u/CartographerFeisty66

Hey everyone,

My wife and I are heading to Paris from July 9th to July 12th to celebrate her 40th birthday. We are leaving the kids at home, so we’re looking for a trip focused on amazing food, great wine, local markets, and a relaxed pace. We want to avoid major tourist traps and stick to high-quality, authentic experiences.

We are staying at Hôtel de Neuve Le Marais.

Here is our current itinerary. I’d love some feedback on any tweaks we should make.

Thursday, July 9:

18:00 | Land at airport, taxi to hotel (budgeting 1.5–2 hours for traffic/customs).

20:00 – 20:30 | Check-in at Hôtel de Neuve Le Marais.

21:00 | Dinner at Le Petit Marché or Le Mary Celeste

22:30 | Optional late drink at The Cambridge Public House.

Friday, July 10:

09:00 | Early morning coffee (Leaving the specific café blank for now).

09:30 – 11:15 | Marché d’Aligre

11:15 | Mid-morning coffee (Blank).

11:30 – 12:45 | Coulée Verte René-Dumont

13:30 | Lunch (Booked): Parcelles

15:30 – 19:30 | Shopping

20:30 | Dinner (Booked): Shabour

22:30 | Optional nightcap at Experimental Cocktail Club.

Saturday, July 11

09:00 – 11:00 | Coffee

11:00 – 12:30 | sandwiches at Chez Alain Miam Miam

12:45 – 14:30 | Picnic - Place des Vosges.

15:00 – 17:00 | Optional: Musée Rodin

17:30 – 19:15 | Eiffel Tower

21:00 | Dinner (Booked): Adraba

23:00 | Optional late drink at Le Très Particulier.

Sunday, July 12:

09:00 | Early morning coffee

11:00 | Mid-morning coffee (Blank).

12:00 | Lunch (Booked): La Christine (6th Arrondissement).

14:00 – 17:30 | TBD

19:00 | Taxi out to the airport

Coffee Recommendations: We left our 09:00 and 11:00 coffee spots blank. We want excellent specialty coffee near the Marais, Aligre, and Saint-Germain areas where we’ll already be walking. Any must-visits?

Where's a good place to watch the World Cup in Paris?
Are there any public places with big screens where I can watch the matches?

I've been using both Catch ai and Tomo ai for a 2 weeks now, and I don't think they should really be compared as direct competitors.

Tomo is great if what you want is an AI companion that remembers things, helps you think, reminds you about stuff, and stays with you throughout the day. persistent conversational layer that is easy and fun to work with.

Catch is much more execution-oriented. It has access to my email, calendar, notes, crm, and slack, and it carries tasks through to completion instead of just suggesting what I should do next.

For example, after I forwarded an email asking me to find time with a customer, Catch handled the back-and-forth, found a slot that worked, sent the invite, and updated everyone. I didn't have to copy information between apps or babysit the process.

From a technical perspective, what i like about tomo is the speed of the agent - very fast and fun to work with. catch has voice which is a big plus for me.

Neither approach is better, and i think they're solving different problems.

i think i'll keep using both. but curious if anyone else has tried them.

these AI agents that you can speak with on the phone are freaking crazy, and it's the most intuitive way you can work with an AI agent. I just love this. reminds me of this:

which one is more sophisticated?

https://preview.redd.it/lynwwslcwe9h1.png?width=1868&format=png&auto=webp&s=42f2f56dd035c2ad636da32fee8386c41903a847

so here is a crazy story.

​

during the weekend, one of the guys in my office got engaged. and i was like, this is a reason to celebrate. so i told my ai agent (catch ai) hey, please arrange for us a team event to go drink in a bar or eat in a restaurant.

​

and i gave him a little bit of guidance, but basically what he did was, one, speak with the entire team and get their schedule and availability. two, pick a place for us to have a fancy dinner. three, actually call the restaurant and book us a table. and four, they requested a credit card as a deposit, and he was actually able to speak with the host and get her to save us the table without giving my credit card details.

​

so it wasn't one prompt to get everything right, but it was freaking crazy!!

for those of you using ai agents, are you actually using phone calls? if so, what kinds of tasks are you delegating?

i've been using catch ai for a couple of months now, and one thing that has changed recently in their phone calling feature.

at first, i tried using it for simple things like booking a table for dinner. it sometimes worked - but not always. recently it feels a lot more capable, and i've started handing off more tasks: starting with morning sync about my day, calling people i work with when i need information from them, calling hotels or businesses with questions. basically every time i get into the car i ask him to call me.
(I don't don't trust it with sensitive cases but i fell like it's getting better)

it's gotten me thinking that phone calls might actually be one of the most useful applications for ai agents. most of the ai products i see focus on writing, research, or content generation, but having an agent interact with the real world on your behalf feels like a different category entirely.

I'm watching House of the Dragon now, and it's been a long time since I watched Game of Thrones. One thing I've noticed is that I use ChatGPT a lot while watching the show to learn more about the history of the houses, castles, geography, and other details.

