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Edibles are nice. But they do require patience. Until now.

Say hello to Quick Hits from five. These fast-acting THC gummies are engineered to hit in ten minutes or less. Yes, you read that right. Ten. Minutes. Think about it. You can finish up that DoorDash order, pop a gummy, and feel the vibe before your meal arrives. Genius.

How’d they do it?

Thanks to a new delivery tech that’s lightyears ahead of your old-school edible, five is speeding up the high and ditching the guesswork. Each gummy packs 15mg of premium THC, infused with strain-specific terpene blends for a high that actually feels familiar, just quicker. Whether you’re a fan of sativa or something perfectly hybrid, there’s a gummy with your name on it.

The high? Familiar, balanced, and unmistakably real. The vibe? O.G. strains, new-age speed. Think the heady calm of Blue Dream or the creative spark of Pineapple Express. Only now, you’ll know exactly when it’s coming. Immediately.

Even better? You can skip the dispensary lines and awkward cash-only transactions. Quick Hits are legally shippable, a few clicks away, and start at just $26.24 for a 10-pack. That’s because we’ve unlocked a secret discount for you. Shhh.

Whether you’re a seasoned edible loyalist or a curious newcomer who hates waiting, Quick Hits isn’t just a convenience. It’s an edible revelation.

Hits hard. Hits fast. No waiting. 

Buy now at five CBD

Photo by Vanessa.

My favorite kind of bar is one that serves snacks: peanuts, potato chips, an emergency hot dog, whatever. They’re almost as important as the drinks. At the cozy Brooklyn spot Dynaco, there’s usually a freshly made cake behind the bar. Recently, while my girlfriend and I played cards, I had a slice I hadn’t yet tried: a gingery chocolate cake with a whipped bouffant of cream cheese frosting. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

Let’s just assume I won this round of Spite & Malice.

Eventually, I tracked down Catherine Lloyd Burns, whose husband started the bar with his brother back in 2013. Catherine bakes all the cakes for Dynaco and fielded an email I’m sure she’s seen many times over the years. “Lots of people have asked for the recipe and I haven’t given it out yet,” she wrote me. “I don’t know if I ever will.” But! She was still very helpful. She told me she started with a Nigella recipe and then “did some altering because I don’t like to just make someone else’s cakes.” But “that particular Nigella cake is perfect” and, she promised, I would be very happy with it.

The next weekend, I grabbed a Guinness from the bodega and gave it a spin. I can’t even remember the last time I baked a cake, so making one is an indicator of how much I loved Catherine’s cake at Dynaco and also how approachable Nigella’s recipe is. Catherine is right about Nigella’s cake; it’s really, really good. Because I’m no star baker, mine looked a little like a children’s bake sale cake, but that did not detract from how good it tasted. The next morning, I had a slice with my coffee.

Breakfast of champions.

As I was sampling the Nigella cake, I wondered if one of Catherine’s modifications was adding a bit of fresh ginger, but both cakes are fantastic. I’m definitely going to make it again. And probably head to Dynaco to see what seasonal cake they’re serving now.

If you’d like to make it yourself, here’s the recipe (NYTimes gift link). “This cake is magnificent in its damp blackness,” says Nigella. “I wanted to make a cream cheese frosting, but it is perfectly acceptable to leave the cake un-iced: in fact, it tastes gorgeous plain.”

Have you ever tracked down a recipe from a restaurant? Or tried to reverse-engineer one? Thank you, Catherine, for tipping us off to this great recipe. New York non-bakers can order one of Catherine’s stout cakes by emailing her directly. It’s $80 and, as I’ve said, wildly delicious.

P.S. The best strawberry cake, Dorie Greenspan’s everything cake, and pound cake with apples, French style.

(Top photo by Vanessa of Kitchen Feasts.)

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (English) Review {3.0/5} & Review Rating

Director: Len Wiseman

From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina Movie Review Synopsis:
FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: BALLERINA is the story of a woman seeking revenge. The young child Eve Macarro (Victoria Comte) lives with her father Javier (David Castañeda), a Ruska Roma. Her deceased mother was a part of the Cult and its members want to take away Eve with them. Javier is not okay with the idea and hence, he’s hiding along with Eve. One day, the Cult members, under the leadership of the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), locate Eve and Javier. Eve escapes while Javier is killed. New York Continental owner Winston (Ian McShane) finds Eve and brings her to the Ruska Roma. Eve meets their Director (Anjelica Huston) and agrees to join them. 12 years later, Eve (Ana de Armas) is now a trained ballerina as well as an assassin. Now that she’s ready, she asks the Director about the Cult so that she can find the Chancellor and take revenge. However, there exists a longstanding truce between the Cult and the Ruska Roma. Hence, the Director forbids Eve from going after the Cult. Eve anyway decides to find them, leading to chaos. What happens next forms the rest of the film.

