Well, hello!
You’re reading Mappy Monday, a free monthly newsletter about budget travel, AI shenanigans, self-help experiments, budget hacks, movie and book gems, and occasional silliness. Also check out my MappyEverAfter website.
🤖 AI Shenanigans: 7-app Day or Adventures in Vibe Coding
🧪 Experiment: The Outermost Loop
🌍 Travel: Where to Stare at Art, Mountains, and Your Diminishing Hyatt Points
🌞 Health: Inflammaging
💰 Money: My 90% Regret & The 2026 Pics
🎥 Watch: Arrival
📚 Read: Solve Everything: Achieving Abundance by 2035, and Flatshare
💡 Mind Hack: Talk to Yourself in Questions
🎈 Just because: The Ultimate Speeding Ticket Defense
Note: I will always tell you if I’m getting any referral bonuses and how much they are. In this letter, I earn 4.5% if you buy The Flatshare book from Amazon. I got mine from the library.
🤖 AI Shenanigans:
7-App Day or Adventures in Vibe Coding
When the “vibe-coding” startup Lovable temporarily removed its paywall for International Women’s Day, I figured I’d poke around. You describe what you want in plain English, and it builds the software for you.
The afternoon quickly deteriorated into an all-night hackathon. By 6am, fueled by pure stubbornness, I had talked seven half-baked web apps into reality. Everything from a core-value finder and a baby activity planner to an ambitious attempt at visualizing time as a road you can throw chores onto.
My favorite is Peel, a grocery helper (in English and Slovak). Instead of squinting at ingredient lists in a supermarket, you set your dietary preferences, point your camera at a label, and it tells you what you probably shouldn’t be eating.
It’s very addictive to build small, practical tools for your own life out of thin air.
And if you try vibe coding yourself, I’d recommend starting on a weekend morning… and setting a time limit.
🧪 Experiment:
The Outermost Loop
Every morning, I get my AI news from Alex Wissner-Gross’s newsletter The Innermost Loop. It’s fascinating, but dense enough that I often paste it into Claude or Gemini and ask for a translation into something a normal person can process.
And then I had a brilliant idea. What if I just… published those “translations”? I’ll call it The Outermost Loop!
But, reading the simplified version alone in the bathtub is one thing. Signing my name under it and hitting publish is another beast entirely. Suddenly, I don’t just want it to be more understandable. I want it to be good.
So I start fact-checking every link (the “heroic self-driving taxi” Alex mentioned actually didn’t feel very heroic to the people inside it), and reworking every sentence.
What I imagined would take a day of prompt tweaking and a few clicks while I brush my teeth each morning, turned into days of policing AIs who acted like a small band of unhinged interns.
At one point, Gemini was convinced it was 2024 and that Alex’s newsletter was “a very convincing piece of speculative fiction.”
Claude followed instructions beautifully, except it drained all the life out of the text.
ChatGPT questioned most claims, then admitted it hadn’t opened the links. Which is… not ideal for fact-checking.
My takeaway from the week in the trenches:
AI is a brilliant thinking partner, but it doesn’t remove the work, it just changes it. Instead of writing, I become the prompter, fact-checker, and supervisor. And those jobs take longer than I have the time or patience for.
I may come back to it when the tools (or my prompting skills) improve. But for now, here is the only surviving artifact of the experiment.
🌍 Travel:
Where to Stare at Art, Mountains, and Your Diminishing Hyatt Points
If your 2026 travel plans are still just a vague “somewhere nice,” here are a few ideas.
If you’ve been in Vegas and never made it through James Turrell’s hidden installation Akhob, you missed out on something weird and lovely. But fret not. He’s opening his largest Skyspace yet, at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark this June. Worth the pilgrimage if you enjoy having your sense of space quietly rearranged.
If your version of culture involves a gorgeous view and minimal effort, the Rocky Mountaineer just launched a glass-domed train route through the Canadian Rockies. It’s slow, scenic, and really expensive.
