Peter Mayle

Peter Mayle

Estate

Peter Mayle was born in Brighton and went to boarding-school there for several years before leaving England for Barbados where his father had been posted with the Foreign Office. He left school at 16 and joined Shell as a trainee, before getting a job in advertising where he began as a copywriter. After almost 15 successful years in the industry, he decided to devote himself fully to writing.
Mayle began his writing career with a series of factual guides for children and adults, and also published two volumes of stories for children about Chilly Billy, who lives in the fridge.
However, it was in 1989, having relocated two years earlier from Devon to Provence in order to concentrate on fiction, that Peter Mayle published the book which not only became an international bestseller but also redefined the travel genre: A Year in Provence chronicles, with great humour and affection, the challenges Peter and his wife Jennie faced in adapting to French life. Over the years, he was to write several more books on Provence and on aspects – including the cuisine – of the life there.
Mayle also wrote several standalone novels (including A Good Year, which was adapted into a film directed by Ridley Scott) and four light-hearted detective stories, featuring the character Sam Levitt.
In 2002, Peter Mayle was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in recognition of his services to French culture.

Contact

@MayleOfficial @Peter Mayle Official

Twitter users, esp. Twitter VCs

Has anyone created a GPT-enabled bot to decide which cold emails/DMs/LinkedIn messages are actually worth responding to?

One year of progress in generative AI with @midjourney_ai

Talk about being left holding the bag.

JPM thought it had bags of raw nickel in a warehouse; turns out it was just rocks. 🤯

https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgans-nickel-bags-turned-out-to-filled-with-stones-2023-3

Was on a plane yesterday, studying some physics; got confused about something and I was able to solve my problem by just asking alpaca-13B—running locally on my machine—for an explanation. Felt straight-up spooky.

The pace of AI development is dizzying.

Imagine tweeting this the same week GPT4 is launched and both Google and Microsoft add AI copilots with step-function productivity gains.

GPT-4 in 30 seconds with @GetSteamship:

% pip install steamship
% ship login
% python

> ship = Steamship()
> gpt4 = ship.use_plugin("gpt-4")
> task = gpt4.generate(
> text="Announce Steamship's GPT-4 support"
> )
> task.wait()
> print(task.output.blocks[0].text)

This is absolutely wild. Pretty soon a toddler will be able to spin up a full stack website.

Of all the changes to Twitter, ads in reply threads has got to be one of the most user hostile choices.

This is what I exchanged with my dad about what led to this (IMHO)… sharing here in lieu of trying to write a tweet version.

Can you imagine how cool that would be?!

Anyone getting transfers out of SVB yet this morning? Would love to know what others have seen (verified, not rumor).

I still don’t understand how SVB failed when they had so many liquid assets

In hindsight, perhaps there were some signs…

Barney Frank of the Dodd-Frank Act fame was also on the board of Signature Bank, which was shut down by regulators.

What strange times we live in.

We may have averted catastrophe, but things could still get messy…

I feel this in my bones.

Founders: I hope that you paid very close attention to the behavior of certain VCs over the last four days.

I hope this moment serves as a character test, to guide you to the types of partners you would like to work with in the coming years.