From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina Movie Story Review:
Shay Hatten’s story is cliched. But Shay Hatten’s screenplay is better and keeps viewers engrossed. Shay Hatten’s dialogues are conversational. Sadly, there are no subtitles available which will make it difficult for a section of the viewers to understand certain dialogues.

Len Wiseman’s direction is pacy. He brings a certain freshness to the series of JOHN WICK as his execution style is different from that of Chad Stahelski. The training sequence stands out and the fact that it’s a female character adds a nice touch. Len reserves the best for the second half. The manner in which the town of Hallstatt is depicted and the way its residents are portrayed are very novel.

On the flipside, things get repetitive. Though the direction style is different, the pattern is still the same. Hence, one knows what to expect, more or less. The characters of Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus) and Lena (Catalina Sandino Moreno) are not properly fleshed out. Lastly, the first half is just alright. A scene starts all of a sudden, depicting that Eve has killed tons of men in a washroom. Though it makes for a unique watch, it is also abrupt.

From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina Movie Review Performances:
Ana de Armas adds a lot to the lead character with her bravura performance and star power. This is no easy role by any stretch and yet, she pulls it off effortlessly. Keanu Reeves (John Wick) is to this film what Salman Khan is to PATHAAN or Ajay Devgn is to SIMMBA. He is superb in a supporting role and his scenes will be greeted with whistles and hoots. Gabriel Byrne is subtle and very effective as the villain. Ian McShane, Anjelica Huston, the late Lance Reddick (Charon), Abraham Popoola (Frank; arms dealer) and Juliet Doherty (Tatiana) lend able support. Norman Reedus and Catalina Sandino Moreno do well but are let down by writing. Waris Ahluwalia (The Eye, who oversees the town) leaves a huge mark due to his character and Indian connection. David Castañeda, Victoria Comte, Choi Soo-young (Katla Park), Jung Doo-hong (Il Seong) and Ava McCarthy (Ella Pine) do well in small roles.

From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina movie music and other technical aspects:
Tyler Bates and Joel J Richard’s score is in sync with the JOHN WICK series and is catchy. Romain Lacourbas’s cinematography compliments the goings-on. The town of Hallstatt is beautifully depicted. The action is a high point and is quite entertaining and also gory in places. The one that takes place in the Hallstatt eatery and the one involving the flamethrower stand out. Philip Ivey’s production design is first-rate while Tina Kalivas’s costumes are stylish. Jason Ballantine’s editing is slick.

From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina Movie Review Conclusion:
On the whole, FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: BALLERINA organically takes forward the much-loved franchise and works due to the gripping second half, action and the performances of Ana de Armas and Keanu Reeves.

To achieve this balance, Hin says, that they lead with the idea of “locality” and, transofrming elemants of production and life in the village into a series of symbols. Through elementary, geometric forms, the identity illustrates rural scenes – whether it be food stuffs, animals, gatherings, architecture, or landscape – and reimagines their natural hues through a more saturated lens. “These elements are presented in the form of abstract illustrations,” Him notes, preserving “rural memories” in a simple, modern light. Hin says that Guanzhong is also informally known as the ‘Capital of Carbohydrates’, and so pasta features as a key visual element throughout, reflecting the towns culture of food and the warmth it can provide in contrast to hectic urban activity. 

While going for a modern overall look, there are nods to more traditional techniques. One such is the soft, subtle application of hand-rendered texture to modern typography, an effect that Hin suggests “symbolises the interaction between villagers”, contrasting the modern, mathematical illustrations. The narratives behind Untitled Macao’s illustrations doesn’t stop there. In fact, the illustrative system is exactly that – a system – with different stroke styles interpreting different things. “For example, triangles and circles are combined to represent stacked grains, and smooth lines are used to outline the contours of animals,” Hin says. “The composition breaks the traditional symmetrical pattern, adopting irregular typesetting and dynamic visual flow to guide the viewer’s gaze to wander across the image.”

Untitled Macao’s festival identity achieves a welcoming and warm balance between a brand that feels appropriate while, at the same time, surprising – culminating in something that challenges preconceptions of rural life and rural living without diminishing it. “The core of the design is not to challenge people’s inherent perception of nature,” Hin explains, “but to break the stereotype that ‘rural culture is equal to simple realism.’” Throughout Guanzhong Mangba Arts Festival’s geometric kaleidoscope of saturated hues and contemporary typography, the studio has reinterpreted an arcadian lifestyle but, importantly, as Hin says, the identity “preserves its original artistic tension while giving it contemporary aesthetic value.”

In response to any written document, like the one you are reading right now, it is reasonable to ask who wrote it and can therefore authorize its content. To resolve this, you will probably try to learn a bit about the author, for their identity can help determine the truthfulness of what is in the document. Given, for instance, that my bio tells you I’m a professor of communication studies at an American university, you may assume I’m well-placed to write on the disruption caused by large language models (as I intend to here) — even, perhaps, that what I say is more or less to be trusted. After all, you’ve identified the author and found him to hold some authority on the subject.

