😴 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) — 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 🔪: 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 ✨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. ✨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!
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?
Our fridge is dying. After some eight years of dutifully cooling and freezing our food reserves, it’s losing its mind. Like a soldier left to survive too long in the jungle, it can’t tell right from wrong anymore, and it’s probably a threat to someone’s life. It started midweek when I decided to get some ice-cream and found the unopened tub mushy and soft to the touch. Ditto blocks of frozen salmon — uh oh, not a good sign.
I’ve realized in recent years that I get disproportionately upset when things go wrong in the household. They’re like waves rattling loose the stones in my psychological seawall; things at home simply need to be predictable, dependable, safe. Maybe it’s the result of some trauma. Maybe the outside world is just too much sometimes.
A new fridge has been viewed and paid for now, it will be roused from its Korean factory-induced slumber this Monday and loaded up with every surviving vegetable and condiment. I get images of them as war refugees lining up to get on a boat. They’re the tough ones, made of more shelf stable stuff. Pour one out for their fallen brothers: the spoils of war.
Do you know what new fridges cost these days? I certainly did not. I’m pretty sure our last one was under S$1,000, but they cost more now. Blame inflation, the chip shortage, whatever, but the ones under a grand now are the brands that probably don’t come to mind when you think refrigerators: Whirlpool, Electrolux, Sharp, and local OEM brands you wouldn’t think of at all. So now we’ll have our very first Samsung product, if you don’t count the displays and components they make for others.
Coupled with the so-called seasonal downturn in the markets now underway (supposedly the August and September months before a US election year tend to see significant corrections), there have been quite a few conversations about everyone feeling poor and worried. More than usual, anyway. I know one has to take a long view of these things, but the lack of bright spots is a little daunting.
CNA put out a two-part documentary on Singapore’s fiscal reserves, promising unprecedented access and interviews, which I found quite enlightening. There was a visit to a secret warehouse literally filled with tons of gold, and stories about how this war chest came into being from the early days of our independence. It had not occurred to me before that our reserves were used to weather the 2008 finance crisis and Covid without issuing more debt, a luxury most countries did not have. Nor that one of the reasons we’re able to enjoy such a low tax rate is that annual income from invested assets helps to offset spending on public infrastructure.
Here are the episodes on YouTube:
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I had fun this week with TikTok’s “Aged” filter, which is certainly not a new concept as far as apps are concerned, but it’s probably the most advanced execution yet. Through a blend of machine learning with harvested personal data from millions of non-consenting people and regular ol’ voodoo, it shows you what you’ll look like as a pensioner (should pension funds survive the financial end times). Some people have tested it on photos of celebrities when they were younger, and the aged photos reflect how they really look now, so… this is probably how you’ll turn out! Might as well get comfortable with it.
It turns out that old me will look kinda like one of my uncles, and I’ve been having fun recording aged videos in a wheezing voice and sending them to friends and colleagues.
Some of the other trending filters on TikTok are pretty sophisticated mini apps that involve a prompt box for generative AI. It takes a photo of you and will restyle it as a bronze statue, an anime girl, or whatever you ask it to do. They are also incredibly fast, compared to other generative AI image tools, which suggests Bytedance is burning some serious cash to power these models and gain AI mindshare.
I also came across a new product called BeFake that will try to take this one feature and turn it into an entire social media network based on posting creative generative AI selfies. It makes some sense — you don’t have to be camera ready (already a low bar with some of the beauty filters now available), and you can showcase wild ideas. Will this sweep the world only for people to get tired of unreality and swing back to finding “boring” posts interesting? Stranger things have happened.
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On Sunday we went to the ArtScience Museum (at the Marina Bay Sands) for a rare high-profile exhibition of digital art. Notes from the Ether says it’s focused on NFTs and AI, but it’s also got a lot of generative art that just happens to be encoded on blockchains. I was especially excited to see the inclusion of work by DEAFBEEF and Emily Xie (Memories of Qilin), and Tyler Hobbs and Dandelion Wist’s QQL project was also presented for anyone to play with.
Obviously this movement is in a weird sort of place at the moment. Valuations for most projects are as volatile as shitcoins, and a few “blue chip” projects like the ones displayed are more stable, but only about as much as bitcoin. Because NFT art is defined in large part by the medium, which is currently inseparable from talk of price and value, it’s hard to have a viewing experience divorced from these considerations. You don’t really visit a Monet exhibition and think about how much everything costs. Which is why the Open Editions I mentioned last week are interesting, and likewise with this event, which offers you a free NFT at the end. You get to co-create an artwork with an AI engine by uploading a photo of your own to be transformed, and it’s minted as a Tezos NFT if you’d like. I thought it was a very cool collectible to remember our visit by.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen more affordable tickets at this museum, just S$6 with a further 30% off if you sign up for a free “Sands Lifestyle” account, so there’s little excuse not to go if you’re remotely interested in this stuff.
