Today’s hike with TJ was the most difficult hike I think I’ve done without a fully-loaded pack. Five hours. It was beyond wet. While it wasn’t raining, it was misting and absolutely everything was wet. When we got to the Backbone Trail, it clearly had not been hiked by many, if anyone, for a while. There was grass and other growth over our heads. We could have definitely used a machete. Every time we brushed against anything, we got soaked. We could not have been more wet jumping into a pool. And then we got cold. We got so cold that we had to start jogging the trail, which was made difficult by the overgrowth. It was so overgrown that we couldn’t really even see the trail unless we were walking through it. Needless to say, it felt amazing to finish. We got an Uber just off Sunset, at the entrance to Will Rogers State Park that took us back to Topanga. My legs are definitely sore.
We need to forget, but we first must feel safe forgetting.
That’s why notes and bookmark apps are so valuable to us. Their promise of a storehouse for all our fleeting whims looks like the salvation we so desperately need. Absolution from procrastination at the altar of getting things done.
Notes let us forget and remember, simultaneously. No more loss aversion; we can have our ideas and forget them, too. We can cut and trim and still keep our darlings.
This is a cross-post from my newsletter about my AI research. If you would like to support or just subscribe, you can do so on Substack.
This week I saw two brilliant examples of artists embracing AI to do some wonderfully interesting projects. Bjørn Karmann created a context-to-image camera called Paragraphica which is both a physical and digital camera (pictured above). Jasper van Loenen is also combining hardware and AI for his Black Box Camera project.
I’ve been thinking a lot about physical and digital art a lot recently. When it comes to digital art, some of my favorite digital art falls into a category called generative art, which is overly broad. Maybe a better name for the stuff I like is math art — art that is generated by math equations. I follow a ton of artists using Midjourney and other tools and had no idea until this week that you can prompt Midjourney with equations. I mean of course you can! And the wonderful thing about Midjourney and other text-to-image tools like it is you can copy-paste the same word-for-word prompt and you will get a different result than everyone else. A few of my results are below.
I can’t write about art without thinking about and mentioning Sean Bonner. He had a great post on his blog this week that is definitely worth reading. He knows a thing or two about art. Not only is he an artist in his own right, but a voracious art fanatic. He’s one of those people I try and support, no matter what he’s doing. It’s always interesting and I want him to keep doing it.
A paper was recently published on human-computer interactions, specifically around the creativity of prompting. The wonderful thing about this moment in time is that many of us are learning together. We’re experimenting and playing together, largely in the open. This allows for collaboration, remixing, riffing and jamming with one another. It is endlessly fascinating and inspiring. Surprisingly, of the 58% of U.S. adults that say they are familiar with ChatGPT, only 14% have tried it themselves.
Japan took a bold, if not unexpected, stance on copyright recently. It came to light this week that the Japanese government stated that it will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training. As you would expect, that has Japanese artists worried. It will be interesting to see what other countries decide.
The written word can be art and Sudowrite can help write an entire novel. While the tool itself isn’t likely to produce art, perhaps through collaboration art will be born. I suspect that will be the case, though I wonder, especially in these early days, if writers will talk about it. Adi Robertson from The Verge gave Sudowrite a go with mixed results. Google started rolling out AI in Docs and Gmail to help you write things. I would pay good money to have someone simply sort and file my email so I can respond to the things that truly matter because 95% of the email sitting in my inbox does not matter.
I feel like it gets talked about a lot in certain circles, but I’m constantly baffled at just how awful iOS autocorrect has become. It hasn’t been this bad before and it’s something I perceive has gotten progressively worse.
TIL a new word. The kids were asking about whether gold coins are still produced, so we asked ChatGPT. It used a word I didn’t know.
The word “numismatic” refers to the study or collection of coins, paper currency, and other forms of money. It encompasses the examination, research, and appreciation of coins and related objects, such as tokens and medals, from a historical, cultural, and artistic perspective. Numismatics involves the study of the design, production, and distribution of currency, as well as the analysis of their historical context and significance. Collectors and enthusiasts who engage in numismatics often appreciate the historical, artistic, and monetary value of coins and currency.
