Well, hello!
You’re reading Mappy Monday. Every month I fall down a rabbit hole or two, travel, AI, health, money, books, whatever grabbed me, and write it up in case you want to come along.
🤖 AI Shenanigans: Fix Your Factory Settings, and try ChatGPT Images 2.0
🧪 Experiment: Do the Math in the Autopilot Aisle
🌍 Travel: Small Town, Big Sound
🌞 Health: How I Cheat at Sleeping
💰 Money: $400 to $900 Bonus from Chase
🎥 Watch: Flow
📚 Read: How to Know a Person by David Brooks
💡 Mind Hack: Essential Social Skills for Good Relationships
🎈 Just because: Cursor Camp and a Perfect Circle
Note: I will always tell you if I’m getting any referral bonuses and how much they are. There’s one in this letter. If you open a Chase checking account using my link, you get $400, and get $50.
🤖 AI Shenanigans:
Fix Your Factory Settings, and Try ChatGPT Images 2.0
If you don’t use AI language models because you tried them and found them annoying and dumb, there’s still hope. The problem isn’t the tech, it’s that you might be stuck in factory settings.
If you don’t tell the machine who you are and what you like, it gives you the safest, blandest answer it can come up with.
The key hides in the settings: in ChatGPT look for Personalization, in Gemini it’s Personal Intelligence, in Claude it’s in General Settings and in Capabilities. Tell them a bit about yourself and how you want to be talked to. I’ve told mine (in many more words) that I have zero patience for fluff, I don’t need a cheerleader, and if it starts “As an AI language model”-ing me, we’re going to have a problem. Now they push back, make puns, and send me to bed when I start chatting at 1am.
Toggle memory on, too. Then you can shape it over time, mid-conversation: “I love that wordplay. Remember that.” or “Stop asking me small-talk questions just to keep me going. I have a life.”
For Christ’s sake, also save yourself the typing and just talk to it. The phone apps all have a microphone and speaker icon. They also have a “live” feature for hands-free chats, but use it only when quick, slightly dumbed-down answers will do.
If something didn’t work last month, try it again. These things update constantly. Case in point: last Monday, this wasn’t possible. On April 21st, OpenAI released a new ChatGPT Images 2.0 image generator, so I gave it a simple prompt to draw a comic about the personalization process we just talked about. See the picture above. One shot. On the free tier. Same character in every panel. The text makes sense. There’s a joke on the cup. And the cat stays the same cat.
🧪 Experiment:
Do the Math in the Autopilot Aisle
I was downing a scoop of whey protein powder every morning and feeling like a responsible adult. In the US, it made sense. Then I moved to Slovakia and kept that habit. Until I did the math.
Only about a quarter of raw chicken breast is protein. But even so, that protein costs about half as much as the equivalent in whey, it comes with actual flavor and keeps you full for longer than 15 minutes. I'd been paying double for a beige powder when I could have just eaten lunch. Eggs are the priciest source of protein on this short list, but pack the most nutrients. So I stopped buying the powder. Nothing dramatic happened, I still get close to 100g of protein a day, just in the form of normal food. And I spend less on it.
The experiment, if you can call it that: pick one thing you buy on autopilot and do the math to see if it still makes sense. It might not.
🌍 Travel:
Small Town, Big Sound
I moved from Las Vegas, a city that runs on entertainment, and somehow I’ve seen more live music in small-town Slovakia than I did in years of living next to the Strip.
It started with concerts in the main square over the holidays, but lately, it’s been the 3-month-long “Music Spring” festival. The stuff I’ve made it to has been incredible. From Lúčnica (they’re a huge deal here, basically a national monument) and Dvořák’s Stabat Mater by the State Opera Banská Bystrica, to the concert of church choir students. Even the mayor, who used to be a professional opera singer, got up and sang.
I’m still ticked that I missed the kickoff with a 100-member Gypsy band, but there are still plenty of shows left before the end of May. Most are free, or ask for a voluntary donation at the door. At the last one, they were collecting for a stair lift so a boy at the local school could get to his classroom.
Turns out, when you only have a couple of things to pick from on a Friday night, you actually choose one and go.
🌞 Health:
How I Cheat at Sleeping
Right now, the world’s way too exciting to sleep 8hrs each night. To offset a slight sleep debt, I’ve been trying two things: glycine before bed and creatine in the morning.
Glycine is a cheap (or “inexpensive”, as the hubby would correct me), sweet-tasting amino acid. To fall into deep sleep, your body needs to drop its core temperature by about 1-2°F. Glycine works like a thermal valve, it dilates your blood vessels so you can quickly dump heat through your hands and feet. Your core cools, and your brain gets the signal that it’s officially ‘deep sleep’ time. I take 3 grams right before bed. It doesn’t make me drowsy, it just seems to make whatever sleep I do get count for more.
