mary.codes

Five-ish things that I loved this week.

‘I paint daily, no matter what’: how one woman’s coping mechanism became a global business (article)

I found this article a little sad but very inspiring. It's about Margo McDaid finding success in art after overcoming tragedy. She turned to creating daily paintings to cope, and years later, her prolific painting has honed her craft and brought her success as an artist.

“I wanted to see how my work would change if I practised every day. As a teacher, I’d watch how kids developed, from circling around their hands to joined-up handwriting... All the Old Masters were apprentices. Trying to improve in a short space of time is tough. Doing it daily, you don’t expect outcomes quickly.”

The article also discusses a few other people in other fields who use daily practice and repetition to hone their respective crafts. One of my favorite books is Atomic Habits, which not only emphasises daily practice, but striving to be a little bit better every day. I suppose that's why this article resonated with me, it reminded me about the importance of daily habits. (I also talk about James Clear and his 1% better theory in my post "Streaking into the new year").

What Happens When Your Art Is Used to Train AI (interview)

Another artist, Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl, reacts to her name being included in a court document naming artists whose work has been used to train AI, specifically Midjourney. She created a comic called 4,000 of my closest friends about the difficulty of being a small, independent artist whose work was then taken and used by others for for-profit purposes.

But this interview is so much more than that. It discusses visibility on the internet, content silos, and how the wealthy have already been monetizing our work via the main avenues of communication on the internet, long before the AI age. And, now that everything is fed to us by "the algorithm" on social media, or hidden behind low-effort crap, finding interesting, authentic content on the internet is no longer satisfying.

"Internet users in 1999 were seeking out things to read and see. We had the internet, we wanted it to entertain us, and there just wasn’t much there. So it was really exciting to find someone’s comics! People were really excited to find your comics! And then the internet filled up, and it was hard to get anyone’s attention, because there were so many other things to see and do. And now… there are so many things, but it feels like there’s nothing. We’re all content, and content is just an infinite slog. I feel that way as a reader, too. Somehow removing the small effort of searching something out or entering a url has made everything we see feel equally worthless."

The more that I read different perspectives on AI, and the more that I think about it, the more I'm convinced that AI is going to further homogenize the internet in general. AI generated content is, in my opinion, quite bland, and as it proliferates it will just make the internet more and more bland, and browsers like the Arc Browser (I touch on its summarization capabilities a bit in a prior Friday Fave) will condense the blandness even further. It makes me hopeful that genuine, personal content created by humans will become increasingly valuable.

...Well, this should probably be its own blog post, shouldn't it?

Eloquent JavaScript, Fourth Edition (book)

Eloquent JavaScript, Second Edition was one of the first JavaScript books I read when I was learning JavaScript. I look forward to reading through this version and seeing what's changed. I didn't read the third edition, so I assume there's going to be big changes from the second. If you're interested in learning JavaScript or you're a pro looking for a refresher (like me!), I think Eloquent JavaScript is a great place to start.

Anson's Aggregated Feed (website)

This is a really cool project that takes RSS feeds and displays them card-style. It's inspired by The Webpage, which displays feeds in a newspaper format. I really like the idea of having a publicly-available aggregation of RSS feeds that anyone can read and use as their own RSS inspiration. Of course, now this has me thinking about building my own aggregator, but I'm also interested in an open source solution like FreshRSS.

360 spinning guitar (video)

I really love watching people work on ridiculous engineering projects. The more creative the better. Creative projects require creative solutions, and I love watching people come up with creative solutions that actually work. Not only is this video a great look into the build process of this seemingly impossible guitar, but it's also incredibly funny.

"It's kind of flat. I see a problem here. So I cut it into six parts and you know what? Now it's broken. But now it's broken and cylindrical."