Sonia Connolly

In healthy human community, the kind that so many people say they want, and the kind study after study suggests people living in Western countries feel is missing in their lives, human beings are often in community with people with whom we aren’t individually or personally close, but who nonetheless form part of the larger circle of human bonds that forms the anchor and soilbed of our belonging.

Collective care refers to seeing members’ well-being – particularly their emotional health – as a shared responsibility of the group rather than the lone task of an individual. It means that a group commits to addressing interlocking oppressions and reasons for deteriorating well-being within the group while also combatting oppression in society at large.

There is a real rot at the core of many of our institutions – and certainly at the core of those powerful players operating within and adjacent to them. "Artificial intelligence" emerges from this rot. It cannot be a bulwark against it.

Every time a translator takes a book and puts it in their own words, they are interpreting the material slightly differently. What we found was that ChatGPT Plus couldn’t do that. It could regurgitate or transcribe, but it couldn’t achieve the nuance to count as its own interpretation of a study.

I think that’s because ChatGPT Plus isn’t in society — it doesn’t interact with the world. It’s predictive, but it’s not distilling or conceptualizing what matters most to a human audience, or the value that we place in narratives that are ingrained in our society. [...]

Now, after this experiment, we’re very against using it. After a year of data, we know it can’t meet our standards. If we ever did plan to use it, we’d have to implement super rigorous fact-checking, because we don’t want to lose reporters’ trust.

Creating a pattern requires considering the entire work; each step has to fit with and work with all the others. Blindly selecting the next step without that consideration will, more often than not, fail. This is especially true since AI can’t “test” the pattern after writing it, which is a big part of what humans do. [...]

However, the best and simplest advice is to buy from patternmakers that you trust. If you know someone who is a human making high-quality patterns, turn to them first. Rewarding known human creators rather than chasing the cheapest pattern is the best way to avoid buying AI slop.

No matter how well “AI” works, it has some deeply fundamental problems, that won’t go away with technical progress. I’d even go as far and say they are intentional.

erinptah

Black and white thinking is a trauma response that is important to break down for our overall happiness and wellbeing. When we are not feeling safe, it’s easy to slide into rigid thought patterns such as everything is either good or bad, friend or enemy, kind or mean, awesome or awful etc. The reality is things are rarely ever all one or the other, and as we break down binary ways of thinking we allow more space for connection and collaboration to move forward in our lives.

When I was twelve, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours. I was at another new school, the odd man out, bullied by my desk mate. My problems were too complex and modern to explain. So I skated across parking lots, breezeways, and sidewalks, I listened to the vibration of my wheels on brick, I learned the names of flowers, I put deserted paths to use. I decided for myself each curve I took, and by the time I rolled home, I felt lighter. One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating, beyond joy, and as Rollerbladers and cyclists overtook me, it eclipsed my own. Soon after, I stopped skating.

It was amazing to me to get to graduate school and to discover that I was a Southerner, and to discover that there was this idea that once all the Black [Southern] people left for the Great Migration, apparently we just didn’t even exist anymore, despite the inconvenient fact of the whole civil rights movement. So I had a bone to pick, and I just continued picking it.

"You have an emotional response to sound," says Prof Clark. Sound is detected by the ear and passed onto the brain and one region – the amygdala – performs the emotional assessment. This is part of the body's fight-or-flight response that has evolved to help us react quickly to the sounds like a predator crashing through the bushes. "So your heart rate goes up, your nervous system starts to kick in and you release stress hormones," Prof Clark tells me.

Through analysis of immune cells, biomarkers in the blood and RNA sequencing, they identified a distinct immune signature in female versus male patients.

They found evidence of “gut leakiness” in the women patients, including elevated blood levels of intestinal fatty acid binding protein, lipopolysaccharide, and the soluble protein CD14 — all signs of gut inflammation that can then trigger further systemic inflammation once they reach the circulatory system.

There's noise, so much noise, but there's also signal and the signal was that they were here that they were everywhere. Smash and grab jobs happening across the city nearly simultaneously. But the things being stolen aren't jewels, they're lives. Off streets, from yards. One roofer plucked off a ladder. A landscaper thrown to the ground, tackled by a half-dozen men in camo with weapons. Sixteen people on this day. Sixteen people disappeared, from just the northern side of the city and suburbs. More across the entire city.