Hi,

This week, I’m trying a new format. You can leave your feedback here, or just reply to this email and let me know what you think. Thanks!

3 ideas worth procrastilearning over

1. The Great Green Wall

The region of Africa covered by the Saharan Desert is known as the Sahel. And unsurprisingly, the countries of the Sahel are not too keen on the increasing desertification and sand storms coming out of that vast hell hole.

To combat the problem is the ambitious, slightly insane, and heart-warming Great Green Wall - a zone of trees 15km wide but 8000km long.

The project started in 2007 and isn’t going to be finished anytime soon. Especially since it’s plagued by problems.

But it’s a bloody wonderful idea. At the very least it gets people interested in supporting this region as everybody tries to figure out how to deal with rising global temperatures. Here is a sexy trailer for a documentary about it:

2. Actors are losing their voices to AI

In what was only implied a few years back, when the new Stars Wars films started resurrecting Peter Cushing and then Carrie Fisher, is now becoming a widespread phenomenon affecting the living.

Voice actors in particular are being forced to compete with themselves due to companies’ use of new AI technology that clones their voices. There is a growing movement to get copyright laws updated to deal with this fast-moving problem, but sites like Revoicer and dozens of other text-to-speech AI sites are being used more and more, especially for social media creation. Just think about the random little videos you saw on social media today - it’s likely many of them didn’t even use a real voice.

Vice has a great article about the issue here. And this Washington Post one has audio from real people side-by-side their AI copycats.

3. Getting your answers from books

Before AI started making real headway last year, Google had a similar project that now seems antiquated.

Its Talk to Books app invited people to ask a question about anything and get a series of book quotes in return. This is all obviously part of Bard now, but TtB was much friendlier looking, and it seems like the results were more trustworthy. The fact it gave references also made it seem more like a recommendation machine, rather than something that just stole intellectual property, which is a common perception with contemporary AI.

Here are some questions it answered:

• How does eating fiber help you lose weight?

• What policies can help the middle class in America?

• What is the most memorable lesson you learned from your parents?

It’s a shame the service isn’t open to new questions. But it’s also funny that we can already start getting nostalgic about AI.

2 quotes to keep in mind

1 tip for controlling procrastination

When you’re feeling motivated to do something, science says you should visualise all the great things that'll happen once you've achieved it. Imagine yourself working at that goal with a big grin, loving every moment of you doing your best.

But if you’re not motivated and you’re procrastinating instead, you should instead spend 3 to 5 minutes imagining all the crappy things in your future because you continued to do nothing.

Imagine how terrible you'll feel, how barren your life will be.

Imagine failing.

As I’m often unmotivated, I find visualising failure pretty effective! The tip comes from this episode of the Huberman Lab podcast:

To recap:

• Feeling motivated? → Imagine the wins
• Feeling unmotivated? → Imagine the fails

Simple enough! Now you just have to remember that in the moment.... 🤔

That's it for this week. Did you like the new format?

Let me know what you think of the new 3-2-1 format by clicking here.

Thanks!

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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