The Mathematically Optimal Peanut Butter Banana Sandwich
As a big eater of peanut butter sandwiches myself, this blog post was so inspiring. There will be a day where machine learning is so present in our lives, use cases and optimizations like this will become as commonplace as the light switch in our rooms.
This blog is a masterclass in machine vision tom-foodery, both funny and educational.
Cute lil’ SVGs
For those looking to add a hand drawn look to your SVGs, check out rough.js. I’m really excited to use it in my blogs and videos, especially since I’m really not talented at drawing by hand.
Machine Learning Lo-Fi Beats
A cool experiment out of Google Labs that allows you to play around with Machine Learning models to create your own Lo-Fi beats. Very fun and easy to play around with!
Be on the lookout soon for Machine Learning algorithmic “10 hour beats to study to” on someone's YouTube channel.
An Idea I've Been Mulling Over
Consider the archetype of the starving artist. The starving artist makes no income from their work, lives in some attic spending all hours of the day painting, and their work isn't appreciated by their contemporaries until they die and their work is placed in some museum somewhere. Fully individual, but highly disconnected. For an understanding of the starving artist, read about the tragic life of Van Gogh.
Now, consider the archetype of the Henry Ford factory floor worker. The factory floor worker places widgets in cars, no questions asked. They lose their autonomy in favor of fulfilling a company's goal. There is no thinking required, and every worker is entirely replaceable by someone else.
Henry Ford literally said:
"How come when I ask for a pair of hands, I get a human being as well?"
Both of these suck.
The goal is to be in the middle. You want to let your individual skill set shine through, but do a service that the world desires.
Have your comfortable, well paid, well fed lifestyle while you're alive, and furnish libraries and museums with your work after you pass away.
Consider which extreme you gravitate towards (9-5 job you hate? resistance against selling and marketing? etc.), and find a way to push against it.
Book Recommendation: Where Good Ideas Come From
This book examines the origin of the ideas and inventions that shape our lives. It challenges the notion of the lone inventor, and teaches us how to sniff out fields where disruption and changes are brewing.
A great book for those looking to become better at creating.
One of my favorite quotes from the book:
“If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.”
Sharing your ideas is always better than cloistering them in the long run.
Speaking of Sharing…Code Blocks now on Gumroad!
I've been getting some questions from people about the process I use to build projects. Instead of answering one by one, I've been pulling pieces out of my projects that are useful between different projects, so hopefully you'll be able to do some creative coding of your own!
You can check it out here.
That's all for this week, thanks for reading.
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