Oof, this was a tiring week. Navigating change, physically recovering from a vaccine’s side effects, and having conversations about Christmas gifts, that shit will wear a blogger out. Helping me navigate all this was my astrology GPT, Co—Sign, who would tell me how to deal with challenging situations and to trust in my own nature, even if some decisions felt like bad ideas by other people’s standards.
Of course, the week started off with more twists in the OpenAI management saga, which seems to have ended now with Sam and Greg back at the company, not at Microsoft, and the formation of a new board underway. This pleases me because OpenAI was a company/brand with significant momentum and destroying value of that sort for no good reason doesn’t sit well with me (this may or may not be a reference to something else happening in my life). I’m glad I won’t have to port my collection of GPTs to another product like Poe or whatever.
I used Gen AI to bone up on Silicon Valley mind viruses like EA (effective altruism) and e/acc (effective accelerationism), which I’d kinda grokked in passing but not spent any time specifically reading up on. I have to say I feel myself falling in the accelerationist camp — given current world events, we’re not exactly proving ourselves a worthy species, so we may as well hasten our demise or salvation in every aspect from the upheaval of labor to economic principles. Incidentally bitcoin hit a new high for the year this week, going over $38,000 for a brief period.
I’ve buried the lede, but AI voice recognition and synthesis technology has enabled my favorite gag of the year: this Chinese dubbing of Van Morrison performing Caravan with The Band. It’s sublime; a French chef’s French kiss. It caught me in a moment of weakness and I couldn’t watch the whole thing through because I was dying of laughter. Van shouting “turn your radio up” in Mandarin will live rent free in my head from this week forth. This video is so precious to me I’ve saved a copy on personal cloud storage just in case the tweet goes down.
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I was excited to hear that the Muji store in Plaza Singapura had reopened after an extensive renovation, now twice its original size and the largest in South-East Asia. We went down on the weekend to take a look, and it had things normally seen only in Japan: plants, bicycles, an embroidery service, renovation services, a wider range of furnishings, frozen food, and regional specialty goods (including $350 silk scarves). Not your average Muji! In fact, it’s billed as a “Global Flagship Store”, and I hope their gamble pays off and Singaporeans vote for more of this with their wallets.
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Up to episode 4 of Pluto on Netflix now and it’s really the best anime series of the year for me. Just on those late 90s cybernoir SF mystery vibes. This is what the Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex reboots should have been like.
Also up to episode 4 of Blue Eye Samurai and I’ll admit it’s gotten better. More complexity, somewhat interesting stakes, but the CG anime look with fake low-fps stuttering is getting a little annoying. If I had a modern TV I might actually turn on motion smoothing just to make it a more authentic experience.
I tried real hard to avoid buying a 4K HDR TV during the Black Friday sales and succeeded. Gotta save up funds for the dark days ahead.
Speaking of premonitions, we saw episode 2 of Lessons in Chemistry on Apple TV+ (mild spoiler alert) and let me tell you, my cinematic Spidey sense tingled and I called the event that happens at the end of the episode minutes before it happened. I’m usually quite bad at anticipating TV twists, but something about the atmosphere and pacing and shots just told me what was coming.
We also saw the first two episodes of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+ and were left impressed. It’s the new series involving Godzilla and other monsters that either belong to Toho or Warner Bros now? Really, the monster custody is unclear to me. But halfway through, as new characters were being introduced in flashbacks, Kim assumed an Asian woman was the mother of a younger Asian woman we’d already seen. And I said, “maybe it’s just an unrelated Asian woman”, to which she laughed, “there are never unrelated Asians”. Which I took to mean in American shows, not the real world, and sadly she’s right.
Many people have been raving about Andre 3000’s new instrumental album with flutes, New Blue Sun, and I’ve tried to get into it, I have. But it’s literally put me to sleep a couple of times, so I’m assuming it’s just not for me.
(This week’s Featured Image is a Dall•E representation of a Chinese Van Morrison impersonator performing in a Muji store.)
Album of the week: Daft Punk released a “drumless” edition of Random Access Memories and the simple act of removing elements adds an unexpected amount of value. The album strikes a delicate balance between novelty and nostalgia. By removing the drum tracks, it reveals intricate instrumental interplays once masked by robust beats, offering new perspective on familiar melodies. Within minutes, you’ll be surprised at how different this feels. I don’t know how many other albums have been rereleased like this, but it’s a great idea — one made less cynical by the streaming model, as Michael observed in a chat. In the old days, this would just look like trying to sell you a CD you already bought.
Speaking of cynical purchases avoided, I saw and held the Leica Sofort 2 in person this weekend while attending a talk and exhibition at their annual Celebration of Photography event. The glossy front plastic was not as fingerprint prone as I’d feared, and overall build quality felt a touch better than on the Fujifilm Instax mini Evo: the rocker button on the back panel had more click resistance, the “film advance” lever that prints photos was sturdier and more satisfying to activate, and the flimsy USB port cover on the bottom was slightly firmer and seemed to stay in place. For me, those were the top 3 basic problems that needed to be addressed. The software menus were simply reskinned and not redesigned, as expected. All in all, Leica did the minimum they had to do to make the Fujifilm product a little more premium, but without improvements to image quality, it’s still a very odd product to bear a red dot. I did not feel the urge to replace my mini Evo on the spot.
With Leica’s latest attempt at opening my wallet rejected, my week was free to absorb excesses of a different kind when I met up with Jianjia for a farewell lunch. She decided we would eat Mala at some place called YGF. It turns out that she schedules every meet-up she can there, because she’s addicted to their high sodium spice blend. When I pointed out how salty it was (after she had drunk all her soup, and for the record I couldn’t finish my massive bowl), she was like “huh, maybe that’s why I like it so much. I never had much salt in my food growing up”.