But when a text is written or generated by a large language model like ChatGPT, Claude or DeepSeek, the view of the author becomes clouded. Technically speaking, an algorithm wrote the text, but a human had to prompt the algorithm. So who or what is the author? Is it the algorithm, or the human, or a joint venture involving both? Why does it even matter?

Since ChatGPT was launched in 2022, much commentary has been dedicated to bemoaning the end of the human writer. Either LLMs will overtake the act of writing entirely, or humans will cede too many of their own creative powers to them. The advance of this technology will “render us wordless, thoughtless, self-less,” one journalist lamented last year. But, he emphasised, it is not only writers who will be impacted. “If AI does indeed supplant human writing, what will humans — both readers and writers — lose? The stakes feel tremendous, dwarfing any previous wave of automation.”

I hold a different view. LLMs may well signal the end of the author, but this isn’t a loss to be lamented. In fact, these machines can be liberating: They free both writers and readers from the authoritarian control and influence of this thing we call the “author.”

If you were to ask someone what an author is, they would most probably answer that it is someone who writes a book or some other text and is therefore responsible for what it says. They could reel off the names of people we identify as such: William Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, maybe even this guy David Gunkel. But this understanding of an author is not some kind of universal truth that has existed from the beginning of time. Rather, it is a modern conception. The “author” as we now know it comes from somewhere in the not-so-distant past; it has a history. 

The French literary critic Roland Barthes, in his 1967 essay “The Death of The Author,” traced the roots of this now-commonplace idea to the modern period in Europe, beginning around the mid-16th century. Before then, people did of course write texts — but the idea of vesting responsibility and authority in a singular person was not common practice. In fact, many of the great and influential works of literature — the folklore, myth and religious scripture that we still read today — have circulated in human culture without needing or assigning them to an author. 

The modern period, however, spawned a number of related intellectual and cultural developments in Europe that centered around what Michel Foucault later called a “privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas.” In rejecting subservience to the papacy, the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century birthed an individualized faith. Then, in the following century, philosopher René Descartes built his rationalist philosophy on the statement “I think, therefore I am,” making all knowledge dependent on the certainty of self-conscious thought. Accompanying these innovations was the concept of personal property as an individual right, ensured and protected by the state.

The concept of the author, as both Barthes and Foucault demonstrate, emerges from the confluence of these historically important innovations. But this does not mean that the author as the locus of literary authority is just a subject for theory — it also evolved to be a practical matter of law. In 18th-century England and its breakaway North American colonies, the author became the responsible party in a new kind of property law: copyright. The idea of an author being the legitimate owner of a literary work was first introduced in London not out of some idealistic dedication to the concept of artistic integrity, but in response to an earlier technological disruption that permitted the free circulation and proliferation of textual documents: the printing press. 

As Sven Birkerts explains in the book “The Gutenberg Elegies”: “The idea of individual authorship — that one person would create an original work and have historical title to it — did not really become entrenched in the public mind until print superseded orality as the basis of cultural communication.” Once mechanically generated copies of text became easily accessible, and it became possible to make money from them, it was important to identify the author — or, rather, to be identified as the author. Thus, the proper name of the author is not only critical in terms of the origin of a text and its significance and attribution — it’s necessary for commercial transactions and cutting checks. 

The advent of what we now understand as “an author” had several important consequences for modern literary theory. As Barthes wrote: “When the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained.’” Authority came to be seen not in the material of the writing — i.e., in the words themselves — but in the original thoughts, intentions and character of the individual who wrote it. 

Because of this, the primary task of the reader became one of penetrating the surface of the writing, finding the authorial voice behind it, and then comprehending what they originally intended with it. Following this formulation, modern critics and philosophers agreed with Descartes that “the reading of good books” meant “having a conversation with the most distinguished men of past ages.” (The use of the gender-exclusive “men” in this context is not insignificant — the author, like so many of the other authority figures during this period, was usually a white guy.) 

This conceptualization of writing as a medium of expression or communication has a deep intellectual reach and a well-established historical foothold. In Aristotle’s doctrine of signs and their meanings, the written word was characterized as a symbol of mental experiences — in other words, what you write represents or expresses what’s on your mind. This was further theorized in the science of communication, formalized by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in the mid-20th century, who gave us a unidirectional model that is taught in every introductory course on the subject: source, transmitter, channel, receiver, message,

Thus, or so the argument goes, the best writings are those that speak clearly and directly so a reader can access, understand and comprehend what the author had in mind. The writing should become virtually transparent and permit the unimpeded flow of information from the mind of the author to the mind of the reader.

