CoâSign: An interactive astrologer and coach for personalized horoscopes and star-guided advice.
Features:
Calculates your star signs when given birth date, time, and location.
A talking horoscope you can engage with â ask questions, articulate fears, deflect responsibility!
Get general advice with an astrological twist.
Type /help any time for an overview of how it works.
I was never one for horoscopes until I found the CoâStar app in 2019. Itâs not that I suddenly became a believer, but I liked how it gave me random prompts and lenses to consider lifeâs events through, like spinning a roulette wheel to determine what attitude you should meet the day with. And why not? Letting the stars set you secret objectives can be both a fun challenge and a reminder not to take anything too seriously.
But the âproblemâ with horoscopes (excluding those delivered by a fortune teller) that CoâStar doesnât solve is how their provocations can be quite cryptic and vague. Sometimes you just want to ask a follow-up question!
Which brings us to the magic statement: âNow with AIâ. I made CoâSign to be a GPT astrologer and life coach you can have a conversation with, and not just ask for a more detailed reading, but talk through problems or situations youâre facing. Instead of generic advice, itâll give you options that take your astrological traits and temperament into account.
This was probably the hardest GPT to make yet. I must have spent hours trying to get it to reliably calculate your star signs based on birth date, time, and location. Itâll figure out your natal chart from those inputs, i.e. where all the planets were above you in that moment, and use those to guide its readings. There are astrology calculators online for that, but I wanted CoâSign to be able to figure it out for itself.
To begin, you can give it those data points and get an initial interpretation of who you are, or just say hi and let it guide you. From there, ask for a daily outlook, or weekly, or whatever. Ask it for advice, ask it who youâre compatible with, any of the standard things. I recommend keeping one chat open to come back and reengage with it, so you donât have to calculate your star signs over each time (it can take awhile.)
Here’s an example of me saying I’m afraid I’d impulse buy a Leica Sofort 2 while attending an exhibition this weekend:
Doctor Talkabout: A thoughtful âpsychologistâ exploring happiness and paths to fulfillment.
I find talking about problems a great way to start feeling better, even better if the listener has some insightful perspectives or solutions, even if itâs just a reframing of what you said. While talking to someone yesterday about actual therapists and how long it takes to bring them up to speed on your situation and get to know you, I wondered if an AI chatbot could accelerate the process and get to insights and solutions faster.
So, I made Doctor Talkabout. Itâs instructed to ask questions, consider the root causes of your problems/feelings, and apply a range of psychological schools of thought as you converse. You can start talking to it about a specific situation youâre in, or just say hi and let it get a sense of how happy or fulfilled you are, and figure out how to make improvements from there.
I tried it out myself for something that Iâve spoken to therapists about, and was impressed by how it was able to succinctly articulate some helpful concepts, in some ways better than the humans did. I think it comes down to how a person thinking on the fly is never going to deliver their thoughts perfectly each time, but an AI (assuming it has the right idea at all) has a much higher chance of consistently phrasing it well.
(I must stress that this is an AI chatbot, and you shouldnât rely on it to solve real problems; see a trained professional if you need help. Itâs partly for entertainment, partly a tool for thinking through your thoughts and situation productively when alone. If you have any reason to doubt OpenAIâs commitment to data privacy, then please do not use this to talk about personal matters or your mental health.)
Explaining money, economics, and the financial world in simple terms. No question is too dumb!
I must stress that DemystiFi is not a substitute for professional financial advice or your own research. But I started on my personal finance journey quite late by all accounts, only saving and not investing for the first decade of my working life, and missing out on much of the 2010s bull market. It was a different time: no robo-advisors, no apps for buying stocks, and not a whole lot of financial education in the system.
One of the great things about ChatGPT and generative AI models is that you can learn by having a conversation, with a lot more flexibility than just searching and reading online articles that may or may not answer your questions directly. But without explicit intervention, a lot of the info you receive will still come phrased in the secret language of finance, which isn’t especially useful for people who know so little about money they’ve resorted to asking a chatbot for help!
So I made DemystiFi to explain things in simple terms, using analogies and plain language. When it uses a financial term, it’ll stop to explain it. If you act like you know a little bit, it’ll gauge your level and ramp up to match you.
You can ask it about current events (like the announcement of a new inflation figure) and it’ll search the web to find out what happened and explain the implications to you. You can also ask it to help with matters of personal finance, like calculating how much you should save each month in order to retire at 40. It’ll work out some formulas, generate code to calculate it, and give you the results.
It’s basically the finance friend I wish I had when I was starting out, and still need many times a month these days. I hope it helps you too.
Okay this one’s a bit childish but useful! Or at least well intentioned. You know how some names just lend themselves to being made fun of, and you’re like… “what were the parents thinking?” Or maybe your name is just fine, but you’re about to marry someone, or your parent is remarrying, and your last name might change into something problematic.
Name Guardian is here to solve this very niche problem. It will check your name for several “vulnerabilities”, namely does it sound like something rude? Does it have double meanings? Will your initials spell something unintended? Might different forms or contractions of your name have some cultural significance somewhere?
It even kinda works with Mandarin Chinese names, but it admittedly can’t do anything about dialect names. YMMV but it worked on all the English names I tested it on.
FilmNerd is your friendly movie buff for deep dives into cinema history, critiques, and all things film! đŹ
Hereâs a fun chatbot for those times you want debate a film but your friends havenât seen it or have had enough of your bullshit. Itâs up for all sorts of questions and hypothetical arguments, and Iâm learning a lot just talking to it.
Example: I asked for a film where a bolt of lightning was at the center of a major plot point and it said Back to the Future (of course!), and then we asked it whether that was a more worthy moment in lightning-centric film discourse than Thor, and it was able to provide compelling arguments both ways.
