jefftweedy

GEAR TALKIN’™ #24: Analog Outfitters

Ben lived as if he had an obligation to these old instruments, like a responsible hunter who uses all the parts of their kill; the meat, the fat, the blood, the hide, and the bones. Every bit has a use. Every bit has a purpose.

lennysnewsletter.com

How to turn your AI into a world-class designer

Great design, on the other hand, starts with feeling and aims to create an emotional response. It bends the rules and delights users with memorable, unexpected choices. Great design is exactly the opposite of what an LLM does naturally, which is to make the most predictable choice at every step.

themarginalian.org

Uncoding Creativity in the Age of AI: What Makes a Great Poem, What Makes a Great Storyteller, and What Makes Great Person

An AI may never be able to write a great poem — a truly original poem — because a poem is made not of language but of experience, and the defining aspect of human experience is the constant collision between our wishes and reality, the sharp violation of our expectations, the demolition of our plans. We call this suffering. Suffering is the price we pay for a consciousness capable of love and the loss of love, of hope and the devastation of hope.

whyisthisinteresting

The AI and Writing Edition

The other problem, I think, is that good writing is fundamentally anti-consensus. For writing to be above average, it shouldn't sound like everything else. My daughter might get a fine grade aping the teacher's example essay, but the road to good, or even great, is doing it your own way.

platformer.news

The website that created an AI clone of its editor in chief

I think there is a real dirty secret right now, which is that almost every writer is using it. Just, most of them are not saying so.

jefftweedy

Real Magic (Star Moles cover)

I had to sing this song really low because I was in a hotel room and I couldn't sing it high. Plus, it's kind of hard—there's a lot of really cool melodic twists and turns that she does.

themarginalian.org

Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary

Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms.

lennysnewsletter.com

How a solo founder used Codex and ChatGPT to launch a fashion brand without engineers | Yana Welinder

Her 'fashion prompt' is a detailed spec covering silhouette, volume, fabric behavior, movement, and sound, and watching her use Codex plus computer use to navigate 3D design software that's entirely new to her is a clarifying demo of what today's toolset actually makes possible.

themarginalian.org

How Love Comes to You

To give up on anything — a dream, a loved one, love itself — is to deny this most irrepressible pulse-beat of being alive.

personalcanon.com

the life you were meant to live

He is saving himself for an invisible 'creative' life that he is too unimaginative to envision.

themarginalian.org

How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself

An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn't even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined.

jefftweedy

Awake (Black Moon) [early demo]

I think I also felt self-conscious about the lyric 'She loved the bums/All the ones/That never stopped falling/Whole lives appalling.' It seems a little bit harsh. But that was one of the things my mother was infamous for. I say infamous because my father kind of hated it. She befriended a lot of people that were down on their luck.

honest-broker.com

Is a Multibillion-Dollar Company Smarter than a 6th Grader?

We finally get a trillion dollars invested in the arts, and its sole purpose is to destroy the livelihood of artists. Count me old fashioned, but I prefer the old days when rich people were patrons of the arts, not parasites.

themarginalian.org

Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”

Schiller died considering his "Ode to Joy" a failure — an idealist's fantasy unmoored from reality, a work of art that might have been of service perhaps for him, perhaps for a handful of others, "but not for the world." The young Beethoven was among those few it touched, and this was enough, more than enough — he took Schiller's bright beam of possibility and magnified it through the lens of his own genius to illuminate all of humanity for all of time.

jefftweedy

Bizarre Love Triangle (New Order cover)

I think part of it was an unwillingness to let go of that joke. And I think that's probably my only valid excuse other than obstinacy and overthinking.

themarginalian.org

The Bird in You, the World in You, and the Art of Trusting Time: A Ceramics and Serpentine Raffle

That the Earth decided to make something this beautiful, when it could have just gone on making granite, felt like a miracle — the miracle of all those things unnecessary to survival, like music, like love, that give meaning to being alive.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Matt Spevack

I guess some might argue that reading would have the benefit of expanding my mind, but I already have so many creative and administrative projects I'm excited about that I can hardly keep up with my own ideas. That's my unapologetic justification for not reading.

jefftweedy

Tom Sawyer (Rush cover)

We should be suspicious of the people that don't have something that sustains them, and that they've fallen in love with. And Rush was absolutely something that gave people courage.

themarginalian.org

Carl Jung on Creativity

The creative act, which is the absolute antithesis of mere reaction, will forever elude the human understanding. It can only be described in its manifestations; it can be obscurely sensed, but never wholly grasped.

themarginalian.org

G.K. Chesterton on the Dandelion and the Meaning of Life

No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.

longreads.com

A Beastie Boy Returns to the Mic, With Some Help

Horovitz lent Skyler and Davis a 1980s-vintage sampler that came with floppy disks still holding Beastie Boys beats. "It's a time machine," Donaldson recalled with a chuckle. "They'd be trying to find a sound, and you'd randomly hear a drum break that was on a Beastie Boys song."

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ How I AI: How the founder of Morning Brew built a Claude content machine that never runs out of ideas

AI slop is mostly a people problem, not a model problem. Alex's framing here is blunt: the only time the Content Machine produces slop is when the person being interviewed doesn't share interesting enough ideas during the interview. The model is shaping clay, not inventing ideas. If the clay is bad, the sculpture will be bad.

readtheprofile.com

Kevin O'Leary Is Happy Playing the Villain

Heroes are expected to be flawless. Villains are allowed to be human. Audiences may not always like them, but they remember them and connect with their flaws.

longreads.com

Skill Nostalgia

Nostalgia can be a toxic impulse, reactionary and uncritical, but it can also hold revolutionary potential for the future. Here, nostalgia is more than a self-soothing search for comfort; it's about engaging with loss, reconnecting with ideals that might improve the future.

honest-broker.com

The 10 Greatest Failures of Orson Welles

It's testimony to Welles's greatness that The Magnificent Ambersons is still ranked among the best movies of the era despite the meddling. After Brazil, everything fell apart for Welles. Hollywood never forgot him, but also never forgave him.

jefftweedy

Take Me Home, Hot Stuff

Art, on the otherhand, is ever-expanding, like the universe itself, with limitless new frontiers to explore and question, and with possibilities for unending growth, understanding, and emotion.

whyisthisinteresting

The Death and Return of Browsing Edition

Record crates, video-store aisles, and bookshop tables were all machines for serendipity. What made them work was friction. They were slow, physical, and slightly annoying, and that was the engine.

lennysnewsletter.com

GPT-5.6 Sol vs. Claude Fable: Why OpenAI’s new model crushes my benchmark

Fable's precision and pedantry made it harder to collaborate with, and the exact moment Sol broke through where Fable got stuck.