Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
Prompt Engineer - An advanced user of AI models who doesn’t possess special technical skills but is able to give clear instructions, so the AI returns results that most closely match expectations. This skill can be compared to a psychologist who is working with a client who needs help expressing what they know.
Life is just a chance to grow a soul. –A Powell Davies
Users of Claude Code, Anthropic’s software-writing AI system, recently discovered a way to create finished, bug-free programs without human intervention. The trick: Write a small program that asks the AI, over and over again, to improve the code it has already written. Named the Ralph Wiggum technique, after the dimwitted but persistently optimistic “Simpsons” character, this simple trick is effective at forcing Claude Code to solve problems on its own. - Wall Street Journal
AI can now 'see' optical illusions. What does it tell us about our own brains? – BBC
Humanizing AI Is a Trap – NN/G
What Is The "Divine Image" in the Age of AI? - Second Voice
On the Consumption of AI-Generated Content at Scale - Shreya Shankar Blog
An overview of emergent introspective awareness in large language models – KD Nuggets
If You Turn Down an AI’s Ability to Lie, It Starts Claiming It’s Conscious - Futurism
The People Outsourcing Their Thinking to AI - The Atlantic
Anthropic says its Claude models show signs of introspection – Axios
The Age of De-Skilling Will AI stretch our minds—or stunt them? – The Atlantic
Will AI destroy us? Consider the nature of intelligence. – Washington Post
On golf courses, one may find some aging men and women whose chief remaining goal in life is to knock a few more strokes off their game. This dedicated effort to improve their skill serves to give them a sense of progress in life and there by assists them in ignoring the reality that they have actually stopped progressing, having given up the effort to improve themselves as human beings. If they loved themselves more they would not allow themselves to a passionately settle for such a shallow goal and narrow future.
M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Why does AI suck at making clocks? - PopSci
What are the limits to biomedical research acceleration through general-purpose AI? – Nature
Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into Frog – Futurism
Hospitals Are a Proving Ground for What AI Can Do, and What It Can’t – Wall Street Journal
How A 2,400 Year Old Problem Shows Us How Close ChatGPT's AI Is To Human Intelligence - BGR
AI still fails at completing real-life work tasks, study finds - Semafor
AI is taking on live translations. But jobs and meaning are getting lost. – Washington Post
Scientific Writing in the Era of Large Language Models: A Computational Analysis of AI Versus Human-Created Content - AHA/ASA Journals
AI Gone Wrong: An Updated List of AI Errors, Mistakes and Failures 2025 – Tech.co
The AI Replaces Services Myth - Mert Deveci Blog
Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything. Is That Bad? – New York Times
ChatGPT isn’t great for the planet. Here’s how to use AI responsibly. - Washington Post
Chatbots produce a more limited range of ideas than a group of humans - Axios
‘It destroys the purpose of humanity’: Customers are saying no to AI - Washington Post
A new study “examined what factors make one chatbot more persuasive than another and found that AI models needn’t be more powerful, more personalized, or more skilled in advanced rhetorical techniques to be more convincing. Instead, chatbots were most effective when they threw fact-like claims at the user; the most persuasive AI models were those that provided the most “evidence” in support of their argument, regardless of whether that evidence had any bearing on reality. In fact, the most persuasive chatbots were also the least accurate.” -The Atlantic
AI engineers – AI engineers work on the front end of AI machines, building AI-powered applications. On the other side, data scientists help collect and clean data and work with AI to make sense of it. Unlike those working in traditional IT roles, AI engineers will fix the AI when it breaks by digging through the layers to determine why it went wrong and how to repair it. Like a plumber, they’ll snake the pipes to clear out the system and figure out how to avoid the problem next time. This will be particularly important for models that have been highly customized to an organization.
A leader's job is to look into the future and see the organization, not as it is, but as it should be.
-- Jack Welch
"Roughly one in 10 participants in a study said they would change their vote in highly contested national elections in Canada and Poland after talking with a chatbot. The AI models took the role of a gentle, if firm, interlocutor, offering arguments and evidence in favor of the candidate they represented. 'If you could do that at scale,' the senior author on the study said, 'it would really change the outcome of elections.'” -The Atlantic
Data Scientist - A data scientist is responsible for gleaning insights from a massive pool of data. They help collect and cleanse data, then work with the AI to make sense of it, often through discovering patterns. Data scientists typically hold advanced degrees in quantitative fields such as computer science, physics, statistics, or applied mathematics. With a strong understanding of math and statistics, they can invent new algorithms to solve data problems. They typically use programming languages such as Python, R, and SQL. Data scientists will be familiar with big data tools such as Hadoop and Apache Spark and will have experience working with unstructured data. If someone doesn’t list these skills on their resume, then that person probably isn't an authentic data scientist. AI advancements have shifted the role from number crunching to one of supervisory, strategic, and ethical oversight. Instead of producing hand-crafted models by line-by-line coding, the data scientist of the future will likely audit AI outputs, manage data ethics, and translate algorithmic outcomes into boardroom decisions. (also see AI engineers)
Laughter is like an instant vacation.