We are all the products of our childhoods, each messed up in our own special ways, which is something I was discussing with a colleague in a work-related conversation one day when I thought, “ooh, I should make a GPT therapist!” Which I called Doctor Talkabout, and tried to bias it towards exploring barriers to happiness that originated in childhood. On the whole, the unlicensed doctor is now quite good at discussing all manner of problems, and I hope it gives better perspectives than vanilla ChatGPT. And just in case psychology and psychoanalysis are a little too… “real” for you? I also made a GPT therapist based on astrology, inspired by Co—Star. I honestly get a kick out of both, and discussing my problems with them has been more effective at managing my feelings than just going in circles on my own.
The number of GPTs I’ve made this past week is now in the double digits (including one for work and a private one for editing text), and so I’ve had to make a category page to see them all on this site. Please check them out.
And yes, some shit is afoot at OpenAI, after CEO Sam Altman was ousted early Saturday morning. Too early to say why, but ChatGPT has noticeably struggled to perform quickly of late, and they’ve both turned off new signups for ChatGPT Plus AND reduced the rate for paying members from 50 to 40 messages every three hours. I have a feeling they might renege on their commitment to open a GPT App Store and share revenue with creators. Time will tell. I wasn’t going to quit my day job for this anyway. And as of Sunday afternoon, he’s supposedly been asked to come back and the board of directors will resign? Pure insanity.
I watched the first episode of Netflix’s acclaimed Blue Eye Samurai Western anime series, and it felt like something an AI wrote. I don’t get the rave reviews just yet; two people described it to me using Kill Bill as a reference point, and you’ll see why in the super derivative first episode. It even uses the same Tomoyasu Hotei song, Battle Without Honor or Humanity, in a cliche sword-forging and training montage sequence. I mean, Kill Bill itself was a pastiche of samurai movie tropes, but this warms them over without any shame. It also has a dash of Afro Samurai to it, however both of these are examples of how to do homage without feeling like copies. Netflix shows are like cloud kitchen-brand versions of fast food items that were inspired by restaurant dishes.
Somehow the show has some talent signed up to it: George Takei, Ming Na-Wen, and Kenneth Branagh provide voices. Its writer and co-creator, Michael Green, was involved in Blade Runner 2049 (but also Branagh’s trilogy of Hercule Poirot films which I do not love). But I’ll give it a second chance anyway; there may be other themes at play here beyond the Othered protagonist seeking revenge. But having seen this, I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what AI-generated mass entertainment would look like, and I’m not down for it anymore. I’d like for AGI to come and take away all the other jobs in the world, leaving us humans free to come up with new and more creative ways to show sword fights.
So imagine my surprise when I started up Pluto (also on Netflix) after two episodes of Blue Eye Samurai, and found it the total opposite in terms of quality. You don’t know where the story is going even if some ideas, like androids that grapple with unexplained dreams from a past life, are familiar and were explored before in other works. It takes its time with characterizations, and aims for a timeless beauty that goes beyond slow-motion action scenes. Polygon has a nice piece about it, but don’t read anything before you’ve seen the first episode, just trust me on that.
This week in artificial intelligence was a big one: Humane unveiled their highly-anticipated wearable, while OpenAI made strides with ChatGPT enhancements.
The Humane Ai Pin
A lot has already been said about the letdown that the Humane reveal was, mostly by people confused by the presentation style of the two ex-Apple employees who founded the company.
If you’ve seen Apple events and Humane’s 10-minute launch video, you’ll note the contrast in delivery and positioning. Apple tries to couch features and designs in real-life use cases, and show authentic enthusiasm for what they do to improve customers’ lives (Steve was unmatched at this). Humane kicked off with all the warmth of a freezer aisle, missing the chance to sell us on why their AI Pin wasn’t just another tech trinket in an already cluttered drawer. They puzzlingly started with how there are three colors available and it’ll come with extra batteries you can swap out, before even saying what the thing does! The rules of storytelling are quite well established, and why they chose to ignore them is a mystery.
A lot was also said about how two key facts in the video presentation, provided by the AI assistant so central to their product, turned out to be inaccurate. One was about the upcoming solar eclipse in 2024 (and Humane’s logo is an eclipse! How do you get this wrong?), and the other was an estimate of how much protein a handful of nuts has. It’s a stunning lack of attention to detail that this was not fact-checked in a prerecorded video.
Personally, I have been waiting for the past five years to see what this stealth startup was going to launch, and as the rumors and leaks came out, I was extremely excited to see an alternative vision for how we interact with computers and personal technology. What they showed did not actually stray from what we knew. An intelligent computer that sees what you see, is controlled by natural language, and is able to synthesize the world’s knowledge and project it onto your hand in response to queries is amazing!
The hardware looks good, channeling the iPhone 5’s design language to my eyes, and I’ll bet they had to pioneer new ideas in miniaturization and engineering to get it down to that size. I expected it to cost as much as an iPhone, but it’s only $699 USD, which feels astoundingly low. That’s not much more than what we used to pay for a large-storage iPod.
The disappointment is in their strategy. By positioning it as a replacement for your phone rather than an accessory, they’ve reduced the total addressable market to a few curious early adopters and people who want to address having a tech or screen addiction. The kind who intentionally buy featurephones in 2023. I think their anti-screen stance is interesting, but it doesn’t win over the critical mass necessary to scale and challenge norms.
The Ai Pin comes with its own phone line for messages and calls (for $24/mo), so it’s not going to be convenient to use this alongside your phone, and I would not give up my phone while this is still half-baked — I say this kindly, because even the iPhone launched half-baked in many ways. For many things that we have become accustomed to in life, there is no substitute for a high-definition Retina display capable of showing images, video, and detailed or private information when necessary.
Do I believe that Apple can one day get Siri to the level of competence that OpenAI has? I have to hope, because the Apple Watch is probably a better place for an AI assistant to live than in a magnetically attached square on my T-shirt. In any case, Humane seem to have taken a leaf out of their old employers’ playbook, and will be releasing this first version only in the US, and so whether or not I would buy one is a moot point.
