Here’s the NotebookLM version for comparison which has a more emotive take on things:
Are you feeling emotionally exhausted by the constant barrage of depressing news about political events, wars, and climate disasters? You might be experiencing outrage fatigue. This phenomenon occurs when repeated exposure to outrage-inducing content leads to feeling withdrawn and like resistance is futile.
What is Outrage Fatigue?
Outrage is a response to a perceived transgression against what we consider right and wrong. It can be functional for groups, drawing attention to issues and catalysing collective action. However, constant outrage, especially along group identity lines, can create hostility and conflict, leading to psychological exhaustion.
How Outrage Manifests
Group Level: Constant outrage at a group level can lead to a sense of being jaded, making it hard to focus on what truly matters.
Individual Level: Some people become “super-outrage producers,” while others withdraw, feeling isolated or afraid to express their opinions. High levels of negative emotions, including outrage, can be taxing, leading individuals to regulate their emotions.
The Role of Social Media
Social media algorithms can amplify outrage content, making it seem more widespread than it is. This can lead to feeling turned off from political participation, even if the outrage isn’t representative of the broader group’s feelings.
Combatting Outrage Fatigue
Local Involvement: Engage in local community politics to build a feeling of safety and understanding. This allows for concrete actions and a sense of direct impact.
Directed Outrage: Focused outrage is more effective as you know what it’s for and what outcomes you’re seeking.
Alter Your Social Media Ecosystem: Change your online environment by engaging with different content if you feel overwhelmed.
Outrage as a Political Tool
Outrage can be weaponised to divide groups. For example, stoking outrage on issues like immigration or abortion can distract people from economic policies that harm them.
Final Thoughts
It’s essential to be aware and experience outrage while staying grounded in local communities. Direct your outrage towards concrete actions and be mindful of the media you consume to avoid fatigue.
I have been sharing some of the interesting reads that I come across on this blog/newsletter for a while now. Given the pace at which AI related news has been rolling out, I am consolidating the links into a series of monthly posts to reduce the load on your inbox/feed.
Here are the interesting developments in the world of AI from the last month and a half or so:
Agentic AI
When you give Claude a mouse: LLMs are gradually getting more access to actually do things on your computer, and effectively becoming agents. Ethan Mollick shares his experience with Claude’snew feature, and the current strengths and weaknesses:
On the powerful side, Claude was able to handle a real-world example of a game in the wild, develop a long-term strategy, and execute on it. It was flexible in the face of most errors, and persistent. It did clever things like A/B testing. And most importantly, it just did the work, operating for nearly an hour without interruption.
On the weak side, you can see the fragility of current agents. LLMs can end up chasing their own tail or being stubborn, and you could see both at work. Even more importantly, while the AI was quite robust to many forms of error, it just took one (getting pricing wrong) to send it down a path that made it waste considerable time.
Claude get’s bored: With great power comes great boredom, it seems. We are already witnessing some unintended behaviour with the AI agents with them getting distracted just like humans or taking unwanted actions:
Even while recording these demos, we encountered some amusing moments. In one, Claude accidentally stopped a long-running screen recording, causing all footage to be lost.
Later, Claude took a break from our coding demo and began to peruse photos of Yellowstone National Park. pic.twitter.com/r6Lrx6XPxZ
We find that having access to Copilot induces such individuals to shift task allocation towards their core work of coding activities and away from non-core project management activities. We identify two underlying mechanisms driving this shift – an increase in autonomous rather than collaborative work, and an increase in exploration activities rather than exploitation. The main effects are greater for individuals with relatively lower ability. Overall, our estimates point towards a large potential for AI to transform work processes and to potentially flatten organizational hierarchies in the knowledge economy.
We found that AI-generated poems were rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. Our findings suggest that participants employed shared yet flawed heuristics to differentiate AI from human poetry: the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.
Metaphysic developed the facial modification system by training custom machine-learning models on frames of Hanks’ and Wright’s previous films. This included a large dataset of facial movements, skin textures, and appearances under varied lighting conditions and camera angles. The resulting models can generate instant face transformations without the months of manual post-production work traditional CGI requires.
SEO may soon be passe with the chatbots taking over from the search engines. So, what’s next – something possibly along the lines of Citate which helps you analyse and optimise what is being served up on these chatbots.
Can we manipulate AI as much as it manipulates us? – With every new development in the way humans manage and share knowledge, come tools to manipulate the said knowledge. Fred Vogelstein takes a deeper look at the emerging options including Citate and Profound.
UK-based mobile operator Virgin Media O2 has created an AI-generated “scambaiter” tool to stall scammers. The AI tool, called Daisy, mimics the voice of an elderly woman and performs one simple task: talk to fraudsters and “waste as much of their time as possible.”
…
Multiple AI models were used to create Daisy, which was trained with the help of YouTuber and scam baiter Jim Browning. The tool now transcribes the caller’s voice to text and generates appropriate responses using a large language model. All of this takes place without input from an operator. At times, Daisy keeps fraudsters on the line for up to 40 minutes, O2 says.
I have already been doing a simpler version of this using Samsung’s AI based call screening, with most hanging up pretty quickly. I’m sure this will get enhanced in the future.
It’s not just scammers misusing AI unfortunately, and this bit of news on creating deepfakes of classmates in a US school doesn’t help allay the fears of parents like me. Food for thought for the regulators, and also for authorities who need to take prompt action when such incidents occur:
Head of School Matt Micciche seemingly first learned of the problem in November 2023, when a student anonymously reported the explicit deepfakes through a school portal run by the state attorney’s general office called “Safe2Say Something.” But Micciche allegedly did nothing, allowing more students to be targeted for months until police were tipped off in mid-2024.
