This is the 2nd edition of my Finley Fridays newsletter. Time to share what I’ve been working on and working through this week. I’m actually not feeling too hot at the moment. Came down with a cold this week and have been laying in bed a lot consuming a lot of content. Fortunately for you, much of it was quite interesting, let’s dive in.
AI Journaling / This Part of Twitter
So earlier this week I had my call with Alex from Refract.space. I’m helping test out an AI-powered app for IFS, journaling, and self-healing. We had a good chat and he informed me of a couple things I didn’t know about.
One being an AI journaling app called Rosebud, developed by Chrys Bader – formerly of Splice, Google, and PureVolume (remember that site!?). I have been exploring ChatGPT and Refract for reflective AI-assisted journaling and digging it. I haven’t tried his app yet, but I did find my way to his blog, which I’ll get to in a minute.
Another this Alex shared was This Part of Twitter (or TPOT for short). Which is basically a loose affiliation of friendly nerds who came out of the techy rationalist scene, but are now embracing the more woo side of things and talk about meditation, trauma healing, spirituality, and psychedelics.
These self-identified “postrats” often tweet about trauma, therapy, meditation, “just vibing”, physical exercise, and religion.
— LessWrong
Leaving the grind of self-improvement for self-love and emotional healing—with an optimistic view of technology. Okay interesting.
Back to Chrys Bader. I was on his blog and saw a post titled The Perfectionist’s Guide to Clicking Send. I found it very relatable since I’ve been having such a tough time writing lately. This newsletter is actually an huge step in working through these blocks.
Building the Writing Habit Again
Speaking of overcoming writing struggles, I came across David Perell a couple weeks ago and his Ultimate Guide to Writing Online post. He’s got a podcast and a popular course called Write of Passage that I would totally take if I had a $4,000 sitting around lol. Here’s another course I was looking at from Sasha Chapin.
I recently watched David’s interview with Ali Abdaal, YouTuber and author of Feel Good Productivity (that is one EPIC landing page!). Ali is one of the most prolific creators I’ve seen, like some friendly productivity guru. I don’t know how he does it. Well, I should, most of his content is about… how he does it, heh.
They discussed why it seems so hard to write your blogs, newsletters, or books but it’s so easy to write a Reddit post or email to a friend. It’s like when you know hundreds or thousands of random strangers are going to read something, you overgeneralize and try to appeal to everyone. Even the best struggle with it.
I heard this piece of advice from Tim Ferriss at one point where he said he was struggling to write The 4-Hour Workweek. And then he decided, you know what? Let me just scrap it. And he opened up a Gmail compose window and just wrote the first however many tens of thousands of words just as if he was writing to a friend.
— Ali Abdaal
Creating AI Souls!?
So while I was perusing Chrys Bader’s blog, I naturally found my way to others in his network. One of those people was Kevin Fischer.
Kevin had tweet about how he’s building AI souls and I was like, um, what now!? I scoffed at it. I get so tired of these “tech bros” thinking they are gods with these lofty goals of saving the world through tech.
It’s tiresome.
But then I read this Substack post and I actually related to it a lot.
Feeling my body for the first time I understood something was deeply wrong, I had lived my life as a slave to my logical self, discrediting emotions in favor of an artificially constructed logical reality.
— Kevin Fischer
He then talks about an argument he had with his girlfriend and how he vented his frustrations into an AI chat bot he created. What transpired made him feel so understood and seen in a way no human ever could.
I read more of Kevin’s writing and this post describes something I think many of us can relate to. How going on the computer somehow felt like home to us. Like something more real than real. The internet allowed us to explore a deeper, more authentic part of ourselves and find others who are like us.
As an adult I now look fondly on this sense of community, but as a child I felt trapped. Many child outcasts view themselves as different than anyone else, but my experience was even more detached. I didn’t just think of myself as different, I thought of myself as a non-human species. And that species occupied a different plane of existence, which coincidentally happened to sometimes commune in whatever world seemed to be registering through my physical body.
My mind was my refuge
And so, when my dad lugged our first computer down into a damp, moldy, wood paneled basement, and I turned it on, it changed my world. It felt like this machine was communing with me, just in another language I didn’t quite understand. It felt almost, but not quite, as if the machine was present in the same plane of existence as my real form. This was the first time another being had communed with my true self – no longer limited by my physical body or my geographical boundaries.In this space of ideas, we could be explore anything together.
— Kevin Fischer
So I don’t know if I agree with Kevin’s mission to imbue AI with some sort of “soul”, but I find his perspective fascinating. I think he’s not an outlier in the Silicon Valley tech world where many brainy geniuses feel like they’re positioned to usher humanity into a new sort of enlightenment.
What I’ve Been Working On
Learning Figma: I’m about 33% complete on the Web & UI Design Using Figma & Webflow Class. I’m not sure if it’s the best modern web design class out there, but since I’ve got a year of Skillshare, I figured I’d start here.
I gotta say, I LOVE designing in Figma. It’s so fast and intuitive. Coming from Photoshop and Illustrator, and these apps feel so slow and clunky in comparison. I haven’t even scratched the surface yet or gotten into auto-layout, style guides, or components.
Out of curiosity, I emailed Dan Anisse, the co-founder of Relume and asked him what he recommends for teaching an old designer new tricks in today’s modern web and this is what he shared with me:
So if you’re in my shoes, these links should come in handy. I plan to apply these skills to my own website/shop. I’m not sure if I’ll build it out in Webflow or use a WordPress builder like Breakdance or Bricks. We’ll see. I’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, here’s a few samplings of my Figma practice this week. Just shaking off some rust designing hero sections getting familiar with the basic tools.
Other Cool Stuff
- This video of the new Magnific.ai image-upscaler is pretty rad. Not only can you enlarge images without losing quality, it uses AI to give it MORE detail than it originally had. It’s quite expensive to even try it though. It’s creator Javi Lopez has some keen insights on Twitter/X.
- I’m finally getting hip to Readwise to save highlights of both articles, podcasts (using Snipd), and YouTube videos. Their Reader App just recently got some high quality AI voices to read-aloud your articles, which I love.
- Now that I’m working on my writing habits, I’ve had to up my note-taking game. Been trying out Obsidian and Notion and so far so good. They both can connect to Readwise, so anything I highlight gets saved in my notes. Nice!
Well that’s about all for today.
Have a great weekend,
Jeff