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 youâve seen Apple events and Humaneâs 10-minute launch video, youâll 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 customersâ 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 itâll 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 Humaneâs 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. Itâs 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 worldâs knowledge and project it onto your hand in response to queries is amazing!
The hardware looks good, channeling the iPhone 5âs design language to my eyes, and Iâll 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 itâs only $699 USD, which feels astoundingly low. Thatâs 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, theyâve 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 doesnât 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 itâs 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 â 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 employersâ 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 theyâre still the team to beat when it comes to foundation models. The playing field is full of open-source alternatives now, including Lee Kai-Fuâs 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 âGPTsâ. 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 youâre a researcher at work and sometimes you want to have some dumb fun, thus Iâm 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 agentsâ 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 âCreateâ 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, itâs a sudden shift in the tide and theyâre now forced to build things that arenât reducible to mere prompts.
What weâll soon see is a GPT gold rush. Brace yourself for a stampede of AI prospectors, each hunting for their piece of OpenAIâs bonanza â the company will be curating and offering GPTs in a âStoreâ and sharing revenue with creators. Thatâs 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, youâll 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 wonât 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 weâll probably see an app-less one.
My GPT projects
Of course Iâm playing with this and making some of my own! Did you think I wouldnât, given the ability to create AI things without coding?
Iâve got a list of ideas to work on, and so far Iâve acted on three of them, which are explained on this blog in separate posts.
⨠PixelGenius was my first, and contains the most complex prompt Iâve 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 âI want to achieve the look of Fujifilm Astia slide filmâ and itâll 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
đ´ SleepyTales was the second, and Iâm still amazed at how good it is. Itâs 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 đŞ was born from a hilarious misread â I told Cien about it and ‘mundane’ became ‘murder’. So if your bedtime stories of choice are usually true crime podcasts, then youâre in luck. This GPT agent will create an infinite number of dreary murder stories, but stripped of all suspense, mystery, and excitement. Theyâre about as exciting as real police work, not the flashy TV investigating sort. Again, I still canât 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 didnât really get it at first when using it for general queries. IMO, the killer app for it is storytelling. Iâve been using the voice called Sky for both the above bedtime stories apps, and it works well.
Films
I watched David Fincherâs 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 Ritchieâs 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 â I shit you not â is easily a Top 10 career highlight for him. Jason Statham in the right hands is a very different animal than when heâs doing B material; I donât know how to explain it. I actually gave it 4 stars on Letterboxd and wonât take it back.
Album of the week
REMâs Up received a 25th Anniversary Edition, with some tracks seemingly remastered and a whole second âdiscâ 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. Thereâs no Dolby Atmos here either, so Iâm 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 â not unlike The Smashing Pumpkinsâ 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.
đ´ SleepyTales: Spins long and boring stories to help you unwind and fall asleep. Designed for voice mode, turn it on and chill…
This is a GPT designed to be used with ChatGPT’s “Voice Conversations” mode (currently only in the mobile app) â although you can use it to generate text alone, it really shines when paired with one of their realistic voices. I currently prefer the one called Sky. Like it says in the description above, this GPT agent has been prompted to provide tension-free, inconsequential, meandering stories about anything you like. It reads them out in a slow, gentle manner, for quite awhile at a stretch.
So just turn on voice mode and pop your phone on the nightstand and listen to the most boring stories ever. Unfortunately, I’m unable to make it speak indefinitely without building an app, so it will occasionally stop and ask if it should keep going. You can say “yeah” or even “mmhmm”, and it will. Or you can give it some direction. Hint: just try and get it to make the story more exciting, I don’t think you’ll succeed!
And I suppose if you’ve nodded off and can’t tell it to continue, that’s a good thing? Nevertheless, I find its stories very good just for unwinding while still awake.
𼹠SleepyKills đŞ: A generative true crime podcast that couldn’t be more boring. Sleep tight!
While showing the former app to Cien, she misread “mundane” as “murder” and thought it generated boring true crime stories, to which I thought “WHY NOT!?”
And so SleepyKills was born, designed to emulate the language and style of a popular true crime podcast except… you might find it very hard to care? Firstly because the murder stories are completely generative and fictional, and secondly because they’re almost comically full of irrelevant details and lacking in any excitement or suspense. The AI podcaster often spends time on aspects of the case that no one else would want to know.
Check it out if that sounds like your kind of bedtime story.
Do you edit photos, use filters, or make your own presets? What if you had an AI tool to help create any look you asked for?
That’s â¨PixelGenius, my first “GPT” (a custom agent built on ChatGPT). It’s a photo editing expert that creates filters, suggests improvements, and helps you elevate your craft.
Describe a vibe and it’ll provide the settings to make a preset/filter.
Emulate a classic film stock!
Upload photos and get editing suggestions.
Reverse-engineer edited photos by providing a Before and After.
Learn editing techniques just by chatting naturally.
It’s designed to help beginners learn the art and color science of photo editing, while letting pros save time with great starting points. For every adjustment, it explains the intent so you learn how this stuff works.
It gives you standard adjustment values that you can plug into your favorite photo editing app like Darkroom, VSCO, Photomator, or Adobe Lightroom and save them as your own custom presets.
I prefer to learn by trying stuff out rather than watching videos or whatever, so when I first started using Lightroom, it was a messy process of trial and error that lasted years. â¨PixelGenius turns that into an interactive, guided experience. It’s like having a photo editing expert on demand, and you can even get into deep conversations about color theory and photographic history. All you need is a ChatGPT Plus account.
This involved writing one of the most comprehensive prompts I’ve done so far, so I’d be curious to know your thoughts after you give it a go!
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