Since we were already there, we also hopped into Sensory Odyssey: Into the Heart of Our Living World which pairs 8K video projections of natural scenes with immersive sounds and scents. In one space you’re smelling fresh air and damp earth in a rainforest, and in the next you’re underground with mole rats. It’s very cool, but ruined by small children being allowed to run loose in front of screens (can’t really be helped), and elderly museum staff loudly declaring that “this is a night savannah, very dark, no need to be scared!” (can be helped with training) in such a way that any illusion of being in a savannah is totally pierced — unless you’ve gone on a safari tour with a gaggle of Singaporean aunties, of course.
A tough and tiring week under dispiriting circumstances. But in the grand scheme of things, the worry is optional and the problems are irrelevant. So I remind myself!
It’s Thursday night as I write some of this in advance and we fly for Melbourne tomorrow night. I am ungraciously unpacked, a rarity. I’m hoping to fit everything into a single cabin bag for the first time. I’m traveling light. No cameras, no gear, and no plans to bring any shopping home. The mission seems to be merely spending a week on another continent. Okay maybe I’ll bring my Switch.
At work, I started doing team updates as a newsletter. I ask everyone to send me what they’ve been up to, and they’re free to write a few lines or a bullet list. I chuck all of it into ChatGPT using a fairly specific prompt, and out pops an entertaining roundup of the week that reads like a news radio show.
It strikes me that I could easily do the same for these weeknotes right here, except for the times I go off and end up writing 1,000 words on something (which is quite often). I hope the act of a human spending their valuable human life minutes every week to write these updates by hand makes them more valuable than if I just ask an AI to elaborate. Lord knows the quality is close.
I came across this story about the potential for AI models to collapse as they’re trained on increasingly reflexive information generated by AIs, decaying like analog copies of a tape. This is of course what we’ve been wondering about: can AI keep learning to create new things in the absence of new original inputs from humans?
And it might be inevitable, because there’s as yet no way to separate content that’s AI generated, and it’s going to be invisibly and thoroughly mixed into every pool of data. Even Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers are using ChatGPT to do their work, which is explicitly meant to be human work. It’ll be interesting if years from now we look back at this moment in time when it looked like AI was going to take over everything but then suddenly fell apart and became unviable like seedlings in poisoned soil. Like HG Wells’ invaders succumbing to the common cold.
It took awhile but I finished reading Matt Alt’s Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World. My Goodreads count for the year so far is a pitiful TWO. Anyway the book is enjoyable and well done. It promised previously untold stories about the invention of karaoke, the Walkman, the Game Boy, and others, which I doubted heading in — don’t we all know these stories? Would there really be anything new here? But I definitely learnt some new details here, and Alt does a great job of stitching it all together into a decade-spanning thesis about innovation, globalization, and the power of culture.
In Melbourne now after a couple of nights of bad sleep, after a miserable red eye flight where I got maybe an hour of sleep, after staying awake most of Saturday. Finally rested on Sunday. Listening to Apple Music’s excellent playlist of songs produced by MIKE DEAN. Looking forward to a chill week of Nintendo, coffee, reading, a visit to my favorite museum of screen culture, and no expectations of doing much more.
Amongst last week’s music releases, I missed a new album from Bob Dylan. And from Ben Folds. If I’m out to shift blame, it’s more like Apple Music neglected to inform me about them. The algorithms could use some work.
Melbourne
I started generating Midjourney images for a conceptual series and am in the process of curating the collection. Maybe I’ll put it up in a separate post at some point next week. It’s called Strange Beach, and I’m shooting for “wrong”, trying to prompt my way to pictures that are subtly unsettling or unhinged, yet set on a sunny Hawaiian beach. Some not so subtly.
It was WWDC week and hours before the keynote event started, I was telling people that the thought of an Apple XR headset made me tired. I knew that if it really was happening, that the world would never be the same again, and we would be starting a whole new cycle of change: changes in the way we interact not just with computers, but entertainment, services, each other, and the hundreds of companies in our orbits. That takes a whole lot of energy and enthusiasm (positivity?) to prepare for, especially if you’re in one of the industries that will need to be an early mover.
