The AI Tools & Toasties Edition
All you can eat cheese toasties, AI tools and TV recommendations
Dear Reader
I hope you’re not hungry or you may not make it past our first item this week: the true passion of your human author: toasties. AIntonym and I will return to normal service later in the letter, with the AI moral panic, favorutite tools, stress management, those weird Dyson headphones, my current favourite AI tools and TV recommendations.
The perfect cheese toastie (and a perfect opening paragraph)
I love this opening paragraph from an article about cheese toasties by Tim Hayward in last week’s FT Weekend. It’s the kind of paragraph you can only have in a feature article or column – a neat parabola that suddenly turns a tight right corner and lands on its subject.
Joseph Campbell was a bloke with interesting ideas. An American writer and professor of literature, he specialised in comparative mythology. Among his many ideas about character archetypes, heroes’ journeys and a bunch of other stuff that’s left us with Star Wars and screenwriting courses, was The Monomyth, the notion that myths from different cultures share many elements from which one can extrapolate a single root influence deep in the collective psyche. This is very much how I feel about cheese toasties. (View Highlight)
The full article (worth registering for or, hell, even subscribing to) includes knockout recipes for grilled cheese, toasties and – my favourite – Welsh Rarebit.
Fake meat loses heat
Let’s stay with food for a minute…
Just before the coronavirus pandemic, fake meat seemed to be the future. Companies like Possible and Beyond Meat were attracting hype and investment aplenty. This week Beyond Meat announced falling revenue. The FT pointed reported that the company had lost 94% of its value since its heady early days.
Why has fake meat lost its sizzle? The first problem is that it has not won enough converts. In the US, sales of plant-based meat substitutes have plateaued following a boost from pandemic stockpiling. Sales totalled $1.37bn last year, compared with $1.38bn in 2021 and $1.4bn in 2020, according to the Plant Based Foods Association. Price increases helped flatter the numbers. Sales volumes declined 8 per cent year on year.
Other headwinds for alt-meats include price (plant-based meat is more expensive than flesh) and low barriers to entry (The Good Food Institute in the US lists 60 plant-based meat companies). There’s also a sense that the cultural drift against meat-eating has slowed – “Veganuary”, when people would give up animal products for January, was a quieter affair this year, at least in Antonym’s corners of social media, and influencers like Diana Rogers challenge claims about the health and environmental benefits of avoiding all meat.
Is there AI panic on the streets?
Spoiler: Betteridge’s law states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
The front page of the Daily Mail on Friday contained the headline "Is this the start of the great AI jobs bloodbath?" in response to BT's announcement of massive job cuts, which also mentioned AI in the same announcement.
Comments on the same story in the FT included “I wish they’d replace BT’s board with AI.” and
AI the new catch-all restructuring trigger and gold digger. Making “ cloud “ and “ automation “ and “ algorithms “ seem like dinosaurs.
https://www.ft.com/content/b8d4e70c-7c28-424f-b345-9c84b8898939#comments-anchor
The Financial Times' analysis reveals that BT's cost cutting is largely due to the company's loss of customers, and that the job cuts are not as significant as they may seem. Ironically, BT wants to give the impression of making significant job cuts in order to receive positive ratings from the market. The consumer communications team may be embarrassed by the front page of the FT, but the investor relations team is likely celebrating. As you may have noticed, large-scale layoffs have been the most effective way for tech companies to boost their share prices this year. For BT, the tactic – like its customer service, by many accounts – hasn’t worked very well at all.
Futurama, remade as an 80s-style sitcom.
We're currently seeing many mash-ups of intellectual property and ideas, similar to the Star Wars by Wes Anderson trailer we mentioned a couple of weeks ago. This trend evokes the first mash-ups of the 2000s and demonstrates people's exploration of the possibilities of new tools and media, much like sampling before it. Sometimes, these mash-ups provide silly fun, but other times, they result in genius like The Grey Album. Dangermouse created this legendary legal-action-bait blend of Jay-Z's The Black Album and The Beatles' ninth album, commonly known as The White Album.
AI tools news.
I put this list together for a new course I’m developing at Brilliant Noise called AI-B-C, which is a basic introduction to using AI as part of everyday work and I thought I’d share it here too.
ChatGPT. (Free, or If you use it a lot, $20 (£18) gets you the vastly better GPT-4 version). ChatGPT is only a little over six months old, but it remains the default tool for Generative AI, at least for now. Keeping a history of your chats is useful, as is the simplicity of the interface.
Poe. Also about £18 a month, and you can use ChatGPT, as well other models like Claude 100K from Anthropic, another very powerful AI (there’s a cap on the number of times you can use the most expensive AI models). You can also create simple AI bots to deal with specific kinds of tasks. For instance, I made OrwellEd who gives feedback on writing using George Orwell’s Six Rules as a reference. I also made a bot to help my wife with her garden design, set up to answer questions about project plans, which she says has been useful.