OpenAI and GPTs
Speaking of OpenAI, it would seem that they’re still the team to beat when it comes to foundation models. The playing field is full of open-source alternatives now, including Lee Kai-Fu’s 01.ai and their Yi-series models, but as a do-it-all company offering dependable access to dependable AI, OpenAI seems unassailable.
They announced enhancements to their models, increasing context windows and speeds while halving prices for developers, and launched a new consumer-friendly product: customized instances of ChatGPT that work like dedicated apps, which they call “GPTs”. In effect, these are a version of Custom Instructions which were introduced earlier this year as a way to tell ChatGPT how to behave across all chats. But sometimes you’re a researcher at work and sometimes you want to have some dumb fun, thus I’m not sure they caught on.
So now GPTs let you specify (pre-prompt?) different contexts and neatly turn them into separate tools for different purposes. Importantly, you can now also upload knowledge in the form of files and documents for the agents’ reference in generating replies. This makes them more powerful and app-like, and normal people like me with no coding ability can create them by telling a bot what they want (in natural language, of course), or writing prompts directly. I recommend the latter, because chatting with the “Create” front-end tends to oversimplify your instructions over time and you risk losing a lot of detail about how you want it to work and interact with users.
So what does the launch of these GPTs mean? Well, for many of the developers who were riding the OpenAI wave and only used their APIs to build simplistic wrapper apps, it’s a sudden shift in the tide and they’re now forced to build things that aren’t reducible to mere prompts.
What we’ll soon see is a GPT gold rush. Brace yourself for a stampede of AI prospectors, each hunting for their piece of OpenAI’s bonanza — the company will be curating and offering GPTs in a “Store” and sharing revenue with creators. That’s a different model than their APIs where developers pay OpenAI for compute and charge users in turn. Here, users all pay OpenAI a flat fee for ChatGPT Plus and can use community-made GPTs all they want (within the rate limits).
Hear everyone talking about a viral GPT that makes it so easy to do X? When you want to try it out, you’ll see a call-to-action to sign up for ChatGPT Plus. This signals to me that launching GPTs is a strategy to drive paid account conversion, which begins the lock-in that OpenAI needs in order to make ChatGPT the new OS for services, not unlike how WeChat is the base layer that runs China, regardless of whether you use iOS or Android. Eventually you won’t even need to know about or choose the GPTs you use; the master ChatGPT system will call them as necessary. We may not be headed for a screen-less future, but we’ll probably see an app-less one.
My GPT projects
Of course I’m playing with this and making some of my own! Did you think I wouldn’t, given the ability to create AI things without coding?
I’ve got a list of ideas to work on, and so far I’ve acted on three of them, which are explained on this blog in separate posts.
✨ PixelGenius was my first, and contains the most complex prompt I’ve ever written. It started out as a tool to generate photo editing presets/filters that you can use on your own in any sufficiently advanced photo editing app with curves, H/S/L controls, and color grading options. You can just say “I want to achieve the look of Fujifilm Astia slide film” and it’ll tell you how to do that. But now it does more than just make presets, which you can find out about here. More details and examples in the blog post here.
SleepyTalesSleepyKills
😴 SleepyTales was the second, and I’m still amazed at how good it is. It’s designed for Voice Conversations mode (currently only in the mobile app), so you can get a realistic human voice reading you original (and also interactive, if desired) bedtime stories. These are never-ending, long, and absolutely boring tales with no real point, in drama-free settings, told in a cozy and peaceful manner. It’s the storytelling equivalent of watching paint dry, yet oddly mesmerizing. More on this and the next one here.
🥱 SleepyKills 🔪 was born from a hilarious misread — I told Cien about it and ‘mundane’ became ‘murder’. So if your bedtime stories of choice are usually true crime podcasts, then you’re in luck. This GPT agent will create an infinite number of dreary murder stories, but stripped of all suspense, mystery, and excitement. They’re about as exciting as real police work, not the flashy TV investigating sort. Again, I still can’t believe how cool it is to hear these being written and read in real time.
People have said the Voice Conversations feature is a game-changer for ChatGPT, but I didn’t really get it at first when using it for general queries. IMO, the killer app for it is storytelling. I’ve been using the voice called Sky for both the above bedtime stories apps, and it works well.
Films
I watched David Fincher’s new film The Killer in bed on my iPad, just like he would want me to. Even then, it was spectacular, a cinematic victory lap for both him and Michael Fassbender. It plays with genre conventions, expectations, and riffs off his own body of work. There are some great moments and a fantastic performance by Tilda Swinton. 4.5 stars.
Speaking of performances by English actors, I also watched Guy Ritchie’s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, which is both a terrible name and attempt at creating a new globetrotting spy/special ops team franchise. But, he has a certain touch even when making shit, and the film is a hell of a lot of fun, bringing out the best in Jason Statham (who tried to hold up The Expendables 4 and failed), as well as a villainous turn from Hugh Grant that — I shit you not — is easily a Top 10 career highlight for him. Jason Statham in the right hands is a very different animal than when he’s doing B material; I don’t know how to explain it. I actually gave it 4 stars on Letterboxd and won’t take it back.
Album of the week
REM’s Up received a 25th Anniversary Edition, with some tracks seemingly remastered and a whole second “disc” of an unreleased live performance they recorded on the set of the TV show Party of Five?! Sadly it is not a track-for-track live performance of the album, which would have been great. There’s no Dolby Atmos here either, so I’m just taking this as an opportunity to revisit this album.
I can still feel the gut punch from the day Bill Berry bowed out, post-aneurysm. I was afraid they might break up, and REM was absolutely my favorite band back then (maybe still), so when Up came out, I was hopeful for a new and long-lived chapter to begin. And yeah, it was a weird album, playing with new sounds and using drum machines — not unlike The Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore album after Jimmy Chamberlin left. But many songs were great, some even recognizably REM. The band kept going for a few more albums, each a new spin on an evolving sound. And in true style, they dropped the mic at just the right moment.