If the author as the principal figure of literary authority and accountability came into existence at a particular time and place, there could conceivably also be a point at which it ceased to fulfill this role. That is what Barthes signaled in his now-famous essay. The “death of the author” does not mean the end of the life of any particular individual or even the end of human writing, but the termination and closure of the author as the authorizing agent of what is said in and by writing. Though Barthes never experienced an LLM, his essay nevertheless accurately anticipated our current situation. LLMs produce written content without a living voice to animate and authorize their words. Text produced by LLMs is literally unauthorized — a point emphasized by the U.S. Court of Appeals, which recently upheld a decision denying authorship to AI. 

Criticism of tools like ChatGPT tends to follow on from this. They have been described as “stochastic parrots” for the way they simply mimic human speech or repeat word patterns without understanding meaning. The ways in which they more generally disrupt the standard understanding of authorship, authority and the means and meaning of writing have clearly disturbed a great many people. But the story of how “the author” came into being shows us that the critics miss a key point: The authority for writing has always been a socially constructed artifice. The author is not a natural phenomenon. It was an idea that we invented to help us make sense of writing.

After the “death of the author,” therefore, everything gets turned around. Specifically, the meaning of a piece of writing is not something that can be guaranteed a priori by the authentic character or voice of the person who is said to have written it. Instead, meaning transpires in and from the experience of reading. It is through that process that readers discover (or better, “fabricate”) what they assume the author had wanted to say. 

This flipping of the script on literary theory alters the location of meaning-making in ways that overturn our standard operating presumptions. Previously, it had lain with the author who, it was assumed, had “something to say”; now, it is with the reader. When we read “Hamlet,” we are not able to access Shakespeare’s true intentions for writing it, so we find meaning by interpreting it (and then we project our interpretations back onto Shakespeare). In the process of our doing so, the authority that had been vested in the author is not just questioned, but overthrown. “Text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation,” wrote Barthes, “but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader. … A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” The death of the author, in other words, is the birth of the critical reader. 

This fundamental shift in the location of meaning-making also explains how LLM-generated content comes to have meaning. The critics are correct when they point out, for instance, that LLMs generate seemingly intelligible sequences of words but do not “truly comprehend the meaning behind” them because they “have no access to real-world, embodied referents.” But it would be impetuous to conclude that LLMs simply generate bullshit. 

Their writings are and can be meaningful. What they mean is something that comes about through the process of our reading them and then interpreting and evaluating them. But this is not specific to LLMs; instead, as Barthes already demonstrated, it is a defining characteristic of all writing — this essay included, since it is you, the reader, who has had to determine what it means. LLMs simply render all of this legible and obvious.

But there’s something bigger at play here. The advent of LLM AI also brings into question the concept of meaning itself. When I write the words “large language model,” it is assumed that those words stand for and refer to some real thing out there in the world, like the ChatGPT application. Words have meaning because someone, like an author, who we assume is an embodied human person with access to the real world, uses words to refer to and say something about things. This, after all, is what Aristotle was getting at when he said that language consists of signs that refer and defer to things. And the big problem with LLMs is that they lack this ability: They manipulate words without knowing (or caring) what those words refer to. 

But this seemingly common-sense view of how language works has been directly challenged by 20th-century innovations in structural linguistics, which considers language and meaning-making as a matter of difference situated within language itself. The dictionary provides perhaps the best illustration of this basic semiotic principle. In a dictionary, words come to have meaning by way of their relationship to other words. When you look up the word “tree,” you do not get a tree; you get other words — “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk,” and so forth. 

Words, therefore, do not exclusively come to have meaning by direct reference to things; words refer to other words. This is the meaning (or at least one of the meanings) of that famous statement associated with the notoriously difficult French theorist Jacques Derrida: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” or “There is nothing outside the text.” And this fact is especially true for LLMs as there is, quite literally, nothing outside the texts on which they have been trained and that they are prompted to generate. For LLMs, it’s words all the way down. 

Consequently, what has been offered as a criticism of LLM technology — that these algorithms only circulate different words without access to the real-world embodied referents — might not be the indictment critics think it is. LLMs are structuralist machines — they are practical actualizations of structural linguistic theory, where words have meaning not by reference to things but by referring and deferring to other words — and they thereby disrupt the standard operating presumptions of classical (Aristotelian) semiotics.

We should be critical of the promise and peril that LLMs present. After all, they and other forms of generative AI are powerful technologies whose impact on the world will be enormous. ChatGPT is not even three years old and already boasts half a billion weekly users; DeepSeek is one of the fastest-growing platforms worldwide. More will surely follow.  

But in responding to the ways in which these systems challenge how humans access, interpret and convey knowledge, linguists, philosophers and AI experts tend to simply reassert concepts of authorship and authority that have long since been undermined. And the problem is not that these traditional ways of thinking about writing have somehow failed to work in the face of recent innovations with LLMs. It’s quite the opposite. The problem is they work all too well, exerting their influence and authority over our thinking as if they were somehow normal, natural and beyond question.  

