😠 How to Defeat Anger, AI Breakthroughs, and Flowing with Change

Thing 1 - How to defeat anger

It whispers in your ear: “You’re not being unreasonable. You’re being assertive.”

But you’re not. You’re a grown person screaming at a parking meter. You look like a constipated gorilla trying to pass a watermelon. People are crossing the street to avoid you.

- Eric Barker

I love Eric's writing, and you can read his full article on anger, but here's my gist:

Let's look at Seneca, who had a lot of reasons to be mad, but didn't. When he was exiled to a rocky goat-filled island for a crime he didn’t commit, he didn’t rage. He wrote a book. And it can help us.

1. Accept Challenges

Anger is often about unrealistic expectations. You’re furious about traffic, but traffic is normal. We act like the universe owes us - but it doesn’t. If you expected the world to be chaotic, you wouldn’t be angry when it is. Have realistic expectations and lose the entitlement.

2. Broaden Your Perspective

When anger hits, zoom out. Picture your "problems" compared to someone in the 1800s: "Oh no, my Wi-Fi is slow!" Meanwhile, they're sewing shirts by hand and dealing with dysentery. Perspective shrinks your problems. Anger makes you set a high price on worthless things. Draw back and laugh.

3. Delay

Notice your anger rising? Pause. Have a kitkat. Delay is the greatest remedy. Anger feels righteous in the moment, but if you give it time, it fades. Tell yourself you’ll get angry later. By then, you might not care. Do you want to be in control, or the fool shaking a printer while everyone films you for TikTok?

4. Remember We're All Flawed

Next time someone annoys you, ask, “Have I ever done something just as dumb?” The answer is probably yes. We’re all a bit of a disaster. Instead of raging, try a cosmic shrug: “You’re flawed, I’m flawed, let’s not make this a battle.”

Seneca didn’t get mad - not when exiled, not when mentoring a literal maniac like Nero. If he could manage that, maybe we can let go of a few dirty dishes. Let’s be kinder. We’re all just people trying to get by.

Read Eric's full post if you have some time, there's more info and it's entertaining.

Thing 2 - AI of the week

I have a hard time keeping up with all this and I kinda made this my part-time job. Here goes.

• LiquidAI introduced Liquid Foundation Models (LFM) with the first series of their 3 Language LFMs. This is the first time a non-GPT model architecture significantly outperforms transformer-based models.
  You can try it.
• OpenAI announced Real Time API (GitHub repo). Devs can use OpenAI's real time voice model to build things.
• OpenVoice is an open-source (MIT license) voice cloning approach that requires just a short audio clip from the reference speaker to replicate their voice and generate speech in multiple languages and tones.
• OpenAI released Whisper Turbo - 8x faster, half the parameters - multilingual and drop in replacement for Whisper Large v3. Means faster than ever free audio transcription, in the hands of developers.
• LipDub AI gives you the powers to create accurate and realistic lip syncing from an existing video. They are in beta at the moment (and from Toronto, hello 👋)
• OpenAI released Canvas, a collaboration tool in ChatGPT that makes it easier to work on documents or code. It goes head to head with how Anthropic's Claude works. I need more time to play with it but feels smooth so far.
• Meta released Movie Gen - video and audio generation models. They can also generate background music and make video editing simple.
• NVIDIA published a 72B model that's comparable with Llama 3.1 405B in math and coding evals and has vision.

Large models are getting smaller, smaller models are getting better. (We might still get larger models that are awesome).

Thing 3 - Go with the flow

"Going with the flow" doesn't mean "do what you've always done".

It means changing your ways as the flow changes.

It means getting comfortable with change and not resist it.

- Zvonimir Fras

You can quote me on that 😛

Cheers, Zvonimir