Johann Van Tonder
@jvt
20 years in ecommerce, now CEO of a CRO agency. Probably doing analysis in R or building stuff with AI. Or walking on the beach. Yeah, probably that.
Johann Van Tonder
“The fact that these things model language is probably one of the biggest discoveries in history. That you (LLM) can learn language by just predicting the next word … — that’s just shocking to me.”
- Mikhail Belkin, computer scientist at the University of California
Curate to create, there’s no other way
There’s no creation without inspiration.
Every creator throughout history has morphed his interpretation of the world through their chosen medium. Whether that’s painting, writing, music or photography is irrelevant.
First and foremost, creators are curators .
They take it all in and reinterpret it in their own ... See more
There’s no creation without inspiration.
Every creator throughout history has morphed his interpretation of the world through their chosen medium. Whether that’s painting, writing, music or photography is irrelevant.
First and foremost, creators are curators .
They take it all in and reinterpret it in their own ... See more
Jorge Medina • You’re Not Lacking Creativity, You’re Overwhelmed
Content and
"It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it." - Roger Ebert
applies to every creative project
Most self-help stuff can be mulched into some version of “Calm the fuck down, keep moving, and have good goals“
Quotes and Human Stuff
Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say?
Surprisingly often they don’t know.
Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it?
Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time?
On Writing Well, William Zinsser
Your mind is the most rambling, chaotic, needling, insulting, insufferable person you will ever meet. Thoughts do not hold rightful claims on your life—meditation helps you welcome the good ones and ignore the bad ones - Sam Harris
Tim Ferriss • #599: New Insights from Sam Harris, Dr. Peter Attia, Ramit Sethi, and Elizabeth Gilbert | The Tim Ferriss Show • Podcast Notes
Most times, the best way to create value is continue to double down on the domain-specific insights you've collected over your entire career.
Nikita Bier • Tweet
“From this point on, the intelligence of LLMs… will only continue to improve. Human intelligence will not.”
OpenAI’s paper on using AI to debug AI code
Quotes and Generative AI
I recognize the irony here of describing understanding through words, and you being the person that’s internalizing it as knowledge. But with that said, therein lies the value of writing. Writing is an attempt to share your lived experience with others, which makes you face the blind spots in your own thinking in real-time. When you write, it becom... See more
moretothat.com • Knowledge Is Not Understanding - More to That
Writing is an attempt to share your lived experience with others, which makes you face the blind spots in your own thinking in real-time…. Whether it’s in the form of a quote or an entire concept, you recognize the gap between your own knowledge and understanding.