Acknowledgements

My parents for their patience, encouragement, and support, in so many ways. Particular thanks to my mother who never once stopped motivating me to keep going and who listened tirelessly to my successes, failures, and frustrations throughout every stage of this project. She has become an AI guru without realising it.

My daughters, Bella and Vanessa, for their constant encouragement and support. Additional thanks to Bella who suggested adding the "do you suffer with" inclusions you see.

My sick alter ego, Christos Panayiotou, for his wit, critique, and ongoing support, and his untimely suggestion to integrate voice narration into Cooking Mode. Yeah, thanks for adding weeks to my already overburdened development schedule, dude.

And to all of you. Yes, every last one of you who help to keep this site alive, try its recipes, keep it fresh and up to date, and who let others know of its existence. If I wore a hat, I'd tip it to you. Thank you all. I will do my best to keep improving and adding exciting new, useful features.

Technical Acknowledgements

• The team at OpenAI who created an absolutely phenomenal coding model with Codex 5.5 & 5.6. This site would not have been possible without the collaborative effort from those models, well, not as soon, anyway. Particularly grateful for its pragmatic approach and creative naming of agents, for example "McClintock" and "Chandrasekhar the 2nd", and, at the right times, gentle encouragement to rest and sleep: I have never been so happy to see an AI coding model tell me "I've got this. Go and rest." Kudos, guys. Really.
• Google for Nano Banana Pro: an incredible AI image generation model that delivers on all of the beautiful food imagery you see throughout this platform.
• ByteDance and their excellent AI video generation model, SeeDance 2.0, which I used for the short recipe intro videos. Some hilarious ones in there, but still jaw droppingly good outputs from static imagery.
• The Higgsfield AI team for giving me the interface to work with these image and video generators, and for their robust CLI that allowed me to generate almost all the videos you see on this site.
• Resemble AI for their fantastic Chatterbox, used for all the narrations you hear in Cooking Mode.
• Ollama for giving seamless integration and generous tiers of cloud AI models, with web search capabilities, without which this site would be devoid of information, history, news, and verifiable facts.
• amCharts for their incredible and highly customisable Maps and Charts plug ins which brought several of Yum's pages and analytics to life.
• Anthropic for their Claude AI models, used for ongoing planning of so many parts of this platform and for its always pragmatic but kind and helpful responses that really lifted my spirits on challenging days.
• Moonshot AI for their Kimi AI models, used for their invaluable assistance during initial planning of the business model.
• MaxMind for a phenomenal GeoIP service.
• Stripe for their incredibly robust and reliable system, and for taking almost all of the weight off the site's monetisation and global taxation requirements.
• Brevo for their incredible opt in mail solution and support, allowing our internal Mail Manager to remain robust and compliant.
• BookStack for making it an absolute breeze to prepare an extensive Wiki for The Yum Pandemic.
• LibreTranslate for making it possible to do most of the heavy translation work via CLI.
• Lingva for allowing us the opportunity to create our very own API to handle inline comment and message translations.
• And finally, to DreamHost. Thank you for providing a robust, cost effective web hosting starting solution and place to put all this data and media while running our regular cron jobs reliably. You've been a chosen provider of mine for years, so it seemed only logical to start the platform's baby steps into the real world with you.