Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
salman.io
Kafka urges the young man to stay present with his difficult emotions:
Just be quiet and patient. Let evil and unpleasantness pass quietly over you. Do not try to avoid them. On the contrary, observe them carefully. Let active understanding take the place of reflex irritation, and you will grow out of your trouble. Men can achieve greatness only by surmounting their own littleness.
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
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
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.
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.