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WordPress Happiness Engineer Makes My Day!
It was beginning to look like I was probably not going to get human assistance with managing my new blog theme, but the WordPress Happiness Engineer saved the day! By the way, after I switched, I couldn’t find my old classic theme listed anywhere. So, even if I wanted to flip back to it, I…
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All That Digital News
I guess you have to be a certain age to develop the habit of doomscrolling. I’m not minimizing the problem. I just can’t see how anybody gets into it. I’m talking about digital news websites. It’s a tableau of yawners every day. It’s full of models, goggle-eyed golden retrievers, and ads for knuckle removers (“Do…
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AI Chatbots and Psychiatry: Embrace or Dislodge?
I’ve just finished reading a couple of online articles about Chatbot use by patients who then present either to psychiatrists or psychotherapists (not that they can’t be one and the same!) and I’m a little puzzled. The title of my blog post came partly from what my wife, Sena, always says about Artificial Intelligence—which is…
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Dave Barry Beats TV
I’ve been sitting here reading Dave Barry’s book, “Best State Ever: A Florida Man Defends His Homeland.” It was published in 2016 and every time I read something from it, I laugh my fool head off. I used to have more than 20 of Barry’s non-fiction books. Now I have only this one. The others…
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The Case of the Loose SD Memory Card Switch
This is not an April Fools joke, just to let you know. I just returned the second of two SD memory cards for our Nikon camera this morning. I returned the first one about a week ago. I got refunds. These cards are expensive and can set you back a hundred bucks or more. They…
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Replace Sycophantic AI with Marvin the Paranoid Android?
I found the perfect JAMA article explaining that sycophancy is programmed into Artificial Intelligence (AI) therapy chatbots. This reminded me of Marvin the paranoid android (“Life! Don’t talk to me about life!”) in the book series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. Marvin is an incredibly depressed robot who would never make…
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Confabulation in Artificial Intelligence
I saw an excellent post on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Dr. George Dawson’s post today, “The Problems With AI Are More Readily Apparent.” He mentions AI producing confabulations which are sometimes called hallucinations in AI. I distinguish hallucinations from confabulations because the former are sensory or perceptual problems while confabulations are making things up. In…
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See Me at the Neckademy Awards About This Neck Massager
Sena bought some device for neck and shoulder massage called the Shiatsu cordless heat massager today. She tried it and then wanted me to try it. I’m not up for massagers of any kind, especially after seeing the extraterrestrial massage torturer I posted about early this month, “So, Is This Anything?” She didn’t want it…
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New Do it Yourself (more or less) Electrotherapy for Depression at Home!
OK, so the title is a little provocative; on the other hand, this is my take on a legitimate treatment for depression that was just approved by the FDA only last week. A company called Flow Neuroscience is marketing the newly approved FL-100 device for treatment of depression and their website definitely has their marketing…
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When it Comes to AI, What Are We Really Talking About?
I’ve been reading about artificial intelligence (AI) in general and its healthcare applications. I tried searching the web in general about it and got the message: “An AI Overview is not available for this search.” I’m ambivalent about that message. There are a couple of web articles, one of which I read twice in its…
Go Retire Psychiatrist 