Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
salman.io
This Nonprofit Wants To Use AI To Understand Animal Communication–And Two Billionaires Are Backing It
Phoebe Liuforbes.com
I love the idea of being able to speak with animals. I am suspicious of the billionaire motive here.
The Earth Species Project has largely run on donations from billionaires, in part thanks to its cofounders’ roots in Silicon Valley. Raskin met Hoffman when he was working at Mozilla designing Firefox and Hoffman was on the board. He first floated the idea of the Earth Species Project to Hoffman in 2015. Hoffman is “fascinated by the philosophical implications of what happens when it’s not just humans that have culture and have language, and what that means for the shift in the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature,” Raskin says.
In his 1947 essay “On Fairy Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that a creator should “hope that he is drawing on reality,” to shape the qualities of his world.
Dirt • Dirt: Worldbuilding, Pt. 2
Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
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
'Once you were a child. Once you
knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions
because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them.
Become that child again: even now.' —C.S. Lewis
If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag... See more
Create things that come alive
A good summary of the positives from leaving Substack
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... See more
When it comes to creativity, optimize for freedom