Prompt: “Give me an elevator pitch for a TV show called Stakeholders, a corporate dramedy with vampires.”

ChatGPT-4:

“Stakeholders” is a cutting-edge corporate dramedy that intertwines the cutthroat world of business with the dark, secretive existence of vampires, offering a unique twist on the workplace drama. In the bustling metropolis of New York City, a prestigious investment firm, Bloodline Capital, serves as the battleground for power, ambition, and survival. The catch? The firm is run by vampires who’ve been pulling the strings of the financial world for centuries. By day, they’re savvy business moguls navigating mergers, acquisitions, and corporate espionage. By night, they engage in a more primal struggle for dominance within the vampire hierarchy and their quest for the elixir that promises them daywalking abilities.

Our protagonist, a young, ambitious MBA graduate, unknowingly becomes embroiled in this supernatural corporate world after landing a dream job at Bloodline Capital. They must navigate the treacherous waters of vampire politics, corporate rivalry, and their own burgeoning vampiric powers after a fateful encounter. As alliances form and secrets are uncovered, they discover that in the world of vampires and venture capital, stakes are more than just a financial term—they’re a matter of survival.

“Stakeholders” blends dark humor with thrilling drama, exploring themes of power, identity, and the quest for immortality against the backdrop of the high-stakes corporate world. It’s ‘The Office’ meets ‘True Blood,’ where every negotiation has fangs and every boardroom battle is a fight for eternity. This show promises to captivate viewers with its witty dialogue, compelling characters, and a plot that twists and turns like a stock market chart on a volatile trading day.

I’d watch it.

Just last week, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 saved me 4 hours of work. It is like having a not-too-bright but hardworking undergrad student who’s trying to impress you. So, trust but verify — which is good enough for me! In any case, it was more than worth the monthly subscription price.

However, for creating graphics, MidJourney is still miles better. I use it weekly for some podcast artwork and what it generates is miles better than the plastic-y, obviously AI-generated nonsense ChatGPT produces. See here for some examples of the latter, and this is not a comment on the newsletter itself which is quite good and would be even better were it not for the distracting visuals. Or maybe I just like my own prompts better and someone would think the same of the stuff I like?

Microsoft’s Copilot has so far been absolutely useless — a slightly less intrusive Clippy. Note that I only tried to use it in Word and Outlook, and its value in Excel and other more code-like environments may be higher. Copilot’s constraint to use only what’s in the document in which you are using it is particularly limiting, especially if you need it to fill some blank space. Having it be able to browse the internet would be nice, or at least create a collection of documents, NotebookLM-style, which it could access.

Speaking of NotebookLM, formerly known as Tailwind, I haven’t used it nearly as much as I expected I would. Having a 10-document limit for each collection is too constraining, so it never became my default place to ask questions. Now, if DEVONtechnologies built something like that into DEVONthink and was able to train an LLM on my document collection, I would probably use it first, then ChatGPT, and leave everything else for playing and experimentation.

And something I haven’t used yet but might is Claude 3, which some on X have said achieved AGI level which, really, no (see the last link for Tyler Cowen’s reasons why, with which I agree), but it does look quite good. Note, however, that even supposedly simpler LLMs like Kagi’s FastGPT gave me the “correct” answer to a question that’s in the is-this-an-AGI battery of tests while also being, well, faster.

So, my actual real-life use of generative AIs to date:

0. (doesn’t exist yet but would be great if it did) LLM trained on my DEVONthink database — let’s call it DEVONai
1. ChatGPT-4
2. MidJourney
3. FastGPT
4. …
5. NotebookLM

This is for matters of productivity only. As I wrote last week, LLMs have already received entertainment chatbot perfection and any further “improvement” on that end would be to our detriment.

A friend asked me this morning whether Apple Vision Pro is a good enough substitute for business class airplane tickets.

The short answer is: no, especially not on red-eye flights. It will never be able to substitute the ability to lay down flat and actually have a good night’s rest. The “no” is more qualified for daytime trips. If you weren’t planning on sleeping anyway, you would probably be able to do a lot more on your Mac with an AVP in economy than without one in first class. That qualified “no” turns into a qualified “yes” for shorter flights in business class — say, American coast-to-coast — where you don’t even have the option of laying down flat and even if you did there isn’t much time for sleep even on a red-eye.

Keep in mind that a cross-Atlantic business class ticket is more than twice the cost of an AVP, and once you spend the money on it it’s all gone. You get to keep the AVP, and even use it on land. Ben Thompson has made this point several times on Dithering, and even had an episode called Vision Pro on a Plane. He also noted that the number of people able to afford AVP but still regularly fly economy is small, but not zero. I can confirm, as I am one of those people: I have taken more flights in the first two months of this year than all of last year, and will take many more in the months to come, so the investment was worthwhile. Your own milage may vary.

P.S. I can confirm that you can charge AVP while in use. The battery seems to have been designed for that very purpose, since the UCB-C charging port is on the same side as the cable going to the headset so that you can have two cables on the same side of the battery while it’s in your pocket. And even economy seats have power outlets these days, unless it is a very short flight where battery life wouldn’t even be an issue.

