Rebecca Heiss: “A study of workplace interventions to reduce stress, published in Industrial Relations Journal in 2024, revealed a startling truth: Of the 90 different stress-reduction strategies tested in corporate settings, which included meditation, massage and breathing exercises, only one consistently mitigated the negative effects of stress: serving others…People experiencing their own stress had all instinctively relieved this pressure by helping someone else—in this case, me. They weren’t following any wellness program or stress-management protocol. They were simply, and perhaps unconsciously, responding to their own anxiety by extending kindness to another person…This helped me see how we’ve been approaching stress relief backward. Instead of turning inward with bespoke wellness practices, we do best when we turn outward—toward the needs of others. This doesn’t mean meditation and self-care are useless, just that they are incomplete solutions.”
Crazy Stupid Tech: “[Cloudflare CEO] Prince wants to talk about the future of the web and journalism with me because he thinks the AI chatbot revolution is killing both of them. And he thinks he can help fix that with something he calls pay-per-crawl, a gambit he and Cloudflare launched on July 1…There are no ads when AI chatbots give you the answer. If there are links to sources, users almost never click on them. AI chatbots also drive up publishers’ bandwidth costs because they crawl thousands of times a day…And now Google itself is accelerating the problem. As more and more users ditch Google search for their favorite AI chatbot, Google itself is referring less of the traffic that’s still using Google search. Instead, to compete with the AI chatbots, Google is using its own AI chatbot Gemini to answer those questions immediately.”
FT: “Cinematic-quality AI production tools are helping to launch thousands of digital avatars — or “AI influencers” — into the creator economy, which was estimated to be worth $250bn in 2023, whether newly generated personas or clones of existing influencers…Proponents argue such tools can help existing influencers by automating some of their work — translating video content into other languages, responding to fans or deploying animated versions of themselves to clinch marketing deals, even while they sleep. For brands, there is the promise of cheap, instant influencer marketing and full control over what an avatar looks like and says. It is, according to Alexandru Voica, head of corporate affairs and policy at media generation start-up Synthesia, the “great equaliser”, whereby even small brands without big budgets can afford “polished, studio-quality content at scale”.”
Economist discusses “There’s Got To Be A Better Way”: “The authors’ premise is that many of the processes which govern work within organisations are broken. Whether they are flawed from the outset or malfunction over time, they need constant monitoring and improvement. At the heart of the book is a simple instruction to managers: go and see how things actually work. “If you aren’t embarrassed by what you find,” they write, “you probably aren’t looking closely enough.””
Bloomberg: “The best-case scenario, of course, would be that [Ashish] Vaswani hits on another breakthrough with the impact of the transformer. Llion Jones, another co-author of the “Attention” paper, says hunger is mounting for another leap. The leading AI labs have made significant strides in wringing out increased performance from transformer-based models, as they’ve adapted them to handle larger datasets, developed strategies to increase their reasoning and applied them to specific use cases. “They’ve been around for so long that every single permutation that one can think of has been tried,” Jones says. He says there are still valuable projects to be done with transformers, but he’s mostly scrapped them from his personal research agenda in favor of more speculative work. “I decided I’ve had enough of them.””