And this is just my gut talking, but after the big reveal of the Apple Vision Pro, I felt that positivity surging through me. It was an exciting prospect — yes, it’s still a heavy thing strapped to your head, and it has the many limitations and intentional design constraints of any first-generation consumer product — but I felt that Apple thoughtfully got the experience foundations right (again). This looks like it could change the world in an exciting and additive way.
I can’t wait to try it out and get my own, but it will probably be the end of 2024 before it lands in Singapore. That gives everyone plenty of time to think about and design for a spatial computing future. Do I think the price is justified? Sure! It’s not really comparable to any other product at any price, which is the beauty of their ecosystem play (again).
On the downside, the technical achievements it contains are incredible, but will need to become more incredible very quickly. Over the next few years, it will need to become lighter, smaller, faster, cheaper to get us where this “vision” is pointing. Or perhaps they believe the parallel development of a photon passthrough technology (that is surely continuing internally) will pay off before then, and become the solution. I’m referring to true AR glasses, of course, rather than this VR headset that acts like glasses by having screens facing inwards and outwards.
Side note on those outward-facing eye screens: it’s funny how that detail was completely leaked, and we knew it might have screens that showed your eyes to others, but nobody could come up with a way that it didn’t look awful. And yet, the real thing looks pretty good! Dimming and blurring a virtual avatar’s eyes so that they looked recessed behind frosted glass? Brilliant. Wanna put a pair of comedy Vision Pros on? Try this Snapchat lens — it’s super amusing when pointed at the TV.
But let’s not forget the other things announced at WWDC. I’m super excited for iOS 17’s Journal app*, as I said several weeks ago; the new AirPods Pro adaptive mode sounds exactly like what I’ve been wanting for awhile; Freeform showed that it isn’t being neglected, with some great looking new drawing tools coming; and the Apple Watch really did get a good rethink of the UI! The Side Button will now pull up Control Center instead of the Dock I never use, and it’s being replaced with a new Smart Stack model that sounds good in principle. And that new Snoopy and Woodstock watchface? Plus a smarter transformer-based keyboard and dictation? A more easily invoked Siri? Wow! (Ten bucks says a transformer-enhanced Siri is in the works for next year.)
Sadly, Apple Music only got light design refinements instead of the rethink I was hoping for, oh well.
*The Verge’s Victoria Song is skeptical about Journal.app because it relies on AI to suggest journaling prompts, which as Apple’s Photo Memories have proven, can be inappropriate or tone deaf. Personally I’m just planning to use it as a lifelogging tool: where I went, what I saw, what I was listening to. I’ll probably write entries manually, no prompts needed.
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On Thursday evening I checked out the National University’s industrial design program’s graduation show with some colleagues who came out of the program a few years ago. There were some thoughtful projects and most were well presented. The kids are alright, etc.
Then on Friday evening I went with some other team members to visit the Night Safari for the first time in probably many years. The iPhone 14 Pro’s camera let me down by defaulting to very long night mode shots even when there were moving animals. I’m talking hold-still-for-10-seconds type situations. I wasn’t using Halide as I wanted Apple’s smart processing to light up the dark as much as possible, but it didn’t seem to make the right trade offs.
It continues to be super hot and muggy here; I was sweating my butt off both nights outdoors. Looking forward to the cool Melburnian winter weather in a couple of weeks.
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Inspired by the album listening technique of Pearl Acoustics’ Harvey Lovegrove (mentioned last week) — put it on all the time in the background for a few days, and then sit down to listen to it once through properly, after it’s already soaked into your subconscious — I’ve been listening a lot to Cisco Swank’s new debut album, More Better. It’s a seamless blend of jazz, hip-hop, and soul that the New York Times quoted a fellow musician describing it as “black music. All of it.”
Speaking of music, Kim returned from her trip to the US and brought me back an unexpected gift: a pair of the new Beats Studio Buds+ with the translucent case! I was coveting them but probably wouldn’t have bought them for myself, and they’re still not available locally with no release date either. But since I have them now I can’t complain. #blessed
I started playing Astral Chain on the Nintendo Switch, a stylish beat-em-up title that came out very early in the console’s life and looks astonishingly good, period. I’m now putting Bayonetta 3 on my wishlist because Platinum obviously knows how to get incredible visuals out of this aging hardware.
The following is a post written by GPT-4 given a detailed brief by yours truly. The [H-AI] tag in the title declares this as human-supervised AI content.
In the tech world, it’s easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest. But sometimes, it’s worth taking a moment to look back at the innovations that brought us here. Today, I’m talking about the Nintendo 3DS and its 3D camera, a feature that seems to have found a spiritual successor in Apple’s newly announced Vision Pro headset.
