You're going to hell and your data is for sale happy monday

But there's something here to make your crappy doodles look cool

Feb 27, 2023

Chat GPT prompt: “Compare donating to Depresh Mode to a sandwich”

selections from the lengthy answer:

Donating to Depresh Mode can be compared to making a sandwich in many ways. Just like a sandwich, donating to Depresh Mode involves putting different ingredients together to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The bread in a sandwich serves as the foundation, just like the donation you make to Depresh Mode forms the foundation of the organization's mission to provide mental health resources and support. Without this foundation, the sandwich, or the organization, cannot exist.

Overall, donating to Depresh Mode is like making a sandwich in that it involves combining different ingredients to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Just like a sandwich can satisfy your hunger, your donation to Depresh Mode can satisfy your desire to make a positive impact on the lives of those struggling with mental health challenges.

Zach Zimmerman on the podcast

If you grow up convinced that you are going to Hell, that might mess you up some. If you have spent your childhood waiting for an epiphanic message from Jesus H. Christ himself that you are on the list, and that message never arrives, yeah, that can donk you up. If you spend your formative years in certainty that in this life is but a brief prelude to the eternity of torture you have ahead, then it’s very possible you will be affected by this.

And Zach Zimmerman was. Zach was raised in a very conservative Christian home and went on to go to Princeton on a full-ride scholarship, where he promptly became a gay, vegetarian atheist, leaving the programming of his youth behind.

I think it’s a mistake to discount the worldview of kids, especially when it comes to a sense of doom. Because a lot of kids have a lot of senses of doom. I wasn’t raised religious but I did grow up during the Cold War and there was no doubt in my mind that the world would be destroyed by nuclear weapons at some point, and probably at some point soon. I hoped I would have sex before that happened but I figured probably not because we’d all die in a fireball before, like, 9th grade. I suspect a lot of kids today feel the same way about the climate crisis, that we’re going to be living in a charred hellscape before too much longer here.

As for the effect the fear of mushroom clouds had on me, it made me detach from the world to some extent. I was unmoored. I couldn’t take the world seriously if it was all going to be burned up in the next little while. And in separating from the world to some extent, I had nothing new to latch onto. When this all happens in your formative years, you end up going into adulthood with at least the vestiges of that perspective still in place. The doom follows behind.

Anyway, Zach is a comedian now and he’s very funny. And he’s a writer with lots of Shouts & Murmurs pieces in the New Yorker as well as an upcoming book, Is It Hot in Here (or Am I Suffering for All Eternity for the Sins I Committed on Earth)?

Can A.I. treat mental illness?

So asks an article in the New Yorker

The treatment of mental illness requires imagination, insight, and empathy—traits that A.I. can only pretend to have. And yet, Eliza, which Weizenbaum named after Eliza Doolittle, the fake-it-till-you-make-it heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” created a therapeutic illusion despite having “no memory” and “no processing power,” Christian writes. What might a system like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has been trained on vast swaths of the writing on the Internet, conjure? An algorithm that analyzes patient records has no interior understanding of human beings—but it might still identify real psychiatric problems. Can artificial minds heal real ones? And what do we stand to gain, or lose, in letting them try?

It’s easy to be wary of the idea of AI playing a meaningful role in helping people. Because it’s not human. It’s an index of a ton of information that’s out there. But then I think of the internet itself and how when one has a problem (physical health, home repair, recipes), one can consult this repository of information. And when you do that, you don’t get a caring person telling you how to make pancakes, you essentially get information on how someone else has made pancakes at some point. You can then follow that information and have your own pancakes.

A bunch of code can’t be a therapist but it can be useful.

People are making a lot of money off your mental health records

Mental health apps and software based services are very popular these days because they’re readily available on your phone or computer. They’re also popular because we’re in a huge mental health crisis in America. And because America is full of enterprising capitalists, some people are making a lot of money off the information you are feeding into those services.

The pricing for this mental health data varied widely, according to the findings. Some data brokers charged as low as $275 for 5,000 aggregated accounts of mental health records while others charged between $75,000-$100,000 on an annual basis for access to data that included information on individuals’ mental health conditions.
“Most people are not affirmatively, knowingly, explicitly agreeing to this practice, and consumers’ consent is not freely given in a society where people are forced to interact with the data brokerage ecosystem to apply for a job, apply for housing, get a loan, or sign up for an insurance plan,” Sherman said. “Congress needs to act to rein in this practice and uphold the spirit of HIPAA — protecting Americans’ health data from this kind of exploitation.”

Here goes part of your day

You’re going to play Scribble Diffusion. It turns your primitive doodles and descriptions into AI-generated art.

For instance, my effort (original drawing on the left):

Not even AI can recognize my little waves as waves.

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