A life ordinary by Amit Sarkar - Issue #41

Author

Amit Sarkar
December 26, 2023

Welcome to another edition of my newsletter.

This time it’s been very long since I last published my newsletter. The reason is I recently came back from our holiday to India. It was my wife’s cousin’s wedding and we planned our trip around it. It was great to meet both sides of our families and create new memories. The best part was the delicious food and escaping the UK cold.

On the other hand, the India trip resulted in a weight gain of 2 kilos and an increase in fat %. But the muscle mass stayed the same which is good since I did train with weights twice in Kolkata. But my running was affected and my heart rate and timings have all been affected because I didn’t run for 3 weeks. Time to train again and get back into shape.

Me and Rinat went on a journey to find a Podcast producer for our show on Upwork. But we realised that we can’t afford anyone yet since we are not making any money from our podcast. It would have cost a minimum of $100 to produce each episode which would have included all aspects of releasing an episode after it is recorded.

One of the new things I have discovered is Ben Böhmer’s music thanks to my friend Monty. I have been listening to him constantly these last couple of days. Some really nice music if you are into the House genre.

And I bought myself an OpenRun headset from Shokz. These headsets generate sounds that reach our ears through bone conduction technology. That means our ear canals are completely open. I got a really good deal over the Black Friday period so couldn’t resist buying these.

📝 Personal Will

Recently I have been talking to a solicitor to get our Wills drafted. It is Will Aid month every November when many solicitors provide a free will writing service to people living in the UK and all they ask is for people to donate to charities.

Will Aid is a special partnership between the legal profession and nine of the UK’s best-loved charities. Together we raise vital funds for these wonderful causes, while ensuring that people in the UK gain the reassurance of knowing they have a professionally written Will.

As part of my discussion with the solicitor, I learnt a lot. There are three main reasons I want to write my Will -

  1. The first reason is because we have a son, I need to make sure that if anything happens to me then my wife and son get all our assets and have full control over it.

  2. The second reason is that in case me and my wife both passed away at the same time, then our son should not be put in the UK foster care system. As part of the Will guardians will be assigned who can take care of our estate and son till he reaches the age of 18 and goes to university.

  3. The third reason is that I want to ensure our estate doesn’t get unduly taxed on my death.

Writing a Will enables you to define your estate which includes any property you own, any savings/investments you have, any insurance policy in your name and any pension funds where you save money. The estate will also pay out any outstanding debt such as loans or credit card debts before it is finally settled.

Each individual has their own Will but if your circumstances are the same then your wife can have a mirror copy of your own Will. Also, Wills can be modified as many times as you want whenever your circumstances change in life to reflect the most up-to-date state of your assets.

The legal aspect of passing on your money is crucial. And there are two things in particular to tick off.

1. Registering your Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) - the person(s) you name as attorney(s) will manage your affairs if you should become incapacitated or pass away. There are two types of LPA, one for health and welfare and one for property and financial affairs. You can choose to make one type or both.

2. Writing up a Will - a Will is essential in making sure your money is passed on to the people or organisations you decide.

The last part of writing a Will is How to prepare your digital life for when you die. This is crucial since we want to make sure our email accounts, social media accounts and any other accounts we regularly use are properly taken care of after we die.

The MoneySavingExpert has a detailed Death Plan on how to plan for your death before you die.

🤖 AI Influencer

I have been thinking of creating my own AI Influencer ever since I heard about the below two famous AI models -

  1. Shudu created by Diigitals touted as the world’s first digital supermodel

  2. Aitana Lopez created by The Clueless

I also checked the Top 13 AI Influencers on Instagram in 2023 to understand which profiles have the most followers and what are they doing to gain these followers.

Talking about these AI models with Rinat resulted in him sharing a YouTube video with me that showed how to create such models.

I then went on a journey and created India’s first AI Influencer Aisha Kalpana. Aisha is your girl next door who is out exploring the world. I have modelled her to represent strong women in my life who are go-getters and achievers.