I’ve been on the edge of a flu, with intermittent fatigue and headaches and a warm scratchy feeling at the back of my throat that makes me remember being ill and nauseous, but it hasn’t gone full blown. Maybe I’ve actually got the flu, but the vaccine I got a few weeks ago has inspired my immune system to resist and now my body is locked in a hundred-year war. I write this on Saturday with a full-day social test (wedding party) to attend tomorrow that will probably push me over if this doesn’t get better.
While on the subject of health: I suppose you’re officially old when you buy yourself a blood pressure monitor. It was a conversation about strokes that got me on it, and it was a very quick impulse purchase that went from idea to research to purchase in under half an hour.
I think this is the Omron model I got. I didn’t know they made them this small nowadays, not to mention that you can measure BP from a wrist! It connects to your phone via Bluetooth, and the Omron Connect app also syncs with the Apple Health app — which was the selling point for me. Omron’s app looks overly complicated and isn’t very pleasant to use, but it doesn’t matter since you can just overanalyze and freak out over your data more comfortably in Apple Health alongside your other health metrics.
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The only music news of the week that mattered was the release of the final Beatles song, Now and Then. This was the third and last John Lennon demo on the tape that gave us Free as a Bird and Real Love back in 1995. The audio quality on this one wasn’t good enough for it to be finished back then, but now it’s relatively trivial to separate vocals from instruments using tools built on machine learning — one music YouTuber reviewing the song literally demonstrates it himself using an online service — and so Paul and Ringo were finally able to complete the song using guitar bits George recorded in the ’95 sessions, making it probably the last song we’ll ever get with all four Beatles on it.
It’s a lovely song and I’m glad we’re around to enjoy this historic moment of celebration and closure. I don’t mind posthumous vault releases as long as they’re done with love, care, and good intentions, and the short film above goes to lengths to assure everyone that John would have gotten a kick out of this. Real Love is one of my all-time favorites, just for the beautiful melody in its chorus and refrain, and the existence of these three songs together are like a treasure from a parallel universe where the Beatles never broke up (a scenario that the Apple TV+ show For All Mankind tantalizingly visualizes for a moment in one episode). It’s extra heartbreaking that all three songs read to me like products of John’s regret and wish for reconciliation.
The incredible clarity they were able to get out of the tape recording, though, makes me want new versions of Free as a Bird and Real Love, remastered with modern technology. I don’t care who complains about opportunism or George Lucas-ism, it should just be done to close the chapter off neatly and in the best possible way for fans. Get it done, money men!
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Other bits:
Normally when you see too many sequels and the drawing out of stories, it comes with lowered quality, formulaic laziness, and/or the jumping of sharks, but Only Murders in the Building topped itself with the third season and now I can’t wait for a fourth. (Spoiler) I didn’t expect them to really go down the musical route with proper abandon, but they did and that bloody Pickwick Triplets patter song was stuck in my head for days. And they only got bloody Meryl Streep to be part of it, Christ.
Okay, but you know what IS a scummy money grab? The Backbone controller company pushing their old designed-for-Android USB-C models at the launch of the new iPhone last month, telling early adopters to step right up and get them (and then messing up the release so many of us received ones without the iPhone-supporting firmware), KNOWING FULL WELL they had a 2nd-generation model waiting in the wings that would support the new iPhones even better! Old inventory cleared at full price, the new model then quietly dropped, with redesigned dimensions that mean the camera bump no longer presses up against the chassis, bending it, and even supports being used with a case on. I was a big supporter of their work, but no longer. They’ve apparently been deleting critical posts from their subreddit, if you can believe such foolishness.
Three months ago I switched mobile telcos from Circles to M1, lured by a bigger data package for the same price. Shortly after that, M1 migrated many users to new plans (it was not a very smooth process either, fraught with confusion and poor communications), and sort of reneged on a basic tenet of my “contract” (technically it’s a contract-free plan): once free, 5G would now be a paid add-on after six months. Fudge that, I said, and now I’m back with Circles for (yet again) even more data and a lower monthly price to boot. The porting process was also flawless compared to my experience moving to M1.
While looking for the above link to my own recent post, I chanced upon older entries talking about local telcos and got sucked into reading notes from my younger self. It’s one of the greatest joys of keeping a blog, and yet I rarely take the time to. I’ll post a few links now.
As the iPhone and Android wars heated up, I asked in 2015 what telcos could possibly be thinking by advertising Xiaomi devices alongside iPhones in their weekly newspaper advertising spreads. I said they were legitimizing cheaper Chinese devices that customers could easily buy through other retail channels for a couple hundred bucks, which would come back around to hurt telcos by dispelling the idea that one should sign a two-year contract (with high margins baked in) to get a good phone. I think I was right? Who gets a phone with a contract these days?
Back in 2006, I noted the opening of the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York and called it the most beautiful storefront I’d ever seen and wanted to visit someday — it would be 10 years before I did. And then there was this post from 2017 when Singapore finally got our first Apple Store.
Reader, I was even there when the fresh and ultra-luxe ION Orchard mall opened its doors in July 2009 — a fact that seems mindboggling today; hasn’t that building been there forever? At the recent team barbecue at a colleague’s condo overlooking Orchard Road, we were discussing some of the visible buildings and I discovered that our youngest team members are so young they don’t remember how the site of ION Orchard used to be a grassy mound of park-like open space. They were rightfully incensed when told that it used to be a popular picnic spot for Singapore’s domestic helpers until ION’s construction drove them away.
That just reminded me of the famous murder case where a bag of body parts was found dumped near that park.
In a 2016 post, I said that the future of gaming looked like cloud saves, cross-platform compatibility, and game designs that allowed you to play for both hours on a console or minutes on mobile. Back then, my signal was universal binary games on Apple TV that also ran on your iPhone. In 2019, Apple Arcade launched and that model was a core requirement for developers: all games had to support Mac, Apple TV, and iOS. And this week, Resident Evil Village launched for iPhone 15 Pro, as well as Macs and iPads with M1 chips or newer, the first in a new wave of console-quality titles you can both play at home and on-the-go. I think it’s a direct threat to whatever the Switch’s successor will offer, but the picture won’t be complete for a few more years.
