A very quick email [Sunday Surprise 19th May 2024]
Busy week, short email
Howdy there!
Well, what a busy 72 hrs it has been! How has your weekend been going? Just hit reply and let me know!
This week, it’ll be a very short email but there has been some really cool things out that you should explore.
Without ado, lets get to it!
Weekly update
This week has been a bit of a blur to be honest. I’m currently out in our country hospital and have spent most of the last 24hrs in said hospital. It’s a bit unusual to be this busy here, but hey, that’s healthcare!
This week also had us quizzing our trainees in a mock exam interview. I’ve been helping out and doing these for the past few years but for whatever reason, my folder full of the old ones wouldn’t open!
Turns out, it’s easy to make up a mock exam scenario if you’ve had a bunch of recent unusual incidents. I had to finalise my scenario quickly so it was actually pretty close to what happened. Though it was meant to be an exam, it also helped me see what other people might have done in this setting and their reasoning behind it.
The other thing that I had a chance to play with this week was ChatGPT-4o - more on that below but it blew my mind! Really made me want to stop and learn more on what can be done with it.
Project updates
No real project updates this week since it was mainly filled with trying to tidy up loose ends at work before the move to the US. Here’s some of the things from the recent past you might like:
Youtube: Smart cleaning made easy: Ecovacs T10 Plus - my review of my latest robovac. Compact and filled with features.
randInt: What’s a country? - possibly one of the most random chats we’ve had on the randInt podcast. It was meandering and fun while covering a very unusual life journey of an author.
Cool finds
By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about AI and ChatGPT. You might not have heard about the latest release: ChatGPT4o. That “o” makes SUCH a difference! The “o” stands for “omni” and is basically OpenAI’s version of multimodal AI: a fancy way of saying it’s not JUST something that you can type to.
If you have haven’t yet tried it, I highly recommend having a play. It should be available for free to most people.
The way I’d use it is to think of it as a smarter version of Google Assistant/Siri/Alexa. The chats are a lot more natural and you can just start by saying “hello”. The clever things they’ve added is persistent memory: you’ll see little markers in the text where the AI will remember things about you: simple things like your name and preferences but also things you have talked about.
I brainstormed ideas for my sabbatical and the next day, when I asked it to summarise out previous chat, it did just that!
There’s some videos at the bottom of the page showing some possibilities and it really does feel like “the beginning of the internet” moments in time where this will shape the world for the next few decades.
Things to read/watch/listen
Stephen Colbert interviews Yuval Noah Harari
Late night comedy combined with an interview with one of my favourite authors? Yes, please!
This is from 2 months ago is a great easy primer by one of the best thinkers around currently on some of the trajectories our world might take. This also sounds fairly intellectual, but I love Stephen Colberts ability to take the material and make it funny and engaging. Well worth the 7 and a half minutes!
Quote of the week
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