Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
salman.io
Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain. We leave our attachments and our worldliness behind and slowly make our way to the top. At the peak we have transcended all pain. The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all the others behind—our drunken brother, our schizophrenic sister, our tormented
... See morePema Chodron • When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Shambhala Classics)
The definition of hell is: Your last day on Earth, the person you became meets the person you could have become.” - Dan Sullivan
What you learn about the world through fairy tales is to accept things that may not make obvious sense. Trust that there is order behind them, and by doing so slow down the entropy of life.
Shane Parrish • The Great Mental Models Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology
I have been stuck. Every time I sit down to write a blog post, code a feature, or start a project, I come to the same realization: in the context of AI, what I’m doing is a waste of time. It’s horrifying. The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. All of my original thoughts feel like early drafts of better, more complete thoughts that simply haven’t yet formed inside an LLM.
I empathize with the author. But it also reinforces a feeling I’ve had lately: One must live in order to write, to have something to say. If you are going out into the world, changing things, changing yourself, then ideas come to you and you can channel them. But the channeling and expression in digital essay writing shouldn’t be the majority, it should be just one piece of a big puzzle.
If writing and thinking about writing is your life, then yes, AI can replace it. But you can become “unLLMable” by having a rich life that you want to live. Out in the real world. Let AI accelerate the expression a bit, if you want. Or don’t. But protect, foster and grow the most important part: human experience.
In a culture of constant busyness, finding the time to read can be challenging.
Here's a list of some excellent SHORT books you can read in just a few hours: https://t.co/4UN6C1FrWJ
A great story about simplicity from Akio Morita, the instigator of the Walkman project at Sony:
Engineers had the technology to add the recording function to the Walkman and it would’ve cost only 50 cents to a dollar per unit. Morita decided against it. He wanted the device to have one function, which it performs very well. Walkman should only play
“Go, young men to grow wise and wise men to stay young, not West nor East nor North nor South, but anywhere that men are not. For we all need, profoundly, to maintain ourselves in our essential, God-descended manhood against the forces of the day we live in—to be at last less products of a culture than the makers of it.”
—Wilderness, Rockwell Kent