Reading my posts from the year of living well (on sabbatical) is so bittersweet. On one hand, I was a bum reading books, watching films, and drawing all day. On the other, it was not unfulfilling? The little bit at the end of this weekly update from Jan 2022 reminded me how great a game Disco Elysium was and that I should replay it someday soon.
(This week’s featured image was created by DALL•E from the idea of “The Beatles Resurrections”)
Kim was away again for work most of the week. This effectively gave me the gift of freedom from our Beyond Deck addiction, cold turkey. So I played a little Super Mario Wonder, drank too much bourbon, watched Bitcoin YouTube, and lazed around unproductively on my iPhone.
And on the days I decided to work from the office, I was richly rewarded with elevator breakdowns, mall escalator maintenance, and other inconveniences that made me wish I’d stayed home. I don’t think I’ve mentioned my recent obsession with Luckin Coffee, the Chinese chain that’s been expanding nationwide, including an outlet in my office building. Bosses forcing a return to office take note, getting one of their iced coconut lattes in the morning is one of the reasons I head in. I was looking forward to my fix one of these cursed mornings but found the branch closed for upgrading.
Luckin’s model is fully app-dependent and most branches are just pickup counters, with no seating. You order on your phone, pay via card or Apple Pay, and pick it up by scanning a QR code. You don’t interact with staff, and they don’t handle any filthy cash. For comparison, you can do the same thing with Starbucks’s app, as well as order in person like a boomer. To get you past the friction of downloading the app and setting up an account, your first drink at Luckin is just $0.99. Subsequently, you’ll get hit with a barrage of discount vouchers ranging from 35% to 60% off, so much so that I haven’t paid full price for a coffee yet.
For the record, their drinks are priced around $8 each, and they’re somewhere between a Starbucks tall and grande. The discounting is an aggressive acquisition play, of course, but I’ll take low margin coffees while they last, not least because they’re actually pretty tasty! Like Starbucks Reserve, they offer a range of single-origin specialty coffees, and even give you beautiful little info cards with tasting notes. The absurdity is not lost on me, given their quick-service image it’s like if McDonald’s gave you facts on the cow in your Quarter Pounder. Nevertheless, on that day my Luckin outlet was closed, I went to a Starbucks for the first time in quite a while, and it felt like comparatively much less value.
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From clicks to chats
I went over a new trend report my company put out, and there’s a large focus on generative AI as one might expect, which led to a couple of interesting conversations about how much work is ahead of us when it comes to overhauling the touch points we use to deal with merchants, service providers, and even governments.
In a way, the graphical interfaces we use today evolved as proxies for “natural” verbal and gestural communication. Similar to how we used mouse cursors because we couldn’t touch displays directly, we have menus and buttons and screens filled with data because we can’t directly ask computers for complex outcomes. The promise of large language models is that now we might.
There have been think pieces this week about how Apple was “caught off guard” by this gen AI wave and is now scrambling to catch up. I think they have plenty of time; here’s why:
What’s at stake isn’t smaller-scale improvements like the transformer-based autocorrect in iOS 17; it’s about whether gen AI can bring a more radical change in how we use computers. You can already see the hunger for this — the dream of J.A.R.V.I.S. — in a dozen half-baked AI-powered product announcements. We’re not far from Humane’s wearable phone alternative, Rewind’s Pendant which will process everything you say or hear, and Meta has great-looking new “smart” Ray-Bans which can put their new AI voice assistant(s) in your ear (US-only).
The basic version of conversing with AI looks like a text chat, and on the other end of the spectrum is a “multimodal” natural chat that takes a user’s body language, tone, and facial expressions into account. Putting aside the fact that such a model hasn’t been trained yet, just the massive amount of personal data this would involve means only a company positioned to put privacy first might get any traction. And then there’s the staggering hardware requirements of doing this in real time. If only someone was working on a new kind of computer equipped with industry leading silicone, and biofeedback sensing that can even predict you’ll tap a button before you do it…
Assuming this is the right thing to do at all, the Apple Vision Pro with its microphones, retina scanners, and hand-tracking cameras should be well positioned for a future where you can simply sit down in front of an AI relationship manager from your bank, have a free-flowing discussion, and see the appropriate figures and charts pop up — instead of poking around a UI to find out how your money is doing. But the stated purpose of the Vision Pro is spatial computing, which is only a step towards natural computing.
So like every other time in history, Apple will wait while others jump the shark first, and hopefully clean up after with a more sensible execution. They have the time; it’s just a shame for impatient people that the hardware looks so ready. But as a wise man once said: technology moves fast, while people change slowly.
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Pints and pop music
Ex-colleague and friend Bert is back in town for the first time in over four years, so we met up twice to catch up and see some other faces we’ve missed in recent years. This meant many pints of Guinness (if ever I associated a person with one drink only, it’s Bert and Guinness), which compounded with the aforementioned bourbon and a gut-busting, sodium-loaded visit to Coucou hotpot for a physically taxing week. Every organ is straining to detoxify and I really felt the effects all weekend.
We watched half of the third season of Only Murders in the Building and I’m happy to report it’s much better than the second. I think there’s even a self-effacing joke at one point about how the first season of the in-show podcast was more likable than the second. It comes down to a clearer story with fewer detours, the kind I’ll probably remember a year from now unlike, say, season two’s.
Sigrid has a new four-song EP out: The Hype. It is extremely Gen-Z in that it has a shoddy photograph on the cover and looks like it was made in Canva. The music is much better, but she’s just doing more of the same, which I won’t complain about because if Coldplay just kept doing the same thing as in their early albums maybe they wouldn’t be so insufferable today.