P.P.S. A great thing about AVP is that it isn’t a large electronic device, so you don’t have to put it away during takeoff and landing. In fact, an interesting use case would be for people afraid of flying. I imagine the fear is elevated during takeoff and landing, and wouldn’t it be nice if they could watch a movie at Joshua Tree instead?

P.P.P.S. If you are to bring an AVP onto a plane for purposes of entertainment, one thing to remember is pre-downloading things you are going to watch. It is amazing that we can text and surf the web while flying, but in-flight internet is bad for anything else.

• I gave Readwise a shot, and it just wasn’t for me. With age comes aversion to things that are too finicky and precious.
• Spaced repetition is overrated outside of studying for exams, and I am saying this as someone who used the Palm Pilot version of SuperMemo.
• We tend to underestimate our brains and overestimate technology, the latest example being generative AI which is at best a veneer over actual intelligence. We also tend to overestimate verbal intelligence over any other, and the two biases go hand in hand.
• You can read Chris Arnade’s Walking Phoenix and recoil at his depictions of American destitution, but don’t forget that those empty souls are just the tip of the iceberg — the submerged part is all online.
• When did “Happy Monday” become a phrase people say out loud?

Happy Monday!

One very good use case for ChatGPT is… actually chatting. Who knew?

I was waiting for someone at a restaurant and had 10 minutes by myself — a rarity these days. Instead of scrolling through one social network timeline or the other, I opened up the ChatGPT iPhone app, and learned that the only Leonardo painting in the Western hemisphere was right at my doorstep. Also learned that there are only 20 paintings by Leonardo and more than 300 by Rembrandt, and a few other tidbits.

Are any of them true? Well, trust but verify as they say, but why should I trust it any less than a random X account? Or worse yet, a non-random threadboy — now there’s a useful word I saw just recently — who posts unsourced graphs and opinions-as-facts.

Now sure, X and other social networks have upsides, like bonding with fellow humans over topics of joint interest. But these are for the most part shallow connections, empty calories for our socialite stomachs. A more stable and sustainable equilibrium for most people, certainly for me, could be real-life interactions for socializing and algorithms for tickling the mind without any pretense that we would be buddies. Social networks try to be both but are not great at either, the same way pickup trucks try to be both a car and a truck but are mostly gas-guzzling parking spot-hogging behemoths, and at the same time the most popular vehicles in the US. So, a perfect analogy.

From this perspective, ChatGPT’s forgetfulness is an excellent feature. It remembering prior conversations would bring it a step closer towards parasocializing, making it even worse than human social networks. I have no doubt that the feature is coming any month now, if it’s not already here. If and when it comes will the the point when X/Threads/Bluesky et al should sound the alarm — or introduce friendly algorithms of their own.

Three or so years ago I started a blog post draft titled “Twitter as a dark forest”. Unsurprisingly, I never finished it — and now I can delete it knowing that someone has formulated the issue better than I ever could have, and earlier. There is even a book out which, yes, I’ve ordered. (↬Waxy.org)

After a few weeks of owning an AVP, my use has settled into four categories:

1. Personal entertainment (15%)
2. Travel productivity (15%)
3. Open office shield (20%)
4. Demoing in guest mode (50%)

Apple should be giving me a commission.

The American feedback-industrial complex is getting out of hand. “Overall, how satisfied were you with your recent ATM experience?” asked an email I received today. Really, Bank of America?

Trying out Readwise this week. I am still undecided, though leaning towards “not for me” and for the reason why look no further than their video explaining how to use RSS: I am about 20 years too old to appreciate the style, and the anachronisms are infuriating.

I am attending a medical conference in Valencia, Spain this week — more thoughts on being back in Europe after 7 years coming up — and all I could think about while sitting in the auditorium, looking at slides and listening to the speakers was that these kinds of events would be the perfect use case for AVP.

The congress center in Valencia is top-notch, with comfortable seats and plenty of leg room. Even so, laptops are unwieldy, especially if you need to balance one while holding a coffee cup in one hand and a phone for taking photos of the slides in the other. This is even harder when you are crammed against the seat in front of you, which is the more common situation for large conferences. And if you use the laptop for anything other than touch typing — say, pulling up a paper that was just mentioned while it was still fresh in your memory — you will have to be focused on the screen and nine times out of ten an important slide will pass you by without your noticing or, even worse, noticing and pulling out the phone quickly only for the slide to change just as you were about to snap a photo.

So imagine if there was a device that could let you take photos, write notes, and do some web browsing all while still paying attention to what matters, the talk itself. If a friend and colleague was the one on the stage you could even take an immersive video. And before you say that the virtual keyboard is useless, Apple’s Magic Keyboard is lighter than an abstract book, more durable than a laptop if and when dropped, and works beautifully with AVP.

If I were one of 30,000 attendees in a large conference, say ASCO or ASH annual meetings, I wouldn’t even mind trying this out. Alas, this one is on the small side, with a few hundred people sharing the same room and hallways, and the embarrassment factor was just too much for me to pull it off. But I thought about it, and I’m hoping to try it out by the end of the year, shame be damned.