Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
salman.io
I’ve seen so many influencers advocating for people to quit their jobs and explore their passions to nurture creativity. It’s a terrible idea for many people pursuing creative projects.
Most people are undisciplined. Large swaths of time to explore passions— or worse, find oneself— often leads to neuroticism, less productivity, laziness or even pa... See more
“Traveling leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”
—Ibn Battuta
On the extortion of sensitivity:
We also live in a culture that has warped sensitivity from the measure of our porousness to life — the openhearted porousness from which all creative work springs — into a means of manipulation, extorting sympathy and slack, unconcerned with creation.
The definition of hell is: Your last day on Earth, the person you became meets the person you could have become.” - Dan Sullivan
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.
But please, let us not turn this heartbreak into something useful just yet. If we do, we will be tempted to walk in old ways. We will rely on tired words. We will make memes of ourselves. Easy, digestible phrases that fill a short term longing for solutions.
Instead let us truly bear witness.
Let the fog of confusion obscure our clarity for a time. To not know how – or where – we’ll live. To be fumbling and full of grief, because what we always counted on has been struck from our horizon. And we may never be as magnificent again.
Creativity requires connecting the dots, and connecting the dots requires allowing time for my subconscious to consolidate my ideas and make associations. This means that, from time to time, I need to just stare out the window and do nothing.
This doesn’t feel productive, even though it is.
This doesn’t feel productive, even though it is.
Ozan Varol • You’re doing better than you think. Here’s why. - Ozan Varol
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?
I think that being an artist ultimately is about searching for a kind of freedom, a freedom of spirit, and a freedom in making. The moment when that is possible comes at different times for different people. You should never give up, because being an artist—there’s no one path to it. It’s not like some other fields. If you’re an artist, you’re alwa... See more
When it comes to creativity, optimize for freedom