Taylor Swift’s 1989 is finally out in (Taylor’s Version) form! I think this was the first album of hers to ditch the country pop style and just go straight pop? Did it have something to do with leaving Nashville for New York? In any case, it was the first album of hers I played for myself, and also the one Ryan Adams liked enough to cover I guess. I’ve been mostly playing both versions this weekend and came across a debate I never knew I needed: is 1989 a beach album about the Hamptons or a city album?
I used to (sporadically) log my mood and mental state in a great free app called How We Feel, but ever since iOS 17 came out with a similar feature in the Health.app, I’ve been doing it there. It’s nowhere as good, though, and the act of recording how you feel is (surprise!) so much better in How We Feel. Apple’s version makes you scroll a list of feelings like Anxious, Content, and Sad, sorted in alphabetical order.
The other app arranges feelings in a colorful 2×2 grid, from high to low energy, from unpleasant to pleasant. An example of a high-energy unpleasant feeling is Terrified, while a low-energy pleasant feeling might be Serene. This grid is a much more logical and visual way to find the right word and quickly record your feelings throughout the day. Anyway, the rumor is that iOS 17.1 will be out next week, and I’m hoping the new Journal app is part of it, because I want better ways to record and look back on my state of mind.
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We attended the local premiere of Martin Scorsese’s new film that everyone’s talking about online: Killers of the Flower Moon. In a theater, no less! It’s an Apple Original Film, and will be coming to Apple TV+ after this irl run is over. I can’t remember the last 3.5 hour film I saw under such circumstances, unable to take a break, forced to focus. If I’d seen it at home I’d probably have paused it no less than five times, and so I’m glad that I couldn’t, because it’s the kind of film that quietly spends its budget building a world so absolutely intact and complete that you’re left to focus on the people, the time, and the weight of its historical crimes. As a true story, it’s devastating. “People are the worst” is pretty much my 4-star Letterboxd review.
On the flip side, we saw disgraced filmmaker Woody Allen’s 2019 film, A Rainy Day in New York, which has pretty poor ratings online, and really enjoyed it. I’m aware that he has approximately, oh… one style? And a hallmark of it is neurotic, pretentious characters in awkward romantic situations who spout smart alecky jokes in an artificial, stage performance cadence… but I like it. It’s also amusing to see current generation stars like Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning as his stars, but playing their roles exactly like Woody. Is it because they’ve seen his old films and think they have to? Or do the scripts just demand that delivery? Also, Selena Gomez is in it, and I can’t help but see this performance as a superior version of what she does in Only Murders in the Building.
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I got jabbed for Hepatitis A & B on Friday, and it was a doozy. I felt lightheaded and weird all afternoon afterwards, and I have to go back for two more boosters over the next few months.
Contributing to the feeling all weekend has been my new contact lenses, the first ones I’ve worn in maybe 8 years? The right eye prescription is a little underpowered and so I’m suffering with blurry images that are driving me crazy. I’ll need to try and get them exchanged next week.
Why am I wearing them at all? I got an annoying pimple/scratch behind one ear, exactly where the arm of my glasses sit, and so I decided on some disposable dailies while it heals. On one hand, the feeling of freedom is amazing — I really miss this about wearing contacts, which I did regularly in my younger days. Just things like being able to do a spontaneous facepalm! But now everyone has learnt that “my look” is “guy with glasses”, and suddenly my normal face looks weird, even to me gazing in the mirror, and I don’t need to freak people out any more than necessary.
The blurriness has had a slight impact on my enjoyment of Super Mario Wonder, the latest and greatest Mario game which just came out. I wasn’t planning to buy it, because I wasn’t planning to play it any time soon, being still in the middle of another old Mario game on the Switch, Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Revenge. But peer pressure got to me, and talking to Jussi got me justifying it to myself that playing a 2D and 3D Mario game at the same time isn’t a problem — it’s like reading a fiction and non-fiction book at the same time!
Super Mario Wonder is the 2D one, for the uninitiated. It’s a modern take on the classic Mario games, far more inventive and deep-reaching than even the New Super Mario Bros. series of games that tried to breathe new life into the side-scrolling platforming formula. Wonder has incredibly detailed and expressive animations all throughout: Mario and friends move and react to things like characters in a proper animated movie (was this planned to coincide with this year’s film? I don’t know), bursting with character, while the levels and events are literally psychedelic festivals of invention. This is a blockbuster game that spends its budget conspicuously, gleefully.
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In playing with DALL•E 3 some more (within ChatGPT Plus), I discovered that it goes a great job of replicating the look of classic 80s anime. You literally just have to ask it for that. I tried some classic scenes, and then asked for couples hanging out near a 7-Eleven drinking Strong Zero, and then for screenshots from a movie about a female detective investigating a case of financial fraud, and it’s that last one that made me think this thing is a new milestone in tools for visualizing stories.
There was a period about a year ago when quite a few new moms all had ideas for children’s books, and wanted to use DALL•E or Midjourney to illustrate them. I got questions about whether it was feasible to do this, and if you’ve been talking everyone’s head off about this stuff too, you probably had the same conversations.
I think this level of natural language interface with GPT-4 and DALL•E 3 coming together is finally making it possible for anyone to direct images with consistent settings and characters. I read somewhere that Midjourney v6 is going to make prompting easier as well, so perhaps we’ll get a flood of storybooks next year.
There was also a thing going around on Threads that basically asked participants to “paste your Threads bio into an AI art tool” and see what comes out. I saw a few people doing this, all floored by the accuracy of the people they saw gazing back through the black mirror, I suspect afraid of how accurately they were seen from just a few keywords — one lady said “I own all of those tops”.
I think this is a pretty strong signal for the mainstreaming of generative AI, that a meme like this can spread without instructions attached. Everyone who is online enough knows what it means to invoke an electronic genie that grants image wishes, knows very well how to go find one and get the deed done. Next year is going to be wild.
