Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
salman.io
Sitting in the Autumn Breeze: Thay’s Blue Cliff Letter, 2007 | Plum Village
plumvillage.org
Our mother, The Earth, the green planet has suffered from her children’s violent and ignorant ways of consuming. We have destroyed our Mother Earth like a type of bacterium or virus destroying the human body, because Mother Earth is also a body.
One consequence of everything feeling thin & flimsy, is that it's really hard for complex emotions to form. They feel like sand slipping through my fingers, and won't manifest or grow roots.
For an emotion to successfully manifest in my mind, it has to be either super simple or super strong. This goes for both happy & sad emotions.
I still feel a lot of joy, love, and gratitude, because those emotions are really simple. They don't require a lot of intricate structure.
I have a harder time feeling anticipation, romantic love, a crush that gives me butterflies, "fun", anger, irritation, sadness, grief, loneliness, surprise, melancholy, and most other emotions.
"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 moreTime it took to reach 100 million users worldwide:
Telephone: 75 years
Mobile phone: 16 years
World Wide Web: 7 years
iTunes: 6.5 years
Twitter: 5 years
Facebook: 4.5 years
WhatsApp: 3.5 years
Instagram: 2.5... See more
World of Statisticstwitter.comWhat 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.
"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
— C.S. Lewis
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