Use my AI emails

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I get marketing emails from OpenAI. The message is clear – AI is going to replace us all but it won’t ever replace the email marketing. How else are we going to convert the users who use something else and are not subscribed?

I checked my inbox. This was not the first product announcement I received but it was the first that looks like a pure marketing email, created by a human email marketer. I hope there’s a real person behind it, not a bot, trained on the junk mail folder.

This is a major improvement to the cluttered product announcements from before, that looked as a conspiracy theory, posted on Reddit.

Best way to battle negative thoughts

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s the best way to deal with negative thoughts?
View all responses

Okay! We all live on a tiny piece of dust next to a very old star that’s eventually going to consume Earth. We’ve not be informed about our purpose but we know we’re all going to die. It’s not easy to deal with all of that and the other reasons to feel bad about the future. Negative thoughts use periods of vulnerability from stress, health, or other misfortunes and just penetrate the walls and take space we can use for, pretty much, anything else. By the time they reach us, it might already be late to act in the most efficient way.

Here’s my short list, listing multiple items that have helped me over the years.

  • Walking. 1h outdoors is like 2h of meditation. Also helps with sleep. I didn’t start the 10k/day to improve my mental health but after doing it for several years, hard to not put it on top of my list.
  • Sleep – the brain just works better when properly rested but it can’t do that if it’s fed with coffee and alcohol, or you’re not physically tired. So…
  • No alcohol or coffee. I’ve experimented in this area and no amount of alcohol or coffee is good.
  • Planning positive events ahead, just placing good things in the calendar. Planting them like seeds to grow in anticipation.
  • Cats (and dogs btw) but cats work for me. Cats don’t care.
  • Religion and spirituality – after all, we need a way to accept defeat.
  • Awareness about thinking errors. Most of our fears are about stuff we have no control over. I think superstitions can be particularly harmful. People are universally afraid of black cats. Why?
  • Reading books, fiction in particular.

None of that counters negative thoughts at the moment, and none of this is a measure against moments of grief and loss. But it helps over the long run.

I re-read some of my old posts in preparation to publish this one. I think they still hold.

Moustache

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

I’m pretty sure I’ve featured this cat before.

The day sent me off the usual tracks. Sofia was closed for a bike parade or something like that. The bus I took to get out of my neighborhood sent me to another neighborhood that was further out of the center than my starting point. Nothing unfamiliar. In my steps journeys, I have the tendency to try slightly different routes every time, expanding my internal map. So, this was a cat I’ve seen before but who knows if I blogged about her. Hard to say 🙂

EV Show in Sofia

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

I accidentally visited an EV car show in Sofia. Hundreds of Chinese cars lined up on the square, ready to be tested and purchased. Pretty cars, cheap cars, big cars, very big cars. I was impressed by the amount of marketing money invested to show all these cars.

Here are the vehicles that won my attention:

A 50-year-old trolleybus and a retro-sci-fi single-seater EV sports car that looked as if it was built in someone’s basement to be a bat mobile.

The other cars kind of explained a lot to me why people still drive their 20-year-old petrol cars.

Oh, and of course, here are some electric scooters.

Slop grenade

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

Phrase of the day, thanks to Shopify’s CEO, who used it.

A slop grenade is when a person uses a small prompt to generate one or multiple walls of texts that then need to be read and understood by others. The slop grenade doesn’t need to be bad slop. There can be some good meaning in the wall of text. The issue is with the deferred understanding. In order to truly process it, you need to either spend unreasonable amount of time or use agents and throw the grenade back.

I experience this somewhat often but had no words for it. I’m in love with this phrase.