Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
salman.io
Don’t break the promises you make to yourself
"Fall in love with some activity, and do it!
Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world.
Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best.
Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do.
... See more"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
— C.S. Lewis
Japanese Kissa by Kissa, Norm Maclean, Toni Morrison, Akiya in Japan, Howtown, Bobby Fingers, and more — Roden newsletter issue 094
craigmod.com
Why is maintaining your own online independent nook important? Because the big companies are all fraught, you just have to choose which level of fraught you are willing to stomach. Yes, terrible things are happening on X, but Meta has also catalyzed arguably far more terrible things on a far larger scale. Email and an Apache or Nginx web server are a couple of the last bastions of (mostly) apolitical online publishing mechanisms. And nobody can take them away from you or go out of business under you.
Sojourns in the Parallel World: America Ferrera Reads Denise Levertov’s Ode to Our Ambivalent Relationship with Nature
Maria Popovathemarginalian.org
We could lament that the price we have paid for our so-called progress in the century and half since Muir has been a loss of perspective blinding us to this essential kinship with the rest of nature. But that would be a thoroughly ahistorical lament. We humans have always had a troubled relationship with this awareness — from the pre-Copernican days, when we hailed ourselves as the center of the universe, to the campaign launched against Darwin for demonstrating our evolutionary consanguinity to every single creature on this beautiful planet.
Still, something deep inside us — something elemental, beyond the ego and its conscious reasonings — vibrates with an irrepressible sense of our belonging to and with nature
“Traveling leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”
—Ibn Battuta
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.