – TechCrunch 

AI is upending search as we know it – Venture Beat

Generative AI Speech-to-Speech Systems and Their Applications – Datanami  

How AI is helping judge Olympic gymnastics – The Verge

Closed Doors

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Houdini was a master magician as well as a fabulous locksmith. He boasted that he could escape from any jail cell in the world in less than an hour, provided he could go into the cell dressed in his street clothes. A small town in the British Isles built a new jail they were extremely proud of. They issued Houdini a challenge.

"Come give us a try," they said. By the time he arrived, excitement was at a fever pitch. Houdini rode triumphantly into the town and walked into the cell. He proudly walked into the cell and the door was closed. Houdini took off his coat and went to work. Secreted in his belt was a flexible tough and durable ten-inch piece of steel, which he used to work on the lock.

At the end of 30 minutes his confident expression had disappeared. At the end of an hour he was drenched in perspiration. After two hours, Houdini literally collapsed against the door--which opened. Yes, it had never been locked--except in his mind. One little push and Houdini could have easily opened the door. Many times a little extra push is all you need to open your opportunity door. Most locked doors are in your mind.

Zig Ziglar, See You At the Top