Hi Friends,

It is taking me time to get used to writing this email on Mail Chimp. Those of you who don’t know, Mail Chimp is an email marketing service that small businesses and bloggers like myself use to write to their subscribers. I had been postponing using MailChimp dreading to learn yet another software but finally gathered enough courage and launched into it. Longer I leave it, the more I feel intimidated by technology. So bear with me if things feel a bit out of place.

Speaking of technology, did you know that podcasts are the next big thing?

First Google launched a podcast app for Android phones. It’s called Google Podcasts and you should download it if you haven’t. Next, according to The Hotsheet, and Amazon is also getting into podcasts. I also read somewhere that the next generation of cars will have podcast apps built in the dashboards. That is entertainment and learning blended in one. If you haven’t started listening to podcasts yet, it is time you start. Leaving it too long will mean living in the eighties without watching TV.

If that is not enough to shock you, here is another technology shocker. A college student used GPT-3 to write fake blog posts and ended up at the top of Hacker News. GPT-3 is a language-generating Artificial Intelligence tool that looks for patterns in data. Liam Porr was trying to demonstrate that the content produced by GPT-3 could fool people into believing it was written by a human. He told MIT Technology Review, “it was super easy, actually, which was the scary part.”

Here’s a sample from Porr’s blog post (with a pseudonymous author), titled “Feeling unproductive? Maybe you should stop overthinking.” A reader to the AI post wrote, “Reads exactly like 99% of the bullshit you find on Hacker News and Medium – well done!”

Where does it leave bloggers like us? We will have to think of ways to beat the machines.

This leads me to an interesting conversation I had with a Medium writer Cody Mcgraw whose article 15 Radical Minutes caught my eye. Cody has been spending 15 virtual minutes with people he had never met before and having “beautifully unique conversations” with them (his words). I wrote a note in his article saying I like this idea and he invited me to have a conversation with him. We hooked on Goggle Meet yesterday and in fifteen minutes I get to know a guy who was young, amazing, interesting, and a great listener. And as they say, it might be the beginning of a long friendship.

This week I submitted the synopsis of my novel to the workshop I am doing with the Australian Writers Centre. It got great reviews. I am feeling energized to get back into it. I was about to dump the damn thing but apparently, the story wants to be born. You will find me talking about it from time to time. 

I started several reports this week, which I want to develop into free resources to be made available on my website. They will keep me busy for months to come.

That is it from me this week.

I will write to you again next Friday.

Until then take care.

Regards
Neera