Good Enough

Outrageous service charge of £9,600 per year.

And more...

This weirdo property has listed its service charge as £9,600 annually.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Why isn't your GROWN ASS SELF seeking out young people to SUPPORT instead of pointing your judgemental finger at them from your couch?

Snap!

As a mental health worker I'd add late-stage capitalism as another serious contributing issue. Being treated like shit by a manager in a job you can't leave because you have no savings and extortionate rent to cover has an impact on mental health too. Tricky for a snappy headline though.

Of course it's called Thor's Helmet 🥹

AI Confessions: A Chatbot Saved My Life “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for chat.”

Listening to this on my way to work and thought you'd find it interesting.

slate.com/podcasts/dea...

Byline photo apparently of a man named Wayne Hall, which looks suspiciously AI generated.

I have my doubts that Wayne is a real live journalist. He managed to pump out 36 stories all on his own yesterday.

“If we had English names, I don’t think there would have have been an issue,” she said.

Conditional citizenship is no citizenship at all.

This is really good advice. When I went freelance I made a point of looking up old workmates that I got on with, but with whom I'd lost contact. Asking to meet for a chat over coffee simply to ask them what they were up to with work was great. Got work out of it and reconnection with friendly faces.

Best song of the year

Using tools to soothe is useful, but be wary if they're presented replacements for actual human experiences. This feels like a slippery slope issue. Art and literature and music is soothing too, but is it ok if an LLM makes that stuff and we leave people to attach to that? Philosophical pickles!

Co-regulation for the patient only! But real regulation is a co-created mechanism, which I think therefore is not possible through an LLM because there's no body on the other side. It's like Harlow's cloth mothers monkey experiments. There's soothing, but the same as soothing by TV or screen....

I think we could go quite deep into what 'self-regulation' is anyway? What does it have to look like? Even getting to the bottom of that for every person is different. It takes time and nuance to explore. I see therapy more as an experience of co-regulation that is then taken out of the room.

Yup. I entered after the IAPT boom. Psychodynamic, but max 12 sessions. And patients would only see me after months/years of jumping through CBT hoops. If they weren't 'fixed' by that I was the final step for primary care patients. The extra damage done by all that hoop jumping was never considered.

I once met someone who, in the 1990s, had 3-times-a-week psychoanalysis through the NHS. Capped at 2 years. It's extraordinary what used to be available when priorities were different.

I'm with you on the financial blocks. Not everyone can afford it and I need money to eat too. These difficulties are hard to square. But there's enormous value in being two bodies in a space or two faces looking at each other online or two voices on a phone line - ultimately two humans interacting.

I have yet to witness a widely used LLM involved in an action that wasn't based on keeping eyeballs firmly locked on the screen and away from other eyeballs. That's anti-community in my view.

... you're right to say that not everyone has a community to help, but what happens between me and the people I work with *is* a kind of little community, a communal endeavour. My hope is that it's a seed that then can be taken outside sessions to grow. Can relating to an LLM the seed of community?

...is their availability undermines what a real human relationship offers - care and commitment, yet with limitation. There's no limit with LLMs. Depends what folk imagine 'resilience' is. I am firmly against resilience as a neoliberal 'pull your pants up and get on with it on your own'...

..my hope is that we've grown a relationship within which they can talk to me about their disappointment, about the ways they feel I've failed them, crucially without feeling attacked when they do, so that these experiences can be witnessed and not felt in isolation. The problem with LLMs is that...

Very vested interest here, but from my side as a relational practitioner 'resilience' isn't really the point. There is something profoundly human in the endeavour and one of the human aspects is that at some point, in some way, I will disappoint the person I'm working with and when that happens....

The picture quality is awful anyway. Network TV didn't really know what they had commissioned I think. Watched it the first time around aged 13. Changed my life.

"American innovation" now refers to making a kind of atrocity cronut by combining insider trading with war crimes.

I was worried, but 2 secs of searching shows that while GG did endorse them, it was hardly warmly welcomed by the Greens. The Greens specifically said they disagreed on points and agreed on points, so they appreciated it was a difficult decision for the Workers Party to stand down. Savvy politics.

No surprises, surely?

Candidate is arrogant charmless TV presenter & hates everything: lose.

Campaign is entitled technocracy + smearing left-liberalism: lose.

Candidate is local & can make OK speech about how a good job should lead to a good life: win.

Normal politics is trying to be born.

This framing brings into focus one of the major offenses this regime has perpetrated against us. They have stolen our collective investment in a more just society.

The launch of every piece of AI-driven surveillance/security/criminal justice software basically goes like this:

AI COMPANY: this is an error free, bias free, state of the art, highly intelligent software system

Two Weeks Later: …aaaand it’s racist

its amazing how chatgpt knows everything about subjects I know nothing about, but is wrong like 40% of the time in things im an expert on. not going to think about this any further