I was reading a recent post from Dave Winer and it got me thinking about the fact that I hate having to think about where I should write. It often keeps me from writing. Everything should be as easy as publishing somewhere and deciding (or not) where it shows up.
Way back in the Before Times of 2015, I switched from sending out my annual playlist thing to individual people to using TinyLetter to publish them as a newsletter. Newsletters have come a long way since then and TinyLetter has kind of been frozen in time. This has largely worked for me, but when I attempted to send out this year’s playlist I found that for some reason I could not add links. I’ve been working exclusively on my iPad Pro this week, so that may have had something to do with the trouble.
I saw Sean had migrated his newsletter from TinyLetter to Paragraph recently. I had looked at Paragraph shortly before Sean made the jump and thought what they were doing was a great approach that embraced the decentralized web, focused on empowering creators and offered the ability to store everything on the permaweb. The transition was as simple as copying and pasting once I signed up and imported my subscribers from TinyLetter. I sent out my Selections from 2022 playlist to everyone a few days ago. Paragraph seems like a really nice platform that I’ll be exploring more in the coming year.
While you’re here, go ahead and sign up for the newsletter. You’ll receive one, maybe two, emails per year from me.
As Miles Davis once said, “Time isn’t the main thing. It’s the only thing.” I simply have less time between work, family and hobbies. And I need a lot more time alone than most people. When I’m asked to consult, have my brain picked, mentor or other such things, I have a TextExpander snippet that simply says:
Thank you for thinking of me for this opportunity. At this time I’m over-committed. Please keep me in mind for other opportunities in the future. Be well.
I don’t like saying “no” (FOMO), but saying “yes” to a lot of things means that I don’t have time to focus on the truly important things.
Throughout the day, as I come across interesting links, threads, articles, interviews and other things, I bookmark them, categorize them and into a vast cavern of information they go. All of this information serves as a sort of hyper-personalized search engine, but I’m the only person that has access to it. For over 15 years now, I’ve been collecting links to stuff that interests me. Some of them I read, some of them I skim, but most of them I stash away, only to reference later, if at all. To date I have 47,331 bookmarks, all of which represent me in some way. I feel like if someone or some machine wanted to really understand me, they would look at my bookmarks.
This kind of all began in 2005 when I started using Delicious to bookmark and tag interesting things I came across on the web. To give you an idea of when that was, the second thing I bookmarked on June 14, 2005, was YouTube.
My tagging has come a long way since 2005
I haven’t stopped bookmarking since. Yahoo! acquired Delicious and we all know what happened to companies acquired by Yahoo! in that era. Thankfully Pinboard, started by someone who worked on Delicious, came onto the scene in 2009. I exported all of my Delicious bookmarks and imported them into Pinboard, where they remain, but the service hasn’t kept up with my needs. As a result, I started using Raindrop about a year ago and have been really happy with the service. I have an IFTTT applet that pushes bookmarks from Raindrop to Pinboard for redundancy and because I like supporting Maciej.
Information Sources
Almost all of the information I consume comes from three main sources — RSS feeds, Twitter and email. RSS feeds have been, and continue to be, the dominant way I consume information. I use a service called Feedbin to store my RSS subscriptions and serve as a feed reader, for which I pay $50/year. There are “free” services and feed readers out there, but free is never really free and after Google Reader disappeared, it was a valuable lesson to us all that paying for things keeps them around. I use Feedbin in a browser tab when I’m using my laptop and on my iPad and iPhone, I use a $5 app called Reeder, which I like a lot. I currently have about 400 highly-curated sources, including popular websites, personal blogs, link blogs, Google searches and email newsletters. To give you an idea of what that means in terms of the volume of items several hundred feeds generate, I have just over 56,000 waiting to be consumed, tagged and saved. I will never get to most of them and I don’t care.