But anyway I wanted to try it out, although my bio isn’t like “Founder/CEO (he/him), hustling 24/7 🇸🇬, new book out 20/12, always up for coffee ☕️ and meetups 🤝”; it’s currently “Designer, sense-maker, aesthete, imposter, garbage, scum.” which gives you results like this:
First, a correction to last week: I believed that the Leica Sofort 2 will offer little functional advantages over the Fujifilm Instax mini Evo camera that it’s based on. But I missed that the Sofort 2’s design favors a landscape orientation; its camera strap connection points and tripod mount are placed with that in mind, whereas the mini Evo seems intended to be used in portrait. This is another point of annoyance because the Fujifilm’s design visually indicates it should be used in landscape. Well, it also visually indicates its a vintage analog camera, but we’ll ignore that.
Cameras are for capturing memories anyhow, so on Friday night when we had a team barbecue for the first time in years, I brought my Instax mini Evo out to get some lo-fi, low-res, flash-enabled snaps. A camera never gets as much use as it does in the days just before its replacement is due to arrive — if that isn’t a camera addict’s maxim, it ought to be. But I wonder if Leica is ready for the backlash when the photos from this low-grade 5mp sensor start being associated with their premium brand. It’ll be the worst digital camera they’ve ever made. At least with the fully analog Sofort 1, the results were just little Instax prints. But now some really questionable digital files are gonna come from a Leica camera and start circulating.
These were the only ones without faces in them
Anyway, in a big coincidence, the last time I remember having a work barbecue was when Oya left in 2019 to return home, and I met her this week for the first time since as she passed through town for a day. A bunch of us who were around back then met up for Mexican food, margaritas, and refried memories.
I finally got access to ChatGPT’s new features (these couple of weeks felt like forever): image uploads for multimodal chats, a voice-driven mode, and DALL•E 3. I’ve yet to make proper use of the first feature, apart from a few tests. I gave it a photo I took at Toa Payoh Hub (what can you infer about my location from this photo? And it correctly guessed Singapore from some visible shop names); a receipt (split this bill, and would I be an asshole if I asked for this money back as a billionaire?); and a photo of a dying plant at home (how do I nurse this withered thing back to life?).
I wish the voice mode could listen out for your interruptions, which would make it much more conversational. Right now you have to tap the screen to stop it talking first. The synthesized voices are really good, and enhance the illusion of talking to a trustworthy intelligence. Using Siri Shortcuts, you can now just start talking to ChatGPT on your phone at any time, but I still hope Apple finds a way to design a more responsible, private version of this with a future Siri.
The ability to interface with an image generator with natural language is a big deal — in theory, ChatGPT can break down your detailed, context-laden instructions into the right prompts for DALL•E to work with — and affirms my belief that “prompt engineering” will be designed out of relevance for the majority of users. It can’t do photorealistic images as well as Midjourney, but it may be close for illustrations.
I made a new playlist on Apple Music, mostly made up of recent releases I’ve been enjoying, with a few oldies thrown in there: BLixTape #2
iOS 17 introduces crossfading, and I think it works great for mixtapes, making the intentional juxtapositions even clearer and jam-mier. Crossfading is when one song fades out just as the next one fades in. It’s like having a budget DJ. (Edit: AI suggested I explain it for those who might be unfamiliar, but Kim says this is mansplaining. I guess this is an explainer for the explainer.)
I played with this cover art idea for awhile in Midjourney over the past few weeks, but wasn’t super happy with any of it. I gave the same brief to ChatGPT + DALL•E 3 and decided to use its version. It came up with a more interesting composition than all the other centered, literally middle-of-the-road shots, and it was able to follow my instructions that the headphones should be Beats Studios.
Remember the Leica Sofort (German for “instantly”) camera? It came out of nowhere years ago, an unacknowledged collaboration with Fujifilm that took their popular Instax Mini 90 model and rehoused it in a sleeker Leica-designed body (offered at a much higher price, nearly double if I recall right). Reviewers tried to discern a difference in the photos, but they were essentially identical cameras on the inside. For some reason, everyone danced around the similarities and at best said the Sofort was “inspired” by the Mini 90, as if it was a new Instax camera by Leica that somehow came out looking mighty similar, rather than a simple body swap at the same Fuji factory.
This week, Leica announced the Sofort 2, which is now a redesigned Instax mini Evo (a camera I bought myself for Christmas in 2021). Where the original Sofort was a fully analog Instax camera, the Sofort 2 is one of Fuji’s hybrids: a digital camera fused with one of their Instax printers, so you can take tons of photos and then decide which to print.
In my opinion, the mini Evo is the least ugly Instax camera Fuji has made, which is one of the reasons I was excited to get one when they came out. Oh, I noticed that Jurin from XG uses one, and some of their IG posts look like mini Evo shots. But the Sofort 2 is beautiful, streamlining the body to its essential elements and removing nearly all traces of fake plastic leather and silver-effect plastic.
Leica’s ability to wrap other companies’ cameras in minimalist industrial designs and sell them for more money is unmatched. I bought their D-Lux 7 precisely because I wanted Panasonic’s LX100M2 but could not get behind its rugged hiking shoe looks.
Where the mini Evo is a cute plastic facsimile of a Fujifilm X100 camera, and wearing one around on a shoulder strap makes you look like a kid who’s been placated with their very own toy iPhone, the Sofort 2 looks like a camera in its own right (far as I can tell from the images). And as little as I have used my mini Evo over the past two years, it will be very hard to convince myself not to “upgrade” to this version for Christmas. And to be clear, there are ZERO functional improvements from the Fuji version, apart from not looking like a toy.
Fujifilm makes their Instax cameras kid-friendly. They’re colorful, bulbous, fun, and recall the freewheeling sensibilities of product design before the 2008 financial crisis, when phones could look like tubes of lipstick and translucentplastics were everywhere (they’re coming back). The Leica partnership seemingly exists to provide the market with what the Japanese might innocently call “adult versions”. Why Fujifilm leaves money on the table by not doing this themselves is mind-boggling. Are they really incapable of producing understated designs? I don’t care about the Leica logo; it’s a joke on a product like this, I just want a clean-looking rounded rectangle.