Notion. The built-in AI for this already excellent note-taking application is great. This service costs about £8 a month. For everyday work, it is probably the most useful AI tool available as it can handle big ideas, but also perform small tasks like cleaning up text or rewriting paragraphs if I've been a bit sloppy with grammar. See illustration:
Lex. Free (for now), Lex is being developed quickly as a kind of Google Docs with AI. Typing three “+” in a row will have it continue writing your text just like a helpful assistant. One recent update that is very useful is a sidebar that lets you adjust the “temperature” of the AI (how creative or precise it is) and you can connect it to a premium ChatGPT account to get access to GPT-4's power, should you feel the need. You may need an invite to join the free beta – if so leave a comment or DM – I have a few.
Here’s what it generated when I pressed +++ after the previous paragraph:
Midjourney. The best image generator. You will spend at least £8 a month after a free trial, but the results are incredible and seem to get scarily better with every passing week. A few months ago you would have to do all sorts of clever things to make it create high quality images. Now, the prompt “The perfect cheese toastie” returned the illustration for the toastie image above in seconds.
Consensus. Lets you ask a large collection of academic papers questions to get “evidence-based answers”. The AI responses are based on what it finds from the research and links / references to sources are given. It’s been free, but in July will start charging about £8-10 a month.
Summarize.tech (Free) This is really useful for research. Effectively it reads the content for the whole of a YouTube video and tells you what’s in it and when. For lectures or documentaries this can save an awful lot of time. If there’s a section that interests you, clicking on a link will give you more detail about what’s said in that section.
Perplexity.ai. (Free). This is a little like Consensus, but casts its net wider for answers and gives links to sources. I’ve found it useful for research.
Google Bard. (Free) Erratic at the moment, but getting more useful by the week and I expect to see big improvements soon. The best thing about it is the speed – Google’s vast computing power is second to none – where with ChatGPT you have to wait a little while for results often, Bard responses spring into existence, sometimes almost instanteously.
Bing.com. (Free) Microsoft’s search engine was briefly the most powerful out there, once OpenAI’s GPT technology was plugged into it. Its up-to-date results and link references make it very useful and it’s freee.
A review of the bizarre Dyson Zone
This thing during the pandemic, and like many, thought it was a joke. It may even have come out around the time of April fools day, perhaps to give some plausible deniability to the Dyson brand. Recently they started pushing it again through email. I have a C1 in the world. I will presume that someone is testing it for a review videos like this one.
Top stress management tip: distant self talk
By AIntonym X Google Bard
Chatter, by Ethan Kross and asked for a summary of the concept of distant self talk:
[Bard] Distant self-talk is a technique where you talk to yourself as if you were talking to a friend. This can be helpful in situations where you are feeling overwhelmed or stressed, as it can help you to gain perspective and make better decisions.
To use distant self-talk, simply imagine that you are talking to a friend who is going through the same situation as you. What advice would you give them? What would you tell them to do? Once you have a better understanding of the situation, you can start to make decisions that are in your best interests.
Here are some examples of how you can use distant self-talk in everyday situations:
At work: You are feeling overwhelmed by a project. You can use distant self-talk to help you break the project down into smaller, more manageable tasks. You can also talk to yourself about your priorities and what is most important to you.
At home: You are feeling stressed about your finances. You can use distant self-talk to help you create a budget and track your spending. You can also talk to yourself about your goals and what you want to achieve financially.
Distant self-talk is a powerful tool that can help you to improve your mental health and well-being. By talking to yourself as if you were talking to a friend, you can gain perspective, make better decisions, and cope with stress more effectively.
Here are some additional tips for using distant self-talk:
Be kind and compassionate to yourself.
Focus on the positive.
Be patient with yourself.
Don't be afraid to ask for help.
Distant self-talk is a skill that takes practice. The more you use it, the better you will become at it. With time and effort, you can learn to use distant self-talk to improve your life in many ways.
[AIntonym] It’s surprisingly hard to speak to yourself compassionately consistently. The way that we’re our own worst critics often is something explored in other recommended reads Self Compassion by Kristin Neff and Radical Compassion by Tara Brach.
TV
Image: David Oyewolo as Sherriff Holson in Silo.
Silo (Apple TV) is based on the book Wool by Hugh Howey which I enjoyed reading a few years ago. Just long enough to forget enough of the detail to find the series engrossing. It’s set in a dystopian future, where the remnants of humanity live in a giant underground silo but have no idea how they got there, why they can’t leave or what is wrong with the world outside.
Fargo (Amazon Prime). Recommended last week and I’m recommending it again, now that Gomorrah’s Salvatore Esposito has been to the already ridiculously heavyweight ensemble cast playing a gurning, bug-eyed villain.
Listening
Lately, I've been hooked on the audio versions of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, a noir-style mystery series. Gunther is a private detective during and after the rise of the Nazis in Germany, worn-down and cynical but a moral instinct that makes him walk the line between resisting and being crushed by the regime. Listening to the series is like having the gruff old cynic growling in my ear. Bravo to Jonathan Keeble for top-notch voice acting.
That’s all for this week…
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Antony