A large part of the reason for our misunderstanding of the significance of these machines is the way “artificial intelligence” is understood. Because of its nominal focus on “intelligence,” AI’s outputs are taken to either signify the actual presence of intelligent thought or, in cases where the device spits out nonsense or hallucinates, the lack thereof. Taking the generation of written content as a sign or symptom of intelligence has been the definition of AI since the time of Alan Turing’s imitation game. LLMs, however, produce intelligible textual content without intelligence (or without us knowing for sure whether there is intelligence inside the black box or not, which is actually worse). In doing so, they destabilize the rules of the game.

All this throws up something that has been missed in the frenzy over the technological significance of LLMs: They are philosophically significant. What we now have are things that write without speaking, a proliferation of texts that do not have, nor are beholden to, the authoritative voice of an author, and statements whose truth cannot be anchored in and assured by a prior intention to say something. 

From one perspective — a perspective that remains bound to the usual ways of thinking — this can only be seen as a threat and crisis, for it challenges our very understanding of what writing is, the state of literature and the meaning of truth or the means of speaking the truth. But from another, it is an opportunity to think beyond the limitations of Western metaphysics and its hegemony. 

LLMs do not threaten writing, the figure of the author, or the concept of truth. They only threaten a particular and limited understanding of what these ideas represent — one that is itself not some naturally occurring phenomenon but the product of a particular culture and philosophical tradition. Instead of being (mis)understood as signs of the apocalypse or the end of writing, LLMs reveal the terminal limits of the author function, participate in a deconstruction of its organizing principles, and open the opportunity to think and write differently.

But don’t take my word for it. Who or what am I? What authorizes me to assert and exercise this kind of authority over a text? How can you be certain that everything you just read is the product of a human author and not something generated by an LLM or some human-machine hybrid? 

You have no way of knowing for sure. And everything that could be done to resolve this suspicion, like pointing to my name, listing the details of my biography or even having me add a statement asserting that everything you have just read is “100% genuine human-generated content,” will ultimately be ineffectual. It will be so mainly because an LLM can generate exactly the same. No matter the assurances, there will always be room for reasonable doubt.

And that’s the point. The difficulty that has been assumed to be unique to LLM-generated content — that we have words without knowing for sure who or what authorizes what is being said through them — is already a defining condition of all forms of writing, this essay included. The LLM form of artificial intelligence is disturbing and disruptive, but not because it is a deviation or exception to that condition; instead, it exposes how it was always a fiction.

The Amazonian municipality of Caracaraí has 22,000 inhabitants and an overworked pharmacist named Samuel Andrade.

Andrade arrives at work at 8 a.m. to handle hundreds of prescriptions from free government clinics. Most days, he can’t get through all of them. He sometimes gets stuck for hours cross-checking drug databases to ensure nothing has been prescribed incorrectly by rural doctors. 

It is stressful work. He has to help the dozens of patients who line up at his dispensary every day, some of whom have traveled for days to get there. Sometimes he has to rush through prescriptions, and worries he will miss something dangerous.  

In April, Andrade welcomed a new assistant: artificial intelligence software that flags potentially problematic prescriptions and digs up the data to help him decide if they are safe. It has quadrupled his capacity to clear prescriptions, he told Rest of World. In the months since he started using the AI assistant, it has caught more than 50 errors, he said.

“It works instantly and uses digital rather than physical reports,” said the 34-year-old. 

Pharmacists in Brazil began testing the technology earlier this year. Its initial success suggests it could be a game changer for the country’s overburdened primary care system. 

The South American nation has the world’s most ambitious state-backed universal health-care program, by some measures. It offers health care to everyone, everywhere, for free — even to non-citizens. It strives to serve more than 200 million people, which means most of the tens of thousands of government facilities are overstretched, particularly in rural areas where there are fewer doctors and pharmacists. 

The pharmaceutical AI assistant was developed by a Brazilian nonprofit called NoHarm, established with grants from big tech firms including Google and Amazon. 

NoHarm was the brainchild of two smart siblings: Ana Helena, a pharmacist, and her brother Henrique Dias, a computer scientist. They began working on a tech fix for the nightmare of paperwork and research required of pharmacists, often over Sunday lunches at their family home in the southern city of Porto Alegre.

They built an open-source machine learning model trained on thousands of real-world examples. To train the software, NoHarm gathered anonymized patient data and historical prescriptions. The founders fed the algorithm thousands of real-world drug combinations, dosage errors, and adverse interactions. Over time, it learned to spot patterns that even experienced professionals might miss, Dias, also the company’s chief executive officer, told Rest of World. 

It can process hundreds of prescriptions at a time, identifying potential red flags, the company said. NoHarm is designed to support decision-making, not make decisions. 

“We provide a set of alerts, and the professional will evaluate them through the lens of the patient’s needs,” Dias said. 

Over the last seven years, NoHarm has received grants and donations of cloud services, software, and other support from Google, Oracle, Nvidia, Amazon, and the Gates Foundation. It charges private health-care facilities for its software while offering it to public-sector facilities at no cost. 