Generational shifts in photography
And apropos of all this, I heard that Sean was getting into film photography and about to use an Olympus XA2 I once gave to Cien. Which got me talking to my Pi AI (we’ll come back to this) about old becoming new again in photography. Part of it was trying to convince myself that a Sofort 2 would be worth buying as an adult-friendly retro toy camera — a loving term for cameras with garbage image quality. I’ve owned many of the sort, like the Digital Harinezumi series, and they’re always plastic and cheap, or simply dusted-off vintage digital cameras. But this is a new! luxury! toy camera!
So Pi sorta made the “observation” that using an analog camera is an attempt to engage with photography more deliberately. Which I already knew? Because of course using a dedicated camera instead of a smartphone today is deliberate; a “slow photography” thing, a “real photographer” flex. Of course instant film is an extension of this.
But I’d not really appreciated it from the perspective of Gen Z people who grew up without them. Like why ordinary kids not into capital-P Photography would be interested in Instax/film cameras and old digital cameras beyond signaling coolness. Obviously we Xennials and Millennials grew up with photographic scarcity and have fewer photos of our younger days, but these kids grew up in an age of surplus, literally taking photos for granted. Phone cameras everywhere mean cheap and infinite memories. So naturally tools that force moments to be more precious, that force viewers to see events through wonky lenses, would hit different.
I noticed afterwards that Leica’s press release for the Sofort 2 sums this up with a simple statement: “Back then, the instantly printed photo symbolized acceleration, whereas, in today’s fast-paced world, it represents a moment of caution and relief.”
Next day update: I neglected to mention here that the mini Evo and Sofort 2 cameras are actually perfect bridges between these two approaches to photography. They are digital cameras that let you shoot in surplus, and print only the photos worth keeping in scarcity. Also, having two offerings serves buyers across the spectrum from fun/affordable to serious/expensive, which tends to be a generational divide. The hybrid instant camera is a tool that unifies photographers with different values (so long as they’re okay with 5-megapixel shots), and serves as a symbol of ‘making this moment count’.
The Pi personal AI assistant
Okay, so what’s Pi? It’s billed as a personal AI, a ChatGPT for your daily life. But isn’t ChatGPT already for daily life, as well as work life, I hear you ask? Yeah I know, which is why I’m giving this a go. The main difference is that instead of multiple chat threads for different topics, with Pi you just have one main chat. It tries to learn more about you and draws on past context to inform its responses. It’s built on a proprietary foundation model, so perhaps they have a way to get around the short-term memory and context collapse that I’ve seen with other generative AI text systems — so far it’s doing quite well after a few days!
It’s free, and their privacy policy claims they’ll never share or sell your information, but yeah sure what else would they say? I’ve found it quite pleasant, and its responses are tuned to be shorter and less formal than ChatGPT’s defaults. It does feel like talking to a friendly personal assistant.
So far I’ve had discussions with it about movies (we talked about Interstellar and why some Nolan films don’t work as well as others), python programming, economics, frameworks for building good arguments, as well as its own purpose and unique value proposition.
I just asked it to brainstorm what a Sofort 3 could bring to the table. It suggested more AI features (lol) and making it more user friendly. I said I’d go the other way and make it more unapologetically professional, with manual controls and higher quality. It was able to say that it sounded almost like an instant film version of a Leica M, and when I asked it to price such a product, it said $800 USD or higher. That’s pretty insightful!
Something about its simulated personality and the UX of having a single chat thread (where I don’t have to keep introducing my needs and context) makes this very pleasant to use, so much so that I might end up using it over ChatGPT for some queries.
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Media activity
I had Saturday all to myself so it was a movie day. I saw The Equalizer 3, which was much slower and less action-packed than you’d expect. But Denzel is still badass and he gets to have a nice Italian holiday. Just expect a chiller installment going in. I think this is the last one for Robert McCall.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was nowhere as bad as I was led to believe. I’d say it’s actually very successful in closing out Harrison Ford’s role and setting up a possible future heir. The last one was roundly panned and tried to introduce the idea that he had a son, played by an awful human being, which failed so badly they wrote him out in the most delicious way possible in this film. I really hope Phoebe Waller-Bridge gets her spinoff out of this, but apparently she’s developing a Tomb Raider TV series for Amazon Prime? What a shame to work on the pretender when the original tomb raiding franchise is right there!
I forced myself to finish season 1 of Invasion on Apple TV+, just because season 2 looked good in the trailers and has a higher Rotten Tomatoes score. Season 1 is an awful plodding mess, which given Simon Kinberg’s involvement should not surprise anyone. If you’re interested in S2 and haven’t started on S1, I’d recommend you just go straight to it and try to fill in the blanks.
The Below Deck marathon continues. We finished seasons 5 and 6, started over with season 1 — it was disappointing in terms of production quality and crew likeability — and are now on the second.
Apple Arcade’s new James Bond game is quite entertaining. Cypher 007 is an isometric stealth-action game from the makers of Space Marshalls, and should scratch the itch for anyone who loves the franchise and/or Metal Gear games.
So much new music came out and I haven’t had a chance to hear it all yet. After hearing about how Sufjan Stevens’ Javelin is dedicated to his partner who died this April, I’ve played it through several times. I think it’ll be one I come back to over the years.
There’s also a new Drake album, For All The Dogs, which may not have the same longevity.
I enjoyed my playthrough of HOW DID WE GET HERE? by a 22-year-old Canadian pop artist named “young friend” while writing this post. Admittedly, I wasn’t listening to the words at all, but it was very pleasant and I’ll have to get back to it.
A new Omar Apollo EP, Live For Me, which I’ve heard one song off and am really excited for.
Caroline Polachek’s second album, Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, has been getting great reviews too, so I’ll get around to it next week hopefully.
sangsara.net 