The quality of the equipment or tools that you use is more relevant the less experienced you are. But the irony is that, at the beginning of any pursuit, we end up cheaping out on our tools and equipment because we want to see if it’s something we want to try.

However, I think that when we are new to something, there is a disproportionate benefit to having the best tools as compared to when we’re not new to something. This is because, the more you practice a given something, the better you get and the less relevant the quality of tools becomes.

Somebody with a ton of experience can make do with ugly, crap tools to do beautiful work. However, when you are a beginner, good tools actually help you do more.

  • Alec Steele

Alec is a blacksmith but his quote made me think of all the YouTube videos where world famous photographers are given crap cameras and, in spite of the quality, they still end up taking meaningfully good photographs with them.

Once you reach a certain level of skill, you know how to target good work. Your competency identifies what parts to ignore or compensate for along the path to a result.
When you’re just beginning, you have none of that.

The fix is not a better way of highlighting, but building in friction: forcing yourself to retrieve, explain or generate something without the source at hand. That feels harder and less successful in the moment, precisely because you can fail at it, and that friction is what leaves a lasting trace.

  • Jeroen Sanders explaining why you need to reprocess things into your own words to truly internalize them.
    I feel like this applies as much to diary entries as it does studying.

A high-profile influencer can mobilize a following within hours of posting a standout dish at a restaurant, creating demand for a menu item that can’t possibly be sustained—all to re-create a moment that wasn’t theirs to begin with.

When I got to art as an undergraduate student, I felt like, oh, this is amazing. I want to be able to learn all of these things. But my program, like most art schools, was basically entirely conceptual. So I didn’t have any practical classes in terms of like how do you learn how to paint better?

You just have studio time where you sort of figure it out by yourself, and then you have crit classes where you gather with artists or other students who are all doing totally different things, and then you just talk about your project for an hour.

It would’ve been a hugely valuable lesson years ago, to realize that it’s not simply that my journals and sketchpads don’t need to be perfect. It’s best when they’re not!

I love Chuck’s attitude towards keeping unfocused and messy journals. Much like the photos I share on this blog, the process is the whole point.

If we allow these [AI] tools to dictate our visual culture, we must accept that it will be vitrified by machines which consider a few billion webpages equivalent to the sum total of human existence. I don’t accept that. How dare we abandon so many countless traditions and people and ideas and nuances, simply because they are under­represented in the training data?

It’s harder to convince people there’s something wrong with them when they intimately understand that the things they are experiencing are normal and shared.

smallthingsgrowing, What you’re missing without a village is not just material help

The people you know in real life are also trying to figure things out as they can. The problem is not struggling, it’s struggling alone.

Whenever you’re lucky enough to find it, you have to receive life’s poetry – even when, and especially if, it makes for a funny story to tell.

The world, one giant selfie jostle. Eventually, right before the machines turn off our light of meat-based consciousness, we’ll do some Borgesian space selfie and be done with it all. But for now, we selfie on the ground, with great desperation, preening for the screen, to be uploaded to god only knows where for god only knows what audience. The volume of media captured defies comprehension. It is empyrean in volume, flip-flopping beyond theory into the theology of bytes, for how could so many selfies be contained within the physics of our world?

The history of tech has calcified into stories of dramatic wins and unforeseen downfalls, and what results is a tech culture of near compulsory participation in prediction rather than creating value or serving needs.

Expecting a sanctioned biopic to deliver unvarnished truth misunderstands the dynamics: The estate is the gatekeeper, and the film is a catalog activation strategy — a two-hour advertisement engineered to send audiences straight to streaming platforms to rediscover the back catalog.

It feels really good when the dominant culture likes the things you like but it should never be construed as more than companies finding new ways to amortize art.

Meanwhile, the barons of the private sector have likewise backed down from even superficial concern for equality, and now demand such extreme fealty to their enterprises that only someone with no caretaking responsibilities whatsoever—with no care at all, not even for themselves—could possibly meet them.

These are fields where monotony walks hand in hand with craft. Some people throw their hands up and bemoan the death of such practices in the age of AI, but I believe we’re headed toward a resurgence in valuing the things machines cannot do.

…we are very easily taken in by the promise that buying or upgrading to some new thing will measurably improve our lives. I propose that, if we learned how to fully use what we already had better, such depth of knowledge and skill would have a far greater and more lasting impact.

I absolutely love the (almost secret) positivity in Patrick’s advice here: You bought a thing. A really cool thing! Learn how to really use it so your enjoyment can last longer than the afterglow of the purchase.

“The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to. Those are completely different lessons.”

I read this thinking of my daughter’s untaught hatred for her school Chromebook and how quickly she figured out the school forms to drop it for an ancient MacBook Air that she still refuses to let me replace.

Producing training data means working toward your own obsolescence. While the number of people doing data work may continue to rise, any particular gig will last only as long as it takes for the machines to successfully mimic it. It takes years for a human to develop expertise, and sooner or later, they’re going to run out of skills to sell.

  • Josh Dzieza, writing for The Verge about another depressing “business” created to exploit people.
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