Pen Thoughts

I received today a newsletter from Igor Pogany, from MyAIAdvantage about the New York Times suing OpenAI. I met Igor recently in a capacity building organized by the YMCA World Alliance , and he was introducing Chat GPT's unbelievable abilities. The truth is, it feels illegal for anyone to own such an assistance. I spent 20 years of my life developing written communication skills and my ability to articulate plans strategically and tactically. In the hands of way less qualified individuals, Chat GPT can out skill me in producing better-quality papers in a fraction of the time. But let's go back to the main story. ​A federal lawsuit filed by The New York Times accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of copyright infringement, claiming ChatGPT was illegally trained on Times data. If the Times' demands are met, it will spell the end for ChatGPT. For months, attorneys negotiated a licensing agreement that would compensate the Times for the unauthorized use of their content. Recently the

  Valarie Kaur is an American activist, documentary filmmaker, lawyer, educator, and faith leader. She is the founder of the Revolutionary Love Project . Kaur's debut book, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love was published in June 2020. I was impressed by her description of "listening" and wanted to share her views on my blog: "Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear. When I really want to hear another person’s story, I try to leave my preconceptions at the door and draw close to their telling. I am always partially listening to the thoughts in my own head when others are speaking, so I consciously quiet my thoughts and begin to listen with my senses. Empathy is cognitive and emotional—to inhabit another person’s view of the world is to feel the world with them. But I also know that it’s okay if I don’t feel very much for them at all. I just need to feel safe enough to stay curious. The most critical pa

In May 2021,  Louis Charbonneau  a United Nations Director, published in the Foreign Policy Focus  on  How the UN can help end Israeli Apartheid and persecution ;  It was one of the most vocally direct condemnations of the Israeli occupation and the atrocities they are committing day in and day out, violating human rights all over the chart. It was surprising for me to read direct messages, holding the Israeli government the responsibilities for Palestinian suffering, an alien declaration from UN officials. Surprising statements were: "The world should stop pretending that these crimes aren’t happening. It should also not tolerate depriving millions of Palestinians of their fundamental rights in order to preserve the possibility of a peace deal that isn’t coming anytime soon." he continues with " The crime requires three elements: an intention to maintain a system of domination, systematic oppression, and inhumane acts committed as part of that project." " Hum

I recently had the chance to read about  Richard Hamming , American mathematicians who have countless applications on the evolution of computing technologies, an area that interests me since I was a software engineering student. one of his quotes is really intriguing and inspiring for teachers: "Teachers should prepare the student for the student's future, not for the teacher's past." #students   #education   #future   #teachers   #computing

It is amazing watching this video; I rewound it so many times; if it has to be a scientific observation, it will be a piece of anecdotal evidence that music has a unique quality to be the actual universal language and not math. and maybe that the string theory is correct; This video has deepened my belief that we are, as human beings, more than we appear to be and the connectivity underneath is on so many levels!

Sometimes I enjoy flipping my notebooks to read some quotes I registered from different authors or articles; today, I stumbled against an article quoting Morgan Housel , a columnist at Wall Street and an author as far as I know. I never had the chance to read anything for him though. The quotes were about finding the balance between optimism and pessimism; I guess it is the perfect timing for my Lebanese peers to read this out; here you go: "Optimism is usually defined as a belief that things will go well. But that's incomplete. Sensible optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favour, and over time things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between is filled with misery. And in fact, you know it will be filled with misery. You can be optimistic that the long-term growth trajectory is up and to the right, but equally sure that the road between now and then is filled with landmines, and always will be. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.&qu