News Copycats

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"ChatGPT will often link to news publishers aggregating original reporting, elevating these copycat articles over the initial story, or failing to surface the initial story at all. Frequently these copycats are far less reputable, including blogs and websites that have outright plagiarized established news outlets. This copycat citation problem even plagues news publishers that have active licensing deals with OpenAI." - Harvard’s Nieman Lab

Stress can do a body good

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Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist at Stanford University and the author of “The Upside of Stress”, helps people rethink stress by telling them that it is what we feel when something we care about is at stake. She asks them to make two lists: of things that stress them; and of things that matter to them. “People realise that if they eliminated all stress their lives would not have much meaning,” she says. “We need to give up the fantasy that you can have everything you want without stress.”

In 2012 a group of scientists in America looked back at the 1998 National Health Interview Survey, which included questions about how much stress the 30,000 participants had experienced in the previous year, and whether they believed stress harmed their health. Next, they pored over mortality records to find out which respondents had died. They found that those who both reported high stress and believed it was harming their health had a 43% higher risk of premature death. Those who reported high stress but did not believe it was hurting them were less likely to die early than those who reported little stress.

The study shows correlation, not causation. But since much stress is unavoidable, working out how to harness it may be wiser than fruitless attempts to banish it.

Read more in the Economist

How to Grieve

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There are recovery programs for people grieving the loss of a parent, sibling, or spouse. You can buy books on how to cope with the death of a beloved pet or work through the anguish of a miscarriage. We speak openly with one another about the bereavement that can accompany a layoff, a move, a diagnosis, or a dream deferred. But no one really teaches you how to grieve the loss of your faith. You’re on your own for that.

Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday 

Do You Know what an AI Cannot Do? Try this Multiple Choice Question

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If you write a prompt asking an AI to do each of these things, which would it be good at doing? 

a. Give me a cube root of a seven-digit number.

b. Write text backwards.

c. Give me a 5x12 animated GIF of green, falling Matrix letters in Python code.

d. I have a stack of Fiesta ware plates of these colors: green, yellow, orange, red, purple. Two slots below the purple one, I placed a yellow one, then one slot above the green one, I placed a black one. What is the final stack of plates?

e. Give me a list of 10 examples of something.  

Riley Goodside, lead prompt engineer for Scale AI gives the answer in a conversation with Semafor

What does she see in him?

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It happened years ago, but I've never forgotten it. I was singing and speaking at a small Midwestern college. During an informal seminar in one of the dorm lounges, a couple came in late.

I couldn't help noticing something odd about them. The girl was very attractive, close to cover-girl standards. The guy looked as if he had just walked off the set for The Nerds. He was short, wore thick horn-rimmed glasses and a plaid short-sleeved shirt. He was definitely a candidate for getting sand kicked in his face.

But the strangest thing of all was that these two were obviously in love. What could she possibly see in him? I asked myself. Suddenly I realized — she was blind.

But what did she see in him? Everything. Everything that's important about who a person is, what love is, and what a real man is. She saw everything she needed to know about him.

Blessed are the blind, for they can see people as they really are. Woe to those who can see, for they will constantly be tripped up by the image.

John Fischer

Expert Performance

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Expert performance is built through thousands of hours of practice in your area of expertise, in varying conditions, through which you accumulate a vast library of such mental models that enables you to correctly discern a given situation and instantaneously select and execute the correct response.

At the root of our effectiveness is our ability to grasp the world around us and to take the measure of our own performance. We are constantly making judgments about what we know and don't know whether we're capable of handling a task or solving a problem. As we work at something, we keep an eye on ourselves, adjusting our thinking or actions as we progress.

Monitoring your own thinking is what psychologists call metacognition (meta is Greek for "about".) Learning to be accurate self-observers helps us stay out of blind alleys, make good decisions, and reflect on how we might do better next time. An important part of this skill is being sensitive to the ways we can delude ourselves. One problem with poor judgment is that we usually don't know when we've got it. Another problem is the sheer scope of the ways our judgment can be led astray.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

The origins of our anger

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Problems of anger begin as seed thoughts of self-pity, discouragement, jealousy, or some other negative thought. One’s thought life is the key ingredient in behavioral and emotional control; therefore thoughts prior to and during times of anger are important. Thoughts give emotional feelings prolonged existence and strength, and lead interpretation to vague emotions.

When anger feelings begin, people should “listen” to themselves think. Their minds are constantly making value judgments, decisions, and comparisons. Therefore, there always exists the opportunity to intercept anger by changing these thoughts.

Gary Collins, Counseling and Anger

Unleashing AI Agents

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Setting a bunch of A.I. agents loose on the internet could provoke a backlash. If you’re a business buying ads on Amazon, you want those ads to be seen by humans, not bots pretending to be humans.In the future, I can imagine more websites taking steps to block A.I. agents or steer them toward certain pages or products.

Right now, A.I. agents are too incompetent to be much of a threat. But it doesn’t take much imagination to envision a near future when most of the web will consist of robots talking to robots, buying things from robots and writing emails that only other robots will read.

Kevin Roose  writing in the New York Times

19 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

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Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance - Washington Post 

Chegg bets big on the AI that nearly broke it – Semafor

OpenAI Set to Make Super Bowl Ad Debut – Wall Street Journal  

OpenAI looks across US for sites to build its Trump-backed Stargate AI data centers - Washington Post

DeepSeek AI Is the Competition America Needs – Wall Street Journal

OpenAI may reveal reasoning steps behind outputs from its AI models, will consider open source approach – Business Insider  

European AI firms encouraged by DeepSeek in scramble to catch up to US - Semafor 

The AI Spending Race Is Still On as Google Antes Up – Wall Street Journal 

Why ‘Distillation’ Has Become the Scariest Word for AI Companies – Wall Street Journal

The DeepSeek app is impressively strange. It’s clever, quirky and self-censoring — but it’s the stuff behind the scenes that really matters. – Washington Post 

SoftBank in Talks to Invest as Much as $25 Billion in OpenAI – Wall Street Journal

What to Know About DeepSeek and How It Is Upending A.I. – New York Times

DeepSeek's great news for the corporate world - Axios

Reid Hoffman Raises $24.6 Million for AI Cancer-Research Startup - Wall Street Journal

Stunning breakthroughs from China's DeepSeek AI alarm U.S. rivals – Axios  

OpenAI introduced a new tool, called Operator, that can autonomously perform tasks on the internet – New  York Times 

South Carolina to Reboot Giant Nuclear Project to Meet AI Demand – Wall Street Journal 

Google rushed to sell AI tools to Israel’s military after Hamas attack – Washington Post   

OpenAI product chief says world is "on the verge" of AI agents - Axios