Brazil has been a latecomer to the AI party. While hospitals around the world have been adopting AI, only 1% of the more than 50,000 public health-care units in Brazil used it last year, according to a report from the Regional Center for Studies on the Development of the Information Society. 

“There are other actors ahead of us,” sociologist Rodrigo Brandão, an author of the Center’s report, told Rest of World. “We’re still learning to walk.” 

Brazil’s unified health system could, however, eventually give it an edge in developing AI for health care, as the country has a uniquely large and diverse database to use for training AI. Unlike countries with fragmented systems or privatized data, Brazil’s centralized records offer a rare opportunity to integrate both public and private data sets and test AI tools at scale.

“That’s very strategic for AI development,” said Brandão. Around 20 cities in the country’s poorest regions have begun using the NoHarm software. It is being adopted in the northeast and deep in the Amazon.

Caracaraí has become an unlikely early adopter. 

While the municipality spans the Amazon with an area larger than the Netherlands, its biggest settlement is a patch of single-story homes, a few stores, and mostly dirt roads. It is inhabited chiefly by fishing and farming families.

Many in the region are underemployed and rely on government relief funds to support their households. Many inhabitants live deep in the Amazon and must travel for days by boat to obtain their prescriptions.

Andrade works out of a small dispensary, filled with shelves and cabinets of various medications, piles of paperwork, and a computer. He hands out prescriptions through a small window to the long line of people who arrive every day. 

The patients often have a combination of chronic conditions that require multiple drugs, making pharmaceutical review complicated.

“Many things slip past our eyes, or we simply don’t know,” said Andrade. “The system lets us cross-check information much faster.”

Between checking and handing out prescriptions and managing inventory, he is overworked and exhausted most days. In his five years since moving to Caracaraí to serve as the main pharmacist for the region, he hasn’t had time to visit the other outposts in the municipality where drugs are distributed.

Until this year, much of his day was spent looking up information on drugs online to cross-check prescriptions. It was challenging, he said, given the unreliable internet and uncertainty about where to find the latest information. 

Today, he just has to log in, and the software lists all the prescriptions he has to handle. It clears the ones that are safe and flags those that need further investigation. 

NoHarm highlights potential problems with labels like “medicine interaction” and “overdose.” It provides links to the data sources on which the warnings are based.

The NoHarm system has only been used in Amazonian towns for a few months now. It sometimes fails to connect to the internet to come up with answers. 

Some experts are also concerned that health professionals aren’t prepared for the rapid adoption of AI. Critics argue there is a lack of training on how these assistants operate, and workers may not know how to identify bugs, hallucinations, or errors in the software. 

“There’s a challenge for not only learning how to use this tech, but also on how to direct IT professionals to improve it, since it demands continuous adjustments and tunings,” said Brandão.

NoHarm says its AI assistant is designed for transparency: Each flagged alert includes a reference to a medical source, and pharmacists are encouraged to override suggestions based on patients’ needs. The cultural shift toward trusting AI to assist in health care decision-making may take time.

The startup said the software is still a work in progress and is continually improving. Its original training was mostly based on prescriptions from hospitals in the south of the country, which has different illnesses than Caracaraí. Certain tropical diseases, such as malaria, which are very common in Amazonian areas, are rare in Porto Alegre, the town where NoHarm is based.

“Our algorithms may have a ‘disease bias’ where it won’t detect adverse events more common in the north than the usual ones from the south,” said Dias. 

The algorithms can be quickly updated as soon as the AI assistant is trained on data from new regions and feedback from local pharmacists, he said. 

Nailon de Moraes, a rural physician, told Rest of World he appreciates the extra support with AI. He handles boatloads of villagers every day in a small clinic near the Branco River, which runs through Caracaraí. Often, they are in desperate need of medication.

The NoHarm software recently flagged four of his prescriptions as potentially dangerous. He had prescribed too high a dose of one medicine and didn’t realize that the two medicines he prescribed to another patient needed to be taken at separate times in the day. 

NoHarm stopped him from hurting his already ill patients, said de Moraes. 

“This job is a lot to handle, especially for those of us who are younger,” and less experienced, he said.

By Charlie Sawyer

Published Jun 13, 2025 at 12:28 PM

Reading time: 2 minutes

Images courtesy of Instagram

After being detained for six months during his battle for legal entry to the US, Andry Hernández Romero was awaiting his asylum hearing when he was deported to CECOT, a mega prison in El Salvador.

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Members of the public and lawmakers are currently demanding information regarding the deportation of asylum-seeker Andry Hernández Romero. A hairdresser by trade, Hernández Romero had fled his home country of Venezuela in 2024 and was seeking safety in the US after facing threats and discrimination for being gay. Despite there being no legitimate evidence that Hernández Romero posed a threat to US security, the Trump administration sent the 31-year-old to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious maximum security prison.