Twitter is, perhaps, the most under-appreciated social network ever. I was one of the first few hundred people on Twitter and while my usage has increased over time, how I use it has changed massively. I’m a firm believer that the best way to use Twitter is to not follow anyone and instead use its Lists feature. I have a large-ish number of lists on all sorts of topics like breaking news, security and privacy, music, technology, IRL friends, Los Angeles, and so on. The greatest thing about it is you have access to the world’s experts in pretty much any field of interest you might have. When I come across a tweetstorm worthy of saving, I use a service called Threadreader to gather the tweets, save them to a Threadreader URL and then add a bookmark with tags to Raindrop. I generally bookmark the Threadreader URL as I find it easier to read than reading it natively on Twitter. Every time I heart a tweet, I have an IFTTT applet that saves it to Raindrop in a Twitter collection.
Favorited for obvious reasons
Email has made a comeback since newsletters really started taking off. I don’t get a lot of newsletters in my email inbox. Most of the newsletters I subscribe to go directly to Feedbin. One of the coolest features is that you have an email address associated with your account, which you can use when you sign up for a newsletter. Hence, every time that newsletter is sent, it stays out of your inbox and can be read alongside everything else I read in Feedbin. Of the new newsletters that actually come to my inbox, I have a couple of link-heavy favorites. Dense Discovery is one of the most exquisitely curated newsletters out there. It definitely has a certain aesthetic and voice. I always look forward to saving it for when I know I can read through it entirely. I probably bookmark at least 60% of the links Kai sends. My other favorite is from Alexey Guzey and it’s called Guzey’s Best of Twitter, which is pretty self-explanatory.
How I Read
The two primary ways I read are on a web page in the Brave browser or in the Instapaper app. Brave is a Chromium browser, which means it’s based on Google Chrome, but you can think of it as a de-Googlefied version of Chrome that runs faster, behaves better and respects your privacy. The great thing is it can run Chrome extensions. One of the extensions I use to highlight quotes and passages on web pages is called Memex. I’m still trying to figure out how to integrate this into everything as there’s definitely some redundancy with Raindrop.io. Until I do, I’m fine doing a little extra copying and pasting. It’s a fairly extensible tool, so I’m guessing there is a simple way to integrate it, but I just haven’t had the time to explore this much.
Memex allows me to highlight things on web pages and save the text
I’ve used Instapaper since it launched in 2008. It really is the best, least distracting reading experience for articles. I’m able to save highlights as I read, similar to what Memex allows for. Articles are passively saved to my Instapaper through an IFTTT applet triggered when I save something to raindrop with the tag ‘toread’. I have nearly 13,000 articles saved to Instapaper and while it is somewhat of a black hole, I keep my subscription going because I really enjoy reading things more in Instapaper than I do on the web.
Why Bother?
The big question is why do I spend all of this time and energy collecting and categorizing information. The boring answer is I enjoy learning and the ability to recall information that I don’t need to store in my own brain is magical. It also allows me to build and see relationships between disparate things through tagging. If I want to see all of the medical research on Parkinson’s Disease that I’ve come across, it’s simple. If I want to read over the latest research findings on COVID-19, I don’t have to use DuckDuckGo or Google. I look in Raindrop because I’m tracking it regularly. It really does feel like a superpower. Curators are the new creators, after all.
There is another, more existential reason I do all of this. It represents me in some way. It’s a piece of me. And while I’m currently the only one able to extract any value from the work I put into maintaining all this information, I’d like to figure out a way for it to be accessible to others as sort of a human-curated, micro search engine.
The Next Frontier
The next phase, which I’ve dabbled in a bit, is really turning more of this information into knowledge. The productivity space has become extremely interesting in the last couple of years. There is a new class of leaders building on the incredible foundation laid in the early aughts by David Allen, author of Getting Things Done and a bunch of powerful new apps and tools. People like Conor White Sullivan, co-founder of Roam Research, Tiago Forte, founder of Forte Labs and creator of the Building A Second Brain course and Anne-Laure Le Cunff, founder of Ness Labs are people I learn from every day. I can’t remember a time when a piece of software changed my life the way Roam Research has. Tools like Readwise are changing the way people turn information into knowledge. It’s a great time to be swimming in a lot of information and I’m only just getting started with my ocean.
