Children are naturally curious about the world around them. When Chase Hansen was only 4 years old, he encountered homeless people for the first time while shopping with his dad at an outdoor mall in Salt Lake City, Nevada. It's no wonder that he had a lot of questions.

"Chase looked at me and said, 'Dad, who are these people? Why don't they have a place to stay?' " John Hansen recalled. "After I explained that they had run into hard times and were homeless, I knew that we were looking at an educational opportunity. My son wanted to help them."

The father and son convinced a local Jamba Juice store to donate more than 100 smoothies (果汁) and the pair gave them out to homeless people in a park.

After that, they came up with an even better idea. "I wanted a way to get to know people better," Chase said. "So, my dad and I decided to start taking some of the homeless people we'd met out to lunch."

"A lot of people walk right past homeless people and don't see the person," he said. "I know now that they're people just like us. They want to make a connection and not feel so alone in the world."

Hundreds of lunches later, they run a self-funded charity called Project Empathy(同情) to help inspire others to meet and to create relationships with the homeless people in their neighborhoods. The organization provides a list of resources that can help homeless people with food, housing and employment.

John said that what started as a way to spend quality time with his son has turned into a passion for both of them." "Chase and I realized that the country needed an army of people to practice empathy, and that by doing something as simple as taking a homeless person to lunch, we could maybe inspire others to do the same," he said. "Any time you can help to give someone a voice, it's empowering."

Emerson, my 11-year-old daughter, is on a wild ride with the United States Postal Service （USPS） and our postman, Doug. She has a serious letter-writing habit and keeps in touch with her favorite people. If you've been the receiver of her hand-decorated letters and envelopes, then I know they really make your day.

A letter from Emerson is likely to include some art, a joke and enough questions to guarantee a response. But when she wrote a letter to Doug, she put something new in it. "You may know me as the person living here that writes lots of letters. . . You're very important to me, helping me stay in touch with friends. I cheer people up with my letters, and you do that too!", Emerson wrote.

The next day, a package arrived with two letters. One was from Doug and the other from his superior, Sara, saying she had shared Emerson's letter in the internal newsletter（内部通讯）of the USPS and believed many postal workers wanted to thank Emerson. Emerson was so pleased with Sara's letter that it upset me much, for the possible result of no reply would come as a blow to her.

Surprisingly, today, we saw Doug come with two boxes of letters from around the country. These letters were so human, filled with stories about family, pets and a sense of kindness. But there was something more in them. People felt seen—some for the first time in a long time. "I work alone in a small rural post office..." "Not many people think about how hard we work..". Emerson wrote back seriously.

I'm sharing this not because I'm a proud dad, but because it's relatively easy, if we take the time, to give others links they need to be good-human connection. Emerson did this daringly. Her lesson to me is simple: It's the small things that matter most. We all want to be seen, known and loved.

Send a letter. Give a call. Take a step of bravery, like Emerson.

D

As the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) keep growing, some companies are hiring "AI prompt (提示) engineers" to help them get the best out of the emerging technology. Are these jobs set to become a universal presence, or are they a passing fad (时尚)? Generative AI creates text or images in response to prompts entered by the user. This can be as simple as asking for something in plain English, similar to using a search engine. But there is a key to it: including the right references and keywords that can guide AI towards the desired outcome.

"By buying a pre-built prompt given by prompt engineers, you can ensure the AI model will generate what you want. The average price is $3.50, but some prompts can cost hundreds of dollars," says Ben Stokes, the founder of Prompt Base. Most of the prompt engineers on the site don't have a technical background. The engineers tend to come from a photography or graphic design background, and those working on prompts for generating text used to work in marketing or copy writing.

Aaron Sines at US recruitment firm Razoroo has been placing engineers into AI jobs for five years, but only came across the term "prompt engineer" earlier this year. Sines says that a lot of the companies approaching him looking for a "prompt engineer" are actually seeking a more rounded AI researcher with technical skills. He believes AI models could become better at extracting (提取) information from humans about what they want, making the idea of a specialized prompt engineer obsolete, but thinks there will always be a need for humans to oversee AI models during development and application.

Zhan Qin at Zhejiang University in China says complex prompts, and the prompt engineers who create them, are unlikely to disappear any time soon because AI models aren't like traditional algorithms (算法) that work on logic and can be entirely understood by humans. "Some prompts are short. But there are a lot of very, very long prompts. Even the generators of those prompts do not know the exact meanings behind those magical words," says Qin.