James' World 2

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The beauty of WhatsApp, along with other popular third-party chat apps, is that it allows you to message anyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re reaching out to friends, family, or new acquaintances, or if those people have an iPhone or Android. If they have a WhatsApp, they can chat. However, there is one person you haven’t been texting on WhatsApp that you probably should be: yourself.

If you’re coming from a platform like iMessage, the ability to message yourself might not seem novel. But on WhatsApp, it’s a brand new feature. In the past, the app offered no direct way to send a text to your own number. One workaround, though, was to start a group chat, then remove all other members, which would leave only yourself to your own thoughts.

But why bother texting yourself in the first place? This isn’t a hack for those of us with no one else to message. Instead, texting yourself can be a helpful replacement for a notes app: You can jot down ideas, interesting links you stumble upon, or any photos or videos you want to share. And because its WhatsApp, and not a random notes app, you could use this space to store content you want to share with other WhatsApp users down the line.

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(Image credit: Ben Fergusson)

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After a long weekend away, today let’s talk about the largely positive reception that Elon Musk’s radical remaking of Twitter is getting from tech CEOs — and whether those views are likely to change if the fight that Musk is picking with Apple erodes even more value from his $44 billion purchase.

The CEO’s revenge

Last week, Musk publicly mocked Twitter’s somewhat notorious “Stay Woke” T-shirts. The shirts, which the company produced in 2016 in response to the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, were considered suspect even at the time. In those days, it was the left rolling its eyes — particularly after then-CEO Jack Dorsey wore the shirt during a Code Conference interview, giving the impression that a phrase that had originated within the Black community in response to systematic oppression had been co-opted by white corporate marketers.

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Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

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And in Uganda, there are 47 psychiatrists serving a country of 48 million — less than one single psychiatrist for every million people.

These are staggering ratios. To get your head around them, take the US as a comparison. There are around 45,000 psychiatrists for all 333 million Americans, which translates to about 135 psychiatrists for every million people. That’s still not enough — experts are actually warning of an escalating shortage — and yet it’s a whopping 135 times more coverage than exists in Uganda.

These numbers have very real, and sometimes very brutal, implications for people’s lives. When psychiatry and other forms of professional mental health care are not accessible, people suffer in silence or turn to whatever options they can find. In Ghana, for instance, thousands of desperate families bring their ailing loved ones to “prayer camps” in hopes of healing, only to find that the self-styled prophets there chain their loved ones to trees. Instead of receiving medical treatment for, say, schizophrenia, the patients receive prayers.

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Violeta Encarnacion for Vox

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Happy Holidays Everyone Be Blessed

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Joy to All

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On Wednesday, OpenAI announced ChatGPT, a dialogue-based AI chat interface for its GPT-3 family of large language models. It’s currently free to use with an OpenAI account during a testing phase. Unlike the GPT-3 model found in OpenAI’s Playground and API, ChatGPT provides a user-friendly conversational interface and is designed to strongly limit potentially harmful output.”

The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests,” writes OpenAI on its announcement blog page.

So far, people have been putting ChatGPT through its paces, finding a wide variety of potential uses while also exploring its vulnerabilities. It can write poetry, correct coding mistakes with detailed examples, generate AI art prompts, write new code, expound on the philosophical classification of a hot dog as a sandwich, and explain the worst-case time complexity of the bubble sort algorithm… in the style of a “fast-talkin’ wise guy from a 1940’s gangster movie.”

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An AI-generated image of a chatbot exploding forth from squiggly radial lines, as was foretold by the prompt.

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If cold and flu season seems to be hitting your household harder this year, you’re not alone. This is the year when common viruses that took a backseat to Covid-19 finally return. Positive tests for the flu in the United States stood at 25 percent in late November, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared to 8 percent at the same time of year in 2019. Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has pushed some children’s hospitals to capacity. And Covid hospitalizations are rising again. It’s the tripledemic that epidemiologists feared—those viruses, with the help of a few other seasonal recurring ones, are working together to fuel weeks of coughing, runny noses, and fevers. So if your kids, your coworkers, and everyone you know has been feeling sick, that’s why.

“This season is truly unprecedented,” says Katelyn Jetelina, who writes Your Local Epidemiologist, a newsletter about infectious disease spread. The high rates of flu-like illness could be an early peak or an early warning of a monumentally bad season. “How high it will go, and how severe it will be, is, unfortunately, something we have to wait and see,” she says. “We’re at the mercy of time.”

The problem goes beyond making everyone feel sluggish and icky. CDC director Rochelle Walensky has confirmed that the flu, RSV, and Covid are putting stress on US hospital systems. It’s the unintended consequence of measures that sought to save lives—social distancing and mask-wearing curbed the spread of flu and RSV in 2020 and 2021. (Although there was a warning sign in 2021 when RSV cases in the US had an out-of-season uptick over the summer, an indicator that things were shifting in the wake of Covid.) Now, these viruses are roaring back and hitting a burned-out healthcare system that’s spent three years treating Covid infections. 

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Photograph: Getty Images

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