​

I've realized that I'm much less sensitive to spoilers than I used to be. When I watched Game of Thrones, I was extremely spoiler-sensitive. Now I feel like I can't help myself—I keep looking things up and learning about events before they happen.

​

I'm curious whether this is just a personal phenomenon or if other people feel the same way. Has anyone else become less sensitive to spoilers over time?

​

I'm only asking people who haven't read the books, of course, because that's a completely different situation.

​

so after the final scene of season 2, I'm a little confused about where some of the major houses stand. what's going on with the Baratheons, the Greyjoys, and the Vale? why aren't we really seeing them involved? and the tyrells?

i just connect catch and i like it a lot - thinking what else should i connect.

i told my wife this when she asked why i was feeling down after watching an episode of house of dragons: the thing with game of thrones is that it makes you cheer for and love a set of characters, then starts killing them off one by one. you desperately keep watching, hoping your loved ones won't die. but they will die too. so painful.

I think what's going to happen is that Anthropic will no longer be the darling of the AI industry. That doesn't necessarily mean anything about its IPO prospects or the underlying business, but I'm talking about the narrative that will dominate the conversation.

I think three things are happening in parallel.

First, the cost of AI is skyrocketing, while open-source models seem to be catching up in terms of the price-to-intelligence ratio.

Second, Notion publicly criticized Anthropic's models.

And third, it feels like the models themselves are no longer improving at the pace people expected.

What I think will happen over the next few weeks is that we'll start hearing many more voices criticizing Anthropic and shifting their support toward open source or OpenAI as the new winner.

cool experience:
during our morning briefing, my agent told me that i had a demo session booked with a potential client but the prospect had made a typo in their email address.

my agent pointed out that maybe the prospect had accidentally typed an extra "t" in the word "solution." (one of the words in the company name) and suggested fixing the email address and sending a new calendar invite.

i don't know whether the prospect will end up joining the meeting, but i thought it was pretty cool that the agent caught that detail and took the initiative to fix it.

edit:
credit to catch for building this!

Why did Robert Baratheon name his son and heir Joffrey if it was already the name of a Targaryen prince?

Considering Robert fought a rebellion to overthrow the Targaryens and seemed to hate them, it feels strange that he'd give his firstborn the same name. Is there an explanation for this?

something quite amazing happened today: i booked my first hotel using an ai agent.

when i say "my ai agent," i mean an agent built on a product i'm using called catchagent.ai.
i use it for a lot of things but - today was the first time i used it for travel. I travel regularly to one of our sites, which is about a three-hour flight away. i've always wanted an executive assistant to handle my travel arrangements, but until now i've had to do it myself.

this was the first time my agent actually completed part of that job. it didn't book my flight, which i don't think is supported yet, but it successfully booked my hotel and even found a better rate than i would normally get on my own.

Such a great milestone!!!

another quietly enjoyable feature of my ai admin assistant, is that it can click on scheduling links for me.

whenever someone sends me a calendly link, or one of those eventbrite or luma links where i need to manually fill in my details, i just don’t do that anymore. i either forward it by email or, if i get it as a text message, i send it to my agent and say, “set me up for this please.” that’s it.

the nice part is that it actually looks at my calendar and checks the available options. if you have a busy schedule, someone sending you a scheduling link is usually easier for them, not for you. you still need to compare the available times against your calendar.

and if other people on your team are involved, it gets even more annoying. now you need to open multiple calendars, compare schedules, and match everything against the options in the scheduling link.

instead, you can just send it to your agent and say, “find a time for me and x to meet this person using their link,” and move on with your life while the agent takes care of it.

i think that’s pretty awesome.

one of the things i’m being asked is why i use an ai executive assistant vs just chatgpt.

here's how i see it:

chatgpt
amazing in drafting documents, emails, longer forms of content, images + general copywriting
can be connected to many other tools
brainstorming & ideation - great tool to think with about things, amazing general understanding of the world
really shines in research - if i want to learn something or get instructions on how to do something (both for work or personal - from how to change things on meta ads to how to fix my washing machine)
good for work and for personal

catchagent
shine on work related admin tasks
available on imessage + slack + phone call
focused / limited scope - only for work
proactive
no code, no images, no data analysis, no long form content
stronger integration with mail, calendar and notion
more responsive to feedback - one chat and one context
can speak with other people over email or text

bottom line:
chatgpt - research, email drafts, long form content or data analysis (tool), personal use case
catchagent - calendar, email, tasks, delegation vs other people in or out of the org (admin assistant)

one of the big benefits of ai executive assistants is that it’s software and basically on 24/7. now, this might sound dumb, but it’s actually something that i found very, very useful, especially during weekends and holidays.

the thing that i hate the most is being stressed about work when i’m not supposed to be working. so the idea that i have someone i can throw my thoughts at — tell it to draft a bunch of emails, set reminders for the rest of the week, and give it tasks to schedule things for me, but only initiate them on monday morning, has actually proven to be really useful.

i guess sometimes we think these things are objectively really small, but just the notion that i have someone to throw my ideas at, no matter how late it is, no matter if it’s the weekend, without me feeling any guilt, is actually priceless.