According to Pink News, Robert Garcia, a California Congressman and strong critic of Trump’s fascist approach to immigration policies, has led a coalition of Democrats to put pressure on the State department to provide proof that Hernández Romero is still alive.

A letter, which was officially signed by 52 lawmakers on Monday 9 June 2025, called on the government to “conduct a wellness check on Mr Hernández Romero, facilitate his access to legal counsel and immediately facilitate his release.”

After being detained for six months during his battle for legal entry to the US, Hernández Romero was awaiting his asylum hearing when he was deported to CECOT—pinned by the Trump administration as a member of the notorious Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. The openly gay make-up artist and hair dresser did not have a criminal record and was identified as having gang affiliations solely due to certain distinguishable tattoos.

Specifically, as reported by The Guardian, Hernández Romero was singled out by immigration enforcement due to the two crowns he had tattooed on his wrists. “Detainee Hernandez ports [sic] tattooed ‘crowns’ that are consistent with those of a Tren de Aragua member,” an agent at California’s Otay Mesa detention centre claimed.

However, family members have tried to explain that these tattoos actually symbolise commemoration for the annual Three Kings Day celebrations that take place in Hernández Romero’s hometown.

Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, told crowds who had gathered on 6 June to demonstrate in support of Hernández Romero: “Andry is a son, a brother. He’s an actor, a makeup artist. He is a gay man who fled Venezuela because it was not safe for him to live as his authentic self. We believe at this moment that he sits in a torture prison, a gulag in El Salvador. We say ‘believe’ because we have not had any proof of life for him since the day he was put on a U.S. government-funded plane, forcibly disappeared.”

“Andry is not alone. He is one of more than 235 men who disappeared and were rendered to CECOT with no due process. […] Many of them, like Andry, were in the middle of their asylum cases. They were denied their day in court. In an attempt to erase their very existence, they were sent to suffer in a prison where officials in El Salvador have bragged that people only live in a coffin,” she continued.

Pressure regarding Hernández Romero’s status mounted after Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem refused to discuss the 31-year-old’s status. Garcia, persistent in attempting to force an answer out of Noem, stated: “You and the president have the ability to check that Andry is alive and not being harmed. Would you commit to at least looking and asking El Salvador if he is alive?”

Noem, evidently unphased, answered: “This is a question that is best asked to the president and the government of El Salvador.” The video is available to watch on X.

There is no update on Hernández Romero’s wellbeing or safety at this current time.

Melissa Hortman, a former Minnesota House speaker who championed the passage of ambitious progressive policies in the state, was assassinated early Saturday in what Gov. Tim Walz called “an act of targeted political violence.” 

Hortman, 55, who was elected to the Minnesota House in 2004, became the speaker of the state’s House of Representatives in 2019 and, during her first few years, presided over the chamber under a divided government. In 2022, when the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party won full control of the state government, Hortman played a key role in shaping what legislation the chamber would prioritize, working closely with Walz to enact a slew of progressive policies that included major investments in children and families, as well as expanded protections for abortion and gender-affirming care. She left the post in March.

A man posing as a police officer killed Hortman and her husband, Mark, at their home in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park in what Walz described at a news conference as an apparent “politically motivated assassination.” DFL state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot by the same gunman at their home in nearby Champlin. Walz said they were out of surgery and was “cautiously optimistic” that they would make a recovery.  

“Our state lost a great leader and I lost the greatest of friends,” Walz said. “Speaker Hortman was someone who served the people of Minnesota with grace, compassion, humour and a sense of service. She was a formidable public servant, a fixture and a giant in Minnesota. She woke up every day determined to make this state a better place. She is irreplaceable and will be missed by so many.”  

Hours after the attacks, an “extensive manhunt” remained underway for the suspect, who impersonated a law enforcement officer to enter Hortman’s home, Brooklyn Park chief of police Mark Bruley told reporters in a news conference Saturday. The suspect fled on foot, leaving behind his car, where, according to CNN, law enforcement officials found a list containing about 70 names, including abortion providers and advocates, as well as lawmakers.

Here’s a look at Hortman’s legislative history and legacy on key policies:

Abortion:

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in June 2022, Minnesota emerged as a key access point for abortion as other Midwestern states moved to ban the procedure. 

“There was a simmering rage that did not stop,” Hortman said after the 2022 election, according to Minnesota Public Radio. “I was hopeful that voters would take that energy and put it on the ballot and vote for Democrats. And thankfully they did.”

In 2023, Hortman led the Minnesota House in passing the PRO Act, legislation that codified the legality of abortion and other forms of reproductive health care in the state. In subsequent bills, the Minnesota legislature eliminated other restrictions on abortion, passed protections for abortion providers, boosted state funding for clinics providing abortion and eliminated funding for anti-abortion counseling centers.     

LGBTQ+ rights: 

The Minnesota legislature passed a bill banning gay conversion therapy for minors in the state, which Walz signed into law in April 2023. Lawmakers passed additional legislation with protections for gender-affirming care that made Minnesota a “trans refuge state.”  