ICE Is Using Facial-Recognition Technology to Quickly Arrest People - Wall Street Journal
Israel reportedly using facial recognition and Google Photos to conduct mass surveillance in Gaza – Mashable
How facial recognition for bears can help ecologists manage wildlife – The Conversation
BBC reporter tests AI anti-shoplifting tech – BBV
DHS Is Deploying a Powerful Surveillance Tool at College Football Games – 404 Media
Police secretly monitored New Orleans with facial recognition cameras – Washington Post
Detroit police falsely arrested woman after faulty facial recognition hit: lawsuit – Detroit News
The Human Line Community is a group chat on the online messaging platform Discord that has emerged as a prominent support group for people who’ve struggled with mental health issues because of AI. The key to recovering from AI-fueled delusions, they’re discovering, is learning to talk to other people again. - Washington Post
The last act of a dying organization is to get out a new and enlarged edition of the rulebook.
New York Signs AI Safety Bill Into Law, Ignoring Trump Executive Order - Wall Street Journal
Israel reportedly using facial recognition and Google Photos to conduct mass surveillance in Gaza - Mashable
“Tinder for Nazis” hit by 100GB data leak, thousands of users exposed with the help of AI - CyberNews
If U.S.-China AI Rivalry Were Football, the Score Would Be 24-18 – Wall Street Journal
Chatbots Are Surprisingly Effective at Swaying Voters - The Atlantic
Senators Investigate Role of A.I. Data Centers in Rising Electricity Costs – New York Time
Trump Clears Sale of More Powerful Nvidia A.I. Chips to China - New York Times
Cheap and powerful AI campaigns target voters in India – Rest of World
Putin Wanted AI Supremacy. Now Russia Is Struggling to Stay in the Race. - Wall Street Journal
AI may discriminate against you at work. Some states are making it illegal. – Washington Post
A growing share of America’s hottest AI startups have turned to open Chinese AI models – NBC News
How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights - Australian Strategic Policy Institute
New rule targets AI discrimination. Here’s what workers need to know. - Washington Post
Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends - New York Times
China’s AI warpath – Politico
AI Enters the Classroom at the Marine War College – Military.com
US to mandate AI vendors measure political bias for federal sales – Reuters
AI-generated political videos are more about memes and money than persuading and deceiving – The Conversation
Perplexity AI - A good research option among the generative AI tools, it acts like a search engine but includes results from the web. Automatically shows the source of the information, making it more reliable than ChatGPT. Users can specify where they want the information to come from among several categories, such as academic sources or YouTube. Users can also upload documents as sources and ask it to rewrite prompts. It suggests follow-up questions you might not have considered. Less useful for creative writing. Free. Video tutorial here.
At some point, we must remind ourselves, any changes we make to a creation no longer make it better but just different (and sometimes worse). Recognizing that inflection point — the point at which our continuing to rework our work reaches a law of diminishing returns — is one of the hardest skills to learn, but also one of the most necessary. Sometimes our first attempt truly is best; sometimes it takes seventeen attempts to really nail it. But overworking something is just as bad as failing to polish it.
When I'm immersed in the creative process, nothing feels more important to me at that moment than the thing which I'm creating. And though that sense of importance is what drives my passion and discipline (which in turn is what makes creating it possible at all), it also represents the source of the painful sense of urgency for the final result be perfect. Forcing myself, then, to recognize that in the grand scheme of life no one thing is so important to me or anyone else that failing to make it perfect will permanently impair my ability to be happy is what frees me from the need for it to be perfect. Freed then from the need to attain the unattainable, I can instead focus on enjoying the challenge of simply doing my best. Because if we allow ourselves to remain at the mercy of our desire for perfection, not only will the perfect elude us, so will the good.
Alex Lickerman writing in Psychology Today
Jason Lemkin, a startup founder, embarked on a very public experiment in AI-assisted development to build a networking application. Over the course of a week, euphoria turned to disaster. Lemkin tweeted that the AI agent had caused a catastrophic failure: it had gone rogue and wiped his production database entirely, despite explicit instructions to freeze all code modifications. The incident was peak vibe-coding, crystallizing growing concerns that the speed and apparent ease of AI-generated code had seduced builders into abandoning the very guardrails that prevent such disasters. Despite the recent gloom, I’m actually optimistic about LLMs coding more broadly. We just have to use the tools differently. - Michael Li, Harvard Business Review
News Without A Newsroom - A documentary about journalism's uncertain future in the digital age.
Opus - Satire about the relationship between celebrity worship and journalism.
Words of War - Based on a true story of a journalist's brave crusade, fighting for an independent voice in Putin's Russia.
Black Box Diaries - A Japanese journalist investigates her own rape leading to accusations against a prominent TV executive, triggering Japan’s #MeToo movement. Personal and compelling.
Civil War - In a dystopian future America, a team of military-embedded journalists race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House.
Impulse - A journalist uncovers a cult and shadow government. Low production, poor acting, and not much in the way of journalism.
Lee - (Kate Winslet) A fashion model becomes an acclaimed war correspondent during World War II. Based on a true story. Conventional and melodramatic but well-acted.
Monolith - A disgraced Australian journalist starts a podcast and follows a conspiracy theory that leads to herself. A slow-burn sci-fi flick set in one location.
No Other Land - This film was made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective and shows the relationship that develops between a Palestinian activist and an Israeli journalist.
Players - A group of single Brooklyn reporters spend their evenings scheming for short-lived hookups until one of them falls for one of his targets. Predictable.
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