For something more active, Sweden is opening a 170km cycling route that seems designed to guide you from wildflower fields straight into bakeries, and northern Spain’s Picos de Europa was just named one of the most beautiful places in the world. Both feel like a respectable reason, if you need one, to justify the trip.
One practical note: World of Hyatt is changing its award pricing in May, with peak nights jumping significantly. If you’ve been hoarding points, now’s the time to use them.
🌞 Health:
Inflammaging
Here’s a way of thinking about aging that reframes the usual story.
Instead of your body just “wearing out,” some researchers say it’s more like a communication breakdown. Imagine millions of tiny messages constantly moving through you: your brain sending quick electrical signals to your muscles, or your gut rushing hormone “letters” through the bloodstream to tell your liver how to handle lunch.
When you’re young, the system is well coordinated. Messages arrive on time. They make sense. The right things happen in the right order.
Over time, it gets less precise. Some signals are delayed. Some are too strong, or don’t switch on or off properly. Older cells can start producing background chemical noise (they call it inflammaging) which confuses nearby cells about what they’re supposed to be doing. Rather than a single part breaking, the whole network struggles to stay in sync.
A lot of the recommendations that come out of this line of research are simple: exercise to help clear out dysfunctional cells, eat foods that are good for the body, sleep to reset the system, and get morning light to keep your internal clock ticking.
These things sound basic, but they clear the static and keep the signals going.
💰 Money:
The 90% Regret and 2026 Picks
Remember the “Moonshot” experiment I did 9 months ago? I asked an AI to pick stocks that could grow 1,000% in five years. While the S&P 500 is barely up 4% since then, that robot-picked basket is sitting at a 90% gain. Planet Labs (+426%) and Aehr (+145%) did the heavy lifting, but not everything went up (looking at you, Recursion Pharma, dropping -40%). See the original July 2025 experiment here.
Seeing those results made me wonder what stocks today’s AI models would recommend. They pointed me straight at the nuts and bolts: copper wires, power grids, and the cooling systems the world needs as it gets “smarter”. I’ve recorded this moment as a 2026 snapshot to check back on in 9 months and further down the line.
🎥 Watch:
Arrival
I finally watched Arrival. After all the talk about orbital data centers, Moon bases and Mars colonies that’s all over the internet, it felt fitting. Instead of expansion and space battles, it’s about language, time, and how we understand reality itself. Quiet, and not what you expect from a typical sci-fi film, but that’s exactly what makes it work.
Watch on Netflix, Amazon Prime, or wherever you get your movies.
📚 Read:
Solve Everything: Achieving Abundance by 2035, and Flatshare
I’m reading Solve Everything by Alex Wissner-Gross and Peter Diamandis. It’s a long essay proposing a playbook for the next 10 years. In the age of self-improving AI, they say we need to move fast to get out of the muddle, change incentives, and pour intelligence into humanity’s biggest problems.
Despite the “no financial advice” disclaimer, it’s full of pointers for businesses and investors. Here’s the short version.
On the opposite end: The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary, which the hubby recommended. Two strangers share a one-bedroom flat and even the same bed, but don’t see each other, because one works nights and the other days. You’re essentially following two people as they get to know each other through Post-it notes and the traces they leave behind.
💡 Mind Hack:
Talk to Yourself in Questions
Your brain doesn’t like being told what to do, but it absolutely loves solving a puzzle.
The fix is just a bit of grammar: turn your statements into questions. Instead of saying “I need to do this,” try asking, “How will I do this?” “What’s the easiest way to start?” “What would make this less annoying?” Research on Interrogative Self-Talk shows that asking “How?” or “Will I?” shifts your mind from a stressed, defensive state into a state of curiosity and problem-solving.
It’s a lot harder to feel overwhelmed when your brain thinks it’s just trying to beat a level in a game.
🎈 Just Because:
The Ultimate Speeding Ticket Defense
Taika Waititi reads a real-life letter from a man who used a series of impossible logic to challenge a speeding ticket:
So there you have it. We’re building things, breaking things, and sometimes even getting one to work.
Be mappy,
Mags
