Arvind's Newsletter

1.Extended range forecasts by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) and Skymet Weather suggest that monsoon rains in the Indian hinterland may be patchy until the first week of July.

Skymet Weather's forecast indicates that central and northwest India could experience "extremely" and "severely" dry conditions until July 6. The "extremely"dry conditions is explained as rainfall 60% or less than normal and rain deficiency between -20% and -59% respectively.

Meanwhile, IMD's forecast also predicts patchy rain coverage from June 30 to July 6. The deficiency in rainfall since June 1 stands at 54% for the country, with variations across different regions.

2.How noise could take years off your life, reports this article from the New York Times.
The world has plenty of noise we can’t tune out — shrilling sirens, barking dogs, blazing jets and clacking jackhammers — all of which affects us more than we might think. A growing body of research suggests that chronic noise is an unrecognised health threat.
Unpleasant noises are relayed to the stress detection centre in your brain, and they can trigger a cascade of reactions that over time can lead to inflammation, hypertension and plaque buildup in arteries — increasing the risk of heart disease, heart attacks and stroke.

3.Humans are biased. Generative AI is worse.
Generative AI could transform society, but the human biases the technology can amplify may do more harm than just perpetuating stereotypes, opines an article from Business Week.

Stable Diffusion creates images using artificial intelligence, in response to written prompts. Like many AI models, what it creates may seem plausible on its face but is actually a distortion of reality.

To gauge the magnitude of biases in generative AI, Bloomberg used Stable Diffusion to generate thousands of images related to job titles and crime. We prompted the text-to-image model to create representations of workers for 14 jobs — 300 images each for seven jobs that are typically considered "high-paying" in the US and seven that are considered "low-paying" — plus three categories related to crime. Read the findings of the investigation in the article below.

4. The Binge Purge: TV’s streaming model is broken, argues this article from Vulture.
   "The high-stakes Writers Guild of America strike has focused attention on Hollywood’s labor unrest, but the really systemic issue is streaming’s busted math. There may be no problem more foundational than the way the system monetises its biggest hits: It doesn’t."

   Director Steven Soderbergh explains: "The entire industry has moved from a world of Newtonian economics into a world of quantum economics, where two things that seem to be in opposition can be true at the same time: You can have a massive hit on your platform, but it’s not actually doing anything to increase your platform’s revenue. It’s absolutely conceivable that the streaming subscription model is the crypto of the entertainment business. Read full article at end of page.
   
   5.AI Prompt Engineering Isn’t the Future
   Despite the buzz surrounding it, the prominence of prompt engineering may be fleeting opines this article from the Harvard Business Review. A more enduring and adaptable skill will keep enabling us to harness the potential of generative AI?

   It is called problem formulation — the ability to identify, analyse, and delineate problems
   Prompt engineering focuses on crafting the optimal textual input by selecting the appropriate words, phrases, sentence structures, and punctuation. 
   In contrast, problem formulation emphasises defining the problem by delineating its focus, scope, and boundaries. Prompt engineering requires a firm grasp of a specific AI tool and linguistic proficiency while problem formulation necessitates a comprehensive understanding of the problem domain and ability to distill real-world issues.

The fact is, without a well-formulated problem, even the most sophisticated prompts will fall short. However, once a problem is clearly defined, the linguistics nuances of a prompt become tangential to the solution.