Paid leave: 

In a 2024 interview with the Minnesota Reformer, Hortman cited a paid family and medical leave program as “the most rewarding” piece of legislation she passed. The legislature also enacted paid sick leave and paid safe leave for survivors of intimate partner violence, to help them find temporary housing or seek relief in court. 

“An average person can take time, whether it’s to take care of somebody who has cancer or to take care of a new baby,” she said. “People shouldn’t have to choose between a job and recovering from illness.”

Child care and education: 

Hortman and Walz passed major investments in child care and early childhood education aimed at lowering child poverty and hunger. These included providing free school breakfasts and lunches, expanding the child tax credit and increasing funding for early childhood scholarships, child care provider stabilization funds and child care for low-income families. Lawmakers also enacted a program making tuition at Minnesota’s public colleges free for families earning less than $80,00 a year.   

“From the word ‘go,’ you can see that children were top of mind,” Hortman told the Reformer. “Gov. Tim Walz gave a very inspiring state of the state address in 2023. He was very clear that his administration was focused on reducing childhood poverty. The DFL House and the DFL Senate said, ‘Governor, we are right there with you.’”

In 2024, Minnesota lawmakers passed legislation that prohibited banning books from local schools and libraries on the basis of ideological or content objections. 

Gun safety and criminal justice: 

After the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, Hortman worked across the aisle to negotiate police reforms. In 2023, the Minnesota legislature passed the Restore the Vote Act, which restored voting rights to formerly incarcerated Minnesotans upon completion of their sentences. Hortman was also an advocate for gun violence prevention . In 2023, Walz signed a bill that included gun safety measures like universal background checks and extreme risk protection orders, or “red flag” laws. In 2024, the Minnesota legislature passed a gun safety bill that, among other things,  made straw purchases of firearms a felony. 

“We clearly have a gun violence problem in this country, and there are things we can do about it, and we did them,” Hortman told the Reformer.

You don’t have to buy Dad more stuff this Father’s Day. Chances are, he doesn’t need another tie, mug, or multitool. Instead of giving him something that’ll end up in a drawer, give him an experience or service that’ll make his life a little sharper, smoother, or more enjoyable.

Here are six non-material gifts your old man might actually appreciate — and as a bonus, they’re all things you can grab at the last minute.

1. Professional Car Detailing

When you’re a dad with kids, your car’s interior takes a beating. Everything gets all scuffed up from kids putting their feet everywhere, and the backseat turns into a graveyard of crumbs and half-eaten snacks. One of life’s underrated pleasures is climbing into a freshly detailed car. I treat myself to a professional detail a couple times a year and am an evangelist for its ROI. I use a mobile service, and would recommend you do likewise when gifting the service to Dad; they’ll show up and restore his vehicle to like-new condition right in the driveway.

2. A Professional Massage

Whether your dad works a physically demanding job or spends his days hunched over a desk, he could use a massage to work out his body’s kinks. While a basic Swedish massage can be relaxing, consider getting Dad a gift certificate for a masseuse who specializes in sports massages. A sports massage feels less foo-fooey, and more importantly, it targets real physical issues — loosening tight muscles, increasing mobility, and leaving Dad feeling noticeably better.

3. Knife Sharpening Service

Knife sharpening is one of those to-dos dads tend to perpetually put off, even though getting it done perceptibly enhances your life. So gift Dad a professional knife sharpening service. There are even mobile ones that will come right to your house and sharpen everything from kitchen knives to pocket knives to axes to mower blades right in your driveway. Once the job is done, Dad will find everything from chopping onions to chopping wood more enjoyable.

4. A One-on-One Skill Lesson

Has your dad ever said, “I’ve always wanted to learn ____” but never gotten around to it? Help him finally make it happen with a one-on-one lesson from a pro. Whether it’s a BBQ class with a local pitmaster, a private fly-fishing session, a blacksmithing workshop, a tactical pistol course, or a basic woodworking class, there’s a hands-on experience out there to match just about any interest.

5. A Barbershop Shave

An old-school straight razor shave with all the trimmings is the male grooming equivalent of the pedicure. The hot towel on your face, the warm lather . . . take it from me, the experience is so dang relaxing. And just a unique, memorable experience all around. Buy Dad a gift card for a straight razor shave at a local barbershop, and he’ll leave the chair feeling like a million bucks.

6. Tickets to an Event

Is your dad a baseball fan? A diehard Springsteen guy? Get him tickets to an event that he’ll really enjoy. And then go with him to it. The thing fathers want most is to spend time with their children — even when they’re grown.

Personally, my dream is for my kids to score me backstage passes to a Killers’ concert. A dad can dream . . .

Bonus: Books are material objects, but they’re more experiences than “stuff.” If you’re looking for a great book to gift Dad — especially one who’s into history — check out these nine suggestions.