Shame cuts you down to size

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Shame is universal, but the messages and expectations that drive shame are organized by gender. These feminine and masculine norms are the foundation of shame triggers, and here's why: If women want to play by the rules, they need to be sweet, thin, and pretty, stay quiet, be perfect moms and wives, and not own their power. One move outside of these expectations and BAM! The shame web closes in. Men, on the other hand, need to stop feeling, start earning, put everything in their place, and climb their way to the top or die trying. Push open the lid of your box to grab a breath of air, or slide that curtain back a bit to see what's going on, and BAM! Shame cuts you down to size.

Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

AI Glasses During Exams

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“What is to stop someone from sitting in the back of a classroom and whispering into their glasses to say, ‘Hey, I need help with solving this problem,’” said Luke Hobson, an assistant director of instructional design at MIT. “Every time I see someone saying, ‘Blue books are the future,’ I’m like, ‘So are we going to ban students from wearing glasses?’” -Inside Higher Ed

AI-powered Hacking

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In just the past several weeks, Google disclosed that hackers had used AI-powered malware in an active cyberattack, and Anthropic reported that its models had been used by Chinese state-backed actors to orchestrate a large-scale espionage operation with minimal human intervention. The greatest challenges facing the United States do not come from overregulation but from deploying ever more powerful AI systems without minimum requirements for safety and transparency. - Chuck Hagel writing in The Atlantic

AI Definitions: Circularity

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Circularity – As AI companies invest in each other, money flows in a circular fashion, from one company to another and then back again. In effect, they prop up one another’s finances, in a similar fashion to what was known as “round-tripping” during the dot-com years. The result is an inflated performance without creating profits. The hope is that this will change over time, while larger concern is that demand for AI’s new products might never catch up with the capacity the industry is building.

More AI definitions

All-or-nothing thinking

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I spend days at a time in bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking of all the things I could be doing but can’t because I know I would do them imperfectly. I lose countless hours to inner monologues filled with self-hatred and all-or-nothing thinking. I don’t read anything, instead preferring to slowly crush myself with the existential weight of knowing that I will never be able to read all the things.

For a very long time, I thought that I did this because I was lazy. I figured that if I just worked a little harder, tried a little more, then I would be able to accomplish the things I set out to do. Failing to do them was a failure of my character. It was because I was a bad person, or at least bad at being a person.

I told myself that I had to get my act together; I had to do all of these things so that I could prove I wasn’t the worthless piece of garbage I thought I was. When I inevitably cracked under that pressure, I took it as proof that I was a worthless piece of garbage.

If all of this sounds repetitive, that’s because it is. It’s a vicious, repetitive, monotonous cycle. It moves at breakneck speed, but also not at all. Experiencing it is the most damning case against perfectionism I have ever come across. Expecting perfection only leaves you with two options: do everything right on the very first try, or don’t even bother. Which is actually only one option, since 9 times out of 10, human beings don't do things right on the first try.

Jenni Berrett writing in Ravishly

Imaginary Friends

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There's a little bit of evidence that adults who are novelists or musicians, for example, tend to remember the imaginary friends they had when they were children. It's as if they are staying in touch with those childhood abilities in a way that most of us don't. Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults.

Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby

Sometimes Experts can't tell AI Writing from Human Writing

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It’s become common for writers to mock AI’s stilted, wooden, and em-dash-heavy writing style. But with some gentle coaxing, AI is much better at writing than professional writers want to admit. In one 2025 study, three top AI models were pitted against MFA-trained writers. In initial tests, expert readers clearly preferred the human writing. But once researchers fine-tuned ChatGPT on an individual author’s full body of work, the results flipped. Suddenly, experts preferred the AI’s writing and often couldn’t tell whether it came from a human or a machine. – Derek Thompson

Extraordinary claims (require extraordinary evidence)

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For some people, the less likely an explanation, the more likely they are to believe it. Take flat-Earth believers. Their claim rests on the idea that all the pilots, astronomers, geologists, physicists, and GPS engineers in the world are intentionally coordinating to mislead the public about the shape of the planet. From a prior odds perspective, the likelihood of a plot so enormous and intricate coming together out of all other conceivable possibilities is vanishingly small. But bizarrely, any demonstration of counterevidence, no matter how strong, just seems to cement their worldview further.

Liv Boeree writing in Vox

16 Things People are Trying to Get AI to Do

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17 Articles about AI & the Military

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An AI Plays Civic Watchdog

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CalMatters this year launched a new feature that takes this kind of civic watchdog function a big step further. Its AI Tip Sheets feature uses AI to search through all of this data, looking for anomalies, such as a change in voting position tied to a large campaign contribution. These anomalies appear on a webpage that journalists can access to give them story ideas and a source of data and analysis to drive further reporting. - The Guardian