I have played with 100s of image prompts to see what these tools can do and what they can’t and how I can overcome some of their shortcomings. There is still a lot to learn.

Screenshot of Aisha Kalpana’s Instagram page

There are also other AI models in India -

  1. Kyra - India's first virtual influencer created by FUTR Studios

  2. Naina - India’s first virtual superstar! created by Avtr Meta Labs

  3. Tia Sharma - India's first AI-powered virtual influencer created by Mouni Roy and Suraj Nambiar

The tools I have used to create Aisha are as follows -

All of the images and models are based on Stability AI’s open-source Stable Diffusion image generation model.

I will create a video soon to describe the whole process of creating Aisha.

The current aim of creating Aisha is to gain some followers and see if this thing takes off big. If it does, then I will explore options which the current AI Influencers are already using for their growth.

I am also thinking of training a Stable Diffusion model on Rinat’s computer. That way we can have more specific images generated which are similar/closer to Aisha's facial profile.

While creating Aisha I realized that not all the followers on Instagram are real people. There are a lot of bots on Instagram unlike X. Elon Musk created good policies to remove bots from its platform but Instagram hasn’t. Some links are mentioned below to show just how many bots are followers as a % of the top celebrity profiles on Instagram.

💰 Laws of getting rich

Recently, I read this wonderful article about a few laws for getting rich.

A few laws of getting rich

There are 13 divorces among the 10 richest men in the world. Correlation isn’t causation, and the sample size is tiny.

collabfund.com/blog/a-few-laws-of-getting-rich

This is not an anti-wealth list – just a collection of subtle downsides that are easy to ignore, and so common you may as well call them the only true laws of getting rich.

  1. Most of what makes you happy in life has nothing to do with money, and realizing that once you have money can be a painful admission.

  2. What you think is admiration of your success may actually be envy.

  3. The richer you become, the less likely people around you are to tell you when you’re wrong, crazy, mean, or oblivious.

  4. Sometimes what made you successful was worry and anxiety, and you can’t let go of that when you’re rich.

  5. There is no easy way to manage wealth and kids.

  6. Quick wealth is fragile wealth.

  7. Reputations have momentum in both directions because people want to associate with winners and avoid losers.

  8. Expectations can rise faster than income, so a higher income sends expectations spiralling out of control.

  9. No one is going to remember you in 100 years.

Most of the points made a lot of sense and I could connect with them. Please read the whole article to understand the nuance of each point.

❤️ Things I enjoyed

This section has been inspired by Ali Abdaal’s wonderful newsletter.

🎬 Video - Great Ball Contraption (GBC) at Japan Brickfest 2023 is a wild video on Lego contraptions. The imagination used to build these with Lego is insane. Must watch for all builders.

📝 Article - Where Is the World's Most Dangerous Drinking Water? shows which countries have the safest and the most dangerous drinking tap water. It’s surprising to see some countries from the EU and even the USA getting a Water Quality EPI (Environmental Performance Index) score of less than 100.

📱 App - I have been using Tensor Art for the last couple of days and it’s been a brilliant app to generate images from text. Echoing my quote in Issue #39, I can confidently say that AI has democratized content creation.

🎙️ Podcast - Life Begins At 40: How To Escape The 'Rat Race' & Take Back Control Of Your Life | Adam Grant is a brilliant podcast hosted by Dr Rangan Chatterjee. I would urge everyone to listen to it. Some very important life skills are discussed.

📺 TV shows - The Billion Dollar Code and How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) are both German shows available on Netflix and I would highly recommend you guys to watch these. Both are based on true stories. The first show is based on Google Earth’s predecessor and the second show is based on The true story of Shiny_Flakes.

Thank you so much once again for reading my newsletter this week. Please feel free to Buy me a coffee if you are enjoying what I am sharing.

If you want to follow me around the internet, then please do so here.

Until we meet again next week, try a new AI tool, play often, eat healthy, be more social and stay safe from COVID.

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