The 3DS, launched in 2011, was a marvel of its time. It brought 3D gaming to the palms of our hands, no goofy glasses required. But the real kicker was its 3D camera. With two outer sensors capturing slightly different angles, it could take 3D photos and videos. It was a novelty, sure, but it was also a glimpse into the future.
The 3DS’s 3D camera was met with a mix of awe and skepticism. Some saw it as a gimmick, while others reveled in the new dimension it added to their photos and videos. Regardless of the reception, it was a bold move by Nintendo, a testament to their innovative spirit.
Fast forward to today, and we see Apple taking a page from Nintendo’s book with the Vision Pro. This VR headset lets you relive moments in dramatically higher resolution — a step up from the 3DS, but the core concept remains the same.
The 3DS may be discontinued, but its legacy lives on. It was a pioneer in 3D technology, a stepping stone to the immersive experiences we see today. As we anticipate the release of the Vision Pro next year, let’s not forget the devices that paved the way.
So here’s to the Nintendo 3DS, a trailblazer in its own right. And here’s to the Apple Vision Pro, a testament to how far we’ve come. The future of XR technology is bright, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what’s next.
Six years after I booted up my Nintendo Switch for the first time and slotted in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s cartridge, I finally took on the final boss this week and finished the game. Before you think this game is a monster (although it is), I effectively took a 5.5 year hiatus.
My first experience with the game was both exhilarating and overwhelming — here was a non-linear open-world adventure designed to be an exercise in self determinism. Yes, the princess has been locked in a bubble, literally waiting 100 years for you to wake up and save the kingdom, but that didn’t mean you had to hurry. You could decide to be a chef and spend time gathering rare ingredients and experimenting with recipes. You could examine every curious crevice of the natural landscape to discover the Korok seeds deviously placed by the designers, or climb foreboding mountains just for the hell of it (you’d probably find Korok seeds for your trouble).
This was a game that demanded longer play sessions — no dipping in for just five minutes — and frequent ones at that. You kind of had to remember what you were last doing and where you wanted to go next. So, faced with too much commitment and mental load, I started to distance myself from it and play other games instead.
If you’ve been following along in recent weeks, you’d know that the release of the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, spurred me to try completing it once and for all. And it’s been quite the journey: I had to re-familiarize myself with the game’s laws of physics, Link’s complicated powers, and in the process discovered that I’d spent those first 40 hours or so essentially mucking around in just one corner of the world.
By last week, I’d finally uncovered the whole world’s layout, but with some places still unexplored and doubtlessly many secrets left to be found. I’d gotten good at fighting, and was told that I was ready for the final showdown with “Calamity Ganon”. Except… I wasn’t, not mentally.
So I spent this week’s game time mucking about and doing inconsequential side quests, like helping a group of arguing scientists collect evidence of giant monster skeletons using my digital camera (yes). And then, on Friday night, I said ‘fuck it’ fought my way to the center of the map, took the big baddie out, and saw the credits roll. It was an absolute anticlimax, partly because I was in a hurry and took a bunch of sneaky shortcuts to the final fight, instead of exploring the giant castle like I suppose I was meant to do.
So I guess the moral of the story is err… heh… it’s the journey, not the destination? And as I was telling Cien earlier that day, the game is designed so that it’s possible to start the game and simply walk a beeline straight to the final boss and kill him instantly, if you had the skills and weren’t interested in slowly unfolding the whole experience for yourself. So this implicit message was always present, and I’m glad I took the time this year to enjoy more of it.
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Speaking of picking up old games again, I re-subscribed to the New York Times in order to play their crosswords. The last time I played a lot of them was when they released a Nintendo DS game back in 2007. In recent weeks, a group of people at work starting playing them collaboratively, and I found the experience fun enough to give it a shot. The current promotional price is just $20 USD for the first year of All Access membership ($90 afterwards).
With the installation of the NYT Games app, I’ve also got the main news app again, of course. It does a couple of things really well, namely it presents simple text and images beautifully with a handful of layout variations, and it has a personalized tab called “For You” that is finite and completable each day.
I didn’t realize how much I’d missed having a primary source of news in my life, with its own Home Screen button, but of course I’m prioritizing it only because I paid for it. I’m still enjoying Artifact, and I’ve just told it that I have an NYT sub now and it promises to prioritize it for me. Artifact has a real chance here of being the winning news aggregator.
It makes me upset how Apple Music’s personalized tab could be so much better, like an AI-compiled digest of what’s new in music that I’d be interested in. Fingers crossed for WWDC next week! (Disclaimer: I know nothing.)
