Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
salman.io
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 want you to visit my website. I want you to read an article from a search result, and then discover the other things I’ve written, the other people I link to, and explore the weird themes I’ve got. I want some of you to read my article then ask me to speak at your conferences. Many folks rely on ad impressions to support the high-quality content... See more
Sophie Koonin • This website is for humans - localghost
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.
Young Adults Are in Crisis - The Atlantic
Faith Hill • Young Adults Are in Crisis — The Atlantic
Young adults are the ones most in crisis. Even Richard Weissbourd, who led the study in 2022, was taken aback. His team found that 36 percent of participants ages 18 to 25 reported experiencing anxiety and 29 percent reported experiencing depression—about double the proportion of 14-to-17-year-olds on each measure. More than half of young adults were worried about money, felt that the pressure to achieve hurt their mental health, and believed that their lives lacked meaning or purpose. Teenagers and senior citizens are actually the two populations with the lowest levels of anxiety and depression, Weissbourd’s research has found.
The author noted how GPT-3 could generate poetic text, but ChatGPT has since lost that ability.
We’ve seen a fair bit of degradation in models over time. The biggest factor is that its developers are optimizing for certain use cases (eg friendly professional chat bot). So it’s not just AI, it’s AI + the founder vision that will dictate its impact.
Also: How long will that be the case? When will AI evolve out of its developers influence?
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
- Use your tools to make things, don't make things about your tools. Technology and the end result are in a dance, one can never lead the other too long.
MANIFESTO
Understanding Colors — Blender Guru
blenderguru.com
The video and notes offer an excellent breakdown of color theory and how to use to make more compelling visual art.