I've never participated in a book club so I don't know if I am doing this right. I don't know how the conversation would go in a group setting and I normally lean to sharing my experiences as a way to connect. I've recently learned it isn't something people are keen on. But since this is my personal blog I guess I get a pass.

Zachary Kai proposed the book The Creative Act by Rick Rubin and I was immediately drawn to it.

I managed to borrow the book from my local library and a few pages in I immediately regretted it! I wanted to highlight with pens, add bookmarks and notes to so many things! Right now, it isn't on my budget to buy (even) more books so I had to resort to taking photos of passages that I loved on my phone.

The Creative Act felt like a conversation with your most supportive friend. It is also what you would say back to someone who wanted some encouragement on following through practising their art. My inner critic wouldn't stand a chance against the lovely encouragement from the book and I love how I stumbled upon this challenge just when I quit attending my art classes.

I've been struggling with not having the skills to put into a canvas the things I see in my head and I've been feeling silly and discouraged.

Many tips and encouraging words also apply to things outside art - even feelings I have about this blog and my recent adventures on doing live tech talks. The constant revisit of materials, the feeling of imperfection and incompletion and fear.

The goal of art isn't to attain perfection. The goal is to share who we are. And how we see the world.

Thank you for the initiative Zachary!

Chris Metinko / Axios:
New York-based Kaizen, which provides a commerce platform for government agencies to offer services like utility billing, raised a $21M Series A led by NEA  —  Kaizen, a commerce platform for government agencies, raised a $21 million Series A led by NEA, co-founders Nikhil Reddy and KJ Shah tell Axios Pro.

Tim Bray:

Last night I had a very strange experience: About two thirds of the way through reading a Web page about myself, Tim Bray, I succumbed to boredom and killed the tab. Thus my introduction to Grokipedia. Here are early impressions.

My Grokipedia entry has over seven thousand words, compared to a mere 1,300 in my Wikipedia article. It’s pretty clear how it was generated; an LLM, trained on who-knows-what but definitely including that Wikipedia article and this blog, was told to go nuts.

Putting aside the political slant of Grokipedia, a 1,300-word article being better than a 7,000-word one exemplifies the current shortcomings of LLMs as creative engines (as opposed to serving as mere tools in the arsenal of human creators).

The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously quipped: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” No encyclopedia in history has been written with less time or effort than Musk’s LLM-generated vanity project. Verbosity is not the worst of Grokipedia’s deficiencies, but it’s one of them. The more its entries stray from simply regurgitating the equivalent entry in Wikipedia, the more they suffer from verbal diarrhea.

(My own Grokipedia entry is just a clone of my Wikipedia entry, with a few mistakes added, including one in the first sentence regarding the creation of Markdown.)

Rockstar Games, the developer of Grand Theft Auto VI, fired between 30 to 40 employees on Thursday, as previously reported by Bloomberg. According to the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), all of the employees fired were part of a private trade union Discord chat and were either already union members or attempting to organize a […]

Jason Koebler, writing at 404 Media:

Wednesday, as part of his ongoing war against Wikipedia because he does not like his page, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, a fully AI-generated “encyclopedia” that serves no one and nothing other than the ego of the world’s richest man. As others have already pointed out, Grokipedia seeks to be a right wing, anti-woke Wikipedia competitor. But to even call it a Wikipedia competitor is to give the half-assed project too much credit. It is not a Wikipedia “competitor” at all. It is a fully robotic, heartless regurgitation machine that cynically and indiscriminately sucks up the work of humanity to serve the interests, protect the ego, amplify the viewpoints, and further enrich the world’s wealthiest man. It is a totem of what Wikipedia could and would become if you were to strip all the humans out and hand it over to a robot; in that sense, Grokipedia is a useful warning because of the constant pressure and attacks by AI slop purveyors to push AI-generated content into Wikipedia. And it is only getting attention, of course, because Elon Musk does represent an actual threat to Wikipedia through his political power, wealth, and obsession with the website, as well as the fact that he owns a huge social media platform.

In season 10 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David gets into an argument with Mocha Joe, the owner of an eponymous coffee shop. David leases the space next door and opens Latte Larry’s, a copycat “spite store” cafe. Grokipedia reminds me of this, except that Larry David is genuinely funny and (in real life, as opposed to his Curb alter ego) at least somewhat self-aware.