Cops arrested the student accused of creating the harmful content in August. The student’s phone was seized as cops investigated the origins of the AI-generated images. But that arrest was not enough justice for parents who were shocked by the school’s failure to uphold mandatory reporting responsibilities following any suspicion of child abuse. They filed a court summons threatening to sue last week unless the school leaders responsible for the mishandled response resigned within 48 hours.
It’s been exactly 2 years since I joined my regional role in Boehringer Ingelheim in Dubai. I rarely blog about my personal life, but I thought now would be a good time to share some of the experiences around this move.
The move to Dubai was in itself fairly straight forward as it was through an internal move. I started off with a regular employment based residence visa valid for 2 years. My family also relocated in the middle of last year, and their visas were completed through the office pretty quickly.
Since my visa was due for renewal this year, I decided to opt for the UAE Golden Visa for salaried professionals which has a relatively easier qualification qualification criteria than the others:
Monthly gross salary of AED 30,000 or higher (that seems to be the current consensus, as I have also read of it being the basic salary without allowances in the past)
Bachelor’s degree or higher
Getting the equivalency certificate for this is typically the most time consuming process
While my application was managed by my office in DIFC which definitely helped with the clarity around the process, I did find this recent Reddit post by the Amer Centre quite helpful and along with this article in Khaleej Times that explains the process and documentation requirements. I am sharing a simple guide to get the necessary documents ready based on my experience.
Step by step guide
The overall process took about 2 months for me, out of which the first 3 weeks went in getting the degree equivalency certificate, followed by 2 weeks for the degree physical attestation and about 2 weeks for the actual visa application, health checkup & Emirates ID issuance.
You need digitized versions of the following key documents for the application (some like the equivalency certificate require additional documents for the verification) in addition to other documents from your employer:
Degree equivalency certificate
Bank statement showing the salary credit each month
Attested degree certificate (UAE Embassy in university country and MOFA in UAE)
NOC from company
Current passport and visa
Current passport sized photo (white background, no glasses – you can tell the photo studio for the Emirates ID or visa version)
The equivalency certificate
Getting the degree equivalency certificate is usually the bottleneck in this process, based on the experience of my colleagues and those who have shared their experience online.
The process is as below with details on the Ministry site here (they also have a useful document checklist that you can refer to):
Typically you would need your original degree certificate, the final transcript (official stamped marksheet for the entire duration of the course) and your passport copy. You need to choose one of the official partners (Dataflow or Quadrabay at the moment) for the verification and share these documents with them. It costs around AED 350 for this part of the process.
The turnaround time is slated to be 30 days, but is completely dependent on the response time of the university. Here are a couple of tips to help speed up the process which worked for me:
Keep the details of your university alumni association and key academic departments handy.
Once the initial documents have been verified by the partner and sent to the university, if you do not get any update within a couple of weeks check in with the customer support for details regarding the communication with the university.
I managed to get the details of the email subject line and the department to which they had mailed this way.
Contact the alumni association or academic department with the details you got regarding the verification communication to nudge it along.
Once the verification process is successfully completed, you will get the notification to complete the application on the Ministry site with the appropriate link. There is another payment involved, and the certificate is generated almost immediately. This completes the most time consuming part of the application.
Degree attestation and next steps
The next few steps are quite straight forward, and you could even get the degree attestation done while you are waiting for the verification to happen. You will of course need the physical degree certificate for this, and use an agency like VFS (they have an attestation helpline that you can mail here) to get this done in 2-3 weeks with doorstep pickup and drop-off.
Once you have these documents you can go ahead with the actual visa application. A few additional tips:
In the bank statement (an online statement download should be fine), highlight the salary deposits and make sure that your name & account details are there on every page & highlight those as well.
If you are immediately transferring your salary to another account after the deposit, you may need to provide the statement from the other account as well.
The photo you submit will be used in the visa and Emirates ID, so you can ask the photo studio to take it accordingly.
You will probably be given a slot for the health checkup, but depending on your location you may be able to walk in for the checkup much earlier.
Ensure that you are setup on UAE pass so that the authentication on the partner sites is easier.
Setup your ICP app as well do that you can access the digital versions of your visa and updated Emirates ID. This uses UAE pass as well for login.
Depending on how you have applied, you may need to get the new Emirates ID re-issued.
You will need to transfer your dependents’ visas at some point in time as well.
Hope this helped you, and wish you the best with your Golden Visa application! If this gets a good response, I’ll share some of my experiences and learnings around the Dubai relocation.
Maybe I should start visiting Reddit more often and posting on my blog to drive page views. Then again it’s likely that I’ll pick up the chickpea farming stories:
And then an hour or two — or 12 or 24 — later, there’s a really good chance you’re going to see that popular Reddit post repurposed on Gawker or BuzzFeed. Well, the silly or controversial stuff, at least. (The random nerdy/newsy topical stuff that Redditors upvote — like last Wednesday’s front-pager about chickpea farming — tends to stay in the Redditverse.)
I noticed something interesting when I entered the elevator to reach my floor in the office yesterday. There was an LCD monitor in the top corner of the elevator, broadcasting the Elevator New Network (ENN). Now that’s a very unusual place for an LCD screen, and on further investigation (read Googling), I discovered that ENN is in fact quite an old network. ENN also apparently changed its name to Captive Network way back in 2001, but I suppose it retained the name for the channel. They also have over 8000 elevator screens in North America, and they must be looking to expand to India going by this rediff article posted a couple of days ago. They seem to have started out in office elevators, with malls and buses as next targets.
I’m don’t get the utility of such a set up – maybe it’ll increase the general awareness of people using the elevator. It is certain to get some advertisement revenue, which seems to be the basic business model. Now that I have some in my office, do you have one in your office elevator?