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Friday was Vesak Day here and a public holiday, so I spent the afternoon with Peishan and Cien visiting two cafes, and let me just say I am disappointed that we are allowing so many Instagrammable cafes to flourish. They’re all variations of the same bare concrete interior, tables and stools placed closely together, serviceable coffee + $20 and up full English breakfast plates template of an F&B business. We managed to land in two that offered differented value: Acoustics on Neil Road, which understands that bare concrete is a terrible environment to have conversations or listen to music in, so they invested in sound dampening wall panels and impressive looking speakers; and the Allpress pop-up cafe down the street on on 73 Duxton Road which, well, offers Allpress beans.
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Back to AI, Jose pointed me at the Planet Money podcast which is currently producing a series of episodes about GPT. They’re using it to write and create a full actual episode, and documenting the process. Parts 1, 2, and 3 (the actual AI-produced episode). Listening to the first episode, I observed them going through the same cycle of revelations that I went through recently as I experimented with using AI to do elements of my own job. The initial curiosity and excitement, the sudden surprise at how good it is, the disbelief when it’s sometimes even better, and the slow acceptance of the chaos to come as you realize no one knows how this is gonna turn out. We live in interesting times.
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I watched the finale of Ted Lasso’s third and possibly final season. Season 1 is everyone’s pick for the strongest arc, but I think Season 3 is right behind it now. Season 2 was disjointed and strange to me, so quite a distant third place.
I said of the episode in a group chat:
The Ted Lasso finale is one of the best I’ve ever seen. On brand, unashamed, fan servicing, heavy-handed symbolic closure with all the love in the world. 5 stars.
There’s a line in it about how absolute perfection is boring, and by being imperfect on its own terms, the final episode was effectively, truly perfect. They made some polarizing choices this year and didn’t give us what we wanted at times, but the last episode gives it all. It mirrors the beginning, it offers thematic and narrative closure, and it gives room for the satisfying character growth it nurtured to show itself off.
Their choice of song to play over the final minutes was spot on, obvious, schmaltzy, perfect. It might have been better if they’d used my favorite version featuring Fiona Apple, but what do I know.
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A couple of weeks ago Michael pinged me to talk about Daft Punk, after I wrote about Random Access Memories, saying sheepishly that Discovery was probably his favorite album, as if RAM was a purer musical endeavor and Discovery was sonic candy for philistines. I was mostly surprised that anyone could fail to love RAM best, and admitted that I hadn’t heard Discovery in many years and hardly knew it well.
Then I saw this YouTube video by “Digging The Greats”, in which they break down the achievements in sampling that Discovery contains. Absolute magic. I keep telling myself to spend more time on shows like Song Exploder and Watch The Sound on Apple TV+ and This Is Pop, but I never seem to make the time. What I love about this 15-minute video is they don’t just play the samples and show you what Daft Punk did; they load them up and perform the melodies live on an MPC to show you how the band did it.
Then on Sunday night, the algorithms delivered me this endearingly old-fashioned 20-minute talk from Pearl Acoustics (they seem to make loudspeakers) in which their technical director, Harley Lovegrove, inducts RAM into his list of Great Recordings, and proceeds to discuss why he thinks the production and musicianship on it are noteworthy. He’s got a trained ear as you’d expect, and spends quite a bit of time talking about the incredible Giorgio by Moroder, pointing out things like how there are two different drummers on the track (I had no idea!). What makes it more fun is the fact that this is clearly not the kind of music he normally reviews — other Great Recordings include Jacqueline Du Pré’s Elgar Cello Concerto (this often moves me to tears on good headphones), and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Anyway, loved this video and it helped me appreciate a favorite album even more.
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A different sort of band, but I bought the 2023 Pride band for my Apple Watch. Rather than the heavy and vibrant rainbow bars of previous versions, this year’s design has a white base with scattered color pills. It looks like birthday cake sprinkles or confetti, which is a fun vibe you don’t see in any other official Apple Watch bands, almost like something Swatch would do.
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And now, for this week’s conclusion, brought to you by GPT:
In wrapping up, there’s something uniquely human about picking up where we left off, be it a beloved video game, a trusted news source, or a favorite TV show. That’s the joy of life’s continuity, the pleasure in seeing where a journey takes us, especially when it’s one we didn’t quite finish the first time around. These past weeks, I’ve immersed myself in familiar worlds, marveled at the capabilities of AI, and watched characters grow, and it made me realize how we continuously strive for balance, exploration, and ultimately, an understanding of our own story. We may stumble, we may take detours, but isn’t that the beauty of life’s game?
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