My tracker shows that even on a 6-hour night, I get about 90 minutes of deep sleep and nearly two hours of REM.
Then, in the morning, I stir 5g of Creatine into my tea. It’s the stuff bodybuilders take to squeeze out one more rep, but it actually recharges the tiny batteries (ATP) inside all your cells. In the brain (which hogs about 20% of your energy) it helps with memory and processing speed. It seems to help most when you’re sleep deprived (and who isn’t?). I don’t usually use caffeine, so I rely on this to keep my head clearer. And if it’s a placebo, I’m fine with that.
Good to know: Creatine can spike creatinine levels on your blood tests making it hard for your doctor to figure out if you have a kidney issue or it’s just a side effect of your morning routine.
💰 Money:
$400 to $900 Bonus from Chase
If you live in the US and have been ignoring the bank-bonus game, this is your reminder that Chase is giving away free money for opening a checking account, as long as you haven't had one in the last two years.
There are two versions worth knowing about:
The big one (up to $900). Open a Chase Total Checking, set up direct deposit, and park some cash for 90 days. The bonus scales with how much you deposit: $5,000 gets you $450 bonus, $10,000 gets you $600, and $15,000 gets you the full $900. After 90 days, the money is yours to move wherever. Here’s the link. I get nothing from this one. You get a big bonus.
The smaller one ($400). Just direct-deposit $1,000 within the first 90 days. Good for people who don’t have a few thousand sitting around to park. Here’s my referral link. You get $400, I get $50.
Both offers are good till July 15th, so don’t sit on this one. The monthly fees are waivable, read the small print. One annoying detail worth knowing: direct deposit means an actual paycheck or government deposit. Zelle from your friend doesn’t count.
🎥 Watch:
Flow
I was shopping for a first birthday gift for my little grand niece, and saw a Noah’s Ark puzzle, which reminded me of a movie I’d been meaning to watch:
It’s about a cat, and a flood, and a boatload of other animals. It looks more like a high-end Indie video game than a Disney/Pixar movie. The animals don’t talk. They don’t crack jokes like tiny people in fur coats. Nobody talks. There is no dialogue at all because there are no humans. Ninety glorious minutes of that.
The director, Gints Zilbalodis, is a self-taught Latvian artist who didn’t go to film school.
The whole thing was made in Latvia for around $3.5 million using Blender, which is free. Inside Out 2 cost $200 million.
Flow won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and dozens other awards.
There’s now a statue of the cat in Riga.
It’s gorgeous, it’s grounding, and it’s a 90-minute reset for your brain. Watch it on a real screen with the lights off, not on your phone in bed.
📚 Read:
How to Know a Person by David Brooks
If you’ve ever sat through a get-together feeling like you only touched the surface of a conversation or have a friend who is quietly going through something you never dare to ask about, this is your manual.
Brooks argues that the most important skill in life is your ability to make others feel seen, heard, and understood, and spends the book trying to figure out what it actually takes to know another person.
What kind of attention you have to give them. What kind of questions get past the small talk. How to be present when someone is grieving without trying to fix it. How to talk to someone who is depressed. How to listen to a person tell their own story without jumping in with “oh, I’ve been there too.” (which I am very guilty of). It feels supportive in the moment but it shifts the spotlight to you, and the person you were trying to help ends up listening to your story instead of telling theirs.
Brooks admits he wasn’t naturally good at any of this. The book reads like the notes of someone who got tired of being that person and went looking for a better way.
“The act of being curious about another person is a form of love.”
💡 Mind Hack:
Essential Social Skills for Good Relationships
We talk about relationships, community, connection, friendship, but those are big, abstract words. The actual work of being a good friend or building a community comes down to a handful of small, specific things.
These are some of the most important skills a human being can possess:
Disagreeing without Poisoning the Relationship
Asking for and Offering Forgiveness
Hosting Gatherings Where Everyone Feels Included
Revealing Vulnerability at the Appropriate Pace
Being a Good Listener
Letting Someone Down Gently
Sitting with Someone Who is Suffering
Ending a Conversation Gracefully
- David Brooks, in “How to Know a Person”
🎈 Just Because:
Cursor Camp and a Perfect Circle
If you need a digital palate cleanser after all that social skills homework, try the low-stakes Cursor Camp (desktop only, at least my phone won’t do it). You are just a cursor with a flag roaming in a virtual summer camp, roasting marshmallows, playing beach volleyball, and watching Godzilla with strangers from all over the world.
And if that is not your speed, try drawing a perfect circle.
So there you have it. A Latvian cat made history, an Argentinian cursor played volleyball, and a Slovak mayor sang opera. And on that note, I’ll bow out.
How’s that for ending a conversation gracefully?
Be Mappy,
Mags
