Music for Optimal Focus, Thoughts on GPT4o, Hybrid Friendships, CSS Animation tools, and AI Generated Podcasts
A lot of news in the AI space during the past few weeks, especially with Open AI launching GPT4o, and Google I/O’s announcement of Gemini 1.5 Flash. In this issue highlight some helpful links plus some other relevant topics.
- When doing deep work I enjoy listening to sounds that keep me in a focused state for as long as possible. More recently I discovered Jason Lewis’ - Mind Amend YouTube channel. He has various mixes of various styles of electronic music mixed with isochronic tones and binaural sound waves. While doing some further reading I found this informative article by Kyle Pearce discussing the mental benefits of listening to isochronic tones.
2. As some of you may know. I’ve been building web projects with Statamic. The Statamic team recently released version 5, packed with some big performance improvements. Some specifics include performance increases ranging from 50%-100%, support for Laravel 11, command line improvements, fake flat file SQL queries, better multisite-management and control, plus several more goodies. Be sure to check out the recent blog post published by Jack McDade to see the finer details.
3. 11 days ago Open AI’s GPT4o version was released and it’s free to users. Not to mention that it’s fifty percent cheaper, has five times more rate limits, and two times the generation speed. Because it’s free to users, I think we’ll see a massive increase in adoption, especially from folks who have not used AI before. Some of the features include the ability to reason across modalities, searchable memory, and a new desktop app with the ability to read screens and communicate with users based on their needs, to name a few. More in the demo video here.
4. Every Sunday I look forward to thoughts from the Farnam Street newsletter. Here’s a thought that’s been on my mind lately from a recent issue:
“Winning without luck requires doing ordinary things for an extraordinary amount of time”
5. 100 things that were announced at Google I/O last week. Including the new AI advancements, Google is making. I was also shocked when I saw they brought Marc Rebillet AKA Loop Daddy up for the pre-show.
6. In an age where we are immersed in a culture that has blended IRL relationships with hybrid relationships, the lines can get blurred around friendship. Hybrid friendships are a topic that isn’t talked about enough. How can we be good hybrid friends? In her post Being a Hybrid Friend is Hard, Bekah HW addresses this topic and discusses the challenges of blending both IRL and hybrid friendships.
7. Working on my CSS chops, I found this CSS animation kit from Angry Tools. It lets you play around with animation presets within their UI and spits out the CSS code for you.
8. Sometimes I think about improving my workflows. In my research for a better way to onboard clients, I ran across BuildShip. It’s a visual low-code tool for creating automated workflows with AI. Going to give it a whirl and get some of my time back.
9. AI podcast creation is on the rise. The Wondercraft AI tool is being used to recap YCombinators HackerNews posts and generate podcast episodes from that content. Folks love the Hacker News Recap podcast and its become a popular hit, so much so that it’s hitting the top podcast charts.
10. In number 3, I lightly covered the launch of GPT4o, professor Ethan Mollick, has some interesting thoughts on how GPT4o will democratize access and change the way we look at education, work, and global entrepreneurship. I spend a lot of time thinking about this topic, the future is much closer than we think.
And that’s a wrap for this week. Thanks for reading and have a good weekend!