Self and About
Just over two years ago, I landed the first commit in a fresh Github repo and started the Breadboard project. The innocuous “Here is a graph” title of that commit already pointed to where I wanted to go – a graph-based system for composing what I later named “AI patterns” and even later, “Recipes for Continue reading "Breadboard and Opal"
I’ll begin with an overly simplistic metaphor. Let’s visualize a ball rolling down a shallow slope. Driven by gravity, it’s seeking the easiest path down. Except the slope is full of ridges, channels, and nubs, and they make the ball bounce and veer in various directions. If we imagine that thinking is something like the Continue reading "Machine Thinking"
I’d like to present to you a distinction: two different approaches I take when using large language models (LLMs). I’ll call these two approaches “chat” and “recipe”. In the first approach, I treat my interaction with Gemini, ChatGPT, et al. as a conversation: I type something, the LLM replies, I type again, etc. Very familiar, Continue reading "Recipes for Thought"
I have been on a bit of a kick to get the large language models (LLMs) to generate interesting lyrics for songs. Over time, it’s become quite an adventure, a fun exploration of LLM capabilities. Here’s the multi-part account of this quest, offered as a loose timeline and progression of techniques, interspersed with pictures of Continue reading "Teaching AI to write lyrics"
Today, I had my first jam session with Udio. With the introduction of audio prompting, I am now able to use my own sound as the starting point for a generated track. This seems like a leap forward, despite the actual product still being quite clunky. It’s a leap, because through introducing audio upload, Udio Continue reading "Jamming with Udio"
I’ve been geeking out on AI-generated music services Suno and Udio, and it’s been super-interesting to see them iterate and ship quickly. It looks like there might be a value niche in this particular neck of the woods in the larger generative AI space. There are tons of users with very active Discord communities for Continue reading "Casino Creativity"
A moment of clarityI suspect it’s playing a gameI reach out, and it’s goneMy unrealityBy a different nameIs what yet to be drawn. What needs to be doneAlways feels rightAnd when the story had spunShying from light,It always begs to forgetFilling the stores of regret. Do caterpillars dream of flying?Do they know they will have Continue reading "Chrysalis"
I facilitated a workshop on systems thinking recently (or “lensical thinking” as I’ve come to call it). The purpose of the lensical thinking workshop is to provide a coherent set of tools for approaching problems of particularly unsolvable kind, using the concept of lenses as the key organizing concept. One of the participants became quite Continue reading "The third option"
I did this fun little experiment recently. I took my two last posts (Thinking to Write and The Bootstrapping Phase) and asked an LLM to turn them into lyrics. Then, after massaging the lyrics a bit, to better fit with the message I wanted to come across, I played with Suno for a bit to Continue reading "Flexibility of the medium"
I think I have a slightly better way of describing a particular moment in a product’s life that I alluded to in Rock tumbler teams, Chances to get it right, and later, Build a thing to build the thing. I call this moment the “bootstrapping phase.” It very much applies to consumer-oriented products as well, Continue reading "The Bootstrapping Phase"