Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
salman.io
The video and notes offer an excellent breakdown of color theory and how to use to make more compelling visual art.
sometimes the most important thing we can do is let ourselves stay blurry. to be unbranded, unpositioned, undone for a while. because real self-knowledge is a slow, unmarketable process. and the lost feeling might just be the first sign that you’ve finally stopped performing someone else’s idea of a good life.
milk and cookies • why feeling lost might mean you’re finally doing it right
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.
For children only the present instant exists. For that child the present doesn’t exist for the sake of the future.
Hayao Miyazaki • Turning Point: 1997-2008
Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the... See more
Walter Isaacson • Steve Jobs
But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the... See more
Jasmine Sun • the scenic route
Replit CEO on AI breakthroughs: ‘We don’t care about professional coders anymore’ | Semafor
Reed Albergottisemafor.com
Don't waste your wildness + the 8 inner conflicts that shape who we are + a tender cosmic fable about the rhythms and consolations of friendship
Maria Popovanewsletters.feedbinusercontent.comA decade after Maya Angelou channeled the selfsame polarity of human nature in her staggering space-bound poem “A Brave and Startling Truth,” Griffiths writes:
There are two sides: the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild. Either for life or against it. And each of us has to choose.
and
Reclaiming our wildness emerges as an act of courage and resistance amid the conspicuous consumption by which late-stage capitalism drugs us into mistaking having for being, anesthetizing the urgency of our mortality — that wellspring of everything beautiful and enduring we make. What Griffiths offers is a wakeup call from this near-living, a spell against apathy, against air con and asphalt, against our self-expatriation from our own nature
Much has been made of next-token prediction, the hamster wheel at the heart of everything. (Has a simpler mechanism ever attracted richer investments?) But, to predict the next token, a model needs a probable word, a likely sentence, a virtual reason — a beam running out into the darkness. This ghostly superstructure, which informs every next-token prediction, is the model, the thing that grows on the trellis of code; I contend it is a map of potential reasons.
In this view, the emergence of super-capable new models is less about reasoning and more about “reasons-ing”: modeling the different things humans can want, along with the different ways they can pursue them … in writing.
Reasons-ing, not reasoning.